Letters From an Unknown Woman (39 page)

‘Stop being so bloody daft’ at first gave way to ‘Be reasonable, Tory’ and ‘For God’s sake, woman, we can’t live like this – this is worse than the concentration camps … To think of all I fought for! I never thought I’d live to see torture practised in an English family home …’

Eventually it worked. If the way to a man’s heart was through his stomach, Tory reasoned, then the best way to dispose of that heart was through the stomach also. Donald began going else- where for his meals. Once he was out of the house Tory began to make a pile of his belongings in the hall, announcing, when he came back, that he had a week to make arrangements for their removal; after that she would start burning them. There wasn’t much, and Tory was good at burning things now.

*

The No. 217B was a new bus service that Tory rather liked because it took a round-the-houses route that visited many of the places that had been special to her in the past, swinging left off Old Parade and onto the steep Dorothy Hill, past the Hamlet, down Clifton Road and round by the graveyard of St Andrew’s, where Mrs Head was now buried alongside Arthur, then a winding route down Russell Lane with sycamores and cow parsley leaning out from the railway embankment (you could almost be in the countryside, Tory had often thought), which came out on the corner with Randall Street, by the English Rose Tea Rooms and close to where Tory used to wait for the tram that had taken her to the gelatine factory. Then past her father’s old bank (now a branch of the Midland), and to the left, there was Walsingham Avenue, at the end of which, close to an inlet of the Thames, she had spent an unhappy few weeks as a searchlight operator. Then it was a long stretch on the Dartford road to George Farraway’s new gym.

Tory and Branson were sitting on the top deck, at the front, a vantage-point that Tory loved because it felt to her like riding a winged chariot, the sycamore branches of Russell Lane whiplashing against the windows, on an eye level with all the bedrooms of the houses. What a magnificent form of travel. They were sitting either side of the gangway, occupying a double seat each, against Tory’s wishes, but Branson could not be made to share with her. She glanced across at him.

‘Good right hooks,’ she said, smiling. He looked at her with an expression of mild disgust. He didn’t seem to realize that she was referring to the trees lashing against the windows, and although Tory tried nodding towards them, by way of explanation, it was too late. Branson had turned away. Was she mad? To allow that sweet, square, still downy face to be pummelled by boxing gloves? Why was he so keen? He had never shown the slightest interest in rough sports before, but when she had casually remarked that he might like to take boxing lessons at a renowned gym not too far from there, he had shocked her with his enthusiasm. When can we go? He asked the question incessantly. Give me a couple of weeks to sort it out. A couple of weeks? Can’t we go tonight? No Branson, we mustn’t rush into something like this. On and on he had pestered her. Since he had no idea that he was the son of a man who had fought Jack Dempsey on Long Island and had drawn blood from the eyebrow of the Manassa Mauler, she could only assume that Branson’s enthusiasm for boxing was the manifestation of an inherited trait.

After the death of Alec Stott, the old gelatine gym, where Tory had first set eyes on a sweaty-vested George Farraway, had closed. George had a smaller factory now, a little unit, as it was called, on a trading estate off the Dartford Road. It was here that he had planned to bring an end to world hunger with the Farraway Food-free Diet. The bad publicity had put that project on indefinite hold. Now Mrs Farraway, the woman with the film-star looks whom Tory had never seen, had come up with her own alternative scheme. Alec Stott, she reasoned, had become thinner and thinner on a diet of George’s pills. Why not turn them into diet tablets, then? The cold logic of this argument was irresistible to George, and he had already begun developing a marketing strategy.

Meanwhile the shop floor of his workshop was deserted. But George wasn’t in a hurry. He had made a fortune in selling his factory and, besides, he was more interested in what was happening upstairs at the new unit, for on the top floor he had built one of the best-equipped boxing gyms in the country.

He must have spent thousands on it, Tory thought, when she entered the space for the first time. It gleamed with newness, so unlike the gelatine gym, with its dusty windows, peeling paintwork and pipe runs. Here there was the glint of chrome and stainless steel; the heavy punchbags hung in a row from an overhead gantry and had the smooth tautness of black puddings. There were exercise machines that looked like the scaffolding for a small building project, bicycles with only one wheel, on which young men sweated frantically to get nowhere. It was like a factory of the type that lay empty downstairs, this one for the production of powerful men. In every corner trainees were shadow-boxing, others skipping or at punchbags. There were three rings, each for a different level of expertise.

