by Weldon, Fay
‘But you’re big Pattie Duveen,’ protested Miss Leonard, as she opened the door. ‘I know you. You came fourth in English in spite of a very insensitive paper on Keats. I was expecting a little girl called Praxis Parker.’
Miss Leonard looked disappointed, and was. So far the war had brought inconvenience but very little novelty. The paper bag containing Hilda’s blackberries disintegrated; over-ripe berries tumbled out and down the pale stair-carpet, staining as they went. Praxis cried, perceiving that Hilda’s influence would follow her for the rest of her life, and that her past could never in fact be forgotten, would never be over. She must be Praxis and Pattie too until the end of her days.
She stood limp and crying at the top of the stairs. Behind her the kettle boiled and a canary sang. Miss Leonard, perceiving a challenge, cheered up. Over a period of months she pushed Pattie there, pulled her here, patted and cosseted sense back into her: made her sweep under the beds and not just round them, hem her coat properly, hand in neat homework, take the eyes out of potatoes when she peeled them, and little by little extract from her the causes of her grief.
‘Jesus was a bastard,’ said Miss Leonard to Praxis. ‘Not to mention Napoleon and Nelson. Disadvantages either make you or break you. See that yours make you.’
‘It’s not perverted to fall in love with girls,’ said Miss Leonard, ‘if no boys are available. Freud says, in any case, that homosexuality is a normal step on the road to full sexual maturity.’
‘To be Jewish is no disgrace,’ said Miss Leonard. ‘On the contrary. In any case a Jewish father doesn’t count. Only a Jewish mother. Sorry.’
‘Your mother was not trying to harm you, only to save you,’ said Miss Leonard. ‘Poor thing.’
‘Yes, I can well believe that your sister is mad,’ said Miss Leonard, ‘though it never occurred to me at the time. One is not accustomed to the notion of mad children. But you’re not mad, Praxis. What did you do with the rat poison?’
Miss Leonard emptied it down the lavatory bowl, and flushed and flushed.
‘Mind you,’ she added, ‘I do know what she means about the third year. They do scuttle and scamper, whisper and pry, and they seem to have very sharp, bright, sinister eyes.’
But she laughed as she said it, and that day cut off the crusts of the sandwiches as a special treat – it was a practice frowned upon by the Ministry of Food – and filled them with tinned melon jam from South Africa, as opposed to the turnip-pulp, flecked with wood splinters and coloured with cochineal, which did for raspberry jam.
‘You’re getting to be quite a pretty girl, Praxis,’ said Miss Leonard. Praxis’ smile was less frequent, but her face becoming more expressive.
‘I suppose,’ said Miss Leonard, with rather less certainty, ‘it is possible to be happy in a strait-jacket. Especially if there are others in like condition to keep you company. One is usually at home in the presence of one’s peers. It is if one is obliged to live with others either greater or lesser than oneself, that one is so wretched –’
All the same, Miss Leonard wrote to Butt and Sons, Solicitors.
‘It is disgraceful,’ she declared, ‘that the children of your client should have been so neglected. If you will kindly send me the father’s address I will contact him personally. The mother has been driven into a breakdown by his harshness, and is in a position to sue for compensation through a third party, and I will have no hesitation in being that third party if funds are not immediately forthcoming for her transfer to a private institution –’
Miss Leonard received a cheque by return of post.
‘Be a carnivore,’ said Miss Leonard, carefully boiling the week’s ration of one egg each, to make a Sunday breakfast, ‘not a herbivore.’ She wore a crimson flowered dressing-gown, and her nails were bloody, red, but her slightly pop eyes were gentle and searching.
‘What do you mean?’ asked Praxis.
‘Carnivores feed off herbivores,’ said Miss Leonard. ‘Carnivores exist to herbivores in a ratio of fifty to one. I am a herbivore. We munch away peacefully, looking wise, until suddenly snap, snap, we’re gone.’ Miss Leonard had spent a lurid Saturday night.
Miss Leonard had lost her one true love in the First World War. First she’d slept with him: then she’d lost him. A punishment for sin, she assumed. She’d been seventeen.
