Letter to Sister Benedicta

by Rose Tremain

  “I’m with you,” she says.

  JANUARY 22

  On the way to the cremation, we drive past the Oratory. I remember the soldier’s bride and the flickering candles. I remember that, feeling herself becoming very small, Alice tries to remember what the flame of the candle looks like after the candle has been blown out.

  “I used to go there most days,” I admit to Alexandra.

  “Where?”

  “In there. The Oratory.”

  “Why?”

  “To pray for Leon. I prayed he wouldn’t die.”

  “I thought you weren’t a Catholic. I thought you’d given it up.”

  We go in the big car in silence. Alexandra has no gloves and her hands are blue with cold. She still wears her duffle coat and a shabby skirt underneath. I imagine her in a warm department store, trying on new clothes. In the communal changing room, her body is the thinnest.

  JANUARY 23

  I think it’s because I sleep for so short a time each night that I can’t write for long in the daytime . . .

  JANUARY 24

  Four a.m and I haven’t slept. The cats have been carrying on somewhere in the cold streets. Better to put on the light and try to write something down – more than a fragment this time.

  Evelyn Wainwright called today. She was wearing a black coat and her hair was moulting all over it and inside the black coat, her being was a-shiver and I think it never rests or is still. I made tea. She’d come about Leon, she said, to tell me how sorry . . .

  “I don’t really want to talk about him, Mrs Wainwright. He’s not a part of me any more.”

  I said this very firmly. I realized that for days and days, I have kept on saying it: “He’s not a part of me any more.”

  “I’ve lost my own home, or as good as lost it,” Evelyn Wainwright whispered into her teacup, “I was forced to take Partridge in the end, younger than my sop, you see, younger than Richard and no good.”

  “He’ll do his best for you, Mrs Wainwright.”

  “His best won’t be good enough.”

  “When does the hearing come up?”

  “Tuesday fortnight. I have to appear. I said I didn’t want to appear, but Partridge says I must. If I’d had a better solicitor, I wouldn’t have had to appear.”

  “Won’t your son change his mind about selling the house?”

  “No. Greed and debts, you see, Mrs Constad. He can’t understand my feelings, not for one moment. He says there’ll be central heating in the new bungalow, and of course I’ve lived my life without central heating, but I’ve never complained about this, not so as you could infer I wanted change. Now, if only, you see, your husband hadn’t been taken ill. I know I would have been alright with him. He was such a clever man.”

  Louise came to my rescue. She took my hand and looked at me with her large eyes. “Don’t listen to anyone,” she counselled, “Leon is clever and kind and he loves you. Don’t listen to your mother who’s so crumpled up inside, or to your grandmother, or anyone – listen to your heart! Max and I will come to your wedding. We’ll sing and rejoice for you. But if no one in the world rejoiced, no one at all, it wouldn’t matter, just as long as you rejoice, Ruby, and know that you’re doing what you want to do.”

  Evelyn Wainwright talked on. She asked me twice if she was disturbing me and I didn’t answer. I held Louise’s hand. I said to her: “I love Leon. He’s changed me and I love him.” And then I let myself lean against Louise, who took me in her arms and I could feel her soft hair against my forehead and I wept. Louise didn’t move or speak. She held on to me and my tears made a damp patch on her dress. I felt as if I wanted to stay weeping in her arms for ever, until there wasn’t a shred of confusion or grief inside me, and I knew she would stay holding me, however long it took. I believe I wept for a long time. When I opened my eyes, the first thing I saw was Evelyn Wainwright’s empty teacup on the coffee table and I looked round the room for her, but she had gone.

  JANUARY 25

  Word has gone out to the co-respondents. I often wake in the night and imagine I hear the telephone ringing and that when I pick up the receiver, I’ll hear a click and then a voice saying: “Oh this is Sam Mundy calling from L.A.” But it never does ring and I’m really very grateful for this, because I have discovered that it’s very hard for me to say Leon’s name out loud and I keep praying that a long time will pass before I have to do this again. I can write it down, write it to you, Sister, and not feel the weight of it, the unforgettable weight of that name on my life. But when I say it, all I can remember is that when I uncovered his dead face, I couldn’t bear to touch it with my hand, let alone bring my lips near it.

