‘Is it visiting hours?’ asked Liffey. Perhaps she was dreaming Mabs?

  ‘No,’ said Mabs, ‘it isn’t. I’m living in, with Debbie. She’s been quite poorly. Isn’t it a coincidence, the two of us here together? So I can pop in any time I please. Where’s baby?’

  Dreamed or not, Liffey wasn’t replying to that.

  ‘In the special care unit, I suppose?’ went on Mabs. ‘I’ll just nip down and see him. Poor little mite, all wired up. No baby of mine ever went into special care.’

  Mabs saw the bruises on Liffey’s neck.

  ‘Who ever tried to strangle you?’ she asked, as she left.

  ‘Now who would want to do a thing like that?’

  And Mabs was gone.

  I dreamed it, thought Liffey. There was a great hollow under her ribs where the baby used to live, and a hole in that part of her mind which the baby had used. She had endured some kind of fearful loss. Liffey sat up and cried for help.

  No one came.

  No. She had not dreamed Mabs. Mabs had been real.

  Liffey remembered Richard’s going, the pain, the broken telephone, the slammed door, the blood, Eddie, the walk. Mabs. Witch. Murderess.

  Liffey got out of bed. She took her legs with her hands and dropped them over the side of the bed, and let the rest of her fall after them. Once she was out of bed and on the floor, progress was possible. Surprisingly, movement begat movement. Liffey began to crawl. She still wore a white surgical gown, tied with tapes across her back.

  Mabs was already at the special care unit, at the far end of a wedge of post-natal wards. The walls of a corridor turned to glass, and there, behind the glass, under the bright yet muted lights, were ranks of plastic incubators, and in them babies, wired up to monitors by nostril and umbilicus, or linked to drips or life support machinery: tiny mewling scraggy things.

  Baby Lee-Fox, there only for observation, unwired, unlinked, lay in a far corner, breathing, sighing, snuffling, doing well. Masked nurses sat and watched, or moved about the rows on quiet urgent missions. An orderly at the door handed out masks and gowns for parents and close relatives. ‘Baby Lee-Fox?’ asked Mabs. She looked like many women in these parts, large and strong, yet soft.

  The name Lee-Fox with its pallid hyphenated ring, its overtones of refined home counties, sat strangely on her tongue, but not strangely enough for the orderly to doubt Mabs’ right to be where she was so clearly at home; amongst these small babies, hovering between dark and light, at that moment of existence where the ability, the desire, to go forward peaks again towards reluctance.

  At Honeycomb Cottage doors and windows stood wide. Rain had fallen in the night and splashed unheeded on to papers and books. A column of ants now filed through the sunny front door and into the sugar bowl on the kitchen table. The rain had washed out most, but not all, of the marks where Richard, in his anxiety to be away, had scored the lane with his tyres.

  Up at Cadbury Farm Tucker was in charge. He liked being alone with the children. They sat round the kitchen table eating large plates of cornflakes, liberally sprinkled with sugar and swimming in milk. Audrey made a cake. Eddie sat on his father’s knee and poked his fingers up Tucker’s nostrils. They missed Debbie. The radio was on. All remembered a time when Mabs had been kind, and Tucker felt at fault for not having earned them, of late, a remission. Each remission, of course, meant another mouth to feed for the next fifteen years. Now, it seemed, he had earned one by proxy.

  Mabs leaned over Baby Lee-Fox. Mabs laughed. The tone of the laugh disturbed a nurse, who came over and looked as well.

  Baby Lee-Fox clenched and unclenched fists; struggled to open eyes.

  ‘Lovely little baby,’ said the nurse. ‘Of course Caesar babies usually are. They don’t get so squashed.’

  Mabs laughed again: it was a strange deflating sound, as if all the air and spirit was draining swiftly out of a balloon, so that it tore and raced and hurled itself about a room, before lying damp and still.

  ‘Is it that funny?’ asked the nurse, puzzled.

  ‘He’s the image of his father,’ said Mabs.

  ‘Just like Richard,’ said Mabs to Liffey, laughing again. Liffey had been picked up from the floor outside the special care unit and put back to bed, and the drips set up again, and Baby Lee-Fox brought into her room, since she was apparently earnest in her desire to see her baby.

  ‘Why shouldn’t he be?’ asked Liffey, wearily.

  Mabs smiled, a really happy, generous smile.

  ‘All’s well that ends well,’ said Mabs, ‘and Debbie’s fever has broken. If they’d let me give her feverfew in the first place we’d have had none of this trouble. What a fuss they make in here about every little thing.’

  Mabs leant over and picked Liffey’s baby out of its crib. She did it tenderly, and reverently. Liffey was not afraid. Mabs had dwindled to her proper scale. The world no longer shook at her footfall. Mabs handed Liffey the baby.

  ‘But where’s Richard?’ asked Mabs, all innocence. ‘Where’s the father?’

  Liffey’s memory of the Sunday lunch was vague, overshadowed by the events that had followed it. She remembered, as one remembers on waking from sleep, the feeling tone of the preceding day rather than its actual events—that Richard had left angry and that this had been a practical inconvenience rather than an emotional blow. As to the details of the rest, it seemed irrelevant.

