20

Letters from Willy pursued Praxis for a time – accusing, pleading, threatening, reasoning; but the truth was alas evident – he did not really want her back so much as he was reluctant to commit himself to marrying Carla. Praxis feared that his determination to have Mary rose from his belief that so long as he had her his tenure of the house was secure.

But Mary wanted to go back.

‘Even if I don’t?’ asked Praxis, hurt.

‘You could always come and visit me,’ offered Mary, kindly, and Colleen remarked on what a well balanced and secure child Mary was. Michael, as sometimes happened, had been taken into hospital with a particularly severe attack of asthma and Colleen now welcomed Praxis’ presence: apart from anything else she was so pregnant as not to wish to be left alone. There was no telephone in the house, and the neighbours were out at work all day, and unhelpful by night. Michael’s job was in jeopardy, too, and Colleen tended to ‘brood’, as she put it, if left alone.

‘I have my seven-plus reading test next week,’ said Mary, ‘I can’t miss that.’

‘You know how well you can read,’ said Praxis. ‘Does it matter what other people think of you?’

‘Yes,’ replied Mary. She was an orderly child with an untroubled gaze and a sternly practical nature. Sometimes Mary would confound her by hugging her and assuring her that she loved her, with a straightforwardness of which Praxis herself was scarcely capable. Mary meant to be a doctor: she had been determined on it since she was five years old. When Mary was six she asked Willy if she could have a microscope for Christmas. Willy had provided one, albeit second-hand. Mary took more of an interest in his work than did Praxis, and he appreciated it and was happy to show his appreciation. To all practical purposes, Willy and Mary were father and daughter: he a rather clinical and remote father, if concerned and interested; she a dutiful child, and likewise. They seldom touched each other: for some reason Praxis felt nervous when they did. Mary knew something of the circumstances of her birth, and would proudly point to the rubbled bomb site on the esplanade – later to house a ten-storey office block, but in her childhood still uncleared – say to her friends ‘that’s where I was born’. Her father, Praxis let it be vaguely known, had been an American serviceman briefly married to her mother before being killed in action, and Mary was shrewd enough – as perceptive children can be – not to pursue this particular story in detail. She had a sense of destiny.

‘I wonder what I was saved for!’ she’d ask.

Mary went back to live with Willy, and took her seven-plus reading test, in which of course she excelled. Willy married Carla. Carla looked after Mary, 109 Holden Road, Willy, her job in the canteen, and visited Lucy on Sundays. When Praxis stopped crying, she felt quite sorry for Carla.

In the meantime Colleen had her baby. It happened, as is the manner of these things, on the same day that Michael, still in hospital, lost his job. He had been too often absent, and too long-faced when present, for comfort. A letter came through the post as Colleen set off for hospital. She had a daughter, with a good deal of reddish curly hair and a stoical face, who reminded Praxis of Colleen when young, a player of hockey, and a weeper merely by night, and not by day and night, as she now was. Colleen’s mother came to visit her in hospital and lamented the past, and never once made a helpful contribution to the present, let alone the future. Colleen’s father brought an arrangement of flowers by his mistress: wired winter bulbs stuck in green foam moss. Praxis got a job filing in an office, and stayed on in Michael and Colleen’s flat, to look after Michael while Colleen was in hospital, for Michael was discharged in the afternoon of the same day in which Colleen was admitted.

Michael and Praxis behaved towards each other with careful, self-conscious, and distant civility – those being the days when members of the opposite sex, if left alone together, were expected instantly to fornicate. Both lay awake at night, on different sides of the wall, envisaging the comfort and possibilities of sexual congress with the other, but both, happily, were loyal to Colleen.

Michael went to Australia House and investigated the possibilities of emigrating, and within the month, he, Colleen and the baby were gone, leaving Praxis with a five year lease on the flat, some furniture it would cost more to move than to replace, a single cold water tap, and her future before her.

On the first Sunday in every month Praxis went to Brighton, to visit Mary, and was made barely welcome by Willy, and rather more welcome by Carla. Praxis would help Carla with the Sunday lunch and chat to Mary. At twelve Willy would emerge from his study – for so he and Carla now referred to it – look at his watch and say – ‘Well, you’ll be down to the Raffles now, I suppose,’ and Praxis would grit her teeth and smile and say nothing. ‘Don’t you miss it?’ he’d ask presently, and Praxis still would say nothing; but there was a look of wounded desperation in his eyes which made her all but forgive him for his disgraceful behaviour. She had, after all, betrayed him sexually, and most dreadfully; it turned out that one of her more distasteful occasional clients had been a junior of Willy’s at work.

Once, when Carla was out getting coal for the Aga, Willy tried to force her back against the wall, in the corridor, against the door of the old darkroom under the stairs, and though part of her did, insanely enough, miss the rapid coupling which had been part of her life for so long she pushed him away, for Carla’s sake.

‘I still love you,’ he said, insistently. ‘I still want you.’

‘You should bring the coal in, not leave it to Carla.’

