Praxis (32 page)

Irma, Raya and Tracey were bringing out a weekly broadsheet, devoted to the wrongs done to women by society. Bess rode round on a bicycle and pushed it through letter boxes. Praxis, shocked by its grammar and the general inefficiency of its production, offered to edit the broadsheet. The offer was reluctantly accepted by a group decision.

‘We’re not writing propaganda,’ said Irma. ‘We don’t want any of your selling copy or slogans. But since you have more time than the rest of us, I suppose it would be silly for us to refuse.’

The broadsheet grew into a newspaper. Praxis was its editor. She wrote rousing editorials, which she half believed, and half did not, in the same way as she had half believed, half not, her own advertisements for the Electricity Board. But she felt she was righting some kind of balance. She still occasionally thought of suicide, but knew it could never be done before the next issue, and there was always a next issue to be thought of.

‘When did you become a convert to the Women’s Movement?’ someone asked her, eventually, and Praxis realised that this was what she had in fact become. Ideas which once had seemed strange now seemed commonplace, and so much to her advantage that she was surprised to remember how, in the past, she had resisted them.

She was a convert: she wished to proselytise. She wished all the women in the world to think as she thought, do as she did; to join in sisterhood in a happier family than the world had ever known.

‘I can’t really say,’ she replied. ‘It comes to some as a flash of light. For me it was a gradual thing.’ And she laughed, but nervously. She saw it as a religious experience: she stood divested of the trappings of the past, naked (with a body no longer proud and beautiful) humble before a new altar, in the knowledge of the Daughter of God, reborn.

Wherever she went she saw women betrayed, exploited and oppressed. She saw that women were the cleaners, the fetchers, the carriers, the humble of the earth, and that they were truly blessed.

She saw that men’s lives were without importance and that only the lives of women were significant. She lost her belief in the man-made myths of history—great civilisations, great art, great empire. The male version of events.

She was, for a time, elated. And in her writings, being elated, attracted no little attention. The women in the office, the women in the wider world, listened to what she had to say, and believed her.

Praxis thought that perhaps now she was safe: that having lost her little loves, her shoddy griefs and pointless troubles—lost them all in the vast communal sea of women’s tears—that she was immune, saved by her faith from more distress.

Follow me, the Daughter of God, and you shall be saved.

But she was wrong. She had a faith, but she was not divine. Human lives travel through time like the waves of the sea, rising to peaks of experience, falling again, garnering new strength, to rise once more. There is no finite point at which we can say, ah, I have arrived: I am saved: I am rich, successful, happy. ‘We wake the next morning and see that we are not.

And there is perhaps a force abroad—or in ourselves—which demands that sacrifice is a part of faith. That Abraham must sacrifice Isaac, to prove that God exists.

Mary turned up at the newspaper office. She had a small child on either hand. She wore a neat, inexpensive suit and looked what she was, a housewife up to London for the day. Praxis took her to lunch at a department store, where high chairs were provided for the children, and a special fish finger and chips lunch served at reasonable prices.

‘Edward’s left me,’ said Mary.

‘He just sailed off one day,’ said Mary. Took a crewing job on a yacht going to Madeira, and went with the evening tide.’

‘Sailing was all he ever cared about,’ said Mary. ‘And of course once I had the children I couldn’t go out with him and he resented that.’

‘I don’t blame him,’ said Mary. ‘He was in love with boats. We must have been very boring, in comparison. He wasn’t a very clever man, so I used to keep the conversation down to a certain level, for his sake. So I daresay I never showed at my best.’

‘He hankered so after distant oceans and far-off harbours,’ said Mary, ‘and of course in Brighton you can always hear the sea. Even in bed all night.’

‘We were always all right in bed,’ said Mary. ‘You think that must mean something, but it doesn’t’

‘In retrospect,’ said Mary, ‘I can’t really think why I married him. I think it might have been so the children could be born. They are very special children.’

She looked fondly at their two quite ordinary faces, smeared with tomato sauce and chocolate ice-cream, and leaned over to wipe their mouths with the tissues provided by the management.

‘The universe isn’t magic,’ said Praxis, crossly, but even as she said it, knew that she was wrong.

