It wasn’t a very good story, Tory realized, because nothing happened.
*
It was one of the curious side effects of Donald’s letters that Tory’s mind was permanently filled with sexual thoughts she was unable to express. She could not look at anyone without trying to imagine them unclothed. Once a week she and her mother ventured out of doors for an evening, visiting the saloon bar of the Rifleman for a quick drink, and then going to the pictures for a newsreel and a double feature (they would usually watch only the main one). It had not occurred to Tory before – at least, not in such an immediate and vivid way – that everyone in the pub or the cinema owed their existence to a moment of shocking physical propinquity, not just a touching of skin against skin, but a sort of melding of skins, a peeling back and folding over of skins, and the memories of her own such moments, their rhythmic intensity and occasional discomfort, seemed to thunder in her head. She would glance at the stout gentleman at the bar and his heavy-bosomed wife, or the thick-chinned couples sitting side by side in the Gaumont – surely they never did such things. She would peer miserably into her gin and French and wish, even though she was an atheist, that the Lord had devised a sweeter and more dignified way for people to enter the world.
But the real horror was left for the moments when Tory considered her own conception. Papa, Mr Head, Arthur, the frowning patriarch with his complicated whiskers and rotund, waistcoated belly, who’d managed to extend a portion of the Victorian era well into the twentieth century, and Mrs Head, with her thin, brittle body. Was it really in this universe, in this very house, that they had performed that melding of skins? Sometimes Tory found herself helpless before an unfolding vision of her father and mother in the back bedroom that hadn’t changed noticeably in thirty-two years, with its Seacunny wallpaper and mahogany washstand, soberly undressing, either side of the bed, in a perfectly co-ordinated and symmetrical way – Father’s trousers lowering and that great white shirt spilling down with its two tails to his podgy knees, just as Mama’s heavy skirt falls to reveal the sagging petticoats beneath. They are about to make love, but show no interest in the prospect at all. Thankfully, beyond a certain point, Tory’s imagination always fails her. What happens thereafter between Arthur and Mrs Head remains unimagined, something like a holy mystery, never to be explained or understood.
*
Mrs Head seemed to have changed since the arrival of Donald’s letters. She had become quieter, calmer, less maddening. She had started to talk about returning to Waseminster. ‘I don’t know why I ever came back to London,’ she said one evening. ‘I was much happier in the land of Arthur’s people.’
She wasn’t referring to some mythical English past, but to the fact that her husband, Arthur Head, had sprung from that cold, windswept parish, though he had left it at the age of three. Tory thought it was rather touching, if inexplicable, the need to be close to her late husband’s roots. A pity she hadn’t shown more such interest and affection when he was alive, because Tory could barely remember the two of them exchanging a remark that wasn’t a command or request of some sort. And Mrs Head had always seemed such a person of the present moment. Since history, for her, began about five minutes in the past, most of her own life vanished almost instantly into a vast pool of indifference.
That seemed to have changed. She thought about the past a great deal now, and she thought about Waseminster.
Since returning to London she had corresponded regularly with her old neighbour from the marshland village, Major Brandish, a retired army gentleman who kept her informed of local gossip. Tory had never read any of the Major’s letters, but from the snippets her mother was wont to impart now and then, often with a knowing chuckle, she imagined the former army officer to be a mean, unhappy little man, revelling in the misfortunes of others, ‘Oh, will you listen to this?’ Her mother would say. ‘The Major writes that Mrs Furlong disgraced herself in church …’ Then a puzzled pause, ‘Tory, what does ‘eructation’ mean?’ This nearly always happened with the Major’s letters because he was a man who liked to wrap his little barbs and insults, his little morsels of smut and vulgarity, in extravagant verbal paper. Thus she learnt that Mrs Philips-Hope was a demimondaine, while Mr Philips-Hope was often in a state of crapulence (which Mrs Head assumed to be a digestive problem), the Vicar was a roué, and there were, it seemed, numerous seraglios in the village, and indeed all over the marshes. (‘Perhaps thanks to the Armada,’ Mrs Head rather bafflingly suggested.)
