Letter to Sister Benedicta (12 page)

I think if I had a good supply of martini to last the next few days, I would feel much more cheerful that I've done for some time. I don't know why I've never thought of getting drunk before. If I was a man I believe I would have thought of it and gone stumbling and shrieking along the Victoria Embankment or flown off to Venice for a few days to snivel in cafés by the foul green canals, hopeful for a warm girl on a cold street corner or a good cry at dawn in a shabby hotel room. As it is, all I have done is sit and wait. I have stayed close to Leon, tried to become close to God, waited patiently for Alexandra to come and see me, and all three are mute! Only I have talked on silently to you, Sister, and where am I now but perched still in this tired flat, just serving out my time.

I have never before spent Christmas Day quite by myself. In India, we sometimes sat down twenty to the table decorated with scarlet and gold crackers shipped from Fortnum's to match the scarlet and gold uniforms of all the soldiers, and my mother would let a pale smile cross her face at the sight of so much finery, because she loved the army better than anything in the world, better than my father, who was only a tiny part of the army, and better even than Wiltshire where she had begun her life and for which she often mourned. “A soldier's bride!” she once exclaimed to me in a rare moment of delight, “When I knew I was to be a soldier's bride, I went out into the garden and sang ‘Land of Hope and Glory' by the lily pond!” (Whenever I hear this tune now – which happily isn't often – I imagine my mother singing it in her Wiltshire garden and the old gardener, Len, hearing her and thinking, Lord love us, she's gone nutty.) And I've always known, from the day she told me about singing “Land of Hope and Glory” because she was so full of pride and joy, that she only married my father because he was a soldier and not for love of him. I think any officer would have done, but who can say if she would have sighed more or less with someone else? I can't believe that she would ever have been happy, unless the entire British Army (Other Ranks excepted) had made her its mascot and cleaved itself only unto her.

When India was over and we moved to London, I very soon began to betray my parents by refusing to follow them on trains from Paddington down, to the dusty house in Wiltshire for Christmas, where my thin grandmother sat blinking in an armchair all day, dying of indolence and memories and deaf as a post, so that if ever you plucked up your courage to interrupt her blinking with a word, she'd turn on you accusingly and shout: “Write it down, dear!” And a little notebook would be shoved into your hand into which you scribbled the most terrible trivia like: “You're looking extremely well, Granny,” or “Did you have much trouble with greenfly this summer?”, to which she seldom replied except with an enigmatic nod. She was the most unloving of grandmothers, a palsied version of my mother, who smelt rather nasty because she was to lazy to wash herself and who quite often wet her knickers and the faded silk cushion covers without any shame at all, only remarking with her perfectly-formed vowel sounds: “Oh look, I've done one of my puddlies!” and ringing her bell for the long-suffering housekeeper to come and take the cushion away. I couldn't stand the sight or smell of her, nor the Catholic in her which had transformed her room into a dusty shrine, but had never broadened her heart. Christmas at her house was like an internment: the world was shut out and all I could think of was the day when we would get back on to the train and I would discover it again in all its loud complexity.

I don't know how many such sad Christmases I endured in that house with its lily pond (an apologetically foul place by the time I saw it so that it was very hard to imagine anyone wanting to sing by it, let alone such a rousing number as “Land of Hope and Glory”), it wasn't more than three or four and after that I forgot my grandmother just as if she had died and went each year, in defiance of my mother, to Godmother Louise's house, actually sleeping there for the duration of Christmas, in a cold top room which the Reiters always referred to as “Ruby's room”. Max chose to see Christmas as a day invented by the world in honour of Louise. He filled it with flowers and champagne and presents and his own music, “which never really got going in me, Ruby, till I met Louise”. His joy in all this giving was ecstatic and by the time the evening came and the inevitable friends arrived and friends of friends and the goose was roasted (“In Vienna we used to eat goose and this is much nicer that turkey, Ruby, which was invented by the Americans”) his little bearded person seemed to be on fire with happiness and we sat down to the candlelit meal like excited children, thinking, no other Christmas will ever be as wonderful as this.

