Letters From an Unknown Woman (29 page)

Tory, expecting that she was about to discover the second dead body of her career, cautiously opened the heavy wooden door, only to find the stall within empty. There was a strong smell, however, of an unusual provenance. Not the usual stink of defecation, something more laden and weighty. As she approached the pan of the lavatory, she had an inkling of what had happened. The bowl was filled with red, and in the middle of it a translucent, curled form, maybe limbed, she couldn’t be sure. She stepped back, trying to keep calm. The woman in furs had gone, saying she needed air. When Clive arrived, he dealt with the problem by lighting a rolled-up newspaper and holding it before him as he entered the cubicle, then a horrible churning sound, like a paddle-wheel plying the Mississippi, before he emerged again, more saggy than ever, mumbling something about the jobs he had to do.

‘Some woman’s dropped her guts down the lavatory,’ he said, shuffling off, shocking a lady as she entered.

That was the second death she had witnessed in the Ladies, though this time of the smallest, saddest kind, and when she went home that evening, she couldn’t help but feel that she was contaminating her own home with the colour and smell of death. It’s not fair of me, she thought, to bring these things back to a house that is still in mourning. But what things? Why did she have the curious feeling, when she arrived home, that she had dragged a sack behind her all the way? In fact, she carried nothing. Her overalls and headscarf hung on a little brass hook in the underground office and were left there.

Mrs Head, at first adamant that Tory should not even enter the precincts of the kitchen until she had washed herself thoroughly, had become a little more relaxed recently, no longer insisting on the full bath. But now it was Tory who felt she needed purifying, and could not even enter the dining room but remained in the hall for some time, looking at herself in the hallway mirror, whose ugly, coffin-layered shape was such an unkind frame for her face. Then came the sound of a typewriter key, like a distant gunshot.

*

But in other ways the job at the lavatories continued to have a cleansing effect. Why was it that proximity to so much that was awful about human beings, tending to the far, rarely visited end of the deglutitive experience, should feel so nourishing? Then she realized. Everything was being washed away. It didn’t matter how much dirt was produced, the continual flushing of the cisterns, the nod of their ballcock levers like an affirmative peck of a lavatory bird, was a constant reminder that most things, no matter how dark, malodorous, vile or inhuman, can be washed away in a stream of clear water and never be seen again. That was why (she recalled) the people had looked so bright on emerging from the lavatory, when she had observed them that day years ago, so brisk and bright as they re-emerged into the fresh air. They had been given a new lease.

The woman in artificial furs came back.

‘I want to thank you.’

Tory almost jumped out of her chair: she was unused to people speaking directly to her when she was alone in her office and she had been deeply absorbed in her novel at the time.

The woman went on, in a quieter tone, ‘I’m sorry, did I frighten you?’

It had been a week since the blood incident, and Tory had not seen her before or since, up until this moment. ‘No, I was just …’

‘Crikey. I didn’t realize being a lavatory attendant involved so much paperwork.’

Tory’s little office was decked with pages of
The Distance
, Draft One. The typescript, now vigorously annotated in red and brutally scored so that barely a paragraph survived, was spread out, chapter by chapter, across the floor at the back. Draft Two, entirely handwritten on loose leaves (of several different sizes), was over-spilling from an upturned crate along the side wall. Her desk was cluttered with the third draft, again handwritten, using a specially purchased fountain pen with a marbled shaft and gold-plated nib that blotted freely over her copy.

Tory looked up, not quite knowing what to say. Her office was never visited, and so never had to be explained. The woman, still in her leopardprint headscarf, took a step back, as if suddenly realizing she was encroaching. Tory took a moment to observe her. She was very beautiful, in a modishly regal sort of way; she had the tapered, streamlined look that was beginning to prevail. She wouldn’t have looked out of place with a cigarette holder between her lips, and Tory kept thinking she was wearing jewellery, but every time she tried to look directly at her necklace or earrings, they weren’t there.

‘Well, like I said, I just wanted to thank you for your kindness.’

‘I didn’t really do anything,’ Tory said, once she’d collected herself.

