Praxis (5 page)

Elaine’s father kept a corner grocery shop. Lucy did not approve of the friendship.

‘You’re going too far,’ complained Elaine, at the end of term. Patricia became a source of half-envy, half-disapproval to her classmates. The pretence of crushes was common enough: the real swooning, genuine thing was rare—the pallor, the trembling of the hand, the dizziness of the head, the obsessive dreams at night of a touch, a smile; the lingering in corridors, the watching of doors, and for what? For nothing. For attention from the loved object, which could only make the affliction worse, not better. No other outcome was possible. No touch, no kiss, no declaration.

Patricia started to bleed, one day. Crimson drops appeared on her legs. A scratch, a nick? No, it came from between her legs, where she never looked, or felt: from some hidden dreadful, internal wound. Patricia ran to her sister, crying.

‘I don’t know what it is,’ said Hilda, looking up from her French verbs. ‘It’s very messy, anyway. Go and tell mother.’

‘Perhaps it will stop,’ said Patricia, hopefully. But it didn’t.

Patricia went to her mother.

‘I don’t believe it,’ said her mother, aghast. ‘Fifteen is the proper age. Now if it had been Hilda—’ Lucy went to the linen cupboard, chose the most threadbare of the sheets, tore them into ten neat strips, assembled a piece of white tape into a belt, found two safety pins and handed them to Patricia.

Patricia cried all night. Five-twenty-eights of her life gone, stolen, and for no other reason than that she was a woman.

‘Of course men can’t know you when you’re unclean,’ said Hilda. ‘It says so in the Bible. That’s why it’s called the curse. It’s God’s punishment.’

‘For what?’

‘Giving Adam the apple, I suppose.’

‘He didn’t have to eat it’

‘Yes he did. If someone offers you food, it’s only manners to take it. Why are you always so argumentative?’

A war with Germany had started, largely unnoticed by Patricia, who was too busy considering herself to pay the outside world much attention. Barbed wire covered the beaches. She could not swim if she wanted to, even on the twenty-three days allowed every four weeks by the curse. It was all clearly part of life’s plan.

The signposts were turned the wrong way round to confuse German spies. Lucy stopped defending Hitler and his attitude to the Jews.

Henry’s photographic studio closed. Holidaymakers no longer thronged the promenade. The sellers of candy-floss and placards departed: the donkeys disappeared. Windows were shuttered, and the waterfront deserted. The pretty waves fell and retreated on barbed wire and blocks of concrete, whose purpose no one could determine. By night, the blackout was total: the streets were thronged with breathing, sighing shapes which might have been human and might not.

Henry was fortunate to find a job taking photographs of conscripts at the local recruitment centre. The hours were shorter and the money better than he was accustomed to. He bought a new suit and developed a military air—Lucy asked him back into the dining-room, and started referring to him as ‘your cousin’, and not ‘the lodger’. He shouted at Judith if the soup was not to his liking, and the standard of food improved amazingly in spite of the shortages brought about by the war.

Judith lowered and glowered, but did not hand in her notice. No one bothered to wonder why.

Henry became something of a father to the girls: inspecting their nails for dirt and their hair for tangles before they left for school, as if they were very young children and not accustomed to caring for themselves.

Hilda’s sallow plainness was gone. She was sultry, willowy and intense, and kept her eyes cast down, fixed upon her Greek translation.

Lucy had lately seemed indifferent to the girls’ behaviour and appearance: she became secretive, hiding underwear and plates of food about the house for no apparent reason. With Henry’s return to the upstairs part of the house, she became brighter and brisker; even went out on occasion to bridge parties: took the girls to the cinema on Saturday afternoons, and became quite animated and vociferous about the lipsticked girls who hung about the army camps.

Perhaps Henry visited her room by night: perhaps not. If he did, by the morning she had wiped it from her memory. Perhaps he crept to the attics and Judith’s hard bed. Perhaps not.

Hilda and Patricia were instructed to come straight home after school, for fear of licentious soldiery.

Lucy began to hoard. The cellar was full of rancid butter, mouldy flour, rusty tins—anything. Why and how she did it no one knew.

‘A brave little woman,’ said the vicar. ‘So many of our women are now left alone.’ And so they were. Those who in peacetime were expected to need male protection, in wartime were assumed to be able to manage perfectly well. And so they did.

‘Judith’s a very funny shape,’ said Patricia to her mother. ‘Like Peggy the cat when she was having kittens, only upright.’

