by Weldon, Fay
‘You’re very restful,’ he said, although her mind kept racing ahead to Mary’s return home from school, and the necessity usually fulfilled – of being there first. But she felt, for once, happy where she was.
‘And more beautiful supine than upright,’ he added. ‘All the best women are.’
‘A pity we can’t have children,’ he said. ‘I always want to have children. But I suppose it’s impractical.’
‘Yes,’ said Pattie.
He made no suggestion that he might see her again, and for once, she was disappointed. But what else could she expect? His hand continued to run over hers, however, as if, although the prime purpose of their encounter had been met, his interest and concern for her remained.
‘I used to live in Brighton once,’ he said. ‘It was a terrible time. Before the war. I was more or less married and more or less had children. Lucy, she was called. Loony Lucy. I think she was even more impossible than me, but it was a long time ago.
How could one tell? Who was right and who was wrong?’
‘What became of her?’ asked Pattie, eventually. Her mind moved quickly to the defence, while her feelings remained stunned. Incest, she told herself, rapidly, was merely another label: so, come to that, was father. A father was someone who brought up a child: not someone who abandoned it. Incest was something disturbing which happened, inside families.
‘She was provided for,’ he said. ‘I’m sure she was better off without me. People usually are.’
‘And the children?’
‘Better to keep out of their way,’ he said. ‘They were her idea, not mine. It would only be an embarrassment now, to seek them out. It was a long time ago.’
Pattie lay quiet. His hand moved up from her hand, to her arm, to her breast.
‘You’re lovely,’ he said, as if surprised. ‘I want you again. You make me feel young again.’
To commit incest knowingly, Pattie supposed, was a great deal worse than to do so unknowingly and that was bad enough. Oedipus had put out his eyes, and been pursued by furies, for ever after, for such a sin. But she was committing nothing: she was lying there, while her progenitor plunged and flailed in the body of his own creating. She was glad he liked it. She would say nothing. She would take his guilt upon herself.
He was a charming, impossible man; a hopeless, dangerous romantic. No wonder he had driven Lucy mad. Had he lain his head upon her belly, and tried to listen to the breathing of the universe? No doubt, and then gone straight down to the golf-club, listening in to the waitresses’ hot-line to infinity, as well.
Pattie laughed aloud, with bitterness and exultation mixed, at which orgasm shook her body, so that the laughter turned almost to a cry of distress.
‘Christ,’ he said, with reverence. But she had altogether demystified him: turned him from saint to client, from father to man, from someone who must be pleased to someone who could pleasure her. He was a natty, grey-haired old gentleman, spending the afternoon with a provincial whore, and that was all there was to it. As to being her father: he had renounced his rights to that a long time ago.
As if sensing the change in her, his erection wilted and all but died, and she obliged it up again, and used it for her own purposes, and found she could. She had become, at his expense, autonomous, wresting from him what he had failed to offer.
What am I doing here, wondered Praxis. What am I trying to prove, and to whom? Who is there in the world to care how low I’ve sunk; to take the blame for it? It has all been my own doing.
He dressed: Praxis lay naked on the bed and watched. He left her twenty pounds, white five-pound notes. It occurred to her that perhaps the same knowledge had come to him as had to her, mid-intercourse, causing the momentary lapse in psychic energy, the temporary failure of desire.
He paused before he left.
‘So long as this is only part of your life, not all of it,’ he said, and she was conscious once again of affection between him and her: of something he was trying to offer her, within the very narrow limits of what he saw as his responsibility.
‘All right,’ she said, and he gave her the most paternal of pecks upon the forehead, and a rather less paternal one on each of her breasts, and left.
Pattie got up, washed, dressed, went home, packed, met Mary out of school, took a taxi to the station, the train to Waterloo, and within hours was knocking on Colleen’s front door.
17
Arguments from nature.
It is natural, they told me in prison, waving their keys, to want to be free. The prison I was in, actually, had a secure perimeter, but once inside the high brick walls, the ring of alarms, dogs and surveillance, there was a fair degree of free movement. The difficulty lay in wanting to move, freely or otherwise. Prison was as much inside the head, as outside it.
