Letter to Sister Benedicta

by Rose Tremain

  “But in the end,” Alexandra told me, “it was rather simple and surprising. Sue went off again the next day. She said she’d only come to get her things. She left quite early in a borrowed car and I was still in bed. I heard Noel saying goodbye to her, but Sue wouldn’t say goodbye: she just got her things together and drove away. I wanted to explain to her what had happened, but then I thought, no, there’s no need. Explanations are luxuries, and anyway Sue sees it all, there’s nothing else to say.

  “I let her go without seeing her and waited for Noel. I thought, now we shall get back to our standstill world. I needn’t give anything else my attention, not even my work that I’d neglected since the day Noel arrived. I knew I couldn’t work. I’d lost interest in it. I never thought Noel would go back to Cambridge. He told me he’d lost heart with Cambridge. But he didn’t know what else to do. He saw my term at the art school beginning. He thought I’d be working all day and never be with him. So he just went. He said he’d ask Daddy to give him a car, so that he could come and see me at weekends. He promised to come for the whole of the Easter vac. and he said: ‘In the summer, why don’t we go abroad somewhere, perhaps to France, and not tell a soul where we are going?’”

  By the end of January, then, Alexandra was alone. She wrote and told me that Sue had decided to “move on” and that now she was there on her own and two of the hens had died of cold and neglect. “Noel came for Christmas, as you already know,” she added, “we had a nice time and now he’s back at Cambridge.”

  When Leon read her letter he commented: “Of course Noel’s back at Cambridge. Where else would he be in the middle of term?” And Leon and I didn’t even know then that Christine had left Noel. I imagined him with Christine and wondered how glad he felt to be in bed again with her miraculous hair. I wondered if he would decide to marry Christine, and if so, how I would break the news to Leon.

  Quite soon after getting Alexandra’s letter Leon went to America and I began my poor adventure with Gerald Tibbs and the rain kept on in London and I now and then envied Leon in the California sunshine, drinking bourbon in the gigantic white houses of his co-respondents. I thought, why isn’t my life more filled with colour? And if I was younger, like Sarah Tibbs, and had met an Italian, who knows if I wouldn’t be in Italy now in this early springtime, watching the lemons turn yellow on the trees.

  Leon came back from America very tired. Tired to death, he said. In the three weeks he was away, he put on almost a stone and his face looked very round, like his father’s that I’d seen in faded photographs by Grandma Constad’s bed. He was full of self-disgust at this new weight on his body that had always been thin and at the way he’d been made to live in America, drinking at lunchtime, drinking again at six o’clock, not just a martini or two, but tumblers full of whisky and drinking far into each night, so that every morning he woke with a sour stomach and a headache. And when I said: “I can’t imagine why you did all that drinking, Leon, if you didn’t enjoy it,” he mumbled: “Part of the job Ruby. You wouldn’t understand.” And I wondered what else had been part of the job and if the marbled houses of Beverly Hills hadn’t been decked out with plastic smiles, put on for the smart solicitor from London who spoke with not a trace of Liverpool in him, and who willingly drowned in the scented, perfect smiles and let himself be plundered and stained, and only mumbled when he at last came home: “I’m tired to death.”

  I didn’t ask Leon what he’d done in California. I thought, it makes no difference, just as Gerald Tibbs makes no difference, just as long as Leon doesn’t believe he’s found paradise again and start spending all the money he earns on long-distance telephone calls and flights to L.A. I don’t think he found paradise, because there were no flights or telephone calls (except from the co-respondents in the middle of the night), only a lot of worrying about his weight and a very idiotic diet made up by Leon’s private doctor which seemed to consist of all the things Leon hated most in this world like cottage cheese and radishes, so that Leon didn’t follow the diet and the extra stone clung to him, to his stomach and to his thighs and his face, and never left him until he had his stroke. Sometimes I think the stroke had nothing to do with what happened to Noel and Alexandra that autumn and Leon’s great burst of anger, but came about only because of those three weeks in Beverly Hills, and if Leon is ever completely healed, I may say to him: “Whatever you do, don’t go back to America. Let the co-respondents come to you.”