‘Oh, how I miss village life,’ she would say, after reading one of the Major’s letters. ‘Not that I don’t adore your company, Tory, and it has been nice to renew my many friendships here, but I do have to confess to a feeling that I don’t really belong here any more.’
Tory remembered the letters Mrs Head used to send that had revelled in the language and lore of the countryside, as though she had suddenly obtained a degree in Bucolics at the University of Rural Ways:
Oh, Tory, you should be here to see Mr Wormald shooting the partridges, oh he does look a treat in his knee breeches and cravat, or Mrs Woolnoth blooding the children with a fox’s brush, Mr Reynard himself, I’m sure. I have made myself a cobnut pasty, quite delicious, and I am brewing sloe gin. There are house-martins nesting in the clerestory of St James the Less that have nested there since Norman times …
‘Don’t be silly, Mother.’
‘No, it’s true, Tory. Things have changed …’
‘Because of the war, you mean? But that’s only to be expected. As soon as it’s over we’ll be back to how we were.’
‘No, it’s not just the war. Well, in a way I suppose it is. But I don’t think anything has been quite the same since …’
Mrs Head looked as though she was about to cry. Tory had never seen her cry, not even when Arthur had died. The advent of Mrs Head’s tears was not a moment to be passed over. Tory sat up, watching her mother’s eyes closely. ‘Since?’ she prompted.
Mrs Head took a deep breath. The tears had been abated. ‘Since we ate Mr Dando.’
Mrs Head had been convinced for some time that the pork of doubtful origin had been a section of Mr Dando’s lower thigh, ever since she had heard the news that the butcher had indeed died in the bomb blast.
‘I do wish you wouldn’t put it like that, Mother.’
‘Well, we’ve got to face up to things, Tory. There’s no point in trying to hide anything any more. That’s what war does to you. A bomb lands on your house and throws your secrets to the world. I am a cannibal. And so are you.’
‘There is a great deal of difference between a wilful cannibal and an accidental cannibal.’
‘Not so very much. Not when we had the advantage of considering both options. We both knew there was a chance that it was human meat, but we ate it anyway.’
Mrs Head had earlier made some tea and the pot was on the table, a stout brown betty, reflecting the room in its glaze.
‘I feel such terrible shame,’ said Mrs Head.
‘What’s done is done,’ said Tory. It interested her how the tables seemed to have turned. On the evening of the meal itself, it had been Tory who had resisted, while Mrs Head had pragmatically chosen to ignore the ethics of the situation. Now, a few weeks later, Mrs Head seemed to be in a turmoil of anxiety about the incident, while Tory had lost all interest in it. She supposed it was because of the problem with Donald and his letters. She had no time for thoughts about cannibalism now. For her the problem had only existed while the food was in her gut. Now that it was gone, she felt no queasiness about the subject at all.
‘How can I play bridge with the ladies when I know what I’ve done? How can I sit in Mrs Lippiatt’s living room, dealing out the hands, when they don’t know that the lady sitting with them is a cannibal, no better than one of those blackfellows with bones through their noses?’
‘For goodness’ sake, Mother, let it rest. It’s in the past now, and what we’ve done can’t be undone. You can’t change what happened. And apart
for that, there’s no proof that the meat we ate was Mr Dando.’
‘I’m surprised at you, Tory. Are you telling me you feel no shame? I’d thought you were such a good person, and you were so reluctant to eat Mr Dando that evening. Why didn’t you stand more firmly against my delinquency?’
‘Well, perhaps I’m not as good as you or anyone thinks.’
Mrs Head sat back, a look of distraction on her face, as though she was trying to understand the implications of what her daughter had just said.
