Letter to Sister Benedicta

by Rose Tremain

  For something to say (because Gerald is, as he warned me, a man of very few words and will surely die one day of terminal silence) I began to ask him about his work.

  “At least you have your work, Gerald,” I said, “and I have always envied people who were involved in a job.” But Gerald didn’t want to talk about his work.

  “I’m fed up with it,” he said. “I’ve got far too many cases. I can’t give any of them my attention. My secretary brings all the files in and puts the on my desk. Toffee for a man with no teeth! I don’t even start on them. I dictate stalling letters – ‘You will be hearing from Mr Tibbs in the near future.’ Near future! I don’t believe in the future, near or far.”

  I had made a chicken salad for Gerald with bits of celery and nuts in it. It was rather dry food and this seemed to suit him because he picked and picked at it until his plate was empty and I remembered that at the Hazlehurst’s dinner party he’d eaten nothing at all.

  “Well done!” I said, when Gerald had finished his helping “You’ve eaten it all up!” And then I thought with shame, why do I treat him like a child? Why don’t I know how to begin to help him? He looked at me crossly and I knew I was deservedly punished.

  I got up, feeling very hot and uncomfortable and began to clear away the plates and the dish of salad, thinking that’s the very worst thing I could have done, pat him on the back as if he was a five-year-old struggling with bread and butter pudding, the very worst, because he must be feeling like a child, deserted and helpless. I walked around him in silence, clearing the table. He sipped at his water (he had refused wine) and I knew that I had been no help to him at all.

  He left very soon after this, saying he had to get back to his office.

  “The lunch was most enjoyable,” he said, holding out his hand to me, and I thought, oh the lies we tell in the name of good manners! And then he was gone, slipping silently away and back to his mound of files and the letters he wrote full of promises he’d never keep because his life was in tatters and I had just added to the store of those who had failed him.

  Several weeks passed before I decided to try again. When I heard his thin voice answer the telephone, I dreaded saying my name, imagining that he would be utterly dismayed at the sound of it, but at once he began to apologize, saying: “I should have written, just a note even, I should have written to thank you for the lunch.”

  “Oh no, Gerald!” I said relieved, “it was a terrible lunch and I think I should have written to you really. You see, I was brought up in India, Gerald, and I’m afraid I’ve never quite lost it, the habit of never saying anything that’s helpful. No one in India seemed to have a feeling for helpfulness, only a feeling for what is right, and it took me a long time to see that almost everything they thought was right was actually not all that right, but in fact rather wrong. And this deficiency in helpfulness, I mean, I’ve had it all my life and I blame India, but who can say if it was India or if it wasn’t born in me, because it’s a long time since India now and thank goodness all those feelings of rightness have been swept away . . .”

  “If you were ringing to ask me to lunch again,” Gerald said quietly, “I’d love to come. You were right about no one helping. They don’t.”

  So he came round the next week. Over a rather tasteless lamb casserole, which he didn’t seem to enjoy and I didn’t either, he began to knead away, gently at first, then more firmly, at his own misery until the pain of the kneading doubled him up and he began to cry. He kept apologizing, through his tears, for this crying, but it seemed to me that if you can cry over lunch with a fat woman you hardly know, then your need to cry is probably very strong and your tears might feel like a balm. So I said: “Oh no, Gerald, you’re quite wrong to apologize. Don’t even try to stop crying. Cry as much as you like.”

  “You can’t imagine,” he said at last, “what it’s like to lose someone you knew was all you ever wanted. All, you see. I used to think, she’s one of the wonders of the world, my Sarah. You can’t imagine what it’s like to lose one of the wonders of the world, to lose her in a single day!”

  “Well, I can’t Gerald, I know. But I can try. I mean, I know if anything happened to Leon – not that he’s a wonder of the world, far from it really with his co-respondents and everything – I’d feel dreadfully lost. I don’t know how I’d take root again. I might never.”

  “I never will ,” wept Gerald, “I shall never be strong or patient or anything at all for the children. I feel I can’t give them anything and of course it’s terrible for them too, to lose a mother.”

  “I’d say they might be your salvation, Gerald. I mean, they love you, don’t they, and you love them.”

  “I feel as if I love no one any more. Not even the children. I feel as if I was born just to love one person.”

  Gerald blew his nose and dabbed at his eyes. Between his elbows, his helping of lamb casserole was congealing. I felt empty of words, but wanted to put my arm round Gerald, imagining that since Sarah had left, no one had touched him. But then I remembered that because I am fat I sweat quite a lot and I thought, my heavy sweating arm will disgust him and he will want to tear out of the flat and never come back, thinking, even longing to cry and not crying is better than that, if that’s the price. I stayed motionless and Gerald, getting no more help from me, no word or movement, faded back into silence and very soon left.

  That night Leon went out to dinner with a client and I got into bed early, not bothering to make myself a meal and glad that I wasn’t in the restaurant with Leon and his client and their bottles of wine and glasses of brandy and cigars. I lay back in a clean nightie, having bathed and powdered my body so that there was no trace of sweat on it, and after a while thought up one of my poems about Gerald which went like this:

  Today for the first time

  Gerald wept.

