Letters From an Unknown Woman

by Gerard Woodward

  *

  Destroying the entire print run of Letters To Her Husband seemed impossible. Donald continued to protest that he knew nothing of their whereabouts, since secrecy was the key to the whole operation. Imagine the trouble it takes getting these things through Customs, he said. He did promise, however, to contact Mr Harry Wilde, though naturally Mr Wilde was not someone who could be easily found. He had several addresses, Tory discovered, as well as several names, but eventually she received a letter from him.

  My dear Mrs Pace,

  First of all I must congratulate you on your success as an author. Your book, which your husband laboured for so many months to transcribe into typewritten form, is a literary sensation in Europe. It was published in March and distributed among the more discerning bookshops in Paris, where it can be quite legally sold. It has done very well, and not just to English-speaking customers: Parisians themselves are buying copies. I have even been told that non-English speakers are hurriedly learning the language just so that they can read your book. Of course, a French translation is inevitable, and indeed is in the process of being written as I write. Italian, Dutch, Spanish and German versions are also in preparation. The publisher is so impressed with your work that he has written to me asking if I could persuade you to write a sequel. Perhaps Letters of a Naughty Schoolgirl, Letters of a Naughty Governess, Letters of a Naughty Mother Superior, that sort of thing. He informs me that he would be willing to pay a handsome sum in advance of royalties. I am greatly shocked that Donald has not paid you your share of the sum he received for Letters To Her Husband. This was also a handsome sum, and I am expecting the book to earn out its advance and entitle you to royalties. But it is not for me to put my nose into the sanctity of someone else’s marriage.

  You do not need to worry about the legal side of things. I think Donald has said some silly things to you about this, but you are not in any danger at all in this respect. The only people who should be worried are those who have smuggled your book into this country and are selling it on the black market. I understand Her Majesty’s Government can impose a penalty of five years’ imprisonment in such cases. I only wish I knew how your book found its way into this country. It is quite disgraceful that our decency laws have been offended in this way, and that you have been exposed to possible embarrassment, though of course your identity has been quite carefully concealed in the book. Even those closest to you would not suspect you as the author. As to the possibility of retrieving and destroying those copies that have found their way into this country, I am afraid I can be of no help here, and neither would the publisher, since this has been done without our knowledge, by cads and rakes and other bad eggs. If you are thinking of going to Paris to try and remove the copies that have been distributed there, I am afraid it would be a futile exercise. Unless you have the money to buy up every copy, you have no legal right to the work. You may think you have a case of breach of copyright, in which case your dispute should be with your husband, who assured me that he had your permission to publish the work. The copyright remains yours, of course.

  Should you wish to visit your publisher, I would be most happy to accompany you to Paris, and perhaps represent you in negotiations for future works. I have very good connections in that wonderful city, and know some smashing little places to eat. The publisher of your book is a respected publishing house. They have published many eminent men of letters – not just the naughty stuff but serious stuff as well. It would be a great pity if the world were to be denied future works from your pen.

  Yours sincerely

  Harold S. Wilde

  Literary Agent

  Bloomsbury Square

  London WC1

  PS Donald informed me that you have written a ‘proper’ novel as well. I suppose there is a chance that Mr Girodias would be interested in that. Why don’t you let me have a look at the manuscript?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Mrs Head didn’t leave much behind that was her own. Her only possessions were things already shared with the household – her furniture was their furniture, her kitchen things were their kitchen things, her pots and pans and casseroles, her jelly moulds and pie tins, tie pins (Arthur’s), even her hair pins, hat pins and rolling pins (porcelain, with a motif of violets) were things of common ownership, shared and redistributed. The wallpapers of the different rooms (Seacunny nightmare, daisy madness, soothing bamboo, bounteous bouquets) were technically hers, chosen by her in a time before anyone now alive could remember, along with the carpets and rugs (lush, knotty problems that never solved themselves), but they were everyone’s as well. The walls, the roof, the yard, the whole house itself and just about everything in it – hers and not hers.

  The only object in the house that could truly be said to have belonged to Mrs Head alone, that was not the common property of the house, was her ‘special box’. This was a sandalwood trunk with a copper lock that her grandfather, a sailor, had brought back from India. It had elephants carved on the side (‘trunks on a trunk’ ran the joke), and a stain on the lid said to be a fakir’s blood. Mrs Head always kept the box locked shut and close to her bed. Tory was very familiar with the box, but had never seen inside it. Occasionally she would come upon her mother on her knees before it, shuffling through whatever it contained, and if Tory tried to see inside, which she often did when she was a little girl, her mother would quickly bang the lid shut, not seeming to care if she chopped off her daughter’s nose in the process.

  So now, with Mrs Head’s demise, a lifetime’s curiosity could be satisfied in one long orgy of rummaging. Her box, the only locked part of her long, crowded life, was now in Tory’s possession.

