Letters From an Unknown Woman

by Gerard Woodward

  Donald’s voice came from behind the door, sounding very distant, as though the room had become enormous and he was at the far end of it.

  ‘I need to have a bath like the rest of you. It takes a long time to get rid of four years’ worth of dirt.’

  ‘Well, when are you going to bring the bath back?’

  ‘When I’ve finished with it.’

  ‘I can’t hear you.’

  ‘When I’ve finished with it!’

  When, after three more days, the bath had not been returned, Tory asked again: ‘Donald, can we please have the bathtub back? The children need a bath.’

  ‘I need it.’

  ‘But you can’t keep it all the time. It’s not fair.’

  ‘I need it.’

  ‘How are we going to wash?’

  ‘You can use the sink in the kitchen.’

  Mrs Head protested again, but it was useless. He simply ignored their voices.

  After another week or so, he began to leave the house in the evenings. His claims of immobility turned out to be somewhat exaggerated, it seemed, and he could manage to walk all the way down the road to the Rifleman on his own, leaning heavily on his stick and swinging his stiff leg after him. He would return at half past ten, sometimes with companions, shifty-looking men in dark, pulled-down trilbys, so that only whiskery chins were visible as they shuffled after Donald into the sitting room to have the door carefully locked after them. They would stay sometimes for an hour or more, not leaving till after midnight, and sometimes rather noisily.

  Tory would go downstairs and knock on the door, asking them to be quiet. Her voice would immediately silence those within. Then she would hear Donald muttering something unintelligible, which would produce laughter among the guests, to be followed by Donald calling, ‘All right, my treasure,’ to more stifled laughter.

  Catching Donald in the hall one morning, she asked him who those men were. Donald looked affronted by her questioning ‘They are heroes,’ he said to her, ‘warrior-heroes, every one of them, returned from the war to build a better life for us all.’

  ‘Do you have to bring them home every night? I don’t like the house being full of strange men.’

  ‘It’s not every night, my dear. And, anyway, that is why we confine ourselves to my room, so as not to disturb anyone else …’

  She had meant to ask him about the bath as well, but as always, she was brushed aside.

  *

  Tory had been putting off a confrontation for as long as she could. She knew she should tell Donald that things couldn’t go on like this for much longer, that he couldn’t claim to be unemployable because of his leg when he could manage to walk down to the Rifleman and back nearly every night, and spend money on drinks (of course he claimed that his drinks were always bought for him – that was one of the advantages of a gammy leg, he said) while the rest of his family were having to scrape by.

  Donald’s increasing privacy about his activities in the sitting room raised the suspicion that he was doing something nefarious. Strange, sweet smells emanated from behind the door. Friends of Donald’s would lug heavy objects into the room late at night. Tory once met a man in the passage with a sack of apples in his hands.

  All the while money was dwindling.

  ‘What do you think he’s doing in there?’ said Mrs Head. ‘Why don’t we break the door down when he’s out?’

  ‘Don’t be absurd, Mother.’

  ‘Well, do you know how to pick a lock?’

  ‘Why should I know such a thing?’

  Weeks went by, then months. The family became used to the secretive but regular pattern of Donald’s life – alone in his room all day, then to the pub in the evening. Still the dark-hatted people visited. Sometimes they came over in the morning. Aways they seemed furtive. Then, suddenly, Donald started providing Tory with money. He came into the dining room one morning, his braces dangling down over his trousers, and slapped a sheaf of notes on the table. ‘There you are, old girl. Don’t say I never give you anything.’

  There was ten pounds altogether, in crumpled, dirty notes.

  ‘Where did you …?’

  ‘I told you I had some plans didn’t I? I’m a businessman.’

  ‘But what—’

  ‘Don’t ask any questions and you won’t be told any lies.’

  And then he did another extraordinary thing. He kissed her, full on the lips. Donald’s lips were dry and chapped, his moustache stubbly and brittle. It was like being kissed by a bottle brush.

