Letters From an Unknown Woman (6 page)

She would have written immediately to Donald, had he not included that final request. It threw her into an emotional turmoil. She dismissed from her mind immediately any idea that she would try to meet his demand, but at the same time she had to deal with it somehow. She had to answer it. What should she say in her letter? How should she make reference to his request? How should she refuse him?

Having sealed the children’s letter safely into an envelope, she took another sheet of writing paper out of the escritoire’s tray, and tried drafting a reply.

Dearest Donald,

I thank heaven that you are alive and apparently well. You didn’t ask how I, my mother or the children are, but I am sure you would like to know that we and they are also well. I am afraid, however, that I cannot meet your request for what you call a ‘dirty letter’. In fact, I feel quite insulted that you think I am capable of producing such a document. I will put your request down to a moment of brain fever, brought on by the stresses of your situation.

    Please let me know if there is anything else I can do for you. Would you like me to send you some chocolate?

Your loving wife

Tory

It took Tory nearly an hour to write this letter, and less than a minute to realize that she could never post it.
I sound so cold
, she thought. It had the blunt officiousness of the letters her father must have written to overdrawn customers. Tory had spent her first few years of employment as a clerk in her father’s bank, and the scrupulous procedural efficiency of the work had left its mark on her. She hated waste, ambiguity and inaccuracy. She also hated dishonesty. Even if she was capable of writing a dirty letter, it would have had to be a work of fiction, and therefore dishonest.

Now, by drafting a reply, all she had done was bring another document into being whose existence would need to be covered up. There was a small fire burning in the grate, and Tory gave her letter to its little yellow flames. She wondered for a moment if she should do the same with Donald’s. It would have been the most obvious solution, making a note of the address, as her mother had said, and then simply destroying the horrible thing. But it was the only piece of evidence that her husband was still in the world, and no matter how soiled it seemed, it was precious for that reason alone.

She decided she should not be hasty in replying. Supposing, after all, that Donald had actually written the letter in a state of delirium, and had no memory of adding that final paragraph. What would he then make of her reply, if she was to meet his demand? Apart from that, the letter had been four months in transit. Surely Donald, in all those months of waiting, had written again. Perhaps that letter was following quickly behind the first one. Perhaps she should wait a week or two to see if another letter arrived. If that letter made no lewd demands, she could put the whole incident down to madness, pretend that the first had never existed, and let the matter pass into oblivion.

*

At work Tory was rather alarmed to find that news of Donald’s survival had arrived ahead of her. Doreen, one of the matronly elders, had got everyone to make Union Jacks out of red, white and blue packing paper and sack thread, draping them all around the bare brick walls. An impromptu party was held, and she was toasted with mugs of strong sweet tea and congratulated all round by the packing women. She had made no real friends among these people so was a little surprised by the warmth of her reception. Several other women had husbands or other close relatives in prisoner-ofwar camps, and they were eager to share information. After her initial fear, Tory felt assured that whatever gossipy network had brought the news from Peter Street to here (emanating, no doubt, from one of Mrs Head’s over-the-garden-wall chinwags) it hadn’t included the news about the sordid coda to Donald’s letter. There was no sniggering or blushing among the grey-skinned packing women.

‘I’ve brought a tin of cocoa in for you, darling, so that you can send it to him,’ said Verity, pushing it into her hands.

‘How’s he doing, love? Are they feeding him? I’ve brought in some shortbread I been saving since Christmas – for you to send to your Don.’

Tory didn’t even know the name of this woman. And Don? She had never called him Don.

‘For your Donny,’ said Win, one of the oldest of the group, landing a heavy cylindrical object into her lap at tea break. ‘Made it specially.’

The object was a pound cake.

‘Thank you so much,’ said Tory, genuinely moved.

‘Well, we’ve got to think of the men, haven’t we? Sooner they win this war and come home, the sooner we can pack in these awful jobs.’

‘Oh, I like the way you said “pack in”, Winnie,’ said Verity. ‘That’s so droll.’

By lunchtime Tory had accumulated a stack of gifts and goods for Donald that she would never be able to take home in one go. But she did manage to talk for a little while to Dorothy, one of the women with a husband in a camp.

‘Does he write many letters?’ Tory asked.

‘Quite a regular flow, yes.’

‘What does he write about?’

Dorothy looked at Tory as though she’d said something strange. ‘Just stuff, like what people always put in letters, asking how you’re keeping, what’s the weather like, the weather here’s drizzly, et cetera, et cetera’

‘Does he ever write about anything else?’

‘Sometimes he gets a bit maudlin and says how he misses home, then I write to him to tell him to pull himself together, and then he writes to say he’ll soldier on regardless. Just needs a kick in the pants now and then, that’s all.’

Tory so longed to ask Dorothy if she’d ever been required to write a dirty letter or, if not, what she would do if she was. But it simply wasn’t possible even to broach the subject. There was no one else Tory could turn to. Her best friend had emigrated to Canada just before the war, and of her other friends, there were none with whom she felt it appropriate to share such information.

She returned home that evening, heavily laden with chocolate, biscuits and cakes to send to Donald. Perhaps under the welter of so much sugar his lustiness might dissolve. She would bombard him with sweet and sticky things so that he could forget about his other desires.

She entered the kitchen exhausted, and loaded her goods on to the table. Mrs Head was in her chair, staring at the mantelpiece. There was another blue envelope up there, covered with stamps and seals, waiting for her inspection.

