Letters From an Unknown Woman (28 page)

‘My hands spend most of their time bathed in disinfectant and soap. Those lavatories are probably cleaner than most restaurant dining rooms.’

‘Now you
are
talking nonsense.’

In truth, Tory had never felt more content than in the ladies’ lavatory on the square, where she had an office all of her own. She only spent three hours a day there and, once her regular cleaning duties had been performed, had little else to do but sit in her office and read. And it
was
an office, despite what her mother might say. For the first time since Donald had come home, she had a space for herself. There was a small desk with brass-handled drawers underneath, a comfortable, though very worn leather chair to go with it. It wasn’t long before she realized that she now had somewhere in which she could work on the manuscript of her novel.

Tory had hardly stopped thinking about Charlotte Maugham. She went to bed every night with a sense that underneath it a hostage was tied up and gagged. Through the muffled handkerchief she could sometimes hear,
Write about me! Write about me!
Even if she could have managed to bring herself round to extracting the typewriter and continuing with her novel, she balked at the thought because she was terrified by the notion that she might not be able to give Charlotte the sort of life she wanted to. She might have to be cruel to her. That was why she had been so wedded to the typewriter as the sole instrument of literary production. She could have written the rest of
The Distance
with pen, or pencil, in little notebooks. She could have scribbled away at the kitchen table – no one would have taken much notice and Charlotte Maugham could have watched as her family sadly disappeared. She had longed to deal with Charlotte‘s oldest boy, the clever one, with his chemistry set, his cat’s-whisker wireless set and his train set – Peter, with his bent, wire-rimmed spectacles and his books on bird-watching, his collection of conkers. What sad little road should she map out for him to follow? She might use the death of his father as a starting point for his decline. This was one of the reasons she hoped Donald would never ask about
The Distance
because in it he died, killed in action. The trouble was it gave Charlotte no one to blame. There was nothing for her to put right after the death of Peter.

‘Oh, Charlotte Maugham,’ Tory said to herself, ‘what am I going to do with you?’

It was an odd thing, but it was Donald who had encouraged her to carry on with her novel.

‘Didn’t you use to have a typewriter?’ he said to her one day.

‘Yes. You made me take it out of the room.’

‘You were writing a book on it, weren’t you?’

‘I was trying to.’

‘You should have finished it.’

Tory was quite taken aback. It was probably the kindest thing he’d said to her since his return home. Her spirits were dampened a little by what he said next, though.

‘You could have had it published by now, if you’d finished it, and we could have made a bit of money.’

So it was just the usual thing, everything coming back to how the rest of the family could support Donald in his unemployment.

‘I don’t suppose anyone would have published it,’ she said.

‘Oh, I don’t know. Everyone’s getting published these days – have you looked in the papers? War memoirs, everyone’s writing them, and probably making quite a few bob.’

‘Well, I don’t know. I wanted to write about the war, but I don’t suppose my story was very interesting compared to what other people went through.’

Donald had smiled to himself. ‘Oh, I think you had a pretty interesting time.’ Then, as though struck by a sudden thought, ‘Tory, do you still have that typewriter?’

‘Yes.’ She thought he was going to tell her to get it out and get on with her money-making novel. But no – he wanted it for himself.

‘If these people can write their war memoirs, then why can’t I? My memories are worth just as much as anyone else’s …’

She wanted to say,
Well, it would be a bit boring, wouldn’t it? I mean, you spent the entire war, apart from the first few weeks, in a prison camp, behind barbed wire
. But instead, she said exactly the opposite: ‘It would be a very interesting read, I’m sure. I don’t suppose many men have written about their time as prisoners, but it would be just as interesting …’

‘Yes,’ said Donald, with a touch of mistrust in his voice, as though he suspected, but couldn’t be quite sure, that Tory was mocking him.

So the Remington was brought out from under the bed for the first time in nearly seven years and the dust was blown from its keys. Tory carefully carried it downstairs and placed it on the writing bureau, exactly where it had been before.

