Letter to Sister Benedicta (11 page)

“Ruby,” he said, “I can't make love any more. I've tried.”

“I'm not talking about making love, Gerald, I'm just talking about letting me hold you.”

He crossed to the sofa and clambered on to it. He looked very apprehensive. The sofa wasn't very wide, so he had to lie close to me. Feeling his thin body, I thought, he's like a stick and one day he'll just snap, a brittle stick in solicitor's clothes, he'll snap inside his clothes and nobody will see. We lay in abject silence, but after a while, Gerald put an arm round me.

“You smell very nice, Ruby,” he said sadly.

The following day, he telephoned me. “I couldn't sleep last night, Ruby,” he said, “I thought about you all night, I'm so glad I touched you. I didn't really want to, but when I did, I was glad.”

I said nothing. Really, I felt like laughing, but I didn't want Gerald to think I was laughing at him.

“Are you there, Ruby?” he asked worriedly.

“Yes, I'm there, Gerald.”

“I'm awfully tired,” he said, “not having slept at all, and I was wondering if there was any chance . . . if I could come round for an hour or two and just lie with you and sleep?”

I thought of lying with Gerald on the bed I shared with Leon, and rejected the idea. But both Alexandra and Noel were away and I supposed we could lie in Alexandra's room, on a single bed under the shelf of ornaments which had been there since she was a little child.

“Yes, Gerald, do come round. Leon went to America this morning,” I added.

I suppose I never should have told Gerald that Leon was away. Then he would have had his little doze and thanked me and gone home at about four or back to his office to write more letters of apology to clients he would never see. But as it was, he slept for three hours and, waking up to find me beside him, decided that his private Waterloo had arrived and he had to find out now if he could do it or if Sarah's leaving him had made him impotent for ever.

He took out his cock, which was small and white like the rest of him, but quite erect, and after a lot of fumbling with my corsets and pants simply slipped it into me. He held on to me as if he was drowning, quite without tenderness or affection, but biting his lip in a terrible desperation. I hardly dared move, in case his tiny sex slipped out of me and he couldn't get it in again. It took him a very long time to come and in all his exertions he never looked at me or kissed me, but stared straight at the wall, at a fixed point on the wall until the moment when he knew he could come and he pressed his cheek against mine with a little sob of relief as the sperm shot out of him for the first time in weeks and months and he knew that he was still a man. His Waterloo past, he was silent. Then a few minutes later he sprang off me with a bound and said: “I'm going to put the kettle on, Ruby. I'm parched!”

I lay on Alexandra's bed and wondered why I had so wanted to help Gerald and whether I had helped him enough now and could give up. I couldn't construe what I had done as unfaithfulness to Leon, because there had been no passion in it and for me not even a second's pleasure (not that Leon regarded the notion of faithfulness as anything but “Victorian rubbish”, and this presumably included me as well as him) but it hadn't been very enjoyable to lie like a shipwreck under a drowning man, and now that the drowning man was safe and wouldn't die, I wanted to be free of him. I fastened up my corset with a sigh.

But I went on being the shipwreck. Occasionally, the drowning man – sensing, perhaps, that he was out of danger – gave me a little attention, kissing me and putting his trembling hand on my big breasts. But after a few times, I understood why his wife Sarah had run off with her olive-skinned Romeo. Gerald had never discovered that a woman could feel pleasure too and longed to feel it, and if you had told him this he would have felt a terrible sense of impropriety and probably run away. I went on being the shipwreck, about once a fortnight, until Alexandra came back from France. Then, a terrible feeling of guilt appeared inside me and I telephoned Gerald at his office one morning and told him curtly never to come back. And for a while, I forgot him completely, never giving him a thought or wondering if I had hurt his feelings, never asking myself, how will he get on without my body to take pity on his infantile sex? Until quite recently, when the year has crept towards Christmas again and I have begun to remember how he was the evening he was sick in the lavatory, quite defeated by his sorrow.

