Letter to Sister Benedicta

by Rose Tremain

  And what do I want with all Leon’s money earned from the famous co-respondents, fifteen guineas an hour for his innate understanding of the law and the thousands of invisible words that poured out of him year after year? All my life, I have been left sums of money – from my mother, from my grandmother whom I couldn’t bear to be near, even from Louise and Max who had no children to leave it to. I am rich. Riches have made me fat and silent.

  FEBRUARY 1

  Today I got an invitation to Gerald’s wedding. I won’t go to it. With the invitation, a note was enclosed (Gerald, in his new happiness, hadn’t wanted to ring me).

  My dear Ruby,

  I cannot begin to tell you how shocked I was by the news of Leon’s death. Surely, it was little expected and this must be a terrible moment in your life.

  Davina so enjoyed meeting you and shares in my heartfelt condolences. If there is anything, anything we can do for you, please do not hesitate to ring.

  Yours ever, Gerald.

  If Leon had come home and recovered his speech and stopped all the crying he did in the nursing home, I would have told him, sooner or later, about my sexual voyage with Gerald and we both would have laughed about it, because Leon often said to me in the days when he loved Sheila, “It would do you good, Ruby, to have an affair; I wouldn’t mind.” But I never did have an affair. There was nobody to have an affair with.

  The only other man I’ve ever longed to love, years ago before I met Leon, was Max Reiter. My loyalty to Louise – I hope – would have made me refuse Max if he had crept up to my cold room one night, and yet I often lay there, at the top of his house, imagining him and Louise in their big bed, imagining in my virgin head how the weight of Max’s body would feel on mine, his great rollocking, noisy body, whose smell I breathed ecstatically each time I was near him. But the only time I held Max’s head on my shoulder was when he was sitting in his armchair, soundless and dying of heartbreak, and chose one day to reach out for me and weep. The smell of him seemed to have changed by then. He smelled sour and musty, and only the years of my loving him and Louise made me stay close to him.

  FEBRUARY 2

  I wrote to Noel today. I should have written before, Sister. Tomorrow and it’ll be a month since Leon died, and I’ve made no effort to reach Noel, so that when he gets my letter – if he ever does – he’ll say to himself, why did it take her so long? I keep re-reading the letter and wondering about it:

  Dearest Noel,

  It was good to learn from your friend, Al, that you’re fine and working in Paris. I had worried about you.

  At home, Noel, a terrible and unexpected thing has happened. Your father died on January 3rd. He had been ill, darling, since early December when he suffered a severe stroke that paralysed parts of him. He couldn’t do anything for himself and couldn’t talk properly, but I didn’t let you know all this, because the doctors told me he would be well again one day if he was taken care of and none of them thought he would die. I went to see him every day and he did seem to be getting on better at the end of December, so that the day I met Al, I felt confident enough to say to him, don’t worry Noel with news of his father’s illness, because I thought he’d soon be home and on the road to recovery.

  I don’t know what to say. This has been such a troubled year, and the loss of Leon is terrible for us all. I believe that he loved me as well as he could and I shall never complain that he might have loved me more. But I know how very, very much he loved and regarded you. Never doubt this. No father could have loved his son more and when he was ill, although he couldn’t say your name, he kept writing it down and asking me to bring you to see him, which of course I would have, had I known where you were. Then you could have seen for yourself what happened.

  I imagined you in Avignon, I don’t know why. I’m glad you’re not there and I feel sure you have friends in Paris who will stay with you and let you cry, if you feel like crying. Or if you feel you’d like to come home for a while, here I am, Noel, with no disapproval or anger left in me, only a feeling that I haven’t seen you for a very long time and that I love you and Alex with all my heart.

  Please take care of yourself.

  Mummy.

  P.S. There is nothing for you or Alexandra in Leon’s will, but I shall remedy this and let you and Alex have his money, once Death Duties are paid. And if you need a little money now, please write and ask.

