Praxis (26 page)

Indeed, with the roots of her yellow hair black, and her sore eyes, red from weeping, and the cold in her nose which always accompanied any change in the manner of her living, Praxis did not look her best. Phillip did not seem to mind. He found it restful, he said, after Irma’s lacquered perfection: and the slipslop of Praxis’ slovenly slippers preferable to the brisk and dangerous clatter of Irma’s stiletto heels. They lay with their arms around each other in bed, Praxis snuffling and sighing, Phillip peacefully sleeping.

‘Hilda,’ said Praxis. ‘I might be living with Ivor if someone hadn’t sent him an anonymous letter telling him I’d been a whore before I married him.’ Hilda looked blank.

‘But no one would believe a disgusting thing like that,’ Hilda said, in all sincerity.

‘You really hate me,’ said Praxis. ‘Ever since the beginning you’ve hated me.’

‘That’s childish,’ said Hilda. ‘You’re a mature woman in your thirties and you talk like a six-year-old. It would have been better for everyone if you’d never been born, but that’s not your fault.’

Praxis cried, mildly. Hilda observed her sister, coldly.

‘What’s the matter?’ She sounded curious, rather than concerned.

‘I’ve got no one,’ said Praxis. ‘I’ve never had anyone. Mother, father, you—nobody ever wanted me.’

‘Good heavens,’ said Hilda. ‘You were everyone’s darling. You’ve had man after man ever since I could remember. You even have children. All you seem able to do is throw them away. Look at you! You’re hysterical. I expect you’re pre-menstrual. I’m afraid women are hopelessly handicapped by their biological natures.’

Hilda was doing what she could at the Ministry to block a scheme to introduce women trainee executives into the nationalised industries.

Hilda gathered her neat, spinsterish things together and went back to run the country. Praxis was crying when Phillip returned.

‘She stands me on my head,’ Praxis complained, ‘and shakes every bit of my brain about until it’s addled. She’s always done it. She always will.’

Praxis went to visit Irma; her hands trembled: she had difficulty in breathing: she stood on the wrong platform and missed the train, but she got there. Phillip hadn’t wanted her to go, so she went without his knowledge. He would find out but she would have to put up with that. The cousins lived in a Sussex farmhouse. He was a stockbroker and she bred horses. Irma was the worldly member of the family.

Praxis was coldly received: dogs barked and leapt up at her, and were barely restrained. She was not offered refreshment but taken around to where Irma lay stretched out in a deck-chair, wearing dark glasses. The baby slept in a cot beside her.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Praxis. ‘I think I’ve been mad. I’ll move out at once.’

‘Don’t bother,’ said Irma, ‘I’ve got cancer. I really don’t want Phillip filming my death-throes.’

(‘Of course she hasn’t got cancer,’ said Phillip, savagely. ‘She’s been threatening me with cancer for as long as I can remember. She’ll use anything. Nothing’s sacred.’)

‘No,’ said Irma to Praxis, ‘you stay and be Nanny, and wipe Phillip’s nose for him while he plays make-believe. That house is really terribly hard work. And nothing changes except you have another child, or the ones you’ve got grow older, or some different boring people come to a dinner party you’ve got to wash up after.’

‘I tell you,’ said Irma, ‘unless you wake up in the morning wanting to be alive, there’s no point in any of it. And waking up next to Phillip, I just want to be dead.’

(‘The trouble with Irma,’ said Phillip, ‘is that she’s an acute depressive. Can you imagine what it’s been like, living with a depressive all these years? What it’s been like for the children? What it’s going to be like for the wretched Pulitzer baby? She ought to have been sterilised.’)

‘All the same,’ said Irma, ‘one would always rather leave than be left. He’ll do the same to you, one day. Just watch out for his sense of timing, that’s all. It’s murderous. He nearly killed me. You nearly killed me, Praxis. I didn’t trust him, but I trusted you. Didn’t you have any sense of
me,
at all?’

‘No,’ said Praxis. ‘Not when it came to it.’

‘When we were girls,’ said Irma, ‘it was all fair in love, I seem to remember. A date with a man always took priority over a date with a girl. But now there’s property and children and whole lives at stake, Praxis. Are people speaking to you?’

‘No.’

‘Good,’ said Irma. She didn’t seem to have much strength. She began to cry.

