Letters From an Unknown Woman

by Gerard Woodward

‘That’s very silly, Mother,’ said Paulette. ‘Everyone knows there aren’t enough homes.’

  ‘Well, I don’t see hordes of homeless refugees drifting past my windows. Everyone seems to live somewhere, just as they always have.’

  ‘But maybe in overcrowded conditions,’ said the housebuilder, then hesitated, for fear that he had inadvertently insulted his host’s household. He tried to make up for it by belittling his own background. ‘We lived twelve to a room at one time …’

  It suddenly occurred to Tory that the housebuilder was too old for Albertina. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘after all, how much space do you really need? And where on earth are they going to fit all these new town? What I say is, just stop building so many blooming houses, and just squeeze everyone in where they can.’

  ‘And stop having babies,’ added Donald, then, looking at the young sweethearts, ‘well, for a few years anyway.’

  ‘We’re set for a population explosion, Mrs Pace. Haven’t you noticed all the prams?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve noticed them all right.’

  ‘Mother, are we going to actually get anything to eat?’

  ‘Why, of course.’

  A joint of pork had been roasting in the oven all morning.

  ‘Well now,’ Tory said, ‘which one of you two fine young men would like to carve?’

  There was a moment of hushed embarrassment as the two young men glanced at Donald, as if unsure of whether they were permitted to take the head of the house’s role in such a way.

  ‘It’s no good looking at me,’ he said. ‘I could never stand the sight of blood.’

  ‘Mr Pace is excused carving duties on health grounds,’ said Tory.

  The baker, to everyone’s surprise, deferred to the builder, and so it was he who accompanied Tory to the kitchen.

  ‘Shouldn’t I carve at the table?’

  But Tory had everything carefully planned. The meat was to be carved up and everything served in advance, including vegetables and gravy, and the plates taken in and served individually. By this means Tory was able to strictly control the distribution of food during the meal. Before long, everyone had a roast dinner before them, except Donald, who had a plate on which was an upturned stainless-steel dish – an improvised serving lid.

  ‘What’s all this?’ said Donald, lifting the dish to reveal a pointlessly empty plate. Empty but for one thing: a torpedo-shaped pellet of a shiny deep-reddish-brown colour.

  ‘The food of the future,’ said Tory, in a half-singing voice.

  Donald bent down to look closely at the pellet. Then, sitting back, he flicked it off his plate with his finger and thumb, in the same way that a child flicks a marble, and said, ‘Well, you can bring me the food of today.’

  The pellet had landed close to Branson’s plate, and he was about to pick it up to look at, before Tory, who had not yet sat down to her own meal, placed it carefully back on Donald’s plate. It chinked against the china. ‘This is very special food, for a very special man …’ She picked up Donald’s cutlery and put it in his hands, ‘You can even eat it with a knife and fork. You know how to use a knife and fork, don’t you?’

  As if realizing for the first time that his wife was being serious, and sensing danger, he said, more cautiously, ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘These pellets contain all the nutritional value of a full roast dinner – not just protein but all the vitamins and minerals as well.’ Tory said this as she took her seat at the opposite end of the table to Donald.

  ‘Really?’ said the baker, who seemed genuinely interested. and peeved that he hadn’t been given one. ‘You mean in the future there won’t be any need for all of this …’ He waved his knife vaguely at the loaded plates around the table.

  ‘No, not at all. No more carrying heavy shopping bags of food, no more peeling potatoes or shelling peas, no more trips to the butcher’s shop, no more cutting up bloody beef …’

  ‘That’s incredible.’ The baker was clearly preparing to say something like, Can’t we all have one and be done with proper food? But attention was drawn towards Donald, who had caught Albertina’s eye and had said, in more or less an undertone, ‘Be an angel, sweetheart, and go out to the kitchen and get me some grub. Your mother seems to have flipped her lid.’

  Albertina obediently began to leave her seat.

  ‘Where are you going, Albertina?’ Tory voice had acquired a new edge, a sort of sawing sound, sharp and abrasive. No one had ever heard it before.

