by Weldon, Fay
‘I feel bad about being in Irma’s bed,’ said Praxis.
‘Don’t start all that,’ said Phillip. ‘Once you started that you’d never stop.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Praxis. ‘Sheer hypocrisy, anyway.’
‘Quite,’ said Phillip. ‘In any case she’s never in it. Irma mostly sleeps in the spare bed. She uses sex as a controlling weapon.’
‘She seems to get pregnant, all the same.’
‘You know how it is,’ said Phillip, rolling on top of Praxis.
She had never quite realised, before, that sexual satisfaction could result from the fulfilled desire for a whole person; she had seen it as the occasional outcome of local physical stimulation. She supposed that this was love. Whatever it was, it suffused her. She did not doubt but that it was right to pursue it.
In the morning the hospital rang. Irma was in labour. Phillip rounded up the film crew.
‘I wish she wouldn’t,’ said Phillip. ‘I find it distasteful. It would be easier to film someone not one’s wife: but as Irma says, it is two hundred pounds for her and five hundred for me. We do have to have the basement done out after the old lady: the film is sponsored by the Natural Childbirth Trust: the clouds of ignorance and fear shrouding the mysteries of birth have to be swept away, and so on, and so on; but frankly I wish she wouldn’t.’
‘Ivor wouldn’t do it for a thousand pounds.’
‘Go back to Ivor, then.’ He was angry.
‘Never.’
‘Well,’ said Phillip, ‘there is no progress without sacrifice.’ And off he went to the hospital. It was a false alarm. The crew had to be paid for the day’s non-work.
‘We’ll never bring this film in on budget,’ said Phillip. ‘That’s Irma’s plan, no doubt.’
‘She can hardly help it,’ said Praxis, but wasn’t so sure.
Victoria and Jason discovered Phillip and Praxis in bed.
‘What are you doing in my mummy’s bed?’ asked Victoria.
‘Keeping it warm,’ said Praxis.
‘I’ll tell mummy,’ said Victoria crossly. ‘She doesn’t allow anyone in her bed, not even me.’ Victoria was six. Jason got into bed beside Praxis.
‘You’re warmer than mummy,’ he said.
‘What are we going to do?’ asked Phillip, helplessly.
‘Perhaps you’re lost without a story-line,’ suggested Praxis.
‘I make documentaries, not features,’ he said. ‘There is no story-line. That’s part of the trouble. I’m not doing what I want, or living as I want.’
Irma was in labour again. The crew reassembled, set up their lights and got some decent footage of contractions, major and minor. After that they hung about. Waiting. Twelve hours later, the doctor turned the crew out and Irma had an emergency Caesarian. It was a boy. She would be in hospital another ten days.
‘The Trust is right,’ said Phillip. ‘There’s far too much interference in natural processes. If they’d left her alone she’d have had the baby naturally, and we would have got our film. They should never have given her that first injection. It slowed things up. I’m not worrying for myself: we can get another volunteer easily enough: it’s just that Irma’s going to be so furious at having to do without her moment of filmic glory; not to mention her two hundred pounds. I think she wants to be a film star. That’s her whole trouble. She doesn’t understand why I can’t make her one.’
Praxis would have remonstrated and said ‘poor Irma’ but feared, rightly, that sympathy would appear hypocritical.
Phillip was agitated. He strode up and down the kitchen, when he should have been visiting Irma.
Praxis had polished the copper saucepans, cleaned behind the taps and scoured the butcher’s block. Other women’s kitchens are easy to transform.
‘I want to make my own films,’ he said, ‘not other people’s.’
‘Then why don’t you?’
‘Because I have to keep all this going.’ He gestured to include house, children, absent wife, missing nanny, present mistress, rooms, insults, sulks, self-indulgences and disciplines and the whole paraphernalia of middle class life. ‘It takes money.’
During the day Praxis had opened up the basement door so that the Council workmen would clear away the belongings of the deceased sitting tenant. The men threw everything into the street, and from the street into the waiting dust-cart, where a churning iron screw compacted everything. Chairs, sofa, bed, all sodden with urine. Christmas cards, wedding photographs; old letters and postcards, greasy and dusty; the newspaper she had kept as extra blankets for cold nights; cracked crockery and tinny cutlery; mousetraps; mouldy sliced bread. So much for a life. The workmen finished, nodded, declined a tip and went away to the next address on their list.