‘When the children are at school,’ said Mary, ‘I’ll try and get back into medicine. It will be difficult, because of course I’ve lost six years. But I don’t regret them. The children, that is: or the years.’

‘I might try and go to America,’ said Mary. ‘My father was an American, wasn’t he?’

Mary leaned forward and arranged a straighter parting in her daughter’s hair. She did not meet Praxis’ eye. Praxis knew that she wanted information. Well, why not? The world had changed around them both. Causes for shame, disgrace, embarrassment and shock were not what they were. ‘He might have been,’ said Praxis. ‘Your mother certainly hoped he was. She wanted you to be open and free, and so you are.’

‘When I was thirteen,’ said Mary, ‘I had an anonymous letter. It said my mother was a prostitute and so were you.’

‘Of course she wasn’t. She was a respectable teacher of English literature. She was forty-five. She went out one night and slept with three men. A middle-aged and intelligent school-teacher, his son, and a passing G.I. of pleasant demeanour and aspect.’

‘Did she do it for money?’

‘Of course not.’ Enough was enough.

‘It might have happened to anyone,’ said the cool, clear young voice of the Seventies. ‘Of course in those days it was a problem getting contraceptives.’

‘Yes.’

‘Did she try to get rid of me ?’

‘Not very hard.’

‘I’m a clear argument against abortion,’ said Mary. ‘And then I was plucked living, like Caesar,’ said Mary, ‘from my dead mother’s womb.’

‘Yes.’ Praxis felt tears pressing against her eyelids.

‘It must all mean something,’ said Mary. ‘I expect so,’ but what it was, Praxis could not remember.

‘And then you rescued me from a wicked clergyman’s wife.’

‘They weren’t wicked. Just neglectful.’

‘You were very young. You gave up a lot to do it.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Willy told me.’

‘It wasn’t all that much,’ said Praxis, diffidently.

‘Just your life,’ said Mary. ‘Well, never mind. Good actions are never wasted.’ She spoke firmly, as if she knew.

Praxis paid the bill. Mary sorted out her children and scooped them up. They went up and down in the lift, Mary holding the children so they could press the buttons.

‘I seem to have difficulty,’ said Praxis, out of nothing, into nowhere, ‘in actually loving a man, in any permanent sense.’

‘Some do,’ said Mary, blithely. ‘Most, I daresay.’

‘What can I do about it?’ Mary was half Praxis’ age. Why she enquired, she did not know.

‘What you’re doing, I expect,’ said Mary. ‘You learn to love the world enough to want to change it’

Mary went back to Brighton and Praxis to her office, where she viewed rather differently the women who came and went. Those whom she had privately regarded as rejected, humiliated, obsessive, angry and ridiculous, she began to see as brave, noble, and attempting, at any rate, to live their lives by principle rather than by convenience. All kinds of women—young and old, clever, slow, pretty, plain; the halt and the lame, the sexually confused, or fulfilled, or indifferent, battered wives, raped girls, vicious virgins, underpaid shop assistants, frustrated captains of industry, violent schoolgirls, women exploited and exploiting; but all turning away from their inner preoccupations and wretchedness, to regard the outside world and see that it could be changed, if not for themselves, it being too late for themselves, then at least for others.

Praxis smarted and fumed on Mary’s account. Irma merely shrugged.

‘That’s what it’s like,’ she said. Irma was grey and drawn in the face. She had been to the hospital for tests.

‘They want to take my womb out,’ said Irma. ‘It’s the current preoccupation of male surgeons. If they can only remove the whole thing, lock, stock and barrel, take away what women have and they don’t, then that must be an improvement.’

‘But Irma—’ said Praxis.

‘Individual life is not so important,’ said Irma. ‘What are we? Little centres of identity winking in and winking out! It’s the manner of living that matters: not the length of the life. I don’t want to drag on and on. Do you?’

‘Yes,’ said Praxis.