When Judith brought in the paste sandwiches for tea Lucy stared at her for a little and then rose and followed her to the kitchen.

Patricia heard raised voices. After some minutes Lucy returned and sent Patricia to fetch the vicar.

A maid ushered Patricia in to the vicarage study. Mrs. Allbright had lately died. The children had been sent to boarding school. The house was cheerless: the vicar’s study darkened—the blackout curtains were still in place, although outside the sun blazed. The vicar sat, as if puzzled, at his desk.

‘Can you come?’ asked Patricia. ‘Mother needs you.’

‘Why?’ ‘I don’t know.’

‘Nobody needs me,’ said the vicar. Slowly, he unbuttoned his trouser fly and watched, as if with amazement, while his penis rose of its own volition and stood pointing towards heaven. It seemed he did not know what to make of it: nor, indeed, did Patricia. She was still out of breath from running. Something terrible had happened at home, and something terrible was happening here. As they both watched, the strange pillar of mottled flesh decreased, shrunk and wilted. Tears stood in the vicar’s eyes.

‘I do miss her,’ he said, confidingly. ‘You’ve no idea.’ He buttoned his fly.

‘Good heavens,’ he said, blinking at Patricia. ‘I’d no idea there was anyone there.’

‘Vermin,’ said the vicar, as they walked back together to Holden Road, to confront Judith’s sin. ‘Vermin.’

Nazi planes, on their way back from bombing raids, would offload any remaining bombs over the towns of the channel coast, and occasionally shoot up streets and playgrounds with the last of their ammunition. The rattle of ack-ack guns was constantly in their ears.

Judith was sent away. Henry left too. Lucy roamed the house. She seldom slept. Patricia found it difficult to believe in the reality of the world, so oddly was it arranged.

Only her love for Louise seemed real: and that was because it hurt.

Patricia told Elaine what she had seen in the vicar’s study.

‘It’s a penis,’ said Elaine. ‘My little brother plays with his. He got an infection and it swelled up. Served him right if they’d had to cut it off.’

Miss Mercier, the French-mistress, elegant and buck-toothed passed by, and saw them whispering, heads together.

‘Pas de whispering,’ said Miss Mercier, brightly, spinning them apart with red-taloned hands. She glittered with ferocity. Her home town was occupied by the Germans: she was trapped here in this barbarian land, with dough-faced dumpy ignoramuses of English girls. ‘Pas de whispering!’ Fräulein Bechter, her only friend, had been whisked off to the Isle of Man, to an internment camp. No one protested: no one seemed to even notice.

Perhaps she herself would be next No one could tell for sure whether the French were gallant allies, or wretched traitors.

‘Pas de whispering,’ said Miss Mercier, savagely, and reeled Patricia and Elaine apart, as once she’d flung a bucket of cold water over two mating dogs, who seemed unable to separate. The effect, from the look on their faces, was as much of a shock.

Patricia had become argumentative.

‘I don’t see why Judith had to go,’ said Patricia to Hilda, ‘it would be lovely to have a baby in the house.’

‘Not that kind of baby,’ said Hilda. ‘Not a bastard.’

‘But it’s not the child’s fault.’

‘All kinds of things are nobody’s fault, but that’s not the point; like being a Jew, or blind, or deaf, or a bastard; it’s just the way you’re born.’

‘Or a woman,’ said Patricia. She was sweeping the floors, having sprinkled tea-leaves first, to keep the dust down. Since Judith had left, the girls shared the housework between them.

Lucy seemed incapable of doing it.

‘What do you mean?’

‘If I was a boy I’d be allowed to get on with my homework—I wouldn’t have to sweep the floors first.’

The Reverend Allbright asked Lucy to take Judith back into the household. Times were hard. There was a war on. Allowances had to be made.

The vicar returned a week later with the news that Mr. Whitechapel was to marry Judith. He had persuaded him to it. ‘Our best chance of happiness in this world,’ said Mr. Allbright, ‘is to do what we ought, not what we want.’

Lucy took to her bed: she seemed frightened. She insisted that Hilda keep the doors locked, night and day. She would not see a doctor. No one came to the house. There was no money to buy food. Hilda brought up the hoarded food from the cellar, and they ate sardines and condensed milk for breakfast and dinner. There was no money for school dinners, so Patricia and Hilda went home at midday. They walked together, but seldom talked. They looked over their shoulders frequently, and jumped at sudden noises. Their mother’s room stank like a stable. She would not let them clean it.

