She took a long sip of champagne, as if to get rid of a taste in her mouth. Tory and Grace did have such amusing chats in the lavatory, but they had never actually had a party down there, not until today. Grace had arrived, already a little slurred in her speech, and had produced from the reptile-skin handbag that hung from her shoulder a bottle of Moët et Chandon, and two glasses wrapped in a silk handkerchief. Grace explained that it was her birthday. Grace had opened the bottle like an experienced drinker, deftly dealing with the foil and the wire contraption, making Tory jump for her life when the cork popped and allowing a little spurt of froth to splatter the office.
Tory made protestations that she should not drink on the job, while Grace pointed out that she was so rarely visited in her office, no one was ever likely to know and, besides, was she sure she wasn’t allowed? So she drank, sneezing instantly on a noseful of bubbles, feeling heady as a result of the gases given off by the alcohol. Her eyes watered. ‘I don’t know how I ever drank this stuff,’ she said. ‘It’s like trying to drink a beehive.’ But she had another go, and was soon, along with Grace, what she called, ‘a little bit tiddled’.
‘You know,’ said Grace, ‘the thing about Heaven … What I’ve often wondered is, if they took a census up there, do you think there would be more men than women, or more women than men, or would it be exactly even?’
‘Given there’s no way the question can ever be answered, I don’t think there’s much point in considering it.’
‘But you can still speculate. My guess is that there’ll be more women. What do you think?’
‘Well, there are people like Donald who think that Heaven is a place where only men can go.’
‘Like a gents’ lavatory?’
‘Oh, Grace, you do say such funny things.’
‘What do you think, Tory? If we had a look next door, at the Gents, we could have a glimpse of Heaven.’
‘Now you’re being silly.’
‘Oh, I wish you wouldn’t call me that so often. You begin to sound like my husband. But I’m serious. I suddenly find the thought quite preposterous that I could live out my entire life never having seen the inside of a gents’ lavatory.’
Tory laughed, almost spilling her champagne. ‘But what would there be to see? It must be a place like this, just like this.’
‘Do you think so? No, Tory, I think you’re wrong. They have these things there, where men can just stand. Do you mean to tell me you’ve never been next door?’
Tory explained that once in a while she did have to call upon Clive in the Gents for assistance in some technical matter, but that when she did she merely went to the bottom of the stairs and hallooed him from there. She had never actually ventured into the lavatory itself. ‘And I can assure you that’s as far as I ever want to go. The smell! Clive does like using his bleach – I was nearly blinded.’ She paused. ‘It is true that today is Clive’s day off. The Gents is unattended …’
‘Well, there you are, then. Now’s our chance. Eyes closed to the effects of chlorine we could walk blind through the Kingdom of Men, a phrase that could sum up my life. The University of Melbourne was not an easy place for a woman to be. Oh, Tory, you’re a pioneer and an explorer. Let me give you a little peck.’
At first, being kissed on the lips by a woman had been a surprising experience for Tory. She had been surprised by the softness of a woman’s face. When she kissed Donald, it was like putting your face into a bramble bush – prickly, rigid, unyielding. But Grace’s lips were the soft beginnings of an apparently endless softness. It was like kissing a cloud.
‘Let’s do it now,’ she whispered breathlessly, into Tory’s neck.
‘Now?’ Tory whispered back, into the sweet spiral of Grace’s ear. ‘You mean …’
‘Yes, let’s visit the forbidden kingdom …’
*
Wednesday was early closing in the square. There weren’t many people around. There had been no visitors to the Ladies for an hour. Furthermore, there seemed hardly anyone above ground – there were no boot soles clomping over the glass ceiling tiles. It was almost as if they were alone in the world.
‘So you think we could go next door, have a look around, and there would be no one there?’
‘Well. I’m not sure it would be a good idea.’
Grace pleaded with her friend. ‘Oh, please, Tory …’
‘But what if we get caught?’
