22

Praxis waited, a small immobile figure in an arid landscape: she waited for something to happen. The children had new shoes: Ivor had a new suit. She did not prune the roses, although Ivor kept reminding her to do so. Praxis knew she would not be there to watch them bloom.

Something happened. Irma telephoned. Praxis had not heard her friend’s voice for two years, but recognised it at once. The tones were a little more commanding than before, as if Irma had stood once too often at Harrods counter; she was a little more petulant, a little less charming: but the pent-up, bitter, invigorating energy remained.

‘I only ring when I want something,’ said Irma. ‘I want something now. I’m having a bloody baby. They’re taking me into hospital early. Nanny’s walked out, naturally: they only take these jobs for the pleasure of walking out at the worst possible moment – it’s an art in itself. Will you come and look after things for me?’

‘What about my own children?’

‘Leave them with neighbours. I’m sure you’ve got neighbours,’ said Irma, as if the having of neighbours was a plebeian activity.

‘Don’t you have any friends, Irma?’ enquired Praxis. There was a pause.

‘That sounds more like the old Praxis,’ remarked Irma, hopeful. ‘No, I don’t seem to have any friends, come to think of it.’

Praxis left the children with Beryl next door, packed the few things she might possibly ever want to see again, and left home.

Ivor was away for the week. He would telephone in the evening and no one would answer. She could envisage his agitation, jealousy and distress, and it did not affect her. He would eventually, she imagined, ring Beryl and discover that the children at least were still his.

Irma sat on her stairs monstrously pregnant. A taxi waited outside: she made no move to get into it or put the driver out of his misery.

‘The fare’s ticking up,’ said Praxis, anxiously. ‘It’s already over a pound. I looked at the clock.’

‘You have such a suburban mentality, Praxis,’ complained Irma.

‘Let him wait. It’s Phillip’s money anyway. Why should I care?’ Her face was puffy and pink: her ankles swollen: her feet pushed ruthlessly into too-tight bright pink very high-heeled shoes. When she stood she clearly found it difficult to balance. Her blood pressure was high. She was going to hospital to await the birth, due in a week.

The crescent had been gentrified since Praxis last saw it. Most of the houses were freshly painted, had window boxes on the sills, and carriage-lamps in the porches. Victoria and Jason, indifferent to their mother’s fate, played outside in the gutter.

‘They don’t care about anything,’ complained Irma. ‘I don’t expect them to get upset about me, but they might at least have the grace to mind about Nanny leaving. I’m sure I do.’

‘Is it safe for them to be in the street?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Irma. ‘I left that kind of thing to Nanny. It’s all Volvos and Rollses anyway, these days. A good class of car to die by. I am glad I’m not going to be around when you are, Praxis. Nag and fuss all the time. I can tell the sort of mother you are.’

‘At least I can trust you with Phillip,’ said Irma, wandering the house in search of a hair-dryer. ‘You’re not his type. Philip only likes important people,’ said Irma, ‘and let’s face it, Praxis, you’re not important.’

‘Of course Phillip’s a voyeur,’ said Irma, ‘he sublimates with cameras, that’s all.’

‘Now don’t start cooking him little meals or anything,’ said Irma. ‘He’ll only expect them when I get back.’ Now she had lost her tweezers.

‘At least I don’t have any real worry about other women,’ said Irma, ‘Phillip’s so undersexed. He’s impotent. Did you know that?’

The taxi driver rang the door-bell.

‘I don’t know what he’s worrying about,’ said Irma. ‘He’s getting paid, isn’t he? Do I look really awful?’

‘I don’t think it matters much,’ said Praxis, ‘at the moment.’

‘Yes, it does,’ said Irma, ‘since Phillip’s going to be filming the birth.’

‘Not to mention a full camera crew,’ said Irma. ‘With any luck they’ll faint and slip their discs falling.’

‘You notice I have to get myself to the hospital,’ observed Irma. ‘When it’s real life, and not images of life, he simply can’t concentrate.’

Irma by now seemed to have almost everything she needed packed into a dusty bag made of Persian carpeting. It seemed an old and shabby bag to Praxis, who had yet to acquire a liking for the artefacts of the past. There wasn’t, so far as Praxis could see, a single new, dark, shiny, polishable surface in the house. Everything was old.

‘I hate Phillip,’ said Irma, calmly, ‘and I hate this house. The stairs have enlarged my calf muscles. I hate all men, all children, and the institution of marriage, and most of all I hate this baby. We won’t go into that now. If I get excited my blood pressure goes up. Now look after everything, Praxis. Keep your hands off Phillip. And thank you very much,’ Irma added as an afterthought, remembering some childhood lesson.

