by Weldon, Fay
‘I don’t know what it is,’ he said, ‘I can only face real life if there’s a camera between it and me. Perhaps I need some kind of treatment.’
Phillip’s mother had died when he was four. His father was an army officer; he had retired after his wife’s death and started a fruit farm. Phillip had been sent to boarding school from an early age. His father, he had always felt, was fonder of his fruit trees than of Phillip. He was a Methodist; a formal, disciplined and undemonstrative man.
‘He never played with me,’ Phillip would complain. ‘I don’t think I can remember playing as a child. I don’t really know how to be spontaneous. I have to work out what I ought to feel, before I feel it.’
‘You play with your children,’ said Praxis, comfortingly. ‘You’re spontaneous with them.’
‘I suppose so,’ he said, uncomfortably. ‘I always thought I was. Now I’m not so sure.’
He rolled on top of her and the familiar magic reasserted itself.
Presently he felt better, justified. He had been transferred to the BBC’s Drama Department. He felt their restrictions against the showing of female nudity were puritanical and absurd. He was irritated by the actresses’ refusal to take their clothes off. ‘There’s nothing to be ashamed of,’ he kept saying. ‘A tit’s a tit.’
The political revolution had come and gone. Phillip had been at the barricades, filming. For a day or two it had seemed as if the world would change. Now they were back with the sexual revolution.
Phillip wanted to intercut telecine of Praxis’ bare breasts, seen in the shower, into his latest play, since the leading actress declined to do the shots he needed.
‘Yours are very similar,’ he said, and then clearly felt he had given himself away.
Praxis, shocked into stillness, wanted to ask how he knew, but dared not for fear of finding out the truth. A good deal of the play had been made on location. The whole cast had gone off together.
She still saw the truth as a demon, bat-winged, hovering over her life.
‘Are you showing the men nude?’ she asked, absently.
‘Who’s interested in nude men?’ asked Phillip. ‘Now don’t get all coy, Praxis. You never used to be. Your tits won’t be filmable for ever: make the most of them while you can.’
‘No,’ said Praxis. ‘I won’t. They’re private.’
Phillip felt insulted and betrayed: he rolled away from her at nights to the far edge of the bed. Praxis took to sleeping in the spare room: not because she wanted to, but because his cold and hostile back made her miserable and tearful, and she needed to sleep in order to function, and earn, and keep the household going. Phillip had bought a Maserati. It was exciting to drive in, but expensive to run. He would not talk about money. He found the subject tedious and depressing.
Mary wrote to ask if she could come and stay with Praxis and Phillip, while she did the final year of her medical training at a London hospital. She preferred to live out.
‘What do you think?’ asked Praxis of Phillip.
He didn’t think. He shrugged. Hadn’t she enough to do? She always claimed she had too much to do. She must make up her own mind. So long as Victoria and Jason didn’t suffer.
Victoria and Jason seldom suffered, Praxis thought. They stayed in their rooms and played records, loudly: or stayed out late and, Praxis greatly feared, smoked pot.
Phillip belonged to a reform group who were trying to legalise the smoking of cannabis.
‘No less harmful than alcohol,’ he’d say, downing whisky of an evening, while Praxis agitated about what party they were at, or where, and why they were not home; envisaging Jason in the clutches of the police, Victoria driven incurably mad by LSD. She was glad Robert and Claire so seldom put in an appearance. Robert had joined the Army Corps at his grammar school and Claire had become religious.
In the morning, eyeing her hung-over husband, and Victoria and Jason, irritable and alienated at the breakfast table, Praxis suffered and said nothing. She wished Mary to stay: but she did not wish to have her own discomfiture witnessed. She attempted to trim her own nature a little more to suit Phillip’s requirements and bring back peace to the household.
She drank a little whisky, smoked a little pot: did not ask Phillip where he was going or where he had been: bought Jason a leather jacket and Victoria a guitar, and waited up in the evening for no one.
Money’s easy, she thought. Nothing else is.
