Letters From an Unknown Woman

by Gerard Woodward

  ‘I was trying to.’

  ‘You should have finished it.’

  Tory was quite taken aback. It was probably the kindest thing he’d said to her since his return home. Her spirits were dampened a little by what he said next, though.

  ‘You could have had it published by now, if you’d finished it, and we could have made a bit of money.’

  So it was just the usual thing, everything coming back to how the rest of the family could support Donald in his unemployment.

  ‘I don’t suppose anyone would have published it,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Everyone’s getting published these days – have you looked in the papers? War memoirs, everyone’s writing them, and probably making quite a few bob.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know. I wanted to write about the war, but I don’t suppose my story was very interesting compared to what other people went through.’

  Donald had smiled to himself. ‘Oh, I think you had a pretty interesting time.’ Then, as though struck by a sudden thought, ‘Tory, do you still have that typewriter?’

  ‘Yes.’ She thought he was going to tell her to get it out and get on with her money-making novel. But no – he wanted it for himself.

  ‘If these people can write their war memoirs, then why can’t I? My memories are worth just as much as anyone else’s …’

  She wanted to say, Well, it would be a bit boring, wouldn’t it? I mean, you spent the entire war, apart from the first few weeks, in a prison camp, behind barbed wire. But instead, she said exactly the opposite: ‘It would be a very interesting read, I’m sure. I don’t suppose many men have written about their time as prisoners, but it would be just as interesting …’

  ‘Yes,’ said Donald, with a touch of mistrust in his voice, as though he suspected, but couldn’t be quite sure, that Tory was mocking him.

  So the Remington was brought out from under the bed for the first time in nearly seven years and the dust was blown from its keys. Tory carefully carried it downstairs and placed it on the writing bureau, exactly where it had been before.

  ‘You know you don’t have to type it out, not the first draft?’ said Tory, a little breathless.

  ‘I want to do it properly don’t I? What’s the point of writing it out with a pen then typing it all out again? All right, you can clear off now.’ He smiled to show that he was only being jokingly rude. ‘I need to get my memories sorted out.’

  But I would like to work on The Distance, Tory wanted to say. What about my book? She listened for a while, leaving the kitchen door open. There was silence for a long time, except for the rustling of paper, coming through the open doorway of the living room. And then, quite unexpectedly, even though she had been expecting it, the sharp, punching sound of a key on the typewriter being decisively pressed. Just one key, on its own, which caused Tory to marvel, for a moment, at what a horribly violent noise it was. So unlike the piano, its distant relation, the typewriter cannot take a light touch. It responds to only one level of pressure. She remembered that from her own first experiences of typing. Her very first attempt had been soft and tentative: the key had lowered but the sequence of subsequent movements, all that leverage and counterbalance, couldn’t be pushed into action. She’d had to press harder. The typewriter had demanded decisiveness and commitment. Every letter, it seemed, had to be placed with energy and resolve. There was no such hesitation in Donald’s first letter.

  There was the emphatic stabbing of the key, the throwing forward of the lever to smack against the white paper, the carriage shifting one space to the left, the lever falling back into its bed. It must have been a full thirty seconds before the second key was pushed. Another longish pause, then two keys in quick succession. Another pause, shorter this time. And so the faltering rhythm of Donald’s typing filled the house. The long pauses were gradually elided, and after a few days the keys were being pressed at a steady trickle. He was certainly busy. He could type for several hours at a time.

  Now that she was working in the lavatories, however, Tory realized she could write her novel without the aid of a typewriter, that she could simply use pen and ink, or even pencil. She had never realized quite what a pensive place a lavatory was, how conducive to thought. It wasn’t simply that it provided her with long stretches of solitude, punctuated only by the echoey clip-clop of some old girl coming down the stairs to spend a penny, but that it was a place removed from the real world in a most decisive and concise way. A bit like a nunnery, Tory imagined. It was also a good place to manage grief. Surely no one, no matter how sharply bereaved, can dwell too long on their loss when they are confronted with such sights as a public lavatory affords.

