Letters From an Unknown Woman

by Gerard Woodward

  But she realized it was much more than that. By taking his drink she was entering into some sort of pact, not only agreeing to be a guinea pig in one of his experiments but somehow to give a part of herself to him, if only her nails. If she took the drink as directed, Mr Farraway would be entitled to examine them again. He would run them under that glistening, perceptive but lopsided eye and pass judgement on them, and if they were improved in some way – thicker, glossier, unflecked – she would owe that part of herself to him. It would be like he had made a part of her. And, as such, he would have a right to take it whenever he wanted it. He could call on her in the middle of the night and demand access to her fingernails – he could summon her presence at any moment for the examination, the perusal, the caress of her fingernails, strengthened, reborn through his own tonic.

  ‘It’s just a silly little drink,’ she said to herself, realizing that she was thinking too much into the situation, but she was contemplating this green tonic from the viewpoint of a woman who had just been wooed by a millionaire, taken to a restaurant, the luxury and opulence of which she had never before seen the like, had travelled there in a luxury car upholstered in calves’ hides, with lamps on the front bigger than her head. No drink in a dark blue fluted glass bottle proffered by the provider of such decadence could be taken lightly, could it?

  She drank. She knocked the glass back in one all-or-nothing gulp. The taste wasn’t bad, but the texture was unpleasant. It oozed down her throat in a slippery, half-alive way. There seemed to be strings in the fluid and, for a moment, she thought she would gag. The thick viscosity of the gelatine itself was responsible, she supposed. The temptation to look at her fingernails immediately was irresistible, even though she knew there could not possibly be a difference. Even after a week there couldn’t be much change, given how slowly fingernails grow. She glanced at herself in her compact mirror. Her upper lip was marked with a little Hitler moustache of green, which she quickly wiped away.

  *

  George Farraway was relentless and ingenious in his pursuit of Tory Pace. He didn’t want for resources in this enterprise, after all. He had an entire factory employing more than two hundred people at his disposal; he had his wealth, his cars, his properties. When, a few days later, Clara quietly informed Tory that Mr Farraway had asked to see her in his office and that she was to accompany her there now, she meekly acquiesced, though her heart was trembling as she followed Clara through several unsightly rooms and cobbled yards.

  When she was delivered to the owner and managing director’s office, it wasn’t quite what she’d been expecting. She had imagined oak-panelled walls and leather armchairs, portraits on the wall, big charts of profits inclining to the right. Instead, the office bore the same general air of shabby Victorian industrial leftovers as the rest of the factory. Bare brick walls, big pipe runs down the corners, a dirty window of small panes. There were the charts she had predicted and portraits – not the oil on canvas studies she had imagined, but photographs of George in his boxing days, some posed in the traditional way, the young boxer with his guard up, peering over the top of his gloves with a determined, piercing stare, and some framed press photos of George in action, landing his famous right hook square in the face of a hapless opponent.

  ‘My secretary has taken the liberty of going down with the blasted ‘flu,’ he explained, when they were alone together. ‘Didn’t think you’d mind doing a bit of filling in – you seem such a bright lass, wasted in the Packing Room.’

  ‘Don’t personal secretaries get paid rather more than packing skivvies?’ said Tory, surprising herself with her boldness.

  George laughed.

  ‘You’re not one of those blasted union people, are you? Don’t worry, I will pay you the extra, but for God’s sake start looking like a secretary, will you? Take your hair out of those nets for a start.’

  ‘I haven’t even agreed to this yet,’ said Tory, unleashing her hair. ‘I’ve never done anything in the secretarial line before.’

  ‘Oh, nothing too complicated, a well-trained chimp could do it. My word, the nail drink has taken effect already, hasn’t it? I assume you’ve started the course – otherwise why would your locks look so glossy and bright?’

  Ignoring his compliment (which, she also saw, was a statement of self-congratulation), she turned towards the photographs on the wall, walking over to examine them closely. The thing that struck her most strongly about these was how little resemblance they bore to the man sitting behind the desk. The lack of beard was perhaps the most significant difference, and the much darker hair had an oily wave to it. But a subtler difference was in the arrangement of the features: the nose of the young boxer had yet to be broken, the brows had yet to sustain their heaviest bombardment, the ears were still sharp and clearly defined.

  ‘I wouldn’t look too closely at those, my dear,’ said Mr Farraway, coming over to join her in contemplation of his younger self. ‘I hardly know that person any longer.’

  She turned her attention to the other paraphernalia, the trophies, belts and, most intriguing of all, a pair of old boxing gloves, the leather a hard, glazed deep red that, like the punchbag she had met at the gym, was crying out for her to touch it. ‘Yours, I presume?’ she said.

  He nodded in reply. ‘If you look very carefully you’ll see traces of the blood of a world champion. My greatest moment, you could say, was to lose to the greatest in the world. I cut him above his right eye. Every time I landed another punch I was splashed in his blood. He wore me down in the end, though. Jack Dempsey. A true fighter, if ever there was one. I’m sorry, have I made you feel faint?

  I keep forgetting not to take for granted the goriness of my life hitherto. Why don’t you sit down?’