‘It’s all she’s fit for,’ he said, bitterly. ‘You should never have left.’

‘Then make me more welcome when I come here.’

‘Why should I? You’re a tart and a whore. You’re mad, like your mother and sister.’

But he could not hurt any more. When she cried it was because the past had changed and the present had failed her; and she had no hope of the future, not for the loss or love of Willy. Rather, she enjoyed the power she had over him. He had become the one person towards whom she could be liberally unpleasant, without risking the loss of his love.

She had been wrong about Phillip and Willy. It was Phillip who loved what he had, however disagreeable it tasted: it was Willy who loved what was out of reach. Carla, she was gratified to see, was these days dressed in matted brown.

In the afternoon of those once-a-month Sundays she would visit her mother.

‘Are you the same one as comes the other days?’ asked her mother, slightly puzzled. ‘She looks smaller than you, or perhaps you’ve grown.’ When Praxis murmured an unintelligible answer she seemed satisfied enough.

‘See,’ the sister said, proudly, ‘how much better she is. I really think one of these days you’ll be able to take her home.’

Sister had short straight dark hair, an almost mannish face, and a scar running round her chin. Flying glass, from the look of it. On one of her visits Praxis raised the question with her mother of selling Holden Road, more in speculation than anything else, but Lucy’s vague eyes instantly focused, with a distressing intensity, and she shook her head violently from side to side and trembled all over her body, so that Praxis had to call sister who sedated and soothed her patient kindly.

‘What did you say to her?’ sister asked, crossly, when it was done. She had been called from tea to deal with the situation.

‘But that’s her home,’ said sister. ‘You can’t sell her home, over her head. It’s all she has.’

‘After all the struggle she had,’ said sister. ‘Two little girls and no support, and those dreadful solicitors!’

Sister seemed to know as much about it as anyone.

‘We have little chats, you know,’ said sister. ‘Before bedtime medication, when the morning doses have all but worn off, your mother can be quite talkative.’

‘We have so many deserted wives in here,’ said sister, ‘it’s surprising. Or wives committed by their husbands. It quite puts you off marriage.’ She laughed gaily.

The world pities you, thought Praxis, for a spinster, and so you pity yourself. All you’re fit for, they think, and you think, is to look after others. Since you have no helpless children of your own, you must look after helpless adults. A good woman, they say, pityingly: what a tragedy about the scar. I am a good woman, you persuade yourself, through your grave, lonely nights preferring to be safe than sorry.

I would rather be sorry a hundred times, thought Praxis than safe.

Well, I am, aren’t I? Very sorry and not at all safe.

‘It’s better for your mother not to have visitors at all,’ said sister sharply, ‘than visitors that upset her. I never have this trouble with the other girl who comes. Is she a relative too?’

‘Carla? She’s a relative, of a kind.’

‘That’s the trouble, these days,’ said sister. ‘There’s a great deal of vagueness in family relationships, and far too much loose living.’

She spoke in general terms, but with too knowing and rebuking a look for Praxis’ comfort. Perhaps she had a brother who frequented the Raffles? Praxis left before visiting hour was over: her mother kissed her on both her cheeks, which was unusual, and brought sudden tears to Praxis’ eyes.

‘Don’t fret,’ said her mother, astonishingly. ‘You’ll be all right.’

As she left the hospital grounds, Praxis felt her face set into an expression which was recognisably Hilda’s, and had to carefully arrange its lineaments. To suspect her mother of being perfectly sane, if very cunning, was in itself madness. Sane people did not prefer mental asylums and sedation to the real world.

Praxis went to visit Elaine; she was behind the counter arranging jars of barley sugar and mint humbugs.

‘Why did you go off like that, so suddenly?’ enquired Elaine. ‘All the fun went out of it. I hardly ever go down to the Raffles any more. Derek got in another girl but she wasn’t a nice type at all. And I got beaten up by some madman and ended up in Brighton General with my ear half bitten off. But it’s an ill wind. I’m going steady with one of the young doctors there. I must say,’ she added, speculatively, ‘it did all teach you a thing or two. Of the kind you wouldn’t read in books.’

Praxis supposed that it had. She had not learned the arts of seduction: that required the projection of an erotic fantasy; the suggested offering of something beyond the power of any human being to offer to another: but she had learned the techniques of arousal, and culmination, and re-arousal. For what it was worth.

‘Well,’ she said vaguely, ‘you live and learn.’ She remembered Elaine as a little girl, her braid of embossed bars almost as long as Hilda’s, and here she was, arranging sweets, back where she started.

‘I hope it works out with the doctor,’ she said.

‘That elderly man with the soft voice was back looking for you,’ said Elaine. ‘I told him you’d gone up to London suddenly and he seemed quite put out.’

‘Did he go back with you?’

‘No. I offered but he didn’t seem to want to. I was sorry. He was rather nice. A real gentleman, for a change. Was he a Jew? He had that kind of nose.’

‘A descendant of King David,’ said Praxis, ‘I seem to remember.’

