Letters From an Unknown Woman (10 page)

One evening at the escritoire, she took a sheet of paper and wrote a list of all the words she could think of that related to the subject of sex. She wrote them down the left-hand margin of the page, afterwards realizing she had placed them, more or less, in alphabetical order (she wondered why there were so many Bs). It didn’t take Tory long to exhaust her sexual vocabulary, although she was surprised by the number of words she produced. She was also surprised by the fact that the process left her feeling hot and breathless. She could see in the bureau mirror that her cheeks were blushing. She fanned her face with her jotter, and opened the top button of her blouse to let some air in. There was something rather thrilling, she half admitted to herself, in doing something so silly as writing a list of dirty words. When she read them back to herself she couldn’t quite suppress a giggle. The words were, after all, so very silly. They couldn’t possibly be used to construct a piece of erotic writing. At the same time, there was something oddly powerful about them. She had never seen them on paper, as far as she could recall (apart from the one or two that had polite as well as impolite uses), and as such she felt as though she had done something rather special. She felt like a witch who had just cast a spell, or that she had somehow rent the fabric of the familiar world to glimpse a different one beyond, a libidinous landscape with unfrocked peasantry continually fornicating in the hedgerows. It was, evidently, where Donald now lived, among the overly endowed and the wretchedly hedonistic.

Perhaps she should just send him the list. Perhaps that would be enough, would do the trick. Then, thinking that she needed to write to the children now (at that same desk! With that same pen and notepad!), she hurriedly crumpled her list of dirty words and threw it on to the still-glowing coals of the fireplace, where it slowly ignited.

*

She visited the library, seeking inspiration. There were more books on medical matters that primly ignored the nether regions of the human body, but were gleefully filled with pictures of bodies prickled with scarlet fever or plague. In the catalogue she discovered there were guides to love and married life, but they were not on the shelf and had to be requested. Given that the librarian was a hawk-faced man with a runny nose who watched his customers carefully, and, no doubt, made thorough mental notes of their reading habits, she was loath to make such a request. Certain books had ‘For Adults Only’ stamped on their covers in purple ink, the personal choice of the same librarian, reminding Tory for a moment of the heavily stamped and scored envelopes in which Donald’s letters arrived, but when she nervously examined these well-worn volumes they turned out to be classics –
Madame Bovary
,
Jane Eyre
. She was not a literary person but she knew enough about books to realize that she would not find what she was looking for in those, and pitied the poor ranks of desperate men she imagined who had waded through their long, dense narratives waiting for the moment of abandonment that would never come.

The bookshops were no better (or worse?). There were crime and romance sections with pictures on the covers of devilish men and swooning dames. The bold lettering of the titles, written in shaded perspective, seemed to leap off the boards. But Tory knew that they would contain no writing of the sort that Donald so desired. Even so she felt hotly self-conscious as she browsed them, trying to avoid the gaze of a tweedy proprietor, only to notice a clergyman a few feet away, a leathery tome in his hands and a disapproving look on his face. She left the shop, desperately hoping she would not be remembered.

She vaguely knew that certain lewd material could be obtained on the black-market. Slim volumes of saucy stories using nondictionary words. She imagined men bought them from corrupt barbers or lavatory attendants, purveyors of filth who dwelt in filthy places to which she could never venture and so were for ever beyond her reach.

One afternoon, on her way home from an early shift, she found herself lingering on one of the benches in the square, opposite the public lavatories. From here she had a perfect view of everyone who entered and exited the underground spaces, and for a while she considered what an odd thing it was to watch these stately men and women descending the steps at their separate entrances, to emerge a little while later, visibly no different, but in some profound and indefinable way transformed. What would a visitor from another world make of it, this private, secretive yet entirely respectable endeavour? Tory herself had not visited those lavatories since childhood and would do almost anything to avoid having to use them. She recalled the moment of terror that had begun this exile, when, as a six-year-old, she had followed her mother into the lavatories without her mother’s knowledge and locked herself into one of the stalls. The lavatory had seemed an enormous space to her, yellow and green tiling, a ceiling made of glass panels that let the light through, and also the sight, vaguely deckled, of people’s feet as they walked above. Large porcelain sinks with fat silver taps, and the grand, polished wooden doors of the stalls, each with a large brass handle and lock. She was too frightened to call for help, and no one knew she was there. Above ground, Mrs Head must have gone into a terrible panic, and it seemed to Tory hours before she was discovered by the attendant, who’d heard her quiet sobbing.