  In contrast Albertina’s voice seemed to have reverted to her childish piping, as she tried to explain.

  ‘Sit down, Albertina,’ Tory said, with that unsettlingly authoritative tone still in her voice. Having made to sit down, Albertina decided to try to continue her errand, mumbling that her mother was being silly.

  ‘I said sit down!’ Tory banged her palm on the table, making everyone, apart from Donald, visibly jump. She noticed Paulette glance at her boyfriend then roll her eyes upwards, as if to suggest that this was a regular occurrence, one of Mummy’s little scenes that they had to put up with.

  ‘No one is leaving this table until they have eaten their food.’

  ‘What food?’ said Donald, with a derisive chuckle.

  ‘I don’t mind swapping with Mr Pace,’ said the baker, nudging his plate towards Donald’s.

  ‘What I don’t understand,’ said the builder, ‘is if these little pills are supposed to replace shopping and cooking, what are our wives going to spend their time doing?’ He gave Albertina an endearing glance.

  ‘You keep your food,’ said Donald to the baker, in a comradely way, as if they were both suffering at the hands of his wife’s foolishness. ‘Tory, will you get me something to eat, or do you want me to limp all the way to the bloody kitchen on my bad leg?’

  ‘You’ve always kept your appetite, haven’t you?’ she said.

  ‘Even when you came back from the war all shell-shocked and simple, you could still stuff your face until it was running down your chin.’

  ‘At least you won’t have to blow on it to cool it down,’ said the baker, who didn’t seem to have heard his hostess speak. And it seemed, as Tory stood up and walked around the table towards her husband, that the joke was now over, and that she was going to take away that silly little pill and bring him his real dinner. Nothing was said. Donald looked at his wife with a resigned expression on his face that said, All right, you’ve got me, you’ve had your fun, you’ve made your point, now let’s get back to normal. But that was not what happened. Instead of taking Donald’s plate, Tory took hold of Donald’s head, the head that, for several years now, she had balmed with a soothing lotion to ease the scars that he himself had inflicted in a moment of madness, and yanked it back.

  ‘You want some help, Donald, you want me to feed you?’

  She had pinched his nose so that his mouth gaped. His arms came up, waving pathetically in their attempts to pull his wife’s hands off, but he was held in such a way that there seemed to be nothing he could hold on to. Others at the table gasped and began to stand up, not sure what to do. With a deft movement Tory took the pill and put it into her husband’s throat, but in a particularly rough way, jabbing, almost stabbing it into his gullet, then vigorously rubbing his pitifully exposed neck.

  ‘You want some water?’

  She picked up the full glass and splashed it in, so that half went into his mouth, half down his shirtfront. Then she released his head, which catapulted forward so that Donald banged his forehead on the empty plate. He was making no sound but for a quiet gasping noise. Tory began to return to her seat.

  ‘Are you all right, Dad? said Albertina, as shocked as everyone else by what had just happened. Donald was now writhing around in his chair, his mouth wide open, as though trying to vomit, but failing.

  ‘He doesn’t look too good,’ said the baker. ‘I think he’s choking.’

  ‘Your dinner is getting cold,’ said Tory. ‘All of you, eat up before it gets cold.’

  ‘Da
ddy, are you choking?’ said Paulette.

  Donald was hooking fingers into his gaping mouth, trying to pull out the blockage. As he bent forward, brown liquid poured from his nostrils. The baker stood up, began hitting him in the back.

  ‘I’m choking,’ said Donald, with a voice that lacked any human quality, but which sounded like a dog growling. Suddenly he leant back hard in his seat so that it tipped over and he was on his back on the floor, his face a deep red, his mouth still gaping.

  ‘Get him on his side,’ said the builder. ‘Try and shake it out of him.’ The room had transformed: the girls had stood up and were uncertain of what to do: the men were down on the ground with their host, shaking him like a dummy. Eventually the blockage was expelled, like a champagne cork, nearly hitting the ceiling, and Donald breathed in with a rush of suction so desperate it felt as though the whole room would enter his mouth.

