Letters From an Unknown Woman (35 page)

The women had panicked at the onset of all this watery commotion, half feeling that the lavatory had come alive, or that they were not alone after all, and that a secret chain-puller was hidden somewhere, watching. But Tory had seen the insides of a cistern enough times now to know that they could be worked automatically, by nothing more than gravity and leverage.

Once the shock was over they giggled again, and feigned anger at their own silliness.

‘It had just never occurred to me before,’ said Tory, ‘that men come in here and … do it together, standing next to each other, shoulder to shoulder. You could never imagine women doing that, could you? Even if they were able. That must mean something about men, their shamelessness.’

‘I don’t know about that,’ said Grace. ‘Perhaps it says something about their attitude to disgust. At least they don’t do the other thing together, but have cubicles, like us.’

Grace giggled as she wandered deeper into the space, seeming to gain confidence as she walked around, stamping her feet to hear the echoes, whistling.

‘Have you had enough of a look, Grace? I think we should go before someone comes …’ The emboldening effects of the champagne were beginning to fade. But Grace had spotted Clive’s office, and the door was open.

‘Let me just have a peek in here and then we can be done,’ she said, then exclaiming, ‘Oh, it’s so much bigger than yours. Everything’s bigger here – the whole place must be twice the size.’

‘I’m not sure you should go in there,’ said Tory, cautiously following Grace up to the door, feeling rather surprised that it was left open, and wondering if that meant Clive was, after all, around today.

Grace was already busying herself with nosing around everything in the office, before she exclaimed, ‘Well, I’d never have thought of Clive as a literary man. It looks like he spends all his time down here reading while you’re writing.’

Tory had never been inside Clive’s office before. She saw Grace sitting in his chair, beside his desk, reading a book.

‘He’s got dozens of these – see?’ She waved the book cover at Tory, and then indicated a box under the table, which contained identical copies of the same small green volume. There was no title on the cover, and no author’s name. Grace handed the copy to Tory while she took another from the box. A book each, they read together.

The title page carried the following, which Grace read aloud, hardly able to control her giggling.

Letters To Her Husband

By

a Naughty Housewife

Being the genuine correspondence of a nymphomaniac wife
To her husband while he was suffering In a
German prisoner-of-war camp
Transcribed faithfully by him

‘Oh, gosh, it looks like our friend Clive has got a little trade going in dirty books. Oh, you must read this, Tory! “…
I imagine you taking me in your manly arms, my love, and then inserting your little finger
.. .”’ Grace was now choking with shock and mirth. ‘Have you ever read anything like it, Tory. Tory? What’s the matter, Tory? You look quite upset.’

PART THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Tory was a little disappointed that Branson did not look as though he was ever going to exceed her in height. On his sixteenth birthday they stood side by side at the bus stop opposite Baines, on Old Parade, waiting for the new bus that would take them all the way to George Farraway’s new boxing gym, and she couldn’t help wondering what she’d done wrong that her son, fathered by someone as immense as George, should be so small. Had she not fed him enough?

It seemed that she had been having the same thought almost since the day he was born. She had always regarded his body as a promise that was never kept. If he had inherited from George and become big and powerful, no one would think for a moment that he was her child, though with Donald now removed from her life, this had ceased to be important. It was simply a matter of curiosity to see how many degrees of George Farraway would become apparent in his son’s body.

When Branson was very little she hadn’t known what to look for, because she had never seen George at the same age, and the task of imagining George Farraway as a baby was enormous: one could only start with the bulk and weight of his present-day self and extrapolate backwards, crushing the might of adult George down to its primary form – but she could never rid the resulting little thing of its beard and its broken face. When she looked at Branson as a baby she saw something slight, smooth, intact and uncoordinated. It was possible that baby George had been these things as well, but Tory doubted it.

