by Weldon, Fay
Listen, I have had good times. It is only on bad days that I regret the past and hate the young. I helped to change the world. I made life what it is for those lovely, lively, trampling girls upon the bus.
Look at me, I said to you. Look at me, Praxis Duveen. Better for me to look at myself, to search out the truth, and the root of my pain, and yours, and try to determine, even now, whether it comes from inside or from outside, whether we are born with it, or have it foisted upon us. Before my writing hand seizes up, my elbow rots, my toe falls off.
In the meantime, sisters, I absolve you from your neglect of me. You do what you can. So will I.
3
After Ben’s defection, his mother, a stately, large-busted matron, often moved by compassion, came presently to visit her son’s abandoned common-law wife. She found two little girls of whose existence she had not known. Both stared up at her with her son’s sad defiant eyes. Their hair was uncombed, their white dresses soiled, their mother distraught. The maid had left: the rent was unpaid. There was no food in the cupboard. Ben’s mother left quickly, in her chauffeured Rolls-Royce.
A letter from solicitors followed, hand-delivered the next day. The rent was to be paid: the little girls provided for. If their mother was in financial or practical difficulty, she could make special application to the solicitors at any time, who would judge the merits of the case, and pay out accordingly.
Goodbye, Benjamin Duveen. Off to greener golf-courses; three fine sons: and Ruth, a woman who loved him for what he was, and not what he wasn’t.
Lucy presently wrote to the solicitors asking if she could move away, move house, start a new life somewhere else with the girls, and still have the rent paid: but they would not hear of it. Continuity, they said, was important for children. So Lucy perforce stayed where she was, seldom leaving the house. She should have been grateful to the Duveens, and so she was. Many families would have preferred to have ignored her existence altogether. She could have gone into service, to the work-house, or on the streets. The little bastards to a Barnado Home. Henry Whitechapel, arriving in the May of the following season, looked out for Mrs Duveen on the beach, and missed her. He made his way to 109 Holden Road, and found the garden unkempt, the gravel drive full of weeds, the motorcar gone and curtains drawn, so that he thought at first the house was empty. But Hypatia and Praxis were playing on the lawn. Or rather, Hypatia was sitting sketching a plant, and Praxis was sitting in a puddle and her wet drawers, when she stood, hung down muddily round her knees.
‘Where’s your mother?’ he asked.
‘Crying,’ said Praxis.
‘Shush,’ called out Hypatia. ‘You silly little girl.’
‘Well, she is,’ said Praxis. ‘Silly girl yourself.’
Hypatia sighed heavily and raised her narrow eyebrows. She had a receding chin and slightly buck teeth, yellowish: a muddy complexion and dull brown hair with a tendency to grease, but was either unaware of these deficiencies, or affected unawareness. Her look was supercilious.
‘And your father?’
‘He’s left,’ said Praxis.
‘He’s away at the moment,’ corrected Hypatia.
Henry took the opportunity of knocking at the door. He was not normally so bold, but his life that day seemed desperate, and the season stretched ahead, meaningless, filled with grinning, eager, silly faces, craning for a likeness; cheated and derided as they were all year, at work, and now at play, by someone of their own kind, who ought to know better. It made him feel bad but what could he do?
‘Mrs Duveen?’ he enquired. ‘You remember me? The beach photographer? I came to check that your photographs arrived.’
He thought he had never seen anyone so changed. She seemed like a little old woman, with her hair scraped back, her kimono clutched round her with a hand whose nails were none too clean.
She shook her head, vague. Then she nodded.
‘If by any chance you need frames – and a photograph looks twice as grand in a frame, I always say – I stock a special line. Very reasonable.’
She did not want the frames, but showed him the photograph stuck any old how on the mantelpiece in the dusty parlour.
‘A big house you have here,’ he remarked kindly. ‘Difficult to keep up, for just one person, I should say.’
At which she burst into tears. Her life was finished; over. Benjamin had gone. She kept her breath in her body for the sake of the girls, nothing else.
