Letters From an Unknown Woman (2 page)

There was Mrs Richards, in the same turban and pearls that had, only yesterday, charmed Mr Dando into passing her some fillet steak. When Mrs Head, who had glimpsed the exchange when passing the window, challenged him about this he had claimed it was liver. ‘You are a tricky little spiv, Mr Dando,’ she had called through the shop doorway, then done her best to slam the door, not waiting for Mr Dando’s retort, ‘It was liver, love! LIVER, my lovely!’ Well, she had a right to be angry. He had sold her nothing but ox tails, trotters, cow heels and tripe for weeks.

The mothers, roped off, exclaimed in surprise when one spotted what looked like victims of the explosion. At the distant end of the parade, only partly visible, bodies were arranged on the ground, on their backs, in fashionable but tattered clothes, stiffly raising arms to the heavens that had rained death upon them. It was a moment before anyone realized the dead were in fact shop mannequins, rescued from Mr Carter’s dress emporium. He emerged with some more while they were watching, a woman under each arm. Mrs Head and the other gathered housewives couldn’t help smiling at the spectacle: the little bald-headed chap looked like the Sheikh of Araby carting off his harem.

‘Do you think anyone really was – hurt?’ said Mrs Lippiatt, a sad and rather turtle-like woman, who always had trouble with her neck.

‘I wouldn’t have thought so,’ said Mrs Sparrow, wiping her nose aggressively. ‘I don’t think anyone lived over those shops …’

‘What about Mr Dando?’ said Mrs Richards, in her sandpapery voice.

No one seemed quite to know where the butcher lived, or what his habits were. It was odd that he wasn’t on the scene to inspect the damage. Perhaps he’d been already and was busy making his arrangements, whatever they might be. There was clearly nothing that could be salvaged from his shop, so there was probably little point in staying around.

There were lots of suitcases in the road, scattered, splayed, empty. Handbags as well, little brown leather ones, also empty. It was as if the residents of Old Parade had seen what was coming and had boldly made to escape, but just a minute too late. In fact the bags came from the luggage shop, Bon Voyage, whose merchandise had all been blown out through its windows. A sign was propped on the rubble, in dripping red: ‘Looters Will Be V. Severly Delt With.’

‘I think Mr Larkin must have written that,’ said Mrs Taylor. Mr Larkin was, at that moment, gathering up the apples and oranges that had fallen from his greengrocer’s.

‘I don’t know where we’re going to do our shopping now,’ said Mrs Pinner, who also had her shopping bag, making Mrs Head feel less foolish. ‘There isn’t a decent butcher’s within a mile of here.’

‘And if we do find one, will we be able to register?’

‘We’ll have to. They can’t let us starve.’

‘Why not? In Silvertown they were fighting each other over bags of flour …’

‘The high street must be the nearest. There’s several there. Shouldn’t be any trouble, as long as the trams are running. Otherwise it’s a two-mile walk.’

‘Perhaps they can deliver …’

Mrs Head began making plans in her mind almost immediately. All the housewives of Peter Street, and Mark Street, and John Street, and all the tough little terraces around here, they would all be making for the high street, elbowing each other out of the way to get to the best butcher. The jostling for position would begin all over again. She would need to plan her campaign, practise her charm (her one serious failing) and, above all, strengthen her legs. A two-mile walk every day was more than she’d bargained for on returning from Waseminster.

*

The conversation petered out and the housewives began to drift away, empty-handed, to their homes. Mrs Head would have been among the first to make her way back and prepare for the expedition to the high street, but she was transfixed by the details of the devastation. She had already noted the mannequins, the suitcases and handbags, the apples and oranges, now she began to notice the upper storeys of the bombed shops. The tall interior walls disclosed apparently lived-in spaces, marked by the stained zigzags of fallen staircases, and the macaroni ends of wrenched piping (some trickling pathetically) standing feebly out from tiled corners. Faded wallpaper, exposed to the glare of daylight for the first time, had pictures hanging on it. A wardrobe was lying half shattered and aslant on a heap of rubble. Thirty feet in the air, a little black fireplace was stranded in a wall, its mantelpiece (surely not) had what looked like an ornament still in position.