  Suddenly I admire the bluster and strength of Matron who thinks she can give Leon back his limbs and his voice. I realize that, despite my size, there is no bluster and strength in me at all and in my heart, Sister, even when I’m on my knees or paying my money for a candle, I have kept on believing that sooner or later, long before he’s well and back at his office with the Wainwright file on his desk, Leon is going to die.

  DECEMBER 29

  Gerald Tibbs telephoned me again this morning.

  “Davina and I would very much like you to come round for a meal,” he said, “If Leon’s still in hospital, I imagine you’re jolly lonely. And it’s not as if I’ve forgotten how you helped me when I was lonely, Ruby . . .”

  “I think that’s probably best forgotten, Gerald.”

  “Not at all! I was in a poor way, a very poor way and you—”

  “That all seems a long time ago, Gerald, and now your life’s really come on. You can put last winter firmly in the past.”

  “Oh I have, Ruby, I have.”

  “You mustn’t feel you owe me anything, and really I’m quite alright on my own. I’m getting very used to it.”

  “But we’d like to see you. Davina hasn’t met many of my friends yet because she’s quite a shy person. It wouldn’t be a social occasion. We’re all agreed, aren’t we, we don’t like them very much? But we’d like to see you and we thought, if you haven’t got any plans, what about New Year’s Eve?”

  I was silent. I found I couldn’t hear Gerald’s reedy voice now without imagining his white body going through its exertions on Alexandra’s bed. I saw it for an instant, naked except for a paper hat, saying “Happy New Year, Ruby”, and the paper hat which was orange fell off onto my face.

  “I don’t think I can come on New Year’s Eve,” I said, “I usually stay at the hospital until quite late . . .”

  “The later the better, Ruby. It’s miserable to start anything too early on New Year’s Eve, don’t you think?”

  “Well, I know, but I’m not good company at the moment, Gerald. I may even have gone batty and not know it, because there’s no one to tell me and I noticed on the tube going to Highgate that people looked at me oddly.”

  “Oh we’ll tell you,” Gerald joked, “if you’ve gone mad! Davina’s expert at that kind of thing.”

  “But New Year’s Eve, you see, everyone wearing hats . . . I don’t think I could.”

  “It’ll only be us, Ruby, just us. As I say, Davina is a very shy person, but I know you’d make her feel at home.”

  This was an extremely confusing thing for Gerald to say. He’s muddled about everything, I thought, and sighed one of my mother’s despairing sighs that echoed down the wires to Gerald who ignored it and said brightly: “New Year’s Eve at about nine, then?”

  I’ve never been to Gerald’s house, which is quite big and grand in a Kensington square. I can’t help wondering if the shy person, Davina, has taken out all the furs and dresses that cluttered the bedroom cupboards and carried them off to a jumble sale, or if Gerald himself threw them out when he felt his heart begin to mend, and Davina never saw them. I don’t suppose I shall ever know the answer to this, unless Gerald himself should mention it in his New Year’s Eve euphoria, in the shelter of his paper hat.

  I’m not looking forward to going to Gerald’s house or to meeting Davina. I would prefer to leave Gerald to tempt fate unseen. I’ve decided that I won’t be at his Fool’s Day wedding, and I hope that New Year’s Eve will be the last time I see him, because he has no need of me now and must turn to pe
ople like Betty Hazlehurst who won’t try to be to wise and will rejoice with him. I notice that I’m becoming a bit like my mother, very miserly with joy and quite unfit to attend weddings or celebrations of any kind, just as she was.

  She came to my own wedding dressed in grey, only outdone by Grandma Constad, who draped her enormous frame in black lace and you would have thought from all the sighing and grumbling that came out of these two women on that day in 1949 that they were burying their children, not uniting them. And I couldn’t help but think of my mother singing out her love for the British Army by the lily pond, and I wondered why, when I was a child of the British Army, she wouldn’t sing for me.