  *

  Tory never fed Donald again. Any meals she prepared for the family were carefully measured out so that there was not enough for Donald, even if he went himself to the pot or the pan. He could get by, making himself toast, opening tins, but with his leg, it was difficult. The girls helped him, despite their mother’s insistence that they should not, and Branson sometimes offered his father food from his own plate. It led to terrific rows, not just between Donald and Tory but between Tory and her daughters, who couldn’t see the point of excluding their father from every meal, of reducing him to eating bread and butter while they ate stews and pies. They would have gone as far as cooking a full meal for their father, but they didn’t dare cross the kitchen threshold while their mother was in residence.

  No one asked why Tory had taken this peculiar stance. While none of the children was the least bit fond of their father, they had a certain amount of respect for him, Branson especially, and didn’t think that any marital dispute warranted what seemed to be on Tory’s part a systematic attempt to starve her husband out of the house.

  ‘Stop being so bloody daft’ at first gave way to ‘Be reasonable, Tory’ and ‘For God’s sake, woman, we can’t live like this – this is worse than the concentration camps … To think of all I fought for! I never thought I’d live to see torture practised in an English family home …’

  Eventually it worked. If the way to a man’s heart was through his stomach, Tory reasoned, then the best way to dispose of that heart was through the stomach also. Donald began going else- where for his meals. Once he was out of the house Tory began to make a pile of his belongings in the hall, announcing, when he came back, that he had a week to make arrangements for their removal; after that she would start burning them. There wasn’t much, and Tory was good at burning things now.

  *

  The No. 217B was a new bus service that Tory rather liked because it took a round-the-houses route that visited many of the places that had been special to her in the past, swinging left off Old Parade and onto the steep Dorothy Hill, past the Hamlet, down Clifton Road and round by the graveyard of St Andrew’s, where Mrs Head was now buried alongside Arthur, then a winding route down Russell Lane with sycamores and cow parsley leaning out from the railway embankment (you could almost be in the countryside, Tory had often thought), which came out on the corner with Randall Street, by the English Rose Tea Rooms and close to where Tory used to wait for the tram that had taken her to the gelatine factory. Then past her father’s old bank (now a branch of the Midland), and to the left, there was Walsingham Avenue, at the end of which, close to an inlet of the Thames, she had spent an unhappy few weeks as a searchlight operator. Then it was a long stretch on the Dartford road to George Farraway’s new gym.

  Tory and Branson were sitting on the top deck, at the front, a vantage-point that Tory loved because it felt to her like riding a winged chariot, the sycamore branches of Russell Lane whiplashing against the windows, on an eye level with all the bedrooms of the houses. What a magnificent form of travel. They were sitting either side of the gangway, occupying a double seat each, against Tory’s wishes, but Branson could not be made to share with her. She glanced across at him.

  ‘Good right hooks,’ she said, smiling. He looked at her with an expression of mild disgust. He didn’t seem to realize that she was referring to the trees lashing against the windows, and although Tory tried nodding towards them, by way of explanation, it was too late. Branson had turned away. Was she mad? To allow that sweet, square, still downy face to be pummelled by boxing gloves? Why was he so keen? He had never shown the slightest interest in rough sports before, but when she had casually remarked that he might like to take boxing lessons at a renowned gym not too far from there, he had shocked her with his enthusiasm. When can we go? He asked the question incessantly. Give me a couple of weeks to sort it out. A couple of weeks? Can’t we go tonight? No Branson, we mustn’t rush into something like this. On and on he had pestered her. Since he had no idea that he was the son of a man who had fought Jack Dempsey on Long Island and had drawn blood from the eyebrow of the Manassa Mauler, she could only assume that Branson’s enthusiasm for boxing was the manifestation of an inherited trait.

  After the death of Alec Stott, the old gelatine gym, where Tory had first set eyes on a sweaty-vested George Farraway, had closed. George had a smaller factory now, a little unit, as it was called, on a trading estate off the Dartford Road. It was here that he had planned to bring an end to world hunger with the Farraway Food-free Diet. The bad publicity had put that project on indefinite hold. Now Mrs Farraway, the woman with the film-star looks whom Tory had never seen, had come up with her own alternative scheme. Alec Stott, she reasoned, had become thinner and thinner on a diet of George’s pills. Why not turn them into diet tablets, then? The cold logic of this argument was irresistible to George, and he had already begun developing a marketing strategy.

