Letters From an Unknown Woman

by Gerard Woodward

  Tory was so shocked that all she could say was ‘Donald!’

  But Donald wasn’t at all ashamed, and in fact seemed keen, having taken the word out of whatever place he’d been keeping it, to give it a good airing.

  ‘In fact, it looks like it’s got two arseholes.’ Then he went a little bit further, noting the same anatomical feature in other trees, and Tory gave up even trying to respond to these statements. The fact that Donald saw so many of them in the trees (and she could see them as well – those puckered rings of bark, thickening round the hollowness left by a fallen or chopped-off branch) meant that she saw them, and the woods generally, in a slightly different way from then on, and she mourned less their loss when they were felled some years later, as though they had been rather indecent, the poor, venerable things. He never used that word again.

  It was one of the many occasions that Donald had said something odd, peculiar, even unsettling. It was very difficult to know when he was being serious. She remembered what he had said the day his call-up papers arrived.

  ‘When I was a boy I used to think, How the hell am I going to get through the next sixty years or so without killing someone? Well, now it looks like I won’t have to.’

  Then there was that thing he had said just after she’d accepted his proposal of marriage: ‘I’m so glad, Tory. I’ve always thought you were too good for me, you see.’

  Oddly, she’d always thought exactly the opposite, that she couldn’t possibly be good enough for the strictly moral painter and decorator.

  ‘What do you mean, too good for you?’

  ‘Let me put it this way, Tory. I’ve always felt that you are made of gold while I am a man of lead.’

  It was only years later that she understood he was paraphrasing something from Plato’s Republic, a book he often carried around with him and would brandish at certain moments of intellectual anxiety, at which times he would also revert to his broadest Gorbals accent: ‘Ye need to take a look a’ this wee book. Nivver min’ Mein Kampf, ye want tae read Thae Republic.’

  Such remarks cut little ice with Tory’s mother, who didn’t care for books, but to Tory they gave her husband an authority and stature she had not seen in her family before.

  ‘You are an ideal of goodness,’ he said, ‘the lost half of my spirit double …’

  She didn’t know, quite, what he meant by this, but she loved the words.

  *

  They had met when she was working as a waitress in the English Rose Tea Rooms. She had taken up a position there shortly after leaving her job at her father’s bank (a necessity when things had turned sour with her fellow teller, Clarence Dundry). Donald had been a regular customer at the bank and was now a regular customer at the Tea Rooms. ‘I’m not following you, you understand.’ Despite its name, the English Rose was not a genteel establishment frequented by Victorian ladies sipping Darjeeling. It was, rather, a rough and ready eating house, serving hot-pots and pies to hungry working men and women, clerks from the nearby council offices, shopworkers from the high street, artisans who ate chops with their fingers and then loudly licked the tips of them. Butchers used to come in, Tory now recalled, bloodstained and sweaty, for their steaks. There was one who had taken the cheese and onion flan for lunch every day, as though he could not stand the sight of any more blood.

  Donald always had devils on horseback with a glass of milk. She felt she’d got to know Donald from the top down, because in the early days of their relationship she would stand over him while he sat at a table, choosing from the menu. She became familiar with the crown of his head, with its brushed-back wiry hair that sometimes stood up in spikes that trembled or vibrated, like tuning forks, when Donald spoke. She got to know the over-furrowed brow, which was very high, giving him the tousled widow’s peak of the soon-to-be-bald. (In fact, to her surprise, Donald had done a good job of keeping his hair, just the littlest bald spot opening at the top after a few years.) Then she came to know the eyes, which would turn up to look at her with a mysterious twinkle when he ordered his devils on horseback, making a little joke each time about how he was struggling with the choice, then ordered the same thing yet again. ‘Let me see, what’ll I have? My, my so much choice, so little time. Well, just for a change I think I’ll be daring and have … devils on horseback.’ He could be funny when he wanted to.

  But mostly he was serious. He had a way of speaking that made everything he said sound profoundly important. Perhaps it was the accent, which Tory always associated with bank managers, solicitors and other purveyors of probity and prudence. He would underscore statements with a piercing stare from rather feline eyes, which made it impossible to doubt anything he said. Once under his spell, there was no escape for Tory. Not that she ever desired escape, not seriously anyway. Occasionally she experienced an engulfing sense of dread that she had made some awful mistake in marrying Donald and should instead have thrown in her lot with Clarence Dundry and a life similar to her mother’s, that of a bank clerk’s wife. But such fears were usually shortlived. Donald’s maturity, learning and practical sense made him seem a sensible yet adventurous option. He was a craftsman, a businessman, a self-made intellectual. As their marriage progressed Tory slowly began to feel it wasn’t love she was experiencing, rather a sense of awe and admiration. They had lived their first few years together in a spirit of mutual respect. Tory felt that she was not so much loved as curated. Donald treated her as a precious and rare specimen, always concerned for her safety and comfort, and proud to show her off to his friends. She, in turn, enjoyed the way his talk soared far above the heads of all around them.

