24

‘Do you realise,’ said Irma to Praxis, ‘that you are not only a personally misguided woman, but a danger to other women as well?’

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

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

Irma’s room seemed arranged for a permanent meeting. Hard chairs were placed around the walls. The central table was long and functional. Irma’s bed was pushed against the wall: narrow, hard, and used for sleeping not for sex. Praxis wondered what Irma could do with all the money that Phillip sent her monthly. Or rather which Praxis now sent, for Phillip had no money to spare. The sources of his income, gradually but inexorably, were drying up. The BBC employed him less and less frequently. Now that naked women appeared quite happily and quite often on the television screen, the sources of his creativity seemed to be drying up. And he was expensive and temperamental, and a temperamental director was capable of bringing a whole studio out on strike. The race, these days, was to the adaptable, the economical, and the polite – Phillip was none of these things: and there was a whole new young breed of television directors who were. Phillip, rightly, was gloomy about his future. He cancelled his banker’s order to Irma, if not for the Maserati.

‘You have to send it, by law,’ objected Praxis.

‘If she has the audacity to sue,’ said Phillip, ‘let her.’ So Praxis sent the banker’s order herself. What difference did it make – Phillip’s money or hers?

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

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

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

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

Phillip certainly thought so. He would regale dinner tables with amazed accounts of his wife’s background and beginnings. ‘Praxis is no ordinary person,’ he’d say. ‘No conventional home life for a wife of mine! A mother in a mental home, and father who, to all accounts, was no ordinary Jew, but a gambling, drinking, fornicating Jew.’

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

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

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

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

At home Praxis pretended she did not go out to work: never took jobs home: never talked about her office day. It would have annoyed Phillip. In the office she pretended she did not have a family: never talked about her home: never took time off. It would have annoyed her employers. She juggled her life with amazing dexterity: always guilty, always in a hurry. Running home from work to get the boeuf bourguignon into the oven: up in the morning, before anyone, to iron her smart white office blouse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All sighed, unimpressed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What shall I do?’ she asked aloud.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Of course advertising increases total sales of cigarettes,’ said Praxis naïvely to the Deputy Creative Director over melon and ginger. ‘We spend our time associating cigarettes with young love, virility, achievement and good living. I don’t want to do this new account.’

The Deputy Creative Director’s warm eyes grew noticeably less warm. ‘It’s an all or nothing matter, Praxis,’ he said. ‘If you take a salary from an employer he has a right to expect loyalty. If you don’t approve of what we’re doing, then hand in your resignation. Anything else would be hypocrisy.’

Praxis put the matter to Phillip.

‘The way things are going,’ he said, ‘you can’t possibly give up your job.’

Phillip had been six months without work. He felt, obscurely, that it was Praxis’ fault. Victoria had a boyfriend with long blond hair, who was discovered in her bed. Long-haired girls called at the door for Jason, and were uninterested in Phillip. Hard times.

Praxis kept her job and took on the cigarette account.

Government regulations were introduced, forbidding the association of cigarettes, in advertising, with sex, sport, youth, or healthy activity of any kind. She contorted her mind to get round the new restrictions, and managed a subtle connection between airlines and cigarettes which was applauded.

‘It’s not,’ said Phillip, ‘as if you told lies. Nothing you say is untrue.’

‘But nothing I say is true,’ complained Praxis. ‘Truth lies in the gaps between sentences. That’s what copy-writing is.’

‘No one takes any notice of advertising anyway,’ said Phillip.

‘They recognise it for what it is.’

Phillip was employed to make a documentary about a new hydro-electric scheme in the Scottish Highlands. It was not fiction, but it was work. He cheered up.

Hilda had become a negotiator for the Industrial Relations Board. She and Praxis rarely met. They seemed to have little in common. Praxis dealt with the surfaces of living, the material things of life: Hilda with the deeper significances. Praxis supposed that it had always, really, been so. Hilda had escorts, not lovers. Her jaw retreated more as she grew older. When Praxis did see her she was reminded vividly of Hilda as a plain little girl, playing on the beach. She was respected by both Management and Unions: Praxis suspected that she intimidated both. If either side walked out swearing that she was mad, at least the other side could presently be relied upon to do the same, and the situation at least made for a certain community of interest and attitude. Hilda’s success as a negotiator was established.

‘I’m not like a woman, you see,’ said Hilda to Praxis, when they did meet once, for lunch. ‘They forget I’m a woman.’ She spoke as if she had solved her problems, and Praxis felt sorry for her.

‘What’s for dinner?’ said Phillip, coming home from the Highlands, where the eating had been frugal. ‘Who can we ask round?’

Who indeed? The sixties were over.

The friends who had thronged to the house during the sixties, eating, drinking, enthusing, profligate of money, health, time and life, had gone their various ways – some to the country, some to new marriages, a few, even, to their deaths, remembered only by a scored out line in a telephone book. Phillip and Praxis seemed to make few new friends. Phillip did not like Praxis to invite her colleagues home, and his contemporaries in the film world seemed either absurdly rich and successful – too much so for easy conversation – or else too shamefully left behind to comfortably ask round.

‘It would only be embarrassing,’ Phillip would say. ‘He’d be envious and I’d feel awkward, and how could they ever ask us back? You’re a very flashy hostess, Praxis, all cream and brandy. I rather think you’ve driven our friends away. This is the age of austerity, and fear of cholesterol.’

And so it was. Petrol prices and inflation soared, long faces and recriminations. Architect friends went bankrupt: a friend in the building industry went to prison. Their wives just melted away. Too embarrassing to ask them round: besides, since a wife basked in the glory of her husband’s success, so must she share his fall.

In the meantime, who to ask for dinner? Praxis looked through the telephone book and found there was no one to ask.

Victoria and Jason were out. They usually were. Praxis and Phillip are alone, facing each other. There seemed little to say. Phillip brooded.

‘It’s not my fault there’s no one to ask round,’ said Praxis, picking at her take-away kebab. But Phillip clearly thought it was.

‘Everything must change,’ said Praxis. ‘We must just change with it.’

‘You’ve certainly changed,’ said Phillip, pushing back his chair, and leaving his kebab half eaten. ‘You don’t even bother to cook properly any more. No wonder we don’t have any friends.’

Praxis was less easily made to feel guilty. She finished her kebab, and then ate Phillip’s.

She was, astonishingly, forty. She knew, because men no longer whistled at her in the street, but otherwise she felt the same as usual. She felt rejected, and discarded, and humiliated when men at work or at home made lecherous remarks about other, younger, sexier women.

‘If you live by your looks,’ said Irma to her over the phone, ‘you die by your looks. Come to a meeting.’

But Praxis wouldn’t. A meeting of all women! She felt she would be finally relegated, down among the women. A woman past her prime, taking comfort from the company of other rejected ageing women. There was to her something infinitely depressing in the notion of any all-female group, which must lack the excitement and pleasure of mixed company.

But the company of men was not what it was. The Deputy Creative Director took up with his young secretary, and Praxis suffered pangs of unreasoning jealousy. Phillip complained about her looks and her increasing lack of bosom. He would not do it directly; rather he let the implication be felt.

‘I think you should stop using so much make-up. It’s beginning to get in the cracks.’ Or he’d point out a passing girl.

‘God, what a figure. Look at those knockers!’

Praxis, while pained, felt a vague, rising indignation in herself. She could no longer quite take his attitudes for granted. They were those of most other men she knew, although expressed more cruelly, and with an increasing desire to hurt.