‘I’ll do the nude shots if you want me to,’ she finally said, one night in bed to Phillip’s turned back. He seemed surprised. ‘I got someone to do them long ago,’ he said. The world doesn’t stand still and wait for you to get over your sulks.’ But he turned back towards her, and made love, and she felt that things were back to normal and that she could write to Mary and say yes, of course, come and stay.
‘Did you audition for suitable breasts?’ she heard herself ask Phillip, but fortunately he had gone to sleep.
He had, in fact, as Praxis discovered later: and selected those of a girl called Serena out of some thirty available applicants. It was her first part.
Mary came to stay. She did not join in the life of the household: she went early to the hospital, and returned late, and tired, having lived through a day of dramas and decisions, other people’s pains, reliefs and tragedies. She was friendly, but cool: a rather severe and unsmiling young woman. She made Praxis feel frivolous.
‘So you are,’ said Phillip. ‘Zipping about over the surface of things!’
‘What about you?’ asked Praxis.
‘Fiction does more to change the world,’ said Phillip, ‘than any amount of fact.’
‘A working mother,’ wrote Praxis in her office, in deference to the changing times, ‘needs extra love and extra electricity.’ For once her copy was turned down.
‘Too small a part of the market,’ said the Deputy Creative Director. He took her out to lunch. He was a clever, softly-spoken gentle-eyed man who said he preferred gardening to advertising, but Praxis did not believe him. He liked Praxis and Praxis liked him. ‘You haven’t studied the research.’
‘I have,’ said Praxis. ‘And it may be small now but it’s growing.’
‘Then heaven help the nation’s children,’ said the Deputy Creative Director. ‘We do have some kind of social responsibility, Praxis, and if it is a trend the last thing we should do is encourage it.’
‘I’m a working mother,’ said Praxis.
‘I know,’ he said, over his steak-au-poivre. They were both experienced expense account lunchers, and ate melon, steak, and salad and shared a frugal half-bottle of wine. ‘But are you happy?’
He reminded her of Ivor, sometimes, long ago, far away: married to Diana. Tears stood in her eyes.
‘If I’m not happy,’ she said, ‘it’s not because of what I do, but because of what I am.’
Praxis went home and waited for something to happen.
Praxis presently received an invitation from Irma to evening coffee. She was surprised. Irma sometimes called at the house to check that Victoria and Jason were being properly cared for, but she had shown no signs of wishing to pursue a friendship. Praxis was gratified, if tired. She was usually tired, these days. Phillip was away, allegedly taping a play. She no longer asked for details of his absences, or believed him if he offered explanations.
Praxis accepted, and went to visit Irma.
23
Why does it take so long? Why do we stay so stubbornly blind to our own condition, when our eyes are not only open, but frequently wet with grief and bewilderment?
I’ll tell you, old woman that I am, without an old man to hold my hand or call the ambulance. Don’t disregard me on that account. Women outlive men: it is how most of us will end: and most of us, I sometimes think, mis-spend our youths in blind panic on that account. This man or that. Really! Willy, Ivor, Phillip: does it matter, in retrospect? No.
We are betrayed on all sides. Our bodies betray us, leading us to love where our interests do not lie.
Our instincts betray us, inducing us to nest-build and procreate – but to follow instinct is not to achieve fulfilment, for we are more than animals. Our idleness betrays us, and our apathy – murmuring, oh, let him decide! Let him pay! Let him go out to work and battle in the terrible world! Our brains betray us, keeping one step, for the sake of convenience, to avoid hurt, behind the male. Our passivity betrays us, whispering in our ears, oh, it isn’t worth a fight! He will only lie on the far side of the bed! Or be angry and violent! Or find someone else more agreeable! We cringe and placate, waiting for the master’s smile. It is despicable. We are not even slaves.
We betray each other. We manipulate, through sex: we fight each other for possession of the male – snap, catch, swallow, gone! Where’s the next? We prefer the company of men to women. We will quite deliberately make our sisters jealous and wretched. We will have other women’s children. And all in the pursuit of our self-esteem, and so as not to end up cold and alone.
