Praxis (22 page)

Mary herself seemed friendly, but distant. She was Willy and Carla’s child now, and so far removed—with her long, lean legs, and pleasant serious face—from the baby Praxis had rescued and tended, that Praxis herself could scarcely make the connection.

‘She doesn’t have to wear school uniform,’ complained Carla. ‘But she insists. She says not to wear it makes it obvious which girls are poor and which aren’t. I tell her her clothes are as good as anyone’s, if not better, and she says “exactly, that’s the point.” I ask her if I’ve been wasting my time and my eyesight making her nice clothes and she says “how can it, if it gives you pleasure?” I say it’s more work for me, keeping your school uniform in order—and she says “I’ll do it then,” and so she does. She doesn’t seem like a child at all. She thinks before she speaks. Well, she’s the only one I’ve got. Willy says we can’t afford children of our own. I have to keep on working.’

‘You could always have an accident,’ observed Praxis, ‘and simply find yourself pregnant,’ at which Carla looked quite shocked.

Praxis missed the early train home, and took the opportunity of walking alone on the dark, pebbly beach, under the starry sky. Betelgeuse twinkled redly, and had nothing to say. There was no magic in the night. Some grace had been withdrawn from her. ‘How long?’ she asked, but there was no reply. And if the dark clouds which gathered over the horizon, bright-edged by the concealed moon, had any shape or significance for good or bad, it was not apparent, now, to Praxis.

Praxis presently decided that she did not love Ivor. She began to feel he blocked her vision: that there was something else to be seen if only he would get out of the way. He had to go to Stuttgart for two weeks, for his firm, to study German methods of soup production. She found she did not miss him at all; that the minute he was out of sight he was out of mind. One day before he was due to return she went to a party, had too much to drink, and was taken home by a cameraman whose wife was in hospital having a baby.

She was in bed with him when Ivor returned. There was a fight: she herself felt in no particular danger, and the cameraman seemed in a way grateful for his bloody nose and cut eye, as if this was the penance he owed his wife. He left swearing and grasping his stomach where Ivor had kicked him.

Ivor knelt by Praxis’ bed and wept.

‘I can do as I like,’ Praxis said. ‘We’re not married.’

This time she did not see him for a week, and did not cry once, but there was a flatness and emptiness in her life which frightened her. Then she had a letter from him, asking her to marry him, and she said yes, she would.

They were married presently in a registrar’s office. Praxis invited only a few friends from work; Ivor invited a handful of grey-suited, crop-haired, suave business colleagues, and his parents, who were a good deal less grand than Praxis had supposed. She was glad that Hilda was not there, to detect the vulgarity behind the careful curls and floury face-powder of Ivor’s mother. Hilda was away on her annual holiday, touring the Greek islands. Irma and Phillip came. Praxis thought Phillip looked rather sad. When he kissed her in congratulation he held her rather hard and long, and Praxis knew she should not have married Ivor.

Praxis gave up her job: Ivor did not want a working wife: there was, in any case, plenty to do in the new house, some fifteen miles outside London on one of the new executive estates. The houses were neat and compact: built above and around garages, open plan and with large expanses of glass window. When trees and hedges had time to grow, as the estate agent explained, there would be more privacy: in the meantime there were lace curtains, and the knowledge that the other householders were of good business and social standing.

Praxis became pregnant almost at once. Ivor destroyed her rubber contraceptive on their wedding night, and that night and thereafter made love to her in the missionary position. ‘That’s marriage,’ he said, ‘isn’t that better?’ And Praxis, bemused, agreed that it was.

Praxis was, at last, respectable.

‘Praxis,’ said Irma, much, much later, ‘you got so boring. You’ve no idea.’

‘Nothing ever happened,’ Praxis explained herself.

‘Of course things happened,’ said Irma. ‘Things happen on an executive estate as much as anywhere else. The tragedies and triumphs of the aspiring middle classes, not to mention births, deaths, cancer and road accidents. No, your personality went into eclipse for five years. You should try and work out why.’

‘Perhaps I was married to the wrong man?’

‘The entire female population is more or less married to the wrong man,’ remarked Irma, ‘but we are not for that reason a race of zombies.’

‘Then it was the children.’