Instead she found her thoughts directed, yet again, back to the morning after the bombing and the scene of devastation at Old Parade. She recalled the façade of the confectioner’s, Timothy’s, those little pieces of mince and offal she’d seen stuck to the wall. They, too, she supposed, could have been pieces of Mr Dando. That he had, by a horrible violent process, become exactly the thing he sold. She found herself trying to imagine a bomb that, on exploding, would turn greengrocers into cauliflowers, or drapers into rolls of twill and chiffon, and found it quite impossible. Yet Mr Dando, unpacked and dispersed – an ounce here, an ounce there – over the confectioner’s wall, had, in his gory stucco, told her something very disturbing about the nature of human existence.
‘Thinking meat’ was the phrase that came to her again and again, one that she would have claimed as her own invention, if it had not sounded so clever. She imagined she’d heard it in a snatched moment, listening to The Brains Trust. And she thought back to the black pudding she had eaten at the beginning of the war, which Tory had warned her was likely to have been made from human blood. Only now did she begin to feel nausea rising, as though, a year later, the pudding was still down there, silted up in some deep corner of her gut.
The cat arrived to distract her, as he often seemed to do.
‘It’s all your fault, Sambo,’ she said, to the sprightly little thing. ‘Why didn’t you stop us?’
The cat purred and rubbed its arching back against Mrs Head’s leg.
‘You certainly haven’t shown any remorse. And you ate Mr Dando with more eagerness than any of us. But then, in a queer way, that makes you better than us, doesn’t it? Because Mr Dando was not a cat, you are not a cannibal. The only non-cannibal in the room. Tory, how does it feel to be morally inferior to a cat?’
Tory didn’t answer, except for an indignant grumbling sound as she tried to read her evening newspaper.
‘I’m only trying to make light of the matter,’ Mrs Head went on. ‘If we lost the power of laughter, where would we be then?’
Another incomprehensible burble from Tory, who was secretly amazed at her mother’s latest turn-around – she had never laughed much at anything in her life. If cannibalism had woken sensitivities and sentiments hitherto suppressed, then perhaps there should be more of it. Bring more butchers to the table.
‘No word from Donald for a while?’ asked Mrs Head. She no longer made any attempt to read Donald’s letters, but she had noticed their absence.
‘No,’ said Tory quietly, wondering how she was going to explain, if called upon to do so, Donald’s silence.
‘Strange,’ said her mother.
I have starved him, Mother, Tory wanted to say. My own husband, a prisoner of war, he wanted food and I denied him.
‘Men are the very devil,’ Mrs Head said after some moments’ pause, half to herself. The remark made Tory give her a long, unacknowledged stare.
‘What I think you need to do,’ said her mother, quite matter-of-factly, ‘is to send him some food.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. Has he never asked for it?’
‘No, never. Not food. Not really.’
‘And is he still making his other demands?’
Tory closed her eyes and nodded delicately.
‘And how have you dealt with the matter?’
‘By asking that he stop making them.’
‘And has this worked?’
‘No. It seems to stir him up all the more. I’m at a complete loss to know what to do.’
Tory had never got round to sending the cakes and other comestibles the women at Farraway’s had given her.
Mrs Head leant forward and spoke slowly, as if to make sure the words went into her daughter’s ears.
‘Cocoa,’ she said quietly but firmly. ‘Oxo cubes, Typhoo, golden syrup, Camp Coffee, fish paste …’ she was counting off the items on her fingers as she listed them ‘… Marmite, Alka Seltzer, tomato soup … Can you imagine what it must do to a man to know such things are out of reach? You need to make a parcel, Tory, and put as many of these things in it as you can. You could make a start this very evening …’
*
It was several weeks before Donald replied. He had moved camps and the post had taken a long time to catch up with him.
Dearest,
You have done me great wrong. I am not asking you for much, after all. I am only asking you to perform what most normal people would consider to be your wifely duties, the only difference being that I ask you to do in words what you would willingly do bodily, that is satisfy your husband’s sexual needs. Why should this be considered smutty, simply because it is written down?
But you must not ask me what you should write. If I must supply you with the words and phrases, then the whole object is defeated, because the words are not coming from your thoughts. What you write must be the product of your own memory and imagination, and be an expression of your own honest desires. Otherwise it will mean nothing. You must write to me honestly, Tory, but at the same time imaginatively. Do both those things and I will be saved.