It is natural, they told me, to miss the opposite sex. Sexual deprivation, of course, though it is seldom mentioned, is what prison is all about. Thirty years without fucking, to this robber or that. A year without fucking, to this or that rowdy young man. It used to be more awe-inspiring a penalty in the days when the general degree of sexual disgust was higher. Now the men masturbate in cheerful unison over girlie magazines, and the girls fall in love with each other.
That’s natural.
It is nature, they say, that makes us get married.
Nature, they say, that makes us crave to have babies.
You must breast-feed, they say. It’s natural. Best for baby. Eat raw carrots, yeast tablets, sea salt, honey, and so on. Natural. Eschew white sugar, chemical salt, artificial sweetness, preservatives. Unnatural.
It’s nature that makes us love our children, clean our houses, gives us a thrill of pleasure when we please the home-coming male.
Who is this Nature?
God?
Or our disposition, as laid down by evolutionary forces, in order to best procreate the species?
I suppose, myself, that it is the latter.
Nature does not know best, or if it does, it is on the man’s side. Nature gives us painful periods, leucorrhoea, polyps, thrush, placenta praevia, headaches, cancer and in the end death.
It seems to me that we must fight nature tooth and claw. Once we are past child-bearing age, this Nature, this friend, we hear so much about, disposes of us. In drying up our oestrogen, it bends our back, brittles our bones, rheums our eyes and clouds our tempers: throws us on its scrap-heap of useless though still moving, stirring, moaning flesh. It is not natural to be a grandmother: it may be nice, but it is a social role, a consolatory one: no, it is natural to be dead.
What I am saying is, I am useless. I do not mind dying. I have given up. I, little Praxis Duveen, bastard, adulteress, whore, committer of incest, murderess, what else? Hand me your labels. I’ll wear them for you.
But as for the rest of you, sisters, when anyone says to you, this, that or the other is natural, then fight. Nature does not know best; for the birds, for the bees, for the cows; for men, perhaps. But your interests and Nature’s do not coincide.
Nature our Friend is an argument used, quite understandably, by men.
18
‘You should go back,’ said Colleen to Praxis. Colleen was eight months pregnant. She was married to Michael, a thin, dark, kind, silent man, who suffered from asthma and depression. He had been a business executive for a farm machinery firm when she married him, but his illness had forced him to take a less responsible job and now he sold Rolls-Royces in Berkeley Square. His asthma and his depression, alas, had merely been accentuated by the move; by contact with motor fumes and the very rich. He longed for the rural life. He did not see how he could support a child, let alone Colleen, on the money he earned. He had been to University, but despair and wheezing combined had induced him to leave just before his finals. He suffered from nostalgia, from the belief that once things had been better than they were now: sometimes he would lie in bed for days trying to summon the courage and strength to get up: or else wheeze and choke, so that Colleen would
call the doctor. By the time the doctor came, he could breathe quite easily. Yet on good days he was charming, and interested, polite and clever, and kind.
‘I thought I could cheer him up,’ said Colleen. ‘I’m quite a vigorous person, really. I thought I might infect him, somehow, with energy. Make him look forward instead of back.’ She spoke doubtfully, as if she now knew it would never be. The flat was small and poky. Praxis slept on the couch: Mary on pillows on the floor. In the bedroom Michael wheezed and Colleen murmured consolation through the night. She had given up tennis and hockey. She could not share them with Michael.
There were wedding photographs on the mantelpiece. Michael looked handsome, sombre, and well-bred; Colleen lively and pretty. Colleen’s mother wore a hearty felt hat pulled down over her eyes, and Colleen’s father had insisted that his elderly flower-arranging mistress be in the picture. ‘Such a good friend of the family.’
‘You should go back,’ said Colleen. ‘Marriage is sacred.’
‘But I’m not married. I never married him.’
