Letters From an Unknown Woman (3 page)

‘Aren’t you going to change for dinner?’ said Mrs Head, setting the table, using her cork place mats for once, and the Noah’s Ark condiment set – indicators that this was indeed to be a very special meal.

‘Into what?’ said Tory, lifting her head.

‘You could at least take your coat off, and take your hair out.’ Mrs Head had worried a little about her daughter’s hygiene

Since she had started working at Farraway’s. Her clothes always smelt of animals, her fingernails were usually black, and there was often a grimy tincture to her skin, as though someone had scribbled all over her with a pencil. In the early days Mrs Head had set up the bath in the sitting room ready for her when she got home, but now Tory only bathed once or twice during the week, although she usually washed her hands and face at the basin. Farraway’s had a reputation locally. If you found yourself downwind of it, you’d better shut all your windows and doors. It seemed such a pity that her daughter should soil herself with such tawdry manufacturing. Gelatine of all things. Who needed gelatine now?

‘Can’t I change afterwards, Mama? My body feels like it’s bound with red-hot iron hoops.’

‘All the more reason to change, I would have thought, and to have a wash as well. At least give your hands a clean.’

‘I washed them at the factory,’ said Tory, as her mother entered from the kitchen, with her oven gloves on, which made her hands look as soft and bulky as a bear’s paws. The gloves were joined together, which made her seem like a bear in chains.

‘I’m just about to get it out of the oven,’ Mrs Head said, flourishing the gloves.

Tory stood up and took off her coat, and went out into the hall to hang it up. In the hall mirror she released her hair from its netting, shook it out, was briefly appalled by the rat-tails that appeared at her shoulders but which she managed to knead back into the main body of her hair. She was aware that she was a little grimy, that her eyes looked tired, that her lips were pale and cracked, but it wasn’t as though she was going anywhere tonight. It was only her mother who had to look at her, and she felt a certain pleasure in presenting such a tired, dirty face to her, just to remind her of how much she was suffering in this war. She didn’t realize her mother had had exactly the same thoughts, and deliberately stooped and left her hair partially unpinned for the same reason.

By the time she re-entered the dining room, the joint of roast pork was on the table, and Mrs Head was standing before it with a carving knife.

‘It’s at times like this you realize how much you miss men,’ said Mrs Head, immediately biting her lip, for she hadn’t really wanted to invoke the absent fathers of the family, deceased Arthur and missing Donald.

‘Why should we assume that carving is a man’s job?’ said Tory, taking her seat at the table – somewhat reluctantly, it seemed to Mrs Head. She had still shown no sign of appreciation for the spread that had been put out: thick gravy in a china boat that hadn’t been used for years, roast potatoes and buttered sprouts in servers under floral lids, even ringed napkins beside the coasters.

‘Well, the one who provides, I suppose, also does the carving, but then, by that logic, it’s right that I should carve, since I’m the provider this time.’

This brought a little smile to Tory’s tired face. Mrs Head inserted the tines of a carving fork into the meat. The crackling cracked, juice bubbled up and flowed down. The knife was put against the roasted skin, a few cautious strokes were made, the sharpened edge moving against the hard skin, which yielded nothing. Then suddenly, with a little pressure, she was through; the skin had broken and the meat was coming away under the knife. With a few strokes a slice had been produced, which flopped to the side, like the page of a book turning. Mrs Head worked quickly.

‘Even if I say so myself,’ she remarked, delivering the first pink slice to Tory’s plate, ‘this meat is done to perfection.’

Tory had to agree, as the excellent crackling clinked onto the plate. She was even beginning to feel quite hungry. She bent down to sniff it, in a way that her mother thought was rather rude. ‘So where did you get it?’ she said.

‘Where did I get it?’ Mrs Head hesitated, suddenly struck by the trickiness of this question, shocked that she hadn’t anticipated it. ‘Where did I get it? Well, where do you think I got it?’

‘You’ve just been telling me about how Dando’s has been completely destroyed, and how you haven’t been able to buy any meat there for days, and how there aren’t any other butchers for miles around, and that you’ll set off early to visit them tomorrow …’

‘Yes,’ said Mrs Head in a lingering sort of voice, ‘yes, I did say that, didn’t I?’ She was going through all the possible fabrications she could tell, and wondering how they compared with the truth. In the end there just wasn’t time for her to work out a story.

