by Weldon, Fay
Praxis reeled, at the sudden presentation of the malice which underlies love; the resentment which interleaves affection between the sexes, of which she had until that moment no notion. She was shocked; she would not cry. Willy looked at her with Lucy’s eyes. As with Lucy, they hated: they feared: they wanted to hurt: they had learned how, and all too well. Now Willy, too. Praxis went home to the hostel.
‘What did you say to him in return,’ Irma enquired, briskly. ‘Did you tell him he was a dwarf, a sex maniac; that he smells? That he’s a looter of dead bodies?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Well, he is, he does, he did.’
‘I’d never say so to his face.’
‘But you’ve thought it. You must have. He just said the things he thought about you in his worst moments. I don’t suppose he means them. They’re not nearly as awful as the things you’ve thought about him.’
She could be very kind. Praxis, relieved, cried herself to sleep in a rather comforting and comforted way.
‘If you behave like a whore,’ said Colleen, ‘you get treated like a whore. Would you like to borrow my red shirt?’
‘No thank you.’ Praxis’ clothes had become more orthodox. Willy picked her out garments from church sales, excellent bargains all, and more in keeping with the times, albeit somewhat washed-out.
The next day Willy came round and apologised, and even bought her a half of shandy and paid for it himself. She was vastly relieved. Her main fear had been that she would presently find Willy in the students’ bar investing in the gin and lime which would buy him his next term’s sex, comfort, company and secretarial services.
Praxis made sure that her next essay was poorly executed and badly presented, and she inserted a few good extra paragraphs of her own composition into Willy’s essay while typing it out for him; this time he got a straight A and she a C minus and a sorrowful note from her tutor.
The earlier A had been a flash in the pan, her tutor could only suppose. One of the tantalising little flashes girls in higher education would occasionally display: for the most part flickering dimly and then going out, extinguished by the basic, domestic nature of the female sex, altogether quenched by desire to serve the male. Indeed, the consensus of the college authorities was, not surprisingly, that girls seldom lived up to early promise: were rarely capable of intellectual excellence; seemed to somehow go rotten and fall off before ripening, like plums in a bad season. The extension of equal educational facilities to girls had been a hopeful, and perhaps an inevitable undertaking, but was scarcely justifiable by results. He had hoped it was not true, but was beginning to believe it was.
For Praxis, Willy’s A’s and her own C’s seemed a small price to pay for Willy’s protection, Willy’s interest, Willy’s concern; for the status of having a steady boyfriend.
Red-lipped Irma, red-haired Colleen, had to do without. Irma through choice, Colleen by necessity.
Praxis, in the meantime, with Willy around, about, and into her body, loved Phillip with her head. She had secret knowledge of him: she dreamed of him: of the mature male that lurked behind the childish eyes, and boyish lips: the soft voice that murmured easy endearments over the telephone to his virgin, distant love. She saw the look of distracted boredom on his face as he replaced the receiver: before the permanent half-smile returned. Praxis knew: Praxis knew what his boring fiancée did not, the harsh grip of his hands on her shoulders, male and digging, the savagery in his eyes, the obscenities from his mouth. She remembered.
If she had known how to seduce: she would have. But she had no conception of herself as temptation. She was a slice of bread and butter on the table, not a cream eclair just out of reach; but Phillip was clearly not hungry for bread and butter, or thought he wasn’t. He found it easier to yearn romantically after the unavailable: lick his lips over imaginary scented cream.
Praxis hated being alone with Phillip. She did not know what to say to him: nor, she suspected, did he know what to say to her. It did not stop her loving him. It was almost as if she associated love with embarrassment.
Christmas was coming. Hilda wrote to say she would be staying at Holden Road for the vacation: that Butt and Sons had written to offer the freehold of the house as final settlement of their (purely voluntary) obligations to Miss Parker’s family; that Lucy had accepted the offer, and so was now back in a National Health Service hospital, but a very nice one, with modern equipment; that the Holden Road house was in a very bad state, riddled with woodworm, charred by the stars (what did that mean? Praxis shuddered), that Baby Mary had developed pneumonia as a result of Mrs Allbright’s habit of leaving her out under the night sky, and would Praxis please come home at Christmas to help clear up the house – Why should everything be left to Hilda?
