Praxis (6 page)

‘It wasn’t meant for anyone to read,’ said Patricia. ‘It was just things I made up.’

‘Nevertheless you wrote it, and to write such unhealthy nonsense shows a very sick little mind. I’m not surprised your mother’s so upset. Louise assures me she’s never spoken to you in her life. Is that right, Louise?’

‘Yes,’ said Louise, to her fingertips.

‘I believe you, Louise. I have great faith in the honour and decency of my prefects.’

‘I don’t believe her,’ said Lucy. ‘I believe what’s written there. There are horrible, filthy things going on in this school. Patricia’s corrupt and perverted. She’s the devil’s spawn. I’ve seen it in her eyes.’

The head-mistress sent Louise and Patricia back to their classes.

‘What did you want to go and write all that for?’ asked Louise, outside in the corridor. She had a soft and slightly nasal speaking voice. Eleven words.

‘I don’t know,’ mumbled Patricia. Louise looked once or twice down the corridor, then lifted Patricia’s face with her forefinger and kissed her lightly on the lips.

‘Now it’s not a lie,’ she said, ‘so you can stop looking so miserable.’

Patricia went back to the classroom. She searched into her heart for love: for her mother, for Hilda, for Elaine, for Louise, but could find nothing now but indifference and a vague embarrassment. All events seemed much of a muchness. She pressed the pen-nib hard into her hand, but it did not hurt. She was not surprised.

After school she found Hilda waiting for her. Hilda usually went on ahead.

‘They’ve taken mother to hospital,’ she said.

‘What’s the matter with her?’

‘Nothing much.’

‘How long for?’

‘Until she’s better.’

‘What sort of hospital?’

‘Just a hospital.’

‘She’s mad, isn’t she.’

Hilda turned and looked at Patricia as lately her mother had looked at her, with cold hating eyes.

‘Don’t ever say that, ever.’

‘What about us?’ asked Patricia, once they were home.

‘I’m nearly eighteen; you’re fifteen. They’re sending the child officer round about you. In the meantime we stay where we are. I told them I could manage. I’m in charge.’

Hot coals had been flung around the kitchen. Burn marks on the linoleum were to remain for years in remembrance of that particular day. Was there not a time, Patricia wondered, some other world, some other place, when she had been happy? In her mother’s bedroom she found the early photograph of herself on the beach, torn up, and in wretched pieces on the floor. No. It had never been.

The house seemed very quiet, and the night frightening.

T
HERE, THAT’S DONE. LIVED
through, yet once again. Are we what our childhoods make us? I was thirty before I could even think about my past. Yes, I would say, to all enquiries, I had a happy childhood, and if pressed would give an account of pre-war Brighton, with its clean pebbly beach, and long summer days in the sun, complete with candy-floss. A photographic account. Or pressed still further, forced to remember the photograph torn and on the floor, turn the whole thing into a bad joke.

Yes, I am a bastard, and a Jewess at that. My father abandoned me and my mother went mad and I was a lesbian for a time.

Ha-ha.

Laugh gaily. Gayly, even.

All enquiries, I say. There were few of them. I must have carried the past with me, as an almost visible load. Why would anyone want to help me with it? They wanted me to help with theirs.

In the middle portion of my life, when I gave dinner parties by night and wrote advertisements by day, I was prepared to believe, how I wanted to believe, that I had to cure myself to cure the world. Now I believe I have to cure the world to cure myself. It is an impossible task. I am bowed down by it.

The world is ungrateful. See how I am left alone, unable to hobble to the stove? Or perhaps I just abuse the world, as my mother abused me. Call it the names I should call myself. Indifferent, ungrateful, callous.

Bastard, Jewess, slut.

I did better than my mother, or my sister. I can put such memories of joy together! Don’t think I can’t. Patch them together into a protective quilt of happiness, to keep the cold winds of reality out. I learned how to do it. Even here, in this horrible room, hungry and in pain, helpless, abandoned by the world in general and the social worker in particular, I can feel joy, excitation and exhilaration. I changed the world a little: yes, I did. Tilted it, minutely, on its axis. I, Praxis Duveen.