  She and Grandma Constad hardly spoke, but stared at each other like museum exhibits out of their widow’s eyes, never met again as long as they lived, but remembered that terrible day all their lives, so they said, knowing the Faith had been betrayed. My grandmother who, in her damp old age, had outlived my father and might outlive us all, so once I thought, was carried up the steps of the London hotel in her wheelchair and was heard to shout at my mother as she entered the flower-filled room: “Is Ruby pregnant? Is that why she’s got to marry this Jew?” And in my white dress, I wished her dead and wondered why she had to live on and on when the soul inside her skull seemed to be crawling with maggots.

  Louise had chosen and paid for the flowers. My mother was just glad to be spared the expense and didn’t listen when Louise said to her: “Max has always filled my life with flowers; I would like to fill this day for Ruby.” Louise chose lilies, white roses, gardenias and scented stocks and when you entered the room where our few guests sat down to lunch, the smell of these flowers was like mid-day in Eden, and I made Leon ask the hotel management if we could take some with us on our boat to France, because I wanted to hold this Eden in my hands and make it last.

  Leon and I had asked Max Reiter if he would play for us after lunch. The hotel had charged extra, my mother said, for getting a grand piano into the room. He played two Bach preludes and then a new piece of his own that he had composed for us and had called Summer Song. But my grandmother spoiled his playing by hiccuping very loudly all through it and then saying, near the end, “I’ve never liked this kind of thing. I’m told he’s famous, but that doesn’t mean anything these days, does it?” And I wondered why I had allowed my mother to bring this terrible old woman to my great day, to sit under her rug and spoil it and I felt ashamed of myself and of them both with their joyless eyes.

  “I’m dreadfully sorry about Granny,” I whispered to Max afterwards, “she’s quite decayed and terrible and I never should have let her in!”

  He took my hand and said: “Ruby, I refuse even to mention your grandmother! She had her day long ago, but this one is yours.”

  “We love Summer Song, Max.”

  “Do you? Well, it was for you. Now you must see if you can make your summer last!”

  It seems to me now that it lasted ten years, and by the time Louise died in 1960, it was over. For five of the ten years, Leon had his office above the gym in the Fleet Street alleyway and during this time, often said to me: “I’m biding my time, Ruby. It’s very hard to become known in this business, but in a year or two . . .” And I thought, don’t wish our lives away, Leon, don’t live on and on for tomorrow and not sense the purpose of today.

  I have a very old tape recording of Max’s Summer Song, made before tape recorders were properly invented and I can’t play it any more because Leon sold the big tape recorder some years ago as an antique to the Science Museum and bought a Japanese cassette machine instead. But I used to play it. I played it the night Louise died. I believe I thought it would remind me of Louise, of her laughter and her beautiful hair and her joy. But I found that I wasn’t thinking about Louise. I was thinking about a day, a hot June day when Noel was at Miss Forester’s school and I took Alexandra on to the heath in the early afternoon. Alexandra was three years old under her linen sunhat and the smell of her little body was like fresh cream. I sat her down beside me on our old rug, happy that the hot sun shone on us, that we were there with the familiar shapes of the heath around us and that Alexandra was mine. She lay down on her back with her legs in the air and looked at the blue above us, and I lay down beside her and shut my eyes. The sun on my face mocked my closed eyes, light crept through my lashes into my head and for a minute or more I forgot where I was. I’ve become the sun, I thought, it’s easy to become the sun! I must tell Leon and the Hazlehursts and everybody we know how easy it is to become the sun. I lay quite still. I dreamed I held in my head the light of continents, until a cloud crept in front of the sun and I sat up. I looked all around me, saw everything and yet nothing. A space. This was what I first noticed: there was a space where there shouldn’t have been a space. Then I understood. Alexandra had gone.

  I got up. I was no longer the light of all generations; I was ragged with terror. I was a beggar with nothing where once I had been rich beyond imagining. I ran this way and that, calling. I had no idea how long I had been lying down – two minutes, fifteen minutes? – and fears crowded into me until my calling became a scream and picnicking students and schoolboys playing rounders and dog-owners of all ages heard it for miles around and I fancied the heath had gone strangely silent, sensing the inevitability of tragedy.

