by Weldon, Fay
‘Not very hard.’
‘I’m a clear argument against abortion,’ said Mary. ‘And then I was plucked living, like Caesar,’ said Mary, ‘from my dead mother’s womb.’
‘Yes.’ Praxis felt tears pressing against her eyelids.
‘It must all mean something,’ said Mary.
‘I expect so,’ but what it was, Praxis could not remember.
‘And then you rescued me from a wicked clergyman’s wife.’
‘They weren’t wicked. Just neglectful.’
‘You were very young. You gave up a lot to do it.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Willy told me.’
‘It wasn’t all that much,’ said Praxis, diffidently.
‘Just your life,’ said Mary. ‘Well, never mind. Good actions are never wasted.’ She spoke firmly, as if she knew.
Praxis paid the bill. Mary sorted out her children and scooped them up. They went up and down in the lift, Mary holding the children so they could press the buttons.
‘I seem to have difficulty,’ said Praxis, out of nothing, into nowhere, ‘in actually loving a man, in any permanent sense.’
‘Some do,’ said Mary, blithely. ‘Most, I daresay.’
‘What can I do about it?’ Mary was half Praxis’ age. Why she enquired, she did not know.
‘What you’re doing, I expect,’ said Mary. ‘You learn to love the world enough to want to change it.’
Mary went back to Brighton and Praxis to her office, where she viewed rather differently the women who came and went. Those whom she had privately regarded as rejected, humiliated, obsessive, angry and ridiculous, she began to see as brave, noble, and attempting, at any rate, to live their lives by principle rather than by convenience. All kinds of women – young and old, clever, slow, pretty, plain; the halt and the lame, the sexually confused, or fulfilled, or indifferent, battered wives, raped girls, vicious virgins, underpaid shop assistants, frustrated captains of industry, violent schoolgirls, women exploited and exploiting; but all turning away from their inner preoccupations and wretchedness, to regard the outside world and see that it could be changed, if not for themselves, it being too late for themselves, then at least for others.
Praxis smarted and fumed on Mary’s account. Irma merely shrugged.
‘That’s what it’s like,’ she said. Irma was grey and drawn in the face. She had been to the hospital for tests.
‘They want to take my womb out,’ said Irma. ‘It’s the current preoccupation of male surgeons. If they can only remove the whole thing, lock, stock and barrel, take away what women have and they don’t, then that must be an improvement.’
‘But Irma – ’ said Praxis.
‘Individual life is not so important,’ said Irma. ‘What are we? Little centres of identity winking in and winking out! It’s the manner of living that matters: not the length of the life. I don’t want to drag on and on. Do you?’
‘Yes,’ said Praxis.
Phillip’s film, ‘Flood’, released after more than two years of delays, was not a success. It lacked, critics complained, grandeur of concept and scale. He was a television director at heart, and it showed. What would do on the living-room box was not enough for the big screen. Working in television had, they alleged, cut him down to manikin size, and worse, had made him mean. If millions had been spent, as alleged, it simply did not show. Serena, they complained, was getting fat, and was red-rimmed about the nostrils in several scenes. If the leading lady had a cold in the nose, then shooting should be delayed. It would have been in the old days. Modern films, the general consensus was, clustering round Phillip’s film like blowflies around a god-given joint of meat inadvertently left out of the fridge, were not what they were. In the old days camera crews and technicians had risked death to obtain their desired effects – had not an entire film crew been decapitated by the knives on the chariot wheels in the original Ben Hur? – but it was obvious that the team working on Phillip’s film hadn’t even risked getting their feet wet.
And so on.
Praxis was pleased to be able to say ‘poor Phillip’. Victoria moved out of her father’s house and slept alternately on Irma’s sofa or Praxis’ floor. Serena had become fanatical about yoga and refused to serve meat, or have cigarettes or alcohol consumed in the house. Jason took a job as a gardener in one of the royal parks and declined to give it up when the time came to go back to University. The majority of the other gardeners, he alleged, were honours graduates, and he found the conversation in the potting sheds more illuminating than any he had encountered at college.
Phillip, listening to this nonsense, hit his son, and Jason hit back.