‘It is an honour to lose a son for one’s country,’ observed her true-love’s mother, carrying on, head and chin held high. War Office telegrams mounting up on the mantelpiece, continuing with her charity fete to Beat the Boche. He was the third of her sons to die, trying to do so.
‘If that’s the only way you can bear it,’ observed Miss Leonard’s mother, ‘call it what you like, even honour. I prefer to call it a tragedy and a wicked waste. What are my daughters going to do for husbands?’
What indeed? Miss Leonard did without one, denied any need for one, lived quite happily without one, went to Teachers’ Training College, and thereafter spent her time putting romantic notions into the heads of growing girls. Keats, Wordsworth, Rupert Brooke.
‘If I should die, think only this of me –’
No, but there was so much else to be thought. She perceived it now: the war helped. Now the putative husbands were dying again, but this time not so willingly, Miss Leonard was glad to observe. As for sex, now that it was emerging as an easy traffic between ignoble men and willing women, it could hardly be, as she had once assumed, a matter for God’s instant, personal intervention.
These days, on Saturday nights, after Praxis had gone to her early bed, Miss Leonard had taken to dressing up in black mesh stockings, high heels, yellow satin blouse, tight black crêpe-de-chine skirt, swinging a white handbag, and walking, unrecognisably, down the esplanade – until accosted by a man, whereupon sanity would return and she’d rush home in agreeable panic.
On this particular Saturday night, Miss Leonard had arrived home to find the lights on, and Praxis presumably awake and out of bed, and rather than be discovered so eccentrically dressed, had returned to the esplanade. This time, courteously accosted by a respectable man with an educated accent, she did not run home, but fell into step beside him. He had lost his wife, so he said, in the Coventry air raids. Now he lived with his son. They went to bed together in a poky back bedroom, where a gas-fire, fed by sixpences, spluttered and smelt. The bed creaked.
Miss Leonard’s unaccustomed arms clasped thin limbs and a bony chest: she had expected more weight, more solidity. But that had been long ago: and had she been wrong then, and had it not been love she felt, but simple lust? Had she all these years regretted the loss of something not lost at all, but freely available in the bodies of all men: or had chance brought her something rare and extraordinary, something so composed of tenderness as only to be called love? Miss Leonard cried out in orgasm.
‘Hush,’ he said, embarrassed. ‘Hush,’ and she felt ashamed. Though she sought and recognised qualities in him – such as intelligence, education and gentleness – he saw in her only an ageing tart with a swinging handbag. What else could he see? He got out of bed and went to the bathroom. When he comes back, Miss Leonard thought, I’ll tell him who I really am, what I really am. Not a whore at all, but a school-teacher, to be taken seriously, loved and appreciated. Looked after, and looking after. For ever. He’ll believe me, he’ll forgive me. In her mind Miss Leonard re-papered the dismal room; filled it with flowers: she was his wife. One of those strange wartime marriages: but happy, how happy: happiness snatched out of loss, desolation, violence. His wife, pulped beneath falling masonry: and Miss Leonard’s true love, dull dead body hanging on barbed wire, pecked at by crows forming the comfort out of which such rare and lovely flowers grew.
When he came back and moved on top of her again, she was surprised. Surely this was the time for affection? She found his body heavy, his actions painful – and realising it was not the father but the son, struggled and cried out.
‘Did I take you by surprise?’ he asked, though not desisting
.
‘Didn’t he tell you I was next? Don’t worry I’ll give you extra. What’s the matter? What difference can it make to you?’
He left an extra pound on the dressing-table when he had finished.
‘Let yourself out,’ he said. ‘No hurry.’
Miss Leonard heard the lights of the house switched off, one by one, upstairs and down and all was presently silent. She dressed and let herself out, and shivered in the night air. She felt serviceable and useful, but second-rate and in need of cleaning: like some old chipped saucepan, pulled from the back of a cupboard: good enough as a receptacle but hardly for haute cuisine. Well, as one valued oneself, so one was valued. She must tell Praxis that, in the morning.
