Letter to Sister Benedicta

by Rose Tremain

  He held out his right arm and I took this to be a sign that he wanted lifting. He was heavy to drag up on to the crumpled pillows. I wished I was Matron with her strength and her “years of experience of these sort of cases, Mrs Constad”, and I did a very mediocre job of lifting Leon, so that he looked tilted and uncomfortable and I thought, why do I do everything so badly and by halves, like my healing of Gerald and my loving of Noel?

  I stayed only a short time. I talked a little, and while I talked, Leon slid down the bed again, needing to rest, it seemed, to gather strength for the next day’s walk down the corridor.

  I told Leon that a new year was coming in a few days and we would at last be free of 1977, which had been the worst year of our lives, worse even than the freezing winter I spent in my grandmother’s house in 1946 when never a day passed without someone grumbling out the word “rationing” and my cold room was the only refuge in a place gone sour with my grandmother’s leavings, the spilt sherry and the urine-stained cushions.

  “I’m looking forward to next year,” I told Leon. “It’ll be a year of patching-up. You’re on the mend now and let’s try to mend everything that’s broken in our lives.”

  Leon’s eyes were closed. I think it’s ages now since he’s listened to a word I say, and even these days, when I’m his only visitor, he doesn’t seem inclined to give me his attention for long. Or perhaps it’s just this weariness of his, that Matron wants him to strive against, but which seems to come from deep inside him and if he could talk, he’d look at me each day as he looked at me when he came back from America and say: “I’m tired to death.”

  Before I left – as soon as I said I was leaving – Leon opened his good eye, reached for the slate and wrote: “bring the albums”. There are eight albums and they are all extremely heavy, so I shall have to take them to the nursing home one by one, beginning chronologically with the pictures of me when we moved to Chelsea and Leon spent a month’s earnings on his expensive camera and began to feel like Cartier-Bresson: me at thirty in a webbing belt and pleated skirt and white-rimmed sunglasses, when Noel and Alexandra were tiny children on kiddicars in our backyard garden. There are dozens of almost identical snaps of me smiling and holding one or other of the children, and it was only later on – in the third album, I think – that Leon noticed that many of the people in Cartier-Bresson’s photographs aren’t smiling at all, but in fact look full of tribulation and confusion. And from then on, he kept saying to me: “I don’t know where you’ve got this idea of smiling from, Ruby. For heaven’s sake take the smile off your face!” In consequence, in the last four or five of the albums I invariably look very glum, so that Grandma Constad once remarked: “Why does Ruby come out so terribly in your snaps, Leon?” And Leon, who hated his photographs to be called “snaps”, snapped: “She’s not photogenic, Mother. It’s not my fault.”

  Once or twice, Leon let us all smile – in the cafés in Brittany in front of our Orangina bottles, or tobogganing on Wimbledon Common one snowy January Sunday. We smiled at the summit of Snowdon, but the clouds came down on our moment of triumph and we suddenly lost Leon and his camera who had only been a few feet away and our smiles vanished as we imagined him loosing his footing and plunging down the mountain to his death.

  The last album is – or was – Leon’s favourite, because at least half of this one is filled with pictures taken in Cambridge when he and Noel spent a weekend there “to get the feel of Cambridge, Noel” before the term began. It was August and very hot. The buildings look golden. Leon lay in a punt and photographed Noel as he punted. They sat in a pretty riverside pub and Noel photographed Leon whose skin had gone brown in a day, and he looks burnished with content in a strange floral shirt that he’s never worn since because it reminds him of that day, one of the most perfect of his life.