‘Well, you could say I did get it from Dando’s after all …’

Tory, about to put some of the meat into her mouth, instead returned it carefully to her plate. ‘What do you mean, Mother?’

‘I suppose you could say I was lucky, Tory. Very lucky. Blessed, you could say.’

Now Tory put down her knife and fork. ‘Are you trying to tell me you found this meat in the ruins of the shop?’

‘No, no, no,’ said Mrs Head, as though affronted. ‘No, not in his shop at all, no. It had been thrown right across to the other side of the street.’

Tory closed her eyes and hung her head, as though having trouble comprehending the simple words her mother was speaking. She lifted her head and spoke. ‘Where exactly did you find it?’ She still had her eyes closed, as though dreading the answer.

‘Now, Tory, there is absolutely nothing wrong with this meat. I’ve thoroughly cleaned it, I inspected it very closely …’

‘You’re telling me that this meat has been lying on the pavement since the small hours of this morning?’

‘Tory please, be practical …’

Tory stood up and moved away from the table, as though merely being near the meat could be dangerous. She stood in the middle of the room with her arms folded. ‘This is wrong in so many ways,’ she said, ‘I hardly know where to begin. Leave aside the question of looting for the moment. This meat has been lying in the open air since around three o’clock in the morning before you found it. Goodness knows what creatures could have run their rheumy snouts over it and dragged their dirty little feet across it, or sat on it with their dirty little bottoms. Then there is the question of what exactly this meat is. You say it is leg of pork. I wonder how you know it is even animal meat at all.’

‘What are you saying, Tory? Don’t be ridiculous. Of course it’s pork.’

‘Were there any casualties in this air raid? I heard people on the tram saying there had been some…’

‘It’s leg of pork, Tory, trust me. I have been visiting butchers’ shops for more than forty years and I know my cuts of meat. No bomb could joint a piece of meat so neatly. And I know how Dando cuts his pork …’

Mrs Head knew that she had not succeeded in convincing her daughter of the meat’s cleanliness, its wholesomeness. And now she, too, was starting to have her doubts. It had never once occurred to her that the meat might not be animal at all, but the remains of some poor devil caught in the bomb blast. Trust Tory to think of this possibility. She remembered how her daughter had put her off black pudding. A few months ago Tory had refused to eat any when Mrs Head had brought some home. She claimed to have heard it on good authority that the Government was using human blood for its manufacture. It was a way of making use of the surplus that had built up at the blood banks since the outbreak of war, when everyone was queuing up to ‘give’. Her mother wondered how she could know these things, and presumed that the gelatine factory was privy to such information.

‘It’s tantamount to cannibalism,’ Tory had said.

That was one way of looking at it. But it hadn’t stopped Mrs Head frying some up with the previous day’s mashed potato for a solitary lunch. She didn’t tell Tory she’d eaten it, nor that it had tasted, to her, better than normal. So good, so filling, that she’d had to lie down for an hour afterwards. It had confirmed her own feelings about herself, that she was a strong woman who could withstand anything.

A black cat entered the room, its tail perpendicular, and sniffed the air eagerly. Mrs Head, still seated at the table, lifted a small slice of pork off her plate and held it out for the cat who, as though having a fantasy realized, darted across and grabbed the meat in its teeth, making Mrs Head laugh. ‘Sambo doesn’t care,’ she said, as the cat hurried to a corner of the room and ate with his back to the humans.

Though she recognized that cats did this thing with their food, of eating defensively in corners, Tory wondered if he didn’t look a little bit ashamed. ‘The day we look to cats for moral guidance will be the day that civilization ends,’ she said.

‘They’re very practical creatures, aren’t you, Sambo?’ He had finished his morsel and come back for more.

‘All animals are practical, Mother. They’re also thoughtless.’

‘I don’t know about that, Tory. Sometimes I look at Sambo and he seems to see right through me. And you know what they say about following a cat in an air raid.’ Both women contemplated him for a few moments. ‘You know how difficult it is to come by good meat, Tory, and now that Dando’s has gone, we need to make the best of what we can get. This may be the last piece of decent meat we see for a very long time. And you can rest assured that I would never knowingly eat someone …’

Tory laughed at the statement, made so sincerely by her mother, who failed to see what was funny. The ensuing discussion grew quite heated but only served, in the end, to strengthen Tory’s conviction that there was something wrong about the meat. The more they spoke of cannibalism (in all but name), the more likely it seemed that the meat on the plate was human. Perhaps it was even Mr Dando himself. With such a possibility foremost in her mind, Tory now even found the sight of the meat repulsive, and believed that she was, indeed, very close to vomiting. At the same time she was so damn hungry.

