Letters From an Unknown Woman

by Gerard Woodward

  ‘But you took him on.’

  Tory didn?t know quite what to say, so tried changing the subject. ‘Wasn’t it nice seeing all your old friends again?’

  ‘Friends? I didn’t know any of them.’

  Tom was following his thoughts through a fiercely logical progression. ‘If it was safe enough for a baby to live here, then why couldn’t we come home?’

  ‘But I thought you liked it in Upper Slaughter …’

  ‘That is not the point, Mother …’

  All the children were now busily eating the food they’d ignored during the party.

  ‘Well, one had to weigh the risks and the benefits. It was very difficult.’

  ‘Weren’t you even bombed once?’ said Albertina, in a disappointed voice.

  ‘Thankfully, no.’

  ‘I find that rather hard to believe, Mother. I do read the newspapers, you know.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘That’s what’s happened, I can see it now. This house got bombed, didn’t it, and you’ve rebuilt it exactly as it was, except that you’ve forgotten one of the rooms, and the ceilings are a bit lower?’

  To Tory’s horror, Tom’s half-joking explanation for the diminution of the house was being taken seriously by the girls.

  ‘You’re right, Tom. This isn’t the same house at all. You’ve rebuilt it, haven’t you?’

  Later, Tory heard the girls talking to each other in their bedroom.

  ‘I don’t think this is our house, do you?’

  ‘No, it’s like Tom said, it’s a different house, designed to look the same as the old one.’

  ‘But they didn’t get it right.’

  Then Tom’s deep, breaking voice was heard.

  ‘I don’t think our mother is really our mother, either. I think she was probably killed when the house was bombed, and she’s been replaced by someone from the Government so that we wouldn’t get upset.’

  To Tory’s relief, this was going too far for the girls, and they disagreed with Tom.

  ‘No, Mama’s real, and so is Mrs Head …’

  ‘But how do you know?’

  ‘Shut up, Tom. Of course Mama’s real.’

  ‘So how do you explain the kid?’

  ‘Simple. Like she said, she found him in Leicester.’

  ‘Whoever heard of someone finding a kid in Leicester? It’s obvious that the Government has sent a replacement, except this replacement has got a kid of her own …’

  ‘Well, he can’t be her own because he’s got dark hair, and none of us is dark.’

  ‘He could be wearing a wig. Let’s find out tomorrow.’

  ‘Don’t be nasty to that little boy. I think he’s a sweet thing, and you think how frightened he must be, with all us grown-ups in the house all of a sudden.’

  Tom was so persistent in his theory that his mother had been replaced that the girls became exasperated.

  ‘You be pullin’ our leg, Thomas Pace,’ said Paulette, apparently impersonating someone from Upper Slaughter. ‘You see if I don’t lash out wi’ me whupp at thee …’

  ‘I be not pulling yer leg, li’l wuzz’n, be I? Plain as day sha bain’t no mother we never knowed …’

  The conversation dissolved into giggling.

  All three children had come home with West Country accents, quite strong in Albertina’s case. They did not have to extend them very far to lampoon their erstwhile country cousins. In fact, none of the children realized their accents had changed, not until they went back to school where they were teased mercilessly. The accents were gone in less than a week.

  *

  It was Albertina who announced the arrival home of Donald Pace, though she did not at first imagine that the man she saw was her father.

  ‘There’s a soldier outside who keeps marching back and forth past the house. He’s got a sword. He keeps looking at the window.’ Tory carefully placed the teapot on the table, clutched herself, then stared at her mother.

  ‘Go on,’ said Mrs Head. ‘What are you waiting for?’

  She saw that her daughter was thinking about Branson, who was sitting in a bored sort of way at the kitchen table, arranging spoons.

  ‘Just go,’ she said.

  For a moment Tory forgot all her anxieties about Donald’s return and ran to the front door. He was there, at the end of the short path. She hardly took a moment even to look at him as he came through the gate towards her. But when she put her arms around him, it was as though she had hugged a soufflé. The bulging khaki had mostly air inside it, and then a bony little body some-where in the middle. He seemed aged, shrunken, crooked. His skin was loose around his jowls, his chest seemed scooped out, hollow, and his neck poked like a vulture’s through the wide collar of his battle blouse.