‘Caught? We’re not little children breaking into someone’s back garden to steal the apples.’
‘But it could be awfully embarrassing.’
‘I won’t be embarrassed … and you – you’ve got a legitimate reason. If anyone comes in I could pretend to be your boss, from the council.’
The two women found themselves holding hands as they descended the stone steps of the gents’ lavatory on Union Square. Grace was unsure in her high heels: the steps seemed wetter, more narrow and slippery than the steps to the Ladies. There was no handrail either. As if men are naturally expected to be more deft step-climbers than women, she thought. They had watched the entrance for ten minutes before making their move, so felt confident that it was empty down there, but that didn’t prevent them feeling nervous as they neared the bottom of the steps, the white ceramic tiles with their occasional strata of bottle green rising like a hard liquid around them.
The smell as they descended the stairwell was immediately noticeable as being different from that of the Ladies, though not particularly masculine (neither was the smell in the ladies particularly feminine, for that matter). The aroma was of some sort of menthol with an acid undertone. A sharp, spacious smell, like mountain air. As they reached the corner, Grace half expected to see a glacier stretch before them.
They paused, listening for the faintest sound that might indicate occupancy. There was nothing other than the expected echoey trickle of the cisterns slowly filling, the same sound that constantly filled the Ladies. Tory, who was ahead, turned back to Grace and gave her a reassuring nod. Grace’s face was filled with excited glee, and she covered her mouth with her hand to restrain her excitement. They stepped down and rounded the final turn.
‘It is different,’ was Tory’s first, disappointed exclamation.
‘I told you,’ said Grace.
Before them was a space twice the size of the Ladies. The narrow well of white tiles they had just descended opened out into a quite dazzling vista of ceramics, with green ornamentation, curlicues and foreign-looking motifs that made the place seem like a palace. There were the same wooden stalls with frosted windows and brass locks, but these were fewer. To the right the same row of porcelain washbasins with stout silver taps. But there was the additional thing, which accounted for the extra space: the long row of standing stalls, ten of them (Tory counted), raised on a step, each one tiled in Byzantine patterns of black, red and white, surrounding the porcelain troughs that rose high and as proud as tombstones.
Still holding hands, the two women approached this solemn terrace and took the step up.
‘It’s like being in church,’ said Grace, suddenly serious.
‘It’s much cleaner than I expected,’ said Tory. ‘Clive must be more conscientious than I thought. There isn’t a trace of dirt anywhere.’
‘I feel like we’re a bride and groom who’ve just stepped up to receive the vicar’s blessing …’
Just then the slow dripping of the cistern reached its brim, a float-lever somewhere lifted, and the flush sprang into life, making the two women jump. They had been admiring the copper plumbing for a moment, without quite understanding what it meant. Now they saw that the water poured down the vertical stem, then branched out to feed each urinal, emerging with a shrill, squeaking rush from a bulbous, verdigris-encrusted outlet at the top of each one, then cascading down the cliff of porcelain to reach the gutter at the bottom, which became, briefly, a river.
The women had panicked at the onset of all this watery commotion, half feeling that the lavatory had come alive, or that th
ey were not alone after all, and that a secret chain-puller was hidden somewhere, watching. But Tory had seen the insides of a cistern enough times now to know that they could be worked automatically, by nothing more than gravity and leverage.
Once the shock was over they giggled again, and feigned anger at their own silliness.
‘It had just never occurred to me before,’ said Tory, ‘that men come in here and … do it together, standing next to each other, shoulder to shoulder. You could never imagine women doing that, could you? Even if they were able. That must mean something about men, their shamelessness.’
‘I don’t know about that,’ said Grace. ‘Perhaps it says something about their attitude to disgust. At least they don’t do the other thing together, but have cubicles, like us.’
Grace giggled as she wandered deeper into the space, seeming to gain confidence as she walked around, stamping her feet to hear the echoes, whistling.
