Letter to Sister Benedicta Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by Rose Tremain

  Title

  December 6 1977

  December 7

  December 8

  December 9

  December 11

  December 14

  December 20

  December 19

  December 21

  Christmas Eve

  Christmas Day

  Boxing Day

  December 27

  December 28

  December 29

  December 30

  December 31

  January 1 1978

  January 2 1978

  January 17

  January 19

  January 20

  January 22

  January 23

  January 24

  January 25

  January 26

  January 27

  January 28

  January 29

  January 30

  January 31

  February 1

  February 2

  February 3

  February 4

  February 6

  February 7

  February 8

  February 9

  February 10

  February 11

  April 1

  Copyright

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Rose Tremain is a writer of novels, short stories and screenplays. She lives in Norfolk and London with the biographer Richard Holmes. Her books have been translated into numerous languages, and have won many prizes including the Orange Prize, the Whitbread Novel of the Year, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Prix Femina Etranger, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Angel Literary Award and the Sunday Express Book of the Year.

  Restoration was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and made into a movie; The Colour was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and selected by the Daily Mail Reading Club. Rose Tremain’s most recent collection, The Darkness of Wallis Simpson, was shortlisted for both the First National Short Story Award and the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Three of her novels are currently in development as films.

  ALSO BY ROSE TREMAIN

  Novels

  Sadler’s Birthday

  The Cupboard

  The Swimming Pool Season

  Restoration

  Sacred Country

  The Way I Found Her

  Music & Silence

  The Colour

  The Road Home

  Short Story Collections

  The Colonel’s Daughter

  The Garden of the Villa Mollini

  Evangelista’s Fan

  The Darkness of Wallis Simpson

  For Children

  Journey to the Volcano

  LETTER TO SISTER BENEDICTA

  Rose Tremain

  DECEMBER 6 1977

  I was there at the beginning. Mother of Noel and Alexandra, wife of Leon. I was there in London last year in December with a grey Christmas on my mind, spending money and waiting, spending time with myself. The window-sills of the flat, I noticed, seemed to be rotting away. The weight of all the wet London mornings was slowly rotting them to nothing and I said to Leon, “Have you noticed this rot everywhere creeping right to our windows?” I said, “Have you noticed the ironwork on the balcony, so sore with its blisters of rust that one can’t bear to touch it?” This was when it began, Sister. I shall try to say it all to you, Sister Benedicta, whom I imagine still in the hot courtyard of the Convent School in India, tiny nun in grey when I was a fat girl.

  I’ve begun going to church again. I walk to the Brompton Oratory and in all its vastness whisper a little puff of prayer for Leon who lies in the hospital with tubes up his nose and a bag out of his stomach and who can’t make a sound any more but has to write down the few things that cross his mind on a little slate. “The night nurse masturbates” he wrote the first time he wrote anything down and a few days later, the second time he reached for the slate, he tried to write this again but his hand was very feeble that day and all he could write was “the night nurse m”. But I take hope, Sister, from this and from the other little things he’s written since writing that and have got into the habit of asking God to spare him. If you were here, Sister Benedicta, I would ask you to ask God to spare him even though he’s a Jew and thinks that nuns are the carrion of the world. We could kneel down side by side in the bathroom – I’ve never prayed anywhere but the bathroom since I married Leon – and say something out loud to God and to the repeating kingfishers on the wallpaper. You would pray with your white hands folded under your breasts and I would pray in the manner of someone learning to pray, doing a kind of prayer exercise with my fists pushed into my eyes. We could ask God to give Leon back.

  I was quite wrong to imply that Leon has written several things on his slate. He’s only written three things altogether since he became conscious. He wrote “the night nurse masturbates”, then on the day his hand seemed very weak like an old man’s hand he wrote “the night nurse m” and after that he wrote nothing for three days until one morning when I went to visit him and he suddenly picked up the slate and wrote “the aforementioned Richard Mayhew Wainwright” and I honestly couldn’t tell you what this means or whether it’s a good sign or a bad. Sometimes it seems to me that if he can write long words like “aforementioned” and “masturbate” and spell them correctly he must be getting better, but who can say? Not the doctors. They don’t utter a sentence in the way of comfort or hope. They are extremely gentle with me, the doctors, never rude or cross, but I long for them to utter and they don’t. They say, “It’s really too early to tell, Mrs Constad. You must be patient.”