Irma appeared more and more on television, and what she said seemed to Praxis less and less bizarre.

‘If only women would realise,’ said Irma to the world, ‘that their miseries are political, not personal.’

‘What poor Irma needs,’ said Phillip, ‘is a good lay. But where’s she going to find that? Look at the way she dresses! Christ, what happens to frustrated women.’

Praxis thought Irma looked rather good, with short hair and no make-up. Praxis, on Phillip’s insistence, still went to the hairdresser twice a week, and sat under the drier with her hair in rollers, hot and bored.

‘Let’s face it,’ said Phillip, ‘it’s all right for Victoria to go about al fresco, but hardly you, darling, at your age.’

It occurred to Praxis that Phillip too was not as young as he had been. He was certainly going through a hard time. He suffered from insomnia and fits of depression. He would brood and sulk for days over imagined slights: he had indigestion. All Praxis’ fault, his manner implied, even when his words did not.

Phillip complained, as once Ivor had complained. He complained about the grease in the oxtail soup, about the dryness of the duck, about the way she handled the children, about the untidiness of the house, about the rate she spent money. He could not work, write or think while the cleaner was in the house. The cleaner left and was not replaced. Then he complained about the state of Praxis’ hands and the meanness of her temper.

‘What have I done?’ she asked, rashly.

‘You haven’t done anything. You just are,’ he complained. She knew what he meant. She had begun to feel herself, that her very existence was an affront to him.

Her enigmatic stomach pains returned.

‘Menopausal,’ said Phillip.

Things will get better again, thought Praxis. Things do. And so indeed they did, from time to time. When Phillip was working he would be enthusiastic, loving and friendly, and she would move back out of the spare room and into the double bed, and all would be as it had been.

‘I love you,’ he’d say. ‘Don’t get too fed up with me. Don’t ever leave.’

‘Of course not. Why should I leave?’ She had a wonderful, useful gift for forgetting the events of the past. Useful, at any rate, to everyone except herself.

Then work would dry up, and the difficulties begin again.

‘Things only get better,’ wrote Colleen from Sydney, ‘if you do something to make them better.’ Her little girl, not so little now, was backstroke champion of New South Wales. The shelves were covered with her silver trophies. Colleen had lost three stone through diet and exercise. She had been to a matrimonial agency and was marrying a swimming coach. ‘Do write,’ begged Colleen.

Praxis wrote, a cheerful, bouncy account of her life with Phillip. A tale of progress, achievement, and good cheer. She tore it up. Phillip was out of work and she back in the spare bed.

At the firm’s Christmas party Praxis drank a great many champagne cocktails and ended up under the board-room table, coupling with the Deputy Creative Director.

‘I’ve always wanted to do that,’ he said.

‘So have I,’ she said.

‘All those half bottles of wine!’ he complained. ‘If you only knew how much I always want to get drunk.’

But it did not develop into an affair. She was too conscious of the photograph of his wife and children on his desk. All the same, the incident cheered her up.

She exercised half-forgotten and neglected skills on Phillip, and he responded well enough. Things will get better, she thought, yet again: as she sprawled on a chair, naked and ungainly, and he pumped away, and excitement rose; but it was of the flesh, not of the spirit. Useless.

Victoria and Jason were both increasingly troublesome. Victoria chose to see more and more of her mother, and spoke more and more curtly to Praxis, whom she affected to despise; and talked in a patronising fashion to her father. She had given up boys. Presently she announced that she was a lesbian, and brought home a friend to prove it – a pretty girl with curly hair and dimples, who prided herself on the likeness to Shirley Temple in the ‘Little Colonel’. The friend stayed the night and in the morning Praxis found them sleeping in bed together, arms wrapped round each other’s necks. She crept away, horrified; woke Phillip and told him.

‘Why shouldn’t they?’ asked Phillip. ‘If it gives them pleasure. Safer than boys.’

He pulled Praxis down to the bed and made love to her; buggering her, something he seldom did. She cried, from pain and shock. She thought perhaps he was mad: perhaps he was in love with his daughter: perhaps anything.

‘I hear you are a lesbian,’ he said to Victoria at breakfast time.

‘That’s right,’ said Victoria.

‘You must tell me what you do,’ he said to the curly-headed friend, who turned pale at his crudity. ‘If you do it under my roof,’ he said, ‘I think it’s the least you can do.’

Victoria left the table, offended. Her friend followed.

Phillip laughed.

Victoria packed and stayed with Irma for a month, but presently returned – so Praxis suspected – for the sake of comfort, good dinners, and ironed clothes.

‘It must be difficult being a step-mother,’ said Victoria on her return, and kissed Praxis’ cheek. Praxis cried, with relief.

‘You should never have gone off with Phillip in the first place,’ said Victoria, ‘but I’m glad it was you and no one else. When I think of the women it could have been!’

But she showed no further interest in boys: only in girls. Praxis felt that she had failed with her step-daughter. Victoria assured her that lesbianism was a higher state than heterosexuality: that there was affection, comfort, consolation to be found in girls; and only war with boys. Praxis remembered Louise Gaynor; long, long ago. Perhaps if they had slept together, spent nights together, discovered each other, so much since might have been different?

‘I wish it didn’t turn daddy on, that’s all,’ Victoria said, bitterly. ‘Men!’

Jason was increasingly rude and defiant, and left girlie magazines about for Praxis to see. Phillip, discovering them, became hysterical, took his belt off and hit his son. Jason hit back and went to stay with Irma.

‘You talk so much about sexual freedom,’ said Praxis, mildly, ‘I find this display of prudery quite surprising.’

‘It’s not prudery,’ said Phillip. ‘It’s decency. How dare he behave like that to you? Unless of course you provoke him?’

Nightmare times.

Mary passed her finals, and emerged from her room glowing and confident. She was to take up a hospital job in the New Year. She walked about the house like a good dream, chatting here, tidying there, interested in Phillip’s work, in Praxis; in the problems of Victoria and Jason, which she assured Praxis would soon pass.

‘It’s only their age,’ she kept saying. ‘They’re both so nice. They’ll be back to themselves, presently. Why do you doubt yourself? What you put into children is never wasted.’

But Praxis doubted. On the other side of London Robert now played obsessive rugby, and Claire was a girl-guide leader. They were going to live good, orderly lives. They were their father’s children, not hers. They thought their mother strange. Certainly, she was unhappy.

At Christmas Mary went home to Willy and Carla, and came back with a boyfriend, a trainee estate agent. He was strikingly handsome: he and Mary joked and chatted easily; they held hands. It seemed a simple relationship, if not profound. Mary explained the world to her Edward, and he listened, happily enough, because he loved her, but he had no opinions of his own to return. He liked sailing. He knew about winds and tides and boats, and house prices, but that was all.

In January Mary started work, junior member of a group medical practice. In February she announced that she was pregnant, and in March that she was going to marry Edward; have the baby, and stop work.

Praxis wept.

‘It was bound to happen,’ said Phillip. ‘But just think of the waste of tax-payers’ money. All that training, and what’s at the end of it? Babies!’

Willy shrugged, Carla sighed. Praxis risked Mary’s upset by suggesting an abortion and more time to think.