Leon and I spent one Christmas with the Reiters before we had Noel, in the same little top room, reaching for each other in the early morning cold and making love until the house woke up and we could smell breakfast and hear Max singing in his bath. We
did
love then, I remind myself, when Leon had his office over the Fleet Street gym and we lived in a small flat five minutes walk from Hampstead Heath.

Before lunch that Christmas Day, Max and Leon and I went for a walk on Primrose Hill. It was windy and very cold and on the way home we all linked arms and ran stumbling and laughing, our cheeks bright with cold, our three breaths puffing out like steam along the empty streets, running home to Louise, quiet and beautiful in her flower-filled room to listen to Max play for an hour while we sipped champagne and waited for lunch. If I could have stopped time just once in my life, I would have stopped it there that morning on Primrose Hill, with Leon and Max holding my arms and giggling like boys.

Now time seems to have stopped here. London, so full of laughter that one Christmas morning, has gone silent. I imagine the little scufflings of countless old people, balanced on the edge of their lives in the tenement buildings that still criss-cross London with their concrete balconies and their dark stairwells, the comings and goings of lives lived out by ancient gas fires, tea in brown pots, bits of chuck steak fried in dripping, “just enough for one, dear, don't give me any more than I can afford, because I won't have company, not this Christmas, and food's too dear to waste . . .” I wait and listen and come and go as they come and go, but they are thin and shadow-eyed on their pensioners' diets and all my life I have been wasteful and fat.

The telephone was ringing when I got back from my visit to Leon. It was Gerald. As it turns out, he
has
been rushing across Europe, but not to Milan, thank goodness, (of which he made no mention at all) but to some smart ski resort in Austria with his two children and flying down mountains with uncharacteristic enthusiasm and little daubs of colour in his cheeks.

“Ski-ing, Gerald!” I echoed.

“Yes. It was dreadfully expensive. You couldn't move – up or down the mountain – without paying, and cups of hot chocolate were a pound.”

“They couldn't have been, Gerald.”

“Yes, they were. I had to call a halt to hot chocolate after the first week.”

“Well, no wonder!”

I was very relieved to hear Gerald's familiar voice. My image of him bleeding to death in a Milan cul-de-sac had been quite strong at times. But now he sounded very much alive, chirpy even, as if he'd got on much better without me and his strivings on Alexandra's bed, and the apology I was going to make for my desertion of him seemed superfluous.

“Well,” I said, “it's nice to know you've had a holiday, Gerald.”

“Yes, I feel much better, and Ruby . . . after all your, well, kindness to me last year, I'd like you to be the first to hear my news!”

“News, Gerald?”

“Yes. I'm getting married again.”

I sat down, taking the telephone with me and tripping over the wire as I went. I was quite lost for a word, as if it was my turn to go in a board game and I had suddenly lost track of the rules.

“Married?” I gaped.

“Yes. She's called Davina.”

My first thought was, we must wall up Italy! Let no men out and no-one called Davina in!

It seemed incredible to me that any woman could commit herself to Gerald, knowing him as I did, little white panting man with a broken heart. And I couldn't but believe that it was only a matter of time before Davina went the way of Sarah and then what would become of Gerald? I wanted to say: “Don't do it, Gerald. Don't ever fall in love again, you poor stick of a man, let alone marry!” I saw the whole dreadful process begin again, and by the time Davina left him, he would be old and impotent then for ever and crumble away to nothing inside his pinstripes.

“That's wonderful news!” I eventually stammered out, “Wonderful news for Christmas Day!”

“Yes, well I hope you and Leon will come to the wedding, Ruby. It'll be in the spring.”

“I will of course, Gerald, but—”

“Oh yes. I heard from someone that Leon's been ill. I hope that's all over and done with.”

I paused. I didn't want to taint Gerald's little spasm of joy with my long miseries.

“He's getting on,” I said.

“Oh good. Well, you tell him that whatever happens, he must be OK by April 1st.”

“That's the great day, is it?”

“Yes. Davina's choice.”

Gerald wanted to fix a date for us all to meet and go out to a restaurant, but I told him that until Leon was better I couldn't really do this.

