Praxis (8 page)

Mr. Robinson’s eyes and nose were fresh to such sights and smells: they made him doubt the soothing reports on the Parker sisters from both school and clergyman, which sat thick upon his clip-board and had allowed him to delay his visit.

‘The girls,’ the head-mistress wrote, ‘seem to do better with no parents than many do with two. Patricia is quiet, neat, well-behaved and will get a good School Certificate: Hilda is of course our very valuable head girl, and is much respected by the other pupils.’

Pupils, it is true, certainly fell silent when Hilda approached. She seldom smiled: her eyes glittered: the black braid with its embossed metal bars now hung almost to her waist, and clanked against the buckle of her money-belt: Head Girl, House Captain, the engravings read: and descending, Hockey, Latin, English, French, Geography, Religious Knowledge, Deportment—there seemed no end to Hilda’s accomplishments. She meted out punishment liberally if erratically. She might give twenty lines or 2000 for the same offence: she invented crimes. She had designated the second peg to the left of the cloakroom door as one which for some reason must be kept free of hats and coats, and would give a detention to anyone who used it: and once compelled a third year girl, a certain Audrey Denver, to stand on her head in the playground until she fainted for the sin of having brown laces in black shoes. Then she kept the entire third year in after school until whoever had done it owned up. But done what? Nobody was quite sure: nobody owned up: and Hilda went home in the middle of the detention anyway. The staff seemed unaware of their head girl’s eccentricity: on the contrary, the head-mistress enthused about her capacity for keeping order, and the general lack of silliness in the school since her appointment. It was as if a certain implicit insanity in the school, dressing its burgeoning female adolescents in collars, ties, boaters and blazers; having them learn classics while the walls around them collapsed, and play netball on playgrounds increasingly pitted by falling shrapnel, had become explicit in Hilda.

Since her appointment as head girl, Hilda had been unusually pale, and her eyes dark, shiny and troubled. But she had been more talkative and confiding than usual: she would keep Pattie up until the early hours, talking about the third year girls remarking on how like rats they were, scuttling here and there, carrying diseases, secretly watching Hilda and sending each other messages concerning her. Hilda went over and over the same ground: it was as if some gramophone record in her head had stuck. Pattie almost came to believe her. Audrey Denver certainly had a sharp little face, and red eyes due (she said) to chronic conjunctivitis: it was perfectly possible that the one black shoe lace and one brown was a signal of some kind and that standing her on her head would cross the connections and scramble the lines between the rat armies, before worse befall; and all was known.

Anything, Pattie thought increasingly, was possible.

Mr. Robinson, standing on the doorstep, was real enough. Was he? He wore his brother’s brown boots, his uncle’s pin-striped suit, his deceased father’s trilby, frayed along the brim, and chewed by his wife’s dog, but not discarded. Since clothes rationing, people had ceased to be so readily identifiable as themselves. They were an amalgam of past and present, family and friends. The identity card, carried compulsorily on the person, was almost as reassuring to the individual as it was to the State.

This is who and what I am.

Mr. Robinson made brisk arrangements for Patricia to be boarded out, and for Hilda to stay where she was until it was time for her to go to Oxford. She had won her scholarship to Somerville. The school had clapped and clapped, to Hilda’s distress, for all she heard was the noise of a million rat feet, scuttering, dancing, all together. Hilda was prudent and kept the rats well out of her scholarship essays. To write about them was to give them more power: to speak about them weakened them. Lucy, visited by Pattie, and told of Hilda’s success, merely looked blank. There were now three women in the padded cell. They sat in strait-jackets, like three nodding Chinamen on a mantelpiece ornament, in a stench of urine.

‘You’re my grandchild, aren’t you,’ said Lucy to Pattie. ‘I am such a very old woman.’

Her face, wiped of all care, seemed like that of a child’s.

Perhaps she was getting better?

Hilda was.

Hilda packed Pat’s belongings into a damp cardboard suitcase, and made a special journey to the chemist for a farewell gift of rat poison.

‘They’re very cunning,’ she said. ‘Do be careful.’

But Hilda’s colour was returning: she slept well, early and late: the sharp little teeth had stopped gnawing away in her mind. She seemed slightly bewildered by her own gift to her departing sister, and subsidised it with a pound or so of ripe blackberries from the brambles which now overgrew the garden. (Butt & Sons had agreed to put the house on the market, but no one came forward to buy.)