  ‘What are you doing hanging around outside, you stupid fool?’ she said. ‘Why didn’t you knock?’

  ‘Wasn’t sure you were expecting me,’ he said, and for the first time she realized that hers was one of the few houses not festooned with welcome-home banners. Even from there she could see the houses opposite, garnished with balloons and the sign ‘Welcome Home Dennis’ daubed in black paint on a bed sheet. They had been left hanging long after the soldiers had returned.

  ‘They never gave us any warning,’ said Tory. ‘I haven’t heard anything … Why didn’t you send a telegram?’

  Apart from his thinness, his cragginess, there was a moustache,almost orangeincolour,meticulouslycrafted and overmanaged so that it formed a perfectly symmetrical shape around the centre of his upper lip, like two little orange flames flaring sideways from his philtrum. It gave him an uncharacteristically rigid and disciplined air. He looked like an officer, and it was, she supposed, an officer’s moustache, and probably newly formed, carved out of the remnant of the straggly beard she imagined he had grown in the camp. As he walked up the path alongside Tory she thought for a moment that he was marching, but then realized that his leg was stiff, and that he was using a stick (how could she not have noticed?). But he seemed, by his gait and general demeanour, to be someone anxious to show that he was suffering, and that he was in no mood to accept any excuses for there not being a welcome-home banner over the door. What would it have taken, for goodness’ sake, to paint a few words on a bedsheet? Tom would have enjoyed doing that. Why hadn’t she thought of it?

  By now the others had gathered at the front door, but were watching as if from a position of safety, not quite sure what to make of the visiting stranger. The children, especially Albertina, could hardly remember their father, and when they had last seen him he certainly hadn’t looked like he did now. They were used to seeing a spiky-haired man in a paint-splattered apron, not this brass-buttoned soldier with brand new boots shining like mirrors and a barely used forage cap tucked smartly into his epaulette, and certainly not someone with an orange moustache, so neatly clipped and vivid it looked as though it had been painted on.

  Sensing that Donald was on the verge of being overwhelmed, Mrs Head ushered her grandchildren into the sitting room to allow him some space.

  ‘Is that man our father?’ said Albertina, once they were on their own.

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Paulette, who was holding the hand of a very puzzled Branson.

  ‘Has he escaped?’ said Albertina.

  ‘No,’ said Tom, his arms folded. ‘The war’s over – didn’t you hear?’

  ‘So they let him out?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They must have said, “Ok, you win, off you go, back to your own country”, then just opened the gates and let them all out.’

  They listened carefully through the ajar door to the sounds that were coming from the hallway. Very few sounds were coming from the man, and what he said they couldn’t make out. The accent seemed very strange, and he spoke in rather a whisper.

  ‘Is our father foreign?’ said Albertina.

  ‘He’s Scottish,’ said Tom, remembering.

  ‘He didn’t have a kilt on,’ said Albertina.

>   ‘I shouldn’t think the Germans let him have one.’

  *

  Suddenly, after some moments of quiet while the adults had retreated to the kitchen, the sitting-room door swung open and their grandmother appeared, looking a little anxious.

  ‘Children, your father is ready to see you now. He would like you all to line up and wait for him to come in.’

  ‘Like an inspection?’ said Tom, giving a slightly insolent halflaugh.

  ‘It’s what your father’s used to. Now, go on.’

  Mrs Head left the room and the children had to arrange themselves into a row, instinctively ordering it chronologically and from tallest down, with Tom, the eldest, nearest the door, descending through Paulette, Albertina and Branson, who could not be made to stand still and instead twined himself around Albertina.

