Letters From an Unknown Woman (30 page)

Tory blushed. Running water, she thought. Running water.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Donald’s typing went on for so many weeks and months that the noise of it slowly disappeared. The jabbing, punching sounds of the keys that had so disrupted the regular music of the house (clocks ticking and chiming, sinks filling and emptying, gas rings thumping into life, pots bubbling, stairs creaking) became just another of the background sounds that one only heard when they stopped. Tory found great comfort in the sound. It didn’t matter to her if Donald was writing something that would ever be published, and in fact she thought it very unlikely that he actually was or, even if he did, that he would ever make much money from it. She was comforted by the simple fact that he was occupied in something productive, and it helped to alleviate the pangs she felt at having her own ambitions as a writer checked and brushed aside. It could only be good for the family, after all, that Donald was so busy. He had even cut down on the frequency of his visits to the Rifleman, and the sinister miscreants he used to bring back with him no longer visited.

His mood and temperament were also softened. She began to think that his writing of his memoirs was a way of coming to terms with Tom’s death. More than anything, she hoped he would explain himself. That he would present her with a document that would account for the sort of person he had become, or had been in danger of becoming. She would forgive him even if it turned out to be a self-pitying account, so long as it gave evidence that he had thought about himself and the effect he was having on those around him.

He did not show her any of his writing, but he did eventually begin to talk a little more freely about his experiences during the war.

He described some of his fellow prisoners, what a good bunch of chaps they were, like brothers to him, some of them. He talked a little about a man who wrote poetry as good as Rupert Brooke’s.

Tory remembered an occasion when she had encountered Donald and one of his guests in the passageway, and he had introduced the fellow as a war poet. ‘This is Harry Wilde. We were in the Stalag together. Harry’s what’s called a war poet, aren’t you, Harry?’

‘Well, I can’t deny that I was on occasion moved to turn out some verses in response to the great débâcle …’ He gave an exaggerated, drawling French pronunciation to that last word. Tory remembered him because the fellow didn’t conceal his face with collar and hat brim as the others did, but instead presented her with a rather dignified, elegant countenance, which did look very like what she imagined a poet’s face to be – delicate, pale and pretty.

At times, Donald would even be forthcoming about life in the prison camp, though she began to wonder if he wasn’t inventing some of it. ‘We slept on bunks with bare slats, no mattress, just straw-filled burlap sacks. you traded
Zigaretten
for favours from the guards …’

‘But how did you fill your days? What did you do?’

‘I made a piano.’

‘A piano? Are you mad?’

‘No, over the years I made a piano. Not that hard. I scavenged bits of wood from all around the camp – no one was going to miss the odd slat from a bed, and there were hundreds of beds, little bits of skirting, anything really. I used glue reconstituted from the carpenter’s glue that had been used already on the beds and other furniture, scraped it off, ground it down to powder, mixed it with water and heated it on the stove – good as new. I used a bit of broken glass for a modelling knife. For strings I used cat gut, from a real cat, Fritz, we called him, though his real name was Hermann, one of the guards’ cats, used to give a Hitler salute when he was washing his ears, used to give us proper uppity looks, and definitely used to smile when the guards were shouting at us, or beating us, so we had no qualms when he came into our hut one night. We tortured the little Nazi moggy to death and ripped his intestines out. Made super strings for my piano. We buried the body to avoid detection, and didn’t half laugh to see the guards panicking about where little Fritz had gone – ‘
Wo Hermann ist? Wo meine Katze ist?
’ Would you believe it? Big guard in jack boots holding out pieces of cat food under the huts to tempt out his missing moggy, then sobbing when no Nazi miaowing came in reply. Honestly, they snuff out six million Jews without a second thought but start weeping over a missing cat.’

It seemed odd, to say the least, that Donald should have filled his time with such a project. He was not a musical man; he never had been. He certainly couldn’t play the piano.

‘I thought I could make a piano, then learn to play it. The war poet could have taught me because he could play. You don’t understand, Tory, what it does to a man to have his days emptied of everything except a morning roll call –
eins, zwei, drei
– when there are people dropping dead from starvation and sickness all around you, chaps walking about with half their faces blown off, trying to whistle merry little tunes through burnt lips just to make it seem like nothing’s up, who politely decide to take their meals on their own – if you could have called them meals – sawdust bread and black sauerkraut – because they know it makes you sick to watch them putting food into their tongueless mouths, poor blighters. What do you think it does to you, Tory, a life like that?

