Praxis by Fay Weldon

in love with girls,’ said Miss Leonard, ‘if no boys are available. Freud says, in any case, that homosexuality is a normal step on the road to full sexual maturity.’
    ‘To be Jewish is no disgrace,’ said Miss Leonard. ‘On the contrary. In any case a Jewish father doesn’t count. Only a Jewish mother. Sorry.’
    ‘Your mother was not trying to harm you, only to save you,’ said Miss Leonard. ‘Poor thing.’
    ‘Yes, I can well believe that your sister is mad,’ said Miss Leonard, ‘though it never occurred to me at the time. One is not accustomed to the notion of mad children. But you’re not mad, Praxis. What did you do with the rat poison?’
    Miss Leonard emptied it down the lavatory bowl, and flushed and flushed.
    ‘Mind you,’ she added, ‘I do know what she means about the third year. They do scuttle and scamper, whisper and pry, and they seem to have very sharp, bright, sinister eyes.’
    But she laughed as she said it, and that day cut off the crusts of the sandwiches as a special treat—it was a practice frowned upon by the Ministry of Food—and filled them with tinned melon jam from South Africa, as opposed to the turnip-pulp, flecked with wood splinters and coloured with cochineal, which did for raspberry jam.
    ‘You’re getting to be quite a pretty girl, Praxis,’ said Miss Leonard. Praxis’ smile was less frequent, but her face becoming more expressive.
    ‘I suppose,’ said Miss Leonard, with rather less certainty, ‘it is possible to be happy in a strait-jacket. Especially if there are others in like condition to keep you company. One is usually at home in the presence of one’s peers. It is if one is obliged to live with others either greater or lesser than oneself, that one is so wretched—’
    All the same, Miss Leonard wrote to Butt and Sons, Solicitors. ‘It is disgraceful,’ she declared, ‘that the children of your client should have been so neglected. If you will kindly send me the father’s address I will contact him personally. The mother has been driven into a breakdown by his harshness, and is in a position to sue for compensation through a third party, and I will have no hesitation in being that third party if funds are not immediately forthcoming for her transfer to a private institution—’
    Miss Leonard received a cheque by return of post.
    ‘Be a carnivore,’ said Miss Leonard, carefully boiling the week’s ration of one egg each, to make a Sunday breakfast, ‘not a herbivore.’ She wore a crimson flowered dressing-gown, and her nails were bloody, red, but her slightly pop eyes were gentle and searching.
    ‘What do you mean?’ asked Praxis.
    ‘Carnivores feed off herbivores,’ said Miss Leonard. ‘Carnivores exist to herbivores in a ratio of fifty to one. I am a herbivore. We munch away peacefully, looking wise, until suddenly snap, snap, we’re gone.’ Miss Leonard had spent a lurid Saturday night.
    Miss Leonard had lost her one true love in the First World War. First she’d slept with him: then she’d lost him. A punishment for sin, she assumed. She’d been seventeen.
    ‘It is an honour to lose a son for one’s country,’ observed her true-love’s mother, carrying on, head and chin held high. War Office telegrams mounting up on the mantelpiece, continuing with her charity fête to Beat the Boche. He was the third of her sons to die, trying to do so.
    ‘If that’s the only way you can bear it,’ observed Miss Leonard’s mother, ‘call it what you like, even honour. I prefer to call it a tragedy and a wicked waste. What are my daughters going to do for husbands?’
    What indeed? Miss Leonard did without one, denied any need for one, lived quite happily without one, went to Teachers’ Training College, and thereafter spent her time putting romantic notions into the heads of growing girls. Keats, Wordsworth, Rupert Brooke.
    ‘If I should die, think only this of me—’
    No, but there was so much else to be thought. She perceived it