Letters From an Unknown Woman (34 page)

‘What are you doing?’

‘I forgot to get Mrs Head her hot milk.’

‘She’ll be asleep by now.’

‘No, she can’t get to sleep without it. I must just check on her anyway.’

She said all this without really looking at Donald, although she could see that he was no longer just a pair of eyes, but had sat up a little, exposing his head and shoulders. She went out onto the landing. The girls were still awake, arguing quietly in their room. She went downstairs to the darkness of the kitchen, passing Mrs Head on the way. She was snoring quietly but with the intense, unwavering rhythm that indicated deep sleep.

In the kitchen she poured herself some water from the tap, filling a teacup with it, spilling some in her eagerness to swallow. She went back into the sitting room, now Mrs Head’s bedroom. How much friendlier the wallpaper in here was. Fronds of ferns and stalks of bamboo. The walnut whatnot, the mahogany escritoire, all these things had somehow survived the years of Donald’s residence, and her mother on the bed, sleeping on her back with that curious spread of limbs that she always displayed in sleep, as though someone had simply flung her there. It was no good, she could not sleep upstairs with Donald. She went back up to tell him that Mrs Head was having trouble getting to sleep, and that she had promised to stay with her for a while: she wasn’t used to the new room and needed time to get adjusted. There was a cat in the front garden making rustling noises in the privet, and Mrs Head wasn’t used to those sorts of noises.

Perhaps he could hear Mrs Head’s snoring, but he didn’t seem to believe Tory’s story. ‘You won’t be able to hide down there for ever you know,’ he said quietly, as she left. ‘You’ll have to sleep with me some time.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

‘This may sound like an odd sort of compliment, Tory, but since I’ve known you, I think I’ve lost my sense of disgust.’

Tory reminded Grace, as they sat in Tory’s lavender-scented office, that she had paid her this ‘compliment’ several times already. She was, she said, becoming a little tired of it.

‘But it’s true, Tory. Before I met you I would have gone out of my way to avoid anything dirty or rotten, without realizing that these are just natural states of being. The ugliness of matter is not the problem, it’s the ugliness of people’s hearts … Nothing disgusts me, nothing in the world.’

Well, thought Tory, you haven’t met my husband.

For a week now Tory had been sleeping downstairs with her mother while Donald slept alone upstairs, under the watchful eyes of a hundred Seacunnies. In an attempt to reconcile herself with her husband she had, instead, turned the house upside-down.

‘In fact,’ Grace went on, ‘I would go so far as to say that there is no such thing as ugliness in the natural world. In our back garden I found a bird that had died and was being eaten by maggots. I decided that this was a beautiful tableau of death and rebirth. The body of the bird was being tidied up by the maggots—’

‘Who would soon become horrid bluebottles.’

‘But the bluebottles are food for spiders and spiders are food for birds. It all goes round and round. If I was a writer or an artist I would extol the beauty of bluebottles, so that we should value them as part of nature’s way of processing itself. I suppose it’s the economist in me that delights in such efficiency. Everything is accounted for in the natural world, just like a good balance sheet. I tried explaining this to my husband. He looked at me as though I was mad.’

By now Tory knew a lot about Grace. She knew that she was Australian, for one thing, and that she had come to England after marrying an Englishman. She knew that this Englishman was an eminent academic, a professor of economics at the LSE, and that they had met while she was a student in the same subject at the University of Melbourne, and he had been her teacher. He was much older than she, too old to be called up during the war, though he had contributed on the intelligence side of things, which she still didn’t really understand. They lived in a large house in Dulwich, and had no children.

When Grace said that she was Australian, many things fell into place for Tory – that accent, for instance. At first Grace’s accent had been hard to place, and she had sounded like a posh person impersonating a south-east Londoner (the perfect description, Grace had said, of the Melbourne accent). Her occasionally odd word choices and her easy intimacy, which seemed so very unEnglish to Tory, were also explained.

‘You know what, Tory? I’d love to meet your husband.’

‘Would you?’

‘Course I would. Why wouldn’t I? I feel like I’ve met him already.’

‘In which case there would be no need to have the reality.’

‘But I want to check out if he’s as bad as you say he is.’

