Letters From an Unknown Woman (16 page)

That was why she allowed him to take her out that very afternoon, and for several afternoons thereafter, initially on the pretext of attending some business meetings outside the factory, in fact to be swept away in the almost-limousine out of London altogether, through places she’d never seen before, plunging down chalk escarpments, through a landscape of furrowed richness, dotted everywhere with fruit trees, hop fields, lazy, meandering rivers. Oast houses, thick-set churches with erect little towers. It was a landscape she had known to exist, and surprisingly close by, but which she had never visited. George had visited it many times. In fact, he had a house in the midst of it, a kind of country retreat, not a particularly grand place, more a classic roses-round-the-door thatched cottage that he used, she assumed, almost exclusively for illicit romantic convocations. The furniture was mostly under dust covers.

Tory came to know this cottage rather well over the ensuing weeks. It seemed such a remote place that at first she wondered if anyone, apart from she and George, knew of its existence. There was a village nearby, but this also seemed undiscovered, with its tiny village green, which had just enough room for a knuckly sweet chestnut with a corkscrew trunk to spread its branches. If it wasn’t for the odd glimpsed figure turning into a doorway, she would have wondered if the village was inhabited at all. It was more like something that had been built as a reminder of what would be lost if the Germans won.

There was a woman who looked after the cottage, a wispily grey-haired creature with a shawl and dusty boots, sometimes accompanied by tousled, rough-and-tumble children. She could sometimes be seen besoming the leaves from the path where there weren’t any leaves. It occurred to Tory that if ever she wanted to know about George’s private life, she should speak to that woman. Other than that, Tory felt the cottage was so remote that she and George could have done anything there, and no one in the world would know.

At first George treated the afternoons at the cottage like jolly days out. He liked to take a little wicker hamper down there, filled with chilled champagne and packs of sardine sandwiches. They would pull the dust covers from a couch and chat while drinking. Tory noticed that if she drank too much champagne at the cottage, she nevertheless sobered up the moment they left. It was as though drunkenness was a property of the cottage rather than the champagne. And Tory was quite aware of what was happening.

‘Have you brought me here to seduce me?’ she said, emboldened by alcohol.

‘Yes.’

‘But there are prettier women in the factory.’

‘Are there?’

‘I’m sure of it.’ Tory said this in what she realized was a too-doubtful voice, which George took for a marvellous joke.

‘There you are – you’ve realized that you’re beautiful. Let’s drink to your beauty.’

He raised his glass and chinked it against Tory’s. She didn’t seem to notice. She was thinking about what George had just said.
Beautiful
was a much more powerful word than
pretty. Pretty
was what her mother and Donald might have called her, if they’d had to.
Beautiful
was for famous paintings and sculptures, for poems by the great Romantic poets, for Shakespeare’s sonnets. By his use of that single word, Tory later realized, she had permitted herself to become his mistress.

A shiver of doubt remained right up to the moment, however, when George made his move. Standing in the centre of the lowceilinged sitting room, on their third visit to the cottage, he had taken the champagne glass out of her hand, as though he was plucking the bud of a white rose, and brought his face right up to hers. She felt the bristles of his beard and experienced, at first, disappointment. The uncomfortable prickliness of it reminded her of Donald, but then, from the centre, a pulse of warmth and softness, his mouth opening into hers.

Then he did this thing – he touched her in a very special way. It took her so by surprise that she couldn’t help uttering a little squeal. He had placed one of his hands on her behind.
‘I imagine you taking me in your manly arms, my love, and placing one of your hands on my behind.’

‘Pardon?’ said George, withdrawing and looking at her quizzically.

She had not realized she had spoken out loud. ‘Nothing.’

‘It sounded like you were quoting something.’

‘Just a silly romantic novel I once read.’