  Things began to change when the children arrived. They seemed to unsettle and disconcert him. He didn’t know quite what to do with them. His aura of authority and wisdom began to wane. He became distant and distracted. He was embarrassed when, for financial reasons, they had to move back into Peter Street, and he did little to disguise his glee when Mrs Head emigrated to the estuary. The children seemed to embarrass him as well – when they were babies at least. As they grew up, and he started to take more notice of them, he became a strict father, though he was never particularly severe. She only had one clear memory of him playing with the children when, one Christmas, he picked up a rug and pretended to be wrestling with a lion. On the whole, though, it seemed clear that his children, in his eyes, were not quite good enough.

  She thought of Donald’s oft-repeated remark that she was too good for him as she waited for his response to her letter. It came quickly, the usual blue envelope covered with stamps and the imprints of military officials. This was what appalled her most about the correspondence that had begun between them – that it was conducted through so many different levels of officialdom, from the bullet-dodging couriers (so she imagined) to the border guards, the censors. Great pains and, risks had been taken to negotiate the exchange of mail between prisoners of war and the outside world, and all Private Donald Pace and his wife could think to do was exchange indecent thoughts.

  When she opened this latest communication she was puzzled. Even without reading it she could see that the envelope contained her own letter, the one she had sent to her husband two weeks earlier. She thought for a moment that perhaps the censor had not allowed it through. Surely her postscript was not strong enough to earn that degree of censure. Perhaps there had been some mistake. When she looked through the letter her eyes were immediately drawn to the bold red letters that had been scrawled in the margin. Not the censor’s hand, but her husband’s. In harsh, angry block capitals he had written ‘NOT GOOD ENOUGH!!!’ And several arrows pointing to the offendingly inadequate sentence.

  How the officials on both sides of the border must have laughed. The jackbooted guards who had previously leered and chuckled over the letter on its way in must have laughed even louder on its way out. Her humiliation was official and international. The frigid, inadequate wife unable to satisfy her husband’s simple demands for sexual satisfaction – all he’d wanted was a few dirty wo
rds and the best she could come up with was ‘behind’.

  If it wasn’t bad enough to have her erotic writing so closely examined, it seemed even worse to have it deemed inadequate. What he meant, of course, was that she was not bad enough.

  In her next letter she tried pleading with her husband:

  Dearest, I must ask you to stop making these requests. I know you do not mean anything serious by them, but you must know that anything – how shall I say? – ‘earthy’ will be blacked out by the English censor …

  He replied:

  Do you not think the English censor might be a wee bit more sympathetic to my needs than you yourself seem to be? Do you think he will really run his pencil through lines of passionate love between an estranged wife and her husband? Other men here have wives who oblige – I haven’t seen their letters, of course, they are always private, but I know they are full of lovely things. I shall not cease from asking you for this, Tory, no matter how many months or years this war lasts or how many years I am a prisoner of it. I need it as much as I need food and drink, and I am a starving man, Tory. I have precious memories of our many nights of passion, when you were as energetic and as lustful as I. They are my only sustenance at this time, but they are fading fast.

  Love to the weans, and your ma,

  Donald

  PS if you are stuck for what to write, why don’t you ask some of the girls at your factory? You know what they say about factory girls.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Tory didn’t know what they said about factory girls, and she didn’t like the implications. Whatever they said, she was a factory girl now. Did that mean they said it about her?

  She also wondered what sort of nights Donald remembered, and why they seemed so different from the ones that had stuck in her own mind. Energy was not something she associated with them, at least from her viewpoint: it was Donald who had done all the work, striving away above her in the darkness, as busy as a picador. She lay in bed one night trying her best to recall the occasions when Donald had done the deed, and the kinds of words that came to her – sweaty, rough, friction, grease – were not the sort she imagined Donald wanted. She did remember thinking, on one of the first occasions they’d done it, how he had treated her rather like an awkward corner of a room that needed sanding and papering. Examining her closely, brushing her skin with his lips, then blowing, as if to remove shavings or dust. Then re-examining her, his brows knotted, frowning, as though she was such an awkward, difficult thing. A problem. Then he was sanding her down again, brushing her off. He was abrasive, rough, though not wilfully. It was just that he had an angular, hard, stubbly body. And he smelt of turpentine, and in his wiry hair there were always little flecks of white paint. Were those the sort of details he required? How I miss the reek of turpentine in my nostrils as you dig your sharp little Scottish elbows into my ribs … I want nothing more than to feel your unshaven chin sandpapering my breast …

  Reluctantly Tory began to think that perhaps the answer did lie in the factory somewhere. Surely there was someone, among all those careworn, lovesick and battle-scarred women, who knew how to write the sort of letter Donald wanted.

  Farraway’s was not a good place to think about matters of a carnal nature since it dealt with such matters itself in the most pitiless and brutal way. She had not given gelatine a moment’s thought before arriving at the factory for work. She was aware of the existence of Farraway’s, and that it had a reputation as an originator of bad smells. One of the reasons she had been conscripted there for her war work was that very few women could be found to go there out of choice. If the wind was blowing a certain way, people within range of the factory took their washing in, so it was said, to avoid it becoming saturated with that odour – what was it? Tory had never found it particularly offensive: a rich, spicy, faintly animal smell, similar to that which you find in a zoo, but Tory loved zoos. Then she saw what caused the smells: animal parts, stewed and simmered for days on end, vats bubbling with calves’ feet and hides, barrows heaped with bones.

