Letter to Sister Benedicta

by Rose Tremain

  But the flat was quiet when I got home. No sign of Noel and Leon was sitting where he’d been asleep, staring worriedly at the room. I put the cakes on the kitchen table and thought, they’re a waste of money, the cakes, they’ll never be eaten.

  Then I sat down by Leon and took his neat hand in my podgy one (I remember on my wedding day seeing our hands side by side for the first time and smiling at the difference in them) and said: “We’re bound to hear, Leon, sooner or later.” Leon nodded. “Thoughtless little sod!” he said, turning away and I nodded, recalling that Leon said “thoughtless little sod” quite often about all sorts of people who arrived late or stayed too long or forgot to deliver his drink order or drove cars in any way inimical to him, and I found it odd that he put the word “little” in there when he himself, though a neat and quite handsome man, only measures five foot eight.

  “Noel’s not little,” I said.

  “Little of spirit,” he declared, “if he can let his mother down like this!”

  I pondered this, remembering how surely Leon had let his own mother down by marrying not merely a gentile but an alleged Catholic and that he had tried all his life until her death in 1970 to atone for this by buying her presents and bits of her favourite Jewish food and by letting her who had been poor all her life and widowed at thirty-one come to see him in his huge office to prove that he hadn’t failed her.

  “It’s not me so much, dear,” I said quietly, “as you.”

  But Leon didn’t reply to this, lit one of his small cigars and puffed away at it in silence until it was gone.

  I haven’t mentioned Alexandra, Sister. Alexandra was twenty then. When she was eighteen she left London and her room that seemed still to be a little girl’s room and went to an art school in Norwich. Leon bought her a mini. She moved into a cottage near Wymondham with a friend called Sue. “We love the cottage,” Alexandra told me, “even though it’s cold and Sue says why not keep our own chickens?” So of her life I knew scarcely more than this. “You’d hate the cottage, Mummy,” she told me, “so don’t come up and see us and anyway it’s only got two bedrooms.” And obedient even to her, I’ve never been there, but used to imagine her there in the cottage with her paintings and her friend Sue whom I’ve never met. I worried about her when really I shouldn’t she kept telling me because she’d never been so happy and if ever she felt overtired from all the painting she was doing she’d just go and feed the hens (because of course Sue had bought the hens and a hen coop straight away, no sooner mentioned than there they were free-ranging all over the garden) and listen to their little noises until she felt peaceful again. “So please don’t worry,” she kept saying, “not about me!” And I believe I did try not to think of her, saying to myself, she is quite free.

  “We don’t have favourites,” you used to say, Sister Benedicta, “in this school. You are all God’s children and we are here to do God’s work.” But how then could I have stayed whispering in your room with its narrow bed and raffia blinds on countless late afternoons with sundown coming on, whispering about poetry and all the young poets who were dying of love for somebody, writing of a love they could die for and I had never felt any love except the love of your immaculate quietness, Sister Benedicta, and your little room with the blinds where you made tea. Did all the girls come creeping to your room to whisper about Keats? Did they have tea? If you were here now, Sister, when we knelt down by the bath and said our prayers for Leon, I could ask you, “wasn’t I your favourite?” And then I wouldn’t be afraid to say that it’s very hard for me to let Alexandra be free because of my two children I love her so much the best that if Leon’s going to die in spite of the candles and the prayers I would want to go and be with her. Quite often I pass on my walks a small shop that sells paraffin stoves and I think to myself, if I took a paraffin stove or even two paraffin stoves to Alexandra’s cottage, then all of us would be warm. Not that she’d want me there in her life that she’s trying so hard to rearrange. I’d be in her way all the time and in Sue’s way and I dare say the hens would stop laying.