He took a room in the house. She had a male lodger! She, a woman alone. What did it matter what people said? In fact, knowing so little about her, they said nothing. Had they known more, no doubt they would have been kind: but the kindness, or lack of it, with which one regards oneself finds its echo in the outside world: and Lucy could not forgive herself. All her fault. Her lost marriage, her failed love, her bastard children, her dusty home, her condemnation to this cruel street, this unfeeling, gossiping town – all her fault. Seeking out more degradation, the seedy lodger, the false photographer, slurping milk through his moustache at her breakfast table, she began to feel better again.
Lucy curled her hair and pressed her clothes. She weeded the drive. She dressed Hypatia and Praxis in pale pink – they had somehow lost their right to white – and wrote to Butt and Sons, the Duveen solicitors, for money to hire a servant, as befitted the litle girls’ state as descendants, albeit on the male side, of King David. Butt and Sons at first demurred, but then conceded.
Benjamin’s mother paid another visit, and seemed relieved by what she saw. (Henry was banished to the kitchen for the occasion). She left the girls a signed photograph of their father; but Praxis had already forgotten what he looked like; he seemed a stranger to her, with his glowing eyes and large nose. Hypatia took the photograph, in any case, and slept with it under her pillow. Praxis set up a howl, discovering this, but Henry dealt her a sharp cuff and she soon stopped.
Lucy presently found pleasure in telling Henry what to do. He followed on her heels like a little pet dog: she scolded and chided and soon had him fetching her bag, her book, her wrap, and so rebuilt a little world around herself, and even came down to the beach on warm days.
The girls watched their lodger take photographs, though pretending to be nothing to do with him. Nothing. A street photographer, after all. None too honest, either, with rotting lungs and bad breath; and their mother a doctor’s daughter, and her daughters of the line of King David. Lucy told them so, frequently: proud of it at last. They had no concept of the notion of Jewishness: either of pogroms or passover. Lucy was vague enough about it herself.
Hypatia and Praxis went to school and suffered with Jesus on the cross, gasped at the beauty of the Virgin Mary, drenched their souls in the blood of the lamb; were slapped if they stole or told lies, heard that they were daughters of Eve and responsible for leading men into sin and for the loss of Paradise, and must make amends for ever. Praxis cleaned Henry’s shoes in penance: Hypatia actually learned how to develop his prints. And he did develop them nowadays, all of them, and Lucy would send them off. His teeth never lost their blackness, but he seemed on the whole, as the years went by, less dejected. Lucy even scolded him into a vague sexual response: human beings, he perceived through her, added up to more than the tattered shreds of flesh he had observed hanging on the barbed wire of the Ypres front; the grinning faces, skin stretched over bone, which presented themselves before his camera. The world was something more than a charnel house, a human factory farm, insanely breeding flesh out of flesh as its way of cheating death.
Presently they slept together in the big brass bed: she a little brisk woman with a tight mouth, prophesying disaster even in her sleep, tossing and turning; he coughing and spluttering all night long, trying to be rid of something; both somewhat healed by virtue of the other: both older than they used to be.
Praxis and Hypatia slept soundly but woke anxious, eyes wide and stretched, for ever fearful that something unexpected might happen. No one explained anything to them: where Ben ha
d come from, where he had gone: who Henry was, and why. Why their mother cried, scolded or laughed, for no apparent reason. Who the woman in the Rolls-Royce was. If everything was inexplicable, anything might happen.
Anxiety ironed itself into their souls.
Praxis thought Hypatia might know more than she did about it all, by virtue of the extra two and a half years to her credit, but if Hypatia did, she said nothing. Hypatia kept herself to herself: she was aloof, like a cat. Praxis more like a clumsy puppy, leaping up with muddy paws, enthusiastic but ridiculous.
4
I do not wet the bed now; at least not that: though soon, I dare say, the time will come when I do. I dread the day. I do not want to be an old woman sitting in a chair, wearing nappies, nursed by the salt of the earth. It seems unjust; not what Lucy and Benjamin meant at all; rolling about in their unwed bed, year after year, moved by a force which clearly had nothing to do with commonsense or anyone’s quest for happiness: until, their mission apparently accomplished, they rolled apart and went their separate ways, assisted by Butt and Sons, Solicitors.