‘Next time,’ said Jason, ‘I’ll use a shovel and that will be the end of you.’ But he apologised the next day.
The household was under considerable strain. Serena’s baby had infantile eczema, and cried and cried, and scratched and scratched, and had to be fed on goat’s milk, and dressed in muslin and receive Serena’s full attention. Phillip could not sleep. Work dried up again. Serena and the baby spent most of their nights in the spare room. The royal child, confused by the ups and downs in his life, wet his bed and soiled his pants. Serena, her eyes wide with strain and dismay, did her breathing exercises, started each day with a glassful of wine vinegar and honey, and achieved the lotus position, but little else.
She called to see Praxis in her editorial office. She held her thin baby with its skull-like head and staring, anguished eyes, against her bosom.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I realise now what I did to you. I didn’t then.’
Together they studied the baby: its scaly face, its raw limbs.
‘I think she’ll be all right in the end,’ said Serena. ‘They say she may grow out of it when she’s three. In the meantime I have to watch her suffer. I think I’d rather be dead, and I know she would, but they don’t let you. Everyone has to go on trying.’
‘She’s your child, not theirs,’ said Praxis, mildly.
‘Yours to pay for,’ said Serena, ‘not yours for deciding what’s best.’
Serena went home and Praxis went off to a television studio to take part in a discussion on the reform of the abortion laws. She was recognised in the street these days. Some smiled, and nudged each other: a few came up to her and abused her as a mass-murderer, killer of unborn children.
‘I saw you on telly last night,’ wrote Mary from Brighton. ‘I expect you’re right but I feel you’re wrong. I spent most part of a year on a gynae ward. I was the one who got blood on my surgical gloves, remember, actually doing abortions. I’d do it happily for the older women, who at least knew what was going on and were as distressed as I was, but I resented having to do it for the girls who used me as a kind of last-ditch contraceptive, because they didn’t want their holiday interfered with. Or am I being like one of those people from South Africa who when you say something about apartheid say, listen, I live there, I know what it’s like?’
‘I have a job!’ wrote Mary from Brighton. ‘It’s in Toronto. Not quite the States but getting near. In a big general hospital. There’s a creche for the children: they actually seem to want me, kids and all! So you see, my life wasn’t finished, merely postponed, by my marriage. I’m doing better than you!’
‘Trouble, I’m afraid,’ wrote Mary from Brighton. ‘The job’s off. I’m pregnant. I met this married man at a party –’
Praxis took the train to Brighton. Mary was pale, thin, and suffering from bouts of vomiting. Carla came in daily to help with the children. The house was cold and sparsely furnished. Mary lived on Social Security benefits.
‘You’re a qualified doctor,’ said Praxis, white with fury. ‘You must know about contraceptives.’
‘I don’t like contraceptives,’ said Mary, calmly. ‘They’re antilife. I associate sex with procreation, and that’s that. I’m not a Catholic; I don’t go for the Jesus stuff; but I do understand what the Pope is going on about. Life is either sacred, or it’s not.
People are either meant or they’re not. I believe I am sacred and that my existence has some purpose. And I’m sorry, but I have been more convinced of it ever since you told me about my mother.’
‘You can’t possibly go through with the pregnancy,’ said Praxis. ‘It’s absurd. If you don’t even know the father’s name.’
‘Neither did my mother.’
‘If you don’t have a termination, you’re finished. Everything thrown away.’
‘Except the baby. And I’m not asking another person to abort it for me. I don’t have the right. If I could do it myself, I might. But I can’t, so that is that. I run my life on principle, not convenience, and that is that.’
‘If you don’t believe in contraception, or abortion,’ said Praxis, ‘you might at lease abstain from sexual activity.’
‘I like sex,’ said Mary blandly. ‘And it’s much more exciting without contraceptives.’
Praxis slapped Mary’s smooth cheek, and left. Mary did not see her out. Carla walked with her to the station.
‘I offered to adopt it,’ said Carla. ‘But she won’t have that, either. She’s very stubborn. Sweet as pie just so long as she’s doing exactly what she wants.’
‘Like Willy, I suppose,’ said Carla. ‘Like most people, come to that.’
