Letters From an Unknown Woman (26 page)

Branson knew only vaguely that the
Echo
was their local paper. ‘And I was merrily looking through the issues covering the years of the war, when me and my sisters happened to be living in a little paradise a hundred miles from here, and what do you think I found?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well, I found an article that described an air raid on London on the fourth of March 1941. Many parts of London were heavily bombed that night, but it was the eastern half of the city that suffered the most. There were houses destroyed in Erith, Foots Cray, Plumstead, Blackheath and Dartford. Stapleton’s was hit – they make screws – and the Pegasus factory, which made incandescent mantles, was completely destroyed. How that place must have glowed!’ He looked as if he was about to laugh at this, but didn’t. ‘There were bombs in this area too. In fact, there was a bomb that fell here, in Peter Street. Not only that, but the report in the paper says that numbers thirteen, fifteen and seventeen were completely destroyed.’

Tom gave a long pause, during which Branson again felt he was expected to say something, especially since Tom was now staring at him with wide-open eyes and his mouth pursed in a rather strange way, somewhere between a grimace and a smile. Then it clicked with Branson. ‘But this house is number seventeen.’

Tom nodded slowly. ‘Haven’t I always said it? This isn’t the same house? Well, you wouldn’t know, because you’re a little boy who never knew the old house. But that isn’t the most shocking thing. The most shocking thing is that the report announced the deaths of the occupants. It said Mrs Emily Head and her daughter Victoria were killed in the blast.’

‘Who’s Victoria?’

‘Mummy, silly. She’s always been called Tory.’

‘So Mummy was killed by the bomb?’

Tom nodded. ‘The woman who was my mother was killed, yes. The woman who lives here now, and who calls herself Tory Pace, and her mother, Mrs Head, are actors.’

Branson laughed cautiously, as though not sure whether his older brother was fibbing, as he often did about things.

But Tom went on: ‘They’re good, I have to admit. Very good. You have to be very observant to spot the difference. The girls haven’t noticed, and you mustn’t tell them, because they’ll just tease you. When I try to tell them, they think I’m being fanciful, but then I didn’t have the proof. Now I’ve got it, in the newspaper article, in black and white.’

‘Show them the article. They’ll believe you.’

‘How can I? I can’t take the paper out of the library. They won’t bother to come down to the library to see it.’

‘I bet they would.’

‘Anyway, you need special permission to see the archives. They wouldn’t let the girls in.’

‘But I don’t understand why they’ve replaced Mummy.’

 Branson noticed for the first time that, all the while Tom had been talking, he had been fiddling with a pencil. He now raised the pencil to his nose and ran it several times, very gently, beneath his nostrils, as though it was a cigar.

‘Who’s to say what governments get up to in wartime?’ he said. ‘We’re just pawns, Branson, little pieces in a giant chess game. I bet the government did this all the time, rebuilt the bombed houses, replaced the dead with lookalikes, so the Germans would think their bombs were having no effect, so that neighbours and families weren’t demoralized by the loss of neighbourhoods and loved ones … The Germans must have thought their bombs were just swallowed up by the city, as though they’d dropped them into a pool of syrup.’

Although Tom was speaking in a grammatically sensible way, Branson could tell, even at eight years old, that he was talking nonsense. It wasn’t so much what he was saying, but the way in which he was saying it. Four o’clock in the morning, sitting on his bed with his jacket over his pyjamas, whispering loudly and fast, shaking all over with a curious energy and staring all the time with those wide-awake eyes.

He tried to change the subject. ‘Tom, what’s it like in the factory?’

Tom had never spoken about his work, and Branson was desperate to know because he presumed that when he was old enough he would be sent there in just the same way that Tom had been. But now it seemed he was prepared to explain, and took a moment to settle himself.

‘We make car tyres,’ he said quietly, with a sort of resolute laugh. ‘Car tyres. You wouldn’t think such violence goes into the making of car tyres, Branson. When I first saw the inside of the factory I thought I was in the middle of a battlefield. Tongues of flame, clouds of smoke, the smell of sulphur in the air. And figures of men, just shadows really, running back and forth through the smoke. And everything you touch is coated with a waxy sort of grease. We’re supposed to wear masks to protect us from the fumes, but they’re too uncomfortable so no one wears them. That’s why I’ve started to smoke a pipe. It helps clear my lungs of the smoke from the factory.’

