Praxis (33 page)

‘You can’t possibly go through with the pregnancy,’ said Praxis. ‘It’s absurd. If you don’t even know the father’s name.’

‘Neither did my mother.’

‘If you don’t have a termination, you’re finished. Everything thrown away.’

‘Except the baby. And I’m not asking another person to abort it for me. I don’t have the right. If I could do it myself, I might. But I can’t, so that is that. I run my life on principle, not convenience, and that is that.’

‘If you don’t believe in contraception, or abortion,’ said Praxis, ‘you might at lease abstain from sexual activity.’

‘I like sex,’ said Mary blandly. ‘And it’s much more exciting without contraceptives.’

Praxis slapped Mary’s smooth cheek, and left. Mary did not see her out. Carla walked with her to the station.

‘I offered to adopt it,’ said Carla. ‘But she won’t have that, either. She’s very stubborn. Sweet as pie just so long as she’s doing exactly what she wants.’

‘Like Willy, I suppose,’ said Carla. ‘Like most people, come to that.’

‘Willy’s run out of exams to take,’ complained Carla. ‘He simply doesn’t know what to do with himself. Of course he’s Director of the Institute now.’

Carla was still wearing dusty brown.

‘He mends his shoes with Sellotape,’ said Carla, ‘instead of tying the sole on with string. I suppose that’s an advance.’

Eventually Mary telephoned Praxis. Praxis had thought of apologising but had felt too dispirited to do so.

‘You shouldn’t invest so much in individuals,’ said Irma. ‘It’s always been your mistake. Stick to movements: wide sweeps of existence and experience. Ignore detail. It’s how men get by.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Mary. ‘I was behaving badly. In fact everything’s going to be all right. The Toronto hospital is holding the job open for another year; they say they’ll stretch a point and take a small baby. It’s a hot-bed of feminism. So you see my life isn’t over; it’s merely postponed for a year. Come and see me in hospital, when the baby’s born, when it’s too late for you to wish it out of existence.’

But there was a certain coolness in her voice.

‘Of course there is,’ said Irma. ‘You can’t safely suggest terminations to women who are consumed by mother lust.’

Praxis devoted herself to the many, rather than the few. She wrote editorials of such power and vehemence—finding a certainty in writing which she certainly did not find in real life—that readers cut them out, stuck them on walls, and quoted them in arguments.

‘My diatribes,’ Praxis referred to them, diffidently. But others found in them the stuff of revolution: the focusing of a real discontent, and with that focusing the capacity for alteration.

Next time Mary telephoned it was to say that she was in hospital and that she had a three-day old son. There was no pleasure in her voice. Praxis went again to Brighton: stood yet once more on the railway platform, and remembered Hilda’s curse. ‘Wherever you go you take yourself with you.’ She took the bus to the hospital.

Mary had a room to herself: she looked thin, and grey, and moved with difficulty. The baby lay in a wheeled cot by the bed, swathed in blankets, lying on its side like a doll, still and silent.

‘I had to have a Caesarean,’ said Mary. ‘Everything seemed to go wrong. It wasn’t very nice.’

‘The baby nearly died,’ said Mary. ‘He’s been in the special care unit, wired up to this and that. But they pulled him through.’

‘I fell in love with my other two babies,’ she said. ‘It took a day with the eldest, and the next was love at first sight. It’s called the bonding process, I believe. It hasn’t happened with this one. I suppose it still might.’

But she did not sound hopeful.

‘Don’t look at him too closely,’ said Mary. ‘He’s mongoloid. He’s got a chromosome missing. I could have had tests done at four months but I didn’t. They can detect mongolism as early as that. Or spina bifida. Then they terminate; but you know my beliefs. I would just have known five months earlier and had five months more misery in my life, that’s all.’

‘It is the end of my life, isn’t it,’ said Mary. ‘I’ll never get to Toronto now. Never get to the States. Never get anywhere. Why didn’t they let him die? I wasn’t asking anyone to do anything: just to do nothing. But institutions are incapable of doing nothing, I suppose.’

‘You can put it in a home,’ said Praxis.

‘Him,’ said Mary, ‘not it. No, I can’t do that. We all have to take responsibility for ourselves; we can’t hand our troubles over. Besides, he might suffer. And what would the other two think? No. God sent him. He must have meant it.’

