Praxis Read Free Page A

and the season stretched ahead, meaningless, filled with grinning, eager, silly faces, craning for a likeness; cheated and derided as they were all year, at work, and now at play, by someone of their own kind, who ought to know better. It made him feel bad but what could he do?
    ‘Mrs. Duveen?’ he enquired. ‘You remember me? The beach photographer? I came to check that your photographs arrived.’
    He thought he had never seen anyone so changed. She seemed like a little old woman, with her hair scraped back, her kimono clutched round her with a hand whose nails were none too clean.
    She shook her head, vague. Then she nodded.
    ‘If by any chance you need frames—and a photograph looks twice as grand in a frame, I always say—I stock a special line Very reasonable.’
    She did not want the frames, but showed him the photograph, stuck any old how on the mantelpiece in the dusty parlour.
    ‘A big house you have here,’ he remarked kindly. ‘Difficult to keep up, for just one person, I should say.’
    At which she burst into tears. Her life was finished; over. Benjamin had gone. She kept her breath in her body for the sake of the girls, nothing else.
    He took a room in the house. She had a male lodger! She, a woman alone. What did it matter what people said? In fact knowing so little about her, they said nothing. Had they known more, no doubt they would have been kind: but the kindness, or lack of it, with which one regards oneself finds its echo in the outside world: and Lucy could not forgive herself. All her fault. Her lost marriage, her failed love, her bastard children, her dusty home, her condemnation to this cruel street, this unfeeling, gossiping town—all her fault. Seeking out more degradation, the seedy lodger, the false photographer, slurping milk through his moustache at her breakfast table, she began to feel better again.
    Lucy curled her hair and pressed her clothes. She weeded the drive. She dressed Hypatia and Praxis in pale pink—they had somehow lost their right to white—and wrote to Butt and Sons, the Duveen solicitors, for money to hire a servant, as befitted the little girls’ state as descendants, albeit on the male side, of King David. Butt and Sons at first demurred, but then conceded.
    Benjamin’s mother paid another visit, and seemed relieved by what she saw. (Henry was banished to the kitchen for the occasion). She left the girls a signed photograph of their father; but Praxis had already forgotten what he looked like; he seemed a stranger to her, with his glowing eyes and large nose. Hypatia took the photograph, in any case, and slept with it under her pillow. Praxis set up a howl, discovering this, but Henry dealt her a sharp cuff and she soon stopped.
    Lucy presently found pleasure in telling Henry what to do. He followed on her heels like a little pet dog: she scolded and chided and soon had him fetching her bag, her book, her wrap, and so rebuilt a little world around herself, and even came down to the beach on warm days.
    The girls watched their lodger take photographs, though pretending to be nothing to do with him. Nothing. A street photographer, after all. None too honest, either, with rotting lungs and bad breath; and their mother a doctor’s daughter, and her daughters of the line of King David. Lucy told them so, frequently: proud of it at last. They had no concept of the notion of Jewishness: either of pogroms or passover. Lucy was vague enough about it herself.
    Hypatia and Praxis went to school and suffered with Jesus on the cross, gasped at the beauty of the Virgin Mary, drenched their souls in the blood of the lamb; were slapped if they stole or told lies, heard that they were daughters of Eve and responsible for leading men into sin and for the loss of Paradise, and must make amends for ever. Praxis cleaned Henry’s shoes in penance: Hypatia actually learned how to develop his prints. And he did develop them nowadays, all of them, and Lucy would send them off. His