Letter to Sister Benedicta

by Rose Tremain

  “Noel?” Mrs Walton said, “Oh no, dear, Noel won’t be coming back.”

  “How do you know, Mrs Walton? Has he told you definitely?”

  “Oh definitetly, dear, yes.”

  “Did he write to you? Because the last time I telephoned you, you hadn’t heard from him and you didn’t know . . .”

  “Well, I had a card, yes.”

  “A card?”

  “Yes. He asked me to give his books to Trevor.”

  “Did he?”

  “Yes. A card from France, you see.”

  “Yes, I see.”

  “Now Trevor’s here. Would you like a word with Trevor?”

  “No. It was only Noel I wanted – on the off chance . . .”

  Noel is afraid. If he knew his father was dying and couldn’t say a word, he might come home. As it is, he may stay in France for ever, though how he’s living and where I can’t imagine, because living anywhere at all in France seems to cost such a lot that it makes you wonder whether everybody there, even the boys on mopeds and the cashiers at the Credit Lyonnais, isn’t a millionaire, for how else could they go on spending so much and getting so little and never being heard to say: “Ah non, alors!”

  Noel was always frightened of Leon’s Jewish anger. Jewish anger seems to burst out of Jewish people in a particular kind of way, with an astonishing fluency, words gushing and tumbling as if a hose had been turned on inside them by their two-thousand-year-old memory of pogroms and atrocities and there is no stopping them. Grandma Constad’s two-thousand-year-old memory of pogroms always seemed to be at its most alert on London buses in the rush hour when she felt her huge bum being pressed against some tired typist and as she grew older and wider her angry monologues got longer and longer until one day an extremely sensible West Indian bus conductor said to her: “You shut up your complainin’, mam, or I put you off at di next stop and never mind Moses!” And I don’t know if, after that, Grandma Constad ever went on another London bus because the West Indian conductor frightened her into silence, and as Grandma Constad was so seldom silent, I can only think that she must have suddenly remembered all the black people in the world who work down mines and live their lives in anger and grief and have to tell their children that life is anger and life is grief and that she felt ashamed.

  I dare say Noel feels ashamed of what he did. I feel ashamed of it, Sister Benedicta, because all that Alexandra has said seems to tell me that it was done quite without love.

  It had to do with Christine, undoubtedly. When Noel got to Alexandra’s cottage, all he wanted to do was talk about Christine. He let his hurt pride talk: he drank and swore and thought the drinking and swearing would heal his wound. But the next day, when he woke up in his sleeping-bag by the embers of the fire, fogged from the whisky and cold, he discovered that his wound was still there and he wanted to cry. Sue and Alexandra were up and had had breakfast. Sue was working in the garden and Alexandra was in the garage where she’d made herself a studio. They had seen Noel huddled asleep in his bag and had left him to sleep on, and once they had each begun their work they forgot about him until he woke up and began shouting for Alexandra. She heard him shouting and came in and saw that he looked quite lost and abject and thought, I can’t send him away – as she had planned with Sue in the early morning – and instead made him sit down in the kitchen while she cooked eggs for him and then stayed and talked to him, thinking after all he’s my brother whom I hardly know, not since we were kids and went to Miss Forester’s school.

  Sue came in with muddy hands and four eggs she’d collected from the coop. Less than six eggs from her hens and Sue was disappointed and when she saw that Alexandra had stopped work to make breakfast for Noel she felt cross, knowing that Alexandra had decided to let him stay. She sulked out in the garden for the rest of the day. Alexandra went out to her and said: “Sue, I’m sorry. Please understand that I can’t send Noel away and let’s try and make the best of it.” But Sue couldn’t see that there was any “best” to be made. She went on with her digging and said nothing, so Alexandra wandered away and tried to get on with her painting, only she found she couldn’t work because she felt trapped.