‘Abortion is all right in theory,’ said Mary. ‘But I’ve seen the reality of them in practice. By the dozen. It’s carnage. A woman’s got a right to her own body, and all that: she’s got the right to ask anyone else to make her un-pregnant. If I could do my own abortion, I might consider it. But I’m not asking anyone else to do it for me. I’d rather wait for it to be born, and then kill it myself.’

‘That would be murder,’ said Praxis, shocked.

‘It’s murder at any stage,’ said Mary. ‘In any case I love Edward and I want his child. I’ll be able to go back to work sooner or later.’

‘You don’t understand,’ said Praxis, ‘you’ll shrivel up and die, mentally and emotionally. Women do.’

‘Not me,’ said Mary, and laughed. ‘In any case I rather fancy the domestic life. It’s woman’s highest calling, according to you. “God made her a woman, love made her a mother – electricity made it easier.”’

Praxis shuddered, but went to work as usual the next day.

Praxis went to visit Willy and Carla.

‘She loves him,’ said Willy. ‘Why, what did you hope for her? That she wouldn’t love anyone?’

Willy’s beard was grey. The hairs on his thin chest curled white and wiry.

‘Of course not,’ said Praxis. But perhaps she had.

‘She reminds me of you,’ said Willy, ‘at her age. But she’s not your flesh and blood. Perhaps it’s just that all girls are the same?’

‘Perhaps,’ said Praxis.

‘I’m going to be a grandmother,’ complained Carla, ‘without ever really being a mother. Mary’s been like a daughter, but it’s not the same as your own flesh and blood.’ She was superintendent manageress of the canteen, now. She drove a little car.

She took Praxis in to see Lucy. Lucy sat in an old chair in the dank master bedroom and stared out over the drive, and tuttutted vaguely at the behaviour of the common children on their way to school, although the school had long since been closed.

‘Who are you?’ she asked Praxis, and drew Carla towards her and said, ‘I only like to see family.’

Carla, upset for Praxis, hurried her out of the room.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Praxis, weeping. ‘I understand.’

‘But she knows who you are, I’m sure she does!’

‘I don’t,’ said Praxis, sniffing.

‘You will come to the wedding, won’t you,’ begged Carla. ‘Mary will be so upset if you don’t.’

Willy walked her to the gate.

‘You don’t look like yourself at all,’ said Willy. ‘When you were a whore you looked most like yourself.’

He had never forgiven her.

Mary was married in Brighton in a becoming white dress which did not even attempt to conceal the bump in her tummy.

Edward’s parents were there. Praxis thought she recognised the father from the old Raffles days, but did not study him too closely in case she was right. It was a good outing. They all went. Phillip, Victoria and Jason; Robert and Claire too. Everyone laughed: nobody said anything unkind. Praxis had the feeling they were all supporting her, bolstering her against misfortune. And so they were. Even when they were stuck in the traffic jam on the way back to London – it was one of the first fine spring weekends, and Brighton a pleasant day’s outing for Londoners – they sang, and did not grumble.

Praxis resigned herself to the futility – or so it appeared – of human effort. Phillip seemed happier: he did not ask her to sleep in the spare bed: he had a feature film to direct: a disaster movie about the great flood. (His documentary on the hydroelectric scheme had won two awards.) The commission meant spending much time away on location. When he was not home she served fish fingers and chips straight from the pan, instead of fillet of sole Veronique, potato duchesse and mange-tous from Wedgewood serving dishes, and had time to recover her strength and energy.

There was, finally, trouble at work.

Advertising budgets had been slashed. Staff were fired, on a last-in, first out basis which at least left Praxis protected. But now the cigarette account was lost altogether. She did the work of three people. The value of money diminished, the annual rise was not forthcoming. She felt her work was under scrutiny. The research department, increasingly powerful, seemed to feel the need to explain things to her.

‘Sixty per cent of women go out to work,’ they said. ‘And it’s not interesting work like yours. They have boring, repetitive, tedious jobs. The work that men won’t do, but women don’t mind.’

‘I know,’ she’d say. ‘I know all that.’

‘You mustn’t lose touch with the market.’ Had she?

Lucy had a stroke and lay still and silent in the damp, dank bed where she had lain with Benjamin long ago, and later, sporadically, with the photographer. Praxis sat at her bedside, but when Lucy stirred, or turned, she made her movement towards Carla. Carla, after all, had looked after her: Praxis had provided the money – but what was money? Easy. Days passed. Praxis did not go to work. Lucy’s condition remained unaltered. Her breathing was difficult: it would seem to stop altogether from time to time; then it would restart.

Hilda was sent for. She peered at her mother. She sat by the bed, opposite Praxis, and fidgeted with her gloves, and occasionally spoke.

‘She should never have left father,’ said Hilda.

‘What sort of mother was she anyway?’ asked Hilda.

‘I hate this house,’ said Hilda. ‘You can smell the rats.’

‘We’d better sell it now she’s gone,’ said Hilda, hopefully.

‘Hilda!’ beseeched Praxis, ‘for God’s sake be quiet. She’ll hear you.’

‘She never could hear anything,’ said Hilda, and cried.

Praxis could not remember Hilda having ever cried before.

Hilda and Praxis went round the house, looking at damp, peeling wallpaper, rotten plaster, crumbling woodwork.

‘Really,’ said Hilda, ‘Willy is the meanest man in the world. He’ll have to go. It would be a kindness to Carla.’

It was as if, with her tears, at least some of the madness had drained away.

‘We don’t need the house for Mary and Carla,’ said Hilda, ‘do we?’ The ‘we’ touched Praxis.

‘Miss Leonard was so kind to you,’ said Hilda, ‘we owed Mary something.’

Hilda looked out of her old bedroom window.

‘How wonderful the night sky used to be,’ she said. ‘With the searchlights and the flak and the guns. Nothing’s been the same since.’

Hilda went back to London. In the night Lucy died. Her breathing stopped and did not reassert itself.

‘A peaceful life,’ said Carla.

‘With a few struggles,’ said Praxis, remembering the distant past.

Praxis took more time off work; she organised the funeral and disposed of Lucy’s belongings. Carla wept and was helpless. So long as somebody is rendered helpless, thought Praxis, that’s all right. Blood ties don’t matter, not as I thought they did. Now Carla is my dead mother’s daughter; Mary is Willy’s child; Victoria and Jason are mine; Robert and Claire are Diana’s. We claim as much or as little as we want, through the degree of responsibility which we offer.

Phillip rang through just before Lucy’s death, and asked if Praxis would mind if he came down and filmed her end for the disaster movie. Aged actresses were always difficult to locate and employ, and tended to get upset if asked to simulate the brink of death.

Praxis refused.

Phillip was hurt: wasn’t Praxis being selfish and unfeeling? Did she really want to put some old actress through inevitable pain, when Lucy would neither know nor care? And the fee could go towards the funeral; or, if Praxis preferred, to any charity for the aged she cared to name.

‘Why don’t you just cut the scene altogether,’ enquired Praxis, ‘if it’s so difficult.’

‘If I was to cut out all the deaths,’ said Phillip, ‘there wouldn’t be a film at all. This is a disaster movie.’ He put the phone down.

After Lucy’s funeral, Praxis thought she would call at the hotel in Sussex where the film unit was based, and make her peace with Phillip. There was nothing he could do to Lucy now.

‘Room 22,’ said the desk clerk.