Yours affectionately
Donald
PS You sent me a box of food. I have no use for it and have distributed it among the chaps. They ask if you can send another soon. Timmy the Canadian wants to know if you can get hold of any Peanut Butter.
CHAPTER NINE
Every now and then Tory would be overtaken with grief for her absent children. The nights of sobbing seemed to come in a regular wave, separated by perhaps a fortnight or so, when the continual feeling of loss would suddenly clot into something bigger and more difficult to contain. It was like a refrain to the quieter, perpetual verse of her sorrow. It could be triggered by the silliest of things, the rediscovery of a token of their childhood in one of the back bedrooms, even something as flimsy as a particular colour or smell, if it prompted some more intense recollection.
It was the evenings that were hardest to bear, because those hours had been the most crowded with children. From the moment she had brought them home from school each day the house would be filled with their three-way conversations, with their feeding and bathing and playing. With the children around, the evenings had been her favourite time of day, and even now, with air raids, she still preferred the evenings. She might feel her children’s absence most painfully at this time, but there were still other comforts – the withdrawal of the daytime antagonizers (bosses, shopkeepers, coalmen, tinkers), the pleasures of silence and darkness. In a strange way, the evenings of the Blitz were even more peaceful – the utter darkness of the blackout, the deserted streets. The forces of antagonism didn’t just withdraw: they vanished completely, along with the city itself. Night-time had become what she had thought it was always meant to be: empty, mysterious, boundless. The bombs, both the cause of and the threat to this form of darkness, were the one sour element in the great romance of the darkened city, but they were not a challenge that had to be met. They were not to be argued with or stood up to. One simply had to endure them.
Another reason she missed her children was that she, now, was most definitely the child of the house. She didn’t even have the presence of a sane husband to shore up her status against her mother, who had become noticeably more bossy as the months of the war progressed. It seemed an age ago that Mrs Head had returned from Waseminster, humbly insisting that Tory wouldn’t know she was there, that she wouldn’t get under her feet. How had it happened that she now found herself running hither and th
ither at her mother’s behest, frequently apologizing, and listening attentively, with bowed head to endless dispensations of motherly advice?
At the same time, Tory could sometimes relish the comfort of being a daughter, especially in the evenings, when she and her mother would sit together in the dining room. The work of the day over, she liked listening to Mrs Head.
Her mother had a very clever way of making artificial flowers out of scraps of old material – frayed curtains, worn-out cushion covers, outgrown children’s clothes. It involved sewing and folding in such ways that Tory could never follow so that she would end up with something like a squashed purple carnation where her mother had crafted a magnificent, radiant sunflower. It was an undoubted talent her mother had, and a resourceful one as well. More than once Tory had found that a pair of her faded knickers, which she had still thought wearable, had been transformed into the delicate petal of a peony or water-lily. Tory’s mother had more or less given up passing judgement on her daughter’s wilting efforts, but it was as they were making another little spray for the empty vases that Tory mentioned the gym at Farraway’s.
To Tory’s surprise, her mother knew about George Farraway.
‘Oh, so it is the same Farraway,’ Mrs Head said. ‘I did wonder.’
‘The same Farraway?’
‘As the boxer. He was a very famous man around here for a little while. Did well for himself and went into business. I heard he had a pub, and – that’s right – he did open up a factory of some sort. Well, I’m glad to see he’s made something, after all that trouble.’
‘What trouble?’
There was a half-beat’s pause before Mrs Head answered, ‘He killed a man,’ she said, trying to sound casual. ‘In the ring,’ she added, as if Tory might have thought otherwise. ‘Nothing he could have done about it – boxing is a brutal sport. But I think he lost his nerve after that, and was never quite the same man. One of the papers tried to pin the blame on him, and he took it to heart. There was some legal fussing. I can remember the first time I saw him fight in public …’
Letters From an Unknown Woman Page 9
