Letters From an Unknown Woman

by Gerard Woodward

  What alternative was there for her to hope for? Did she really crave victory for the Nazis, if it would save her from the awfulness of having to face Donald? Did she really long for the end of civilization as a means to rescue her from social embarrassment? Once or twice, Tory confessed to herself, she thought that she did. Or at least not victory, because that might also lead to eventual reunion, albeit under a different regime. Instead she longed for the indefinite prolongation of the war, that it would never end. Apart from the difficulty of having to explain her child, what sort of man was Donald Pace now? She had a vision of the returning soldier carrying her upstairs, salivating like a dog, stripping her and throwing her on the bed and not letting her go until four years of stored lust had been expended in one interminable coital event. Then, spent, lifting his red face from her body, he would suddenly remember that there was one more child in the house than before. Explain that, please, wife!

  *

  Tory had managed to keep her pregnancy secret from all but her mother, and she had managed to conceal it even from her until the sixth month. Then suddenly Mrs Head was all for poor Donald, and how he would feel coming home from however many years he was to spend in captivity to find that his wife had produced a child in his absence. ‘I must have known about this in the back of my mind for weeks, Tory Pace, but was unable to believe it. I heard you retching in the mornings, I saw your abdomen swell, but nothing could have persuaded me that you were the sort of woman capable of such a thing, such a low, sordid, unchivalrous crime …’ Indeed, so unlikely did Tory’s capacity for adultery seem, Mrs Head couldn’t help feeling that her daughter had conceived her child by post. But what an odd word to use, ‘unchivalrous’, Tory thought, as though she had betrayed both mankind and womankind in one single action.

  George Farraway had offered to have the thing destroyed. He knew a doctor, a real, qualified doctor, a Harley Street man, not some back-street wise woman, who could do the whole thing, she’d never know it had happened, no questions asked, he wouldn’t even know her name. If she didn’t take up this offer, she was to understand that George would play no further part in the child’s life, and that she must not come to him for support. He said it with the measured, calculated tones of someone who’d had to deal with similar situations before, wagging a plump pink finger in front of her face, taking charge of the newly formed life as though it was just another item on the production line. Oh, she had been such a fool. He probably had an account with that Harley Street abortionist. God knew how many little lives he’d paid to be flushed away into the sewers of Fitzrovia. It was her choice, he had said. But there had never been any choice available in Tory’s mind. All kinds of wrongnesses had set this new life going; the least she could do now was to give it the best possible chance of happiness. At the same time she could not see any means by which Branson’s existence could be established in such a way that Donald, on his return home from his terrible ordeal, would not be heartbroken.

  This was Mrs Head’s main concern as well. ‘If only we could have you sent away somewhere …’ she said.

  ‘Away?’

  ‘Just so that you could have the baby out of the range of prying eyes and the Peter Street gossips, then bring it home when it’s three months old, saying you’d found it on a bomb site.’

  Tory couldn’t help laughing. ‘Mother, your capacity for deception is extraordinary.’

  But it could work, Tory supposed. Mrs Head said she would cover with a story of Tory being away, staying with friends up north. Didn’t she have connections up there somewhere? One of her old school friends had moved to Leicester, hadn’t she? Yes, Mary Frost, twenty years ago; she’d married a sign-writer and moved to Leicester, never to be heard of again. There was your cover. But Tory couldn’t stay with Mary – she didn’t even have her address. No, Mrs Head said, Mary could just be the cover. We could send you somewhere else. But where? Of course, that was the problem. A mother-and-baby home was tentatively suggested, one of those horrible places where little harlots go, the hapless girls who’ve fallen pregnant under age and out of wedlock. It was absurd, though. They don’t take middle-aged women in places like those. That’s what I mean, said Mrs Head, there’s nowhere to send you.

  Tory was so keen on the idea of going away that the solution soon presented itself to her. George Farraway’s cottage, the little Wealden hideaway. The place where this little thing had been conceived. Now it could be born there as well.

