Letters From an Unknown Woman

by Gerard Woodward

  Tory had just put down her pen in what might, she now realized, have looked like a gesture of exasperation. ‘No, I don’t mind.’ She wondered if there was something she could say to emphasize the truth of this statement, and thus cancel out the pen-throwing gesture, but instead she allowed a little bubble of silence to form.

  ‘Now that I’ve started talking to you,’ the woman said, with a forced laugh, ‘I realize I’m not quite sure what I want to say. And I do hate people who talk but have nothing to say.’

  ‘In my opinion,’ said Tory, helpfully, ‘it’s a rather extraordinary skill, when you think about it. I wonder how people do it, and I wish I could do the same.’

  The woman produced a laugh, a genuine one this time, but it ended with another silence.

  ‘Well,’ the woman said, ‘thank you again.’ There was an awkward moment of prolonged eye contact, and she left, her footsteps echoing for what, to Tory, seemed like an hour.

  *

  The woman became a regular visitor to Tory’s office, the frequency of visits gradually increasing as the weeks went by. At first Tory was worried that she would become an intrusive presence, disrupting her work on the novel. At other times she welcomed the chance to put it aside. The woman was called Grace, and it was true that she never talked about nothing, it was just that the things she said were sometimes rather odd.

  ‘Do you know what, Tory? I must have come here twenty times now, and I haven’t used the lavatory once. I was going to, on that first day, when I saw the … you know … but all my subsequent visits have been to talk to you. I suppose that makes me a rather strange woman. I would now count you among my best friends, but I have never seen you anywhere except in a public convenience. Don’t you think we should meet in the outside world, just once in a while?’

  ‘We might not like each other above ground,’ said Tory, who had come to enjoy Grace’s conversation because she could say anything to her and still be understood.

  Grace laughed. ‘Yes, we might be like ferrets, who co-operate when hunting through tunnels but attack each other in the open air.’

  Once Grace’s visits had attained a certain level of regularity, Tory allowed her into the office and even made a little space for her, using the crate that had once contained Draft Two as a makeshift chair. Here Grace would sit and talk for half an hour or so, always a little nervous, breaking into little peals of jittery laughter, or else falling into pensive silences, when her beautiful eyes would seem to lose their focus, or else focus on something not in the real world. It seemed to Tory, on these occasions, that Grace could actually watch her own thoughts. Tory found herself being uncharacteristically open with her. She had soon told her things about herself that she had never told anyone else. The writing was the first quarter of her private world to fall to Grace’s charms.

  ‘What are you writing?’ Grace asked one day.

  ‘Oh, nothing. I just like scribbling things down.’

  ‘Don’t call it scribbling, that makes it seem thoughtless, and I can see you have put a lot of thought into it. What is it? A book?’

  ‘It might be, one day.’

  ‘Tory, I think you’re so wonderful, sitting here in the back of a public lavatory, writing a book. There can’t be another woman in the world doing the same thing.’

  ‘It isn’t anything, really. I don’t know why we make such a fuss about writing – it’s just scribbling things down. Anyone can do it.

  The only thing that distinguishes writers is they can do it for long stretches at a time.’

  ‘Well, that can’t be as easy as it sounds.’

  ‘My husband is also a writer,’ said Tory, surprised at the sound of pride in her own voice. Though why shouldn’t she be proud of Donald? He might be an awful typist, still pressing the keys at the slow rate he had started with, but he had persistence, a dogged determination to get to the end that was admirable.

  ‘Does he write in a public lavatory as well?’

  When Grace asked the inevitable question – what is your book about? – Tory again felt perfectly comfortable talking about her novel, which would have been impossible with anyone else.

  ‘It keeps changing. At first it was about a woman whose husband is killed in the war, and she remarries. But at the end of the war it transpires that her husband was not dead at all, but had merely been held prisoner in the Far East. This is true – it happened quite a lot, because the Japanese often didn’t let the Allies know if any of their men were being held prisoner, and they would be declared missing in action or dead. Well, like I said, this woman – she’s called Charlotte – remarries and has a child during the war, but at the end of the war, her husband returns. So what does that mean for Charlotte’s marriage? If her husband was never dead, then her second marriage isn’t legal.’

