Letter to Sister Benedicta (8 page)

Sheila is still Leon's secretary. She sent carnations to the hospital. She still lives in Grandma Constad's house, and until he became ill, I think Leon used to go round there once in a while. I'm not certain about this and Leon and I have never mentioned it, but I only think it probable because in all the years since Grandma Constad's death and Leon's return, we have loved very little and very poorly and how could a man like Leon be content with a love that is so little and so poor?

At the Convent School, they told me: “There is only one love and this is the love of Our Lord, His for us, ours for Him.” But not even then when I weighed twelve stone and saw and heard so little in my home that resembled love (our house was bathed in my mother's sighs; they drifted into every room) no, not even then, Sister, did I believe this. Because what on earth was the point of all those young poets opening their casements and looking out and feeling their hearts leaping like larks with joy or wilting like unwatered basil with sorrow if the love they leapt or wilted for wasn't a real kind of love but a sham, a thing only experienced by a few nervous young men who were destined to die of consumption or mosquito bites? The hours we stayed, Sister Benedicta, pondering this other love, the kind of love that Godmother Louise felt for Max Reiter and he for her, a love that I have wanted to feel ever since I sat in your room and thought, let me stay beyond sundown, and you never did. Those hours were quite in vain, Sister, when you have hidden your body and protected your soul all your life for the love of God and I have walked as if bandaged up for fifty years, never daring to take off the bandages and look at myself – wound or no wound – and let myself love. It's too late now. I have become so used to half-loving, it's all I can do. But when I go to the nursing home and stare at Leon, I sometimes think, damn all my beginnings, damn the creeping nuns with their guilt and silences, damn the great white wall of the Convent School that girded the daughters of the high-ranking officers and kept out a continent and damn you, Sister, who only gave me a kiss like a benediction and never held me so that I could feel you and understand.

Alexandra dared –
tried
– to love. She dared to let Sue take her and bring her body to little ecstasies. She felt no guilt about loving Sue. She let Sue's love flame over her like a sunrise. And when Noel arrived, shouting soldier in the midst of her calm, she began to move, that was all, just slip very slowly out of the sunrise that had been Sue into the hard mid-day that was Noel. Sue saw her moving away. She watched and was amazed. Sue couldn't believe, loving Alexandra as she did, that she would just walk away. Sue followed and questioned. She pulled Alexandra back to her and shouted, “No!” But Alexandra slipped out of her arms like a child from a grown-up embrace and wandered in a kind of bewilderment towards her brother. The soldier in Noel was shouting orders: his sister must not love a woman. A woman! Because he found Sue and Alexandra together one morning in the very act of loving. He had woken early and wanted to talk to Alexandra. He opened her door and there was his sister, naked and hot with Sue's long scroll of a tongue bringing her to a perfect climax. “I'm good, Alexandra,” Sue had said, and so Alexandra let it be and they were together for more than a year, happy and guiltless until Noel arrived and parted them.

For part them he must, he at once decided – only for Alex's own good, of course, for what would her life become, sleeping face to face with a woman far from anywhere until they were both old and their breasts sagged under the weight of each other's hands? And Alexandra found it impossible to send Noel away. She began to believe that Noel's arrival was meant “because I never really loved Sue and one day I would have gone away from her and never come back.” Sue pleaded with Alexandra: “Send him away, my darling. Please make him go.” But Alexandra said no, she couldn't send him away, he was her brother and Christmas was coming on. She felt angry with Sue because of the pleading and wanted to say to her: “You knew I wouldn't stay for ever, Sue. I'll never love women the way you love them. Loving women is a nice game.” And it would have been kinder to Sue, I often feel, if Alexandra had said this, but as it was she said nothing about their love coming to an end, but stayed quite silent, even letting Sue come to her bed night after night and never pushed her away until it was Christmas Day and the soldier, whose head was filled with rage, began his march.

