Letter to Sister Benedicta

by Rose Tremain

  At least she had been right about India. Her loathing for the idea of empire had been as strong as Queen Victoria’s love of it. She despised my parents for their snobbishness and their loveless ways. It was a kind of sickness, she said, their terrible pride and reserve, and I must be cured of it. I must forget the school for the daughters of the high-ranking officers, no longer think of myself as a daughter of a high-ranking officer, or even as a Catholic, because these were the masks to hide behind and until I threw them away, these masks, threw them away and never put them on again, I wouldn’t know myself.

  “This is why so many of us are lost, Ruby,” she said, “this is why your mother and father are so lost: they are crouching down behind their masks; they believe they are their masks and without them they will be nothing!”

  Godmother Louise had a very gentle but clear voice. I remember much of what she said because of that voice of hers and when she died, I missed it. It was as if a little fountain where I had often gone to drink had suddenly dried up, like the healing waters of Streatham dried up and there is nothing left to remember them by except the tiny pump house, and the traffic and the ugly high street buildings roar and thrive, ignorant that here was once a spring where people came to sip and be healed. Today, at the cemetery, I longed for the wisdom of Godmother Louise who surely would have laughed at my superstitious candles and my half-remembered prayers. She would have led me quite differently through this time and I would have followed, just as I followed her when I was young and married a Jew as she had done and thought so mistakenly, now my life will be like hers – a thing of beauty.

  I was very hungry after my walk to the cemetery, and in Highgate village I found one of those all-purpose restaurants run by Italians, where you can have cups of tea and slices of battenburg cake or spaghetti bolognese at almost any time of the day or night, and where you find people having lunch at eleven and tea at two and dinner at one in the morning and no one seems to mind or even notice and the cooks in the basement go patiently on, resting for only a few hours and waking again to make cannelloni for breakfast.

  I ordered chicken cacciatora and a glass of red wine. I rather enjoyed the meal out. I enjoyed being in Highgate, high up and away from Knightsbridge. I sat at my table until after three o’clock, ordering a second glass of wine and following this with three cups of coffee. I was waiting for the darkening afternoon to creep on. I thought of the sunlight slanting over Leon’s bed, imagined it disappearing and the room becoming shadowy. I knew I was still afraid, but Louise had helped a little. The Australian daffodils were gone, so I would have to go to Leon empty-handed. This, of course, doesn’t really matter when tomorrow I could take Rhodesian sunflowers or gardenias grown in a solarium on Mont Blanc.

  DECEMBER 21

  I was too tired after my visit to Leon yesterday to write about it, so I never told you, Sister, how it has increased my general confusion.

  I went prepared to talk to Leon about the Wainwright case, thinking, it’s time he wrote something else down and the mention of Richard Wainwright may jog his mind to make a pattern. But when I arrived at the nursing home, the receptionist popped quickly out of her booth and said:

  “I wonder if you’d mind waiting, Mrs Constad. There is a visitor with your husband and we only allow one visitor at a time. If you’d care to have a seat?”

  “What visitor?” I asked. “Who is the visitor?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know, Mrs Constad. I wasn’t here when she came in. I was advised by Matron to ask you to wait – if you came today.”

  “Well, surely it wouldn’t matter if I went in? I wouldn’t disturb Leon.”

  “Nursing home rules, Mrs Constad,” the receptionist said with a smile. “We don’t have many rules, but this is one.”

  She showed me to a leather chair in a room I’d never noticed before. It resembled a dentist’s waiting-room: blackish oil paintings hung on damask walls, a polished table piled up with copies of Vogue and Homes and Gardens. I fell into the leather chair and stared at the room. I felt unbalanced by the news of Leon’s visitor, rather shocked. I decided at first that the visitor was Sheila and searched myself for signs of anger. I found a little; I thought of the girl’s body, imagined Leon telling her each day how he wanted to love it for ever. But then the anger passed. Leon’s love for Sheila had diminished, died even, and I thought poor girl, when she sees him it will be a terrible shock, like seeing a dead person, and who knows if she won’t feel like throwing up in the washbasin.