‘You know you don’t have to type it out, not the first draft?’ said Tory, a little breathless.

‘I want to do it properly don’t I? What’s the point of writing it out with a pen then typing it all out again? All right, you can clear off now.’ He smiled to show that he was only being jokingly rude. ‘I need to get my memories sorted out.’

But I would like to work on
The Distance
, Tory wanted to say. What about my book? She listened for a while, leaving the kitchen door open. There was silence for a long time, except for the rustling of paper, coming through the open doorway of the living room. And then, quite unexpectedly, even though she had been expecting it, the sharp, punching sound of a key on the typewriter being decisively pressed. Just one key, on its own, which caused Tory to marvel, for a moment, at what a horribly violent noise it was. So unlike the piano, its distant relation, the typewriter cannot take a light touch. It responds to only one level of pressure. She remembered that from her own first experiences of typing. Her very first attempt had been soft and tentative: the key had lowered but the sequence of subsequent movements, all that leverage and counterbalance, couldn’t be pushed into action. She’d had to press harder. The typewriter had demanded decisiveness and commitment. Every letter, it seemed, had to be placed with energy and resolve. There was no such hesitation in Donald’s first letter.

There was the emphatic stabbing of the key, the throwing forward of the lever to smack against the white paper, the carriage shifting one space to the left, the lever falling back into its bed. It must have been a full thirty seconds before the second key was pushed. Another longish pause, then two keys in quick succession. Another pause, shorter this time. And so the faltering rhythm of Donald’s typing filled the house. The long pauses were gradually elided, and after a few days the keys were being pressed at a steady trickle. He was certainly busy. He could type for several hours at a time.

Now that she was working in the lavatories, however, Tory realized she could write her novel without the aid of a typewriter, that she could simply use pen and ink, or even pencil. She had never realized quite what a pensive place a lavatory was, how conducive to thought. It wasn’t simply that it provided her with long stretches of solitude, punctuated only by the echoey clip-clop of some old girl coming down the stairs to spend a penny, but that it was a place removed from the real world in a most decisive and concise way. A bit like a nunnery, Tory imagined. It was also a good place to manage grief. Surely no one, no matter how sharply bereaved, can dwell too long on their loss when they are confronted with such sights as a public lavatory affords.

She might only be there for three hours every day, but she was the only person who could deal with many of the problems that arose. And such problems were many and varied, from the lack of toilet paper to the jamming of money in the cigarette machine to minor plumbing difficulties. She could even cope now with an overflowing cistern. And to think she had been afraid of coming down here for all those years, that it had taken the death of her son to enable her to overcome such fears. She even liked to spend time in the exact cubicle of her childhood fright, sitting on the seat imagining her six-year-old self sweating in panic at the big bolted door. It hadn’t changed since then, in nearly forty years. Nothing down there had changed, but had been silently waiting for her return.

One day, as she left the public lavatory, passing the small brass sign that said ‘PUBLIC LAVATORY’ at the top of the steps, she could not help but amuse herself by covering up the first ten letters with her gloved hand and forearm, to leave just ‘TORY’ exposed.

And when she re-emerged into the everyday world of shops and daylight, everything seemed lighter and sillier than it had before, but in the most affirmative way. The soaring civic buildings of the square seemed made of lace – even the town hall looked as if it was about to launch itself into the sky. Though she always rather dreaded that her masculine counterpart from the Gents would emerge at precisely the same time and that they should, with due solemnity, do some symmetrical bowing and hat-tipping to each other before walking off in opposite directions. In fact, she very rarely even saw the male attendant, although she had been told to call on him in any emergency (she prayed there would never be one – how could she ever be expected to set foot in that underground world of dripping male members?). An emergency, she soon realized, usually took only one form: that of the lock-in, when some frazzled dame would either jam or break the bolt on the inside of the cubicle, or else render herself incapacitated, would faint, have a hot flush or, more rarely, die.

‘A very high proportion of deaths occur on the lavatory,’ Tom had once said, during a phase of hypochondria.

