Praxis (17 page)

Elaine and Praxis had tossed up for the privilege of sitting beside him; and that they had never done before. He was wealthy: you could tell from his shirt and his shoes, and not just the thickness of his wallet. Estate agents and farmers could be rich, and often were, flashed gold signet rings and watch-chains to show it, but that was no guarantee that the money would easily come the girls’ way. This man was what Elaine and Praxis described as Bond Street rich: he had an easy affluence.

‘The sort of man,’ as Elaine said romantically, ‘who steps on a bus and finds he doesn’t have the money to pay the fare, because he has better things to do than think about it.’

However, Praxis won the toss, and then wished she hadn’t. He asked her name.

‘Pattie,’ she said.

‘An ordinary name,’ he said, ‘for a not very ordinary young person.’ His blue eyes travelled, with not so much speculation as was usual, but rather, with a contemplative admiration, over her breasts and down to her legs, and up again to meet her eyes, quite frankly.

‘What blue eyes you have,’ he said.

‘I like blue eyes, better than brown,’ she replied. ‘Brown eyes hide feelings: blue eyes show them.’ Hilda had brown eyes.

‘I agree,’ he said, ‘but perhaps that’s just because we both have blue eyes.’

‘We both,’ he had said, and the feeling of inclusion warmed and satisfied her. Nor did he ask, as so many did, what’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this, before going on to make sure that the notion of niceness did not apply. He accepted her right to be there, as much as his own: her right to be penetrated by him, as much as his to penetrate. Nor, on the way to the summer house, did he go behind, or before, as one ashamed, but took her arm in his and walked beside her, talking about himself and her.

Was she married? More or less.

Children? More or less.

‘You don’t say much about yourself,’ he complained.

‘There is so little to say,’ she complained, in return.

‘Only because you have not investigated yourself,’ he maintained, ‘or no one has yet investigated you. If you had, or they had, you would be of infinite interest to yourself.’

‘I am,’ he assured her. ‘I may bore other people, but I never bore myself, and that’s the main thing.’

Did she like Brighton?

‘No,’ she replied.

‘Neither do I,’ he said. ‘It makes me feel desperate. Perched on the end of the world, in danger of falling off. That’s why I’m behaving like a man half my age. I am rather old,’ he apologised.

‘Not nearly so old as some,’ she remarked.

‘If I lived in Brighton,’ he said, presently, as they reached the summer house, ‘more or less married, more or less with children’—he stopped.

What?

‘I’d get out,’ he replied.

Her hands shook as she tried to disengage her brassiere strap.

‘Why are you trembling?’ he asked, doing it for her.

‘I don’t know,’ she replied, truthfully.

‘You’re not new to this?’

She shook her head.

‘It’s the terrible effect I have on people. My wife trembles all the time, but mostly with indignation.’

So, he was married.

She stood naked. He knelt, with his head pressed against her belly, in his grey expensive suit, well manicured hands clasped behind her back.

‘I love young women,’ he said. ‘All young women, any young women. I love to hear them talk, and feel them breathe. They are the centre of the universe. And their centre is the nearest a man can ever get to it. When their centre moves, when I make it move, the world shifts.’

She hardly liked to ask for money.

‘We all try to do it,’ he said, lying white and pale beside her, his skin not young but smooth from health and care. ‘We all try to do it, to move the universe to our way of thinking.’

She wished the sheets were cleaner, less familiar, the bed more unsullied by the fumes, the tears, the odours and the struggles of the many who had lain upon it. He did not seem to mind. What was she to call him? He had not given her a name, and it was not her place to ask for one. What was she, after all? A whore. But titles were absurd, definitions were absurd; she’d always known that: words used to simplify relationships between one person and another: granting one privilege, the other disadvantage. Bastard, Jew, student, wife, mother, prostitute, murderer: all made assumptions that reduced the individual, rather than defined them.

His hands moved over her body, her breast, between her legs.

‘Pattie,’ he said, ‘smile, smile.’

It seemed more indecent than anything she had ever been asked to do.

‘Keep your eyes open: look at me.’

