by Weldon, Fay
‘Do you have no sense at all of the effect you have on women? “God made her a woman, love made her a mother – with a little help from electricity.” Don’t you see that it’s debasing?’
‘I see that there’s no coffee,’ said Praxis, ‘and since I came for coffee, there seems no point in my staying.’
Bess and Raya stood between Praxis and the door. They did not move. Praxis still smiled, but there was a frozen antagonism in her heart. Did they really believe that she would be a convert? That she could ever be as they were, ever think or act, let alone dress, as they did? They were the women she pitied: the women without men: the rejects. They should keep their voices low and not draw attention to themselves. Lucy without Benjamin: mad: retiring into her own head for ever and ever. Hilda, who could be as much a success in the world as she liked, but who was a failure as a woman. Irma, defeated, finished. What did she, Praxis, have in common with any of them?
‘Let her go,’ said Irma, in the tones of the victor. ‘She’s too far gone. It’s no use.’
‘I’m sorry, everyone,’ said Praxis vaguely and amiably. ‘I suppose you’re Women’s Libbers. I am sympathetic, actually, in principle.’
‘But not to the point of inconveniencing yourself.’ Tracey sneered so much Praxis almost supposed she had a hare lip. Perhaps that accounted for her sourness.
‘The trouble is,’ said Praxis, ‘I really can’t take a roomful of women seriously.’
Bess and Raya moved aside to let her go. Bess even opened the door for her. Still no one smiled.
On her way home Praxis caught sight of Betelgeuse in the night sky. She sat on a public bench and stared at the star, and wondered if the strange, tough, knowing person she now was had any connection with the wretched, but hopeful, Praxis she once had been. Perhaps it was everyone’s fate, to harden without ripening, as she feared that she had done?
‘What shall I do?’ she asked aloud.
The night around her grew still: the street was empty: the brilliance of the stars increased in intensity, dazzling her. She felt that she had stopped breathing: she bowed her head away from the light and the fingers of her right hand felt for the pulse of her left wrist, in an automatic but pointless gesture. Her hand stilled. Betelgeuse grew enormous, and brilliant, dulling the brilliance around him, and leaned out of heaven, with his spear. ‘Wait.’
She heard the word, enormous and deafening, inside her head, not outside it. The noise and the brilliance faded: the outside world started up again; she breathed; she heard: cars and pedestrians passed, noisy and ordinary.
Imagination, she told herself. Hysteria. Stress. The shock of the encounter with Irma, Bess, Raya and Tracey, setting up some kind of short-circuit in her brain. For to encounter hostility, when you have done nothing to deserve it, must surely be a shock. To know that you are observed, and judged, and that you have secret enemies, is indeed shocking, and might well, Praxis thought, bring about a retreat from reality, back into childhood fantasy. It did not mean that she was mad.
Praxis turned the meeting with the Women’s Libbers into a joke, into a dinner-table story, and presently could stop trembling when she thought about it.
She told no one about the visitation from the Red Dwarf Betelgeuse, however. Shock and hysteria it might have been, but it comforted her. More and more often now, she slept apart from Phillip. Whether it was her doing or his, she could no longer make out. It was certainly not what she wanted. But though it grieved her, made a sombre background to her life, it no longer distressed her.
Phillip was part of a journey she was making: he was not the end of the journey. She must wait.
Praxis was asked to take on a cigarette account. Reports had been emerging from universities and medical foundations to the effect that cigarette smoking caused death by lung cancer, and ill-health in those it did not kill. The validity of the research was hotly denied by heavy smokers, and those who profited, one way or another, by the manufacture and sale of cigarettes. The advertising agencies merely said blandly that since advertising did not increase the total sale of cigarettes but merely switched brand allegiance between the various makes, it was all nothing to do with them.
‘Of course advertising increases total sales of cigarettes,’ said Praxis naïvely to the Deputy Creative Director over melon and ginger. ‘We spend our time associating cigarettes with young love, virility, achievement and good living. I don’t want to do this new account.’