Even empty, the place stank. Praxis hated Irma.
‘I’d have done better,’ thought Praxis. ‘I wouldn’t have let her rot.’ But would she?
‘You mean, you let them throw everything out?’ Phillip was worried. ‘Irma was going to go through the old postcards. There might have been something interesting. People collect them, these days, you know.’
‘I’m sorry I missed it,’ he said later. ‘There might have been some interesting footage.’
Another day passed, of love, tranquillity and reciprocated passion. Victoria and Jason had some friends to tea. The noise and mess were exhausting and exhaustive. Their parents, collecting them, looked coldly at Praxis. Her roots were growing out: she feared she looked hollow eyed and sexually satiated. And poor Irma, she could hear them thinking, having such a terrible time in hospital!
Did anyone really think poor Irma, wondered Praxis? Or did they think, as she did, selfish, bad-tempered bitch of an Irma, better out of the way!
‘You ought to go and visit Irma,’ said Praxis.
‘It’s not my child she’s having,’ said Phillip, becoming, at least for a while, impotent. ‘Unless I conceived it in my sleep. You’ve no idea what life’s been like.’
‘Irma’s been going to poetry readings,’ he said. ‘She was having an affair with a hairy poet.’ Phillip was smooth skinned, almost hairless.
‘I find that rather hard to believe,’ said Praxis.
‘He’s an American,’ said Phillip. ‘A Pulitzer Prize winner,’ and Praxis had less trouble believing it.
‘I can’t let you go,’ said Phillip.
‘Then don’t,’ said Praxis.
‘Irma told me she hated you,’ said Praxis.
‘Irma said you were a voyeur, and used cameras as a sublimation,’ said Praxis.
‘Irma said you were impotent and a social climber,’ said Praxis. And so on. Praxis was fighting for her life, her happiness, and Irma’s children.
‘I love you,’ said Praxis. Not only did she say it, but it was true.
‘I can’t be married to a madwoman for the rest of my life,’ said Phillip.
‘Then don’t be,’ said Praxis.
Praxis telephoned Ivor, who wept. She marvelled at the telephone system. Every house in the country physically linked by bits of wire to each other: the vibrations of distress passing so easily over distances.
‘Where are you?’ he wept. ‘What are you doing? Where have you been? Who are you with? Never come home! I’ll kill you if you do, bitch, whore, slut. When are you coming back? The children need you. The cat is ill.’
She put the telephone down and rang again later. He was calmer. No, she wasn’t coming back. What about the house, he begged: their life together, the children?
‘What about Carol?’ enquired Praxis, unkindly. ‘What about you not letting my mother live with us?’
‘You only asked once,’ he replied, astounded.
He was angry. He said he’d divorce her. She said she’d counter petition. He said she wasn’t fit to look after the children, anyway. She said she knew that. He said she was mad, monstrous, unnatural. She did not deny it. He said the children lay awake at night, crying: he could not go to work because of them: what was he to do? She
said she did not know. He could always get Carol to help out, she supposed.
‘It’s all very vulgar,’ said Phillip, calmly, taking the receiver from her and putting it back in its cradle. Praxis cried for her children. Phillip said they’d soon get settled and she would see them again.
‘How?’
‘We’ll manage,’ he said. ‘And your mother, too.’
‘But it will all be just the same for you, only more,’ she wept. ‘More people, more households, more obligations.’ What Praxis really meant was that she wanted just the two of them. Phillip and Praxis. They wrote to Irma to tell her so.
Irma was too weak and too stunned to say anything at all: or at any rate neither Praxis nor Phillip were there to hear it. Irma went straight from hospital, with the baby, to stay with cousins in the country.
‘It isn’t my baby,’ said Phillip. ‘This proves it. She must be feeling very guilty, or she wouldn’t take it so quietly.’
