Praxis (9 page)

On this particular Saturday night, Miss Leonard had arrived home to find the lights on, and Praxis presumably awake and out of bed, and rather than be discovered so eccentrically dressed, had returned to the esplanade. This time, courteously accosted by a respectable man with an educated accent, she did not run home, but fell into step beside him. He had lost his wife, so he said, in the Coventry air raids. Now he lived with his son. They went to bed together in a poky back bedroom, where a gas-fire, fed by sixpences, spluttered and smelt. The bed creaked.

Miss Leonard’s unaccustomed arms clasped thin limbs and a bony chest: she had expected more weight, more solidity. But that had been long ago: and had she been wrong then, and had it not been love she felt, but simple lust? Had she all these years regretted the loss of something not lost at all, but freely available in the bodies of all men: or had chance brought her something rare and extraordinary, something so composed of tenderness as only to be called love? Miss Leonard cried out in orgasm.

‘Hush,’ he said, embarrassed. ‘Hush,’ and she felt ashamed. Though she sought and recognised qualities in him—such as intelligence, education and gentleness—he saw in her only an ageing tart with a swinging handbag. What else could he see? He got out of bed and went to the bathroom. When he comes back, Miss Leonard thought, I’ll tell him who I really am, what I really am. Not a whore at all, but a school-teacher, to be taken seriously, loved and appreciated. Looked after, and looking after. For ever. He’ll believe me, he’ll forgive me. In her mind Miss Leonard re-papered the dismal room; filled it with flowers: she was his wife. One of those strange wartime marriages: but happy, how happy: happiness snatched out of loss, desolation, violence. His wife, pulped beneath falling masonry: and Miss Leonard’s true love, dull dead body hanging on barbed wire, pecked at by crows forming the comfort out of which such rare and lovely flowers grew.

When he came back and moved on top of her again, she was surprised. Surely this was the time for affection? She found his body heavy, his actions painful—and realising it was not the father but the son, struggled and cried out.

‘Did I take you by surprise?’ he asked, though not desisting ‘Didn’t he tell you I was next? Don’t worry I’ll give you extra. What’s the matter? What difference can it make to you?’

He left an extra pound on the dressing-table when he had finished.

‘Let yourself out,’ he said. ‘No hurry.’

Miss Leonard heard the lights of the house switched off, one by one, upstairs and down and all was presently silent. She dressed and let herself out, and shivered in the night air. She felt serviceable and useful, but second-rate and in need of cleaning: like some old chipped saucepan, pulled from the back of a cupboard: good enough as a receptacle but hardly for haute cuisine. Well, as one valued oneself, so one was valued. She must tell Praxis that, in the morning.

One her way home she was accosted by a drunken G.I. For ten shillings she allowed herself to be leaned against a wall, her skirt taken up, her knickers down, and herself penetrated by a member as long, pale, lean, cool and strong as the G.I. hands she had often wondered at, so unlike the tense and crooked hands of the English. She remained quite passive herself: he did not seem to notice, but walk on after the incident as if he had been merely relieving himself.

Is that what sex is, wondered Miss Leonard. Such a simple impulse, after all?

Miss Leonard arrived home, bathed, slept, boiled the breakfast eggs, and recommended that Praxis should grow up a carnivore, not a herbivore.

‘You may well be, one in any case,’ she said. ‘You certainly seem to be at the centre of events. A catalyst. Do you know what a catalyst is?’

‘No.’

‘They ought at least to pretend to teach girls science,’ said Miss Leonard.

‘Girls aren’t good at science.’

‘Madame Curie was.’ It was the stock answer, unbelieving and unbelieved.

Miss Leonard presently took Patricia to visit her mother in the Seaview Nursing Home. It was a private establishment: and clean and cheerful. Lucy was sitting in the autumnal sunset, in a flowered wrap, gazing out over concrete emplacements, barbed wire, and the rising and falling tides. She kept her arms rather closely to her sides, as if they rather missed their confinement, but talked charmingly to her daughter, as if to some passing stranger, about the changing moods of the seasons. She was no longer distressed, or distressing.

‘What about the others?’ Praxis asked Miss Leonard.

‘What others?’

‘The others still in strait-jackets.’

Miss Leonard stared at Praxis.

‘Don’t tell me,’ she said, ‘you’re going to be the sort who cares about others.’ But she seemed pleased rather than otherwise.

