Letter to Sister Benedicta

by Rose Tremain

  “Our room in the hotel grew so familiar,” Alexandra said, “that I began to think of it as home. I thought we might stay on and on there, because I couldn’t imagine ever leaving. I told Madame Gilbertini we’d stay till the season was over, and she changed all her bookings around so that we could keep our room. We wanted to keep that room because we belonged in it. I felt it was ours.”

  In the second week of August, Alexandra cabled Leon for some money. “Damage to mini,” her telegram read, “need £100 urgently.” Leon sent the money and with it a letter saying didn’t Alexandra think it was only fair to spend a little time with us in London before term began and she went back to the cottage? Alexandra didn’t reply to this, only sent another cable saying the money had arrived safely.

  Alexandra didn’t need the money for the car. She wanted to stay on a bit longer at the Hotel des Etrangers and Noel had begun to say their money was running low and hadn’t they better think of going back to England? Alexandra took fright. How could Noel suggest this, when she only had to look at their bodies to know that they had been transformed by the sunshine? How could he think of waking and looking out anywhere but through their wistaria-covered window in the room that had held their secret safe for so long? She began to accuse Noel: “You’re tired of me. You’re ashamed of it all in your heart.”

  She sent Leon the cable, hoping that once they had money again, Noel would forget his talk of going back. The thought that Noel’s love was shallow and would pass made her cry silently in the hot nights while he slept. Surely he would love her as long as they stayed in that room, heard the tom-cats fight in the dark and woke each day to the threads of sunlight coming through the shutters? She was afraid of England with its end-of-summer gales and the routine of its year. Even the cottage became a dread: Noel will leave me there and never come to see me and that will be the end of it all.

  When the £100 arrived from Leon, Noel agreed to stay until the first week of September. But sometimes in the mornings now Alexandra would wake to find that Noel had slipped out without a sound. He would come back long after she’d eaten her breakfast and got ready for the day. He told her he’d gone for a walk or had a coffee down at the harbour, watched a big yacht come in.

  In Corsica there is a saying that after Napoleon’s birthday on August 15th, the weather breaks. The town that gave the Emperor to the world celebrates with parades and feasting and then goes oddly silent, waiting for the rain. Often it rains for two weeks and the old city is awash with floating garbage and the smell of limp flowers, which was how it was when Leon and I got off our yacht, so that I’ve never seen it in sunlight. True to its custom, it began to rain on the day Leon’s money arrived, and the rain kept on for ten days, and Noel said again and again: “I don’t know why we decided to stay on. We might as well be in England.” But the rain didn’t put him off his morning walks, and the nights had a habit of uncovering a skyful of stars, so that Madame Gilbertini would nod at them from her desk and say: “Vous voyez, il fera beau demain!”

  Then one morning it was fine and hot again. “You couldn’t imagine it had rained for ten days,” Alexandra said, “the whole town was dry in a few hours, even the café awnings and the public benches.” But when she and Noel got down to the beach, they noticed a big crowd at the water’s edge and saw when they came near that the storms had washed up a dead porpoise. Its lumpish blue-grey body, coated with wet sand, looked ugly and immovable in the midst of the raffia beach mats and the sunshades and Alexandra didn’t want to be there on the beach until it had been taken away.

  She and Noel got in the car and drove north-east out of the town towards Vizzavona. The road winds steeply up; wild rosemary grows among the maquis of those hard hillsides and the air, buzzing with cicada sound, is a balm. I know the winding road to Vizzavona; there is a good restaurant in the little hill town, and Leon’s co-respondent who was always in pursuit of good restaurants, hired a car in Ajaccio and drove us all up there for lunch. I enjoyed the drive more than the lunch. I asked the co-respondent (who was called Walter J. King and was president of his local Wine and Food Society back home in California) to stop the car so that I could walk for a few minues in the sunshine that had eluded us in Ajaccio, but up here was giving an extraordinary shimmering light to the hills. I can imagine Alexandra and Noel on that road, stopping perhaps where I stopped and then discovering that sixty feet below them ran a clear stream and deciding to scramble down to it and bathe because they were hot in the small car and Alexandra felt full of joy and hope again, now that the rain had gone. They drank their bottle of wine by the stream, and Alexandra wanted to stay there all day with Noel until the sun went down. But Noel said no, if they were going to Vizzavona, they ought to be on their way. Alexandra lay still and waited. She wanted Noel to change his mind. “We hadn’t loved for days,” she told me, “and here was a beautiful hidden place. I waited for Noel to touch me, but he didn’t. He pulled me up and we drove to Vizzavona in silence.”