  I remember the way it rained in India, Sister. You, the nuns, would turn on all the lights in the classrooms and in the corridors and though you often said you couldn’t bear the terrible heat of India you went mute with the rains, thinking of Noah and great floods and disasters in your silence. The day the Viceroy visited the Convent School the rains broke and we heard their drumming in the middle of our “welcome” pageant and wondered about the Viceroy’s plumes and the Viceroy’s wife in her finery as we made the word “welcome”, in girls across the dais. I was one half of the “o” in “welcome”, arching forward, feet and fingertips pressed to another girl who was the other half of the “o” and I could smell her menstrual blood as we arched and stretched for the Viceroy and I thought, Lord I hope she doesn’t bleed onto the dais in front of the Viceroy’s wife who looks so fine and beautiful in her silk dress that you couldn’t imagine blood ever flowing out of her.

  Leon is quite bloodless in the private room, no wound anywhere, nothing to see except the changes in him that are so hard to describe. When I look at him, I imagine the smallness of his heart with its branching arteries and veins compared to the whole size of him and then I marvel that it still keeps him going. I talk to him; I jabber away. I don’t tell him that I go to the Oratory and pay 10p for a candle to stop his spirit flickering out; I don’t say, I’m imagining your heart, Leon, so small inside the rest of you and can’t believe that it will ever let you run, dear, even talk, because your face under the tubes seems so absolutely blank and only the right side of you moves under your blankets, but I talk about the weather and the difficulty of getting taxis and the price of flowers and about the men who have come to repaint the window-sills so that they’ll stop rotting away in the damp and fumes and “when you come home, Leon,” I say, “you’ll find all the window-sills done and as good as new.” I never talk to him about Alexandra and Noel. I think he wants to forget about them and I must not interrupt this forgetting in case it helps to make him well. But quite often I want to shout out: “I was th
ere at the beginning of it all, Leon. I saw it happen and there is no need to lie down and die because of it. Look at me, fat still, fifty-year-old woman with a crocodile handbag who last week had a cry in the powder room at Harrods, but not dying, Leon, not dying, Sister Benedicta, silent nun dead or alive wherever you are . . .”

  Fat, curly-haired girl, Ruby Waterhouse, with my red cheeks and big thighs like my father’s so that his uniform always looked stretched and my mother often laughed: “Don’t split your breeches, Harry, on parade!” I haven’t often given her a thought, so preoccupied, you see, with the comings and goings of my family for twenty-six years, trying to care for Leon, proud of the way he’s kept his body in trim, there really hasn’t been time to remember the Convent School and the funny ways of the English in India, trying so hard to make everything just like Wiltshire with picnics and tennis parties. But I do remember her now and then, just as now and then I’ve taken to walking to the Oratory and doing my poor prayer and coming out again wondering, could that have done any good? And if I see myself reflected in Harrods’ windows (sometimes I walk straight by the windows, not looking at the display, afraid for some reason to see a reflection) I think, Ruby Constad that’s all you’ve got, only the self that was once Ruby Waterhouse, daughter of a Colonel with my big thighs and my bad deportment and then I feel my thighs rubbing together as I walk and the touch of my own warm skin is comforting: I can go on.

