He took her to Simpson’s, parking the car outside the imposing front door, where a doorman eagerly took care of it.
‘I have brought you to the home of English Roast Beef,’ he said, as they sat at a table amid oak panelling and chandeliers. Tory had dug in her heels like a puppy being taken for a bath as they entered the restaurant, convinced that she would not be allowed in, sure that Mr Farraway was making some terrible mistake in thinking they would admit her. She was, after all, in her ordinary clothes, unwashed and unmade-up, barely presentable at the best of times. Now, seated, she found herself surrounded by tables at which men of business sawed at red meat. There seemed to be no other women.
‘Why have you brought me here?’ she whispered hotly, after the menu had been delivered.
‘Because I thought you could do with some nourishment, my dear,’ he replied, smiling, ‘though with the shortages they’re having trouble even here with obtaining decent beef. We might have to make do with game, or venison. Don’t look so frightened – why do you always look frightened?’
‘I don’t feel as though I belong here,’ she said, surprised that she could so easily express this particular anxiety. In any other circumstance she would have suppressed her true feelings, but George Farraway was an extraordinarily easy man to confide in. In that moment she suddenly realized she enjoyed his company more than that of any other man she had ever met. Nothing she could say surprised or shocked him. Most things she said amused him.
‘They may look exclusive, but in fact they’ll let anyone in,’ said George, adding hastily, with another smile, ‘Not that you are just anyone, of course, but you see what I mean.’
‘Have you brought other girls here?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘I’ve had no desire to.’ He followed this with an enigmatic smile, opening the big tasselled menu. Tory opened hers and was surprised to find that she could understand it. She had been expecting things in French.
Tory couldn’t quite understand what was happening to her. Was George just being kind to one of his employees or were they at the start of an affair? She felt ridiculous in the restaurant, unkempt and unwashed, gauche, lustreless. But looking around her she noticed how little notice was being taken of her. She could tell that George was a widely respected regular of the establishment: the waiters and concierges addressed him by name; some of the customers gave him polite nods. He shook a few hands, casually introducing Tory as a colleague or business acquaintance. She didn’t believe him when he said he had not brought other girls here. She assumed she was one of many, all casually introduced in the same way.
If they were about to have an affair (or had they already begun one? It was hard to say), Tory felt curiously prepared. All that business with Donald’s letters, his implorations for her to be bad, made it somehow easier for her actually to be bad.
‘Well,’ said George, once they had ordered, ‘this makes a welcome change from the environs of a gelatine factory.’
‘Yes,’ said Tory. ‘Cooked meat smells so much better.’
‘I don’t know how I ended up in such a grisly branch of manufacturing. It’s rather like mining gold – to those few who are prepared to do the darkest work, there are the greatest rewards.’
‘But it is useful, I take it, gelatine?’
‘Useful?’
‘Yes, for the war effort. Is it an ingredient in explosives?’
There was a pause while Mr Farraway seemed to consider this question. ‘There are many, many uses for gelatine,’ he said. ‘You may think of it as an ingredient for thickening desserts, such as jelly and blancmange. It is also used in ballistics to provide a simulator for human flesh. Yes, they fire bullets into blocks of our gelatine in small-arms factories throughout the land.’
The thought rather appalled Tory, as though she had been struck by the possibility that gelatine could suffer. ‘That’s a good thing, I think.’
‘It’s my belief that in the future all food will be made from gelatine in some form or other. It’s pure protein, don’t you know? Utterly flavourless when refined, it can be artificially flavoured to taste like anything. In these times of shortages I believe we can use gelatine, processed and modified, to supply up to ninety per cent of essential nutrients in the diet for a fraction of the cost. Imagine yourself sitting down to a roast dinner, with slices of beef, roast potatoes, greens, gravy. Everything on that plate could be made out of the same stuff – flavoured gelatine. We could inject vitamins and minerals into it for essential goodness. It could have all the nutritional value of an actual roast dinner yet be made from almost nothing but gelatine.’
Tory thought for a moment. It seemed astonishing, a roast dinner made entirely out of gelatine, and she was certain there was something wrong with the idea. Then she had it. ‘But wouldn’t it wobble terribly?’ she said.
Mr Farraway seemed to find this amusing at first, then took it more seriously. ‘Show me your hands,’ he said. Tory did so and he inspected her nails. ‘I have developed a drink that strengthens nails and hair. It tastes delicious too. I would like you to be my first guinea pig, to drink it for a month. I guarantee you will have improved nails. They will be hard and shiny, and your hair, too, will be glossy.’
‘Are you saying I look ill?’
‘Like I said, you’re undernourished, but then we all are …’
She glanced across the tables as he said this, watching waiters lifting silver domes to reveal saddles of venison, then carving the same with shining knives, to fill the plates of portly capitalists.