  Then the door squeaked open, and the small, smart soldier appeared, looking a little more composed than a few minutes earlier, but his expression was serious and concerned. It was as though he was about to ask them some huge favour. There was a long silence, during which Donald walked up and down the line of children, none of whom knew what to do so just stood there, looking back at the man who was looking at them. Albertina’s eyes were fixed with wonder on the walking-stick, which she had first thought was a sword. Now and then her father would shake his head very slightly, and mutter something to himself, a quiet expression of wonder. For Tory, who watched, as instructed, from the door, the silence was unbearable. The house should be filled with the noise of celebration, she thought. There should be laughter and music, not this agonizing quietness, this pin-drop silence where Donald’s creaking boots were the only noise.

  ‘Well, well,’ he eventually murmured, giving promise of a full sentence which soon faded, continuing only with more quiet exclamations of wonder. ‘Well, well.’

  Tory could contain herself no longer and, having seen enough of the children’s worried eyes as they followed their father left to right, right to left, as he paced back and forth, she blurted out, ‘Don’t you think Tom looks so much more like a man?’

  Donald swung his head round. ‘Did I ask you to speak, woman?’

  Although he said this quietly, his voice was sharp enough to make Albertina burst into tears. Donald continued his silent inspection of the children, ignoring Albertina’s sobbing and eventually settling his gaze upon Tom. He stood before him, and Tom wondered, for a moment, if his father was expecting a salute, but instead Donald held out his hand and they shook, firmly but briefly.

  ’We must not speak, in this house, unless spoken to …’ Donald said, in a slightly embarrassed way, to Tom, but in reference to Tory, who remained distant, by the door. ‘If people speak without asking, then there is no chance to think.’

  He moved on to Paulette and Albertina, whose hands he didn’t shake. He patted their golden heads instead.

  ‘Fine girls,’ he said, as though he was appraising specimens at a country show. ‘Fine, fine girls.’ He turned to Tory. ‘Soon be able to marry these two little beauties off, eh, Tory?’ he said. ‘The young men will be forming a queue down the path before long.’

  ‘Smile at your father,’ Tory whispered urgently to the girls, but by the time they had overcome their fear enough to muster a smile, Donald’s inspection had moved on to Branson, who was hiding behind Albertina’s billowing dress.

  The child, seemingly the least troubled soul in the room, returned Donald’s gaze with a lazy sort of curiosity.

  ‘I heard about someone who came home to find his wife had given birth to a little black baby,’ said Donald, without taking his eyes off Branson, ‘and the first thing he did when he saw it was throw it out of the window. And they lived on the fourth floor …’

  ‘This is the little boy I told you about Donald, who I found on a bomb site in Leicester. Poor little thing was orphaned so I took him in. Didn’t you get my letter?’

  ‘I must have lost it among all those other stories you sent me …’ He gave her what she interpreted as a knowing glance, a glance she’d never seen on Donald’s face before, which said – I know exactly what you’ve been up to, old girl. It seemed he was just about to say something else when his attention was caught by another object in the room. ‘And what in God’s name is this?’

  He was talking about the typewriter that now sat rather stolidly on the escritoire, the Remington 748, nicknamed the Old Faithful, that she had been given by one of her mother’s friends, Mrs Harrington, who had no more use for it. Donald lurched over to it, exaggerating his limp, it seemed to Tory, and bent down to take a closer look. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it in my life,’ he said. ‘I suppose you’ll tell me you gave birth to it …’

  Apart from the wireless in the kitchen, the Remington was probably the most complicated and sophisticated machine that had ever taken up a space in the house. Tory loved it. She had been hesitant about accepting it at first, because it somehow seemed to ask too much of her. If she began picking away at the keys, filling the house with the sound of her slow, laborious clatter, then it would be expected that she would write something of value, something serious, worthy, publishable. In fact, Tory’s ambitions as a writer had come upon her almost by stealth and against her will. Through her manipulations of viewpoint and time in the gushing narratives issued by George Farraway as he satisfied himself (and her, she had to concede), she saw how whole new worlds can suddenly spring into being. Intrigued by the possibilities, she had thus embarked on some storytelling on a bigger, more ambitious scale.

