Letters From an Unknown Woman (20 page)

‘Well, well,’ he eventually murmured, giving promise of a full sentence which soon faded, continuing only with more quiet exclamations of wonder. ‘Well, well.’

Tory could contain herself no longer and, having seen enough of the children’s worried eyes as they followed their father left to right, right to left, as he paced back and forth, she blurted out, ‘Don’t you think Tom looks so much more like a man?’

Donald swung his head round. ‘Did I ask you to speak, woman?’

Although he said this quietly, his voice was sharp enough to make Albertina burst into tears. Donald continued his silent inspection of the children, ignoring Albertina’s sobbing and eventually settling his gaze upon Tom. He stood before him, and Tom wondered, for a moment, if his father was expecting a salute, but instead Donald held out his hand and they shook, firmly but briefly.

’We must not speak, in this house, unless spoken to …’ Donald said, in a slightly embarrassed way, to Tom, but in reference to Tory, who remained distant, by the door. ‘If people speak without asking, then there is no chance to think.’

He moved on to Paulette and Albertina, whose hands he didn’t shake. He patted their golden heads instead.

‘Fine girls,’ he said, as though he was appraising specimens at a country show. ‘Fine, fine girls.’ He turned to Tory. ‘Soon be able to marry these two little beauties off, eh, Tory?’ he said. ‘The young men will be forming a queue down the path before long.’

‘Smile at your father,’ Tory whispered urgently to the girls, but by the time they had overcome their fear enough to muster a smile, Donald’s inspection had moved on to Branson, who was hiding behind Albertina’s billowing dress.

The child, seemingly the least troubled soul in the room, returned Donald’s gaze with a lazy sort of curiosity.

‘I heard about someone who came home to find his wife had given birth to a little black baby,’ said Donald, without taking his eyes off Branson, ‘and the first thing he did when he saw it was throw it out of the window. And they lived on the fourth floor …’

‘This is the little boy I told you about Donald, who I found on a bomb site in Leicester. Poor little thing was orphaned so I took him in. Didn’t you get my letter?’

‘I must have lost it among all those other stories you sent me …’ He gave her what she interpreted as a knowing glance, a glance she’d never seen on Donald’s face before, which said – I know exactly what you’ve been up to, old girl. It seemed he was just about to say something else when his attention was caught by another object in the room. ‘And what in God’s name is this?’

He was talking about the typewriter that now sat rather stolidly on the escritoire, the Remington 748, nicknamed the Old Faithful, that she had been given by one of her mother’s friends, Mrs Harrington, who had no more use for it. Donald lurched over to it, exaggerating his limp, it seemed to Tory, and bent down to take a closer look. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it in my life,’ he said. ‘I suppose you’ll tell me you gave birth to it …’

Apart from the wireless in the kitchen, the Remington was probably the most complicated and sophisticated machine that had ever taken up a space in the house. Tory loved it. She had been hesitant about accepting it at first, because it somehow seemed to ask too much of her. If she began picking away at the keys, filling the house with the sound of her slow, laborious clatter, then it would be expected that she would write something of value, something serious, worthy, publishable. In fact, Tory’s ambitions as a writer had come upon her almost by stealth and against her will. Through her manipulations of viewpoint and time in the gushing narratives issued by George Farraway as he satisfied himself (and her, she had to concede), she saw how whole new worlds can suddenly spring into being. Intrigued by the possibilities, she had thus embarked on some storytelling on a bigger, more ambitious scale.

She had immersed herself in the works of Warwick Deeping, and wanted to write a novel about a family that struggles through wartime, the husband and wife separated by the necessities of war. She found that she could use her own family as a model, and that with those little shifts of perspective, alterations to time and space, a new family emerged, bearing only fragile similarities to her own. It was more as though they existed in a different country, one in which everything was foreign, yet at the same time comprehensible. They were different, but the same. She called the novel
The Distance
, and had written fourteen chapters, and each chapter was at least ten pages long, some a lot longer. Given that she couldn’t type, she regarded this, with much concealed pride, as a colossal achievement. Only one thing worried her. The mother of the story, a character she had named Charlotte Maugham, was going irredeemably to the bad, and there didn’t seem anything she could do to stop her.

