by Weldon, Fay
It was advantageous to advertise, he said, and thus keep sales up, rather than maintain the quality of the product. Minimally. Advertising, he said coyly, with a glance at his host and hostess, and a daring one at Praxis’ cleavage, was more fun.
He looked like a tailor’s advertisement, Praxis concluded. This was the kind of man she should marry. Kind, good-looking, forward thinking, conventional and respectable. She did not think that he should marry her, not that he would even think of it. He needed a conventional, well-spoken, well-bred girl, with a Cordon Bleu cookery course behind her, a knack for flower arrangements, and parents to provide her with a formal white wedding and grand reception after a year’s engagement.
Mother, meet my fiancé, Ivor. Ivor, this is my mother, Lucy. Ivor, this is my sister Hilda. Yes, she’s very clever. In the Administrative Grade of the Civil Service. Why is she wearing a fur coat at dinner? It’s the static, you see. Now they weave nylon into the carpets, it’s everywhere. No, Ivor, don’t bring the dog. It might be a bit tricky. There’s rat poison down in the corners. And did you know the stars shine by day?
Hilda was going through a bad patch. Praxis met her for lunch occasionally. Her smile was a grimace. Or so Praxis thought. No one else noticed.
Hypatia, not Hilda. If you’d only go back, thought Praxis, find the real enemies, face demon truths, out-stare them, you might feel better. My sister Hypatia.
Ivor took Praxis home to her flat in his MG sports car. He drove fast and well: she felt secure, exciting and excited, secure in his admiration.
He asked if he could come in for coffee and was hardly able to believe his luck when she said of course.
Praxis had made the flat as bright, comfortable and conventional as she could: buying from Irma, at exorbitant prices, the bits and pieces she was throwing out as she went up in the world.
‘You’re a bohemian, too,’ he said, glancing round. She made coffee: they kissed on the sofa. Daring, he parted her lips with his tongue and thrust it into her mouth. His tongue was cool, sweet and unaccustomed.
‘That was a French kiss,’ he said.
‘I know.’
‘I think you are a very daring young lady,’ said Ivor. ‘How do you know I’m to be trusted?’
His simplicity amazed her. She realised how easy it would be to manipulate his innocence: to offer herself as a forbidden delicacy, forever further and further out of reach, until he interpreted a frustrated appetite as love. She saw that he would believe whatever she told him about herself: that if she were more like Irma and less like herself she would construct an edifice of sweet smiles, reticences and false assertions around herself which he would happily mistake for her. She also knew that she could not do it, even if the prize was respectability, matrimony and motherhood – which it surely was. It would affront his dignity and her own. He was a good, kind, clever if obtuse man. She owed him honesty.
‘I know you’re to be trusted,’ she said. ‘The trouble is, I’m not.’ She pulled away from him and stood up.
‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. I was carried away. You’ve no idea what you make me feel. How could you know? Men are such brutes. It won’t happen again. Trust me.’
She stared, open-mouthed. He mistook incredulity for moral censure.
‘You shouldn’t have asked me in for coffee,’ he said, like a small boy searching for excuses.
‘Why not? You asked.’
‘I’m supposed to ask and you’re supposed to refuse.’
‘Is it all games, then?’
‘So far as I can see,’ he said desperately. ‘It’s all games.’
‘I was never any good at games,’ said Praxis. She briskly took off her clothes. He seemed shaken and appalled.
‘This is me,’ said Praxis, naked and herself. ‘Come to bed.’ He followed, fumbling with tie, and buttons; embarrassed, folding his clothes, putting shoes neatly together, delaying, turning out the light. He was disappointed. He had wanted romance, and all she would offer was sex.
‘Leave the light on,’ she said, at which he looked even more wretched.
I will never see him again, thought Praxis, after this. And just as well: this Ivor, this advertisement for a clean-cut decent man is far more than I deserve, and certainly more than I want.
