by Weldon, Fay
‘A love child,’ Ivor said, on each occasion, holding Praxis’ hand and making her uncomfortable in both mind and body.
‘A love child,’ she agreed, biting back the information that a love child means one born out of wedlock, not one born out of love.
She was protective towards the children, but they seemed to need little protection. They were seldom ill, seldom naughty, never surprising. Robert and Claire, little strangers, foreign fruits of her womb. They got on well together. Too well, Praxis sometimes thought. If they had disliked each other, they might have liked their mother more. She had felt closer to Mary.
On summer evenings, Praxis could look out through the graceful folds of the net curtains which looped her wide drawingroom windows, and see the Red Dwarf Betelgeuse. But the affairs of heaven and the affairs of earth made no contact here. Little boxes of dwelling places covered the hill: stars, like ornaments devised by the estate agent, sprinkled the sky at night, and that was that. No one on the hill went to heaven or hell, Praxis thought. All dwelled in limbo, and were extinguished on their death.
Ivor was an attentive husband. Other estate wives envied her. He caught the same train every morning, and the same train back. He remembered wedding anniversaries and birthdays. Sometimes problems at work made him bad-tempered at home, but he was efficient, straightforward and unafraid, and more interested in what he was doing than in the status that accrued to doing it, and the problems did not remain unresolved for long. The events in Ivor’s life – as Praxis came to realise – the sense of forward travelling, of progress, and personal achievement, came from his work: at home with his family, he rested.
‘You see the children growing strong and healthy,’ said Ivor. ‘Doesn’t that give you a sense of achievement?’
‘Of course,’ said Praxis. But it didn’t. It seemed to her that if you let a growing thing alone, it would grow strong and healthy by itself, and no credit to her or anyone.
Presently Ivor was obliged to spend less time at home. He travelled by air about the world: sometimes he would be away for days, sometimes for weeks. He developed a far-away, absent look in his eye: his teeth seemed whiter, his chin more cleanly shaved than ever: his shirts crisper. There was little to do in hotel rooms, after all, but pay attention to matters of grooming. He was promoted to Group Product Manager, then Product Manager, then Junior Management Director – the youngest in the firm’s history. The firm was taken over by an international company: Ivor went forward: it was his colleagues who were made redundant. No one begrudged him his success. He deserved it.
‘Behind every great man,’ he’d say, laughing, his hand round Praxis at the firm’s annual ladies’ night, ‘is the love of a good woman.’
When he was away he would telephone frequently, every day if possible. The company paid for the calls, aware – for research had told them – of the value to an executive of a happy domestic life. Praxis wondered whether the calls were to check her fidelity, or to confirm his own, or merely because he wanted to talk to her, and decided that it was the latter.
Praxis now lived in the largest house on the estate. It had an attic floor and a detached garage. Fewer wives dropped in to morning coffee: more came, on invitation, to tea. Praxis gave dinner parties: the same rotation of guests in ceaseless gavotte, in endless competition: company talk, recipe talk. Nothing was said that Praxis could not have said herself. Robert and Claire went to the little day preparatory school around the corner. They left the house in the morning clean, shiny and tranquil: and returned in the evening clean, shiny and tranquil. Sometimes, when she collected them, she found it hard to distinguish them from the other children; or herself, for that matter from the other mothers. She learned to drive. Ivor bought her a car.
Praxis had a brief, secret affair, with the estate agent who arranged the purchase of their various houses, but had lost the taste for sexual adventure, and it came to nothing, when she discovered she was one of many of his mistresses. She made artefacts, by the hundred, out of cardboard egg-boxes for Robert and Claire’s benefit, in the hope of developing their artistic talents. Robert and Claire Sellotaped with finesse and painted cautiously.
‘You do make a mess, mummy,’ complained Claire.
‘Finger painting is for babies,’ said Robert. They cleaned their brushes before putting them away.