‘What does modern equipment mean?’ Willy asked. Praxis shook her head, unable to speak, afraid to think. There were tears of shock in her eyes.
‘A new form of strait-jacket, I daresay,’ said Phillip, blithely.
‘What a superb film could be made inside a mental asylum. Do you think they’d let me in? If only cameras were smaller, I could go in as your brother and no one would be the wiser. What a scoop it would be.’
Phillip had started a film club. He had a cine-camera. He seemed to think only of films. He would form his two hands into squares and look at the world through them: first this way, then that. Sometimes he looked at Praxis, framing her with his hands. It made her uneasy. Sometimes, nowadays, he would come home between lectures and surprise Willy and Praxis on the floor, or against the cooker, or wherever, and would appear surprised, which surely by now he couldn’t be, and take his time to leave. Her breasts would tingle at the thought of his observation: the back of her mouth go dry: her eyes blacken: her buttocks tighten: the centre of her body shrink, oddly, away from him, not towards, as if desiring yet fearful of too overwhelming an experience. Her body acquiesced to Willy: yet crept round him, through some darkening of vision, some fusing of matter into magic, reaching out to Phillip.
But he was nothing, nothing. Something trivial in herself called out to the trivia in him: she knew it was no more than that. Listening to him speak now, using the griefs of the world as if they were bucketfuls of oats to be fed to some lively horse he was determined to mount and spur on to personal victory, with the sound of popular applause ringing in his ears, she knew that he was not really to be taken seriously. It was an intuition she would have done well to recall, in later years.
Willy kicked Phillip. She saw it and was grateful. Willy at least recognised personal pain when he saw it. Phillip, who did not, looked puzzled, as people do when they are woken from hypnosis, and are obliged to travel from early childhood to maturity in the space of seconds.
‘Not if it upsets you, of course, Praxis,’ Philip said, politely. ‘But the more people can be persuaded to turn private grief into public good the better. Film is the way ahead. Photographic images of recorded time. We must hold up a mirror to the world, so it can see itself, and reform itself. Everything else has failed. Religion, literature, art, war, mass education and political systems. Film is what we need.’
Photographs!
Lucy had relegated the beach photographer, her lover, to the cupboard under the stairs: had sent him there from her bed. Years later, when clearing out the cupboard, Praxis was to come across an envelope of nude photographs, showing her mother, Lucy, in her prime, posing for the camera, oddly coy, with one hand over her breasts, the other one over her crotch, head thrown back, enticing. The white of her eyes showed unnaturally. And why was that? Was it from madness, lust, embarrassment or despair? And why had she destroyed the innocent photograph of Hypatia and Praxis on the beach, but not these? Was there a significance in it? Had it been a struggle between decency and indecency, the maternal nature and the erotic, that had in the end destroyed poor Lucy? Or none of these: just the piling up of chance on chance, episode on incident; the wrong enzymes in the brain; a faulty heredity; the accumulation of loss, tr
ouble and social humiliation, which had sent her storming so angrily and destructively back into the inner refuge where she huddled for the rest of her days, safe from reality.
‘No one’s going to take pictures of my mother,’ said Praxis unduly bold, out of instinct, if not knowledge. ‘It won’t do her any good.’
‘It might do society good,’ Phillip persisted. His eyes were soft and large. He rarely spoke to Praxis directly.
‘Anyway,’ said Praxis, ‘I’m not going back home for Christmas.’
Baby Mary would have to look after herself, suffer from starlight as she might.
Praxis spent Christmas with Willy and Willy’s mother, sleeping in the spare room for appearance sake, waylaid by Willy in pantry and corridor. Willy’s mother was a slight, nervous, tidy woman who spoke only of practicalities, and then only briefly, and hid behind spectacles even thicker than Willy’s own. She walked about her chilly, spotless house, reading books on philosophy, politics or economics: anything so long as it was removed from the day-to-day actualities of life, which she found boring. Sometimes she would stumble, so engrossed in her book would she be, and cry out, but rejected help or comfort. Her husband had died of lung cancer when Willy was twelve: it seemed to her, thereafter, that life was something which had to be got through, rather than enjoyed, whilst observing the proper formalities. Or so Willy related it.
