Letters From an Unknown Woman (19 page)

As a baby he had been frighteningly quiet. It was almost as though he knew he shouldn’t be there. He rarely cried, but he often looked as though he was about to, pouting with misery, thrusting out his lower lip at everything around him. He seemed unbearably disappointed with the world, and Tory sometimes felt sorry for bringing him into it. She breastfed him in secret, hiding from neighbours any clue that she might be lactating. In the darkened bedroom the child would take the nipple with a sigh, then look up at her faintly accusingly, as if to say, Is this the best you’ve got?

Tory’s other children had accepted her story of Branson’s arrival into their family with a heartstopping lack of hesitation. Paulette and Albertina, at least, showed no sign that they thought their mother might be lying, and this made her cry, tearlessly and silently.

She had shed many tears when she went to Upper Slaughter to fetch them home at the end of the war. She had opted against visiting them during their evacuation, apart from that one weekend six months after their departure. The visit had been so difficult and awkward, the ending of it so sad (for her, at least, though the apparent lack of sorrow in her children had been one of the things that had made it so difficult), that she had decided against repeating the experience. She watched their receding figures on the platform at Moreton-in-Marsh, engulfed by sulphurous clouds from the little steam train, and she had not seen them since, instead trying to make up for her absence with her copious letter-writing. So when she returned to Upper Slaughter in May 1945, she was quite terrified that the children would not recognize her, or she them. And she didn’t at first.

They had changed in proportion to their respective ages. Tom, the eldest, had altered the least, still with his intellectual hair, parted at the side and shaved at the back, and with his heavy, black-rimmed glasses. He shook his mother’s hand without meeting her eye, examining the toes of his shoes instead. Paulette had become a woman, almost, with a full, downy face and flowing golden hair, and a buttoned-up bosom beneath her countrywoman’s coat. Albertina, at least, had the vestiges of childhood. She was twelve now, but still had a little girl’s knock-knees and ribbons in her plaited hair.

‘I suppose you want us to kiss you,’ said Tom, wiping an imaginary piece of grit from his eye, which caused his spectacles to glance sideways.

‘No,’ said Tory, laughing, ‘I want to kiss
you
.’ And she took him and hugged him and kissed his freckled cheek, and was shocked by the faintest hint of whiskers there. She did the same with her daughters, who responded with respectable hugs in turn. They were crying by the time they got on the train, but not for joy. They were sad to be leaving their home.

They were sullen and disappointed when they arrived at Peter Street. Branson had been left there in the care of Mrs Head.

‘I want you to meet your adopted brother, children. Branson is a little boy I found in Leicester. He was a baby then, but his family had been killed in an air raid.’ Tom showed not the least interest in the boy, apart from expressing concern about where he was going to sleep.

‘Well, he can share a room with you, Tom. I will share with Mrs Head, and the girls can have a room to themselves.’

This seemed like a good arrangement, and no one asked what would happen when and if their father came home.

*

It seemed to take the children a long time to settle back into their old lives. Tory would catch Paulette looking wistfully out of the back-door window at the concrete yard. She didn’t say as much, but Tory could see that she was remembering the enormous gardens at Upper Slaughter, with their adjacent orchards and paddocks. What a prison a place like Peter Street must seem to her, she thought.

Then, one morning, Tom said to his mother, ‘Has this house got smaller, Mama?’

‘No, Tom. You’ve got bigger.’

‘But there were more rooms …’

‘No, the same number as before.’

‘Didn’t there used to be grass in the garden?’

‘A long time ago, yes. But Daddy put cement down, and paving stones when you were about six years old.’

Tory had tried to organize a party for the children, inviting some of their old friends from before the war. It had been an awkward affair, because none of the children remembered each other or, if they did, were frightened by how they’d changed. Only one boy seemed untroubled by the changes, a golden-haired angelfaced but noisy child who helped himself to all the food (there wasn’t a lot), and ended up pulling Paulette’s hair.

Afterwards, as she cleared away the mess of cake, Tom spoke to her, as though the representative of her three children. ‘Why didn’t you tell us you’d adopted a baby?’

‘I don’t know, Tom. I suppose I thought you might be worried …’

‘But why wasn’t he evacuated like us?’

‘Yes, he would have loved the horses.’ Albertina said this through a full mouth.