‘Will I have to work there?’

‘No, Branson.’ Tom reached out to touch Branson’s knee and shake it reassuringly. ‘You must never work there.’

‘Why not?’

Tom held out his hand as though offering, in his palm, an answer, but then he turned the gesture into one of restraint, the palm up and facing out, like a traffic policeman. ‘Let me show you something very beautiful and very precious,’ he said.

Branson sat up, excited, but all that Tom gave him was the pencil he’d been holding.

Branson took it and examined it. It wasn’t even a very good pencil, no rubber, and chewed down half its length.

‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ said Tom.

‘I’ve got a better one,’ Branson replied, after some thought.

‘Oh, I don’t think so, Branson. It’s just not possible. I think you’re not looking at it properly. Look at it closely.’

Branson looked.

‘Tell me what you can see.’

‘Just toothmarks …’

‘Exactly. But then you, poor creature, have not met the maker of the toothmarks. They were made by one of the most beautiful girls ever to have set foot upon the earth. I won’t tell you her name, not yet, but she lives in a house in the village of Upper Slaughter, an Eden to which you have never been admitted, and never will be now. It’s too late …’

*

Tom didn’t come home from work the following day. Tory waited up till past midnight. She waited up till two o’clock in the morning, then went to bed, but didn’t fall asleep properly. She got up every hour to check in Branson’s room to see if Tom had returned without her hearing. On one of these occasions Branson woke up, and was told quietly to go back to sleep by his mother.

The next morning, when the little green van called, Tory went out to speak to the driver. She had only spoken to him once before, the one time that Tom was ill and couldn’t go to work and she’d gone out to explain. This time she asked the driver to take her to the factory. She wanted to see if Tom had come in to work directly from wherever he’d spent the night. It was the first time she’d seen Bolan’s close up. Its jagged roof of sloping skylights and its many chimneys, already spewing black smoke at that time of the morning, presented a gaunt, thorny outline against the dawn sky. She went to the office and a girl took her down to check the clocking-in cards. No, Tom Pace’s card had not been stamped. Could she be allowed to wait for a while by the clock to see if he arrived late? The girl shrugged and went back upstairs.

Tory lingered in the chilly, tiled entrance vestibule, watching the square, roman-numeralled clock ticking. Every now and then a huddled figure would enter through the swing doors, take their card from the large rack that said ‘OUT’, insert it into the clock and pull a brass lever, which produced a noise rather like a cash register chiming, then place his card on the large rack labelled ‘IN’. These people gave Tory no acknowledgement. She looked closely at the beige card marked ‘PACE, T.’, which sat in almost complete isolation on the ‘OUT’ rack. She then wondered if the girl had made a mistake. Perhaps there was another Pace, T. (Terry? Tim? Tobias?), working at the factory. So she carefully looked through all the cards on the ‘IN’ rack but, to her disappointment, discovered that Pace,T., was unique among the employees of Bolan’s.

Tory waited until ten o’clock, then made her way back alone. It was a long walk along puddly roads that wound through the enormous trading estate, back to the main road. She felt an acid sensation beneath her breastbone. She sneezed into a tissue and saw that her mucus was black. She noticed her hands, also, were black, yet she hadn’t touched anything, as far as she could recall. She had merely leant against the wall, once or twice. She might have let her hands wander over the tiles behind her. She arrived home feeling exhausted. On the way she had been hoping to find Tom safely returned, and his continued absence crushed her, so that she could only sit down and pant. No one else seemed worried. Mrs Head said he had probably gone for a drink with friends and had one too many. He was old enough to do that sort of thing now, not that she approved. Donald took much the same line. But he would be home by now, surely, Tory thought. It was midday.

After lunch, which she didn’t eat, she went to the police station to report her son missing. The officers were as unconcerned as Mrs Head and Donald. He was a man of eighteen, they said. There was nothing they could do. Nothing? Supposing he never comes back? The policemen shrugged. A lot of eighteen-year-olds go missing, these days, Mrs Pace. Something to do with National Service, I shouldn’t wonder. But Tom was looking forward to his National Service. It would get him out of that filthy factory he’s been stuck in for two years … We’ll let you know if we hear anything.

And that was it. They would keep an eye open for him, keep an ear to the ground. If they happened to notice him as they went about their routine business of directing the traffic and telling people the time, they would let her know.