  I suppose it might be wisest to bring him the last album first and let him look at Noel. Ever since the day when he wrote “bring Noel” on the slate, I have wondered how he might react if Noel was suddenly brought back from the room in Avignon where I imagine him – cheap, musty room with grey lace at the window and a communal W.C. down the corridor – brought back as he is and not as Leon wanted him to be with his liking for pubs and his innate understanding of the law. No doubt Leon would weep, because he weeps at all things and can’t stop himself which Matron says is quite normal and is to be expected for some time to come – but whether he would weep with anger or despair or joy if he woke up one afternoon and found Noel sitting by his bed, I’m unable to tell. I only remember that in the autumn, when Leon found out that Noel and Alexandra had been together in France and that Noel wasn’t ever coming back to Cambridge to follow the path chosen for him, his Jewish rage came gushing out of him so violently that he seemed insane, but Noel who was in Avignon never saw it, only imagined it perhaps as he lingered on in France as the weather grew colder and he thought of the autumn term in Cambridge going by without him. Perhaps Leon’s anger with Noel has just passed through him – as mine seems to be passing through me – and is gone without a trace, and if Noel did go to the hospital, Leon would shed tears on the hand he held and forget all about Cambridge and the weekend they had there, just the two of them, when the sun shone and his hopes for Noel were high.

  To be safe, however, I think I shall start by bringing the first of the albums, because I don’t think Leon could feel anger for children on kiddicars or playing on a windy beach in Wales, or indeed for me when I was young and still in the habit of smiling. And if he felt any nostalgia for those black and white faded days, he could comfort himself with the reminder that he’s come a long way since then when his office was above the gym and his telephone was silent right through the night.

  Then it occurs to me that Leon may only want the albums in order to tear them up, page by page, and send all those years flying into the hospital dustbins, wishing that he’d never tried to become Cartier-Bresson, when now the limit of his world is a few feet of corridor and his camera eye is closed. I don’t mind if he does destroy them (though I doubt if his right arm is strong enough to tear out the thick pages) because the albums are full of ghosts, and even my own ghost is malicious sometimes and begins to haunt me, and it might be much better if all the ghosts were thrown away and I held them only in my head, just as I hold your ghost, Sister Benedicta, knowing that my memory is blurred and feeble and one day I shall look there for the ghosts and find them gone.

  DECEMBER 30

  I saw a nun today on the tube. Her feet inside the black lace-up shoes looked pinched, as if she was a child of poor parents who couldn’t afford new shoes and had told her: “You’ll have to make do.” Perhaps her feet really were hurting her, because she looked very cross and unable to stop her nun’s heart from spilling over with irritation, thinking, why am I here on a freezing December morning with the sacrifice of my life pressing on my toes? Why am I being jolted across London with the stares of unbelievers and their turned backs showing me no gratitude for my years of selflessness and my winters of lightweight clothing?

  I stared at her face and pale eyes that had never worn a trace of make-up even when she was young, and wondered what God ever said to her now that her life was half-way gone and the stink of God’s world crawled up her nostrils. Perhaps she had been born on Valentia Island and christened Mary and never a day passed without her remembering Ireland, where even the sea was Catholic and God lay curled in the miracle of a pink cowrie shell.

  The nun got off the tube at Charing Cross station. She carried a black hold-all. Off to relatives in Kent to celebrate a new year of obedience? Not liking the relatives in Kent with their cosy hearths and their warm tweed suits, wanting only to be back with the Sisters, wherever they were, waking in the six o’clock darkness to start each day with a blessing and a sip of Jesus at her throat.

  “We don’t really look forward to the school holidays,” you told me once, Sister. “We miss the girls.” And of course this was so, because the girls, with their high, English voices
, kept out the sound of India that you knew would never go away, but was always there, just outside the gate, and what could you do to keep it out when there were so few of you and India was so vast, it sometimes seemed as if it filled the globe and that England had long ago been buried beneath it. “No, we don’t look forward to the holidays!” I didn’t either, Sister. My house was full of the belly-laughs of soldiers and there was no peace in it.

  I saw the nun on my way to the London Library with Leon’s London Library ticket in my handbag and an idea in my mind that I would go there and look for a little book about India that might tell me something about the way it is now and what has happened there in the thirty years since the last British soldiers passed through the Gateway of India on to their waiting ship.