‘Do they?’

‘Yes.’

‘I suppose you’re going to tell me why.’

‘Because the symptoms that are associated with a catastrophic internal disorder that may cause sudden death, such as a heart-attack or aortic embolism, are very similar to feelings associated with an urgent need to evacuate the bowels.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes.’

It had worried Tory for weeks. Every time she felt an urge to go to the lavatory, she wondered if she was about to die. Going to the privy had felt like the long walk to the guillotine. What a way to die – for one’s last moments on earth to be spent in contemplation of the WC, collapsing forward, dead on the floor with one’s drawers around one’s ankles.

But it was true. She had wondered why her predecessor had made a point of telling her to use the public telephone box that was not ten yards from the entrance to the lavatories, in case of a
real
emergency, but within a month of starting she was having to do just that, dealing with her first fatality. She had learnt that a lock-in can usually be solved with a step-ladder and a broomstick, but not this time. It was a woman of rotund anatomy and roseate complexion, and she hadn’t even got as far as lowering her bloomers. She was sitting on the lowered lid, fully clothed, slumped sideways against the cubicle wall, her plump hands gathered in her lap in a way that seemed rather contrite and humble, like a child in church. When Tory phoned for the ambulance it surprised her that the operator seemed familiar with the public conveniences and, indeed, so did the ambulance men, when they arrived. A grinning couple of chaps with their caps set back on their heads, as chirpy as milkmen. Down in the lavatory they found the dead woman and searched for a pulse. One of the men, after they’d heaved the woman on to a stretcher, took the opportunity to flirt with Tory.

‘Hullo, you don’t look like the usual sort we find down here. When are you knocking off ?’

Tory was furious with herself for blushing at this (think of running water, her mother had said, and the colour will go), which only encouraged the ambulance man, until he was beckoned on by his colleague, who asked him if he wouldn’t mind taking the other end of the stretcher. ‘Oh, I do hate doing the below-grounds. Why do they have to build these places underground?’

It was as though it was part of a regular routine, as though once a month they called to collect a dead woman. But, in fact, it was almost the last time someone died in the Ladies’ lavatories on her shift.

Should she send Charlotte Maugham to do the same work? Tory thought she might as well, though to give it a twist she had her heroine taking a job in the Gents. Tory was thrilled at the turn her novel had taken: she was quite sure that no English novel had ever contained a heroine who was an attendant in any sort of lavatory, let alone a male one. Though she supposed such a novel might have been written by a member of the Communist Writers Committee of the Soviet Union, or whatever it was called, celebrating the heroic struggle of a urinal-wiping, headscarved babushka. Well, hers would be a decadent version of that. She wrote the scene of Charlotte’s first day, in which a red-faced colonel enters the clammy rooms below ground and reddens further at the sight of Charlotte in her headscarf and overall (neither of which could quite conceal her understated beauty). He makes to turn around, believing himself in the wrong place, then notices the urinals, at which other men are already standing.

‘I – I— What is the meaning of this outrage?’

‘Outrage? This is 1949. Haven’t you heard of socialism?’

After some months in the job she came to find the presence of males in the Ladies a most unwelcome intrusion. In fact, it was more like a distortion of reality. When old Clive made his occasional visits to check on some plumbing malfunction, it was as though something impossible had happened: a baggy-eyed, grey-moustachioed man, sagging in every aspect of his being, entering this female space, a space more feminine than any other in the world, a place
chemically
feminine.

One quiet afternoon a scream brought her from her office. A woman in artificial fur with a leopardprint headscarf and long mauve gloves was standing by the door of a stall, leaning one hand against it for support, the other struggling to find a handkerchief in her deep pocket, which she then brought to her nose. She looked at Tory as she approached, her face zigzagged with distress.

‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ Tory asked.

Shaking her head, the woman moved to the washstands, her handkerchief still to her face, then gestured with her other hand towards the stalls. ‘In there,’ she gasped. ‘Oh dear …’