Letters From an Unknown Woman (33 page)

Every evening it became a little bit more difficult to get her up the stairs, though Mrs Head herself was determined to accomplish the task, and wouldn’t ask for help until the moment came when every last vestige of strength had been used up and there was nothing left but to call Tory. And then it became a co-operative exercise, a partnership. Mother and daughter were like mountaineers tackling a tricky rockface, relying on each other for support and encouragement. Mrs Head still did most of the work, holding on to the banister with both hands, lifting a foot with careful deliberation, placing it on the next stair, then pulling herself up to meet it. At first Tory’s role was simply as ‘catcher’, following her mother a couple of steps behind, ready to save her if she fell. Then, by degrees, her assistance became more physical. She had to take one of her mother’s arms and help her lift herself on to each step.

The mornings were just as difficult, if not more so. Mrs Head was confronted with what seemed now to be a waterfall of floral treads and risers, the sight of which had begun to upset her.

‘Mama, we’ll have to bring your bed downstairs. There’s no alternative.’

Mrs Head reluctantly agreed, though she was not so concerned about what this would entail. Donald was now occupying the only room downstairs that could be used as a bedroom, and had done so since his return from Germany. If Mrs Head was to go down, Donald would have to come up.

‘Donald,’ Tory said to him one day, ‘isn’t it about time we lived together like a proper man and wife?’

‘I thought we did.’

‘Well, we don’t. A proper married couple share the same bed, or at least share the same floor of the house. They don’t sleep one upstairs, one downstairs.’

‘Tory, how many times do I have to tell you? Stairs are out of the question for me.’

‘But they are also becoming out of the question for Mrs Head.’

And so it went on. The question revolved around which of them, Donald or Mrs Head, would find it most inconvenient to sleep upstairs. Donald, Tory argued, at least had one good leg, while Mrs Head was becoming weak in her entire body. Donald had strength, Mrs Head had none. Mrs Head was less likely to survive a fall down the stairs. Furthermore, Donald had a moral duty to sleep with his wife.

To push the argument further, Tory began to express a physical desire for Donald. This was not entirely contrived. It was true that since his return from Germany she had, against her own best wishes, felt nothing but disgust for him, which had increased as his behaviour had worsened. By the time of Tom’s death, he had had all the sexual appeal of a rat. But things had changed since then. His expressions of remorse for the loss of his son, and the deep, thoughtful seriousness with which he’d undertaken the writing of his memoirs, had begun to sweeten him as a physical presence. His glossy lizard scalp and browless eyes no longer seemed so demon-like. Now they looked tender, vulnerable and expressive. Since he’d stopped drinking and had begun eating properly, he had lost the ragged look he’d had. He had filled out and softened. Now, when she finished balming his head, she concluded the process with a kiss on the lips and tasted no sourness there.

She was balming his head now, as they spoke. He was seated, as usual, on one of the dining-chairs, and she was behind him, slowly working the ointment into his skin.

‘If we could sleep together upstairs we could do the things that married couples are supposed to do,’ she said, gracefully stroking his neck, then sliding her hand inside the open V of his shirt to feel a healthily fat breast.

‘You mean the type of things you described so well in your letters?’

Tory withdrew her hand from Donald’s breast and placed it on her own to check that her heart was beating. It was the first mention that had been made of those letters in all the years since Donald’s return.

‘Yes,’ she said hesitantly. ‘Yes, if you like.’

A chill ran through her body. She had rather assumed that, as they had remained unacknowledged between herself and Donald for all these years, they had actually ceased to exist. Or she would go even further, and suppose that they had never existed, or that she had simply posted those lustful, obscene thoughts into the air. Now here was the truth: Donald’s memory of them. He had talked her into acknowledging them and so bringing them back into the world.

‘All of them?’ he said.

Tory couldn’t quite remember what she had written. ‘I don’t know, Donald.’

‘How about this? I will promise to come upstairs if you promise to do everything you described in those letters.’

‘But I can’t remember what I wrote in them.’

‘Oh, I can.’

‘Donald – you haven’t kept them, have you?’

‘Only in here,’ he said, tapping his shining head. ‘But don’t try and pretend you’ve forgotten.’

