She turned her attention to ground level and saw, for the first time, what seemed to her an almost perfect leg of pork, just sitting there on the pavement. Or, rather, it was resting, tucked slightly behind a piece of timber (probably part of a window frame), and was off the ground and quite hidden. Furthermore, it was covered with the same layer of dust as everything else in the area and so was well camouflaged.
After a moment’s thought, Mrs Head bent down, picked up the joint and put it in her shopping bag, feeling grateful that she had decided to bring that piece of equipment after all.
*
Had anyone called Mrs Head a looter she would have expressed great indignation, even outrage, though the thought did cross her mind, as she hurried home, as to whether, if spotted, she would have been ‘v. severly delt with’ in the manner of that crudely written sign. Apart from the fact that Mr Dando was always lying about how much meat he had in stock, which in itself was justification for taking it when it had become available, such goods were perishable and would only spoil if they weren’t used. It could hardly be compared to stealing tins of food or dresses or wireless sets.
When home she gave the meat a long, investigative sniff. She looked closely for any signs that it might have been nibbled by rats. She ran her fingers over its surface, feeling for any splinters of broken glass. There were none. She brushed off the little pieces of grit and ash, ran it under the kitchen tap for a full five minutes, dabbed it with a kitchen towel, then wondered what she should do with it.
Cleaned up, the meat looked excellent. A lovely deep, almost purply pink, with a nice hairless skin covering a layer of snowywhite fat. It seemed to cry out, ‘Roast me, roast me.’ Mrs Head thought of the wonderful crackling such a joint would give, and she wouldn’t have hesitated, except that it was a Wednesday. A stew would have been more appropriate for a Wednesday. On the other hand, the meat might not keep until Sunday. She didn’t like the thought of it lying around in her house uncooked for four days. And the look of excitement she would see on Tory’s face when she got home from work, to smell a joint of pork roasting in the oven, would be worth it in itself. They hadn’t had a joint for many months. Apart from that, she had some apples and could make a good sauce to go with it. And the cold pork would keep them in sandwiches for days.
So, that afternoon, instead of going to stake her claim on the butchers of the distant high street, Mrs Head prepared the roast dinner of her life, using the joint of pork she had found near the site of a bombed butcher’s shop.
And still no one seemed to know what had become of Mr Dando.
CHAPTER TWO
Mrs Head was a little disappointed with her daughter, in almost every way. She had not attained the beauty that had seemed possible when, as a ten-year-old, she had possessed the most lovely eyes. In adulthood they seemed, instead, to bulge slightly. In the same way her face, going through the mill of puberty, had been pulled out of shape. All the bones were wrong. Her forehead was too high, her chin too small. Such things might not have mattered, but Mrs Head was beginning to believe that all her other little failings seemed to stem from this one – the failure to be beautiful.
If beautiful, she could have attracted a more worthwhile husband than the little Scottish painter and decorator she had married, without much obvious enthusiasm, in 1930, and who now had been missing in action for more than six months. With more beauty she could have found more appropriate, more glamorous war work than toiling in the packing department of a gelatine factory. Above all, she would have attracted and benefited from the attentions of the world: her teachers would have taught her more, her friends would have shared their best things with her. She would, like all beautiful people, have had a trust fund set up on her behalf for the world to fill with its riches. She would have had vitality.
Instead, it seemed to Mrs Head, Tory not only lacked vitality, she seemed, at just thirty-four years old, to be spent, exhausted, defeated. Each day she looked greyer. She came home from work each evening red-eyed and chap-lipped and, after a silent, small dinner, would shut herself in the sitting room for most of the evening. Hardly a word passed between them on most nights.