‘I never thought I’d see the like of one of these in the house,’ said Donald, bending so low it was as though he was investigating the typewriter with his nose, but his remark wasn’t approving. He wasn’t in awe of the machine, as Tory had been. He seemed to regard it as some sort of invading despot. ‘Clapped-out old thing, isn’t it? When was it made?’

Tory regretted that she had left a sheet of paper in the machine, abandoned mid-sentence. She had been working on the novel in a few stolen minutes that very morning. Donald whacked some of the keys with his right index finger, jabbing down on the letters so emphatically that the typewriter’s response seemed like a cry of pain as the typeface hit the paper and the carriage shunted one space to the left. In his carelessness he doubled some keys, and there was a jam in the barrel.

‘Toddlers and typewriters. You’ve been busy while the rest of us have been fighting for king and country, haven’t you, old girl?’

Later she was able to look at what Donald had typed. The words were added to the sentence Tory had been writing, typed so heavily the black ink filled all the spaces within the letters so that they became blobs.

don lladsshome

It was unfortunate also that Tory had left the whole typescript on the escritoire bureau beside the typewriter. She had done a title page, which read

THE DISTANCE

by

Victoria Louise Pace

She had taken great care over it, making sure that the text was centred, double-typing the title so that it appeared darker. In fact, the title page had taken about fifteen drafts, each previous one ending up a crumpled ball in the wastebasket. So to have it lifted up by one corner, as though it was a sickly kitten being lifted by its ear, and have her carefully chosen words read out in a quietly mocking Scottish accent, with an awful emphasis on her rarely used middle name – it was almost too much to bear, and she was only thankful that, after the surprise of the title page, Donald felt no inclination to pursue the opening lines of Chapter One.

It was a bright purple evening in October when Charlotte Maugham came home from her first day of working in the Glue Factory. I’m not sure I can stick this, she thought.

She couldn’t resist that little joke in the opening sentence, but with the way the novel was beginning to take shape, it no longer seemed appropriate, and what would Donald think of such a thinly disguised reference to the gelatine factory? He would immediately think that she was writing a novel about her own family, and he would begin looking for himself in there. But all she wanted to do was to write about a woman who had the same, or similar, thoughts and feelings to her own. And even that was proving difficult. Charlotte Maugham had already worked as an artist’s model, posing nude for a sculptor who wore a red bow-tie. She even drank Dubonnet.

But Donald replaced the title page with exaggerated care, then simply said, ‘Well, Tory
Louise
Pace, famous author, you’re going to have to shift all this junk somewhere else. I will be requiring this room.’

He said he needed a downstairs room, because, with his bad leg, he could not manage the stairs. He intended to use the sitting room as his bedroom, saying he would sleep, for the moment, on the chaise longue, which was almost exactly the right length for his not very ‘longue’ body.

The typewriter and manuscript of
The Distance
were removed at once. There was nowhere else in the house Tory could type. She couldn’t use the small dining-table, as it was always being used for other things, and she would have felt awkward typing in the dining room, even if most of the others were out of the house. There was a small dressing-table in her bedroom, but it was not suitable for writing at. There was really only one place for the typewriter and the novel that had slowly emerged from it to go, and that was under the bed. So that was where it went, and work on
The Distance
came to an abrupt stop.

Just as well, Tory comforted herself. Now she didn’t have to worry any more about what poor old Charlotte Maugham was going to get up to. Just as well.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Donald was different. In some ways, the differences were obvious – he was thinner, greyer, craggier. He limped and used a walking-stick. He was quieter, in that he spoke less, but he was also louder, in that when he spoke he shouted. He seemed to have developed a need for solitude, and would spend hours on his own in the sitting room with the door firmly shut, barking at anyone who disturbed him.