More worryingly, little Branson didn’t have a sportsman’s eye for moving objects. He had trouble kicking a ball, even more trouble catching one. His walk was ungainly. As a toddler he fell more frequently than most, and more dangerously, seeming unable to break his fall as others did. She was afraid of sending him to school because she thought he would be defenceless against the bullies she imagined lay in wait for him. She lingered outside the railings each day, observing how he was treated by the other children. To her surprise they seemed friendly and welcoming. Even so, Tory still wondered if they were merely luring him into a trap. And then she would retrieve him at the end of the day and feel baffled by his happiness. If he was ever unhappy, it was because of his teachers rather than his fellow pupils. He even started bringing little friends home, then being invited to other friends’ houses, just as though he was a normal child. Then Tory would check herself for feeling so surprised. Why should it amaze her that Branson had friends? It was hardly the case that he carried around a badge of her own wifely betrayal for all to see, and even if he did, what would little children care? In everyone’s else’s eyes Branson was just a regular kid.

She recalled the exact moment of realization that Branson was beautifully ordinary when she attended a little presentation given by his class on the subject of Noah’s Ark. It was only his second year in the school, and he was up on stage with the other five-yearolds before what must, to him, have seemed like a huge audience. He had only one line, ‘N is for Nightingale’, which he stood and delivered, spreading his little cardboard and crêpe-paper wings, holding, for a few seconds, the attention of the entire audience. Just for a few seconds, before the tall lad to his right mumbled, ‘O is for Ostrich,’ but during that time, Branson’s clear little voice, so carefully enunciating the words, seemed to have the ear of the whole universe, making Tory feel, for the first time, that he existed as a real flesh-and-blood little boy, taking up space in the world, using up air and food, reflecting light. It brought a choking sensation to her throat.

The enormous but manageable leap: from a little boy dressed as a nightingale on a school stage, enunciating carefully and clearly, to a champion boxer in the ring, delivering the winning uppercut to the bristled jaw of a blood-streaming opponent, the eyes of a stadium of jubilant people turned upon him, standing on their chairs and punching their fists in the air, hailing him as the new champion of the world.

*

At times she felt that that was his rightful inheritance. She didn’t care about George Farraway’s money or his Edwardian pile in Blackheath, or his stinking factory. She cared about the nearchampion’s blood he had delivered into her womb one night in the middle of a world war and which she had painstakingly nurtured to the cusp of adulthood.

She even took a certain pride in his academic inability. She was used to having clever children. Since they were all clever she hadn’t really noticed their cleverness but had taken it for granted. The arrival of Branson had put that all into perspective, and she had a clear view, for the first time, though too late, of how magnificent Tom’s brain had been – busy, curious, able to weave together lots of different things. Tom had been clever beyond all reason, and the girls were clever too. But Branson seemed to be a little bit slow and a little bit stupid. This meant, as far as Tory could see, that he had inherited from his father rather than his mother. George often boasted of how he couldn’t read and write until he’d retired from boxing and taught himself from nursery primers, with a magnifying glass. Branson may have inherited this slowness of mind, but he had not shown a fighting spirit until after Tom’s death, when he regularly came home bloody around the nose or mouth, or with a bruised eye and scraped knuckles, and was given to lurchingly unpredictable behaviour.

The hands she had examined so carefully since he had been a baby were now beginning to grow into strong, square, hammer-shaped  things. His body was becoming squarer and stockier. The nightingale was turning into something altogether more powerful. She might have hoped for an eagle or a hawk, but in his adolescence Branson began to look as though he was made of cardboard boxes. Or tea chests. A body designed to withstand blows. His squareness also gave him an awkwardness: he continued to have poor balance and the tumblings of his toddler days extended into his youth. A few times he had fallen completely over for no obvious reason, having somehow pivoted wrongly, turning in mid-stride, his centre of gravity going awry, and there he was, reeling on the ground, looking baffled.

There could hardly be a greater weakness for a boxer than to be easily felled. He might have strength in his arms and a solid resilience in his body, but if he lacked the agility to remain upright, then there wasn’t really much hope for him. A child could have knocked him down with a little finger.

