Letters From an Unknown Woman

by Gerard Woodward

  *

  Business from then on was difficult for George. He escaped prosecution but was given a strong warning about his training practices. He sold the gelatine factory to an American firm, but had enough money invested elsewhere to save him from disaster and, indeed, he was able now to devote himself entirely to the training of young boxers. He bought new premises on the Dartford road. A fully equipped, brand-new gym. He invested in some of the holiday-camp businesses that were springing up in the coastal resorts.

  He used the Wealden cottage as a warehouse to store nearly a million protein pills, enough to feed the entire population of the county of Kent for three days.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  After what felt like years of slow, steady progress, the heavy mechanical stutter of Donald’s typing came to an end. It was some time before anyone noticed. Tory wasn’t sure how many days it was before she suddenly became aware of the new silence at the back of their lives, as sweet and as even as a layer of fresh snow.

  There was no other indication that Donald’s work was finished. Tory wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting – perhaps that her husband would stagger from the room that had become known as Daddy’s Study with a pile of papers in his arms and slam them on the dining-table, saying, ‘There you are, the product of all that work – My War Memoirs, The Keys To Freedom.’

  But nothing like that happened. Mrs Head claimed to have known all along that the typing had stopped, and that the type-writer had been silent for some days.

  ‘He has either finished his book or broken his typewriter,’ she said.

  Tory flinched at the word ‘his’. ‘Oh, I’m sure he’s finished it. If he had broken the typewriter, we would know about it. He would have made the same sort of fuss he makes when he runs out of paper or ribbon, gets us all in a panic to go into town to replenish his stock. I should think the typewriter breaking down would have caused havoc in the house.’

  ‘Well, if he’s finished his book, perhaps he’ll let us read it.’

  Yes, surely now Donald would allow his memoirs to be read. She looked forward to the evocations of barbed wire and sandy compounds, the thoughtful depiction of confinement and its frustrations, the soldiers longing to fight or to be home with their loved ones. It would be so important for Branson and the girls to know what their father had gone through, and why he was the man he had been when he came back.

  Donald emerged from his study and limped through the dining room on his way to the yard. At first it seemed he would make this journey in his usual silence, but by the door he paused and turned, as if about to make an announcement. ‘You know, I’ve been thinking. It’s about time we had a television set in this wee house.’

  The eyes of the children brightened.

  ‘I don’t think we could afford one of those,’ said Mrs Head.

  ‘Well, perhaps you won’t have to afford one,’ said Donald.

  ‘Why? Have you come into some money?’

  Donald unfolded the newspaper he’d been holding under his arm. ‘Wright’s, the electrical shop on the high street. They’re renting them for two shillings a week.’

  Tory came straight out with the question: ‘Donald, have you finished your book?’

  ‘Two shillings a week.’ He avoided Tory’s eyes, and was looking, for some reason, at Mrs Head, who in turn was looking at the bulrushes that had recently been installed in a vase on the dresser. Mrs Head was the least likely candidate for an ally in his campaign for a television. ‘And with the coronation coming up, we wouldn’t want to miss the crowning of the new Queen of England, would we?’

  ‘I don’t think we should be allowed to have a queen,’ said Branson, who had recently taken to teasing his older sisters. ‘It should be a “kings only” country.’

  The sisters, who lately seemed much older than their years and had even acquired boyfriends, didn’t rise to his bait.

  ‘Donald, I asked you a question.’

  He dropped his paper in exasperation. ‘What are you asking me about my book for when I’ve got pressing matters on my mind like when we’re going to get a television so we can watch the beautiful Princess Elizabeth be made queen of this country?’

  ‘But have you finished it?’

  ‘Well, as a matter of fact, I have.’

  ‘When can I read it?’

  ‘That will be rather difficult, dear Tory, because I have already passed the manuscript on to my agent.’

  ‘You’ve got an agent?’

  Even Mrs Head was drawn away from her contemplation of the bulrushes by this news.

  ‘Of course. Every author has to have an agent.’

  ‘But who is he?’

  ‘He is none other than Mr Harry Wilde, former prisoner of war, and former war poet.’

  It was noticeable that everyone, including the children, sank back into their chairs at this information.

  ‘Oh, Donald, I thought you meant you’d got a proper agent.’

  ‘Mr Harry Wilde is a man with very good connections. He is an educated man and a literary man. Put those three things together and you have got an agent.’

  Tory thought otherwise. She did not like Mr Harry Wilde at all. On the few occasions that they had met (he was a frequent visitor to the house, though rarely made himself known to anyone other than Donald, who seemed to hide him away, like some sort of contraband), she had thought him sly and slippery and very condescending. He seemed to despise the female sex, as she could tell just by the way he looked at her. And she remembered now that she had overheard them making lewd remarks once about the princesses, whose pictures must have been in the paper.

  There had been only one occasion when they had ever talked at any length, and that was when Harry Wilde had called while Donald was out and had accepted Tory’s grudging invitation for him to come inside and wait. To her surprise, instead of waiting alone in the study as she would have expected, he had come through to the dining room and sat himself at the table.