In other ways, the differences were less obvious, and they filled Tory with unease. Donald had never been a passionate man, and had always struggled to show affection or express joy. But, all the same, one had assumed those feelings were there, deep down. Tory had always said that if you dug deep enough into her husband, you would eventually find a warm, beating heart. But not any more. Since that first hug on the front path, they’d hardly made physical contact. It was true that sometimes he would hold on to her arm for support, particularly when they were out walking, and try to pass it off as an affectionate conjoining, but even though they were touching, there was no connection. To touch without connecting. What an odd, unnerving experience, thought Tory.

They would go to the shops together. There was a new butcher’s in Old Parade now, though not where Dando’s had been. That gap had yet to be filled. The new butcher’s was further down, next to Bon Voyage. It was called Hughes. Passing this shop, Donald had noticed a large lattice-topped Grosvenor pie in the window. Such a thing had not appeared in a butcher’s shop window for many years. He went in and bought the whole pie, but he ate it immediately, on the pavement outside the shop. Sometimes he would do a similar thing when passing a baker’s – buy a whole cake and eat it immediately. Tory had to remember that for four years Donald had lived on nothing but prison-camp rations. She didn’t know what they were because Donald said nothing about life in the camp, but she assumed they must have been dreadfully meagre. What must a pie look like to a man deprived of proper food for so long? Old Parade must seem like a sort of paradise, a teeming thoroughfare, every window laden with riches.

‘Donald, you could wait until we get home …’

‘What?’ said through a muffler of pie.

‘You know, take it home, eat it there, perhaps share it out.’

Donald looked for a moment as though he wasn’t going to answer, but then he said, ‘It might get wasted.’

*

They hadn’t had a proper celebration of his homecoming. The day of his arrival, people had gathered at the house. Word had spread. Old friends of the family arrived with bottles of ale in their hands. Someone suggested they have a singsong round the piano, before Tory pointed out that they didn’t have such an instrument. But Donald didn’t want to see anybody anyway, and she had to send them away. Since then he had become increasingly solitary.

Tory supposed that Donald considered food and people to be very different things. He had been deprived of both for many years, and yet he did not want to gorge on company in the same way he gorged on food. The sitting room very quickly became Donald’s private room, into which no one else was allowed to venture. Tory missed the room that had been hers throughout the war. When she asked Donald if she could look at her books, he didn’t invite her in to browse her little library. Instead he dumped the books in the passageway. It was as though he was fashioning his own house within a house. He had no use for books of any description, so she didn’t just get her Warwick Deepings and the complete works of Walter Scott: her father’s accountancy journals were expelled from the sitting room as well. There were no other bookcases in the house, so these books went under the bed, alongside the typewriter and
The Distance
.

At times Tory felt – there was no other word –
homeless
. She realized that if she wanted to have the slightest chance of feeling that she belonged anywhere in the house, she would have to occupy the kitchen and dining room with a zeal she had never before possessed. She had to give herself to the kitchen, embrace the brass and iron of the gas range. She had to set down kitchen roots.

The problem was her mother. All through the war she had been saying that when this thing was over she was going to go straight back to Waseminster, just as soon as another property became available. But she had aged in the years since her return to London, and the prospect of a solitary life in a marshland village did not seem so attractive as it once had.

So it seemed, for a while, that the kitchen would become a new battlefield for the two women. But Mrs Head was losing physical strength rapidly: she bowed out of the contest gracefully and Tory became the undisputed cook and shopper of the household.

It seemed also that Donald was not troubled by the presence of Branson in the house, but then again, it was hard to tell because he did spend an awful lot of time alone in his room. It could not quite be said that he ignored Branson in particular because he seemed to ignore everyone in the house, including his children.

Tory thought it best to leave Donald to himself for a while. He needed a period of adjustment. Of acclimatization. She had tried a few times to see if he wanted to talk about the years that he had spent away from his family, but the only thing she could manage was once placing a reassuring hand on his shoulder when they had a moment alone together, ‘Donald – was it really very bad?’