Letter to Sister Benedicta

by Rose Tremain

  Alexandra made a mug of tea and sat on her own in the kitchen, warming her hands on her mug and staring at Sue’s note. She felt bewildered. She hadn’t asked Noel to the cottage, didn’t really want him there. Now Sue had gone and her present for Sue – an oil painting of Sue she had done secretly from a photograph – would stay wrapped in the garage and instead she would spend all the hours of Christmas with Noel, eating food that Sue had bought. She felt like a thief. Some of the voices she heard inside her as she sat there with her tea blamed Sue with her sulking and jealousy, but others told her: “You should have sent Noel away. You’ve been weak and unkind to Sue and it will be weeks before you’ll be forgiven and can be at peace again with Sue and the hens and the routine of the cottage.”

  When Noel got up, always a bit frozen and cramped by his nights in the sleeping-bag, and wandered into the kitchen with his cheerful “happy Christmas, Alex!” all Alexandra could say, without looking at him, was: “Sue’s gone.”

  He sat down on the other side of the table and held out his hand to Alexandra. “Cheer up,” he said, “the world is full of Sues.” And Alexandra, suddenly enraged by him, hurled her tea at his face, missed it narrowly but deluged his crumpled pyjamas. The hot tea stung but didn’t burn. Noel swore and stamped off to the bathroom, leaving Alexandra to mop the floor.

  This was the beginning of that Christmas Day, Sister, as Alexandra described it to me. She told me that the rest of the day, until the evening, was very quiet. Alexandra sulked as she prepared the turkey Sue had got from a local farmer; Noel lit the fire and sat reading by it. The sunshine melted the frost on the garden and went down and almost at once there was a frost in the air again. Alexandra felt hungry and cold and wanted to be by the fire, but stayed in the kitchen, drinking tea and waiting for the food to be ready, but forgetting to feed the hens even though Sue had put their little basin of corn by the back door.

  When the turkey was at last cooked, Alexandra piled all the food on to trays, opened a bottle of wine and shouted to Noel to come and carry them into the sitting-room. They squatted down by the fire and spread the feast all around them. Noel rubbed his hands, glad that the silent day with its tolling of church bells and freezing afternoon was coming to an end, and careful now to be nice to his sister, to make amends. The food warmed and cheered Alexandra; she felt her body revive and her guilt begin to leave her. Sue will have gone to friends, she decided, she’ll be alright with friends, or even with her parents in King’s Lynn, who would have cooked a magnificent meal . . .

  When they had eaten two helpings of the turkey, Noel produced a present for Alexandra. It was a glossy book of Magritte paintings and Alexandra marvelled over it as she touched it, was suddenly very glad that Noel had given her something that she liked so much. “I’ve got nothing for you, Noel,” she said, “I thought we’d agreed – no presents.” Noel shrugged. He pretended not to mind, finding he did mind. He opened another bottle of wine, uncurled himself on the floor and took sip after sip. He felt rejected.

  Alexandra cleared away the food, put on some music, and came and sat near Noel and looked at the Magritte paintings. But Noel wanted her attention and made her put the book down. He began to ask her about Sue, asked her gently this time why she had tied herself to Sue. “Don’t you like it with men?” he said and Alexandra shrugged her shoulders.

  “It’s OK,” she said, “but they’re so selfish.” So Noel began to talk about his loving of Christine, describing it, saying he didn’t believe any kind of homosexual love could compare with what a man and a woman could have together, if they understood each other’s bodies and the perfection of giving and taking.

  “He talked and talked about it,” Alexandra told me, “he was turning himself on, trying to blot out Christine by seeing me as a challenge. And I knew in the end – I’d half known it ever since he arrived – that he’d just smother me with himself and I wouldn’t resist. In fact, I knew that I wanted it, that I’d make him offer it all.”

  By the time Noel touched Alexandra, beginning with her black hair, then stroking her face and neck, and then pulling her slowly towards him, she was on fire for him, thinking over and over to herself, this is why he came here and in the end it’s beautiful and perfect and I have loved him all my life. And the image of Sue speeding off into the darkness on her little bike never entered her mind again. All she whispered when she woke up the next day with Noel beside her was: “My life has changed”, and she laughed.