  She might only be there for three hours every day, but she was the only person who could deal with many of the problems that arose. And such problems were many and varied, from the lack of toilet paper to the jamming of money in the cigarette machine to minor plumbing difficulties. She could even cope now with an overflowing cistern. And to think she had been afraid of coming down here for all those years, that it had taken the death of her son to enable her to overcome such fears. She even liked to spend time in the exact cubicle of her childhood fright, sitting on the seat imagining her six-year-old self sweating in panic at the big bolted door. It hadn’t changed since then, in nearly forty years. Nothing down there had changed, but had been silently waiting for her return.

  One day, as she left the public lavatory, passing the small brass sign that said ‘PUBLIC LAVATORY’ at the top of the steps, she could not help but amuse herself by covering up the first ten letters with her gloved hand and forearm, to leave just ‘TORY’ exposed.

  And when she re-emerged into the everyday world of shops and daylight, everything seemed lighter and sillier than it had before, but in the most affirmative way. The soaring civic buildings of the square seemed made of lace – even the town hall looked as if it was about to launch itself into the sky. Though she always rather dreaded that her masculine counterpart from the Gents would emerge at precisely the same time and that they should, with due solemnity, do some symmetrical bowing and hat-tipping to each other before walking off in opposite directions. In fact, she very rarely even saw the male attendant, although she had been told to call on him in any emergency (she prayed there would never be one – how could she ever be expected to set foot in that underground world of dripping male members?). An emergency, she soon realized, usually took only one form: that of the lock-in, when some frazzled dame would either jam or break the bolt on the inside of the cubicle, or else render herself incapacitated, would faint, have a hot flush or, more rarely, die.

  ‘A very high proportion of deaths occur on the lavatory,’ Tom had once said, during a phase of hypochondria.

  ‘Do they?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I suppose you’re going to tell me why.’

  ‘Because the symptoms that are associated with a catastrophic internal disorder that may cause sudden death, such as a heart-attack or aortic embolism, are very similar to feelings associated with an urgent need to evacuate the bowels.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes.’

  It had worried Tory for weeks. Every time she felt an urge to go to the lavatory, she wondered if she was about to die. Going to the privy had felt like the long walk to the guillotine. What a way to die – for one’s last moments on earth to be spent in contemplation of the WC, collapsing forward, dead on the floor with one’s drawers around one’s ankles.

  But it was true. She had wondered why her predecessor had made a point of telling her to use the public telephone box that was not ten yards from the entrance to the lavatories, in case of a real emergency, but within a month of starting she was having to do just that, dealing with her first fatality. She had learnt that a lock-in can usually be solved with a step-ladder and a broomstick, but not this time. It was a woman of rotund anatomy and roseate complexion, and she hadn’t even got as far as lowering her bloomers. She was sitting on the lowered lid,
fully clothed, slumped sideways against the cubicle wall, her plump hands gathered in her lap in a way that seemed rather contrite and humble, like a child in church. When Tory phoned for the ambulance it surprised her that the operator seemed familiar with the public conveniences and, indeed, so did the ambulance men, when they arrived. A grinning couple of chaps with their caps set back on their heads, as chirpy as milkmen. Down in the lavatory they found the dead woman and searched for a pulse. One of the men, after they’d heaved the woman on to a stretcher, took the opportunity to flirt with Tory.

  ‘Hullo, you don’t look like the usual sort we find down here. When are you knocking off ?’

  Tory was furious with herself for blushing at this (think of running water, her mother had said, and the colour will go), which only encouraged the ambulance man, until he was beckoned on by his colleague, who asked him if he wouldn’t mind taking the other end of the stretcher. ‘Oh, I do hate doing the below-grounds. Why do they have to build these places underground?’

  It was as though it was part of a regular routine, as though once a month they called to collect a dead woman. But, in fact, it was almost the last time someone died in the Ladies’ lavatories on her shift.