At ground level groups of men in dusty clothes were hastily trying to assemble scaffolding poles and salvaged timber to shore up the teetering walls. Mrs Head moved away, across the wide, strewn expanse of Old Parade itself to the opposite pavement, noting the damage on this side, the gaping windows, and the deeply pocked brickwork, which had taken the full impact of shrapnel. Further along, firemen were still hosing water into a smouldering shopfront.

Directly opposite where Dando’s had been was Timothy’s, a large bakery, confectioner and chocolatier, which had done rather well since opening a few years back but had suffered since the shortages had taken hold and had seemed, recently, to be on the point of going out of business – as much for the scarcity of its wares, Mrs Head sometimes suspected, as for its suspiciously continental leanings. It liked to sell what it called Austrian Apple Cake and Bavarian Gateau, as well as Swiss Pralines (slightly more acceptable).

As she looked closely at the shopfront of Timothy’s now she could see, among the many scars and mini-craters of a building that had been exposed to a bomb blast, other matter. Yes, she was sure of it. There was actually a rasher of bacon stuck to the wall over the main window, perfectly flat against the brickwork, as though it had been cemented there. And then she saw another, and then another, fanned out across the façade, an array of streaky bacon. Then other materials that must have been flung with terrific force from the exploding butcher’s across the street – that thing up there, over the door, that was surely a sausage. It was flattened and burst, but it was definitely one of Mr Dando’s notoriously gristly bangers. (It was said that sawdust was a prime ingredient.)

There was much else. Dollops of mince, pieces of liver, kidneys, other offal, all stuck fast. And, Mrs Head felt like raising a fist in self-vindicating triumph, there was steak. The tricky little victualler who had denied his shop contained an ounce of beef now had his lies stuck fast over Timothy’s for the world to see. His shop had been veritably overflowing with beefsteak. There must have been so much steak in Dando’s shop he probably couldn’t close his refrigerator doors for it. She turned to the busy crowds of rescuers and onlookers, ready to cry out, ‘I told you so! You want proof, here it is, the sins of the butcher written on the walls of the confectioner’s …’ She didn’t shout it. There wasn’t anyone nearby anyway. No one was even looking in her direction. And Mrs Head turned back to her tableau of exposed meat, and briefly wished that the bomb hadn’t thrown it so high.

She turned her attention to ground level and saw, for the first time, what seemed to her an almost perfect leg of pork, just sitting there on the pavement. Or, rather, it was resting, tucked slightly behind a piece of timber (probably part of a window frame), and was off the ground and quite hidden. Furthermore, it was covered with the same layer of dust as everything else in the area and so was well camouflaged.

After a moment’s thought, Mrs Head bent down, picked up the joint and put it in her shopping bag, feeling grateful that she had decided to bring that piece of equipment after all.

*

Had anyone called Mrs Head a looter she would have expressed great indignation, even outrage, though the thought did cross her mind, as she hurried home, as to whether, if spotted, she would have been ‘v. severly delt with’ in the manner of that crudely written sign. Apart from the fact that Mr Dando was always lying about how much meat he had in stock, which in itself was justification for taking it when it had become available, such goods were perishable and would only spoil if they weren’t used. It could hardly be compared to stealing tins of food or dresses or wireless sets.

When home she gave the meat a long, investigative sniff. She looked closely for any signs that it might have been nibbled by rats. She ran her fingers over its surface, feeling for any splinters of broken glass. There were none. She brushed off the little pieces of grit and ash, ran it under the kitchen tap for a full five minutes, dabbed it with a kitchen towel, then wondered what she should do with it.

Cleaned up, the meat looked excellent. A lovely deep, almost purply pink, with a nice hairless skin covering a layer of snowywhite fat. It seemed to cry out, ‘Roast me, roast me.’ Mrs Head thought of the wonderful crackling such a joint would give, and she wouldn’t have hesitated, except that it was a Wednesday. A stew would have been more appropriate for a Wednesday. On the other hand, the meat might not keep until Sunday. She didn’t like the thought of it lying around in her house uncooked for four days. And the look of excitement she would see on Tory’s face when she got home from work, to smell a joint of pork roasting in the oven, would be worth it in itself. They hadn’t had a joint for many months. Apart from that, she had some apples and could make a good sauce to go with it. And the cold pork would keep them in sandwiches for days.

