The Lost Letters of William Woolf

by Helen Cullen

  When Clare eventually tried to talk about Jamie to a counsellor, it felt like someone else’s story. As she struggled to understand why she had stayed with him for as long as she had, her account was always interrupted by memories from her childhood invading the narrative. The sessions never caught up to recent events. It was meeting William that eventually gave her the peace to leave Jamie and the emotional fallout of their relationship behind her. He helped her to understand that she deserved kindness and how a relationship could strengthen you instead of stealing your power. The difference between intensity and intimacy. It was an epiphany for her: unconditional love that was so far removed from that of her childhood home or the toxic men she was consistently drawn to throughout college and her first year at university. She hadn’t understood that you could find creativity, passion and adventure living inside a dependable, trustworthy man. It was an irresistible combination, with which William had completely seduced her; the memory of it sustained her even now, when the light in him had dimmed so. If they did separate, was that the end of love for her, or could she find it again with someone new? Perhaps it was time to stop resenting William for having grown into someone different and just let them both move on? Maybe some other woman would accept him the way he was and not hold old promises against him.

  Over the years, William had sometimes suggested she see a counsellor again, usually when he was campaigning for them to have a baby. It was an easier way for her to show willing than to try to explain to him directly the disappointment she felt in their married life, but she had never really felt that it helped her to resolve anything. On the day of her last appointment, a year before, she left sobbing and swore she would never return. In the therapist’s office, she remembered her first day at a drama summer school when she was seven.

  Clare had worried herself into a tight little knot beforehand about strange faces, lisping out loud or if she would need to be able to do cartwheels (which she couldn’t), but it had never crossed her mind that the shame of unwashed feet would be her downfall. It wasn’t that her family was dirty or that her mother wouldn’t have been appalled if she saw the black between her toes. It was more that her mother just couldn’t see it. She was as oblivious to the grubby soles of Clare’s feet or Flora’s unwashed hair as she was to the runs in her own sagging tights or the egg stains on her blouse. Her mother, Teresa, felt invisible and so believed that she was, and her slovenly condition too. Somewhere over the years, her mother had transformed from a militant housekeeper who scrubbed kitchen tiles, cloth nappies and scruffs of necks with equal vigour, into a half-person who had abandoned herself to apathy. Clare understood now that her mother had been suffering from a severe depression but, as a child, it just confused her and she tried to cover for her as best she could and to protect Flora from the worst of her episodes.

  At the summer school, while the rest of her classmates pulled off their shoes and socks with excitement, Clare retreated into the corner and surreptitiously peeled back her left sock to assess the condition of her feet. The sight of her heel was enough to stop her and she yanked the sock straight back up again. How she wished she had filled the red plastic basin with sudsy water the night before and given her feet a scrub. She always loved the feeling of submerging her feet in the soapy water before wrapping them in a towel and drying away the wrinkly sensation. It just wasn’t something she made a habit of. Cleanliness had become political in her house, and being too keen to tidy up or be clean yourself seemed almost a direct assault on her mother, who resented the insinuation, however true, that she wasn’t capable of doing these things herself. Of course, there was a certain element of laziness, too. She hadn’t learned to care for her own sake yet. Not at that point. Clare slipped around the perimeter of the room and sidled over to Miss Mimi’s side, where she tugged on her sleeve and whispered, ‘I can’t take off my socks, Miss, because I have an infection on one of my feet, Miss, and the bandage might come off.’ She watched as Miss Mimi looked down at her twisting feet, where no contour of a bandage was visible through the thin cotton socks.

  ‘A bandage on both feet, Clare?’ she asked, bending closer to whisper. Clare smelled roses from her skin.

  ‘No, Miss, just the left one, but I think I’d feel strange with one sock on and one sock off. Uneven.’

  Miss Mimi gave her a long look, then turned Clare to face the room, her hands on her shoulders.

  ‘Very well, then,’ she said. ‘Leave them on for now, but try not to slip. Hopefully, you’ll be footloose and fancy free next week.’

  Clare couldn’t meet her eyes but said a little prayer of thanks for the reprieve. Next week, her toes would squeak. She had learned a lesson: to take responsibility for herself. She longed for the day when she would be a grown-up lady. Not like her own mama but like the other children’s mothers, with toenails painted red or pink peeping out of white, high-heeled summer sandals. Smelling of soap and roses.

  As she sat at her shining kitchen table now, it crossed her mind that she had perhaps taken that lesson too much to heart. Was she so self-sufficient that it rendered William’s role in her life redundant? She wanted them to be equals but strived so hard for perfection and control in her life that maybe she’d made the gap too wide. If she let her grip on things loosen just a little, would he tighten his?