  Should she send Charlotte Maugham to do the same work? Tory thought she might as well, though to give it a twist she had her heroine taking a job in the Gents. Tory was thrilled at the turn her novel had taken: she was quite sure that no English novel had ever contained a heroine who was an attendant in any sort of lavatory, let alone a male one. Though she supposed such a novel might have been written by a member of the Communist Writers Committee of the Soviet Union, or whatever it was called, celebrating the heroic struggle of a urinal-wiping, headscarved babushka. Well, hers would be a decadent version of that. She wrote the scene of Charlotte’s first day, in which a red-faced colonel enters the clammy rooms below ground and reddens further at the sight of Charlotte in her headscarf and overall (neither of which could quite conceal her understated beauty). He makes to turn around, believing himself in the wrong place, then notices the urinals, at which other men are already standing.

  ‘I – I— What is the meaning of this outrage?’

  ‘Outrage? This is 1949. Haven’t you heard of socialism?’

  After some months in the job she came to find the presence of males in the Ladies a most unwelcome intrusion. In fact, it was more like a distortion of reality. When old Clive made his occasional visits to check on some plumbing malfunction, it was as though something impossible had happened: a baggy-eyed, grey-moustachioed man, sagging in every aspect of his being, entering this female space, a space more feminine than any other in the world, a place chemically feminine.

  One quiet afternoon a scream brought her from her office. A woman in artificial fur with a leopardprint headscarf and long mauve gloves was standing by the door of a stall, leaning one hand against it for support, the other struggling to find a handkerchief in her deep pocket, which she then brought to her nose. She looked at Tory as she approached, her face zigzagged with distress.

  ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ Tory asked.

  Shaking her head, the woman moved to the washstands, her handkerchief still to her face, then gestured with her other hand towards the stalls. ‘In there,’ she gasped. ‘Oh dear …’

  Tory, expecting that she was about to discover the second dead body of her career, cautiously opened the heavy wooden door, only to find the stall within empty. There was a strong smell, however, of an unusual provenance. Not the usual stink of defecation, something more laden and weighty. As she approached the pan of the lavatory, she had an inkling of what had happened. The bowl was filled with red, and in the middle of it a translucent, curled form, maybe limbed, she couldn’t be sure. She stepped back, trying to keep calm. The woman in furs had gone, saying she needed air. When Clive arrived, he dealt with the problem by lighting a rolled-up newspaper and holding it before him as he entered the cubicle, then a horrible churning sound, like a paddle-wheel plying the Mississippi, before he emerged again, more saggy than ever, mumbling something about the jobs he had to do.

  ‘Some woman’s dropped her guts down the lavatory,’ he said, shuffling off, shocking a lady as she entered.

  That was the second death she had witnessed in the Ladies, though this time of the smallest, saddest kind, and when she went home that evening, she couldn’t help but feel that she was contaminating her own home with the colour and smell of death. It’s not fair of me, she thought, to bring these things back to a house that is still in mourning. But what things? Why did she have the curious feeling, when she arrived home, that she had dragged a sack behind her all the way? In fact, she carried nothing. Her overalls and headscarf hung on a little brass hook in the underground office and were left there.

  Mrs Head, at first adamant that Tory should not even enter the precincts of the kitchen until she had washed herself thoroughly, had become a little more relaxed recently, no longer insisting on the full bath. But now it was Tory who felt she needed purifying, and could not even enter the dining room but remained in the hall for some time, looking at herself in the hallway mirror, whose ugly, coffin-layered shape was such an unkind frame for her face. Then came the sound of a typewriter key, like a distant gunshot.