Well, perhaps things would be different this evening, Mrs Head thought, when Tory caught the whiff of a real roast dinner. It was a troublesome thing for Mrs Head, thinking of her own child in such poor terms, and she wondered if she was making sufficient allowances for her. She must, of course, be missing her children terribly, and was probably rather upset about Donald (whom she seemed to think for certain was dead), and if she wasn’t the radiant beauty Mrs Head had been expecting, it was going too far to say she was ugly. Just a quarter of an inch off the forehead, a bit more on the chin, a rounding-off of the face to lose that horrible squareness it had developed, and she would be quite good-looking. If only she would make the best of what she had. She didn’t even bother with makeup these days. And this evening, the evening of the roast-pork dinner, she arrived home, not for the first time, with her hair still in the factory-issue nets under her own slightly crumpled hat.
She entered the dining room utterly indifferent to the smell that filled it, or the sound of a spitting joint that could be heard from the kitchen and, still in her chunky, too-masculine raincoat, flopped into an armchair by the mantelpiece, took out the newspaper that was folded under her arm and dropped it onto the dining-table beside her.
Mrs Head told her about the bombing of Old Parade and the destruction of the shops, how terrible it had been to see all those lovely little shops blown inside out, and how difficult it was going to be now to do the shopping, but she, Mrs Head, was not going to be put off and she was going down to the high street first thing tomorrow and would get herself registered with the best butcher she could find…
Tory took all this in, or at least seemed to, in a passive, disinterested way, leaning back in her chair with her eyes closed, working her head gently from side to side, as though to ease some tension in her neck. Having told Tory everything she could think of about the bomb, Mrs Head came to a stop, trying her best not to show frustration at her daughter’s indifference, both to the news and to the cooking smells she should have noticed by now. She felt, as she stood there in the middle of the room facing her seated daughter, rather like an actor who had forgotten their lines. Then she said, ‘Hungry?’
‘No, not really.’ It was the expected answer.
‘Oh, but you must be. I’ve got something special tonight, really special.’
‘Oh, yes?’ She seemed to be waiting to be told what it was.
‘Can’t you smell it?’
‘I can smell something.’
‘We’re having roast pork. A real treat. And I’ve made apple sauce, and roast potatoes, and we’re going to have the most marvellous gravy, well…’
Tory managed a nod and a smile, as if she was, in some remote corner of her mind, surprised and pleased.
‘Aren’t you going to change for dinner?’ said Mrs Head, setting the table, using her cork place mats for once, and the Noah’s Ark condiment set – indicators that this was indeed to be a very special meal.
‘Into what?’ said Tory, lifting her head.
‘You could at least take your coat off, and take your hair out.’ Mrs Head had worried a little about her daughter’s hygiene
Since she had started working at Farraway’s. Her clothes always smelt of animals, her fingernails were usually black, and there was often a grimy tincture to her skin, as though someone had scribbled all over her with a pencil. In the early days Mrs Head had set up the bath in the sitting room ready for her when she got home, but now Tory only bathed once or twice during the week, although she usually washed her hands and face at the basin. Farraway’s had a reputation locally. If you found yourself downwind of it, you’d better shut all your windows and doors. It seemed such a pity that her daughter should soil herself with such tawdry manufacturing. Gelatine of all things. Who needed gelatine now?
‘Can’t I change afterwards, Mama? My bo
dy feels like it’s bound with red-hot iron hoops.’
‘All the more reason to change, I would have thought, and to have a wash as well. At least give your hands a clean.’
‘I washed them at the factory,’ said Tory, as her mother entered from the kitchen, with her oven gloves on, which made her hands look as soft and bulky as a bear’s paws. The gloves were joined together, which made her seem like a bear in chains.
‘I’m just about to get it out of the oven,’ Mrs Head said, flourishing the gloves.
Tory stood up and took off her coat, and went out into the hall to hang it up. In the hall mirror she released her hair from its netting, shook it out, was briefly appalled by the rat-tails that appeared at her shoulders but which she managed to knead back into the main body of her hair. She was aware that she was a little grimy, that her eyes looked tired, that her lips were pale and cracked, but it wasn’t as though she was going anywhere tonight. It was only her mother who had to look at her, and she felt a certain pleasure in presenting such a tired, dirty face to her, just to remind her of how much she was suffering in this war. She didn’t realize her mother had had exactly the same thoughts, and deliberately stooped and left her hair partially unpinned for the same reason.