  I don’t go to the London Library very often and in consequence forget my way around its metal gangways and have to keep asking where things are and this infuriates the staff who are used to writers and professors like A. J. P. Taylor who knows the Library as if it were the lines on the back of his hand and never asks for anything. For me, it’s a bit like playing “Hunt the thimble” with no one to shout “cold” or “warm” or “boiling!” and I feel like walking out again without a book, except that I’m afraid to walk out without a book in case the staff believe I’ve stolen one and put it in my handbag. I wander on, guided by numbers and categories, and when at last I came to a section which said “History – oriental” I saw at once that there are no small books about India, only very thick ones, and I felt very glad that I hadn’t asked for a small book at the desk, when of course the complexity of India could never be compressed or ignored and all who write about India do so at great length and I should have been prepared for this.

  On my way home, on an empty, middle of the morning tube, I started the one book I eventually selected (the smallest in the section, but I’ll come back and get a bigger one next time) and it began with an extract from a speech made by the Finance Minister of Congress on 4th August 1975. “The topmost people in India today,” he said, “can have any number of servants; two servants in the kitchen and another two servants in the drawing-room,” and I thought of our four servants and the way they kept us in idleness for a pittance and can’t help but feel there is a connection and that although we are long gone, some of our ways linger on and where on earth are the head and heart of India if this can happen? We hear about the poor, the millions of them, landless, poorly clothed, starving. Photographers take pictures of them; the pictures win prizes at photographic exhibitions. But we don’t hear about these “top-most people” with their servants, and I wonder who they are? I shall try to read my library book carefully so that I understand who they are and what they’re doing in big houses with servants, building walls round their houses, just as we did, to keep out the beggars at their gates.

  London has been very silent today, waiting perhaps for the last day of the year to come and go and the new year to begin. Or maybe I just haven’t noticed London because I’ve been thinking about India and been wearied, as the day went on, by the notion that there is a beggar at the gate of every person and only those who have nothing are quite free of them. In my imaginings, Sister, the beggars change shape: deaf old girl in pre-war tenement doesn’t hear the popping of her gas fire, doesn’t know her shilling’s run out till she looks round and the room is like ice and all her shillings are gone; grubby child dressed in gypsy rags sells dry heather wrapped in foil up and down Knightsbridge, pushes the heather almost up the noses of the powdered women who walk there with crocodile handbags and they don’t buy the heather; two Pakistani boys prop up their badly-made Guy and ask for 10p though it’s not even November yet, and “Who was Guy Fawkes?” I ask. “Some old geezer,” they say and I pass on without opening my bag and I hear them ask everyone who passes – “10p for the Guy!”, all the rush hour people scuttling home in suits, “10p for the Guy, sir, please?”

  I was too full of my thoughts about beggars to risk seeing Leon, who has spent his life running away from being poor and sees poor people only as reminders of Liverpool in the 1930s and Grandma Constad’s bleak little house in Stokeley Street that was one of the worst streets in the city and you could hear the rats squeaking in the dark and “thank heavens they came along one day and said they were pulling it down”. Leon’s eyes have a membrane that closes at the least manifestation of poverty. Even Christine, with her army surplus coat, was poor enough to wake up Leon’s unease, and Evelyn Wainwright was much too poor for him to take on – though in the Fleet Street gym days he had some poor clients and I can’t imagine now how he was able to bear them and the terrible waiting he had to endure before he was rich and could snatch his mother away from her high-rise flat, put her into a little dressed-up Chelsea house and forget that he had ever breathed the Liverpool air.

  I had planned to take along the first of the albums today. Instead, I forgot all about Leon, letting the day pass without a visit to the nursing home or the Oratory.

  Towards evening, I began once again to wonder about Noel and to wish he would send me a card, because his silence has begun to terrify me and I wonder if I shouldn’t go rushing across France in search of him, leaving Leon to mend without me. Perhaps he’s planning to be silent for ever, and we shall never know, even when we’re very old, what became of him after he took Alexandra to the sleeper for Boulogne. “Didn’t he leave a poste restante?” I asked Alexandra when she came back, but she laughed and said: “Noel never rests! He’s probably halfway across the world by now with his whore.” I can’t picture this “whore” of Noel’s. Alexandra never described her. All I know is that he found her at the beach café.