‘Well, what else can they do?’ said Mrs Head. ‘He could be anywhere …’

‘But surely they could ask people at the factory, ask his friends, ask anyone who knows him where he might be or where he might have gone.’

And that was what Tory ended up doing herself. She went back to the factory, asked to speak to people Tom worked with, to see if he’d told them anything about going away. But it broke her heart to speak to them, as they emerged from the factory floor (where she wasn’t allowed) into the grimy locker rooms, because it became evident that Tom had had so few friends in the factory. Most didn’t even know who she meant, and those who did knew nothing about him. She persuaded a manager to open his locker, which only contained the expected things: his overalls, breathing mask, boots and a mug with his name written in enamel paint on the side.

By now, at least, Mrs Head and Donald could not pretend that it didn’t matter. Days had passed and Tom had not reappeared. None of them could think of where to look. They had already asked his old school friends, but they hadn’t been in contact since Tom had started at the factory. Oh, why did you send him there, Donald? Why did you send him to such a dirty, ignorant, friendless place?

Then Tory wondered why she hadn’t thought to ask Branson. Perhaps it was Branson’s curious ability to disappear, so that he went about the house unnoticed. But he had shared a bedroom with Tom, right up until his last night in the house. If Tom had confided in anyone, it would have been Branson.

She found herself taking a strange sort of comfort from the fact that Branson was so little concerned about his older brother. She had taken this comfort many times before, especially when the raids were still happening. The flying bombs could not have bothered little Branson less. Her children made her feel safe. But Branson didn’t know where Tom was.

‘But he thought you weren’t real,’ he said, as an afterthought, in a hoping-to-please voice.

‘He thought … ?’

‘He thought you died in the war and that you were an actor.’ Branson paused as he became slightly confused by his own information. ‘I mean, he thought the person you were pretending to be had died, and also that the house wasn’t real, but that it had been bombed.’

‘Oh, God,’ Tory couldn’t help saying, putting a hand to her mouth. Had Tom really believed those silly stories she’d overheard him telling the girls?

‘Are you?’ Branson said, with an eagerness suggesting he’d wanted to ask this question for a long time. In truth Branson was excited by the idea that his mother might be an actor.

‘Don’t even ask such a silly question, Branson. I’m me, and Tom is my son.’

‘Well, Tom didn’t think so.’

This conversation took place in Branson’s bedroom while Branson was in bed. He didn’t like sleeping alone and had got into the habit of waking in a panic at around ten o’clock in the evening and coming downstairs. Tory had to take him up again and sit with him until he was asleep. She didn’t mind; in fact, she liked it. She looked forward to the appearance downstairs of Branson’s worried little face every evening, and of their quiet, soothing conversations upstairs later. She always felt disappointed when he did finally fall asleep, and would sometimes cough or clear her throat to prolong his wakefulness a few seconds longer. (How she loved the response in his eyes when she did this, their sudden opening without focus, and then, by ever narrowing degrees, their slow reclosure.)

It was three weeks before Tom’s body was discovered. He had hanged himself in a large disused barn in the village of Upper Slaughter.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Apart from the fact that he was kept off school, Branson might not have known that anything unusual had happened. His mother went about her business shopping, cooking, laundering and mending just as she always had. The only difference was that now she did these things with a silent, almost mechanical efficiency. The fact of Tom’s death was not fully explained to him. His mother was only able to report that Tom had had an accident and that he wouldn’t be coming home. Branson couldn’t understand his mother’s expression as she told him this news. She had her eyes screwed up, as if against smoke, then seemed to wink at him. Then suddenly her face was open, and the eyes appeared damp and troubled. Then she would wink again. She ended the conversation by kissing him on the forehead, which Branson found funny and laughed, but quietly. The girls went about the house in tears, but wouldn’t say why. Their faces were as red as if they’d been slapped, and they looked as angry as sad. Branson kept out of their way. At the funeral, he found himself passed from person to person, each of whom would speak to him seriously and firmly, as though passing on important instructions, but all they were saying was things like ‘How are you?’; ‘How’s school?’; ‘How’s your mother?’ Branson observed the funeral from afar, he was kept at the back among people he didn’t know, and only saw the coffin once, as it passed down the aisle of the church on the shoulders of six young men in black. It seemed to tower above him, like a liner passing out of port.