Praxis (23 page)

‘She doesn’t rant or rave or break things,’ said Praxis. ‘She just sits and stares.’

‘We must think of the children,’ repeated Ivor, and Praxis was relieved to think of the children and tell herself that it was not practical to have Lucy installed in the spare room. What was Lucy, in any case, to the creature who had sprung ready-made from Ivor’s imagination? She had no mother, no father: blonde curls: doll’s eyes, doll’s mind.

Praxis decided, with what glimmers of her old self remained, that Hilda should be given the opportunity of looking after Lucy, and wrote to her to that effect. She, Praxis, had husband and children to look after: Hilda, the implication was, had neither: had a career instead, which any right-minded woman would give up in order to look after an ill mother.

Hilda responded by sending an unsigned letter to Ivor, asking him if he knew what everyone else knew: that his wife had been a professional whore before he married her, working from the Raffles Esplanade Dive in Brighton?

It was unfortunate in a way that the letter arrived on one of the rare mornings when Ivor was at home, yet fortunate in another. Had Praxis been alone, she might well have steamed open the letter, read it and destroyed it, and gone on in her half life for years more.

As it was, she watched Ivor’s face grow pale with shock and distress, and recognised that some kind of reality, however dreadful, was at last beginning to surface, and that she should be grateful.

‘I don’t understand,’ said Ivor. ‘Why should anyone send this?’

‘It’s Hilda,’ said Praxis. ‘I know her writing. She’s mad. I told you she was mad. Anything to do with mother sets her off. She’ll do anything to damage me.’

‘Your own sister?’ He didn’t believe her. In Ivor’s world family offered mutual support; they were not natural destroyers of each other.

‘If you’d let me have mother here,’ said Praxis, tears in her eyes, pain in her heart. But Ivor just stared at her as if he saw things in her that he had never seen before.

‘You didn’t cry before,’ he remarked. ‘You were only too glad not to have her. I knew that. I just provide the excuses. That’s my function in your life. What’s going on?’ As if he had discovered the accountant cooking the company’s books.

He left to catch his plane during the morning. He did not ask her to deny or confirm the contents of the letter, but neither did he kiss her before he left. When he returned, two weeks later, he was critical of Praxis; he found fault with the cooking, the house, the way she behaved with the children; was rude to her in front of them: insisted that she make love to him in the way she had done when they first met. She felt degraded by it now.

His eyes followed her wherever she went. She was almost afraid of him.

‘What’s the matter?’ she kept asking. ‘What’s the matter with you?’

‘Nothing’s the matter, what should be the matter?’ he’d reply, setting out for his usual train, leaving her bruised, slightly shocked and sore, pecking her goodbye as if everything were normal.

‘If it’s my past,’ she volunteered, eventually, but he did not want to hear.

‘You’ve never let me talk about it,’ she protested.

‘I don’t want to know,’ he said, ‘let’s leave it at that. You have a mad sister and a mad mother. Isn’t that enough?’ She could see that in this particular world it was more than enough. There were too many different worlds, it seemed to Praxis, with very little cross reference from one to the other: each with its different ways and standards, its different framework of normality. Women crossed the barriers easily: were required to by marriage, moving house, changing status: men seldom crossed them, went on as they began, their lives under their own control.

‘Perhaps I should get a job,’ she persisted. ‘When you’re away I’ve nothing to do. When you’re back all you do is find fault.’

‘There’s plenty to do in the house,’ said Ivor. ‘If you did it, I wouldn’t find fault.’

He worried over the remark, as these days he worried over everything she said or did, chewing and tasting and discarding, only to scoop it up again, poor denatured thing, and start all over again.

‘Why should you want to work?’

‘What sort of work?’

‘You mean I keep you short of money?’

‘You find the children boring?’

‘You want to work with men, I suppose? Find someone new?’

The wives on the estate did not work. Husbands, for the most part, had fought their way out of a world in which a working wife was a sign of family disaster, disgrace and humiliation. They reckoned their achievement in life by the leisure and comfort they could offer their families: the picture windows, the carpets, the air, the light, the safety.

‘Forget it,’ said Praxis. ‘Just forget it.’

But he didn’t.

