Praxis (13 page)

Baby Mary would have to look after herself, suffer from starlight as she might.

Praxis spent Christmas with Willy and Willy’s mother, sleeping in the spare room for appearance sake, waylaid by Willy in pantry and corridor. Willy’s mother was a slight, nervous, tidy woman who spoke only of practicalities, and then only briefly, and hid behind spectacles even thicker than Willy’s own. She walked about her chilly, spotless house, reading books on philosophy, politics or economics: anything so long as it was removed from the day-to-day actualities of life, which she found boring. Sometimes she would stumble, so engrossed in her book would she be, and cry out, but rejected help or comfort. Her husband had died of lung cancer when Willy was twelve: it seemed to her, thereafter, that life was something which had to be got through, rather than enjoyed, whilst observing the proper formalities. Or so Willy related it.

Willy had been a mere accident: an afterthought: a by-product of the marriage. His mother was polite to him, even interested in his welfare and progress, but still surprised by his existence. So Willy said.

Praxis saw Willy’s eyes, large behind his thick glasses, dilated with hurt, and believed him.

Praxis found her arms creeping round Willy (as they had never used to) as he penetrated her, in the greenhouse, or the bathroom, or wherever, her own bottom cold against the shiny Christmas surfaces of his mother’s house, trying to warm him, and make up for what he had never had.

Christmas dinner was served formally in the unheated dining room. A pair of candles were lit, placed in saucers to catch the drips. There was roast chicken: a sliver each. The remainder was served cold on Boxing Day, as a fricassee the day after, and the carcass boiled for soup the day after that. There was an agreeable sense of ceremony, properly and frugally performed.

Willy’s mother smiled, as she pecked Praxis goodbye. Praxis went to London and was fitted with a contraceptive device at the Marie Stopes clinic. It was a rubber cap which fitted over her cervix. Willy was relieved of the conflict between his dislike of coitus interruptus and his reluctance to spend good money on French letters.

The new term started. Willy was in his final year at Reading, Praxis in her first: part of his course and hers overlapped. Willy had a plan for Praxis’ future. After he had taken his final examinations he meant to do statistical research at London University. If his degree was good enough he could get a grant: otherwise, he could scrape together only a certain amount by way of bursaries, but if Praxis was earning, and they lived simply and economically enough, there should be no difficulty in his managing. He did not mention marriage, and Praxis did not presume to do so.

‘You’re mad,’ said Irma, ‘to even think of it.’

Irma had temporarily settled for a young man with a future, or so she predicted, in back-bench politics. His name was Peter; he belonged to the young Conservatives; he bought her flowers and chocolates and she kissed him goodnight on the doorstep, regulating the length and passion of the kiss according to the value of the gifts he had bought her that evening, and the quality of the attention he offered. (Willy and Praxis seldom kissed. There seemed no need.)

‘You have to send your life in the direction you want it to go,’ said Irma. ‘You can’t just let things happen. You can’t just live with men because they’re there. You know Willy’s there because he
smells
.’

Praxis didn’t speak to Irma for a good week. If Willy smelt she had long since ceased to notice it.

‘You’ve got to make him marry you,’ said Colleen.

Colleen’s life had changed, along with the fashions. Skirts had become full, waists nipped, shoulders dropped, hair softened. Colleen had abandoned sport and taken to sex. She frequented the cafe where the Rugger set hung out, and on a Saturday, after closing hours, could be seen making for the downs, laughing heartily and noisily in the company of one or other of the brave, who clearly deserved the fair. In her New Look Saturday dress, Colleen at last felt herself one of the fair. She serviced Irma’s Peter once a month or so, secretly, when the balls ache, as he described it, brought on when Irma’s doorstep good-nights became too much for him to bear. Colleen suffered badly from guilt on this account: and still cried herself to sleep at nights, though nowadays for a different reason; she lived in constant fear of being pregnant.

Victory and beer made the Rugger boys fearless: defeat and beer made them invite disaster: French letters were expensive, embarrassing to procure, and tended to be kept back for special occasions, special girls. Not just Colleen on a Saturday night. Peter was of course always gentlemanly, and withdrew, politely, turning away to use a handkerchief. Colleen loved him. Irma didn’t. It hardly seemed fair.

‘It’s different for you,’ said Praxis to Colleen, ’you’ve got a home. You don’t understand. I’ve got nothing, no one. Only Willy.’