  *

  But in other ways the job at the lavatories continued to have a cleansing effect. Why was it that proximity to so much that was awful about human beings, tending to the far, rarely visited end of the deglutitive experience, should feel so nourishing? Then she realized. Everything was being washed away. It didn’t matter how much dirt was produced, the continual flushing of the cisterns, the nod of their ballcock levers like an affirmative peck of a lavatory bird, was a constant reminder that most things, no matter how dark, malodorous, vile or inhuman, can be washed away in a stream of clear water and never be seen again. That was why (she recalled) the people had looked so bright on emerging from the lavatory, when she had observed them that day years ago, so brisk and bright as they re-emerged into the fresh air. They had been given a new lease.

  The woman in artificial furs came back.

  ‘I want to thank you.’

  Tory almost jumped out of her chair: she was unused to people speaking directly to her when she was alone in her office and she had been deeply absorbed in her novel at the time.

  The woman went on, in a quieter tone, ‘I’m sorry, did I frighten you?’

  It had been a week since the blood incident, and Tory had not seen her before or since, up until this moment. ‘No, I was just …’

  ‘Crikey. I didn’t realize being a lavatory attendant involved so much paperwork.’

  Tory’s little office was decked with pages of The Distance, Draft One. The typescript, now vigorously annotated in red and brutally scored so that barely a paragraph survived, was spread out, chapter by chapter, across the floor at the back. Draft Two, entirely handwritten on loose leaves (of several different sizes), was over-spilling from an upturned crate along the side wall. Her desk was cluttered with the third draft, again handwritten, using a specially purchased fountain pen with a marbled shaft and gold-plated nib that blotted freely over her copy.

  Tory looked up, not quite knowing what to say. Her office was never visited, and so never had to be explained. The woman, still in her leopardprint headscarf, took a step back, as if suddenly realizing she was encroaching. Tory took a moment to observe her. She was very beautiful, in a modishly regal sort of way; she had the tapered, streamlined look that was beginning to prevail. She wouldn’t have looked out of place with a cigarette holder between her lips, and Tory kept thinking she was wearing jewellery, but every time she tried to look directly at her necklace or earrings, they weren’t there.

  ‘Well, like I said, I just wanted to thank you for your kindness.’

  ‘I didn’t really do anything,’ Tory said, once she’d collected herself.

  ‘Oh, I think you did. I think I would have fainted if you hadn’t come over to me. It was very kind o
f you, to wipe my brow like that …’

  ‘Wipe your brow?’

  ‘Yes. Perhaps you’ve forgotten. You were such a kind dear, dampening those paper towels and then applying them to my fore-head.’

  Oh, well, if that was what the woman remembered, perhaps Tory had done such a thing. ‘Think nothing of it,’ she said.

  The woman dared start forward again, placing her foot across the threshold.

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t stand the sight of blood, you see. I can hardly even say the word. I’ve always felt ashamed of the fact, especially as my mother was a nurse.’

  ‘Well, it was enough to make anyone feel giddy …’

  ‘But not you. I suppose you’re toughened against things like that. I suppose your job makes you a little bit like a nurse.’

  A toilet flushed, and Tory blushed. A bolt was emphatically drawn. ‘I wouldn’t say that.’

  ‘I must say, I’ve never seen an attendant quite like you before.’

  This was the third or fourth time such an observation had been made, and Tory was beginning to find it a little tiresome. How was she supposed to respond, after all – with an apology? With a promise to be someone else? But coming from this elegant young woman’s lips (the first time a female had made the observation), Tory felt rather flattered. ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, not that I’m a professional observer of lavatory attendants, but they tend to be of a similar type – a certain age and … deportment, shall we say? Now I’m going to sound like a terrible snob, and you’ll hate me.’

  The woman was well-spoken, prosperous-looking, but with a timidity, self-deprecation and deference towards Tory the Lavatory Attendant that Tory herself found utterly compelling.

  ‘The very fact that we’re having this conversation is proof that you’re an unusual lavatory attendant,’ she continued. ‘I’ve never had a conversation with a lavatory attendant before in my life.’

  ‘Perhaps you’ve never tried.’

  ‘Well, that’s probably true, but then it takes two people to have a conversation. You don’t mind me talking to you, do you?’