  George was not pleased. Only a few days before he had been trying to persuade her to visit his man in Harley Street. Now he was being expected not only to agree to his child’s existence but to provide shelter and comfort for its mother and the thing itself for the first few weeks of its unwanted life.

  ‘Perhaps you would like me to tell your wife about it,’ she said. ‘The woman whose cookery skills you have so often mocked would, I am sure, like to know what you yourself have cooked up.’

  ‘What an ugly turn of phrase you have, my dear …’

  But he agreed, and within days Tory was a resident of the Wealden cottage.

  *

  It was the best time of year to be there. She moved down in March to find the lawns and verges steeped in daffodils. Then the little wood at the back, visible from the bedroom window, soon became brilliant with bluebells. She stayed there six months in all. She saw the swallows arrive to build their daub and wattle under the eaves, she heard the cuckoos all day, and the nightingales at night, she watched the puffy roses filling the southern wall, and rabbits burrowing in the flowerbeds. She was looked after by the woman she’d seen in the distance before, the blowsy, rosy woman who minded the cottage, with her somersaulting children. She turned out to be a delightful soul, a dreamy Scandinavian, an outsider like herself. Tory never asked how she had ended up in the Weald of Kent, because she asked no questions about Tory – at least none of the prying kind. She kept her stocked up with eggs, milk, butter, cream and bread. Fresh off the land, the food there was abundant and unrestricted. She wrote to her mother to tell her of how she had grown quite used to eating rabbit. Be careful your child isn’t born with long ears, Mrs Head replied.

  Tory got along well with the children, Jennifer and Raymond, who did much of the eggs-and-milk delivering. Jennifer had something of Albertina’s sweetness, and although they acted in part as a welcome substitute, they made Tory miss her own children even more. There was a doctor in the village as well, who took Tory under his tired old wing. Of George she saw nothing, though it was presumably he who was paying for all the supplies and care. If she mentioned him to the doctor or to Jorinda, they smiled in knowing ways. Tory tried, once, to ascertain from Jorinda how much of a Lothario George was – expecting to hear that his cottage was in constant use as a hideaway for his fancy women – but was surprised to learn that he very rarely used it these days.

  ‘They bought it in 1931, and lived here two summers, but Mrs Farraway – would you believe it? – she finds she gets the sneezes. Hay fever. She didn’t know before, lived in the city all her life. But this isn’t the place to be if you suffer from sneezing,’ she tittered, ‘not with the meadow just over the lane. So she never comes now. Not been here for over a decade. Just as well, really. A woman like that does look strange in the countryside, like she doesn’t belong.’

  ‘I’m surprised Mr Farraway keeps the cottage on,’ said Tory.

  ‘Well, he can’t sell it. He’s tried often enough, but no one wants to buy a cottage out here in the middle of nowhere, not when there’s no land attached – or not much.’

  The image of the runny-nosed Mrs Farraway, with her reputed film-star looks, sneezing and weeping under the assault of grasses and sedges, kept Tory sustained for quite some time, and she relished her own ability to sniff the country air and feel nothing but the nothingness of it. It was a hot, dry, dusty summer as well. The trees turned pale and began sagging by July. Tory wrote constant letters to Mrs Head and the children. She enclosed her letters for Tom, Paulette and Alber
tina with Mrs Head’s to be forwarded. She didn’t want to have to explain a strange postmark, and she would wait until the war was over to let them know about the new member of the family. London had been spared bombing raids for more than a year, and Mrs Head’s letters rarely contained any real news. Things were almost starting to feel normal, although the blackout was still rigidly enforced, just in case. There was still nothing to be had in the shops.

  At times Tory felt desperately homesick, and as her pregnancy approached full term, she began to feel scared as well. There was a good midwife who would look after her, the doctor was on hand, and Jorinda, who was the sort of person one assumed knew how to deliver a baby, but still Tory felt that perhaps she should go home, have the baby in Peter Street and let the gossips do their worst. But no, her deceit had to be followed through. It was just a pity, she felt, that she could only think of saving her marriage by telling lies.