‘I see it in the gym, strapping lads all skin and bone. They’re good fighters but they just don’t have the fuel to build up decent muscle. These are hard times for those of us involved in food production. Most of our hides were imported from the United States or even further afield, India and the Far East. Increasingly we’ve had to rely on homegrown hides and bones, but there just aren’t the quantities necessary. We have to cut back. Production is down. And it’s true. Domestic use of gelatine is falling. The ladies of England, like your good self, have enough problems on their hands without having to find the time to make jellies and blancmanges. I suspect the evacuation programme has had an effect, and the foster mothers are disinclined to provide jellies for the children of the towns and cities. We have to explore other avenues to secure a future for our product. Hence my nail drink. In America they’ve come up with a plasma extender based on gelatine. Artificial blood, if you will. I have something up my sleeve too. Protein pills.’
‘Protein pills?’
‘As I said before, gelatine is almost pure protein. My Jelly Babies – I mean my lads in the gym – I believe can attribute their exceptional energy and strength to the regular doses of liquid gelatine I have provided for them. I have some boffins working on a tabloid form that can be swallowed easily.’ He suddenly looked round with exaggerated caution, as though suspecting the presence of eavesdroppers. ‘I shouldn’t be telling you this, you know, trade secrets and all that. But it’s going to be quite a moneyspinner. You’ve seen the way my lads fight – like little bulls, aren’t they? – and they eat no more red meat than you or I on the ration. Think what my pills could do for a soldier out in the middle of nowhere. If he had a pack of Farraway’s Protein Pills in his knapsack he could live on those and nothing else, apart from water …’
‘For how long?’
‘Almost indefinitely. If we can combine the vitamins and minerals – like I said – we could have a complete meal in a little pill no bigger than a cough sweet.’
He pointed to a side of roast beef, which had drawn gasps of admiration from all around the restaurant when it was uncovered – the only such joint available that day. ‘All that goodness and strength contained in a single pill – can you imagine? Oh, I know we have similar things already – vitamin tablets, Iron Jelloids and so forth, but they can only supplement a normal food diet. What I’m suggesting is that in the future we could do away with meat and veg
etables altogether. Think of it – no more cooking or shopping, no more crouching in front of a blazing oven basting a joint for hours on end. The future of food is in pill form, Tory.’
She liked hearing him say her name, and she tried to sound approving of his scheme for the future of food. It certainly seemed to make sense on the military front, but she tried to imagine how people like her mother would react, if told their services were no longer needed, she who liked nothing more than to stare into the blazing heat of an oven and skewer a shoulder of lamb to test for running blood. What odd little world would she find herself inhabiting, in which no cooking was done, and what would she find to do in it?
‘Won’t your wife miss cooking awfully?’
It was the first time mention had been made of the woman whom she knew to exist.
‘She may do, but the question really is, would the world miss my wife’s cookery?’ He gave a sideways sort of laugh, before adding, ‘Given the choice between one of her hot-pots and a protein pill … Well, I’m being cruel, I know. I suppose you were hoping to catch me out somehow with that question.’
‘No, not really. But I find myself thinking about her.’
‘I wouldn’t.’
‘Is she beautiful?’
‘Apparently. Too beautiful, probably.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Very beautiful women – they’re an awful bind. They get bored easily, are suckers for temptation, prone to scheming and dishonesty. Give me a plain but presentable woman any day.’
Tory supposed he meant her, and wished she could be angry about it. ‘Does your wife know you’ve taken me out to dinner?’
‘She probably has an inkling I’m doing something I shouldn’t be. When I get home there’ll be a stream of innuendoes. She can be a sarky little tripehound at times.’
Tory peered into the lucid depths of her gin and French, trying to control the thrill she felt at hearing George Farraway defame his own wife, for her ears only.
‘I’m quite aware that you are married too, my dear,’ he said, ‘and not just because of the ring on your finger. No doubt your husband is fighting the good fight. Where is he, or aren’t you allowed to say or know?’
‘He’s a prisoner of war,’ said Tory, in a voice she didn’t like – too weak and whiney.
‘Oh.’ George clearly didn’t know quite what to say. ‘Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Out of harm’s way, I suppose, but you might not see him again till the war’s over, whenever that might be.’
‘I sometimes wish I would never see him again, or that the war will never end.’ This came out involuntarily, and she managed to bring forth some tears to excuse the apparent treachery in what she’d said. George changed tack immediately, took her delicate white hands in his (inspecting the nails closely when he thought she wasn’t looking), then uttered soothing implorations, telling her it didn’t matter if she had feelings like those. She went on: ‘I don’t mean to be so weak. It’s just that I’m afraid my husband is being turned into some sort of monster by the Nazis. I’m dreading meeting the man who will be returned to me when we win this war.’
‘Perhaps it will be sooner. Did you read about those men who escaped?’
*
When the meal came to an end, George Farraway drove her home. As he arrived at the usual spot for her disembarkation, he took her hand and squeezed it. She had not quite managed to recover her spirits since talking about Donald. George reached into a sort of little cupboard underneath the steering-wheel and produced a bottle of blue glass. She glimpsed an array of different-coloured bottles in that cupboard, a sort of on-board medicine chest.
‘Will you take this?’ he said, putting the bottle into her hand, then closing her fingers around it.