‘Willy’s run out of exams to take,’ complained Carla. ‘He simply doesn’t know what to do with himself. Of course he’s Director of the Institute now.’
Carla was still wearing dusty brown.
‘He mends his shoes with Sellotape,’ said Carla, ‘instead of tying the sole on with string. I suppose that’s an advance.’
Eventually Mary telephoned Praxis. Praxis had thought of apologising but had felt too dispirited to do so.
‘You shouldn’t invest so much in individuals,’ said Irma. ‘It’s always been your mistake. Stick to movements: wide sweeps of existence and experience. Ignore detail. It’s how men get by.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Mary. ‘I was behaving badly. In fact everything’s going to be all right. The Toronto hospital is holding the job open for another year; they say they’ll stretch a point and take a small baby. It’s a hot-bed of feminism. So you see my life isn’t over; it’s merely postponed for a year. Come and see me in hospital, when the baby’s born, when it’s too late for you to wish it out of existence.’
But there was a certain coolness in her voice.
‘Of course there is,’ said Irma. ‘You can’t safely suggest terminations to women who are consumed by mother lust.’
Praxis devoted herself to the many, rather than the few. She wrote editorials of such power and vehemence – finding a certainty in writing which she certainly did not find in real life – that readers cut them out, stuck them on walls, and quoted them in arguments.
‘My diatribes,’ Praxis referred to them, diffidently. But others found in them the stuff of revolution: the focusing of a real discontent, and with that focusing the capacity for alteration.
Next time Mary telephoned it was to say that she was in hospital and that she had a three-day old son. There was no pleasure in her voice. Praxis went again to Brighton: stood yet once more on the railway platform, and remembered Hilda’s curse. ‘Wherever you go you take yourself with you.’ She took the bus to the hospital.
Mary had a room to herself: she looked thin, and grey, and moved with difficulty. The baby lay in a wheeled cot by the bed, swathed in blankets, lying on its side like a doll, still and silent.
‘I had to have a Caesarean,’ said Mary. ‘Everything seemed to go wrong. It wasn’t very nice.’
‘The baby nearly died,’ said Mary. ‘He’s been in the special care unit, wired up to this and that. But they pulled him through.’
‘I fell in love with my other two babies,’ she said. ‘It took a day with the eldest, and the next was love at first sight. It’s called the bonding process, I believe. It hasn’t happened with this one. I suppose it still might.’
But she did not sound hopeful.
‘Don’t look at him too closely,’ said Mary. ‘He’s mongoloid. He’s got a chromosome missing. I could have had tests done at four months but I didn’t. They can detect mongolism as early as that. Or spina bifida. Then they terminate; but you know my beliefs. I would just have known five months earlier and had five months more misery in my life, that’s all.’
‘It is the end of my life, isn’t it,’ said Mary. ‘I’ll never get to Toronto now. Never get to the States. Never get anywhere. Why didn’t they let him die? I wasn’t asking anyone to do anything: just to do nothing. But institutions are incapable of doing nothing, I suppose.’
‘You can put it in a home,’ said Praxis.
‘Him,’ said Mary, ‘not it. No, I can’t do that. We all have to take responsibility for ourselves; we can’t hand our troubles over. Besides, he might suffer. And what would the other two think? No. God sent him. He must have meant it.’
‘He’s very low grade, I think,’ said Mary. ‘He will sit in a chair and dribble and wear nappies when he’s a grown man. Well, some people reach personal salvation through such events, I’m told. A life of dedication. And there’s nothing wrong, to a mongol, with being a mongol. One of the doctors told me so. A Dr Gibb. A woman. I liked her. And I seem to remember saying that myself, to a woman in my position. When I was in obstetrics, and had a future.’
‘I’ll look after it,’ said Praxis.
‘No you won’t,’ said Mary. ‘You call him “it”. You’re not fit. Other women have worse to put up with. I watched them in the special care unit. They sit by the incubators, staring at their children, little babies, taped to electrodes, fastened to drips, ill, in pain, possibly dying, possibly living: possibly deformed for life, possibly not. There is an animal look in their eyes; in the mothers, and in the babies. It shouldn’t be there. We are spirits, not animals. They should let the babies die when they get to that stage, and the mothers too. Life itself is not important. Only the manner of living.’