Patricia started a diary, part fact, part fantasy. She simplified the vicar’s act of self-exposure into a rape: turned Miss Mercier into a German spy, and described in detail how Louise Gaynor had kissed her behind the bicycle sheds after a school concert.

Hilda went through her mother’s papers, and wrote to Butt and Sons explaining her situation and asking for money. They agreed to increase the allowance, and sent an immediate postal order for thirty shillings, with which they could buy their rations.

‘I think mother’s gone mad,’ Patricia said to Hilda one day. The house was cold. Hilda and Patricia gathered driftwood from the beaches for the fires, but ‘Danger - Mines’ signs had recently gone up and they were more afraid of explosions than cold.

‘Don’t ever say that,’ said Hilda, leaning over and slapping Patricia’s face hard, using Lucy’s sharp, strange voice, so that Patricia herself felt doubly betrayed. There was little to choose, she sometimes felt, between mother and sister.

But one day Lucy got up and cleaned her room. The next day she came out into the house, and when Patricia and Hilda came home from school she was in the kitchen making tea. She had lit the fire and made sardine sandwiches. She found fault with the buttons missing from Patricia’s blazer. She was so thin her ribs stuck through her dress, and she seemed unsteady on her legs, but she smiled and was brisk and seemed herself again. Patricia stopped writing in her diary. Now it was over, she described it all to Elaine.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘It was too dreadful to talk about. Some things are.’

Miss Leonard the English teacher asked Patricia and Elaine to tea. She gave them scones with butter (given to her by Elaine’s father) and talked about love, and about how her fiancé had been killed in the First World War, and how cruel war was.

‘Love is so important,’ she said. Patricia began to cry, for no reason that she could think of.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked Miss Leonard, distressed. She had a soft, round, floury face and grey soft curls and scarlet lips. But Patricia merely shook her head.

Lucy read Patricia’s diary. Patricia came home to find her mother not her mother, but some glassy-eyed, violent, mad stranger. There was an elderly policeman in the room; her own diary open: and her mother hissing abuse at her, from a distance, as if to come near would be to risk pollution.

‘Little Jewess, after all. Sly little lesbian. Little slut. Filthy, dirty little piece of slime. Little bastard.’ The policeman attempted to intercede, but failed, and presently gave up and left. There was a war on.

Lucy would only speak to Patricia through Hilda.

‘Hilda, tell your sister I shall go to the head-mistress tomorrow. It’s no use her telling lies. It will all come out.’

‘All what?’ Patricia beseeched. ‘All what?’

‘Don’t speak to me,’ said Lucy. ‘The gutter’s where you belong. Rolling around in filth and slime.’

She did strange things that night: arranging the sheets of her bed into a tent at the top of the staircase: putting the tea-pot into the coal cellar. Hilda let Patricia into her bed to sleep. They lay together, quiet and sleepless. On the other side of the blackout curtains searchlights made moving patterns.

‘Let me die tonight,’ prayed Patricia for the first but not the last time in her life. ‘Let me sleep now and never wake up.’ But she knew she would not be allowed to die. She could hear her mother singing now, loudly. A tuneless, repetitive sound, as she locked and unlocked the front door; clicked the lock this way, now clicked it that way.

‘What shall we do?’ asked Patricia of Hilda.

‘Do about what?’ enquired Hilda, grimly.

In the morning Lucy was sleeping on the living-room floor.

Patricia and Hilda moved her on to the sofa. She weighed so little one of them could have done it on their own. For the first time it occurred to Patricia that she loved her mother: it was a love compounded with pity, anxiety and fear: but it was love. She covered her with a blanket. Her diary was still lying open. She put it in the kitchen stove and closed the door on it. Hilda watched, silently. Presently they set off for school together, in their navy gym-slips, blazers and blue felt hats, picking their way through the debris which the anti-aircraft battery on the cliffs nightly showered upon the town.

‘I hope the Germans do come,’ said Patricia.

‘On top of everything else,’ said Hilda, ‘you’re a traitor.’

Patricia was summoned to the head-mistress’s office. There she found her diary, charred but still readable, on the head-mistress’s desk. Her mother stood and stared out of the window, and Louise Gaynor stared remotely at her fingertips. ‘And what have you to say, Miss?’ asked the head-mistress, not unkindly.