Praxis (28 page)

I’ll tell you, old woman that I am, without an old man to hold my hand or call the ambulance. Don’t disregard me on that account. Women outlive men: it is how most of us will end: and most of us, I sometimes think, mis-spend our youths in blind panic on that account. This man or that. Really! Willy, Ivor, Phillip: does it matter, in retrospect? No.

We are betrayed on all sides. Our bodies betray us, leading us to love where our interests do not lie. Our instincts betray us, inducing us to nest-build and procreate—but to follow instinct is not to achieve fulfilment, for we are more than animals. Our idleness betrays us, and our apathy—murmuring, oh, let him decide! Let him pay! Let him go out to work and battle in the terrible world! Our brains betray us, keeping one step, for the sake of convenience, to avoid hurt, behind the male. Our passivity betrays us, whispering in our ears, oh, it isn’t worth a fight! He will only lie on the far side of the bed! Or be angry and violent! Or find someone else more agreeable! We cringe and placate, waiting for the master’s smile. It is despicable. We are not even slaves.

We betray each other. We manipulate, through sex: we fight each other for possession of the male—snap, catch, swallow, gone! Where’s the next? We prefer the company of men to women. We will quite deliberately make our sisters jealous and wretched. We will have other women’s children. And all in the pursuit of our self-esteem, and so as not to end up cold and alone.

I tell you, it is not so bad to be old and alone.

Well, no doubt men and women should walk through life hand in hand. There is enough to be done in the world, as Phillip once said, without all this trouble. And it does not take a man to make a woman cry. I think of Colleen, crying through the night: and I think of my all-women prison. It was not a pleasant place to be; yet I imagine the sum of emotion, good or bad, happy and unhappy, pretty much the same inside as outside. A girl can cry all night because a woman has been unkind: it doesn’t take a man to do it.

Outside my window old men and women shuffle by: their chins are whiskery: their slack mouths mutter: they are full of discontent and will die in the same state—don’t believe that life has dealt fairly with them. It can’t, as I used to say (usually wrongly) go on!

‘D
O YOU REALISE,’ SAID
Irma to Praxis, ‘that you are not only a personally misguided woman, but a danger to other women as well?’

‘Well, no,’ replied Praxis, trying not to laugh, ‘actually I hadn’t.’

Four women regarded her with speculative and sombre eyes. They seemed to see nothing ridiculous in the situation, and Praxis’ smile died. No one said anything. It was a hot evening. Irma, Bess, Raya and Tracey wore jeans and T-shirts, making no attempt to disguise the various unsuitabilities of the bodies beneath. There seemed to Praxis to be a great many brownish, sinewy, sweaty arms in the room: too many rather large, shiny noses, strong jaws, wild heads of hair, intense pairs of eyes, pale lips, and rather dirty sets of toes cramped stockingless into sandals. Praxis was wearing high-heeled shoes, black mesh stockings and a red flowered Ossie Clark dress. Her hair was shorn, dark and neat against her face. She had the sudden feeling that she looked and behaved now as Irma had once done. ‘You did say coffee,’ murmured Praxis into the silence, but Irma did not move. Cuttings of Praxis’ advertisements for the Electricity Board lay on the table before her, scored with red markings and indignant exclamation marks.

Irma’s room seemed arranged for a permanent meeting. Hard chairs were placed around the walls. The central table was long and functional. Irma’s bed was pushed against the wall: narrow, hard, and used for sleeping not for sex. Praxis wondered what Irma could do with all the money that Phillip sent her monthly.

Or rather which Praxis now sent, for Phillip had no money to spare. The sources of his income, gradually but inexorably, were drying up. The BBC employed him less and less frequently. Now that naked women appeared quite happily and quite often on the television screen, the sources of his creativity seemed to be drying up. And he was expensive and temperamental, and a temperamental director was capable of bringing a whole studio out on strike. The race, these days, was to the adaptable, the economical, and the polite—Phillip was none of these things: and there was a whole new young breed of television directors who were. Phillip, rightly, was gloomy about his future. He cancelled his banker’s order to Irma, if not for the Maserati.

‘You have to send it, by law,’ objected Praxis. ‘If she has the audacity to sue,’ said Phillip, ‘let her.’ So Praxis sent the banker’s order herself. What difference did it make—Phillip’s money or hers?