  She had immersed herself in the works of Warwick Deeping, and wanted to write a novel about a family that struggles through wartime, the husband and wife separated by the necessities of war. She found that she could use her own family as a model, and that with those little shifts of perspective, alterations to time and space, a new family emerged, bearing only fragile similarities to her own. It was more as though they existed in a different country, one in which everything was foreign, yet at the same time comprehensible. They were different, but the same. She called the novel The Distance, and had written fourteen chapters, and each chapter was at least ten pages long, some a lot longer. Given that she couldn’t type, she regarded this, with much concealed pride, as a colossal achievement. Only one thing worried her. The mother of the story, a character she had named Charlotte Maugham, was going irredeemably to the bad, and there didn’t seem anything she could do to stop her.

  ‘I never thought I’d see the like of one of these in the house,’ said Donald, bending so low it was as though he was investigating the typewriter with his nose, but his remark wasn’t approving. He wasn’t in awe of the machine, as Tory had been. He seemed to regard it as some sort of invading despot. ‘Clapped-out old thing, isn’t it? When was it made?’

  Tory regretted that she had left a sheet of paper in the machine, abandoned mid-sentence. She had been working on the novel in a few stolen minutes that very morning. Donald whacked some of the keys with his right index finger, jabbing down on the letters so emphatically that the typewriter’s response seemed like a cry of pain as the typeface hit the paper and the carriage shunted one space to the left. In his carelessness he doubled some keys, and there was a jam in the barrel.

  ‘Toddlers and typewriters. You’ve been busy while the rest of us have been fighting for king and country, haven’t you, old girl?’

  Later she was able to look at what Donald had typed. The words were added to the sentence Tory had been writing, typed so heavily the black ink filled all the spaces within the letters so that they became blobs.

  don lladsshome

  It was unfortunate also that Tory had left the whole typescript on the escritoire bureau beside the typewriter. She had done a title page, which read

  THE DISTANCE

  by

  Victoria Louise Pace

  She had taken great care over it, making sure that the text was centred, double-typing the title so that it appeared darker. In fact, the title page had taken about fifteen dra
fts, each previous one ending up a crumpled ball in the wastebasket. So to have it lifted up by one corner, as though it was a sickly kitten being lifted by its ear, and have her carefully chosen words read out in a quietly mocking Scottish accent, with an awful emphasis on her rarely used middle name – it was almost too much to bear, and she was only thankful that, after the surprise of the title page, Donald felt no inclination to pursue the opening lines of Chapter One.

  It was a bright purple evening in October when Charlotte Maugham came home from her first day of working in the Glue Factory. I’m not sure I can stick this, she thought.

  She couldn’t resist that little joke in the opening sentence, but with the way the novel was beginning to take shape, it no longer seemed appropriate, and what would Donald think of such a thinly disguised reference to the gelatine factory? He would immediately think that she was writing a novel about her own family, and he would begin looking for himself in there. But all she wanted to do was to write about a woman who had the same, or similar, thoughts and feelings to her own. And even that was proving difficult. Charlotte Maugham had already worked as an artist’s model, posing nude for a sculptor who wore a red bow-tie. She even drank Dubonnet.

  But Donald replaced the title page with exaggerated care, then simply said, ‘Well, Tory Louise Pace, famous author, you’re going to have to shift all this junk somewhere else. I will be requiring this room.’

  He said he needed a downstairs room, because, with his bad leg, he could not manage the stairs. He intended to use the sitting room as his bedroom, saying he would sleep, for the moment, on the chaise longue, which was almost exactly the right length for his not very ‘longue’ body.

  The typewriter and manuscript of The Distance were removed at once. There was nowhere else in the house Tory could type. She couldn’t use the small dining-table, as it was always being used for other things, and she would have felt awkward typing in the dining room, even if most of the others were out of the house. There was a small dressing-table in her bedroom, but it was not suitable for writing at. There was really only one place for the typewriter and the novel that had slowly emerged from it to go, and that was under the bed. So that was where it went, and work on The Distance came to an abrupt stop.