*

Baines was the butcher that now occupied the spot were Dando’s had been. There was no reason, Tory supposed, why a butcher should not have come to replace the one destroyed in the war, but she did think it a little odd. Was there something special about that particular location, which meant it should always be occupied by vendors of meat, from now and into the future for ever? It hadn’t happened with the other shops. The baker’s had been replaced by a shoe shop, the greengrocer’s by a branch of a building society. She had been into Baines’s a few times, and she thought the new butcher a rather cold, sinister character; he had none of old Dando’s joviality, none of the rosy-cheeked sauciness that had so characterized the old man. Baines was a cold, silent, efficient butcher. He wore a narrow dark tie, and had a narrow dark moustache. It was a relief not to have to face the combative repartee of Dando any more, but Tory wondered if the coldness of Baines was worse.

‘It’s good to see the shops rebuilt at last,’ said Tory. Branson looked at her as though she’d said something ridiculous. For the last couple of years Tory had felt as though she was on a different wavelength from her son: nothing she said seemed to interest him, and most of what she said he seemed to find baffling. She was a little surprised that he had been so insistent on her coming with him today.

‘Won’t you feel silly with your mummy there, and all those strapping blokes knocking seven bells out of each other?’ she had said.

‘I don’t care, you’ve
got
to come.’

‘I don’t think any of the other would-be boxers will have their mummies there.’

‘I’m not going on my own.’

Another slight pang of disappointment, to add to the one about his lack of height. Branson didn’t want to go to the gym on his own, but he had done other things on his own, he had caught a train all the way up to London, sneaking out of school to do so. He had walked the length of Charing Cross Road, all the way from Trafalgar Square to Bloomsbury. He had found Donald’s flat, the one he shared with the educated Mr Wilde. Oh, yes, Branson had done many things on his own by now. He had even got a Saturday job as an assistant to Bill Welch, Donald’s old partner, and was learning the painting and decorating trade. He came home caked in the same decorative muck that used to cover Donald – plastery fingers, hair stiff with gloss paint, nails in his shoes, and always that pong of turpentine.

She would have done everything she could to stop Branson seeing Donald, and certainly from following his footsteps into that messy profession, if she’d thought there was the least chance she would be successful. And so she didn’t.

Tory stole another glance at her son, standing awkwardly beside her at the stop. Not tall, certainly. He would never be tall. By pure coincidence, it seemed, he resembled, in height if nothing else, Donald.

The bus arrived. They got on.

*

The task of removing Donald from Tory’s life was a long and complicated one. In the end she had resorted to a method that also had its associations with George – starvation. She began, simply, by denying him food. It was less immediately violent than the first method she had considered, that of killing him. On the afternoon of their discovery, in the gents’ lavatory, of a stock of Donald’s so-called ‘memoirs’, in fact a near perfect transcription of her letters with only the names changed, she had come home in a blind fury. All the way Grace had followed her (or, more accurately, walked in front of her, backwards), trying to make her stop and think about what she was doing.

‘There’s to be no discussion, Grace. I’m just going to kill him.’

Grace had realized quite quickly what had happened, knowing, as she did, all about the letters. ‘Don’t you think you should think about it?’

‘I am thinking about it. There is an axe in the shed. I was thinking of using it a long time ago, and I didn’t. But I think I will use it now.’

Would she ever have used it? Tory thought probably not, that it was more than just an accident of circumstance that had prevented her becoming an axe-wielding murderess, crazed to a comical degree, lampooned by her own fury into something quite ridiculous. If she thought about it more she could see all the improbabilities – especially if Grace had still been with her – of fetching the axe out from the shed, marching into the kitchen (there was no refuge for Donald now – with Mrs Head downstairs he had only the dining room or the upstairs bedroom to occupy), to raise the axe above Donald’s inattentive head (probably reading the racing pages – betting on the horses had become his latest interest). Then what? He looks up just in time to see the blade flash before his eyes, as it bisects them perfectly, his face falling away in two symmetrical halves (or as near as possible for Donald, whose face had steadily lost its symmetry over the years). What a terrific horror that would have been, more horrible, probably, than anything Donald himself had seen during the war, but he would have been responsible because he had proved himself to be on the side of the bad people after all, and the blow wouldn’t just have been for his sneaky, sleazy betrayal, but for all the wrong things he’d done since coming home, and most of all for taking Tom’s future away from him.