CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

There was the question of what to do about Mr Briggs. He had been sitting in the yard in the same position as he’d been left at the end of the day of his unveiling, right at the far end, by the back gate, facing the house. Tom had not worked on him at all since that day, and he had not moved since, his bucket face turned slightly to the left, one arm raised, the other lowered, frozen in mid-stride. Weeds had grown up in-between the cobbles and woven themselves through the rusting framework of his lower torso. Birds used him as a perch and as a site of defecation. In the winter he was the armature for an instant snowman, and in the summer months the anchoring point for many spiders’ webs. His rigid stance at the end of the yard had become so commonplace that it was no longer observed. Like the ticking of a clock, he failed to register on the senses. Now, with Tom’s death, he had become resolutely alive. He was noticed every time anyone looked out of the window or went to the privy.

Mrs Head’s first instinct had been to get rid of Mr Briggs: he was a constant reminder of Tom. But Tory wanted to keep him for the same reason. She even went so far as to clean him up a little, yank the weeds out of his chest, pull the cobwebs from his ears, brighten up his eyes. Seeing her from the window, going at the robot with a scrubbing brush, Mrs Head didn’t know quite what to think. She supposed it wasn’t a bad thing for the robot to remain in the yard, as a sort of memorial to her grandson, but on the other

hand, it was such an ugly brute of a thing, and with that sarcastic, condescending expression (that, thankfully, wasn’t turned fully on the house), that she couldn’t help feeling there was something unhealthy about allowing it to remain in the yard. She wondered how she could tactfully broach the subject of removing it. The rag-and-bone man would be more than happy to take it, she thought. She was aware that she was not a tactful person, and that the rag-and-bone cart might not be the most sympathetic way to dispose of what Tory considered to be her son’s memorial, his only surviving mark on the world.

‘Tory, I wonder if it’s about time we did something with Mr Briggs.’

‘Like what?’

‘Well, perhaps we could give him to one of the schools around here, for their science projects or something.’

Mrs Head was very pleased with her idea, and it seemed to strike Tory as a possibility. But she dismissed it anyway. ‘No, I like to have Mr Briggs, he reminds me …’

‘Perhaps now is the time to let the past go, and to let Mr Briggs move on to better things.’

‘You’re talking to me as though I’m a fool,’ said Tory, with the air of sudden realization, ‘as though I’m a little child.’

‘No, Tory, I’m just trying to be considerate.’

‘Well, have you considered what it’s like to lose a son?’

‘I’m your mother, Tory. You seem to forget. I’ve lost a grandson.’

‘I’m sorry.’

Tory believed she was suffering from too much knowledge, that she knew things no mother should ever have to know, and which she had to keep to herself. A space had been created in her mind, which was continuously present and which she could not help but visit. It consisted of a disused barn in a remote Cotswold village, a young man rigging up the apparatus of his own death with the painstaking care and precision of an engineer. He had used a block and tackle. This was what the police had decided she needed to know. They also told her that the farmer had been led to his discovery by the unusual activities of jackdaws on his farm.

She felt that she understood Donald now, because when she had chopped through the sitting-room door with an axe she had found bandaged with cobwebs in the outhouse, and had discovered her husband unconscious on the chaise longue hugging an empty whisky bottle to his heart, sleeping like a babe in the wood, she had stood over him with the axe in her hands and raised it above her head, as if she was about to chop a difficult log. But she didn’t kill him. He had opened his eyes and looked at her with a jolting sense of recognition, as though he had been expecting this moment for a long time. And then, having taken in the whole picture, he simply closed them again. For a moment Tory saw herself as he must have seen her, axe lifted, a trembling tower of anger and grief. And he had just closed his eyes as if ready to take it. The axe wilted in Tory’s hands and she sank to her knees and wept.

Later, when the acrid fog of Tory’s grief had cleared a little, he emerged slowly, and cautiously, and did his best to appear remorseful and contrite. The morning after Tory had contemplated splitting him in two with an axe, he emerged from the living room, brushing aside some shard of door-wood that stuck out awkwardly from the frame, and, with a teetering, tippy-toes walk, entered the kitchen and said, in his quietest, shakiest voice, ‘Tory, dear, I think my head needs doing.’