‘They all have to be something. I wouldn’t mind being Jewish. You could go to Israel and fight Arabs and really start something. Build a new country.’

‘New countries are in your mind,’ said Praxis.

‘They have to be, if you’re a woman,’ said Elaine. ‘Personally, I’d rather carry a gun,’ and she went on arranging a tray of penny sweets for the children – bubble-gum, raspberry chews, all-day suckers – an ordinary-looking young woman with a plaster on her ear and a shop to run.

‘Now you have really left Willy and done the sensible thing about Mary,’ said Irma, who was quite helpful now her spare room was not in danger, and Praxis had stopped showing signs of tears, ‘we must start doing something with you.’

She took Praxis to the hairdresser and had her hair cut short and dyed blonde, at considerable expense to Praxis; and sold her, at half-price, which Praxis suspected was a great deal more than it was worth, a collection of clothes Irma no longer needed, mostly in bright reds, yellows and green. Praxis stared at herself in Irma’s mirror. She looked rather like a doll: blank and characterless, if pretty. She had a memory of herself on a beach, as a small child, and of a photograph; but the memory closed in – it was painful. She did not pursue it.

‘It’s all a matter of presentation,’ said Irma.

Phillip came home from work and framed Praxis between the square of his two hands.

‘Portrait of a transformation,’ he said.

‘I’m not sure about it,’ said Praxis.

‘Neither am I,’ said Phillip, ‘but if that’s what Irma wants, that’s what Irma has.’

Irma sighed loudly and left the room. It seemed to Praxis that whenever Phillip walked into a room Irma walked out of it. Phillip had lost his boyish look. Praxis found him slightly formidable. He still smiled sweetly but his smile now hid something, and she did not know what it was. Irma seemed perpetually angry with him, that much she knew: but Phillip seemed not to notice it. Praxis could see that this in itself was singular unkindness. She began to feel easier in his presence, perceiving that Irma was more his victim than he hers.

Praxis applied for a job in a Research Department of the BBC and failed to get it, in as much as she had no qualifications. She was however offered a job on the reception desk because she was blonde, pretty, sensible and had an easy manner – a combination of qualities rarely found, or so the Appointment Board said, in the same woman.

She quite enjoyed it. She sat on a stool at a high desk which somebody else dusted and polished. Cups of coffee appeared at regular intervals, and she did not even have to wash the cup. She had nothing to do but make, all day, a series of minor decisions, which gave her no difficulty, but seemed to exhaust and agitate the two other girls who sat alongside her. Ring this person, ring that one, keep this one waiting, let another one through: ignore the bombastic, who were usually unimportant: succour the modest and retiring who frequently were not: apologise, empathise, organise. Compared to dealing with 109 Holden Road, Willy, Mary and the Raffles Esplanade Dive, it was nothing. Her fingernails grew long: she painted them: had her dark hair roots seen to frequently, and was made Reception Desk Supervisor.

Well, thought Praxis, it isn’t what I meant, but it isn’t bad. She went to parties, unescorted, and slept with the occasional guest, or even host, but it came to nothing.

‘Of course it comes to nothing,’ said Irma, irritably, ‘you shouldn’t lead them on.’

‘I can’t be bothered,’ said Praxis. ‘I am way, way beyond cuddling on doorsteps.’

‘I don’t know where it will all end,’ said Irma, ‘I’m sure. Do be careful of VD.’

Phillip was promoted: one of the elderly twins died of bronchitis and pneumonia – the roof was leaking; Irma either refused to have it mended, or Phillip forgot, Praxis could not be sure which, and Irma certainly claimed the former – and the other twin, Irma hoped, could not long survive. Already he was pining. Then she would be able to have the attic floor converted to a proper nursery wing, and see even less of the two children, by name Victoria and Jason. Or so she said.

Now that Praxis had tales to tell of the great and famous, and ate her sandwiches and drank her shandy in the BBC bar, Irma occasionally asked her to dinner, to sit opposite a spare man.

‘You have to be especially nice to this one,’ said Irma, on the telephone to the reception desk. ‘He’s the product manager on a new soup mix and it’s going to be a big account for Phillip. Wear a low dress, for heaven’s sake.’

‘What do you mean by especially nice?’

‘You know,’ said Irma. ‘He’s down here in London all by himself, and not even married. I wish I didn’t have to live like this; it’s all so sordid. I wish Phillip was Nobel Prize material, and not commercial. As it is, I have to do the best I can.’

‘You don’t, you know,’ said Praxis. ‘He’s only in advertising to keep you in nannies. And it can’t help to have you despising him every step of the way.’

‘You wait till you’re married,’ said Irma, and rang off.

She dialled through again, almost immediately, to Praxis’ great inconvenience.

‘Except I don’t think anyone ever is going to marry you. You’re much too sharp.’

‘Irma, I have to go. The Director General is in Reception and his taxi hasn’t turned up.’

‘Now I’m married,’ said Irma, ‘I can be as sharp as I like. It’s lovely. I speak the truth; you can’t think what a treat it is. But you can’t afford to.’

