Letter to Sister Benedicta (18 page)

The Oratory has gone very quiet now that Christmas is over. I went in there today to mutter something for Leon. I don't know what I muttered. Nothing much. I leant on the hard pew and pictured Leon's face struggling, not with a word that wouldn't shape itself, but with the anger that invaded him when Alexandra rang our doorbell late on a Saturday afternoon in September and sat down in front of us and wept. “Where did I fail?” sang out his Jewish heart, “that I have been so betrayed by my own flesh and blood that I have spent my life teaching and working for? You disgust me! I'd rather see rats in a flea-bitten copulation than contemplate your degradation and greed! You've
eaten
each other. Wasn't there anything better to eat, Alexandra, than your own brother?”

“I love Noel. I love Noel,” was all Alexandra could say and she repeated this over and over again as Leon's anger flooded her and the tears ran down her face.

“Don't imagine,” he shrieked, “that your mother or I will ever forget what you've done to this family as long as we live! You've pulled this family apart and thrown it into a stinking garbage pit. You've murdered this family and don't fool yourself that it can ever,
ever
be reborn. Murdered bodies are dead and stay dead and the stinking rotten earth pushes out its maggots to creep into their mouths, and that's what you've given us all – decay and filth and a mouthful of worms!”

I closed my eyes and pressed my fists into them, wanting to forget that I'd ever seen or heard Leon's anger. But my picture of him and of Alexandra with her tears and her endlessly repeated “I love Noel”, slipped not away, only out of focus, so that I saw Leon indistinctly and couldn't recall another word in the torrent of words that came out of him that day, but heard him shout: “mudgen! mudgen!
mudgen
!” to Alexandra and then to me, and to make him stop I began a desperate whisper: “Quiet, Leon! Matron says . . . This is a church –
my
church when I was a girl and in love with a nun. You must be good and quiet and not say that word any more, Matron says . . .”

I looked around the Oratory and saw that it was completely empty. Usually, I keep company there with the unheard whispers of Catholics whose knees are utterly obedient to their genuflections and their hearts and minds to their prayers – or so they seem. Now, I was quite alone. I looked up at the roof and then towards the altar, still covered in its red and gold cloth and I thought of Godmother Louise being carried down her stairs in a red ambulance blanket by Max Reiter, who wouldn't let the ambulance men touch her, he said. I stood in the hall as Louise passed me with her thin face, red-blanketed to the chin, resting against Max's shoulder and she winked at me and whispered: “Don't let the priests near me, Ruby. OK?”

She died the same afternoon, as if the journey to the hospital that both she and Max had put off for so long had quite exhausted her, and as far as I know, Max was the only guardian of her soul as it slipped away from her. Louise saw the Catholic church, with all its rules and punishments, as a school. “I grew out of it,” she often said. “God's no better than a headmaster, with his apostles as prefects.”

I stared for a long time at the red-covered altar. I had come to the Oratory to ask for strength to help Leon and to try to fill my heart with love for him, Sister, so that I won't feel disgust if he keeps on saying
mudgen
, even when he's home and there's no nurse to come running. But the strength doesn't seem to come; and I don't think God was in the Oratory today. He'd gone to wherever the faithful had gathered. I lit a candle nevertheless. Just in case.

When I came out of the Oratory, it had begun to snow, and I walked home letting the snow fall on me, rather liking it, despite the cold, thinking somewhere in the back of my mind, it'll be falling fast on Norfolk, covering up railway lines.

As I turned the corner into our street, I saw a dormobile parked outside the entrance to the flat, and a young bearded American, wearing an anorak with badges all over it, jumped out of the dormobile as soon as he saw me going in and said: “Pardon me. I'm waiting here for Mrs Constad, and I didn't know if you mightn't be she?” and this all sounded so polite and strange and so absolutely a part of Philadelphia or Oregon or thousands of places where I've never been that I stared amazed at the man, forgetting to reply. When at last I admitted to being Mrs Constad, he looked very relieved and told me he'd been waiting for an hour and would he be disturbing me if he came in out of the snow because he was a friend of Noel's.