She named the parts of his body in medical and colloquial terms: as she did her own. She described to him coldly what he was doing to her, and she to him: in both technical and obscene terms. He seemed hardly to hear.
‘You’re so beautiful,’ he said. ‘It’s so beautiful. I had no idea.’
He seemed transfigured: she, to herself, merely animal.
When dawn was breaking he said, ‘I love you.’
‘That’s ridiculous,’ she said. ‘This is not how people love each other.’
‘Yes it is,’ he said, determined. ‘Other people can do what they like. You can do what you like; I love you. Nothing’s going to change that.’
When dawn had fully broken he said, ‘I have to get back to my flat now, and bath, and change. I don’t want to leave you but I have to be at the office at eight forty-five. A lot of people depend on me. Will you have lunch with me?’
‘All right,’ she said, baffled. He kissed her tenderly; it seemed difficult for him to withdraw his flesh from hers. He rang her during the morning, at her busiest time. Flowers arrived. The other girls envied her.
‘How do you do it?’ they asked. Praxis replied, with truth, that she had no idea.
Irma rang.
‘What have you done to him?’ she asked, ‘or what didn’t you do, for a change? He’s been on the phone to me for half an hour and all he talked about was you. He didn’t even mention dinner, after all the trouble I went to. Some men take too much for granted.’
Praxis didn’t want to talk about it. There were four taxis available at Reception, and five MPs to be got home, all claiming priority of need, and she wished to give her attention to the problems this discrepancy posed. She was short of sleep and annoyed with herself.
‘Ivor is rather boring,’ said Irma doubtfully. And then, more hopefully, ‘But you might change all that, Praxis.’
Ivor collected Praxis from the BBC Centre at lunchtime. The envy of the other girls flattered her. He took her to an Italian restaurant at Shepherds Bush; watched the food disappear between her lips as if even that was blessed, and held her hand under the table. She fell asleep over the crême chantilly. He did not mind. He met her out of work, escorted her home, looked away while she changed out of her work clothes, sat reverently by her while she slept. He did not seem to feel the need for sleep, himself.
‘I can do with three hours a night,’ he said proudly, ‘like Napoleon.’
When she woke he ran his well-manicured hand over her breast, tentatively.
‘You are everything I adore,’ he said. ‘You are an angel come down from heaven.’
She could not believe him. She guided his hand down to her crotch, to dispose of his gentlemanliness.
He told her the story of his life, and informed her as to his principles. He believed in hard work, honesty, industry, and firm but kindly discipline for children. He feared that since the war and the coming of the welfare state British workmen had turned into workshy scroungers, who these days had to be bribed, by means of piecework, to work at all. Then they complain, he said bitterly, ‘because the belts move too fast. They don’t seem to realise that their wages depend on our productivity. Where do they think the money comes from?’
He did not want to hear Praxis’ life story, or Praxis’ principles. He wanted her life to have begun the day he met her, and his opinions to be hers. She could see it might be restful. It was how most women lived.
‘I’m a figment of your imagination,’ she complained, yawning, on the second evening of their acquaintance.
‘Come here,’ he whispered, ‘I’ll show you how much of a figment you are.’ He had learned his love-making vocabulary, she feared, from romantic novelettes: perhaps his moth
er had left them lying around when he was a lad. It never ceased to embarrass her.
Presently she felt she loved him. Her flesh called to his: learned to miss him: tingled with expectation at his approach. And he was always there. Before work, at lunchtime, after work. In the middle of the night. If work called him away there were flowers and phone calls. Sometimes she wondered if the love she felt was a mental haziness induced by lack of sleep.
‘Has he taken you to meet his mother?’ asked Irma, and shook her head dubiously when Praxis said he had not. Sometimes Praxis wanted to be Ivor’s wife; sometimes she did not.
‘Anyway,’ said Irma, ‘it doesn’t matter to us. Phillip’s changed firms. He’s making boring documentaries now, of a sociological nature: he’s lost all interest in soup mixes. I think I preferred the old days. At least people laughed at the dinner table, and noticed what they ate. These days they just drone on, and use their soup spoons to eat the pudding.’