‘You’re as good as,’ said Colleen, with truth. ‘He’s been keeping you all these years.’
Colleen sat with her legs apart, arms clasped over her eight month lump, occasionally gasping and groaning. ‘And it’s not as if Mary was his own. Besides, you can’t just wander round London homeless with Mary; someone will catch up with her and take her away.’
‘She’s mine,’ said Praxis. ‘They can’t.’
‘Not unless you officially adopt her,’ said Colleen primly. ‘And that means being married. Go back home and marry Willy.’
‘Never,’ cried Praxis.
‘I don’t think you’ve given it a fair chance,’ said Colleen. ‘Living in sin is very different from being married. What you need in your life is more commitment, not less.’
At which point Michael loomed through the door, home early from work. His face was white and his eyes glazed: he took to his bed. He had triumphed that day, and sold a Silver Ghost to the nineteen-year-old son of an earl, but at once had started wheezing.
‘Asthma’s a terrible thing,’ said Colleen when she had settled her husband, and he was breathing more easily.
‘So’s envy,’ said Praxis, tartly. ‘He should get a job where he mixes with people less fortunate than himself.’
‘That’s nothing to do with it. Michael despises worldly privilege and wealth.’
There seemed to be little left of the original Colleen. She had become her husband’s spokeswoman.
‘What’s happened to the archaeology?’ asked Praxis.
‘It’s not really practical, is it,’ said Colleen. ‘Though I must say,’ she added, more brightly, ‘I did get interested in tracing trade routes via artefacts. I might go back to it later. But one has to settle down, doesn’t one? All that sleeping around – you can’t think how wonderful it is just to have Michael, and be married and secure. And now the baby. After the baby’s born I’ll make Michael join a tennis club. I expect all he needs is exercise.’
But she spoke without conviction. She looked at Praxis mutely, appealing for help, but Praxis had none to offer. She did not doubt that Colleen still filled the night with the sound of her tears, carefully controlled so that her husband did not hear.
As you start, so Praxis decided, you have a terrible tendency to go on.
Not me, thought Praxis, not me.
Colleen lumbered about the tiny kitchen, washing chipped cups in cold water, wedging herself perpetually between table and cupboard. She did not seem like an object of love but Praxis supposed she was. This at any rate was where love led. Mary watched, open-mouthed.
‘How’s it going to get out?’ she whispered later to Praxis. ‘Won’t she burst?’
‘Of course not,’ said Praxis, briskly, but she shared Mary’s fears.
They stayed with Colleen for two nights. A sense of nightmare assailed Praxis.
The welcome inside the house was dutiful, but strained: Colleen’s loyalty was to Michael: her desire to protect him from her former girlfriends in distress quite understandable. The welcome outside the house was non-existent. Nothing familiar met the eye. The London streets seemed strange and the people who thronged through them were indifferent to her plight. How could she ever get the better of this place: get the crowds to part and to acknowledge her?
Willy had made no attempt to get in touch with her, and Praxis was confused. She had expected him to come after her with axe, or writs or reproaches. Instead, there had been silence. Even the sense of having someone to have run from would have been welcome: would have given her some sense of scale.
‘When are we going home?’ asked Mary.
‘I thought we might live in London,’ said Praxis.
‘I don’t like London,’ said Mary.
‘Why not?’
‘You have to sleep on the floor.’
‘Not for long. I’m going to find somewhere lovely.’
‘And what about Willy?’ Mary looked at Praxis with clear, accusing eyes. ‘And what about my friends?’
She sulked: shuffled and whined.
‘You took her on,’ said Colleen. ‘You’re behaving very selfishly. Just because you’re bored...’ Her own eyes were glazed with boredom of late pregnancy.
‘I’ll feel better when it’s born,’ she kept saying, ‘and I can get on with things. It’s just not being able to bend.’
But she offered to look after Mary for a day or two while Praxis tried to find somewhere to live.
‘If it’s not too much of a burden,’ said Praxis, falsely. ‘It seems bad to burden you at such a time –’
‘She can do things for me,’ said Colleen, practically. ‘I can sweep and she can use the dustpan and brush.’
