Letters From an Unknown Woman (13 page)

‘You mean you took me to see boxing matches?’ Tory was floundering in new uncertainties about her childhood. She did have the vaguest memories of the old fairs on the different commons and heaths around south-east London, but she couldn’t remember the fight booths.

‘It was more Papa, really. He would carry you into the tents on his shoulders, and you would be cheering as loudly as the rest of them in there. Arthur was quite a man for the rough sports but, then, he was the son of a docker …’

Tory tried hard to remember. Perhaps there was the slimmest recollection of a baying crowd, with combatants at the centre, the grey dome of her father’s head rising from between her legs.

She wanted to ask her mother more, but didn’t want to appear too interested so let it rest.

A week later she went back to the gym.

CHAPTER TEN

The room was empty this time, but unlocked, and Tory felt compelled to explore its emptiness, though she sensed it had recently been used: a mist of human sweat lingered in the air (so distinct from the other animal smells that pervaded the factory). Having crept between rotting pelts and shattered bones to gain the space, she felt as though she was creeping through the alleyways of the human body itself, or at least its masculine incarnation. The stinking leather, the saturated canvas. She looked at rows of boxing gloves hanging by their laces on hooks, then at a downcast row of padded helmets and the thick, heavy drapery of towelling robes – it was as though the warriors had abandoned their own bodies in some comically accelerated moment of retreat. Then the instruments of their increased strength: weights, dumbbells, bars. Everything seemed thick, solid and heavy. Tory felt she was almost certainly the lightest thing in the gym, and that amid such prevailing heaviness she might float away. There was a punchbag on a stand, looking like a face which, though featureless, somehow managed to appear haughty and disdainful. It seemed to give her an eyeless stare, querying her presence. Should she dare give that punchbag a punch? There was another one hanging on a sort of spring from the ceiling. All she could do, in the end, was merely to reach out and tap the punchbag with the tip of her index finger, which caused it to stir not one little bit.

Then there was the boxing ring. Even though this was a small amateur gym and not a theatre or public venue of any kind, the boxing ring possessed the same kind of aura as a religious space, like a chapel or chancel, which sometimes, she remembered, was roped off with similar cordage. The thought amused her – of boxing priests, of a bishop out for the count – and she tittered, but only briefly because she suddenly became aware that she was being observed.

She turned and saw him, George Farraway, owner of the factory, ex-boxer, millionaire gelatine magnate. He was fully dressed this time, in his business clothes, a three-piece suit, a watch and chain. He had an overcoat draped over one arm. He was holding his hat with the other.

‘Are you looking for something, Miss?’ he said.

Tory didn’t know what to say so only shook her head.

‘It was you, wasn’t it, who put a nervous little head through the doorway the other week?’

Tory was angry at her own speechlessness. It was because she knew much more about George Farraway now. Because his name was written on the chimney, it was almost as if the brick vastness of that structure had condensed itself to human size while maintaining all the weight and density of its original form. The effect was enhanced by the cigar that was lazily pluming from his lips. Since talking to her mother she had learnt more about him, mostly from Edi, one of the more senior members of the packing staff and a serious boxing fan.

‘Oh, he was a gorgeous fighter,’ she had said, ‘absolutely gorgeous. He had this tremendous way of keeping an opponent at a distance with little jabs from the left, at arm’s length, so they dangled like a fish on the end of a hook, taking hopeless swipes at thin air. Then he would finish them off with a single blow from the right. I saw him do three people like that, and he hardly raised a sweat.’

It was funny to hear Edi talk about boxing, especially when she started doing the actions to accompany her words, thrusting and uppercutting with her flabby arms.