  P.P.S. This letter is inadequate to tell you what has happened, which is why I put off writing it for so long. I believe I have always mistrusted letters.

  My love once more, M.

  Only the letter to you, Sister, is important. It is helping me to make sense of my world. Sometimes, I write for most of the day and forget to eat, and when I see myself in Knightsbridge windows, I notice that I am thinner than on the evening we went to the Hazlehurst’s dinner party and I wore my mauve cocktail dress. If I were to try it on, I think my mauve dress would need taking in.

  FEBRUARY 3

  A month today since Leon died. A fortnight since Alexandra went back to Norfolk. My letter to Noel is on an aeroplane. In a few days, I might have word from Noel that he’s on his way, or word from Alexandra that the hens are laying again and the crisis of the year is passing, a little each day as her garden begins to push out signs of spring.

  But I tell myself I mustn’t think of Noel and Alexandra because they are as they are, just as the seats on London buses are of a certain size and shape and no amount of wailing and noise can change them, so that all the noise and wailing are utterly pointless and it is much better to endure the bus ride in silence, not giving a thought to the seats, glad to be on a bus, going somewhere.

  When I’m not writing this letter, I read my library book. I read about a dawn on the outskirts of New Delhi, a grey city dawn on the grey rags of an old man, the stick-boned body of all India’s poor, wakening to a terrible new day with a ravening stomach and a heart scarred by lack of hope. In the city centre, a boy in clean white socks rides in a rickshaw to school with a sterilized-water bottle and a packed lunch. The boy’s blue-black hair gleams with health as the sun comes up.

  I wonder if, now that Leon’s dead, I can go on using his London Library ticket? Because the book I chose is small compared to almost all the other books about India in the shelves there and surely isn’t big enough to explain to me why the old man lies in the gutter less than a mile away from the plump child riding in the rickshaw.

  My father used to say: “Independence for India is folly! The Hindu mentality is lazy and untrustworthy. The Hindu needs leaders – real men!” And if he was alive in his well-polished boots to see the distress of India today, he would say: “You see! All would have been well, if we’d stayed on. They wouldn’t be in this mess!” But I know, and perhaps you would have recognized in the end, Sister, that India had grown tired of us and our bossy ways and wanted us gone.

  But of course men like my father didn’t want to leave when they had been so spoiled and pampered and looked up to, and thought of themselves as superior beings. The War Office was chock-a-block with beings who thought themselves superior, so that in the end, all the superiority cancelled itself out and my father sat at his desk and mourned for his “men” and his white-clad servants, for the days when he was ruler. He mourned for all of this so much, just like Napoleon on St Helena saying: “When I think what I was and what I am now!”, that all his boisterousness and shouting went out of him and his hair began to moult and he took to farting in public, a thing he never would have done in his Indian days. My mother didn’t seem to notice or care that the boisterousness and shouting had gone, or that his hair was falling out, but the farting, she couldn’t bear that, it made her sick, she said, “and when I think,” I heard her whispering to my grandmother one evening, “that I’ll have to live with those . . . noises for the rest of my life!”

  In the end, she didn’t have to. Two years after our return from India, cancer of the bowel was diagnosed and my father was sent to the King Edward VII
Hospital for Officers. Waiting to die, he had only this to say: “It was sitting on my bum that killed me! I’d have been alright if they’d let me stay on in India.”

  For all my physical likeness to him, I never felt close to him and I never mourned him. “He’s an amiable buffoon,” Louise once said and that is how I have always thought of him, shouting and yet saying nothing, telling jokes – “not in front of the ladies, eh Rutherford!” – clowning and belly-laughing and now and again slapping a wet kiss on my cheek. I have lived my life quite happily without him. I shall go on remembering him now and then, but I never think of him with sadness. I’m glad that he and my mother aren’t alive now to meddle with my confusion. A cold wind sighs over their Wiltshire graves and I keep away.