  The money was gratefully received by Tory, and the regular stream of pound notes that followed, but she felt a sense of dread every time she opened her purse to fill it with Donald’s money. It was more than apparent that Donald was becoming rich by very dubious means.

  ‘He’s probably dealing in arms,’ said Mrs Head. ‘Since the war the country’s awash with armaments – I read about it. Mostly German guns our boys have brought home with them, taken them off dead soldiers.’

  The thought appalled Tory, all those little revolvers, the most meagre and undignified spoils, the sweepings-up of the war.

  ‘You go in his room and I bet he’s got guns stuffed under all the cushions. There was a shooting only last week in Deptford. Donald probably sold them the very gun.’

  ‘No,’ protested Tory. ‘Donald would never be involved in anything like that – you forget what a decent man he is.’

  ‘Was,’ corrected Mrs Head. ‘You tell me if he’s been behaving decently now, taking over the sitting room and never coming out except to go to the pub, stealing our bath, having those rowdy coves over nearly every night – a bunch of cutthroats you never saw the like of, then pretending to have a bad leg so he can avoid doing any proper work. Oh, yes, I agree he was a hard worker before the war, and never touched a drop of drink, but I always thought he had a darker side, and it’s taken the Germans to bring it out.’

  Tory took a moment from listening to her mother (she had put her hand anxiously to her neck at the word ‘cutthroat’) to reflect on how Donald had changed. It was almost as though he’d been Nazified by the Germans, as though a certain portion of their badness had rubbed off on him. Just a portion. He was not a thoroughly bad person – he hadn’t caught the full Nazi disease, he had just absorbed some of it. What must it have been like, for four years, to see those ugly uniforms, those tin-pot commandants swaggering around, to be in close daily contact with pure evil? For the entire war she had not come face to face with one of them. They had remained as distant and as unreal as figures in comic books. She had to make allowances for that, surely, even now.

  It was not guns Donald was dealing in, however, but liquor. This fact was revealed when two constables and a detective called at the house one evening while Donald was at the pub. The policeman asked Tory’s permission to break down the sitting-room door, revealing for Tory an entirely new room in the house. Apart from the wallpaper, she did not recognize anything about it. (How strange, she thought, that the only thing the former painter and decorator hasn’t changed is the painting and decoration.) All the pictures had gone from the walls. Every other piece of furniture in the room had been given over to whisky production: the table, the whatnot, the escritoire, the chairs, all were piled to the brim with bottles and stone jars, some empty, some full. All the floor space was taken up with bottles as well. There were now two tin baths on the floor (When had he got that other one in? Tory wondered), and a whisky still, which looked like an old oil drum. In one corner there was a sort of nest made of cushions, pillows and bedclothes, where presumably Donald curled up and slept at night.

  The two baths were filled with a thick, scummy substance that the policemen referred to as ‘wash’. Donald was to be prosecuted for having a still and for retailing spirits without a licence.

  Donald was defiant. He claimed he was not making whisky but merely ‘condensed wine’, and that if he had made any whisky, it was purely by accident. He had started out by making fruit juice, he said, and this
had, of its own accord, fermented into wine. The problem was that the wine had become stronger and stronger.

  It was certainly strong. When Donald was taken to court, the jury was told that the substance he had produced was 56 per cent proof alcohol. One of Donald’s customers was also prosecuted, for failing to pay duty. He had been found by an excise officer carrying mysterious-looking bottles into a public house. When asked what they contained he had replied, quite openly, ‘Whisky,’ and that he had bought them from Donald Pace, whose address he gave them. They found forty gallons of wash in the two tubs, along with a still, some stone jars and some apples. The friend was quite certain that Donald knew he was making whisky, because when he had a cold, just before Christmas, Donald had invited him to drink some that he had made.

  The wash was so thick that it could not be poured down the drain but had to be buried in the garden. There was a patch of bare earth at the end near the privy, and a constable arrived with a spade to dig a grave for the alcohol.