  Meanwhile the shop floor of his workshop was deserted. But George wasn’t in a hurry. He had made a fortune in selling his factory and, besides, he was more interested in what was happening upstairs at the new unit, for on the top floor he had built one of the best-equipped boxing gyms in the country.

  He must have spent thousands on it, Tory thought, when she entered the space for the first time. It gleamed with newness, so unlike the gelatine gym, with its dusty windows, peeling paintwork and pipe runs. Here there was the glint of chrome and stainless steel; the heavy punchbags hung in a row from an overhead gantry and had the smooth tautness of black puddings. There were exercise machines that looked like the scaffolding for a small building project, bicycles with only one wheel, on which young men sweated frantically to get nowhere. It was like a factory of the type that lay empty downstairs, this one for the production of powerful men. In every corner trainees were shadow-boxing, others skipping or at punchbags. There were three rings, each for a different level of expertise.

  George approached them through the boiling throng, wearing what looked like a skin-diving outfit, but which Tory later learned was called a tracksuit. He seemed all done up in one piece with a single zip, and looked awesomely modern.

  ‘Aha, the famous Mr Branson Pace.’

  Branson glanced worriedly at his mother, as if thinking Mr Farraway was mixing him up with someone else.

  Father and son shook hands for the first time, and at that moment Branson’s likeness to his father was confirmed for Tory beyond any doubt. Their handshake produced an aspect of near-perfect symmetry, pivoting around the joined hands, expanding into two square, stocky bodies either side, of differing height, but of a near identical stance and carriage.

  ‘You’ll be gentle with him?’ Tory couldn’t help saying this, and received another glare from her son, who wanted it to be known that he didn’t require gentle handling.

  ‘As a lamb.’ George laughed as he led Branson away, his guiding hand on his son’s shoulder, towards the back rooms where, Tory hoped, he would begin the process of transforming the clumsy boy into a world-champion boxer.

  ‘I’ll be waiting for you,’ she called after them, suddenly f
earing that she would never see her son again. As she sat down on one of the benches near the door, she supposed that, in a way, it was true. A different Branson Pace would be returned to her in an hour or so’s time.

  *

  It was Branson who missed Donald’s presence the most.

  ‘Why did you do those things to Daddy?’ he would say, in a heartbreakingly adult voice. The girls, on the other hand, hardly seemed to notice that their father was gone, just pleased that there was no longer any shouting in the house. Tory warned everyone, one evening, that if their father was to knock (she had changed the

  locks) they should not, under any circumstances, let him in. Afterwards Branson remonstrated with his sisters, who seemed happy to comply with their mother’s request.

  ‘What’s he done that’s so bad? I’m not going to stop him coming in.’

  ‘Just don’t ask, Branson,’ was the girls’ well-practised reply, as if to say it must be truly bad for their mother to be so adamant that Donald should be gone for good. They were young women now, with their own sights on marriage, and seemed to have entered an exalted realm, where everyone had insights into everyone else’s thoughts – they liked to give the impression they knew what their mother was going through, and that their own marriages would never get into such deep and dark waters.

  But Donald never tried to come back. It was almost as though he’d had a contingency plan all along. On the night of his final departure a car had called for him. Tory had never seen the driver before, a coiffed young man with a fag in the corner of his mouth, lean and chiselled, a bit like Dirk Bogarde. He helped Donald with the suitcases and the one trunk Donald had packed.

  Tory made as if to take no interest in the scene, and continued to read her newspaper.

  ‘Where are you going, Dad?’ said Branson, with some urgency in his voice.

  ‘Just away, son,’ he said, taking a moment to look into the boy’s eyes, then, turning to Tory, ‘I told you you were too good for me, didn’t I? I told you, you’re made of gold, Tory Pace, while I’m a man of lead. But I managed until the war came along, managed to be good. Didn’t I? Good enough for you?’