‘Irma, I’m working.’

‘What a treat!’ said Irma, ‘I wish I was.’ And rang off.

Within three months Praxis was married and within four she was pregnant. Married to and pregnant by (there’s posh for you, cried Irma, one and the same man and all!) the product manager of the soup mix form, for whom she had worn, on Irma’s instructions, a low-cut dress. His name was Ivor, he was the only son of a county surveyor in the Midlands, had been to grammar school and business school, and was at the age of thirty on the middle rungs of a company ladder, doing well and pleased with himself. He was handsome; his hair short and dark, his brown eyes wide and bright, his mouth shrewd, wide and narrow, and his teeth very regular and very white. He was broad-shouldered, narrow hipped and well-suited. His shirt was very white, his tie conventionally and carefully knotted, his shoes polished, and his voice quiet and confident. One day, he knew, he would be Chairman of the Board. He found Phillip and Irma, as he confided to Praxis, bohemian and exciting. He had been pleased by their invitation to dinner. He wore his boldest tie for the occasion. He was nervous of Praxis’ cleavage, and kept his eyes firmly on her face for most of the meal. She would see his eyes drift downwards and then jerk upwards again, as if horrified at their own behaviour. He talked to her about capital costs, investment and the wage-price spiral, and seemed astonished when she understood what he was talking about. He told her about marketing policy, of what happened when a new food product was launched: how the product – in his case a noodle soup – would at first contain quality ingredients, while the market established itself: how then the cost – in other words the quality – of the ingredients would be reduced until minimum costs and maximum sales met on the graph he kept in his office.

It was advantageous to advertise, he said, and thus keep sales up, rather than maintain the quality of the product. Minimally. Advertising, he said coyly, with a glance at his host and hostess, and a daring one at Praxis’ cleavage, was more fun.

He looked like a tailor’s advertisement, Praxis concluded. This was the kind of man she should marry. Kind, good-looking, forward thinking, conventional and respectable. She did not think that he should marry her, not that he would even think of it. He needed a conventional, well-spoken, well-bred girl, with a Cordon Bleu cookery course behind her, a knack for flower arrangements, and parents to provide her with a formal white wedding and grand reception after a year’s engagement.

Mother, meet my fiancé, Ivor. Ivor, this is my mother, Lucy. Ivor, this is my sister Hilda. Yes, she’s very clever. In the Administrative Grade of the Civil Service. Why is she wearing a fur coat at dinner? It’s the static, you see. Now they weave nylon into the carpets, it’s everywhere. No, Ivor, don’t bring the dog. It might be a bit tricky. There’s rat poison down in the corners. And did you know the stars shine by day?

Hilda was going through a bad patch. Praxis met her for lunch occasionally. Her smile was a grimace. Or so Praxis thought. No one else noticed.

Hypatia, not Hilda. If you’d only go back, thought Praxis, find the real enemies, face demon truths, out-stare them, you might feel better. My sister Hypatia.

Ivor took Praxis home to her flat in his MG sports car. He drove fast and well: she felt secure, exciting and excited, secure in his admiration.

He asked if he could come in for coffee and was hardly able to believe his luck when she said of course.

Praxis had made the flat as bright, comfortable and conventional as she could: buying from Irma, at exorbitant prices, the bits and pieces she was throwing out as she went up in the world.

‘You’re a bohemian, too,’ he said, glancing round. She made coffee: they kissed on the sofa. Daring, he parted her lips with his tongue and thrust it into her mouth. His tongue was cool, sweet and unaccustomed.

‘That was a French kiss,’ he said.

‘I know.’

‘I think you are a very daring young lady,’ said Ivor. ‘How do you know I’m to be trusted?’

His simplicity amazed her. She realised how easy it would be to manipulate his innocence: to offer herself as a forbidden delicacy, forever further and further out of reach, until he interpreted a frustrated appetite as love. She saw that he would believe whatever she told him about herself: that if she were more like Irma and less like herself she would construct an edifice of sweet smiles, reticences and false assertions around herself which he would happily mistake for her. She also knew that she could not do it, even if the prize was respectability, matrimony and motherhood – which it surely was. It would affront his dignity and her own. He was a good, kind, clever if obtuse man. She owed him honesty.

‘I know you’re to be trusted,’ she said. ‘The trouble is, I’m not.’ She pulled away from him and stood up.

‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. I was carried away. You’ve no idea what you make me feel. How could you know? Men are such brutes. It won’t happen again. Trust me.’

She stared, open-mouthed. He mistook incredulity for moral censure.

‘You shouldn’t have asked me in for coffee,’ he said, like a small boy searching for excuses.

‘Why not? You asked.’

‘I’m supposed to ask and you’re supposed to refuse.’

‘Is it all games, then?’

‘So far as I can see,’ he said desperately. ‘It’s all games.’

‘I was never any good at games,’ said Praxis. She briskly took off her clothes. He seemed shaken and appalled.