Praxis went into Room 22 and found Phillip in bed with Serena Walker, whose breasts he had auditioned long ago. She had done well since then. Praxis recognised her long, thick red hair from publicity stills. She was not yet thirty and renowned not just for her looks but her acting ability, and for the scandal, now six years old, of the birth of a baby with an allegedly royal father.

‘I’ve nothing to be ashamed of,’ she had said. ‘No, we’re not married. And not getting married. I’ll be mother and father to my baby. It’s all right.’ She had been one of the first: now there were many others following her footsteps, and Serena was reduced to disaster movies. Her mother looked after the baby.

Phillip and Serena did not hear Praxis come in. Praxis watched them for a while. Serena’s red hair spread like a modesty veil over Phillip’s loins. Her smooth plump behind arched delicately over his face. It was a strangely decent sight. There was a Polaroid camera on the end of the bed. Phillip had been taking photographs of her: Serena like this; Serena like that: of Serena and Phillip together, using the delay buzzer.

Praxis shuffled through the cards.

‘I love you,’ she heard Phillip say. Praxis laughed aloud. Phillip and Serena twisted themselves about and stared at her; not shocked, not guilty: secure in the conviction that what they were doing was right, beautiful and natural, as it probably was.

Praxis felt an intruder, foolish for having turned up uninvited, foolish for making claims. She went and sat downstairs in the lobby.

‘You in the cast?’ asked the desk-man.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘A bit part player.’

Oh, I’m cool, she thought. Like Irma. Like Irma, once.

‘A great movie,’ he said. ‘Not a thing left standing at the end.’

Serena came downstairs presently. Apart from her spectacular hair, she looked more plain and ordinary than she did in her publicity photographs. Praxis even thought she looked quite nice. Victoria and Jason would like her: would enjoy the sensation of fame, of something special about the house; something supremely filmable.

‘I’m sorry,’ Serena said. She had a little, high, piping voice.

‘You’re welcome,’ said Praxis. ‘Of course he’s a voyeur; he only uses the camera as a sublimation.’

She wished she hadn’t said it. It seemed, these days, an unnecessary comment. It made Serena cross, moreover.

‘I love Phillip,’ Serena said, her voice rising. ‘I make him happy. You’ve never understood him, never appreciated him. You don’t look after his house: you won’t sleep in his bed: you’ve driven his children away. He lives in a kind of desert of non-appreciation. You’ve all but ruined his career. He’s a fabulous director; fabulous. You make him nearly destroy himself in television; do those dreadful series: those boring commercials: you’re completely superficial: you believe that advertising is real life.’

‘Go slowly,’ said Praxis. ‘My mother’s just died. My mind isn’t quite functioning yet.’

‘Listen to you,’ said Serena. ‘You’re cold. So cold. You don’t care about anything; not even your mother dying. You find your husband in bed with me and you just stand there and watch and then melt away – God, you must be guilty. You’re sleeping with your boss, anyway. Everyone knows. You’ve no right to object: you drove him to it. Now we love each other and it’s too late. We want to get married!’

‘I told you you were welcome,’ said Praxis. ‘Take it all. I hope you have some money. You’ll need it.’

‘And I’m having his baby. All these years you’ve refused him a baby, one excuse or another. You were too tired, you had pains, you couldn’t give up your job. You’re just so competitive. Prudish and old-fashioned: that’s why his children are in the mess they are.’

She cried, all the same, anxiously. Praxis took Serena’s hand and laid it on her own cheek.

‘Oh well,’ she said. ‘Love.’

‘You are a bitch,’ said Phillip to Praxis later, ‘upsetting Serena like that.’

Praxis couldn’t do anything right: nor did she try. She developed a cold in the nose, and bronchitis and took to her bed.

‘Don’t cough over everything,’ said Phillip, ‘or you’ll infect Serena.’

Whether he was worried for the film or the baby, Praxis neither knew nor cared.

Praxis moved out of the house such few things as she thought she could bear to see again, and left the rest for Serena. Friends advised her not to, saying she would lose what few legal rights she had. The house was in Phillip’s name. Praxis had no savings of her own: they had been spent during his periods of unemployment; the earnings of the past years had gone into the running of the home, not its fabric. The fee for the new film was safely in Phillip’s account. They had no children between them: Phillip would not be obliged to keep her, or pay her alimony since she was earning.

‘Well, why should he?’ inquired Irma. Praxis spent a good deal of time, now, with Irma. ‘I took his money because I was angry with you both and I was ill. I gave it straight to the Women’s Movement. But you’re able-bodied and healthy. Why expect him to keep you? It’s humiliating.’

‘Because of the years of service,’ said Praxis, angrily. ‘Doing the washing up and the cleaning and the children while he played records and criticised.’

‘More fool you,’ said Irma, unkindly. ‘Nobody made you do it, you volunteered.’

‘I’ve just evaporated from Phillip’s life,’ Praxis wept.

‘You evaporated from Willy’s, and Ivor’s,’ said Irma.

She allowed Praxis no way out, turning her round to face herself, whenever self-pity or indignation threatened to overwhelm her.

‘Victoria and Jason don’t seem to care,’ she moaned.

‘I know the feeling,’ said Irma, sprightly.

She would have gone anywhere else, but there was nowhere to go. She had few friends: well, she had hardly looked after them. They were mostly Phillip’s, in any case. It was as if, over the years, he had been planning her downfall, her total misery.

‘Of course he wasn’t,’ said Irma. ‘You were merely sharing his life, that’s all, edging over and over into it. Your fault.’

‘I hate you,’ said Praxis to Irma, eventually.

For a time, she did. It seemed that Irma required from her a whole new view of the world, and one which, while liberating her from the sense of personal failure which so afflicted her, would also free Phillip from the guilt she wished him to bear.

What, see Phillip not as a villain, but as a victim of a crazy culture? No; she needed his villainy in order to survive. Anger was better than misery.

Phillip was bad, bad. He was selfish, wicked, cruel and shallow.

‘You would have him,’ said Irma. ‘Nothing would stop you. Now you’re being done to as you did.’

‘You’re condoning him,’ complained Praxis.

‘He is as much a victim as you are. He has his image of himself to maintain, as you have yours. You weren’t happy living with Phillip, Praxis. You were thoroughly wretched. You’re well out of it. You’re just piqued because you can’t act the earth mother any more.’

‘Irma, my whole life is finished.’

‘Your life is just beginning, if you learn to live it among women. I know you have a low opinion of your own sex: it is inevitable; our inferiority is written into the language: but you must be aware: you must know what’s happening: it’s half the battle. Come to a meeting. Bess, Raya and Tracey want to see you again.’

‘They want to see me defeated; and brought down to their level. Manless.’

‘No. They want you to speak bitterness, and share it, so it stops destroying you. They’re your sisters.’

‘They’ll try and make me give up work.’

‘And so you should. It’s immoral and anti-social. You can’t still believe it.’

‘Yes I do,’ said Praxis defiantly. ‘I believe that to be a wife and mother is the highest purpose of a woman.’

‘Fine mother you made,’ jeered Irma. ‘Running out on your children. Fine wife – letting your husband slip through your fingers.’

Praxis cried, like a little girl.

But she went to Irma’s consciousness-raising group, all the same. Otherwise, after work, there was only her bed-sitting room to return to, and loneliness. She viewed Bess, Raya and Tracey more fondly now. Bess’s husband was a mental patient, Raya’s husband had killed himself, Tracey, unmarried, was twenty-two and had six-year-old twins.

