by Weldon, Fay
Rory and Carol gave key parties. At the beginning of the evening the men would throw their front door keys into a central pool. At the end of the evening the men would pick out a key, any key, and escort home the wife whose own front-door key matched.
Carol rang Praxis.
‘Do come,’ she said. ‘You and Ivor do come! It’s the third time I’ve asked. I’m beginning to think you’re avoiding us on purpose. Of course, we all know you’re so grand –’
Ivor said to Praxis’ astonishment, that they were going to accept the invitation. She didn’t want to go.
‘I would have thought it was your style,’ said Ivor.
‘It’s not,’ said Praxis. ‘Why do you want to go?’
‘Because I’m bored,’ said Ivor. ‘I’m as bored with you as you are with me.’
It was a bad day, after all, and she had thought it was a good one. He had pruned the roses in the garden. She cried, which always affected Ivor.
‘I do love you,’ he said, as if puzzled by himself. ‘None of this means I don’t love you.’
‘What, like Rory loves Carol?’
That annoyed him. He didn’t relent. They went to Rory and Carol’s party.
‘I love you,’ she said, before they went. When he was angry and she was miserable she felt that it was true.
‘I don’t believe you,’ he said.
He read the children bedtime stories before they set out for the party. As he grew older he became even more handsome: his face less innocent, more stern. The other wives envied her. She was considered an intellectual, because she read the Guardian and not the Telegraph like everyone else: she was never quite totally accepted, she knew that.
They were, she thought, rather surprised to see her there that evening.
Ivor had insisted that she wear black underwear and suspender belt and stockings, instead of the tights that had lately become fashionable.
‘It’s what you used to wear,’ he said. ‘I prefer it.’ He had been irritable about her make-up, and made her draw crude black lines around her eyes, and put heavy, sticky lipstick on her lips. It was no different from what the other wives wore, but unusual for Praxis. She had been to the hairdresser. It was crowded that day, and everyone had been excitable and rather bad-tempered. She stared at herself in the mirror: she was a doll again, to be pushed here and prodded there. All the same, she was not as young as she had been.
‘I think I am a figment of your imagination,’ she said, as she had said before, a long time ago.
‘Yes you are,’ was all he said, this time. ‘I am tired of having you in it.’
She understood that he was trying to rid himself of something. Well, so had she, once, and succeeded.
‘Since Hilda’s letter,’ she said, ‘everything has changed.’
‘You imagine it,’ he said. ‘A mad letter from a mad woman.’
Praxis drank too much at the party: she watched Ivor dance with, kiss and fondle in turn Beryl, Sandra, Sue and Raquelle. He watched to see if she was watching, and she obliged him by doing so. She looked and felt pained, which was as he wanted it to be. Ivor, usually so attentive, so discreet. She did not join the dancing, a kind of musical chairs, in which, whenever the music stopped, the women peeled off a further garment.
‘Don’t be such a wet blanket,’ said Carol, spitefully, as she passed, bare breasts pressed up against Ivor’s suit. When the keys were given out, Ivor got Carol and Rory got Praxis. Praxis had understood that she and Ivor were the prizes of the evening: the last to succumb to the communal madness.
She walked home with Rory. The moon shone. Nature was calm.
She could almost believe she was walking next to Ivor. She pretended that she was.
Dutifully, in bed, she performed her seductive tricks, summoning them out from memory. Had she once been, nightly, so generous?
‘I knew you’d be hot stuff,’ Rory said, entranced. She shuddered. She really could not spend her life amongst these people.
Rory went and Ivor returned in the early hours, and lay still and sleepless beside her. Presently she heard him crying. I seem to have heard that for so long, she thought, from so many people. Women in relation to men: men to women. There must be something wrong. She slept and so did he.
In the morning Ivor was as he had been before the advent of Hilda’s letter; he was kind, affectionate, and uncritical. He made no mention of the previous night, and nor did she. They went to no more of Rory and Carol’s parties; Rory came round once or twice to issue special invitations but soon gave up. Praxis recognised Carol’s voice on the phone, asking for Ivor, but Ivor was brusque and unfriendly with her and the calls stopped.