  FEBRUARY 4

  I got on a Number 11 bus and went to Fleet Street today. I wanted to see if the gym and Leon’s old office were still there in their alleyway.

  The building is there, with its metal windows and air of neglect, but its use has changed. It belongs now to the Inner London Education Authority and is a centre for extraordinarily divergent things like Yoga and Accountancy. The room that was Leon’s office is presumably a classroom where foreign students can learn English and English students can learn foreign languages and Urban Planning and underneath them in the old gym, people come and go for Yoga and Judo and Flower Arranging. I stood for a while on the very spot where I used to wait for Leon, just inside the door, and read the long list of activities that went on there. I felt rather glad that no young, ambitious solicitor sat working away in Leon’s room and that the building was so productive and lively, and I realized of course that this was why I had come: I wanted to see and feel change.

  I felt sprightly on the bus home. I held the thought of the changed building in my head and it cheered me up.

  I haven’t been near the Oratory for days. I’ve begun to feel that I may never go in it again, that I have given it back to those who use it rightly. “You must remember this, Ruby,” you once said, Sister, “we must not go to God only when we are in trouble. God is not a government department.” And I know that you were right: this is not the Catholic way. But I’m not a Catholic any more, Sister. I’ve forgotten how to be one. In the Oratory, I always felt like a stranger and, worse than this, I always doubted. And the ghost of Louise with her whispered “Don’t let the priests come near me, Ruby,” laughed at my conversations with God. “What an odd way to try and save Leon!” she kept saying.

  And I think I knew that in the end Louise would win. Only if God had given me some sign, by saving Leon, might I have kept going on my journey back towards Faith. “But God seldom gives signs, Ruby. It is wrong of us ever to seek for signs.” And the truth is that I never found God in the Oratory. He never heard me.

  FEBRUARY 6

  Still no word from Noel. I imagine my letter on the five o’clock mail into the Gard du Nord, dumped on a metal trolley in a sack, this one sack forgotten. For surely if Noel had received it, he would have written straight away. He would have taken the day off, gone back to his room or walked around Paris and thought about Leon, who looked at his son the day he was born and said: “I see myself.” He would have remembered Leon’s hopes and boasting, the visit to Cambridge, the big carpeted office “that will be yours when you qualify for it, Noel”, and the tight little family we once were when we spent holidays in Wales and Leon played football with Noel on Harlech beach. And he would have wondered as he lay there or walked whether this death, coming quite soon after his loving of Alexandra, wasn’t his responsibility in some way, for he could only guess at what had happened after he put Alexandra on the train. He’d had no word from us and asked for none. He hoped we’d forgive him, perhaps, and that Leon, whose plans for him had been so ambitious with talks of partnerships and big salaries, had simply been wise enough to say to himself, “Plans are foolish and I should never have made them. I’ve only myself to blame.”

  Perhaps, if Al is back in Paris, Noel will take a holiday from selling organs at the Bon Marché and he and Al will drive home to England on Harrisburg money and my life will suddenly become busy again, cooking proper meals and ironing jeans. If they do arrive, I think I shall ask Al if I can go for a ride in the dormobile.

  FEBRUARY 7

  I went through Leon’s cupboards. I threw away some old, frayed shirts and all his underpants, but folded his other clothes, set them out on the bed, and made them into brown paper parcels to take to the Oxfam depot. All the things he’d had with him in the nursing home I threw away, and then I washed out all his cupboards and drawers, just as I would have done if the flat had been sold and I was leaving everything ship-shape for the new tenant. Only his study I don’t dare touch. It surely contains the folded corners of other people’s lives and I daren’t disturb these.

  I went straight down to Pimlico in a taxi with the Oxfam parcels and left them with an arthritic woman who was sorting through hundreds of pairs of shoes. “Some of the shoes in these parcels,” I began, indicating Leon’s, “have hardly been worn . . .”

  “Put them there,” she snapped, and I hurried out.