‘He’s very low grade, I think,’ said Mary. ‘He will sit in a chair and dribble and wear nappies when he’s a grown man. Well, some people reach personal salvation through such events, I’m told. A life of dedication. And there’s nothing wrong, to a mongol, with being a mongol. One of the doctors told me so. A Dr. Gibb. A woman. I liked her. And I seem to remember saying that myself, to a woman in my position. When I was in obstetrics, and had a future.’

‘I’ll look after it,’ said Praxis.

‘No you won’t,’ said Mary. ‘You call him “it”. You’re not fit. Other women have worse to put up with. I watched them in the special care unit. They sit by the incubators, staring at their children, little babies taped to electrodes, fastened to drips, ill, in pain, possibly dying, possibly living: possibly deformed for life, possibly not. There is an animal look in their eyes; in the mothers, and in the babies. It shouldn’t be there. We are spirits, not animals. They should let the babies die when they get to that stage, and the mothers too. Life itself is not important. Only the manner of living.’

‘I thought I might kill it,’ said Mary. ‘Then I realised it was him.’

Mary got out of bed, stiffly and painfully, to go to the bathroom.

Praxis tried to help her but Mary shook her off.

‘I can manage all right,’ she said.

While Mary was out of the room Praxis took a pillow from the bed, turned the baby on to its back, and pressed the white mass over its face. No movement came from beneath; before, or during, or after. It scarcely seemed like the extinguishing of a life: more like the rectifying of a mistake, which had to be done, in the same way that an inflamed appendix has to be removed, before it kills the entire body. Nature’s weak point. Nature’s error, not God’s purpose.

Praxis put the pillow back on the bed and rang the bell. A nurse came.

‘I think there’s something wrong with the baby,’ said Praxis.

The nurse ran the baby, cot and all, down the corridor. Red lights flashed, footsteps echoed. Mary came slowly back from the bathroom.

‘Where’s the baby,’ asked Mary, and fainted.

Presently Dr. Gibb came. She was Pakistani, dark-eyed and frail, but had about her the same look of resolution as Mary had had, in better days, and which Praxis trusted would now presently return.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Dr. Gibb. ‘Your baby did have breathing difficulties, as you knew. Perhaps we took him from the incubator too soon? I’m not saying it isn’t a tragedy, of course it is—but in the circumstances, I have seen worse things happen.’

Dr. Gibb wanted no further discussion. Mary turned her back on Praxis and cried, but whether from physical weakness and shock or real distress, Praxis did not know.

Praxis left the hospital and walked down Holden Road and to the beach. 109 had been painted, and newly fenced. The garden bloomed. Two little boys, companionable, swung on the gate. It was getting dark. A woman came out of the front door and called them in to tea. The door, Praxis noticed, opened easily. It had finally been taken off its hinges, and planed.

Praxis walked along the sea-shore. The sky darkened and one by one the stars emerged. The sea rustled the pebbles on the beach. The world became still: breathing stopped. Betelgeuse leaned down in his fiery shaft, towards her: tears of flame dripped down around her. Betelgeuse spoke. The roaring faded her ears: the noise of the sea and the shore reasserted itself. The pebbles dragged up and back, up and back, soothing and reassuring. Her feet sank, as she walked back to the hospital, into the loose piled sand and stones of the upper beach. It held her back, and made her the more determined.

She found Dr. Gibb sitting in the sister’s room of the post-natal ward, white-coated, filling up forms; an exotic creature, passing through, out of place.

‘It wasn’t natural causes,’ said Praxis. ‘I did it, and I think I was right to do so.’

‘And I think you are overwrought,’ said Dr. Gibb, ‘and should think carefully about what you say, in case you upset the mother more than she is upset already.’

‘We can’t think about individuals all the time,’ said Praxis.

‘I do,’ said Dr. Gibb.

‘Well, I’m sorry,’ said Praxis, ‘if I’m a nuisance. But the fact is that the baby was alive and good for another forty years of semi-vegetable living, but because of something I did, deliberately, it is now dead. That is the truth. I offer it to you, Dr. Gibb.’

Black bat wings hovered and pounced even as she spoke. Claws of doubt dug into her skull. But for once Praxis was not unsure as to what was reality and what was not. What she remembered and what had happened were identical. She had passed into the real world, where feelings were sharp and clear, however painful.

