Letter to Sister Benedicta (19 page)

It was pitch dark when I woke. On the landing outside, I could hear Mrs Smith saying to some long-awaited guest: “Come in, come in. No, You're not late at all!”

J
ANUARY
17

I haven't said a word to you, Sister, for fifteen days.

But now I can write it: Leon is dead.

I'm not trying it out. It is real.

It has happened. Leon is dead.

Alexandra has been with me. I sent her a telegram and she arrived. Too late. Because even I, when the nursing home telephoned, well, I ran out into Knightsbridge and screamed for a taxi and I told the taxi driver to race like an ambulance with his horn blaring, but even I was too late. Dr Woods was there, wearing glasses. I'd never seen him wear glasses before. Matron was there with her eyes in shadow. “You're too late,” they said.

I stared at Dr Woods and Matron, from one to the other. I could hear their two breaths, the repetitious sighs that kept them alive and I thought, Leon is without breath.

“Why?” I said.

Dr Woods took my arm. “We did everything we could,” he said, “be assured of that.”

“We had very high hopes,” Matron said, “we thought, at his age . . .”

He was younger than me. Still forty-eight, two weeks ago when he died. My mother said: “That's a great mistake. As if it wasn't bad enough him being a Jew.”

“He's only forty-eight,” I said to Matron and Dr Woods and they nodded.

“It's exceedingly rare,” said Dr Woods.

“Why did he die?” asked Alexandra, arriving in her duffle coat two days after he was dead.

“That's just it,” I said, “‘why him?' I keep on asking.”

“No!” she screamed, “What did he die
of
?”

Matron and Dr Woods led me along the corridor to him. When I see him, I thought, I may let out a wail, as Grandma Constad would have done. But there didn't seem to be any wailing inside me. I looked. The room was bare of flowers, empty and tidy. Me and you, Leon, I thought, but only for a moment longer. I could hear Matron and Dr Woods waiting outside the room. Me and you, Leon, for this one last time. And your face looks so dry, dear, with the stubble coming through. I can't bear to touch it.

J
ANUARY
19

There was a cup of tea for me in Matron's room. Dr Woods was called away and shook my hand gently.

“Drink the tea, Mrs Constad,” said Matron.

I sipped and said: “I'd like to know . . . when you said so much about rehabilitation. I'd like to know . . .”

“Massive secondary stroke,” she announced. She announced this as if it was a parade order. I thought, the whole world is crawling with soldiers shouting orders and I have never been free of them, only with Leon when he was twenty and poor and we ran down Primrose Hill with Max Reiter, only then was I free of them.

“Unexpected,” Matron said.

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ANUARY
20

Where and how was I to bury him, Sister? I believe I wouldn't have minded the wailing of Grandma Constad, someone to take charge. And yet Leon never went near the synagogue, not since the ordeal of the Barmitzvah when he was a boy and living in Liverpool in the wide shadow of Grandma Constad's skirt. I thought of going to the Rabbi and asking: “What shall I do with him?” But I was afraid of the Rabbi, speaking his secret language that I had never bothered to understand.

“Help me,” I said to Alexandra.

She is very thin. She wears no make-up. She is frail and unhelpful. On the day of the cremation of Leon's body (the simplest and easiest way, say the undertakers) I ask her: “Are you alone still or is Sue with you?”

“I'm with you,” she says.

J
ANUARY
22

On the way to the cremation, we drive past the Oratory. I remember the soldier's bride and the flickering candles. I remember that, feeling herself becoming very small, Alice tries to remember what the flame of the candle looks like after the candle has been blown out.

“I used to go there most days,” I admit to Alexandra.

“Where?”

“In there. The Oratory.”

“Why?”

“To pray for Leon. I prayed he wouldn't die.”

“I thought you weren't a Catholic. I thought you'd given it up.”

We go in the big car in silence. Alexandra has no gloves and her hands are blue with cold. She still wears her duffle coat and a shabby skirt underneath. I imagine her in a warm department store, trying on new clothes. In the communal changing room, her body is the thinnest.

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ANUARY
23

I think it's because I sleep for so short a time each night that I can't write for long in the daytime . . .

J
ANUARY
24

Four a.m and I haven't slept. The cats have been carrying on somewhere in the cold streets. Better to put on the light and try to write something down – more than a fragment this time.