I tell you, it is not so bad to be old and alone.
Well, no doubt men and women should walk through life hand in hand. There is enough to be done in the world, as Phillip once said, without all this trouble. And it does not take a man to make a woman cry. I think of Colleen, crying through the night: and I think of my all-women prison. It was not a pleasant place to be; yet I imagine the sum of emotion, good or bad, happy and unhappy, pretty much the same inside as outside. A girl can cry all night because a woman has been unkind: it doesn’t take a man to do it.
Outside my window old men and women shuffle by: their chins are whiskery: their slack mouths mutter: they are full of discontent and will die in the same state – I don’t believe that life has dealt fairly with them.
It can’t, as I used to say (usually wrongly) go on!
24
‘Do you realise,’ said Irma to Praxis, ‘that you are not only a personally misguided woman, but a danger to other women as well?’
‘Well, no,’ replied Praxis, trying not to laugh, ‘actually I hadn’t.’
Four women regarded her with speculative and sombre eyes. They seemed to see nothing ridiculous in the situation, and Praxis’ smile died. No one said anything. It was a hot evening. Irma, Bess, Raya and Tracey wore jeans and T-shirts, making no attempt to disguise the various unsuitabilities of the bodies beneath. There seemed to Praxis to be a great many brownish, sinewy, sweaty arms in the room: too many rather large, shiny noses, strong jaws, wild heads of hair, intense pairs of eyes, pale lips, and rather dirty sets of toes cramped stockingless into sandals. Praxis was wearing high-heeled shoes, black mesh stockings and a red flowered Ossie Clark dress. Her hair was shorn, dark and neat against her face. She had the sudden feeling that she looked and behaved now as Irma had once done. ‘You did say coffee,’ murmured Praxis into the silence, but Irma did not move. Cuttings of Praxis’ advertisements for the Electricity Board lay on the table before her, scored with red markings and indignant exclamation marks.
Irma’s room seemed arranged for a permanent meeting. Hard chairs were placed around the walls. The central table was long and functional. Irma’s bed was pushed against the wall: narrow, hard, and used for sleeping not for sex. Praxis wondered what Irma could do with all the money that Phillip sent her monthly. Or rather which Praxis now sent, for Phillip had no money to spare. The sources of his income, gradually but inexorably, were drying up. The BBC employed him less and less frequently. Now that naked women appeared quite happily and quite often on the television screen, the sources of his creativity seemed to be drying up. And he was expensive and temperamental, and a temperamental director was capable of bringing a whole studio out on strike. The race, these days, was to the adaptable, the economical, and the polite – Phillip was none of these things: and there was a whole new young breed of television directors who were. Phillip, rightly, was gloomy about his future. He cancelled his banker’s order to Irma, if not for the Maserati.
‘You have to send it, by law,’ objected Praxis.
‘If she has the audacity to sue,’ said Phillip, ‘let her.’ So Praxis sent the banker’s order herself. What difference did it make – Phillip’s money or hers?
She began to feel the first stirrings of anger against Irma. Perhaps Phillip was right, and she was Irma’s victim, and not Irma hers.
Irma, besides, had taken to strange behaviour, eschewing the company of men and claiming that women were oppressed. She had paraded outside the Albert Hall in protest against the annual Miss World beauty contest, appeared on television to defend her conduct, and been derided for her pains. The protestors, everyone agreed, were ugly, warped and jealous.
‘She’s a lesbian,’ said Phillip. ‘That was the whole trouble. Basically unfeminine. Look, I do believe she’s growing a moustache! She certainly will if she goes on like this. And her voice was always raucous but it’s getting worse. Switch her off, quick!’
