Praxis (27 page)

‘Here’s how electricity helps you keep feminine, and well and truly loved!’ she wrote.

‘The electric way to start the day!’ That was one for men. Sweaty and muscly under the hot shower: soapy under open arm-pits.

Men had public arm-pits: women’s, though more troublesome, were considered private.

‘I can’t take Justin,’ pleaded Praxis, ‘I really can’t. He’s lovely; but he’s not even at school, and I can get temporary help in if ever Victoria and Jason are ill, and they don’t seem to mind, but I do; I feel guilty, and that I’m neglecting them; so far I’ve been lucky because when they’re ill Phillip hasn’t been working, and at least he’s at home, but I don’t like to ask him—’

‘You must be mad,’ said Irma, enigmatically. And then—‘Well, you wanted them. You got them. You wanted Phillip. You’ve got him too.’

‘I don’t think Phillip will want Justin.’

‘Why not? He’s his child, after all.’

‘I thought he wasn’t his child. He was some poet’s child. That was the whole point.’

For the second time Praxis saw Irma look astounded.

‘Good God,’ said Irma, and left Justin with Praxis.

Justin was accustomed to being left here and there. Phillip took him on his knee calmly enough, said ‘the more the merrier’ and handed him to Praxis when his nappies needed changing. Justin was not, as they said in the nursery world, ‘potty-trained’ and she had difficulty finding him a nursery which would take him all day. When she did, it was some three miles and a bus-ride away: Phillip needed the car: he was working with one of the BBC’s major documentary units now, and large sums and many peoples’ jobs were usually dependent upon his prompt arrival here and his even temper there.

People said how happy he looked. They had many friends. The husbands greatly admired Praxis. She seemed to have all the qualities needed in a wife. An excellent cook, a good earner, a lively conversationalist, and a loving mother; a scarlet past and a virtuous present; she was a somewhat messy housekeeper, however, all agreed. She washed the dishes, but seldom actually put them away. She paid the bills but never filed the receipts.

Praxis’ blood pressure rose. She had to take a month off work, which was fortunate, since it coincided with first Justin, then Jason, then Victoria, and then Robert catching measles. Diana wrote crossly to say she should have been warned about the measles: she would not have let Robert come over had she known. As it was, half the estate were now down with the disease and it was, by implication, Praxis’ fault. No, Claire wouldn’t be coming over that weekend. She missed her friends when she came, and she loved to potter about the kitchen with Diana, in any case, icing chocolate cup cakes, and doing all the other things which Praxis somehow failed to do.

Praxis wept all night. She was tired.

‘Perhaps we should have a baby,’ said Phillip.

‘I’m just tired,’ said Praxis. Phillip, all concern, managed to take a holiday. They all went camping, to the Continent. Phillip sat under a Mediterranean palm and read books on film technique. Praxis saw to the family.

Praxis, after a spell in hospital on her return for mysterious stomach pains, developed a kind of second wind. Irma returned from the states, took Justin back, and things went better.

Irma paraded outside the Miss World contest with a banner saying such contests were humiliating to women. She threw a smoke bomb and was arrested. Nobody could understand her attitude, except Phillip. ‘She’s got so ugly lately,’ he said. ‘I expect she’s jealous.’

Years passed: flew past: where did they go? Jason wore the same size shoes as his father: Victoria borrowed Praxis’ clothes, and Praxis was jealous.

‘Growing up clean with electricity!’ wrote Praxis.

Willy and Carla took Lucy to live with them. She was now a quiet elderly woman, with few memories. Praxis sent money every month to pay for her support. She assumed that Willy must by now have tens of thousands of pounds saved, and consulted with Hilda as to the possibility of charging him rent, but Hilda would have none of it. Hilda did not contribute to Lucy’s keep: not to the upkeep of the fabric of Holden Road. Praxis did all that, and was happy to do so. It seemed to her that the roots of much of her misery had lain in lack of memory. To provide money was so much simpler in the end, than providing love, companionship or understanding. To earn it, so much easier than asking for it.

Praxis grew bolder: she hired a cleaner, and had a girl, Elspeth, to come in by day to help with the washing, shopping and so on. Phillip did not seem to mind. She had been foolish, she could see in retrospect, to regard his lightest word as law. If you pushed, Phillip gave. She did not enjoy the discovery. Her love for him did not exactly lessen, but it changed its form.