  The baby lay in Liffey’s arms, snuffling and rooting for food. She sensed its triumph. None of that was important, the baby reproved her: they were peripheral events, leading towards the main end of your life, which was to produce me. You were always the bit-part player: that you played the lead was your delusion, your folly. Only by giving away your life, do you save it.

  ‘The little darling,’ said Mabs. ‘How could anyone hurt a baby?’

  The baby smiled.

  ‘Only wind,’ said Mabs, startled.

  ‘It was a smile,’ said Liffey.

  ‘Babies don’t smile for six weeks,’ said Mabs, uneasily.

  The baby smiled again.

  Resignation

  Liffey slept. The baby slept. Mabs went home.

  ‘It wasn’t your baby after all,’ she said to Tucker, and they went upstairs to try for another one. This time sufficient of Tucker’s sperm survived the hazardous journey up to Mabs’ fallopian tubes to rupture the walls of a recently dropped ovum—fallen rather ahead of time, by virtue of the emotions of tenderness and remorse, mixed, which had flooded Mabs when she marvelled over Baby Lee-Fox, and laughed at his looks. Richard’s bemused air of competence combined with innocence, Liffey’s gentle generosity: as if the baby, wonderfully, had captured both their good qualities as they flew, and let the others pass.

  Mabs, being pregnant, became quiet and kind as if, in her, body alone dictated mood. She had no rational knowledge that she had conceived: only her body, setting off on its forty-week journey, conveyed a general impression of contentment, which the mind accepted.

  Mabs came downstairs, smiled at the children, and brought them all fish and chips, and even lemonade to go with it.

  The doctor came up to Cadbury Farm presently to say that Debbie was to be sent off to a convalescent home, and to take a general look around.

  ‘Rather them than me,’ said Mabs. ‘She’s a dirty girl. She wets the bed. Still,’ she added, magnanimously, ‘the others miss her.’

  ‘You nearly lost her altogether,’ said the doctor.

  ‘No,’ said Mabs, ‘I knew I wouldn’t.’

  There had been no signs, after all—no owls hooting out of nowhere, no lightning out of a clear sky, no yew brought into the house—no signs or portents. Only Mabs twisting a pin in a wax image when she should have left it to others: enough to damage and frighten, but surely not to kill. Debbie had always been safe enough; but how could she tell the doctor a thing like that?

  ‘I’d like to hear a little less about home remedies,’ said the doctor, ‘and a little more about visiting the surgery when anyone’s ill.’

  ‘All right,’ Mabs acquiesced. It was a genuine capitulation. She yawned. She was tired. It occurred to her that Tucker and she were not as young as once they had been.

  She allowed the doctor to put Eddie on a course of antidepressants, and Audrey on the pill, and she herself on valium to cure the rages she now admitted to, and Tucker on Vitamin B because he drank so much home-made wine. With every act of consent, every acknowledgment of his power, her own waned. She felt it. She didn’t much mind.

  Mabs told the doctor that she and Tucker would fetch Liffey and the baby home from hospital. They’d look after Liffey. Well, the husband had finally gone off.

  Liffey’s drips were removed. Her stitches came out. Snip, snip—eight times. The skin that had stretched and smarted around the catgut resumed its natural place. She could sit up now, of her own accord. She could lie on her back and lift her legs. She could do without the physiotherapist, who thumped her hard from time to time to make her cough and clear her lungs. She could take a bath, albeit on her hands and knees. She rang her mother, hardly knowing what to say. Madge was cool but friendly, and busy with a Royal visitor to the school.

  Mrs Harris from the shop came to visit; and Audrey brought the curate, who saw God’s hand in the deliverance of both Liffey and Debbie. The incident had even reached the local paper. Audrey wished to be confirmed; he was undertaking it. Mabs and Tucker came, with flowers. Tucker wore collar and tie, and sat on the edge of his chair and seemed embarrassed by his surroundings, but he was robust and solid, and dignified: powerful, dark and male in a pale female world.

  And certainly as Mabs lost power, Tucker gained it. He knew it: he was rough with Mabs now; he told her what to do: he shouted at her if she behaved badly to the children. He recognised that she was deflated, that although she still stared at the Tor, the clouds around its summit neither reflected her will nor shadowed her intent. Her sly looks requested rather than commanded, and he performed at his own pleasure, and not hers. He thought she was a better mother, and high time too. As one set of energies drained out of her, others took their place.

  Richard did not visit Liffey.

  Ripples

  Richard, after a whole week’s absence, unaccounted for and so far unexplained, went back to the office.

  ‘Welcome back!’ said Personnel. ‘We’ll ask no questions and be told no lies. You have a fine son and mother’s doing well. Can we be of any help?’ ‘No, thank you,’ said Richard.

