Letters From an Unknown Woman (11 page)

Tory found herself examining that phrase –
plucking the red fruit
– over and over again. She wondered how juice could be sad. Plucking the red fruit, she supposed, meant kissing, but which part of the body? The lips, one must suppose but, then again, maybe the sad juices came from other places. Dare she think that low? Dare she write to Donald, ‘
I would have you pluck my red fruit, dearest (and I don’t mean my lips)
.’ Would that do?

She tried reading more. She went back to the library and looked up more of Warwick Deeping’s books. She found one that sounded promising –
The Pride of Eve
, which sounded like something scandalous starring Bette Davis and brought to mind temptresses in dark lipstick. It lacked a ‘For Adults Only’ stamp, however, and she was greatly disappointed when it turned out to concern the plight of a struggling female artist and her relationship with a married man who adores flowers. Tory soon realized that all the sex in the novel was contained in the flowers that filled the married man’s garden. The censoring librarian had either missed this or had deemed floral writhing an acceptable substitute for sex. It was a metaphor that appealed to Tory. Almost immediately she tried applying the technique herself.

Darling, imagine me as a sagging crimson rose that wants watering. Imagine yourself as a gardener, walking up the path to my dry rose bed, with a watering-can, full to the lip with water. Now think of yourself pouring your water over me, imagine the beads of it falling into the crimson folds of my petals, seeping right down into the centre of my flowerhead. Imagine me drinking it all up, quenching my great thirst on your thousands of white pearls …

Tory wasn’t quite sure what she had written there, and even as she posted it she pondered over what, exactly, was happening between the gardener and his rose. It had seemed simple enough to start with. But she shrugged off the meaning, satisfied and astonished, even, that she had managed, without using a single rude word, to write something so erotically charged. Moreover, the writing itself did something quite peculiar to her. She felt a warmth in the lower parts of her body, so sudden and intense that it quite shocked her. She had to go to the ewer and baste herself with cold water.

But she dreaded Donald’s reply. It came as swiftly as usual, and was quite unforgiving:

I did not ask you for an essay on the art of managing my allotment. I am asking you to write about sex. How many times do I have to tell you?

This letter made Tory weep. She wept so copiously that afterwards she felt noticeably lighter. But it wasn’t just the weight of tears that had gone: her imagination had been drained as well. It was as if her letter had been written in blood – why had Donald not recognized the effort she had put into it? She, who’d never written from her imagination before, not since her pitiless schooldays at least, had managed to do something miraculous: write about sex in a way that she found charged with erotic delight, at the same time as containing nothing that would raise the eyebrow of a Nazi guard.

Perhaps, husband, you could provide me with some examples of the kind of smut you require. A list of appropriate words would be useful, along with some scenarios. I am not familiar with the genre of writing of which you seem to be such a connoisseur. If not, then I do not think I can help you, and I will ask that our correspondence should cease.

CHAPTER EIGHT

This brought a silence from the Stalag, and it was an immense relief for Tory to have this respite. For weeks now she had dreaded the blue envelopes with the prickly German writing that she found propped on the mantelpiece between the clock and the china spaniels nearly every week. There was something so relentlessly accurate and stealthy about them, the way they sought her out — dispatched from God knew where behind enemy lines, traversing a barbed and twisted European geography to land plumb in the centre of the mantelpiece at 17 Peter Street. Bombs by night, letters by day. More and more Tory began to feel that these two types of assault were linked. If the bombs didn’t wipe her out, the letters, landing in her heart, would bring a different kind of death.

It seemed that with one brief, curt letter she had dammed the flow of mail from Donald, yet the continuing silence soon became its own source of anxiety. The relentless surge of unsavouriness should not have been so easily stemmed. What had she done to Donald? She pictured him in the compound, the only one among the men without a letter from his wife, the only one emaciated and hollow-eyed in a camp full of satisfied, rosy-faced prisoners. Surely it was her wifely duty to sustain, by whatever means she could, her captive husband.

