Letters From an Unknown Woman

by Gerard Woodward

  Tory realized it was stupid of her now, as a thirty-four-year-old woman, to allow this childhood experience to influence her behaviour, but her vow of avoidance had almost reached the level of superstition. It was not that she still feared the underground lavatories on the square but it had simply become one of the rules of her life that she never used them.

  The attendant who’d found her had been very kind, an enormous old woman with a long ponytail and no teeth, who’d let her sit in her office and even given her some sheets of paper and pencils and told her to do some drawing while she went above ground to look for her mother. On this occasion, however, her focus was on the men’s. There was an attendant down there too, she knew, the male equivalent of the old woman who’d rescued her from the cubicle (who must have long since departed her post and probably her life). Sometimes, passing, she saw the man emerge in his sagging blue overalls, like a miner coming up for air. He would lean against the spiked railing that surrounded the entrances to the lavatories and puff on a curled pipe. He had a sad, bloodhound face, with lots of red in his eyes (all those years of bleaching, perhaps). And, as Tory thought about this man, she tried to imagine if he was the sort to deal in illicit literature. Were there stashed somewhere in his lair, perhaps between packs of brittle toilet paper or disinfectant blocks, smudged carbon editions of stories detailing the saucy escapades of young housemaids? The thought of that sagging, lumbering old man, with his greying walrus moustache and his hands that delved daily into unspeakable mires, possessing such material was almost too hideous to bear.

  She watched for about twenty minutes. The attendant didn’t emerge, and Tory observed the comings and goings of the customers with a bird-watcher’s avidity. There were few young men among them. Occasionally a soldier in uniform, greatcoat flapping, would scamper down the steps, or a delicate thing with spectacles and sunken cheeks, probably excused call-up on grounds of general fragility, would shakily emerge, clinging to the handrail as he lifted himself up the steps. Otherwise it was mostly older men, stout patriarchs in bowler hats and medals on their lapels to show they’d done their duty in the first war, old-timers with long beards and red swollen hands, who were too old to have fought even in the Great War, and a steady stream of sharply dressed men, just a shade too old for the draft but who seemed fit enough and were probably the most likely to use the services of an underground purveyor of smut. Tory was trying to see if any of the men emerged carrying something they hadn’t gone in with. Particularly anything in a book-shaped brown-paper bag. But none did, that she could see. But, then, she didn’t really know what she was going to do if she did see one. She could hardly go down into the Gents and ask to browse the shelves of the lavatory library. Perhaps it was partly because she wanted to know that ordinary men did these things, to feel assured that Donald had not, in developing this interest, turned into some sort of monster.

  But the men who emerged from the lavatory in the square seemed disappointingly clean and unblemished.

  There was no bench outside the barber’s so she felt a little less comfortable observing its entrances and exits, and could only note that the same type of men visited this place as well, from the nearly bald to the Dickens-bearded. The only difference was that the men emerged with less than they had come with, half an inch or more from the back and sides, or a grey swathe of whiskers gleaned from the jowls. None came out with packages, or gave the least impression that they might be concealing one beneath their coats: no furtive glances up and down the street, just a bold stepping out, some fingering their newly shorn chins and temples with a satisfied air.

  There was a moment when the barber’s shop was empty and the barber, in his long apron, had sat down for a quick break, picking up a copy of the News Chronicle to read.

  She had never been in a barber’s before. At home she had cut Tom’s hair herself, painfully, with a pair of dressmaking scissors. Donald went regularly, but to where she knew not, since his work took him sometimes far afield and he would usually visit a barber local to his job. Without giving herself the opportunity to hesitate, she entered the shop. A bell tinkled above her head as she did so, and the barber looked up from his newspaper. His hair was dark and thick, and stood up on end, like a boot brush. The shop was very bright, being lit by electricity, which burnt away in three large neon tubes hanging from the ceiling.

