Letters From an Unknown Woman

by Gerard Woodward

  *

  At home, things continued in this silent, efficient way for another week, and then, one night, things changed.

  The first Branson knew about it was when he was lying awake in his bed in the darkened room with its empty other bed. Out of the great engulfing silence of the house there came a very small sound, like an enamel plate being rolled across the floor down-stairs, its course becoming more wonky as it slowed, until it collapsed, like a coin, into a slowly increasing spin that gathered speed until, with a sort of metallic glissando, it stopped.

  There should have been no one awake to cause such a noise, and Branson tried hard to get himself to sleep. But he was awoken again, this time by heavier sounds. As though someone was delivering sacks of linen. They were crashing softly downstairs. Or it was like very fat men, so fat they had lost the use of their limbs, falling over each other, pulling and squeezing past each other in the passageway … Then, the crisp, brittle sound of a small glass object falling onto a hard floor. Branson looked at the foot of his closed door. There was only a dim line of light there, which meant the landing light was off but the passage light was on. No shadows had moved past it. No one had come out of their room to see what the noise was. Then there was a colossal sound, so loud it was as though a part of the house had fallen down, except that it was a wooden, rather than a stony sound. As though there was a tree growing in the middle of the house, and someone had just chopped it down. Branson tightened the bedclothes around him, watching with one straining eye, too scared to blink, the line of dim light under the door. Surely that noise would have brought Mrs Head out of her room, or the girls, but there was no movement on the landing. Perhaps they had all gone and left him alone in the house. Perhaps he was the last surviving member of the household, which had been invaded by some sort of consuming demon, and he was the last one remaining to be eaten.

  Then came laughter, a tinkling, brittle peal that was so uncharacteristic Branson couldn’t be quite sure that it was his mother’s. It seemed to Branson to be a perfect example of laughter such as you would give to demonstrate to someone who didn’t know what laughter was. Then other voices, a sort of conversation, though it was difficult to tell between how many. In his half-awake state Branson thought that they were rehearsing a play. That would explain the range and speed of the voices he could hear, the way they were punctuated with other noises – shrieks, wails, laughs, and the rumble and judder and thud of scenery being shifted, props being tested and discarded. That was surely the explanation. Branson went to sleep.

  *

  In the morning he went downstairs to an apparently normal house, except that the door to the sitting room, where his father had lived as a semi-recluse for so long, appeared to have been smashed through. All that remained were the stiles and one panel on the hinge side. The rest hung in jagged shreds, or lay in dagger-shaped splinters on the sitting-room floor beyond. And there, in the kitchen, was his father Donald. As it was so unusual to see his father in the kitchen at this time of the morning, Branson couldn’t help but stare. His father looked extremely crestfallen, sitting hunched, like a dog that had been whipped, not meeting anyone’s eye, his lower lip drawn in. Branson’s mother was standing behind him, and she was gently and very tenderly applying ointment to his fused scalp.

  A china spaniel lay in pieces on the floor. As with the debris of the door, Branson wondered why no one had yet picked up the pieces. They seemed to have been deliberately left where they had fallen.

  Mrs Head was at the kitchen table. She smiled in a serious way at Branson as he came in, and then she turned to his father and said, ‘And this is Branson.’

  It was as though she was introducing him for the first time. It was as though his was the last name on a long list Mrs Head had gone through that morning, a list in which she’d been saving the best until last. Then Branson’s father did a most unexpected thing. He held out a hand towards him. It was a long-fingered, bony hand, and Branson found it slightly repellent. His mother continued her balming of his father’s head, and appeared to take no notice of Branson. It was such a peculiar reversal of roles that Branson didn’t know what to do. But he stepped forward because the hand was beckoning in quick, shaky finger movements.

  When Branson stepped within reach of the hand, which in his mind seemed somehow disembodied, a big, bony, gesturing shape hanging in the air, it came to rest on his shoulder. And tears were falling down his father’s face. But Branson’s mother was still not looking at him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  There was the question of what to do about Mr Briggs. He had been sitting in the yard in the same position as he’d been left at the end of the day of his unveiling, right at the far end, by the back gate, facing the house. Tom had not worked on him at all since that day, and he had not moved since, his bucket face turned slightly to the left, one arm raised, the other lowered, frozen in mid-stride. Weeds had grown up in-between the cobbles and woven themselves through the rusting framework of his lower torso. Birds used him as a perch and as a site of defecation. In the winter he was the armature for an instant snowman, and in the summer months the anchoring point for many spiders’ webs. His rigid stance at the end of the yard had become so commonplace that it was no longer observed. Like the ticking of a clock, he failed to register on the senses. Now, with Tom’s death, he had become resolutely alive. He was noticed every time anyone looked out of the window or went to the privy.