  The telephone call from Noel came very late on the Friday night when Leon and I were in bed with our beside lights on and through my spectacles I was peering once again at the Margaret Drabble. Leon has the telephone on his side of the bed in case one of his famous clients – who never seem to go to bed at all or else keep popping over to California where night is day – ring him at two in the morning, just like you might ring a doctor or a Samaritan, believing that Leon is quite happy to talk to them any time, even at sundown in Beverly Hills, which he is. So Leon answered the telephone and kept saying. “Speak up, speak up Noel. I can’t hear what you’re saying.” But then it turned out that what Noel was saying made Leon wish he hadn’t heard it because I put down the Margaret Drabble and watched Leon and his face did, in the manner of a stage direction I once read, “register extreme disappointment” so that I knew then and there just by looking at Leon’s face that Noel wasn’t coming for Christmas. “Your mother,” Leon kept pronouncing angrily, “will be extremely disappointed. I hope you clearly understand, Noel, that she goes to a great deal of trouble to make Christmas here for us all and it was quite bad enough Alexandra not wanting to come because of her supposed work, but at least she had the decency to let us know several weeks ago and I can’t begin to describe to you how disappointed your mother will be!”

  When Leon put the receiver down, he lay on his back, not looking at me but up at the ceiling and said nothing. After a while I said: “It’s not as if I have been to a great deal of trouble this year, Leon. I only bought the teasels because the barrow boy was so wet and I’ve done nothing about ordering a turkey and—”

  “That’s not the point!” snapped Leon. “Noel must learn that if he says he will do something, then he must do it. He’ll never make a good lawyer unless he learns this.”

  I returned to the Margaret Drabble. Her heroine was giving birth to a baby in her own bed; the bed was saturated with the broken waters.

  “Where is Noel?” I asked suddenly and I heard Leon sigh.

  “He’s with Alexandra,” he said, “at the cottage.”

  DECEMBER 7

  The thought that Leon may die illuminates for me how poorly I love myself. I really don’t know what I shall do with this self, only let it trudge purposelessly about, legs taking it here and there – even to a new home, away from London which seems to me to be dying year by year just as Leon may be dying minute by minute – but soul in the deepest confusion, Sister, and heart with so feeble a love for the whole self that I sometimes feel, why did no one ever teach me to love myself, only taught me that I must put the whole world and everything in it, even the things I cannot see, before the self, so that all the world goes marching ahead of me and then round and round and round me and I am quite afraid of it. Last night I thought, if Leon dies, I must learn to love myself better and that perhaps what I should do is go back to India because from India seem to come compassionate and patient voices and in their quietness I might begin to learn. You see, even in the Oratory, Sister, whose echoing body gives me a little sense of wonder as I find the money for my candle, even in there, well, I say my prayer so quietly that no one hears it and my prayer is for Leon and not for me and I come out into the Brompton Road and I think, if only I didn’t feel ashamed of everything I do.

  At the Convent School one of the Sisters said to me: “We are none of us alone, Ruby, because Our Lord is always with us. If you feel lonely, think of Jesus reaching out to you as He reached out to the sinner, Mary of Magdalen, and touching you on the shoulder.” And for a long time, until I left India, I used to imagine the Jesus of my picture-Bible with his crinkly hair and his long white robes putting out His hand and saying, “I am here. I am here.” Until one day, I actually felt the weight of His hand on my shoulder and wondered for a while if I hadn’t been Chosen. But what I never learned, Sister, was how to be quite alone without Jesus’s hand on my shoulder and His picture-Bible eyes comforting
me in their expressionless purity and now Jesus is long since gone, unless He does come once in a while to the bathroom.

  Leon, now, has never been troubled by lack of self-love and I sometimes wonder whether the whole question of loving oneself may not have a lot to do with the way, when we were children and tried to speak out for the touch and caring of our mothers or of those, such as you, Sister, whom we chose to love, the grown-ups in our world gave us their affection. And if I think for a moment of Leon’s mother and of mine, I can so clearly see that – in spite of her miserliness and her whining that God had treated her unkindly by giving her such a colossal bottom that she always felt squashed to bits in a rush-hour bus and by making her family poor – Leon’s mother gave him such a grandiose love that in comparison to it my mother’s love for me was a little stick of a thing, gone in a minute like barley sugar and leaving no taste at all. It was as if my mother was dry of love, simply found none in her to give. And when she saw that all my life I was going to be fat like my father whom she teased and yet never laughed with and not a bit like her with her pale skin and freckles and narrow waist, she turned away from me with a sigh. Again and again I would tell her things and instead of listening, she’d just turn away. And I would wait for the sigh, almost inaudible but always there, the sighing of her weariness of India and her emptiness of love.

