Letter to Sister Benedicta (10 page)

I used to go and see him. He sacked the cook-housekeeper when Louise died and the house began to smell of dust and rotting food and cigar ends. I tidied up for him sometimes, but he preferred me to sit by him in the faded sitting-room where I had first met Leon and hold his long, white hand and listen to him grieving. “I'd rather clean and dust,” I always wanted to say, “than sit so still and listen to your grief that will never end.” “But I like it when you sit with me, Ruby,” he used to say, “no one else sits with me. They don't want to listen.”

Godmother Louise had been sixty when she died. She died unexpectedly, one day graceful and full of laughter and still reaching for Max's hand if they sat together on a sofa, and the next day yellowed by the certainty of death, which took root as a cancer in her thyroid gland and sent her to her grave in Highgate in a matter of weeks. It seemed to me very unkind that Godmother Louise should die at sixty when she so loved her life “that I cherish every hour of it, Ruby, and never want it to end”, when in St John's Wood alone, there must have been hundreds of men and women clinging wearily to their seventies and eighties, full of disgust and meanness, their bodies squeezed dry of life and love like old water-skins. Why couldn't one of them have gone and not Louise? So Max Reiter asked himself countless times as he sat and brooded on her memory, listening now and then for a snatch of music inside himself and hearing nothing, only the great silence she had created by dying and which would never again be filled.

I unwrapped my Australian daffodils intended for Leon and scattered them on Godmother Louise's mound.

“I shall insist that she goes to Highgate!” Max had said, “She was a good Marxist,” and he had made a huge bureaucratic fuss to slip her emaciated body into its little corner of this most famous of cemeteries. I remember that at her funeral, I pondered the idea of Godmother Louise being “a good Marxist” and found it rather strange. I think I decided that she was only a good Marxist deep down in her soul and that she let the rest of herself be rather a bad Marxist. And the bad Marxist in her kept on and on going to five-star hotel rooms where enormous bouquets arrived “courtesy of the management” and where she sipped away, guiltless, at the finest champagne a bourgeois capitalist society can produce.

At least she had been right about India. Her loathing for the idea of empire had been as strong as Queen Victoria's love of it. She despised my parents for their snobbishness and their loveless ways. It was a kind of sickness, she said, their terrible pride and reserve, and I must be cured of it. I must forget the school for the daughters of the high-ranking officers, no longer think of myself as a daughter of a high-ranking officer, or even as a Catholic, because these were the masks to hide behind and until I threw them away, these masks, threw them away and never put them on again, I wouldn't know myself.

“This is why so many of us are lost, Ruby,” she said, “this is why your mother and father are so lost: they are crouching down behind their masks; they believe they
are
their masks and without them they will be nothing!”

Godmother Louise had a very gentle but clear voice. I remember much of what she said because of that voice of hers and when she died, I missed it. It was as if a little fountain where I had often gone to drink had suddenly dried up, like the healing waters of Streatham dried up and there is nothing left to remember them by except the tiny pump house, and the traffic and the ugly high street buildings roar and thrive, ignorant that here was once a spring where people came to sip and be healed. Today, at the cemetery, I longed for the wisdom of Godmother Louise who surely would have laughed at my superstitious candles and my half-remembered prayers. She would have led me quite differently through this time and I would have followed, just as I followed her when I was young and married a Jew as she had done and thought so mistakenly, now my life will be like hers – a thing of beauty.

I was very hungry after my walk to the cemetery, and in Highgate village I found one of those all-purpose restaurants run by Italians, where you can have cups of tea and slices of battenburg cake or spaghetti bolognese at almost any time of the day or night, and where you find people having lunch at eleven and tea at two and dinner at one in the morning and no one seems to mind or even notice and the cooks in the basement go patiently on, resting for only a few hours and waking again to make cannelloni for breakfast.