I do not want to be an incontinent old lady. I would rather die. I feel today, my elbow throbbing and my toe swelling, that the time for dying will be quite soon. On Thursdays I go down to the Social Security offices, stand in a queue, and draw the money which keeps me for a further week. It should be possible for a postal draft to be sent weekly and myself to cash it at the local post office, but I do not like to make the request. I am an ex-con, and habit dies hard of not causing trouble to, let alone demanding one’s rights of, those in authority.
Those in authority, at any rate, in that strange grey world of bars and keys which I have inhabited, where cause and effect works in an immediate way, and the stupid are in charge of the intelligent, and each wrong-doer carries on his poor bowed shoulders the weight of a hundred of the worthy – from prison visitors to the Home Secretary – whose living is made, indirectly, out of crime, or sin, or financial failing, or criminal negligence: or, as with me, the madness of believing that I was right, and society wrong. Who did I think I was? I, Praxis Duveen.
Madness, I say. Today, certainly, it seems like madness. It’s raining. I can see water seeping beneath the door, and have not the strength to fetch one of my cheap, bright, non-absorbent towels to sop it up. Damp stains the stone floor: I feel a dark stain of wretchedness creeping up to the very edges of that part of my mind, my being, which I usually manage to keep inviolate. The part which is daily reborn with gladness, excitement and gratitude to God (or whatever you call it) because the world exists and is so full of interest and possibility: a part of me which I associate, rightly or wrongly, with the Praxis of the very early years, who would run happily into the waves with shoes and socks on to see what would happen, meet with a slap or two, and do it again the next day, unafraid.
Praxis, protected by parental love. While it lasted. Paradise was there, then snatched away.
Children who have been hurt, grow up to hurt. This I know. I knew it, but was helpless in the knowledge. I shouted and screamed, attempted murder or faked suicide, in my children’s presence: conducted the dark side of my erotic nature beneath their startled gaze, careless of the precipice I opened up beneath their feet. I, who guarded them from the fleas of strange dogs, and nasty sights at the pictures, and brushed their hair with loving care. Yes, I did, and so did you, and you: paid back to them what mother did to you.
I remember clearly that early sense of fear and desolation of which all later fears and desolations are mere shadows. And I handed it on to them: this extreme of terror and horror; the ultimate standard by which they must judge the traumas of their own lives, and will hardly feel alive if they do not attain, and so strive to attain for ever. The shrieks of generations growing louder, not softer, as the decades pass.
I am ashamed of it: as ashamed of that as of anything I have done: and bewildered as to why I feel compelled to do it. The domestic row existed, I could almost believe, in order to distress the children.
Perhaps I am dead, and this is my punishment? To believe I am still alive, and live as a useless old woman in a Western industrialised society? There cannot be much worse a punishment. Unless it be to live as a young woman in the East, and see your children die from starvation: or worse, watch them grow up sour, undersized and crippled by curable diseases.
I touch my elbow to see if I am alive. I am.
5
‘I want to go to school,’ Praxis said to Hypatia, when she was seven; she spoke experimentally, wondering whether it was possible, by mere words, to influence the course of events.
‘Always fussing,’ said Hypatia. ‘Anyway we can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘Just be quiet,’ said Hypatia, who was sensitive to Lucy’s anxieties, and knew that the matter of their going to or not going to school kept their mother awake at night. ‘And wipe your nose, it’s dripping again.’
Hypatia walked cautiously through life, fearful of disturbing stones in case she saw the insects scuttling underneath. Praxis, she felt, blundered blithely on, aiming careless kicks as she went.
Hypatia sat inside the house and sewed and embroidered with her mother. Praxis swung on the garden gate and watched the other children going to and from the council school at the end of Holden Road. Noisy, messy, muddled children, even by comparison to herself: shirts and ties awry, satchels broken, shoes dirty, trailing sweet papers as they went. They ran, shrieked, scuffled, stumbled, fell and helped each other up.
‘Common children,’ said Lucy Duveen, ‘come away.’