  There must be other barbers who work in this place, Tory thought. Sometimes all four must be at work, busily shearing and shaving. Did they all deal in forbidden literature? she wondered. If not, was she now standing before the one barber who did? He seemed old and sage enough to be the owner, the employer of the other barbers, in which case it was more likely he who dealt out the filth. But looking at him, he didn’t seem the sort of man to be involved in such things. He was too clean and fatherly. There was a hint of kindness in his dark brown eyes.

  ‘Can I help you, madam?’

  She looked quickly around the shop, as if there might be a clue in her surroundings. Four mirrors, four washbasins, each strewn with shaving and hair-cutting paraphernalia, little bottles of oils and lotions with silver spouts, clustered like the bottles of liquor in a cocktail cabinet, electric-powered clippers hanging on hooks with their cables dangling beneath them, scissors, cutthroats, strops. The bitter stench of perfumed alcohol stung her eyes.

  Tory had been there a minute without speaking.

  ‘I was just wondering …’ she stammered, her eyes drawn to a little montage of photographs that adorned one of the mirrors, of film stars in revealing costumes, long legs and coy glances over shoulders. Here was the mirror of the barber who dealt in pornography, surely. But it was not the mirror of the barber she was talking to now – she could tell it had not been used recently. ‘I mean I was wondering if you sell …’ Betty Grable seemed to wink at her.

  ‘I’m sorry, I seem to have made a mistake,’ Tory muttered, and left, clumsily mishandling the door on the way out so that the bell rang louder and longer than necessary.

  At home she collapsed, exhausted, in her study, and noticed, for the first time, that she had been crying on the long walk home. She dried her tears with trembling hands. She looked at her parents’ engagement photo (had the expressions now changed from shock to pity?) and said to herself, ‘I will never be able to do this thing that is asked of me.’

  *

  The house in which she had grown up contained few books. Donald was a great reader, but he used the library. There was a small bookcase in the sitting room of volumes that were mostly her father’s. There was a complete set of Walter Scott, which she could not remember anyone ever reading, and there was a collection of poetry by James Montgomery. There were some editions of an accountancy journal, and some books of history, which, again, seemed forever unread. Tory knelt before the bookcase, fingering each volume, extracting some for a brief examination, a glance at the title page, or the first few lines of Chapter One, each of which only seemed to emphasize the rigidly correct and sexually modest nature of the prose within. Oh, Father, Tory said to herself, I don’t even know why I’m looking at your library. How could I possibly think I might find what I’m looking for here? And it was then that she came across a book she hadn’t noticed before. It was called Sorrell and Son, and the author was Warwick Deeping. She recognized the name but she had no idea what the novel was about. She only knew that it was a ‘modern’ novel, and that it was very popular. At one time she seemed to remember people everywhere talking about it, and she had the vaguest notion that it was somewhat ‘racy’.

  Her heart filled at the thought that her own house might contain the very sort of book she had been looking for, and later that evening, after writing her usual letters to the children, she began reading it.

  She was quickly absorbed by the story and soon discovered why it was thought to be racy. Betrayed by his wife, the elder Sorrell devotes his life to providing for his only son, often taking lowly work in order to do so – he polishes shoes in a provincial hotel, he becomes a ga
rdener. Reflecting on his wife Dora, he remembers ‘She was not a bad woman, only a highly-sexed one, and [he] had never satisfied her sex and its various desires …’ This in itself was enough to shock Tory. What on earth was such a book doing in the house? Whose was it? Her father’s or Mrs Head’s? And what did Sorrell mean by ‘various desires’? She read on. Unfortunately, the language never went into any more detail. Sexuality was acknowledged but never described. The younger Sorrell, as he grew up, seemed to see women, perhaps in the light of his mother’s life, as beastly seductresses, who exercised an unholy fascination and possessed a damnable beauty. ‘I can’t help it, Pater, but women are the very devil …’ When he does meet a more agreeable woman, Mary, a seller of theatre programmes, Tory became hopeful that a sex scene might follow, but was rather disappointed when it came, describing Kit ‘plucking the red fruit from time to time, to find the juice of it sadder and less sweet’. Shortly afterwards Mary was flattened by a bus.