‘See,’ said Praxis. ‘It’s a castle with a submarine moored in the moat.’
‘How would a submarine get into a castle moat? You are silly, mummy.’
She felt that her friends – the young wives of other rising executives – were both envious and critical. Their eyes would wander from hers as she talked, shifting and darting as they inspected the state of Praxis’ home, not Praxis’ soul, and finding it wanting. The scent of furniture polish and pine disinfectant wafted out from the open front doors: stand stiff as you might outside Praxis’ front door, you would never detect the pleasant aromas of conscientious housewifery.
‘You’re too sensitive,’ said Irma. ‘They weren’t passing judgment: they were merely interested, and why not? You probably got it all wrong, anyway. They hated your taste: loved your dusting.’
Praxis developed backache and headaches: she sat with the other wives in the doctor’s surgery and was prescribed tranquillisers, which unlike the others she did not take. The doctor took to visiting her at home and talking about his unhappy marriage, and she was flattered to have been thus selected, out of all the other women in the estate. Staring at herself in the mirror, at her doll’s face, stiff doll’s body, curly blonde doll’s hair, she wondered what experience or wisdom it was that could possibly shine through the casing that Ivor had selected for her. She did not blame Ivor: she knew that she had done it to herself: had preferred to live as a figment of Ivor’s imagination, rather than put up with the confusion of being herself.
The doctor laid his head upon the table and wept. She stroked his head with her doll’s hand. They kissed.
‘I’d better not come again,’ he said.
‘No,’ said Praxis. ‘You’d better not.’
Little doll voice, piping gently in the wilds!
Praxis asked Hilda to Christmas dinner, one year, but Hilda, fortunately, could not come. She was going, she wrote, to spend Christmas with Willy, Carla and Mary. The names sounded unfamiliar to Praxis. She found it hard to believe that they still lived and breathed. She had long since ceased visiting Lucy. She had sprung to life ready-made on the day she met Ivor; it was what he wanted and what suited her.
Sometimes Ivor’s mother would visit. Praxis would pour her long, gin-based drinks from the wheeled cocktail cabinet, and they would talk about Ivor’s father, who had one lung and seldom left home, and Ivor’s childhood in the small Northern town where they lived. Ivor was his parents’ only child: their pride and achievement. Ivor’s father was not, as Ivor had implied, the county surveyor, but a clerk invalided out of the surveyor’s office. Praxis did not condemn Ivor for this mild deception: on the contrary, it made her feel soft and protective towards him. He lied for his father’s sake, as much as for his own.
‘You are happy?’ Ivor would question her, relentlessly, bringing home gifts of duty free scent, Swiss chocolates, Malaysian orchids.
‘Perfectly happy.’ But the question puzzled her. How would she know if she were happy? She felt neither happiness, nor unhappiness. She waited, for what she had no idea: she endured, why she could not tell.
Sometimes, when Ivor was away and the children were asleep and television palled, she would walk out under the stars and remember her vision on Brighton Beach: a distant, ridiculous fancy, best forgotten. Loving husband, happy children, lovely home.
A letter came from sister in Brighton to say that Lucy, thanks to new medication now available, could safely be cared for at home.
‘I wish we could have her here,’ said Ivor. ‘But it wouldn’t do. Think of the children.’
‘She doesn’t rant or rave or break things,’ said Praxis. ‘She just sits a
nd stares.’
‘We must think of the children,’ repeated Ivor, and Praxis was relieved to think of the children and tell herself that it was not practical to have Lucy installed in the spare room. What was Lucy, in any case, to the creature who had sprung ready-made from Ivor’s imagination? She had no mother, no father: blonde curls: doll’s eyes, doll’s mind.
Praxis decided, with what glimmers of her old self remained, that Hilda should be given the opportunity of looking after Lucy, and wrote to her to that effect. She, Praxis, had husband and children to look after: Hilda, the implication was, had neither: had a career instead, which any right-minded woman would give up in order to look after an ill mother.
