‘It can’t go on,’ said Praxis, aloud. Willy did not hear, or pretended not to hear.
And still it went on.
Praxis wrote to Hilda suggesting that the house could be sold and the proceeds divided between Lucy, Hilda and herself. Hilda wrote back to Willy saying it was out of the question: what was he thinking of? Praxis, fearful, told Willy it was just another of Hilda’s mad letters: Willy seemed to believe the lie. Praxis’ panic, or determination, call it what you will, subsided.
Elaine’s father died. He had a heart attack at the wheel of the delivery van and drove it into a wall. Praxis plucked up her courage, called on Elaine, to extend condolences, and found her behind the counter, slicing ham.
‘No matter where you go,’ said that young woman, pink with distress and determination, ‘or however hard you try, you end up where you began.’
‘It isn’t over, yet,’ said Praxis. ‘It’s only just beginning.’ She spoke bravely, but found it hard to believe.
‘I suppose sooner or later I’ll get married and have children and apart from the marriage ceremony, that will be me more over than ever. Come to think of it, we only have until we’re twenty. After that it’s all downhill.’
She had given up her job in the Social Security Office and come home permanently to be near her mother and help run the shop.
‘Why does it have to be me?’ she complained. ‘Why couldn’t it be my brother who came home?’
‘Because he gets paid twice what you do,’ said Praxis.
‘It’s good of you to talk to me at all,’ said Elaine. ‘My Dad always used to have hysterics about you. First because your mother was in the loony bin and then because you were a scarlet woman. I wonder what he wanted for me? To stand here and slice ham, I suppose. Anyway he’s dead now, and I’m free to do what I like. My Mum’s nearly blind, not to mention stone deaf. I’m sure it’s hereditary.’
She had grown into a sturdy young woman with the same mixture of placidity and vigour which had characterised Judith in the old days: but blessed—or cursed, considering her circumstances—with intelligence.
The only way out,’ Irma had said, ‘is to sleep your way out.’
So they did.
L
ISTEN! I AM NOT
anxious. I am angry, resentful, spiteful, plagued with self-pity, frightened by death, but I am not anxious; not plagued by the worm Anxiety, which gnaws away at the foundations of female experience, so that the patterns of magnificence fail, time and time again, to emerge.
Don’t pity me, down here in my basement. Don’t blame yourselves for your neglect of me. Old woman and a nuisance. I am all right, I tell you. The worm is gone. I am everything disagreeable, but I am not anxious.
I feel no anxiety because I have no one to love. Parents, spouse, or children; above all, I have no children any more. They have grown up now. I have disowned them and they have disowned me. We are free of each other: I should be, and am, proud of that. We do not need each other any more.
There comes a time, when the Alaskan brown bear gets fed up with her young. She leads her brood to the top of a tall pine tree and leaves them there. She knows how to get down, but they don’t. By the time they’ve found out, she’s off and away, the other side of the mountain; and they do without her, well enough. They have to.
And she can live without the thought—are they all right? Where are they now? Altogether free from the instinctive anxiety that plagues the maternal life, animal or human. It starts before the child is born—will it have arms, legs, a brain? Will it be birth-marked, deformed, monstrous? Where are their teeth? Why don’t they talk? Why do they steal/lie? Why can’t they read? Why do they fight, why don’t they fight? Are they happy? Why can’t I make them happy? There is no end to it.
Do you think I could be happy with my mother in the loony bin? Waking every morning knowing she was there? Myself part of her, never grown out of her, away from her, as I left my children free to grow away from me?
My children are ungrateful: they don’t care. That is my great reward. They are free.
Anxiety, I think, is part of women’s lives more than it is men’s. Men shake it off more easily: whether it is in their natures or the mere product of their lives today, how can I tell? I do know that the worm Anxiety snips some nerve in the minds of women, and keeps their heads bowed.
‘R
AFFLES ESPLANADE DIVE’ WAS
a lunchtime drinking club down on the sea-front. Ordinary pubs shut by law at two p.m., but the Raffles had a licence which enabled it to go on serving drinks until three o’clock, provided that food was served at the same time. A few curled ham sandwiches were therefore passed, as tokens of respectability, from table to table while drinks were served between two and three. The club’s name, and its decor—red plush, with candles in chianti bottles—not to mention its prices, served by and large to keep the lower-born drunkards out; those who might stumble out of the pubs and instinctively down the steps, out of the bracing sea-air and spray back into the warm, familiar embrace of alcoholic fumes.