‘That’s a nice thought, Albertina – and I’m glad you seem to have got your appetite now your friends have gone. I suppose the trouble was that he was just a baby when I found him. I don’t think anyone could have been found in your village to take on a little baby …’

‘But you took him on.’

Tory didn?t know quite what to say, so tried changing the subject. ‘Wasn’t it nice seeing all your old friends again?’

‘Friends? I didn’t know any of them.’

Tom was following his thoughts through a fiercely logical progression. ‘If it was safe enough for a baby to live here, then why couldn’t we come home?’

‘But I thought you liked it in Upper Slaughter …’

‘That is not the point, Mother …’

All the children were now busily eating the food they’d ignored during the party.

‘Well, one had to weigh the risks and the benefits. It was very difficult.’

‘Weren’t you even bombed once?’ said Albertina, in a disappointed voice.

‘Thankfully, no.’

‘I find that rather hard to believe, Mother. I do read the newspapers, you know.’

‘Do you?’

‘That’s what’s happened, I can see it now. This house got bombed, didn’t it, and you’ve rebuilt it exactly as it was, except that you’ve forgotten one of the rooms, and the ceilings are a bit lower?’

To Tory’s horror, Tom’s half-joking explanation for the diminution of the house was being taken seriously by the girls.

‘You’re right, Tom. This isn’t the same house at all. You’ve rebuilt it, haven’t you?’

Later, Tory heard the girls talking to each other in their bedroom.

‘I don’t think this is our house, do you?’

‘No, it’s like Tom said, it’s a different house, designed to look the same as the old one.’

‘But they didn’t get it right.’

Then Tom’s deep, breaking voice was heard.

‘I don’t think our mother is really our mother, either. I think she was probably killed when the house was bombed, and she’s been replaced by someone from the Government so that we wouldn’t get upset.’

To Tory’s relief, this was going too far for the girls, and they disagreed with Tom.

‘No, Mama’s real, and so is Mrs Head …’

‘But how do you know?’

‘Shut up, Tom. Of course Mama’s real.’

‘So how do you explain the kid?’

‘Simple. Like she said, she found him in Leicester.’

‘Whoever heard of someone finding a kid in Leicester? It’s obvious that the Government has sent a replacement, except this replacement has got a kid of her own …’

‘Well, he can’t be her own because he’s got dark hair, and none of us is dark.’

‘He could be wearing a wig. Let’s find out tomorrow.’

‘Don’t be nasty to that little boy. I think he’s a sweet thing, and you think how frightened he must be, with all us grown-ups in the house all of a sudden.’

Tom was so persistent in his theory that his mother had been replaced that the girls became exasperated.

‘You be pullin’ our leg, Thomas Pace,’ said Paulette, apparently impersonating someone from Upper Slaughter. ‘You see if I don’t lash out wi’ me whupp at thee …’

‘I be not pulling yer leg, li’l wuzz’n, be I? Plain as day sha bain’t no mother we never knowed …’

The conversation dissolved into giggling.

All three children had come home with West Country accents, quite strong in Albertina’s case. They did not have to extend them very far to lampoon their erstwhile country cousins. In fact, none of the children realized their accents had changed, not until they went back to school where they were teased mercilessly. The accents were gone in less than a week.

*

It was Albertina who announced the arrival home of Donald Pace, though she did not at first imagine that the man she saw was her father.

‘There’s a soldier outside who keeps marching back and forth past the house. He’s got a sword. He keeps looking at the window.’ Tory carefully placed the teapot on the table, clutched herself, then stared at her mother.

‘Go on,’ said Mrs Head. ‘What are you waiting for?’

She saw that her daughter was thinking about Branson, who was sitting in a bored sort of way at the kitchen table, arranging spoons.

‘Just go,’ she said.

For a moment Tory forgot all her anxieties about Donald’s return and ran to the front door. He was there, at the end of the short path. She hardly took a moment even to look at him as he came through the gate towards her. But when she put her arms around him, it was as though she had hugged a soufflé. The bulging khaki had mostly air inside it, and then a bony little body some-where in the middle. He seemed aged, shrunken, crooked. His skin was loose around his jowls, his chest seemed scooped out, hollow, and his neck poked like a vulture’s through the wide collar of his battle blouse.