And so, in October, Pattie left 109 Holden Road, bound for the sea-front, and the more suitable and cheerful home the children’s department had found her. She carried a cardboard suitcase in one hand, and a paper bag of blackberries in the other. Her hair was short, ordinary and curly: her face round, ordinary, and not so much innocent as expressionless. Her smile, however, was frequent, if automatic, and used both to ward off attack and give herself time to think. She looked well bred and well brought up, as Lucy would have wished—but of course was neither. She was sixteen. She wore Lucy’s old tweed coat, cut down to three-quarter length (it was in fact the very coat in which Lucy had eloped, so disastrously, with Benjamin, but Pattie did not know that. It was merely to her, a coat which had hung on a peg for years, and from which a cloud of moths arose when anyone brushed past, making Hilda’s eyes anxious and suspicious, as if moths were part of the rats’ greater plan. Hilda had attacked it first with scissors: Pattie had neatened up the jagged edges and turned up an uneven hem with bodging stitches.) Beneath the coat she wore her school uniform. Pattie seldom wore anything but her school uniform: white blouse, striped tie, navy gym-slip sponged and pressed weekly, until the pleats were paper thin and the serge shiny, black stockings, the holes darned out, and stout brown shoes. The suitcase contained her school books and papers, a single dress, spotted red and white, some underwear, rather grey and held together by safety pins and black cotton stitching, a thick flannel nightie or so, and three pairs of smart brown and red shoes, as used by lady golfers, donated to her by the children’s department.

It seemed enough. Even in those early days Pattie knew that all you really need take with you anywhere is yourself: the rest is clutter, and the world will, or should, provide it. A confident and self-righteous view—if a selfish one. Hilda on the other hand, more of her time, felt the need for possessions: liked to be surrounded by objects which reflected her self, her state of mind, however cluttered and wayward that might be. She had recently started to collect things: old birds’ nests, complete with withered fledglings, awkwardly shaped stones, scraps of torn fabric, twisted driftwood from the beach—the little meaningful objects which the world kept tossing up at her feet. She would deride Pattie for her philistinism, when her lip puckered with distaste and she failed to see the significance.

‘Look at the shapes, Pattie. If you have eyes to see, look at the shapes! If you have any understanding of art, then this is art. But of course you haven’t; how could you?’

Sensitive Hilda, pretty Pattie; as Lucy had defined them long ago.

Now Pattie turned the corner towards the sea-front, and left Hilda behind, and her spirits rose.

‘Everything is meant,’ she thought. ‘Everything is planned. That was my punishment, and now it is over.’

A strong wind caught the wave tops on the other side of the esplanade and beat her about with bitter foam, stinging her lips: as if to deny the sentiment. Hilda would certainly have assumed that that was the meaning of the event

Miss Leonard taught English at Pattie’s school. She lived alone above what had been a popular furniture shop, but was now empty of stock, and was boarded up by means of a row of assorted doors battened together with railway sleepers. Miss Leonard was comfortable and solitary up above, and refused to be driven out of her house by the exigencies of war, which she regarded as a male pastime. She had also, so far, stood out against requisitioning orders and billeting officers, until now Mr. Robinson had prevailed upon her to take in a motherless and homeless girl child.

‘But you’re big Pattie Duveen,’ protested Miss Leonard, as she opened the door. ‘I know you. You came fourth in English in spite of a very insensitive paper on Keats. I was expecting a little girl called Praxis Parker.’

Miss Leonard looked disappointed, and was. So far the war had brought inconvenience but very little novelty. The paper bag containing Hilda’s blackberries disintegrated; over-ripe berries tumbled out and down the pale stair-carpet, staining as they went. Praxis cried, perceiving that Hilda’s influence would follow her for the rest of her life, and that her past could never in fact be forgotten, would never be over. She must be Praxis and Pattie too until the end of her days.

She stood limp and crying at the top of the stairs. Behind her the kettle boiled and a canary sang. Miss Leonard, perceiving a challenge, cheered up. Over a period of months she pushed Pattie there, pulled her here, patted and cosseted sense back into her: made her sweep under the beds and not just round them, hem her coat properly, hand in neat homework, take the eyes out of potatoes when she peeled them, and little by little extract from her the causes of her grief.