  It rained the day that Noel didn’t come home. We thought he’d be catching the 10.30 from Cambridge and Leon said “boil a chicken for lunch” and I said “boilers are very hard to find these days, Leon.” But I walked to the butchers in my green mac and got a boiler and on the way home bought some dyed teasels from a drenched barrow boy who said “Happy Christmas, lady” and I thought, oh Lord, only ten days and we’ll be eating plum pudding. My stomach felt uncomfortable from all the eating we’d done the evening before at Betty Hazlehurst’s dinner party, eating and eating and getting hot in my mauve cocktail dress but trying to listen to Gerald Tibbs, the man on my left, pale man with little shivering hands who couldn’t eat a thing, he said, since his wife had left him, left him and gone off with a smart-alec Romeo, left him alone in the house with all her things, even her furs and gilt-framed pictures of the children. “She’ll come back,” I said to the pale man, Gerald, idiotic thing to say when of course she won’t.

  She’s gone to Milan

  with her smart young man

  leaving her furs

  and all that was hers

  including the very

  pale man she called Gerry.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, “I didn’t mean to say ‘she’ll come back’. What a stupid thing to say when of course she may not. The thing is, these kind of social occasions seem to take away . . .”

  “What?” said Gerald Tibbs.

  “Compassion.” I said.

  So the next day, as it rained on London and I noticed the window-sills for the first time, Leon came home for lunch to welcome Noel and Noel never arrived. We waited in the drawing-room, Leon staring out beyond the rotting balcony to the street. I mixed us each a martini and laid the table, made a sauce for the chicken and sat down, remembering the kind of noise Noel always made in our flat, wondering why, when he’d been a quiet little boy, he was now so full of shouting and loud laughter. Leon kept looking at his watch. “Do sit down, Leon,” I said, but he went on pacing by the window. “Half past one,” he said.

  At two o’clock we ate a little bit of chicken, but after a few mouthfuls, Leon decided that he felt very tired and went to telephone his office to say he wouldn’t be coming back. After he’d telephoned, he flopped down on the sofa in the drawing-room where he fell asleep and his piece of chicken in its sauce went cold and I unwrapped the dyed teasels from their sodden newspaper and stuck them in Grandma Constad’s Chinese vase where they stood erect and dead. I crept into the drawing-room with the vase of teasels where Leon sat asleep. I put the vase down without a sound.

  It is mortally silent in Leon’s room at the nursing home. Most of the time he seems to be in a kind of sleep and isn’t aware of me. His clients have sent expensive flowers and his room is a bower. I notice the armchair where the night nurse sits with her hand up her skirt. I wonder if the night nurse is young. I wonder if in the depths of his inert being Leon feels his cock stir for the night nurse. I want to lie down on the bed and hold Leon, but I’m afraid to do this because of the tubes that mustn’t be moved and because day nurses come in and out all the time to look at him.

  Leon, who is a solicitor, has – or used to have – lots of “cases” going on interminably, a constant stream of adulterers for instance seemed to pass through his office, actors and filmstars, never a shortage of them and people who had been libelled demanding money to erase the truth. “I don’t know how you can bear it, the constant interminable stream,” I once said to Leon, but he laughed and then made a fist and said, “I’m a fighter, Ruby!” But though he enjoys fighting in his office, smartly decorated office with nine and a half paces of brown carpet and his secretary Sheila always alert for his buzzer, he seems quite unwilling to fight for his life, so all I can hope is that “the aforementioned Richard Mayhew Wainwright” is one of the rich and famous and adulterous for whom Leon fights so well and that if this case is on his mind it will give Leon a bit of strength to struggle through. Unless, Sister Benedicta, God notices my 10p candles. But what are the chances when it is so long since I was a good Catholic and said my prayers anywhere but the bathroom?

  On the day that Noel never arrived, Leon didn’t wake till four. It was dark by four, darker because the rain kept on. I had washed up and then sat opposite Leon in the drawing-room, reading the Margaret Drabble novel lent to me by Alexandra until it became too dark to see a word she’d written and I was afraid to switch on the light, preferring to watch Leon sleep and to sit silently for a while wondering at last what had happened to Noel, for until that moment I hadn’t really given him a thought, letting Leon who loved Noel so much worry for the two of us. Now I let myself remember Noel. I imagined him standing in the drawing-room, taller than both Leon and me, his body very pleased with itself, disconcerting in its little boastful ways, a thing to love and fear if you were a girl and twenty, or even if you were me, fat all my life, never imagining myself the mother of a tall son with straight brown hair that flopped and shone and a voice that was too loud.