  ‘What a pickle,’ said Grace.

  ‘And what about the child? Who had legal custody of it – the illegally married natural father, or the legally married step-father?’

  ‘So, what happens?’

  ‘Well, poor Charlotte is pulled this way and that – she’s overjoyed that her first husband is alive, but she’s now deeply in love with her second husband.’

  ‘Things could get very difficult.’

  ‘To make things worse, her first husband has been mentally damaged by his brutal treatment in the prison camp and has developed a violent tendency.’

  ‘What does he think of the second husband?’

  ‘He despises him, and is even violent towards him. For a while, Charlotte is afraid that he’ll kill her second husband, or even her child.’

  ‘And does he?’

  ‘Well, this is what I can’t decide. My original story had the first husband killing the child, then Charlotte and her second husband taking revenge on him in rather sickening ways. But now I’m thinking that the first husband should be saved, and that there should be a happier ending.’

  ‘Perhaps the three of them could live together in what they call a ménage!’

  ‘Grace, you are saucy. It started off being rather closely based on my own life, and now it’s veering off in different ways because my life is changing so much. I have a husband who was a prisoner of war and who changed in peculiar ways. I had an affair and had a child, and I was afraid that my husband would kill my little boy. In fact, it was my older child who died, in such a way that I blamed Donald. But now Donald is rediscovering his good side and I can see that his behaviour wasn’t all his fault.’

  ‘How very touching. I think I prefer the revenge story, But, Tory, I didn’t know you’d lost a child. Now I can see why you have a tragic look about you. You must be weighed down with sadness.’

  How was it that she could talk to this woman about Tom’s death, even telling her those aspects of it that she found most difficult to contemplate – its dreadful loneliness, the macabre tableau it must have presented to its discoverers, the ingeniousness of it, the efficiency? The manner of his death so rejected the possibility of life, gave it no chance, no corner. When she thought about that, Tory couldn’t help but feel that life itself was, in the end, a broken, badly designed, inefficient, wasteful thing. In which case, why should any of us be troubled by it? Non-existence, now there was efficiency. The perfect uninterrupted span of blackness and silence that goes on for ever, and which is our ultimate destiny anyway. All of this she told Grace, who listened with the calm focus of someone who is unsurprised. Though at the end Tory couldn’t quite believe that Grace was kneeling beside her, kissing away the tears that were rolling down her face.

  Tory blushed. Running water, she thought. Running water.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Donald’s typing went on for so many weeks and months that the noise of it slowly disappeared. The jabbing, punching sounds of the keys that had so disrupted the regular music of the house (clocks ticking and chiming, sinks filling and emptying, gas rings thumping into life, pots bubbling, stairs creaking) became just another of the background sounds that one only heard
when they stopped. Tory found great comfort in the sound. It didn’t matter to her if Donald was writing something that would ever be published, and in fact she thought it very unlikely that he actually was or, even if he did, that he would ever make much money from it. She was comforted by the simple fact that he was occupied in something productive, and it helped to alleviate the pangs she felt at having her own ambitions as a writer checked and brushed aside. It could only be good for the family, after all, that Donald was so busy. He had even cut down on the frequency of his visits to the Rifleman, and the sinister miscreants he used to bring back with him no longer visited.

  His mood and temperament were also softened. She began to think that his writing of his memoirs was a way of coming to terms with Tom’s death. More than anything, she hoped he would explain himself. That he would present her with a document that would account for the sort of person he had become, or had been in danger of becoming. She would forgive him even if it turned out to be a self-pitying account, so long as it gave evidence that he had thought about himself and the effect he was having on those around him.

  He did not show her any of his writing, but he did eventually begin to talk a little more freely about his experiences during the war.