The Pulitzer Prize winner went to visit Irma in the country and Praxis felt better about everything. The neighbours fell silent as she passed all the same, and the shopkeepers looked at her with hostility. Praxis hoped that she just imagined it, that people were not really so prejudiced and unreasonable. She could not see that she had done Irma any great harm. Irma hated Phillip, her children, and the house. She had said so.
Irma, in any case, suffered some internal complications and went back into hospital for three whole months. The cousins looked after the baby for her, and called twice weekly to collect Victoria and Jason for the day. There could be no doubt but that the cousins – he wearing a tweed cap, and she in horsey headscarf – regarded Praxis coldly, and positively gobbled at Phillip. Praxis and Phillip thought that quite amusing, except it was disconcerting to imagine how Irma had misrepresented the situation.
It was as if Praxis were blinkered: her focus limited to what was in front of her: everything else blurred, or black; she was unable to register the implications of what she had brought about, what she had done. She was dizzy with desire by day, weak with satiation by night.
Sometimes she lay awake grieving for Robert and Claire, but not often, not for long.
Victoria and Jason came back from their days with the cousins wild and noisy. Children were not allowed to visit in their mother’s ward. Jason started to wet the bed. Stoically, daily, Praxis stripped the bed and washed the sheets. She thought Irma ought to be grateful. When she needed money she asked Phillip for it. He handed over banknotes blithely, in wodges, without counting first, or asking Praxis to account for what she did with it. Praxis had kept careful budgeting books for Ivor.
Within weeks Phillip was sitting down to an evening meal, each one an extravaganza, the choicest cuts of meat, the rarest vegetables, any error in cooking remedied by the addition of brandy or cream, or both.
‘A real woman,’ said Phillip, gratefully. They sat together on the same side of the table, to be the closer, the better to be able to lean into each other.
One day when Phillip was away filming, and Victoria and Jason were off with the funny cousins, Praxis went to Brighton, to visit Willy and Carla.
109 Holden Road seemed smaller, less set apart: it was just another house in a long, long road, rather old-fashioned and inconvenient, but no longer dark with nightmare. Willy and Carla seemed a mildly eccentric couple; small-town. Willy was no longer powerful: Carla was no longer a trump card pulled out of Willy’s pack. Rather, she was a slight, tired, put-upon young woman with an unhealthy pallor and hollow eyes, and the manner of a servant. She scurried about in an apron, with damp clothes and steaming dishes, sulkily, reminding Praxis of Judith, long ago. And Willy, moving sometimes above-stairs, sometimes below-stairs, unsure of his status, was a version of Henry the photographer, cut down to size. Praxis had the feeling that her life had lapsed out of colour and into black and white: as if she too were now some part of Phillip’s imagination. What she saw lacked solidity: as if Phillip were making an eternal square with his two hands and framing her through them; able at will to cut to the next square, to edit and delete.
I’m going mad, thought Praxis.
Willy counted on his fingers.
‘Well done, Pattie,’ he said. ‘That’s six people’s lives ruined, at a minimum. Your two wretched children, your unbelievable Ivor; the impossible Irma and her two trendy brats. And of course Phillip.’
‘I love Phillip. He loves me.’
‘What kind of an excuse is that? He’s just another bloody idiot, like the rest of us. No, not six, seven. There’s Irma’s new baby.’
‘It isn’t Phillip’s.’
‘Who says so?’
‘Phillip.’
Willy laughed. Praxis wept. Carla heaved obvious sighs. Mary came home from playing tennis. She was in adolescence now: long-legged, long-haired, smooth-skinned.
‘Auntie Pattie!’ she cried, pleased. ‘Auntie Pattie! We haven’t seen you for ever so long.’ She went to Brighton High School. There was no longer a school uniform, and the girls no longer jangled their achievements on metal bars, over plump bosoms. Sunday dinner was served.
Praxis talked brightly to Mary about chemistry exams and medical school, but the image was now clear in her mind, worming its way finally through the barriers put up to bar its way. Robert and Claire, crying in bed. Crowding in, on the periphery of her consciousness, a cluster of others waiting for admission. Irma, her friend. Ivor, her husband. Jason, wetting the bed. Victoria, confused and pale. The cold cousins, the censorious neighbours, the shopkeepers.