  Alexandra heard my scream. From a little dell, where she had wandered to play, she came running to me and I lifted her into my arms and crushed her with the weight of my joy at finding her until she began to cry. She had been no more than ten yards away from me.

  The dog-owners walked on, the students turned back to their sandwiches, the schoolboys started to bat and run, the sun came out again and I carried Alexandra to the rug and we both had a drink of lemonade from a thermos cup that tasted of stale tea. And it was then, holding the child’s hand, that I knew that the sun’s mysterious passage into my head was only a poor imagining and that what truly filled me was a sense of wonder at my life, at the love in it which seemed boundless and bright. I felt blessed, Sister. My body on the ground beside my child was never – before or since – as beautiful as it was on that day. I rocked Alexandra on my knee and found that in time to the rocking, I was humming Max’s little piece of music. Alexandra laughed. I thought, I can’t remember if I told Leon yesterday that I love him, but I shall tell him this evening, before he’s put his latchkey down, I shall tell him that all my days are filled with love for him and for our children and this is how it will be until we are old and sit together in the silence of our rememberings.

  I collected Noel from school and walking home with the two children, I knew that I never wanted to move from our little Hampstead flat, even though it was cluttered with the children’s toys and Leon often said: “How can I bring clients here, to this mess?”

  But then my mother died and left me the money she’d been so careful with all her life (even grudging our Indian servants the few rupees they earned to keep her idle and discontented) and we bought a house in Chelsea, not far from where Sheila lives now. In those days, Chelsea was rather a quiet place and even the fishmonger delivered to your door and a horse and cart selling flowers used to go up and down the King’s Road, and sometimes the horse’s hooves and the little cries of the flower-seller were the only sound.

  Leon moved his office several times during the years we lived in Chelsea, first to Holborn, then to Bloomsbury and finally to Mayfair, which he’s never left, only moved round it to bigger, grander offices as he took on partners and more and more rich clients who expected to see him in a large office and would quite have lost faith in him if they’d found him above the gym, with the squeaking and thudding of the apparatus going on all the time, even while they talked.

  After Louise died and I made my visits to Max in the house in St John’s Wood, he often said to me: “You’re happy, aren’t you, you and Leon?” And a year or two earlier, I would have answered “yes” and not been lying, and now I answered “yes” and knew that I was lying, remembering
my autumn walks on the heath and thinking, it’s slipped away from us since then, the kind of happiness that Max understands. And it wasn’t very long after Max’s death that Leon went secretly in search of paradise.

  “He’s getting on alright!” Matron said to me today, “I think he’s begun to try, and that’s half the battle.”

  When I went to see Leon, he was fast asleep and snoring like a very old man with his mouth open, tired out, it seemed, by his trying. I sat down by the bed and waited for him to wake up, and I thought of a remark my mother made to me one warm evening in India when my father had fallen asleep in his chair: “Never wake up a sleeping man, Ruby. If you do, he thinks you’re offering yourself.” And she said this with a shudder, as if the thought of offering her thin-waisted body to my father’s wide one was like brushing her lips with death, and I wondered how many times in all her years with him she had offered it and where my father had gone in search of love, perhaps even to the officers’ mess?

  “Leon,” I whispered, putting my face very close to his, and he opened his eyes and looked at me; or rather, he opened his right eye and the skin over the left eye hardly moved. Matron hasn’t mentioned eye exercises, but he will surely need them, if he’s to sit in his brown-carpeted office with a shred of his former dignity – though it’s very hard to believe that he will sit there one day, buzzing for Sheila to take Mrs Wainwright away and bring in Charlton Heston, which was how he seemed to carry on before, when he looked at the world through both his eyes and manufactured all his quicksilver words that made him rich and known.

  “Only me, dear,” I said.

  Leon was lying very far down in the bed and looked rather buried by it. I wanted to help him up. “Shall I help you up, Leon?” I asked, “or do you want to go back to sleep?”