He’d been known as Joe Jupiter in his early days as a regular of Fred Goss’s fight booths, which toured the open spaces of South London from Woolwich Common to Putney Heath. In the 1920s he had turned semi-professional and become known as the the Cockney Cooler, thanks to the seeming effortlessness of his fighting style. He went to America, and a string of victories eventually found him face to face with Jack Dempsey on Long Island. It was the pinnacle of his career, even though victory had never been a serious possibility. The Manassa Mauler was at the height of his powers, and George Farraway was lucky to last six rounds, though he did manage to get some good punches in and even made the champion stagger a couple of times. His career had been set back by problems with his size, his body always hovering somewhere between middleweight and light heavyweight, and had ended on a low note when he was disqualified for headbutting an opponent who, through nine rounds, had been elbowing, gouging and rabbit-punching, like a street fighter, without penalty.

Edi had said nothing about him killing a man, and Tory couldn’t quite bring herself to ask.

He had surprised everyone in his retirement by proving to have an astute business sense. His fight with Jack Dempsey had earned him a fee, it was rumoured, of $50,000, though he claimed the Mob and the IRS had taken most of it before he left America’s shores. Whatever the truth, he had had enough money to buy a derelict factory up a creek of the Thames and turn it into the most successful gelatine business in Britain.

The boxing gym had begun as a hobby of George‘s, a way of keeping in touch with the sport he loved. There was a general feeling that the productivity of the factory was suffering because of the time he was putting in at the gym when he should have been giving his attention to the business. There were only two gelatine factories in England (the other being somewhere in the north), so he didn’t seem to think he needed to worry about the competition. It was said he was more concerned with producing champions than gelatine, these days. The fighters who emerged from his gym had not yet got that far, but they were gaining a reputation. They were known, collectively, as George’s Jelly Babies.

*

Oh, but he is ugly, Tory thought, as he approached her in the gym. You couldn’t see it at first, but when you looked closely you noticed how damaged his face was. And he didn’t care about his ugliness. That was what rendered it invisible. Vanity was an intolerable quality in a man, Tory had always thought. He had a broken nose, the tip turned almost back on itself, to face the opposite direction. He had the flat, frayed ears of an elephant. His brow was deep and heavy, as robust as the breast of a T-42. Beneath it his eyes seemed slightly uneven, as though one had been knocked back further into his head than the other. His smile revealed several gold teeth.

What frightened her more than his ugliness was that he found her attractive. She could tell instantly, from the undistracted glance of those odd eyes. It was an unusual feeling. Tory had realized quite early in life that she was not one of the world’s beauties. Male heads didn’t swing in her direction when she entered a dance hall, or if they did, it was to gaze upon her girlfriends. She was small and slight, and comforted herself with the thought that her beauty was too small for most people to see until they were close. Her smallness made her susceptible to bullying, which made her nervous of any dominant male. She only felt safe among small men, like Donald. If Donald had been a boxer, he would almost certainly have been a featherweight. Maybe even a flyweight (though Tory had no idea what weight qualified for these categories, and even thought Donald might belong to some as yet unclassified realm of lightness beyond that of flyweight – perhaps fleaweight, or speck-of-dustweight).

‘Have I stumbled upon a secret admirer of the noble art?’ Mr

Farraway said, showing her an unthreateningly clenched fist.

‘I got lost,’ Tory stammered at last.

‘Twice?’ He smiled.

She felt her nerves easing. When the damaged face smiled it seemed to fix itself. He didn’t look dangerous at all. She laughed, but not from nervousness. ‘I never realized this was here, that’s all. It seems odd.’

He took it for granted that she knew he’d been a boxer.

‘Most of the chaps of my generation look like walruses now,’ he said, lifting his arms slightly to display the slimness of his figure.

‘Once you leave the ring your body runs to fat. But not mine. I’ve kept my hand in, training…’ He patted his torso, which gave a solid thud, like a pillar. ‘Keeps me fit.’ Again the smile. He gave a passing jab at the same punchbag Tory had earlier tapped with her fingernail. It gave a dreadful, agonizing lurch backwards, the springs making a wrenching sound and the whole gymnasium vibrating in sympathy with the poor writhing thing, which then presented itself for more of the same treatment. George Farraway appeared to have expended no energy at all on this act and, with an ushering gesture of the other arm, swept Tory gently along with him towards the exit.