  One evening while Alexandra was here and I was lying in bed trying to read, the telephone did ring. It wasn’t a co-respondent: it was Sue. I listened to Alexandra talking to her. She told Sue that she felt very ill in London, that she hated being here and wanted to get back to Norfolk. My imaginings of Sue and the cottage came back. I wanted to say to Alexandra: “This is how I imagine it all, the cottage and the hens and Sue – is it right?” But I knew Alexandra didn’t want to talk about her life. She has grown thin and tired with the effort of reshaping it, and only when she feels better will she talk to me. I wonder, though, if Sue is just an instrument in her recovery, to be discarded again just as before, when some soldier’s footfall sounds outside her door. Or will she stay with Sue, grow old with her, lover and friend?

  “I’m quite outside it,” I say to myself, “I can do nothing at all, only send her back in a warmer coat.” (I didn’t even dare to ask her if it was she who came one day to visit Leon in a duffle coat and went home without seeing me.) But then I laugh. After all this time, Sister, after twenty-five years of loving, this is all I have left to give my children – winter coats!

  JANUARY 26

  “A fortnight is a long time,” Alexandra said to Sue.

  She came with me the next day to the nursing home to collect Leon’s belongings, such as they were.

  “Why on earth did you take him one of the photo albums, Mummy?”

  “He asked for it. He wanted them all.”

  “He couldn’t have wanted to see us, not after all that raging.”

  “He often asked for—”

  “Noel?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Who can say, dear? Noel seemed to be part of his confusions. He couldn’t say ‘Noel’, of course. He made noises.”

  “Didn’t he say any words at all?”

  “Only one. It was a made-up word.”

  “What was it?”

  “I’d rather not say it.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t like hearing it.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t make me say it, Alexandra.”

  A fortnight is a long time.

  JANUARY 27

  But then, when Alexandra had gone and I was alone again and Leon’s clothes still hung in the wardrobe and his books and papers in the study lie untouched, then I missed her, even though her ways are cold and strange and she is altogether like someone lost.

  JANUARY 28

  The smell of Leon is in his clothes. I open the cupboard and put my face into his suits and it’s as if his body was inside one of them. The smell of his makes me so ashamed that I couldn’t go near his dead face. Did I imagine his death was contagious?

  JANUARY 29

  Such a bad night again, Sister, and the mating cats are like sirens. When the light comes, my eyes are swollen and there is such an ache in my legs, I wonder if I can get out of bed. I am ageing surely, ageing quite out of time. If I see Gerald again, or Betty Hazlehurst, they will say: “Good heavens, Ruby, you’ve aged out of all proportion . . .”

  Out of all proportion to the paper-thin life, led in silence for quite some years now, ever since Leon went away in search of paradise, out of all proportion to these hundreds of pale days is the hurting weight of Leon’s death.

  I remember at the Con
vent School, when one of the Sisters died of heat and old age in the middle of the summer term, we were told that there would be “a suitable period of mourning”. We stood in silence for a minute each day at the end of morning prayers, thinking of Sister Jordana’s soul, but the “suitable period” didn’t last very long, and after that we were allowed to forget about her soul and only a few of you remembered it, I suppose, Sister, and sometimes said prayers for it. And if you were here with me now, Sister Benedicta, you might say to me: “Don’t let the period of mourning be too long, Ruby. Don’t let it be longer than ‘suitable’.” And we would kneel down together in the bathroom and pray for Leon’s Jewish soul side by side, and then one day you would say: “That’s enough. Let the dead bury the dead.” And you would help me to forget him. You would bundle his suits off to Oxfam and call the removal men to come and take away all his books and papers and his real leather-topped desk, and in your heart you would be saying: “It’s a blessed release. Now she is free again to love Jesus.”

