Letters From an Unknown Woman (9 page)

Lowest of the pecking order were the younger women and girls, childless and unmarried, who might well have worked in such a factory as this anyway. They formed a noisy posse at the near end, cackling and giggling all through the long mornings and afternoons. It was among this group that Tory thought she might be able to find someone who could help her. Seated near their end, she could overhear their conversations sometimes, and was shocked at how crude they could become. There was one girl, called Amy, a little blonde with a face like a knife, who was particularly loud in her conversations and would use words that Tory could only guess were grossly indecent. Sometimes they sat together at tea break, Amy slurping loudly, often spilling her drink in fits of giggling. She would tell everyone stories about her family, about how her sister was having her fourth baby and she was only twenty-one, about her own boyfriend, who was only sixteen and worked in the sugar factory over the river. These stories were always on the edge of respectability. Amy once came back from the lavatory doubled up with laughter, saying she’d heard a funny noise in the next cubicle, only able to say, after a long effort of self-control, ‘She went
hisss
plop-plop-plop …’ then doubled up in tearful laughter again.

‘Who did, dear?’ said someone.

‘The lady in the next cubicle, and guess who it was.’ She claimed it was Clara, their uppity shift manager, who took her tea breaks alone.

‘Well, that’s nothing to get worked up about, dear,’ said one of the older women. ‘We all go hiss plop-plop-plop sometimes.’

‘Well, I just thought it was funny, that’s all.’

Thinking it probably unwise, but doing it anyway, Tory confided in Amy, when she could get her alone. She showed her one of Donald’s letters and confessed that she had no idea what she should write.

But Amy was a terrible disappointment, and Tory soon realized she had far overestimated her maturity. The letter from Donald seemed to shock her even more than it had Tory. She read it slowly and carefully, went bright red in the face and seemed unable to speak, looking up at Tory with slit eyes.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Tory, taking the letter out of Amy’s hands, which was as easy as taking a petal from a wilting rose. ‘I shouldn’t have troubled you with it.’

After some opening and shutting, Amy’s mouth produced some muffled words: ‘I – I won’t tell,’ she stammered.

‘No, please don’t.’ The horrible thought occurred to her that Amy had somehow misunderstood her reason for showing her the letter, that it was not simply a request for help in constructing a reply, but a sharing of intimate marital details to one who had so often talked about her boyfriend’s prowess and lustiness. Did Amy think she was perhaps displaying her own husband’s masculine virtues in reply? The thought was reinforced by the faint smirk that was beginning to appear on Amy’s face.

Then the worst possible thing happened. Amy was overtaken with spasms of uncontrollable laughter. Luckily this occurrence was so frequent that no one else in the department took any notice. It was just Amy laughing again.

‘This has been very distressing for me, Amy,’ Tory said, over the laughter, feeling urgently the need to reinforce the  seriousness of her situation, to make it clear that she was not just sharing a piece of marital smut with a work colleague. ‘Having a husband who is a prisoner of war puts one in a very difficult position …’

Amy regained some self-control, and gave Tory a twinkling, dangerous smile. ‘No – it’s when he gets out you want to be worried about,’ she said. ‘What’s he going to be like by then? Like a tomcat that’s been locked in a shed for the summer. You’ll need to put chains on him – you’ll need to padlock him to the bedpost …’

‘Yes, well, thanks so much for your help.’ Tory left, having issued more reminders about confidentiality, to the hoarse chuckles of the gelatine guttersnipe, wondering how she could have been so stupid as to turn to someone like that for help.

She realized that it was a measure of her desperation that she had done so. There was no one else. How she longed for a sister who might have married an artist or worked as a nude model in Paris. Oh, for a Bohemian in the family, a believer in free love, a frequenter of back-street abortionists, a denizen of the opium dens of Limehouse Reach, someone who knew the lingo, the vocabulary, someone who knew what the sex-starved male would like to read about. Her own sisters were far from that type: stern, aloof, they had both married prosperous men in distant counties. Adelle had married a hotelier in Clevedon, who was now an officer in the air force. Mabel had wedded an antiques dealer in Epsom, and ran a tea shop.