  Donald was fined twenty pounds with the alternative of a month in prison. His distinguished record as a war veteran was taken into account, and he claimed to have been suffering severe distress since returning from incarceration in Germany. He was only trying to make an honest living, he said to the magistrate. He’d fallen foul of the law by accident rather than design. He wasn’t to know that what he was doing was illegal. He had been in a prison camp for four years, he had forgotten the laws of the country. He was suffering from malnutrition, he was trying to support a family when there was no work for cripples. He could no longer practise his highly skilled trade. His wife had cheated on him. He was owed compensation by the British Government, by the German Government, by the British Army, by the German Army. He was a decorated war hero, and they were taking away what little money he had and threatening him with prison. He claimed he had sent his medals back in protest.

  ‘Well,’ the magistrate had said at the end of this long tirade, ‘your defence is certainly a “spirited” one,’ to chuckles around the courtroom.

  *

  He was given two weeks to pay the fine, but refused. When the police called to take him into custody, he protested by setting fire to his hair, which he had primed by combing it through with cognac. ‘Take one step nearer,’ he’d said, holding the flame of a lighter close to his head, ‘and we’ll all go up like November the fifth.’

  The policemen didn’t understand quite what was being threatened so were shocked when Donald Pace ignited his head, which burned brightly for several seconds before anyone thought to snuff him. The confused, trembling constables took him to hospital, where he was treated for burns, then to a mental hospital, where he stayed for six weeks.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Tory felt that she had survived the first wave of Donald’s return home. She had not undergone the continuous rape she had dreaded; Branson, while not exactly welcomed, had been tolerated; the crazed, hedonistic, delinquent self she had poured into her letters appeared to have been forgotten, while her infidelity had been put to one side. And now that Donald’s own delinquency had reached its climax and had achieved a type of resolution, she was able to feel that the worst had passed, and that at least she would have time to regroup before the second wave of Donald’s homecoming began.

  She checked herself, sometimes, for thinking about the whole episode in such literary terms, of climaxes and resolutions, but she could not help remembering her novel, The Distance, and Charlotte Maugham’s situation, which was so very similar to her own. How she longed for a chance to retrieve the typewriter from under the bed and pick up the thread of the story. But it seemed inappropriate now, to start tapping away while her husband suffered, even though the yearning to do so was greatest for that very reason. Charlotte’s husband is called Eric and he is also a prisoner of war, but in the Far East, and she has no communication with him at all, so that she does not know, in fact, if he is alive or dead for the entire duration of the war. Most of this was in Tory’s mind, for she had not written much beyond describing Charlotte’s daily routines, and her work in the glue factory.

  ‘Is glue important in the war effort?’ Charlotte asks her manager one day.

  He replies enthusiastically, ‘You would not believe just how important glue is in the war effort, Charlotte. What do you think keeps the wings of our Spitfires attached to the main fuselage?’

  ‘Surely not our glue?’ says Charlotte, breathlessly.

  ‘No, of course not, but every rivet is coated with a rust- resistant resin in which our glue is a vital ingredient …’

  Would people believe that? Tory wondered. Oh, why had she chosen a glue factory for her heroine to work in?

  But what would they think if I set fire to her husband’s head? No one would believe it. Not unless I made him completely mad, but then what is the use of a mad character in a novel? They might do anything. She had imagined a happy reunion for Charlotte and Eric, a welcome-home party that lasted for weeks on end, as had so many she’d heard about, with people sitting on top of a piano as it was constantly tinkled. But perhaps if she began writing those scenes, tried imagining Eric’s ordeal, the agonies and torments he had suffered (she had heard very terrible things about the treatment of prisoners out there), she might begin to understand how Donald had come to be so unhappy.