I feel very ashamed, Sister, about everything that happened with Gerald. Ashamed of what I did and of what I failed to do. I marvel sometimes that all my years have never taught me to be wise and it serves me right, I dare say, that now I'm alone with myself and it's Christmas Eve, Christmas Eve even in California where the day is just beginning and Leon's co-respondents have all their gift-wrapped presents hidden away with their shoe trees. None of them will give Leon a thought, nor a thought for London which is deserted now except for tourists in big hotels and rubbish flying about in the wind and little posses of beery youths sicking up into alleyways.

Like Leon last year, when Noel didn't arrive, I long for Christmas to be over. I keep thinking that there may be a knock at the door and it will be Alexandra in the duffle coat described by the hospital receptionist, but really I should give up all hope of this. If it was Alexandra at the nursing home, she must have gone straight back to Norfolk, and this isn't surprising because after last year's Christmas, she must want to make amends to Sue (if indeed Sue is there and hasn't gone off with a girl who loved her better). Since Alexandra went back to the cottage in the autumn, she hasn't written to me, so who can say what has happened? Only in my dreams do I ever get to the cottage, but I know that really I shall never go, having promised Alexandra that I would stay away and not go near her until she asked for me.

I am writing now with a martini beside me and half a shaker full of it in the fridge – a little Christmas Eve treat to myself – and perhaps if I drink it all, I shall wobble my way to bed and sleep right through Christmas and when I wake up the M4 and M1 and the A12 will be bathed in a cloud of exhaust fumes, as all the Londoners fart their way home from their country weekends with boots full of broken plastic toys, saying “Thank God that's over for another year,” exactly as Leon said after his day in bed with the albums, “Thank God that's over,” and then put on his suit and went back to the office.

What Leon didn't know that day was that nothing at all was over, not even his disappointment in Noel, but that it had just begun, begun then and there on Christmas morning when Alexandra woke early and looked for Sue and couldn't find her. Long before Alexandra looked out of the window and took her breath of the winter morning, Sue had crept out of the house and in the pitch darkness started her moped and ridden away. A note scribbled in crayon and left on the kitchen table said: “See you next term. Please feed the hens. Love, Sue.”

Alexandra made a mug of tea and sat on her own in the kitchen, warming her hands on her mug and staring at Sue's note. She felt bewildered. She hadn't asked Noel to the cottage, didn't really want him there. Now Sue had gone and her present for Sue – an oil painting of Sue she had done secretly from a photograph – would stay wrapped in the garage and instead she would spend all the hours of Christmas with Noel, eating food that Sue had bought. She felt like a thief. Some of the voices she heard inside her as she sat there with her tea blamed Sue with her sulking and jealousy, but others told her: “You should have sent Noel away. You've been weak and unkind to Sue and it will be weeks before you'll be forgiven and can be at peace again with Sue and the hens and the routine of the cottage.”

When Noel got up, always a bit frozen and cramped by his nights in the sleeping-bag, and wandered into the kitchen with his cheerful “happy Christmas, Alex!” all Alexandra could say, without looking at him, was: “Sue's gone.”

He sat down on the other side of the table and held out his hand to Alexandra. “Cheer up,” he said, “the world is full of Sues.” And Alexandra, suddenly enraged by him, hurled her tea at his face, missed it narrowly but deluged his crumpled pyjamas. The hot tea stung but didn't burn. Noel swore and stamped off to the bathroom, leaving Alexandra to mop the floor.

This was the beginning of that Christmas Day, Sister, as Alexandra described it to me. She told me that the rest of the day, until the evening, was very quiet. Alexandra sulked as she prepared the turkey Sue had got from a local farmer; Noel lit the fire and sat reading by it. The sunshine melted the frost on the garden and went down and almost at once there was a frost in the air again. Alexandra felt hungry and cold and wanted to be by the fire, but stayed in the kitchen, drinking tea and waiting for the food to be ready, but forgetting to feed the hens even though Sue had put their little basin of corn by the back door.

