The Lost Letters of William Woolf

by Helen Cullen

  I remember, when I first moved to this city, I loved how everyone was a stranger, but I also remember believing that my solitary state was a temporary situation. You are taking much longer to find me than I’d hoped. This morning, while waiting for the bus, I watched a dapper man’s suitcase snap open and a pile of papers dance down Old Street. He was laughing, despite the calamity and the wind poking icy fingers between buttons, down collars and up trouser legs. London was grey and howling and his laugh carried in the wind like a tangerine lasso, pulling everyone in. A gaggle of girls in wine-coloured school uniforms rushed to help him. If he felt foolish, he was a happy fool. I wondered if it could be you. I ask myself that all the time as I walk about the city, when a certain sort of someone catches my eye. I find myself waiting for you to look up and notice me noticing you.

  It will soon be Valentine’s Day – what a perfect time to write to you, when lovers everywhere are wrapping, writing or worrying. I am in good spirits, although my hands are cold as I grip this silver pen. I’ve just arrived home from New York and the radiators have forsaken me now that the first spot of snow has fallen. I do love long-haul flights: the suspended reality, the anonymity, the disconnection from everything and everyone. Every passenger, an island. It’s the most captivating waiting room in the world: sad eyes from leaving-behinds, excited hearts for going-tos, nervous bellies for the unknown, eager longings for the familiar. High up in the skies, we are free from decisions, action, responsibility, identity – reduced to being toddlers pushed in a pram by a stranger. Landing came almost too soon because, every time I fly, I dread the Arrivals lounge. It is so bittersweet to walk out past Security and see all the expectant faces of people waiting impatiently for someone who isn’t me. In times gone by, my father would always be there, watching the Arrivals board for any changes, in position too early, just in case he missed me.

  I wish you had been waiting for me when I came in this morning, an unread newspaper twisted under your arm, hair still ruffled from sleep. I wouldn’t expect you to bring me flowers, but a fresh carton of milk waiting at home in the fridge would be lovely. I know you would take my suitcase and sweep me off my feet in one swift movement – I would well up, even though I hadn’t been away for very long at all. But you weren’t there. Instead, I dragged my case along by myself and waited in the rain for a taxi back to the city. When I eventually dripped into my flat, it was freezing. The milk in the fridge had turned sour and the bed was still messy, as I had left it. I’m not trying to make you feel guilty, I promise, but I have to tell you all the ways I miss you. The gaps you could fill are widening and I worry they will soon become too big for one person to satisfy. How can anyone be all the things that another needs? Answer all questions?

  I wonder now if the choices that brought me to this city were clever ones. Since Christmas, I feel as if I am slipping further and further away from all that is familiar, all those that I love. I furiously write long letters on my lunch break and crackle down phone lines to try to connect with people at home, but it’s not enough. My life is synopsized now into anecdotes and reflections after the fact. News is old before it is told, feelings forgotten before they are cried or laughed over, questions answered before they are asked. My old friends have no window into my life now. They can no longer picture me eating breakfast in Donnybrook, in the little flat over the cake shop that they knew so well. There are no faces for new names as we talk on the telephone. I try to paint some wordy pictures, but it gets harder.

  I miss my friends and family so much, and that has made me miss you even more. It’s true. I hope you miss me, too. Do you? Are you wandering around London, feeling that you’ve left your umbrella behind? (I do think you’re the sort to carry an umbrella.) Do you have dreams of somewhere you’ve never been but wish you could go? Is your head full of thoughts that no one has quite the right ears for? Do you read about exhibitions, concerts, tours, plays, trips to the seaside, and wish you knew someone who would want to go along with you? Is your hand lonely in your pocket? It’s me, I tell you! I’m your forgotten umbrella!

  Oh dear, it just dawned on me that you mightn’t be in London. Oh, I hope you are. It’s hard enough filtering all those millions of people down to one as it is. Or worse still – you could be back in Ireland! No. I won’t believe it. If you’re not in London, you must come to find me here.