‘You could always sell yourself,’ he said, starting up one night out of the insomnia which now plagued him; ‘Is that what you mean by work?’

‘Let me tell you about it,’ she begged.

But he wouldn’t have it. He had moulded her to his liking, but been mistaken in the clay he used. His whole life was like that, he felt. You achieved what you wanted, or rather what your parents wanted for you, and it tasted not delicious, but sour and rancid on the tongue. He blamed the post-war Socialist government for a great many of his own and his company’s misfortunes. When Praxis asked him what misfortunes, he merely shrugged.

Ah, she was to blame for so much: her past like a hideous millstone round his neck. The doctor prescribed sleeping tablets.

‘But I think he’s gone mad,’ she said. Ivor too! The doctor laughed.

‘Shortage of sleep can make many a man seem mad,’ he said. ‘I should know.’

He wouldn’t take the pills. He suspected her motives in obtaining them. Presently he began to feel better. They returned, almost, to normal.

‘What’s the worst thing you ever did?’ said Diana to Praxis one day. Diana was the nearest to a friend Praxis had on the estate. Her husband Steve had a drinking problem. Diana’s pretty, childlike face was occasionally bruised, which she would explain away with one excuse or another: a lamp-post, a fall, a sudden braking in the car.

‘The worst thing I ever did,’ volunteered Diana, ‘was pour two bottles of Steve’s whisky down the sink. What about you?’

‘I slept with my father,’ said Praxis, the words leaping to her lips out of nowhere, as if they’d been lurking all this time, waiting to be said, preventing the formation of other words, other thoughts, other conclusions: keeping her in limbo, year after year.

‘You’re joking,’ said Diana.

‘Yes, I was joking,’ said Praxis.

When she looked in the mirror that evening, she thought she looked older: more like some other person, less like a doll.

Ivor was away. She stretched out in bed alone that night and allowed herself to remember; the pleasure, humiliation and shame. She had barely seen her mother since: had avoided the thought of her. Was her sense of sin, of having stolen something illicit, and of having damaged her mother by it, first by intent, then by actuality, the waves of shock and horror travelling backwards and forwards in time, before the event and after it, damaging, wounding, and traumatising?

These hands, she thought, turning on the bedside light, looking at them. What they’ve done, where they’ve been! And it seemed to her that as she looked, they lost their white powerlessness, the well-creamed, pretty look they’d had of late, and became stronger, older, more her own.

In the morning her hands looked much as usual, sleep had smoothed over the gritty surface of her night-thoughts. Life went on as usual. Nearly but not quite.

A new couple moved in to the estate: always a welcome event. New tastes, new faces, new clothes, new gossip. Rory was chief sales manager of a big paint firm, and had almost, but not quite, the same status as Ivor. He had the most powerful car on the estate, and spoke about his public school. Carol spoke genteelly, dressed quietly, had once run a hairdressing salon, had a larger refrigerator than anyone else, looked after her two children well, and held hands with Rory in public. They seemed a safe and respectable pair. They lived next door to Steve and Diana.

Rumours, however, soon began to fly. Rory and Steve, it was said, had contrived together to exchange beds for the night, first making their wives so insensible with drink that they would not notice the difference. Carol had, and hadn’t cared: Steve’s wife Diana hadn’t, which everyone reckoned was just as well. Now everyone knew except Diana. Rory and Carol were swingers: they played strip poker: they wife-swapped: they took nude photographs. Rory and Carol gave a party: everyone was invited: quite a few went. Carol drank a whole half bottle of whisky, stripped to the waist, and then altogether, and danced on a table. Rory, in the meantime, while the men gaped at Carol, openly kissed and fondled one of their wives after another. The lights went out. Unlikely couples paired off. Presently sanity returned: someone turned on the lights, couples sorted themselves out, and all returned home, abashed, to quiet homes and sleeping children. In the morning Rory and Carol were seen to kiss goodbye, affectionately. He even brought home some bookshelves in the car that evening, and could be heard hammering that night. A good and handy husband, walking evidence that sexual experimentation did not instantly bring about the collapse of a community.

Everything seemed safe: only rather more interesting than before. Praxis had not been to the party: she seldom went out when Ivor was away. He would question her too closely afterwards, to make it worth her while.