Alexandra told me that it turned very cold on Christmas morning. She had spent the previous night in Sue's bed but woke up to find herself alone. It was seven o'clock and dark and the cottage was quite silent. Alexandra lay and waited for Sue to come back from the bathroom or wherever she was, looked forward to being warm with Sue for an hour or two before they got up, lit the fire and had their Christmas breakfast and opened their presents. She dozed, despite the cold, woke up again, saw day beginning at the window and felt afraid. She got up and went to the bathroom, then looked in her own room and stood on the stairs listening for sounds. She could hear Noel snoring by the burnt-out fire. Nothing else. No sound of anyone in the kitchen making breakfast, no sounds at all but the sounds of the morning beginning now, the hens murmuring and a church bell tolling early Communion. She went back to Sue's room and drew the curtains. The morning was whitening from its dawn blue. There was ice on the window, frost on the little patch of grass. Occasionally, Sue got up early and went out to feed the hens, but no footprints marked the frosted grass, no sign of Sue with her little basin of corn.

Alexandra sighed. She got dressed, thinking as she pulled on her jerseys and thick socks, Sue will come back and I must try to make this day happy – for us all. We'll build a bigger, hotter fire than we've ever had! The sun was up now, slanting across the garden. She went to the window, opened it, and took a breath of the winter morning. There wasn't a sign in Norfolk of the rain that was falling on London. There, the day was frozen and bright, waking to its own perfection, like the first day of the world.

It's a very long time, Sister, since I remembered all this – or pictured it, as Alexandra once asked me to do on the one and only time she ever talked about it – and I feel tired now at the thought of that day's beginning and can't write down any more. You see, I must be full of strength today and not fail Leon again by walking out of his room without doing my Black Power salute. Because the days are going by and why is there no change in Leon, in spite of all my prayers and the fragile candles and the nurses coming and going and the eternal smell of flowers?

D
ECEMBER
20

I keep trying to telephone Gerald Tibbs. I fear he may be away because his telephone is never answered. I imagine him passing through France on a train with his litre of wine bought at the station buffet at Boulogne and a glass smuggled out of the station buffet, cheap, round-bowled wineglass that goes with him all the way across France towards Italy and the wife who left him. I wonder about his children left behind, wise teenagers saying to each other: “Why is he so stupid as to try and find her? She's been gone more than a year now and never writes to us, not even cards on our birthdays, so why doesn't he just accept the loss of her and get on with his life?”

I have been trying to ring Gerald to apologize for my neglect of him. Since Leon's illness, you see Sister, I haven't felt I could go on helping him and though he's never written to me saying “What good is this, helping me for a while and then one day disappearing and never seeing me again?” I know he must be
feeling
“what good is this?” and I would like the chance to explain to him what has happened and why I can't help anybody at all, not even him of whom I had really grown quite fond.

During the time that I was helping him, I occasionally wrote bits of poems about him, starting with the poem about his wife going to Milan with her smart young man. I never showed the poems to Gerald, but one day, if he ever comes right out of his mourning, I might show them to him. The second poem went like this:

Not that Gerald resembles a bear at all, so the imagery in this poem isn't at all good. In fact, it's really extremely misleading because Gerald Tibbs is a very white, hairless man with no hint of fur anywhere on his body and he treads the world with such a light step that he makes no mark, whereas bears are heavy and look as if they are constantly trampling things to death. Gerald actually looks a bit as if he had been trampled to death, or put into a dark cupboard for decades where no light has reached him, and you can easily imagine that after Gerald, the Romeo person, so brown and flashy, was like colour television after years with black and white. And after this there was no going back, not even for the furs, though perhaps she thought of them sometimes when it snowed in Milan.

I do hope Gerald isn't on a train in France with a stolen wine-glass, heading for a chemical factory and another explosion of sorrow from which he will surely never recover and it will take years and years to piece him together again. I wish he would answer his telephone so that I could say: “Gerald, for heaven's sake don't go rushing through Europe!” But he doesn't answer and I haven't seen him since the autumn when Alexandra came back from France, not even once to explain my silence.