  There isn’t much time perhaps. When I went to see Leon yesterday afternoon, his right eye was open and I brought my chair very near to the bed and put my face close to his, but he didn’t turn his head to look at me. I said his name quite a few times and once before when I did this he rolled his head on the pillow and stared at me. But yesterday I might just as well have said Henry Cooper or Lord Olivier, he could have been either of these and not known it just as he seemed not to know that he is Leon Constad and will die in spite of all the expensive care he’s getting unless he begins to fight. I think when I go to see him this evening I shall make a fist like a Black Power athlete and grit my teeth as I do it to help him get the idea of fighting. But if he won’t do this and plans to die, then Lord knows how I shall begin on all my days waiting for me, so that I can only hope and hope and even turn Catholic again in my hoping that “he will almost certainly pull through, Mrs Constad, because worse stroke cases than his have rallied – at his age – but of course it really is too early to tell . . .”

  Christmas is almost here again. The barrow boys with their dyed greenery are cold and wet; Harrods is lit up. I feel sorry for the men painting the window-sills, swaying on hanging trolleys outside the flat in their white coveralls and so cold out there that now and then I ask them in and make cups of tea for them and we always talk about the weather and this day being more raw than that and will it snow for Christmas but I shouldn’t think so because it’s years since it did that. And I remember the way we sat, Leon and I, last Christmas Day and ate our Christmas lunch quite devoid of laughter or even kindnesses to each other, sat and were lonely and drank a bottle of claret and slept all afternoon, he on the sofa and I in our bed with the electric blanket turned on. Nobody telephoned us and we can never telephone Alexandra because there is no telephone in the cottage. In the evening, a client of Leon’s, one of his co-respondents staying at the Ritz for Christmas with his girlfriend, came for a drink, though why he wanted to when he might have drunk more graciously at the Ritz Bar I really couldn’t see. And Leon had also asked the Hazlehursts, who seem to spend their lives going out for drinks, and the Hazlehursts brought Gerald Tibbs, thinking he might like to get out on Christmas Day.

  You could tell as soon as Gerald Tibbs walked in that he was lonely. His wife hadn’t come back, hadn’t even come to take her furs or the gilt-framed pictures of the children, so he said, and not a word had he had from her so that it had crossed his mind she might have been blown up on one of the chemical factory explosions you hear about in Milan. And after he’d said this, he began to drink and drink, obliterating the idea of his wife’s body being blown to pieces in Italy and his hands stopped shaking and turned themselves into gesturing hands so that with his pale face he looked like a bad mime artist. Then he suddenly walked out of the room and I could hear him being sick in the lavatory, where he stayed, lying down on the floor, until I could persuade the Hazlehursts to stop drinking and take him home. Flecks of his vomit were everywhere in the lavatory, as if in his gut a bomb had exploded.

  The co-respondent and his girl stayed on. The co-respondent talked to Leon about the case and the girl-friend who had left her two daughters for the bed of this man said almost nothing, as if she was killing time until she got back to the Ritz. Then, as they were leaving, she turned to me and said: “It’s awfully strange, don’t you think – Christmas without children?”

  Leon, who had been full of professional noise while all the drink was being drunk, returned to silence as soon as the door had closed on the guests. I cleared away the glasses and the dirty ashtrays and Leon sat motionless on the sofa with one of his small cigars.