‘However, no doubt we all have a right to be happy,’ observed Willy.
‘I’m not so sure,’ said Praxis, and went to the bathroom and brought up roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes, frozen peas, plum duff, custard and all.
She went back to London without visiting her mother. She rang Ivor, who refused to let her see the children. She was in no state to do so. Later, perhaps, he said. Had she seen a psychiatrist? Phillip formed his two hands into a square and observed her grief.
‘Irma never cried,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘It waters the roots of my being.’ He consoled her. She loved him: though she could see that he was flawed. Seeing this, a kind of sanity returned.
Hilda came to visit Praxis.
‘You’re making a mess of your life,’ she complained. ‘You had everything a woman could want: a loving husband, lovely children, nice little home, and you’ve thrown it all away.’
Praxis regarded Hilda with more coldness and less fear than usual. Hilda was dressed in black and white, and had her hair piled high in a kind of lacquered beehive on top of her head. She wore a string of pearls, and moved briskly and competently.
‘It’s not what you want from life,’ observed Praxis.
‘If you have a career,’ said Hilda, ‘you have to make sacrifices. We were always different, in any case. You were always more, well, physical, than me, and it’s caused everyone a great deal of trouble.’
‘Has it?’
‘Poor Willy,’ said Hilda. ‘He was prepared to stand by you. But that wasn’t good enough for you, either. And you realise it was because of you and that filthy incident with another girl when you were barely into your teens that mother had to spend the rest of her life in hospital?’
Praxis cried. She couldn’t help it. Hilda relented somewhat, but not much.
‘I suppose it’s not your fault, Praxis. You have a kind of innate filthiness of spirit. You must have inherited it from poor mother’s husband.’
‘He wasn’t her husband.’
‘You see?’ Hilda felt her point was proved. ‘You scrub around in the underside of life: and look at you! You look common, like a servant.’
Indeed, with the roots of her yellow hair black, and her sore eyes, red from weeping, and the cold in her nose which always accompanied any change in the manner of her living, Praxis did not look her best. Phillip did not seem to mind. He found it
restful, he said, after Irma’s lacquered perfection: and the slipslop of Praxis’ slovenly slippers preferable to the brisk and dangerous clatter of Irma’s stiletto heels. They lay with their arms around each other in bed, Praxis snuffling and sighing, Phillip peacefully sleeping.
‘Hilda,’ said Praxis. ‘I might be living with Ivor if someone hadn’t sent him an anonymous letter telling him I’d been a whore before I married him.’
Hilda looked blank.
‘But no one would believe a disgusting thing like that,’ Hilda said, in all sincerity.
‘You really hate me,’ said Praxis. ‘Ever since the beginning you’ve hated me.’
‘That’s childish,’ said Hilda. ‘You’re a mature woman in your thirties and you talk like a six-year-old. It would have been better for everyone if you’d never been born, but that’s not your fault.’
Praxis cried, mildly. Hilda observed her sister, coldly.
‘What’s the matter?’ She sounded curious, rather than concerned.
‘I’ve got no one,’ said Praxis. ‘I’ve never had anyone. Mother, father, you – nobody ever wanted me.’
‘Good heavens,’ said Hilda. ‘You were everyone’s darling. You’ve had man after man ever since I could remember. You even have children. All you seem able to do is throw them away. Look at you! You’re hysterical. I expect you’re premenstrual. I’m afraid women are hopelessly handicapped by their biological natures.’
Hilda was doing what she could at the Ministry to block a scheme to introduce women trainee executives into the nationalised industries.
Hilda gathered her neat, spinsterish things together and went back to run the country. Praxis was crying when Phillip returned.
‘She stands me on my head,’ Praxis complained, ‘and shakes every bit of my brain about until it’s addled. She’s always done it. She always will.’
Praxis went to visit Irma; her hands trembled: she had difficulty in breathing: she stood on the wrong platform and missed the train, but she got there. Phillip hadn’t wanted her to go, so she went without his knowledge. He would find out but she would have to put up with that. The cousins lived in a Sussex farmhouse. He was a stockbroker and she bred horses. Irma was the worldly member of the family.