‘Oh, I think you did. I think I would have fainted if you hadn’t come over to me. It was very kind of you, to wipe my brow like that …’

‘Wipe your brow?’

‘Yes. Perhaps you’ve forgotten. You were such a kind dear, dampening those paper towels and then applying them to my fore-head.’

Oh, well, if that was what the woman remembered, perhaps Tory had done such a thing. ‘Think nothing of it,’ she said.

The woman dared start forward again, placing her foot across the threshold.

‘I’m afraid I can’t stand the sight of blood, you see. I can hardly even say the word. I’ve always felt ashamed of the fact, especially as my mother was a nurse.’

‘Well, it was enough to make anyone feel giddy …’

‘But not you. I suppose you’re toughened against things like that. I suppose your job makes you a little bit like a nurse.’

A toilet flushed, and Tory blushed. A bolt was emphatically drawn. ‘I wouldn’t say that.’

‘I must say, I’ve never seen an attendant quite like you before.’

This was the third or fourth time such an observation had been made, and Tory was beginning to find it a little tiresome. How was she supposed to respond, after all – with an apology? With a promise to be someone else? But coming from this elegant young woman’s lips (the first time a female had made the observation), Tory felt rather flattered. ‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, not that I’m a professional observer of lavatory attendants, but they tend to be of a similar type – a certain age and … deportment, shall we say? Now I’m going to sound like a terrible snob, and you’ll hate me.’

The woman was well-spoken, prosperous-looking, but with a timidity, self-deprecation and deference towards Tory the Lavatory Attendant that Tory herself found utterly compelling.

‘The very fact that we’re having this conversation is proof that you’re an unusual lavatory attendant,’ she continued. ‘I’ve never had a conversation with a lavatory attendant before in my life.’

‘Perhaps you’ve never tried.’

‘Well, that’s probably true, but then it takes two people to have a conversation. You don’t mind me talking to you, do you?’

Tory had just put down her pen in what might, she now realized, have looked like a gesture of exasperation. ‘No, I don’t mind.’ She wondered if there was something she could say to emphasize the truth of this statement, and thus cancel out the pen-throwing gesture, but instead she allowed a little bubble of silence to form.

‘Now that I’ve started talking to you,’ the woman said, with a forced laugh, ‘I realize I’m not quite sure what I want to say. And I do hate people who talk but have nothing to say.’

‘In my opinion,’ said Tory, helpfully, ‘it’s a rather extraordinary skill, when you think about it. I wonder how people do it, and I wish I could do the same.’

The woman produced a laugh, a genuine one this time, but it ended with another silence.

‘Well,’ the woman said, ‘thank you again.’ There was an awkward moment of prolonged eye contact, and she left, her footsteps echoing for what, to Tory, seemed like an hour.

*

The woman became a regular visitor to Tory’s office, the frequency of visits gradually increasing as the weeks went by. At first Tory was worried that she would become an intrusive presence, disrupting her work on the novel. At other times she welcomed the chance to put it aside. The woman was called Grace, and it was true that she never talked about nothing, it was just that the things she said were sometimes rather odd.

‘Do you know what, Tory? I must have come here twenty times now, and I haven’t used the lavatory once. I was going to, on that first day, when I saw the … you know … but all my subsequent visits have been to talk to you. I suppose that makes me a rather strange woman. I would now count you among my best friends, but I have never seen you anywhere except in a public convenience. Don’t you think we should meet in the outside world, just once in a while?’

‘We might not like each other above ground,’ said Tory, who had come to enjoy Grace’s conversation because she could say anything to her and still be understood.

Grace laughed. ‘Yes, we might be like ferrets, who co-operate when hunting through tunnels but attack each other in the open air.’

Once Grace’s visits had attained a certain level of regularity, Tory allowed her into the office and even made a little space for her, using the crate that had once contained Draft Two as a makeshift chair. Here Grace would sit and talk for half an hour or so, always a little nervous, breaking into little peals of jittery laughter, or else falling into pensive silences, when her beautiful eyes would seem to lose their focus, or else focus on something not in the real world. It seemed to Tory, on these occasions, that Grace could actually watch her own thoughts. Tory found herself being uncharacteristically open with her. She had soon told her things about herself that she had never told anyone else. The writing was the first quarter of her private world to fall to Grace’s charms.