Willy had been a mere accident: an afterthought: a by-product of the marriage. His mother was polite to him, even interested in his welfare and progress, but still surprised by his existence. So Willy said.
Praxis saw Willy’s eyes, large behind his thick glasses, dilated with hurt, and believed him.
Praxis found her arms creeping round Willy (as they had never used to) as he penetrated her, in the greenhouse, or the bathroom, or wherever, her own bottom cold against the shiny Christmas surfaces of his mother’s house, trying to warm him, and make up for what he had never had.
Christmas dinner was served formally in the unheated dining room. A pair of candles were lit, placed in saucers to catch the drips. There was roast chicken: a sliver each. The remainder was served cold on Boxing Day, as a fricassee the day after, and the carcass boiled for soup the day after that. There was an agreeable sense of ceremony, properly and frugally performed.
Willy’s mother smiled, as she pecked Praxis goodbye. Praxis went to London and was fitted with a contraceptive device at the Marie Stopes clinic. It was a rubber cap which fitted over her cervix. Willy was relieved of the conflict between his dislike of coitus interruptus and his reluctance to spend good money on French letters.
The new term started. Willy was in his final year at Reading, Praxis in her first: part of his course and hers overlapped. Willy had a plan for Praxis’ future. After he had taken his final examinations he meant to do statistical research at London University. If his degree was good enough he could get a grant: otherwise, he could scrape together only a certain amount by way of bursaries, but if Praxis was earning, and they lived simply and economically enough, there should be no difficulty in his managing. He did not mention marriage, and Praxis did not presume to do so.
‘You’re mad,’ said Irma, ‘to even think of it.’
Irma had temporarily settled for a young man with a future, or so she predicted, in back-bench politics. His name was Peter; he belonged to the young Conservatives; he bought her flowers and chocolates and she kissed him goodnight on the doorstep, regulating the length and passion of the kiss according to the value of the gifts he had bought her that evening, and the quality of the attention he offered. (Willy and Praxis seldom kissed. There seemed no need.)
‘You have to send your life in the direction you want it to go,’ said Irma. ‘You can’t just let things happen. You can’t just live with men because they’re there. You know Willy’s there because he smells.’
Praxis didn’t speak to Irma for a good week. If Willy smelt she had long since ceased to notice it.
‘You’ve got to make him marry you,’ said Colleen.
Colleen’s life had changed, along with the fashions. Skirts had become full, waists nipped, shoulders dropped, hair softened. Colleen had abandoned sport and taken to sex. She frequented the cafe where the Rugger set hung out, and on a Saturday, after closing hours, could be seen making for the downs, laughing heartily and noisily in the company of one or other of the brave, who clearly deserved the fair. In her New Look Saturday dress, Colleen at last felt herself one of the fair. She serviced Irma’s Peter once a month or so, secretly, when the balls ache, as he described it, brought on when Irma’s doorstep goodnights became too much for him to bear. Colleen suffered badly from guilt on this account: and still cried herself to sleep at nights, though nowadays for a different reason; she lived in constant fear of being pregnant.
Victory and beer made the Rugger boys fearless: defeat and beer made them invite disaster: French letters were expensive, embarrassing to procure, and tended to be kept back for special occasions, special girls. Not just Colleen on a Saturday night. Peter was of course always gentlemanly, and withdrew, politely, turning away to use a handkerchief. Colleen loved him. Irma didn’t. It hardly seemed fair.
‘It’s different for you,’ said Praxis to Colleen, ‘you’ve got a home. You don’t understand. I’ve got nothing, no one. Only Willy.’