  In Vizzavona, they sat on a white wall and listened to the church bells. It was a wedding day and the whole town had stopped to marvel. In the cafés, some of the men wore suits with bits of fern and flowers in their buttonholes; their glasses were filled and refilled with pastis before they got up noisily and made their way to the church. “We sat on our wall and thought the bride might come by,” said Alexandra, “but she went another way and we never saw her and then the church bells stopped and the cafés were empty and we felt left out.”

  When they arrived back at the Hotel des Etrangers, Alexandra was tired after the hot, empty day, lay down in the shuttered room and went to sleep. She woke at nine and it was dark and there was no sign of Noel. “I was very hungry,” she told me, “but I didn’t want to sit in a restaurant on my own, so I decided to go down to the beach café, which played records in the evening and sold pizza. I couldn’t find the car. I suppose Noel had taken it, so I walked. The beach seemed a long way off in the dark.”

  When Alexandra got to the beach, she saw that a group of boys had poured petrol over the dead porpoise and were burning it. Oily flames flared up at the water’s edge; the burning flesh smelt of charred salt. But the fire, reflected in the sea, seemed to light up the whole beach, and it was in the light of the burning porpoise that Alexandra saw Noel walking away from her along the beach with his arm round the girl who sold pizza at the beach café. Alexandra stood still and watched her. She wanted to believe that it wasn’t Noel’s arm that held her. She followed. She heard Noel laugh and the girl from the beach café laughed and then the two of them began to run, hand in hand, on and on along the beach, racing into the joy of being together and laughing at the world left behind.

  Alexandra walked very slowly back to the room at the Hotel des Etrangers. Madame Gilbertini smiled at her as she handed her the key. Alexandra took the smile with her to the room, knowing it only needed a smile to release in her the inevitable tears, thinking as she cried, I should have been crying and crying ever since the day I first touched Noel. Because she had known all along that he had a soldier’s heart and would defeat her.

  DECEMBER 31

  The last day of my long year. I must go to see Leon today, to put the year in its place, to remind him that this is the end of it, and tomorrow we might begin, as I was taught at the Convent School, to make resolutions.

  I believe I’ve already made rather a contradictory resolution, which is to break my habit of obedience to Leon and begin to feel free of him. This doesn’t mean that I won’t care for him when he comes home. I would do anything for him: I would clean him up and wash him like a baby. But I see, now that I’ve been without him for a while, that he has been quite free of me all our lives, free to consult his own head and heart, but never mine. And my head and heart have grown so unused to being consulted, so used to being disbelieved, that they have become small and covered themselves and let me go on and on in my confusions, so that my soul is like the soul of Harrods – very small as souls go, and always in pursuit of
the unnecessary and the unobtainable.

  I have also begun to wonder whether, if I am to discover myself – head, heart and soul – I shouldn’t break at once with the illusive God who hides in the silences between thought and action and who never comes, Sister, never once when I’ve knelt down in the bathroom and prayed with my fists in my eyes, and who never even seems to notice the Faithful in the Oratory, paying the price of a bus ride for a candle, but stands aloof and lets their husbands die and their sons drown and knows He will not be blamed, only that the price of candles will go up as the years go on.

  Perhaps it is only that I have lost the habit of loving God, just as I never seemed to get the habit of loving myself. And if I persevered, I might rediscover it and feel His presence like a gleam of light in my skull. I don’t know, Sister. Sometimes, when I remember India, I think I only loved God just to please you.

  JANUARY 1 1978

  I did go to see Leon yesterday, but I had no time to write about this, because the evening with Gerald and Davina was very long and tiring and I have crept exhausted into this new year.