The Deputy Creative Director’s warm eyes grew noticeably less warm. ‘It’s an all or nothing matter, Praxis,’ he said. ‘If you take a salary from an employer he has a right to expect loyalty. If you don’t approve of what we’re doing, then hand in your resignation. Anything else would be hypocrisy.’
Praxis put the matter to Phillip.
‘The way things are going,’ he said, ‘you can’t possibly give up your job.’
Phillip had been six months without work. He felt, obscurely, that it was Praxis’ fault. Victoria had a boyfriend with long blond hair, who was discovered in her bed. Long-haired girls called at the door for Jason, and were uninterested in Phillip. Hard times.
Praxis kept her job and took on the cigarette account.
Government regulations were introduced, forbidding the association of cigarettes, in advertising, with sex, sport, youth, or healthy activity of any kind. She contorted her mind to get round the new restrictions, and managed a subtle connection between airlines and cigarettes which was applauded.
‘It’s not,’ said Phillip, ‘as if you told lies. Nothing you say is untrue.’
‘But nothing I say is true,’ complained Praxis. ‘Truth lies in the gaps between sentences. That’s what copy-writing is.’
‘No one takes any notice of advertising anyway,’ said Phillip.
‘They recognise it for what it is.’
Phillip was employed to make a documentary about a new hydro-electric scheme in the Scottish Highlands. It was not fiction, but it was work. He cheered up.
Hilda had become a negotiator for the Industrial Relations Board. She and Praxis rarely met. They seemed to have little in common. Praxis dealt with the surfaces of living, the material things of life: Hilda with the deeper significances. Praxis supposed that it had always, really, been so. Hilda had escorts, not lovers. Her jaw retreated more as she grew older. When Praxis did see her she was reminded vividly of Hilda as a plain little girl, playing on the beach. She was respected by both Management and Unions: Praxis suspected that she intimidated both. If either side walked out swearing that she was mad, at least the other side could presently be relied upon to do the same, and the situation at least made for a certain community of interest and attitude. Hilda’s success as a negotiator was established.
‘I’m not like a woman, you see,’ said Hilda to Praxis, when they did meet once, for lunch. ‘They forget I’m a woman.’ She spoke as if she had solved her problems, and Praxis felt sorry for her.
‘What’s for dinner?’ said Phillip, coming home from the Highlands, where the eating had been frugal. ‘Who can we ask round?’
Who indeed? The sixties were over.
The friends who had thronged to the house during the sixties, eating, drinking, enthusing, profligate of money, health, time and life, had gone their various ways – some to the country, some to new marriages, a few, even, to their deaths, remembered only by a scored out line in a telephone book. Phillip and Praxis seemed to make few new friends. Phillip did not like Praxis to invite her colleagues home, and his contemporaries in the film world seemed either absurdly rich and successful – too much so for easy conversation – or else too shamefully left behind to comfortably ask round.
‘It would only be embarrassing,’ Phillip would say. ‘He’d be envious and I’d feel awkward, and how could they ever ask us back? You’re a very flashy hostess, Praxis, all cream and brandy. I rather think you’ve driven our friends away. This is the age of austerity, and fear of cholesterol.’
And so it was. Petrol pri
ces and inflation soared, long faces and recriminations. Architect friends went bankrupt: a friend in the building industry went to prison. Their wives just melted away. Too embarrassing to ask them round: besides, since a wife basked in the glory of her husband’s success, so must she share his fall.
In the meantime, who to ask for dinner? Praxis looked through the telephone book and found there was no one to ask.
Victoria and Jason were out. They usually were. Praxis and Phillip are alone, facing each other. There seemed little to say. Phillip brooded.
‘It’s not my fault there’s no one to ask round,’ said Praxis, picking at her take-away kebab. But Phillip clearly thought it was.
‘Everything must change,’ said Praxis. ‘We must just change with it.’
‘You’ve certainly changed,’ said Phillip, pushing back his chair, and leaving his kebab half eaten. ‘You don’t even bother to cook properly any more. No wonder we don’t have any friends.’