  She had known that Wilde had been assisting Donald with his book. Donald had only half jokingly referred to Mr Harry Wilde as his editor. They certainly seemed to spend hours together in the study, presumably going through what Donald had written. If she listened carefully, she could hear papers rustling and comments being made, though very quietly, and when she could interpret something it seemed of the trivial sort – ‘Do you think we’ve spelt this right, Harry?’

  ‘So, you’re helping my husband with his book?’ she said to him, on this occasion.

  ‘I’m offering my services, such as they may be, to my friend and brother-in-arms, yes.’

  ‘He doesn’t say much about it to me, you know.’

  ‘I’m not surprised.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You husband’s memoir does contain some rather – how shall I put it? – unsavoury material.’

  ‘Unsavoury?’

  ‘Or perhaps visceral would be a better word.’

  Tory paused. She wasn’t a hundred per cent sure she knew what the word meant.

  Mr Harry Wilde could see this, and enjoyed her uncertainty. ‘If you understand what I mean.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We want to make it a straightforward, honest and open account, and that means not shying away from the details.’

  ‘I see. And I suppose you think I’m too fragile to read such details.’

  ‘Well, I would have thought so, yes.’

  This was before Tory had started working at the public lavatories.

  ‘We had our share of ‘visceral’ moments here on the home front, you know.’ The penny had suddenly dropped for her, and she enjoyed throwing the word back at this paper-thin man of letters. His face visibly dropped, scarcely less so than if she had lobbed a little piece of offal at him. ‘Yes, a bomb landed on the butcher’s just round the corner from here. I suspect we saw more blood than Donald did in most of his time as a PoW.’

  ‘I wouldn’t bank on that, my dear.’

  ‘Did you ever see his pi
ano?’

  ‘Piano?’

  ‘Yes, the piano he made in the camp. He told me all about that. One of the few things he was willing to talk about.’

  Mr Harry Wilde was obviously having trouble recalling the instrument, helping to confirm Tory in her belief that he had never taken up arms in his life, let alone been an inmate of a prisoner-of-war camp.

  ‘Surely it must take up a large part of Donald’s memoirs, making that piano, finding the glue, then killing that poor Nazi cat …’

  Wilde looked at her as though she was a mad woman, his mouth hanging slightly open. Without changing his expression he somehow managed to say, ‘Yes, of course. The piano.’

  ‘I suppose lots of the men filled their time with things like that, didn’t they? Did you make anything?’

  Wilde crossed his legs, evidently feeling uncomfortable. ‘Well, as a matter of fact, yes. I made a bird table.’

  ‘That can’t have taken long.’

  ‘Out of matchsticks.’

  ‘That sounds a little more impressive.’

  ‘My only mistake was to use live ones. Swan Vestas. Unfortunately, when a Nazi blackbird with a particularly abrasive beak landed and started pecking at the seed, the whole thing went up like a firework, toasting several Nazi sparrows.’

  ‘I see you must take me for a fool, if you think I would believe such a story.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  Harry Wilde was annoyingly handsome, though in a way more suited to his former Nazi captors: he looked like a paragon of Aryan breeding, with blue eyes and golden hair. Curls fluttered across his forehead, to be swept back with a single finger. His moustache was small, hardly worth bothering with, and certainly not worth the amount of attention he gave it, constantly preening with that same single finger, maintaining the all-important symmetry. Though she couldn’t help but find Mr Wilde visually fascinating, Tory was immune to his appeal. She was wary that her interest would be misinterpreted as attraction.

  ‘I must say,’ he went on, ‘from Donald’s descriptions, I had no idea his wife was so pretty.’

  Tory was so shocked by the sudden praise, coming from this sullen, bored man that she couldn’t reply but felt herself blushing. Running water, she kept thinking to herself. Running water.

  ‘Not that he did you a disservice, you understand. It’s just that he never described you at all. Never brought you to our attention, in the way that some chaps did. They liked to talk endlessly about their supposedly beautiful wives. I’m sure in nearly all cases the reality would have been a mighty disappointment. But not you, my dear, no description could have done you justice.’

  Never had Tory been so pleased at the return of Donald to the house, when his limping entrance brought an end to this ghastly serenade.

  *

  ‘I am quite against the idea of a television,’ said Mrs Head. ‘Mrs Lippiatt’s sister has bought a set. She says she and her husband do nothing all day but sit and stare at the thing, even when it’s switched off. I don’t think it can be very good for the brain.’

  ‘Well, if you’re saying you’re not interested in watching the dawning of a new Elizabethan Age, then I think you’re not only being unpatriotic, you’re being a traitor as well. I suppose you don’t even care if we no longer have an empire …’

  Donald went off on one of his increasingly frequent rants. He had never seemed quite the same since Churchill was kicked out of office, and even though the Labour government had proved itself incapable and Churchill was back, he sometimes seemed to regard himself as the only true patriot in a nation of traitors. In the ensuing debate the matter of his memoir was forgotten, but Mrs Head’s frailty became very apparent.