  I’m not sure what I will do with this letter now, although I feel better for writing it. Forgive me for counting all the ways that I am lonely; it is not something I can do out loud.

  I hope, somehow, that it finds you, and finds you well.

  Yours,

  Winter

  III

  Clare couldn’t force herself to look in the mirror, did not want to recognize herself as the creature before her. She resented her pale, pear-shaped body. Like a turkey hanging in the butcher’s window at Christmas. With every year that passed, her bottom half widened but her upper body stayed the same and, in her mind, the disproportion had taken on gigantic importance. Having been effortlessly slender in her twenties, it shocked her how quickly her body had changed in the five years since she became thirty. She signed up for pole dancing, thinking it would make her feel better about her now more curvaceous shape, boost her confidence and help her remember how she used to move. In times past, she had felt graceful, conscious of the heat of men’s eyes on her as she strode along the marble corridors between court rooms or danced until dawn at the jazz clubs she and William used to frequent. After she graduated, she bought her first pair of stilettos and practised walking up and down the aisles of the supermarket, pushing the trolley for balance and support. It paid off. Before long, she struggled to walk in anything flat; the arches of her feet were now unaccustomed to being horizontal and she loved the added height, even though William was a good two inches shorter than her. It never seemed to bother him either.

  Of late, though, she had felt uncomfortably conspicuous, being so tall; an advantage wasted if you couldn’t hold your spine straight, your shoulders back, your head high. Her grace felt balled up in her belly. She constantly resisted the urge to bend over and nurse it. The advertisement on the noticeboard at work for pole-dancing classes seduced her with the promise of sculpting her body back to its ‘former glory’ and ‘rejuvenating her va-va-voom’ with this new, vaguely taboo, craze. She knew that her self-esteem should not be determined by her physical appearance, but this wasn’t about looking good for other people – this was about her own self-control, what made her feel strong and proud. Feeling like she had lost her fitness, her physique, made her worry that she was in a state of decline, but she wasn’t ready to surrender just yet. The advertisement failed to mention, however, two elements crucial for the transformation: loving (or at least tolerating) your scantily clad reflection under fluorescent light and at least some natural capacity for gymnastics. Clare struggled through each class with mounting embarrassment. She could hold her position on the pole but, when the time came to slide down, she just couldn’t let go. Instead of elegantly gliding to the base with her back arched, Clare descended inch by inch in stops and starts, burning the palms of her hands and leaving friction marks on her thighs. When all her classmates were ready to mount again, she was still clawing her way to the bottom, trying to ignore the looks of pity and the stifled laughter. She was sorely tempted to quit after the first week, to scuttle away with a feather boa between her legs, but she knew the failure would lower her spirits even further and so she persisted. Every week, Clare was optimistic that she would have a breakthrough moment. Each time, the other girls looked more and more accomplished and she remained clinging midway up the pole, praying for an end to come soon.

  When Clare arrived home after class, she then had to suffer William’s feigned nonchalance as he asked how it had been, if she had enjoyed herself. She couldn’t tell him how awful it was, that it was the least erotic experience she had ever had the misfortune to undergo. In the past, they would have been in hysterical fits as she regaled
him with her humiliation at the hand of Miss Fortuna. Not any more. His poorly disguised curiosity was probably the only bit of satisfaction she gleaned from going. After the first class, William had asked her if he would ever have the pleasure of a private performance. Clare was taken aback; she couldn’t tell if he was genuinely excited at the prospect, saying what he thought he was supposed to, or mocking her. She walked to the bathroom without meeting his eye. ‘Seeing as it took you eight months to install the towel rack,’ she said, ‘I won’t hold my breath waiting for a pole.’ William didn’t reply. Before the door had fully closed, the tears she had been swallowing squeezed out in streams of salty sadness down her hot cheeks. She buried her face in William’s dressing gown, the one he said made him feel like a Siberian prince, and inhaled the lingering peppermint smell of his soap. If she opened the door and showed him how upset she was, wouldn’t he comfort her? Couldn’t he still find ways and words to pull her out of this molasses? She missed him despite being no longer sure that the man she missed still existed.