One her way home she was accosted by a drunken GI. For ten shillings she allowed herself to be leaned against a wall, her skirt taken up, her knickers down, and herself penetrated by a member as long, pale, lean, cool and strong as the GI hands she had often wondered at, so unlike the tense and crooked hands of the English. She remained quite passive herself: he did not seem to notice, but walked on after the incident as if he had been merely relieving himself.
Is that what sex is, wondered Miss Leonard. Such a simple impulse, after all?
Miss Leonard arrived home, bathed, slept, boiled the breakfast eggs, and recommended that Praxis should grow up a carnivore, not a herbivore.
‘You may well be one in any case,’ she said. ‘You certainly seem to be at the centre of events. A catalyst. Do you know what a catalyst is?’
‘No.’
‘They ought at least to pretend to teach girls science,’ said Miss Leonard.
‘Girls aren’t good at science.’
‘Madame Curie was.’ It was the stock answer, unbelieving and unbelieved.
Miss Leonard presently took Patricia to visit her mother in the Seaview Nursing Home. It was a private establishment: and clean and cheerful. Lucy was sitting in the autumnal sunset, in a flowered wrap, gazing out over concrete emplacements, barbed wire, and the rising and falling tides. She kept her arms rather closely to her sides, as if they rather missed their confinement, but talked charmingly to her daughter, as if to some passing stranger, about the changing moods of the seasons. She was no longer distressed, or distressing.
‘What about the others?’ Praxis asked Miss Leonard.
‘What others?’
‘The others still in strait-jackets.’
Miss Leonard stared at Praxis.
‘Don’t tell me,’ she said, ‘you’re going to be the sort who cares about others.’ But she seemed pleased rather than otherwise.
The time for Miss Leonard’s monthly period came and went, and came and went again. She thought it was the Change of Life, and took care to wrap up well in cold winds. ‘Hormonal changes,’ she told herself when she felt sick: and ‘one puts on weight’, when her waist band would no longer button; and ‘it’s a difficult time’ when she found herself snapping at Praxis for leaving the table uncleared, and crying instead of shouting when her pupils left their homework undone: until her shape was too characteristic of pregnancy to be denied, even to herself.
‘No, I don’t know the father,’ said Miss Leonard to the doctor, ‘it was rape.’
‘Did you go to the police?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘I felt too dirty. I couldn’t even talk about it.’ How she lied! She who was so honest, and honourable. ‘Please do something for me.’
‘There is nothing I can do. Not even in cases of rape is abortion anything other than a criminal act’
‘But I’m forty-five.’
‘What has that to do with it?’
‘I’ve never had a baby. Isn’t it dangerous?’
‘If it is a question of your life or the baby’s, it is sometimes permitted to sacrifice the baby. Not, of course, if you are a Roman Catholic. Then the newer soul takes precedence.’
‘You mean they’d kill me?’
‘Not directly. But they’d save the baby.’
‘Are you a Roman Catholic?’
He was an elderly man. He shook his head. He smiled. He didn’t believe her story of rape.
‘No. But I know God’s work when I see it. I am afraid this pregnancy is your punishment. Believe me, those who pay the penalty for their sins in this world, not in the next, are indeed blessed.’
Miss Leonard went to other doctors, who declined to help. Many showed her the door, outraged at the notion that they should connive at murder. Others expressed sympathy, but did not, could not, risk imprisonment on her account.
Miss Leonard confided all to Praxis.
When Praxis had reassessed her vision of Miss Leonard, which took the best part of a week – shock modifying to surprise, surprise to disapproval, disapproval to acceptance, she observed, ‘It seems extraordinary to me that in a world in which men are killing each other by the million, they should strike such attitudes about an unborn foetus.’
Miss Leonard, through her distraction, felt she had done well with Praxis. Praxis had joined the Peace Pledge Union. She was now a pacifist. It was not a popular thing to be, but now that she was freed from the worst of her inner preoccupations, Praxis was left with sufficient energy to strike the difficult moral attitudes suitable to her years.
‘If men won’t help,’ said Praxis, ‘perhaps women will.’
Praxis went to visit Mrs Allbright, that soft, honey-coloured creature.