The argument had the opposite effect on her mother. The more they discussed cannibalism, the more rigid her resolve to eat the meat, even if it was only to prove how firmly she believed it was safe. So it was Mrs Head who took the first bite at the pork of doubtful origin. Stabbing a piece with her fork, popping it into her mouth and chewing, she was careful not to meet her daughter’s eye, but to glance elsewhere with as much casual indifference as to what was in her mouth as she could muster. She took another forkful, carefully selecting the biggest, juiciest piece of pork she could find on her plate. She chewed slowly and thoughtfully. Chewing had replaced speech in their discussion. She could say all she needed to say on the subject simply by chewing.

Tory watched the spectacle, her lips set a tiny bit lopsidedly, not quite grimacing, but close to it. She sat down again and took a drink from the glass of water next to her.

‘It’s getting cold,’ her mother said, as she poked around on her plate for the next morsel. ‘It would be the most awful crime, in these times of scarcity, to waste good food like this. Absolutely criminal. And so tasty …’ She sprinkled some salt and pepper onto her meal. ‘If you don’t eat it, Tory, I – well, I don’t know what the world would think of you, if it knew …’

The likelihood of the roast dinner containing human meat was very, very slight. No one lived over those shops, she was sure, and certainly not Mr Dando (she hadn’t seen the fallen wardrobe, of course, or the pictures on the wall, or the ornament on the stranded mantelpiece). And there wouldn’t have been anyone out in the street at that time of night during a raid. Which could only mean that the meat was stock from the butcher’s shop, thrust forth by the bomb blast. But then – it was very unlikely that Dando’s was so richly stocked with meat that there was much to keep overnight. Surely any meat that came in was gone within minutes.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Tory, picking up her fork, ‘I’m sure you know best.’ She was giving the meat the benefit of the doubt. Besides, it was producing the most appealing, tempting smell. Human meat, surely, would not give off such savouriness. She picked up a piece on her fork, opened her mouth and filled it.

Mrs Head was very pleased. If she herself had any doubts about the food that had entered her digestive tract, if she discerned the faintest unwholesome taint to what was now slowly progressing through her gut, it seemed instantly dispelled the moment Tory joined her in her meal. This was because she sincerely believed that Tory would not, for a moment, have considered eating the pork if there had been any doubt in her mind that it might be human flesh. She was good in that way. Had Mrs Head been told that she had eaten human meat, she would merely have felt that an unfortunate misunderstanding had occurred. She might have felt uncomfortable, even a little nauseous, but that would have passed once the digestive process had reached its discreet conclusion. Tory, on the other hand, would have believed that her soul had been indelibly stained. She was not, as far as her mother knew, a particularly religious person (if she was, it certainly wasn‘t her parents’ doing) and yet she seemed to have an almost spiritual understanding of right and wrong. She had what her father had called a sound moral foundation. He should have known, of course, because, at six years old, Tory had reported him to the police for breaking a promise to take her kite-flying. This was something for her mother to be proud of, but it irked her sometimes because she was often made to feel bad in the radiant light of her daughter’s goodness.

But Tory didn’t eat much. If she was to be a cannibal (so she seemed to imply with her leftovers), she wasn’t going to be a greedy cannibal. By contrast Mrs Head was again made to feel a little bit bad by finishing her portion entirely and wiping up the juices with some bread.

CHAPTER THREE

The rest of the evening followed a well-established pattern, though Tory couldn’t rid herself of the lingering suspicion that she had been transformed in some irrevocable way. It was a similar feeling to the aftershock of being kissed for the first time (Clarence Dundry, chief teller at her father’s bank, on the common after a tea of kidneys and lemonade at the English Rose Tea Rooms). She would look at her face in the mirror and say, ‘Tory Head has been kissed by a man,’ and wonder why the face looking back at her was the same face that had always looked back at her, and not a different one, a woman’s one. Now she might look in the mirror and say,