by Weldon, Fay
Praxis went down to see them. Carla was out.
‘You should never have married Phillip,’ said Willy. ‘You look much better now you’re not.’
‘You always liked me in dusty black,’ observed Praxis.
‘Yes I did,’ said Willy. ‘It suited you. You were always in mourning for something or other.’
He looked round the new gleaming walls of the bungalow, the smooth cool surfaces of built-in wardrobes and furniture. Carla had a taste for crimson velour.
‘It’s all too unused for me,’ he said. ‘I like dark places where people have been before.’
He lifted Praxis’ jersey and put his chilly hands on her breasts. Both fingers and breasts felt less resilient than they had in earlier years. He undid her jeans and pushed and nudged her back against the marble of a modern fireplace.
‘It’s all got to be used,’ he said. ‘It’s all got to be made warmer and darker.’
She wriggled away from him and rearranged her clothes. He did not seem to mind.
‘You’re married to Carla,’ said Praxis.
‘You never used to think like that. All those husbands down at the Raffles.’
‘I do now.’
‘I don’t see what difference it can make,’ protested Willy. ‘It’s my wanting to is the offence to Carla, if any: not the actual doing. That’s the harmless part.’
‘That’s your truth. Mine is different.’
‘You must miss sex, now you’re not married. Isn’t it hard?’
He was inquisitive: he always had been inquisitive: his body as well as his mind. It had gone searching into hers, anxious to know the exact state of play within, at any given minute, trying to catch something elusive, as if something might be missed between this penetration and that: quick! Catch it as it flew! No, she didn’t miss sex. Yes, it was hard. She missed the establishment and warmth of the household: she missed a pattern of obligations, the fulfilling of other people’s needs, no matter how badly she had, latterly, fulfilled them. She missed the telephone ringing, the laying of the table, the sharing of the days’ events, the lack of time to think: she missed the exhaustion and the sense of self-righteousness. She was left with silence and herself and it was hard.
‘I told you so,’ said Ivor, satisfied. She even went to visit Ivor, in search of herself. ‘You were always too rackety. People round here live perfectly happy, stable lives. If only you’d settle down, Praxis.’
He still lived in the biggest house on the estate, and that had grown in grandeur since she left. Diana had brilliant white Terylene curtains looped across the windows: her taste ran to chintz and little lamps. There was a handsome chrome cocktail cabinet. Diana clearly didn’t wish Praxis to visit, so Praxis went only the once. Ivor regretted her: Praxis knew he did. She had been the excitement of his life; the opportunity for change and enrichment, it had gone sour: over a vision of Carol’s bare breasts against his dark suit. Praxis felt that if she tried, if she pursued, if she seduced, it could all have begun again: but to what end?
When the money from the sale of the Holden Road house came through, Praxis gave up her job. She would have liked to have given it up earlier, as a moral gesture, but the habits of prudence remained.
Irma shrugged, kind for once.
‘I don’t know that motives matter,’ she said. ‘It’s not why people do things, it’s what they do that has its effect.’
Praxis considered suicide, but kindness of heart, not to mention the sheer habit of being alive and doing one’s best to stay so, stood between her and the actuality of the deed. Someone would have to find the body and endure nastiness: others would have to put up with remorse, regret, and if not grief (for she could think of no one who would long or sincerely grieve for her) at any rate the shock, dismay and disagreeable nostalgia which attends any untimely and violent death. Ah, better times, long past, when we were young, vigorous, and hope came in equal measure with despair! By dying, Praxis could see, she would be more closely connected with others than she was when living, and that of course was the main temptation. To brush aside, tear down, the blanket of unreality between herself and the rest of the world, was indeed inviting. But she did not do it.
‘What am I going to do with the second half of my life?’ Praxis asked Irma. ‘I don’t really want to live through it. I don’t seem to have any function.’
‘Find one,’ said Irma, brusquely.
