Praxis (2 page)

Ruth was free to marry; she was the daughter of a Jewish taxi-driver, made excellent beef sandwiches and her lowly social status was sufficient to keep Ben free from sexual anxiety and mental torment. He could love her, and make love to her, all at the same time. They were happy ever after.

Lucy was of course unhappy ever after, and so was Hypatia, and Praxis too.

N
OW WHAT KIND OF
memory is that to comfort anyone? The memory of the afflicted child one was: the knowledge of wrongs unrighted and wounds unhealed, the tearing pain of a past which cannot be altered? Unless of course I remember it wrongly, and it is my present painful and unfortunate state which casts such a black shadow back over what would otherwise be a perfectly acceptable landscape of experience? But I fear not.

I, Praxis Duveen, being old and scarcely in my right mind, now bequeath you my memories. They may help you: they certainly do nothing to sustain me, let alone assist my old bones to clamber out of the bath.

Last night, doing just that, I slipped on the soap and cracked my elbow. This morning the pain was such that I took the bus to the hospital, instead of to the park.

My erstwhile sisters, my former friends: I did what you wanted, and look at me now!

You have forgotten me.

Two years in prison have aged me two decades. I should not regret the new grey wiriness of my hair, the swollen veins in my legs, the huddling lumpiness of my figure, faded look in my watery eyes. But I do, I do. The eyes of the world look quickly past me, beyond me, and I am humiliated.

My fingers are stiff and sore with what I suppose to be arthritis. Writing has become painful. But I will write. I am accustomed to pain. And pain in the elbow, the fingers and, since my abortive journey to the hospital, pain in my stamped-upon toe, is nothing compared to that pain in the heart, the soul, and the mind—those three majestic seats of female sorrow—which seems to be our daily lot.

I do not understand the three-fold pain: but I will try. Perhaps it serves a useful purpose, if only as an indication that some natural process is being abused. I cannot believe it is a punishment: to have a certain nature is not a sin, and in any case who is there to punish us? Unless—as many do—we predicate some natural law of male dominance and female subservience, and call that God. Then what we feel is the pain of the female Lucifer, tumbling down from heaven, having dared to defy the male deity, cast out for ever, but likewise never able to forget, tormented always by the memory of what we threw away. Or else, and on this supposition my mind rests most contentedly, we are in the grip of some evolutionary force which hurts as it works, and which I fear has already found its fruition in that new race of young women which I encountered in the bus on the way to the hospital this morning, dewy fresh from their lovers’ arms and determined to please no one but themselves. One of the New Women trod me underfoot and with her three-inch soles pulped my big toe in its plastic throw-away shoe (only I, unlike her, cannot afford to throw anything away, and am doomed to wear it for ever) causing me such fresh pain that when the bus broke down and we were all to be decanted into another, I lost heart altogether, abandoned the journey and limped home.

The New Women! I could barely recognise them as being of the same sex as myself, their buttocks arrogant in tight jeans, openly inviting, breasts falling free and shameless and feeling no apparent obligation to smile, look pleasant or keep their voices low. And how they live! Just look at them to know how! If a man doesn’t bring them to orgasm, they look for another who does. If by mistake they fall pregnant, they abort by vacuum aspiration. If they don’t like the food, they push the plate away. If the job doesn’t suit them, they hand in their notice. They are satiated by everything, hungry for nothing. They are what I wanted to be; they are what I worked for them to be: and now I see them, I hate them. They have found their own solution to the three-fold pain—one I never thought of. They do not try, as we did, to understand it and get the better of it. They simply wipe out the pain by doing away with its three centres—the heart, the soul and the mind. Brilliant! Heartless, soulless, mindless—free!

Listen, I have had good times. It is only on bad days that I regret the past and hate the young. I helped to change the world. I made life what it is for those lovely, lively, trampling girls upon the bus.

Look at me, I said to you. Look at me, Praxis Duveen. Better for me to look at myself, to search out the truth, and the root of my pain, and yours, and try to determine, even now, whether it comes from inside or from outside, whether we are born with it, or have it foisted upon us. Before my writing hand seizes up, my elbow rots, my toe falls off.

In the meantime, sisters, I absolve you from your neglect of me. You do what you can. So will I.