  Leon wants Noel to become a solicitor. “My son,” he sometimes says proudly, “is very like me: he has an innate understanding of the law.” Of course it’s some days since Leon has said that or anything at all, but that Friday in London when we waited for Noel I knew that Leon was looking forward to him being with us for a while so that when clients came to dinner as they often did he could say those kind of things. But he never asked Noel how he was doing at Cambridge, never wrote to Noel’s tutor saying “does my boy have an innate understanding of the law?” He invented Noel’s “innate understanding of the law” out of love and fear and out of love and fear Noel never contradicted him. I know now – Alexandra told me – that Noel hated the fat books of the law and during the course of that very term at Cambridge had decided to give it up.

  So there we waited, the afternoon darkness on us, sitting uselessly together until at four Leon woke and looked at his illuminated watch and seeing the time was quite bewildered, not knowing where he was or why, and called out for me. “Here I am, Leon,” I said gently, “I’m going to put on the light.”

  Leon blinked at me and remembered. “Has Noel come?” he said.

  “No, Leon, Noel hasn’t come and I was only waiting for you to finish your little sleep to say surely we ought to telephone his landlady?” And when I remember saying this, I can’t imagine why one of us, Leon at least, hadn’t thought of doing this earlier because had we telephoned at two when Leon flopped down for his sleep we might have spoken to Noel and as it was we didn’t telephone till four and a far-away sounding Mrs Walton said: “Oh no, Mrs
Constad, Noel’s packed and gone.” But Leon at once said: “Packed and gone could mean anything. It could simply mean he’s catching a later train, Ruby, so why don’t you pop out, dear, before the shops shut and get some cakes and things for his tea?” So I put on my green mac and began another of my countless walks up Knightsbridge, knowing as I saw myself pass in all the shop windows that Noel wouldn’t be coming for tea, that in his uncaring way he had decided on something else.

  Obedience to Leon (why else was I walking up Knightsbridge in the rain for cakes?) comes very easily to me. Leon believes that he is right in his little commands; Leon believes in his own answers. So my obedience to Leon comes I think not from my belief that he’s always right, but from his. I don’t question. I let Leon be right. I have let other people be right all my life. Yet I have begun lately to wonder at this unfashionable tendency of mine and think it may have something to do with being fat and wish now and then that I lived in seventeenth-century Holland and was a mistress of Rubens and he would joy in my big thighs and paint me laughing and naked and my nipples flamingo pink. Alexandra despises my habit of obedience when in the 1970s she believes that women must say no to everything and go on and on saying no so that men will repent of their arrogance and in the spirit of lambs lie down with the lionesses to draft a new constitution for the Western world and God knows we do need a new constitution because our world has lost count of all its sorrows and people like me have so absolutely lost count of them that no wonder I sometimes feel like a dinosaur who should be dead under the great forests of coal.

  There were none of Noel’s favourite cakes in Harrods’ food halls. I bought one or two Danish things, thinking these might keep better than ordinary cake, knowing Leon and I wouldn’t want to eat cakes on our own. But when I came out of Harrods, the rain had passed on and was falling on Highgate or Camden Town or somewhere to the north, sparing Knightsbridge which was unexpectedly gleaming in pale sunlight. So I walked home with my umbrella folded, discovering in the bit of sunshine that I was hurrying, believing suddenly that after all Noel might have arrived and wanting to get home with the cakes and see Leon full of relief and joy. The pavements were very slippery and my left leg almost skidded down a grating and the cakes with it, but my heart was now quite bright with expectation and in all the taxis that passed me I looked for Noel, sure to see him now with his odd Cambridge paraphernalia, happy to see him in spite of his noise and Leon’s doting on him, thinking after all he is my son, my first-born child and never mind if there’s no peace in the flat for three weeks as long as he’s there and I can now and then reach out and touch him.