Praxis (12 page)

There were better things to do with life, he told her. Phillip did not seem to notice the dirt. He merely bathed a good deal, and moved in an aura of soap, reminding Praxis, rather painfully, of Baby Mary. She tried not to think and worry about anything: about Baby Mary, Hilda, or her mother. Willy helped.

At a quarter to seven in the evening Praxis would return to the Ladies’ Residence and to Colleen, moodily cleaning sports-shoes, or polishing medallions, or pressing the pimples which now erupted between her freckles; and to Irma, painting her toe-nails, shaving her legs, complaining of the predatory nature of men; and to supper. Praxis did not eat with Willy: since her year’s board at the Residence had been paid for in advance, to do so would clearly be a waste of money. Willy urged Praxis to eat as much as she could, to be sure of getting her money’s worth. The staple Residence diet, toad-in-the-hole, baked in nameless grease in slow ovens, and cabbage, put on to simmer at midday by the morning staff, strained, compacted, and cut into wedges by the evening staff, sickened her but did not seem strange to her.

Willy told Praxis about the war: how he had been called up at eighteen, seen two years active service in Burma, then spent a year rounding up the Japanese in Siam, clearing the dams formed by, at best, human bones, at worst, dead bodies, which stopped the flow of rivers in those parts, and held up the return of the countryside to normal agricultural life. He had four expensive wristwatches and five gold fountain pens in a secret place, which Praxis felt privileged to be shown. He fingered them with mixed honour and pride.

‘I couldn’t just leave them to rot, could I? There was no identification on the bodies. Mostly parts of bodies. If it was an American watch, it was probably on a Japanese, anyway, and vice versa. I hate waste. I really hate waste,’

Praxis told Willy about Brighton, and school, and Hilda, and her mother, and Miss Leonard, and her horror of madness. He listened attentively and she felt, with him, the same kind of relief that had attended her conversations with Miss Leonard. She almost, likewise, came to expect his sudden death; half dreading it, half hoping for it, as a relief from the drudgery, sometimes six or seven times a day, of politely, kindly and affectionately responding to his sexual needs.

‘Thank you,’ he would say: and he was fond of her and she of him: the nakedness of his need touched her: but neither he, nor she herself, seemed to expect a female response in the least equivalent to the male. She never cried out, or thought she should, or knew that women did, or why they would.

She typed Willy’s essays though, and found books for him in the library, getting there early so as to be first in the queue when work was set. After Willy’s essays were completed and typed, she would then begin on her own. She typed slowly, using only two fingers. It was assumed by both of them that this was the proper distribution of their joint energies. He got A’s and she got C’s.

‘Well and truly snapped up,’ said Irma, ‘more fool you. It’s war, you know. They lose and you win, or vice versa. It’s vice versa for you. Mind you, they’re all like that in the Humanities Department. They talk virtue and practice vice.’

Irma often got A’s, but always pretended she got C’s. To look at her, as Colleen remarked, you wouldn’t think she had a brain in her head, and that was the way Irma wanted it. Irma was looking for a husband. She’d tried to get into Oxford and had failed—there were few places available for women—and so had missed out, she felt, on her chances of marrying a future Prime Minister. She was, perforce, now prepared to settle for an embryo famous novelist, atomic scientist or Nobel prize winner, of the kind who could presumably be found at the lesser provincial universities. Provided, of course, one could spot a winner. Irma was certain she could.

Skirts were narrow and calf-length and split up the back. Irma wiggled her bottom, pouted her orangey-red lips and wriggled out of goodnight kisses and away from groping, futureless hands.

‘If you want to waste your time at college,’ said Colleen to Praxis, ‘that’s up to you. If you want to be soiled and second hand, so you’ll never find a husband, just carry on the way you are.’ But Colleen dyed her white Aertex shirt bright red, and bravely went to the weekly students’ dance, unescorted. No one asked her to dance. She didn’t go again: and the next week was penalised for cracking the ankle of a Cardiff College left wing with her hockey stick, and grew another crop of spots. Sometimes, Praxis, stiff and sore about the thighs, trying to sleep in the airless room, strong with Colleen’s body odours, would hear her friend crying in the night. Colleen cried from loneliness and bewilderment, and the sense of life slipping by, of time already running out, her own negligible place in the world so suddenly and disappointingly marked out.