She did not give up her job. It was all she had. But she was less good at it than before. Her lack of conviction showed through: the words on the page rang false.

‘You and Phillip will be back together soon,’ said the Deputy Creative Director, comfortingly. ‘I expect he’s going through the male menopause. Times will get better.’

But his prophecies were not what they were. The rules of advertising, as of living, had changed. What had worked in the sixties did not work in the seventies. He was not as young as he had been. He was fired in the afternoon of the morning in which he spoke to Praxis.

Hilda put 109 Holden Road on the market. The demand for houses at the time was brisk, and a buyer was found at once. Willy expressed some indignation at being obliged to move: Carla none at all. They bought a modern bungalow outright, for cash. Willy was Assistant Director of the Institute.

Praxis went down to see them. Carla was out.

‘You should never have married Phillip,’ said Willy. ‘You look much better now you’re not.’

‘You always liked me in dusty black,’ observed Praxis.

‘Yes I did,’ said Willy. ‘It suited you. You were always in mourning for something or other.’

He looked round the new gleaming walls of the bungalow, the smooth cool surfaces of built-in wardrobes and furniture. Carla had a taste for crimson velour.

‘It’s all too unused for me,’ he said. ‘I like dark places where people have been before.’

He lifted Praxis’ jersey and put his chilly hands on her breasts. Both fingers and breasts felt less resilient than they had in earlier years. He undid her jeans and pushed and nudged her back against the marble of a modern fireplace.

‘It’s all got to be used,’ he said. ‘It’s all got to be made warmer and darker.’

She wriggled away from him and rearranged her clothes. He did not seem to mind.

‘You’re married to Carla,’ said Praxis.

‘You never used to think like that. All those husbands down at the Raffles.’

‘I do now.’

‘I don’t see what difference it can make,’ protested Willy. ‘It’s my wanting to is the offence to Carla, if any: not the actual doing. That’s the harmless part.’

‘That’s your truth. Mine is different.’

‘You must miss sex, now you’re not married. Isn’t it hard?’

He was inquisitive: he always had been inquisitive: his body as well as his mind. It had gone searching into hers, anxious to know the exact state of play within, at any given minute, trying to catch something elusive, as if something might be missed between this penetration and that: quick! Catch it as it flew! No, she didn’t miss sex. Yes, it was hard. She missed the establishment and warmth of the household: she missed a pattern of obligations, the fulfilling of other people’s needs, no matter how badly she had, latterly, fulfilled them. She missed the telephone ringing, the laying of the table, the sharing of the days’ events, the lack of time to think: she missed the exhaustion and the sense of self-righteousness. She was left with silence and herself and it was hard.

‘I told you so,’ said Ivor, satisfied. She even went to visit Ivor, in search of herself. ‘You were always too rackety. People round here live perfectly happy, stable lives. If only you’d settle down, Praxis.’

He still lived in the biggest house on the estate, and that had grown in grandeur since she left. Diana had brilliant white Terylene curtains looped across the windows: her taste ran to chintz and little lamps. There was a handsome chrome cocktail cabinet. Diana clearly didn’t wish Praxis to visit, so Praxis went only the once. Ivor regretted her: Praxis knew he did. She had been the excitement of his life; the opportunity for change and enrichment, it had gone sour: over a vision of Carol’s bare breasts against his dark suit. Praxis felt that if she tried, if she pursued, if she seduced, it could all have begun again: but to what end?

When the money from the sale of the Holden Road house came through, Praxis gave up her job. She would have liked to have given it up earlier, as a moral gesture, but the habits of prudence remained.

Irma shrugged, kind for once.

‘I don’t know that motives matter,’ she said. ‘It’s not why people do things, it’s what they do that has its effect.’

Praxis considered suicide, but kindness of heart, not to mention the sheer habit of being alive and doing one’s best to stay so, stood between her and the actuality of the deed. Someone would have to find the body and endure nastiness: others would have to put up with remorse, regret, and if not grief (for she could think of no one who would long or sincerely grieve for her) at any rate the shock, dismay and disagreeable nostalgia which attends any untimely and violent death. Ah, better times, long past, when we were young, vigorous, and hope came in equal measure with despair! By dying, Praxis could see, she would be more closely connected with others than she was when living, and that of course was the main temptation. To brush aside, tear down, the blanket of unreality between herself and the rest of the world, was indeed inviting. But she did not do it.

‘What am I going to do with the second half of my life?’ Praxis asked Irma. ‘I don’t really want to live through it. I don’t seem to have any function.’

‘Find one,’ said Irma, brusquely.

The money from the sale of the Holden Road house came through: Praxis left her bed-sitting room and bought a small flat in Camden Town. She furnished it cosily and seductively, out of habit. ‘A man trap,’ said Irma unkindly, looking round at soft sofas, deep carpets, and little lamps.

‘There don’t seem to be any men to trap,’ said Praxis.

‘All that means,’ said Irma, ‘is that you’re not looking for one. Good for you.’

But it seemed to Praxis to be a matter of sorry inadvertence, not resolution.

Serena had her baby – a little girl. Her picture appeared in the newpapers; the baby in her arms and Phillip smiling behind her. An unflattering snapshot of Praxis, as the ousted wife, also appeared, with a caption saying that she was seeking a divorce. Presumably Serena had raked through the family photograph album and provided the worst likeness she could. Or it might of course have been Phillip who obliged. Serena’s little boy, the one with the allegedly royal genes, now lived with Phillip and Serena. A Sunday supplement presently ran a feature on the new young family as part of the pre-publicity for Philip’s disaster movie. Serena, Praxis observed, had made considerable improvement in the kitchen.

‘It was nicer in my day,’ said Irma, ‘simpler and more functional,’ and Praxis, who had her mouth open in dismay, distress and indignation, had to close it again.

Praxis’ mind could accept and condone Phillip’s sexual relationship with Serena: her body could not. A sense of loss, of being usurped, of being in the wrong place while something dreadful happened elsewhere which she ought to be there to stop, kept her awake and tormented at night.

‘I know the feeling,’ said Irma. ‘Try sleeping pills.’

Praxis tried them, and slept heavily at night. The feelings faded: broke through from time to time in dreams, and that was all. ‘It’s all no big deal,’ said Irma. ‘Really, it is all so unimportant. Regard the pain of rejection as an illness. It passes. It’s a pain in the heart, in the mind, instead of in the stomach. Think yourself lucky not to have both, like me.’

‘You don’t still care about Phillip?’ asked Praxis, startled.

‘He’s beneath you, and me. We’re worth ten of him and always were.’

‘What difference did that ever make?’ asked Praxis, sadly.

Hilda’s name appeared in the New Year’s Honours list. She went to Buckingham Palace to receive the award from the Queen, wearing a grey suit and white blouse, with her hair piled high into a bristly beehive topped with a floppy emerald green ribbon. She had found favour in high places by quietly and quickly settling a series of strikes before news of them appeared in the newspapers. She gave a small cocktail party to celebrate the event and even asked Praxis.

‘You will wear something ordinary,’ she pleaded with Praxis, ‘and have your hair done.’

Praxis obliged, and mingled happily enough with grey-suited civil servants and their pleasant wives. She stayed behind to help Hilda wash up the sherry glasses and the ashtrays. There were not many of the latter; fewer people smoked, these days, than had done in the past.

‘You must be very pleased,’ said Praxis.

‘The OBE? It is an acknowledgment. It’s something.’