George approached them through the boiling throng, wearing what looked like a skin-diving outfit, but which Tory later learned was called a tracksuit. He seemed all done up in one piece with a single zip, and looked awesomely modern.

‘Aha, the famous Mr Branson Pace.’

Branson glanced worriedly at his mother, as if thinking Mr Farraway was mixing him up with someone else.

Father and son shook hands for the first time, and at that moment Branson’s likeness to his father was confirmed for Tory beyond any doubt. Their handshake produced an aspect of near-perfect symmetry, pivoting around the joined hands, expanding into two square, stocky bodies either side, of differing height, but of a near identical stance and carriage.

‘You’ll be gentle with him?’ Tory couldn’t help saying this, and received another glare from her son, who wanted it to be known that he didn’t require gentle handling.

‘As a lamb.’ George laughed as he led Branson away, his guiding hand on his son’s shoulder, towards the back rooms where, Tory hoped, he would begin the process of transforming the clumsy boy into a world-champion boxer.

‘I’ll be waiting for you,’ she called after them, suddenly fearing that she would never see her son again. As she sat down on one of the benches near the door, she supposed that, in a way, it was true. A different Branson Pace would be returned to her in an hour or so’s time.

*

It was Branson who missed Donald’s presence the most.

‘Why did you do those things to Daddy?’ he would say, in a heartbreakingly adult voice. The girls, on the other hand, hardly seemed to notice that their father was gone, just pleased that there was no longer any shouting in the house. Tory warned everyone, one evening, that if their father was to knock (she had changed the

locks) they should not, under any circumstances, let him in. Afterwards Branson remonstrated with his sisters, who seemed happy to comply with their mother’s request.

‘What’s he done that’s so bad? I’m not going to stop him coming in.’

‘Just don’t ask, Branson,’ was the girls’ well-practised reply, as if to say it must be truly bad for their mother to be so adamant that Donald should be gone for good. They were young women now, with their own sights on marriage, and seemed to have entered an exalted realm, where everyone had insights into everyone else’s thoughts – they liked to give the impression they knew what their mother was going through, and that their own marriages would never get into such deep and dark waters.

But Donald never tried to come back. It was almost as though he’d had a contingency plan all along. On the night of his final departure a car had called for him. Tory had never seen the driver before, a coiffed young man with a fag in the corner of his mouth, lean and chiselled, a bit like Dirk Bogarde. He helped Donald with the suitcases and the one trunk Donald had packed.

Tory made as if to take no interest in the scene, and continued to read her newspaper.

‘Where are you going, Dad?’ said Branson, with some urgency in his voice.

‘Just away, son,’ he said, taking a moment to look into the boy’s eyes, then, turning to Tory, ‘I told you you were too good for me, didn’t I? I told you, you’re made of gold, Tory Pace, while I’m a man of lead. But I managed until the war came along, managed to be good. Didn’t I? Good enough for you?’

Tory looked up from her newspaper. There were tears in her eyes and her head was trembling, as if uncertain whether to shake or nod in reply. But Donald didn’t wait, he gave a little one-fingered salute, tapping the rim of a peaked cap, if it had been there, and turned, tap-tapping down the path to the car.

‘Are you coming back, Dad?’

‘Stop it, Branson,’ said one of the girls. ‘Let him go.’

‘He can’t just go. Mummy, you’ve got to tell me what he’s done that’s so bad …’

Tory blew her nose, wiped her eyes. ‘He has been bad in such a way that I can’t tell you. I have been bad as well, but his badness started it all. He will not be coming back to live with us.’

It took a while for Branson to understand this, and he looked at his fingers as he tried to puzzle it out. ‘But he’s my father,’ he said, as though he had found the solution. ‘You can’t send him away.’