That piano was the only thing that kept me going. I could see you looked shocked when I talked about Fritz, but you grew to hate everything about the Germans, everything, even their animals …’

He had brought himself close to tears by telling her these things, so that Tory regretted, not for the first time, asking about them. The intimations he gave of a terrible life (someone had estimated there were seventeen barbs of barbed wire for every prisoner in the camp) lived over those five years softened her heart a great deal, and she felt ever more strongly the need to forgive him for his behaviour since his return.

‘What do you think it does to a man, Tory? Look at my hands …’ He held the two jointed plates splayed before her, each digit shaking like a mouse. ‘How can a man be expected to just take up his old life and pretend none of it ever happened?’

*

‘Is Daddy writing a book?’ said Branson, one day.

‘Yes, he is.’

‘What’s it about?’

‘It’s about his time in the army.’

‘Did Daddy kill anyone?’

It made Tory feel very strange when he referred to Donald as ‘Daddy’. Stranger still, when Donald referred to Branson as ‘sonny’.

*

For Branson’s tenth birthday, Tory had made a very special effort. She had left the public lavatory early and had rushed around the shops, buying presents and food for the party. She had rushed home and decorated the dining room with balloons and paper chains, more festively even than for Christmas Day itself. She had made a large cake in the shape of the Bluebird, and a large jelly in the shape of a rabbit, using the three-pint mould. She had allowed Branson to invite some friends around after school. It was a bigger party than usual, to mark Branson’s entry into double figures. She was hopeful, very hopeful, that Donald would attend.

Up until Tom’s death Branson had been a blank space in Donald’s notion of his family, an uncontoured part of the family map. It broke Tory’s heart when his cutting of Branson became so evident, as it did at Christmas and birthdays. She had always done her best for the children on these occasions, and Donald, even, could be mustered to exit his sitting room and make an appearance for the little celebrations that marked the anniversaries of Tom, Paulette and Albertina. He would sing along with ‘Happy Birthday’, and would shock everyone with his atonal gusto, always dominating the verses with a growling, over-emphatic pronunciation of the particular child’s name –
Alber-TI-NAAAA
! (It had always struck Tory how he could turn anyone’s name, just by stress, into a kind of insult, as though to say, There, I didn’t choose that stupid name for you.) As the girls grew older he would embarrass them by making reference to their developing bodies, as though he only ever noticed their physical presence on their birthdays.

‘Well, my little dear, you’re getting round and soft in all the right places – or is that cotton wool I see tucked into your bra?’

The girl would redden, glance at her mother, unable to speak from embarrassment.

‘Come on, now, you’re a woman, near enough …’

‘She’s twelve, Donald, and I don’t think you should speak to her like that.’

‘Well, what about a birthday kiss from your pa?’

And he would swing his stiff leg around the table to kiss his daughter on the lips, an experience from which she would shrink back as far as it was possible to shrink.

Christmas was the time that his cutting of Branson became most evident, when Donald would again emerge from his room to make an elaborate show of minor gift-giving. It was he who gave Tom his first pipe, wrapped up in a little box. He always thought it a good joke to wrap a small gift in outsize wrapping, so that he would present Albertina with an enormous parcel decorated with Christmas trees, and she would unwrap a box (just big enough, everyone thought, to be the doll’s house she longed for) to find that within it, in the centre of a lot of weighty padding, there was nothing but a steel thimble that wasn’t even new. He would laugh a nasty, mocking laugh. ‘Now then Alber-T I-NAAAAA, are you saying you don’t like my present?’ Tory was thinking, If only you could wrap up something large to make it seem small. Imagine the delight on Albertina’s face if she was given a present the size of a thimble, which would unfold, when unwrapped, into a magnificent doll’s house.

Tory wondered how she could have allowed her husband to be so hurtful to Branson, remembering all those birthdays he had snubbed, either making no appearance or pointedly leaving the room the moment the cake appeared, slamming the door behind him, or all those Christmases when he had given a present to everyone except the little boy, who bore his exclusion with stoical resolve.