‘It’s a great deal.’

‘I could never have got married,’ said Hilda. ‘I couldn’t have coped with that and a career. Women can’t. Besides, madness is hereditary. I didn’t want to pass it on.’

‘That never worried me,’ said Praxis, surprised.

‘I was always the responsible one,’ said Hilda. She washed and rewashed the same glass, with disdainful red-tipped fingers. She had done very little washing-up in her life.

‘I looked after children and had a career as well,’ said Praxis.

‘You mean you managed, for a time,’ said Hilda. ‘And then everything broke down and now you have nothing.’

‘And you have the OBE.’ Another bar to hang on Hilda’s chest, along with Latin, Geography and Deportment.

‘Yes,’ said Hilda. ‘People fail you, children disappoint you, thieves break in, moths corrupt, but an OBE goes on for ever. I shall write and tell father.’

Praxis said nothing. She polished and re-polished a glass and waited.

‘He’s in a nursing home in Deal,’ said Hilda. ‘He’s an alcoholic. Mother drove him to drink when she left him. He’s very old now, of course. I write to him quite often.’

Perhaps it was true. Perhaps it was not.

‘I didn’t know you were in touch with him,’ said Praxis, as casually as she could.

‘I have been for years,’ said Hilda. ‘Since I was at school. Butt and Sons put the wrong letter in an envelope and I found out where he was. I write to him once in a while.’

‘Does he write back?’

‘That’s not the point.’

‘How do you know he’s in a nursing home?’

‘I telephone from the Ministry, sometimes. I keep up with his changes of address, one way or another. He’s moved about quite a lot.’

‘What do you tell him, when you write?’

‘Family news,’ said Hilda blithely.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I’m the elder sister. I’m in charge.’

‘Did you write to him when I was living with Willy?’

‘Of course.’

‘What did you say?’ enquired Praxis.

‘The truth.’

‘How did you know what that was?’

‘Willy told me. Willy was very fond of me.’

Hilda was both smug and evasive.

Praxis did not pursue the matter. Yes, Willy had been fond of Hilda: how fond, she did not wish to know. She remembered, or thought she remembered, Hilda dancing naked in front of Willy in the night. In the same way she remembered lying with her father in Elaine’s summer house. But perhaps these things had not happened at all: perhaps they were fantasies, manifestations of inner fears and desires, which came to her with the strength of memories? How was she to know? And why should she want to know? There was no obligation, after all, to know the truth, let alone face it. And if Benjamin had not appeared by chance, but had come looking for his daughter in Raffles Esplanade Dive in response to a letter from Hilda, what did it matter now?

Old man in a nursing home – that part sounded true enough – with his memories to sustain him. If Praxis had contributed in any way to the richness of his memories, then she was glad. She had liked her father. The realisation cheered her up, made some kind of rent in the mist between herself and other people.

She leaned forward and kissed Hilda on the cheek.

‘What did you do that for?’ asked Hilda, startled.

‘Because you’re my sister,’ said Praxis. ‘Don’t worry about it: about what I did, or what you did. Everything’s quite all right, and you’ve got the OBE, and I’m glad.’

She put away the glasses in Hilda’s bow-fronted mahogany corner cabinet – Hilda collected antiques, of a dark and shiny nature – and went home, far happier than she had arrived.

As if in recognition of her new state and mind, Victoria and Jason came and sat in her flat, bringing their records with them, until she wished they would leave her in peace. Robert wrote to her, in avuncular terms, from Kenya, where he was doing a year’s Voluntary Service Overseas, and Claire wrote, enclosing a photograph of her fiancé who looked remarkably like Ivor and who was a trainee executive for a pharmaceutical firm.

Irma, Raya and Tracey were bringing out a weekly broadsheet, devoted to the wrongs done to women by society. Bess rode round on a bicycle and pushed it through letter boxes. Praxis, shocked by its grammar and the general inefficiency of its production, offered to edit the broadsheet. The offer was reluctantly accepted by a group decision.

‘We’re not writing propaganda,’ said Irma. ‘We don’t want any of your selling copy or slogans. But since you have more time than the rest of us, I suppose it would be silly for us to refuse.’

The broadsheet grew into a newspaper. Praxis was its editor. She wrote rousing editorials, which she half believed, and half did not, in the same way as she had half believed, half not, her own advertisements for the Electricity Board. But she felt she was righting some kind of balance. She still occasionally thought of suicide, but knew it could never be done before the next issue, and there was always a next issue to be thought of.

‘When did you become a convert to the Women’s Movement?’ someone asked her, eventually, and Praxis realised that this was what she had in fact become. Ideas which once had seemed strange now seemed commonplace, and so much to her advantage that she was surprised to remember how, in the past, she had resisted them.

She was a convert: she wished to proselytise. She wished all the women in the world to think as she thought, do as she did; to join in sisterhood in a happier family than the world had ever known.

‘I can’t really say,’ she replied. ‘It comes to some as a flash of light. For me it was a gradual thing.’ And she laughed, but nervously. She saw it as a religious experience: she stood divested of the trappings of the past, naked (with a body no longer proud and beautiful) humble before a new altar, in the knowledge of the Daughter of God, reborn.

Wherever she went she saw women betrayed, exploited and oppressed. She saw that women were the cleaners, the fetchers, the carriers, the humble of the earth, and that they were truly blessed.

She saw that men’s lives were without importance and that only the lives of women were significant. She lost her belief in the man-made myths of history – great civilisations, great art, great empire. The male version of events.

She was, for a time, elated. And in her writings, being elated, attracted no little attention. The women in the office, the women in the wider world, listened to what she had to say, and believed her.

Praxis thought that perhaps now she was safe: that having lost her little loves, her shoddy griefs and pointless troubles – lost them all in the vast communal sea of women’s tears – that she was immune, saved by her faith from more distress.

Follow me, the Daughter of God, and you shall be saved.

But she was wrong. She had a faith, but she was not divine. Human lives travel through time like the waves of the sea, rising to peaks of experience, falling again, gathering new strength, to rise once more. There is no finite point at which we can say, ah, I have arrived: I am saved: I am rich, successful, happy. We wake the next morning and see that we are not.

And there is perhaps a force abroad – or in ourselves – which demands that sacrifice is a part of faith. That Abraham must sacrifice Isaac, to prove that God exists.

Mary turned up at the newspaper office. She had a small child on either hand. She wore a neat, inexpensive suit and looked what she was, a housewife up to London for the day. Praxis took her to lunch at a department store, where high chairs were provided for the children, and a special fish finger and chips lunch served at reasonable prices.

‘Edward’s left me,’ said Mary.

‘He just sailed off one day,’ said Mary. ‘Took a crewing job on a yacht going to Madeira, and went with the evening tide.’

‘Sailing was all he ever cared about,’ said Mary. ‘And of course once I had the children I couldn’t go out with him and he resented that.’

‘I don’t blame him,’ said Mary. ‘He was in love with boats. We must have been very boring, in comparison. He wasn’t a very clever man, so I used to keep the conversation down to a certain level, for his sake. So I daresay I never showed at my best.’

‘He hankered so after distant oceans and far-off harbours,’ said Mary, ‘and of course in Brighton you can always hear the sea. Even in bed all night.’

‘We were always all right in bed,’ said Mary. ‘You think that must mean something, but it doesn’t.’

‘In retrospect,’ said Mary, ‘I can’t really think why I married him. I think it might have been so the children could be born. They are very special children.’