Tory realized it was stupid of her now, as a thirty-four-year-old woman, to allow this childhood experience to influence her behaviour, but her vow of avoidance had almost reached the level of superstition. It was not that she still feared the underground lavatories on the square but it had simply become one of the rules of her life that she never used them.

The attendant who’d found her had been very kind, an enormous old woman with a long ponytail and no teeth, who’d let her sit in her office and even given her some sheets of paper and pencils and told her to do some drawing while she went above ground to look for her mother. On this occasion, however, her focus was on the men’s. There was an attendant down there too, she knew, the male equivalent of the old woman who’d rescued her from the cubicle (who must have long since departed her post and probably her life). Sometimes, passing, she saw the man emerge in his sagging blue overalls, like a miner coming up for air. He would lean against the spiked railing that surrounded the entrances to the lavatories and puff on a curled pipe. He had a sad, bloodhound face, with lots of red in his eyes (all those years of bleaching, perhaps). And, as Tory thought about this man, she tried to imagine if he was the sort to deal in illicit literature. Were there stashed somewhere in his lair, perhaps between packs of brittle toilet paper or disinfectant blocks, smudged carbon editions of stories detailing the saucy escapades of young housemaids? The thought of that sagging, lumbering old man, with his greying walrus moustache and his hands that delved daily into unspeakable mires, possessing such material was almost too hideous to bear.

She watched for about twenty minutes. The attendant didn’t emerge, and Tory observed the comings and goings of the customers with a bird-watcher’s avidity. There were few young men among them. Occasionally a soldier in uniform, greatcoat flapping, would scamper down the steps, or a delicate thing with spectacles and sunken cheeks, probably excused call-up on grounds of general fragility, would shakily emerge, clinging to the handrail as he lifted himself up the steps. Otherwise it was mostly older men, stout patriarchs in bowler hats and medals on their lapels to show they’d done their duty in the first war, old-timers with long beards and red swollen hands, who were too old to have fought even in the Great War, and a steady stream of sharply dressed men, just a shade too old for the draft but who seemed fit enough and were probably the most likely to use the services of an underground purveyor of smut. Tory was trying to see if any of the men emerged carrying something they hadn’t gone in with. Particularly anything in a book-shaped brown-paper bag. But none did, that she could see. But, then, she didn’t really know what she was going to do if she did see one. She could hardly go down into the Gents and ask to browse the shelves of the lavatory library. Perhaps it was partly because she wanted to know that ordinary men did these things, to feel assured that Donald had not, in developing this interest, turned into some sort of monster.

But the men who emerged from the lavatory in the square seemed disappointingly clean and unblemished.

There was no bench outside the barber’s so she felt a little less comfortable observing its entrances and exits, and could only note that the same type of men visited this place as well, from the nearly bald to the Dickens-bearded. The only difference was that the men emerged with less than they had come with, half an inch or more from the back and sides, or a grey swathe of whiskers gleaned from the jowls. None came out with packages, or gave the least impression that they might be concealing one beneath their coats: no furtive glances up and down the street, just a bold stepping out, some fingering their newly shorn chins and temples with a satisfied air.

There was a moment when the barber’s shop was empty and the barber, in his long apron, had sat down for a quick break, picking up a copy of the
News Chronicle
to read.

She had never been in a barber’s before. At home she had cut Tom’s hair herself, painfully, with a pair of dressmaking scissors. Donald went regularly, but to where she knew not, since his work took him sometimes far afield and he would usually visit a barber local to his job. Without giving herself the opportunity to hesitate, she entered the shop. A bell tinkled above her head as she did so, and the barber looked up from his newspaper. His hair was dark and thick, and stood up on end, like a boot brush. The shop was very bright, being lit by electricity, which burnt away in three large neon tubes hanging from the ceiling.

