Praxis by Fay Weldon Read Free Book Online Page A

felt, between mother and sister.
    But one day Lucy got up and cleaned her room. The next day she came out into the house, and when Patricia and Hilda came home from school she was in the kitchen making tea. She had lit the fire and made sardine sandwiches. She found fault with the buttons missing from Patricia’s blazer. She was so thin her ribs stuck through her dress, and she seemed unsteady on her legs, but she smiled and was brisk and seemed herself again. Patricia stopped writing in her diary. Now it was over, she described it all to Elaine.
    ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
    ‘It was too dreadful to talk about. Some things are.’
    Miss Leonard the English teacher asked Patricia and Elaine to tea. She gave them scones with butter (given to her by Elaine’s father) and talked about love, and about how her fiancé had been killed in the First World War, and how cruel war was.
    ‘Love is so important,’ she said. Patricia began to cry, for no reason that she could think of.
    ‘What’s the matter?’ asked Miss Leonard, distressed. She had a soft, round, floury face and grey soft curls and scarlet lips. But Patricia merely shook her head.
    Lucy read Patricia’s diary. Patricia came home to find her mother not her mother, but some glassy-eyed, violent, mad stranger. There was an elderly policeman in the room; her own diary open: and her mother hissing abuse at her, from a distance, as if to come near would be to risk pollution.
    ‘Little Jewess, after all. Sly little lesbian. Little slut. Filthy, dirty little piece of slime. Little bastard.’ The policeman attempted to intercede, but failed, and presently gave up and left. There was a war on.
    Lucy would only speak to Patricia through Hilda.
    ‘Hilda, tell your sister I shall go to the head-mistress tomorrow. It’s no use her telling lies. It will all come out.’
    ‘All what?’ Patricia beseeched. ‘All what?’
    ‘Don’t speak to me,’ said Lucy. ‘The gutter’s where you belong. Rolling around in filth and slime.’
    She did strange things that night: arranging the sheets of her bed into a tent at the top of the staircase: putting the tea-pot into the coal cellar. Hilda let Patricia into her bed to sleep. They lay together, quiet and sleepless. On the other side of the blackout curtains searchlights made moving patterns.
    ‘Let me die tonight,’ prayed Patricia for the first but not the last time in her life. ‘Let me sleep now and never wake up.’ But she knew she would not be allowed to die. She could hear her mother singing now, loudly. A tuneless, repetitive sound, as she locked and unlocked the front door; clicked the lock this way, now clicked it that way.
    ‘What shall we do?’ asked Patricia of Hilda.
    ‘Do about what?’ enquired Hilda, grimly.
    In the morning Lucy was sleeping on the living-room floor.
    Patricia and Hilda moved her on to the sofa. She weighed so little one of them could have done it on their own. For the first time it occurred to Patricia that she loved her mother: it was a love compounded with pity, anxiety and fear: but it was love. She covered her with a blanket. Her diary was still lying open. She put it in the kitchen stove and closed the door on it. Hilda watched, silently. Presently they set off for school together, in their navy gym-slips, blazers and blue felt hats, picking their way through the debris which the anti-aircraft battery on the cliffs nightly showered upon the town.
    ‘I hope the Germans do come,’ said Patricia.
    ‘On top of everything else,’ said Hilda, ‘you’re a traitor.’
    Patricia was summoned to the head-mistress’s office. There she found her diary, charred but still readable, on the head-mistress’s desk. Her mother stood and stared out of the window, and Louise Gaynor stared remotely at her fingertips. ‘And what have you to say, Miss?’ asked the head-mistress, not unkindly.
    ‘It wasn’t meant for anyone to read,’ said Patricia. ‘It was just things I made