She looked fondly at their two quite ordinary faces, smeared with tomato sauce and chocolate ice-cream, and leaned over to wipe their mouths with the tissues provided by the management.

‘The universe isn’t magic,’ said Praxis, crossly, but even as she said it, knew that she was wrong.

‘When the children are at school,’ said Mary, ‘I’ll try and get back into medicine. It will be difficult, because of course I’ve lost six years. But I don’t regret them. The children, that is: or the years.’

‘I might try and go to America,’ said Mary. ‘My father was an American, wasn’t he?’

Mary leaned forward and arranged a straighter parting in her daughter’s hair. She did not meet Praxis’ eye. Praxis knew that she wanted information. Well, why not? The world had changed around them both. Causes for shame, disgrace, embarrassment and shock were not what they were.

‘He might have been,’ said Praxis. ‘Your mother certainly hoped he was. She wanted you to be open and free, and so you are.’

‘When I was thirteen,’ said Mary, ‘I had an anonymous letter. It said my mother was a prostitute and so were you.’

‘Of course she wasn’t. She was a respectable teacher of English literature. She was forty-five. She went out one night and slept with three men. A middle-aged and intelligent school-teacher, his son, and a passing GI of pleasant demeanour and aspect.’

‘Did she do it for money?’

‘Of course not.’ Enough was enough.

‘It might have happened to anyone,’ said the cool, clear young voice of the seventies. ‘Of course in those days it was a problem getting contraceptives.’

‘Yes.’

‘Did she try to get rid of me?’

‘Not very hard.’

‘I’m a clear argument against abortion,’ said Mary. ‘And then I was plucked living, like Caesar,’ said Mary, ‘from my dead mother’s womb.’

‘Yes.’ Praxis felt tears pressing against her eyelids.

‘It must all mean something,’ said Mary.

‘I expect so,’ but what it was, Praxis could not remember.

‘And then you rescued me from a wicked clergyman’s wife.’

‘They weren’t wicked. Just neglectful.’

‘You were very young. You gave up a lot to do it.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Willy told me.’

‘It wasn’t all that much,’ said Praxis, diffidently.

‘Just your life,’ said Mary. ‘Well, never mind. Good actions are never wasted.’ She spoke firmly, as if she knew.

Praxis paid the bill. Mary sorted out her children and scooped them up. They went up and down in the lift, Mary holding the children so they could press the buttons.

‘I seem to have difficulty,’ said Praxis, out of nothing, into nowhere, ‘in actually loving a man, in any permanent sense.’

‘Some do,’ said Mary, blithely. ‘Most, I daresay.’

‘What can I do about it?’ Mary was half Praxis’ age. Why she enquired, she did not know.

‘What you’re doing, I expect,’ said Mary. ‘You learn to love the world enough to want to change it.’

Mary went back to Brighton and Praxis to her office, where she viewed rather differently the women who came and went. Those whom she had privately regarded as rejected, humiliated, obsessive, angry and ridiculous, she began to see as brave, noble, and attempting, at any rate, to live their lives by principle rather than by convenience. All kinds of women – young and old, clever, slow, pretty, plain; the halt and the lame, the sexually confused, or fulfilled, or indifferent, battered wives, raped girls, vicious virgins, underpaid shop assistants, frustrated captains of industry, violent schoolgirls, women exploited and exploiting; but all turning away from their inner preoccupations and wretchedness, to regard the outside world and see that it could be changed, if not for themselves, it being too late for themselves, then at least for others.

Praxis smarted and fumed on Mary’s account. Irma merely shrugged.

‘That’s what it’s like,’ she said. Irma was grey and drawn in the face. She had been to the hospital for tests.

‘They want to take my womb out,’ said Irma. ‘It’s the current preoccupation of male surgeons. If they can only remove the whole thing, lock, stock and barrel, take away what women have and they don’t, then that must be an improvement.’

‘But Irma – ’ said Praxis.

‘Individual life is not so important,’ said Irma. ‘What are we? Little centres of identity winking in and winking out! It’s the manner of living that matters: not the length of the life. I don’t want to drag on and on. Do you?’

‘Yes,’ said Praxis.

Phillip’s film, ‘Flood’, released after more than two years of delays, was not a success. It lacked, critics complained, grandeur of concept and scale. He was a television director at heart, and it showed. What would do on the living-room box was not enough for the big screen. Working in television had, they alleged, cut him down to manikin size, and worse, had made him mean. If millions had been spent, as alleged, it simply did not show. Serena, they complained, was getting fat, and was red-rimmed about the nostrils in several scenes. If the leading lady had a cold in the nose, then shooting should be delayed. It would have been in the old days. Modern films, the general consensus was, clustering round Phillip’s film like blowflies around a god-given joint of meat inadvertently left out of the fridge, were not what they were. In the old days camera crews and technicians had risked death to obtain their desired effects – had not an entire film crew been decapitated by the knives on the chariot wheels in the original Ben Hur? – but it was obvious that the team working on Phillip’s film hadn’t even risked getting their feet wet.

And so on.

Praxis was pleased to be able to say ‘poor Phillip’. Victoria moved out of her father’s house and slept alternately on Irma’s sofa or Praxis’ floor. Serena had become fanatical about yoga and refused to serve meat, or have cigarettes or alcohol consumed in the house. Jason took a job as a gardener in one of the royal parks and declined to give it up when the time came to go back to University. The majority of the other gardeners, he alleged, were honours graduates, and he found the conversation in the potting sheds more illuminating than any he had encountered at college.

Phillip, listening to this nonsense, hit his son, and Jason hit back.

‘Next time,’ said Jason, ‘I’ll use a shovel and that will be the end of you.’ But he apologised the next day.

The household was under considerable strain. Serena’s baby had infantile eczema, and cried and cried, and scratched and scratched, and had to be fed on goat’s milk, and dressed in muslin and receive Serena’s full attention. Phillip could not sleep. Work dried up again. Serena and the baby spent most of their nights in the spare room. The royal child, confused by the ups and downs in his life, wet his bed and soiled his pants. Serena, her eyes wide with strain and dismay, did her breathing exercises, started each day with a glassful of wine vinegar and honey, and achieved the lotus position, but little else.

She called to see Praxis in her editorial office. She held her thin baby with its skull-like head and staring, anguished eyes, against her bosom.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I realise now what I did to you. I didn’t then.’

Together they studied the baby: its scaly face, its raw limbs.

‘I think she’ll be all right in the end,’ said Serena. ‘They say she may grow out of it when she’s three. In the meantime I have to watch her suffer. I think I’d rather be dead, and I know she would, but they don’t let you. Everyone has to go on trying.’

‘She’s your child, not theirs,’ said Praxis, mildly.

‘Yours to pay for,’ said Serena, ‘not yours for deciding what’s best.’

Serena went home and Praxis went off to a television studio to take part in a discussion on the reform of the abortion laws. She was recognised in the street these days. Some smiled, and nudged each other: a few came up to her and abused her as a mass-murderer, killer of unborn children.

‘I saw you on telly last night,’ wrote Mary from Brighton. ‘I expect you’re right but I feel you’re wrong. I spent most part of a year on a gynae ward. I was the one who got blood on my surgical gloves, remember, actually doing abortions. I’d do it happily for the older women, who at least knew what was going on and were as distressed as I was, but I resented having to do it for the girls who used me as a kind of last-ditch contraceptive, because they didn’t want their holiday interfered with. Or am I being like one of those people from South Africa who when you say something about apartheid say, listen, I live there, I know what it’s like?’