  Tory was aware that she must look very pale, for she could feel the blood draining from her face. It wasn’t so much his talk of Jack Dempsey’s sanguination that bothered her but the sudden recollection of what her mother had said, that George Farraway had killed a man, and she found herself wondering if it had been with these very gloves that he had done the deed.

  She wanted to ask him, but didn’t. It was too early in their relationship for her to broach such a subject, though she was quite aware that the opportunity would arise soon. There was a grinding inevitability about what was to follow, but Tory appeased herself by imagining that nothing more than curiosity was driving her into an ever-increasing intimacy with George Farraway. If she was on the verge of betraying her husband, a British soldier and prisoner of war, and, by extension, betraying the British Army in its fight against fascism, she could console herself with the notion that it was Donald’s fault for filling her mind with the problem of how to describe the sexual act, and in allowing George his pursuit, she was coming ever closer to what she sensed would be a glorious revelation.

  That was why she allowed him to take her out that very afternoon, and for several afternoons thereafter, initially on the pretext of attending some business meetings outside the factory, in fact to be swept away in the almost-limousine out of London altogether, through places she’d never seen before, plunging down chalk escarpments, through a landscape of furrowed richness, dotted everywhere with fruit trees, hop fields, lazy, meandering rivers. Oast houses, thick-set churches with erect little towers. It was a landscape she had known to exist, and surprisingly close by, but which she had never visited. George had visited it many times. In fact, he had a house in the midst of it, a kind of country retreat, not a particularly grand place, more a classic roses-round-the-door thatched cottage that he used, she assumed, almost exclusively for illicit romantic convocations. The furniture was mostly under dust covers.

  Tory came to know this cottage rather well over the ensuing weeks. It seemed such a remote place that at first she wondered if anyone, apart from she and George, knew of its existence. There was a village nearby, but this also seemed undiscovered, with its tiny village green, which had just enough room for a knuckly sweet chestnut with a corkscrew trunk to spread it
s branches. If it wasn’t for the odd glimpsed figure turning into a doorway, she would have wondered if the village was inhabited at all. It was more like something that had been built as a reminder of what would be lost if the Germans won.

  There was a woman who looked after the cottage, a wispily grey-haired creature with a shawl and dusty boots, sometimes accompanied by tousled, rough-and-tumble children. She could sometimes be seen besoming the leaves from the path where there weren’t any leaves. It occurred to Tory that if ever she wanted to know about George’s private life, she should speak to that woman. Other than that, Tory felt the cottage was so remote that she and George could have done anything there, and no one in the world would know.

  At first George treated the afternoons at the cottage like jolly days out. He liked to take a little wicker hamper down there, filled with chilled champagne and packs of sardine sandwiches. They would pull the dust covers from a couch and chat while drinking. Tory noticed that if she drank too much champagne at the cottage, she nevertheless sobered up the moment they left. It was as though drunkenness was a property of the cottage rather than the champagne. And Tory was quite aware of what was happening.

  ‘Have you brought me here to seduce me?’ she said, emboldened by alcohol.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But there are prettier women in the factory.’

  ‘Are there?’

  ‘I’m sure of it.’ Tory said this in what she realized was a too-doubtful voice, which George took for a marvellous joke.

  ‘There you are – you’ve realized that you’re beautiful. Let’s drink to your beauty.’

  He raised his glass and chinked it against Tory’s. She didn’t seem to notice. She was thinking about what George had just said. Beautiful was a much more powerful word than pretty. Pretty was what her mother and Donald might have called her, if they’d had to. Beautiful was for famous paintings and sculptures, for poems by the great Romantic poets, for Shakespeare’s sonnets. By his use of that single word, Tory later realized, she had permitted herself to become his mistress.

  A shiver of doubt remained right up to the moment, however, when George made his move. Standing in the centre of the lowceilinged sitting room, on their third visit to the cottage, he had taken the champagne glass out of her hand, as though he was plucking the bud of a white rose, and brought his face right up to hers. She felt the bristles of his beard and experienced, at first, disappointment. The uncomfortable prickliness of it reminded her of Donald, but then, from the centre, a pulse of warmth and softness, his mouth opening into hers.

  Then he did this thing – he touched her in a very special way. It took her so by surprise that she couldn’t help uttering a little squeal. He had placed one of his hands on her behind. ‘I imagine you taking me in your manly arms, my love, and placing one of your hands on my behind.’

  ‘Pardon?’ said George, withdrawing and looking at her quizzically.

  She had not realized she had spoken out loud. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘It sounded like you were quoting something.’

  ‘Just a silly romantic novel I once read.’

  ‘Oh.’ George sounded a little doubtful, but his hand was still there. He squeezed her. Then he kissed her again. He moved down to her neck and began unbuttoning her blouse with his teeth. Tory was struggling for breath. She felt she must be blushing so much she might weep tears of blood. She couldn’t help it, only barely thinking about what was happening to her, and struggling under the influence of the champagne and other intoxications, but she blurted out, as George continued to maul her buttocks, squeezing them alternately, as though pumping the pedals of a bicycle – in the whirl of gorgeous sensations she blurted out, in little more than a whisper, ‘Not good enough! Not good enough!’