  I got up and crossed to the polished table, deciding to pass the time with a glossy magazine and not think about Sheila. I sat down with Vogue, which is inevitably crammed with photographs of thin women and Scandinavian kitchens and very bad therapy if you are fifty and fat and the London dirt gets into every cranny of your rooms and the plants on the kitchen window-sill die one after the other and you never know why. Looking at all the pages of expensive clothes, I thought, how strange when Leon has let me be rich that I’ve never been smart. Leon would have liked a well-dressed person for a wife and has now and then complained about my utter lack of smartness. If Leon gets better, I heard myself think, I shall try to smarten up – and I shall get thin. But then the thought of going back to India slipped suddenly into my mind. I saw myself walking, walking through a crowded bazaar, wearing some kind of robe that was loose and comfortable in the heat and which wasn’t at all smart but made me forget my Western body crammed into its corset. I walked on, moving slowly with the crowd, a part of the crowd, going nowhere, only letting myself hear and see, full of wonder at the strangeness of the place and the people pressed in so tightly all around me, knowing that if I walked for long enough, I would be changed by what I saw and smelt and understood and my old ways would fall off me like scabs.

  I put down the magazine and closed my eyes. No sooner were they closed than the receptionist came into the room and announced to me that I could go and see Leon now if I wanted to.

  “What about the other visitor?” I asked.

  “She’s just left, Mrs Constad.”

  “I didn’t see her go.”

  “No? She was quite a young person, wearing a duffle coat.”

  This was confusing. Somehow, I couldn’t imagine Sheila wearing a duffle coat, not even in December on a dark afternoon.

  “Are you sure it was a duffle coat?” I persisted.

  “Oh yes. Black, I think. Though I couldn’t say for certain. So many visitors come and go past me.”

  I walked slowly to Leon’s room. I was aware that I had begun to wonder if the visitor hadn’t been Alexandra. I had written to her twice, telling her that Leon’s chances of recovery were good, but never asking her to come and see him, afraid that if he saw her, the great anger he had felt with her and with Noel would come rumbling up from inside him again and burst out of him in appalling incoherent noises. It had seemed to me better that Alexandra and Noel stayed away. In time, if he recovered, Leon might find that all his anger had gone and that he could think of them again just as he’d thought of them for more than twenty years – with pride and with love – and one day, he’d get down the photograph albums and chuckle with pleasure over the trudges up Snowdon in the mist and the picnics in France.

  The thought that Alexandra was in London was a cruel one. Would she leave after her visit to Leon, just take the next train out of Liverpool Street, or would she decide to come and see me and stay a few days so that I would have some company and to tell me about her life? I knew that I was hoping desperately to see her and I knew that this was very foolish of me and that really I should have been wiser than that.

  When I went into Leon’s room, I saw that they had propped him up a bit and his right eye was wide open, staring fixedly at a chrysanthemum plant on a table near the end of his bed.

  “Leon,” I said quietly and to my surprise he turned his head a little and looked at me. I smiled at him, wished I had come with the Australian daffodils so that I could hold them out to him.

  �
��How are you today, dear?” I began as I often begin. And it was then that a sound came out of Leon’s mouth, a little breathless sound, the very first he has made since he had his stroke.

  “Go on, Leon,” I said, standing still in the middle of the room, and with a great effort of concentration he made his mouth move again and another noise escaped it, tuneless, meaningless but there, and with it a little dribble of saliva that ran down his chin.

  I took a handkerchief out of my crocodile handbag, went to Leon and wiped the dribble away. Then I sat on the bed and took his hand, watching his face for any sign of another noise. But he seemed to have given up and was content just to stare at me.

  “I hear you had another visitor today, Leon,” I said, carefully jollying my voice along. “I expect she brought you that lovely chrysanthemum plant, dear, didn’t she? But I do wonder who she was, Leon. Because no one comes except me, do they? I can’t think who it could have been unless it was . . .” I was going to say Alexandra and then thought better of it. I didn’t know what the sound of her name might do to him. But it was at that moment that Leon pulled his right hand free of mine, reached for the slate and began to write in his slow shaky hand. It took him a long time to write the one word that was on his mind, but he finished it eventually and pushed the slate towards me. He had written “tomorrow”.