It was soon after Christmas Day last year when he was sick in the bathroom that I rang him up. I rang him because I had never seen anyone in my life (except a middle-aged Indian woman in Delhi whose baby had been run over by a tram) so distracted with sorrow. He couldn't make a single gesture, a single little movement without revealing his sorrow in all its horrible shape and I thought, this demon of sorrow inside him will drive him mad unless someone begins to rescue him.

At first he didn't answer his telephone – just as he isn't answering now – but I kept on trying and trying until the day when he answered in his reedy voice and I said: “Gerald, I've been thinking about you a lot and daren't ask you if your wife has come back because I don't suppose she has.” To which he said nothing, so I knew that she was still in Milan (which is the greyest of Italian cities and a bad choice if you are English and imagine all of Italy a-shimmer with olive trees and white with marble) and that Gerald was alone with his almost grown-up children and a house full of sad belongings. Gerald didn't sound at all pleased to hear me; he wanted to be left alone with his demon. But for once in my life I believed that I was right and that Gerald needed help. “I'd like to come and see you, Gerald,” I said, “or you could come and see me if you like and I could cook you lunch, although I'm not a good cook at all as Leon's always telling me.”

“Why do you want to see me?” asked Gerald and I could tell that he was very suspicious of me, thinking either that I had some bad news for him or that I wanted to rape him.

“Oh don't sound so alarmed, Gerald!” I said, “It's not bad news or rape or anything at all other than a feeling that no one was helping you much, in fact they seem to be hindering you really, taking you out to cocktail parties, and I thought, a nice plain lunch and a chat about whatever you liked . . .”

“I don't talk much,” said Gerald.

“No, I know you don't and I don't as a rule, so we could have lunch in total silence, if you wanted to. I wouldn't mind at all!”

Gerald laughed. Laughter seemed to fill his voice and body out a bit.

“I'd like you to come and see me, Gerald,” I said rather earnestly, “I'd love to know about your children because mine are grown up and miles away and I've forgotten how teenagers are. I mean, it's not even the Beatles any more, is it, it's other extraordinary Punk things with names like ‘Cow Pat' and you sometimes wonder if it's not all a dance of death.”

“Yes,” said Gerald and coughed.

He did come to lunch. And it was during the first of the lunches that I had with Gerald that I discovered an extraordinary thing about him – he was a solicitor! It was idiotic of me to be so surprised because of course London is chock-a-block with solicitors, all of them quite different from each other. But it did seem very difficult to believe that Gerald's being wouldn't have absolutely rejected the solicitor in itself like bodies reject transplanted organs, preferring to die rather than house a stranger, even for a few months. The notion that Gerald would ever be rung up in the middle of the night by a co-respondent in Beverly Hills was absurd. In fact, I'm sure none of Gerald's clients ever rang him up in the middle of the night, sensing that, being so pale, he needed a lot of sleep. So I concluded that he was in quite a different category from Leon when it came to solicitors, a category that I had never come across in all my years as a solicitor's wife and therefore found very hard to believe in.

For something to say (because Gerald is, as he warned me, a man of very few words and will surely die one day of terminal silence) I began to ask him about his work.

“At least you have your work, Gerald,” I said, “and I have always envied people who were involved in a job.” But Gerald didn't want to talk about his work.

“I'm fed up with it,” he said. “I've got far too many cases. I can't give any of them my attention. My secretary brings all the files in and puts the on my desk. Toffee for a man with no teeth! I don't even start on them. I dictate stalling letters – ‘You will be hearing from Mr Tibbs in the near future.' Near future! I don't believe in the future, near or far.”

I had made a chicken salad for Gerald with bits of celery and nuts in it. It was rather dry food and this seemed to suit him because he picked and picked at it until his plate was empty and I remembered that at the Hazlehurst's dinner party he'd eaten nothing at all.