So, that afternoon, instead of going to stake her claim on the butchers of the distant high street, Mrs Head prepared the roast dinner of her life, using the joint of pork she had found near the site of a bombed butcher’s shop.

And still no one seemed to know what had become of Mr Dando.

CHAPTER TWO

Mrs Head was a little disappointed with her daughter, in almost every way. She had not attained the beauty that had seemed possible when, as a ten-year-old, she had possessed the most lovely eyes. In adulthood they seemed, instead, to bulge slightly. In the same way her face, going through the mill of puberty, had been pulled out of shape. All the bones were wrong. Her forehead was too high, her chin too small. Such things might not have mattered, but Mrs Head was beginning to believe that all her other little failings seemed to stem from this one – the failure to be beautiful.

If beautiful, she could have attracted a more worthwhile husband than the little Scottish painter and decorator she had married, without much obvious enthusiasm, in 1930, and who now had been missing in action for more than six months. With more beauty she could have found more appropriate, more glamorous war work than toiling in the packing department of a gelatine factory. Above all, she would have attracted and benefited from the attentions of the world: her teachers would have taught her more, her friends would have shared their best things with her. She would, like all beautiful people, have had a trust fund set up on her behalf for the world to fill with its riches. She would have had vitality.

Instead, it seemed to Mrs Head, Tory not only lacked vitality, she seemed, at just thirty-four years old, to be spent, exhausted, defeated. Each day she looked greyer. She came home from work each evening red-eyed and chap-lipped and, after a silent, small dinner, would shut herself in the sitting room for most of the evening. Hardly a word passed between them on most nights.

Well, perhaps things would be different this evening, Mrs Head thought, when Tory caught the whiff of a real roast dinner. It was a troublesome thing for Mrs Head, thinking of her own child in such poor terms, and she wondered if she was making sufficient allowances for her. She must, of course, be missing her children terribly, and was probably rather upset about Donald (whom she seemed to think for certain was dead), and if she wasn’t the radiant beauty Mrs Head had been expecting, it was going too far to say she was ugly. Just a quarter of an inch off the forehead, a bit more on the chin, a rounding-off of the face to lose that horrible squareness it had developed, and she would be quite good-looking. If only she would make the best of what she had. She didn’t even bother with makeup these days. And this evening, the evening of the roast-pork dinner, she arrived home, not for the first time, with her hair still in the factory-issue nets under her own slightly crumpled hat.

She entered the dining room utterly indifferent to the smell that filled it, or the sound of a spitting joint that could be heard from the kitchen and, still in her chunky, too-masculine raincoat, flopped into an armchair by the mantelpiece, took out the newspaper that was folded under her arm and dropped it onto the dining-table beside her.

Mrs Head told her about the bombing of Old Parade and the destruction of the shops, how terrible it had been to see all those lovely little shops blown inside out, and how difficult it was going to be now to do the shopping, but she, Mrs Head, was not going to be put off and she was going down to the high street first thing tomorrow and would get herself registered with the best butcher she could find…

Tory took all this in, or at least seemed to, in a passive, disinterested way, leaning back in her chair with her eyes closed, working her head gently from side to side, as though to ease some tension in her neck. Having told Tory everything she could think of about the bomb, Mrs Head came to a stop, trying her best not to show frustration at her daughter’s indifference, both to the news and to the cooking smells she should have noticed by now. She felt, as she stood there in the middle of the room facing her seated daughter, rather like an actor who had forgotten their lines. Then she said, ‘Hungry?’

‘No, not really.’ It was the expected answer.

‘Oh, but you must be. I’ve got something special tonight, really special.’

‘Oh, yes?’ She seemed to be waiting to be told what it was.

‘Can’t you smell it?’

‘I can smell something.’

‘We’re having roast pork. A real treat. And I’ve made apple sauce, and roast potatoes, and we’re going to have the most marvellous gravy, well…’

Tory managed a nod and a smile, as if she was, in some remote corner of her mind, surprised and pleased.