‘I thought you were my friend,’ said Irma. ‘I really did.’

‘I love him,’ said Praxis, ‘and you don’t. I could make him happy.’

Irma looked quite astounded, an expression Praxis had never before seen on her face. Irma took Praxis’ band and laid it against her own cheek.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘Love!’

Praxis cleaned Irma’s home, looked after Irma’s children, slept with Irma’s husband. She was overwhelmed by the notion that someone as malicious as Irma could bear so little malice: and surprised by the knowledge that Irma’s feeling for her ran so much deeper than her own, for Irma.

Presently Irma regained her health and strength, and ceased to be so forgiving.

Writs flew: from Irma, and from Ivor. Damages were claimed. Phillip was away making a film about poverty in the Third World, and came back, to his indignation, with some obscure and debilitating tropical virus. Praxis dealt with the solicitors.

Eventually Phillip was divorced by Irma; Praxis was divorced by Ivor. Phillip had custody of Victoria and Jason, a state of affairs which Irma did not contest. Ivor had custody of Robert and Claire: a state of affairs which Praxis wanted to contest, but did not, under threat from Ivor that he would bring up the subject of the Raffles Esplanade Dive and her moral fitness to bring up children. She was however, granted liberal access to them.

Phillip was required to buy Irma a flat and provide her with maintenance, and was thus further weighted down by practical obligations. He began to count the notes in the wads he handed over for housekeeping. Praxis would have to go out to work.

‘I suppose it’s all been worth it,’ said Praxis, on their wedding night.

‘Of course it has been,’ said Phillip. ‘I’d love to get some handheld cameras into the registrar’s office. Those faces!’

He always kept his eyes open when they made love. Praxis, in these days of love and modesty, rather wished he would not. When the very soul left the body and flew to join in a cosmic ecstasy, the details of the flesh seemed irrelevant. But not apparently to Phillip. He had her enclosed by the square made by his two hands.

He was working for the BBC now: not on the staff, but freelance. His hair was thinning. He played startlingly rough games with Victoria and Jason in the little garden: hurling garden stakes like javelins: narrowly missing neighbours’ cats and children. Victoria and Jason were surprised at, and slightly superior to these outbursts of boisterousness, but joined in, obligingly. Robert and Claire, when they came for the weekends, were nervous and frightened, and would not join in. Robert played with Lego and Claire stroked Irma’s white cat. Praxis felt her children did not really enjoy their time with her, in a house where meals came at irregular hours, no one washed their hands before eating, or particularly said please and thank you. They stared at her wonderingly, with Ivor’s brown eyes, and she felt that she had little to offer them. But they slept soundly at night and did not cry. She would listen at their doors to make sure. Victoria and Jason put up with their presence, but found them boring. Phillip was happy to have his empire spread.

Praxis’ roots grew out. Phillip found her a job in an advertising agency.

‘I thought you despised advertising,’ said Praxis.

‘I don’t see what else a bright and totally untrained person can do,’ said Phillip, ‘except be a school dinner lady.’

‘You didn’t exactly get me the job,’ Praxis murmured, later. ‘I had to do any number of tests.’ She worked in the copy department, writing pamphlets for the Electricity Board.

‘They would never have given you the tests,’ said Phillip, ‘if it hadn’t been for me.’

Whether he was demanding credit or blame, Praxis could not be sure.

‘Women are so fundamentally immoral,’ Phillip would complain, admiringly enough, at dinner parties. ‘They go after what they want, red in tooth and claw. Whether it’s babies, or a man, or sex, or promotion, they let nothing stand in their way. They’re barbarians.’

That was in the days when men were prepared to generalise about women, and women would not argue, but would simper, and be flattered by the attention paid.

It was difficult for Praxis to get to see her mother. There were four children at the weekends—ever since Irma seldom took her pair—the house to run, her job to do, the food to buy, the meals to serve, the clothes to keep washed, ironed and put away and so on. Phillip did not want her to engage a cleaner, let alone house an au pair.

‘It’s nicer without outsiders,’ he said with truth. ‘Don’t worry about standards. Let’s just live.’

Just living, all the same, was exhausting. And he had become accustomed to three-course meals in the evening, complete with cream and brandy.

‘Why don’t you have your mother here,’ asked Phillip, ‘if you worry about her?’