Irma tottered on her high heels to the taxi, and engaged in conversation with the driver, who now seemed reluctant to have her as a fare, but presently drove off. Irma then remembered to turn and wave to her children, but they did not seem to see her. After the taxi had gone, however, they came inside, went up to their attic bedroom, and sat close together on a bed watching television, eating fruit and sweets from the bowl, letting peel and wrappers lie where they fell. They were clearly not as tidy or biddable as Robert and Claire; they heard only what they wanted to hear, and did only what they wanted to do: but Praxis could see that Irma’s children would do very well to sop up the overflow of her maternal affection, which still drained from her, like mother’s milk in the presence of a weaned baby. It would get better with time. She knew it would.

Praxis sat beside them on the bed, and presently took a tissue to wipe Jason’s running nose for him, but he turned his face sharply away, and said, in an irritable voice, ‘Don’t do that. I like it running.’ Then he put out his tongue to investigate the pale trickle.

It would never have done on the estate. Praxis laughed.

She felt she was home.

Phillip, returning that evening, seemed taken aback to find his wife gone and Praxis in her place. He had worked till past nine in the cutting room, and was tired. His hair was receding. He no longer had the look of a young man.

‘She was meant to be going in tomorrow,’ said Phillip. ‘I was taking her in. It was all arranged. I was editing today. I couldn’t leave it, how could I? She knew that perfectly well.’

The children were in their night clothes, in bed, still watching television, still munching through fruit and sweets. The Nanny had left, apparently, in dispute about the propriety of the late hours they kept, their diet, and their viewing habits. They were well-built, healthy children, on an altogether larger scale than Robert and Claire, with pale, mobile, fleshy faces, brown hair falling into their eyes, and each with a version of Philip’s full, curved mouth. Praxis’ heart beat faster, observing him in them. They should have been her children. She knew it.

She was embarrassed, as ever, to be alone with Phillip. He wandered about the kitchen, finding bread and cheese. He opened a bottle of wine as if it was an everyday occurrence. On the estate wine was for birthdays and celebrations. He ate and drank standing up. Praxis, from long years of laying tables first for Willy, then for Ivor, and setting before the homecoming male a plate of soup, followed by meat and two vegetables, and like as not a pudding too, was disconcerted. She sat on a stool and watched. Phillip pushed bread and cheese towards Praxis. The bread was a long French loaf: the cheese soft and rolled in black peppercorns. On the estate bread was a sandwich loaf and the cheese Cheddar or processed.

‘Irma has a good taste in cheese,’ he said, sadly. ‘Did she go off happily?’

‘Not particularly.’

‘I don’t make her happy,’ he said.

‘People make themselves happy,’ said Praxis, disloyally.

‘Are you happy?’ he enquired.

‘No.’

‘I should have married you,’ said Phillip.

An awkward silence fell.

‘I know,’ said Praxis, eventually.

‘On the other hand,’ said Phillip presently, ‘perhaps no one should marry anyone. There’s so much to be done in the world, and the people best equipped to do it keep getting bogged down in these terrible partnerships.’

‘Where I’ve been living,’ said Praxis, ‘the question of partnership doesn’t arise. The women do what they’re told, and no one tries to change anything.’

‘You speak about it in the past tense,’ said Phillip.

‘That’s right,’ said Praxis.

‘Irma trusts you with me,’ observed Praxis.

‘She’s mad,’ said Phillip.

‘I rather thought she was,’ said Praxis.

‘I knew I should have married you,’ said Phillip, in the middle of the night. ‘You’re so warm. You must be wonderful in the winter. Willy always said you were so warm.’

‘Willy had a very cool body. It might just have been a matter of comparison.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Phillip. ‘We should have got married. Saved ourselves all this trouble.’

‘I did always find you difficult to talk to,’ said Praxis. ‘I don’t know why.’

‘I do. It was all so embarrassing,’ said Phillip, ‘from the very beginning. If I’d won the toss with Willy how different things would have been. Fancy tossing for a girlfriend.’

‘I thought you did win it.’

‘No. I lost.’

‘I feel bad about being in Irma’s bed,’ said Praxis.

‘Don’t start all that,’ said Phillip. ‘Once you started that you’d never stop.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Praxis. ‘Sheer hypocrisy, anyway.’

‘Quite,’ said Phillip. ‘In any case she’s never in it. Irma mostly sleeps in the spare bed. She uses sex as a controlling weapon.’

‘She seems to get pregnant, all the same.’

‘You know how it is,’ said Phillip, rolling on top of Praxis.

She had never quite realised, before, that sexual satisfaction could result from the fulfilled desire for a whole person; she had seen it as the occasional outcome of local physical stimulation. She supposed that this was love. Whatever it was, it suffused her. She did not doubt but that it was right to pursue it.