Hilda responded by sending an unsigned letter to Ivor, asking him if he knew what everyone else knew: that his wife had been a professional whore before he married her, working from the Raffles Esplanade Dive in Brighton?
It was unfortunate in a way that the letter arrived on one of the rare mornings when Ivor was at home, yet fortunate in another. Had Praxis been alone, she might well have steamed open the letter, read it and destroyed it, and gone on in her half life for years more.
As it was, she watched Ivor’s face grow pale with shock and distress, and recognised that some kind of reality, however dreadful, was at last beginning to surface, and that she should be grateful.
‘I don’t understand,’ said Ivor. ‘Why should anyone send this?’
‘It’s Hilda,’ said Praxis. ‘I know her writing. She’s mad. I told you she was mad. Anything to do with mother sets her off. She’ll do anything to damage me.’
‘Your own sister?’ He didn’t believe her. In Ivor’s world family offered mutual support; they were not natural destroyers of each other.
‘If you’d let me have mother here,’ said Praxis, tears in her eyes, pain in her heart. But Ivor just stared at her as if he saw things in her that he had never seen before.
‘You didn’t cry before,’ he remarked. ‘You were only too glad not to have her. I knew that. I just provide the excuses. That’s my function in your life. What’s going on?’ As if he had discovered the accountant cooking the company’s books.
He left to catch his plane during the morning. He did not ask her to deny or confirm the contents of the letter, but neither did he kiss her before he left. When he returned, two weeks later, he was critical of Praxis; he found fault with the cooking, the house, the way she behaved with the children; was rude to her in front of them: insisted that she make love to him in the way she had done when they first met. She felt degraded by it now. His eyes followed her wherever she went. She was almost afraid of him.
‘What’s the matter?’ she kept asking. ‘What’s the matter with you?’
‘Nothing’s the matter, what should be the matter?’ he’d reply, setting out for his usual train, leaving her bruised, slightly shocked and sore, pecking her goodbye as if everything were normal.
‘If it’s my past,’ she volunteered, eventually, but he did not want to hear.
‘You’ve never let me talk about it,’ she protested.
‘I don’t want to know,’ he said, ‘let’s leave it at that. You have a mad sister and a mad mother. Isn’t that enough?’ She could see that in this particular world it was more than enough. There were too many different worlds, it seemed to Praxis, with very little cross reference from one to the other: each with its different ways and standards, its different framework of normality. Women crossed the barriers easily: were required to by marriage, moving house, changing status: men seldom crossed them, went on as they began, their lives under their own control.
‘Perhaps I should get a job,’ she persisted. ‘When you’re away I’ve nothing to do. When you’re back all you do is find fault.’
‘There’s plenty to do in the house,’ said Ivor. ‘If you did it, I wouldn’t find fault.’
He worried over the remark, as these days he worried over everything she said or did, chewing and tasting and discarding, only to scoop it up again, poor denatured thing, and start all over again.
‘Why should you want to work?’
‘What sort of work?’
‘You mean I keep you short of money?’
‘You find the children boring?’
‘You want to work with men, I suppose? Find someone new?’
The wives on the estate did not work. Husbands, for the most part, had fought their way out of a world in which a working wife was a sign of family disaster, disgrace and humiliation. They reckoned their achievement in life by the leisure and comfort they could offer their families: the picture windows, the carpets, the air, the light, the safety.
‘Forget it,’ said Praxis. ‘Just forget it.’
But he didn’t.
‘You could always sell yourself,’ he said, starting up one night out of the insomnia which now plagued him. ‘Is that what you mean by work?’
‘Let me tell you about it,’ she begged.
But he wouldn’t have it. He had moulded her to his liking, but been mistaken in the clay he used. His whole life was like that, he felt. You achieved what you wanted, or rather what your parents wanted for you, and it tasted not delicious, but sour and rancid on the tongue. He blamed the post-war Socialist government for a great many of his own and his company’s misfortunes. When Praxis asked him what misfortunes, he merely shrugged.