  An idiotic little word follows my thoughts: mudgen. While I was sitting with Leon yesterday afternoon, he reached for the first of the photograph albums that I had taken him and his chin jutted sideways and his mouth began to make the Chinese gurgling sounds I’ve heard before, but this time, he wasn’t content with them and struggled on, going red behind his eyes, until he came out with it: mudgen. He stared at me, waiting for me to understand. I was shocked that he’d made a word and wanted to ring for a nurse. I didn’t like the word, didn’t know what to do with it. I stared back at Leon and couldn’t speak. I wanted to say: “I can’t make anything of that, Leon. Don’t ask me to try.” But when Leon saw that I hadn’t understood, I could see him getting very angry and confused and he tried to make another word, one that I’d understand, but after another long struggle with his face, he said it again: mudgen.

  “Do you mean album, dear?” I asked frantically. “Al-bum. Do you mean that? Because I know there are eight, of course I do, but I couldn’t bring them all at once, Leon, they’re too heavy.”

  I waited. Leon shook his head and then began to try yet again to say what he wanted to say, but before the word came out, he lay back and shut his eyes and mouth and more of the tears that he sheds every day now slid down his cheeks and on to his pyjamas. I passed him the slate. (“Write it down, dear!” I heard my grandmother shriek.) He took it crossly and in very strong handwriting put: “Noel”, underlined it three times and handed it back to me. I looked at it and sighed. I took a breath before I said: “I’ve told you all this before, Leon, only you don’t remember things, dear, do you? I’ve told you, I don’t know where Noel is. If I did, I’d bring him here just as you asked me. Alexandra left him in Avignon when she got on the train and came home. She left him her mini, but she didn’t know where he was going or what he was going to do. He had very little money, so I expected – we expected, don’t you remember? – to get a cable, but no cable’s come. Sometimes I think I ought to ring up Interpol, Leon, though how you go about ringing them up I honestly don’t know, and perhaps even if they made a global search for Noel they might just miss him. He could be in a room in Avignon waiting for something to turn up, or he could be a waiter or a road cleaner or selling the Herald Tribune in the square of the Palais des Papes, though heaven knows if any Americans go to France in the winter when it can be so very cold.”

  I felt so angry with Leon for all this questioning about Noel that I found I was shouting at him. I wanted to cry. I wanted to shout: “You think you’re the only one in pain, Leon, but my days are almost as empty of life as yours and I have to keep going for you all, up and down the freezing London streets day after day, backwards and forwards, to hold your hand and pray for you and try to be strong enough to help you all in case you all come back to me – just in case.” But I’m glad now that I didn’t let my wave of self-pity go tumbling down on Leon. He has begun to try very hard at what Matron calls rehabilitation and this is brave of him and I must keep saying to myself, “he’s doing his best”, and try not to mind that he can’t manufacture a real word, try to forget that when he said mudgen, it sounded like an obscenity.

  I was glad to get away from the nursing home. Last night I dreamed I saw a pale crab creeping out of the sea at sunset; the sun on the water was beautiful and I thought, here at last is God’s gentle world, silent and perfect. But the crab began skittering on the grey sand as the sun fell lower, and I moved further and further from the water’s edge, hating the crab moving like a spider, aware that my feet were bare in the sand and that the crab was following my feet. I ran, and the crab skittered after me. The sun went down behind the sea and in the grey light the crab became invisible, invisible but near, and I thought, if only I had worn shoes I wouldn’t be so afraid, if only I had decided to protect myself . . .

  When I woke, it seemed very clear to me that I had been running from Leon and the hideous faces he makes and that far from wanting to care for him with my own hands, I don’t even want to be near him. I’m terribly afraid of these feelings. My only hope is that I shall shake them off and replace them with love and compassion of the kind Jesus felt for the lumbering dumb cripples who hobbled up the Mount of Olives for a touch of His robe. Or perhaps last night Gerald’s rum punch was flowing through me like a lie and my heart wasn’t really talking.