Willy always kept his eyes closed: so did she. Her clients would watch what she did, to herself, or to them: they would look for pain or pleasure on her face, but it was the reaction they needed and one brought about by themselves; but it made no difference whose it was. This man acknowledged her: it was not comfortable or what she wanted.

‘Pattie,’ he repeated. ‘Pattie,’ when she tried to retreat into solitary isolation, bringing her back into contact with him.

His methods were straightforward: himself on top of her: admiring, leisurely, talking at first, later busy and exciting. She cried out, in genuine orgasm: she had all but forgotten how not to feign them.

‘Pattie,’ he said again, ‘Pattie,’ almost as if her climax had been all he wanted, but then he came to his own, and lay there for a time, half asleep.

‘You’re very restful,’ he said, although her mind kept racing ahead to Mary’s return home from school, and the necessity usually fulfilled—of being there first. But she felt, for once, happy where she was.

‘And more beautiful supine than upright,’ he added. ‘All the best women are.’

‘A pity we can’t have children,’ he said. ‘I always want to have children. But I suppose it’s impractical.’

‘Yes,’ said Pattie.

He made no suggestion that he might see her again, and for once, she was disappointed. But what else could she expect? His hand continued to run over hers, however, as if, although the prime purpose of their encounter had been met, his interest and concern for her remained.

‘I used to live in Brighton once,’ he said. ‘It was a terrible time. Before the war. I was more or less married and more or less had children. Lucy, she was called. Loony Lucy. I think she was even more impossible than me, but it was a long time ago. How could one tell? Who was right and who was wrong?’

‘What became of her?’ asked Pattie, eventually. Her mind moved quickly to the defence, while her feelings remained stunned. Incest, she told herself, rapidly, was merely another label: so, come to that, was father. A father was someone who brought up a child: not someone who abandoned it. Incest was something disturbing which happened, inside families.

‘She was provided for,’ he said. ‘I’m sure she was better off without me. People usually are.’

‘And the children?’

‘Better to keep out of their way,’ he said. ‘They were her idea, not mine. It would only be an embarrassment now, to seek them out. It was a long time ago.’

Pattie lay quiet. His hand moved up from her hand, to her arm, to her breast.

‘You’re lovely,’ he said, as if surprised. ‘I want you again. You make me feel young again.’

To commit incest knowingly, Pattie supposed, was a great deal worse than to do so unknowingly and that was bad enough. Oedipus had put out his eyes, and been pursued by furies, for ever after, for such a sin. But she was committing nothing: she was lying there, while her progenitor plunged and flailed in the body of his own creating. She was glad he liked it. She would say nothing. She would take his guilt upon herself.

He was a charming, impossible man; a hopeless, dangerous romantic. No wonder he had driven Lucy mad. Had he lain his head upon her belly, and tried to listen to the breathing of the universe? No doubt, and then gone straight down to the golf-club, listening in to the waitresses’ hot-line to infinity, as well.

Pattie laughed aloud, with bitterness and exultation mixed, at which orgasm shook her body, so that the laughter turned almost to a cry of distress.

‘Christ,’ he said, with reverence. But she had altogether demystified him: turned him from saint to client, from father to man, from someone who must be pleased to someone who could pleasure her. He was a natty, grey-haired old gentleman, spending the afternoon with a provincial whore, and that was all there was to it. As to being her father: he had renounced his rights to that a long time ago.

As if sensing the change in her, his erection wilted and all but died, and she obliged it up again, and used it for her own purposes, and found she could. She had become, at his expense, autonomous, wresting from him what he had failed to offer.

What am I doing here, wondered Praxis. What am I trying to prove, and to whom? Who is there in the world to care how low I’ve sunk; to take the blame for it? It has all been my own doing.

He dressed: Praxis lay naked on the bed and watched. He left her twenty pounds, white five-pound notes. It occurred to her that perhaps the same knowledge had come to him as had to her, mid-intercourse, causing the momentary lapse in psychic energy, the temporary failure of desire.

He paused before he left.

‘So long as this is only part of your life, not all of it,’ he said, and she was conscious once again of affection between him and her: of something he was trying to offer her, within the very narrow limits of what he saw as his responsibility.