  On the evening of the day that William discovered Winter’s letter, Clare was feeling particularly low. There was an option to sign up for an end-of-course performance and she was the only woman in the class who didn’t want to do it. No one was surprised. Nor did they try to talk her into it. She sat in the car outside their flat holding her red-raw palms over her eyes, breathing through the bout of anxiety that crawled over her body like an army of ants. She could see the light on in the kitchen and knew William would be sitting there, reading yesterday’s paper, unaware that he had grown cold until he stood up and stretched. A cup housing an Earl Grey teabag would sit on the counter, waiting for him to remember he had boiled the kettle. She knew him so well: the light and shade of his moods; when his eyes strained to see; the spot where his muscles always knotted in his left shoulder blade. Clare had always collected stories from her day which she thought would fascinate him, or jokes that would tickle him. She made a note of films, gigs or exhibitions he would be excited about, and stored them in her ‘William’ vault. She still mined all those observations, conditioned as she was to the practice, but she didn’t share them with him any more. They were just filed away and forgotten. Any affectionate words stuck in her throat; she felt that any act of kindness would be taken as a reward for his disappointing behaviour. At times, she felt the fact that she was still with him at all was more than he deserved. She had done everything she could: keeping them financially afloat, humouring him when he spent the first summer after they were married on tour with Stevie, expecting patiently his great novel that never came. All these years, she had waited for him to fulfil the promise he held when they met. How could he be satisfied with working in that godforsaken depot? When people met them for the first time now, she knew what an unlikely pairing they must seem. If they themselves could meet anew as strangers, she thought it questionable they would even be friends – and a romance would be completely inconceivable. And yet, she couldn’t turn her back completely on the memory of how much they once were the perfect pair. When her granny met William, she hugged Clare and said, ‘When God made ye, he matched ye. For every sock, there’s a shoe.’ And she had known it was true.

  She had started dating much too young: older boys who somehow tricked her into thinking they were the ones who needed impressing; insecure men who had tried to control her in order to feel more powerful. When she met William, she was shocked at how utterly effortless it was to be with him. And not because she didn’t care enough, but because they both cared, and in equal amounts. William knew the punchline to her every joke; in his company, she was wittier, more outspoken, fearless in a way that she had never even considered being before. And in her attention, he bloomed. Before she met him, in her romantic entanglements, she had felt like she was trying desperately hard to re-create an idea of love she had drawn from black-and-white films shot on Parisian boulevards. After him, life was vivid; in full Technicolor.

  When she walked into the flat, an aroma of soup wafted from the kitchen. Hearty, thick; real vegetables from the ground, stewing hot in a pot. Warming. Loving. Calling. She followed the trail and was amazed to find the kitchen gleaming in godly cleanliness. Normally, William’s cooking involved ingredients exploding into every crevice of the kitchen and a mountain of encrusted saucepans balanced precariously in the sink. He turned down their crackling old record player, softening Bob Dylan’s crooning of ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right’, and crossed the kitchen floor to peck her on the cheek. He was clearly very pleased with himself but trying to behave as if this little miracle of domesticity was an everyday occurrence. Clare was immediately suspicious; she hoped he didn’t want to have a ‘talk’ or give her an ill-considered surprise. The last time he had made this big an effort was to announce that he had impulsively adopted a puppy. That was not a happy weekend. William had sulked like a child for a week after she made him take the mongrel back to Morgana in the depot. Why could he not have considered the practicalities of housing a growing dog in their already cramped living space without making her be the spoilsport again? She edged her way to the kitchen table, murmured something about the nice smell and waited for the bomb to drop while he ladled some soup into her favourite sea-green ceramic bowl. They had bought a set of four from a local potter on their honeymoon in Sorrento, but this was the only one that still survived. William had often said that he planned to order more for her, but had never quite managed it.

  ‘So, what’s all this in aid of, then?’ she asked, while rifling through her briefcase. ‘Have you broken something? Or invited a homeless person to come and live with us? Oh God, you haven’t bought a motorbike, have you?’

