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consider.
    I wish she would come. She could make the tea. Her name is Myra Jones. She is half my age: she has the warm light of virtue in her eye. She would never have killed as I did, coldly, gritting my teeth. She would have been positive and sensible, and put the poor little half-witted thing into a home, and then set about running the home, if it didn’t suit her vision of what a home for the mentally handicapped should be. Would she herself have spooned slops into the adult mouth, or cleaned off the adult nappies? Yes, she would, she could, from sheer insufficiency of imagination. If she had to. Only if she had to, and until she could persuade or train some other slightly more high-grade half-wit to do it. I have encountered some of these latter half-wits, on the staff of mental homes, or shelters or protected communities—whatever the latest name is for these repositories for human distress: they love to be revenged upon their charges: they tease the mumbling and the twitching and the incontinent as they themselves are teased and humiliated in the outside world. No, the seed of King David, however distorted and debased, was not to end at the mercy of such as these. Obliteration was better.
    Last time Myra Jones called, I remember, I would not let her in. I did not want her poking and prying. There is something of my mother in me.
    My mother, in the acuteness of her distress after my father left her, spent her nights for a time with Henry Whitechapel. Or so he told me later, and I have no reason to disbelieve him.
    There was certainly no point in asking her. Mother would have denied it and believed her denial, whether she had or whether she hadn’t. At a time when women’s instincts were so much at a variance with the rules of society, such localised amnesias were only to be expected. But was this episode out of character? Was my mother, from the age of thirty to the age of seventy, living out a part that did not suit her at all? I believe the latter. I concur with the vicar, the Reverend Allbright, and the younger Butt, who both avowed that a woman who’d sleep with one man outside marriage, would sleep with another. I have friends who married as virgins and only made love with their husbands all their lives, and wouldn’t want it any other way. They seem the happiest with their lot in life. I wish it were not so, but it is. My mother tried to attain the happiness of the sexually exclusive, but had left it too late. She was polluted. To lose one’s virginity is not—as the toe-trampler on the bus would no doubt have it—an insignificant event. It is tremendous, momentous, and sets the pattern for an entire sexual life to come. I even think, sometimes, that that narrow hypocritical society was right, and that Hypatia and myself had no right to be alive: and had better have remained the outcasts we were born.
    Myra Jones, where are you? I hope I have not driven you away. I need you now. I, Patricia Fletcher, humble murderess, who will not even argue with you about my name, need my cup of tea and pain-killer.
    I, Praxis Duveen. Let them carve that name upon my headstone, if I have a grave. Let them engrave it upon the urn which holds my ashes. It was the name I started with: I have changed it often enough since; and seldom for the better.

7
    H ILDA AND PATRICIA DUVEEN. Patricia fell in love. She wore a navy gym-slip, white blouse, brown belt, black stockings and brown shoes, and fell in love with a girl similarly clad, except that she wore a yellow prefect’s sash and a row of short metal bars hanging from a black tab pinned to her chest. The bars, embossed, told of one prowess or another. Louise Gaynor, Patricia’s love, had bars for Athletics, Latin, English and French. She was sixteen and Patricia was twelve.
    Patricia did not speak to Louise: her passion existed in her own head and, being unafflicted by reality, was the more powerful for it. She gazed, she exulted, she suffered, she all but swooned, at an