In the morning the hospital rang. Irma was in labour. Phillip rounded up the film crew.

‘I wish she wouldn’t,’ said Phillip. ‘I find it distasteful. It would be easier to film someone not one’s wife: but as Irma says, it is two hundred pounds for her and five hundred for me. We do have to have the basement done out after the old lady: the film is sponsored by the Natural Childbirth Trust: the clouds of ignorance and fear shrouding the mysteries of birth have to be swept away, and so on, and so on; but frankly I wish she wouldn’t.’

‘Ivor wouldn’t do it for a thousand pounds.’

‘Go back to Ivor, then.’ He was angry.

‘Never.’

‘Well,’ said Phillip, ‘there is no progress without sacrifice.’ And off he went to the hospital. It was a false alarm. The crew had to be paid for the day’s non-work.

‘We’ll never bring this film in on budget,’ said Phillip. ‘That’s Irma’s plan, no doubt.’

‘She can hardly help it,’ said Praxis, but wasn’t so sure.

Victoria and Jason discovered Phillip and Praxis in bed.

‘What are you doing in my mummy’s bed?’ asked Victoria.

‘Keeping it warm,’ said Praxis.

‘I’ll tell mummy,’ said Victoria crossly. ‘She doesn’t allow anyone in her bed, not even me.’ Victoria was six. Jason got into bed beside Praxis.

‘You’re warmer than mummy,’ he said.

‘What are we going to do?’ asked Phillip, helplessly.

‘Perhaps you’re lost without a story-line,’ suggested Praxis.

‘I make documentaries, not features,’ he said. ‘There is no story-line. That’s part of the trouble. I’m not doing what I want, or living as I want.’

Irma was in labour again. The crew reassembled, set up their lights and got some decent footage of contractions, major and minor. After that they hung about. Waiting. Twelve hours later, the doctor turned the crew out and Irma had an emergency Caesarian. It was a boy. She would be in hospital another ten days.

‘The Trust is right,’ said Phillip. ‘There’s far too much interference in natural processes. If they’d left her alone she’d have had the baby naturally, and we would have got our film. They should never have given her that first injection. It slowed things up. I’m not worrying for myself: we can get another volunteer easily enough: it’s just that Irma’s going to be so furious at having to do without her moment of filmic glory; not to mention her two hundred pounds. I think she wants to be a film star. That’s her whole trouble. She doesn’t understand why I can’t make her one.’

Praxis would have remonstrated and said ‘poor Irma’ but feared, rightly, that sympathy would appear hypocritical.

Phillip was agitated. He strode up and down the kitchen, when he should have been visiting Irma.

Praxis had polished the copper saucepans, cleaned behind the taps and scoured the butcher’s block. Other women’s kitchens are easy to transform.

‘I want to make my own films,’ he said, ‘not other people’s.’

‘Then why don’t you?’

‘Because I have to keep all this going.’ He gestured to include house, children, absent wife, missing nanny, present mistress, rooms, insults, sulks, self-indulgences and disciplines and the whole paraphernalia of middle class life. ‘It takes money.’

During the day Praxis had opened up the basement door so that the Council workmen would clear away the belongings of the deceased sitting tenant. The men threw everything into the street, and from the street into the waiting dust-cart, where a churning iron screw compacted everything. Chairs, sofa, bed, all sodden with urine. Christmas cards, wedding photographs; old letters and postcards, greasy and dusty; the newspaper she had kept as extra blankets for cold nights; cracked crockery and tinny cutlery; mousetraps; mouldy sliced bread. So much for a life. The workmen finished, nodded, declined a tip and went away to the next address on their list.

Even empty, the place stank. Praxis hated Irma.

‘I’d have done better,’ thought Praxis. ‘I wouldn’t have let her rot.’ But would she?

‘You mean, you let them throw everything out?’ Phillip was worried. ‘Irma was going to go through the old postcards. There might have been something interesting. People collect them, these days, you know.’

‘I’m sorry I missed it,’ he said later. ‘There might have been some interesting footage.’

Another day passed, of love, tranquillity and reciprocated passion. Victoria and Jason had some friends to tea. The noise and mess were exhausting and exhaustive. Their parents, collecting them, looked coldly at Praxis. Her roots were growing out: she feared she looked hollow eyed and sexually satiated. And poor Irma, she could hear them thinking, having such a terrible time in hospital!

Did anyone really think poor Irma, wondered Praxis? Or did they think, as she did, selfish, bad-tempered bitch of an Irma, better out of the way!

‘You ought to go and visit Irma,’ said Praxis.