  William was one of the few people who understood what her childhood experience had been. When she had nightmares, as she sometimes did, he would brush her eyelids closed with the palm of his hands, over and over again, slow and steady, until her breathing calmed and her forehead cooled, just like her father had done when she was a little girl to calm her down after another vicious row between her parents. It had taken a long time for her to feel ready to explain where those dark dreams came from; to share with William the memories of the alcohol-fuelled rows and psychological violence on the part of her mother. Despite the public façade of respectability they all maintained, she and Flora had suffered. It pained her to explain that when, eventually, plates stopped smashing and shouting gave way to sobbing, her father would escape the aftermath in the kitchen and wearily climb the stairs to see if she was sleeping. She always waited for him on the top step, hugging herself, her nightdress pulled down over her knees. She worried about how tired he would be when the alarm called him for work, dreaded the silence she knew would smother the house at tea-time the next day. She sat on the stairs, shivering, but she would not fetch herself a blanket. Little Clare had believed that, if she suffered, maybe her daddy would have to suffer less. She knew the people she described were at odds with the family William met when Clare finally invited him home to meet them. He found it hard to reconcile them with the stories he had heard, but never doubted her, nonetheless.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ William’s voice cut through her thoughts and Clare realized she sat holding a spoonful of soup in mid-air. She was too tired to try to explain to him what was running through her mind.

  ‘Nothing. Just a case I’m working on.’ She turned the pages of the magazine, scanning the headlines, and allowed herself a moment to take pride in how far that little girl had come.

  After Clare left home for university, she worked hard to re-create herself in the image and likeness of those other mothers, the career women, not her own mama, who had stayed at home with the curtains drawn. The decision to study law and not go for an art degree was made easily in her head. Her heart struggled to follow suit, but she would not allow herself to be emotional when confronted with the choice between struggle and poverty and success and security. Perhaps that was partly what had attracted her to William, as he floated through his creative-writing degree. She could flirt with his lifestyle, walk with him as he talked about the challenge of this plot twist or that character’s arc; it was light relief from laboriously reading tome after tome, writing essay after essay, until she rose to the top of her class. Sometimes, she allowed herself to daydream of an alternative life where she spent hours choosing the exact shade of green to pa
int a particular leaf or sketching spectators in the Natural History Museum. The day she discovered William’s book club, she had arrived exhausted by yet another battle to prove her position among the public-school boys who fell just short of pulling her pigtails in class. They loved to remind her how recently it was that girls had been allowed to attend the university, as if it were a privilege that could be revoked. Clare was searching for a different tone of conversation, something dove grey, where she could feel her way through a conversation, instead of marching to a black-and-white beat she never felt quite in step with.

  William looked like he had been caught eating stolen cookies when she walked in; guilty he had no one else to offer her, worried that he was wasting her time. His thumb curled through a hole in the sleeve of his jumper, his spectacles were lop-sided on the bridge of his nose. The glossy brown curls erupted from his head at all angles and fell over his eyes in a fringe that tried hard to disguise how handsome he was. This jumble sale of a man thawed something inside her. While they sat together, he flicked through the yellowed pages of a notebook with a cracking, navy-blue leather cover. She put her hand on his to make him pause. ‘What are all these notes?’ she asked. A flush sneaked from behind his ears. She soon learned that these blushes seemed always to be lying in wait for any opportunity to creep out and expose him.

  ‘Oh, just some silly stories. Sometimes, I’ll notice a stranger on the street and make up a little life for them, imagine where they are going, what they care about, who they are.’

  It blew her heart wide open. Perhaps he would become a hugely successful novelist one day and she could forget about the law and spend her days painting in a little studio. How wrong she was. She could never have anticipated that William would surrender his dream so easily for what she saw as the drudgery of the depot; that was never his long-term plan. All that time he spent typing out those supernatural letters on that battered Imperial typewriter. Why couldn’t he write stories of his own any more? Even if he had focused on his ill-fated band with Stevie, that might have fulfilled him more. Much as she had loathed the influence Stevie exerted on William and the trouble they always managed to get themselves into, perhaps William would have been happier. It would have been very hard for her to endure Stevie’s constant presence in their lives; they were fundamentally allergic to each other. He, with his fantastical dress sense and eccentric lifestyle, thought she was far too pedestrian, despite what she considered to be creative styling of her own; she thought he was a self-indulgent poser who had never done a day’s work in his life. She remembered him staggering up to William’s bedsit one day with a dozen flattened washing-machine boxes; he was going to put their demo tape inside them and deliver each one to the radio stations wrapped up as a giant present. He had considered getting in himself before jumping out and presenting the cassettes in person, until she convinced him his scheme would most likely end in either suffocation or arrest. This, of course, he had interpreted as Clare spoiling their fun, as usual.

  In fairness, though, at the time, she had believed that William really was going to have great success with his writing; otherwise, she might not have been so quick to encourage him to leave the band to take up the depot position. It was supposed to be temporary. In the beginning, he worked only three days, leaving two days to write in the British Library but, over time, he admitted that he wasn’t really getting as much writing done as he had hoped and that he might as well do some real work until he felt inspired again. She wondered now if it wasn’t inspiration he lacked but courage. It was hard to respect that.