He was called Al, or “to be more precise”, he said, “Alan O. Orkiss, but Alan O. Orkiss isn't a name that travels well and I always tell everyone to scrap the ‘O. Orkiss' and just call me Al. You can call me Al, Mrs Constad, for the time I'm bothering you here.”

“You're not bothering me,” I said, “would you like a martini?”

It was teatime and he looked amazed.

“I don't drink,” he said.

“Well, Al . . .” I began very nervously, “if you say you're a friend of Noel's . . . You see I haven't heard from Noel, not since September and his father's very ill and . . .”

“His father's ill?”

“He's
been
ill. He's been very ill and really it's been such a worrying time and just lately I have begun to worry about Noel.”

“Noel's OK.

Alan O. Orkiss began to fumble in his anorak pockets. It was the kind of anorak that has pockets all over it, so that if you decide to go canoeing in it and you capsize, you won't lose your front door keys or your pocket calculator and your french letters won't perish. He took out several maps and guides of Europe and a little wad of lavatory paper before he found what he was looking for: it was a letter with my name and address on it written in Noel's handwriting.

“I'd begun to imagine that Noel was dead,” I said as I took the letter, “I imagined him drowned.”

“No. He's fine.”

The letter was very short. It said:

“I thought of him in Avignon,” I mumbled, “I had terrible thoughts of him there.”

“No.”

“I'd like to write to him. I'd like to write now.”

“Well, I have no address for Noel, Mrs Constad, not right now. You see, my dad came over to Paris and thought Noel was doing a good job with the organs and he said right away he'd like to fix Noel up with a better apartment. He was living in the dix-huitième and it was a crummy place, no bath. He'll have moved on by now.”

“I could write to the shop, couldn't I?”

“Sure.”

“Which shop is it? What's the name of it?”

“It's the Bon Marché but I don't have the exact address for it.”

“Don't you? Oh dear. Well . . . shall I make some coffee, Alan?”

“Al.”

“Oh Al, yes. Shall I?”

“Great.”

I went into the kitchen and put the kettle on. While I waited for it to boil, I examined for the last time the terrible image I had allowed to nibble at my mind: the slow progress of Noel's body down the green channels of the Rhône, bumping against the age-old bridges of Avignon and moving on silently towards the sea. I put the image away; replaced it with a picture of Noel smiling under his straight shiny hair in a Paris café. I must send out his winter overcoat, I thought.

I carried the coffee into the sitting-room and persuaded Al to take off his anorak. Without it, he looked very thin and I wondered how he could endure the freezing London days, when surely the sun shone in winter in Harrisburg and it might have been nicer to have stayed there and helped his father with the music business. But he was travelling, he said. He never wanted to stop travelling, and only in the dormobile did he ever feel free. He couldn't understand why everyone in the world wasn't moving in camel trains across the globe, “when, Christ, there's only one globe and one life and why sit in one corner and let the dust fall on you?”

“It isn't necessarily dust, Al.”

“Yes it is. And anyway travelling isn't difficult,” he said earnestly, “everyone imagines it's difficult and painful and that they won't be able to buy their favourite medicines. But it's not difficult. All you need is a little money and some warm clothes and a map.”

“It's never been like that for me,” I said, “whenever I've travelled with Leon, we've spent hours with his man at Cooks, planning itineraries and learning about rabies and cholera and the state of the tap water. And it's never been a question of ‘a little money'. We've always taken wads of it and our Barclay-cards and Diners Clubs, just in case the wads run out. I mean, I simply can't believe you can live on ‘a little money' in France for instance, where they look at pounds with such scorn, you might as well be offering them Monopoly money.”

Al laughed. “That's just one way of looking at it,” he said.