‘It’s not my child she’s having,’ said Phillip, becoming, at least for a while, impotent. ‘Unless I conceived it in my sleep. You’ve no idea what life’s been like.’

‘Irma’s been going to poetry readings,’ he said. ‘She was having an affair with a hairy poet.’ Phillip was smooth skinned, almost hairless.

‘I find that rather hard to believe,’ said Praxis.

‘He’s an American,’ said Phillip. ‘A Pulitzer Prize winner,’ and Praxis had less trouble believing it.

‘I can’t let you go,’ said Phillip.

‘Then don’t,’ said Praxis.

‘Irma told me she hated you,’ said Praxis.

‘Irma said you were a voyeur, and used cameras as a sublimation,’ said Praxis.

‘Irma said you were impotent and a social climber,’ said Praxis. And so on. Praxis was fighting for her life, her happiness, and Irma’s children.

‘I love you,’ said Praxis. Not only did she say it, but it was true.

‘I can’t be married to a madwoman for the rest of my life,’ said Phillip.

‘Then don’t be,’ said Praxis.

Praxis telephoned Ivor, who wept. She marvelled at the telephone system. Every house in the country physically linked by bits of wire to each other: the vibrations of distress passing so easily over distances.

‘Where are you?’ he wept. ‘What are you doing? Where have you been? Who are you with? Never come home! I’ll kill you if you do, bitch, whore, slut. When are you coming back? The children need you. The cat is ill.’

She put the telephone down and rang again later. He was calmer. No, she wasn’t coming back. What about the house, he begged: their life together, the children?

‘What about Carol?’ enquired Praxis, unkindly. ‘What about you not letting my mother live with us?’

‘You only asked once,’ he replied, astounded.

He was angry. He said he’d divorce her. She said she’d counter petition. He said she wasn’t fit to look after the children, anyway. She said she knew that. He said she was mad, monstrous, unnatural. She did not deny it. He said the children lay awake at night, crying: he could not go to work because of them: what was he to do? She said she did not know. He could always get Carol to help out, she supposed.

‘It’s all very vulgar,’ said Phillip, calmly, taking the receiver from her and putting it back in its cradle. Praxis cried for her children. Phillip said they’d soon get settled and she would see them again.

‘How?’

‘We’ll manage,’ he said. ‘And your mother, too.’

‘But it will all be just the same for you, only more,’ she wept. ‘More people, more households, more obligations.’ What Praxis really meant was that she wanted just the two of them. Phillip and Praxis. They wrote to Irma to tell her so.

Irma was too weak and too stunned to say anything at all: or at any rate neither Praxis nor Phillip were there to hear it. Irma went straight from hospital, with the baby, to stay with cousins in the country.

‘It isn’t my baby,’ said Phillip. ‘This proves it. She must be feeling very guilty, or she wouldn’t take it so quietly.’

The Pulitzer Prize winner went to visit Irma in the country and Praxis felt better about everything. The neighbours fell silent as she passed all the same, and the shopkeepers looked at her with hostility. Praxis hoped that she just imagined it, that people were not really so prejudiced and unreasonable. She could not see that she had done Irma any great harm. Irma hated Phillip, her children, and the house. She had said so.

Irma, in any case, suffered some internal complications and went back into hospital for three whole months. The cousins looked after the baby for her, and called twice weekly to collect Victoria and Jason for the day. There could be no doubt but that the cousins – he wearing a tweed cap, and she in horsey headscarf – regarded Praxis coldly, and positively gobbled at Phillip. Praxis and Phillip thought that quite amusing, except it was disconcerting to imagine how Irma had misrepresented the situation.

It was as if Praxis were blinkered: her focus limited to what was in front of her: everything else blurred, or black; she was unable to register the implications of what she had brought about, what she had done. She was dizzy with desire by day, weak with satiation by night.

Sometimes she lay awake grieving for Robert and Claire, but not often, not for long.

Victoria and Jason came back from their days with the cousins wild and noisy. Children were not allowed to visit in their mother’s ward. Jason started to wet the bed. Stoically, daily, Praxis stripped the bed and washed the sheets. She thought Irma ought to be grateful. When she needed money she asked Phillip for it. He handed over banknotes blithely, in wodges, without counting first, or asking Praxis to account for what she did with it. Praxis had kept careful budgeting books for Ivor.

Within weeks Phillip was sitting down to an evening meal, each one an extravaganza, the choicest cuts of meat, the rarest vegetables, any error in cooking remedied by the addition of brandy or cream, or both.

‘A real woman,’ said Phillip, gratefully. They sat together on the same side of the table, to be the closer, the better to be able to lean into each other.