  William chose not to dwell on the worrying assumptions his wife made when confronted with his good deeds and swallowed the sting. ‘No. Nothing in particular,’ he answered, stirring the soup. ‘I just know you’ve been working hard and, well, sometimes I feel I could do more here to –’

  ‘I’ve been working hard for ten years, William. Don’t start feeling guilty now. We’ll never get all the worms picked up from the floor.’

  Clare felt a pang of remorse when she saw his face but couldn’t bring herself to take it back. It was as if the only way she could cope with the weight of her worries was to release a little bit of pressure with a series of tiny blows. She couldn’t explain how she really felt to him, not until she could accept the idea that the end of the conversation could herald the end of them, too. Instead, she pulled a copy of Marie Claire from her bag and smoothed it open on the table. She scanned an interview with an American opera singer, Carletta da Carlo, who had retired to Rome and was growing ever plumper from a heady mix of sunshine, pasta and a new romance. Her eyes wandered over black-and-white photographs of Carletta posing on the Spanish Steps in an ivory satin evening gown, and her mind travelled back to her own, more painful, excursion to the city, when she had still been in the throes of her last, angsty affair before she met William.

  She could see herself now, perched on the rim of a dried-up old fountain, the sleeves of her jumper stretched over her hands, past their give, the stitches strained at the shoulders. She could still feel the scratchy black wool on her face as it soaked up the angry tears and runny mascara that stung the corners of her eyes. She crouched, her back a half-moon, head upon hands upon knees. A hot little cave of rage, sounds of her hiccupy sobs booming in her ribcage. She could feel the eyes of strangers upon her and was relieved when no one offered any help. Eventually, as she felt the grip of panic loosening, Jamie’s shadow fell across her, blocking the relentless Roman sun. She refused to look up and just stared at his oxblood military boots with the ridiculous black-and-white chequered laces and buckles flapping open. Although she desperately wanted some kind of resolution, she wouldn’t ask for it. He grasped her shoulders and pulled her to her feet. She didn’t struggle but kept her head lolled forward like a puppet with its strings cut until he let her go. With her eyes squeezed tightly closed, she held her breath. A
moment passed as she listened to his breathing, fast, hot and impatient, but he didn’t say anything. She looked up at him through her frizzy fringe. He was pointing a camera straight at her. The shock stopped her crying. The flash blinded her for a second then he instantly turned on his heel and strutted off across the square.

  ‘What are you doing? What’s wrong with you?’ she shouted after him.

  He turned, cold, and with a smirk of satisfaction stretched across his face. ‘Just a little memento of our romantic trip to Rome, Clare, in case I ever need reminding why we broke up here.’ Her fury rendered her speechless as she watched him cut through the tourists and vanish from sight.

  That night, the humid air hung heavy about them as they held hands across a candlelit table in the courtyard of a quiet osteria. Little white lights hung from the veranda as the waiter prego-ed back and forth, smiling at these strange young lovers who clutched at each other but looked so unhappy. Her stomach was churning, doubling and dancing with the shame of his disrespect and her inability to walk away, but now he was smiling and she was too relieved to jeopardize the fragile peace that had settled between them. She hoped they would make love that evening but dreaded the thought of it. Had not yet learned how much she could expect from love. And so it continued: the Jamie period of her life. Before their relationship had reached its ultimate crisis point, after so many near-misses. Before Clare’s little sister, Flora, was called to come and collect her in the middle of the night. Jamie had pushed her out of the door of his flat, tossing her clothes, books, a mini bonzai and her handbag down the stairs in her wake. When she tried to gather her belongings up in her arms, she lost her balance and tumbled down, down, so far down. She cracked a rib on the bottom step and scraped her hands and knees on the gravel. Jamie just closed the front door and left her lying there. Later, he said he knew she was okay when he heard her crying. A passing neighbour helped her to her feet and telephoned Flora while Clare sat in his parlour, drinking sugary tea.