Letter to Sister Benedicta (15 page)

I got up. I was no longer the light of all generations; I was ragged with terror. I was a beggar with nothing where once I had been rich beyond imagining. I ran this way and that, calling. I had no idea how long I had been lying down – two minutes, fifteen minutes? – and fears crowded into me until my calling became a scream and picnicking students and schoolboys playing rounders and dog-owners of all ages heard it for miles around and I fancied the heath had gone strangely silent, sensing the inevitability of tragedy.

Alexandra heard my scream. From a little dell, where she had wandered to play, she came running to me and I lifted her into my arms and crushed her with the weight of my joy at finding her until she began to cry. She had been no more than ten yards away from me.

The dog-owners walked on, the students turned back to their sandwiches, the schoolboys started to bat and run, the sun came out again and I carried Alexandra to the rug and we both had a drink of lemonade from a thermos cup that tasted of stale tea. And it was then, holding the child's hand, that I knew that the sun's mysterious passage into my head was only a poor imagining and that what truly filled me was a sense of wonder at my life, at the love in it which seemed boundless and bright. I felt blessed, Sister. My body on the ground beside my child was never – before or since – as beautiful as it was on that day. I rocked Alexandra on my knee and found that in time to the rocking, I was humming Max's little piece of music. Alexandra laughed. I thought, I can't remember if I told Leon yesterday that I love him, but I shall tell him this evening, before he's put his latchkey down, I shall tell him that all my days are filled with love for him and for our children and this is how it will be until we are old and sit together in the silence of our rememberings.

I collected Noel from school and walking home with the two children, I knew that I never wanted to move from our little Hampstead flat, even though it was cluttered with the children's toys and Leon often said: “How can I bring clients here, to this mess?”

But then my mother died and left me the money she'd been so careful with all her life (even grudging our Indian servants the few rupees they earned to keep her idle and discontented) and we bought a house in Chelsea, not far from where Sheila lives now. In those days, Chelsea was rather a quiet place and even the fishmonger delivered to your door and a horse and cart selling flowers used to go up and down the King's Road, and sometimes the horse's hooves and the little cries of the flower-seller were the only sound.

Leon moved his office several times during the years we lived in Chelsea, first to Holborn, then to Bloomsbury and finally to Mayfair, which he's never left, only moved round it to bigger, grander offices as he took on partners and more and more rich clients who expected to see him in a large office and would quite have lost faith in him if they'd found him above the gym, with the squeaking and thudding of the apparatus going on all the time, even while they talked.

After Louise died and I made my visits to Max in the house in St John's Wood, he often said to me: “You're happy, aren't you, you and Leon?” And a year or two earlier, I would have answered “yes” and not been lying, and now I answered “yes” and knew that I was lying, remembering my autumn walks on the heath and thinking, it's slipped away from us since then, the kind of happiness that Max understands. And it wasn't very long after Max's death that Leon went secretly in search of paradise.

“He's getting on alright!” Matron said to me today, “I think he's begun to try, and that's half the battle.”

When I went to see Leon, he was fast asleep and snoring like a very old man with his mouth open, tired out, it seemed, by his trying. I sat down by the bed and waited for him to wake up, and I thought of a remark my mother made to me one warm evening in India when my father had fallen asleep in his chair: “Never wake up a sleeping man, Ruby. If you do, he thinks you're offering yourself.” And she said this with a shudder, as if the thought of offering her thin-waisted body to my father's wide one was like brushing her lips with death, and I wondered how many times in all her years with him she had offered it and where my father had gone in search of love, perhaps even to the officers' mess?

“Leon,” I whispered, putting my face very close to his, and he opened his eyes and looked at me; or rather, he opened his right eye and the skin over the left eye hardly moved. Matron hasn't mentioned eye exercises, but he will surely need them, if he's to sit in his brown-carpeted office with a shred of his former dignity – though it's very hard to believe that he will sit there one day, buzzing for Sheila to take Mrs Wainwright away and bring in Charlton Heston, which was how he seemed to carry on before, when he looked at the world through both his eyes and manufactured all his quicksilver words that made him rich and known.