  So this is where it began, Sister. I imagine a hundred-year-old judge banging down his mallet with an age-flecked hand and wheezing out the word: Incest. I see you shudder under your grey gown and cross your arms to protect yourself.

  I have almost finished the martini . . .

  CHRISTMAS DAY

  Last night, before I sailed off to sleep on my martini sea, I lay blinking at my dark room and thought up one of my poems. I’m not sure if it’s about Leon or about Gerald, but I don’t think this matters; making up poems, like writing letters to you, Sister Benedicta, who will never read it, seems to keep my mind alive. Without the letter and the mediocre poems I believe I might have lost myself and started to wander about London in a daze with a suitcase crammed full of stolen Marks and Spencer’s knitwear and Jubilee Souvenir tea towels, until the heavy hand of the law reached out and tapped me on the shoulder and I was hauled up before the magistrate with not a word to say for myself.

  The poem I wrote last night went:

  I wish I could have been a ship

  and sailed the seas I’ve never known;

  instead, I am a shipwreck

  and all who sail in me will drown.

  Very soon after that, I drowned myself in my martini sleep and to my surprise it was rather a happy drowning which I didn’t regret at all, because I expected to feel very sorry for myself today and in fact I don’t feel too bad at all, only relieved that Christmas Day has come at last; I’m living it now, minute by minute (even though it’s only 10.30 in the morning and there’s a long way to go yet) and when I wake tomorrow morning, it will be over.

  I’m rather worried that the vermouth bottle won’t last until the shops open again. It’s so long since I had a martini that I have quite lost the habit (so important when Leon was here) of checking the drink supply. However, yesterday’s drizzle has left off; the sun seems to come and go, so I may wander out later in search of a little Off Licence that has dared to sneak up an “Open” sign for an hour or two. London seems to have quite a lot of these and they function in the same spirit as the round-the-clock Italian restaurants, not defying convention exactly, but ignoring it.

  I think if I had a good supply of martini to last the next few days, I would feel much more cheerful that I’ve done for some time. I don’t know why I’ve never thought of getting drunk before. If I was a man I believe I would have thought of it and gone stumbling and shrieking along the Victoria Embankment or flown off to Venice for a few days to snivel in cafés by the foul green canals, hopeful for a warm girl on a cold street corner or a good cry at dawn in a shabby hotel room. As it is, all I have done is sit and wait. I have stayed close to Leon, tried to become close to God, waited patiently for Alexandra to come and see me, and all three are mute! Only I have talked on silently to you, Sister, and where am I now but perched still in this tired flat, just serving out my time.

  I have never before spent Christmas Day quite by myself. In India, we sometimes sat down twenty to the table decorated with scarlet and gold crackers shipped from Fortnum’s to match the scarlet and gold uniforms of all the soldiers, and my mother would let a pale smile cross her face at the sight of so much finery, because she loved the army better than anything in the world, better than my father, who was only a tiny part of the army, and better even than Wiltshire where she had begun her life and for which she often mourned. “A soldier’s bride!” she once exclaimed to me in a rare moment of delight, “When I knew I was to be a soldier’s bride, I went out into the garden and sang ‘Land of Hope and G
lory’ by the lily pond!” (Whenever I hear this tune now – which happily isn’t often – I imagine my mother singing it in her Wiltshire garden and the old gardener, Len, hearing her and thinking, Lord love us, she’s gone nutty.) And I’ve always known, from the day she told me about singing “Land of Hope and Glory” because she was so full of pride and joy, that she only married my father because he was a soldier and not for love of him. I think any officer would have done, but who can say if she would have sighed more or less with someone else? I can’t believe that she would ever have been happy, unless the entire British Army (Other Ranks excepted) had made her its mascot and cleaved itself only unto her.