‘I have a job!’ wrote Mary from Brighton. ‘It’s in Toronto. Not quite the States but getting near. In a big general hospital. There’s a creche for the children: they actually seem to want me, kids and all! So you see, my life wasn’t finished, merely postponed, by my marriage. I’m doing better than you!’

‘Trouble, I’m afraid,’ wrote Mary from Brighton. ‘The job’s off. I’m pregnant. I met this married man at a party –’

Praxis took the train to Brighton. Mary was pale, thin, and suffering from bouts of vomiting. Carla came in daily to help with the children. The house was cold and sparsely furnished. Mary lived on Social Security benefits.

‘You’re a qualified doctor,’ said Praxis, white with fury. ‘You must know about contraceptives.’

‘I don’t like contraceptives,’ said Mary, calmly. ‘They’re antilife. I associate sex with procreation, and that’s that. I’m not a Catholic; I don’t go for the Jesus stuff; but I do understand what the Pope is going on about. Life is either sacred, or it’s not. People are either meant or they’re not. I believe I am sacred and that my existence has some purpose. And I’m sorry, but I have been more convinced of it ever since you told me about my mother.’

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

‘Neither did my mother.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carla was still wearing dusty brown.

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

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

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

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

But there was a certain coolness in her voice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But she did not sound hopeful.

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

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

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

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

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

‘I’ll look after it,’ said Praxis.

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

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

Mary got out of bed, stiffly and painfully, to go to the bathroom. Praxis tried to help her but Mary shook her off.

‘I can manage all right,’ she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I do,’ said Dr Gibb.

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

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

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

‘Yes,’ said Praxis.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘It’s not as if you were the baby’s mother,’ said the librarian. She had a degree in English literature and was in for baby battering. ‘What right did you have?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Thank you,’ said Praxis.

A letter was passed to Praxis. It came from a film company with which Phillip was involved. It asked her to sign enclosed release forms, so that footage of Praxis in earlier days could be used in a documentary ‘The Right To Choose’, which Phillip was making for the Women’s Movement. Praxis signed, as requested. Motivation no longer seemed of much consequence. Results were what mattered.

‘If the child’s mother says she asked you to do it,’ said the lawyer, ‘we’ll stand some kind of chance.’

‘She didn’t,’ said Praxis. ‘I don’t want her to say it.’

‘I don’t think she will,’ said the lawyer. ‘She’s very bitter.’

Praxis cried at that, and the lawyer looked relieved, as if at last something he understood had happened.

The day before the trial opened the governor sent for Praxis and handed her a file of letters.

‘We thought you ought to see these,’ she said. She reminded Praxis of Hilda, but perhaps that was merely the capacity she had for writing adverse reports, and circulating them. ‘They might cheer you up. They’re letters of support, from women saying they wish they’d had the courage to do what you did. Mothers mostly, mind you: but grandmothers, relatives, friends as well, who have watched the disintegration of households, as the years pass.’

‘I don’t want to read them,’ said Praxis. ‘I want a rest from other people’s misery. Thank you very much, all the same.’

‘Ah well,’ said the governor, disappointed. ‘I suppose we can’t be saints all the time.’

As it was a murder charge, Praxis was handcuffed to a wardress on the way to the court. Through the side window she caught glimpses of groups of women with banners, and the sound of cheers, shouts, and boos. As she stepped from the car she was dazzled by flashlights.

‘People get hysterical,’ she remarked to the wardress, more in the spirit of apology than anything else.

‘Better than being cold-blooded,’ said the wardress, who had a backward brother, could see the convenience of his elimination, despised herself for it, and felt the more antagonism towards Praxis because of it.

‘I’m not,’ said Praxis. ‘I’m not.’ But by whose standards did she judge?

‘Yes,’ said Mary, loud and clear across the court. ‘I asked her to do it for me. She was my friend.’ But she did not meet Praxis’ eye. She would tell a lie on her account, but not forgive her.

‘No,’ said Praxis. ‘Of course I was not the proper person to do it. But who else was there?’

‘No,’ said Praxis, ‘I did not have the right, but the mother did. I was her agent.’

Thus far she would lie to get herself out of trouble.

‘No,’ said Praxis, ‘I see nothing worse in killing a four-day-old imperfect baby than in killing a four-month-old perfect foetus. Except that it’s more disagreeable to do.’

‘No,’ said Praxis. ‘I am not mad, am not receiving psychiatric treatment.’

‘Yes,’ said Praxis, ‘it is perfectly possible that my life to date is indicative of a damaged personality: but most of us are emotionally damaged in some degree or another. We do the best we can with what we have.’

The judge was not unsympathetic. The abortion laws, he said, had confused both the moral and the legal issues.

The father of Ancient Rome (he had a classical education) exercised the right of life and death over a new-born baby. If the living would suffer as a result of its birth – by reason of famine, war, or danger – it was not allowed to live. Nor was a defective child: nor a female, in a family already overcrowded with girls. The decision was taken by the father: the deed performed by a servant. That was in the great days of the Empire.

The jury was out for two days and brought back a verdict of guilty, the judge finally consenting to accept a majority verdict.

Praxis was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment.

Women crowded round the Black Maria as she left the court, tapping at the windows.

‘We’ll be waiting.’

‘Don’t give up.’

‘Don’t give in.’

If there were others – as there surely were – wishing to spit and abuse, or weep and reproach, they did not get near.

Mary went to Toronto, with the children.

Irma came to visit and brought Praxis news of the outside world. Serena had left Phillip. Claire married her business executive: it had been a big wedding and Diana had played the mother of the bride very well, in a blue hat with feathers, as surely she was entitled to do. Mary’s job was going well: she was to specialise in pediatrics. Irma herself was looking ill: she had cancer: she would not have treatment for it. Jason had given in, given up park-keeping and gone back to University. The winter weather drove him to it, he said, and not his father. Though now Serena had left, and Phillip was plainly wretched, he felt more kindly inclined towards him. Robert had decided to stay on in Africa.

‘To shoot Africans, I suppose,’ said Praxis, sadly.

‘You should never have left them,’ said Irma. ‘As you sow, Praxis, so you reap.’

Her own younger son lived with her country cousins. He rode horses and despised city life. Irma did not feel she had to keep alive on his account.

‘As you sow,’ repeated Praxis, ‘so you reap.’

It was, in the end, a comforting doctrine.

‘Do call me Pattie,’ she said. ‘I’ve given up Praxis. It’s a very pretentious name.’

‘Funny,’ said Irma, ‘your sister has started calling herself Hypatia.’

When Pattie Fletcher left prison there was no one to meet her. She had, she assumed, been forgotten by a fickle world. She had very little money and nowhere to live. Irma was in hospital, in a coma. Bess, Tracey and Raya had started a commune in Wales. Pattie could not, without effort, trace their address. She developed a cold, which turned into bronchitis. The Discharged Prisoners’ Aid Association found her a basement room in a familiar neighbourhood: the Social Security people paid her a small weekly sum.

She fell, getting from the bath, cracked her elbow on the floor, tried to go to hospital, had her toe stamped on by the kind of young woman she had helped create, and came home.

She wrote, she raged, grieved and laughed, she thought she nearly died; then, presently, she began to feel better.