  She thought about herself and Sue. She asked herself if she loved Sue and knew that she didn’t. Yet she had been very content to let Sue love her, finding in Sue’s passion for her a kind of exhilaration she had never felt with a man. Sue would love women all her life; she would never love a man, couldn’t bear the hardness or the smell of a man’s body, but often wept with joy when she felt another woman’s shape and softness under her. She knew she was good at loving them. Her fingers and tongue could make them shout with pleasure. “I’m good,” she announced to Alexandra the first time she had taken her to bed, and Alexandra, who had never imagined until that night that she would make love with a woman had been shy and awkward, thinking as she lay there, what am I doing and what turn is my life taking? Then, to her surprise, she found she felt no guilt. Rather, she began to feel very content with Sue’s love and with her life which, for the first time, seemed-free from confusion. There was the cottage and there was her work at the Art School and there was Sue. She gave to nothing and no one else any time or attention, scarcely a thought even, so that Leon and I were among those she had come to forget and all of these forgettings mattered very little to her because she had found some peace.

  When Alexandra described to me what her life at the cottage had been like before Noel arrived, this was the word she used: peace. And I thought of the fathomless complexity of that word, knowing that I have hardly dared to use it since I was a girl and thought I had found it, Sister, sitting in your room with the sunset coming on. And yet I know that there was no peace in India and the sun glaring through your raffia blinds set on a false peace that the British wives of soldiers and sons and daughters of soldiers chose to believe in, safe inside their big houses behind tall white walls. And even you believed it, didn’t you Sister? thinking in your little nun’s heart, I shall be here for ever in the Convent School with the daughters of the high-ranking officers, and India – the India of the poor tin houses and the bazaars – will never creep in, I will never come face to face with India as long as I live.

  When Alexandra described the peace she thought she had found, I didn’t say: “There is no peace anywhere, unless perhaps it is the peace of God that passeth all understanding and certainly passeth mine and always has done”, but I listened and listened and tried to come close to imagining her life with Sue in the cottage that I’ve never seen. Alexandra knew and Sue knew that the peace had gone the night Noel walked in. It was as if a soldier had come to arrest them.

  I went to see Leon this afternoon. He showed no sign of having noticed my absence yesterday. One of the nurses looked at me accusingly, but I’ve often noticed that nurses have a way of looking at people accusingly, even at patients lying there with their legs on pulleys or their stomachs stitched up from top to bottom, and so I won’t infer anything from the look this nurse gave me and on the contrary feel rather cheered that Leon picked up his slate today and wrote “How long”. I couldn’t answer this of course, not knowing for certain whether it was a question or a comment and, if a question, to what it referred. “How long have I been here?” “How long shall I have to stay?” “How long will it be before I can get up?” “How long will it be before I know who I am and who you are and what has happened?” It could be any of these. I just don’t know. So I took the slate and rubbed out Leon’s “How long” and wrote “I don’t know” and showed this to him, hoping it might prompt him to ask a more explicit question in order to get a more satisfactory answer. But he stared at the slate quite blankly for a few seconds and then closed his eyes and never opened them again, even when it was time for me to go.

  I tried talking to him as I often do. But today I didn’t talk about the difficulty of getting taxis or the price of flowers; I asked him if he remembered things. I asked him if he remembered being a law student in London and meeting me for
the first time. “Do you remember, Leon,” I said, “how we met in the house of Max Reiter, the Austrian Jewish composer who had married my godmother Louise and teased her out of her Catholic ways until she wrapped up all her pictures of the Holy Family in calico and packed them away with mothballs? Do you remember Max Reiter? You came to dinner and I was there. You came with another Jewish boy, a student of Max’s. The Reiters always liked everyone to bring their friends, and chairs and place mats and extra portions of food appeared as if by magic for all these friends and no one ever complained, not even the cook. Do your remember Godmother Louise? She was in love with Max Reiter all her life. They used to make love very often, even when they were old, she told me. And yet they never had any children. They hadn’t got the time really because Max Reiter was always off on tours to Paris and Salzburg and Vienna and Rome and Godmother Louise always went with him so that they could make love in hotel bedrooms and never be separate from each other.