I ordered chicken cacciatora and a glass of red wine. I rather enjoyed the meal out. I enjoyed being in Highgate, high up and away from Knightsbridge. I sat at my table until after three o'clock, ordering a second glass of wine and following this with three cups of coffee. I was waiting for the darkening afternoon to creep on. I thought of the sunlight slanting over Leon's bed, imagined it disappearing and the room becoming shadowy. I knew I was still afraid, but Louise had helped a little. The Australian daffodils were gone, so I would have to go to Leon empty-handed. This, of course, doesn't really matter when tomorrow I could take Rhodesian sunflowers or gardenias grown in a solarium on Mont Blanc.

D
ECEMBER
21

I was too tired after my visit to Leon yesterday to write about it, so I never told you, Sister, how it has increased my general confusion.

I went prepared to talk to Leon about the Wainwright case, thinking, it's time he wrote something else down and the mention of Richard Wainwright may jog his mind to make a pattern. But when I arrived at the nursing home, the receptionist popped quickly out of her booth and said:

“I wonder if you'd mind waiting, Mrs Constad. There is a visitor with your husband and we only allow one visitor at a time. If you'd care to have a seat?”

“What visitor?” I asked. “Who is the visitor?”

“I'm afraid I don't know, Mrs Constad. I wasn't here when she came in. I was advised by Matron to ask you to wait – if you came today.”

“Well, surely it wouldn't matter if I went in? I wouldn't disturb Leon.”

“Nursing home rules, Mrs Constad,” the receptionist said with a smile. “We don't have many rules, but this is one.”

She showed me to a leather chair in a room I'd never noticed before. It resembled a dentist's waiting-room: blackish oil paintings hung on damask walls, a polished table piled up with copies of
Vogue
and
Homes and Gardens
. I fell into the leather chair and stared at the room. I felt unbalanced by the news of Leon's visitor, rather shocked. I decided at first that the visitor was Sheila and searched myself for signs of anger. I found a little; I thought of the girl's body, imagined Leon telling her each day how he wanted to love it for ever. But then the anger passed. Leon's love for Sheila had diminished, died even, and I thought poor girl, when she sees him it will be a terrible shock, like seeing a dead person, and who knows if she won't feel like throwing up in the washbasin.

I got up and crossed to the polished table, deciding to pass the time with a glossy magazine and not think about Sheila. I sat down with
Vogue
, which is inevitably crammed with photographs of thin women and Scandinavian kitchens and very bad therapy if you are fifty and fat and the London dirt gets into every cranny of your rooms and the plants on the kitchen window-sill die one after the other and you never know why. Looking at all the pages of expensive clothes, I thought, how strange when Leon has let me be rich that I've never been smart. Leon would have liked a well-dressed person for a wife and has now and then complained about my utter lack of smartness. If Leon gets better, I heard myself think, I shall try to smarten up – and I shall get thin. But then the thought of going back to India slipped suddenly into my mind. I saw myself walking, walking through a crowded bazaar, wearing some kind of robe that was loose and comfortable in the heat and which wasn't at all smart but made me forget my Western body crammed into its corset. I walked on, moving slowly with the crowd, a part of the crowd, going nowhere, only letting myself hear and see, full of wonder at the strangeness of the place and the people pressed in so tightly all around me, knowing that if I walked for long enough, I would be changed by what I saw and smelt and understood and my old ways would fall off me like scabs.

I put down the magazine and closed my eyes. No sooner were they closed than the receptionist came into the room and announced to me that I could go and see Leon now if I wanted to.

“What about the other visitor?” I asked.

“She's just left, Mrs Constad.”

“I didn't see her go.”

“No? She was quite a young person, wearing a duffle coat.”

This was confusing. Somehow, I couldn't imagine Sheila wearing a duffle coat, not even in December on a dark afternoon.

“Are you sure it was a duffle coat?” I persisted.

“Oh yes. Black, I think. Though I couldn't say for certain. So many visitors come and go past me.”