Praxis was less easily made to feel guilty. She finished her kebab, and then ate Phillip’s.
She was, astonishingly, forty. She knew, because men no longer whistled at her in the street, but otherwise she felt the same as usual. She felt rejected, and discarded, and humiliated when men at work or at home made lecherous remarks about other, younger, sexier women.
‘If you live by your looks,’ said Irma to her over the phone, ‘you die by your looks. Come to a meeting.’
But Praxis wouldn’t. A meeting of all women! She felt she would be finally relegated, down among the women. A woman past her prime, taking comfort from the company of other rejected ageing women. There was to her something infinitely depressing in the notion of any all-female group, which must lack the excitement and pleasure of mixed company.
But the company of men was not what it was. The Deputy Creative Director took up with his young secretary, and Praxis suffered pangs of unreasoning jealousy. Phillip complained about her looks and her increasing lack of bosom. He would not do it directly; rather he let the implication be felt.
‘I think you should stop using so much make-up. It’s beginning to get in the cracks.’ Or he’d point out a passing girl.
‘God, what a figure. Look at those knockers!’
Praxis, while pained, felt a vague, rising indignation in herself. She could no longer quite take his attitudes for granted. They were those of most other men she knew, although expressed more cruelly, and with an increasing desire to hurt.
Irma appeared more and more on television, and what she said seemed to Praxis less and less bizarre.
‘If only women would realise,’ said Irma to the world, ‘that their miseries are political, not personal.’
‘What poor Irma needs,’ said Phillip, ‘is a good lay. But where’s she going to find that? Look at the way she dresses! Christ, what happens to frustrated women.’
Praxis thought Irma looked rather good, with short hair and no make-up. Praxis, on Phillip’s insistence, still went to the hairdresser twice a week, and sat under the drier with her hair in rollers, hot and bored.
‘Let’s face it,’ said Phillip, ‘it’s all right for Victoria to go about al fresco, but hardly you, darling, at your age.’
It occurred to Praxis that Phillip too was not as young as he had been. He was certainly going through a hard time. He suffered from insomnia and fits of depression. He would brood and sulk for days over imagined slights: he had indigestion. All Praxis’ fault, his manner implied, even when his words did not.
Phillip complained, as once Ivor had complained. He complained about the grease in the oxtail soup, about the dryness of the duck, about the way she handled the children, about the untidiness of the house, about the rate she spent money. He could not work, write or think while the cleaner was in the house. The cleaner left and was not replaced. Then he complained about the state of Praxis’ hands and the meanness of her temper.
‘What have I done?’ she asked, rashly.
‘You haven’t done anything. You just are,’ he complained. She knew what he meant. She had begun to feel herself, that her very existence was an affront to him.
Her enigmatic stomach pains returned.
‘Menopausal,’ said Phillip.
Things will get better again, thought Praxis. Things do. And so indeed they did, from time to time. When Phillip was working he would be enthusiastic, loving and friendly, and she would move back out of the spare room and into the double bed, and all would be as it had been.
‘I love you,’ he’d say. ‘Don’t get too fed up with me. Don’t ever leave.’
‘Of course not. Why should I leave?’ She had a wonderful, useful gift for forgetting the events of the past. Useful, at any rate, to everyone except herself.
Then work would dry up, and the difficulties begin again.
‘Things only get better,’ wrote Colleen from Sydney, ‘if you do something to make them better.’ Her little girl, not so little now, was backstroke champion of New South Wales. The shelves were covered with her silver trophies. Colleen had lost three stone through diet and exercise. She had been to a matrimonial agency and was marrying a swimming coach. ‘Do write,’ begged Colleen.
Praxis wrote, a cheerful, bouncy account of her life with Phillip. A tale of progress, achievement, and good cheer. She tore it up. Phillip was out of work and she back in the spare bed.
At the firm’s Christmas party Praxis drank a great many champagne cocktails and ended up under the board-room table, coupling with the Deputy Creative Director.
‘I’ve always wanted to do that,’ he said.
‘So have I,’ she said.