‘This is me,’ said Praxis, naked and herself. ‘Come to bed.’ He followed, fumbling with tie, and buttons; embarrassed, folding his clothes, putting shoes neatly together, delaying, turning out the light. He was disappointed. He had wanted romance, and all she would offer was sex.

‘Leave the light on,’ she said, at which he looked even more wretched.

I will never see him again, thought Praxis, after this. And just as well: this Ivor, this advertisement for a clean-cut decent man is far more than I deserve, and certainly more than I want.

She named the parts of his body in medical and colloquial terms: as she did her own. She described to him coldly what he was doing to her, and she to him: in both technical and obscene terms. He seemed hardly to hear.

‘You’re so beautiful,’ he said. ‘It’s so beautiful. I had no idea.’

He seemed transfigured: she, to herself, merely animal.

When dawn was breaking he said, ‘I love you.’

‘That’s ridiculous,’ she said. ‘This is not how people love each other.’

‘Yes it is,’ he said, determined. ‘Other people can do what they like. You can do what you like; I love you. Nothing’s going to change that.’

When dawn had fully broken he said, ‘I have to get back to my flat now, and bath, and change. I don’t want to leave you but I have to be at the office at eight forty-five. A lot of people depend on me. Will you have lunch with me?’

‘All right,’ she said, baffled. He kissed her tenderly; it seemed difficult for him to withdraw his flesh from hers. He rang her during the morning, at her busiest time. Flowers arrived. The other girls envied her.

‘How do you do it?’ they asked. Praxis replied, with truth, that she had no idea.

Irma rang.

‘What have you done to him?’ she asked, ‘or what didn’t you do, for a change? He’s been on the phone to me for half an hour and all he talked about was you. He didn’t even mention dinner, after all the trouble I went to. Some men take too much for granted.’

Praxis didn’t want to talk about it. There were four taxis available at Reception, and five MPs to be got home, all claiming priority of need, and she wished to give her attention to the problems this discrepancy posed. She was short of sleep and annoyed with herself.

‘Ivor is rather boring,’ said Irma doubtfully. And then, more hopefully, ‘But you might change all that, Praxis.’

Ivor collected Praxis from the BBC Centre at lunchtime. The envy of the other girls flattered her. He took her to an Italian restaurant at Shepherds Bush; watched the food disappear between her lips as if even that was blessed, and held her hand under the table. She fell asleep over the crême chantilly. He did not mind. He met her out of work, escorted her home, looked away while she changed out of her work clothes, sat reverently by her while she slept. He did not seem to feel the need for sleep, himself.

‘I can do with three hours a night,’ he said proudly, ‘like Napoleon.’

When she woke he ran his well-manicured hand over her breast, tentatively.

‘You are everything I adore,’ he said. ‘You are an angel come down from heaven.’

She could not believe him. She guided his hand down to her crotch, to dispose of his gentlemanliness.

He told her the story of his life, and informed her as to his principles. He believed in hard work, honesty, industry, and firm but kindly discipline for children. He feared that since the war and the coming of the welfare state British workmen had turned into workshy scroungers, who these days had to be bribed, by means of piecework, to work at all. Then they complain, he said bitterly, ‘because the belts move too fast. They don’t seem to realise that their wages depend on our productivity. Where do they think the money comes from?’

He did not want to hear Praxis’ life story, or Praxis’ principles. He wanted her life to have begun the day he met her, and his opinions to be hers. She could see it might be restful. It was how most women lived.

‘I’m a figment of your imagination,’ she complained, yawning, on the second evening of their acquaintance.

‘Come here,’ he whispered, ‘I’ll show you how much of a figment you are.’ He had learned his love-making vocabulary, she feared, from romantic novelettes: perhaps his mother had left them lying around when he was a lad. It never ceased to embarrass her.

Presently she felt she loved him. Her flesh called to his: learned to miss him: tingled with expectation at his approach. And he was always there. Before work, at lunchtime, after work. In the middle of the night. If work called him away there were flowers and phone calls. Sometimes she wondered if the love she felt was a mental haziness induced by lack of sleep.

‘Has he taken you to meet his mother?’ asked Irma, and shook her head dubiously when Praxis said he had not. Sometimes Praxis wanted to be Ivor’s wife; sometimes she did not.

‘Anyway,’ said Irma, ‘it doesn’t matter to us. Phillip’s changed firms. He’s making boring documentaries now, of a sociological nature: he’s lost all interest in soup mixes. I think I preferred the old days. At least people laughed at the dinner table, and noticed what they ate. These days they just drone on, and use their soup spoons to eat the pudding.’

Praxis was offered a job in the Research Department at the BBC. She accepted. Ivor was angry. It meant a small drop in her salary but good prospects of promotion.

‘It’s a waste of time,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to work far too hard for not nearly enough money. They’re only taking advantage of you. You must turn it down. You’re happy where you are.’

Ivor liked to have Praxis where he could see her; where he was accustomed to seeing her, flanked by girls on either side. In the Research Department she worked for men, amongst men.