  He described some of his fellow prisoners, what a good bunch of chaps they were, like brothers to him, some of them. He talked a little about a man who wrote poetry as good as Rupert Brooke’s.

  Tory remembered an occasion when she had encountered Donald and one of his guests in the passageway, and he had introduced the fellow as a war poet. ‘This is Harry Wilde. We were in the Stalag together. Harry’s what’s called a war poet, aren’t you, Harry?’

  ‘Well, I can’t deny that I was on occasion moved to turn out some verses in response to the great débâcle …’ He gave an exaggerated, drawling French pronunciation to that last word. Tory remembered him because the fellow didn’t conceal his face with collar and hat brim as the others did, but instead presented her with a rather dignified, elegant countenance, which did look very like what she imagined a poet’s face to be – delicate, pale and pretty.

  At times, Donald would even be forthcoming about life in the prison camp, though she began to wonder if he wasn’t inventing some of it. ‘We slept on bunks with bare slats, no mattress, just straw-filled burlap sacks. you traded Zigaretten for favours from the guards …’

  ‘But how did you fill your days? What did you do?’

  ‘I made a piano.’

  ‘A piano? Are you mad?’

  ‘No, over the years I made a piano. Not that hard. I scavenged bits of wood from all around the camp – no one was going to miss the odd slat from a bed, and there were hundreds of beds, little bits of skirting, anything really. I used glue reconstituted from the carpenter’s glue that had been used already on the beds and other furniture, scraped it off, ground it down to powder, mixed it with water and heated it on the stove – good as new. I used a bit of broken glass for a modelling knife. For strings I used cat gut, from a real cat, Fritz, we called him, though his real name was Hermann, one of the guards’ cats, used to give a Hitler salute when he was washing his ears, used to give us proper uppity looks, and definitely used to smile when the guards were shouting at us, or beating us, so we had no qualms when he came into our hut one night. We tortured the little Nazi moggy to death and ripped his intestines out. Made super strings for my piano. We buried the body to avoid detection, and didn’t half laugh to see the guards panicking about where little Fritz had gone – ‘Wo Hermann ist? Wo meine Katze ist?’ Would you believe it? Big guard in jack boots holding out pieces of cat food under the huts to tempt out his missing moggy, then sobbing when no Nazi miaowing came in reply. Honestly, they snuff out six million Jews without a second thought but start weeping over a missing cat.’

  It seemed odd, to say the least, that Donald should have filled his time with such a project. He was not a musical man; he never had been. He certainly couldn’t play the piano.

  ‘I thought I could make a piano, then learn to play it. The war poet could have taught me because he could play. You don’t understand, Tory, what it does to a man to have his days emptied of everything except a morning roll call – eins, zwei, drei – when there are people dropping dead from starvation and sickness all around you, chaps walking about with half their faces blown off, trying to whistle merry little tunes through burnt lips just to make it seem like nothing’s up, who politely decide to take their meals on their own – if you could have called them meals – sawdust bread and black sauerkraut – because they know it makes you sick to watch them putting food into their tongueless mouths, poor blighters. What do you think it does to you, Tory, a life like that?

  That piano was the only thing that kept me going. I could see you looked shocked when I talked about Fritz, but you grew to hate everything about the Germans, everything, even their animals …’

  He had brought himself close to tears by telling her these things, so that Tory regretted, not for the first time, asking about them. The intimations he gave of a terrible life (someone had estimated there were seventeen barbs of barbed wire for every prisoner in the camp) lived over those five years softened her heart a great deal, and she felt ever more strongly the need to forgive him for his behaviour since his return.

  ‘What do you think it does to a man, Tory? Look at my hands …’ He held the two jointed plates splayed before her, each digit shaking like a mouse. ‘How can a man be expected to just take up his old life and pretend none of it ever happened?’

  *

  ‘Is Daddy writing a book?’ said Branson, one day.

  ‘Yes, he is.’

  ‘What’s it about?’

  ‘It’s about his time in the army.’

  ‘Did Daddy kill anyone?’