The money from the sale of the Holden Road house came through: Praxis left her bed-sitting room and bought a small flat in Camden Town. She furnished it cosily and seductively, out of habit. ‘A man trap,’ said Irma unkindly, looking round at soft sofas, deep carpets, and little lamps.
‘There don’t seem to be any men to trap,’ said Praxis.
‘All that means,’ said Irma, ‘is that you’re not looking for one. Good for you.’
But it seemed to Praxis to be a matter of sorry inadvertence, not resolution.
Serena had her baby – a little girl. Her picture appeared in the newpapers; the baby in her arms and Phillip smiling behind her. An unflattering snapshot of Praxis, as the ousted wife, also appeared, with a caption saying that she was seeking a divorce. Presumably Serena had raked through the family photograph album and provided the worst likeness she could. Or it might of course have been Phillip who obliged. Serena’s little boy, the one with the allegedly royal genes, now lived with Phillip and Serena. A Sunday supplement presently ran a feature on the new young family as part of the pre-publicity for Philip’s disaster movie. Serena, Praxis observed, had made considerable improvement in the kitchen.
‘It was nicer in my day,’ said Irma, ‘simpler and more functional,’ and Praxis, who had her mouth open in dismay, distress and indignation, had to close it again.
Praxis’ mind could accept and condone Phillip’s sexual relationship with Serena: her body could not. A sense of loss, of being usurped, of being in the wrong place while something dreadful happened elsewhere which she ought to be there to stop, kept her awake and tormented at night.
‘I know the feeling,’ said Irma. ‘Try sleeping pills.’
Praxis tried them, and slept heavily at night. The feelings faded: broke through from time to time in dreams, and that was all. ‘It’s all no big deal,’ said Irma. ‘Really, it is all so unimportant. Regard the pain of rejection as an illness. It passes. It’s a pain in the heart, in the mind, instead of in the stomach. Think yourself lucky not to have both, like me.’
‘You don’t still care about Phillip?’ asked Praxis, startled.
‘He’s beneath you, and me. We’re worth ten of him and always were.’
‘What difference did that ever make?’ asked Praxis, sadly.
Hilda’s name appeared in the New Year’s Honours list. She went to Buckingham Palace to receive the award from the Queen, wearing a grey suit and white blouse, with her hair piled high into a bristly beehive topped with a floppy emerald green ribbon. She had found favour in high places by quietly and quickly settling a series of strikes before news of them appeared in the newspapers. She gave a small cocktail party to celebrate the event and even asked Praxis.
‘You will wear something ordinary,’ she pleaded with Praxis, ‘and have your hair done.’
Praxis obliged, and mingled happily enough with grey-suited civil servants and their pleasant wives. She stayed behind to help Hilda wash up the sherry glasses and the ashtrays. There were not many of the latter; fewer people smoked, these days, than had done in the past.
‘You must be very pleased,’ said Praxis.
‘The OBE? It is an acknowledgment. It’s something.’
‘It’s a great deal.’
‘I could never have got married,’ said Hilda. ‘I couldn’t have coped with that and a career. Women can’t. Besides, madness is hereditary. I didn’t want to pass it on.’
‘That never worried me,’ said Praxis, surprised.
‘I was always the responsible one,’ said Hilda. She washed and rewashed the same glass, wi
th disdainful red-tipped fingers. She had done very little washing-up in her life.
‘I looked after children and had a career as well,’ said Praxis.
‘You mean you managed, for a time,’ said Hilda. ‘And then everything broke down and now you have nothing.’
‘And you have the OBE.’ Another bar to hang on Hilda’s chest, along with Latin, Geography and Deportment.
‘Yes,’ said Hilda. ‘People fail you, children disappoint you, thieves break in, moths corrupt, but an OBE goes on for ever. I shall write and tell father.’
Praxis said nothing. She polished and re-polished a glass and waited.
‘He’s in a nursing home in Deal,’ said Hilda. ‘He’s an alcoholic. Mother drove him to drink when she left him. He’s very old now, of course. I write to him quite often.’
Perhaps it was true. Perhaps it was not.