‘Tell your friend,’ said Mrs Allbright, ‘that abortion is a wicked thing, against God’s law and man’s. No, of course I don’t know any addresses. What your friend should do is have the baby and put it in a home, or have it adopted. There are Charitable Societies which will take the baby away at six weeks, and see to the whole thing for you.’
‘Isn’t that rather hard for the mother? To wait six weeks? Why can’t they take it away at birth?’
‘The mother must be given every opportunity to change her mind, Pattie. She must realise exactly what she’s done, and what she’s giving up. No use just brushing these things under the carpet, or society will collapse into total immorality. It’s only the fear of pregnancy which keeps girls on the straight and narrow.’
Young Mrs Allbright, still childless, was trying to please her husband (increasingly irritable) and seduce God (increasingly inaccessible) by adopting the views of the first Mrs Allbright, as if by some sympathetic magic she too might be as fertile as her predecessor. She worried about Mr Allbright’s feeling for his middle daughter, now fifteen, which was increasingly displayed in huggings, strokings and kissing. A heightened sexuality, she could see, was a double-edged sword. The pleasure extracted by the body must be repaid by the mind, in the form of anxiety. Nothing was for nothing.
‘I hope you’re not a close friend of this particular girl, Pattie,’ said Mrs Allbright. ‘I know that thanks to Mr Hitler we’re all jumbled up next to each other, saints and sinners, and it may even be no bad thing, but do please be careful not to get into bad company. I hope Miss Leonard keeps a strict eye on you. What news of Hilda?’
Hilda was in her second year at Somerville. She was expected to get a first. Praxis said as much.
‘There’s such a thing as being too clever,’ sighed Mrs Allbright. ‘So difficult to find a suitable husband.’
Praxis went to visit Judith, who by now had three small children, all with swarthy complexions and dark, watchful eyes. Her husband was in hospital with stomach pains. Judith wrote an address and handed it to Praxis.
‘So you’re in trouble,’ she said. ‘Like mother, like daughter.’
All Judith’s children were boys.
‘It’s not me,’ protested Praxis, ‘it’s my friend.’
‘That’s what they all say,’ said Judith. ‘You are so like your mother. A hypocrite. Well, fortunately I don’t hold grudges. There’s your address. It’ll cost you five pounds.’
‘Is it safe?’
‘It’s done me often enough. I’m still alive.’
‘Does it hurt?’
‘Of course it hurts.’
When Miss Leonard and Praxis knocked at the suggested door, there was no reply. Dingy lace curtains were drawn over dusty windows. Dogs had been at the dustbins, and household refuse was scattered over the paths.
‘Too late,’ said an elderly neighbour, scarf over curlers, cigarette in the mouth. ‘She’s doing five years. One of them finally died. I’m surprised it didn’t happen before. Dirt! You should have seen it. As for the inside of her dustbins – but she wouldn’t listen. Dead ignorant. Good-hearted, but dead ignorant.’
Miss Leonard was to have her baby. By the time she found an abortionist her condition was public knowledge, her job was lost, and the baby too developed to be safely removed.
‘It’s your fault,’ she said to Praxis. ‘If you hadn’t chosen that night to wander about, none of it would have happened.’
These days Miss Leonard was childish and tearful; it was left to Praxis to be sensible and reassuring.
Mr Robinson the children’s officer appeared, to see if perhaps Praxis was in moral danger, and concluded it was too late to worry. In any case, where else could she go? 109 Holden Road had found no buyer. Miss Leonard swelled, and lumbered, and knitted. Praxis studied, attended to her lessons, and to the cooking. Hilda appeared, briefly, from Somerville. She was in the middle of exams, and suffering the effects of stress. She was pale, dark-eyed, and certain that Miss Leonard’s baby was the Immaculate Conception of the Anti-Christ. She wrote to Butt and Sons asking them to withdraw Praxis’ and Lucy’s allowance – all their trouble she maintained, could be traced back to tainted money. Praxis managed to switch envelopes so that an empty one was dispatched instead. Hilda went away.
‘She doesn’t really want to damage me,’ Praxis said to Miss Leonard, ‘only herself in me.’
‘There is such a thing,’ said Miss Leonard, ‘as being too forgiving.’
