Letter to Sister Benedicta (13 page)

I got up and walked to the window. I heard a taxi pull up, meter still ticking, and wished I was in it, running for home. With my back to Leon, I said: “I can't bring Noel, dear. I haven't seen him for more than a year. As far as I know, he's still in France. I don't know how he's managing to live, when everything there's so expensive. I expect he's got a job selling the
New York Times
or the
Herald Tribune
to Americans in cafés. The Americans can still afford France. It's only us and the Italians who can't. Anyway, Leon, if Noel comes home, I will bring him to see you. He could give you a hand with your walks down the corridor.”

I turned round. Leon was nodding; he seemed to have understood.

But now that I know for certain that Leon is thinking about Noel and wondering where he is, I feel worried that he won't let his mind rest, when no doubt it should be resting and not dragging heavy thoughts about like chains. Perhaps I shouldn't have told Leon that Noel has disappeared and that his body could be floating down the Rhône, for all I know. Perhaps I should have said: “Noel's back at Cambridge, Leon, and with his innate understanding of the law, sailing on towards a first-class degree,” and the great lie would have rallied him and made him try extraordinarily hard at his rehabilitation, bringing a scoutleader's smile to the lips of Matron. Our lives are full of such confusions: when to lie and when to say the truth (I love you; I love you not) and when to keep silent.

B
OXING
D
AY

That's that, then. Christmas Day has come and gone. It is foggy everywhere according to the television weathermen and there will be multiple pile-ups on the motorways, despite the hazard warning lights and the mothers of dead children will say: “If only we'd stayed at home . . .”

The people in the flat next door are away and I hope they don't die trying to get back. I have become very used to their quiet “Good mornings” and their comings and goings with their rubbish. They are middle-aged and walk on tiptoe, never disturbing, never asking favours. You couldn't ask for better neighbours, and even their name – Smith – is very accommodating because it's so easy to remember, so that I can always say: “Good morning, Mrs Smith”, or “Good evening, Mr Smith” and feel I'm being friendly. They, on the other hand, seem to find Constad rather difficult and seldom say it, knowing it's Jewish perhaps and being anti-Semitic at heart despite their silent good manners, or else remembering Grandma Constad lumbering up three flights of stairs one evening, walking by mistake into their open flat and panting: “Those bloody stairs. My God! Why on earth do you live so high up? Do you think it's clever or something to live so high up?”

I imagine the Smiths staying in a neat and tidy vicarage in the heart of Gloucestershire, putting on suits to go to early service, eating and drinking wisely, giving each other identical volumes of John Betjeman's poetry for Christmas, going for walks in wellingtons, watching the Queen on television (“in her Jubilee year, dear, we
must
”) and thinking the eternal, unspoken thought of all who live lives like these: I'm glad we're who we are.

D
ECEMBER
27

I wonder if there will come a day when I stop writing my letter, a day when I say to myself: “it's over, finished, that's the end of it”, sign my name and imagine that I've sent it half way across the world to you, Sister, in the room where I always picture you? Of course I shall never send it. Not only because the India of your days is long gone and you are dying or dead in some English convent, but also because I'm afraid that what I've remembered about you over the years, you have long forgotten, and when it finally reached you, this big parcel of words, you would open it, turn it over and peer at it and say to yourself: “Who is this Ruby? I never knew her.” To the little ghost of you that flutters now and then at the edges of my heart, I dedicate the rest of this letter. But I got no further with it yesterday because of this thought that in so many years of teaching the daughters of high-ranking officers, you never found the time to remember one. For they came and went like flowers and in our uniform we were all the same and hundreds of us, over the years, crept to your room to sip tea and discover Keats, and you took a little pride in us all, the ones who liked poetry, but not one more than another and you gave us all your mothwing kiss, your benediction.