One week Praxis got an A for her essay, on political establishments in the U.S.A. in the eighteenth century, and Willy got a C for his on the same theme. Praxis could not understand why he was so cross, or why he felt obliged to hurt her. But he certainly did. He claimed that Phillip had remembered the Night of the Downs in every sordid detail, but had been so unenthusiastic about her sexual attractiveness that they had agreed to toss a coin as to who should have her, for her domestic and secretarial services. Willy had won, gone to the hostel to stake out his claim, and now wished he hadn’t. Praxis, said Willy, was a neurotic, a bore, a rotten cook, and a slow typist

Praxis reeled, at the sudden presentation of the malice which underlies love; the resentment which interleaves affection between the sexes, of which she had until that moment no notion. She was shocked; she would not cry. Willy looked at her with Lucy’s eyes. As with Lucy, they hated: they feared: they wanted to hurt: they had learned how, and all too well. Now Willy, too. Praxis went home to the hostel.

‘What did you say to him in return,’ Irma enquired, briskly.

‘Did you tell him he was a dwarf, a sex maniac; that he smells?

‘That he’s a looter of dead bodies?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Well, he is, he does, he did.’

‘I’d never say so to his face.’

‘But you’ve thought it. You must have. He just said the things he thought about you in his worst moments. I don’t suppose he means them. They’re not nearly as awful as the things you’ve thought about him.’

She could be very kind. Praxis, relieved, cried herself to sleep in a rather comforting and comforted way.

‘If you behave like a whore,’ said Colleen, ‘you get treated like a whore. Would you like to borrow my red shirt?’

‘No thank you.’ Praxis’ clothes had become more orthodox. Willy picked her out garments from church sales, excellent bargains all, and more in keeping with the times, albeit somewhat washed-out.

The next day Willy came round and apologised, and even bought her a half of shandy and paid for it himself. She was vastly relieved. Her main fear had been that she would presently find Willy in the students’ bar investing in the gin and lime which would buy him his next term’s sex, comfort, company and secretarial services.

Praxis made sure that her next essay was poorly executed and badly presented, and she inserted a few good extra paragraphs of her own composition into Willy’s essay while typing it out for him; this time he got a straight A and she a C minus and a sorrowful note from her tutor.

The earlier A had been a flash in the pan, her tutor could only suppose. One of the tantalising little flashes girls in higher education would occasionally display: for the most part flickering dimly and then going out, extinguished by the basic, domestic nature of the female sex, altogether quenched by desire to serve the male. Indeed, the consensus of the college authorities was, not surprisingly, that girls seldom lived up to early promise: were rarely capable of intellectual excellence; seemed to somehow go rotten and fall off before ripening, like plums in a bad season. The extension of equal educational facilities to girls had been a hopeful, and perhaps an inevitable undertaking, but was scarcely justifiable by results. He had hoped it was not true, but was beginning to believe it was.

For Praxis, Willy’s A’s and her own C’s seemed a small price to pay for Willy’s protection, Willy’s interest, Willy’s concern; for the status of having a steady boyfriend.

Red-lipped Irma, red-haired Colleen, had to do without. Irma through choice, Colleen by necessity.

Praxis, in the meantime, with Willy around, about, and into her body, loved Phillip with her head. She had secret knowledge of him: she dreamed of him: of the mature male that lurked behind the childish eyes, and boyish lips: the soft voice that murmured easy endearments over the telephone to his virgin, distant love. She saw the look of distracted boredom on his face as he replaced the receiver: before the permanent half-smile returned. Praxis
knew
: Praxis knew what his boring fiancée did not, the harsh grip of his hands on her shoulders, male and digging, the savagery in his eyes, the obscenities from his mouth. She remembered.

If she had known how to seduce: she would have. But she had no conception of herself as temptation. She was a slice of bread and butter on the table, not a cream eclair just out of reach; but Phillip was clearly not hungry for bread and butter, or thought he wasn’t. He found it easier to yearn romantically after the unavailable: lick his lips over imaginary scented cream.