  Mrs Head’s first instinct had been to get rid of Mr Briggs: he was a constant reminder of Tom. But Tory wanted to keep him for the same reason. She even went so far as to clean him up a little, yank the weeds out of his chest, pull the cobwebs from his ears, brighten up his eyes. Seeing her from the window, going at the robot with a scrubbing brush, Mrs Head didn’t know quite what to think. She supposed it wasn’t a bad thing for the robot to remain in the yard, as a sort of memorial to her grandson, but on the other

  hand, it was such an ugly brute of a thing, and with that sarcastic, condescending expression (that, thankfully, wasn’t turned fully on the house), that she couldn’t help feeling there was something unhealthy about allowing it to remain in the yard. She wondered how she could tactfully broach the subject of removing it. The rag-and-bone man would be more than happy to take it, she thought. She was aware that she was not a tactful person, and that the rag-and-bone cart might not be the most sympathetic way to dispose of what Tory considered to be her son’s memorial, his only surviving mark on the world.

  ‘Tory, I wonder if it’s about time we did something with Mr Briggs.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Well, perhaps we could give him to one of the schools around here, for their science projects or something.’

  Mrs Head was very pleased with her idea, and it seemed to strike Tory as a possibility. But she dismissed it anyway. ‘No, I like to have Mr Briggs, he reminds me …’

  ‘Perhaps now is the time to let the past go, and to let Mr Briggs move on to better things.’

  ‘You’re talking to me as though I’m a fool,’ said Tory, with the air of sudden realization, ‘as though I’m a little child.’

  ‘No, Tory, I’m just trying to be considerate.’

  ‘Well, have you considered what it’s like to lose a son?’

  ‘I’m your mother, Tory. You seem to forget. I’ve lost a grandson.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  Tory believed she was suffering from too much knowledge, that she knew things no mother should ever have to know, and which she had to keep to herself. A space had been created in her mind, which was continuously present and which she could not help but visit. It consisted of a disused barn in a remote Cotswold village, a young man rigging up the apparatus of his own death with the painstaking care and precision of an engineer. He had used a block and tackle. This was what the police had decided she needed to know. They also told her that the farmer had been led to his discovery by the unusual activities of jackdaws on his farm.

  She felt that she
understood Donald now, because when she had chopped through the sitting-room door with an axe she had found bandaged with cobwebs in the outhouse, and had discovered her husband unconscious on the chaise longue hugging an empty whisky bottle to his heart, sleeping like a babe in the wood, she had stood over him with the axe in her hands and raised it above her head, as if she was about to chop a difficult log. But she didn’t kill him. He had opened his eyes and looked at her with a jolting sense of recognition, as though he had been expecting this moment for a long time. And then, having taken in the whole picture, he simply closed them again. For a moment Tory saw herself as he must have seen her, axe lifted, a trembling tower of anger and grief. And he had just closed his eyes as if ready to take it. The axe wilted in Tory’s hands and she sank to her knees and wept.

  Later, when the acrid fog of Tory’s grief had cleared a little, he emerged slowly, and cautiously, and did his best to appear remorseful and contrite. The morning after Tory had contemplated splitting him in two with an axe, he emerged from the living room, brushing aside some shard of door-wood that stuck out awkwardly from the frame, and, with a teetering, tippy-toes walk, entered the kitchen and said, in his quietest, shakiest voice, ‘Tory, dear, I think my head needs doing.’

  Donald’s head had not been balmed for several days. Usually the absence of just a day’s balming would have him in agony, claiming that his head felt like it was on fire (and he should know), and crying out for water to quench a desiccating thirst. And so Tory balmed her husband’s head, and the tenderness of the process, the slowness and the lightness of the task, started to ease the need to blame him for Tom’s death. Whatever had driven Tom to take his own life couldn’t be laid at the feet of his father, Tory said to herself one night, and repeated it to her mother, who didn’t agree. He’d robbed him of the person he was going to be, she said. He stole his son’s future to pay for his own idleness in the present …

  But Tory went even further than merely absolving Donald of blame. She apologized to him for not having understood the agonies he had gone through, both during the war and after. It was around this time that the first survivors’ accounts of the concentration camps came to be published, which Tory read reviews of in the newspaper. She realized that a prisoner-of-war camp did not dispense suffering on anything like a comparable scale, but the descriptions of things that had happened made her feel that to be in such close proximity to the brethren of the death-camp guards must have been to experience even a fraction of their horror, and even the merest fraction must be dreadful beyond comprehension.

  She apologized for having believed, sometimes, that he exaggerated the injury to his leg and played on his disability, that she had told him off for spending time in the pub, when in fact he had been consoling himself with the company of former comrades, the only people on earth who could understand his suffering. It was true, what she’d heard spoken by others, that the comradeship of the regiment and of the prison camp was a closer bond, in some ways, than that of family. Families may go through their tests and trials, but they rarely have to lay down their lives for each other. Understanding Donald in terms of the life he’d led as a soldier even helped to explain why he might have been so keen for Tom to work at Bolan’s: many of his pals had been recruited from there, so Tom had been inducted vicariously into the brotherhood of veterans. It was not that he had been using Tom as a way of enabling himself to remain idle: he had used Tom to do the work he might have been doing himself, had he been fit. It was a theory that Tory found satisfying and gave her some consolation.