Colleen wrote from Sydney. She had divorced Michael—the family doctor remarking that he was so clinically depressed he would scarcely notice whether he was divorced or not—and now had a job with the Life Saving Department on Bondi Beach. Praxis had a vision of her, hand in hand with some muscled Australian giant, bronzed and curly-headed, free at last, striding the sandy beaches, while the sharks snapped out to sea, and hoped that it was true. Sleeping such a healthy sleep at night, there would be no time left for crying.

‘A woman’s satisfactions,’ wrote Praxis, ‘are husband, child, and home. And a new electric stove is one of her rewards.’

Phillip went off to Vietnam to film the fighting and the dreadfulness. He came back in a state of shock and indignation because one of the camera crew had been shot by a stray bullet, and was paralysed.

‘I don’t understand you,’ said Praxis. ‘Did you think it was just a game? Didn’t you know the bullets were real?’ She shouldn’t have said it. It seemed to her that afterwards his love diminished. He began to complain about the standard of her housekeeping.

Jason fell off a ladder and Phillip was angry because the children were so badly supervised. Jason was concussed and grew worse instead of better. There was internal bleeding. Praxis waited at the hospital all night.

In the early hours Phillip turned up with a hand-held camera and filmed the casualties coming in. He took shots of Praxis’ stunned face, too: and even of his son, still lying in the reception bay, wired up with drips, too acutely ill even to be moved. Irma, summoned from some women’s meeting (or, as Phillip described it, ‘she’s gone all dykey, you know’) physically attacked Phillip. There was a scene in Out Patients: Irma screamed, Phillip shouted, Praxis wept, the camera was smashed. Jason, by some miracle, recovered. Afterwards Phillip was obliging and kind for some time. He even tried to explain himself to Praxis, when they were in bed.

‘I don’t know what it is,’ he said, ‘I can only face real life if there’s a camera between it and me. Perhaps I need some kind of treatment.’

Phillip’s mother had died when he was four. His father was an army officer; he had retired after his wife’s death and started a fruit farm. Phillip had been sent to boarding school from an early age. His father, he had always felt, was fonder of his fruit trees than of Phillip. He was a Methodist; a formal, disciplined and undemonstrative man.

‘He never played with me,’ Phillip would complain. ‘I don’t think I can remember playing as a child. I don’t really know how to be spontaneous. I have to work out what I ought to feel, before I feel it.’

‘You play with your children,’ said Praxis, comfortingly. ‘You’re spontaneous with them.’

‘I suppose so,’ he said, uncomfortably. ‘I always thought I was. Now I’m not so sure.’

He rolled on top of her and the familiar magic reasserted itself.

Presently he felt better, justified. He had been transferred to the BBC’s Drama Department. He felt their restrictions against the showing of female nudity were puritanical and absurd. He was irritated by the actresses’ refusal to take their clothes off. ‘There’s nothing to be ashamed of,’ he kept saying. ‘A tit’s a tit.’

The political revolution had come and gone. Phillip had been at the barricades, filming. For a day or two it had seemed as if the world would change. Now they were back with the sexual revolution.

Phillip wanted to intercut telecine of Praxis’ bare breasts, seen in the shower, into his latest play, since the leading actress declined to do the shots he needed.

‘Yours are very similar,’ he said, and then clearly felt he had given himself away.

Praxis, shocked into stillness, wanted to ask how he knew, but dared not for fear of finding out the truth. A good deal of the play had been made on location. The whole cast had gone off together.

She still saw the truth as a demon, bat-winged, hovering over her life.

‘Are you showing the men nude?’ she asked, absently.

‘Who’s interested in nude men?’ asked Phillip. ‘Now don’t get all coy, Praxis. You never used to be. Your tits won’t be filmable for ever: make the most of them while you can.’

‘No,’ said Praxis. ‘I won’t. They’re private.’

Phillip felt insulted and betrayed: he rolled away from her at nights to the far edge of the bed. Praxis took to sleeping in the spare room: not because she wanted to, but because his cold and hostile back made her miserable and tearful, and she needed to sleep in order to function, and earn, and keep the household going. Phillip had bought a Maserati. It was exciting to drive in, but expensive to run. He would not talk about money. He found the subject tedious and depressing.