‘I wish I had nothing and no one,’ said Colleen, gloomily. She’d had a letter from her mother. Her father, a parish councillor and church warden, had, for many years, been on the verge of leaving her mother for a gentle spinster lady who arranged flowers on the altar for Sunday services. The affair had finally become public knowledge. Colleen’s mother, jolly and stoical to the end, threw the information out in a paragraph, and expressed the hope that her daughter would be bringing home a really magnificent show of sports trophies to join her own array of cups and shields, won in the good old pre-marriage days. Colleen was her mother’s hope and consolation, Colleen’s mother made that clear. All else had failed her.
‘What can I possibly take home now? I’m out of all the teams,’ moaned Colleen.
‘A baby and VD,’ said Praxis. ‘Give her something to think about. It’s the kindest thing.’
Colleen barely spoke to Praxis for a week. They were hard-hearted with each other. A sense of desperation seemed to afflict them: as if whatever path they took, whatever new avenue opened up, it would narrow and block, and they would be turned round once again, to face their own natures.
13
Women of child-bearing age have it easy: if all else fails they can always give birth to another human being, who will love them, at least for a time.
Watch a baby at the breast blankly studying its mother, eyes dewy with love. Whoever else ever looked at her like that?
I have a cat: I had a cat: a raggedy white Tom. When I went to prison a neighbour took it in. When I came out my raggedy Tom was a plump white neuter, with calm, kind eyes. The vet had recommended it, the neighbour said, uneasily. But I think she found the cat’s maleness too naked and too smelly. Well, it was her right. I had left her in charge. Did the cat remember me? He settled back with me easily enough. He shared my Social Security money without guilt: coming and going through the dirty window, himself yet not himself, as I was.
He would lie along the back of the dirty armchair, staring at me as I paced and muttered, cried and ranted, without comment accepting me.
He came to the window just now and found it closed. I can’t walk. I tried, I really did: my leg would not let me. I got out of the chair somehow, and began to crawl, but I think I lost consciousness: when I realised again who and where I was, the windowsill was empty. The cat was gone. Perhaps he will never come back? I wouldn’t, if I were him, and betrayed.
It was not his fault, nor mine. But I feel I should have done better. Listen, I am going to die: murdered by a thoughtless girl on a bus, but never mind all that. There isn’t much time. I must offer you what I can.
Watch Praxis. Watch her carefully. Look, list
en, learn.
Then safely, as they say to children, cross over.
14
‘I won’t decide until the end of the year,’ said Praxis to Willy, with a fine show of self-determination. ‘Until you have your results. If you do get a first then I’ll stay on and get my own degree.’
‘Can I trust you to be faithful?’
‘Of course,’ said Praxis, believing it to be so.
‘But if I don’t? The examiners are fools. They wouldn’t be examiners if they weren’t.’
‘Then I’ll leave, and get some kind of job; it won’t bring in much because there’s nothing I can do except scrub or cook or baby-mind, I suppose. But it will get the rent paid and if we live frugally we’ll manage. It’ll be such fun. And we’ll be really together.’ She added the last two sentences as conventional afterthoughts, rather than because they sprang naturally together. Living with Willy, supporting Willy through his further degree, could not be anticipated as exactly fun. Companionable, perhaps. Intimate certainly.
‘I suppose we’ll have to leave it like that,’ he conceded. ‘But I’m always much happier if I know exactly what’s going to happen. I hate uncertainty.’
It was a good term. Willy was particularly kind and attentive, as if trying to prove to her that she could not possibly live without him. He allowed her to clean up the flat, and put out the old milk bottles twenty at a time, and even defied the milkman who declined to take them away in case they contaminated his vehicle.
‘It is your statutory duty to remove them,’ said Willy. ‘Why should we be obliged to live with the property of your company against our will?’
‘You’ve lived with them long enough,’ said the milkman. But he took them.
Praxis cleaned the windows and a little sunlight filtered down into the gloom.
‘The trouble with you, Praxis,’ said Willy, ‘is that you’re a born housewife. The taxpayer’s wasting his money on you.’ Praxis feared that it was so. Occasionally, when she forgot, she got a B. Once a B +. Once an A –, but she kept quiet about it.
