Read Online Praxis by Fay Weldon - Free Book Online

humour.
    ‘I’ve been to see Henry and Judith.’
    ‘How did you know where they were?’
    ‘I waited for the tram from the recruiting office. Then I followed him.’
    ‘Mother wouldn’t like it. They’re common. Nothing. Why do you want to have anything to do with them? She’s a scarlet woman; you know what she did. And under mother’s own roof.’
    ‘Scarlet? She always seemed kind of black and hairy to me,’ said Pattie, forlornly.
    ‘I hope you told them nothing,’ said Hilda sharply. ‘We don’t want people poking and prying into our business.’
    ‘I don’t think people are all that interested in us. They only think about themselves.’
    She was not going to tell Hilda what she knew. Not yet. Perhaps never. The way to deal with Hilda was to agree with what she said, while believing none of it, and doing nothing to aggravate her. Patricia was frightened of Hilda, as she had never been, quite, of her own mother. Lucy’s madness had been a deviation from maternal love: Hilda’s was an intensification of sisterly hate. Pattie locked her room that night and for many to come, and sat up late at the darkened window, watching the searchlights and the pattern of distant aerial conflicts reflected on the water.
    Pattie found out the whereabouts of her mother by looking up Area Health Board Hospitals in the post office, and ringing them up in turn until one finally acknowledged having a Mrs. Lucy Duveen on its books.
    She went along to the Poole General Asylum the following Sunday. She put on lipstick in an attempt to make herself look older, lest she be refused admittance. She felt wicked so doing.
    The porter at the gatehouse unlocked bars to let her in. Blank eyes followed her. Women sat isolated and remote on benches, lining corridors. All seemed old: all had thick lisle stockings, wrinkling down over slippers, as if suspender belts were unknown. Pattie was frightened. What manner of life was this?
    A male nurse, keys jangling, led her to a cubicle, and there, peering through, Pattie saw Lucy, in a strait-jacket.
    ‘Mother,’ shrieked Pattie.
    ‘Quiet now, quiet,’ said the nurse. ‘They don’t feel as we do, in this state.’
    Lucy seemed quite quiet, but when she saw Pattie she began to struggle and her face contorted.
    ‘You upset her,’ said the nurse. ‘Come away.’
    Pattie suffered herself to be led away. Lucy, seeing her, had been animated by hate and anger, not love and despair, yet this must be some sort of comfort. Better for her mother, worse for her.
    This was the manner of life; and had been for a long time. What was good for Lucy was bad for Patricia, and vice versa.
    Lucy was in bonds, so Pattie could go free.
    ‘I went to see mother,’ she said to Hilda, boldly enough.
    ‘You shouldn’t have done that. It would only upset you.’
    ‘It did.’
    ‘It’s bad enough for me, and she quite likes me. She hates you, though. It’s her illness. The doctors said you shouldn’t go. I don’t know why they let you in.’
    ‘No one knew who I was, I suppose. Anyway, I don’t think they have much time to think about things like that.’
    ‘They’re wonderful people: don’t talk against them. It’s all your fault she’s in there, you realise that.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘You were perverted, weren’t you. It upsets her.’
    ‘I wasn’t.’
    ‘Don’t pretend. You’re just disgusting. Sneaky and sly.’
    Hilda went to bed early, up the stairs in brown lace-up brogues, yellow prefect’s sash making a sack of her navy pleated tunic. She was nineteen. Her sallowness had disappeared: her skin had a smooth yellow-to-pink glow: her waist was slender: her receding chin made her mouth pouty and provocative: her eyes were clear, steady and censorious. Her life was passed in a female world, bounded by examinations: whole weeks would pass in which she would talk only to women. Even the tram conductors were female now: the men passed in noisy clumps of uniform, vulgar, frightening, leaving a