She began to feel the first stirrings of anger against Irma. Perhaps Phillip was right, and she was Irma’s victim, and not Irma hers.

Irma, besides, had taken to strange behaviour, eschewing the company of men and claiming that women were oppressed. She had paraded outside the Albert Hall in protest against the annual Miss World beauty contest, appeared on television to defend her conduct, and been derided for her pains. The protestors, everyone agreed, were ugly, warped and jealous.

‘She’s a lesbian,’ said Phillip. ‘That was the whole trouble. Basically unfeminine. Look, I do believe she’s growing a moustache! She certainly will if she goes on like this. And her voice was always raucous but it’s getting worse. Switch her off, quick!’

And since to be lesbian was the worst insult Praxis could think of, second only to being rated unfeminine, she switched Irma off, and kept her mouth shut, deciding that what might be right for Irma—or at any rate the best Irma could do, as a divorced woman without any status in the world—was certainly not right for Praxis, and the great majority of contented homemakers in the world. She was happy, she told herself, to be a wife and mother, who also had the added stimulation of going out to work. And if she were not happy, if she woke sometimes in the morning with a pain round her heart so severe it all but made her cry out, a great anguished unclassified scream into the world, it was surely nothing to do with the society in which she lived, which suited everyone else well enough—but surely had its roots in her own unhappy childhood—in her relationship with a mad mother, a loony sister, and an absent father. Enough, after all, to upset anyone.

Phillip certainly thought so. He would regale dinner tables with amazed accounts of his wife’s background and beginnings.

‘Praxis is no ordinary person,’ he’d say. ‘No conventional home life for a wife of mine! A mother in a mental home, and father who, to all accounts, was no ordinary Jew, but a gambling, drinking, fornicating Jew.’

It was all right, now, after the 6-day war, for Praxis to have Jewish blood. It was in fact a point of advantage—not just in cultural and intellectual circles, as it always had been—but with more ordinary people. The Jews of the diaspora now basked in the reflected glory of Israel—no longer a cowering, pitiable, persecuted race licking their wounds in a donated desert—but a hard, tough, victorious, efficient nation, in danger, if anything, of being an oppressive and colonial power, rather than one oppressed and colonised.

All right to be Jewish. No need to hide. Less and less need to hide anything: unmarried couples came to dinner: people talked openly about cancer: mad relatives were talked about with relish: you could dine out on a visit to a mental hospital. Phillip made films about psychophrenic art.

Praxis held her head a little higher. Phillip noticed, and cut her down to size.

He thought she should, perhaps, give up her job. The children, he said, were suffering from her absence. Victoria had nits in her hair: Jason had scabies. Wasn’t she being selfish?

At home Praxis pretended she did not go out to work: never took jobs home: never talked about her office day. It would have annoyed Phillip. In the office she pretended she did not have a family: never talked about her home: never took time off. It would have annoyed her employers. She juggled her life with amazing dexterity: always guilty, always in a hurry.

Running home from work to get the boeuf bourguignon into the oven: up in the morning, before anyone, to iron her smart white office blouse.

Happy, lucky Praxis. With a husband, a home, children, and a job. Tired Praxis.

‘Mother’s love is everything in the first five years!’ wrote Praxis. ‘And electricity helps her show it!’

‘How to be loved and loveable!’ wrote Praxis. ‘Let electricity take the strain.’

Now Irma had asked her to coffee. Rashly, she had accepted, expecting what? Friendship, apology; the bridging of gaps for old times sake? But here was the new Irma, firm and strong, demanding principle, in a masculine way, denying love. For that was what it amounted to.

‘You must realise, Praxis,’ said Irma, ‘just how socially irresponsible you are.’

‘You,’ said Praxis, lightly, ‘are maternally irresponsible. I have looked after your two children for years. Have I complained? No.’

‘You were in no position to complain,’ said Tracey, sourly. She was barely twenty, and should not have been so sour, Praxis thought. ‘It was what you wanted. Someone else’s husband, someone else’s children.’

‘People aren’t possessions,’ replied Praxis, smartly, but alarmed that these strangers should know so much about her affairs. She had expected, in spite of all, some kind of loyalty from Irma: some kind of return from the monthly money she had invested in Irma’s welfare, Irma’s silence, and the lessening of her own guilt. All sighed, unimpressed.

‘It’s no use criticising her on a personal level,’ said Raya. ‘She’s as much a victim as anyone else.’