Without really knowing how it had happened, she found herself accepting a lift home from the boss – the owner – of the factory where she worked. He had steered her through the bluebottles and bone marrow at the back of the gymnasium to a little yard where his car stood, a dark, glossy thing, not quite a limousine but which reminded Tory of an enormous black pudding, causing her to titter again.

‘You seem to find things funny,’ he said, as he opened the passenger door for her. ‘You were chuckling to yourself when I first saw you just now.’

‘I don’t know why,’ Tory replied, entering the vehicle cautiously (she had never been in a car before, and wondered if there was something she had to hang on to). ‘I don’t usually laugh very much.’ Then she immediately felt embarrassed by what she’d said, as though she was begging for sympathy.

‘Oh dear,’ said George, slightly mockingly. ‘Has it been a tragic life for you?’

‘I’m not sure why I said that. I’m sure I laugh too much.’

‘That seems more likely. But you wouldn’t be alone. Since this war started I’ve never seen so many cheerful people. It starts to grate on a chap a little, after a while, all this enforced jollity.’

Mr Farraway spoke well for a man who had started his career as a fairground attraction. The rough South London burr was still there (what her mother called the Blackwall Tunnel Howl, or just the Howl, which, her father would protest, for he spoke it too, was considered by the Australians to be little short of the King’s English), but in George Farraway it was overlaid and nearly obliterated by a more even tone, a powerful business voice – assertive, authoritative without being superior. Tory liked it.

The interior of the car was a very comforting, reassuring space, and one filled, again, with leather. How much use we put animal skins to, Tory thought, noticing that there was even leather on the instrument panel, and feeling rather ashamed of the fact, though she wasn’t sure why.

‘I’m afraid to say I don’t recognize your face,’ said George, as the car came to contented life and moved off with almost imperceptible motion, ‘though I try to know most of my workforce. What room are you in?’

‘Packing,’ said Tory.

‘Ah,’ said George, as if that explained it. She supposed it meant he spent much less time in Packing than in the other departments.

‘And are you happy there?’

‘I sometimes think I’d rather be doing something more exciting, but when I think of the alternatives, I’m rather glad to be where I am.’

‘Yes, the manufacture of gelatine is not a picturesque process.’ He glanced in her direction, and half smiled. ‘Before the war I wouldn’t have allowed a woman anywhere near the production rooms, but now I find it curiously heartening to see ladies getting their elbows dirty, cutting hides or working the vats. It reminds me that we’re all in this together. I don’t just mean the war, but the whole business of life.’

Tory remembered the glimpses she’d had of the women at work in the Skin Cutting Room, labouring over thick hides with their cutters, which were a bit like portable sewing machines but with blades instead of needles. They were doing something consummately manual, looking, apart from the hairnets and aprons, as masculine as dockyard welders, their brawny arms wielding the cutters through several hides at once, layer upon layer, so that they were sliced like enormous sandwiches. There were still a few men left in these rooms, but they were the old ones, and seemed abashed and indignant at having to share their work with women.

‘The Packing Room has always been a ladies’ domain. When the men left for call-up I shifted most of them to the production rooms, because they knew a bit about the work and had more of a stomach for it than I thought the new recruits might. That’s why most of the Packing Room is staffed by the new lot, like yourself.’

‘Very considerate of you.’

‘Well, just say the word and I’ll have you trained up for the Melting Room in no time …’

‘Like I said, I’m quite happy to be where I am.’

They laughed. What an easy man he was to talk to. Once over her initial stammers she felt free to say anything she cared to … almost. She wouldn’t have dreamt such a thing possible, to find ease in the company of a millionaire, and one who had been famous in the past at that. But they chatted freely as they journeyed through the streets of south-east London, noting, as they did, the buildings that had disappeared since the start of the Blitz. George noted that they still had not camouflaged his factory. ‘If it’s not there in the morning,’ he said, ‘you’ll know why.’ He said he could take her directly home, as it was on his own way home, but he discreetly dropped her three blocks away. ‘We don’t want anyone talking,’ he said. Tory wondered what about, as she got out of the car, and George, leaning across the passenger seat to call after her, said, ‘I still don’t know your name.’