I walked slowly to Leon's room. I was aware that I had begun to wonder if the visitor hadn't been Alexandra. I had written to her twice, telling her that Leon's chances of recovery were good, but never asking her to come and see him, afraid that if he saw her, the great anger he had felt with her and with Noel would come rumbling up from inside him again and burst out of him in appalling incoherent noises. It had seemed to me better that Alexandra and Noel stayed away. In time, if he recovered, Leon might find that all his anger had gone and that he could think of them again just as he'd thought of them for more than twenty years – with pride and with love – and one day, he'd get down the photograph albums and chuckle with pleasure over the trudges up Snowdon in the mist and the picnics in France.

The thought that Alexandra was in London was a cruel one. Would she leave after her visit to Leon, just take the next train out of Liverpool Street, or would she decide to come and see me and stay a few days so that I would have some company and to tell me about her life? I knew that I was hoping desperately to see her and I knew that this was very foolish of me and that really I should have been wiser than that.

When I went into Leon's room, I saw that they had propped him up a bit and his right eye was wide open, staring fixedly at a chrysanthemum plant on a table near the end of his bed.

“Leon,” I said quietly and to my surprise he turned his head a little and looked at me. I smiled at him, wished I had come with the Australian daffodils so that I could hold them out to him.

“How are you today, dear?” I began as I often begin. And it was then that a sound came out of Leon's mouth, a little breathless sound, the very first he has made since he had his stroke.

“Go on, Leon,” I said, standing still in the middle of the room, and with a great effort of concentration he made his mouth move again and another noise escaped it, tuneless, meaningless but there, and with it a little dribble of saliva that ran down his chin.

I took a handkerchief out of my crocodile handbag, went to Leon and wiped the dribble away. Then I sat on the bed and took his hand, watching his face for any sign of another noise. But he seemed to have given up and was content just to stare at me.

“I hear you had another visitor today, Leon,” I said, carefully jollying my voice along. “I expect she brought you that lovely chrysanthemum plant, dear, didn't she? But I do wonder who she was, Leon. Because no one comes except me, do they? I can't think who it could have been unless it was . . .” I was going to say Alexandra and then thought better of it. I didn't know what the sound of her name might do to him. But it was at that moment that Leon pulled his right hand free of mine, reached for the slate and began to write in his slow shaky hand. It took him a long time to write the one word that was on his mind, but he finished it eventually and pushed the slate towards me. He had written “tomorrow”.

I didn't know what he meant, Sister. I simply looked at the word and nodded and after that I didn't stay very much longer. With the afternoon being so dark outside the blind, I suddenly had the notion that after my visit to Highgate and my lunch in the Italian café and my wait in the leather armchair, it had grown terribly late and that in writing “tomorrow” Leon was saying he was too tired to see me and wanted me gone.

C
HRISTMAS
E
VE

I've done nothing about Christmas this year. No dyed teasels in Grandma Constad's hideous vase, no wreath on the front door of the flat. And I've asked no one round. I would have invited Gerald Tibbs, but still his telephone doesn't answer and each day I feel more and more certain that he's in Milan by now, lying dead in a gutter, his white face carved up by a broken chianti bottle, and I bitterly regret that I didn't warn him, beg him not to go before it was too late.

For a few months, I tried to help Gerald, first of all by listening to him and letting him cry and then by daring to hold him, feeling him resent me at first and want to push me away, and then after a while coming nearer to me and lying with his head on my shoulder.

This happened one rather sunny afternoon on the sofa in the drawing-room after one of my badly-cooked lunches. It was just a feeling I had that all the awful lunches were doing no good at all, that Gerald would come and go and toy with the revolting bits of food I gave him and wander off in his helpless way, his burden of misery intact.

So I lay down on the sofa and said to Gerald: “Before you go, Gerald, come and lie down, just for a few minutes, and let me put my arms around you,” and he looked at me horrorstruck, as if he had been asked to lie in the jaws of a great white shark.

“Please, Gerald,” I said, and I held out my hand to him. “Please do it just for a second. You can forget about me, who I am, all that rubbish. Just think of me as a raft, something to hold on to.”