One day when Phillip was away filming, and Victoria and Jason were off with the funny cousins, Praxis went to Brighton, to visit Willy and Carla.

109 Holden Road seemed smaller, less set apart: it was just another house in a long, long road, rather old-fashioned and inconvenient, but no longer dark with nightmare. Willy and Carla seemed a mildly eccentric couple; small-town. Willy was no longer powerful: Carla was no longer a trump card pulled out of Willy’s pack. Rather, she was a slight, tired, put-upon young woman with an unhealthy pallor and hollow eyes, and the manner of a servant. She scurried about in an apron, with damp clothes and steaming dishes, sulkily, reminding Praxis of Judith, long ago. And Willy, moving sometimes above-stairs, sometimes below-stairs, unsure of his status, was a version of Henry the photographer, cut down to size. Praxis had the feeling that her life had lapsed out of colour and into black and white: as if she too were now some part of Phillip’s imagination. What she saw lacked solidity: as if Phillip were making an eternal square with his two hands and framing her through them; able at will to cut to the next square, to edit and delete.

I’m going mad, thought Praxis.

Willy counted on his fingers.

‘Well done, Pattie,’ he said. ‘That’s six people’s lives ruined, at a minimum. Your two wretched children, your unbelievable Ivor; the impossible Irma and her two trendy brats. And of course Phillip.’

‘I love Phillip. He loves me.’

‘What kind of an excuse is that? He’s just another bloody idiot, like the rest of us. No, not six, seven. There’s Irma’s new baby.’

‘It isn’t Phillip’s.’

‘Who says so?’

‘Phillip.’

Willy laughed. Praxis wept. Carla heaved obvious sighs. Mary came home from playing tennis. She was in adolescence now: long-legged, long-haired, smooth-skinned.

‘Auntie Pattie!’ she cried, pleased. ‘Auntie Pattie! We haven’t seen you for ever so long.’ She went to Brighton High School. There was no longer a school uniform, and the girls no longer jangled their achievements on metal bars, over plump bosoms. Sunday dinner was served.

Praxis talked brightly to Mary about chemistry exams and medical school, but the image was now clear in her mind, worming its way finally through the barriers put up to bar its way. Robert and Claire, crying in bed. Crowding in, on the periphery of her consciousness, a cluster of others waiting for admission. Irma, her friend. Ivor, her husband. Jason, wetting the bed. Victoria, confused and pale. The cold cousins, the censorious neighbours, the shopkeepers.

‘However, no doubt we all have a right to be happy,’ observed Willy.

‘I’m not so sure,’ said Praxis, and went to the bathroom and brought up roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes, frozen peas, plum duff, custard and all.

She went back to London without visiting her mother. She rang Ivor, who refused to let her see the children. She was in no state to do so. Later, perhaps, he said. Had she seen a psychiatrist? Phillip formed his two hands into a square and observed her grief.

‘Irma never cried,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘It waters the roots of my being.’ He consoled her. She loved him: though she could see that he was flawed. Seeing this, a kind of sanity returned.

Hilda came to visit Praxis.

‘You’re making a mess of your life,’ she complained. ‘You had everything a woman could want: a loving husband, lovely children, nice little home, and you’ve thrown it all away.’

Praxis regarded Hilda with more coldness and less fear than usual. Hilda was dressed in black and white, and had her hair piled high in a kind of lacquered beehive on top of her head. She wore a string of pearls, and moved briskly and competently.

‘It’s not what you want from life,’ observed Praxis.

‘If you have a career,’ said Hilda, ‘you have to make sacrifices. We were always different, in any case. You were always more, well, physical, than me, and it’s caused everyone a great deal of trouble.’

‘Has it?’

‘Poor Willy,’ said Hilda. ‘He was prepared to stand by you. But that wasn’t good enough for you, either. And you realise it was because of you and that filthy incident with another girl when you were barely into your teens that mother had to spend the rest of her life in hospital?’

Praxis cried. She couldn’t help it. Hilda relented somewhat, but not much.

‘I suppose it’s not your fault, Praxis. You have a kind of innate filthiness of spirit. You must have inherited it from poor mother’s husband.’

‘He wasn’t her husband.’

‘You see?’ Hilda felt her point was proved. ‘You scrub around in the underside of life: and look at you! You look common, like a servant.’

Indeed, with the roots of her yellow hair black, and her sore eyes, red from weeping, and the cold in her nose which always accompanied any change in the manner of her living, Praxis did not look her best. Phillip did not seem to mind. He found it restful, he said, after Irma’s lacquered perfection: and the slipslop of Praxis’ slovenly slippers preferable to the brisk and dangerous clatter of Irma’s stiletto heels. They lay with their arms around each other in bed, Praxis snuffling and sighing, Phillip peacefully sleeping.