The parties, to all accounts, grew yet wilder.
Someone procured a vibrator from the States, which was raffled, and publicly used. Things began to go wrong. A wife killed herself with an overdose: someone started divorce proceedings: one of Diana’s children ran away: Rory was convicted of a drunken driving charge: the parties stopped as suddenly as they had begun. Madness ebbed and drained away. Rory and Carol moved to another estate. Roses were pruned; grass seed put down: everything was back to normal.
Except that Praxis knew she would not, could not, stay with Ivor: and that if she ruined his life, and destroyed his happiness, as he would surely claim she had, and Robert’s and Claire’s too, then it was just too bad.
21
You end up as you deserve. In old age you must put up with the face, the friends, the health and the children you have earned.
I used to say that when I was young. Now I am old, I don’t recant. I am alone, deserted, ill, and my children don’t speak to me. Very well. It’s no more than I deserve.
I hobbled to the cooker this morning and made a cup of tea. The milk had gone sour but I put in a slice of lemon, which looked old and dry on the outside, but was surprisingly juicy when cut. A shaft of sunlight found its way into the room. I saw the dust motes dance: I was elated by the wonder of creation and my spirit seemed to join the motes and jig about for a time in cheerful worship. When the fit had passed I hobbled to the mirror and recognised myself. Not Pattie the prisoner, but Praxis. My hair was thicker than I thought: my eyes were less rheumy. I saw that I might have a future, and I was afraid. Do I really have to put up with being Praxis?
Children!
When I was young it was rare for a mother to leave her children. It was considered an unspeakable thing to do – an unnatural crime. Bad enough not to love a husband – but for the misfortune of not loving a child, the penalties were, and still are, cruel.
I left my two children. I think perhaps if you want to leave a child, if you cannot love it, you should leave it before the look in your eyes shrivels its life and its hopes. I would watch the expression in Robert and Claire’s eyes, fearing to see there a look of Lucy or Hilda: and I would see Ivor looking at me with a love I was incompetent to return. I did not really feel good enough or whole enough to have children and trust them to exist in the simplicity of their perfectly healthy, perfectly ordinary natures. I was a good mother: years, years I spent: first for Mary, then for the next two, keeping the structures of life steady around them, allowing them to grow: encouraging Willy’s fondness for Mary: loosening Ivor’s fear that children, simply left alone, will grow rampant and wild, like a well-bred rose reverting briar; thorny; demonstrating to him time and time again that it is not discipline that is needed, but understanding, and an awareness that the world to a child is a dangerous place; and that fear of the dark needs not a slap and the light out, but fear of the dark shared and acknowledged. By the time I left, Ivor would sing the children to sleep and think nothing of it.
He was better at it than I was.
After I left, his knowing look disappeared: the innocent one returned. He looked happier.
Perhaps it wasn’t that I could not love the children, but that I loved myself too much. Certainly the neighbours thought so. Diana, Sandra, Beryl; wanton lot! Their children took to vandalism, motorbikes, and drugs. Mine
didn’t: no thanks to me, they’d say. Thank Ivor. Good, decent Ivor.
Ivor, with Carol dancing up against his suit, bare-breasted. Good, decent Ivor. Have it your own way.
So I don’t recant. If I am alone now, I deserve it. I set my Mary free by imprisoning myself: that is sufficient reward for the likes of me.
The cat’s come back.
22
Praxis waited, a small immobile figure in an arid landscape: she waited for something to happen. The children had new shoes: Ivor had a new suit. She did not prune the roses, although Ivor kept reminding her to do so. Praxis knew she would not be there to watch them bloom.
Something happened. Irma telephoned. Praxis had not heard her friend’s voice for two years, but recognised it at once. The tones were a little more commanding than before, as if Irma had stood once too often at Harrods counter; she was a little more petulant, a little less charming: but the pent-up, bitter, invigorating energy remained.