‘More like it,’ said Irma, darkly.

‘I had the wrong children?’

‘Oh no,’ said Irma, ‘they had the wrong mother.’

It was not that the children depressed her, so much as that they drained her of animation. They made demands on her and offered no reward. She could take no pleasure in them, or they in her: that, they reserved for their father. Robert and Claire. They would leap up as he came through the door, and hold his hands, and chatter; and Ivor’s face would light up with the wonder of it all. They were more Ivor’s children than her own: she felt they recognised her instinctively as the impostor she was, regarding her with Ivor’s cool, brown eyes, but without the adoration that softened Ivor’s gaze. A smooth-skinned, smooth-haired pigeon pair, born tidy and careful as their mother was born untidy and careless. She seldom had to tell them to put away their toys: they guarded them too well in the politest possible way, from each other and from their mother’s casual dustpan and brush. Her pregnancies were peaceful. Pregnant, she glowed and felt content. Ivor treated her with extra reverence, bringing her roses and delicacies, helping her over steps, supervising her diet. First Robert, then, a year later, Claire, were born quietly and decently, without causing their mother too much physical pain. But after the birth she would stare and stare at the little mewling creatures and feel only disappointment, not elation. She had hoped for so much, and so little had emerged. She preferred being pregnant to having babies.

‘A love child,’ Ivor said, on each occasion, holding Praxis’ hand and making her uncomfortable in both mind and body.

‘A love child,’ she agreed, biting back the information that a love child means one born out of wedlock, not one born out of love.

She was protective towards the children, but they seemed to need little protection. They were seldom ill, seldom naughty, never surprising. Robert and Claire, little strangers, foreign fruits of her womb. They got on well together. Too well, Praxis sometimes thought. If they had disliked each other, they might have liked their mother more. She had felt closer to Mary.

On summer evenings, Praxis could look out through the graceful folds of the net curtains which looped her wide drawingroom windows, and see the Red Dwarf Betelgeuse. But the affairs of heaven and the affairs of earth made no contact here. Little boxes of dwelling places covered the hill: stars, like ornaments devised by the estate agent, sprinkled the sky at night, and that was that. No one on the hill went to heaven or hell, Praxis thought. All dwelled in limbo, and were extinguished on their death.

Ivor was an attentive husband. Other estate wives envied her. He caught the same train every morning, and the same train back. He remembered wedding anniversaries and birthdays. Sometimes problems at work made him bad-tempered at home, but he was efficient, straightforward and unafraid, and more interested in what he was doing than in the status that accrued to doing it, and the problems did not remain unresolved for long. The events in Ivor’s life—as Praxis came to realise—the sense of forward travelling, of progress, and personal achievement, came from his work: at home with his family, he rested.

‘You see the children growing strong and healthy,’ said Ivor. ‘Doesn’t that give you a sense of achievement?’

‘Of course,’ said Praxis. But it didn’t. It seemed to her that if you let a growing thing alone, it would grow strong and healthy by itself, and no credit to her or anyone.

Presently Ivor was obliged to spend less time at home. He travelled by air about the world: sometimes he would be away for days, sometimes for weeks. He developed a far-away, absent look in his eye: his teeth seemed whiter, his chin more cleanly shaved than ever: his shirts crisper. There was little to do in hotel rooms, after all, but pay attention to matters of grooming. He was promoted to Group Product Manager, then Product Manager, then Junior Management Director—the youngest in the firm’s history. The firm was taken over by an international company: Ivor went forward: it was his colleagues who were made redundant No one begrudged him his success. He deserved it.

‘Behind every great man,’ he’d say, laughing, his hand round Praxis at the firm’s annual ladies’ night, ‘is the love of a good woman.’

When he was away he would telephone frequently, every day if possible. The company paid for the calls, aware—for research had told them—of the value to an executive of a happy domestic life. Praxis wondered whether the calls were to check her fidelity, or to confirm his own, or merely because he wanted to talk to her, and decided that it was the latter.