Praxis was offered a job in the Research Department at the BBC. She accepted. Ivor was angry. It meant a small drop in her salary but good prospects of promotion.
‘It’s a waste of time,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to work far too hard for not nearly enough money. They’re only taking advantage of you. You must turn it down. You’re happy where you are.’
Ivor liked to have Praxis where he could see her; where he was accustomed to seeing her, flanked by girls on either side. In the Research Department she worked for men, amongst men.
‘I’ll do as I choose,’ said Praxis. ‘We’re not married.’
He did not see her for two days. She cried in bed; and wondered where Colleen was, and whether she still cried at night, or whether she was happy water-skiing on Bondi Beach, amongst the sharks, and if the Pacific winds had blown Michael’s asthma clean away.
Ivor came back, as if nothing had happened; except that he slapped her once or twice during their love-making. Praxis had won, in a way: but she knew from the occasional sad expression on his face that he had considered asking her to marry him and decided against it. She was not a suitable wife for a rising business executive. Suitable wives were virgins, or all but virgins; they did not have complex pasts and unhappy childhoods, best not spoken about: they did not take jobs which went against a prospective husband’s grain.
Praxis liked her new job. She would do all the work required on this programme or that, quickly and easily, and her immediate superior would get his name on the screen. She did not mind. She thought that to have it there would only upset Ivor the more.
Willy, on one of the few occasions that Praxis now visited Brighton – for Ivor liked to take her out to lunch on Saturdays, and to the pictures on Sunday – remarked that Praxis had become rather boring. She hoped that it was jealousy speaking, but feared that he was right. Certainly, when she was with Willy and Carla, she seemed to have nothing to say. She had lost her dread of Holden Road, but at the same time it no longer seemed like home. She had no rights in it. The whole house sparkled and gleamed: Carla sang as she serviced it. The garden was neat: the drive was weed-free. Willy’s bike was oiled. The front door opened easily. All this Carla accomplished, as well as working in Willy’s canteen. Willy bought Carla fabric in the markets, and she made it up into clothes for Mary, which lay properly ironed and neatly folded in the drawers. In Praxis’ day Mary’s drawers had been a jumble of mostly unwearable garments, shrunk vests, and single socks.
Mary herself seemed friendly, but distant. She was Willy and Carla’s child now, and so far removed – with her long, lean legs, and pleasant serious face – from the baby Praxis had rescued and tended, that Praxis herself could scarcely make the connection.
‘She doesn’t have to wear school uniform,’ complained Carla. ‘But she insists. She says not to wear it makes it obvious which girls are poor and which aren’t. I tell her her clothes are as good as anyone’s, if not better, and she says “exactly, that’s the point.” I ask her if I’ve been wasting my time and my eyesight making her nice clothes and she says “how can it, if it gives you pleasure?” I say it’s more work for me, keeping your school uniform in order – and she says “I’ll do it then,” and so she does. She doesn’t seem like a child at all. She thinks before she speaks. Well, she’s the only one I’ve got. Willy says we can’t afford children of our own. I have to keep on working.’
‘You could always have an accident,’ observed Praxis, ‘and simply find yourself pregnant,’ at which Carla looked quite shocked.
Praxis missed the early train home, and took the opportunity of walking alone on the dark, pebbly beach, under the starry sky. Betelgeuse twinkled redly, and had nothing to say. There was no magic in the night. Some grace had been withdrawn from her. ‘How long?’ she asked, but there was no reply. And if the dark clouds which gathered over the horizon, bright-edged by the concealed moon, had any shape or significance for good or bad, it was not apparent, now, to Praxis.