‘It’s postmarked two weeks after the first one,’ said Mrs Head, ‘but has still taken nearly four months to get here.’

Mrs Head looked at Tory with one eyebrow raised, the look she might give to a naughty child who was thinking about being naughty a second time. She was dying to know, just as Tory was, whether the two-week interval between the letters had been enough time for Donald’s sanity to return. The letter began:

Dearest Darling Sweetheart Tory,

I don’t know if you ever received my last letter, but I wrote to you about two weeks ago to tell you that I’m fine and that I’m out here in the middle of nowhere in some Godforsaken part of the German empire, being held as a prisoner of war. I was captured in the desert, shipped across the Med then conveyed north through Italy in a cattle truck. Food not too bad, the other chaps are a good crowd – some Canadians and Australians. The English and the Aussies are teaching the Canadians how to play cricket.

    My one problem is that I am starved of sex and I can’t seem to take my mind off the thought of giving you good ol’ fucking. You are always on my mind, Tory, but it is a lonely business when you are not here to do your duty. I therefore beg you to write me a dirty letter by return, as dirty as you can possibly make it, full of filthy thoughts and deeds. Even better would be if you could send me a photo of yourself with no clothes on – I know, it would be a difficult thing to fix. Perhaps you could get a camera from somewhere, and use a mirror. I’m running out of room, damn block caps.

Love to your ma

Donald

XXX (merry Xmas!)

‘Well?’ said Mrs Head, after Tory had read Donald’s letter to herself, remaining silent and motionless long after she had finished reading. ‘Am I to take it from your contemplative immobility that your husband has repeated his earlier request?’

‘Not just repeated it,’ said Tory, offering her mother the letter, ‘he has asked more.’

Mrs Head read it quickly. ‘The nerve,’ was all she could say for a few moments. ‘The nerve.’

More letters arrived in the following days. Sometimes two or three were delivered in the same post. They had all been written at fortnightly intervals, yet were delivered in the space of a few days. Donald’s despair and frustration had spanned several months, yet for Tory they were compressed to about a week and a half. Perhaps if she had received them fortnightly she would have felt differently, would have had more time to be persuaded by their insistence and urgency, but to receive them
en masse
, to have the months of Donald’s frustration crushed into the space of a few days, gave them such density and weight – it was as though she had been struck by a bomb made of words.

Each letter repeated the request made in the first, though phrased differently, with variations each time, and with relentlessly increasing coarseness.

Dearest Tory,

I have been writing letters to you for some time now and I do not know if they have reached you. Letters here arrive sometimes months after they were written, so I am hoping that there has simply been a delay with the post. My news is that I was captured in the desert and transported across the Med, then up the leg of Italy to here. I think we’re in the east of Germany somewhere.

    I am a bit worried that you may have been offended by something I said in my earlier letters. I know it was a bit of a sauce of me, but I have this most burning desire for carnal gratification that only a wife can satisfy. In my earlier letters I asked that you write me a dirty letter. Please forgive me if you find that rude or bad of me. I do not know what else to do. I also wrote that I would like a nude photo of yourself. I know that was a crazy thing to ask because how would you get it developed, even if you could take it? Well a chap here knows of a photographer’s studio in Stepney where they will develop such pictures with no questions asked. If you change your mind, here is the address: 17 Barrow Street, Stepney E1. The fellow there is called Watts.

Yours lovingly

Donald

Dear Tory,

The mail is coming and going quite smoothly out here so I am beginning to think that you are ignoring me. Perhaps you are offended by my requests or are too shy to reply. Come on, old girl! Don’t be a prissy little missy (that’s what the Canadians call ’em). You will do me great wrong by not complying – you might even be breaking the law (denying a husband his conjugal rights is grounds for divorce, you know), so take your knickers down, dip your nib in your fanny and write me a letter full of juice!!!!!!

Love to your ma (ask her for some writing tips!!),

Donald

From this letter onwards Donald’s correspondence became so filthy that Tory could not bear to read it. Furthermore, he had begun illustrating his missives with drawings, of herself and Donald (she supposed), naked and with monstrously large private parts. This was quite enough for Tory, and she finally decided that Donald’s letters had to be destroyed immediately. She burnt them in the sitting-room fireplace, with Mrs Head’s overseeing approval. The last two letters she gave to the flames without even opening the envelopes.

The depravity of his later letters made it easier for Tory to reply. She was not only upset by the experience, she was disgusted and angry, and she wrote to Donald immediately.

Dear Donald,

Your letters were delayed in the post and have arrived all at once this past week. I have destroyed them. Please do not write me any more letters like those. If you do so I will destroy all further communication from you without opening it, and will not write to you again.

You have offended me grievously.

Yours sincerely

Tory Pace

After Tory had posted this letter, she considered the fact that if Donald had not gone so far she might, eventually, have thought about how she might comply. But she was truly shocked by the depths to which her husband seemed to have sunk, and she was thus saved the trouble of tackling the problem of writing a dirty letter. Instead she had written what she supposed was the exact opposite – a cold, clinical, remonstrative epistle that could have come from the pen of a bewigged denizen of the Temple Inn. In fact, Tory was rather proud of the letter: she felt she had written something as pointed and as efficient as an arrow. She imagined it nailing any future indecent letters from Donald, pinning them to the floor so that they would never reach her. It would have an effect on Donald, she was sure. He was someone who appreciated words very much, someone who always corrected her when she misused them. He was a self-educated man, and very proud of the fact. It was this, among other considerations of Donald’s character, that made the letters so very puzzling and shocking.