‘Hilda,’ said Praxis. ‘I might be living with Ivor if someone hadn’t sent him an anonymous letter telling him I’d been a whore before I married him.’

Hilda looked blank.

‘But no one would believe a disgusting thing like that,’ Hilda said, in all sincerity.

‘You really hate me,’ said Praxis. ‘Ever since the beginning you’ve hated me.’

‘That’s childish,’ said Hilda. ‘You’re a mature woman in your thirties and you talk like a six-year-old. It would have been better for everyone if you’d never been born, but that’s not your fault.’

Praxis cried, mildly. Hilda observed her sister, coldly.

‘What’s the matter?’ She sounded curious, rather than concerned.

‘I’ve got no one,’ said Praxis. ‘I’ve never had anyone. Mother, father, you – nobody ever wanted me.’

‘Good heavens,’ said Hilda. ‘You were everyone’s darling. You’ve had man after man ever since I could remember. You even have children. All you seem able to do is throw them away. Look at you! You’re hysterical. I expect you’re premenstrual. I’m afraid women are hopelessly handicapped by their biological natures.’

Hilda was doing what she could at the Ministry to block a scheme to introduce women trainee executives into the nationalised industries.

Hilda gathered her neat, spinsterish things together and went back to run the country. Praxis was crying when Phillip returned.

‘She stands me on my head,’ Praxis complained, ‘and shakes every bit of my brain about until it’s addled. She’s always done it. She always will.’

Praxis went to visit Irma; her hands trembled: she had difficulty in breathing: she stood on the wrong platform and missed the train, but she got there. Phillip hadn’t wanted her to go, so she went without his knowledge. He would find out but she would have to put up with that. The cousins lived in a Sussex farmhouse. He was a stockbroker and she bred horses. Irma was the worldly member of the family.

Praxis was coldly received: dogs barked and leapt up at her, and were barely restrained. She was not offered refreshment but taken around to where Irma lay stretched out in a deckchair, wearing dark glasses. The baby slept in a cot beside her.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Praxis. ‘I think I’ve been mad. I’ll move out at once.’

‘Don’t bother,’ said Irma, ‘I’ve got cancer. I really don’t want Phillip filming my death-throes.’

(‘Of course she hasn’t got cancer,’ said Phillip, savagely. ‘She’s been threatening me with cancer for as long as I can remember. She’ll use anything. Nothing’s sacred.’)

‘No,’ said Irma to Praxis, ‘you stay and be Nanny, and wipe Phillip’s nose for him while he plays make-believe. That house is really terribly hard work. And nothing changes except you have another child, or the ones you’ve got grow older, or some different boring people come to a dinner party you’ve got to wash up after.’

‘I tell you,’ said Irma, ‘unless you wake up in the morning wanting to be alive, there’s no point in any of it. And waking up next to Phillip, I just want to be dead.’

(‘The trouble with Irma,’ said Phillip, ‘is that she’s an acute depressive. Can you imagine what it’s been like, living with a depressive all these years? What it’s been like for the children? What it’s going to be like for the wretched Pulitzer baby? She ought to have been sterilised.’)

‘All the same,’ said Irma, ‘one would always rather leave than be left. He’ll do the same to you, one day. Just watch out for his sense of timing, that’s all. It’s murderous. He nearly killed me. You nearly killed me, Praxis. I didn’t trust him, but I trusted you. Didn’t you have any sense of me, at all?’

‘No,’ said Praxis. ‘Not when it came to it.’

‘When we were girls,’ said Irma, ‘it was all fair in love, I seem to remember. A date with a man always took priority over a date with a girl. But now there’s property and children and whole lives at stake, Praxis. Are people speaking to you?’

‘No.’

‘Good,’ said Irma. She didn’t seem to have much strength. She began to cry.

‘I thought you were my friend,’ said Irma. ‘I really did.’

‘I love him,’ said Praxis, ‘and you don’t. I could make him happy.’

Irma looked quite astounded, an expression Praxis had never before seen on her face. Irma took Praxis’ hand and laid it against her own cheek.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘Love!’

Praxis cleaned Irma’s home, looked after Irma’s children, slept with Irma’s husband. She was overwhelmed by the notion that someone as malicious as Irma could bear so little malice: and surprised by the knowledge that Irma’s feeling for her ran so much deeper than her own, for Irma.

Presently Irma regained her health and strength, and ceased to be so forgiving.

Writs flew: from Irma, and from Ivor. Damages were claimed. Phillip was away making a film about poverty in the Third World, and came back, to his indignation, with some obscure and debilitating tropical virus. Praxis dealt with the solicitors.