“I've never seen it another way,” I admitted. “I mean, even when Leon goes to America where everyone is so hospitable and pays for everything, he always takes hundreds of pounds and he never seems to come home with them.”

“Oh it's not difficult to spend and spend, if you believe you're on a ‘holiday'. You're bound to spend then. But I don't think about travelling as a holiday, it's just the way I like to live. I pay my way mostly, working in bars or something and then move on. And I never buy air tickets. I go by ship or over land. You don't see anything from fifty thousand feet.”

“Where will you end up, Al?” I asked. “You'll go home in the end, won't you?”

“I don't think of ‘ending up'. I mean, ‘ending up's like dying, man. Why think of that?”

I asked Al where he'd be going next. He said he didn't really know, maybe back to France, “but I'll be at the Black Sea in time for the summer.” And I envied him the joy in his eyes and the thin body he took so effortlessly round the world. I found that with Noel's letter safe in my hands and all my nightmares of Avignon gone, I didn't want to talk about Noel. It was enough to know that he was living his life. I don't need him, I thought, and he doesn't need me, unless one day he runs out of money and sends me a cable. So Al drank coffee and I sat watching him, glad that he was Noel's friend and so very unafraid. I asked him to promise that whenever he was in London, he would look me up. “If you're ever short of a place to stay,” I said, “you can stay here. It's a big flat – much too big for Leon and me – and I like it when new people arrive.”

As he left, with his anorak zipped up, he said: “This thing about Noel's father, shall I tell Noel?”

“Oh no,” I said, “there's no need. There was a moment when I thought he wasn't going to pull through, but he's on the mend now, and maybe it's better if Noel doesn't see him for a while – until he's really himself again. The only thing is, if you could ask Noel to send an address? I'm not going to bother him with letters when I know he doesn't want to be bothered. It's only just in case anything should happen . . .”

“Sure. I'll ask him.”

“And Al, if you could tell him I'm not angry with him. I was for a while, but I'm not now. I think it's not in my nature.”

“Yeah, sure.”

When Al had gone, I thought, I should go straight to the hospital and tell Leon that Noel's in Paris and safe and Leon will stop writing “Noel” on the slate. But I had so enjoyed the visit from Al with his tales of travellings, that the smell and sounds of the nursing home seemed more distasteful than they had ever done. And instead of going there, I forgot about Leon and imagined myself bumping across Europe in a dormobile, spending a night on a hillside in Bavaria with a dark German forest like a silent bear for company and a skyful of spring stars over my head; then on through Austria, not stopping to hear Mozart in Vienna or to find Max's grave, but bumping on and on, crossing into Yugoslavia at dawn, following a hay cart down a red brick village where old women in black were up and about, some sweeping, others sitting still on hard wooden chairs in front of their doors, watching the sun climb up and the farm carts pass and sending the children, no bigger than seven or eight, to take the cows to the fields before school began. I imagined stopping in Sarajevo in the late afternoon: unassuming town packing up market stalls, selling fruit where the Archduke was shot in 1914, town in the middle of nowhere, on the road to Lubliana and Rijeka where at last, a day and a half later, in the darkness, I stopped the dormobile on a hillside road, got out among the rocks and blue thistles and heard the sound of the sea . . .

I went to sleep on the drawing-room sofa. I dreamed I was in Leon's room in the nursing home, in his bed and quite alone. I knew that visitors were going to come and see me; I kept my eyes on the door, waiting for it to open, dreading the moment when it opened and someone – Leon? Alexandra? – came in and spoke to me, because only then would I find out if I could make proper words, or just the obscene babblings that Leon makes. I waited and the room got dark and no visitors came. I was afraid to turn on the light, in case the light was some kind of signal that would bring in the visitors. I was afraid to put myself to the test and began to make plans for avoiding it. If the visitors come, I thought, I'll lie right down in the bed and pretend to be asleep, and seeing me asleep, they'll put down the flowers they've brought and tiptoe out and I won't have to say a word.