Letters From an Unknown Woman (23 page)

She visited him in the asylum and it was an awful shock to see him there among the truly mad. She found him playing rummy with a twitchy young chap in stained pyjamas, but she didn’t recognize him at first because he had lost all but a few wisps of his hair. The sight of her husband’s smooth, shiny cranium reduced her to tears instantly, and she knelt down beside him, her arm around his shoulders, sobbing into his body. He just carried on playing cards.

A doctor told her that Donald was suffering from severe depression, common among ex-servicemen, and that if it persisted they would recommend surgical treatment. Tory hadn’t given this remark much thought until she got home and spoke to her mother, who nodded approvingly – ‘So they’re going to give him a lobotomy?’

‘Oh, no!’ Tory said, finally realizing what the condescending doctor had been referring to. ‘They can’t do that!’

‘Well,’ said Mrs Head, thoughtfully, ‘I’ve heard quite good things about lobotomies. Mrs Lippiatt’s brother-in-law had one. She said he used to smash the furniture, but now he just sits in his chair all day, looking at his parakeet, quiet as a mouse.’

This was one thing on which her mother could never persuade her. She went straight to the hospital the next day to bring Donald home. She had heard that doctors sometimes performed lobotomies without giving any prior warning and she was not having a partial Donald sent back to her. She wanted the whole Donald, even if he was behaving strangely. She walked into the ward, packed his things, checked his forehead for any sign of scarring, then virtually fought her way through a cordon of doctors and nurses to the waiting taxi outside.

‘You seem to forget that your husband is facing criminal proceedings. He needs to stay here so that we can report on his state of mental hygiene …’

‘So that you can cut out pieces of his brain?’

It was true that Donald’s legal situation was complicated, but in the end it was settled by a curt letter from the psychiatrist affirming that Donald had mitigating mental problems and the prison sentence was suspended.

*

Now it was as though the children had to get used to another father, the one returning not from a prison camp but from a lunatic asylum, and looking as strange and as different as it was possible for a man to look.

‘Is it the same man?’ Albertina asked of her siblings.

‘He’s got the same moustache, so I suppose it must be.’

‘Anyone can grow a moustache,’ said Tom.

‘I can’t,’ said Albertina.

‘I’ve never seen anyone so bald,’ said Paulette.

‘No, even babies have hair. He looks younger than a baby.’

‘He has got a bit of hair – there was an orange bit sticking out the side. Did you see it?’

‘I told you, this isn’t the same house, our mother isn’t the same mother, and now our father has been replaced.’

‘Perhaps he’ll be better than the last one.’

‘Do you think they’re going to replace us?’

*

While Donald had been away, Tory had taken the opportunity of restoring the sitting room. It was a long, laborious process. At one point it seemed there was no more room for bottles even in the yard, which had been turned into a horrible, inside-out sort of version of Donald’s life, the two filthy bathtubs upended, along with the bottles, stone jars and still. They had no choice but to wait for the weekly visit of the dustmen to take away a little bit at a time, though the rag-and-bone man took the two baths. (He said he could get nothing for glass, and the dustmen weren’t keen on the bottles either.) The area of the garden where the wash had been buried remained slightly raised. Surely a liquid could not be so resilient? She hadn’t thought of the many consequences of the burial, though she had clumsily joked that the worms would be coming up with hangovers for years to come.

It took weeks for all the traces to disappear, the last few bottles pushed neck first into the single swollen dustbin that took care of all their rubbish, the ground finally settling over the fermenting morass of Donald’s failed whisky. Every time there-after when she saw a sprouting shoot of something, she imagined the tree it might turn into, the vomit-flavoured fruit that might hang from its boughs. As it was, things did grow there with more vigour. The chickweed and the fat hen, the ragwort and the thistle, they all emerged from the suffused earth with a prickly vitality, before Tory scythed them with an old bread knife (she had no gardening tools).

They did what they could with the living room. The carpet was beyond saving: drenched in spilled substances, it had dried into a tough, cracked sheath, reminding Tory of the seasoned hides that had sometimes arrived at Farraway’s, rejected from the tannery.