‘Oh.’ George sounded a little doubtful, but his hand was still there. He squeezed her. Then he kissed her again. He moved down to her neck and began unbuttoning her blouse with his teeth. Tory was struggling for breath. She felt she must be blushing so much she might weep tears of blood. She couldn’t help it, only barely thinking about what was happening to her, and struggling under the influence of the champagne and other intoxications, but she blurted out, as George continued to maul her buttocks, squeezing them alternately, as though pumping the pedals of a bicycle – in the whirl of gorgeous sensations she blurted out, in little more than a whisper, ‘
Not good enough! Not good enough!
’

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

It was as though it was her first time. And every time thereafter with George, it was as though it was her first time. She was in a permanent state of virginity, deflowered again and again and again. Every time she saw George naked she thought,
So this is what a man looks like with no clothes on
– not as horrifying as she’d thought. In fact quite … pretty. Somehow that word, applied to George, gained new power. The lopsided features of George Farraway’s face were mounted on a body of burning symmetry. He appeared to be filled, just like a thoughtfully packed suitcase – there wasn’t a square inch of his body that was not crammed with useful things, though muscles and organs rather than rolled-up socks and thimbles. And perfectly balanced. Slice him in half down the middle and weigh the two halves, there wouldn’t be an ounce of difference. What had the boxers thought when their fists crumpled against this solid torso? Imagine, in return, the glove coming at you, knowing there was this much solid weight behind it. At times she was embarrassed by her admiration for George’s body, aghast that she could find beauty in such a thing. But it seemed to defy nature. Wherever she touched with her tongue she found sweetness, even in those most sour places. Whatever she expected to be soft and fragile proved to be solid and robust. Contrarily, things that seemed rigid and hard felt like petals in her hands. If a statue could come to life, it would surely feel something like this.

She felt no guilt. She regarded the whole affair as entirely Donald’s fault. Her union with George was simply the culmination of a research project that had begun the very first time she visited a library to peruse the ‘For Adults Only’ books, to examine the language of carnal desire. As such it proved to be most productive, because George Farraway had one very special quality as a lovemaker: he liked to talk his way through the whole process. For most of the time, he described aloud what they were doing, rather like a commentator at a sporting event, sometimes in the third person, referring to himself and Tory by name, at others, taking the role of a minute observer of the female body, describing the journey through Tory’s realm as though he was a voyager in a land of giants. Most of the terms he used were new to her, as were most of the words he used to describe their various procedures, as were the procedures themselves. But they stayed in her mind as she was driven back to the factory in the late afternoons, back through the gorgeous orchards with their stiff red fruits, through the tall hop poles with their entwining wreaths, along the oozing meanders and finally back into the brick-built corpus of the city, there to finish her day’s work at the factory just as though it had been a normal day, to return home (George had avoided giving her lifts now, for reasons of discretion) to a warm, hearty meal of her mother’s latest gleanings from the new butcher, then to the study, this time, almost trembling with eagerness, to write letters to Donald, meeting his demands as requested, filling them with long descriptions that mostly used George’s rich sexual language but which, with a subtle and deft change of tense and viewpoint, became passionate, erotic missives from a wife to her imprisoned husband.

This, she quickly realized, was a kind of magic: to redraft the real world, to replace, simply by words, one person with another. And what a funny shock that was, to have the hollow, skinny torso of Donald appear where George’s sixteen-stone bulk had been, to have his balding scalp emerge from down there, when it had been the lush grey locks of George that had first descended. By a mere play on words it could have been Donald firing these new feelings into her.

He was getting what he asked for. More than he asked for. More than he’d bargained for. Tory had launched a spring offensive of sexual narrative, she had let him have the whole artillery of sexual expression full in the face, the dirty words falling like dirty bombs square on that little hut in the middle of a German forest. She wrote her letters in a kind of erotic, literary frenzy. Sometimes she didn’t even begin with ‘Dear Donald’ but would plunge straight into a narrative of body against body, in all its possible permutations. She didn’t think to revise or polish her letters – the words poured out of her, each letter like a successive wave in a storm at sea. She didn’t know how many she had written, but in a matter of just a few weeks she had had to visit the stationer so many times for new writing pads that she exhausted his stock and had to go elsewhere.