  One of the managers had given the new recruits a tour before allocating them to their departments, or ‘rooms’, as they were called. She’d seen the Skin Cutting Room, where the sad, flattened pelts of once beautiful creatures were shredded in vicious guillotines, and the Melting Room, where the stewing took place and the gelatine formed as a scum to be lifted off and spread over sheets of glass to cool in the Slabbing Room. There were many other such departments, equally grim, where she could have found herself allocated, so she was greatly relieved when she found she had been assigned to the Packing Room, where she spent her days among rows of girls sewing the granulated gelatine into canvas sacks, or folding sheet gelatine into crates with greaseproof paper.

  Since Donald’s resurrection she had begun to find the sights and sounds of Farraway’s rather disturbing. At the beginning and end of each shift she had to walk the cobbled yards between the tall brick sheds, the Packing Room being (against what seemed practical common sense) at the far end of the maze-like complex, and each time it became more and more like a journey through Hell. Well, ‘a hell for animals’, anyway – all the odds and ends of magnificent beasts being processed. She once came across a trolley of calves’ heads, with eyes and tongues protruding, as though outraged at their treatment. The trolley was harnessed to a patient but tired-looking dray. It was as though the entire animal kingdom had been betrayed. That was the first time the horrors of Farraway’s had struck her, and she was in tears as she passed the gate porter so couldn’t return his customary pleasantries.

  When she told her mother about it Mrs Head scorned her for her softness.

  ‘They are only doing what we’ve always done. I’ve been boiling up bones and trotters to make jelly since I was girl. We were all thankful when powdered gelatine arrived, and we could save ourselves the trouble …’

  But Tory was also bothered by the apparent uselessness of her labours. She had imagined, when she offered herself for employment, that she would be going to work in the munitions factory, manufacturing the weapons that would eventually win the war. What a waste to put so many able-bodied women to such trivial use, enabling the continued production of jellies and blancmanges. But she didn’t say anything. It was assumed by everyone that they were doing important work, and that gelatine must be put to uses they had no inkling of. Perhaps it was a vital ingredient in certain explosives. Wasn’t there an explosive called gelignite? Perhaps a little bit of their gelatine found its way into the bombs that were being dropped on Hanover and Frankfurt. Remembering the gurning calves’ heads, it seemed a far more fitting destination than a children’s birthday party.

  She was a little disappointed not to have made any close friends among the women in the Packing Room. They were not hostile towards her – in fact, quite the opposite. Some of the older ladies especially went out of their way to make her feel at home, and they had been so generous with their parcels for Donald. But, despite all this, she had developed no confiding intimacy with any of the other women.

  Tory soon became aware that there was a well-established pecking order, intricately formed according to various degrees of status, and roughly corresponding to seating arrangements on the long bench. At the far end was a group of women who had worked in the Packing Room since before the war, and who were simply carrying on their regular jobs. They clearly thought themselves above the common herd of conscripted packers and made sure everyone was aware of their exalted rank. Next came the older women, ladies who had worked in other factories and knew the rules and traditions of factory life. Then there were the slightly younger women, who had never worked in a factory before but who came from working-class or lower-middle-class households, who might have fathers, husbands or brothers in factory work. Then came the women of modest education, who had never expected to find themselves anywhere near a factory, and were rather uncomfortable, even embarrassed, at being so positioned. Tory belonged somewhere in this group, though she felt no distaste for her
working environment. She was married to a manual worker, after all, and her bank-clerk father, if truth be told, was only one rung above this sort of life.

  Lowest of the pecking order were the younger women and girls, childless and unmarried, who might well have worked in such a factory as this anyway. They formed a noisy posse at the near end, cackling and giggling all through the long mornings and afternoons. It was among this group that Tory thought she might be able to find someone who could help her. Seated near their end, she could overhear their conversations sometimes, and was shocked at how crude they could become. There was one girl, called Amy, a little blonde with a face like a knife, who was particularly loud in her conversations and would use words that Tory could only guess were grossly indecent. Sometimes they sat together at tea break, Amy slurping loudly, often spilling her drink in fits of giggling. She would tell everyone stories about her family, about how her sister was having her fourth baby and she was only twenty-one, about her own boyfriend, who was only sixteen and worked in the sugar factory over the river. These stories were always on the edge of respectability. Amy once came back from the lavatory doubled up with laughter, saying she’d heard a funny noise in the next cubicle, only able to say, after a long effort of self-control, ‘She went hisss plop-plop-plop …’ then doubled up in tearful laughter again.

  ‘Who did, dear?’ said someone.

  ‘The lady in the next cubicle, and guess who it was.’ She claimed it was Clara, their uppity shift manager, who took her tea breaks alone.