‘Jesus was a bastard,’ said Miss Leonard to Praxis. ‘Not to mention Napoleon and Nelson. Disadvantages either make you or break you. See that yours make you.’

‘It’s not perverted to fall in love with girls,’ said Miss Leonard, ‘if no boys are available. Freud says, in any case, that homosexuality is a normal step on the road to full sexual maturity.’

‘To be Jewish is no disgrace,’ said Miss Leonard. ‘On the contrary. In any case a Jewish father doesn’t count. Only a Jewish mother. Sorry.’

‘Your mother was not trying to harm you, only to save you,’ said Miss Leonard. ‘Poor thing.’

‘Yes, I can well believe that your sister is mad,’ said Miss Leonard, ‘though it never occurred to me at the time. One is not accustomed to the notion of mad children. But
you’re
not mad, Praxis. What did you do with the rat poison?’

Miss Leonard emptied it down the lavatory bowl, and flushed and flushed.

‘Mind you,’ she added, ‘I do know what she means about the third year. They do scuttle and scamper, whisper and pry, and they seem to have very sharp, bright, sinister eyes.’

But she laughed as she said it, and that day cut off the crusts of the sandwiches as a special treat—it was a practice frowned upon by the Ministry of Food—and filled them with tinned melon jam from South Africa, as opposed to the turnip-pulp, flecked with wood splinters and coloured with cochineal, which did for raspberry jam.

‘You’re getting to be quite a pretty girl, Praxis,’ said Miss Leonard. Praxis’ smile was less frequent, but her face becoming more expressive.

‘I suppose,’ said Miss Leonard, with rather less certainty, ‘it is possible to be happy in a strait-jacket. Especially if there are others in like condition to keep you company. One is usually at home in the presence of one’s peers. It is if one is obliged to live with others either greater or lesser than oneself, that one is so wretched—’

All the same, Miss Leonard wrote to Butt and Sons, Solicitors. ‘It is disgraceful,’ she declared, ‘that the children of your client should have been so neglected. If you will kindly send me the father’s address I will contact him personally. The mother has been driven into a breakdown by his harshness, and is in a position to sue for compensation through a third party, and I will have no hesitation in being that third party if funds are not immediately forthcoming for her transfer to a private institution—’

Miss Leonard received a cheque by return of post.

‘Be a carnivore,’ said Miss Leonard, carefully boiling the week’s ration of one egg each, to make a Sunday breakfast, ‘not a herbivore.’ She wore a crimson flowered dressing-gown, and her nails were bloody, red, but her slightly pop eyes were gentle and searching.

‘What do you mean?’ asked Praxis.

‘Carnivores feed off herbivores,’ said Miss Leonard. ‘Carnivores exist to herbivores in a ratio of fifty to one. I am a herbivore. We munch away peacefully, looking wise, until suddenly snap, snap, we’re gone.’ Miss Leonard had spent a lurid Saturday night.

Miss Leonard had lost her one true love in the First World War. First she’d slept with him: then she’d lost him. A punishment for sin, she assumed. She’d been seventeen.

‘It is an honour to lose a son for one’s country,’ observed her true-love’s mother, carrying on, head and chin held high. War Office telegrams mounting up on the mantelpiece, continuing with her charity fête to Beat the Boche. He was the third of her sons to die, trying to do so.

‘If that’s the only way you can bear it,’ observed Miss Leonard’s mother, ‘call it what you like, even honour. I prefer to call it a tragedy and a wicked waste. What are my daughters going to do for husbands?’

What indeed? Miss Leonard did without one, denied any need for one, lived quite happily without one, went to Teachers’ Training College, and thereafter spent her time putting romantic notions into the heads of growing girls. Keats, Wordsworth, Rupert Brooke.

‘If I should die, think only this of me—’

No, but there was so much else to be thought. She perceived it now: the war helped. Now the putative husbands were dying again, but this time not so willingly, Miss Leonard was glad to observe. As for sex, now that it was emerging as an easy traffic between ignoble men and willing women, it could hardly be, as she had once assumed, a matter for God’s instant, personal intervention.

These days, on Saturday nights, after Praxis had gone to her early bed, Miss Leonard had taken to dressing up in black mesh stockings, high heels, yellow satin blouse, tight black crepe-de-chine skirt, swinging a white handbag, and walking, unrecognisably, down the esplanade—until accosted by a man, whereupon sanity would return and she’d rush home in agreeable panic.