Praxis hated being alone with Phillip. She did not know what to say to him: nor, she suspected, did he know what to say to her. It did not stop her loving him. It was almost as if she associated love with embarrassment.

Christmas was coming. Hilda wrote to say she would be staying at Holden Road for the vacation: that Butt and Sons had written to offer the freehold of the house as final settlement of their (purely voluntary) obligations to Miss Parker’s family; that Lucy had accepted the offer, and so was now back in a National Health Service hospital, but a very nice one, with modern equipment; that the Holden Road house was in a very bad state, riddled with woodworm, charred by the stars (what did that mean? Praxis shuddered), that Baby Mary had developed pneumonia as a result of Mrs. Allbright’s habit of leaving her out under the night sky, and would Praxis please come home at Christmas to help clear up the house—Why should everything be left to Hilda?

‘What does modern equipment mean?’ Willy asked. Praxis shook her head, unable to speak, afraid to think. There were tears of shock in her eyes.

‘A new form of strait-jacket, I daresay,’ said Phillip, blithely. ‘What a superb film could be made inside a mental asylum. Do you think they’d let me in? If only cameras were smaller, I could go in as your brother and no one would be the wiser. What a scoop it would be.’

Phillip had started a film club. He had a cine-camera. He seemed to think only of films. He would form his two hands into squares and look at the world through them: first this way, then that. Sometimes he looked at Praxis, framing her with his hands. It made her uneasy. Sometimes, nowadays, he would come home between lectures and surprise Willy and Praxis on the floor, or against the cooker, or wherever, and would appear surprised, which surely by now he couldn’t be, and take his time to leave. Her breasts would tingle at the thought of his observation: the back of her mouth go dry: her eyes blacken: her buttocks tighten: the centre of her body shrink, oddly, away from him, not towards, as if desiring yet fearful of too overwhelming an experience. Her body acquiesced to Willy: yet crept round him, through some darkening of vision, some fusing of matter into magic, reaching out to Phillip.

But he was nothing, nothing. Something trivial in herself called out to the trivia in him: she knew it was no more than that. Listening to him speak now, using the griefs of the world as if they were bucketfuls of oats to be fed to some lively horse he was determined to mount and spur on to personal victory, with the sound of popular applause ringing in his ears, she knew that he was not really to be taken seriously. It was an intuition she would have done well to recall, in later years.

Willy kicked Phillip. She saw it and was grateful. Willy at least recognised personal pain when he saw it. Phillip, who did not, looked puzzled, as people do when they are woken from hypnosis, and are obliged to travel from early childhood to maturity in the space of seconds.

‘Not if it upsets you, of course, Praxis,’ Phillip said, politely. ‘But the more people can be persuaded to turn private grief into public good the better. Film is the way ahead. Photographic images of recorded time. We must hold up a mirror to the world, so it can see itself, and reform itself. Everything else has failed. Religion, literature, art, war, mass education and political systems. Film is what we need.’

Photographs!

Lucy had relegated the beach photographer, her lover, to the cupboard under the stairs: had sent him there from her bed. Years later, when clearing out the cupboard, Praxis was to come across an envelope of nude photographs, showing her mother, Lucy, in her prime, posing for the camera, oddly coy, with one hand over her breasts, the other one over her crotch, head thrown back, enticing; The white of her eyes showed unnaturally. And why was that? Was it from madness, lust, embarrassment or despair? And why had she destroyed the innocent photograph of Hypatia and Praxis on the beach, but not these? Was there a significance in it? Had it been a struggle between decency and indecency, the maternal nature and the erotic, that had in the end destroyed poor Lucy? Or none of these: just the piling up of chance on chance, episode on incident; the wrong enzymes in the brain; a faulty heredity; the accumulation of loss, trouble and social humiliation, which had sent her storming so angrily and destructively back into the inner refuge where she huddled for the rest of her days, safe from reality.

‘No one’s going to take pictures of my mother,’ said Praxis unduly bold, out of instinct, if not knowledge. ‘It won’t do her any good.’

‘It might do society good,’ Phillip persisted. His eyes were soft and large. He rarely spoke to Praxis directly.

‘Anyway,’ said Praxis, ‘I’m not going back home for Christmas.’