A
FTER BEN’S DEFECTION, HIS
mother, a stately, large-busted matron, often moved by compassion, came presently to visit her son’s abandoned common-law wife. She found two little girls of whose existence she had not known. Both stared up at her with her son’s sad defiant eyes. Their hair was uncombed, their white dresses soiled, their mother distraught. The maid had left: the rent was unpaid. There was no food in the cupboard. Ben’s mother left quickly, in her chauffeured Rolls-Royce.

A letter from solicitors followed, hand-delivered the next day. The rent was to be paid: the little girls provided for. If their mother was in financial or practical difficulty, she could make special application to the solicitors at any time, who would judge the merits of the case, and pay out accordingly.

Goodbye, Benjamin Duveen. Off to greener golf-courses; three fine sons: and Ruth, a woman who loved him for what he was, and not what he wasn’t.

Lucy presently wrote to the solicitors asking if she could move away, move house, start a new life somewhere else with the girls, and still have the rent paid: but they would not hear of it. Continuity, they said, was important for children. So Lucy perforce stayed where she was, seldom leaving the house. She should have been grateful to the Duveens, and so she was. Many families would have preferred to have ignored her existence altogether. She could have gone into service, to the workhouse, or on the streets. The little bastards to a Barnado Home.

Henry Whitechapel, arriving in the May of the following season, looked out for Mrs. Duveen on the beach, and missed her. He made his way to 109 Holden Road, and found the garden unkempt, the gravel drive full of weeds, the motorcar gone and curtains drawn, so that he thought at first the house was empty. But Hypatia and Praxis were playing on the lawn. Or rather, Hypatia was sitting sketching a plant, and Praxis was sitting in a puddle and her wet drawers, when she stood, hung down muddily round her knees.

‘Where’s your mother?’ he asked.

‘Crying,’ said Praxis.

‘Shush,’ called out Hypatia. ‘You silly little girl.’

‘Well, she is,’ said Praxis. ‘Silly girl yourself.’

Hypatia sighed heavily and raised her narrow eyebrows. She had a receding chin and slightly buck teeth, yellowish: a muddy complexion and dull brown hair with a tendency to grease, but was either unaware of these deficiencies, or affected unawareness. Her look was supercilious.

‘And your father?’

‘He’s left,’ said Praxis.

‘He’s away at the moment,’ corrected Hypatia.

Henry took the opportunity of knocking at the door. He was not normally so bold, but his life that day seemed desperate, and the season stretched ahead, meaningless, filled with grinning, eager, silly faces, craning for a likeness; cheated and derided as they were all year, at work, and now at play, by someone of their own kind, who ought to know better. It made him feel bad but what could he do?

‘Mrs. Duveen?’ he enquired. ‘You remember me? The beach photographer? I came to check that your photographs arrived.’

He thought he had never seen anyone so changed. She seemed like a little old woman, with her hair scraped back, her kimono clutched round her with a hand whose nails were none too clean.

She shook her head, vague. Then she nodded.

‘If by any chance you need frames—and a photograph looks twice as grand in a frame, I always say—I stock a special line Very reasonable.’

She did not want the frames, but showed him the photograph, stuck any old how on the mantelpiece in the dusty parlour.

‘A big house you have here,’ he remarked kindly. ‘Difficult to keep up, for just one person, I should say.’

At which she burst into tears. Her life was finished; over. Benjamin had gone. She kept her breath in her body for the sake of the girls, nothing else.

He took a room in the house. She had a male lodger! She, a woman alone. What did it matter what people said? In fact knowing so little about her, they said nothing. Had they known more, no doubt they would have been kind: but the kindness, or lack of it, with which one regards oneself finds its echo in the outside world: and Lucy could not forgive herself. All her fault. Her lost marriage, her failed love, her bastard children, her dusty home, her condemnation to this cruel street, this unfeeling, gossiping town—all her fault. Seeking out more degradation, the seedy lodger, the false photographer, slurping milk through his moustache at her breakfast table, she began to feel better again.

Lucy curled her hair and pressed her clothes. She weeded the drive. She dressed Hypatia and Praxis in pale pink—they had somehow lost their right to white—and wrote to Butt and Sons, the Duveen solicitors, for money to hire a servant, as befitted the little girls’ state as descendants, albeit on the male side, of King David. Butt and Sons at first demurred, but then conceded.