  I’ve never heard him weep before

  But now I know

  that while the world’s been weeping,

  I have slept.

  There is more to say, Sister, about my comforting of Gerald Tibbs, but I feel tired out by the thought of him at the moment and, although it’s very late, feel I must put down what happened today when I went to see Leon.

  On the bus going up Oxford Street (I’ve given up taxis now, they’re so expensive) I decided that in case I got faint-hearted again about doing my Black Power salute after spending an hour with Leon, I would do it as soon as I entered his room. I marched down the long, polished corridor to Leon’s bower (actually, it isn’t quite such a bower now as some of the flowers have died, including those intended for the ocean liner), went in as usual without knocking, raised my clenched fist into the air and shouted: “Come on, man! Come on, Leon, you’ve got to start fighting just like an oppressed person, Leon! You’ve got to fight for your right to live!” But there was a shriek of terror from the bed and a dying stranger shot bolt upright in the bed, a woman with a bandaged, shaved head dribbling fear and fumbling for the bell they told her she could ring any time, day or night, and nurses would come running. So nurses did come running and they pushed me out of the way with rough hands and dived on to the patient, laying her down, taking her pulse, soothing her and then turned accusingly to me and said: “What on earth are you doing here, Mrs Constad, when this patient is extremely ill and you know it’s against hospital rules for anyone to shout like that and I think we ought to send for Matron at once because visiting can be limited, you know, and who do you think will be held responsible if this patient succumbs . . . ?”

  So Leon had been moved. He hadn’t died in the night without a murmur as I feared for a few minutes, they had simply wheeled him to another room because, Matron announced to me, “he is out of danger”. OUT OF DANGER! Yes, they needed his old room for this new bald woman who was very much in danger just as Leon had been for nearly two weeks, but now, miraculously, the danger was past; he would not die.

  I sat down on a bench in one of the shiny corridors and thought about this: Leon would not
die. Matron had pronounced. Matron could not be wrong. I thought of the candles in the Oratory. How many more candles till he came crawling, creeping out of his chrysalis of silence and darkness? Had he perhaps begun to creep already and this is why they had decided “he is out of danger”? No, I couldn’t believe this because only yesterday (even though the tubes are gone now and he is fed slops and sweet tea through his mouth) he had seemed more inert than ever, more lost in the spaces of his mind so that it was impossible to believe that anything but resurrection could bring him back from the seas he sailed because they were lost seas and no one would ever find them.

  I tried to find one of the doctors. (India taught me that only men and nuns knew the truth and that ordinary women wove gossamer lies into their underclothes, enough to last a lifetime.) But all the nursing home could come up with was a very young Indian doctor who gave me a careful smile and apologized.

  “I don’t know your husband’s case,” he said, “I’m very sorry but I’m not familiar with this case. But if Matron says he is out of danger, then he is. Be quite comforted.”

  I walked very slowly towards Leon’s new room. I didn’t feel happy about him being in a new room when I had known my way blindfold to the old one and it had always been in that room that I imagined him saying his first word. What would become of him in a new room? Would the nurses still come and go all day, making sure that he lived, or would they leave him alone for hour after hour, saying to themselves “he is out of danger and others need us more.” Would Leon still have his own night nurse or only her empty chair for company and lie wondering, where has she gone with her little busy hands?

  The Indian doctor had told me that Leon was in room 34. I found it and knocked – I was afraid to stumble on another bandaged stranger and learn the wrath of Matron – but there wasn’t a sound from inside the room, so I opened the door slowly and quietly and went in. Leon was lying, just as usual, on his back and yet looked quite changed. He had been changed by the light. The whole of the room and Leon in it was bright with sunlight. He was lying in a pool of sunlight. I stared at him and felt sick. The light was terrible, a degradation. He looked poisoned by the yellow light. “Oh Leon!” I whispered, “what have they done to you?” I began to walk to the window and draw the venetian blind, but the nausea in me rose and rose and I stumbled to Leon’s washbasin and vomited into it and soon after (I didn’t glance at Leon again) a young nurse found me and said: “Oh Lord, dear, please come out of this patient’s room and we’ll find a toilet.” I held on to the nurse’s arm which was very cool and we seemed to slide along the shiny corridor and go sliding and sliding for miles until I was dizzy with all the sliding and I fell, tumbling over and over into darkness.

  They can’t stand Nuisances in hospitals. They see all visitors as potential Nuisances, taking up precious time by walking the wrong way down corridors and asking to be redirected like Arab women in Harrods who mumble incomprehensible questions about Lingerie and Soft Furnishings from deepest purdah and get on everyone’s nerves. Most hated of all are visitors who are sick or who faint in corridors, and when I came floating up from my green unconsciousness, I knew that at all costs I must apologize to the nurse with the cold arm and to the Indian doctor, whose familiar face I could now see above me. But I seemed quite unable to form the words of an apology. It was like a maths equation that I couldn’t do and never would and I found that all I could say was: “Leon’s face. You mustn’t leave it open like that.” To which, quite reasonably, they said nothing, only told me to keep my head down and I would soon be better.