Praxis regarded Raya’s bulging hips and reflected that it was imprudent of her to wear jeans.

‘She doesn’t half ask for it, though,’ said Bess. Bess would look at home in a cow-shed, thought Praxis: sturdy bare arms up to their elbows in milk and mud. ‘Do you realise what you’re doing, Praxis, when you write these advertisements?’

‘Earning a living,’ said Praxis, rising to go. ‘Contributing to Irma’s quite unnecessary alimony, keeping Irma’s children in pot and guitars, and paying my taxes so you can get your security allowances.’

‘Do you have no sense at all of the effect you have on women? “God made her a woman, love made her a mother—with a little help from electricity.” Don’t you see that it’s debasing?’

‘I see that there’s no coffee,’ said Praxis, ‘and since I came for coffee, there seems no point in my staying.’

Bess and Raya stood between Praxis and the door. They did not move. Praxis still smiled, but there was a frozen antagonism in her heart. Did they really believe that she would be a convert? That she could ever be as they were, ever think or act, let alone dress, as they did? They were the women she pitied: the women without men: the rejects. They should keep their voices low and not draw attention to themselves. Lucy without Benjamin: mad: retiring into her own head for ever and ever. Hilda, who could be as much a success in the world as she liked, but who was a failure as a woman. Irma, defeated, finished. What did she, Praxis, have in common with any of them?

‘Let her go,’ said Irma, in the tones of the victor. ‘She’s too far gone. It’s no use.’

‘I’m sorry, everyone,’ said Praxis vaguely and amiably. ‘I suppose you’re Womens’ Libbers. I am sympathetic, actually, in principle.’

‘But not to the point of inconveniencing yourself.’ Tracey sneered so much Praxis almost supposed she had a hare lip. Perhaps that accounted for her sourness.

‘The trouble is,’ said Praxis, ‘I really can’t take a roomful of women seriously.’

Bess and Raya moved aside to let her go. Bess even opened the door for her. Still no one smiled.

On her way home Praxis caught sight of Betelgeuse in the night sky. She sat on a public bench and stared at the star, and wondered if the strange, tough, knowing person she now was had any connection with the wretched, but hopeful, Praxis she once had been. Perhaps it was everyone’s fate, to harden without ripening, as she feared that she had done?

‘What shall I do?’ she asked aloud.

The night around her grew still: the street was empty: the brilliance of the stars increased in intensity, dazzling her. She felt that she had stopped breathing: she bowed her head away from the light and the fingers of her right hand felt for the pulse of her left wrist, in an automatic but pointless gesture. Her hand stilled. Betelgeuse grew enormous, and brilliant, dulling the brilliance around him, and leaned out of heaven, with his spear.

‘Wait.’

She heard the word, enormous and deafening, inside her head, not outside it. The noise and the brilliance faded: the outside world started up again; she breathed; she heard: cars and pedestrians passed, noisy and ordinary.

Imagination, she told herself. Hysteria. Stress. The shock of the encounter with Irma, Bess, Raya and Tracey, setting up some kind of short-circuit in her brain. For to encounter hostility, when you have done nothing to deserve it, must surely be a shock. To know that you are observed, and judged, and that you have secret enemies, is indeed shocking, and might well, Praxis thought, bring about a retreat from reality, back into childhood fantasy. It did not mean that she was mad.

Praxis turned the meeting with the Womens’ Libbers into a joke, into a dinner-table story, and presently could stop trembling when she thought about it.

She told no one about the visitation from the Red Dwarf Betelgeuse, however. Shock and hysteria it might have been, but it comforted her. More and more often now, she slept apart from Phillip. Whether it was her doing or his, she could no longer make out. It was certainly not what she wanted. But though it grieved her, made a sombre background to her life, it no longer distressed her.

Phillip was part of a journey she was making: he was not the end of the journey. She must wait.

Praxis was asked to take on a cigarette account. Reports had been emerging from universities and medical foundations to the effect that cigarette smoking caused death by lung cancer, and ill-health in those it did not kill. The validity of the research was hotly denied by heavy smokers, and those who profited, one way or another, by the manufacture and sale of cigarettes. The advertising agencies merely said blandly that since advertising did not increase the total sale of cigarettes but merely switched brand allegiance between the various makes, it was all nothing to do with them.