“I hope it will be soon, Gerald,” I said, and he seemed content with this, said Happy Christmas two or three times and rang off.

Once his voice had gone, I closed my eyes. “God weeps when we are foolish,” you once said, Sister. So I took God's role upon me for a moment or two and shed a long tear that ran slowly down my face and on to my skirt. I didn't weep for long, any more than God does, I dare say, at our individual follies, but saves his great rivers of tears for the terrible stupidity of nations and lets them fall as rain on the fields of Flanders or on the plumes of the Viceroy in Anglo-India. Perhaps the British weather is, and always has been, a sign of God's sorrow at our idiocy and it has gone on getting worse ever since the Charge of the Light Brigade and the Battle of the Somme and the invention of Lord Birkenhead, and no wonder the Thames is angry and brown and the American tourists all arrive with plastic hats in their raincoat pockets.

Leon was crying when I got to the hospital this afternoon. What I didn't fully realize – and the doctors hadn't pointed this out to me – is that because the whole of his left side is paralysed, he can't see out of his left eye, not being able to raise this eyelid. And if you sit on the left side of the bed, he can't see you, unless he turns himself round to look at you, and this is difficult and uncomfortable for him. Today, he wanted to tell me to move round to his right side, making gestures with his right arm that I failed at first to interpret, thinking he was trying to show me something in the room. And because he wasn't understood, he began to weep, making very odd sounds out of the corner of his mouth and letting his eyes, which are puffy already, fill and refill with tears.

The nursing home has been gaudily decorated for Christmas. They hung a last year's paper chain above Leon's window and I wondered if all the colours in it haven't added to his sorrow and made him wonder what on earth is Christmas doing here in a sickroom and where's my son, whom I waited for last year and have never seen again?

Leon took the slate after a while, still crying, and wrote: “I can't see you.” And it was then that I understood about his left eye, so I moved round the bed and sat very close to him on the other side, taking his hand and stroking it, but making no attempt to stop him crying. In the middle of his little noises and his slow tears, there was a tap at the door and Matron strode in, crisp and powerful and full of “glad tidings”, so she said.

“We're getting him up tomorrow, Mrs Constad,” she announced, “his blood pressure's responding very well to treatment, so it's time he was up.”

I stared at Matron and then back at Leon, who was wiping his eyes on his pyjama sleeve. I imagined his thin legs under the covers.

“Isn't it too early for that?” I questioned.

“Oh no! We've got to have him active again, haven't we?”

“He won't be able to stand, will he?”

“Well, only on one leg – like the flamingoes I saw in Tanzania! And even that one will be a bit wobbly. But he'll be supported of course, and we'll only go a little way down the corridor to start with.”

“Won't he be frightened of walking?”

“Oh, a little. It won't last long. He'll begin to feel happier about himself once he gets going.”

Matron looked at me sternly. “It'll be a long path, Mrs Constad. Hours of patience. But our rehabilitation unit is one of the best in the country and your husband is really quite young – young enough to recover.”

Then she sailed out and I was left staring at Leon, who had stopped crying and had shut his eyes, as if all this talk about rehabilitation had tired him out and he wanted to sleep.

“Well, Leon,” I whispered, “I hope you'll be alright, darling. You hang on to the nurses and they won't let you fall.”

Leon opened his eye and looked at me and began to struggle with some gurgling sounds in his throat that sounded a bit like Chinese on a far-away radio. I watched and waited, in case a miraculous piece of an English word might find its way out of him, but after a minute or two both he and I knew that it wouldn't and despairingly, he reached for the slate again, crossed out “I can't see you” and wrote: “bring Noel”.

His writing has got much stronger since that day when he wrote “the night nurse masturbates'”, but today I felt for the first time that my long vigil over him has made me weaker than I was in those first few days when I thought he would die. I seem to have very few resources left for him, ever since the day I was sick in the basin and began to feel afraid of the nursing home, and hardly any words left. So I felt angry with this sudden order, remembering that in all my years with Leon, he has never ceased to give commands and that I have never ceased to follow and guiltily aware that though I didn't want to lose him, I have been rather glad of his enforced silence.