Eventually Phillip was divorced by Irma; Praxis was divorced by Ivor. Phillip had custody of Victoria and Jason, a state of affairs which Irma did not contest. Ivor had custody of Robert and Claire: a state of affairs which Praxis wanted to contest, but did not, under threat from Ivor that he would bring up the subject of the Raffles Esplanade Dive and her moral fitness to bring up children. She was however, granted liberal access to them.

Phillip was required to buy Irma a flat and provide her with maintenance, and was thus further weighted down by practical obligations. He began to count the notes in the wads he handed over for housekeeping. Praxis would have to go out to work.

‘I suppose it’s all been worth it,’ said Praxis, on their wedding night.

‘Of course it has been,’ said Phillip. ‘I’d love to get some hand-held cameras into the registrar’s office. Those faces!’

He always kept his eyes open when they made love. Praxis, in these days of love and modesty, rather wished he would not. When the very soul left the body and flew to join in a cosmic ecstasy, the details of the flesh seemed irrelevant. But not apparently to Phillip. He had her enclosed by the square made by his two hands.

He was working for the BBC now: not on the staff, but freelance. His hair was thinning. He played startlingly rough games with Victoria and Jason in the little garden: hurling garden stakes like javelins: narrowly missing neighbours’ cats and children. Victoria and Jason were surprised at, and slightly superior to these outbursts of boisterousness, but joined in, obligingly. Robert and Claire, when they came for the weekends, were nervous and frightened, and would not join in. Robert played with Lego and Claire stroked Irma’s white cat. Praxis felt her children did not really enjoy their time with her, in a house where meals came at irregular hours, no one washed their hands before eating, or particularly said please and thank you. They stared at her wonderingly, with Ivor’s brown eyes, and she felt that she had little to offer them. But they slept soundly at night and did not cry. She would listen at their doors to make sure. Victoria and Jason put up with their presence, but found them boring. Phillip was happy to have his empire spread.

Praxis’ roots grew out. Phillip found her a job in an advertising agency.

‘I thought you despised advertising,’ said Praxis.

‘I don’t see what else a bright and totally untrained person can do,’ said Phillip, ‘except be a school dinner lady.’

‘You didn’t exactly get me the job,’ Praxis murmured, later. ‘I had to do any number of tests.’ She worked in the copy department, writing pamphlets for the Electricity Board.

‘They would never have given you the tests,’ said Phillip, ‘if it hadn’t been for me.’

Whether he was demanding credit or blame, Praxis could not be sure.

‘Women are so fundamentally immoral,’ Phillip would complain, admiringly enough, at dinner parties. ‘They go after what they want, red in tooth and claw. Whether it’s babies, or a man, or sex, or promotion, they let nothing stand in their way. They’re barbarians.’

That was in the days when men were prepared to generalise about women, and women would not argue, but would simper, and be flattered by the attention paid.

It was difficult for Praxis to get to see her mother. There were four children at the weekends – ever since Irma seldom took her pair – the house to run, her job to do, the food to buy, the meals to serve, the clothes to keep washed, ironed and put away and so on. Phillip did not want her to engage a cleaner, let alone house an au pair.

‘It’s nicer without outsiders,’ he said with truth. ‘Don’t worry about standards. Let’s just live.’

Just living, all the same, was exhausting. And he had become accustomed to three-course meals in the evening, complete with cream and brandy.

‘Why don’t you have your mother here,’ asked Phillip, ‘if you worry about her?’

‘Because I’d have to give up my job,’ said Praxis, shortly. She had begun to speak shortly, she felt, rather too often; with such breath as she had left while passing from one task to the next. ‘And your income is so erratic we have to depend on mine.’

If she left the bills to be paid by Phillip, the services would be cut off, and debt collectors would ring the bell, so she paid them herself. It didn’t matter.

‘Don’t worry about money,’ said Phillip. ‘That would be very boring and rather lower middle class.’

She was happier than she ever had been. Or if not happy – it now seemed to her that actual, overflowing happiness was a function of extreme youth, and since she had missed it then, she was not likely to encounter it now: and love was a good deal, but not everything: if not happy, she was at least living an appropriate life, amongst people who did not look at her curiously but understood what she was saying, and responded to it.

She was promoted: she wrote headlines now, and not just body copy, and the small print. She found the work easy. She had an assistant, and a little room with a carpet and pot-plants on the windowsill. She honed and fined sentences down to fill the brief and fit the space available. A daily, day-long crossword puzzle, with people clapping as she fitted the last clue.

‘God made her a woman,’ she wrote blissfully, ‘love made her a mother – with a little help from electricity!’