‘Donald, isn’t it better that we forget about certain things that happened during the war? I didn’t write those letters.’

‘Oh? Who did?’

‘No, I mean they were written by a different me. One who was living in constant fear of being killed in an air raid, who was separated from her husband and children and had to work in a filthy gelatine factory. I realize now what happens to people when they’re so frequently at risk of death. It causes them to be so delighted with being alive that they want to experience it as fully as they can, to celebrate it almost. I suspect that is why you yourself were so overtaken by a need for gratification while you were in the camp. I have to admit I was a little shocked, not to say disgusted at first …’

She was repeating something Grace had said, in one of their many underground conversations. Dear Grace, she was so fond of the lavatories. She didn’t mind even when the bad odours emanated. They could be sitting in their little office (Tory now thought of the office as ‘theirs’), talking about some profound thing or other, then suddenly, from a stall, a little explosion followed by an engulfing cloud of pungency, of such deep richness that it couldn’t possibly go unnoticed – and Grace wouldn’t even miss a heartbeat. And yet she had been so delicate and shockable when she had first entered the lavatories and had seen the stall full of blood. When Tory remarked on this she had replied that it had been Tory’s own consolations and reassurances that had helped her get through. ‘I no longer fear anything in the world, not since I met you, Tory. And nothing disgusts me either, absolutely nothing …’

So Tory had told her about the letters she’d written to Donald, how she had been disgusted by the very idea at first but that she had, through her encounter with George Farraway, found a voice to express the things that Donald had wanted to hear, but that now, when she thought back to it, she was so shocked by what she had done she could hardly believe she had done it or that she was the same woman at all. And it was then that Grace extolled on her theories of war and sexual desire. ‘Didn’t you ever hear the screams during an air raid? I don’t mean screams of fear or pain, I mean the screams of people making love. You’ll think I’m mad, but I loved to walk the streets during a raid – they were always so completely empty. Did you ever do it? Absolutely magical, the whole city spread around us and not a chink of light to be seen, it was like walking in an enchanted forest, and no sound but for the wailing and moaning and whimpering of the people making love. Who were they? When all the young men were at war – were there so many on leave or excused call-up or conscientious objectors that there could be so many lovemakers? Or were they the infirm and the elderly? Perhaps they were. Or perhaps it was women making love to women – that’s what I like to think, that in the absence of men, the remaining women had become overwhelmed by a lust for being alive, which transformed into a lust for each other …’

‘Grace, what funny thoughts you have.’

But this view certainly helped explain her to herself. The madness with which she’d yielded to George Farraway – not just yielded but offered herself down to the last molecule of her being – could perhaps now be explained as an extreme sense of gratitude for being alive.

*

Donald was, eventually, persuaded at least to try the stairs.

His leg had got much worse over the years. It had become slightly arthritic and he was not able to bend it at all, or place much weight on it. This would have made it impossible to climb stairs in the normal way, but Tory had an idea that he could get up and down by sitting on the stairs and levering himself up on his bottom, a step at a time, backwards. Scornful of the idea at first, as much for its indignity as for its awkwardness, Donald nevertheless decided to give it a go and, after a few practice runs, was somewhat embarrassed to find that it was remarkably easy and safe – a little more strenuous than the conventional method, but one so easy that he was ashamed not to have thought of it himself.

It was very odd to see Donald upstairs, on the landing, in her bedroom. Tory couldn’t help feeling invaded again.

‘Got it arranged nice up here, haven’t you?’ he said. Was he surprised by the tidiness? It did have a preserved air, the upstairs, a saved quality that she was anxious about losing if she made it available to Donald. As they moved into the bedroom, he pretended that he had been kept from there against his will.

‘At last, after all these years, I’m permitted to see where my wife sleeps …’

There was the same iron-framed bed with the battered beech headboard in which they’d spent their first married years.

‘You were always welcome, Donald, always. You know that.’

‘I remember the wallpaper. What did you call him?’

‘The Seacunny. That’s what Mrs Head called him anyway.’