  “Once you have loved,” Louise said to me, “you will never again want to be without love.” Louise couldn’t see that in hundreds of lives, lovelessness slips in silently, almost unnoticed like a stiffening of the joints, and that wanting to love is purposeless, like wanting to be a child again and it is very idiotic even to try. Louise kept love like a nutmeg in her palm, kept it safe and warm all her life, took it half-way round the world and still held on to it, and of all the things I loved about Louise, I admired most her safe keeping of her love. At twenty, I thought I could do the same. But I told you Sister, ten years was all I managed, and it is those ten, not all the rest that followed, that press on me now – the years when I smiled in photographs and the Fleet Street gymnasts marched and vaulted and climbed and balanced from dawn to dusk seven days a week. It is those years I would like to be rid of now. The albums are back on their shelf in Leon’s study and I never look at them, but my heart echoes with those old years and all the paraphernalia of Leon’s life that still lies around me reminds me not of the man who has just died, but of the man I once loved.

  This morning I walked past Sheila’s house. She keeps it very nicely, with flowers in the window-boxes and newly painted railings. It is Saturday, and I could see Sheila in her kitchen which was yellow in Grandma Constad’s day and now looks very changed, thought I didn’t dare to stop long enough to see what colour Sheila has painted it, not wanting her to catch sight of me and think, why’s she come snooping round, when Leon is dead now and nothing signifies any more? Two streets past the house, and I contemplated going back. I thought of knocking and saying to Sheila: “Help me to remember that for years he hasn’t loved me, but has gone on loving you. Tell me how often he came to see you: Did he always come burdened down with love and take you in his arms? Did he tell you that he felt tired when he came back from America? Why do you think he felt so tired? Did he love not just you, Sheila, but lots of girls, five or ten a year in rotation and a new one each night in Beverly Hills?”

  But I didn’t go back not even to ask Sheila if it was her, the visitor to the nursing home, in a coat like Alexandra’s. Only two more days and it will be February.

  JANUARY 30

  The Smiths announced themselves at my door.

  “We thought we’d wait a while before we called,” they said. “We didn’t think you’d want to see anyone for a while. We won’t come in. We’d only like to say . . .”

  They have never been inside this flat, nor I inside theirs. London neighbours only seem to talk to each other on staircases or in car parks, as if this is all convention allows and the first one to cross a threshold is breaking some inviolate law.

  I asked the Smiths to come in and they hesitated, looking worriedly at each other.

  “No, really, we won’t bother you, Mrs Constad.”

  “It wouldn’t be bothering me. It seems dreadful that you’ve never been into the flat. But now you’re here, I’d love to put a kettle on.”

  So they came in. They tiptoed, as if there was a child in the flat who mustn’t be woken. I sat them down in the drawing-room and went to make coffee for them and I knew that they were sitting very still and in silence. When I took in the coffee, they sipped it in silence until Mrs Smith (who seems to talk more than Mr Smith, according to the snatches of their life I hear on the landing) said: “What we’d really like to say to you, Mrs Constad, is that if ever you feel you need someone – to talk to, perhaps, or for anything at all – we’re here.”

  I nodded.

  “I know you are,” I said, “I hear some of your comings and goings, just as you hear mine, and sometimes, I admit, it’s rather reassuring to hear you. At Christmas, you see, when there was all that fog on the M4, I was awfully worried about you.”

  The Smiths looked at each other. I could tell they thought this was eccentric of me, inappropriate.

  “Oh we were fine,” said Mrs Smith with a smile.

  “Yes, we were fine,” said Mr Smith.

  “Christmas in the country is rather nice, isn’t it?” I said.

  “Well, we prefer it.”

  “We used to go now and then, when friends invited us. That extraordinary noise that pheasants make!”