‘I didn’t know you were in touch with him,’ said Praxis, as casually as she could.
‘I have been for years,’ said Hilda. ‘Since I was at school. Butt and Sons put the wrong letter in an envelope and I found out where he was. I write to him once in a while.’
‘Does he write back?’
‘That’s not the point.’
‘How do you know he’s in a nursing home?’
‘I telephone from the Ministry, sometimes. I keep up with his changes of address, one way or another. He’s moved about quite a lot.’
‘What do you tell him, when you write?’
‘Family news,’ said Hilda blithely.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I’m the elder sister. I’m in charge.’
‘Did you write to him when I was living with Willy?’
‘Of course.’
‘What did you say?’ enquired Praxis.
‘The truth.’
‘How did you know what that was?’
‘Willy told me. Willy was very fond of me.’
Hilda was both smug and evasive.
Praxis did not pursue the matter. Yes, Willy had been fond of Hilda: how fond, she did not wish to know. She remembered, or thought she remembered, Hilda dancing naked in front of Willy in the night. In the same way she remembered lying with her father in Elaine’s summer house. But perhaps these things had not happened at all: perhaps they were fantasies, manifestations of inner fears and desires, which came to her with the strength of memories? How was she to know? And why should she want to know? There was no obligation, after all, to know the truth, let alone face it. And if Benjamin had not appeared by chance, but had come looking for his daughter in Raffles Esplanade Dive in response to a letter from Hilda, what did it matter now?
Old man in a nursing home – that part sounded true enough – with his memories to sustain him. If Praxis had contributed in any way to the richness of his memories, then she was glad. She had liked her father. The realisation cheered her up, made some kind of rent in the mist between herself and other people.
She leaned forward and kissed Hilda on the cheek.
‘What did you do that for?’ asked Hilda, startled.
‘Because you’re my sister,’ said Praxis. ‘Don’t worry about it: about what I did, or what you did. Everything’s quite all right, and you’ve got the OBE, and I’m glad.’
She put away the glasses in Hilda’s bow-fronted mahogany corner cabinet – Hilda collected antiques, of a dark and shiny nature – and went home, far happier than she had arrived.
As if in recognition of her new state and mind, Victoria and Jason came and sat in her flat, bringing their records with them, until she wished they would leave her in peace. Robert wrote to her, in avuncular terms, from Kenya, where he was doing a year’s Voluntary Service Overseas, and Claire wrote, enclosing a photograph of her fiancé who looked remarkably like Ivor and who was a trainee executive for a pharmaceutical firm.
Irma, Raya and Tracey were bringing out a weekly broadsheet, devoted to the wrongs done to women by society. Bess rode round on a bicycle and pushed it through letter boxes. Praxis, shocked by its grammar and the general inefficiency of its production, offered to edit the broadsheet. The offer was reluctantly accepted by a group decision.
‘We’re not writing propaganda,’ said Irma. ‘We don’t want any of your selling copy or slogans. But since you have more time than the rest of us, I suppose it would be silly for us to refuse.’
The broadsheet grew into a newspaper. Praxis was its editor. She wrote rousing editorials, which she half believed, and half did not, in the same way as she had half believed, half not, her own advertisements for the Electricity Board. But she felt she was righting some kind of balance. She still occasionally thought of suicide, but knew it could never be done before the next issue, and there was always a next issue to be thought of.
‘When did you become a convert to the Women’s Movement?’ someone asked her, eventually, and Praxis realised that this was what she had in fact become. Ideas which once had seemed strange now seemed commonplace, and so much to her advantage that she was surprised to remember how, in the past, she had resisted them.
She was a convert: she wished to proselytise. She wished all the women in the world to think as she thought, do as she did; to join in sisterhood in a happier family than the world had ever known.
‘I can’t really say,’ she replied. ‘It comes to some as a flash of light. For me it was a gradual thing.’ And she laughed, but nervously. She saw it as a religious experience: she stood divested of the trappings of the past, naked (with a body no longer proud and beautiful) humble before a new altar, in the knowledge of the Daughter of God, reborn.
