We can’t be strong all the time; I comfort myself with that notion. We can’t stick to our principles, act as we ought, fight for our causes, not non-stop, all our lives. We must surely be prepared to take shifts in our fight for Utopia, or failing that, to hand over entirely the burden of our conscience to those who are younger, fresher and less afflicted by experience than ourselves. Then, our task done, we can sink back with a clear conscience into selfishness and apathy. Our righteousness wears out long before our bodies do.
I ought to rejoice for the girl who stood upon my toe in the bus. I ought to be glad, for her beauty, her freedom, her dignity, her pride. But I don’t; I’m not. She has injured me, and I can see no further than that: my eyes are dimming with age. I ought to be thankful, and take some credit myself, for the fact that she will never have to live in such a prison of shame and hypocrisy as the one in which my mother found herself. Poor mother. Of course she should have struggled. My father’s people in Germany should have struggled too. But she did not, as they did not. We see the world as we are taught to see it, not how it is. Our vision since has widened. And of course she should have kept her misery to herself, not handed it on to her children. For a time I hated her for her weakness, until I saw what I did to my children through my strength. Then I forgave her.
I am not strong at the moment. If the social worker comes knocking at my door I shall certainly let her in. I cannot hobble as far as the cooker to make so much as cup of tea. I cannot, worse, reach the drawer which contains the pain-killers. Am I Praxis or Patricia? Patricia, without a doubt. Pat, for short, for convenience. Everyone’s convenience. A dismissable, neutral name, jolly at best, unerotic at worst. Others seem quite happy with it, but then they were born with it. I wasn’t. The name a vengeful, if practical, mother would choose for a sensible child, the better to give orders to. Pat, fetch my bag, clear the table, weed the garden. Pat, do your homework, find Hilda’s hairgrips. Poor hateful Hilda.
I called myself Pat in Holloway Prison. The social worker calls me Pat. She feels she has the right to be familiar. She does not regard me as a criminal: I wish she did. She sees me as someone half-mad, who couldn’t cope and covered up her inadequacy by what she calls an ad hoc justification. She calls me Pat because she pities me, and her nature and training will not allow her to condemn me. To accept that I acted out of principle, and not because it was expedient, would terrify her: would open up questions and considerations she is frankly too busy doing good to consider.
I wish she would come. She could make the tea. Her name is Myra Jones. She is half my age: she has the warm light of virtue in her eye. She would never have killed as I did, coldly, gritting my teeth. She would have been positive and sensible, and put the poor little half-witted thing into a home, and then set about running the home, if it didn’t suit her vision of what a home for the mentally handicapped should be. Would she herself have spooned slops into the adult mouth, or cleaned off the adult nappies? Yes, she would, she could, from sheer insufficiency of imagination. If she had to. Only if she had to, and until she could persuade or train some other slightly more high-grade half-wit to do it. I have encountered some of these latter half-wits, on the staff of mental homes, or shelters or protected communities – whatever the latest name is for these repositories for human distress: they love to be revenged upon their charges: they tease the mumbling and the twitching and the incontinent as they themselves are teased and humiliated in the outside world. No, the seed of King David, however distorted and debased, was not to end at the mercy of such as these. Obliteration was better.
Last time Myra Jones called, I remember, I would not let her in. I did not want her poking and prying. There is something of my mother in me.
My mother, in the acuteness of her distress after my father left her, spent her nights for a time with Henry Whitechapel. Or so he told me later, and I have no reason to disbelieve him. There was certainly no point in asking her. Mother would have denied it and believed her denial, whether she had or whether she hadn’t. At a time when women’s instincts were so much at a variance with the rules of society, such localised amnesias were only to be expected. But was this episode out of character? Was my mother, from the age of thirty to the age of seventy, living out a part that did not suit her at all? I believe the latter. I concur with the vicar, the Reverend Allbright, and the younger Butt, who both avowed that a woman who’d sleep with one man outside marriage, would sleep with another. I have friends who married as virgins and only made love with their husbands all their lives, and wouldn’t want it any other way. They seem the happiest with their lot in life. I wish it were not so, but it is. My mother tried to attain the happiness of the sexually exclusive, but had left it too late. She was polluted. To lose one’s virginity is not – as the toe-trampler on the bus would no doubt have it – an insignificant event. It is tremendous, momentous, and sets the pattern for an entire sexual life to come. I even think, sometimes, that that narrow hypocritical society was right, and that Hypatia and myself had no right to be alive: and had better have remained the outcasts we were born.
Myra Jones, where are you? I hope I have not driven you away. I need you now. I, Patricia Fletcher, humble murderess, who will not even argue with you about my name, need my cup of tea and pain-killer.
I, Praxis Duveen. Let them carve that name upon my headstone, if I have a grave. Let them engrave it upon the urn which holds my ashes. It was the name I started with: I have changed it often enough since; and seldom for the better.