  *

  Eventually the shreds of the shattered sitting-room door were removed, the remains of the frame taken off their hinges and discarded. The door was not replaced, and the doorway remained perpetually open. It seemed to be an unspoken understanding between them that Donald should no longer be allowed to shut himself off completely from the rest of the family. He didn’t ask for the door to be replaced, and he did nothing himself to replace it. He still spent most of his time in the sitting room, however, and even without a door it was difficult for the rest of them to cross the threshold. Though, since a large portion of his domain was visible to anyone passing, it lost its power to mystify and threaten. The room became ordinary and unsecretive.

  *

  Tory went so far in her forgiveness of Donald that she insisted he should not even think about trying to earn money. Now that Branson was old enough to take himself to school, she would find a job for herself. Mrs Head was rather shocked by this new development, even more so when she discovered what sort of job her daughter had taken.

  ‘Have you lost your marbles completely, Tory? You cannot possibly work as a lavatory attendant.’

  ‘It’s done, Mother. I am a lavatory attendant.’

  ‘You seem to have an insatiable appetite for disgust. Why must you always submit yourself to the basest, most abject occupations? One would have thought you had learnt your lesson with the gelatine factory, but at least the war could excuse you working in such a filthy place. Now there’s no excuse. You’ve chosen your occupation of your own free will. What is it? Are you trying to martyr yourself? Are you trying to punish yourself? For what? You’ve done nothing wrong.’

  ‘It’s a very good job, Mother. The hours are convenient.’

  ‘I don’t think this is an appropriate time for jokes.’

  ‘But the hours are convenient, and the pay is much more generous than Farraway’s. I’m my own boss – I even have my own office.’

  ‘Office? You call that little cavern an office?’

  Of course, Mrs Head knew the public lavatories on the square very well, having made use of them from her earliest days. Up until this moment she had regarded them as very civilized, with their mosaic floors and oak panelling, the large brass fittings on the stall doors, the copper pipework, now rather green with verdigris and a little mossy. She had never paid any attention to the attendants over the years, though she was conscious that they tended to be the elderly, overweight, hoarse-voiced wives of market traders, just a step up from gypsies or fairground people. Now that her daughter was to be one of those people, she couldn’t help but see the public lavatories as a malodorous, leaky underground cavern, each stall spewing forth a fountain of human manure and even more unspeakable things. How could her daughter dwell in such a place, then come home and with those same hands prepare dinner for her family?

  ‘My hands spend most of their time bathed in disinfectant and soap. Those lavatories are probably cleaner than most restaurant dining rooms.’

  ‘Now you are talking nonsense.’

  In truth, Tory had never felt more content than in the ladies’ lavatory on the square, where she had an office all of her own. She only spent three hours a day there and, once her regular cleaning duties had been performed, had little else to do but sit in her office and read. And it was an office, despite what her mother might say. For the first time since Donald had come home, she had a space for herself. There was a small desk with brass-handled drawers underneath, a comfortable, though very worn leather chair to go with it. It wasn’t long before she realized that she now had somewhere in which she could work on the manuscript of her novel.

  Tory had hardly stopped thinking about Charlotte Maugham. She went to bed every night with a sense that underneath it a hostage was tied up and gagged. Through the muffled handkerchief she could sometimes hear, Write about me! Write about me! Even if she could have managed to bring herself round to extracting the typewriter and continuing with her novel, she balked at the thought because she was terrified by the notion that she might not be able to give Charlotte the sort of life she wanted to. She might have to be cruel to her. That was why she had been so wedded to the typewriter as the sole instrument of literary production. She could have written the rest of The Distance with pen, or pencil, in little notebooks. She could have scribbled away at the kitchen table – no one would have taken much notice and Charlotte Maugham could have watched as her family sadly disappeared.
She had longed to deal with Charlotte‘s oldest boy, the clever one, with his chemistry set, his cat’s-whisker wireless set and his train set – Peter, with his bent, wire-rimmed spectacles and his books on bird-watching, his collection of conkers. What sad little road should she map out for him to follow? She might use the death of his father as a starting point for his decline. This was one of the reasons she hoped Donald would never ask about The Distance because in it he died, killed in action. The trouble was it gave Charlotte no one to blame. There was nothing for her to put right after the death of Peter.

  ‘Oh, Charlotte Maugham,’ Tory said to herself, ‘what am I going to do with you?’

  It was an odd thing, but it was Donald who had encouraged her to carry on with her novel.

  ‘Didn’t you use to have a typewriter?’ he said to her one day.

  ‘Yes. You made me take it out of the room.’

  ‘You were writing a book on it, weren’t you?’