  I didn’t know what he meant, Sister. I simply looked at the word and nodded and after that I didn’t stay very much longer. With the afternoon being so dark outside the blind, I suddenly had the notion that after my visit to Highgate and my lunch in the Italian café and my wait in the leather armchair, it had grown terribly late and that in writing “tomorrow” Leon was saying he was too tired to see me and wanted me gone.

  CHRISTMAS EVE

  I’ve done nothing about Christmas this year. No dyed teasels in Grandma Constad’s hideous vase, no wreath on the front door of the flat. And I’ve asked no one round. I would have invited Gerald Tibbs, but still his telephone doesn’t answer and each day I feel more and more certain that he’s in Milan by now, lying dead in a gutter, his white face carved up by a broken chianti bottle, and I bitterly regret that I didn’t warn him, beg him not to go before it was too late.

  For a few months, I tried to help Gerald, first of all by listening to him and letting him cry and then by daring to hold him, feeling him resent me at first and want to push me away, and then after a while coming nearer to me and lying with his head on my shoulder.

  This happened one rather sunny afternoon on the sofa in the drawing-room after one of my badly-cooked lunches. It was just a feeling I had that all the awful lunches were doing no good at all, that Gerald would come and go and toy with the revolting bits of food I gave him and wander off in his helpless way, his burden of misery intact.

  So I lay down on the sofa and said to Gerald: “Before you go, Gerald, come and lie down, just for a few minutes, and let me put my arms around you,” and he looked at me horrorstruck, as if he had been asked to lie in the jaws of a great white shark.

  “Please, Gerald,” I said, and I held out my hand to him. “Please do it just for a second. You can forget about me, who I am, all that rubbish. Just think of me as a raft, something to hold on to.”

  “Ruby,” he said, “I can’t make love any more. I’ve tried.”

  “I’m not talking about making love, Gerald, I’m just talking about letting me hold you.”

  He crossed to the sofa and clambered on to it. He looked very apprehensive. The sofa wasn’t very wide, so he had to lie close to me. Feeling his thin body, I thought, he’s like a stick and one day he’ll just snap, a brittle stick in solicitor’s clothes, he’ll snap inside his clothes and nobody will see. We lay in abject silence, but after a while, Gerald put an arm round me.

  “You smell very nice, Ruby,” he said sadly.

  The following day, he telephoned me. “I couldn’t sleep last night, Ruby,” he said, “I thought about you all night, I’m so glad I touched you. I didn’t really want to, but when I did, I was glad.”

  I said nothing. Really, I felt like laughing, but I didn’t want Gerald to think I was laughing at him.

  “Are you there, Ruby?” he asked worriedly.

  “Yes, I’m there, Gerald.”

  “I’m awfully tired,” he said, “not having slept at all, and I was wondering if there was any chance . . . if I could come round for an hour or two and just lie with you and sleep?”

  I thought of lying with Gerald on the bed I shared with Leon, and rejected the idea. But both Alexandra and Noel were away and I supposed we could lie in Alexandra’s room, on a single bed under the shelf of ornaments which had been there since she was a little child.

  “Yes, Gerald, do come round. Leon went to America this morning,” I added.

  I suppose I never should have told Gerald that Leon was away. Then he would have had his little doze and thanked me and gone home at about four or back to his office to write more letters of apology to clients he would never see. But as it was, he slept for three hours and, waking up to find me beside him, decided that his private Waterloo had arrived and he had to find out now if he could do it or if Sarah’s leaving him had made him impotent for ever.