‘I thought I might kill it,’ said Mary. ‘Then I realised it was him.’
Mary got out of bed, stiffly and painfully, to go to the bathroom. Praxis tried to help her but Mary shook her off.
‘I can manage all right,’ she said.
While Mary was out of the room Praxis took a pillow from the bed, turned the baby on to its back, and pressed the white mass over its face. No movement came from beneath; before, or during, or after. It scarcely seemed like the extinguishing of a life: more like the rectifying of a mistake, which had to be done, in the same way that an inflamed appendix has to be removed, before it kills the entire body. Nature’s weak point. Nature’s error, not God’s purpose.
Praxis put the pillow back on the bed and rang the bell. A nurse came.
‘I think there’s something wrong with the baby,’ said Praxis.
The nurse ran the baby, cot and all, down the corridor. Red lights flashed, footsteps echoed. Mary came slowly back from the bathroom.
‘Where’s the baby?’ asked Mary, and fainted.
Presently Dr Gibb came. She was Pakistani, dark-eyed and frail, but had about her the same look of resolution as Mary had had, in better days, and which Praxis trusted would now presently return.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Dr Gibb. ‘Your baby did have breathing difficulties, as you knew. Perhaps we took him from the incubator too soon? I’m not saying it isn’t a tragedy, of course it is – but in the circumstances, I have seen worse things happen.’
Dr Gibb wanted no further discussion. Mary turned her back on Praxis and cried, but whether from physical weakness and shock or real distress, Praxis did not know.
Praxis left the hospital and walked down Holden Road and to the beach. 109 had been painted, and newly fenced. The garden bloomed. Two little boys, companionable, swung on the gate. It was getting dark. A woman came out of the front door and called them in to tea. The door, Praxis noticed, opened easily. It had finally been taken off its hinges, and planed.
Praxis walked
along the sea-shore. The sky darkened and one by one the stars emerged. The sea rustled the pebbles on the beach. The world became still: breathing stopped. Betelgeuse leaned down in his fiery shaft, towards her: tears of flame dripped down around her. Betelgeuse spoke. The roaring faded her ears: the noise of the sea and the shore reasserted itself. The pebbles dragged up and back, up and back, soothing and reassuring. Her feet sank, as she walked back to the hospital, into the loose piled sand and stones of the upper beach. It held her back, and made her the more determined.
She found Dr Gibb sitting in the sister’s room of the post-natal ward, white-coated, filling up forms; an exotic creature, passing through, out of place.
‘It wasn’t natural causes,’ said Praxis. ‘I did it, and I think I was right to do so.’
‘And I think you are overwrought,’ said Dr Gibb, ‘and should think carefully about what you say, in case you upset the mother more than she is upset already.’
‘We can’t think about individuals all the time,’ said Praxis.
‘I do,’ said Dr Gibb.
‘Well, I’m sorry,’ said Praxis, ‘if I’m a nuisance. But the fact is that the baby was alive and good for another forty years of semi-vegetable living, but because of something I did, deliberately, it is now dead. That is the truth. I offer it to you, Dr Gibb.’
Black bat wings hovered and pounced even as she spoke. Claws of doubt dug into her skull. But for once Praxis was not unsure as to what was reality and what was not. What she remembered and what had happened were identical. She had passed into the real world, where feelings were sharp and clear, however painful.
‘The death certificate is signed,’ said Dr Gibb, sadly. ‘I suppose I will have to tear it up.’
‘Yes,’ said Praxis.
‘Good for you,’ said Dr Gibb, surprisingly. Dr Gibb was back from Bangladesh, floods, famine, war and plague. She had seen hundreds die, and thousands dead. ‘Good for you.’
It was not a view, it seemed to Praxis, that was held by many, first at the inquest, then at the trial. Praxis was held in custody between the two events, and only echoes of the row in the outside world reached her. The prison itself was newly-built and bleak, but in no way horrific. Praxis had a small room with a window in the door, a comfortable enough bed, shelves, Home Office issue prints on the wall and was allowed one photograph from home, but chose to go without.