There must be other barbers who work in this place, Tory thought. Sometimes all four must be at work, busily shearing and shaving. Did they all deal in forbidden literature? she wondered. If not, was she now standing before the one barber who did? He seemed old and sage enough to be the owner, the employer of the other barbers, in which case it was more likely he who dealt out the filth. But looking at him, he didn’t seem the sort of man to be involved in such things. He was too clean and fatherly. There was a hint of kindness in his dark brown eyes.

‘Can I help you, madam?’

She looked quickly around the shop, as if there might be a clue in her surroundings. Four mirrors, four washbasins, each strewn with shaving and hair-cutting paraphernalia, little bottles of oils and lotions with silver spouts, clustered like the bottles of liquor in a cocktail cabinet, electric-powered clippers hanging on hooks with their cables dangling beneath them, scissors, cutthroats, strops. The bitter stench of perfumed alcohol stung her eyes.

Tory had been there a minute without speaking.

‘I was just wondering …’ she stammered, her eyes drawn to a little montage of photographs that adorned one of the mirrors, of film stars in revealing costumes, long legs and coy glances over shoulders. Here was the mirror of the barber who dealt in pornography, surely. But it was not the mirror of the barber she was talking to now – she could tell it had not been used recently. ‘I mean I was wondering if you sell …’ Betty Grable seemed to wink at her.

‘I’m sorry, I seem to have made a mistake,’ Tory muttered, and left, clumsily mishandling the door on the way out so that the bell rang louder and longer than necessary.

At home she collapsed, exhausted, in her study, and noticed, for the first time, that she had been crying on the long walk home. She dried her tears with trembling hands. She looked at her parents’ engagement photo (had the expressions now changed from shock to pity?) and said to herself, ‘I will never be able to do this thing that is asked of me.’

*

The house in which she had grown up contained few books. Donald was a great reader, but he used the library. There was a small bookcase in the sitting room of volumes that were mostly her father’s. There was a complete set of Walter Scott, which she could not remember anyone ever reading, and there was a collection of poetry by James Montgomery. There were some editions of an accountancy journal, and some books of history, which, again, seemed forever unread. Tory knelt before the bookcase, fingering each volume, extracting some for a brief examination, a glance at the title page, or the first few lines of Chapter One, each of which only seemed to emphasize the rigidly correct and sexually modest nature of the prose within. Oh, Father, Tory said to herself, I don’t even know why I’m looking at your library. How could I possibly think I might find what I’m looking for here? And it was then that she came across a book she hadn’t noticed before. It was called
Sorrell and Son
, and the author was Warwick Deeping. She recognized the name but she had no idea what the novel was about. She only knew that it was a ‘modern’ novel, and that it was very popular. At one time she seemed to remember people everywhere talking about it, and she had the vaguest notion that it was somewhat ‘racy’.

Her heart filled at the thought that her own house might contain the very sort of book she had been looking for, and later that evening, after writing her usual letters to the children, she began reading it.

She was quickly absorbed by the story and soon discovered why it was thought to be racy. Betrayed by his wife, the elder Sorrell devotes his life to providing for his only son, often taking lowly work in order to do so – he polishes shoes in a provincial hotel, he becomes a gardener. Reflecting on his wife Dora, he remembers ‘She was not a bad woman, only a highly-sexed one, and [he] had never satisfied her sex and its various desires …’ This in itself was enough to shock Tory. What on earth was such a book doing in the house? Whose was it? Her father’s or Mrs Head’s? And what did Sorrell mean by ‘various desires’? She read on. Unfortunately, the language never went into any more detail. Sexuality was acknowledged but never described. The younger Sorrell, as he grew up, seemed to see women, perhaps in the light of his mother’s life, as beastly seductresses, who exercised an unholy fascination and possessed a damnable beauty. ‘I can’t help it, Pater, but women are the very devil …’ When he does meet a more agreeable woman, Mary, a seller of theatre programmes, Tory became hopeful that a sex scene might follow, but was rather disappointed when it came, describing Kit ‘plucking the red fruit from time to time, to find the juice of it sadder and less sweet’. Shortly afterwards Mary was flattened by a bus.