Free Praxis by Fay Weldon

service foot would easily collapse them, and often did. Pattie watched from her window. Knickers off, hands in, trousers down, whispers and giggles, pant and heave, in and out. Some times money changed hands: sometimes addresses. Sex! The force at the heart of the universe. It hardly seemed sufficiently important.

10
    I T WAS NOT UNTIL September that Mr. Robinson the children’s officer arrived, knocking at the front door. The knocker was stiff with disuse—visitors seldom came to the house. The brass door-furniture, so beloved by Lucy in the days of her youth and sanity, had not been cleaned since Judith’s dismissal. Paint and plaster peeled and flaked; last year’s leaves mouldered in the corners of steps: grubs scuttered away at the fall of Mr. Robinson’s brown boots.
    After the fashion of the young, Hilda and Pattie cleaned what was beneath their eyes, but seldom went searching for dust or decay. They washed the dirty cups, but not the shelves where the cups were kept. They made beds, they even washed sheets: but they never turned a mattress or shook a blanket. They turned their eyes resolutely away from peripheral grime and grease, and focused on their books, their homework, or, on the good days, on the heavens and higher thoughts. Their noses had grown accustomed to the smell of the cats which came in through the broken scullery window to get out of the cold or away from the noise of aerial warfare; and to the stale water in the flower vases, where last autumn’s chrysanthemum stems had long ago rotted away to slime: and to dry rot, wet rot, woodworm, decomposing bins and decay.
    Mr. Robinson’s eyes and nose were fresh to such sights and smells: they made him doubt the soothing reports on the Parker sisters from both school and clergyman, which sat thick upon his clip-board and had allowed him to delay his visit.
    ‘The girls,’ the head-mistress wrote, ‘seem to do better with no parents than many do with two. Patricia is quiet, neat, well-behaved and will get a good School Certificate: Hilda is of course our very valuable head girl, and is much respected by the other pupils.’
    Pupils, it is true, certainly fell silent when Hilda approached. She seldom smiled: her eyes glittered: the black braid with its embossed metal bars now hung almost to her waist, and clanked against the buckle of her money-belt: Head Girl, House Captain, the engravings read: and descending, Hockey, Latin, English, French, Geography, Religious Knowledge, Deportment—there seemed no end to Hilda’s accomplishments. She meted out punishment liberally if erratically. She might give twenty lines or 2000 for the same offence: she invented crimes. She had designated the second peg to the left of the cloakroom door as one which for some reason must be kept free of hats and coats, and would give a detention to anyone who used it: and once compelled a third year girl, a certain Audrey Denver, to stand on her head in the playground until she fainted for the sin of having brown laces in black shoes. Then she kept the entire third year in after school until whoever had done it owned up. But done what? Nobody was quite sure: nobody owned up: and Hilda went home in the middle of the detention anyway. The staff seemed unaware of their head girl’s eccentricity: on the contrary, the head-mistress enthused about her capacity for keeping order, and the general lack of silliness in the school since her appointment. It was as if a certain implicit insanity in the school, dressing its burgeoning female adolescents in collars, ties, boaters and blazers; having them learn classics while the walls around them collapsed, and play netball on playgrounds increasingly pitted by falling shrapnel, had become explicit in Hilda.
    Since her appointment as head girl, Hilda had been unusually pale, and her eyes dark, shiny and troubled. But she had been more talkative and confiding than usual: she would keep Pattie up until the early hours, talking about the