  Tory found herself examining that phrase – plucking the red fruit – over and over again. She wondered how juice could be sad. Plucking the red fruit, she supposed, meant kissing, but which part of the body? The lips, one must suppose but, then again, maybe the sad juices came from other places. Dare she think that low? Dare she write to Donald, ‘I would have you pluck my red fruit, dearest (and I don’t mean my lips).’ Would that do?

  She tried reading more. She went back to the library and looked up more of Warwick Deeping’s books. She found one that sounded promising – The Pride of Eve, which sounded like something scandalous starring Bette Davis and brought to mind temptresses in dark lipstick. It lacked a ‘For Adults Only’ stamp, however, and she was greatly disappointed when it turned out to concern the plight of a struggling female artist and her relationship with a married man who adores flowers. Tory soon realized that all the sex in the novel was contained in the flowers that filled the married man’s garden. The censoring librarian had either missed this or had deemed floral writhing an acceptable substitute for sex. It was a metaphor that appealed to Tory. Almost immediately she tried applying the technique herself.

  Darling, imagine me as a sagging crimson rose that wants watering. Imagine yourself as a gardener, walking up the path to my dry rose bed, with a watering-can, full to the lip with water. Now think of yourself pouring your water over me, imagine the beads of it falling into the crimson folds of my petals, seeping right down into the centre of my flowerhead. Imagine me drinking it all up, quenching my great thirst on your thousands of white pearls …

  Tory wasn’t quite sure what she had written there, and even as she posted it she pondered over what, exactly, was happening between the gardener and his rose. It had seemed simple enough to start with. But she shrugged off the meaning, satisfied and astonished, even, that she had managed, without using a single rude word, to write something so erotically charged. Moreover, the writing itself did something quite peculiar to her. She felt a warmth in the lower parts of her body, so sudden and intense that it quite shocked her. She had to go to the ewer and baste herself with cold water.

  But she dreaded Donald’s reply. It came as swiftly as usual, and was quite unforgiving:

  I did not ask you for an essay on the art of managing my allotment. I am asking you to write about sex. How many times do I have to tell you?

  This letter made Tory weep. She wept so copiously that afterwards she felt noticeably lighter. But it wasn’t just the weight of tears that had gone: her imagination had been drained as well. It was as if her letter had been written in blood – why had Donald not recognized the effort she had put into it? She, who’d never written from her imagination before, not since her pitiless schooldays at least, had managed to do something miraculous: write about sex in a way that she found charged with erotic delight, at the same time as containing nothing that would raise the eyebrow of a Nazi guard.

  Perhaps, husband, you could provide me with some examples of the kind of smut you require. A list of appropriate words would be useful, along with some scenarios. I am not familiar with the genre of writing of which you seem to be such a connoisseur. If not, then I do not think I can help you, and I will ask that our correspondence should cease.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  This brought a silence from the Stalag, and it was an immense relief for Tory to have this respite. For weeks now she had dreaded the blue envelopes with the prickly German writing that she found propped on the mantelpiece between the clock and the china spaniels nearly every week. There was something so relentlessly accurate and stealthy about them, the way they sought her out — dispatched from God knew where behind enemy lines, traversing a barbed and twisted European geography to land plumb in the centre of the mantelpiece at 17 Peter Street. Bombs by night, letters by day. More and more Tory began to feel that these two types of assault were linked. If the bombs didn’t wipe her out, the letters, landing in her heart, would bring a different kind of death.

  It seemed that with one brief, curt letter she had dammed the flow of mail from Donald, yet the continuing silence soon became its own source of anxiety. The relentless surge of unsavouriness should not have been so easily stemmed. What had she done to Donald? She pictured him in the compound, the only one among the men without a letter from his wife, the only one emaciated and hollow-eyed in a camp full of satisfied, rosy-faced prisoners. Surely it was her wifely duty to sustain, by whatever means she could, her captive husband.

