Letter to Sister Benedicta (7 page)

When Noel was born, Leon came into the ward and took the baby out of my arms, held it up and looked at it very closely and then said a strange thing. He said: “I see myself,” as if the red-faced baby was a mirror and I laughed. But Leon was serious. All through Noel's life, he has wanted the boy to be like him. It was Leon's idea – and once this was in his head, it wouldn't come out of it – to call the baby Noel, his own name spelt backwards. And he kept on looking at Noel, trying to see himself take shape in him. “My son is very like me!” he so often announces to people who've never met Noel and then I always think, there he goes again with that old twaddle, because Noel isn't really at all like Leon and I don't think he ever will be. He doesn't look a bit like Leon, for a start, but resembles my mother and all her rather tall relatives who were narrow-boned, straight-haired and freckled. There's not a freckle on Leon's body. And Noel is a loud person, clumsy, too big for the room; he's inherited nothing of Leon's neatness and sharp efficiency.

I don't know why Leon has always wanted Noel to be like him. It sounds very like conceit, but I know it isn't this – it's far too desperate a hope. I once asked Grandma Constad if she understood why Leon clung to this hope, but all she said was: “Sons, oh my Lord, and sons of sons!” which revealed to me only that she didn't know, just as she didn't seem to know about a great many things in the world such as where the Pope lived (she though it was Dublin) and why the seats on London buses weren't wider. “I only know about being poor. That's all I know about,” she once announced to me. But she said this long after she was rich and Leon had bought her a house in Chelsea, and whenever I think about her now, I have to conclude that she was rather a stupid woman and only said meaningless things like “Sons, oh my Lord!” to fill up all the blanks in her mind.

I discovered that talking to Evelyn Wainwright had made me tired. I'm not used to talking to anyone. I say my monologues in Leon's room with the nurses coming and going, but there I can stop talking whenever I like and I never have to listen to anyone else because Leon is mute. I think the listening tired me. I found that after I had wondered a little about the Wainwright case, and its place in Leon's subconscious, I felt a terrible weariness seeping into me, as if my blood was flowing so slowly it could hardly get round me, and I didn't know what to do with my body except lie it down.

One of the painters on his trolley was painting my bedroom window. He is Irish and the cheeriest of painters and I long for him to say “top o' the mornin'”, only he never does and I really can't blame him because the mornings are all cold and grey as sorrow. I waved to him and he gave me a kind of salute with his brush and then I caught a brief glimpse of his startled eye as I drew the bedroom curtains and shut him out. It was lunchtime, but I wasn't hungry and I knew that unless I could rest for a while, I wouldn't get to the nursing home in the afternoon.

I didn't get to the nursing home. I dreamed away the whole afternoon, not waking when it got dark, sleeping an exhausted, dream-filled sleep.

I was on my train again going towards Norfolk, but this time the snow had fallen so thickly, drifted so dangerously, that the train had to keep stopping. There were great mountains of snow on the line that had to be shovelled away before the train could go on. Men came up with shovels. The men were dressed like the navvies who broke their backs building the Stockton and Darlington in the 1820s, and I thought with all the muscle and strength in them they would clear the snow in no time and we could go on. But I leant out of my carriage window and I could see the mountain of snow and the men with shovels and I knew that they were working dreadfully slowly, taking their time, not caring whether the train moved off or whether it sat on that lonely bit of Eastern Region line until nightfall – until daybreak. I climbed out of the train and I was ankle-deep in the snow on the side of the track. I walked to where the navvies were shovelling away the snow mountain and I said: “Tell me where the blind man is with his stick. He knows where the pub is, and if I can just get to the pub, then someone there will tell me where I am.” The navvies shook their heads and looked at each other and then back at me, as if they hadn't understood a word I'd said. I asked them again, pleaded with them, “tell me where the blind man is”, but they stared at me now like people stare at lunatics and one of them gestured towards the great expanse of snow-covered plough that stretched away to my right towards the great weight of the sky and I looked in vain for a road, the road where I'd first met the blind man, but there was no road.