  “My mother always used to say Godmother Louise was barren. My mother said God had punished Louise with barrenness because she’d wrapped her pictures of the Virgin Mary in calico and stuffed them away. My mother didn’t like me going to see Louise after she wasn’t a Catholic any more; she tried to divest Louise of her godmothership! But I used to love the Reiters’ house in St John’s Wood that was always full of friends and friends of friends and where you never saw a soldier and no one talked about tea parties or tennis. I used to ask myself there as often as I could and I never believed in Louise’s barrenness – even though I was still a Catholic then and went to Mass every Sunday – because Max Reiter once said: ‘We don’t need children of our own, do we Louise, when we have Ruby and we have all my students?’ And Louise laughed and looked happy and in the Bible barren people never seem happy or full of laughter, but walk around with shawls over their heads, getting older and older and more and more barren and you know there’s no hope for them unless God does a miracle. And I know that Louise wasn’t barren and could have conceived hundreds of children in hotel rooms alone, but that all she wanted in her life was to be with Max and this was enough.”

  I stopped at this point, crept to the bed and looked very closely at Leon. He seemed to be asleep, breathing quite easily and I thought of leaving. I wondered if the effort of writing “How long” on the slate had exhausted him. Then it occurred to me that if he was resting as peacefully as he seemed to be, perhaps my talking soothed him and stopped him feeling afraid. For I have a suspicion – from the way his right eye looks when it’s open – that he is afraid. Perhaps his own silence terrifies him. Once or twice one side of his mouth has moved a little, as if he was trying to speak.

  I sat down again and whispered my little reminiscences to Leon and to the flowers, thinking neither Leon nor the flowers hears them. Twice a nurse came in to look at Leon and on the second occasion stood at his bedside and took a pulse reading. I didn’t stop talking. I reminded Leon that he had been a very shy person when I met him that evening at Max Reiter’s house, “not like the person you became, Leon,” I said, “so full of fight and proud of your big office and all your telephones. You had all the words and fight inside you, I expect, but you just weren’t using them very much then, not that evening anyway, but you chose to talk rather quietly to me. You told me you were working so hard to pass your law exams that you never had time to go to dinners and meet people and that you were only there because your friend Philip had insisted and because you had once heard a snatch of Max Reiter’s music on the Third Programme.

  “I told you that Louise was my godmother, that I came to the house often when Max and Louise weren’t abroad, and I believe, Leon, that you only decided to like me because of this, because you had discovered that you enjoyed being away from your law books in the house of a composer and wanted the Reiters to ask you there again. I say this, you see, because what else was there in me to like? I wasn’t fat then at twenty-two, but still plump. I couldn’t talk about law or music – the things that interested you. All I knew was India. Louise and Max pitied me for being a child of the Empire and wanted to teach me how to forget it. ‘India!’ Louise used to say, ‘I marvel that anyone ever thought that could last!’ So I wonder what we talked about sitting there at the dinner table at the first of all our meetings. I can’t remember.”

  I left the nursing home soon after that, not wanting to go on because of the nurses coming in and out and listening to everything I said. On my way out, I stood at the door for a moment, remembering my Black Power salute, but I didn’t do it. There didn’t seem any point when Leon’s eyes were closed and he couldn’t see it.

  I asked the taxi that picked me up in Harley Street to take me to the Oratory. After the glare of Leon’s little room I thought I would try to find you, Sister Benedicta, in that vaulted darkness and ask you to help me pray. I knelt down and tried to think of a prayer but not a word would come to me today, not a word, no God, not even the ghost of a nun, five foot two with her arms folded. I got up and went to light my candle, stood and watched it flicker and tried to calculate how long it would burn.

  DECEMBER 11

  One confusion is at last resolved. I know now who “the aforementioned Richard Mayhew Wainwright” is. Today there was a ring on my doorbell (strange occurrence these days because nobody calls, knowing that if they did call, they wouldn’t know what to say to me) and when I opened the door, there on the mat stood a lean woman with faded hair calling herself Evelyn Wainwright, holding her handbag to her as if it was a china plate and might break, and asking to see Leon. I was so surprised that anyone should ask for Leon that an immediate and totally unexpected statement burst out of me. “Leon’s dead!” I said, and seeing Evelyn Wainwright’s look of disbelief, had to qualify this by stammering: “Well, when I say he’s dead, I mean he’s not absolutely dead. He could die any day.”