  The sun had shone ever since Noel and Alexandra had arrived in Nice in early July and put Alexandra’s mini on the ferry for Ajaccio. They found a room at the Hotel des Etrangers in a quiet street in the heart of the old town, telling the patronne they would stay until their money ran out – for a month at least.

  “We felt so glad to be abroad,” Alexandra told me, “because nobody knew us. And at Easter, when Noel came to stay with me, he’d been worried all the time that someone might find out and write to you. He wanted to go and see Sue and make her swear never to tell a soul, but I stopped him. I knew Sue was still unhappy; she didn’t want to see Noel again.”

  Ajaccio, once a quiet stone-built harbour town, has sprawled back over the hills behind it and the old town is dwarfed by the new, the big hotels and apartment blocks. Leon and I went there once on a co-respondent’s yacht, and I found it a restless, noisy place after the quiet bays our gleaming yacht had discovered on the west coast of the island. When I think of Corsica, I never give Ajaccio a glance, and remember only the clarity of the water and the relentless cicada music that goes on day and night in the pines and on the dry, scented hills, and it seems rather strange to me that Alexandra and Noel should have decided to play out their love there, in a quiet old street, when they might have moved on up the coast and found that the sea occasionally crept into little coves where hardly anyone came and where the sand was white.

  Alexandra had told Leon and me that she was going abroad with Sue; Noel had informed us he was going to stay with Trevor, who shared his digs at Mrs Walton’s, and that they might go off to France or Italy at some time during the vac. Leon and I had a dusty fortnight in Malta at the end of July and tried not to think that Christmas and Easter had come and gone and now the summer was gently passing and in all that time our children hadn’t been home.

  One morning, on our Maltese balcony, as Leon sat and watched the hot day begin, he said to me ominously: “I think something’s wrong.” And when we returned to London, he telephoned Mrs Walton to ask for Trevor’s number. He rang this at once and Trevor answered and said: “Noel? I don’t know where he is. I haven’t seen him since the end of term.” So that all through August and the first week of September, when Alexandra came home, Leon fretted, just as he had done at Christmas, and nothing I could say was of any comfort to him.

&nb
sp; I remembered how I had lied to my mother, lied about my visits to the Reiter’s house, lied about my loathing of my grandmother, lied about my meeting with Leon, until I knew I loved him and couldn’t lie any more. But I lied in the belief that my mother, being the insubstantial person she was, had no automatic right to the truth: I blamed her for my lying, not myself. And when I found out that Noel was lying to me, I began to ask myself, what have I done to deserve his lying? I lay awake beside Leon, asking the question, asking and asking, but knowing the answer, pretending that I didn’t know it, pretending that in all his years I had given Noel my love and knowing really that it was a beggarly love and not worthy of the truth.

  We didn’t know then that Alexandra was lying too. She sent us a card from Ajaccio saying: “Sue and I and the mini have made it to Corsica, which we love. Weather is on the postcard. Love, A.” And we had no idea that Sue was with her parents in King’s Lynn and that Alexandra and Noel made love each night in their rented room in a tree-lined backstreet of Ajaccio, and spent their days on the beach with their bottle of wine and olives and cold meat for a picnic, going now and then to drink Coke or beer at the beach café, the café where Noel found the girl.

  They stayed on in Ajaccio. In August, the beaches were very crowded, but they didn’t mind, rather enjoyed the jostling for places and sunshades, became friendly with some of the people they met on the beach every day, and only occasionally got in the mini and drove the winding route up the west coast of the island, finding on the way some of the little bays Leon and I had swum to from our yacht, stopping there to swim or go in search of a village café, sit there the whole morning, watching the young people go by on their mopeds in the patterning of plane leaves on a white square. They were as brown as berries. They felt that because they had been there a month now, they had taken shallow root in Corsica’s hard summer earth and no one would move them until autumn came.