Wherever she went she saw women betrayed, exploited and oppressed. She saw that women were the cleaners, the fetchers, the carriers, the humble of the earth, and that they were truly blessed.
She saw that men’s lives were without importance and that only the lives of women were significant. She lost her belief in the man-made myths of history – great civilisations, great art, great empire. The male version of events.
She was, for a time, elated. And in her writings, being elated, attracted no little attention. The women in the office, the women in the wider world, listened to what she had to say, and believed her.
Praxis thought that perhaps now she was safe: that having lost her little loves, her shoddy griefs and pointless troubles – lost them all in the vast communal sea of women’s tears – that she was immune, saved by her faith from more distress.
Follow me, the Daughter of God, and you shall be saved.
But she was wrong. She had a faith, but she was not divine. Human lives travel through time like the waves of the sea, rising to peaks of experience, falling again, gathering new strength, to rise once more. There is no finite point at which we can say, ah, I have arrived: I am saved: I am rich, successful, happy. We wake the next morning and see that we are not.
And there is perhaps a force abroad – or in ourselves – which demands that sacrifice is a part of faith. That Abraham must sacrifice Isaac, to prove that God exists.
Mary turned up at the newspaper office. She had a small child on either hand. She wore a neat, inexpensive suit and looked what she was, a housewife up to London for the day. Praxis took her to lunch at a department store, where high chairs were provided for the children, and a special fish finger and chips lunch served at reasonable prices.
‘Edward’s left me,’ said Mary.
‘He just sailed off one day,’ said Mary. ‘Took a crewing job on a yacht going to Madeira, and went with the evening tide.’
‘Sailing was all he ever cared about,’ said Mary. ‘And of course once I had the children I couldn’t go out with him and he resented that.’
‘I don’t blame him,’ said Mary. ‘He was in love with boats. We must have been very boring, in comparison. He wasn’t a very clever man, so I used to keep the conversation down to a certain level, for his sake. So I daresay I never showed at my best.’
‘He hankered so after distant oceans and far-off harbours,�
� said Mary, ‘and of course in Brighton you can always hear the sea. Even in bed all night.’
‘We were always all right in bed,’ said Mary. ‘You think that must mean something, but it doesn’t.’
‘In retrospect,’ said Mary, ‘I can’t really think why I married him. I think it might have been so the children could be born. They are very special children.’
She looked fondly at their two quite ordinary faces, smeared with tomato sauce and chocolate ice-cream, and leaned over to wipe their mouths with the tissues provided by the management.
‘The universe isn’t magic,’ said Praxis, crossly, but even as she said it, knew that she was wrong.
‘When the children are at school,’ said Mary, ‘I’ll try and get back into medicine. It will be difficult, because of course I’ve lost six years. But I don’t regret them. The children, that is: or the years.’
‘I might try and go to America,’ said Mary. ‘My father was an American, wasn’t he?’
Mary leaned forward and arranged a straighter parting in her daughter’s hair. She did not meet Praxis’ eye. Praxis knew that she wanted information. Well, why not? The world had changed around them both. Causes for shame, disgrace, embarrassment and shock were not what they were.
‘He might have been,’ said Praxis. ‘Your mother certainly hoped he was. She wanted you to be open and free, and so you are.’
‘When I was thirteen,’ said Mary, ‘I had an anonymous letter. It said my mother was a prostitute and so were you.’
‘Of course she wasn’t. She was a respectable teacher of English literature. She was forty-five. She went out one night and slept with three men. A middle-aged and intelligent school-teacher, his son, and a passing GI of pleasant demeanour and aspect.’
‘Did she do it for money?’
‘Of course not.’ Enough was enough.
‘It might have happened to anyone,’ said the cool, clear young voice of the seventies. ‘Of course in those days it was a problem getting contraceptives.’
‘Yes.’
‘Did she try to get rid of me?’