‘I only ring when I want something,’ said Irma. ‘I want something now. I’m having a bloody baby. They’re taking me into hospital early. Nanny’s walked out, naturally: they only take these jobs for the pleasure of walking out at the worst possible moment – it’s an art in itself. Will you come and look after things for me?’
‘What about my own children?’
‘Leave them with neighbours. I’m sure you’ve got neighbours,’ said Irma, as if the having of neighbours was a plebeian activity.
‘Don’t you have any friends, Irma?’ enquired Praxis. There was a pause.
‘That sounds more like the old Praxis,’ remarked Irma, hopeful. ‘No, I don’t seem to have any friends, come to think of it.’
Praxis left the children with Beryl next door, packed the few things she might possibly ever want to see again, and left home.
Ivor was away for the week. He would telephone in the evening and no one would answer. She could envisage his agitation, jealousy and distress, and it did not affect her. He would eventually, she imagined, ring Beryl and discover that the children at least were still his.
Irma sat on her stairs monstrously pregnant. A taxi waited outside: she made no move to get into it or put the driver out of his misery.
‘The fare’s ticking up,’ said Praxis, anxiously. ‘It’s already over a pound. I looked at the clock.’
‘You have such a suburban mentality, Praxis,’ complained Irma.
‘Let him wait. It’s Phillip’s money anyway. Why should I care?’ Her face was puffy and pink: her ankles swollen: her feet pushed ruthlessly into too-tight bright pink very high-heeled shoes. When she stood she clearly found it difficult to balance. Her blood pressure was high. She was going to hospital to await the birth, due in a week.
The crescent had been gentrified since Praxis last saw it. Most of the houses were freshly painted, had window boxes on the sills, and carriage-lamps in the porches. Victoria and Jason, indifferent to their mother’s fate, played outside in the gutter.
‘They don’t care about anything,’ complained Irma. ‘I don’t expect them to get upset about me, but they might at least have the grace to mind about Nanny leaving. I’m sure I do.’
‘Is it safe for them to be in the street?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Irma. ‘I left that kind of thing to Nanny. It’s all Volvos and Rollses anyway, these days. A good class of car to die by. I am glad I’m not going to be around when you are, Praxis. Nag and fuss all the time. I can tell the sort of mother you are.’
‘At least I can trust you with Phillip,’ said Irma, wandering the house in search of a hair-dryer. ‘You’re not his type. Philip only likes important people,’ said Irma, ‘and let’s face it, Praxis, you’re not important.’
‘Of course Phillip’s a voyeur,’ said Irma, ‘he sublimates with cameras, that’s all.’
‘Now don’t start cooking him little meals or anything,’ said Irma. ‘He’ll only expect them when I get back.’ Now she had lost her tweezers.
‘At least I don’t have any real worry about other women,’ said Irma, ‘Phillip’s so undersexed. He’s impotent. Did you know that?’
The taxi driver rang the door-bell.
‘I don’t know what he’s worrying about,’ said Irma. ‘He’s getting paid, isn’t he? Do I look really awful?’
‘I don’t think it matters much,’ said Praxis, ‘at the moment.’
‘Yes, it does,’ said Irma, ‘since Phillip’s going to be filming the birth.’
‘Not to mention a full camera crew,’ said Irma. ‘With any luck they’ll faint and slip their discs falling.’
‘You notice I have to get myself to the hospital,’ observed Irma. ‘When it’s real life, and not images of life, he simply can’t concentrate.’
Irma by now seemed to have almost everything she needed packed into a dusty bag made of Persian carpeting. It seemed an old and shabby bag to Praxis, who had yet to acquire a liking for the artefacts of the past. There wasn’t, so far as Praxis could see, a single new, dark, shiny, polishable surface in the house. Everything was old.
‘I hate Phillip,’ said Irma, calmly, ‘and I hate this house. The stairs have enlarged my calf muscles. I hate all men, all children, and the institution of marriage, and most of all I hate this baby. We won’t go into that now. If I get excited my blood pressure goes up. Now look after everything, Praxis. Keep your hands off Phillip. And thank you very much,’ Irma added as an afterthought, remembering some childhood lesson.