This made Tory start. ‘Have I really made him seem that bad?’

‘Course you have. Maybe you don’t realize it, but some of the words you use about him …’

‘Well, do you know what he said to me the other day? He said that women have no souls.’

‘No souls? What does he mean by that?’

‘He said that there is no evidence that God ever breathed life into the body of Eve in the way that he did into the body of Adam.’

‘You never said he was religious.’

‘He had a religious upbringing. He likes to invoke God when it’s convenient for him.’

‘I never had any religion,’ said Grace, brightly, as though recounting a lucky escape. ‘So what does it mean for women, if they don’t have souls? Does it mean we don’t get to Heaven?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘We end up in Limbo, with all the pet hamsters and still-born babies?’

‘Yes – I suppose it means we aren’t any different from the animals.’

This notion seemed truly to disgust Grace.

‘Well, I’d much rather go to Limbo than Heaven, to be with the animals and the little children. It must be a wonderfully peaceful place – I don’t suppose the tigers there are dangerous because they wouldn’t need to eat – whereas Heaven must be full of self-righteous, interfering, bossy do-gooders, and probably people like your husband. People who claim to have the keys to the Kingdom usually belong in the sewer with all the other rats.’

‘Grace!’ Tory was a little shocked by this sudden outburst. ‘You just said that rats and sewers are all beautiful things. And apart from that, I think I might have exaggerated Donald’s more unsavoury qualities …’

She took a long sip of champagne, as if to get rid of a taste in her mouth. Tory and Grace did have such amusing chats in the lavatory, but they had never actually had a party down there, not until today. Grace had arrived, already a little slurred in her speech, and had produced from the reptile-skin handbag that hung from her shoulder a bottle of Moët et Chandon, and two glasses wrapped in a silk handkerchief. Grace explained that it was her birthday. Grace had opened the bottle like an experienced drinker, deftly dealing with the foil and the wire contraption, making Tory jump for her life when the cork popped and allowing a little spurt of froth to splatter the office.

Tory made protestations that she should not drink on the job, while Grace pointed out that she was so rarely visited in her office, no one was ever likely to know and, besides, was she sure she wasn’t allowed? So she drank, sneezing instantly on a noseful of bubbles, feeling heady as a result of the gases given off by the alcohol. Her eyes watered. ‘I don’t know how I ever drank this stuff,’ she said. ‘It’s like trying to drink a beehive.’ But she had another go, and was soon, along with Grace, what she called, ‘a little bit tiddled’.

‘You know,’ said Grace, ‘the thing about Heaven … What I’ve often wondered is, if they took a census up there, do you think there would be more men than women, or more women than men, or would it be exactly even?’

‘Given there’s no way the question can ever be answered, I don’t think there’s much point in considering it.’

‘But you can still speculate. My guess is that there’ll be more women. What do you think?’

‘Well, there are people like Donald who think that Heaven is a place where only men can go.’

‘Like a gents’ lavatory?’

‘Oh, Grace, you do say such funny things.’

‘What do you think, Tory? If we had a look next door, at the Gents, we could have a glimpse of Heaven.’

‘Now you’re being silly.’

‘Oh, I wish you wouldn’t call me that so often. You begin to sound like my husband. But I’m serious. I suddenly find the thought quite preposterous that I could live out my entire life never having seen the inside of a gents’ lavatory.’

Tory laughed, almost spilling her champagne. ‘But what would there be to see? It must be a place like this, just like this.’

‘Do you think so? No, Tory, I think you’re wrong. They have these things there, where men can just stand. Do you mean to tell me you’ve never been next door?’

Tory explained that once in a while she did have to call upon Clive in the Gents for assistance in some technical matter, but that when she did she merely went to the bottom of the stairs and hallooed him from there. She had never actually ventured into the lavatory itself. ‘And I can assure you that’s as far as I ever want to go. The smell! Clive does like using his bleach – I was nearly blinded.’ She paused. ‘It is true that today is Clive’s day off. The Gents is unattended …’

‘Well, there you are, then. Now’s our chance. Eyes closed to the effects of chlorine we could walk blind through the Kingdom of Men, a phrase that could sum up my life. The University of Melbourne was not an easy place for a woman to be. Oh, Tory, you’re a pioneer and an explorer. Let me give you a little peck.’