I noticed then that from all the carriage windows, people were staring at me. Along the whole length of the train they were staring and gaping, so that I became afraid of them and afraid to get back into the train and I wandered off across the white furrowed field. The furrows were as hard as granite, so that with each stride my ankles gave and my feet twisted and it was an agony to go on.

I walked until the train was almost out of sight. I looked back at it, immobile in the snowscape, and felt suddenly glad, proud of myself that I had abandoned the train and gone my own way. It was getting quite dark in a moonless afternoon, but ahead of me now I could see a light. I was glad to be following a light, thinking to myself the light is the pub and it will be warm in there and the landlord will say: “There's not a field for miles around that I don't know like the back of my hand, nor a house for that matter,” and the great grey expanse of the dark Norfolk day will be tamed by this one man's knowledge of it. But then I knew that the light wasn't the pub; the light was Alexandra's cottage. I had found it quite by chance, by stumbling off the train and over the plough. I was within fifty yards of it and I thought, now at last I shall see.

When I reached the cottage, I didn't know whether to knock at the back door or the front. I waited at the back door and listened. There wasn't a sound. I knocked feebly and then noticed that the door was ajar. I crept in.

I found myself in a small kitchen. The light was on, but the room was empty. There were crayons and paints all over the kitchen table. On a very old cooker, there was a pan of boiling water with one egg in it. The bubbling egg was the only sound.

I was very cold and I wanted to find the room with the log fire. So I walked out of the kitchen into a passage. The passage was dark, but I felt my way along it to a heavy door that opened with a Suffolk latch. I could see a light behind the door and I thought, now I have found Alexandra.

I was in the room. The room was small and untidy and smelt of paint. There was a fire in it, but the fire had burned low and no warmth from it reached me because there was a girl kneeling in front of it. I knew that the girl was Sue. I said: “Sue, I've come across all the fields from the train. I dared to get off the train and follow the navvy's pointing hand, so don't tell me that it was all in vain.” Sue turned round and stared at me, but said nothing, only stared. So I said again: “Sue, don't tell me that Alexandra isn't here. I've come here to be with you both and I promise not to disturb the hens and all I want is to understand. Please don't tell me to go away.”

Sue still said nothing, but turned back to the fire. And it was then that I remembered I had brought a paraffin heater with me on the train and had left it there when I clambered down into the snow. I understood then that Sue would only talk to me if I went back and fetched the heater. I had come empty-handed and she scorned me and would tell me nothing until I had gone back to the train and fetched my gift for the cottage. Yet at the same time, I also knew that the mountain of snow on the line had been shovelled away by now and the navvies had gone home to their tea and the train had rushed on into the darkness towards the sea and the paraffin heater was lost.

“I could go . . .” I began to say, “but how could I ever catch the train. Even if I ran and ran, I could never catch the train. . . .”

It was five o'clock and London was noisy outside the closed curtains. I went to the bathroom and said a prayer. “Oh God,” I said, “I'm afraid.”

D
ECEMBER
14

The painters are finishing off today, so they told me. The window-sills are white and smooth again and the rust that bleeds from the iron balcony has been healed for a while by a coat of black paint. When I go to see Leon today, which of course I must, I may tell him that the flat is looking better now and say: “If only you could come home, Leon, and see it, before it starts flaking and decaying again. If only you could come now.”

If Leon does come home one day, talking, moving, knowing who he is, I shall try to love him better, Sister. Because when I think of all my years with Leon, I know that I have been like a big snail, lumbering round the corners of his life with half myself inside me. That is how it feels, and I marvel that Leon, with his quick-talking mind and his neat legs, has been able to bear the sight of me. I have moved so slowly, got in everybody's way. I have been huge and purposeless. When I met Leon and began to love him, Godmother Louise was full of wonder: “You are transformed, Ruby! You are beautiful! Now you can understand, can't you, what it is to love?” But I don't believe I understood love, though I told Louise that of course I did and that my love for Leon would endure summer and winter as hers had done and that if ever Leon was rich, we would travel across Europe making love in hotel bedrooms and never bear to be parted. But all I understood really was a feeling of belonging. I knew that I wanted to belong, to merge, to lose myself. And Leon had such a sure sense of his own identity and was so absolutely purposeful in all that he did, that within a very short time I had put away most of myself – all the self that you knew, Sister, and had a mind to cherish in your way – and seemed to exist only through Leon.