The funny farm, the loony bin, the mental home. The shelter for the mentally disabled. I have visited them all, over the years. Times have got better, I will say that. The staff, medical and paramedical, the social workers, the dieticians and the researchers these days all but outnumber the patients. Each mad act now supports upon itself a whole wonderful structure of bureaucrats, commentators, observers, and philosophers.

In the beginning mother was in a strait-jacket, guarded by those too low, stupid and depraved to work elsewhere; her face the only part of her allowed movement, was alive with hatred for the world in general and me in particular. She wore no quilts of exultation. No.

I did not hate her: I never did. I wanted only to be allowed to love her and help her: look after her: remove her from the distress of her life. I felt more for her pain than I ever did for my own. There could be no happiness for me, knowing that my mother was so incarcerated.

After the strait-jacket days, mother was locked in. Bolts clanged before and behind. I would visit her. She seems to walk towards me for ever, down long, clattery, tiled corridors, smelling of disinfectant and boiled cabbage.

Sometimes she would deign to recognise me: sometimes not. I replay the scene in my mind over and over: sending her back to the end of the corridor: walking her towards me; sometimes she deigns to recognise me, sometimes not.

Mother!

Later, when drugs took the place of locks and bars, and the patient could be imprisoned in his or her own mind (mostly her) and the outer body could be set free, and the buildings got better and day-rooms arrived, and private sleeping cubicles, and frozen peas instead of cabbage, and well-kept gardens, and segregation of the sexes ended and there was occupational and group therapy, and Patient Rights, and even the occasional, though brief, visit to the psychiatrist, mother’s lot was considerably better. She seemed happier. She was allowed out, for a time, on home visits.

Was she always mad, or did the world send her mad with its prudery, hypocrisy and unkindness? Or was it the likes of her that made society what it was, prudish, hypocritical and unkind? Did my father leaving make her mad, or did he leave because she was mad? And what is madness anyway? Throwing red-hot coals about a room, hating one of your children, worrying more about a lesbian kiss than a clerical rape? Preferring to lie in bed than to get up? I suppose, had she done all these things and more, and done them cheerfully, or even drunkenly, no one would have felt obliged to lock her up.

As it was, she was miserable, anxious, and showed it in her actions, and was put away.

Where did the misery come from? Women have given birth to bastards, been left by lovers, and merely laughed and carried on. Mother did not. Why not? She should have, for my sake.

I
T WAS SOME MONTHS
before the child officer called at the house. He was busy. An influx of child evacuees had arrived in Brighton, and promptly had to be re-evacuated, along with many of the local children. German cross-channel guns were now shelling coastal towns, and Brighton was considered an unsafe place to be.

‘Shouldn’t we visit mother?’ Patricia asked Hilda, in the meantime.

‘It’s wartime,’ said Hilda. ‘They don’t allow visitors.’ She left the house herself, however, on Sunday afternoons, and declined to tell Patricia where she was going.

‘Is mother getting better?’ Patricia would ask Hilda, when Hilda received a letter from some official source or other. Hilda, by virtue of her three years’ seniority, dealt with all practical matters, and had her mother’s habit for secrecy.

‘Of course.’

‘When is she coming home?’

‘When she is better.’

There was little to do after school except homework. That term both Patricia and Hilda earned four embossed metal bars. Hilda already had five. She walked around the house clanking. The girls did not change out of school uniform when they got home. There seemed little point. School was real life: home a kind of dank limbo. They cleaned and polished rooms: then shut the door on them. They slept in their separate bedrooms, creeping up the cold, dark stairs, but otherwise spent their time in the kitchen: which could be made cosy, if not companionable,

Hilda did her duty by Patricia, but didn’t like her. So much she made obvious.

‘The hospital’s been evacuated,’ Hilda said one Sunday afternoon when Patricia asked if she were not going out.

‘Where to?’

‘It’s a secret, in case the Nazis find out.’

‘Why doesn’t mother- write to us?’

‘Because of a paper shortage.’

Hilda had an answer for everything, but it was never quite the appropriate answer.

‘I think Hilda’s going mad too,’ Patricia said to Elaine, panic getting the upper hand of reticence. But Elaine had a copy of the
National Geographic Magazine,
and didn’t seem to hear. The magazine contained photographs of bare-breasted native girls.