The wallpaper had been on the wall since Tory herself had been a baby and she had slept in this room with Mrs Head. It depicted the repeated image of a man in an Oriental conical hat, standing up in the prow of a small, canoe-like boat, which he seemed to be paddling by means of a long pole, like a punt. The image had fascinated her as a child, and Mrs Head had told her stories about the figure which she called the Seacunny – where he was sailing to, what he was carrying in that little boat. Mrs Head’s stories of the Seacunny were usually admonitory tales, in which he would sail off the walls and into the room itself, grow to life size and sweep the naughty little girl up into his funny boat, carry her back into the wallpaper, him and his hundreds of twins. She spent most of her childhood in fear of her wallpaper, so that she was eventually moved into the back bedroom with her sisters and more or less forgot about the Seacunny until she was a married woman and took up the master bedroom once her father had died and she and Donald began having children. Yes, the Seacunny had been watchful, the hundreds of him, as she undressed before her husband for the first time, watchful as they conjoined beneath the blankets in hushed copulation, there was no aspect of her sexual life with Donald that the Seacunny didn’t know about. The Lascar oarsman. It frightened her to think that the Seacunny might see out her whole life, from birth to death.

‘I think we should change this wallpaper soon.’

Tory enlisted the help of Mrs Wilson’s husband Derek and his strong, lazy son, Timothy, to help her get Mrs Head’s single bed downstairs and into the sitting room. Mrs Head was not going to sleep on the stained mattress that had served Donald for so long. Finally, it came to the moment when Donald would sleep in her bed.

He had by now become quite agile in his stair-climbing, managing the whole journey in less than a minute. At the top Tory listened with dread to his grunting, gasping efforts. Then, swinging himself into the room, his leg like a baton, clunking against the door frame, he sat on the side of the bed, his bad leg before him, connecting the bed with the floor, as straight as the gangplank of a ship.

‘You remember that bargain we made?’ he said, with his back to her. ‘I want you to do everything you described …’ He was unbuttoning his shirt, which he then took off, with a sort of struggle in which he was briefly held in a half-nelson by it. ‘… every last detail.’

He was talking as though to a shopkeeper or tradesman, as though he was telling a plumber not to leave out any important bits of piping. Unseen by him, Tory began also to undress, more nervous of self-exposure than she had ever been – unbuttoning her cardigan as though picking a series of locks.

‘You’ll have to remind me,’ she said quietly.

‘Will I now?’ The vest beneath the shirt was lifted over the sparkling head.

‘It was a long time ago.’

Donald’s shoulder-blades were frighteningly visible, shovel-shaped. A good oarsman’s shoulder-blades. Oh, he did look like the Seacunny, that funny little Lascar with his bald head and his unlashed eyes. Donald turned to look at Tory over his shoulder. By now she had unbuttoned her blouse and it was hanging open, exposing the silk camisole beneath.

‘You know,’ he said, his back still turned towards her, ‘there are couples our age who have decided to put all this sort of thing behind them.’

He was taking his trousers down now. Still sitting, he did not reveal anything in the process, though for the first time, Tory became aware of an odd smell. It struck her, at first, as the same sort of smell you get from a roasting joint of lamb. It took her only a few moments to realize the smell came from Donald. By undressing, he had released a pent-up flock of odours from his rarely washed body. She caught a similar smell sometimes when she passed the living room in the morning, but had assumed that it had come from some food that Donald had taken in there, perhaps a corned-beef sandwich, or a kipper.

Tory turned her back on her husband so that she could continue undressing. With their backs to each other, they slowly set about the task. Tory found an excuse to delay proceedings by having difficulty with a button on her camisole, then realized that this put her at a disadvantage. If Donald undressed first, he could get into bed and watch the spectacle of her undressing at his leisure. She would have nowhere to hide. And this indeed was what happened. She heard the sound of the covers being pulled back and when she glanced over her shoulder she saw that Donald was covered, right up to his eyes, by the blankets. Because of his slightness, there was little shape of his body evident through the bedclothes, which made it appear as though there was nothing but a pair of eyes in the bed, resting on the pillow, and looking unblinkingly at her. To her surprise, she had found that, after the long struggle with the recalcitrant button, the result was that the camisole had become buttoned up again, and that, furthermore, her blouse was slipping its sleeves over her arms and buttoning itself again too. Things had gone into reverse and Tory was dressing.