She found decisions about what to have for dinner more difficult that decisions regarding campaigns, typefaces, art work and so on. Wrangles with the children upset her more than differences with art directors. She would sit at her desk reading recipe books, planning the evening’s menu. Meals at home became more and more elaborate: Phillip came to expect them. He would bring home friends from the film world, and they expected them too. She did not invite home anyone she met and liked in the advertising world. Phillip found them shallow and meretricious.

She remembered what Irma had said, departing, monstrous.

‘Don’t start serving him proper meals; he’ll only come to expect them.’

Too late.

She went to meetings. People listened seriously to what she had to say. Colleagues struggled to avoid blame: Praxis acknowledged her shortcomings impatiently, in order to get on with the work in hand, and home in good time to clean the stairs and get the dustbins out for the next morning. She gained a reputation for efficiency.

Phillip, when he wasn’t working, sat at home and played records, prepared camera scripts, and worked towards a feature film.

‘A house must be a background to one’s life,’ he’d say, ‘not a source of work and effort.’ But he’d complain when it was untidy. He didn’t like to see Praxis busy about the house either.

‘Sit down,’ he’d say. ‘Slow down. What does it matter? I’ve asked people for supper tomorrow. Shall we have Osso Bucco?’

To get Osso Bucco meant a journey into Soho in her lunch-hour. She would accomplish it. Now she had a reputation as a cook, she would not easily let it go.

‘Women’s highest calling,’ she wrote, ‘keeps a woman busy! Here’s how electricity helps a working mother keep calm, keep cool, and the children kissing her goodnight.’ And so on. She was a real discovery, in the agency world. Other agencies tried to poach her. She stayed loyal and got another rise. She was agreeably thin. Clothes looked good on her.

News came from the estate. Diana’s husband had been killed in a car crash, on his way back from a nightclub. His secretary was killed with him. His way back where, people asked. Diana was left with two children. Ivor married her within the month. Love or commonsense? Did it matter? Robert and Claire came less often: when they did Robert was dressed like a little man, in suit, collar and tie: Claire wore a blouse, pleated skirt, white ankle socks and red button shoes. Victoria and Jason, in dirty jeans and sweaters, declined to play with them. Robert played with Lego and yawned: Claire stroked Irma’s cat and missed Diana’s middle daughter, her best friend. Irma left her Justin now just walking, with Praxis, and went off to America for three months.

‘But I’m working,’ said Praxis.

‘According to your advertisements,’ observed Irma, ‘mothers shouldn’t go out to work.’

She had changed her style. She wore sneakers, jeans and no make-up. Her hair was short and fell naturally. She looked more intelligent and less petulant. She had been sterilised. ‘Now I can’t have a baby,’ she said, ‘I feel like a person, not a cipher.’

Praxis was shocked. Praxis was on the pill – as yet unrefined, massive doses of oestrogen and progestin mixed, causing acute depression, blood-clots, oedoema, infertility and in extreme cases, death. Doctors, for the most part, denied these side-effects vigorously, while refraining from prescribing it for their wives. Apart from severe mid-cycle pains, Praxis showed few ill effects. But her daily pill still seemed a daily denial of her femininity, and her femininity her most valuable attribute.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Why not? He’s his child, after all.’

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

For the second time Praxis saw Irma look astounded.

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

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

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

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

Praxis wept all night. She was tired.

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

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

Praxis saw to the family.

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

Irma paraded outside the Miss World contest with a banner saying such contests were humiliating to women. She threw a smoke bomb and was arrested. Nobody could understand her attitude, except Phillip.

‘She’s got so ugly lately,’ he said. ‘I expect she’s jealous.’

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

‘Growing up clean with electricity!’ wrote Praxis.

Willy and Carla took Lucy to live with them. She was now a quiet elderly woman, with few memories. Praxis sent money every month to pay for her support. She assumed that Willy must by now have tens of thousands of pounds saved, and consulted with Hilda as to the possibility of charging him rent, but Hilda would have none of it. Hilda did not contribute to Lucy’s keep: nor to the upkeep of the fabric of Holden Road. Praxis did all that, and was happy to do so. It seemed to her that the roots of much of her misery had lain in lack of memory. To provide money was so much simpler in the end, than providing love, companionship or understanding. To earn it, so much easier than asking for it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Victoria and Jason seldom suffered, Praxis thought. They stayed in their rooms and played records, loudly: or stayed out late and, Praxis greatly feared, smoked pot.

Phillip belonged to a reform group who were trying to legalise the smoking of cannabis.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What about you?’ asked Praxis.

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

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

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

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

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

‘I’m a working mother,’ said Praxis.

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

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

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

Praxis went home and waited for something to happen.

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

Praxis accepted, and went to visit Irma.