  It seemed only fair, after this dreadful confusion to ask the woman in. We went into the drawing-room and she sat down on the edge of the sofa, still clutching her handbag and I waited for her to explain why she had called. She stared at me, sizing me up. Then she looked round the room.

  “It’s not as grand as his office, is it?” she said.

  “Leon’s office?”

  “Mr Constad’s, yes.”

  “Do you know,” I said, “I don’t remember the office very well. He had so many. He started with a very small one in an alleyway off Fleet Street. It was over a gymnasium and you could hear people thumping about all the time.”

  After a pause, Evelyn Wainwright said: “He is ill then?”

  “Yes, he’s very ill. He had a stroke.”

  “I shouldn’t have come then. You see, I didn’t believe them at Mr Constad’s office – that secretary of his – I didn’t believe he wasn’t there. I thought the secretary was hiding him and not letting me see him. I mean, they do this, the secretaries of important men: they hide them.”

  Evelyn Wainwright was moving nearer and nearer to the edge of the sofa and nearer to the edge of tears. I thought she might bump down on to her thin bottom with a wail.

  “Would you like a cup of tea?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. And the word sounded like a click coming from the back of her throat. I got up. It’s a long time since I’ve made a cup of tea for anyone but the window-sill painters.

  “Please do relax, Mrs Wainwright,” I said feebly and went to the kitchen. While I was there making the tea, I longed to peep back into the drawing-room and see if Evelyn Wainwright had let herself tumble back into the sofa. I realized that I wanted to keep the woman there until I had quite unravelled the mystery of her and discovered her connection with “the aforementioned Richard Mayhew Wainwright”, imagining that all of this was very important and would reveal to me more about the true state of Leon’s mind than anything the doctors had told me.

  When I went in with the tea, Evelyn Wainwright was standing at the french windows looking down on to the street, in the way that Leon had stood watching for Noel on the day th
at Noel never arrived.

  “Tea!” I said, and she turned round with a look of surprise. Then she crossed to the sofa and perched on it again, but this time without her handbag which had fallen to the floor.

  “I won’t stay long,” she said.

  “Oh,” I said; pouring the tea, “you can stay as long as you like. I expect I shall go to see Leon this afternoon, but I’ve really got nothing to do until then.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought of intruding on you – at a time like this. It was only that I didn’t believe them, you see. They said: ‘You can see Mr Partridge if you like,’ but I knew that Mr Partridge was young – younger than my son – and he wouldn’t have done a good job for me. So I said: ‘No, I must see Mr Constad. Mr Constad is the best. I’ve been told that he’s the best and I must have the best man or what hope do I have of winning my case?’ You see, Mr Constad – your husband – had mentioned this Partridge before. He said he was too busy to take on my case, but this Partridge would look after me. But ‘No’, I said, ‘I can choose who I want and I’ve been told you’re the best and my son will pay. It’s not as if you’re not going to get your money.’”

  I had poured Evelyn Wainwright a cup of tea and she tried to take a sip of it straightaway, but it was too hot and she went on talking. She didn’t look at me as she talked, but at a fixed point straight ahead of her on the carpet, as if she was trying to balance.

  “You see, I know I have a case. I know that with a clever man to speak up for me, I could win. But it’s not a usual case, you see, mother against son, and I knew Mr Constad didn’t want to take me on. He wanted to give me to Partridge, but I said no. And then the next time I went to see him – I had an appointment with him – his secretary said: ‘Mr Constad can’t see you today, but Mr Partridge will see you.’ So I said: ‘What is all this? It isn’t as if my son won’t have to pay and I want to see the best man. I need a really good man, or I shall lose. With Partridge I’ll lose, I know I will.’ So I went home without seeing anyone. I wouldn’t see Partridge.