‘He’s trying to make him feel as though he doesn’t belong,’ said her mother.

‘For what purpose? Does he imagine I’ll say, yes, Branson can go back to wherever he came from, which is nowhere?’

Now Tory was hopeful that things were changing. Donald had begun to acknowledge Branson’s existence, even if he had not gone so far as showing him any affection. She hoped he would take the opportunity of the tenth birthday party to do this. But as she and Mrs Head made preparations for the big event, Donald was not in his room and had, it seemed, left the house

The party was a delightful event and seemed to take Branson entirely by surprise. He had not been expecting anything like the spread that filled the dining-room table, or the gaily nodding balloons that hung from every corner of the room, and he could not help but let out a gasp of delight. In fact he was more taken by the food on the table, and the giant jelly rabbit, which was the centrepiece, than the little stack of presents beside it.

The rabbit was a marvellous thing, the biggest jelly Tory had ever made, lime-flavoured, with blades of grass visible around its feet, even noticeable stippling on its body to represent fur. And the whole thing swayed and bobbed, undulated and quivered. When the children arrived they gasped and tittered, jiggling and jogging the table to make it wobble even more, laughing more loudly as the wobbling grew. They bent down and looked through its transparent body at their distorted friends on the other side.

Nothing wobbles quite as well as Farraway’s gelatine, thought Tory, wondering if she had just coined a lucrative advertising slogan. But it was true: it seemed of a lighter, looser structure. Other jellies might simply shiver and shake, but the Farraway’s jelly did a sort of belly-dance and fandango, an exotic, chaotic, squirming, writhing rumba. As she watched the jelly-rabbit leaping and jumping, surrounded by the excited children, she couldn’t help laughing at the idea that it was there as a sort of jelly-proxy for George, Branson’s real father.

She was having lots of odd thoughts. She wondered whether she could write a little story about a woman who, spurned by her lover, renders him in fruity gelatine, then consumes him, spoonful by spoonful, from the top down.

The rabbit had lost his head and most of the front half of his body by the time Donald appeared. His presence could not have produced a silence more instantly had he been a headless spectre. The children, even those who had seen him before, were frightened. His now very pronounced limp, his smooth, hairless head (apart from those devil-like tufts), caused some to think that he was a particularly macabre clown. They edged closer together, as if for protection.

‘I hear it’s some little boy’s birthday today!’ he said, in a growly but friendly voice, which made the children laugh. They had by now noticed that he was holding a present. ‘Who’s the birthday boy?’ he said.

Branson was too shy to give any acknowledgement, and a slightly dopey schoolfriend, not aware that Donald was joking, said seriously, ‘It’s Branson’s birthday today.’

‘Branson’s birthday,’ said Donald, breathlessly, as if it was a truly astonishing fact. ‘Branson’s birthday.’ And he held out the present for Branson to take.

The thing contained in the gaudy wrapping was not a piece of rubbish but something new, pretty and delightful. It was a little brass telescope.

‘Isn’t that a darling little thing?’ said Tory to Branson, who was glowing with appreciation of the present. ‘What do you say to your father?’

‘Thank you, Father,’ said Branson, without a moment’s hesitation, the words falling easily from his tongue, as though they had always been there, waiting.

Tory, under a pretence of clearing the table, went to the kitchen and wept.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

George no longer swooped. Now that Branson was out of his infancy and approaching adolescence, the surprise visits and benevolent ambushes had stopped. It seemed that George couldn’t resist the charms of a baby or toddler (picking him up from his pram, exclaiming at how he wobbled) but was indifferent to the older child. Oh, if we only treated each other with the care and devotion we give to little children, the world would be a wonderful place, Tory thought. She missed the trickle of George’s cash, the pound note discreetly tucked into the bedding of the pram, the fivers. Once Mrs Head had found one when she changed the blankets in the pram while it was parked in the passage. ‘What’s this?’ she exclaimed, as the note fell like a leaf to the floor. ‘Tory, you’re becoming careless with your cash. Good heavens,’ unfolding the five-pound note, ‘where on earth did you get this?’