The seedier gentry of Brighton drank here: estate agents clinching deals, businessmen in financial difficulties, farmers in search of a. good time, a sprinkling of employed gentleman of nebulous means; the well-spoken, gin-and-whisky drinking, cigar-smoking riff-raff. The clientele was almost exclusively male, although occasionally an illicit girlfriend would sit dangling long legs at the bar; or a secretary searching for a missing boss would come in, or an angry and desperate wife, trying to trace a drinking husband.
Here Praxis and Elaine would sit most weekday lunchtimes when Willy was at work, Mary eating her school dinner of stew and mash, cake and custard, and Elaine had someone to help in the shop—swinging their legs, raising slow glasses to provocative lips. Douglas, the Raffles’ owner, was happy to have them there; a pair of well-spoken, educated girls, not obviously tarts—which might endanger his licence—but nevertheless providing a useful service, and good for business.
Sometimes the girls were content merely to increase the flow of drink across the bar, and the money over it: drinking yellow water while their admirers paid for whisky, and sharing the profit with Douglas. Sometimes one or other of them would leave with a customer, and what happened then Douglas neither knew nor cared. In fact, the client would be led, or supported, if he had a lot to drink, to the summer house at the bottom of Elaine’s long garden. Here a gift of money would change hands, in return for the promise, the prospect and indeed, if still required, the actuality—of sexual congress. A gift was tendered: not a charge made—Elaine and Praxis were definite about that. They were not prostitutes; just a couple of girls living life to the full, working their way out of difficulties, in a world which made any other solution impossible.
Why not?
Why was it better, Elaine asked, to give sexual services free, as she was so often required to do? Didn’t the exchange of money, as in psychoanalysis, raise rather than lower the value of the therapy offered? The more was charged, the more the client enjoyed himself. He had to.
‘It’s like when you want to increase the sale of a lipstick,’ said Elaine, ‘you don’t lower its price, you double it. What you’re selling is magic.’
Elaine had worked for a time in marketing, before her father’s death had brought her back to her beginnings.
‘It’s not,’ said Elaine, ‘as if most women enjoyed carnal knowledge, or got anything out of it.’
‘Some do,’ said Praxis.
‘Do you?’
‘Not much,’ Praxis was obliged to admit, at that stage of her life. She had, after all, until the days of the Raffles Esplanade Dive, carnally known, as Elaine put it, only two men. One being Phillip, and he and she had been drunk at the time; and the other being Willy, who drove into her incessantly if briefly, and usually when she was standing up.
‘There you are!’ said Elaine, her point proved from her sample of two. ‘I think it’s disgusting; but I admit I quite like doing it. I like to see men out of control, I really do. It’s the peripheral bits of sex, not the sex itself, that women go for.’
They felt the need to justify themselves to each other, all the same.
Sometimes fear, disgust, boredom or an acute sense of waste would intervene, and Praxis would elude her escort, or her trailer, or the drunken bumbler at her side—however he was best described—and slip off home, and bath, and wait for Mary to get back from school. But just as often and increasingly, she would complete the journey to the summer house, undress, display herself, watch her partner’s mounting excitement, or if it did not mount, assist him as best she could, and do whatever was required of her: things she had never thought of, which Brighton wives were not required to do. To masturbate openly, suck and be sucked, spank and be spanked, be tied, tie up, bugger with dildo, be buggered herself; but mostly just to lie there in a fume of alcohol, her face wet with a stranger’s tears, while he inexpertly plunged, lunged, failed, gave up, tried again, spoke his griefs and unburdened himself, via his ejaculation, of his troubles.
Magic, as Elaine had said.
She asked, in payment, beforehand, what the man thought the experience would be worth. If he seemed reluctant to hand over the money, she did not press the matter. Booksellers, dentists, and whores, she had read, have the most trouble in exacting money from clients. It seemed a modest expectation of life to have free books, painless teeth and love freely offered, and she sympathised.
The more bizarre requests puzzled her: yet it was the fulfilling of these which seemed to give the greatest relief. Afterwards, she liked to think, there would be little remembrance of the event, let alone of Praxis. She seldom took sober men home: and if she was lucky not to catch a venereal disease, or end up murdered, a true victim of the sadism her masochism provoked, then she did not know it. The world in those days was, after all, a gentler place—sex crimes were a rarity: girls went hitchhiking with impunity: front doors were seldom locked, at any rate, by day.