At first, being kissed on the lips by a woman had been a surprising experience for Tory. She had been surprised by the softness of a woman’s face. When she kissed Donald, it was like putting your face into a bramble bush – prickly, rigid, unyielding. But Grace’s lips were the soft beginnings of an apparently endless softness. It was like kissing a cloud.

‘Let’s do it now,’ she whispered breathlessly, into Tory’s neck.

‘Now?’ Tory whispered back, into the sweet spiral of Grace’s ear. ‘You mean …’

‘Yes, let’s visit the forbidden kingdom …’

*

Wednesday was early closing in the square. There weren’t many people around. There had been no visitors to the Ladies for an hour. Furthermore, there seemed hardly anyone above ground – there were no boot soles clomping over the glass ceiling tiles. It was almost as if they were alone in the world.

‘So you think we could go next door, have a look around, and there would be no one there?’

‘Well. I’m not sure it would be a good idea.’

Grace pleaded with her friend. ‘Oh, please, Tory …’

‘But what if we get caught?’

‘Caught? We’re not little children breaking into someone’s back garden to steal the apples.’

‘But it could be awfully embarrassing.’

‘I won’t be embarrassed … and you – you’ve got a legitimate reason. If anyone comes in I could pretend to be your boss, from the council.’

The two women found themselves holding hands as they descended the stone steps of the gents’ lavatory on Union Square. Grace was unsure in her high heels: the steps seemed wetter, more narrow and slippery than the steps to the Ladies. There was no handrail either. As if men are naturally expected to be more deft step-climbers than women, she thought. They had watched the entrance for ten minutes before making their move, so felt confident that it was empty down there, but that didn’t prevent them feeling nervous as they neared the bottom of the steps, the white ceramic tiles with their occasional strata of bottle green rising like a hard liquid around them.

The smell as they descended the stairwell was immediately noticeable as being different from that of the Ladies, though not particularly masculine (neither was the smell in the ladies particularly feminine, for that matter). The aroma was of some sort of menthol with an acid undertone. A sharp, spacious smell, like mountain air. As they reached the corner, Grace half expected to see a glacier stretch before them.

They paused, listening for the faintest sound that might indicate occupancy. There was nothing other than the expected echoey trickle of the cisterns slowly filling, the same sound that constantly filled the Ladies. Tory, who was ahead, turned back to Grace and gave her a reassuring nod. Grace’s face was filled with excited glee, and she covered her mouth with her hand to restrain her excitement. They stepped down and rounded the final turn.

‘It is different,’ was Tory’s first, disappointed exclamation.

‘I told you,’ said Grace.

Before them was a space twice the size of the Ladies. The narrow well of white tiles they had just descended opened out into a quite dazzling vista of ceramics, with green ornamentation, curlicues and foreign-looking motifs that made the place seem like a palace. There were the same wooden stalls with frosted windows and brass locks, but these were fewer. To the right the same row of porcelain washbasins with stout silver taps. But there was the additional thing, which accounted for the extra space: the long row of standing stalls, ten of them (Tory counted), raised on a step, each one tiled in Byzantine patterns of black, red and white, surrounding the porcelain troughs that rose high and as proud as tombstones.

Still holding hands, the two women approached this solemn terrace and took the step up.

‘It’s like being in church,’ said Grace, suddenly serious.

‘It’s much cleaner than I expected,’ said Tory. ‘Clive must be more conscientious than I thought. There isn’t a trace of dirt anywhere.’

‘I feel like we’re a bride and groom who’ve just stepped up to receive the vicar’s blessing …’

Just then the slow dripping of the cistern reached its brim, a float-lever somewhere lifted, and the flush sprang into life, making the two women jump. They had been admiring the copper plumbing for a moment, without quite understanding what it meant. Now they saw that the water poured down the vertical stem, then branched out to feed each urinal, emerging with a shrill, squeaking rush from a bulbous, verdigris-encrusted outlet at the top of each one, then cascading down the cliff of porcelain to reach the gutter at the bottom, which became, briefly, a river.