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Authors: Gerard Woodward
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whatever van, boat or other vehicle helped carry communication across the battlefields would come under fire and her little letter be destroyed.
But afterwards, walking back to the house, she felt the lifting of a great weight. It was as though she’d finally found the money to pay a debt that had been owing for many years.
CHAPTER FIVE
Tory tried to think back to times that Donald had talked about sex. She could not recall a single remark. She wasn’t even sure that she had ever heard him make mention of any of the nether parts of the human anatomy. And she had never heard him use a swear word stronger than ‘blast’.
There was one occasion that stood out in her memory, but she wasn’t sure that it counted. They hadn’t been married for long, and they were walking on the common where they had taken many romantic walks in the days of their courtship, and they came upon a row of very old beech trees. Wonderful, misshapen things, swollen and bloated with age, with many stumps and scars from decades of pruning and lopping. They were little more than torsos, with stumps and sockets instead of limbs. And it was in observation of one of these trees that Donald said his rude word. He said, ‘That tree, it looks like it’s got an arsehole.’
Tory was so shocked that all she could say was ‘Donald!’
But Donald wasn’t at all ashamed, and in fact seemed keen, having taken the word out of whatever place he’d been keeping it, to give it a good airing.
‘In fact, it looks like it’s got two arseholes.’ Then he went a little bit further, noting the same anatomical feature in other trees, and Tory gave up even trying to respond to these statements. The fact that Donald saw so many of them in the trees (and she could see them as well – those puckered rings of bark, thickening round the hollowness left by a fallen or chopped-off branch) meant that she saw them, and the woods generally, in a slightly different way from then on, and she mourned less their loss when they were felled some years later, as though they had been rather indecent, the poor, venerable things. He never used that word again.
It was one of the many occasions that Donald had said something odd, peculiar, even unsettling. It was very difficult to know when he was being serious. She remembered what he had said the day his call-up papers arrived.
‘When I was a boy I used to think, How the hell am I going to get through the next sixty years or so without killing someone? Well, now it looks like I won’t have to.’
Then there was that thing he had said just after she’d accepted his proposal of marriage: ‘I’m so glad, Tory. I’ve always thought you were too good for me, you see.’
Oddly, she’d always thought exactly the opposite, that she couldn’t possibly be good enough for the strictly moral painter and decorator.
‘What do you mean, too good for you?’
‘Let me put it this way, Tory. I’ve always felt that you are made of gold while I am a man of lead.’
It was only years later that she understood he was paraphrasing something from Plato’s Republic , a book he often carried around with him and would brandish at certain moments of intellectual anxiety, at which times he would also revert to his broadest Gorbals accent: ‘Ye need to take a look a’ this wee book. Nivver min’ Mein Kampf , ye want tae read Thae Republic .’
Such remarks cut little ice with Tory’s mother, who didn’t care for books, but to Tory they gave her husband an authority and stature she had not seen in her family before.
‘You are an ideal of goodness,’ he said, ‘the lost half of my spirit double …’
She didn’t know, quite, what he meant by this, but she loved the words.
*
They had met when she was working as a waitress in the English Rose Tea Rooms. She had taken up a position there shortly after leaving her job at her father’s bank (a necessity when things had turned sour with her fellow teller, Clarence Dundry). Donald had
But afterwards, walking back to the house, she felt the lifting of a great weight. It was as though she’d finally found the money to pay a debt that had been owing for many years.
CHAPTER FIVE
Tory tried to think back to times that Donald had talked about sex. She could not recall a single remark. She wasn’t even sure that she had ever heard him make mention of any of the nether parts of the human anatomy. And she had never heard him use a swear word stronger than ‘blast’.
There was one occasion that stood out in her memory, but she wasn’t sure that it counted. They hadn’t been married for long, and they were walking on the common where they had taken many romantic walks in the days of their courtship, and they came upon a row of very old beech trees. Wonderful, misshapen things, swollen and bloated with age, with many stumps and scars from decades of pruning and lopping. They were little more than torsos, with stumps and sockets instead of limbs. And it was in observation of one of these trees that Donald said his rude word. He said, ‘That tree, it looks like it’s got an arsehole.’
Tory was so shocked that all she could say was ‘Donald!’
But Donald wasn’t at all ashamed, and in fact seemed keen, having taken the word out of whatever place he’d been keeping it, to give it a good airing.
‘In fact, it looks like it’s got two arseholes.’ Then he went a little bit further, noting the same anatomical feature in other trees, and Tory gave up even trying to respond to these statements. The fact that Donald saw so many of them in the trees (and she could see them as well – those puckered rings of bark, thickening round the hollowness left by a fallen or chopped-off branch) meant that she saw them, and the woods generally, in a slightly different way from then on, and she mourned less their loss when they were felled some years later, as though they had been rather indecent, the poor, venerable things. He never used that word again.
It was one of the many occasions that Donald had said something odd, peculiar, even unsettling. It was very difficult to know when he was being serious. She remembered what he had said the day his call-up papers arrived.
‘When I was a boy I used to think, How the hell am I going to get through the next sixty years or so without killing someone? Well, now it looks like I won’t have to.’
Then there was that thing he had said just after she’d accepted his proposal of marriage: ‘I’m so glad, Tory. I’ve always thought you were too good for me, you see.’
Oddly, she’d always thought exactly the opposite, that she couldn’t possibly be good enough for the strictly moral painter and decorator.
‘What do you mean, too good for you?’
‘Let me put it this way, Tory. I’ve always felt that you are made of gold while I am a man of lead.’
It was only years later that she understood he was paraphrasing something from Plato’s Republic , a book he often carried around with him and would brandish at certain moments of intellectual anxiety, at which times he would also revert to his broadest Gorbals accent: ‘Ye need to take a look a’ this wee book. Nivver min’ Mein Kampf , ye want tae read Thae Republic .’
Such remarks cut little ice with Tory’s mother, who didn’t care for books, but to Tory they gave her husband an authority and stature she had not seen in her family before.
‘You are an ideal of goodness,’ he said, ‘the lost half of my spirit double …’
She didn’t know, quite, what he meant by this, but she loved the words.
*
They had met when she was working as a waitress in the English Rose Tea Rooms. She had taken up a position there shortly after leaving her job at her father’s bank (a necessity when things had turned sour with her fellow teller, Clarence Dundry). Donald had
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