Letters From an Unknown Woman (15 page)

Tory peered into the lucid depths of her gin and French, trying to control the thrill she felt at hearing George Farraway defame his own wife, for her ears only.

‘I’m quite aware that you are married too, my dear,’ he said, ‘and not just because of the ring on your finger. No doubt your husband is fighting the good fight. Where is he, or aren’t you allowed to say or know?’

‘He’s a prisoner of war,’ said Tory, in a voice she didn’t like – too weak and whiney.

‘Oh.’ George clearly didn’t know quite what to say. ‘Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Out of harm’s way, I suppose, but you might not see him again till the war’s over, whenever that might be.’

‘I sometimes wish I would never see him again, or that the war will never end.’ This came out involuntarily, and she managed to bring forth some tears to excuse the apparent treachery in what she’d said. George changed tack immediately, took her delicate white hands in his (inspecting the nails closely when he thought she wasn’t looking), then uttered soothing implorations, telling her it didn’t matter if she had feelings like those. She went on: ‘I don’t mean to be so weak. It’s just that I’m afraid my husband is being turned into some sort of monster by the Nazis. I’m dreading meeting the man who will be returned to me when we win this war.’

‘Perhaps it will be sooner. Did you read about those men who escaped?’

*

When the meal came to an end, George Farraway drove her home. As he arrived at the usual spot for her disembarkation, he took her hand and squeezed it. She had not quite managed to recover her spirits since talking about Donald. George reached into a sort of little cupboard underneath the steering-wheel and produced a bottle of blue glass. She glimpsed an array of different-coloured bottles in that cupboard, a sort of on-board medicine chest.

‘Will you take this?’ he said, putting the bottle into her hand, then closing her fingers around it.

‘What is it?’

‘My nail drink. I’d like you to take it once a day, just for a week. To see what difference it makes.’

‘Is it …’

‘It’s a perfectly harmless liquid and tastes lovely. You just need to take a small amount each day, about a half a sherry glass. Will you do that for me?’

Tory took the bottle and left George’s car, saying that she would.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Back in the sitting room, she realized she hadn’t written to her children for more than a week. She rushed to the escritoire, took a sheet of writing paper and unscrewed the cap of the fountain pen just as her mother, having creakily descended the stairs, knocked on the door.

It was quite easy to explain away any unexpected lateness to Mrs Head. At the factory they were often called upon to do a spot of overtime, a couple of extra hours for anyone who wanted it, with no warning. Mrs Head was a little put out, however, because she had had another good run at the butcher’s and had procured enough good lamb to make an Irish stew, the tasting of which she had been putting off for as long as possible. She had only just eaten her share, while Tory’s was still warm in the pot. This was harder to deal with. How could she explain that she was stuffed full of venison, hadn’t room for a spoonful of anything more, and would even have trouble finding room for the half sherry glass of Mr Farraway’s nail potion, which was waiting for her in her handbag?

She came into the dining room, whose walls were covered with beads of moisture from the long, steamy hours of stewing that had taken place that afternoon. Mrs Head had already laid a place for her, and a dish of stew was waiting. Illness was the only option left, her only means of explaining her lack of appetite. She took a mouthful of the admittedly rather good stew, then put an elbow on the table and rested her forehead in her hand. Tory did hate lying.

It was, in a way, one of her biggest faults. If she could have lied more freely, more inventively, she could have written those letters to Donald, she could have enjoyed her evening with Mr Farraway more, she could even have found herself a better job than that of a gelatine packer. The whole richness of the world seemed to be available only through a doorway of half-truths and white lies, and the ‘good’ people, the people made of gold, must watch from afar, like beggars outside a banquet, spying the delights through a keyhole, while the people of lead ran amok. Tory herself wasn’t at all convinced that she was good, however. It was more that she wasn’t brave enough, ‘hadn’t the nerve’, to do anything bad. She couldn’t rid herself of a residual belief that bad things came back to you, that bad people reaped the whirlwinds of their bad deeds. Hitler, surely, was about to learn that little lesson.

Well, this was the moment, then, that Tory first lied to her mother (who hadn’t even asked why she was late). She may have concealed things from her before, but there had been no deliberate lies, and not one, such as this, that required a kind of acting out as well.