‘I’ll do as I choose,’ said Praxis. ‘We’re not married.’

He did not see her for two days. She cried in bed; and wondered where Colleen was, and whether she still cried at night, or whether she was happy water-skiing on Bondi Beach, amongst the sharks, and if the Pacific winds had blown Michael’s asthma clean away.

Ivor came back, as if nothing had happened; except that he slapped her once or twice during their love-making. Praxis had won, in a way: but she knew from the occasional sad expression on his face that he had considered asking her to marry him and decided against it. She was not a suitable wife for a rising business executive. Suitable wives were virgins, or all but virgins; they did not have complex pasts and unhappy childhoods, best not spoken about: they did not take jobs which went against a prospective husband’s grain.

Praxis liked her new job. She would do all the work required on this programme or that, quickly and easily, and her immediate superior would get his name on the screen. She did not mind. She thought that to have it there would only upset Ivor the more.

Willy, on one of the few occasions that Praxis now visited Brighton – for Ivor liked to take her out to lunch on Saturdays, and to the pictures on Sunday – remarked that Praxis had become rather boring. She hoped that it was jealousy speaking, but feared that he was right. Certainly, when she was with Willy and Carla, she seemed to have nothing to say. She had lost her dread of Holden Road, but at the same time it no longer seemed like home. She had no rights in it. The whole house sparkled and gleamed: Carla sang as she serviced it. The garden was neat: the drive was weed-free. Willy’s bike was oiled. The front door opened easily. All this Carla accomplished, as well as working in Willy’s canteen. Willy bought Carla fabric in the markets, and she made it up into clothes for Mary, which lay properly ironed and neatly folded in the drawers. In Praxis’ day Mary’s drawers had been a jumble of mostly unwearable garments, shrunk vests, and single socks.

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 tranquillisers, 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.’

‘She doesn’t rant or rave or break things,’ said Praxis. ‘She just sits and stares.’

‘We must think of the children,’ repeated Ivor, and Praxis was relieved to think of the children and tell herself that it was not practical to have Lucy installed in the spare room. What was Lucy, in any case, to the creature who had sprung ready-made from Ivor’s imagination? She had no mother, no father: blonde curls: doll’s eyes, doll’s mind.

Praxis decided, with what glimmers of her old self remained, that Hilda should be given the opportunity of looking after Lucy, and wrote to her to that effect. She, Praxis, had husband and children to look after: Hilda, the implication was, had neither: had a career instead, which any right-minded woman would give up in order to look after an ill mother.

Hilda responded by sending an unsigned letter to Ivor, asking him if he knew what everyone else knew: that his wife had been a professional whore before he married her, working from the Raffles Esplanade Dive in Brighton?

It was unfortunate in a way that the letter arrived on one of the rare mornings when Ivor was at home, yet fortunate in another. Had Praxis been alone, she might well have steamed open the letter, read it and destroyed it, and gone on in her half life for years more.

As it was, she watched Ivor’s face grow pale with shock and distress, and recognised that some kind of reality, however dreadful, was at last beginning to surface, and that she should be grateful.

‘I don’t understand,’ said Ivor. ‘Why should anyone send this?’

‘It’s Hilda,’ said Praxis. ‘I know her writing. She’s mad. I told you she was mad. Anything to do with mother sets her off. She’ll do anything to damage me.’

‘Your own sister?’ He didn’t believe her. In Ivor’s world family offered mutual support; they were not natural destroyers of each other.

‘If you’d let me have mother here,’ said Praxis, tears in her eyes, pain in her heart. But Ivor just stared at her as if he saw things in her that he had never seen before.

‘You didn’t cry before,’ he remarked. ‘You were only too glad not to have her. I knew that. I just provide the excuses. That’s my function in your life. What’s going on?’ As if he had discovered the accountant cooking the company’s books.

He left to catch his plane during the morning. He did not ask her to deny or confirm the contents of the letter, but neither did he kiss her before he left. When he returned, two weeks later, he was critical of Praxis; he found fault with the cooking, the house, the way she behaved with the children; was rude to her in front of them: insisted that she make love to him in the way she had done when they first met. She felt degraded by it now. His eyes followed her wherever she went. She was almost afraid of him.

‘What’s the matter?’ she kept asking. ‘What’s the matter with you?’

‘Nothing’s the matter, what should be the matter?’ he’d reply, setting out for his usual train, leaving her bruised, slightly shocked and sore, pecking her goodbye as if everything were normal.

‘If it’s my past,’ she volunteered, eventually, but he did not want to hear.

‘You’ve never let me talk about it,’ she protested.

‘I don’t want to know,’ he said, ‘let’s leave it at that. You have a mad sister and a mad mother. Isn’t that enough?’ She could see that in this particular world it was more than enough. There were too many different worlds, it seemed to Praxis, with very little cross reference from one to the other: each with its different ways and standards, its different framework of normality. Women crossed the barriers easily: were required to by marriage, moving house, changing status: men seldom crossed them, went on as they began, their lives under their own control.