‘They never show white girls,’ observed Elaine, ‘only niggers. What use is that? They’re probably not like us.’

Since the war had closed the beaches, it was not even possible to study the human form in bathing dress. Fashions, padded shoulders, brassieres which raised, pointed and folded the breasts into a sturdy shelf effect, confused the eye of the young beholder. There was no full-length mirror any more at 109 Holden Road—Lucy had shattered them all, on one pretext or another—and even had there been, Patricia would not have considered viewing her own body. The body, she believed, was a piece of flesh within which she lived. She could make no connection between her body and her feelings.

Patricia kept her doubts about Hilda to herself. Madness was a disgrace; better not talked about. As with cancer, there was no cure, no hope: and madness was worse than cancer, being hereditary and not merely infectious. What use to talk about it, rub people’s noses in it? Something so dreadful! All you could do was pretend it hadn’t happened.

In the meantime Elaine’s parents feared for their daughter’s physical safety: if Patricia’s mother was in the loony bin, Patricia could hardly be guiltless: might turn nasty, dangerous, any minute. It was their turn to discourage the friendship.

Patricia discovered where Henry Whitechapel lived. She waited at the terminus where the bus from the recruitment centre stopped, and then followed him to his house. He wore an old fawn raincoat: he seemed younger than her mental image of him. He was so familiar to her, and yet so strange. He was, of course, beneath her.

People, Patricia decided, dogging Henry’s footsteps unseen, were awarded merit and demerit status marks, much as merit marks were given and taken away at school. Three points up for being a male, two down for being a lodger, three points down for being of common stock, two points up for being physically attractive, six points up for being rich, and so on. You only had to go into a room, talk to someone for a minute or two, to do the social sums required, and rate yourself and others appropriately.

Her own rating was high: she could feel it. It had lately been reduced by her mother’s madness—three demerit marks at least—but she still added up to more than, say, Elaine, or even Hilda; though why two children of the same family should get different marks she could not quite work out

Henry’s house was a semi-detached villa halfway up the hill. Washing hung from the back line—visible from the front. Three demerit points there! But roses grew up the front wall. Half a mark for overt signs of contentment.

Unfortunately, Judith, when she opened the door to Patricia, seemed insensitive to the honour done her. She carried a heavy baby boy in her arms: he bounced and butted his head into his mother’s chest.

‘What do you want?’

What indeed? Perhaps she hoped Henry would move back in, dilute the atmosphere somewhat.

‘I just came to see you and the baby.’

‘Took your time about it.’

‘Mother’s been ill.’

‘Yes. I heard. She always was round the bend, I suppose.’

‘Of course she wasn’t.’

‘I hope she was, or there’s no excuse.’

‘Excuse for what?’

‘The way she treated me. It’s not your fault Sit down. Hold the baby. I’ll make tea. Henry gets extra rations from the camp.’

Patricia held the baby and marvelled at its solidity. She had always thought that babies were weak and powerless things. This one seemed king of its universe.

‘It’s a lovely baby.’

‘No one said that when it was on the way.’

‘Little Pattie!’ said Henry, his smile warm and familiar, out of the past. ‘Seeking me out! Who’d have thought it. Mind you, I liked your other name. Praxis. Praxis and Hypatia. Now that had style. Patricia and Hilda! I told her not, but she wouldn’t listen. We’re none of us like anyone else, I’d tell her, but she was determined. Poor soul!’

‘Poor soul!’ derided Judith.

‘We’re all alone up there now,’ said Patricia, ‘just Hilda and me. Mother’s hospital has been evacuated.’

‘Local hospital? Who said so?’ He seemed surprised. He held the baby on his lap. His hands were stained, as ever, with chemicals. They seemed old, pathetic, beyond fatherhood, yet grateful for it.

‘Hilda said so.’

‘Hilda tells lies. Always did.’

‘I’m sure she doesn’t’ Patricia was shocked.

‘She’s like her mother,’ put in Judith, ‘she’ll say anything if it’s convenient. Mind you, as pillow talk I daresay it’s nice enough to hear. Lovey dovey while it lasts. The next day, who might you be, sir? You’re dirtying my carpet with your muddy boots. Fetch my bag; back to the kitchen; all you’re fit for.’ Patricia found herself quite dizzy.