And since to be lesbian was the worst insult Praxis could think of, second only to being rated unfeminine, she switched Irma off, and kept her mouth shut, deciding that what might be right for Irma – or at any rate the best Irma could do, as a divorced woman without any status in the world – was certainly not right for Praxis, and the great majority of contented homemakers in the world. She was happy, she told herself, to be a wife and mother, who also had the added stimulation of going out to work. And if she were not happy, if she woke sometimes in the morning with a pain round her heart so severe it all but made her cry out, a great anguished unclassified scream into the world, it was surely nothing to do with the society in which she lived, which suited everyone else well enough – but surely had its roots in her own unhappy childhood – in her relationship with a mad mother, a loony sister, and an absent father. Enough, after all, to upset anyone.
Phillip certainly thought so. He would regale dinner tables with amazed accounts of his wife’s background and beginnings. ‘Praxis is no ordinary person,’ he’d say. ‘No conventional home life for a wife of mine! A mother in a mental home, and father who, to all accounts, was no ordinary Jew, but a gambling, drinking, fornicating Jew.’
It was all right, now, after the 6-day war, for Praxis to have Jewish blood. It was in fact a point of advantage – not just in cultural and intellectual circles, as it always had been – but with more ordinary people. The Jews of the diaspora now basked in the reflected glory of Israel – no longer a cowering, pitiable, persecuted race licking their wounds in a donated desert – but a hard, tough, victorious, efficient nation, in danger, if anything, of being an oppressive and colonial power, rather than one oppressed and colonised.
All right to be Jewish. No need to hide. Less and less need to hide anything: unmarried couples came to dinner: people talked openly about cancer: mad relatives were talked about with relish: you could dine out on a visit to a mental hospital. Phillip made films about psychophrenic art.
Praxis held her head a little higher. Phillip noticed, and cut her down to size.
He thought she should, perhaps, give up her job. The children, he said, were suffering from her absence. Victoria had nits in her hair: Jason had scabies. Wasn’t she being selfish?
At home Praxis pretended she did not go out to work: never took jobs home: never talked about her office day. It would have annoyed Phillip. In the office she pretended she did not have a family: never talked about her home: never took time off. It would have annoyed her employers. She juggled her life with amazing dexterity: always guilty, always in a hurry. Running home from work to get the boeuf bourguignon into the oven: up in the morning, before anyone, to iron her smart white office blouse.
Happy, lucky Praxis. With a husband, a home, children, and a job. Tired Praxis.
‘Mother’s love is everything in the first five years!’ wrote Praxis. ‘And electricity helps her show it!’
‘How to be loved and loveable!’ wrote Praxis. ‘Let electricity take the strain.’
Now Irma had asked her to coffee. Rashly, she had accepted, expecting what? Friendship, apolog
y, the bridging of gaps for old times sake? But here was the new Irma, firm and strong, demanding principle, in a masculine way, denying love. For that was what it amounted to.
‘You must realise, Praxis,’ said Irma, ‘just how socially irresponsible you are.’
‘You,’ said Praxis, lightly, ‘are maternally irresponsible. I have looked after your two children for years. Have I complained? No.’
‘You were in no position to complain,’ said Tracey, sourly. She was barely twenty, and should not have been so sour, Praxis thought. ‘It was what you wanted. Someone else’s husband, someone else’s children.’
‘People aren’t possessions,’ replied Praxis, smartly, but alarmed that these strangers should know so much about her affairs. She had expected, in spite of all, some kind of loyalty from Irma: some kind of return from the monthly money she had invested in Irma’s welfare, Irma’s silence, and the lessening of her own guilt.
All sighed, unimpressed.
‘It’s no use criticising her on a personal level,’ said Raya. ‘She’s as much a victim as anyone else.’
Praxis regarded Raya’s bulging hips and reflected that it was imprudent of her to wear jeans.
‘She doesn’t half ask for it, though,’ said Bess. Bess would look at home in a cow-shed, thought Praxis: sturdy bare arms up to their elbows in milk and mud. ‘Do you realise what you’re doing, Praxis, when you write these advertisements?’
‘Earning a living,’ said Praxis, rising to go. ‘Contributing to Irma’s quite unnecessary alimony, keeping Irma’s children in pot and guitars, and paying my taxes so you can get your security allowances.’
