Letters From an Unknown Woman (7 page)

*

More letters came, which had left Germany several weeks before and so would not be an answer to her own. Tentatively Tory opened them and glanced at their contents, in the hope of detecting signs that Donald had mended his attitude. Instead she would see the now familiar graffiti and would not even attempt to read any of the words. The letters went into the fire, like the others. Then, after a gap of about two weeks:

My Dearest Tory,

Once again I have only a little page in which to say so much. Let me tell you how sorry I am for causing you offence. That was never my intention (quite the opposite, actually). But there is something about warfare that affects a man’s spirits in the strangest ways. I did not ask those things of you from mere desire for recreation but out of a strong sense that my survival as a man depends upon it. I cannot describe for you the horrors I have seen, and continue to see. I think my desires for you act in part as an antidote to those horrors. A letter of the kind I describe will lighten so much of my suffering. I am asking you to think again, dearest Tory.

No space left.

Donald

‘Just because he can put it into those long sentences doesn’t make it any less smutty,’ was Mrs Head’s verdict on the letter.

Tory was less sure. She immediately wondered if she was being too harsh on Donald. There was something beautiful about his last letter – for a painter and decorator he really did have an exceptionally sharp and sensitive mind. Well, painting and decorating was a type of art, after all. As Donald himself sometimes said, he shared a profession with Michelangelo, the greatest painter and decorator of them all. Not to mention Giotto. There was something in this letter that worked deeply at Tory’s sense of marital duty – the faintest suspicion that, in ignoring Donald’s request, she was failing in her wifely obligations.

She no longer even heard the bombs falling. At night her thoughts were with Donald and his terrible letters, trying to imagine the circumstances that could have wrought such changes in the man. What must he have seen and suffered to open up such stark and base longings? And who was she, from the relative comfort and security of blitzed London where, although the raids continued nightly, she had yet to see a dead body (unless, of course, the pork Mrs Head had found turned out to be what they most feared), who was she to deny a battle-worn prisoner of the Nazi regime the right to a moment of written lovemaking? It would only be doing what she would normally do as a wife but by post instead.

It was just that, before, Donald had never made much of a fuss about the thing. He performed the deed (always his word for it) perhaps once a month, using a prophylactic that Tory had never seen but which she could smell (it smelt of erasers and olive oil) and occasionally hear as a snapping sound before and after use. The whole business seemed to go on above Tory’s head, with Donald up there, silent and sweating, grinding back and forth, trying to make the bed shake as little as possible, and always in the dark. It was not a wholly unpleasant experience and, in a curious way, Tory had come to miss it in the months since Donald had left. Behind the abrasive, sharp-boned, rough texture of the event, there was something warm and comforting.

As for writing a letter that would substitute for the act itself (if that was what was expected), she was at a complete loss. As a mother of three children she did not lack experience, but when it came to finding the words, her pen seemed to freeze in her hand and all the warmth drained out of those remembered moments. She began to think of their lovemaking as something taking place in a landscape of snow, two motionless bodies locked beneath a frosty counterpane, icicles hanging from the headboard …

*

A letter had come from the children, or from Tom at least, a couple of weeks after she had written to them with news of their father. It was a letter she liked to read and reread.

Dearest Mama,

In reference to your letter of 21 March 1941, we have some important information we would like you to give to Daddy. These are escape plans. The best one is No. 1, a tunnel, but since we do not know the layout or soil type of Daddy’s prison, we have got some other escape plans. No. 2 is the human catapult. This is Paulette’s plan. A catapult, like the ones the Romans used in sieges, could be constructed, and the escaper (with parachute) could be fired over the fence or wall. The parachute could be made from hankies. This would be best done at night. No. 3 is Albertina’s plan, which is a bit silly but I have put it in anyway because she cried. She said Daddy should start a trampolining class, and have all the prisoners practising on trampolines next to the fence or wall. Then, when the signal is given, they could jump over. The trampolines could be made from hankies.

    Please pass these plans on to Daddy as soon as you can, but don’t say we thought of them in case they go wrong.

Yours sincerely,

Tom

The enclosed plans were very detailed, with diagrams, measurements, weight ratios and trajectories. The siege catapult had been carefully drawn, with a dotted, arcing line showing the path through the air to be taken by Donald (represented by a matchstick figure in mid-flight). Tom seemed to have inherited Donald’s practical sense and artistic skills – the diagrams had the same sureness of line as Donald’s pornographic cartoons, she was slightly perturbed to realize. She thought she would forward this letter to her husband to remind him of how much he still figured in the minds of his children. If only he would mention them once in his letters.

There was something about Tom’s letter that inspired her. It was her children who had seen immediately what Donald needed – escape – but why hadn’t she? She read through Tom’s letter on the evening she had set aside for writing, finally, to Donald. She thought she would enclose it with her own letter, once she had written it. Sitting at the escritoire, she began,

Dearest Donald,

Forgive me if I seemed harsh in my earlier letter. We have been apart for a long time and it has taken me a while to try to see things from your position. I understand, now, how difficult things must have been for you, and how the struggles and sufferings you have endured must have affected your thinking, and your memory. I’m sure this is why you have not asked about your children and their circumstances, or mine and Mrs Head’s. First, let me tell you about the children. They have been very lucky in finding good foster families, and they are living in such a beautiful part of the world I feel quite jealous. They were, of course, overjoyed to learn that you are alive and well. I have only been able to visit them once since they were evacuated, but we write regularly. They have devised some plans for your escape which I think you will find amusing.