Colleen, thought Praxis, where are your dreams now? Your hockey cups and netball trophies: your nights on the downs with the boys?
Praxis, not without reluctance, went to visit Irma and Phillip. Irma would feel sorry for her, she knew; as sorry as she herself felt for poor Colleen. Phillip would patronise her, and the memory of their first encounter would remain between them like some extravagant vase of flowers on a dinner table, preventing the easy flow of conversation and ideas.
He would besides, presumably, be on Willy’s side. Whatever Willy’s side was.
‘Phillip’s given Willy up,’ said Irma, loftily. ‘Don’t worry about that. Willy’s of no value to him. Phillip only associates with people who can get him on in his business of improving the world.’
‘Where is he now?’ asked Praxis. Phillip was at work, said Irma, in tones of amazement, as if the activity was bizarre. He sat in a room composing television commercials in preparation for the opening of ITV, the commercial television network set up to rival the BBC.
‘Doesn’t that rather go against the grain?’ enquired Praxis. Willy regarded the arrival of ITV as the death of socialist aspirations.
‘TV commercials,’ said Irma, smirking, ‘by increasing demand reduces capital costs, and thus the consumer benefits and the revolution approaches. Phillip hasn’t joined the system, of course, he’s only infiltrating it. Phillip always has a good argument for doing what he wants to do. They sit in this room,’ said Irma, ‘composing TV commercials, and none of them has ever even read the script of one, let alone seen one. And they call it work and come home tired.’
It was, Phillip had told her, a prime example of the eccentric amateur charm of the English, a proud lack of professionalism, which was presently going to bring the nation to its knees and the revolution nearer.
Praxis had never heard of the revolution.
‘Phillip’s nothing if not clever,’ said Irma, with a curl of her scarlet lips. ‘And always in the forefront.’
Phillip and Irma lived in a high narrow clean house in a crescent of high narrow dirty ones. There were pot plants on the windowsills of Irma’s house. Up and down the street common children played, vulgar women sat on steps, and bored young men mended cars.
‘Th
e area’s bound to come up,’ said Irma. ‘The estate agent thought we were mad, but Phillip knew better.’
The last three words came out spitefully. Was it hate, or habit? Praxis couldn’t make out.
‘Of course we only have the middle floors,’ said Irma. An eighty-five-year old woman lived in the basement: twin brothers of seventy-three had the attic floor. Both had the protection of the law, and could not legally be driven or bribed out.
‘When they die,’ said Irma calmly, ‘at least I’ll have the whole house. I look forward to it. Playing house is all I do have to look forward to. I play Phillip’s L.P.’s very loudly in order to hasten the old folks’ end. In the meantime the twins piss through the ceiling and the old lady craps by the dustbin. Yellow liquid dripped through the ceiling-rose, the other day, on to the table. We were giving a dinner party for one of Phillip’s clients. I laughed.’
Irma trilled her pretty laugh. She had a baby and a girl to look after it, but there was no sign of either.
‘Can I see the baby?’ asked Praxis.
‘What for?’ demanded Irma. ‘It doesn’t say or do anything interesting. It just crawls about, making a nuisance of itself.’ She was expecting another one.
‘I put a knitting needle up me, darling, but nothing happened. I expect the baby will have a hole in the head; like mother, like baby. Of course Phillip’s over the moon. Anything that reduces me, enhances him. I’ve had two abortions. I couldn’t stand another. They come and stand at the bedside in their Harley Street suits and stretch out their hands for the money. In cash. They won’t take cheques, which means somehow I have to get the cash out of Phillip, without letting him know what it’s for. According to Phillip, the more children we have the better. He wants to use them in commercials. Soft as a baby’s bottom, that kind of thing. He says there’s a fortune to be made.’
Irma was by and large indifferent to the details of Praxis’ fate, though she sympathised in principle.
‘Of course you can’t go back,’ she said, ‘to that dreadful smelly little man.’