By the time she re-entered the dining room, the joint of roast pork was on the table, and Mrs Head was standing before it with a carving knife.
‘It’s at times like this you realize how much you miss men,’ said Mrs Head, immediately biting her lip, for she hadn’t really wanted to invoke the absent fathers of the family, deceased Arthur and missing Donald.
‘Why should we assume that carving is a man’s job?’ said Tory, taking her seat at the table – somewhat reluctantly, it seemed to Mrs Head. She had still shown no sign of appreciation for the spread that had been put out: thick gravy in a china boat that hadn’t been used for years, roast potatoes and buttered sprouts in servers under floral lids, even ringed napkins beside the coasters.
‘Well, the one who provides, I suppose, also does the carving, but then, by that logic, it’s right that I should carve, since I’m the provider this time.’
This brought a little smile to Tory’s tired face. Mrs Head inserted the tines of a carving fork into the meat. The crackling cracked, juice bubbled up and flowed down. The knife was put against the roasted skin, a few cautious strokes were made, the sharpened edge moving against the hard skin, which yielded nothing. Then suddenly, with a little pressure, she was through; the skin had broken and the meat was coming away under the knife. With a few strokes a slice had been produced, which flopped to the side, like the page of a book turning. Mrs Head worked quickly.
‘Even if I say so myself,’ she remarked, delivering the first pink slice to Tory’s plate, ‘this meat is done to perfection.’
Tory had to agree, as the excellent crackling clinked onto the plate. She was even beginning to feel quite hungry. She bent down to sniff it, in a way that her mother thought was rather rude. ‘So where did you get it?’ she said.
‘Where did I get it?’ Mrs Head hesitated, suddenly struck by the trickiness of this question, shocked that she hadn’t anticipated it. ‘Where did I get it? Well, where do you think I got it?’
‘You’ve just been telling me about how Dando’s has been completely destroyed, and how you haven’t been able to buy any meat there for days, and how there aren’t any other butchers for miles around, and that you’ll set off early to visit them tomorrow …’
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Head in a lingering sort of voice, ‘yes, I did say that, didn’t I?’ She was going through all the possible fabrications she could tell, and wondering how they compared with the truth. In the end there just wasn’t time for her to work out a story.
‘Well, you could say I did get it from Dando’s after all …’
Tory, about to put some of the meat into her mouth, instead returned it carefully to her plate. ‘What do you mean, Mother?’
‘I suppose you could say I was lucky, Tory. Very lucky. Blessed, you could say.’
Now Tory put down her knife and fork. ‘Are you trying to tell me you found this meat in the ruins of the shop?’
‘No, no, no,’ said Mrs Head, as though affronted. ‘No, not in his shop at all, no. It had been thrown right across to the other side of the street.’
Tory closed her eyes and hung her head, as though having trouble comprehending the simple words her mother was speaking. She lifted her head and spoke. ‘Where exactly did you find it?’ She still had her eyes closed, as though dreading the answer.
‘Now, Tory, there is absolutely nothing wrong with this meat. I’ve thoroughly cleaned it, I inspected it very closely …’
‘You’re telling me that this meat has been lying on the pavement since the small hours of this morning?’
‘Tory please, be practical …’
Tory stood up and moved away from the table, as though merely being near the meat could be dangerous. She stood in the middle of the room with her arms folded. ‘This is wrong in so many ways,’ she said, ‘I hardly know where to begin. Leave aside the question of looting for the moment. This meat has been lying in the open air since around three o’clock in the morning before you found it. Goodness knows what creatures could have run their rheumy snouts over it and dragged their dirty little feet across it, or sat on it with their dirty little bottoms. Then there is the question of what exactly this meat is. You say it is leg of pork. I wonder how you know it is even animal meat at all.’