  Mrs Head’s will had made no reference to the box. There was no line that read I leave my special box and everything in it to my dearest daughter Tory, yet it seemed to be assumed by everyone that she was expected to take charge of it. She had thought she might leave a respectful amount of time before she inserted the little copper key, perhaps even a few years, but in fact she opened the box the same day the will was read, though she nearly broke her back heaving the thing out from the corner of the back bed-room where it had resided for the last decade. Extraordinary that her mother’s life should amount to such a weighty object, when she herself had ended up as light as a piece of bone china. And Tory was terrified when she lifted the lid because a strong smell of her father came out, a smell she hadn’t caught for more than twenty years and which was produced by the little set of his favourite pipes that her mother had preserved. It made Tory cry, and she had to close the lid and recompose herself, thankful that she had chosen to perform the task alone, when the house was empty. She had thought she might have to deal only with a few notebooks and newspapers, a few old savings books and share certificates, marriage certificates and other bureaucratic litter. She wasn’t prepared to meet her long-departed father’s toothmarks on the stem of a pipe, his odour. She didn’t think she’d have to labour through layers of preserved sweat and saliva, richly perfumed dust and their accompanying ghosts to get to the documentation. She was wheezing, even from that little exposure. All that old stuff in there had clogged up her airways. She went downstairs for a drink of water and took a turn in the yard to clear her chest.

  There was a lot of stuff in the box. Not just her mother’s things but her father’s as well, and her grandfather’s, and Arthur’s father’s. It seemed that this box was an amalgam of previous boxes. There appeared to be a system: you stock up your box with mementoes of your life, then hand it on to your children when you die, who sort through it, discard the impersonal stuff – old receipts, invoices and certificates – keep the photos, letters and diaries, then add their own mementoes of their own lives. The box thus becomes a sort of vehicle travelling through the generations, picking up passengers as it goes along.

  At first Tory did not feel the urge to delve too deeply into this material. There was simply too much to take in – albums, scrap-books, letters, ledgers, magazines, journals. She ha
d too much to think about in the present to be distracted by the past. The only thing that held her attention was a batch of more recent-looking letters to her mother, and she took these out of the box to examine.

  They were all from Major Brandish, the eccentric neighbour Mrs Head had been friendly with in Waseminster. She already knew the contents of many of these letters because Mrs Head had liked to read aloud from them, the Major having such an amusing way with words, and such an exotic vocabulary. The gossiping Major loved to keep her informed on the activities of her former neighbours and co-villagers, particularly if he had uncovered anything mildly shameful or scandalous. Mrs Head had read from these letters so frequently that Tory felt she had quite a clear picture in her mind of the retired army man, who’d served some time in India, keeping a forgotten corner of the empire going single-handedly, civilizing the natives by means of the most powerful weapon at his disposal: the china teacup and pot. He evidently regarded the marshes of Waseminster as a similar kind of outpost, the natives there being only marginally more acceptable because of a veneer of civilization. Tory had never actually seen one of the Major’s letters, had no idea what his handwriting was like, and was very curious to find out. It was, as she might have imagined, sturdy, black and scrolled. It could have been made nicely out of wrought iron.

  It was only on a whim that she bothered. Thinking she knew their contents already, she was about to tuck them away, never to look at them again, when she was attracted by an odd phrase, half glimpsed, and it soon became apparent that the extracts from which her mother had read were very selective indeed, and that what had been going on between the two was much more than a gossipy correspondence.

  Your letter of the 21st gave me a deep satisfaction that could only be surpassed by your physical presence, dear Emily. Would that you were here to do those things you describe …

  I would love to provide you with my own thoughts in return, but understand, as you say, the risk of your daughter discovering such letters would be too great, especially if, as you say, she is such a prudish creature. It is a very odd thing if we must avoid shaming our children. Nevertheless, I can quite imagine the devastating effect on the little madam on discovering that her own dear mother has such a rich and vivid imagination…

  This letter was dated 1941, around the same time that Tory was struggling to write her letters to Donald. As she read, she gradually came to realize that the Major was not, by any means, a mere chance acquaintance made by Mrs Head during her time in Waseminster. It appeared that their relationship went back many years before that – that they even seemed to have been lovers at some point.

  You made such a foolish mistake in returning to London, my love. Your destiny is here, with me, as it has always been. Is it not a cruel irony that now that I am free of soldiering and you are free of a husband, we must yet still remain separate, because of your foolish commitment to a lost cause…

  Lost cause? Did he mean her?

  London is finished, Emily dear, you must return to Waseminster at once. There has not been a single bomb fall within twenty miles of the village, and that one was only dropped by accident, landing on a pig sty in St Margaret Without (bacon rain).

  I know you have a devotion to your daughter, but what possible use can you be to her?

  Elsewhere in the letters, it seemed that Mrs Head was exercised by a continual sense of guilt about eating Mr Dando:

  Will you stop wittering on about your cannibalistic crimes, Emily? To accidentally eat human meat is not to sully for ever the purity of your soul, and it is silly of you to think that it has brought you bad luck. As far as I can tell, you have had nothing but good luck since then. If you want my honest opinion, you have only become a proper woman since the day you ate Mr Dando – the meatiness of your letters are testament of that. In which case, bring more butchers to the table so that we may have a feast. I would not care for you any less if you ate a hundred butchers, or any other form of shopkeeper for that matter. There are too many in this country, aren’t there?Wasn’t Napoleon right about that at least? By the way, Napoleon has always been my favourite French general / emperor. Who’s yours?