Phillip’s film, ‘Flood’, released after more than two years of delays, was not a success. It lacked, critics complained, grandeur of concept and scale. He was a television director at heart, and it showed. What would do on the living-room box was not enough for the big screen. Working in television had, they alleged, cut him down to manikin size, and worse, had made him mean. If millions had been spent, as alleged, it simply did not show. Serena, they complained, was getting fat, and was red-rimmed about the nostrils in several scenes. If the leading lady had a cold in the nose, then shooting should be delayed. It would have been in the old days. Modern films, the general consensus was, clustering round Phillip’s film like blowflies around a god-given joint of meat inadvertently left out of the fridge, were not what they were. In the old days camera crews and technicians had risked death to obtain their desired effects—had not an entire film crew been decapitated by the knives on the chariot wheels in the original Ben Hur?—but it was obvious that the team working on Phillip’s film hadn’t even risked getting their feet wet.

And so on.

Praxis was pleased to be able to say ‘poor Phillip’. Victoria moved out of her father’s house and slept alternately on Irma’s sofa or Praxis’ floor. Serena had become fanatical about yoga and refused to serve meat, or have cigarettes or alcohol, consumed in the house. Jason took a job as a gardener in one of the royal parks and declined to give it up when the time came to go back to University. The majority of the other gardeners, he alleged, were honours graduates, and he found the conversation in the potting sheds more illuminating than any he had encountered at college.

Phillip, listening to this nonsense, hit his son, and Jason hit back.

‘Next time,’ said Jason, ‘I’ll use a shovel and that will be the end of you.’ But he apologised the next day.

The household was under considerable strain. Serena’s baby had infantile eczema, and cried and cried, and scratched and scratched, and had to be fed on goat’s milk, and dressed in muslin and receive Serena’s full attention. Phillip could not sleep. Work dried up again. Serena and the baby spent most of their nights in the spare room. The royal child, confused by the ups and downs in his life, wet his bed and soiled his pants. Serena, her eyes wide with strain and dismay, did her breathing exercises, started each day with a glassful of wine vinegar and honey, and achieved the lotus position, but little else.

She called to see Praxis in her editorial office. She held her thin baby with its skull-like head and staring, anguished eyes, against her bosom.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I realise now what I did to you. I didn’t then.’

Together they studied the baby: its scaly face, its raw limbs.

‘I think she’ll be all right in the end,’ said Serena. ‘They say she may grow out of it when she’s three. In the meantime I have to watch her suffer. I think I’d rather be dead, and I know she would, but they don’t let you. Everyone has to go on trying.’

‘She’s your child, not theirs,’ said Praxis, mildly.

‘Yours to pay for,’ said Serena, ‘not yours for deciding what’s best.’

Serena went home and Praxis went off to a television studio to take part in a discussion on the reform of the abortion laws. She was recognised in the street these days. Some smiled, and nudged each other: a few came up to her and abused her as a mass-murderer, killer of unborn children.

‘I saw you on telly last night,’ wrote Mary from Brighton. ‘I expect you’re right but I feel you’re wrong. I spent most part of a year on a gynae ward. I was the one who got blood on my surgical gloves, remember, actually doing abortions. I’d do it happily for the older women, who at least knew what was going on and were as distressed as I was, but I resented having to do it for the girls who used me as a kind of last-ditch contraceptive, because they didn’t want their holiday interfered with. Or am I being like one of those people from South Africa who when you say something about apartheid say, listen, I live there, I know what it’s like?’

‘I have a job!’ wrote Mary from Brighton. ‘It’s in Toronto. Not quite the States but getting near. In a big general hospital. There’s a creche for the children: they actually seem to want me, kids and all! So you see, my life wasn’t finished, merely postponed, by my marriage. I’m doing better than you!’

‘Trouble, I’m afraid,’ wrote Mary from Brighton. ‘The job’s off. I’m pregnant. I met this married man at a party—’

Praxis took the train to Brighton. Mary was pale, thin, and suffering from bouts of vomiting. Carla came in daily to help with the children. The house was cold and sparsely furnished. Mary lived on Social Security benefits.

‘You’re a qualified doctor,’ said Praxis, white with fury. ‘You must know about contraceptives.’

‘I don’t like contraceptives,’ said Mary, calmly. ‘They’re anti-life. I associate sex with procreation, and that’s that. I’m not a Catholic; I don’t go for the Jesus stuff; but I do understand what the Pope is going on about. Life is either sacred, or it’s not. People are either meant or they’re not. I believe I am sacred and that my existence has some purpose. And I’m sorry, but I have been more convinced of it ever since you told me about my mother.’