  They called me a taxi. They didn’t mention the sunlight or the sick in the basin, but only wanted to be rid of me so that they could go rushing about their millions of tasks undisturbed. I was too weak and too afraid of them and of being a Nuisance to say what I wanted to say, or even to get out my apology, which was lost somewhere inside me. I rode home in silence and, going down Park Lane, fell fast asleep.

  DECEMBER 19

  “When Jesus went into the garden of Gethsemane,” you used to say, Sister, “He was dreadfully afraid. ‘Let this cup pass from me,’ he said. And because Jesus knew fear,” so you said, “He doesn’t feel ashamed of us when we’re afraid. He doesn’t say to Himself, ‘What a hopeless cowardly person and let them be cast out for ever from my love.’ Rather, He prays for us, and if we believe this, then we shall find strength.”

  Well, I keep going to the Oratory, Sister. I fold myself into the proper attitude of prayer and I think of Jesus at nightfall in Gethsemane and of His understanding after He had felt fear. I try to imagine Him praying for me, turning to God the Father and whispering: “Ruby Constad is afraid.” It does no good, Sister. And now it is three days since I’ve been to the nursing home. Three days and my fear of the nursing home is so strong that I don’t know how I shall get there ever again, unless there is someone to lead me like a child and go in front of me into Leon’s room and draw down the blind and turn on the dim electric light.

  This morning, I walked to Harrods’ flower department, thinking to myself, if I buy flowers to take to Leon’s room, then I will go to the nursing home. Because all of his other flowers must be dead by now – unless Sheila has kept on with her carnations – and I wouldn’t like to think of Leon’s room quite empty and colourless. I bought a bunch of daffodils. I think they must be Australian daffodils, because the cold is so biting in England just now that I can’t imagine them growing anywhere else but on the other side of the world (and anyway, Harrods is always full of extraordinary out-of-season things like Libyan strawberries in November and Tasmanian leeks in June, it’s as if they believe no one in London should have to go a single week of the year without a leek or a strawberry, and this makes you realize that at heart Harrods is very stupid, like a magnificent gilded elephant with a tiny brain).

  I intended to walk to the bus stop with my Australian daffodils and go straight to the nursing home. But I didn’t do this. It was a very clear morning, with London brittle and bright in winter sunlight, and a clean blue sky above Sloane Street. It is almost the shortest day. By half past three it would be dark and all the sun gone and I thought, I’ll go then. I’ll go at four or five or even later, when Leon’s blind is down.

  But instead of walking home, I got on the underground and rode the Northern Line to Highgate, where the sky was still cloudless, and I walked very slowly to the cemetery. At one of the furthest corners of it, is Godmother Louise’s grave. It is an uncared-for mound with a very small headstone that says only “Louise Reiter, 1901–1961” and no one passing it would know that for hundreds of days poor Max had come and stared at it and gone home again with the musician inside him bruised so badly by his sorrow that he composed nothing more in his lifetime and lived like a lame crab in a little hole, forgetting each day to write down the one thing he wanted to say – that he wanted to be buried by Louise – forgetting until it was too late and his Austrian relatives claimed his famous person and he was buried in Vienna.

  I used to go and see him. He sacked the cook-housekeeper when Louise died and the house began to smell of dust and rotting food and cigar ends. I tidied up for him sometimes, but he preferred me to sit by him in the faded sitting-room where I had first met Leon and hold his long, white hand and listen to him grieving. “I’d rather clean and dust,” I always wanted to say, “than sit so still and listen to your grief that will never end.” “But I like it when you sit with me, Ruby,” he used to say, “no one else sits with me. They don’t want to listen.”

  Godmother Louise had been sixty when she died. She died unexpectedly, one day graceful and full of laughter and still reaching for Max’s hand if they sat together on a sofa, and the next day yellowed by the certainty of death, which took root as a cancer in her thyroid gland and sent her to her grave in Highgate in a matter of weeks. It seemed to me very unkind that Godmother Louise should die at sixty when she so loved her life “that I cherish every hour of it, Ruby, and never want it to end”, when in St John’s
Wood alone, there must have been hundreds of men and women clinging wearily to their seventies and eighties, full of disgust and meanness, their bodies squeezed dry of life and love like old water-skins. Why couldn’t one of them have gone and not Louise? So Max Reiter asked himself countless times as he sat and brooded on her memory, listening now and then for a snatch of music inside himself and hearing nothing, only the great silence she had created by dying and which would never again be filled.

  I unwrapped my Australian daffodils intended for Leon and scattered them on Godmother Louise’s mound.

  “I shall insist that she goes to Highgate!” Max had said, “She was a good Marxist,” and he had made a huge bureaucratic fuss to slip her emaciated body into its little corner of this most famous of cemeteries. I remember that at her funeral, I pondered the idea of Godmother Louise being “a good Marxist” and found it rather strange. I think I decided that she was only a good Marxist deep down in her soul and that she let the rest of herself be rather a bad Marxist. And the bad Marxist in her kept on and on going to five-star hotel rooms where enormous bouquets arrived “courtesy of the management” and where she sipped away, guiltless, at the finest champagne a bourgeois capitalist society can produce.