‘What are you saying, Tory? Don’t be ridiculous. Of course it’s pork.’
‘Were there any casualties in this air raid? I heard people on the tram saying there had been some…’
‘It’s leg of pork, Tory, trust me. I have been visiting butchers’ shops for more than forty years and I know my cuts of meat. No bomb could joint a piece of meat so neatly. And I know how Dando cuts his pork …’
Mrs Head knew that she had not succeeded in convincing her daughter of the meat’s cleanliness, its wholesomeness. And now she, too, was starting to have her doubts. It had never once occurred to her that the meat might not be animal at all, but the remains of some poor devil caught in the bomb blast. Trust Tory to think of this possibility. She remembered how her daughter had put her off black pudding. A few months ago Tory had refused to eat any when Mrs Head had brought some home. She claimed to have heard it on good authority that the Government was using human blood for its manufacture. It was a way of making use of the surplus that had built up at the blood banks since the outbreak of war, when everyone was queuing up to ‘give’. Her mother wondered how she could know these things, and presumed that the gelatine factory was privy to such information.
‘It’s tantamount to cannibalism,’ Tory had said.
That was one way of looking at it. But it hadn’t stopped Mrs Head frying some up with the previous day’s mashed potato for a solitary lunch. She didn’t tell Tory she’d eaten it, nor that it had tasted, to her, better than normal. So good, so filling, that she’d had to lie down for an hour afterwards. It had confirmed her own feelings about herself, that she was a strong woman who could withstand anything.
A black cat entered the room, its tail perpendicular, and sniffed the air eagerly. Mrs Head, still seated at the table, lifted a small slice of pork off her plate and held it out for the cat who, as though having a fantasy realized, darted across and grabbed the meat in its teeth, making Mrs Head laugh. ‘Sambo doesn’t care,’ she said, as the cat hurried to a corner of the room and ate with his back to the humans.
Though she recognized that cats did this thing with their food, of eating defensively in corners, Tory wondered if he didn’t look a little bit ashamed. ‘The day we look to cats for moral guidance will be the day that civilization ends,’ she said.
‘They’re very practical creatures, aren’t you, Sambo?’ He had finished his morsel and come back for more.
‘All animals are practical, Mother. They’re also thoughtless.’
‘I don’t
know about that, Tory. Sometimes I look at Sambo and he seems to see right through me. And you know what they say about following a cat in an air raid.’ Both women contemplated him for a few moments. ‘You know how difficult it is to come by good meat, Tory, and now that Dando’s has gone, we need to make the best of what we can get. This may be the last piece of decent meat we see for a very long time. And you can rest assured that I would never knowingly eat someone …’
Tory laughed at the statement, made so sincerely by her mother, who failed to see what was funny. The ensuing discussion grew quite heated but only served, in the end, to strengthen Tory’s conviction that there was something wrong about the meat. The more they spoke of cannibalism (in all but name), the more likely it seemed that the meat on the plate was human. Perhaps it was even Mr Dando himself. With such a possibility foremost in her mind, Tory now even found the sight of the meat repulsive, and believed that she was, indeed, very close to vomiting. At the same time she was so damn hungry.
The argument had the opposite effect on her mother. The more they discussed cannibalism, the more rigid her resolve to eat the meat, even if it was only to prove how firmly she believed it was safe. So it was Mrs Head who took the first bite at the pork of doubtful origin. Stabbing a piece with her fork, popping it into her mouth and chewing, she was careful not to meet her daughter’s eye, but to glance elsewhere with as much casual indifference as to what was in her mouth as she could muster. She took another forkful, carefully selecting the biggest, juiciest piece of pork she could find on her plate. She chewed slowly and thoughtfully. Chewing had replaced speech in their discussion. She could say all she needed to say on the subject simply by chewing.
Letters From an Unknown Woman Page 2