  Emily, I think you are wrong. We should become married at the earliest possible convenience (I am so sorry to use that word: in the light of your news about your daughter’s new occupation, I could think of no other) – I have always said that we should have been married when we had the chance, in that blissful spring of 1912. Just think, if we had taken our chance then, the whole course of our lives would have changed. You remember you said you wanted to wait two years because of your father’s financial difficulties? You weren’t to know that the Great War was just around the corner. I survived that turmoil to come home and find you married to a bank clerk! Of all the insults …

  How could Mrs Head have read aloud the gossipy extracts, knowing that what she was reading was hemmed in by paragraphs of the most intimate kind, that she was picking a thread out of a tangle of words that would otherwise destroy the reputation of which she had been so proud? Mrs Head had gone to Waseminster not to be among her husband’s people, but to be in the neighbourhood of a former lover. In fact, as Tory delved further into the archives of the special box, she began to wonder if her father had any connection with ‘the church in the mud’ at all. There was no mention of a Waseminster link in any of the documents she had come across in her first foray into Arthur’s things.

  The revelations concerning Mrs Head took her several weeks to digest, during which time she could barely put her mind to the question of Letters To Her Husband — not least because it appeared that somewhere on the Kent marshes a retired major was hoarding a stash of her own mother’s letters in a similar vein. Mrs Head had been writing letters of that kind even into the years of her infirmity, an idea that Tory found very hard to stomach. In fact, she felt physically sick if she dwelt on the thought for too long. She couldn’t help but linger on the observation made by Major Brandish: you have only become a proper woman since the day you ate Mr Dando.

  It should be written on my tombstone, thought Tory. Then the feeling of sickness, which she realized had lingered somewhere at the back of her stomach ever since that day, went.

  *

  The first time she decided to deprive Donald Pace of food was on the occasion of their traditional Sunday lunch. In fact, this meal had more or less disappeared from the weekly routine of the house until that particular day, and as such was staged as a conscious revival of that special tradition. She had also invited the young men she recognized to be the girls’ suitors, dapper young chaps in drainpipe trousers, who had begun calling at the house every other evening to take them to dances. Tory didn’t know what young people did these days, or where they went. She hadn’t ventured into a ballroom for twenty years, and the dance halls now were giant palaces lit with gay, coloured lights, from which frighteningly rhythmic sounds came. And the girls did look like princesses: for the first time she could even find little Albertina, with her bulging eyes, beautiful. Those frocks they wore, with the sharp busts. The elbow gloves in salmon-coloured satin. They were just like characters from a fairy story, Tory thought. It was not a comforting notion. The conscious emulation of a fictional world seemed, to Tory, a very shallow enterprise. They would be travelling in a coach shaped like a scallop shell and pulled by a team of white dolphins, if they had their way. The house was often clammy with scent and powder, and the two girls elbowing each other out of the way of the passageway mirror, which was the only decent mirror in the house, applying lipstick to their pinched mouths.

  Although the young men seemed fine, Tory was not quite sure she approved of the girls having regular boyfriends at such a young age. Albertina was only just out of school, after all, but times seemed to be changing, and girls seemed to be growing up faster than ever before.

  For the Sunday lunch, furniture had to be specially shipped in, the dining-table being moved to the sitting room and a smaller table borrowed from Mrs Wilson next door, then add
ed to the end of the table, along with extra chairs. The exceptionally long surface extended diagonally from one corner to the other.

  The young men sat at the table with too much familiarity and self-assurance for Tory’s liking, although she tried not to show it. They had the loud, unwarranted confidence that distinguished their generation from all the preceding ones. Too young to have fought in the war, they seemed to have dismissed it already as an historical event, of no lasting importance. Though she was quite sure that both men were hard workers, they seemed also to take it alarmingly for granted that work was available and always would be. Paulette’s boyfriend was a baker with big ideas, and dreamt of being a millionaire bread manufacturer (as he liked to call it). The future of bread was in mass production, he believed. The days of rising before dawn to prove the dough and face the torture of the red ovens would soon be over. Loaves in the future would be made in huge factories, ready sliced, ready wrapped, for distribution nationwide. He intended, one day, to own one of those factories

  Albertina’s boyfriend was working his way up through the building trade.

  ‘Houses for all, Mrs Pace,’ he said. ‘The government is building ten new towns and more are planned. With any luck there’ll be a house for every family in the country by 1960.’

  ‘I could never understand why they were so determined to build houses after the war,’ said Tory. ‘Surely the population has decreased drastically as a result of the fighting.’

  ‘But what about all the houses destroyed in the Blitz?’

  ‘Well, you’d think it would probably match the number of lives lost, and be in proportion, at least.’