  Gerald had made an enormous bowl of punch, set fruit swimming in it like flotsam and called it “my own invention, Ruby, very alcoholic”. And the five of us there – Gerald, Davina, the Hazlehursts and myself – kept raising our silver-plated goblets to toast the slow arrival of 1978, until at last a tired midnight came and Gerald kissed Davina on the mouth and I wanted to say “that’s that, then” and drive home. But the announcement of the New Year released in Gerald a very uncharacteristic urge to make a speech, all through which George and Betty Hazlehurst stared at the carpet and Davina did tentative battle with a purple paper hat that kept slipping over her face. I watched Gerald’s eyes darting about in search of the goodwill he wanted us all to feel. “I can honestly say,” he declared, “that I feel this year to be New! I don’t expect any of you to understand the extent to which my wonderful Davina has changed my outlook on life; I can only tell you that she is the most wonderful, patient girl I’ve ever met and that I shall be a very, very proud man the day she becomes Mrs Tibbs.”

  I couldn’t help feeling that it was the rum punch that had enabled Gerald to refer to Davina as a girl, and that when his eyes are seeing clearly, they can’t fail to miss the signs of her unspoken journey towards fifty. She is a sandy-coloured person with grey eyes awash in a face that doesn’t often smile. She talks as if she was balancing a china teacup in her hands; she has walked her way through a childless life on fragile legs in heavy shoes. As I watched her little mouth open for Gerald’s kiss, I thought, she is a strange object for passion – even for Gerald’s rather English and unpassionate passion – but at least this probably makes her safe from Italians and perhaps this is the most important thing, because, whatever happens, we must pray that Gerald stays in one piece now that he’s so completely mended.

  “Are you completely mended?” I whispered to him when Davina was out of the room, but he turned his reddening eyes on me like firebrands and said accusingly: “Davina doesn’t like it talked of!” and wandered away from me. And I know now that Gerald will spend the rest of his life pretending that he never loved Sarah and that Davina is no more than the angel of his forgetting.

  I wondered if Gerald had told Davina about his ride on my roundabout of a body, because it was very clear to me all through the evening that Davina didn’t want to look at me or come near me and was wishing that Gerald had never invited me. She seemed quite happy to stand under the screeching roof of Betty Hazlehurst’s voice and didn’t jump away at George Hazlehurst’s Churchillian growling, but she hardly spoke to me, only to say: “I didn’t make the rum punch, Gerald did. And
we got the caterers in to do the food, because I’m not used to cooking for a party.” And I thought, this is probably what Gerald likes in her, this uselessness and trepidation, and when he holds her, he knows he is holding a child who will remain a child for ever and stay in the shelter of his arm.

  I had thought Gerald’s teenage children might be there at the party, but there was no sign nor mention of them and I didn’t dare ask him where they were in case, after paying for all that expensive hot chocolate in Austria, he’d decided to pack them off to Milan. If I was them, I think I’d rather be in Italy with a brown step-father, and a mother learning to do homemade ravioli, than waking every day to Davina’s timid eyes and the thump of her shoes like club feet. But perhaps they were still there in the house in Kensington and had merely gone to a New Year’s party of their own, wearing satin vests and with their hair frizzed. Teenage children seem to come and go from their homes like cats – or so the Smiths, who have teenage nephews and nieces, once said to me on the stairs – and have lost all sense of night and day and sometimes I feel rather relieved that I don’t know any of them, because on the whole they look rather cruel.

  There were some inquiries about Leon from the Hazlehurst’s at Gerald’s party, and it was after these that I left. I found that all the questioning about Leon, combined with the punch, made my head ache and I longed to lie down and give no thought to Gerald or Davina or Gerald’s children, or indeed to Leon or Noel or Alexandra, because it seemed to me, Sister, as I drove unsteadily home, that each year becomes another, becomes five, becomes twenty, and I have listened as patiently as I can to the noises of these people, but the noises are familiar and as sad as the dry leaves that blew down the corridors of the empty Convent School. Around them all is a high wall that allows no glimpse of a “beyond”. The wall has told me there is no “beyond”. But I am tired to death of the noises, Sister, and tired to death of the wall.