Lucy taught her daughters to read, write, add up, launder, embroider and sew. She taught them how to boil mutton, unlump a white sauce, stew cabbage and mix a plum duff.
Henry emerged from his developing room, adapted from the cupboard under the stairs. His business was thriving. He had saved almost enough to put down a deposit on a small photographic studio on the sea-front. He breathed more easily these days. He went to the pub: he had a crony or two there, although he did not tell Lucy. Her fear of gossip, of people Finding Out, was too great for her to be able to view friends with equanimity.
Lucy was worried by the matter of the children’s schooling: worry made her unreasonable. She would divert her mind from its proper preoccupation, and busy it with trifles: and then accord the trifles the emotional weight that better befitted the preoccupation. Anxiety, anger, and a sense of injustice, welled up in her at the notion of Henry’s lack of breeding, and blotted out her panic at the thought of the girls’ birth certificates, which would have to be produced when and if they ever enrolled at school.
Close inspection of their birth certificates would reveal the girls to be illegitimate, and their true names Hypatia Parker, and Praxis Parker; the mother’s name being entered as Lucy Parker, spinster. And though in the column for father was written not the humiliating ‘unknown’, but ‘Benjamin Duveen, occupation, gentleman’, the disgrace of mother and daughters would become known.
‘I want to go to school,’ said Praxis to Lucy.
‘And mix with common children? Is that the kind of girl you turn out to be?’ Lucy responded, with such a contorted face, and such unmaternal ferocity that her younger daughter was thereafter reluctant to present her mother with a need, let alone a want, for fear they should all tumble over the precipice into madness and despair.
‘Mrs Duveen,’ said Henry, ‘the law of the land requires that children go to school. Now the law of the land has never done anything for me except compel me to go to war and ruin my health, but nevertheless it exists, and the children must go.’
‘His health is a small thing for a gentleman to sacrifice for his country,’ replied Lucy, adding, with meaning, ‘I should have thought.’
‘I’m no gentleman,’ said Henry. ‘I thought you understood that.’
‘In that case,’ said Lucy, ‘perhaps you had better take your meals in the kitchen, with Judith.’
‘Very well,’ replied Henry, to Lucy�
�s dismay. ‘I think I will.’
He retired back under the stairs, where, half-crouching, he developed his prints. He had hoped to convert the small back bedroom to a darkroom but Lucy thought that room much too good for photographs. The stair cupboard would do. She had begun to enjoy despising Henry.
When Henry appeared at supper, as usual, for mulligatawny soup, stewed mince (it was Wednesday) and apple tart, Lucy said ‘I thought you were going to eat in the kitchen,’ and Henry took his plate and went. He absented himself from Lucy’s bed thereafter, letting it be understood that he would not return there until she invited him back into the dining-room, but she did not relent. She put out her shoes for him to clean, however, and clean them he did.
All this for Praxis was safety: waking up in the morning in the bed next to Hypatia: the dull routine of the house, of the day: Henry’s comings and goings: Hypatia’s moods: Judith’s sulks: learning to read: going to the children’s library: (talking to no one as instructed: hurrying straight home) there, running parallel, was a pit, just an edge away, of violence and hatred, screams and blows, fears, illness, death. Lucy sometimes showed Praxis a face which came straight from the other side: a witch face, demoniacal, tormented. Hypatia would show that face too, on occasion. ‘Let’s see who can make the ugliest face,’ she’d say, and promptly produce a devil mask straight from the other side, which terrified Praxis so that she’d cry. ‘Baby,’ Hypatia would deride, satisfied, and Praxis would sleep with her head under the blankets, in case she woke up in the morning and caught Hypatia with her devil face, before she’d had time to remove it.
Hypatia wished her harm, Praxis accepted that. Sometimes she’d relent, and they’d play sevens against the garage wall. Throw, bounce, catch. Throw, bounce, bounce, catch. Throw, bounce, turn, catch; throw, bounce, bounce, clap, catch; on and on for a whole afternoon, or until Judith emerged shrieking that she’d hand in her notice unless the thudding stopped.