Dearest Darling Tory

I told you you could do it, if you just put your mind to it. You are doing me proud, my love, I think your letters are the nearest a man can have to the real thing. You have found the voice I always knew you had. I always knew you had it in you, darling, to be a really dirty girl.

    Such language, Tory. Where did you learn those words? I had to ask some of the fellows here what some of them meant (though I didn’t show them your letters, you can rest assured). Some of those deeds you describe are of a kind that I think never happened in our bedroom, did they? If I had known you wanted me to do those things, or for you to do those things to me, I would willingly have obliged. I have never desired more strongly for this war to be over so that I can come home and we can bring your letters to glorious life. I am very lucky man to have such a willing wife.

    I would reply in kind, but I know your mother always opens your letters, and wouldn’t want her to have a heart attack – well, not really.

    Keep them coming Tory old girl, you dirty, dirty girl, but still my golden girl.

    Love from your man of lead

    Donald

PS How did you know I have grown a beard?

What would he have thought if he’d known it was the words of her lover that formed the meat of her letters? That it was another man’s words that were weaving their erotic magic? Surely that should have given her pause, she thought later. Surely that was a reason for feeling bad. If she had stepped back for a moment, seen herself from the outside (as George so often, during their lovemaking, seemed to see himself), she might have had the wider perspective, and maybe that would have been enough to make her end her affair with George Farraway.

But in fact the affair continued for several weeks more, and didn’t end properly until Tory became pregnant, in the late summer of 1941.

PART TWO

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Private Donald Midlothian Pace of the 11th Royal Hussars, captured east of Tobruk while defending the Bi’r al-Ashhab airfield from encroaching Italian forces, during which he was wounded by a bullet to the knee, had, by the time his camp was liberated on 15 April 1945, been a prisoner of war for four years and twentynine days. About the same as what you’d get, he sometimes joked, for knocking off a jeweller’s.

Having been transported across the Mare Nostrum in the light cruiser
Giuseppe Garibaldi
, he had begun his captivity at a camp beside the Appian Way, before being transported again, north by cattle truck through France to Germany. Here he was moved between camps five times, each time being forced to march up to twenty miles a day, a venture that did little to heal his wounded leg and, in fact, made it a lot worse. By the end of the war he was, effectively, crippled, being unable to bend his right knee, or place much weight upon it. He had never mentioned any of these facts in his letters to his wife.

Donald derived little pleasure from the letters Tory was eventually able to write him, and his requests had been made purely for expedient reasons. In the camp in which he was first detained, there had grown up, in certain quarters, and among certain men, a culture of letter exchange. Captain Harry Wilde, Private Roy Smedley and Sergeant Horace Maxwell, among others, were the first to start bragging about the letters from their wives and sweethearts. They had begun swapping them among themselves, and would teasingly exaggerate the effect of reading them, giving loud moans and sighs of ecstasy that filled the huts as they read, which had the desired consequence of arousing burning curiosity among those in the hut (the majority) without such letters.

‘Roy, I have to say your old girl certainly knows how to get a fellow hot under the old collar …’

‘It’s a good job the Obscene Publications Act doesn’t apply to letters, Harry, old man, otherwise your good lady would be doing a stretch in Holloway.’ The others in the hut, Donald included, could do nothing but imagine what the letters contained.

This led to some unpleasant moments. The merciless teasing by the men with letters led to several confrontations when the honour and morality of the writers were openly challenged. It never came to blows – there was never the energy in the huts for actual violence. Instead there were month-long sulks and endless cold-shouldering. Eventually the men started loaning their letters in return for favours or goods. A few squares of chocolate, a pinch of tobacco, a night off from cooking duties. Donald, having nothing material to offer, agreed to clean Captain Harry Wilde’s boots for a week in return for an evening’s loan of one of his letters. It turned out to be deeply disappointing, being little more than an innocently flirtatious description of French kissing. If only his own wife could write something stronger, he thought. Imagine what he could get people to do for that. Not only could he have almost anything he wanted, he would become part of the hut’s elite. Private Donald Pace could take his place along-side Wilde, Smedley and Maxwell as a force to be reckoned with.