  In the end Tory had little memory of her labour. After twelve hours of gradually rising panic, her waters broke with the pop and gush of a Roman candle. For some reason she remembered that eleven large white towels were used in the process of her labour. The baby was so quiet when he emerged that everyone thought something was wrong. He didn’t come out with the piercing cries she remembered from her other children. Instead he just uttered a little sigh, turned over and went to sleep.

  *

  It seemed to work. No one asked too many difficult questions when she returned to Peter Street. The neighbours, Mrs Wilson and Mrs Allen, seemed to accept her story, though Mrs Head was now on rather frosty terms with Mrs Allen, ever since she had planted a forsythia in the one space that had acted as a chatting gap in the garden wall. Mrs Head was always waiting for the moment when Mrs Allen would trim this plant back, but to her indignation she had let it grow, so that, season by season, their over-the-wall conversations became harder and harder to sustain, until eventually they had stopped as the forsythia reached maturity. Well, if she isn’t going to cut it back I’m not going to go out there to talk to a bush … In fact, Tory’s tale of her rescuing Branson from the rubble of a Leicester suburb garnered enormous sympathy, and Tory elaborated, spontaneously sometimes, on the details of his survival and discovery, how firemen had heard him crying beneath the rubble, how no one could be sure whose he was, because no one knew of a baby living among the buildings that had been bombed, and all the children had been evacuated anyway. And then there were lots of slow noddings and slow winkings, that perhaps the existence of the ‘poor little mite’ was meant to be a secret, perhaps he was an indiscretion that was meant to be kept in the dark. They were getting the right idea. Tory’s fictionalization of her baby’s early life was becoming dangerously convoluted. Now it seemed he was the secret love child of an imagined Leicester harlot, a chambermaid perhaps, confined to a basement for the sake of the family’s reputation, emerging from the rubble like a gurgling phoenix when the bombs had fallen. No one else had known what to do with him. In the confusion and despair of the rescue party, Tory had just happened to claim him. She was a respectable-looking woman. The police and ambulance people didn’t seem to give it a second thought. She would look after him. If there were any surviving relations of the mother (if such a person could ever be identified), she was sure to seek them out.

  ‘But you’ll go back and look for his mother’s people when the war’s over, won’t you, dear?’ said Mrs Wilson, over the other wall.

  ‘I’m sure they’d like to know if he’s all right.’

  ‘Oh, of course, I’ll certainly do that,’ said Tory, aware now of how her deceitfulness not only involved her and Donald but her and the entire world. The lies had to reach as far as ever any knowledge of Branson extended.

  If it ever extended as far as the prisoner-of-war camps that Donald occupied, she was not sure. She had written to him several times to tell him about Branson, her foundling adopted baby, but he had made no acknowledgement of the news. Their correspondence had trailed off since her pregnancy, and now she wasn’t even sure which camp he was in. So it was left to Tory to speculate on Donald’s likely reaction.

  ‘Please give him George’s eyes, please give him George’s eyes’, Tory would whisper to herself, as she looked into her baby’s face, wondering who he would take after, Mr Farraway or herself. Since Donald had never seen Mr George Farraway, it wouldn’t matter if Branson turned out to be his double, but any likeness to herself was liable to betray her as a most wretched liar. Finally, when Branson’s baby blue eyes faded into the sombre browns of Mr George Farraway’s and not the mossy greens of her own, Tory could breathe a little more easily. She was not aware of any other giveaways as to her identity as Branson’s mother and, in fact, Tory was delighted to see that, by the age of two, Branson Pace was definitely of the Farraway mould, a tough-looking thing, lurching around the place, staring at things with a big square face, picking things up with big square hands.

  As a baby he had been frighteningly quiet. It was almost as though he knew he shouldn’t be there. He rarely cried, but he often looked as though he was about to, pouting with misery, thrusting out his lower lip at everything around him. He seemed unbearably disappointed with the world, and Tory sometimes felt sorry for bringing him into it. She breastfed him in secret, hiding from neighbours any clue that she might be lactating. In the darkened bedroom the child would take the nipple with a sigh, then look up at her faintly accusingly, as if to say, Is this the best you’ve got?