*

She negotiated the bloody cobbles on her way out of Farraway’s, and took a wrong turning between the Skin Cutting Room and the Melting Room, finding herself in a part of the complex she’d never visited before. The sense of being lost provided, to her surprise, some relief from the thoughts that had been troubling her, and she decided to explore this undiscovered corner of the factory. She was intrigued by a sound that she hadn’t heard before, and wondered if some part of the gelatine-production process had been missed out on her original tour. The sound was rhythmic, but soft, the sound that a machine designed for testing the durability of pillows might make, but not quite regular enough in its rhythm to suggest automated power. She noticed that the noise was coming from a small, low building tucked away around the corner behind the Skin Cutting Room. This was not a much-used part of the complex. The yard was filled with what looked like useless or redundant machinery. There was a guillotine, with its rows of savage steel blades, like a masculine version of a loom: instead of shuttles and frames there were jaws and teeth. But this contraption was entering decrepitude, covered with blobs of jackdaw and raven droppings (many such birds nested on the high, cliff-like walls of the factory), and rusting. She walked past a barrel of shin bones. Sawn in half lengthways, they looked like a heap of giant broken pencils. As she approached the bones she saw that they were crawling with bluebottles, which suddenly erupted in hysterical clouds. The cobblestones of the yard were slippery with grease. She batted a brave hand at the dizzy flies which, as though having collectively lifted a single baffled head, lowered it again to minute inspection of the bones.

By now it was apparent that the noise that had first attracted her was human in origin. She imagined something being chopped up by a team of people with cleavers, and there was a new smell now, as she approached the open door, a sharp, powerful stink, not unpleasant but not entirely wholesome either. Cautiously she put a toe over the threshold, seeing a surprisingly big space within and sensing that the source of the noise was to the right. For a moment she thought she had entered some illicit, corrupt or otherwise depraved world. Up on a sort of stage two mad men were attacking each other. Then she saw the ropes that ringed the ‘stage’, the weights and dumbbells, the punchbags and exercise benches, the bulbous gloves hanging on hooks, the sweaty young men engaged in various training routines in different corners of the room, and realized that the men on stage, in the boxing ring, were not mad – at least, not in the ordinary sense. They were wearing soft helmets tied under the chin, odd apparel that made them look as though their heads were badly swollen.

Ordinarily she wouldn’t have lingered in such a place, no more so than if she had blundered into a gentlemen’s lavatory, and she would certainly not have admitted to herself that she was in any way aroused by the spectacle of young men thus engaged. It was more an innate sense of concern that caused her to hesitate. The original sense that the two men in the ring were set upon harming each other, which remained true even after she thought about it, confused her somewhat, and she couldn’t quite leave the scene until she felt satisfied that they were not. They had no audience, apart from two or three men standing beside the ropes: monitors, supervisors, closely observing every detail of the fight and occasionally shouting instruction. One man among them stood out, partly because he was of a higher, thicker bearing than the rest, but also because he was smoking a cigar. He was the only one in the room to notice her presence, turning slightly to regard her, then smiling at the sight. Tory stepped back, suddenly realizing what she must look like, a lone woman spying on young male bodies in the middle of athletic exertions. She fled before any ribald commentary could be made, feeling as though she had just escaped from a cage of wild animals.

She’d recognized the man who’d turned to look at her. It was George Farraway himself, the owner of the factory, the man whose name, written vertically, adorned the vast chimney that sent bluish grey smoke across the river to soil the washing lines of Silvertown. She had seen him on several occasions. His presence in the Packing Room always silenced the girls, who would glance over their shoulders to get a glimpse, then turn back red-faced if they thought he’d caught their eye. Others would carry on their work with exaggerated nonchalance, doing their utmost to express their indifference, which only served to sharpen the atmosphere even more. The first time it happened – Mr Farraway standing at the far end in close conference with the dispatch manager and some others — Tory hadn’t known who he was. When he left, she was made to feel curiously ashamed of the fact, almost as if she’d been caught out in church as an unbeliever. It wasn’t that George Farraway was worshipped exactly, it was more a sense that you didn’t really belong until you knew who he was.