‘Have you had enough of a look, Grace? I think we should go before someone comes …’ The emboldening effects of the champagne were beginning to fade. But Grace had spotted Clive’s office, and the door was open.
‘Let me just have a peek in here and then we can be done,’ she said, then exclaiming, ‘Oh, it’s so much bigger than yours. Everything’s bigger here – the whole place must be twice the size.’
‘I’m not sure you should go in there,’ said Tory, cautiously following Grace up to the door, feeling rather surprised that it was left open, and wondering if that meant Clive was, after all, around today.
Grace was already busying herself with nosing around everything in the office, before she exclaimed, ‘Well, I’d never have thought of Clive as a literary man. It looks like he spends all his time down here reading while you’re writing.’
Tory had never been inside Clive’s office before. She saw Grace sitting in his chair, beside his desk, reading a book.
‘He’s got dozens of these – see?’ She waved the book cover at Tory, and then indicated a box under the table, which contained identical copies of the same small green volume. There was no title on the cover, and no author’s name. Grace handed the copy to Tory while she took another from the box. A book each, they read together.
The title page carried the following, which Grace read aloud, hardly able to control her giggling.
Letters To Her Husband
By
a Naughty Housewife
Being the genuine correspondence of a nymphomaniac wife
To her husband while he was suffering In a
German prisoner-of-war camp
Transcribed faithfully by him
‘Oh, gosh, it looks like our friend Clive has got a little trade going in dirty books. Oh, you must read this, Tory! “… I imagine you taking me in your manly arms, my love, and then inserting your little finger .. .”’ Grace was now choking with shock and mirth. ‘Have you ever read anything like it, Tory. Tory? What’s the matter, Tory? You look quite upset.’
PART THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Tory was a little disappointed that Branson did not look as though he was ever going to exceed her in height. On his sixteenth birthday they stood side by side at the bus stop opposite Baines, on Old Parade, waiting for the new bus that would take them all the way to George Farraway’s new boxing gym, and she couldn’t help wondering what she’d done wrong that her son, fathered by someone as immense as George, should be so small. Had she not fed him enough?
It seemed that she had been having the same thought almost since the day he was born. She had always regarded his body as a promise that was never kept. If he had inherited from George and become big and powerful, no one would think for a moment that he was her child, though with Donald now removed from her life, this had ceased to be important. It was simply a matter of curiosity to see how many degrees of George Farraway would become apparent in his son’s body.
When Branson was very little she hadn’t known what to look for, because she had never seen George at the same age, and the task of imagining George Farraway as a baby was enormous: one could only start with the bulk and weight of his present-day self and extrapolate backwards, crushing the might of adult George down to its primary form – but she could never rid the resulting little thing of its beard and its broken face. When she looked at Branson as a baby she saw something slight, smooth, intact and uncoordinated. It was possible that baby George had been these things as well, but Tory doubted it.
More worryingly, little Branson didn’t have a sportsman’s eye for moving objects. He had trouble kicking a ball, even more trouble catching one. His walk was ungainly. As a toddler he fell more frequently than most, and more dangerously, seeming unable to break his fall as others did. She was afraid of sending him to school because she thought he would be defenceless against the bullies she imagined lay in wait for him. She lingered outside the railings each day, observing how he was treated by the other children. To her surprise they seemed friendly and welcoming. Even so, Tory still wondered if they were merely luring him into a trap. And then she would retrieve him at the end of the day and feel baffled by his happiness. If he was ever unhappy, it was because of his teachers rather than his fellow pupils. He even started bringing little friends home, then being invited to other friends’ houses, just as though he was a normal child. Then Tory would check herself for feeling so surprised. Why should it amaze her that Branson had friends? It was hardly the case that he carried around a badge of her own wifely betrayal for all to see, and even if he did, what would little children care? In everyone’s else’s eyes Branson was just a regular kid.