  *

  The continued silence, therefore, only made her task seem more urgent. She would have to write something to satisfy him before it was too late. One evening she came in from work and went straight to her writing desk, having thought, on the tram home, of the perfect solution. It had all seemed so simple. All she had to do was write a description of the sexual act, using conventional terminology. There was no special vocabulary. There were no exotic phrases that she had to know. She could treat the whole exercise in a perfectly matter-of-fact way, just as if she was describing two people having dinner or changing a wheel on a bicycle.

  *

  In some of the letters Donald had written to her, he had referred to the writings he desired as ‘bedroom thoughts’. Please share your bedroom thoughts with me. Perhaps he thought the term less off-putting than ‘dirty letter’. Please write to me your BEDROOM THOUGHTS!!!

  Now the phrase played over and over in her mind, so that she became preoccupied by the notion of what exactly she did think about when she was in bed.

  Dearest Donald,

  You have asked me many times for my ‘bedroom thoughts’ and now I am at last able to tell you what they are. I am sorry to have kept you waiting for so long. I now sleep alone in my bedroom, so my thoughts tend to wander into unexpected places. Last night I was thinking that I haven’t seen the sea since I was seven years old. And we live on an island. How can that happen? And it is the fact that we are an island race that has saved us from invasion so far, more than anything. But most of the time I lie on my back looking at the ceiling. There is a spider up there at the moment. She spins little webs that never catch anything. How does she survive? Sometimes she folds herself up into a sort of shield-shaped blob that doesn’t move for days on end. Is she asleep? Then I think about the children. I am comforted by the fact I know they are safe, but for how long must we live apart? I have not seen them for over a year now. I long to go to the Cotswolds and visit them, but there isn’t the money or the time. Supposing they forget about me? They are happy in their foster homes and might be disappointed when they come back. There is no end to this war in sight. Tom might even find himself called up, if it lasts long enough. And then, of course, I think about you, my darling, and I think about what a strange man you’ve become, in my thoughts, at least. Are you the same man I married? How will I ever meet your demands? You see, I began this letter with the intention of describing our lovemaking, but I have realized that I could no more put those thoughts into written words than I could undress before a stranger in the real world (unless he was a
doctor, of course). I am afraid I can see no difference between what you ask me to do and the work of a prostitute.

  Yours ever

  Tory

  Over the days and weeks she wrote many such letters as the above, but never sent them. She began to derive a curious comfort and fulfilment simply from writing letters she knew would never be posted. She would read them back to herself, and wonder at how articulate and profound her words sounded. She could imagine someone on the radio expressing thoughts like those. She began to use the dictionary, not in the desperate way she’d done before, searching for the smutty language that would have satisfied Donald’s needs, but as a sort of kit, like a puncture-repair kit, or a sewing box, where she could find just the right thread to turn up a hem, or the perfect button to go on a dress. She began to draw words from the dictionary, extracting them carefully and then (moistening her fingertips) sewing them into her letters. The likeness of writing to embroidery startled her at this moment, especially when she remembered the agonies of labour that had gone into a sampler she’d made as a girl, with all the ruddy letters of the alphabet woven in wool. Only in its slowness did it seem much different. Real writing was so quick, so fluid, once you got into it, that the thoughts seemed to flow directly from the brain through the fingertips.

  She even wrote a story. She developed the idea she had had in her gardening letter, the one Donald had been so scornful about, and wrote a story about a lonely woman who employed a gardener, whom she comes to admire from afar. Whenever she speaks to him, however, she becomes tongue-tied and awkward so she just watches him from the window. Tory tried her best to make the two characters come together, imagining some lustful encounter taking place in a potting shed, but Charlotte (the tired, wispy little woman she’d created) would never comply. She had no trouble getting Alfred the gardener into the potting shed, where his muddy hands would caress rhizomes impatiently, but Charlotte always fled back to her upstairs bedroom, locking herself in.