Mary wrote to ask if she could come and stay with Praxis and Phillip, while she did the final year of her medical training at a London hospital. She preferred to live out.

‘What do you think?’ asked Praxis of Phillip.

He didn’t think. He shrugged. Hadn’t she enough to do? She always claimed she had too much to do. She must make up her own mind. So long as Victoria and Jason didn’t suffer.

Victoria and Jason seldom suffered, Praxis thought. They stayed in their rooms and played records, loudly: or stayed out late and, Praxis greatly feared, smoked pot. Phillip belonged to a reform group who were trying to legalise the smoking of cannabis.

‘No less harmful man alcohol,’ he’d say, downing whisky of an evening, while Praxis agitated about what party they were at, or where, and why they were not home; envisaging Jason in the clutches of the police, Victoria driven incurably mad by LSD. She was glad Robert and Claire so seldom put in an appearance. Robert had joined the Army Corps at his grammar school and Claire had become religious.

In the morning, eyeing her hung-over husband, and Victoria and Jason, irritable and alienated at the breakfast table, Praxis suffered and said nothing. She wished Mary to stay: but she did not wish to have her own discomfiture witnessed. She attempted to trim her own nature a little more to suit Phillip’s requirements and bring back peace to the household.

She drank a little whisky, smoked a little pot: did not ask Phillip where he was going or where he had been: bought Jason a leather jacket and Victoria a guitar, and waited up in the evening for no one.

Money’s easy, she thought. Nothing else is.

‘I’ll do the nude shots if you want me to,’ she finally said, one night in bed to Phillip’s turned back. He seemed surprised. ‘I got someone to do them long ago,’ he said. The world doesn’t stand still and wait for you to get over your sulks.’ But he turned back towards her, and made love, and she felt that things were back to normal and that she could write to Mary and say yes, of course, come and stay.

‘Did you audition for suitable breasts?’ she heard herself ask Phillip, but fortunately he had gone to sleep.

He had, in fact, as Praxis discovered later: and selected those of a girl called Serena out of some thirty available applicants.

It was her first part.

Mary came to stay. She did not join in the life of the household: she went early to the hospital, and returned late, and tired, having lived through a day of dramas and decisions, other people’s pains, reliefs and tragedies. She was friendly, but cool: a rather severe and unsmiling young woman. She made Praxis feel frivolous.

‘So you are,’ said Phillip. ‘Zipping about over the surface of things!’

‘What about you?’ asked Praxis.

‘Fiction does more to change the world,’ said Phillip, ‘than any amount of fact.’

‘A working mother,’ wrote Praxis in her office, in deference to the changing times, ‘needs extra love and extra electricity.’ For once her copy was turned down.

‘Too small a part of the market,’ said the Deputy Creative Director. He took her out to lunch. He was a clever, softly-spoken gentle-eyed man who said he preferred gardening to advertising, but Praxis did not believe him. He liked Praxis and Praxis liked him. ‘You haven’t studied the research.’

‘I have,’ said Praxis. ‘And it may be small now but it’s growing.’

‘Then heaven help the nation’s children,’ said the Deputy Creative Director. ‘We do have some kind of social responsibility, Praxis, and if it is a trend the last thing we should do is encourage it.’

‘I’m a working mother,’ said Praxis.

‘I know,’ he said, over his steak-au-poivre. They were both experienced expense account lunchers, and ate melon, steak, and salad and shared a frugal half-bottle of wine. ‘But are you happy?’

He reminded her of Ivor, sometimes, long ago, far away: married to Diana. Tears stood in her eyes.

‘If I’m not happy,’ she said, ‘it’s not because of what I do, but because of what I am.’

Praxis went home and waited for something to happen.

Praxis presently received an invitation from Irma to evening coffee. She was surprised. Irma sometimes called at the house to check that Victoria and Jason were being properly cared for, but she had shown no signs of wishing to pursue a friendship. Praxis was gratified, if tired. She was usually tired, these days. Phillip was away, allegedly taping a play. She no longer asked for details of his absences, or believed him if he offered explanations.

Praxis accepted, and went to visit Irma.

W
HY DOES IT TAKE
so long? Why do we stay so stubbornly blind to our own condition, when our eyes are not only open, but frequently wet with grief and bewilderment?