Praxis now lived in the largest house on the estate. It had an attic floor and a detached garage. Fewer wives dropped in to morning coffee: more came, on invitation, to tea. Praxis gave dinner parties: the same rotation of guests in ceaseless gavotte, in endless competition: company talk, recipe talk. Nothing was said that Praxis could not have said herself. Robert and Claire went to the little day preparatory school around the corner. They left the house in the morning clean, shiny and tranquil: and returned in the evening clean, shiny and tranquil. Sometimes, when she collected them, she found it hard to distinguish them from the other children; or herself, for that matter from the other mothers. She learned to drive. Ivor bought her a car.

Praxis had a brief, secret affair, with the estate agent who arranged the purchase of their various houses, but had lost the taste for sexual adventure, and it came to nothing, when she discovered she was one of many of his mistresses. She made artefacts, by the hundred, out of cardboard egg-boxes for Robert and Claire’s benefit, in the hope of developing their artistic talents. Robert and Claire sellotaped with finesse and painted cautiously.

‘You do make a mess, mummy,’ complained Claire.

‘Finger painting is for babies,’ said Robert. They cleaned their brushes before putting them away.

‘See,’ said Praxis: ‘It’s a castle with a submarine moored in the moat.’

‘How would a submarine get into a castle moat? You are silly, mummy.’

She felt that her friends—the young wives of other rising executives—were both envious and critical. Their eyes would wander from hers as she talked, shifting and darting as they inspected the state of Praxis’ home,, not Praxis’ soul, and finding it wanting. The scent of furniture polish and pine disinfectant wafted out from the open front doors: stand stiff as you might outside Praxis’ front door, you would never detect the pleasant aromas of conscientious housewifery.

‘You’re too sensitive,’ said Irma. They weren’t passing judgment: they were merely interested, and why not? You probably got it all wrong, anyway. They hated your taste: loved your dusting.’

Praxis developed backache and headaches: she sat with the other wives in the doctor’s surgery and was prescribed tranquilisers, which unlike the others she did not take. The doctor took to visiting her at home and talking about his unhappy marriage, and she was flattered to have been thus selected, out of all the other women in the estate. Staring at herself in the mirror, at her doll’s face, stiff doll’s body, curly blonde doll’s hair, she wondered what experience or wisdom it was that could possibly shine through the casing that Ivor had selected for her. She did not blame Ivor: she knew that she had done it to herself: had preferred to live as a figment of Ivor’s imagination, rather than put up with the confusion of being herself.

The doctor laid his head upon the table and wept. She stroked his head with her doll’s hand. They kissed.

‘I’d better not come again,’ he said.

‘No,’ said Praxis. ‘You’d better not.’

Little doll voice, piping gently in the wilds!

Praxis asked Hilda to Christmas dinner, one year, but Hilda, fortunately, could not come. She was going, she wrote, to spend Christmas with Willy, Carla and Mary. The names sounded unfamiliar to Praxis. She found it hard to believe that they still lived and breathed. She had long since ceased visiting Lucy. She had sprung to life ready-made on the day she met Ivor; it was what he wanted and what suited her.

Sometimes Ivor’s mother would visit. Praxis would pour her long, gin-based drinks from the wheeled cocktail cabinet, and they would talk about Ivor’s father, who had one lung and seldom left home, and Ivor’s childhood in the small Northern town where they lived. Ivor was his parents’ only child: their pride and achievement. Ivor’s father was not, as Ivor had implied, the county surveyor, but a clerk invalided out of the surveyor’s office. Praxis did not condemn Ivor for this mild deception: on the contrary, it made her feel soft and protective towards him. He lied for his father’s sake, as much as for his own.

‘You are happy?’ Ivor would question her, relentlessly, bringing home gifts of duty free scent, Swiss chocolates, Malaysian orchids.

‘Perfectly happy.’ But the question puzzled her. How would she know if she were happy? She felt neither happiness, nor unhappiness. She waited, for what she had no idea: she endured, why she could not tell.

Sometimes, when Ivor was away and the children were asleep and television palled, she would walk out under the stars and remember her vision on Brighton Beach: a distant, ridiculous fancy, best forgotten. Loving husband, happy children, lovely home.

A letter came from sister in Brighton to say that Lucy, thanks to new medication now available, could safely be cared for at home.

‘I wish we could have her here,’ said Ivor. ‘But it wouldn’t do. Think of the children.’