And Branson cried. He cried for the man who had despised him as a little boy, who had cut him dead at every opportunity for the first five years of their acquaintanceship and who, if he spoke to him at all, had dished out icy little insults and aspersions instead of words of fatherly affection. Tory wondered if she should say to him,
But he is not your father, Branson, you know that, don’t you?
She had never actually told her son the story of his ‘discovery’ in a bomb site in Leicester. Of the three versions of his birth, he believed the second – which only he believed – that he was the legitimate son of Donald Pace, war veteran and hero.

‘How’s he going to sleep? How’s he going to live?’ said Branson, who couldn’t get past the idea that his father couldn’t survive in the world beyond the house.

‘He has friends who will look after him,’ said Tory. ‘You don’t need to worry about your father – he survived the war, after all.’

*

Branson was so cross with his mother that he wouldn’t talk to her for several weeks. At night he cried alone in his bedroom, and by day displayed brittle anger in everything he did. Most alarmingly, for Tory, he refused to eat. He would sit at the dinner table with his arms resolutely folded, the corners of his mouth turned down as emphatically, a big dark frown in his brows, while in front of him would be his favourite – egg and chips, with the chips done just how he liked them (very brown) – and a scarlet bottle of ketchup next to it. Tory wondered what she could do, and had horrible visions of a repeat performance of that cataclysmic Sunday lunch, but this time it would be Branson’s young mouth that she was force-feeding. She could not go through her whole family like this, surely. But to her great relief it was just a phase: Branson’s hunger strike soon gave way to reluctant gobbling, but the anger was still there.

The moment of revelation never came, though Tory was always waiting for it: the day when she would take Branson aside and say to him, ‘Let me explain something to you, son. Donald is not your father. You were born in May 1942. The man you call your father was a prisoner of war from 1940 to 1945. How do you think you were conceived? By post?’ As the years went by Tory waited for the penny to drop, for Branson to storm in and say, ‘Mother, if you
are
my mother, who is my real father?’ But he couldn’t see it. Perhaps he wasn’t clear about Donald’s career as a soldier. She thought she should drop heavy hints, recount stories she’d heard of Donald’s days as a prisoner, make sure Branson understood that he had been away for nearly all of the war. But whenever she talked about Donald, Branson stormed out; and whenever she talked about Donald’s war record, she was drawn back to thoughts of her dreadful correspondence, Donald’s book, and the fact that
Letters To Her Husband By a Naughty Housewife
was still circulating around the seedier book-shops of Europe.

On Branson’s fourteenth birthday he received a card from Donald, an event that seemed to throw the whole house into turmoil. There hadn’t been a word from Donald since the day he had left – he hadn’t even made an appearance at Paulette’s wedding, or sent a card – hardly surprising, as Tory had done her best to make sure he knew nothing about it, but this didn’t assuage her resentment at his failure to make an appearance. But now a birthday card from out of the blue. At that moment it seemed the dense, dark little cloud that had settled over Branson’s head was instantly dispelled.

To my little mate and comrade in arms, Branson. The only one who gave me nourishment in my time of darkest suffering. Happy birthday.

    Your loving father,

    Donald

Branson read this in a state of extreme excitement, his hands shaking, showing it over and over again to whoever was available. It seemed to Tory that he smiled for the first time in three years, and the smile stayed on his face.

The card, resented by Albertina (‘It’s not fair. I didn’t get a card and I fed him as well’), contained Donald’s address, a flat in Bloomsbury Square. Without Tory’s knowledge, Branson bunked off school, took the train all the way up to Charing Cross and found his way to Bloomsbury. From then on he became a regular visitor, seeing his father, sometimes as much as every week. Tory didn’t like it at all, although she couldn’t help but be pleased that he seemed so much happier, and comforted by the picture Branson inadvertently gave of Donald ’s life. The elegant Bloomsbury apartment was not quite what she had imagined, but a squalid bedsitter he shared with Mr Harry Wilde (even Branson now spoke of that man as ‘literary’ and ‘educated’), down some dank, mossy stairs in a basement. A blue plaque on the first floor of the building, according to Harry Wilde, commemorated E. M. Forster getting his leg over, and that was enough to convince them that they were now part of literary London.