‘Because I’d have to give up my job,’ said Praxis, shortly. She had begun to speak shortly, she felt, rather too often; with such breath as she had left while passing from one task to the next. ‘And your income is so erratic we have to depend on mine.’

If she left the bills to be paid by Phillip, the services would be cut off, and debt collectors would ring the bell, so she paid them herself. It didn’t matter.

‘Don’t worry about money,’ said Phillip. ‘That would be very boring and rather lower middle class.’

She was happier than she ever had been. Or if not happy—it now seemed to her that actual, overflowing happiness was a function of extreme youth, and since she had missed it then, she was not likely to encounter it now: and love was a good deal, but not everything: if not happy, she was at least living an appropriate life, amongst people who did not look at her curiously but understood what she was saying, and responded to it.

She was promoted: she wrote headlines now, and not just body copy, and the small print. She found the work easy. She had an assistant, and a little room with a carpet and pot-plants on the windowsill. She honed and fined sentences down to fill the brief and fit the space available. A daily, day-long crossword puzzle, with people clapping as she fitted the last clue.

‘God made her a woman,’ she wrote blissfully, ‘love made her a mother—with a little help from electricity!’

She found decisions about what to have for dinner more difficult that decisions regarding campaigns, typefaces, art work and so on. Wrangles with the children upset her more than differences with art directors. She would sit at her desk reading recipe books, planning the evening’s menu. Meals at home became more and more elaborate: Phillip came to expect them. He would bring home friends from the film world, and they expected them too. She did not invite home anyone she met and liked in the advertising world. Phillip found them shallow and meretricious.

She remembered what Irma had said, departing, monstrous. ‘Don’t start serving him proper meals; he’ll only come to expect them.’

Too late.

She went to meetings. People listened seriously to what she had to say. Colleagues struggled to avoid blame: Praxis acknowledged her shortcomings impatiently, in order to get on with the work in hand, and home in good time to clean the stairs and get the dustbins out for the next morning. She gained a reputation for efficiency.

Phillip, when he wasn’t working, sat at home and played records, prepared camera scripts, and worked towards a feature film.

‘A house must be a background to one’s life,’ he’d say, ‘not a source of work and effort.’ But he’d complain when it was untidy. He didn’t like to see Praxis busy about the house either. ‘Sit down,’ he’d say. ‘Slow down. What does it matter? I’ve asked people for supper tomorrow. Shall we have Osso Bucco?’

To get Osso Bucco meant a journey into Soho in her lunch-hour. She would accomplish it. Now she had a reputation as a cook, she would not easily let it go.

‘Women’s highest calling,’ she wrote, ‘keeps a woman busy! Here’s how electricity helps a working mother keep calm, keep cool, and the children kissing her goodnight.’ And so on. She was a real discovery, in the agency world. Other agencies tried to poach her. She stayed loyal and got another rise. She was agreeably thin. Clothes looked good on her.

News came from the estate. Diana’s husband had been killed in a car crash, on his way back from a nightclub. His secretary was killed with him. His way back where, people asked. Diana was left with two children. Ivor married her within the month. Love or commonsense? Did it matter? Robert and Claire came less often: when they did Robert was dressed like a little man, in suit, collar and tie: Claire wore a blouse, pleated skirt, white ankle socks and red button shoes. Victoria and Jason, in dirty jeans and sweaters, declined to play with them. Robert played with Lego and yawned: Claire stroked Irma’s cat and missed Diana’s middle daughter, her best friend. Irma left her Justin now just walking, with Praxis, and went off to America for three months.

‘But I’m working,’ said Praxis.

‘According to your advertisements,’ observed Irma, ‘mothers shouldn’t go out to work.’

She had changed her style. She wore sneakers, jeans and no make-up. Her hair was short and fell naturally. She looked more intelligent and less petulant. She had been sterilised.

‘Now I can’t have a baby,’ she said, ‘I feel like a person, not a cipher.’

Praxis was shocked. Praxis was on the pill—as yet unrefined, massive doses of oestrogen and progestin mixed, causing acute depression, blood-clots, oedoema, infertility and in extreme cases, death. Doctors, for the most part, denied these side-effects vigorously, while refraining from prescribing it for their wives. Apart from severe mid-cycle pains, Praxis showed few ill effects. But her daily pill still seemed a daily denial of her femininity, and her femininity her most valuable attribute.