‘All those half bottles of wine!’ he complained. ‘If you only knew how much I always want to get drunk.’
But it did not develop into an affair. She was too conscious of the photograph of his wife and children on his desk. All the same, the incident cheered her up.
She exercised half-forgotten and neglected skills on Phillip, and he responded well enough. Things will get better, she thought, yet again: as she sprawled on a chair, naked and ungainly, and he pumped away, and excitement rose; but it was of the flesh, not of the spirit. Useless.
Victoria and Jason were both increasingly troublesome. Victoria chose to see more and more of her mother, and spoke more and more curtly to Praxis, whom she affected to despise; and talked in a patronising fashion to her father. She had given up boys. Presently she announced that she was a lesbian, and brought home a friend to prove it – a pretty girl with curly hair and dimples, who prided herself on the likeness to Shirley Temple in the ‘Little Colonel’. The friend stayed the night and in the morning Praxis found them sleeping in bed together, arms wrapped round each other’s necks. She crept away, horrified; woke Phillip and told him.
‘Why shouldn’t they?’ asked Phillip. ‘If it gives them pleasure. Safer than boys.’
He pulled Praxis down to the bed and made love to her; buggering her, something he seldom did. She cried, from pain and shock. She thought perhaps he was mad: perhaps he was in love with his daughter: perhaps anything.
‘I hear you are a lesbian,’ he said to Victoria at breakfast time.
‘That’s right,’ said Victoria.
‘You must tell me what you do,’ he said to the curly-headed friend, who turned pale at his crudity. ‘If you do it under my roof,’ he said, ‘I think it’s the least you can do.’
Victoria left the table, offended. Her friend followed.
Phillip laughed.
Victoria packed and stayed with Irma for a month, but presently returned – so Praxis suspected – for the sake of comfort, good dinners, and ironed clothes.
‘It must be difficult being a step-mother,’ said Victoria on her return, and kissed Praxis’ cheek. Praxis cried, with relief.
‘You should never have gone off with Phillip in the first place,’ said Victoria, ‘but I’m glad it was you and no one else. When I think of the women it could have been!’
But she showed no further interest in
boys: only in girls. Praxis felt that she had failed with her step-daughter. Victoria assured her that lesbianism was a higher state than heterosexuality: that there was affection, comfort, consolation to be found in girls; and only war with boys. Praxis remembered Louise Gaynor; long, long ago. Perhaps if they had slept together, spent nights together, discovered each other, so much since might have been different?
‘I wish it didn’t turn daddy on, that’s all,’ Victoria said, bitterly. ‘Men!’
Jason was increasingly rude and defiant, and left girlie magazines about for Praxis to see. Phillip, discovering them, became hysterical, took his belt off and hit his son. Jason hit back and went to stay with Irma.
‘You talk so much about sexual freedom,’ said Praxis, mildly, ‘I find this display of prudery quite surprising.’
‘It’s not prudery,’ said Phillip. ‘It’s decency. How dare he behave like that to you? Unless of course you provoke him?’
Nightmare times.
Mary passed her finals, and emerged from her room glowing and confident. She was to take up a hospital job in the New Year. She walked about the house like a good dream, chatting here, tidying there, interested in Phillip’s work, in Praxis; in the problems of Victoria and Jason, which she assured Praxis would soon pass.
‘It’s only their age,’ she kept saying. ‘They’re both so nice. They’ll be back to themselves, presently. Why do you doubt yourself? What you put into children is never wasted.’
But Praxis doubted. On the other side of London Robert now played obsessive rugby, and Claire was a girl-guide leader. They were going to live good, orderly lives. They were their father’s children, not hers. They thought their mother strange. Certainly, she was unhappy.
At Christmas Mary went home to Willy and Carla, and came back with a boyfriend, a trainee estate agent. He was strikingly handsome: he and Mary joked and chatted easily; they held hands. It seemed a simple relationship, if not profound. Mary explained the world to her Edward, and he listened, happily enough, because he loved her, but he had no opinions of his own to return. He liked sailing. He knew about winds and tides and boats, and house prices, but that was all.