When the turkey was at last cooked, Alexandra piled all the food on to trays, opened a bottle of wine and shouted to Noel to come and carry them into the sitting-room. They squatted down by the fire and spread the feast all around them. Noel rubbed his hands, glad that the silent day with its tolling of church bells and freezing afternoon was coming to an end, and careful now to be nice to his sister, to make amends. The food warmed and cheered Alexandra; she felt her body revive and her guilt begin to leave her. Sue will have gone to friends, she decided, she'll be alright with friends, or even with her parents in King's Lynn, who would have cooked a magnificent meal . . .

When they had eaten two helpings of the turkey, Noel produced a present for Alexandra. It was a glossy book of Magritte paintings and Alexandra marvelled over it as she touched it, was suddenly very glad that Noel had given her something that she liked so much. “I've got nothing for you, Noel,” she said, “I thought we'd agreed – no presents.” Noel shrugged. He pretended not to mind, finding he did mind. He opened another bottle of wine, uncurled himself on the floor and took sip after sip. He felt rejected.

Alexandra cleared away the food, put on some music, and came and sat near Noel and looked at the Magritte paintings. But Noel wanted her attention and made her put the book down. He began to ask her about Sue, asked her gently this time why she had tied herself to Sue. “Don't you like it with men?” he said and Alexandra shrugged her shoulders.

“It's OK,” she said, “but they're so selfish.” So Noel began to talk about his loving of Christine, describing it, saying he didn't believe any kind of homosexual love could compare with what a man and a woman could have together, if they understood each other's bodies and the perfection of giving and taking.

“He talked and talked about it,” Alexandra told me, “he was turning himself on, trying to blot out Christine by seeing me as a challenge. And I knew in the end – I'd half known it ever since he arrived – that he'd just smother me with himself and I wouldn't resist. In fact, I knew that I wanted it, that I'd make him offer it all.”

By the time Noel touched Alexandra, beginning with her black hair, then stroking her face and neck, and then pulling her slowly towards him, she was on fire for him, thinking over and over to herself, this is why he came here and in the end it's beautiful and perfect and I have loved him all my life. And the image of Sue speeding off into the darkness on her little bike never entered her mind again. All she whispered when she woke up the next day with Noel beside her was: “My life has changed”, and she laughed.

So this is where it began, Sister. I imagine a hundred-year-old judge banging down his mallet with an age-flecked hand and wheezing out the word:
Incest
. I see you shudder under your grey gown and cross your arms to protect yourself.

I have almost finished the martini . . .

C
HRISTMAS
D
AY

Last night, before I sailed off to sleep on my martini sea, I lay blinking at my dark room and thought up one of my poems. I'm not sure if it's about Leon or about Gerald, but I don't think this matters; making up poems, like writing letters to you, Sister Benedicta, who will never read it, seems to keep my mind alive. Without the letter and the mediocre poems I believe I might have lost myself and started to wander about London in a daze with a suitcase crammed full of stolen Marks and Spencer's knitwear and Jubilee Souvenir tea towels, until the heavy hand of the law reached out and tapped me on the shoulder and I was hauled up before the magistrate with not a word to say for myself.

The poem I wrote last night went:

Very soon after that, I drowned myself in my martini sleep and to my surprise it was rather a happy drowning which I didn't regret at all, because I expected to feel very sorry for myself today and in fact I don't feel too bad at all, only relieved that Christmas Day has come at last; I'm living it now, minute by minute (even though it's only 10.30 in the morning and there's a long way to go yet) and when I wake tomorrow morning, it will be over.

I'm rather worried that the vermouth bottle won't last until the shops open again. It's so long since I had a martini that I have quite lost the habit (so important when Leon was here) of checking the drink supply. However, yesterday's drizzle has left off; the sun seems to come and go, so I may wander out later in search of a little Off Licence that has dared to sneak up an “Open” sign for an hour or two. London seems to have quite a lot of these and they function in the same spirit as the round-the-clock Italian restaurants, not defying convention exactly, but ignoring it.