‘Perhaps I should get a job,’ she persisted. ‘When you’re away I’ve nothing to do. When you’re back all you do is find fault.’

‘There’s plenty to do in the house,’ said Ivor. ‘If you did it, I wouldn’t find fault.’

He worried over the remark, as these days he worried over everything she said or did, chewing and tasting and discarding, only to scoop it up again, poor denatured thing, and start all over again.

‘Why should you want to work?’

‘What sort of work?’

‘You mean I keep you short of money?’

‘You find the children boring?’

‘You want to work with men, I suppose? Find someone new?’

The wives on the estate did not work. Husbands, for the most part, had fought their way out of a world in which a working wife was a sign of family disaster, disgrace and humiliation. They reckoned their achievement in life by the leisure and comfort they could offer their families: the picture windows, the carpets, the air, the light, the safety.

‘Forget it,’ said Praxis. ‘Just forget it.’

But he didn’t.

‘You could always sell yourself,’ he said, starting up one night out of the insomnia which now plagued him. ‘Is that what you mean by work?’

‘Let me tell you about it,’ she begged.

But he wouldn’t have it. He had moulded her to his liking, but been mistaken in the clay he used. His whole life was like that, he felt. You achieved what you wanted, or rather what your parents wanted for you, and it tasted not delicious, but sour and rancid on the tongue. He blamed the post-war Socialist government for a great many of his own and his company’s misfortunes. When Praxis asked him what misfortunes, he merely shrugged.

Ah, she was to blame for so much: her past like a hideous millstone round his neck. The doctor prescribed sleeping tablets.

‘But I think he’s gone mad,’ she said. Ivor too! The doctor laughed.

‘Shortage of sleep can make many a man seem mad,’ he said. ‘I should know.’

He wouldn’t take the pills. He suspected her motives in obtaining them. Presently he began to feel better. They returned, almost, to normal.

‘What’s the worst thing you ever did?’ said Diana to Praxis one day. Diana was the nearest to a friend Praxis had on the estate. Her husband Steve had a drinking problem. Diana’s pretty, childlike face was occasionally bruised, which she would explain away with one excuse or another: a lamp-post, a fall, a sudden braking in the car.

‘The worst thing I ever did,’ volunteered Diana, ‘was pour two bottles of Steve’s whisky down the sink. What about you?’

‘I slept with my father,’ said Praxis, the words leaping to her lips out of nowhere, as if they’d been lurking all this time, waiting to be said, preventing the formation of other words, other thoughts, other conclusions: keeping her in limbo, year after year.

‘You’re joking,’ said Diana.

‘Yes, I was joking,’ said Praxis.

When she looked in the mirror that evening, she thought she looked older: more like some other person, less like a doll.

Ivor was away. She stretched out in bed alone that night and allowed herself to remember; the pleasure, humiliation and shame. She had barely seen her mother since: had avoided the thought of her. Was her sense of sin, of having stolen something illicit, and of having damaged her mother by it, first by intent, then by actuality, the waves of shock and horror travelling backwards and forwards in time, before the event and after it, damaging, wounding, and traumatising?

These hands, she thought, turning on the bedside light, looking at them. What they’ve done, where they’ve been! And it seemed to her that as she looked, they lost their white powerlessness, the well-creamed, pretty look they’d had of late, and became stronger, older, more her own.

In the morning her hands looked much as usual, sleep had smoothed over the gritty surface of her night-thoughts. Life went on as usual. Nearly but not quite.

A new couple moved in to the estate: always a welcome event. New tastes, new faces, new clothes, new gossip. Rory was chief sales manager of a big paint firm, and had almost, but not quite, the same status as Ivor. He had the most powerful car on the estate, and spoke about his public school. Carol spoke genteelly, dressed quietly, had once run a hairdressing salon, had a larger refrigerator than anyone else, looked after her two children well, and held hands with Rory in public. They seemed a safe and respectable pair. They lived next door to Steve and Diana.

Rumours, however, soon began to fly. Rory and Steve, it was said, had contrived together to exchange beds for the night, first making their wives so insensible with drink that they would not notice the difference. Carol had, and hadn’t cared: Steve’s wife Diana hadn’t, which everyone reckoned was just as well. Now everyone knew except Diana. Rory and Carol were swingers: they played strip poker: they wife-swapped: they took nude photographs. Rory and Carol gave a party: everyone was invited: quite a few went. Carol drank a whole half bottle of whisky, stripped to the waist, and then altogether, and danced on a table. Rory, in the meantime, while the men gaped at Carol, openly kissed and fondled one of their wives after another. The lights went out. Unlikely couples paired off. Presently sanity returned: someone turned on the lights, couples sorted themselves out, and all returned home, abashed, to quiet homes and sleeping children. In the morning Rory and Carol were seen to kiss goodbye, affectionately. He even brought home some bookshelves in the car that evening, and could be heard hammering that night. A good and handy husband, walking evidence that sexual experimentation did not instantly bring about the collapse of a community.