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  It was as though it was her first time. And every time thereafter with George, it was as though it was her first time. She was in a permanent state of virginity, deflowered again and again and again. Every time she saw George naked she thought, So this is what a man looks like with no clothes on – not as horrifying as she’d thought. In fact quite … pretty. Somehow that word, applied to George, gained new power. The lopsided features of George Farraway’s face were mounted on a body of burning symmetry. He appeared to be filled, just like a thoughtfully packed suitcase – there wasn’t a square inch of his body that was not crammed with useful things, though muscles and organs rather than rolled-up socks and thimbles. And perfectly balanced. Slice him in half down the middle and weigh the two halves, there wouldn’t be an ounce of difference. What had the boxers thought when their fists crumpled against this solid torso? Imagine, in return, the glove coming at you, knowing there was this much solid weight behind it. At times she was embarrassed by her admiration for George’s body, aghast that she could find beauty in such a thing. But it seemed to defy nature. Wherever she touched with her tongue she found sweetness, even in those most sour places. Whatever she expected to be soft and fragile proved to be solid and robust. Contrarily, things that seemed rigid and hard felt like petals in her hands. If a statue could come to life, it would surely feel something like this.

  She felt no guilt. She regarded the whole affair as entirely Donald’s fault. Her union with George was simply the culmination of a research project that had begun the very first time she visited a library to peruse the ‘For Adults Only’ books, to examine the language of carnal desire. As such it proved to be most productive, because George Farraway had one very special quality as a lovemaker: he liked to talk his way through the whole process. For most of the time, he described aloud what they were doing, rather like a commentator at a sporting event, sometimes in the third person, referring to himself and Tory by name, at others, taking the role of a minute observer of the female body, describing the journey through Tory’s realm as though he was a voyager in a land of giants. Most of the terms he used were new to her, as were most of the words he used to describe their various procedures, as were the procedures themselves. But they stayed in her mind as she was driven back to the factory in the late afternoons, back through the gorgeous orchards with their stiff red fruits, through the tall hop poles with their entwining wreaths, along the oozing meanders and finally back into the brick-built corpus of the city, there to finish her day’s work at the factory just as though it had been a normal day, to return home (George had avoided giving her lifts now, for reasons of discretion) to a warm, hearty meal of her mother’s latest gleanings from the new butcher, then to the study, this time, almost trembling with eagerness, to write letters to Donald, meeting his demands as requested, filling them with long descriptions that mostly used George’s rich sexual language but which, with a subtle and deft change of tense and viewpoint, became passionate, erotic missives from a wife to her imprisoned husband.

  This, she quickly realized, was a kind of magic: to redraft the real world, to replace, simply by words, one person with another. And what a funny shock that was, to have the hollow, skinny torso of Donald appear where George’s sixteen-stone bulk had been, to have his balding scalp emerge from down there, when it had been the lush grey locks of George that had first descended. By a mere play on words it could have been Donald firing these new feelings into her.

  He was getting what he asked for. More than he asked for. More than he’d bargained for. Tory had launched a spring offensive of sexual narrative, she had let him have the whole artillery of sexual expression full in the face, the dirty words falling like dirty bombs square on that little hut in the middle of a German forest. She wrote her letters in a kind of erotic, literary frenzy. Sometimes she didn’t even begin with ‘Dear Donald’ but would plunge straight into a narrative of body against body, in all its possible permutations. She didn’t think to revise or polish her letters – the words poured out of her, each letter like a successive wave in a storm at sea. She didn’t know how many she had written, but in a matter of just a few weeks she had had to visit the stationer so many times for new writing pads that she exh
austed his stock and had to go elsewhere.

  Dearest Darling Tory

  I told you you could do it, if you just put your mind to it. You are doing me proud, my love, I think your letters are the nearest a man can have to the real thing. You have found the voice I always knew you had. I always knew you had it in you, darling, to be a really dirty girl.

  Such language, Tory. Where did you learn those words? I had to ask some of the fellows here what some of them meant (though I didn’t show them your letters, you can rest assured). Some of those deeds you describe are of a kind that I think never happened in our bedroom, did they? If I had known you wanted me to do those things, or for you to do those things to me, I would willingly have obliged. I have never desired more strongly for this war to be over so that I can come home and we can bring your letters to glorious life. I am very lucky man to have such a willing wife.

  I would reply in kind, but I know your mother always opens your letters, and wouldn’t want her to have a heart attack – well, not really.

  Keep them coming Tory old girl, you dirty, dirty girl, but still my golden girl.

  Love from your man of lead

  Donald

  PS How did you know I have grown a beard?

  What would he have thought if he’d known it was the words of her lover that formed the meat of her letters? That it was another man’s words that were weaving their erotic magic? Surely that should have given her pause, she thought later. Surely that was a reason for feeling bad. If she had stepped back for a moment, seen herself from the outside (as George so often, during their lovemaking, seemed to see himself), she might have had the wider perspective, and maybe that would have been enough to make her end her affair with George Farraway.