‘All right,’ she said, and he gave her the most paternal of pecks upon the forehead, and a rather less paternal one on each of her breasts, and left.

Pattie got up, washed, dressed, went home, packed, met Mary out of school, took a taxi to the station, the train to Waterloo, and within hours was knocking on Colleen’s front door.

A
RGUMENTS FROM NATURE.

It is natural, they told me in prison, waving their keys, to want to be free. The prison I was in, actually, had a secure perimeter, but once inside the high brick walls, the ring of alarms, dogs and surveillance, there was a fair degree of free movement. The difficulty lay in wanting to move, freely or otherwise. Prison was as much inside the head, as outside it.

It is natural, they told me, to miss the opposite sex. Sexual deprivation, of course, though it is seldom mentioned, is what prison is all about. Thirty years without fucking, to this robber or that. A year without fucking, to this or that rowdy young man. It used to be more awe-inspiring a penalty in the days when the general degree of sexual disgust was higher. Now the men masturbate in cheerful unison over girlie magazines, and the girls fall in love with each other.

That’s natural.

It is nature, they say, that makes us get married.

Nature, they say, that makes us crave to have babies.

You must breast-feed, they say. It’s natural. Best for baby. Eat raw carrots, yeast tablets, sea salt, honey, and so on. Natural.

Eschew white sugar, chemical salt, artificial sweetness, preservatives. Unnatural.

It’s nature that makes us love our children, clean our houses, gives us a thrill of pleasure when we please the home-coming male.

Who is this Nature?

God?

Or our disposition, as laid down by evolutionary forces, in order to best procreate the species?

I suppose, myself, that it is the latter.

Nature does not know best, or if it does, it is on the man’s side.

Nature gives us painful periods, leucorrhoea, polyps, thrush, placenta praevia, headaches, cancer and in the end death.

It seems to me that we must fight nature tooth and claw. Once we are past child-bearing age, this Nature, this friend, we hear so much about, disposes of us. In drying up our oestrogen, it bends our back, brittles our bones, rheums our eyes and clouds our tempers: throws us on its scrap-heap of useless though still moving, stirring, moaning flesh. It is not
natural
to be a grandmother: it may be nice, but it is a social role, a consolatory one: no, it is natural to be dead.

What I am saying is, I am useless. I do not mind dying. I have given up. I, little Praxis Duveen, bastard, adulteress, whore, committer of incest, murderess, what else? Hand me your labels. I’ll wear them for you.

But as for the rest of you, sisters, when anyone says to you, this, that or the other is natural, then fight. Nature does not know best; for the birds, for the bees, for the cows; for men, perhaps. But your interests and Nature’s do not coincide.

Nature our Friend is an argument used, quite understandably, by men.

‘Y
OU SHOULD GO BACK,’
said Colleen to Praxis. Colleen was eight months pregnant. She was married to Michael, a thin, dark, kind, silent man, who suffered from asthma and depression. He had been a business executive for a farm machinery firm when she married him, but his illness had forced him to take a less responsible job and now he sold Rolls-Royces in Berkeley Square. His asthma and his depression, alas, had merely been accentuated by the move; by contact with motor fumes and the very rich. He longed for the rural life. He did not see how he could support a child, let alone Colleen, on the money he earned. He had been to University, but despair and wheezing combined had induced him to leave just before his finals. He suffered from nostalgia, from the belief that once things had been better than they were now: sometimes he would lie in bed for days trying to summon the courage and strength to get up: or else wheeze and choke, so that Colleen would call the doctor. By the time the doctor came, he could breathe quite easily. Yet on good days he was charming, and interested, polite and clever, and kind.

‘I thought I could cheer him up,’ said Colleen. ‘I’m quite a vigorous person, really. I thought I might infect him, somehow, with energy. Make him look forward instead of back.’ She spoke doubtfully, as if she now knew it would never be. The flat was small and poky. Praxis slept on the couch: Mary on pillows on the floor. In the bedroom Michael wheezed and Colleen murmured consolation through the night. She had given up tennis and hockey. She could not share them with Michael.