But perhaps there was an element of worship as well. He was a very striking figure, after all. Handsome in a heavy, slightly clumsy way, he had the sort of slapdash face that looked as though it had been put together in a few seconds, and was only handsome by lucky accident. Dark-haired, but starting to grey, he had a finely shaped beard that jutted forward emphatically. And now she remembered the stories about his early career – that he had been a boxer. A good one, she supposed. Famous enough to make some money and start up a successful business when he retired. But she’d no idea he still kept a hand in, running a boxing gym for factory workers. When she asked the girls, they all seemed to know.

The sight of the young men boxing stayed in her mind. It seemed odd to see them there, fighting, in a time of war. All that energy and aggression going to such waste, to be soaked up by punchbags and skipping ropes. They were too young, she supposed, for call-up, but old enough to be as powerful as little bulls. One didn’t see men like that around any more. They had become rare and exotic. She pictured Donald in a boxing ring and thought how miserably lightweight he seemed in comparison, even though he was strong in a wiry way, able to lift surprisingly heavy things (a whole motorbike once). He
looked
puny, however.

She continued to think about the young boxers after she’d got home. In a land where healthy young men had all but disappeared, it was as though she had come across a secret stock of them. An ark for the male of the species, where their precious bullishness was encouraged and preserved so that there would be new generations of fighters and fathers. She had been reassured, she supposed, that there was a future.

CHAPTER SEVEN

She began to think again about Donald and all he’d been through. Since he had told her nothing of his capture and his experiences since then, she could only use her imagination (which she found to be as inadequate to this task as to the unsavoury one), and so she tried her hardest to think of what a terrible time he must have had. He must have seen battle, dead bodies, victorious enemies barking instructions. He must have been marched, starved, tied, blindfolded. He had spent many months in prison, maybe manacled (she had little idea of what a prisoner-of-war camp must be like and could only imagine something like the Bastille, with thick walls and tiny windows, where the little Scotsman would be chained to a mossy pillar). He was probably bearded too, by now. A long, scruffy growth hanging from his chin.

Was it really such a bad thing he was asking, given his circumstances? Perhaps there was some peculiar aspect of the male body’s design that meant it actually needed sexual congress as much as it needed food. Was she, in withholding her co-operation in this respect, actually starving him? She pondered this for a little while – it really did seem a possibility, and would certainly account for the curious hunger men displayed in their courtship practices, and which she remembered with horror from her own courtship days. Even Clarence Dundry had exhibited the tendency, showing her his collection of foreign banknotes with trembling, sweaty hands one moment, pawing hungrily at her chest and reaching for her lips with his own the next. And Donald did make strange gobbling noises during his lovemaking (as she remembered now), and would even, occasionally, bite her. But then, she wondered, what about all the healthy, glowing bachelors she knew? What about monks and Catholic priests? They seemed perfectly nourished despite their sexless lifestyles – or did they all secretly visit brothels? Perhaps that was the very reason for the existence of brothels – to prevent the unmarried men of the world suffering a slow and agonizing death …

She dismissed the thought, and told herself off for being silly.

The house itself seemed to have been tainted by the ingress of Donald’s correspondence. Whatever Tory or Mrs Head did or said, it was against a background of sinister, grubby machinations. Even the kettle coming to the boil on the stove, rocking back and forth with barely contained eagerness, ejecting that long plume of steam as though in resplendent satisfaction, seemed in on the secret. The bombing seemed to have stopped, at least for a while. There hadn’t been a raid for two weeks, and this made the unsavoury vista of Donald’s imagination all the more prominent. Sometimes Mrs Head would doze off in her chair and start muttering in her sleep. Tory was sure that one evening she was saying, ‘The Filth! The Filth!’ over and over again.

She consulted a medical encyclopedia among the house’s small library of books and was unsurprised to find that the subject of sexual intercourse had been omitted altogether. There was only the briefest chapter on human reproduction, which concentrated on the gestative phase and ignored conception altogether. Did ‘womb’ count as an erotic word? She doubted it. She perused one of the diagrams in the book, an exploded view of a child
in utero
, the womb itself looking rather like a rugby ball, cut open and peeled back to reveal the crouching, inverted, huge-headed figure within. The cold objectivity of the grey diagram appalled her, and she closed the book quickly.