There have been moments when Leon has wanted to be rid of me. “This snail,” I expect he said to himself, “with half her being tucked away ever since I met her and the rest creeping (quite without any understanding of the world except the understanding that I give it) so painfully slowly, fatly, backwards and forwards across all my days, I must get away from this snail now, at once, before it falls on me and crushes me.” And he went away, taking almost nothing but the weight of his unspent love in his balls and for a while he kept diving in and out of all the women he could find who were thin and full of purpose and drew him into their bodies purposefully and without sighing.

I waited for him to come back. Whenever he came home, I said nothing but wondered only when he would come back to me or if he would ever come back. And for a while, after he found Sheila, I thought he would leave me and take all his things and I would never see him again unless we happened to meet by chance in the street. Because he fell in love with Sheila. He told me in a pub on a summer evening that he had stopped caring for everything in the world, even for his co-respondents and his ambition to be Cartier-Bresson, except the one, glorious, ecstatic act of putting his cock inside Sheila and letting his love pour out of him and into her, and he knew that unless he could do this day after day, evening and morning, he would go mad. “You must let me go, Ruby,” he said and I could smell the privet hedge that bordered the little pub courtyard and I thought, all of London is held in that sad smell of privet and now after all these years I shall be alone in it. I looked at Leon and said: “Tell me about Sheila,” thinking to myself, if only I could learn to be more like them, these women that Leon craves to love. But he wouldn't talk about Sheila, as if she was a thing too private and too precious to be talked of, but only said again: “You must let me go.”

I knew that Leon would go then. There was no question of my letting him or not letting him: he would simply pack and go, which he did the following day. The same night Grandma Constad, who was alive then in 1969, but whose store of years had been so filled with her raging that I had come to believe they were running out, turned up at the flat.

“Ruby,” she said, “you are a child of the Inquisition and none of us have ever thought about this enough and now you are being punished! The sins of the fathers, you see dear . . .”

I offered her some whisky, a drink she had taken to rather heavily and which did her no good at all, but made her say idiotic things, and she took the drink and said: “Why are you not weeping, Ruby? You have lost my son!”

“Leon will come back,” I said to Grandma Constad. I said it quietly, not really believing it and she didn't hear it, but began talking about her own marriage.

“Ben was never unfaithful to me!” she announced, “because there was
union
, you see, Ruby. And how can there ever be union between a Jew and a Roman Catholic? There never can be. Leon should have married into his own kind and we would never have had to suffer all these troubles. I'm not saying I'm not angry with Leon, Ruby. It's his fault as much as yours. You see, I warned him at the time of your marriage, ‘You will never have union, Leon not with a marriage like this!'”

Grandma Constad died a few months after this. She died while Leon was still away with Sheila, so that I didn't know of her death until I walked past her house one afternoon and saw all the curtains drawn and found that I couldn't help but hope that she had gone, because I never loved her. I had never found pity in me for her poor beginnings, nor understanding for her rages. She was outside me.

Sheila now lives in Grandma Constad's house. Leon gave it to her as a lavish parting present, little Chelsea house for the neat body where he had lived and found paradise. He didn't seem able to go on with paradise very long after Grandma Constad died; he felt too weary for it. He came home. I thought then – just as I'm thinking now – I must love him better, I must try to get thin. But then there was this awful weariness of his which was so deep and silent that it emptied me of all resolution. I thought it would stay with him for ever and that he had come home not to be with me again, but only to sleep. And when at last he began waking up and his energy returned, I found that I had become a snail again, fat still, unlovable in most of my ways and offering nothing more than I had offered him on the day he went away and found paradise.