  “Thank God the day’s nearly over!” he said, and about ten minutes later he said this again with such loathing for all that he could see and feel and hear that I thought, oh Lord why aren’t I somewhere else, why aren’t I in the sunshine in the Bahamas where I’ve never been, only read about, sitting by a pool with my dark glasses on and an iced cocktail stuck with bits of fruit waiting for me on a cane table? Quite alone, I would go in and out of the pool all day, exercising my body and then resting it. I would talk to no one, only nod to the waiters. I would listen to some singing. Natives on a beach singing or chanting. I would watch the sun glint and glare on the water and then flame red-gold, still warm but casting long shadows, shadows of palm and beach house and of the natives still there singing on the beach, some with their brown legs calf-deep in the gentle lapping water. I would absorb all this into me, sight and sound, and then make my way to a cool room with louvered shutters, lie down on a bed and feel the burning of my skin against the cool sheets. I would lie very still on the bed, quite undisturbed and at peace.

  This reminds me that when Leon was strong and full of fight and knew he wasn’t Henry Cooper or Lord Olivier I now and then wanted to be rid of him, finding his miseries oppressive. That Christmas – last Christmas – he chose to be in mourning for Noel and his mourning was a dreadful thing to be with because it was so black and deep. I almost wished Leon’s mother could have returned from her wide grave to make messy kosher meals for her boy and to raise her eyes to heaven now and then and say: “Sons, oh my Lord!” which was a thing she often said to me when Leon was disagreeable and I would agree, thinking of Noel with his noise and boasting. She might have made us both laugh and forget that our children had chosen not to be with us. But as it was, Leon’s misery began a slow seepage into me so that I thought more and more of being in the Bahamas and away from London and from Leon, even envying Alexandra her cottage with the comforting chicken noises and its log fire, thinking anything would be better than this when Leon is never comforted by me, however hard I try.

  What I didn’t know was that during that Christmas it began. The shape of my family changed. And ever since, voices, some in my head such as my mother’s genteel voice, and some simply whispering in my ear have said to me: “Of course, Ruby, you never should have let this happen!” And if I reply – which I seldom do, thinking to myself, why should these bossy, busy people concern themselves with my family which is so acutely a part of me and so little a part of them – I say: “‘Let’ is idiocy, ‘let’ is irrelevant. I wasn’t there.”

  I was in London with Leon’s mood fouling my air. By the end of Boxing Day, I could hear the singing of the natives on the beach and see the sunshine on their bodies and on mine, so much did I want to be away. I think I even talked to Leon of going to the Bahamas but he didn’t listen and the day after Boxing Day when he should have gone back to the office, he didn’t go and instead stayed in bed the whole day, not sleeping though he said he felt tired, but going through all the photograph albums, huge
leather albums filled with his own snaps of the children, their whole lives caught there, faces changing and growing, pictured numberless times.

  Leon is very fond of the albums. When he started to become rich from the river of the famous and adulterous that began to flow through his office, he bought himself a very expensive camera and with this camera at his sharp brown eye tried as hard as he could to become Cartier-Bresson. But Leon is a very bossy photographer, always telling you where to frame yourself and how to have your hands, whereas Cartier-Bresson doesn’t seem to be bossy at all, so that his subjects turn out just the way they are in their panic or their joy. And it’s quite difficult to believe that Cartier-Bresson didn’t build himself deerstalkers’ hides all over Paris, because no one in his pictures ever seems to know he’s there, “and this is the way you should be, Leon,” I often said, “if you want us all to be the way we are, you have to become invisible.”

  Another disappointing thing about Leon’s photographs is that they all tend to be of people eating, because a lot of the time he forgets about trying to be Cartier-Bresson and only remembers it on picnics or on holidays in France so that hundreds of the pictures are framed by café awnings saying things like Au Cheval Blanc or Chez Jacques or by glades where the family has spread its ancient groundsheet to tuck into cold chicken and salami sandwiches. And really, going through the albums, you can imagine that all the Constad family ever does is eat or learn to ride tricycles and occasionally walk up mountains in Wales wearing anoraks, and you certainly wouldn’t believe that any of us lived in London, for there’s hardly a snap of it or that Noel had ever had acne because Leon never photographs anything ugly like blocks of flats or spots.