The time for Miss Leonard’s monthly period came and went, and came and went again. She thought it was the Change of Life, and took care to wrap up well in cold winds. ‘Hormonal changes,’ she told herself when she felt sick: and ‘one puts on weight,’ when her waist band would no longer button; and ‘it’s a difficult time’ when she found herself snapping at Praxis for leaving the table uncleared, and crying instead of shouting when her pupils left their homework undone: until her shape was too characteristic of pregnancy to be denied, even to herself.

‘No, I don’t know the father,’ said Miss Leonard to the doctor, ‘it was rape.’

‘Did you go to the police?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘I felt too dirty. I couldn’t even talk about it.’ How she lied! She who was so honest, and honourable. ‘Please do something for me.’

‘There is nothing I can do. Not even in cases of rape is abortion anything other than a criminal act.’

‘But I’m forty-five.’

‘What has that to do with it?’

‘I’ve never had a baby. Isn’t it dangerous?’

‘If it is a question of your life or the baby’s, it is sometimes permitted to sacrifice the baby. Not, of course, if you are a Roman Catholic. Then the newer soul takes precedence.’

‘You mean they’d kill me?’

‘Not directly. But they’d save the baby.’

‘Are you a Roman Catholic?’

He was an elderly man. He shook his head. He smiled. He didn’t believe her story of rape.

‘No. But I know God’s work when I see it. I am afraid this pregnancy is your punishment. Believe me, those who pay the penalty for their sins in this world, not in the next, are indeed blessed.’

Miss Leonard went to other doctors, who declined to help. Many showed her the door, outraged at the notion that they should connive at murder. Others expressed sympathy, but did not, could not, risk imprisonment on her account.

Miss Leonard confided all to Praxis.

When Praxis had reassessed her vision of Miss Leonard, which took the best part of a week—shock modifying to surprise, surprise to disapproval, disapproval to acceptance, she observed, ‘It seems extraordinary to me that in a world in which men are killing each other by the million, they should strike such attitudes about an unborn foetus.’

Miss Leonard, through her distraction, felt she had done well with Praxis. Praxis had joined the Peace Pledge Union. She was now a pacifist. It was not a popular thing to be, but now that she was freed from the worst of her inner preoccupations, Praxis was left, with sufficient energy to strike the difficult moral attitudes suitable to her years.

‘If men won’t help,’ said Praxis, ‘perhaps women will.’

Praxis went to visit Mrs. Allbright, that soft, honey-coloured creature.

‘Tell your friend,’ said Mrs. Allbright, ‘that abortion is a wicked thing, against God’s law and man’s. No, of course I don’t know any addresses. What your friend should do is have the baby and put it in a home, or have it adopted. There are Charitable Societies which will take the baby away at six weeks, and see to the whole thing for you.’

‘Isn’t that rather hard for the mother? To wait six weeks? Why can’t they take it away at birth?’

‘The mother must be given every opportunity to change her mind, Pattie. She must realise exactly what she’s done, and what she’s giving up. No use just brushing these things under the carpet, or society will collapse into total immorality. It’s only the fear of pregnancy which keeps girls on the straight and narrow.’

Young Mrs. Allbright, still childless, was trying to please her husband (increasingly irritable) and seduce God (increasingly inaccessible) by adopting the views of the first Mrs. Allbright, as if by some sympathetic magic she too might be as fertile as her predecessor. She worried about Mr. Allbright’s feeling for his middle daughter, now fifteen, which was increasingly displayed in huggings, strokings and kissing. A heightened sexuality, she could see, was a double-edged sword. The pleasure extracted by the body must be repaid by the mind, in the form of anxiety. Nothing was for nothing.

‘I hope you’re not a close friend of this particular girl, Pattie,’ said Mrs. Allbright. ‘I know that thanks to Mr. Hitler we’re all jumbled up next to each other, saints and sinners, and it may even be no bad thing, but do please be careful not to get into bad company. I hope Miss Leonard keeps a strict eye on you. What news of Hilda?’

Hilda was in her second year at Somerville. She was expected to get a first. Praxis said as much.

‘There’s such a thing as being too clever,’ sighed Mrs. Allbright. ‘So difficult to find a suitable husband.’

Praxis went to visit Judith, who by now had three small children, all with swarthy complexions and dark, watchful eyes. Her husband was in hospital with stomach pains. Judith wrote an address and handed it to Praxis. ‘So you’re in trouble,’ she said. ‘Like mother, like daughter.’