  The thought pulled her focus back to the kitchen table, where William sat looking at her with searching eyes. She avoided looking back into them. The William she first met would never have settled. If she had told him then, flushed with the confidence of too much wine, that one day in the future they would sit in awkward silence at their kitchen table, he would never have believed her. She would have struggled to believe it herself. What chased that man away? Was it her? Was she ready to accept that they had lost the war? That William was missing in action? The questions circled in her mind like sharks. To lay the blame at his door neatly and begin again, somewhere else, would at least allow her to move on from living within this stagnant cloud. Was that what she wanted? She wasn’t sure, not yet. Instead, she buttered some bread, her shoulders hunched. At least the vegetable soup was warming. At least there was that.

  IV

  William was keenly aware of the physical proximity of his colleagues. Every sigh, fidget and sneeze rattled his emotional infrastructure. The scrape of chair legs felt like claws down his back. The atmosphere stifled him. The heating was still on its winter cycle, even though white sunlight speared through the dusty venetian blinds. The cleaners who arrived every evening at seven seemed to make little headway in their eternal battle against the dust; the whitewashed frames on the floor-to-ceiling windows were no barrier against the dirty air percolating from the traffic below. The Victorian floorboards offered endless chinks and grooves to hide away the daily debris that gathered with the post. Despite it all, however, the depot always felt illuminated by the streams of sunlight flowing in from the south and alive with the coloured patchwork cushions that lay scattered on the chesterfield sofas and the prints on the walls: Klimt’s Apple Tree, Kandinsky’s Yellow-Red-Blue, Monet’s water lilies, a black-and-white photograph of Johnny Cash and June Carter looking over their shoulders at a fairground, a pen-and-ink drawing of two penguins, wings touching as if they were holding hands, staring out from the perimeter of an iceberg. The depot colleagues had clubbed together to buy them as an office Christmas present two years before, each detective choosing one, and it made all the difference to their working habitat. Each detective’s desk was unique, also, infused with their individual characters: William’s old mahogany polished to a shine, Trevor’s leather and chrome, Marjorie’s wicker and pine. The lack of uniformity complemented the higgledy-piggledy nature of their work.

  ‘Marjorie, could you open the window a crack? It’s really stuffy in here,’ William asked, as he wriggled in his chair.

  ‘The window? When I’m sitting in the direct path of the draught? I don’t think so. If you didn’t go around dressed like it’s Christmas every day, you wouldn’t feel so ’ot and bothered. It’s a shame to see a young man dressing like he should be drawing his pension. Why don’t you get yourself some nice new jeans, eh?’

  William regretted the corduroy shirt and cardigan combination chosen in haste that morning. The grey cashmere, normally such a soft comfort, had a newly acquired texture of Brillo pad. It scratched the skin of his neck unmercifully, but the damp patches forming under his arms prevented him shedding the suffocating layer; he would rather endure feverish discomfort than the embarrassment of being exposed as a man not in control of his bodily functions.

  At the Dead Letters Depot, time defied the laws of physics, speeding faster than light one day, dripping along like a tired old tap another. That day wound down like a bucket descending slowly into the driest of wells. Every second a minute; every hour a day. Work did not expand to fill the time allowed for it, despite the volume requiring attention; William’s fingers were clumsy figs. His trolley of undeliverables overflowed and parcels and letters formed untidy piles at his feet. Envelopes haemorrhaged out of postbags all around his desk. His reputation for clearing his allocation every week had always been considered an example to all. Usually, by Friday lunchtime, every one of his letters and parcels had been attended to. It wasn’t entirely selfless; clearing his allocation allowed him time to focus on the Supernatural Division, bought him some hours of peace to click-clack away, typing up letters to add to his collection. Rather than popping out for a tipple to toast the end of the working week, this ritual was his reward. On Mondays, when a new tide of post flooded into his domain, he was generally excited to start the process all over again. And yet, for over a month now, he had barely been meeting his quota. His typewriter lay sulking under its red leather co
ver, neglected. He avoided Mr Flanagan, skipped staff meetings when he could and ate lunch at his desk, alone. William struggled to find his usual inspiration in the stories from strangers that passed before him or to get excited by his role in their delivery. He was drowning in lethargy. Lethargy and letters. How could he care about the plight of others when he feared his own personal life was accelerating towards a moment of crisis?

  He picked up a parcel wrapped in brown paper and tied tightly in string and turned it over in his hands, grimacing to hear it rattle. No address anywhere. He untangled the knot and peeled back the paper to reveal a shoe box that had once held soccer boots, size five. Inside, a large egg shape was cocooned in bubble wrap; it felt heavy in his hands as he laid it to one side and picked up the sheet of dotted paper that accompanied it. The precision of the neat, joined-up handwriting gave the distinct impression of being a newly acquired skill.

  Dear Sirs and Madams of the Royal Geological Society,

  My name is Penelope Bernardine Foxcroft and I am a keen amateur geologist. I have built an impressive collection of rocks and fossils, as I am lucky to live in Aberlemno in the north-east of Scotland, where I can hunt for them in the mountains and along the shore by the sea. I have enclosed a photo of me with my display, holding the Cairngorm granite I found last spring. The reason I am writing to you is I think I may have found a lump of fossilized whale vomit, or ambergris, to use its proper name. I know that this could be quite valuable and so would appreciate it if you could authenticate it for me.