by Rose Tremain
And I’ve begun at last to think that I’ve said enough to you, Sister Benedicta. I’ve imagined that you’ve sat in your room at sundown, sat with your arms folded as I’ve talked on and on, your body still, listening patiently. But then, when it got dark, you would have stopped me gently, as you always did and said: “Come back tomorrow, dear, and tell me the rest.”
FEBRUARY 10
I have asked Partridge, who is quite a clever young man with blond hair (and I don’t really know why Evelyn Wainwright had no confidence in him) to look after the question of Leon’s money. For years, Leon behaved like a very rich man, but it turns out that his investments are worth only about £40,000, which isn’t much by Leon’s standards, and I can’t help wondering if he didn’t give a lot of his money away without my knowing it – to Sheila perhaps or to other women he never told me about, but saw secretly on the evenings he said he was dining with clients and I sat in bed with a library book.
I’ve signed a lot of papers, making over all Leon’s money to Noel and Alexandra. And this morning, I walked to an estate agent in Knightsbridge and put the flat up for sale.
When I look round the flat, I realize that I’ve never cherished it as a home. I’ve worried on and off about the lighting or the colour of the curtains, but nothing very joyful has happened in the flat, nothing that I can remember now, and I want to be rid of it. It won’t be difficult to sell because it’s the kind of place where hundreds of people want to live, almost within sight of Harrods and with quiet neighbours in cardigans to meet occasionally on the stairs.
Partridge seemed to think my decision to sell the flat is very wise. “If I were you, Mrs Constad,” he said, “I’d find myself a nice little place in the country, become part of village life.” And I nodded at this very obvious wisdom, but I heed no one these days, Sister, I’ve lost the habit of it. I heed no one but myself.
FEBRUARY 11
I went to Highgate again today. The weather was cold and blustery, typical February, and not like the last time I was there, when the sun shone. In its winter briar tangle, leafless except for the climbing ivy, Highgate Cemetery looks neglected and cold and all the graves are sodden. I had no Australian daffodils to throw down for Louise, and her mound looks very colourless, in strange contrast to the way she was, because even in five-star hotels she used to dress in gypsy colours and her favourite thing in the St John’s Wood house was a beautiful Persian carpet Max had bought for the dining room, and the colours of this were reflected everywhere in the house – soft blues, ambers and scarlets. At one candlelit Christmas, I remember thinking, the carpet is the magic carpet and it has made all our eyes shine.
The cemetery was deserted and I seemed to be the only person there on this chill day. I bent down and touched the writing on Louise’s headstone. “I’m on my own now,” I whispered.
Then I walked on a bit along the bumpy path, looking at the other graves, but not really noticing them. I thought, thank God you lived, Louise, and showed me a life that was so joyful and unafraid. I so often remember you. You are the nicest memory I have.
APRIL 1
Strange to think I should have chosen this day – April Fool’s day, Gerald’s wedding day – to go.
There has been no time for writing, Sister, not for days. There has been so much to arrange and put in order, and prospective buyers have been trampling round the flat, dozens of them and each one delighted with the flat’s handiness for Harrods. Only to one couple – the first who came – did I say: “I find I don’t go there any more,” and the woman looked at me as if I was insane and said: “I’d live in Harrods if I could, not just near it.” However, this flat seems to be the nearest she could get, and she and her husband have decided to buy the lease which has forty-nine years to run, so perhaps she will grow ancient in the flat and be buried by Harrods’ Funeral Department.
“It’s very handy for me that you’ve decided to buy the flat,” I told her, “I’m going away, you see, and I want everything to be settled quickly.”
“Oh,” said the woman, “where are you going?”
“I’m going to India,” I said.
I was on my way to the London Library, Sister, when the idea came to me. I was going there to take out another book about India. I wasn’t afraid of the Library any more, knowing my way to “History – Oriental” this time. I thought, they won’t sneer at me today and wish I was Antonia Fraser.
But just after I got off my bus in Picadilly and began to walk down the Haymarket, I noticed my changed reflection in the plate glass of a travel agent’s window and I thought, I’m not the tat woman who once wept in the powder room at Harrods. Fifty-year-old woman with bad deportment and a lot of money, the old self that was so obedient to Leon says: “There’s no hope for you, Ruby Constad. Best to stay put, where at least you will die in comfort. Better to stay with what you know and understand, or you will become quite lost, like you were in your dream going to Norfolk.” But then I remember Al Orkiss with his dormobile and my imagined journey across Europe and I know that I wasn’t afraid then, just as, walking down the Haymarket, I knew that I wasn’t at all afraid of going to India.
The idea arrived in me very suddenly and stayed chattering in my head like Punch and Judy noise, so that I could no longer hear the traffic and forgot all about the London Library, walking mechanically right to it and then on past it with my book still under my arm, as a flurry of snow began to fall on London and I knew that I wouldn’t stay to see out the winter. I only need a bit of time, just the time it takes to set things in order, I thought, and then I shall be gone. It will be the last – the only – adventure of my life.
I wrote to Alexandra, giving her my date of departure and telling her that she will be getting some money from Partridge. I wrote to Noel and sent him £200 and in both letters I said: “I don’t know when I shall be coming back. Whatever I find, however upsetting and frightening, I shall try not to bolt for home. And anyway, with Leon gone and the flat being sold, I need to rethink what ‘home’ is. People like Al Orkiss seem to have no concept of ‘home’, and I think I envy them, though of course I wouldn’t have said this before.”
I waited for the postman this morning, in case there was a reply from Alexandra, but none came. I think I hoped to get her approval of my journey, but she doesn’t seem able to give me her attention. My journey isn’t important to her. “Do what you like,” says her silence, “and let me get on with my life.” But I still wonder about your life. Alex. I wonder if you are at peace in your days in the cold garage studio and your nights with Sue who must have forgiven you although you never said she had, and have you got some more hens, dear, to replace those you let die?
Perhaps when I come back – in the summer or in the autumn? – you will start talking to me again, but while I’m travelling I shall try not to think of you.
Nor of you, Sister. There will surely be little in India now to remind me of your quietness, your clean room with the raffia blinds. You are gone from India now. You came back to your English convent, and when you died, the Mother Superior announced that there would be “a suitable period of mourning for Sister Benedicta”, and when the “suitable period” was over, no one ever thought of you again, with your memories of the Viceroy’s pageant and the rains that broke the same day and fell on the Viceroy’s plumes. I may have been the only one to think of you, and you have helped me in the way that you always helped me, by your silence.
We have been flying for more than two hours. I saw the sun go down into the clouds and now, underneath me, I can see a city that is no more that a tiny scab of light on the darkness. I’m on my way.
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: 9781446450536
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Published by Vintage 1999
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Copyright © Rose Tremain 1979
Rose Tremain has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
First published in Great Britain in 1989 by Hamish Hamilton
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