Praxis presently decided that she did not love Ivor. She began to feel he blocked her vision: that there was something else to be seen if only he would get out of the way. He had to go to Stuttgart for two weeks, for his firm, to study German methods of soup production. She found she did not miss him at all; that the minute he was out of sight he was out of mind. One day before he was due to return she went to a party, had too much to drink, and was taken home by a cameraman whose wife was in hospital having a baby.
She was in bed with him when Ivor returned. There was a fight: she herself felt in no particular danger, and the cameraman seemed in a way grateful for his bloody nose and cut eye, as if this was the penance he owed his wife. He left swearing and grasping his stomach where Ivor had kicked him.
Ivor knelt by Praxis’ bed and wept.
‘I can do as I like,’ Praxis said. ‘We’re not married.’
This time she did not see him for a week, and did not cry once, but there was a flatness and emptiness in her life which frightened her. Then she had a letter from him, asking her to marry him, and she said yes, she would.
They were married presently in a registrar’s office. Praxis invited only a few friends from work; Ivor invited a handful of grey-suited, crop-haired, suave business colleagues, and his parents, who were a good deal less grand than Praxis had supposed. She was glad that Hilda was not there, to detect the vulgarity behind the careful curls and floury face-powder of Ivor’s mother. Hilda was away on her annual holiday, touring the Greek islands. Irma and Phillip came. Praxis thought Phillip looked rather sad. When he kissed her in congratulation he held her rather hard and long, and Praxis knew she should not have married Ivor.
Praxis gave up her job: Ivor did not want a working wife: there was, in any case, plenty to do in the new house, some fifteen miles outside London on one of the new executive estates. The houses were neat and compact: built above and around garages, open plan and with large expanses of glass window. When trees and hedges had time to grow, as the estate agent explained, there would be more privacy: in the meantime there were lace curtains, and the knowledge that the other householders were of good business and social standing.
Praxis became pregnant almost at once. Ivor destroyed her rubber contraceptive on their wedding night, and that night and thereafter made love to her in the missionary position.
‘That’s marriage,’ he said, ‘isn’t that better?’ And Praxis, bemused, agreed that it was.
Praxis was, at last, respectable.
‘Praxis,’ said Irma, much, much later, ‘you got so boring. You’ve no idea.’
‘Nothing ever happened,’ Praxis explained herself.
‘Of course things happened,’ said Irma. ‘Things happen on an executive estate as much as anywhere else. The tragedies and triumphs of the aspiring middle classes, not to mention births, deaths, cancer and road accidents. No, your personality went into eclipse for five years. You should try and work out why.’
‘Perhaps I was married to the wrong man?’
‘The entire female population is more or les
s married to the wrong man,’ remarked Irma, ‘but we are not for that reason a race of zombies.’
‘Then it was the children.’
‘More like it,’ said Irma, darkly.
‘I had the wrong children?’
‘Oh no,’ said Irma, ‘they had the wrong mother.’
It was not that the children depressed her, so much as that they drained her of animation. They made demands on her and offered no reward. She could take no pleasure in them, or they in her: that, they reserved for their father. Robert and Claire. They would leap up as he came through the door, and hold his hands, and chatter; and Ivor’s face would light up with the wonder of it all. They were more Ivor’s children than her own: she felt they recognised her instinctively as the impostor she was, regarding her with Ivor’s cool, brown eyes, but without the adoration that softened Ivor’s gaze. A smooth-skinned, smooth-haired pigeon pair, born tidy and careful as their mother was born untidy and careless. She seldom had to tell them to put away their toys: they guarded them too well in the politest possible way, from each other and from their mother’s casual dustpan and brush. Her pregnancies were peaceful. Pregnant, she glowed and felt content. Ivor treated her with extra reverence, bringing her roses and delicacies, helping her over steps, supervising her diet. First Robert, then, a year later, Claire, were born quietly and decently, without causing their mother too much physical pain. But after the birth she would stare and stare at the little mewling creatures and feel only disappointment, not elation. She had hoped for so much, and so little had emerged. She preferred being pregnant to having babies.