All Judith’s children were boys.

‘It’s not me,’ protested Praxis, ‘it’s my friend.’

‘That’s what they all say,’ said Judith. ‘You are so like your mother. A hypocrite. Well, fortunately I don’t hold grudges. There’s your address. It’ll cost you five pounds.’

‘Is it safe?’

‘It’s done me often enough. I’m still alive.’

‘Does it hurt?’

‘Of course it hurts.’

When Miss Leonard and Praxis knocked at the suggested door, there was no reply. Dingy lace curtains were drawn over dusty windows. Dogs had been at the dustbins, and household refuse was scattered over the paths.

‘Too late,’ said an elderly neighbour, scarf over curlers, cigarette in the mouth. ‘She’s doing five years. One of them finally died. I’m surprised it didn’t happen before. Dirt! You should have seen it. As for the inside of her dustbins—but she wouldn’t listen. Dead ignorant. Good-hearted, but dead ignorant.’

Miss Leonard was to have her baby. By the time she found an abortionist her condition was public knowledge, her job was lost, and the baby too developed to be safely removed.

‘It’s your fault,’ she said to Praxis. ‘If you hadn’t chosen that night to wander about, none of it would have happened.’

These days Miss Leonard was childish and tearful; it was left to Praxis to be sensible and reassuring.

Mr. Robinson the children’s officer appeared, to see if perhaps Praxis was in moral danger, and concluded it was too late to worry. In any case, where else could she go? 109 Holden Road had found no buyer. Miss Leonard swelled, and lumbered, and knitted. Praxis studied, attended to her lessons, and to the cooking. Hilda appeared, briefly, from Somerville. She was in the middle of exams, and suffering the effects of stress. She was pale, dark-eyed, and certain that Miss Leonard’s baby was the Immaculate Conception of the Anti-Christ. She wrote to Butt and Sons asking them to withdraw Praxis’ and Lucy’s allowance—all their trouble she maintained, could be traced back to tainted money. Praxis managed to switch envelopes so that an empty one was dispatched instead. Hilda went away.

‘She doesn’t really want to damage me,’ Praxis said to Miss Leonard, ‘only herself in me.’

‘There is such a thing,’ said Miss Leonard, ‘as being too forgiving.’

Miss Leonard would sit stroking her swollen stomach. Now she had decided to keep the baby she had grown to love it. She had high hopes for its future: of the world into which it would be born. Hitler was in retreat: the seeds of a new Jerusalem sewn thick in the churned-up soil of old England, waiting for the sun of freedom to shine, and the rain of equality to fall.

‘I wonder whose it is,’ she would say. ‘The father’s, the son’s, or the American’s? I hope it was the American. He was so tall, and clean, and free. He didn’t care. I would like to have a baby who didn’t care. Someone to take its pleasure and move on.’

Miss Leonard went into labour on the day that Praxis sat her first Higher School Certificate examination. English language. Praxis had worried about leaving Miss Leonard alone that morning, but had gone all the same. Her future loomed larger than Miss Leonard’s present.

Miss Leonard died waiting for the ambulance to arrive: a London-aimed buzz-bomb—shot down over the Channel, but not quite in time—came down not in the sea as had been hoped, but just inland. By the kind of miracle, half-good, half-bad, which seemed to attend bombing raids, and made for memorable headlines and tales of valour and hair’s-breadth escape, Miss Leonard was killed, her torso crushed, but the baby was saved. The umbilical cord was literally bitten through by a woman passer-by, who later collapsed from shock, but not before snatching the child from the mother, seconds before bed, room, dead Miss Leonard, canary, kettle and all toppled into a crater, just as the ambulance arrived. The row of battened doors, falling, made a kind of coffin lid, or so it seemed to Praxis, coming home from school.

‘I told you,’ said Hilda. ‘Anti-Christ. A female anti-Christ. Anti-Christs are female. Pattie, you take trouble with you wherever you go.’

Pattie could see that it might well be so. She sat the rest of her examinations, but in retrospect could remember nothing about them. She did well, however, and was accepted by Reading University. She stared and stared at the letter of acceptance, but it did not seem to mean what it should. She could feel on her face that expression of angry distaste which so characterised her sister Hilda.

Mrs. Allbright took in the baby, christened Mary, and for a time, Pattie. The first Mrs. Allbright, she felt, would have done no less.