  He knew he had a son. His attention had been drawn to an advertisement in The Times which said, ‘Lee-Fox. To Liffey and Tucker, a son’. Miss Martin, Richard rightly guessed, had inserted it. Miss Martin, as did everyone in the company, via Vanessa’s connection with the director of the Canadian oxtail soup television commercial, knew all about the fathering of Liffey’s baby. Malice does not evaporate: it bounces round like a rubber ball, striking here and there, sometimes in the most unexpected places, gradually losing energy. It almost stops. Then up it starts again—the cosmic ball of ill will.

  Richard wangled Vanessa another modelling job, so that she could buy a car for herself, but after that left her alone. She had heard him weep: she would never respect him. The battle, he could see, was to find a woman who would.

  He had spent the whole week with Vanessa: she had made him, for a while, believe that his work was unimportant, that he was only money-grubbing in a rat race: fortunately, common sense reasserted itself. He wished to behave well towards Liffey: to shame her with kindness; to continue to support her. For that he would have to earn more. He owed it to his parents to get promotion, do well, carry on along the road on which they had first set his stumbling footsteps. He could not fail Liffey, or disappoint them.

  When he hated Liffey, it was because of the distress her behaviour would have given his parents. He put off telling them. How was he to put it? Yes, mother, Liffey has her baby but it is another man’s child. Not your grandchild. Not, after all that, after all those years, your flesh and blood.

  Ah yes, I am sure. So sure. It explains so much. Why I betrayed her. It was all her doing. Once the sacred tie is loosed, chaos ensues; the forces of love, of trust, and faith are in disarray: lust sweeps in. Liffey loosed them, quite deliberately. Untied the snowy white robe of her purity and let Tucker in.

  Mrs Lee-Fox senior telephoned.

  ‘Darling, what is happening? How’s lovely Liffey?’

  Lovely Liffey had Tucker’s child, mother.

  Mrs Lee-Fox senior wept. See, Liffey, what you have done? My mother weeps. All my life I have dreaded this minute, this moment. I knew it lurked somewhere, waiting.

  Liffey, I hate you. I would kill you if I could.

  Richard went to stay with Bella and Ray. Bella still couldn’t get over the way Liffey had behaved towards Tony and Tina.

  ‘Not even bothering to pack their homework!’ said Bella.

  ‘Not even making them a sandwich. They were dreadfully upset. I can’t help thinking you’re well out of it, Richard.’

  ‘Next time choose someone who can cook,’ said Ray. ‘Does that sound crude? But it’s no good being romantic. You’re past the age of falling in love.’ Ray had felt infatuation for Karen, not love. Bella had explained it all. Ray was glad it was over.

  No one has a baby alone. Every pregnant woman carries with her the aspirations, the ambitions and the fears of others—friends, relatives, and passers-by—and good and ill wishes of such intensity as might put the sun right out.

  Good Fortune

  As Mabs’ ill-wish evaporated so Liffey’s good fortune returned. Or perhaps it was merely that now she carried the baby in her arms, the ordinary up-and-downness of life returned.

  Tucker and Mabs brought Liffey home from hospital. Their car no longer reeked of menace. It was an ordinary, shabby, littered family car. The baby seemed to enjoy the motion. Home was cosy and familiar. Mabs had put flowers in vases: Tucker had dug over the garden.

  The telephone had been installed.

  There was a pile of letters. One was from the bank to say that a final payment from the trust fund had been paid in on her last birthday but had inadvertently not been entered to her credit. Twelve thousand pounds. Another was from Mory and Helen. ‘Wonderful about the baby!’ they wrote. ‘Just to say the flat’s yours if you want it, even without the £1,000 Richard couldn’t raise. Mory’s been offered a wonderful job in Trinidad, and Helen can’t stand the British climate any more. She’s pregnant.’

  Cruel Richard, thought Liffey. Cruel, cruel Richard. But she did not want the flat back. She wanted very few now of the things she had wanted before.

  It was a wonderful month for late sun and over-ripe roses. Liffey could take off the baby’s clothes, and let the sun get to his little chicken limbs.

  The telephone rang. Friends, who had seen the announcement in The Times, and wanted to know what was going on. Liffey told them. Liffey, they thought, was quite fun again.

  Fortunately no one who knew Tucker and Mabs read The Times, so news of the announcement did not reach them. Personnel fired Miss Martin, however. Enough was enough.

  On Friday nights Liffey would find herself nervous, wondering if Richard would come back: half wanting him to, half not. She needed the full width of the double bed for herself and the baby, rolling over in the night as he woke, to pick him from his crib and feed him. Richard would have been in the way.

  ‘What’s his name?’ people asked.

  ‘Baby Lee-Fox,’ she said. She was waiting.

  Madge wrote out of the blue saying that the name of Liffey’s father had been Martin, and in retrospect had behaved well according to his lights. They just weren’t Madge’s lights. Why didn’t Liffey call the baby Martin?

  She called the baby Martin.

  ‘After his grandfather,’ she told milkman, dustman, postman, proudly. They all came up the drive now.

  The baby’s legs looked more human: he lay in his cot working rather than resting, making sense of the world, recognising kindness, censorious of carelessness.