  The Oxfam depot is so full of discarded clothing that I couldn’t blame the arthritic woman if she couldn’t stand the sight of another load arriving, especially when so many of the clothes must be so unsuitable for their faraway destinations, and it’s hard to imagine earthquake victims in Ethiopia being content to stumble across the rubble of their lives in cocktail dresses.

  On the way home, a drizzle set in and I tied a plastic hat over my hair, looking very odd, like an American I suppose, and the wind blew the drizzle on to the backs of my legs and I thought of the snapping woman going through Leon’s nicely-made suits and saying to herself: “Another rich sod with money to burn.”

  Perhaps I should have taken more time deciding what to do with Leon’s clothes. Perhaps I should have waited to see if Noel wanted the cashmere cardigans and the silk ties, the expensive stuff of countless Christmases. Or Sheila? As I waited for a bus at the bottom of Lower Sloane Street, I wondered if in some clumsy way I might not have offered them to her, because Leon hadn’t dared to leave her anything, only the house with its painted window-boxes she cared for so meticulously and surely she was expecting something from him after she had given so much?

  Then I began to wonder if the Oxfam clothes might not one day find their way to India, where floods and disasters occur more often than in any other country in the world, and an image came to me on the bus of Leon’s crocodile shoes floating down the Ganges on the feet of a dead man.

  FEBRUARY 8

  An airmail letter arrived today from Noel. His handwriting has got much worse, as if he hasn’t practised writing at all since he left England, and I could hardly read what he’d put. The letter was quite short:

  Dear Mum,

  Al told me Dad had been ill. He’d never been ill in his life, had he? so I knew it was something serious. I considered coming back, but honestly I don’t feel ready for England yet.

  But poor you with all his memories and possessions. If you’d like me to come home for your sake, then of course I will, though I think you’ll have to send me the air fare. I’m still stuck with the organs as I can’t get a proper work permit, though they say I will in time.

  Paris is beginning to get rid of its winter and is a good place to be. I’ve done no crying for Dad. I don’t seem to want to. I’m no good at loving anyone.

  I wonder if you’ll stay on in the flat? It must be depressing for you and perhaps a move would be best.

  I could do with some money really. I can never eat out on what I earn and I’m tired of Al paying for everything. But could you send it yourself and not through Dad’s firm or anything. I can’t bear the word ‘solicitor’. Or come and stay for a few days.

  There is a nice hotel on the corner of my street, where I could book you a room.

  I think of you,

  Noel.

  FEBRUARY 9

  I have nearly finished my li
ttle book about India. This morning I read that the high-caste Indians who own the tea gardens have adopted the style of dress of their British predecessors, the shirt, shorts and knee socks that is like a colonial uniform, and surely they must see how ugly this is? Along the estate roads, the plantation workers live in shacks without electricity or water, and although most of them must be too young to remember the British, those who do remember must look at the high-caste tea bosses and say to themselves: “Everything has changed and yet nothing.”

  I read of India as a mutilated land. The shirts and shorts of the tea-planters, the self-wounding of the stick and bone beggars on the steps of the tourist temples: here are symbols for a country that is bleeding to death and yet keeps sharpening up the primitive weapons of the past, with its ancient acceptance of privilege and degradation. And each year, the river of the poor rises and goes tumbling into the cities and out along all the roads that lead to the cities and now in New Delhi there is talk of machine guns to keep the river out.

  Be glad then, Sister, that your skull rests in some winter churchyard and that your eyes never saw the brown river rise in the hills and come rushing towards the white wall of the Convent. You would have been terrified. You would have remembered what happened in the days of the Mutiny, you would have thought, Mary Mother of God, we’ll be clubbed to death by the river, and picked up your grey skirts and run as fast as your nun’s shoes could carry you. And when it was all over, you would have asked God why it had to be so, why the wall wasn’t high enough to keep out the river, why it couldn’t have gone on just as before?