“Only me, dear,” I said.

Leon was lying very far down in the bed and looked rather buried by it. I wanted to help him up. “Shall I help you up, Leon?” I asked, “or do you want to go back to sleep?”

He held out his right arm and I took this to be a sign that he wanted lifting. He was heavy to drag up on to the crumpled pillows. I wished I was Matron with her strength and her “years of experience of these sort of cases, Mrs Constad”, and I did a very mediocre job of lifting Leon, so that he looked tilted and uncomfortable and I thought, why do I do everything so badly and by halves, like my healing of Gerald and my loving of Noel?

I stayed only a short time. I talked a little, and while I talked, Leon slid down the bed again, needing to rest, it seemed, to gather strength for the next day's walk down the corridor.

I told Leon that a new year was coming in a few days and we would at last be free of 1977, which had been the worst year of our lives, worse even than the freezing winter I spent in my grandmother's house in 1946 when never a day passed without someone grumbling out the word “rationing” and my cold room was the only refuge in a place gone sour with my grandmother's leavings, the spilt sherry and the urine-stained cushions.

“I'm looking forward to next year,” I told Leon. “It'll be a year of patching-up. You're on the mend now and let's try to mend everything that's broken in our lives.”

Leon's eyes were closed. I think it's ages now since he's listened to a word I say, and even these days, when I'm his only visitor, he doesn't seem inclined to give me his attention for long. Or perhaps it's just this weariness of his, that Matron wants him to strive against, but which seems to come from deep inside him and if he could talk, he'd look at me each day as he looked at me when he came back from America and say: “I'm tired to death.”

Before I left – as soon as I said I was leaving – Leon opened his good eye, reached for the slate and wrote: “bring the albums”. There are eight albums and they are all extremely heavy, so I shall have to take them to the nursing home one by one, beginning chronologically with the pictures of me when we moved to Chelsea and Leon spent a month's earnings on his expensive camera and began to feel like Cartier-Bresson: me at thirty in a webbing belt and pleated skirt and white-rimmed sunglasses, when Noel and Alexandra were tiny children on kiddicars in our backyard garden. There are dozens of almost identical snaps of me smiling and holding one or other of the children, and it was only later on – in the third album, I think – that Leon noticed that many of the people in Cartier-Bresson's photographs aren't smiling at all, but in fact look full of tribulation and confusion. And from then on, he kept saying to me: “I don't know where you've got this idea of smiling from, Ruby. For heaven's sake take the smile off your face!” In consequence, in the last four or five of the albums I invariably look very glum, so that Grandma Constad once remarked: “Why does Ruby come out so terribly in your snaps, Leon?” And Leon, who hated his photographs to be called “snaps”, snapped: “She's not photogenic, Mother. It's not my fault.”

Once or twice, Leon let us all smile – in the cafés in Brittany in front of our Orangina bottles, or tobogganing on Wimbledon Common one snowy January Sunday. We smiled at the summit of Snowdon, but the clouds came down on our moment of triumph and we suddenly lost Leon and his camera who had only been a few feet away and our smiles vanished as we imagined him loosing his footing and plunging down the mountain to his death.

The last album is – or was – Leon's favourite, because at least half of this one is filled with pictures taken in Cambridge when he and Noel spent a weekend there “to get the feel of Cambridge, Noel” before the term began. It was August and very hot. The buildings look golden. Leon lay in a punt and photographed Noel as he punted. They sat in a pretty riverside pub and Noel photographed Leon whose skin had gone brown in a day, and he looks burnished with content in a strange floral shirt that he's never worn since because it reminds him of that day, one of the most perfect of his life.