‘I wish I had nothing and no one,’ said Colleen, gloomily. She’d had a letter from her mother. Her father, a parish councillor and church warden, had, for many years, been on the verge of leaving her mother for a gentle spinster lady who arranged flowers on the altar for Sunday services. The affair had finally become public knowledge. Colleen’s mother, jolly and stoical to the end, threw the information out in a paragraph, and expressed the hope that her daughter would be bringing home a really magnificent show of sports trophies to join her own array of cups and shields, won in the good old pre-marriage days. Colleen was her mother’s hope and consolation, Colleen’s mother made that clear. All else had failed her.

‘What can I possibly take home now? I’m out of all the teams,’ moaned Colleen.

‘A baby and V.D.,’ said Praxis. ‘Give her something to think about. It’s the kindest thing.’

Colleen barely spoke to Praxis for a week. They were hardhearted with each other. A sense of desperation seemed to afflict them: as if whatever path they took, whatever new avenue opened up, it would narrow and block, and they would be turned round once again, to face their own natures.

W
OMEN OF CHILD-BEARING AGE
have it easy: if all else fails they can always give birth to another human being, who will love them, at least for a time.

Watch a baby at the breast blankly studying its mother, eyes dewy with love. Whoever else ever looked at her like that?

I have a cat: I had a cat: a raggedy white Tom. When I went to prison a neighbour took it in. When I came out my raggedy Tom was a plump white neuter, with calm, kind eyes. The vet had recommended it, the neighbour said, uneasily. But I think she found the cat’s maleness too naked and too smelly. Well, it was her right. I had left her in charge. Did the cat remember me? He settled back with me easily enough. He shared my Social Security money without guilt: coming and going through the dirty window, himself yet not himself, as I was.

He would lie along the back of the dirty armchair, staring at me as I paced and muttered, cried and ranted, without comment accepting me.

He came to the window just now and found it closed. I can’t walk. I tried, I really did: my leg would not let me. I got out of the chair somehow, and began to crawl, but I think I lost consciousness: when I realised again who and where I was, the windowsill was empty. The cat was gone. Perhaps he will never come back? I wouldn’t, if I were him, and betrayed.

It was not his fault, nor mine. But I feel I should have done better.

Listen, I am going to die: murdered by a thoughtless girl on a bus, but never mind all that. There isn’t much time. I must offer you what I can.

Watch Praxis. Watch her carefully. Look, listen, learn.

Then safely, as they say to children, cross over.

‘I
WON’T DECIDE
until the end of the year,’ said Praxis to Willy, with a fine show of self-determination. ‘Until you have your results. If you do get a first then I’ll stay on and get my own degree.’

‘Can I trust you to be faithful?’

‘Of course,’ said Praxis, believing it to be so.

‘But if I don’t? The examiners are fools. They wouldn’t be examiners if they weren’t.’

‘Then I’ll leave, and get some kind of job; it won’t bring in much because there’s nothing I can do except scrub or cook or baby-mind, I suppose. But it will get the rent paid and if we live frugally we’ll manage. It’ll be such fun. And we’ll be really together.’ She added the last two sentences as conventional afterthoughts, rather than because they sprang naturally together. Living with Willy, supporting Willy through his further degree, could not be anticipated as exactly fun. Companionable, perhaps. Intimate certainly.

‘I suppose we’ll have to leave it like that,’ he conceded. ‘But I’m always much happier if I know exactly what’s going to happen. I hate uncertainty.’

It was a good term. Willy was particularly kind and attentive, as if trying to prove to her that she could not possibly live without him. He allowed her to clean up the flat, and put out the old milk bottles twenty at a time, and even defied the milkman who declined to take them away in case they contaminated his vehicle.

‘It is your statutory duty to remove them,’ said Willy. ‘Why should we be obliged to live with the property of your company against our will?’

‘You’ve lived with them long enough,’ said the milkman. But he took them.

Praxis cleaned the windows and a little sunlight filtered down into the gloom.

‘The trouble with you, Praxis,’ said Willy, ‘is that you’re a born housewife. The taxpayer’s wasting his money on you.’ Praxis feared that it was so. Occasionally, when she forgot, she got a B. Once a B +. Once an A—, but she kept quiet about it.