Everything seemed safe: only rather more interesting than before. Praxis had not been to the party: she seldom went out when Ivor was away. He would question her too closely afterwards, to make it worth her while.

For a time a kind of sexual madness seemed to possess the estate.

Rory and Carol gave key parties. At the beginning of the evening the men would throw their front door keys into a central pool. At the end of the evening the men would pick out a key, any key, and escort home the wife whose own front-door key matched.

Carol rang Praxis.

‘Do come,’ she said. ‘You and Ivor do come! It’s the third time I’ve asked. I’m beginning to think you’re avoiding us on purpose. Of course, we all know you’re so grand –’

Ivor said to Praxis’ astonishment, that they were going to accept the invitation. She didn’t want to go.

‘I would have thought it was your style,’ said Ivor.

‘It’s not,’ said Praxis. ‘Why do you want to go?’

‘Because I’m bored,’ said Ivor. ‘I’m as bored with you as you are with me.’

It was a bad day, after all, and she had thought it was a good one. He had pruned the roses in the garden. She cried, which always affected Ivor.

‘I do love you,’ he said, as if puzzled by himself. ‘None of this means I don’t love you.’

‘What, like Rory loves Carol?’

That annoyed him. He didn’t relent. They went to Rory and Carol’s party.

‘I love you,’ she said, before they went. When he was angry and she was miserable she felt that it was true.

‘I don’t believe you,’ he said.

He read the children bedtime stories before they set out for the party. As he grew older he became even more handsome: his face less innocent, more stern. The other wives envied her. She was considered an intellectual, because she read the Guardian and not the Telegraph like everyone else: she was never quite totally accepted, she knew that.

They were, she thought, rather surprised to see her there that evening.

Ivor had insisted that she wear black underwear and suspender belt and stockings, instead of the tights that had lately become fashionable.

‘It’s what you used to wear,’ he said. ‘I prefer it.’ He had been irritable about her make-up, and made her draw crude black lines around her eyes, and put heavy, sticky lipstick on her lips. It was no different from what the other wives wore, but unusual for Praxis. She had been to the hairdresser. It was crowded that day, and everyone had been excitable and rather bad-tempered. She stared at herself in the mirror: she was a doll again, to be pushed here and prodded there. All the same, she was not as young as she had been.

‘I think I am a figment of your imagination,’ she said, as she had said before, a long time ago.

‘Yes you are,’ was all he said, this time. ‘I am tired of having you in it.’

She understood that he was trying to rid himself of something. Well, so had she, once, and succeeded.

‘Since Hilda’s letter,’ she said, ‘everything has changed.’

‘You imagine it,’ he said. ‘A mad letter from a mad woman.’

Praxis drank too much at the party: she watched Ivor dance with, kiss and fondle in turn Beryl, Sandra, Sue and Raquelle. He watched to see if she was watching, and she obliged him by doing so. She looked and felt pained, which was as he wanted it to be. Ivor, usually so attentive, so discreet. She did not join the dancing, a kind of musical chairs, in which, whenever the music stopped, the women peeled off a further garment.

‘Don’t be such a wet blanket,’ said Carol, spitefully, as she passed, bare breasts pressed up against Ivor’s suit. When the keys were given out, Ivor got Carol and Rory got Praxis. Praxis had understood that she and Ivor were the prizes of the evening: the last to succumb to the communal madness.

She walked home with Rory. The moon shone. Nature was calm.

She could almost believe she was walking next to Ivor. She pretended that she was.

Dutifully, in bed, she performed her seductive tricks, summoning them out from memory. Had she once been, nightly, so generous?

‘I knew you’d be hot stuff,’ Rory said, entranced. She shuddered. She really could not spend her life amongst these people.

Rory went and Ivor returned in the early hours, and lay still and sleepless beside her. Presently she heard him crying. I seem to have heard that for so long, she thought, from so many people. Women in relation to men: men to women. There must be something wrong. She slept and so did he.

In the morning Ivor was as he had been before the advent of Hilda’s letter; he was kind, affectionate, and uncritical. He made no mention of the previous night, and nor did she. They went to no more of Rory and Carol’s parties; Rory came round once or twice to issue special invitations but soon gave up. Praxis recognised Carol’s voice on the phone, asking for Ivor, but Ivor was brusque and unfriendly with her and the calls stopped.

The parties, to all accounts, grew yet wilder.

Someone procured a vibrator from the States, which was raffled, and publicly used. Things began to go wrong. A wife killed herself with an overdose: someone started divorce proceedings: one of Diana’s children ran away: Rory was convicted of a drunken driving charge: the parties stopped as suddenly as they had begun. Madness ebbed and drained away. Rory and Carol moved to another estate. Roses were pruned; grass seed put down: everything was back to normal.

Except that Praxis knew she would not, could not, stay with Ivor: and that if she ruined his life, and destroyed his happiness, as he would surely claim she had, and Robert’s and Claire’s too, then it was just too bad.