Praxis by Fay Weldon Read Free Book Online

oddly was it arranged.
    Only her love for Louise seemed real: and that was because it hurt.
    Patricia told Elaine what she had seen in the vicar’s study.
    ‘It’s a penis,’ said Elaine. ‘My little brother plays with his. He got an infection and it swelled up. Served him right if they’d had to cut it off.’
    Miss Mercier, the French-mistress, elegant and buck-toothed passed by, and saw them whispering, heads together.
    ‘Pas de whispering,’ said Miss Mercier, brightly, spinning them apart with red-taloned hands. She glittered with ferocity. Her home town was occupied by the Germans: she was trapped here in this barbarian land, with dough-faced dumpy ignoramuses of English girls. ‘Pas de whispering!’ Fräulein Bechter, her only friend, had been whisked off to the Isle of Man, to an internment camp. No one protested: no one seemed to even notice.
    Perhaps she herself would be next No one could tell for sure whether the French were gallant allies, or wretched traitors.
    ‘Pas de whispering,’ said Miss Mercier, savagely, and reeled Patricia and Elaine apart, as once she’d flung a bucket of cold water over two mating dogs, who seemed unable to separate. The effect, from the look on their faces, was as much of a shock.
    Patricia had become argumentative.
    ‘I don’t see why Judith had to go,’ said Patricia to Hilda, ‘it would be lovely to have a baby in the house.’
    ‘Not that kind of baby,’ said Hilda. ‘Not a bastard.’
    ‘But it’s not the child’s fault.’
    ‘All kinds of things are nobody’s fault, but that’s not the point; like being a Jew, or blind, or deaf, or a bastard; it’s just the way you’re born.’
    ‘Or a woman,’ said Patricia. She was sweeping the floors, having sprinkled tea-leaves first, to keep the dust down. Since Judith had left, the girls shared the housework between them.
    Lucy seemed incapable of doing it.
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘If I was a boy I’d be allowed to get on with my homework—I wouldn’t have to sweep the floors first.’
    The Reverend Allbright asked Lucy to take Judith back into the household. Times were hard. There was a war on. Allowances had to be made.
    The vicar returned a week later with the news that Mr. Whitechapel was to marry Judith. He had persuaded him to it. ‘Our best chance of happiness in this world,’ said Mr. Allbright, ‘is to do what we ought, not what we want.’
    Lucy took to her bed: she seemed frightened. She insisted that Hilda keep the doors locked, night and day. She would not see a doctor. No one came to the house. There was no money to buy food. Hilda brought up the hoarded food from the cellar, and they ate sardines and condensed milk for breakfast and dinner. There was no money for school dinners, so Patricia and Hilda went home at midday. They walked together, but seldom talked. They looked over their shoulders frequently, and jumped at sudden noises. Their mother’s room stank like a stable. She would not let them clean it.
    Patricia started a diary, part fact, part fantasy. She simplified the vicar’s act of self-exposure into a rape: turned Miss Mercier into a German spy, and described in detail how Louise Gaynor had kissed her behind the bicycle sheds after a school concert.
    Hilda went through her mother’s papers, and wrote to Butt and Sons explaining her situation and asking for money. They agreed to increase the allowance, and sent an immediate postal order for thirty shillings, with which they could buy their rations.
    ‘I think mother’s gone mad,’ Patricia said to Hilda one day. The house was cold. Hilda and Patricia gathered driftwood from the beaches for the fires, but ‘Danger - Mines’ signs had recently gone up and they were more afraid of explosions than cold.
    ‘Don’t ever say that,’ said Hilda, leaning over and slapping Patricia’s face hard, using Lucy’s sharp, strange voice, so that Patricia herself felt doubly betrayed. There was little to choose, she sometimes