Benjamin’s mother paid another visit, and seemed relieved by what she saw. (Henry was banished to the kitchen for the occasion). She left the girls a signed photograph of their father; but Praxis had already forgotten what he looked like; he seemed a stranger to her, with his glowing eyes and large nose. Hypatia took the photograph, in any case, and slept with it under her pillow. Praxis set up a howl, discovering this, but Henry dealt her a sharp cuff and she soon stopped.

Lucy presently found pleasure in telling Henry what to do. He followed on her heels like a little pet dog: she scolded and chided and soon had him fetching her bag, her book, her wrap, and so rebuilt a little world around herself, and even came down to the beach on warm days.

The girls watched their lodger take photographs, though pretending to be nothing to do with him. Nothing. A street photographer, after all. None too honest, either, with rotting lungs and bad breath; and their mother a doctor’s daughter, and her daughters of the line of King David. Lucy told them so, frequently: proud of it at last. They had no concept of the notion of Jewishness: either of pogroms or passover. Lucy was vague enough about it herself.

Hypatia and Praxis went to school and suffered with Jesus on the cross, gasped at the beauty of the Virgin Mary, drenched their souls in the blood of the lamb; were slapped if they stole or told lies, heard that they were daughters of Eve and responsible for leading men into sin and for the loss of Paradise, and must make amends for ever. Praxis cleaned Henry’s shoes in penance: Hypatia actually learned how to develop his prints. And he did develop them nowadays, all of them, and Lucy would send them off. His teeth never lost their blackness, but he seemed on the whole, as the years went by, less dejected. Lucy even scolded him into a vague sexual response: human beings, he perceived through her, added up to more than the tattered shreds of flesh he had observed hanging on the barbed wire of the Ypres front; the grinning faces, skin stretched over bone, which presented themselves before his camera. The world was something more than a charnel house, a human factory farm, insanely breeding flesh out of flesh as its way of cheating death.

Presently they slept together in the big brass bed: she a little brisk woman with a tight mouth, prophesying disaster even in her sleep, tossing and turning; he coughing and spluttering all night long, trying to be rid of something; both somewhat healed by virtue of the other: both older than they used to be.

Praxis and Hypatia slept soundly but woke anxious, eyes wide and stretched, for ever fearful that something unexpected might happen. No one explained anything to them: where Ben had come from, where he had gone: who Henry was, and why. Why their mother cried, scolded or laughed, for no apparent reason. Who the woman in the Rolls-Royce was. If everything was inexplicable, anything might happen. Anxiety ironed itself into their souls.

Praxis thought Hypatia might know more than she did about it all, by virtue of the extra two and a half years to her credit, but if Hypatia did, she said nothing. Hypatia kept herself to herself: she was aloof, like a cat. Praxis more like a clumsy puppy, leaping up with muddy paws, enthusiastic but ridiculous.

I
DO NOT WET
the bed now; at least not that: though soon, I dare say, the time will come when I do. I dread the day. I do not want to be an old woman sitting in a chair, wearing nappies, nursed by the salt of the earth. It seems unjust; not what Lucy and Benjamin meant at all; rolling about in their unwed bed, year after year, moved by a force which clearly had nothing to do with commonsense or anyone’s quest for happiness: until, their mission apparently accomplished, they rolled apart and went their separate ways, assisted by Butt and Sons, Solicitors.

I do not want to be an incontinent old lady. I would rather die. I feel today, my elbow throbbing and my toe swelling, that the time for dying will be quite soon. On Thursdays I go down to the Social Security offices, stand in a queue, and draw the money which keeps me for a further week. It should be possible for a postal draft to be sent weekly and myself to cash it at the local post office, but I do not like to make the request. I am an ex-con, and habit dies hard of not causing trouble to, let alone demanding one’s rights of, those in authority.

Those in authority, at any rate, in that strange grey world of bars and keys which I have inhabited, where cause and effect works in an immediate way, and the stupid are in charge of the intelligent, and each wrong-doer carries on his poor bowed shoulders the weight of a hundred of the worthy—from prison visitors to the Home Secretary—whose living is made, indirectly, out of crime, or sin, or financial failing, or criminal negligence: or, as with me, the madness of believing that I was right, and society wrong. Who did I think I was? I, Praxis Duveen.