I sat and pondered you, Sister. I imagined that you were the last of the nuns to leave the Convent School after it was closed, that you waited, waited in the empty, echoing building, thinking, it can't be true; they can't have taken the girls away and sent all the Sisters home to England after their years and years of devoted service. The Viceroy will come and he will remember the pageant, how we made “welcome” in girls for him and bowed our heads to the imperial person, yes the Viceroy will come with his hat and his medals and say, “It was only a dream, Sister Benedicta, only a terrible dream that they sent the girls away and put the nuns on boats bound for England; and tomorrow, you wait and see, they'll come back again and the servants will come with brooms and clean the building, chase away the lizards and the dry leaves, keep a watch out for cobras as they always did, and then you can come out of the corner where you sit and wait, put on a clean habit, wash your face that is white with dust. . . .” But the Viceroy didn't come, though you thought he might, day after day, and you waited a long time for him and even composed a letter to him in your head. The Viceroy didn't come and you knew after a while that he never would; so you crept out of the building, never giving it a backward glance, carrying your few belongings in an old leather suitcase. And only a day or two later, you walked up a gangplank of a ship bound for England with the great weight of India in your nun's heart – all that you'd known and all that you'd never dared to know.

When I got on to the ship that brought us home, my mother and me (my father would follow later with his regiment), and the harbour of Bombay began to slip away from us, my mother turned to me and said: “Well I'm glad it's over,” just as if we were getting on a train at Brighton station after a fortnight's bad weather. She didn't shed tears, as I imagine you did, Sister, only turned her back on seventeen years of her life with a sigh identical to all the sighs that had drifted through our house ever since I was a tiny child and she had sighed as she put me off her knee.

She didn't go ashore at Aden or Cairo or Athens or even Gibraltar (which I felt sure would be abounding with British officers) but stayed in her cabin for most of the long journey, and as we crept round Spain and then up France and the weather became very cold, she began to remember all the disadvantages of England, such as the terrible difficulty of getting servants and the incontinent ways of my grandmother with whom we were going to live for a while, until my father came home to his job at the War Office and we found a house in London.

At Southampton, where it was raining, she sighed and grumbled more than she'd ever done – grumbled about the dirt on the train windows and the slowness of our porter – till an old black taxi deposited us and our heavy luggage at my grandmother's door, when she sighed at last with relief that she'd arrived and said again: “Well, I'm not sorry that's over,” and my grandmother came tottering to greet us, saying: “You're an hour late, you know,” as if India was just up the road.

The first night in Wiltshire – in a room to myself at last – I kept my light on until very late and wrote to you, Sister. “England is awful now that we're going to stay here for ever,” I wrote, “all I think about is the school and hope that all the Sisters are well.” I wrote to you several times, I think, even once or twice after we moved to London and I came to know Godmother Louise and started forgetting my Catholic ways, and once you wrote back, saying: “Everything here is just as usual. Cook's boy, Shanker, found a king cobra in the pantry yesterday morning and told me he'd asked Jesus to help him kill it. I think we may have a convert, so Sister Angelina and myself offered up a prayer of thanksgiving in case we have!”

But not for long could you write: “Everything is just as usual.” The years crept quickly by until the day, Sister, when there was silence all around you and not even a cook's boy to convert and you waited in your corner for the Viceroy to arrive and tell you it was all a dream.

D
ECEMBER
28

True to her word, Matron has had Leon out of bed these last two mornings. “I couldn't walk”, he wrote on the slate today, and Matron told me in private that “as is absolutely normal,” Leon was very upset by his first attempts to put his dangling useless leg to the ground and cried all the time. I wanted to say to her: “Please don't try any more, if it distresses him,” but Matron put a comforting square hand on my wrist and said: “I hope Dr Woods warned you that during the period of recovery – and it
is
recovery, Mrs Constad, we're sure of this – stroke patients are always very emotional. They know there is a struggle ahead and they're experiencing a lot of confusion. They're very easily disappointed, made angry even, and this is why I said to you the other day: ‘It's a long road back.' But with your patience, and ours, I honestly believe your husband will get completely well.”

I asked Matron about Leon's talking, or rather his inability to get a word out and the terrible sideways struggling of his mouth. “Speech therapy,” she announced, taking her hand off my wrist, “again a longish road. He will, in effect, have to learn to talk again.”