  It made Tory feel very strange when he referred to Donald as ‘Daddy’. Stranger still, when Donald referred to Branson as ‘sonny’.

  *

  For Branson’s tenth birthday, Tory had made a very special effort. She had left the public lavatory early and had rushed around the shops, buying presents and food for the party. She had rushed home and decorated the dining room with balloons and paper chains, more festively even than for Christmas Day itself. She had made a large cake in the shape of the Bluebird, and a large jelly in the shape of a rabbit, using the three-pint mould. She had allowed Branson to invite some friends around after school. It was a bigger party than usual, to mark Branson’s entry into double figures. She was hopeful, very hopeful, that Donald would attend.

  Up until Tom’s death Branson had been a blank space in Donald’s notion of his family, an uncontoured part of the family map. It broke Tory’s heart when his cutting of Branson became so evident, as it did at Christmas and birthdays. She had always done her best for the children on these occasions, and Donald, even, could be mustered to exit his sitting room and make an appearance for the little celebrations that marked the anniversaries of Tom, Paulette and Albertina. He would sing along with ‘Happy Birthday’, and would shock everyone with his atonal gusto, always dominating the verses with a growling, over-emphatic pronunciation of the particular child’s name – Alber-TI-NAAAA! (It had always struck Tory how he could turn anyone’s name, just by stress, into a kind of insult, as though to say, There, I didn’t choose that stupid name for you.) As the girls grew older he would embarrass them by making reference to their developing bodies, as though he only ever noticed their physical presence on their birthdays.

  ‘Well, my little dear, you’re getting round and soft in all the right places – or is that cotton wool I see tucked into your bra?’

  The girl would redden, glance at her mother, unable to speak from embarrassment.

  ‘Come on, now, you’re a woman, near enough …’

  ‘She’s twelve, Donald, and I don’t think you should speak to her like that.’

  ‘Well, what about a birthday kiss from your pa?’

  And he would swing his stiff leg around the table to kiss his daugh
ter on the lips, an experience from which she would shrink back as far as it was possible to shrink.

  Christmas was the time that his cutting of Branson became most evident, when Donald would again emerge from his room to make an elaborate show of minor gift-giving. It was he who gave Tom his first pipe, wrapped up in a little box. He always thought it a good joke to wrap a small gift in outsize wrapping, so that he would present Albertina with an enormous parcel decorated with Christmas trees, and she would unwrap a box (just big enough, everyone thought, to be the doll’s house she longed for) to find that within it, in the centre of a lot of weighty padding, there was nothing but a steel thimble that wasn’t even new. He would laugh a nasty, mocking laugh. ‘Now then Alber-T I-NAAAAA, are you saying you don’t like my present?’ Tory was thinking, If only you could wrap up something large to make it seem small. Imagine the delight on Albertina’s face if she was given a present the size of a thimble, which would unfold, when unwrapped, into a magnificent doll’s house.

  Tory wondered how she could have allowed her husband to be so hurtful to Branson, remembering all those birthdays he had snubbed, either making no appearance or pointedly leaving the room the moment the cake appeared, slamming the door behind him, or all those Christmases when he had given a present to everyone except the little boy, who bore his exclusion with stoical resolve.

  ‘He’s trying to make him feel as though he doesn’t belong,’ said her mother.

  ‘For what purpose? Does he imagine I’ll say, yes, Branson can go back to wherever he came from, which is nowhere?’

  Now Tory was hopeful that things were changing. Donald had begun to acknowledge Branson’s existence, even if he had not gone so far as showing him any affection. She hoped he would take the opportunity of the tenth birthday party to do this. But as she and Mrs Head made preparations for the big event, Donald was not in his room and had, it seemed, left the house

  The party was a delightful event and seemed to take Branson entirely by surprise. He had not been expecting anything like the spread that filled the dining-room table, or the gaily nodding balloons that hung from every corner of the room, and he could not help but let out a gasp of delight. In fact he was more taken by the food on the table, and the giant jelly rabbit, which was the centrepiece, than the little stack of presents beside it.