Easter approached, and six weeks’ vacation.

‘Praxis,’ said Willy, ‘you have a perfectly good house at Brighton.’

‘It’s not perfectly good. It’s horrid. I hate it. The nearer I get to it the lower my spirits sink.’

‘Nevertheless, you can live in it rent free. So can I. We could let this place and accumulate a little money. We’re going to need every penny we can get.’

‘What about rail fares?’ She was struggling against common sense. The victory was his already. He had known it would be. ‘We’ll hitch-hike.’

‘Who’d ever rent this place except you?’

‘You can clean it up a little, if that’s what you want.’

Praxis did so.

Two American exchange students paid thirty-seven shillings and sixpence a week for six weeks, for the privilege of living in the two rooms. Willy and Phillip continued to pay twenty-five shillings a week to the landlord. The transaction had already been arranged and Willy and Praxis had their conversation.

‘You’ll have to clean it up a bit,’ they’d said.

‘The dirt’s its charm,’ Willy had said.

‘Not to us.’

‘Very well,’ Willy had conceded.

‘I’d love to do an exchange to the States,’ said Praxis. ‘Shall I apply?’

‘You wouldn’t get to first base,’ said Willy. ‘They’re not interested in housewives.’ She had rubber gloves on at the time, and was scraping out mouse dirt from under the cooker. She saw his point.

They hitch-hiked down to Holden Road. Willy found a nice pair of high-heeled shoes for Praxis at a church bazaar, for two and six, and she wore them for hitch-hiking, instead of her usual sensible lace-ups. She sat on a rucksack by the side of the road with her legs showing to above the knee. Willy hid behind a tree. When a car stopped he would step out and there they would be, the pair of them, and the car driver left with little option but to take them both.

Praxis felt uneasy about such tactics, but could not quite find the words to express what she felt. Willy’s eyes were bright with pleasure and victory when it worked, and she did not wish to dampen his animation. He showed it seldom enough.

Hilda was home for the holidays, wild-eyed, high-coloured, beautiful and talkative. She was very thin. She put her arms round Willy and kissed him: she took to him at once.

‘What a good rat-catcher he’ll be,’ she said. ‘You’re just like a ferret. I love ferrets. I shall call you manikin, and you shall be our pet.’

Willy kissed her back, not seeming to object to this nonsense. Praxis felt jealous: and dull, plodding and dreary. It seemed to her that, for these particular holidays, Hilda had cast herself as Mary, and Praxis as Martha.

‘Don’t you mind?’ she asked, later, safer, in the damp double bed with its broken springs, beneath the heavy weight of rancid blankets.

‘Mind what?’

‘Hilda being mad?’

But Willy didn’t, it seemed.

‘It’s a different view of reality,’ he said. ‘You must learn not to be frightened by it. Go along with it.’

‘If I go along with it,’ said Praxis, ‘I’ll be like her. You don’t understand.’

He laughed at her. He enjoyed the dirt and decay of the house. ‘Don’t bother,’ he’d say to Praxis as she fought her way into caked corners with scrubbing brush and soapy water. ‘Just don’t bother. The more immune we get to germs the better.’

Hilda took off her clothes one night and danced naked in the garden under the stars. Willy took off his and danced too, prancing about, all white and sinewy, in full view of any passerby who chose to peer through the broken palings. He beckoned and begged Praxis to join them, but she wouldn’t. She was horrified.

Hilda changed her mind in the middle of a pas de deux about whatever it was she intended, and stomped off to bed, locking the back door against Willy and Praxis so that they had to break in through a skylight window.

Willy wasn’t angry. Willy had looked, Praxis thought, rather regretfully after Hilda.

‘She’s got a lovely body,’ he said. ‘Longer in the waist than you and longer legs. Your face is prettier, mind you. She doesn’t have enough chin. And unpredictability could be difficult to live with.’

Praxis had the same feeling of nightmare as had so often afflicted her in youth. She visited her mother in the new State Institution for the Mentally Afflicted. Lucy sat in a day-room, one of a row of still, staring women sitting in armchairs six inches apart. Most of the other women were over seventy, and there by virtue of physical rather than mental infirmity. The curtains were bright, however, and the good sea-air blew briskly in. The staff smiled. Sister was particularly nice, and did not make Praxis feel, as she felt so easily, that it was all her fault her mother was incarcerated.