She tried applying carpet cleaner, carbolic, borax and lemon juice, but they merely ran across the surface and drained away. When she lifted the carpet altogether she found that the floorboards beneath were also saturated. There seemed nothing she could do but air the boards and hope that as they dried the smell of fermentation, the reek of yeast and decayed fruit, would disappear. The soft furnishings were also badly damaged. The chaise longue had tidemarks of beer, sweat and possibly urine, though Tory tried to think not. These, at least, succumbed to scrubbing, as did the other surfaces. She paid particular attention to the escritoire, whose varnished mahogany was scarred with the interlinked circles of bottle and glass stains. Beeswax restored some of the lustre.

When Donald returned he was keen to take up residence in this downstairs room again, and within minutes was asking Tory to leave him alone in there and to shut the door.

‘Donald, do you think it’s a good idea to shut yourself away again, after all that’s happened? Why don’t you come upstairs and sleep in a proper bed?’

His reply, as always to questions of this type, was to tap his bad knee with his stick.

‘But at least spend some time with your family, or with me. Let other people share this room. Don’t shut yourself away.’

‘You heard what the doctors said,’ replied Donald. ‘I’m a broken man, Tory, and I need time to heal. What do you do with a broken toy? You glue it back together, but you don’t start playing with it straight away. You leave it on its own, somewhere no one will disturb it, so that the glue can set and harden …’

How odd, thought Tory, that he should talk about glue, with Charlotte Maugham working in a glue factory. She tried to think of ways of working what Donald had just said into her novel.

But it didn’t bode well that Donald should so quickly resume the character of his previous life and start shutting himself away again. It seemed so odd that, after all those years of confinement, he should want to continue it. Why didn’t he crave company and revel in companionship? Was this to become a regular cycle, repeated for ever? She could do nothing but wait and see.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Tory was very proud of her son, Tom. Even though his education had been disrupted by nearly five years as an evacuee, and he had had to make do with a tiny, crowded village school, where all the ages sat together in one classroom and cows jostled at the open windows in summer, as though for a glimpse of the blackboard, he had managed to attain an excellent mark for his exams, on the basis of which he had won a place at Blackdown Grammar School, one of the best schools in the area, and one that Tory thought would be for ever out of reach for her own children. Here, by all accounts, he had settled in quickly and was doing well in all his subjects. His teachers expected him to achieve a very good grade in his school certificate. He was displaying scientific leanings, and had ambitions to be a physicist or an engineer.

She was a little bit worried about his relationship with his father, however. It wasn’t until Donald was away in the hospital that she had realized how frightened of him Tom seemed. With Donald out of the house, Tom thrived. Reduced to silence, usually, by the mere presence of his father, suddenly he was the oldest male in the house, and he seemed to relish his position. He would sit at the table at mealtimes and talk endlessly about some scientific fact or other, or larkingly tease the girls for their pigtails and their dolls. He would pick his mother up on the smallest solecisms, correcting her English and arithmetic whenever the opportunity arose, and siding (to Tory’s delight) with little Branson in any of the teasing arguments that erupted in the house. Branson had an ally in the family now, and Tom seemed to treat him as a genuine little brother. Tory almost wept.

But as soon as Donald returned, Tom was back to his quiet, reclusive self, saying not a word at the dinner table, scuttling off to his room or the yard whenever his father appeared. And his father, on return from the hospital, did look strange, with his smooth, scarred head.

There was an outhouse in the garden, which no one had used for many years. It was next door to the privy, a slate-roofed lean-to set against the high wall at the end of the yard. Tom had soon appropriated this space as a kind of laboratory or workshop. He had done much the same thing in the Cotswolds, where he had had the use of a whole barn full of redundant mechanical equipment, including an entire car, which he had dismantled down to its last nut, then put back together again. He had played about in the farmyard forge and had even done some welding. He had started making Heath Robinson-style contraptions that performed simple tasks in complicated ways. He claimed to have learnt, by such practice, that there is no such thing as a simple task. He had spent a whole year trying to produce a perpetual-motion machine, an elegant device that made use of many bicycle wheels and should have worked in theory but failed miserably in practice.