    Mrs Head and I live in quiet and peaceful coexistence. Mrs H keep herself busy with shopping and cooking and visiting her friends, while I have taken work in a factory. I did spend some time as a searchlight operator, but I’m afraid I wasn’t very good at it, and would have let hundreds of German planes sneak past unilluminated had I stayed in the job, so was glad to be relieved. I can do much less damage to the world in a gelatine factory, though I do sometimes wish I was doing something a little more important than packing gelatine.

    The raids continue nearly every night. I do not know how much longer the city can take this sort of attack, although our part has escaped the worst so far (apart from a single bomb that fell on Old Parade, destroying Dando’s and several other shops), but I do know that the spirit of the people of London has not been broken and never will be, no matter what happens.

She added that last sentence after realizing her letter would be read by Germans. This thought also made it hard to decide how she would write what she thought she should write next.

Donald, I am thinking of what you asked for in your earlier letters …

She sat back, nibbled the end of her pencil nervously, glanced up at the wall, on which hung a framed photograph of Mr and Mrs Head, Mama and Papa, taken to commemorate their engagement, though you would not think this from the expressions on their faces – passive, stern, bored, two sepia-toned Victorians, her hand on his arm, gazing into space. For some reason the studio setting of this photograph was of the seashore. There were pebbles strewn on the floor, a starfish, and white cliffs were painted rather badly onto the draped background. At least they were not looking at her directly as she wrote. On the wall to the left there was a little engraving of Leonardo’s
Last Supper
. Donald had said this picture was all wrong, that Jesus and his disciples had eaten like the Romans, reclining on couches.

She half closed her eyes and wrote:

I imagine you taking me in your manly arms, my love, and then putting one of your hands on my behind.

She wrote this sentence as if hurrying out of a smoke-filled building – blindly, stumblingly and fast. She signed her name, then sealed the letter in the envelope quickly, deciding at the last moment that she couldn’t possibly include Tom’s with her own. She gave another abashed glance at the photograph on the wall – could it be possible that they now looked a little bit shocked?

After posting the letter into the leering red mouth of the box on the corner of Peter Street and Mark Street, she imagined, at the other end, prison-camp guards in jackboots and those horrible streamlined helmets, ripping open her letter and laughing loudly at its last sentence. She imagined it being passed around the guardhouse for the amusement of the whole patrol. She couldn’t help cherishing the hope that whatever van, boat or other vehicle helped carry communication across the battlefields would come under fire and her little letter be destroyed.

But afterwards, walking back to the house, she felt the lifting of a great weight. It was as though she’d finally found the money to pay a debt that had been owing for many years.

CHAPTER FIVE

Tory tried to think back to times that Donald had talked about sex. She could not recall a single remark. She wasn’t even sure that she had ever heard him make mention of any of the nether parts of the human anatomy. And she had never heard him use a swear word stronger than ‘blast’.

There was one occasion that stood out in her memory, but she wasn’t sure that it counted. They hadn’t been married for long, and they were walking on the common where they had taken many romantic walks in the days of their courtship, and they came upon a row of very old beech trees. Wonderful, misshapen things, swollen and bloated with age, with many stumps and scars from decades of pruning and lopping. They were little more than torsos, with stumps and sockets instead of limbs. And it was in observation of one of these trees that Donald said his rude word. He said, ‘That tree, it looks like it’s got an arsehole.’

Tory was so shocked that all she could say was ‘Donald!’

But Donald wasn’t at all ashamed, and in fact seemed keen, having taken the word out of whatever place he’d been keeping it, to give it a good airing.

‘In fact, it looks like it’s got two arseholes.’ Then he went a little bit further, noting the same anatomical feature in other trees, and Tory gave up even trying to respond to these statements. The fact that Donald saw so many of them in the trees (and she could see them as well – those puckered rings of bark, thickening round the hollowness left by a fallen or chopped-off branch) meant that she saw them, and the woods generally, in a slightly different way from then on, and she mourned less their loss when they were felled some years later, as though they had been rather indecent, the poor, venerable things. He never used that word again.

It was one of the many occasions that Donald had said something odd, peculiar, even unsettling. It was very difficult to know when he was being serious. She remembered what he had said the day his call-up papers arrived.

‘When I was a boy I used to think, How the hell am I going to get through the next sixty years or so without killing someone? Well, now it looks like I won’t have to.’

Then there was that thing he had said just after she’d accepted his proposal of marriage: ‘I’m so glad, Tory. I’ve always thought you were too good for me, you see.’

Oddly, she’d always thought exactly the opposite, that she couldn’t possibly be good enough for the strictly moral painter and decorator.

‘What do you mean, too good for you?’

‘Let me put it this way, Tory. I’ve always felt that you are made of gold while I am a man of lead.’

It was only years later that she understood he was paraphrasing something from Plato’s
Republic
, a book he often carried around with him and would brandish at certain moments of intellectual anxiety, at which times he would also revert to his broadest Gorbals accent: ‘Ye need to take a look a’ this wee book. Nivver min’
Mein Kampf
, ye want tae read
Thae Republic
.’

Such remarks cut little ice with Tory’s mother, who didn’t care for books, but to Tory they gave her husband an authority and stature she had not seen in her family before.

‘You are an ideal of goodness,’ he said, ‘the lost half of my spirit double …’

She didn’t know, quite, what he meant by this, but she loved the words.