‘What are you writing?’ Grace asked one day.

‘Oh, nothing. I just like scribbling things down.’

‘Don’t call it scribbling, that makes it seem thoughtless, and I can see you have put a lot of thought into it. What is it? A book?’

‘It might be, one day.’

‘Tory, I think you’re so wonderful, sitting here in the back of a public lavatory, writing a book. There can’t be another woman in the world doing the same thing.’

‘It isn’t anything, really. I don’t know why we make such a fuss about writing – it’s just scribbling things down. Anyone can do it.

The only thing that distinguishes writers is they can do it for long stretches at a time.’

‘Well, that can’t be as easy as it sounds.’

‘My husband is also a writer,’ said Tory, surprised at the sound of pride in her own voice. Though why shouldn’t she be proud of Donald? He might be an awful typist, still pressing the keys at the slow rate he had started with, but he had persistence, a dogged determination to get to the end that was admirable.

‘Does he write in a public lavatory as well?’

When Grace asked the inevitable question – what is your book about? – Tory again felt perfectly comfortable talking about her novel, which would have been impossible with anyone else.

‘It keeps changing. At first it was about a woman whose husband is killed in the war, and she remarries. But at the end of the war it transpires that her husband was not dead at all, but had merely been held prisoner in the Far East. This is true – it happened quite a lot, because the Japanese often didn’t let the Allies know if any of their men were being held prisoner, and they would be declared missing in action or dead. Well, like I said, this woman – she’s called Charlotte – remarries and has a child during the war, but at the end of the war, her husband returns. So what does that mean for Charlotte’s marriage? If her husband was never dead, then her second marriage isn’t legal.’

‘What a pickle,’ said Grace.

‘And what about the child? Who had legal custody of it – the illegally married natural father, or the legally married step-father?’

‘So, what happens?’

‘Well, poor Charlotte is pulled this way and that – she’s overjoyed that her first husband is alive, but she’s now deeply in love with her second husband.’

‘Things could get very difficult.’

‘To make things worse, her first husband has been mentally damaged by his brutal treatment in the prison camp and has developed a violent tendency.’

‘What does he think of the second husband?’

‘He despises him, and is even violent towards him. For a while, Charlotte is afraid that he’ll kill her second husband, or even her child.’

‘And does he?’

‘Well, this is what I can’t decide. My original story had the first husband killing the child, then Charlotte and her second husband taking revenge on him in rather sickening ways. But now I’m thinking that the first husband should be saved, and that there should be a happier ending.’

‘Perhaps the three of them could live together in what they call a ménage!’

‘Grace, you are saucy. It started off being rather closely based on my own life, and now it’s veering off in different ways because my life is changing so much. I have a husband who was a prisoner of war and who changed in peculiar ways. I had an affair and had a child, and I was afraid that my husband would kill my little boy. In fact, it was my older child who died, in such a way that I blamed Donald. But now Donald is rediscovering his good side and I can see that his behaviour wasn’t all his fault.’

‘How very touching. I think I prefer the revenge story, But, Tory, I didn’t know you’d lost a child. Now I can see why you have a tragic look about you. You must be weighed down with sadness.’

How was it that she could talk to this woman about Tom’s death, even telling her those aspects of it that she found most difficult to contemplate – its dreadful loneliness, the macabre tableau it must have presented to its discoverers, the ingeniousness of it, the efficiency? The manner of his death so rejected the possibility of life, gave it no chance, no corner. When she thought about that, Tory couldn’t help but feel that life itself was, in the end, a broken, badly designed, inefficient, wasteful thing. In which case, why should any of us be troubled by it? Non-existence, now there was efficiency. The perfect uninterrupted span of blackness and silence that goes on for ever, and which is our ultimate destiny anyway. All of this she told Grace, who listened with the calm focus of someone who is unsurprised. Though at the end Tory couldn’t quite believe that Grace was kneeling beside her, kissing away the tears that were rolling down her face.