  He took out his cock, which was small and white like the rest of him, but quite erect, and after a lot of fumbling with my corsets and pants simply slipped it into me. He held on to me as if he was drowning, quite without tenderness or affection, but biting his lip in a terrible desperation. I hardly dared move, in case his tiny sex slipped out of me and he couldn’t get it in again. It took him a very long time to come and in all his exertions he never looked at me or kissed me, but stared straight at the wall, at a fixed point on the wall until the moment when he knew he could come and he pressed his cheek against mine with a little sob of relief as the sperm shot out of him for the first time in weeks and months and he knew that he was still a man. His Waterloo past, he was silent. Then a few minutes later he sprang off me with a bound and said: “I’m going to put the kettle on, Ruby. I’m parched!”

  I lay on Alexandra’s bed and wondered why I had so wanted to help Gerald and whether I had helped him enough now and could give up. I couldn’t construe what I had done as unfaithfulness to Leon, because there had been no passion in it and for me not even a second’s pleasure (not that Leon regarded the notion of faithfulness as anything but “Victorian rubbish”, and this presumably included me as well as him) but it hadn’t been very enjoyable to lie like a shipwreck under a drowning man, and now that the drowning man was safe and wouldn’t die, I wanted to be free of him. I fastened up my corset with a sigh.

  But I went on being the shipwreck. Occasionally, the drowning man – sensing, perhaps, that he was out of danger – gave me a little attention, kissing me and putting his trembling hand on my big breasts. But after a few times, I understood why his wife Sarah had run off with her olive-skinned Romeo. Gerald had never discovered that a woman could feel pleasure too and longed to feel it, and if you had told him this he would have felt a terrible sense of impropriety and probably run away. I went on being the shipwreck, about once a fortnight, until Alexandra came back from France. Then, a terrible feeling of guilt appeared inside me and I telephoned Gerald at his office one morning and told him curtly never to come back. And for a while, I forgot him completely, never giving him a thought or wondering if I had hurt his feelings, never asking myself, how will he get on without my body to take pity on his infantile sex? Until quite recently, when the year has crept towards Christmas again and I have begun to remember how he was the evening he was sick in the lavatory, quite defeated by his sorrow.

  I feel very ashamed, Sister, about everything that happened with Gerald. Ashamed of what I did and of what I failed to do. I marvel sometimes that all my years have never taught me to be wise and it serves me right, I dare say, that now I’m alone with myself and it’s Christmas Eve, Christmas Eve even in California where the day is just beginning and Leon’s co-respondents have all their gift-wrapped pr
esents hidden away with their shoe trees. None of them will give Leon a thought, nor a thought for London which is deserted now except for tourists in big hotels and rubbish flying about in the wind and little posses of beery youths sicking up into alleyways.

  Like Leon last year, when Noel didn’t arrive, I long for Christmas to be over. I keep thinking that there may be a knock at the door and it will be Alexandra in the duffle coat described by the hospital receptionist, but really I should give up all hope of this. If it was Alexandra at the nursing home, she must have gone straight back to Norfolk, and this isn’t surprising because after last year’s Christmas, she must want to make amends to Sue (if indeed Sue is there and hasn’t gone off with a girl who loved her better). Since Alexandra went back to the cottage in the autumn, she hasn’t written to me, so who can say what has happened? Only in my dreams do I ever get to the cottage, but I know that really I shall never go, having promised Alexandra that I would stay away and not go near her until she asked for me.

  I am writing now with a martini beside me and half a shaker full of it in the fridge – a little Christmas Eve treat to myself – and perhaps if I drink it all, I shall wobble my way to bed and sleep right through Christmas and when I wake up the M4 and M1 and the A12 will be bathed in a cloud of exhaust fumes, as all the Londoners fart their way home from their country weekends with boots full of broken plastic toys, saying “Thank God that’s over for another year,” exactly as Leon said after his day in bed with the albums, “Thank God that’s over,” and then put on his suit and went back to the office.

  What Leon didn’t know that day was that nothing at all was over, not even his disappointment in Noel, but that it had just begun, begun then and there on Christmas morning when Alexandra woke early and looked for Sue and couldn’t find her. Long before Alexandra looked out of the window and took her breath of the winter morning, Sue had crept out of the house and in the pitch darkness started her moped and ridden away. A note scribbled in crayon and left on the kitchen table said: “See you next term. Please feed the hens. Love, Sue.”