I suppose it might be wisest to bring him the last album first and let him look at Noel. Ever since the day when he wrote “bring Noel” on the slate, I have wondered how he might react if Noel was suddenly brought back from the room in Avignon where I imagine him – cheap, musty room with grey lace at the window and a communal W.C. down the corridor – brought back as he is and not as Leon wanted him to be with his liking for pubs and his innate understanding of the law. No doubt Leon would weep, because he weeps at all things and can't stop himself which Matron says is quite normal and is to be expected for some time to come – but whether he would weep with anger or despair or joy if he woke up one afternoon and found Noel sitting by his bed, I'm unable to tell. I only remember that in the autumn, when Leon found out that Noel and Alexandra had been together in France and that Noel wasn't ever coming back to Cambridge to follow the path chosen for him, his Jewish rage came gushing out of him so violently that he seemed insane, but Noel who was in Avignon never saw it, only imagined it perhaps as he lingered on in France as the weather grew colder and he thought of the autumn term in Cambridge going by without him. Perhaps Leon's anger with Noel has just passed through him – as mine seems to be passing through me – and is gone without a trace, and if Noel did go to the hospital, Leon would shed tears on the hand he held and forget all about Cambridge and the weekend they had there, just the two of them, when the sun shone and his hopes for Noel were high.

To be safe, however, I think I shall start by bringing the first of the albums, because I don't think Leon could feel anger for children on kiddicars or playing on a windy beach in Wales, or indeed for me when I was young and still in the habit of smiling. And if he felt any nostalgia for those black and white faded days, he could comfort himself with the reminder that he's come a long way since then when his office was above the gym and his telephone was silent right through the night.

Then it occurs to me that Leon may only want the albums in order to tear them up, page by page, and send all those years flying into the hospital dustbins, wishing that he'd never tried to become Cartier-Bresson, when now the limit of his world is a few feet of corridor and his camera eye is closed. I don't mind if he does destroy them (though I doubt if his right arm is strong enough to tear out the thick pages) because the albums are full of ghosts, and even my own ghost is malicious sometimes and begins to haunt me, and it might be much better if all the ghosts were thrown away and I held them only in my head, just as I hold your ghost, Sister Benedicta, knowing that my memory is blurred and feeble and one day I shall look there for the ghosts and find them gone.

D
ECEMBER
30

I saw a nun today on the tube. Her feet inside the black lace-up shoes looked pinched, as if she was a child of poor parents who couldn't afford new shoes and had told her: “You'll have to make do.” Perhaps her feet really were hurting her, because she looked very cross and unable to stop her nun's heart from spilling over with irritation, thinking, why am I here on a freezing December morning with the sacrifice of my life pressing on my toes? Why am I being jolted across London with the stares of unbelievers and their turned backs showing me no gratitude for my years of selflessness and my winters of lightweight clothing?

I stared at her face and pale eyes that had never worn a trace of make-up even when she was young, and wondered what God ever said to her now that her life was half-way gone and the stink of God's world crawled up her nostrils. Perhaps she had been born on Valentia Island and christened Mary and never a day passed without her remembering Ireland, where even the sea was Catholic and God lay curled in the miracle of a pink cowrie shell.

The nun got off the tube at Charing Cross station. She carried a black hold-all. Off to relatives in Kent to celebrate a new year of obedience? Not liking the relatives in Kent with their cosy hearths and their warm tweed suits, wanting only to be back with the Sisters, wherever they were, waking in the six o'clock darkness to start each day with a blessing and a sip of Jesus at her throat.

“We don't really look forward to the school holidays,” you told me once, Sister. “We miss the girls.” And of course this was so, because the girls, with their high, English voices, kept out the sound of India that you knew would never go away, but was always there, just outside the gate, and what could you do to keep it out when there were so few of you and India was so vast, it sometimes seemed as if it filled the globe and that England had long ago been buried beneath it. “No, we don't look forward to the holidays!” I didn't either, Sister. My house was full of the belly-laughs of soldiers and there was no peace in it.

I saw the nun on my way to the London Library with Leon's London Library ticket in my handbag and an idea in my mind that I would go there and look for a little book about India that might tell me something about the way it is now and what has happened there in the thirty years since the last British soldiers passed through the Gateway of India on to their waiting ship.