Ah, she was to blame for so much: her past like a hideous millstone round his neck. The doctor prescribed sleeping tablets.
‘But I think he’s gone mad,’ she said. Ivor too! The doctor laughed.
‘Shortage of sleep can make many a man seem mad,’ he said. ‘I should know.’
He wouldn’t take the pills. He suspected her motives in obtaining them. Presently he began to feel better. They returned, almost, to normal.
‘What’s the worst thing you ever did?’ said Diana to Praxis one day. Diana was the nearest to a friend Praxis had on the estate. Her husband Steve had a drinking problem. Diana’s pretty, childlike face was occasionally bruised, which she would explain away with one excuse or another: a lamp-post, a fall, a sudden braking in the car.
‘The worst thing I ever did,’ volunteered Diana, ‘was pour two bottles of Steve’s whisky down the sink. What about you?’
‘I slept with my father,’ said Praxis, the words leaping to her lips out of nowhere, as if they’d been lurking all this time, waiting to be said, preventing the formation of other words, other thoughts, other conclusions: keeping her in limbo, year after year.
‘You’re joking,’ said Diana.
‘Yes, I was joking,’ said Praxis.
When she looked in the mirror that evening, she thought she looked older: more like some other person, less like a doll.
Ivor was away. She stretched out in bed alone that night and allowed herself to remember; the pleasure, humiliation and shame. She had barely seen her mother since: had avoided the thought of her. Was her sense of sin, of having stolen something illicit, and of having damaged her mother by it, first by intent, then by actuality, the waves of shock and horror travelling backwards and forwards in time, before the event and after it, damaging, wounding, and traumatising?
These hands, she thought, turning on the bedside light, looking at them. What they’ve done, where they’ve been! And it seemed to her that as she looked, they lost their white powerlessness, the well-creamed, pretty look they’d had of late, and became stronger, older, more her own.
In the morning her hands looked much as usual, sleep had smoothed over the gritty surface of her night-thoughts. Life went on as usual. Nearly but not quite.
A new couple moved in to the estate: always a welcome event. New tastes, new faces, new clothes, new gossip. Rory was chief sales manager of a big paint firm, and had almost, but not quite, the same status as Ivor. He had the most powerful car on the estate, and spoke about his public school. Carol spoke genteelly, dressed quietly, had once run a hairdressing salon, had a larger refrigerator than anyone else, looked after her tw
o children well, and held hands with Rory in public. They seemed a safe and respectable pair. They lived next door to Steve and Diana.
Rumours, however, soon began to fly. Rory and Steve, it was said, had contrived together to exchange beds for the night, first making their wives so insensible with drink that they would not notice the difference. Carol had, and hadn’t cared: Steve’s wife Diana hadn’t, which everyone reckoned was just as well. Now everyone knew except Diana. Rory and Carol were swingers: they played strip poker: they wife-swapped: they took nude photographs. Rory and Carol gave a party: everyone was invited: quite a few went. Carol drank a whole half bottle of whisky, stripped to the waist, and then altogether, and danced on a table. Rory, in the meantime, while the men gaped at Carol, openly kissed and fondled one of their wives after another. The lights went out. Unlikely couples paired off. Presently sanity returned: someone turned on the lights, couples sorted themselves out, and all returned home, abashed, to quiet homes and sleeping children. In the morning Rory and Carol were seen to kiss goodbye, affectionately. He even brought home some bookshelves in the car that evening, and could be heard hammering that night. A good and handy husband, walking evidence that sexual experimentation did not instantly bring about the collapse of a community.
Everything seemed safe: only rather more interesting than before. Praxis had not been to the party: she seldom went out when Ivor was away. He would question her too closely afterwards, to make it worth her while.
For a time a kind of sexual madness seemed to possess the estate.