‘I’m feeling a bit queer,’ she said, as her mother returned to the dining room. ‘I’m awfully sorry, I don’t think I’ll be able to eat this …’

‘Oh,’ said Mrs Head, then suggested a range of possible treatments, all of which were contained in glass jars, not dissimilar to the one that George had given her, on the mantelpiece.

‘I think I’ll just have a lie-down in the study – I mean the sitting room – on the chaise longue. I probably shouldn’t have done that bit of overtime …’

And with this she was able to retreat with her full tummy back to the seclusion of the sitting room. Oddly enough, she did begin to feel a little bit queasy when she was on her own again. She made another attempt at writing to the children, but found it impossible to make any meaningful marks on the blank paper. It was the bottle that was stopping her, the little blue bottle that George Farraway had given her. She took it out of her bag and looked at it. Half a sherry glass, George had said. There was actually a drinks cabinet in the study which, though it contained no drink, had an array of engraved glasses suitable for just about every drink that could be imagined – beer, champagne, cocktails, whisky … She had no recollection of any of these glasses ever being used. There was a lock on the cabinet’s glass doors, and the little silver key was in the lock as always.

Tory couldn’t avoid thinking about
Alice in Wonderland
as she turned it – tiny little keys, bottles of strange medicines. And the medicine did look very strange when she poured it out. A thick, creamy, pale green liquid half filled the sherry glass. She held it to her nose. Peppermint, with a faint, chalky undertone. Quite nice. Though she didn’t drink it yet. She had to look at her nails first. She put the glass down and examined them closely. Mr Farraway had seemed to read them like a jeweller might read diamonds. She always imagined that everyone’s fingernails looked the same, like hers, but now she thought about it (if she could remember) there were worlds of difference between her own pink ovals and, say, her mother’s yellower talons or Mr Farraway’s – what were his like? Why hadn’t she had the nerve to return his examination? Perhaps she would next time. As it was, she didn’t think her own nails looked too bad. What was he talking about, undernourished? But, then, perhaps he did have a point. There were little white flecks, little wisps, like good weather clouds over a pink sunset, marking some of the nails, which did represent a deficiency of some sort, though she couldn’t quite remember of what. Perhaps there was also a lack of shine. Perhaps they were a bit – what was the word? – papery. And thin? It was true, it didn’t take much effort from a pair of scissors to trim them once in a while. The question was, did she think her nails bad enough to resort to Mr Farraway’s experimental tonic?

But she realized it was much more than that. By taking his drink she was entering into some sort of pact, not only agreeing to be a guinea pig in one of his experiments but somehow to give a part of herself to him, if only her nails. If she took the drink as directed, Mr Farraway would be entitled to examine them again. He would run them under that glistening, perceptive but lopsided eye and pass judgement on them, and if they were improved in some way – thicker, glossier, unflecked – she would owe that part of herself to him. It would be like he had made a part of her. And, as such, he would have a right to take it whenever he wanted it. He could call on her in the middle of the night and demand access to her fingernails – he could summon her presence at any moment for the examination, the perusal, the caress of her fingernails, strengthened, reborn through his own tonic.

‘It’s just a silly little drink,’ she said to herself, realizing that she was thinking too much into the situation, but she was contemplating this green tonic from the viewpoint of a woman who had just been wooed by a millionaire, taken to a restaurant, the luxury and opulence of which she had never before seen the like, had travelled there in a luxury car upholstered in calves’ hides, with lamps on the front bigger than her head. No drink in a dark blue fluted glass bottle proffered by the provider of such decadence could be taken lightly, could it?

She drank. She knocked the glass back in one all-or-nothing gulp. The taste wasn’t bad, but the texture was unpleasant. It oozed down her throat in a slippery, half-alive way. There seemed to be strings in the fluid and, for a moment, she thought she would gag. The thick viscosity of the gelatine itself was responsible, she supposed. The temptation to look at her fingernails immediately was irresistible, even though she knew there could not possibly be a difference. Even after a week there couldn’t be much change, given how slowly fingernails grow. She glanced at herself in her compact mirror. Her upper lip was marked with a little Hitler moustache of green, which she quickly wiped away.