*

The continued silence, therefore, only made her task seem more urgent. She would have to write something to satisfy him before it was too late. One evening she came in from work and went straight to her writing desk, having thought, on the tram home, of the perfect solution. It had all seemed so simple. All she had to do was write a description of the sexual act, using conventional terminology. There was no special vocabulary. There were no exotic phrases that she had to know. She could treat the whole exercise in a perfectly matter-of-fact way, just as if she was describing two people having dinner or changing a wheel on a bicycle.

*

In some of the letters Donald had written to her, he had referred to the writings he desired as ‘bedroom thoughts’.
Please share your bedroom thoughts with me
. Perhaps he thought the term less off-putting than ‘dirty letter’.
Please write to me your BEDROOM THOUGHTS!!!

Now the phrase played over and over in her mind, so that she became preoccupied by the notion of what exactly she did think about when she was in bed.

Dearest Donald,

You have asked me many times for my ‘bedroom thoughts’ and now I am at last able to tell you what they are. I am sorry to have kept you waiting for so long. I now sleep alone in my bedroom, so my thoughts tend to wander into unexpected places. Last night I was thinking that I haven’t seen the sea since I was seven years old. And we live on an island. How can that happen? And it is the fact that we are an island race that has saved us from invasion so far, more than anything. But most of the time I lie on my back looking at the ceiling. There is a spider up there at the moment. She spins little webs that never catch anything. How does she survive? Sometimes she folds herself up into a sort of shield-shaped blob that doesn’t move for days on end. Is she asleep? Then I think about the children. I am comforted by the fact I know they are safe, but for how long must we live apart? I have not seen them for over a year now. I long to go to the Cotswolds and visit them, but there isn’t the money or the time. Supposing they forget about me? They are happy in their foster homes and might be disappointed when they come back. There is no end to this war in sight. Tom might even find himself called up, if it lasts long enough. And then, of course, I think about you, my darling, and I think about what a strange man you’ve become, in my thoughts, at least. Are you the same man I married? How will I ever meet your demands? You see, I began this letter with the intention of describing our lovemaking, but I have realized that I could no more put those thoughts into written words than I could undress before a stranger in the real world (unless he was a doctor, of course). I am afraid I can see no difference between what you ask me to do and the work of a prostitute.

Yours ever

Tory

Over the days and weeks she wrote many such letters as the above, but never sent them. She began to derive a curious comfort and fulfilment simply from writing letters she knew would never be posted. She would read them back to herself, and wonder at how articulate and profound her words sounded. She could imagine someone on the radio expressing thoughts like those. She began to use the dictionary, not in the desperate way she’d done before, searching for the smutty language that would have satisfied Donald’s needs, but as a sort of kit, like a puncture-repair kit, or a sewing box, where she could find just the right thread to turn up a hem, or the perfect button to go on a dress. She began to draw words from the dictionary, extracting them carefully and then (moistening her fingertips) sewing them into her letters. The likeness of writing to embroidery startled her at this moment, especially when she remembered the agonies of labour that had gone into a sampler she’d made as a girl, with all the ruddy letters of the alphabet woven in wool. Only in its slowness did it seem much different. Real writing was so quick, so fluid, once you got into it, that the thoughts seemed to flow directly from the brain through the fingertips.

She even wrote a story. She developed the idea she had had in her gardening letter, the one Donald had been so scornful about, and wrote a story about a lonely woman who employed a gardener, whom she comes to admire from afar. Whenever she speaks to him, however, she becomes tongue-tied and awkward so she just watches him from the window. Tory tried her best to make the two characters come together, imagining some lustful encounter taking place in a potting shed, but Charlotte (the tired, wispy little woman she’d created) would never comply. She had no trouble getting Alfred the gardener into the potting shed, where his muddy hands would caress rhizomes impatiently, but Charlotte always fled back to her upstairs bedroom, locking herself in.

It wasn’t a very good story, Tory realized, because nothing happened.

