Letter to Sister Benedicta (16 page)

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.

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.

“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.”