  ‘All this talking is making me weak,’ she said, and sat down. She rarely sat down during the day, but this time she sat down and didn’t get up again for any length of time, ever.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Tory began to think that old age and childhood were similar in more than the obvious ways. The rapid changes that occur in the body between birth and adulthood, when children seem to be continually racing out of their own skins, are echoed at the other end of life when the body, which has been in a state of barely perceptible change for forty or fifty years, suddenly goes into a state of accelerated collapse. This, at least, was what seemed to be happening to Mrs Head. While it was true that Tory’s mother appeared to have been an old lady for a very long time, recently she had started to look more than just old.

  It had been happening since Tom’s death, Tory now understood, which must have affected her mother more deeply than she’d realized. Thinking back, it was shortly after the funeral that she’d first noticed Mrs Head’s slight decrease in energy: a certain slowness in climbing the stairs, a loud gasp of relief whenever she sat down, as though merely being upright was the most exhausting thing in the world. Then came the reluctant appeals to her daughter for assistance in minor tasks. She needed help taking the rugs out into the backyard for beating. She had trouble with the mangle, whose wheel had become too stiff for her thinning arms. Soon she simply couldn’t do these things and restricted herself to lighter duties. In the space of a couple of years she was reduced to little more than sitting in her chair all day, which had to be repositioned so that she could see out of the back window, not that there was a lot to see.

  This decline in her energy was equalled by a deterioration in her appearance, a simultaneous loosening and tightening of the body, which seemed to contract into a ball within, leaving a loose, ill-fitting outer layer. The slowness and weakness of her body gradually became such that before long a dilemma presented itself to Tory. Sooner or later Mrs Head was not going to be able to use the stairs. The only possible outcome of this situation was that she would eventually have to sleep downstairs.

  The prospect of Mrs Head moving downstairs played on Tory’s mind for many months. Perhaps she had always known it would happen at some point, that the stairs, for her mother, would become a cliff she had no hope of climbing. But Tory had always assumed that, of all the muscles in Mrs Head’s body, her leg muscles would be the last to go. They had always seemed so hard and durable. Mrs Head’s legs, when she showed them – which was very rarely, since she retained a fondness for the long-skirt look that had gone out with Edward VII – were like a sprinter’s: they seemed to be made of rope, plaited together, capable of taking her anywhere, and could probably, though Tory had never witnessed it, deliver a jolly good kick. Tory imagined that, like a fallen clockwork toy, the legs would carry on walking, walking, walking, right into the grave. But, no: like the rest of her body, they were becoming weak.

  Every evening it became a little bit more difficult to get her up the stairs, though Mrs Head herself was determined to accomplish the task, and wouldn’t ask for help until the moment came when every last vestige of strength had been used up and there was nothing left but to call Tory. And then it became a co-operative exercise, a partnership. Mother and daughter were like mountaineers tackling a tricky rockface, relying on each other for support and encouragement. Mrs Head still did most of the work, holding on to the banister with both hands, lifting a foot with careful deliberation, placing it on the next stair, then pulling herself up to meet it. At first Tory’s role was simply as ‘catcher’, following her mother a couple of steps behind, ready to save her if she fell. Then, by degrees, her assistance became more physical. She had to take one of her mother’s arms and help her lift herself on to each step.

  The mornings were just as difficult, if not more so. Mrs Head was confronted with what seemed now to be a waterfall of floral treads and risers, the sight of which had begun to upset her.

  ‘Mama, we’ll have to bring your bed downstairs. There’s no alternative.’

  Mrs Head reluctantly agreed, though she was not so concerned about what this would entail. Donald was now occupying the only room downstairs that could be used as a bedroom, and had done so since his return from Germany. If Mrs Head was to go down, Donald would have to c
ome up.

  ‘Donald,’ Tory said to him one day, ‘isn’t it about time we lived together like a proper man and wife?’

  ‘I thought we did.’

  ‘Well, we don’t. A proper married couple share the same bed, or at least share the same floor of the house. They don’t sleep one upstairs, one downstairs.’

  ‘Tory, how many times do I have to tell you? Stairs are out of the question for me.’

  ‘But they are also becoming out of the question for Mrs Head.’

  And so it went on. The question revolved around which of them, Donald or Mrs Head, would find it most inconvenient to sleep upstairs. Donald, Tory argued, at least had one good leg, while Mrs Head was becoming weak in her entire body. Donald had strength, Mrs Head had none. Mrs Head was less likely to survive a fall down the stairs. Furthermore, Donald had a moral duty to sleep with his wife.

  To push the argument further, Tory began to express a physical desire for Donald. This was not entirely contrived. It was true that since his return from Germany she had, against her own best wishes, felt nothing but disgust for him, which had increased as his behaviour had worsened. By the time of Tom’s death, he had had all the sexual appeal of a rat. But things had changed since then. His expressions of remorse for the loss of his son, and the deep, thoughtful seriousness with which he’d undertaken the writing of his memoirs, had begun to sweeten him as a physical presence. His glossy lizard scalp and browless eyes no longer seemed so demon-like. Now they looked tender, vulnerable and expressive. Since he’d stopped drinking and had begun eating properly, he had lost the ragged look he’d had. He had filled out and softened. Now, when she finished balming his head, she concluded the process with a kiss on the lips and tasted no sourness there.