‘What is it?’
‘My nail drink. I’d like you to take it once a day, just for a week. To see what difference it makes.’
‘Is it …’
‘It’s a perfectly harmless liquid and tastes lovely. You just need to take a small amount each day, about a half a sherry glass. Will you do that for me?’
Tory took the bottle and left George’s car, saying that she would.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Back in the sitting room, she realized she hadn’t written to her children for more than a week. She rushed to the escritoire, took a sheet of writing paper and unscrewed the cap of the fountain pen just as her mother, having creakily descended the stairs, knocked on the door.
It was quite easy to explain away any unexpected lateness to Mrs Head. At the factory they were often called upon to do a spot of overtime, a couple of extra hours for anyone who wanted it, with no warning. Mrs Head was a little put out, however, because she had had another good run at the butcher’s and had procured enough good lamb to make an Irish stew, the tasting of which she had been putting off for as long as possible. She had only just eaten her share, while Tory’s was still warm in the pot. This was harder to deal with. How could she explain that she was stuffed full of venison, hadn’t room for a spoonful of anything more, and would even have trouble finding room for the half sherry glass of Mr Farraway’s nail potion, which was waiting for her in her handbag?
She came into the dining room, whose walls were covered with beads of moisture from the long, steamy hours of stewing that had taken place that afternoon. Mrs Head had already laid a place for her, and a dish of stew was waiting. Illness was the only option left, her only means of explaining her lack of appetite. She took a mouthful of the admittedly rather good stew, then put an elbow on the table and rested her forehead in her hand. Tory did hate lying.
It was, in a way, one of her biggest faults. If she could have lied more freely, more inventively, she could have written those letters to Donald, she could have enjoyed her evening with Mr Farraway more, she could even have found herself a better job than that of a gelatine packer. The whole richness of the world seemed to be available only through a doorway of half-truths and white lies, and the ‘good’ people, the people made of gold, must watch from afar, like beggars outside a banquet, spying the delights through a keyhole, while the people of lead ran amok. Tory herself wasn’t at all convinced that she was good, however. It was more that she wasn’t brave enough, ‘hadn’t the nerve’, to do anything bad. She couldn’t rid herself of a residual belief that bad things came back to you, that bad people reaped the whirlwinds of their bad deeds. Hitler, surely, was about to learn that little lesson.
Well, this was the moment, then, that Tory first lied to her mother (who hadn’t even asked why she was late). She may have concealed things from her before, but there had been no deliberate lies, and not one, such as this, that required a kind of acting out as well.
‘I’m feeling a bit queer,’ she said, as her mother returned to the dining room. ‘I’m awfully sorry, I don’t think I’ll be able to eat this …’
‘Oh,’ said Mrs Head, then suggested a range of possible treatments, all of which were contained in glass jars, not dissimilar to the one that George had given her, on the mantelpiece.
‘I think I’ll just have a lie-down in the study – I mean the sitting room – on the chaise longue. I probably shouldn’t have done that bit of overtime …’
And with this she was able to retreat with her full tummy back to the seclusion of the sitting room. Oddly enough, she did begin to feel a little bit queasy when she was on her own again. She made another attempt at writing to the children, but found it impossible to make any meaningful marks on the blank paper. It was the bottle that was stopping her, the little blue bottle that George Farraway had given her. She took it out of her bag and looked at it. Half a sherry glass, George had said. There was actually a drinks cabinet in the study which, though it contained no drink, had an array of engraved glasses suitable for just about every drink that could be imagined – beer, champagne, cocktails, whisky … She had no recollection of any of these glasses ever being used. There was a lock on the cabinet’s glass doors, and the little silver key was in the lock
as always.
Tory couldn’t avoid thinking about Alice in Wonderland as she turned it – tiny little keys, bottles of strange medicines. And the medicine did look very strange when she poured it out. A thick, creamy, pale green liquid half filled the sherry glass. She held it to her nose. Peppermint, with a faint, chalky undertone. Quite nice. Though she didn’t drink it yet. She had to look at her nails first. She put the glass down and examined them closely. Mr Farraway had seemed to read them like a jeweller might read diamonds. She always imagined that everyone’s fingernails looked the same, like hers, but now she thought about it (if she could remember) there were worlds of difference between her own pink ovals and, say, her mother’s yellower talons or Mr Farraway’s – what were his like? Why hadn’t she had the nerve to return his examination? Perhaps she would next time. As it was, she didn’t think her own nails looked too bad. What was he talking about, undernourished? But, then, perhaps he did have a point. There were little white flecks, little wisps, like good weather clouds over a pink sunset, marking some of the nails, which did represent a deficiency of some sort, though she couldn’t quite remember of what. Perhaps there was also a lack of shine. Perhaps they were a bit – what was the word? – papery. And thin? It was true, it didn’t take much effort from a pair of scissors to trim them once in a while. The question was, did she think her nails bad enough to resort to Mr Farraway’s experimental tonic?
Letters From an Unknown Woman Page 11