  “It’s been a good year for pheasants,” said Mr Smith.

  “Has it?” I said. “My grandmother used to love the sound of a shoot. ‘Aha!’ she used to say, ‘the wonderful shooting season! A good hot breakfast and the excitement of the first drive and the ground all covered with frost.’”

  “That’s it.”

  “Not that she’d been to a shoot in thirty years, because my grandfather died long before I was born. She just remembered it.”

  The Smiths were silent again. I dare say their hearts were bursting with condolences they found they couldn’t utter, because they were people who didn’t utter things easily and lived their lives in cardigans.

  There was quite strong sunlight coming through the drawing-room windows, revealing to me that the windows were very grimy and I thought, why hasn’t the window cleaner come for so long, when now of all times, I mustn’t let everything slip and fall into decay.

  “Has the window cleaner been to you lately?” I asked the Smiths, and once again they looked astonished.

  “Has he dear?” Mr Smith asked his wife.

  “Well, he came just after Christmas. He always comes near Christmas, so that we’ll give him something.”

  “He didn’t come to me, and I was just noticing my windows . . .”

  “I’ll send him round, shall I, the next time he comes to us?”

  “Yes, thank you. I don’t know why he didn’t come to me when he doesn’t normally miss a month. It’ll be spring soon.”

  Mr Smith slapped his knee. “That’s the right attitude, if I may say Mrs Constad. Think ahead!” Then he hushed his voice to say: “We lost a child, you know. She was five years old. And quite honestly, I didn’t know how we were going to get on after that. But we did.”

  “Of course, we’ve never forgotten her,” added Mrs Smith, “we couldn’t really forget her. I mean, one can’t, can one? But as Hugh says, life does go on.”

  I thought of you, Sister, and a thing you once said: “There is great sorrow in the heart of mankind over the death of a child.” And I wanted to say to the Smiths that in India children die easily and in great numbers because of the fly-borne and water-borne diseases that still crawl round the sub-continent, and in the great days of Anglo-India, hundreds of parents of white children sent them back to England and never saw them for months or years on end, because their fear that the children would die was so great. I was never sent back to England, though there was some whispered talk of putting me on a boat for Wiltshire, and I’m glad that I stayed in India and went to the Convent School, even if that was all I really knew of India – the high white wall that never changed colour with the seasons.

  “We must be going,” said Mr Smith, and they both stood up together and thanked me for the coffee.

 
“But do remember,” said Mrs Smith, “if ever you feel lonely, there’s nearly always one of us here, and what are neighbours for?”

  JANUARY 31

  The crocuses are coming up in Hyde Park. I walked there today in bright sunshine with a bag of scraps for the ducks on the Serpentine. The nannies look younger than they used to, otherwise Hyde Park hardly changes, and when you’re down by the water with the noisy ducks you can scarcely hear the traffic noise. One or two boats were out on this fine day and I thought, if Noel was with me he’d take my arm roughly and say: “Come on, Ma! Let’s go for a row!” And I would enjoy being out on the water with Noel’s laughter for company.

  I have had no word from Noel or from Al Orkiss, who may never have gone back to Paris after all, and it seems very wrong to think of Noel in France, not knowing, not even suspecting that something might be wrong. I think I should try sending a letter to the department store called the Bon Marché, just putting: Département de Musique, Bon Marché, Paris, and hope that every postman knows the store as well as the London postmen know Harrods and there is no need to write a street name or a zone number, or anything at all by way of direction.

  If I wrote to Noel and the letter reached him, he might come home. But I would have to tell him in the letter that Leon left him nothing. I put off as long as I could my visit to the solicitors “concerning the Last Will and Testament of your husband, which is lodged with us”, but when at last I got there, the document shown to me was very short and simple: Leon has left me everything he had, and there is no mention of anyone else in the Will, nothing for the children, nothing for Sheila. And this was so unexpected that I said to the solicitor: “This can’t be right. He can’t have forgotten them!”