*

George Farraway was relentless and ingenious in his pursuit of Tory Pace. He didn’t want for resources in this enterprise, after all. He had an entire factory employing more than two hundred people at his disposal; he had his wealth, his cars, his properties. When, a few days later, Clara quietly informed Tory that Mr Farraway had asked to see her in his office and that she was to accompany her there now, she meekly acquiesced, though her heart was trembling as she followed Clara through several unsightly rooms and cobbled yards.

When she was delivered to the owner and managing director’s office, it wasn’t quite what she’d been expecting. She had imagined oak-panelled walls and leather armchairs, portraits on the wall, big charts of profits inclining to the right. Instead, the office bore the same general air of shabby Victorian industrial leftovers as the rest of the factory. Bare brick walls, big pipe runs down the corners, a dirty window of small panes. There were the charts she had predicted and portraits – not the oil on canvas studies she had imagined, but photographs of George in his boxing days, some posed in the traditional way, the young boxer with his guard up, peering over the top of his gloves with a determined, piercing stare, and some framed press photos of George in action, landing his famous right hook square in the face of a hapless opponent.

‘My secretary has taken the liberty of going down with the blasted ‘flu,’ he explained, when they were alone together. ‘Didn’t think you’d mind doing a bit of filling in – you seem such a bright lass, wasted in the Packing Room.’

‘Don’t personal secretaries get paid rather more than packing skivvies?’ said Tory, surprising herself with her boldness.

George laughed.

‘You’re not one of those blasted union people, are you? Don’t worry, I will pay you the extra, but for God’s sake start looking like a secretary, will you? Take your hair out of those nets for a start.’

‘I haven’t even agreed to this yet,’ said Tory, unleashing her hair. ‘I’ve never done anything in the secretarial line before.’

‘Oh, nothing too complicated, a well-trained chimp could do it. My word, the nail drink has taken effect already, hasn’t it? I assume you’ve started the course – otherwise why would your locks look so glossy and bright?’

Ignoring his compliment (which, she also saw, was a statement of self-congratulation), she turned towards the photographs on the wall, walking over to examine them closely. The thing that struck her most strongly about these was how little resemblance they bore to the man sitting behind the desk. The lack of beard was perhaps the most significant difference, and the much darker hair had an oily wave to it. But a subtler difference was in the arrangement of the features: the nose of the young boxer had yet to be broken, the brows had yet to sustain their heaviest bombardment, the ears were still sharp and clearly defined.

‘I wouldn’t look too closely at those, my dear,’ said Mr Farraway, coming over to join her in contemplation of his younger self. ‘I hardly know that person any longer.’

She turned her attention to the other paraphernalia, the trophies, belts and, most intriguing of all, a pair of old boxing gloves, the leather a hard, glazed deep red that, like the punchbag she had met at the gym, was crying out for her to touch it. ‘Yours, I presume?’ she said.

He nodded in reply. ‘If you look very carefully you’ll see traces of the blood of a world champion. My greatest moment, you could say, was to lose to the greatest in the world. I cut him above his right eye. Every time I landed another punch I was splashed in his blood. He wore me down in the end, though. Jack Dempsey. A true fighter, if ever there was one. I’m sorry, have I made you feel faint?

I keep forgetting not to take for granted the goriness of my life hitherto. Why don’t you sit down?’

Tory was aware that she must look very pale, for she could feel the blood draining from her face. It wasn’t so much his talk of Jack Dempsey’s sanguination that bothered her but the sudden recollection of what her mother had said, that George Farraway had killed a man, and she found herself wondering if it had been with these very gloves that he had done the deed.

She wanted to ask him, but didn’t. It was too early in their relationship for her to broach such a subject, though she was quite aware that the opportunity would arise soon. There was a grinding inevitability about what was to follow, but Tory appeased herself by imagining that nothing more than curiosity was driving her into an ever-increasing intimacy with George Farraway. If she was on the verge of betraying her husband, a British soldier and prisoner of war, and, by extension, betraying the British Army in its fight against fascism, she could console herself with the notion that it was Donald’s fault for filling her mind with the problem of how to describe the sexual act, and in allowing George his pursuit, she was coming ever closer to what she sensed would be a glorious revelation.