I came out of Matron's office feeling very depressed at the thought of all the struggling Leon was going to have to do. He hates any process that goes slowly and is always trying to speed things up, even the process of the law, never learning in twenty-five years that the law cannot be hurried, just as Grandma Constad never seemed to learn things that were obvious and died quite ignorant of much that people with less cluttered memories learn in infancy.

I went back to Leon's room and sat down by him again. He looked puzzled to see me back, thinking I'd gone home. “I thought I'd pop back for a minute, Leon,” I said, “I won't stay long, because it's very late and I get so cold going home. But I just wanted to say to you, you must try to be patient with this rehabilitating; think of it like riding a bicycle and don't imagine you can do it in a day. I mean, of course you can't walk, dear, not straightaway, but only by moving, so they say, will the life creep back into your leg and then you will walk.”

I paused, in case Leon wanted to write something on the slate, but he didn't reach for it and was staring at me intently, so I went on.

“They're going to help you to talk again, Leon. They're going to send a speech therapist who will help you make words again; because the words are there inside you, dear, you haven't forgotten them, you just have to learn how to say them again. And Leon, it may not be so long before you can come home, and I'll do all I can to get you going. We'll work at it night and day. I mean, what else have I got to do but help you and it's all I think about, really, making you well.”

I stopped talking and waited for Leon to nod or write something down, but he didn't, so I patted his hand which used to look brown all the year round and which has now faded to yellow, and walked slowly to the door, where I made a rather undynamic Black Power salute. He saw my salute this time and looked frightened to death, as if I was a Symbionese Liberationist about to kidnap him. So I brought my arm down, said gently: “See you tomorrow, dear,” and left. At the moment, two nurses have to feed him: one to hold his mouth open and the other to spoon in the slops that keep him alive, and I thought on my way home from the hospital, if he does come home, how will I manage?

I haven't been to the Oratory since before Christmas so I decided to go there this evening, Sister, and light two candles – one for Leon and one for Noel, about whom I have become afraid and would dearly love to know, after all this time, that at least he's safe. I imagine him in Avignon, which was where Alexandra last saw him when she left him her mini – just gave it to him because he needed it and she didn't care about anything any more, not even about her car – and got on the sleeper for Boulogne. Avignon: terrible crumbling old city with decay and tourists hammering at its heart. I hope Noel didn't linger on there, but went south again with the girl he met at the beach café, or took the Paris road and found work there. I prayed to Our Lady (who, in her forgiving way, surely intercedes with God for wayward children like Noel). I asked her to let him be safe and told her that my anger with him seems to be passing and that if he writes to me for money, I'll send it. “But best of all,” I whispered, “let him come home, so that we can talk and I can take care of him for a while and then he can start again, take a new direction . . .” But even as I lit my candle, I remembered Alexandra saying: “He won't come home, not for a long time. He doesn't think of the family any more. He's glad he's hurt us. He wants to be far away and imagine our hurt.”

She said all this in anger. She was crying when she said it, thinking of Noel with the girl he met at the beach café, so who can say if she was right, or if it was her anger talking and telling lies.

Alexandra wanted Noel to stay with her. She wanted to belong to him, be his. “I didn't mind,” she said, “about people whispering and disapproving and saying ‘brother and sister, how could they?' I loved Noel. I thought we'd stay together.”

Noel did stay with her for a while. He lay with her in her cold room and forgot Christine and Cambridge, finding his sister's body that he hadn't looked at since they were children, miraculously beautiful. “We forgot about everyone else in the world,” Alexandra said, “we forgot they existed. We didn't go out, except once to the pub to buy wine or just to bring in wood for the fire and feed the hens. We didn't even cook. We ate up the cold Christmas food. Sometimes we made up the fire and played music. Most of the time we stayed in bed. We couldn't let go of each other. We touched each other all the time. I'd never known that with anyone else, that wanting to touch them so badly.”