  When India was over and we moved to London, I very soon began to betray my parents by refusing to follow them on trains from Paddington down, to the dusty house in Wiltshire for Christmas, where my thin grandmother sat blinking in an armchair all day, dying of indolence and memories and deaf as a post, so that if ever you plucked up your courage to interrupt her blinking with a word, she’d turn on you accusingly and shout: “Write it down, dear!” And a little notebook would be shoved into your hand into which you scribbled the most terrible trivia like: “You’re looking extremely well, Granny,” or “Did you have much trouble with greenfly this summer?”, to which she seldom replied except with an enigmatic nod. She was the most unloving of grandmothers, a palsied version of my mother, who smelt rather nasty because she was to lazy to wash herself and who quite often wet her knickers and the faded silk cushion covers without any shame at all, only remarking with her perfectly-formed vowel sounds: “Oh look, I’ve done one of my puddlies!” and ringing her bell for the long-suffering housekeeper to come and take the cushion away. I couldn’t stand the sight or smell of her, nor the Catholic in her which had transformed her room into a dusty shrine, but had never broadened her heart. Christmas at her house was like an internment: the world was shut out and all I could think of was the day when we would get back on to the train and I would discover it again in all its loud complexity.

  I don’t know how many such sad Christmases I endured in that house with its lily pond (an apologetically foul place by the time I saw it so that it was very hard to imagine anyone wanting to sing by it, let alone such a rousing number as “Land of Hope and Glory”), it wasn’t more than three or four and after that I forgot my grandmother just as if she had died and went each year, in defiance of my mother, to Godmother Louise’s house, actually sleeping there for the duration of Christmas, in a cold top room which the Reiters always referred to as “Ruby’s room”. Max chose to see Christmas as a day invented by the world in honour of Louise. He filled it with flowers and champagne and presents and his own music, “which never really got going in me, Ruby, till I met Louise”. His joy in all this giving was ecstatic and by the time the evening came and the inevitable friends arrived and friends of friends and the goose was roasted (“In Vienna we used to eat goose and this is much nicer that turkey, Ruby, which was invented by the Americans”) his little bearded person seemed to be on fire with happiness and we sat down to the candlelit meal like excited children, thinking, no other Christmas will ever be as wonderful as this.

  Leon and I spent one Christmas with the Reiters before we had Noel, in the same little top room, reaching for each other in the early morning cold and making love until the house woke up and we could smell breakfast and hear Max singing in his bath. We did love then, I remind myself, when Leon had his office over the Fleet Street gym and we lived in a small flat five minutes walk from Hampstead Heath.

  Before lunch that Christmas Day, Max and Leon and I went for a walk on Primrose Hill. It was windy and very cold and on the way home we all linked arms and ran stumbling and laughing, our cheeks bright with cold, our three breaths puffing out like steam along the empty streets, running home to Louise, quiet and beautiful in her flower-filled room to listen to Max play for an hour while we sipped champagne and waited for lunch. If I could have stopped time just once in my life, I would have stopped it there that morning on Primrose Hill, with Leon and Max holding my arms and giggling like boys.

  Now time seems to have stopped here. London, so full of laughter that one Christmas morning, has gone silent. I imagine the little scufflings of countless old people, balanced on the edge of their lives in the tenement buildings that still criss-cross London with their concrete balconies and their dark stairwells, the comings and goings of lives lived out by ancient gas fires, tea in brown pots, bits of chuck steak fried in dripping, “just enough for one, dear, don’t give me any more than I can afford, because I won’t have company, not this Christmas, and food’s too dear to waste . . .” I wait and listen and come and go as they come and go, but they are thin and shadow-eyed on their pensioners’ diets and all my life I have been wasteful and fat.

  The telephone was ringing when I got back from my visit to Leon. It was Gerald. As it turns out, he has been rushing across Europe, but not to Milan, thank goodness, (of which he made no mention at all) but to some smart ski resort in Austria with his two children and flying down mountains with uncharacteristic enthusiasm and little daubs of colour in his cheeks.

  “Ski-ing, Gerald!” I echoed.

  “Yes. It was dreadfully expensive. You couldn’t move – up or down the mountain – without paying, and cups of hot chocolate were a pound.”