Now, back home in Peter Street, his main ambition was to build a robot. So, in the company of woodlice and spiders, he accumulated junk and scrap of every type, and would hammer, saw and solder all the hours that he had. The girls had little interest in their older brother’s hobbies, and were particularly averse to visiting his dank, cobwebby laboratory. Six-year-old Branson was fascinated, however, and would sit cross-legged on the dirty floor watching his older brother at work. Tom was kind and patient enough to let him clumsily help, and he never tired of providing the younger boy with instruction on matters of physics and mechanics.

The robot was built around the upturned frame of an old folding pram. After some months of work, Tom produced hinged upper limbs that could be worked by pulleys strung with cable that did look unnervingly like a pair of wildly waving arms when the ends of the cable were tugged. The robot’s head was an upturned zinc bucket, a temporary measure, Tom said. He needed more time to think about the head, which was surely to prove the trickiest part. As for power, Tom had extracted the petrol engine from a lawn-mower that had rusted solid at the back of the outhouse.

‘Why on earth there’s a lawnmower here I don’t know,’ he said to Branson, as they examined the engine, which had evidently been a home for mice quite recently. ‘There’s no grass.’

It was true that, apart from the bare patch where the wash was buried, cobbles, paving and cement stretched all the way from the back door to the gate at the end of the yard. But there must have been grass once, they supposed. What an awful thing to be that lawnmower, Tom thought, and see the world that gave you purpose and meaning laid waste beneath a mantle of cement. It must feel like a ship that had run aground.

‘Perhaps they used to mow the concrete,’ said Branson.

‘Yeah,’ said Tom, laughing, ‘that’s a clever thing to say Branson, but you didn’t mean it to be clever did you? I like the thought –’ (Here he did a shrill rendition of his mother’s voice.) ‘– “
The concrete’s getting a bit long, dear, why don’t you go out and mow it?
”’

The robot was called Mr Briggs, after the name embossed on the lawnmower engine. Bit by bit he slowly emerged from the rubbish of the outhouse, Tom adding a piece here and there as he found just the right thing in a scrapyard or junk shop, and always Branson would be Tom’s assistant, holding his instruments for him, handing him whatever he needed (but he was never allowed to actually make any part of Mr Briggs himself ).

As the weeks and months passed, Branson slowly came to

realize what his much cleverer older brother seemed not to: that the robot would never do anything. No matter how intricate and elaborate the contraption became, with its pulleys and cogs (how many old clocks had been eviscerated for this purpose?), no matter how many old nutcrackers, radiogram valves, springs and piano wire went into its construction, it would never amount to anything more than a representation of the human figure, a sort of sculpture, rendered in scrap.

Tom could be quite convincing, however, whenever Branson raised the question of how it would work.

He would talk about electronics, transistors, computational engines, and so on. At one time he decided that the nearest the human race had come to devising a thinking machine was in the common shop till, or cash register, the sort that could be found in any butcher’s or baker’s. They then spent some time scouring scrapyards and junk shops for such an item, but never found one. ‘Our robot’s brain is waiting for us on the counter of every grocer’s in the land,’ said Tom, with the air of a frustrated genius.

At other times he would concede that he didn’t have the technological know-how to construct a fully operational robot, one that could walk and talk and perform simple tasks. But that shouldn’t be a disincentive for making it because, he reasoned, by the time they had finished the body of the robot, science might have come up with an affordable artificial brain.

‘And once they’ve done that, Branson, well, there’s no limit to what Mr Briggs could do. He could be our servant – we could send him to the shops to buy us a bag of lemon bonbons, or we could make him make other robots, and then we’d have an army of them, to do our will wherever we pleased. We could take over the house with them.’

‘Yes,’ said Branson, excited without quite knowing why. ‘We could invade it.’

Tom liked to elaborate a vision of a children-versus-adults world. He persisted with his theory that both his parents were impostors, identical replacements for his real parents, who had both died in the war.