Irma tottered on her high heels to the taxi, and engaged in conversation with the driver, who now seemed reluctant to have her as a fare, but presently drove off. Irma then remembered to turn and wave to her children, but they did not seem to see her. After the taxi had gone, however, they came inside, went up to their attic bedroom, and sat close together on a bed watching television, eating fruit and sweets from the bowl, letting peel and wrappers lie where they fell. They were clearly not as tidy or biddable as Robert and Claire; they heard only what they wanted to hear, and did only what they wanted to do: but Praxis could see that Irma’s children would do very well to sop up the overflow of her maternal affection, which still drained from her, like mother’s milk in the presence of a weaned baby. It would get better with time. She knew it would.
Praxis sat beside them on the bed, and presently took a tissue to wipe Jason’s running nose for him, but he turned his face sharply away, and said, in an irritable voice, ‘Don’t do that. I like it running.’ Then he put out his tongue to investigate the pale trickle.
It would never have done on the estate. Praxis laughed.
She felt she was home.
Phillip, returning that evening, seemed taken aback to find his wife gone and Praxis in her place. He had worked till past nine in the cutting room, and was tired. His hair was receding. He no longer had the look of a young man.
‘She was meant to be going in tomorrow,’ said Phillip. ‘I was taking her in. It was all arranged. I was editing today. I couldn’t leave it, how could I? She knew that perfectly well.’
The children were in their night clothes, in bed, still watching television, still munching through fruit and sweets. The Nanny had left, apparently, in dispute about the propriety of the late hours they kept, their diet, and their viewing habits. They were well-built, healthy children, on an altogether larger scale than Robert and Claire, with pale, mobile, fleshy faces, brown hair falling into their eyes, and each with a version of Philip’s full, curved mouth. Praxis’ heart beat faster, observing him in them. They should have been her children. She knew it.
She was embarrassed, as ever, to be alone with Phillip. He wandered about the kitchen, finding bread and cheese. He opened a bottle of wine as if it was an everyday occurrence. On the estate wine was for birthdays and celebrations. He ate and drank standing up. Praxis, from long years of laying tables first for Willy, then for Ivor, and setting before the homecoming male a plate of soup, followed by meat and two vegetables, and like as not a pudding too, was disconcerted. She sat on
a stool and watched. Phillip pushed bread and cheese towards Praxis. The bread was a long French loaf: the cheese soft and rolled in black peppercorns. On the estate bread was a sandwich loaf and the cheese Cheddar or processed.
‘Irma has a good taste in cheese,’ he said, sadly. ‘Did she go off happily?’
‘Not particularly.’
‘I don’t make her happy,’ he said.
‘People make themselves happy,’ said Praxis, disloyally.
‘Are you happy?’ he enquired.
‘No.’
‘I should have married you,’ said Phillip.
An awkward silence fell.
‘I know,’ said Praxis, eventually.
‘On the other hand,’ said Phillip presently, ‘perhaps no one should marry anyone. There’s so much to be done in the world, and the people best equipped to do it keep getting bogged down in these terrible partnerships.’
‘Where I’ve been living,’ said Praxis, ‘the question of partnership doesn’t arise. The women do what they’re told, and no one tries to change anything.’
‘You speak about it in the past tense,’ said Phillip.
‘That’s right,’ said Praxis.
‘Irma trusts you with me,’ observed Praxis.
‘She’s mad,’ said Phillip.
‘I rather thought she was,’ said Praxis.
‘I knew I should have married you,’ said Phillip, in the middle of the night. ‘You’re so warm. You must be wonderful in the winter. Willy always said you were so warm.’
‘Willy had a very cool body. It might just have been a matter of comparison.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Phillip. ‘We should have got married. Saved ourselves all this trouble.’
‘I did always find you difficult to talk to,’ said Praxis. ‘I don’t know why.’
‘I do. It was all so embarrassing,’ said Phillip, ‘from the very beginning. If I’d won the toss with Willy how different things would have been. Fancy tossing for a girlfriend.’
‘I thought you did win it.’
‘No. I lost.’