*

It was one of the curious side effects of Donald’s letters that Tory’s mind was permanently filled with sexual thoughts she was unable to express. She could not look at anyone without trying to imagine them unclothed. Once a week she and her mother ventured out of doors for an evening, visiting the saloon bar of the Rifleman for a quick drink, and then going to the pictures for a newsreel and a double feature (they would usually watch only the main one). It had not occurred to Tory before – at least, not in such an immediate and vivid way – that everyone in the pub or the cinema owed their existence to a moment of shocking physical propinquity, not just a touching of skin against skin, but a sort of melding of skins, a peeling back and folding over of skins, and the memories of her own such moments, their rhythmic intensity and occasional discomfort, seemed to thunder in her head. She would glance at the stout gentleman at the bar and his heavy-bosomed wife, or the thick-chinned couples sitting side by side in the Gaumont – surely they never did such things. She would peer miserably into her gin and French and wish, even though she was an atheist, that the Lord had devised a sweeter and more dignified way for people to enter the world.

But the real horror was left for the moments when Tory considered her own conception. Papa, Mr Head, Arthur, the frowning patriarch with his complicated whiskers and rotund, waistcoated belly, who’d managed to extend a portion of the Victorian era well into the twentieth century, and Mrs Head, with her thin, brittle body. Was it really in this universe, in this very house, that they had performed that melding of skins? Sometimes Tory found herself helpless before an unfolding vision of her father and mother in the back bedroom that hadn’t changed noticeably in thirty-two years, with its Seacunny wallpaper and mahogany washstand, soberly undressing, either side of the bed, in a perfectly co-ordinated and symmetrical way – Father’s trousers lowering and that great white shirt spilling down with its two tails to his podgy knees, just as Mama’s heavy skirt falls to reveal the sagging petticoats beneath. They are about to make love, but show no interest in the prospect at all. Thankfully, beyond a certain point, Tory’s imagination always fails her. What happens thereafter between Arthur and Mrs Head remains unimagined, something like a holy mystery, never to be explained or understood.

*

Mrs Head seemed to have changed since the arrival of Donald’s letters. She had become quieter, calmer, less maddening. She had started to talk about returning to Waseminster. ‘I don’t know why I ever came back to London,’ she said one evening. ‘I was much happier in the land of Arthur’s people.’

She wasn’t referring to some mythical English past, but to the fact that her husband, Arthur Head, had sprung from that cold, windswept parish, though he had left it at the age of three. Tory thought it was rather touching, if inexplicable, the need to be close to her late husband’s roots. A pity she hadn’t shown more such interest and affection when he was alive, because Tory could barely remember the two of them exchanging a remark that wasn’t a command or request of some sort. And Mrs Head had always seemed such a person of the present moment. Since history, for her, began about five minutes in the past, most of her own life vanished almost instantly into a vast pool of indifference.

That seemed to have changed. She thought about the past a great deal now, and she thought about Waseminster.

Since returning to London she had corresponded regularly with her old neighbour from the marshland village, Major Brandish, a retired army gentleman who kept her informed of local gossip. Tory had never read any of the Major’s letters, but from the snippets her mother was wont to impart now and then, often with a knowing chuckle, she imagined the former army officer to be a mean, unhappy little man, revelling in the misfortunes of others, ‘Oh, will you listen to this?’ Her mother would say. ‘The Major writes that Mrs Furlong disgraced herself in church …’ Then a puzzled pause, ‘Tory, what does ‘eructation’ mean?’ This nearly always happened with the Major’s letters because he was a man who liked to wrap his little barbs and insults, his little morsels of smut and vulgarity, in extravagant verbal paper. Thus she learnt that Mrs Philips-Hope was a
demimondaine
, while Mr Philips-Hope was often in a state of crapulence (which Mrs Head assumed to be a digestive problem), the Vicar was a
roué
, and there were, it seemed, numerous seraglios in the village, and indeed all over the marshes. (‘Perhaps thanks to the Armada,’ Mrs Head rather bafflingly suggested.)