All the same, in retrospect, Praxis marvelled at herself and her foolhardiness.
If, as sometimes happened, both Elaine and she were partnered, they would move a screen to divide the two summer house beds, and let the sounds from one incite further sounds from the other. Then indeed Praxis could, would, become orgasmic herself, but she did not like that. She told Elaine that it interfered with business, but what she meant was that it drew more from herself than she was prepared to give. She could offer her body as an instrument of relief, her sympathy as salvation; she could stretch out her hand and receive money in anticipation of these blessings, but she could not give her own abandonment.
Praxis acquired two regulars, married men whose discretion could be relied upon. Jack, whose pleasure it was to whisper in her ear in detail all the things he was going to do to her, and then do nothing. And Arthur, who had just had mumps and had been told he could not have children: but could not, would not believe there was a difference between impotence and infertility, and lay there, limp of penis, bemoaning his fate, while Praxis read the definitions from the dictionary, over and over, until at last it would spring to life—only to fall once more.
Growing bolder, she would occasionally take these two home to Holden Road instead of to the summer house. They were so clearly both good works: and no possible pleasure to herself.
‘Do you think it’s making us hard and crude?’ asked Elaine, standing naked in front of the summer house mirror, after one of their double sessions. She looked better undressed than dressed, Praxis thought. Her skin was very white, and her breasts, which seemed top-heavy clothed, were firm and strong seen naked.
‘Do you think we should stop? Are we being brutalised? Are we on some slippery downward path? Are we doing things we wouldn’t have done before?’
‘Yes,’ said Praxis.
‘I like doing them more, not less,’ said Elaine. ‘The dangerous thing, I’m sure, is when you stop liking things, not when you start. Because if you stop it might just spoil you for your loving husband, later on. I suppose it’s different for you; you have a kind of husband already. Do you still fancy him?’
‘I never did,’ said Praxis.
That much she had learned.
Praxis had one hundred and thirty pounds saved. A fortune! Elaine, with rather fewer sexual encounters to her credit, but a rather more forceful approach to money, had one hundred and ninety. Both now could afford to run away, start life again somewhere else: get to London, job, men and future. But still the people, the obligations, did not go away. Willy, Lucy, Elaine’s blind old mother. Perhaps the lack of money had been the excuse for, not the cause of their apathy and their indecision.
To all intents and purposes, Praxis now realised, Willy was Mary’s father. If Praxis took Mary to London, away from Willy, Mary might suffer all her life, as Praxis had so far, and presumably for ever would, from the loss of her father.
It made her pause. Something made her pause.
She dangled clues to her lunchtime life in front of Willy’s nose. He took no notice: he changed his thick glasses for even thicker ones; he spoke even less: studied even more: read throughout meals: kept his eyes closed as he impaled her: she felt more and more like a butterfly run through with a pin. She bought new dresses and he made no comment: she yawned with much languorous stretchings: she even made sexual advances to him, of an adventurous kind, which he ignored. Perhaps he knew? No, that was impossible. He would kill her. Surely he would kill her. The prospect, while it frightened her, and made her wake breathless in the night, at the same time made her feel safe. She could only leap and cavort at the end of her leash, because Willy held the other end, in his quivering, unseeing, murderous hand.
Could it really go on?
It did. It seemed to.
Until the event occurred: the extraordinary happening, which divided her life in two: into before and after.
He bought her a double whisky, and for once that’s what she had, instead of the sweet yellow liquid from the bottle Douglas kept especially for her and Elaine. By so doing she lost some two shillings and fourpence, but she needed the whisky, for although he was suave and charming, he made her nervous and self-conscious. He was, she supposed, rare in the Raffles, a man difficult to despise. He was not young; perhaps even about sixty, but his hair was still thick, though grey, and what was more, it was his own. Too often her hand had encountered hair which moved not strand by strand, but in whole slices, tipping here and there across the scalp, and would turn out to be a toupee, or a wig. He drank double whisky after double whisky, but seemed unaffected by the alcohol. His voice was low, smooth and gentlemanly: he smiled at her, and seemed to appreciate what he saw.