‘The death certificate is signed,’ said Dr. Gibb, sadly. ‘I suppose I will have to tear it up.’

‘Yes,’ said Praxis.

‘Good for you,’ said Dr. Gibb, surprisingly. Dr. Gibb was back from Bangladesh, floods, famine, war and plague. She had seen hundreds die, and thousands dead. ‘Good for you.’

It was not a view, it seemed to Praxis, that was held by many, first at the inquest, then at the trial. Praxis was held in custody between the two events, and only echoes of the row in the outside world reached her. The prison itself was newly-built and bleak, but in no way horrific. Praxis had a small room with a window in the door, a comfortable enough bed, shelves, Home Office issue prints on the wall and was allowed one photograph from home, but chose to go without.

The diet was nostalgia enough—a daily reminder through lumpy mashed potato and soggy greens of Willy and her distracted youth: almost she felt the weight of Baby Mary on her arm, and the constant jab of Willy into her. Her body as much as her mind, she felt—was allowed for once to feel, in the boring tranquillity of prison routine—was the sum of its experience; even now it was recording the smell of boiled cabbage, institution toilets, disinfectant, female bodies at close quarters, and so on, and would play them back to her, in a wistful tune, in later years.

Praxis might get a life term, or a two year suspended sentence, said her lawyer on one of his weekly visits. There was no knowing. He was a young, nervous, busy man. He ran in to the room, wiped his bald round head with an unironed handkerchief, asked questions, took notes, and ran out again to see—or so Praxis felt—to some other, more pressing business. He shook his head busily when Praxis declined to plead temporary mental imbalance.

‘What do you want? Martyrdom? To get your name in the papers? Isn’t it there enough already?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Praxis. They don’t let me have newspapers while I’m on remand.’

‘It’s for your own protection,’ said the lawyer. ‘They’re not saying very nice things.’

‘I wouldn’t expect them to,’ said Praxis. ‘I don’t say very nice things to myself.’

Nor she did. But the sense of relief remained, lurking beneath the self laceration, as if she had finally faced and survived the worst which could happen: which was not, it turned out, being killed, but rather, killing. And now it was done, and over. And along with the relief, consoling her, was the visionary notion that the act of killing had not been petty, sordid, ordinary and mad, but that she had been the instrument of some higher will. Praxis could, and would rationalise the deed away: she would say that logically there was no difference between contraception and abortion: that the termination of pregnancy at any stage, whether the foetus was minus nine months, six months, three months or plus one day, must be the mother’s decision. That pregnant women must somehow be relieved of the fear they felt, now that one baby in every twenty was born with some defect or other; and so on, and so on: and half believe it, and half know that all this was irrelevant.

She would cry for Mary’s baby, moan with horror in the night because of what she had done, but something proud and implacable remained. She had been right.

The prison staff and her fellow prisoners discussed the matter with her.

‘It’s not as if you were the baby’s mother,’ said the librarian.

She had a degree in English literature and was in for baby battering. ‘What right did you have?’

‘She was my sister,’ said Praxis. ‘All women are my sisters,’ and sadly interpreted it, even as she spoke. Hilda failed me, so I have claimed in her place all the women in the world.

‘If my baby had been born handicapped,’ said the prison chaplain, who reminded Praxis of Mr. Allbright and who had a new young wife and baby, ‘we would have loved it the more.’

‘You’re nice good people,’ said Praxis. ‘Not everyone is. You don’t live at the limits of your endurance. Many do.’ But she knew he was right, and that others would have taken Mary’s baby and looked after it. As the helpless were looked after—cruelty alternating with kindness. As others had looked after Lucy.

‘One thing leads to another,’ said a prostitute, in for attacking a colleague with a knife. ‘First abortion, then euthanasia, then genocide. Well, that was Hitler’s way, wasn’t it. I just don’t understand how people can harm little children. Let alone kill them.’

‘Life is not always preferable to death,’ said Praxis, and wondered how much of herself she had been killing, when she smothered Mary’s baby. Putting herself, by proxy, out of her misery.

‘You were quite right,’ said a grey-faced shop-lifter. ‘They did their tests and told me at five months I was carrying a spina bifida baby. I had a termination. It was twins. I’d rather they’d waited the full nine months and then done it, when we all knew for sure. What’s the difference, really?’

‘Thank you,’ said Praxis.