  Tory’s other children had accepted her story of Branson’s arrival into their family with a heartstopping lack of hesitation. Paulette and Albertina, at least, showed no sign that they thought their mother might be lying, and this made her cry, tearlessly and silently.

  She had shed many tears when she went to Upper Slaughter to fetch them home at the end of the war. She had opted against visiting them during their evacuation, apart from that one weekend six months after their departure. The visit had been so difficult and awkward, the ending of it so sad (for her, at least, though the apparent lack of sorrow in her children had been one of the things that had made it so difficult), that she had decided against repeating the experience. She watched their receding figures on the platform at Moreton-in-Marsh, engulfed by sulphurous clouds from the little steam train, and she had not seen them since, instead trying to make up for her absence with her copious letter-writing. So when she returned to Upper Slaughter in May 1945, she was quite terrified that the children would not recognize her, or she them. And she didn’t at first.

  They had changed in proportion to their respective ages. Tom, the eldest, had altered the least, still with his intellectual hair, parted at the side and shaved at the back, and with his heavy, black-rimmed glasses. He shook his mother’s hand without meeting her eye, examining the toes of his shoes instead. Paulette had become a woman, almost, with a full, downy face and flowing golden hair, and a buttoned-up bosom beneath her countrywoman’s coat. Albertina, at least, had the vestiges of childhood. She was twelve now, but still had a little girl’s knock-knees and ribbons in her plaited hair.

  ‘I suppose you want us to kiss you,’ said Tom, wiping an imaginary piece of grit from his eye, which caused his spectacles to glance sideways.

  ‘No,’ said Tory, laughing, ‘I want to kiss you.’ And she took him and hugged him and kissed his freckled cheek, and was shocked by the faintest hint of whiskers there. She did the same with her daughters, who responded with respectable hugs in turn. They were crying by the time they got on the train, but not for joy. They were sad to be leaving their home.

  They were sullen and disappointed when they arrived at Peter Street. Branson had been left there in the care of Mrs Head.

  ‘I want you to meet your adopted brother, children. Branson is a little boy I found in Leicester. He was a baby then, but his family had been killed in an air raid.’ Tom showed not the least interest in the boy, apart from expressing concern about where he was going to sleep.

  ‘Well, he can share a room with you, To
m. I will share with Mrs Head, and the girls can have a room to themselves.’

  This seemed like a good arrangement, and no one asked what would happen when and if their father came home.

  *

  It seemed to take the children a long time to settle back into their old lives. Tory would catch Paulette looking wistfully out of the back-door window at the concrete yard. She didn’t say as much, but Tory could see that she was remembering the enormous gardens at Upper Slaughter, with their adjacent orchards and paddocks. What a prison a place like Peter Street must seem to her, she thought.

  Then, one morning, Tom said to his mother, ‘Has this house got smaller, Mama?’

  ‘No, Tom. You’ve got bigger.’

  ‘But there were more rooms …’

  ‘No, the same number as before.’

  ‘Didn’t there used to be grass in the garden?’

  ‘A long time ago, yes. But Daddy put cement down, and paving stones when you were about six years old.’

  Tory had tried to organize a party for the children, inviting some of their old friends from before the war. It had been an awkward affair, because none of the children remembered each other or, if they did, were frightened by how they’d changed. Only one boy seemed untroubled by the changes, a golden-haired angelfaced but noisy child who helped himself to all the food (there wasn’t a lot), and ended up pulling Paulette’s hair.

  Afterwards, as she cleared away the mess of cake, Tom spoke to her, as though the representative of her three children. ‘Why didn’t you tell us you’d adopted a baby?’

  ‘I don’t know, Tom. I suppose I thought you might be worried …’

  ‘But why wasn’t he evacuated like us?’

  ‘Yes, he would have loved the horses.’ Albertina said this through a full mouth.

  ‘That’s a nice thought, Albertina – and I’m glad you seem to have got your appetite now your friends have gone. I suppose the trouble was that he was just a baby when I found him. I don’t think anyone could have been found in your village to take on a little baby …’