For a time a kind of sexual madness seemed to possess the estate.

Rory and Carol gave key parties. At the beginning of the evening the men would throw their front door keys into a central pool. At the end of the evening the men would pick out a key, any key, and escort home the wife whose own front-door key matched.

Carol rang Praxis.

‘Do come,’ she said. ‘You and Ivor do come! It’s the third time I’ve asked. I’m beginning to think you’re avoiding us on purpose. Of course, we all know you’re so
grand—
’

Ivor said to Praxis’ astonishment, that they were going to accept the invitation. She didn’t want to go.

‘I would have thought it was your style,’ said Ivor.

‘It’s not,’ said Praxis. ‘Why do you want to go?’

‘Because I’m bored,’ said Ivor. ‘I’m as bored with you as you are with me.’

It was a bad day, after all, and she had thought it was a good one. He had pruned the roses in the garden. She cried, which always affected Ivor.

‘I do love you,’ he said, as if puzzled by himself. ‘None of this means I don’t love you.’

‘What, like Rory loves Carol?’

That annoyed him. He didn’t relent They went to Rory and Carol’s party.

‘I love you,’ she said, before they went. When he was angry and she was miserable she felt that it was true.

‘I don’t believe you,’ he said.

He read the children bedtime stories before they set out for the party. As he grew older he became even more handsome: his face less innocent, more stern. The other wives envied her. She was considered an intellectual, because she read the Guardian and not the Telegraph like everyone else: she was never quite totally accepted, she knew that.

They were, she thought, rather surprised to see her there that evening.

Ivor had insisted that she wear black underwear and suspender belt and stockings, instead of the tights that had lately become fashionable.

‘It’s what you used to wear,’ he said. ‘I prefer it.’ He had been irritable about her make-up, and made her draw crude black lines around her eyes, and put heavy, sticky lipstick on her lips. It was no different from what the other wives wore, but unusual for Praxis. She had been to the hairdresser. It was crowded that day, and everyone had been excitable and rather bad-tempered. She stared at herself in the mirror: she was a doll again, to be pushed here and prodded there. All the same, she was not as young as she had been.

‘I think I am a figment of your imagination,’ she said, as she had said before, a long time ago.

‘Yes you are,’ was all he said, this time. ‘I am tired of having you in it.’

She understood that he was trying to rid himself of something. Well, so had she, once, and succeeded. ‘Since Hilda’s letter,’ she said, ‘everything has changed.’

‘You imagine it,’ he said. ‘A mad letter from a mad woman.’

Praxis drank too much at the party: she watched Ivor dance with, kiss and fondle in turn Beryl, Sandra, Sue and Raquelle. He watched to see if she was watching, and she obliged him by doing so. She looked and felt pained, which was as he wanted it to be. Ivor, usually so attentive, so discreet. She did not join the dancing, a kind of musical chairs, in which, whenever the music stopped, the women peeled off a further garment.

‘Don’t be such a wet blanket,’ said Carol, spitefully, as she passed, bare breasts pressed up against Ivor’s suit. When the keys were given out, Ivor got Carol and Rory got Praxis. Praxis had understood that she and Ivor were the prizes of the evening: the last to succumb to the communal madness.

She walked home with Rory. The moon shone. Nature was calm.

She could almost believe she was walking next to Ivor. She pretended that she was.

Dutifully, in bed, she performed her seductive tricks, summoning them out from memory. Had she once been, nightly, so generous?

‘I knew you’d be hot stuff,’ Rory said, entranced. She shuddered. She really could not spend her life amongst these people.

Rory went and Ivor returned in the early hours, and lay still and sleepless beside her. Presently she heard him crying. I seem to have heard that for so long, she thought, from so many people. Women in relation to men: men to women. There must be something wrong. She slept and so did he.

In the morning Ivor was as he had been before the advent of Hilda’s letter; he was kind, affectionate, and uncritical. He made no mention of the previous night, and nor did she. They went to no more of Rory and Carol’s parties; Rory came round once or twice to issue special invitations but soon gave up. Praxis recognised Carol’s voice on the phone, asking for Ivor, but Ivor was brusque and unfriendly with her and the calls stopped.