She recalled the exact moment of realization that Branson was beautifully ordinary when she attended a little presentation given by his class on the subject of Noah’s Ark. It was only his second year in the school, and he was up on stage with the other five-yearolds before what must, to him, have seemed like a huge audience. He had only one line, ‘N is for Nightingale’, which he stood and delivered, spreading his little cardboard and crêpe-paper wings, holding, for a few seconds, the attention of the entire audience. Just for a few seconds, before the tall lad to his right mumbled, ‘O is for Ostrich,’ but during that time, Branson’s clear little voice, so carefully enunciating the words, seemed to have the ear of the whole universe, making Tory feel, for the first time, that he existed as a real flesh-and-blood little boy, taking up space in the world, using up air and food, reflecting light. It brought a choking sensation to her throat.
The enormous but manageable leap: from a little boy dressed as a nightingale on a school stage, enunciating carefully and clearly, to a champion boxer in the ring, delivering the winning uppercut to the bristled jaw of a blood-streaming opponent, the eyes of a stadium of jubilant people turned upon him, standing on their chairs and punching their fists in the air, hailing him as the new champion of the world.
*
At times she felt that that was his rightful inheritance. She didn’t care about George Farraway’s money or his Edwardian pile in Blackheath, or his stinking factory. She cared about the nearchampion’s blood he had delivered into her womb one night in the middle of a world war and which she had painstakingly nurtured to the cusp of adulthood.
She even took a certain pride in his academic inability. She was used to having clever children. Since they were all clever she hadn’t really noticed their cleverness but had taken it for granted. The arrival of Branson had put that all into perspective, and she had a clear view, for the first time, though too late, of how magnificent Tom’s brain had been – busy, curious, able to weave together lots of different things. Tom had been clever beyond all reason, and the girls were clever too. But Branson seemed to be a little bit slow and a little bit stupid. This meant, as far as Tory could see, that he had inherited from his father rather than his mother. George often boasted of how he couldn’t read and write until he’d retired from boxing and taught himself from nursery primers, with a magnifying glass. Branson may have inherited this slowness
of mind, but he had not shown a fighting spirit until after Tom’s death, when he regularly came home bloody around the nose or mouth, or with a bruised eye and scraped knuckles, and was given to lurchingly unpredictable behaviour.
The hands she had examined so carefully since he had been a baby were now beginning to grow into strong, square, hammer-shaped things. His body was becoming squarer and stockier. The nightingale was turning into something altogether more powerful. She might have hoped for an eagle or a hawk, but in his adolescence Branson began to look as though he was made of cardboard boxes. Or tea chests. A body designed to withstand blows. His squareness also gave him an awkwardness: he continued to have poor balance and the tumblings of his toddler days extended into his youth. A few times he had fallen completely over for no obvious reason, having somehow pivoted wrongly, turning in mid-stride, his centre of gravity going awry, and there he was, reeling on the ground, looking baffled.
There could hardly be a greater weakness for a boxer than to be easily felled. He might have strength in his arms and a solid resilience in his body, but if he lacked the agility to remain upright, then there wasn’t really much hope for him. A child could have knocked him down with a little finger.
*
Baines was the butcher that now occupied the spot were Dando’s had been. There was no reason, Tory supposed, why a butcher should not have come to replace the one destroyed in the war, but she did think it a little odd. Was there something special about that particular location, which meant it should always be occupied by vendors of meat, from now and into the future for ever? It hadn’t happened with the other shops. The baker’s had been replaced by a shoe shop, the greengrocer’s by a branch of a building society. She had been into Baines’s a few times, and she thought the new butcher a rather cold, sinister character; he had none of old Dando’s joviality, none of the rosy-cheeked sauciness that had so characterized the old man. Baines was a cold, silent, efficient butcher. He wore a narrow dark tie, and had a narrow dark moustache. It was a relief not to have to face the combative repartee of Dando any more, but Tory wondered if the coldness of Baines was worse.
Letters From an Unknown Woman Page 27