‘What are you doing hanging around outside, you stupid fool?’ she said. ‘Why didn’t you knock?’

‘Wasn’t sure you were expecting me,’ he said, and for the first time she realized that hers was one of the few houses not festooned with welcome-home banners. Even from there she could see the houses opposite, garnished with balloons and the sign ‘Welcome Home Dennis’ daubed in black paint on a bed sheet. They had been left hanging long after the soldiers had returned.

‘They never gave us any warning,’ said Tory. ‘I haven’t heard anything … Why didn’t you send a telegram?’

Apart from his thinness, his cragginess, there was a moustache, almost orange in colour, meticulously crafted and overmanaged so that it formed a perfectly symmetrical shape around the centre of his upper lip, like two little orange flames flaring sideways from his philtrum. It gave him an uncharacteristically rigid and disciplined air. He looked like an officer, and it was, she supposed, an officer’s moustache, and probably newly formed, carved out of the remnant of the straggly beard she imagined he had grown in the camp. As he walked up the path alongside Tory she thought for a moment that he was marching, but then realized that his leg was stiff, and that he was using a stick (how could she not have noticed?). But he seemed, by his gait and general demeanour, to be someone anxious to show that he was suffering, and that he was in no mood to accept any excuses for there not being a welcome-home banner over the door. What would it have taken, for goodness’ sake, to paint a few words on a bedsheet? Tom would have enjoyed doing that. Why hadn’t she thought of it?

By now the others had gathered at the front door, but were watching as if from a position of safety, not quite sure what to make of the visiting stranger. The children, especially Albertina, could hardly remember their father, and when they had last seen him he certainly hadn’t looked like he did now. They were used to seeing a spiky-haired man in a paint-splattered apron, not this brass-buttoned soldier with brand new boots shining like mirrors and a barely used forage cap tucked smartly into his epaulette, and certainly not someone with an orange moustache, so neatly clipped and vivid it looked as though it had been painted on.

Sensing that Donald was on the verge of being overwhelmed, Mrs Head ushered her grandchildren into the sitting room to allow him some space.

‘Is that man our father?’ said Albertina, once they were on their own.

‘I suppose so,’ said Paulette, who was holding the hand of a very puzzled Branson.

‘Has he escaped?’ said Albertina.

‘No,’ said Tom, his arms folded. ‘The war’s over – didn’t you hear?’

‘So they let him out?’

‘Yes.’

‘They must have said, “
Ok, you win, off you go, back to your own country
”, then just opened the gates and let them all out.’

They listened carefully through the ajar door to the sounds that were coming from the hallway. Very few sounds were coming from the man, and what he said they couldn’t make out. The accent seemed very strange, and he spoke in rather a whisper.

‘Is our father foreign?’ said Albertina.

‘He’s Scottish,’ said Tom, remembering.

‘He didn’t have a kilt on,’ said Albertina.

‘I shouldn’t think the Germans let him have one.’

*

Suddenly, after some moments of quiet while the adults had retreated to the kitchen, the sitting-room door swung open and their grandmother appeared, looking a little anxious.

‘Children, your father is ready to see you now. He would like you all to line up and wait for him to come in.’

‘Like an inspection?’ said Tom, giving a slightly insolent halflaugh.

‘It’s what your father’s used to. Now, go on.’

Mrs Head left the room and the children had to arrange themselves into a row, instinctively ordering it chronologically and from tallest down, with Tom, the eldest, nearest the door, descending through Paulette, Albertina and Branson, who could not be made to stand still and instead twined himself around Albertina.

Then the door squeaked open, and the small, smart soldier appeared, looking a little more composed than a few minutes earlier, but his expression was serious and concerned. It was as though he was about to ask them some huge favour. There was a long silence, during which Donald walked up and down the line of children, none of whom knew what to do so just stood there, looking back at the man who was looking at them. Albertina’s eyes were fixed with wonder on the walking-stick, which she had first thought was a sword. Now and then her father would shake his head very slightly, and mutter something to himself, a quiet expression of wonder. For Tory, who watched, as instructed, from the door, the silence was unbearable. The house should be filled with the noise of celebration, she thought. There should be laughter and music, not this agonizing quietness, this pin-drop silence where Donald’s creaking boots were the only noise.