  “They couldn’t have been, Gerald.”

  “Yes, they were. I had to call a halt to hot chocolate after the first week.”

  “Well, no wonder!”

  I was very relieved to hear Gerald’s familiar voice. My image of him bleeding to death in a Milan cul-de-sac had been quite strong at times. But now he sounded very much alive, chirpy even, as if he’d got on much better without me and his strivings on Alexandra’s bed, and the apology I was going to make for my desertion of him seemed superfluous.

  “Well,” I said, “it’s nice to know you’ve had a holiday, Gerald.”

  “Yes, I feel much better, and Ruby . . . after all your, well, kindness to me last year, I’d like you to be the first to hear my news!”

  “News, Gerald?”

  “Yes. I’m getting married again.”

  I sat down, taking the telephone with me and tripping over the wire as I went. I was quite lost for a word, as if it was my turn to go in a board game and I had suddenly lost track of the rules.

  “Married?” I gaped.

  “Yes. She’s called Davina.”

  My first thought was, we must wall up Italy! Let no men out and no-one called Davina in!

  It seemed incredible to me that any woman could commit herself to Gerald, knowing him as I did, little white panting man with a broken heart. And I couldn’t but believe that it was only a matter of time before Davina went the way of Sarah and then what would become of Gerald? I wanted to say: “Don’t do it, Gerald. Don’t ever fall in love again, you poor stick of a man, let alone marry!” I saw the whole dreadful process begin again, and by the time Davina left him, he would be old and impotent then for ever and crumble away to nothing inside his pinstripes.

  “That’s wonderful news!” I eventually stammered out, “Wonderful news for Christmas Day!”

  “Yes, well I hope you and Leon will come to the wedding, Ruby. It’ll be in the spring.”

  “I will of course, Gerald, but—”

  “Oh yes. I heard from someone that Leon’s been ill. I hope that’s all over and done with.”

  I paused. I didn’t want to taint Gerald’s little spasm of joy with my long miseries.

  “He’s getting on,” I said.

  “Oh good. Well, you tell him that whatever happens, he must be OK by April 1st.”

  “That’s the great day, is it?”

  “Yes. Davina’s choice.”

  Gerald wanted to fix a date for us all to meet and go out to a restaurant, but I told him that until Leon was better I couldn’t really do this.

  “I hope it will be soon, Gerald,” I said, and he seemed content with this, said Happy Christmas two or t
hree times and rang off.

  Once his voice had gone, I closed my eyes. “God weeps when we are foolish,” you once said, Sister. So I took God’s role upon me for a moment or two and shed a long tear that ran slowly down my face and on to my skirt. I didn’t weep for long, any more than God does, I dare say, at our individual follies, but saves his great rivers of tears for the terrible stupidity of nations and lets them fall as rain on the fields of Flanders or on the plumes of the Viceroy in Anglo-India. Perhaps the British weather is, and always has been, a sign of God’s sorrow at our idiocy and it has gone on getting worse ever since the Charge of the Light Brigade and the Battle of the Somme and the invention of Lord Birkenhead, and no wonder the Thames is angry and brown and the American tourists all arrive with plastic hats in their raincoat pockets.

  Leon was crying when I got to the hospital this afternoon. What I didn’t fully realize – and the doctors hadn’t pointed this out to me – is that because the whole of his left side is paralysed, he can’t see out of his left eye, not being able to raise this eyelid. And if you sit on the left side of the bed, he can’t see you, unless he turns himself round to look at you, and this is difficult and uncomfortable for him. Today, he wanted to tell me to move round to his right side, making gestures with his right arm that I failed at first to interpret, thinking he was trying to show me something in the room. And because he wasn’t understood, he began to weep, making very odd sounds out of the corner of his mouth and letting his eyes, which are puffy already, fill and refill with tears.

  The nursing home has been gaudily decorated for Christmas. They hung a last year’s paper chain above Leon’s window and I wondered if all the colours in it haven’t added to his sorrow and made him wonder what on earth is Christmas doing here in a sickroom and where’s my son, whom I waited for last year and have never seen again?