Praxis Read Free Page B

teeth never lost their blackness, but he seemed on the whole, as the years went by, less dejected. Lucy even scolded him into a vague sexual response: human beings, he perceived through her, added up to more than the tattered shreds of flesh he had observed hanging on the barbed wire of the Ypres front; the grinning faces, skin stretched over bone, which presented themselves before his camera. The world was something more than a charnel house, a human factory farm, insanely breeding flesh out of flesh as its way of cheating death.
    Presently they slept together in the big brass bed: she a little brisk woman with a tight mouth, prophesying disaster even in her sleep, tossing and turning; he coughing and spluttering all night long, trying to be rid of something; both somewhat healed by virtue of the other: both older than they used to be.
    Praxis and Hypatia slept soundly but woke anxious, eyes wide and stretched, for ever fearful that something unexpected might happen. No one explained anything to them: where Ben had come from, where he had gone: who Henry was, and why. Why their mother cried, scolded or laughed, for no apparent reason. Who the woman in the Rolls-Royce was. If everything was inexplicable, anything might happen. Anxiety ironed itself into their souls.
    Praxis thought Hypatia might know more than she did about it all, by virtue of the extra two and a half years to her credit, but if Hypatia did, she said nothing. Hypatia kept herself to herself: she was aloof, like a cat. Praxis more like a clumsy puppy, leaping up with muddy paws, enthusiastic but ridiculous.

4
    I DO NOT WET the bed now; at least not that: though soon, I dare say, the time will come when I do. I dread the day. I do not want to be an old woman sitting in a chair, wearing nappies, nursed by the salt of the earth. It seems unjust; not what Lucy and Benjamin meant at all; rolling about in their unwed bed, year after year, moved by a force which clearly had nothing to do with commonsense or anyone’s quest for happiness: until, their mission apparently accomplished, they rolled apart and went their separate ways, assisted by Butt and Sons, Solicitors.
    I do not want to be an incontinent old lady. I would rather die. I feel today, my elbow throbbing and my toe swelling, that the time for dying will be quite soon. On Thursdays I go down to the Social Security offices, stand in a queue, and draw the money which keeps me for a further week. It should be possible for a postal draft to be sent weekly and myself to cash it at the local post office, but I do not like to make the request. I am an ex-con, and habit dies hard of not causing trouble to, let alone demanding one’s rights of, those in authority.
    Those in authority, at any rate, in that strange grey world of bars and keys which I have inhabited, where cause and effect works in an immediate way, and the stupid are in charge of the intelligent, and each wrong-doer carries on his poor bowed shoulders the weight of a hundred of the worthy—from prison visitors to the Home Secretary—whose living is made, indirectly, out of crime, or sin, or financial failing, or criminal negligence: or, as with me, the madness of believing that I was right, and society wrong. Who did I think I was? I, Praxis Duveen.
    Madness, I say. Today, certainly, it seems like madness. It’s raining. I can see water seeping beneath the door, and have not the strength to fetch one of my cheap, bright, non-absorbent towels to sop it up. Damp stains the stone floor: I feel a dark stain of wretchedness creeping up to the very edges of that part of my mind, my being, which I usually manage to keep inviolate. The part which is daily reborn with gladness, excitement and gratitude to God (or whatever you call it) because the world exists and is so full of interest and possibility: a part of me which I associate, rightly or wrongly, with the Praxis of the very early years, who would run happily into the waves with shoes and socks on