Donald’s head had not been balmed for several days. Usually the absence of just a day’s balming would have him in agony, claiming that his head felt like it was on fire (and he should know), and crying out for water to quench a desiccating thirst. And so Tory balmed her husband’s head, and the tenderness of the process, the slowness and the lightness of the task, started to ease the need to blame him for Tom’s death. Whatever had driven Tom to take his own life couldn’t be laid at the feet of his father, Tory said to herself one night, and repeated it to her mother, who didn’t agree. He’d robbed him of the person he was going to be, she said. He stole his son’s future to pay for his own idleness in the present …

But Tory went even further than merely absolving Donald of blame. She apologized to him for not having understood the agonies he had gone through, both during the war and after. It was around this time that the first survivors’ accounts of the concentration camps came to be published, which Tory read reviews of in the newspaper. She realized that a prisoner-of-war camp did not dispense suffering on anything like a comparable scale, but the descriptions of things that had happened made her feel that to be in such close proximity to the brethren of the death-camp guards must have been to experience even a fraction of their horror, and even the merest fraction must be dreadful beyond comprehension.

She apologized for having believed, sometimes, that he exaggerated the injury to his leg and played on his disability, that she had told him off for spending time in the pub, when in fact he had been consoling himself with the company of former comrades, the only people on earth who could understand his suffering. It was true, what she’d heard spoken by others, that the comradeship of the regiment and of the prison camp was a closer bond, in some ways, than that of family. Families may go through their tests and trials, but they rarely have to lay down their lives for each other. Understanding Donald in terms of the life he’d led as a soldier even helped to explain why he might have been so keen for Tom to work at Bolan’s: many of his pals had been recruited from there, so Tom had been inducted vicariously into the brotherhood of veterans. It was not that he had been using Tom as a way of enabling himself to remain idle: he had used Tom to do the work he might have been doing himself, had he been fit. It was a theory that Tory found satisfying and gave her some consolation.

*

Eventually the shreds of the shattered sitting-room door were removed, the remains of the frame taken off their hinges and discarded. The door was not replaced, and the doorway remained perpetually open. It seemed to be an unspoken understanding between them that Donald should no longer be allowed to shut himself off completely from the rest of the family. He didn’t ask for the door to be replaced, and he did nothing himself to replace it. He still spent most of his time in the sitting room, however, and even without a door it was difficult for the rest of them to cross the threshold. Though, since a large portion of his domain was visible to anyone passing, it lost its power to mystify and threaten. The room became ordinary and unsecretive.

*

Tory went so far in her forgiveness of Donald that she insisted he should not even think about trying to earn money. Now that Branson was old enough to take himself to school, she would find a job for herself. Mrs Head was rather shocked by this new development, even more so when she discovered what sort of job her daughter had taken.

‘Have you lost your marbles completely, Tory? You cannot possibly work as a lavatory attendant.’

‘It’s done, Mother. I am a lavatory attendant.’

‘You seem to have an insatiable appetite for disgust. Why must you always submit yourself to the basest, most abject occupations? One would have thought you had learnt your lesson with the gelatine factory, but at least the war could excuse you working in such a filthy place. Now there’s no excuse. You’ve chosen your occupation of your own free will. What is it? Are you trying to martyr yourself? Are you trying to punish yourself? For what? You’ve done nothing wrong.’

‘It’s a very good job, Mother. The hours are convenient.’

‘I don’t think this is an appropriate time for jokes.’

‘But the hours are convenient, and the pay is much more generous than Farraway’s. I’m my own boss – I even have my own office.’

‘Office? You call that little cavern an office?’

Of course, Mrs Head knew the public lavatories on the square very well, having made use of them from her earliest days. Up until this moment she had regarded them as very civilized, with their mosaic floors and oak panelling, the large brass fittings on the stall doors, the copper pipework, now rather green with verdigris and a little mossy. She had never paid any attention to the attendants over the years, though she was conscious that they tended to be the elderly, overweight, hoarse-voiced wives of market traders, just a step up from gypsies or fairground people. Now that her daughter was to be one of those people, she couldn’t help but see the public lavatories as a malodorous, leaky underground cavern, each stall spewing forth a fountain of human manure and even more unspeakable things. How could her daughter dwell in such a place, then come home and with those same hands prepare dinner for her family?

‘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 …’

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.

Tory blushed. Running water, she thought. Running water.