  *

  It worried Tory greatly that the children (apart from Branson, who had been upstairs at the time) should have witnessed their father’s act of self-immolation. It had happened in the dining room, in full view of Tom, Paulette and Albertina, and it had been such a pitiful and macabre spectacle. His head had ignited in the most spectacular fashion, a burst of light that lit up the gloomy room. Donald’s reflex response was to attempt to put out the flame with his own hands, and in trying to suppress this response he had performed, instead, a peculiar arm-waving jig. He might have been a figure in a pagan carnival, with a fiery headdress, doing the dance of the burning lobster. The girls had screamed at the top of their young voices at the spectacle, and for a few seconds the house had become a house in Hell. Then the fire was out. Tory herself had snuffed the candle of her husband with the aid of a thick table-cloth.

  Tom wondered which was more horrifying: the sight of his father’s head alight, or the sight just after of his father’s head giving off a plume of blue smoke, like a factory chimney. The smoke lingered in the dining room for many days, if not weeks, after that. It made everyone take the utmost care when cooking, because to produce smoke in the kitchen would be to rekindle an aspect of the horror of that evening.

  ‘What happened to Daddy’s head?’ said Albertina, in the grim silence that followed Donald’s exit.

  ‘It exploded,’ said Tom, who had recovered himself and could speak with the calm authority that was his characteristic voice.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Daddy’s ill,’ said Tory, not wanting to wait to hear what Tom had to offer by way of explanation. She could see, by her daughter’s round eyes, that Albertina was even more confused, and was trying to imagine what sort of illness would make one’s head explode.

  ‘Perhaps it was something he ate,’ said Tom.

  ‘Listen,’ Tory said, trying to take charge of the conversation, lightly gripping Albertina’s shoulders and turning her so that they faced each other squarely, ‘when you go to war, it can make you very unhappy. When you are very unhappy, you can do strange things.’

  ‘People cry when they’re unhappy,’ said Albertina.

  ‘Yes, they do. But sometimes crying isn’t enough.’

  Mrs Head, who had been listening with impatience, felt that enough was enough. ‘Your daddy was drunk,’ she said. ‘That’s all you need to know. And when people are drunk they do even sillier things than if they were sad.’

  ‘No,’ said Tory, ‘there’s more to it than that. They were going to put Daddy in prison, when for four years he’s been a prisoner of war. The thought of going back to prison, after what he’s been through …’


  She believed it. It wasn’t as though Donald had done anything so very bad – dodging a bit of duty on homemade spirits. The hard irony was that he’d learnt his brewing skills in the prison camp, and in that environment, making whisky had been an heroic act of defiance. Tory could not but agree that he was suffering an injustice.

  She visited him in the asylum and it was an awful shock to see him there among the truly mad. She found him playing rummy with a twitchy young chap in stained pyjamas, but she didn’t recognize him at first because he had lost all but a few wisps of his hair. The sight of her husband’s smooth, shiny cranium reduced her to tears instantly, and she knelt down beside him, her arm around his shoulders, sobbing into his body. He just carried on playing cards.

  A doctor told her that Donald was suffering from severe depression, common among ex-servicemen, and that if it persisted they would recommend surgical treatment. Tory hadn’t given this remark much thought until she got home and spoke to her mother, who nodded approvingly – ‘So they’re going to give him a lobotomy?’

  ‘Oh, no!’ Tory said, finally realizing what the condescending doctor had been referring to. ‘They can’t do that!’

  ‘Well,’ said Mrs Head, thoughtfully, ‘I’ve heard quite good things about lobotomies. Mrs Lippiatt’s brother-in-law had one. She said he used to smash the furniture, but now he just sits in his chair all day, looking at his parakeet, quiet as a mouse.’

  This was one thing on which her mother could never persuade her. She went straight to the hospital the next day to bring Donald home. She had heard that doctors sometimes performed lobotomies without giving any prior warning and she was not having a partial Donald sent back to her. She wanted the whole Donald, even if he was behaving strangely. She walked into the ward, packed his things, checked his forehead for any sign of scarring, then virtually fought her way through a cordon of doctors and nurses to the waiting taxi outside.

  ‘You seem to forget that your husband is facing criminal proceedings. He needs to stay here so that we can report on his state of mental hygiene …’