Evelyn Wainwright called today. She was wearing a black coat and her hair was moulting all over it and inside the black coat, her being was a-shiver and I think it never rests or is still. I made tea. She'd come about Leon, she said, to tell me how sorry . . .

“I don't really want to talk about him, Mrs Wainwright. He's not a part of me any more.”

I said this very firmly. I realized that for days and days, I have kept on saying it: “He's not a part of me any more.”

“I've lost my own home, or as good as lost it,” Evelyn Wainwright whispered into her teacup, “I was forced to take Partridge in the end, younger than my sop, you see, younger than Richard and no good.”

“He'll do his best for you, Mrs Wainwright.”

“His best won't be good enough.”

“When does the hearing come up?”

“Tuesday fortnight. I have to appear. I said I didn't want to appear, but Partridge says I must. If I'd had a better solicitor, I wouldn't have had to appear.”

“Won't your son change his mind about selling the house?”

“No. Greed and debts, you see, Mrs Constad. He can't understand my feelings, not for one moment. He says there'll be central heating in the new bungalow, and of course I've lived my life without central heating, but I've never complained about this, not so as you could infer I wanted change. Now, if only, you see, your husband hadn't been taken ill. I know I would have been alright with him. He was such a clever man.”

Louise came to my rescue. She took my hand and looked at me with her large eyes. “Don't listen to anyone,” she counselled, “Leon is clever and kind and he loves you. Don't listen to your mother who's so crumpled up inside, or to your grandmother, or anyone – listen to your heart! Max and I will come to your wedding. We'll sing and rejoice for you. But if no one in the world rejoiced, no one at all, it wouldn't matter, just as long as you rejoice, Ruby, and know that you're doing what you want to do.”

Evelyn Wainwright talked on. She asked me twice if she was disturbing me and I didn't answer. I held Louise's hand. I said to her: “I love Leon. He's changed me and I love him.” And then I let myself lean against Louise, who took me in her arms and I could feel her soft hair against my forehead and I wept. Louise didn't move or speak. She held on to me and my tears made a damp patch on her dress. I felt as if I wanted to stay weeping in her arms for ever, until there wasn't a shred of confusion or grief inside me, and I knew she would stay holding me, however long it took. I believe I wept for a long time. When I opened my eyes, the first thing I saw was Evelyn Wainwright's empty teacup on the coffee table and I looked round the room for her, but she had gone.

J
ANUARY
25

Word has gone out to the co-respondents. I often wake in the night and imagine I hear the telephone ringing and that when I pick up the receiver, I'll hear a click and then a voice saying: “Oh this is Sam Mundy calling from L.A.” But it never does ring and I'm really very grateful for this, because I have discovered that it's very hard for me to say Leon's name out loud and I keep praying that a long time will pass before I have to do this again. I can write it down, write it to you, Sister, and not feel the weight of it, the unforgettable weight of that name on my life. But when I say it, all I can remember is that when I uncovered his dead face, I couldn't bear to touch it with my hand, let alone bring my lips near it.

One evening while Alexandra was here and I was lying in bed trying to read, the telephone did ring. It wasn't a co-respondent: it was Sue. I listened to Alexandra talking to her. She told Sue that she felt very ill in London, that she hated being here and wanted to get back to Norfolk. My imaginings of Sue and the cottage came back. I wanted to say to Alexandra: “This is how I imagine it all, the cottage and the hens and Sue – is it right?” But I knew Alexandra didn't want to talk about her life. She has grown thin and tired with the effort of reshaping it, and only when she feels better will she talk to me. I wonder, though, if Sue is just an instrument in her recovery, to be discarded again just as before, when some soldier's footfall sounds outside her door. Or will she stay with Sue, grow old with her, lover and friend?

“I'm quite outside it,” I say to myself, “I can do nothing at all, only send her back in a warmer coat.” (I didn't even dare to ask her if it was she who came one day to visit Leon in a duffle coat and went home without seeing me.) But then I laugh. After all this time, Sister, after twenty-five years of loving, this is all I have left to give my children – winter coats!

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ANUARY
26

“A fortnight is a long time,” Alexandra said to Sue.

She came with me the next day to the nursing home to collect Leon's belongings, such as they were.

“Why on earth did you take him one of the photo albums, Mummy?”

“He asked for it. He wanted them all.”

“He couldn't have wanted to see us, not after all that raging.”

“He often asked for—”

“Noel?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Who can say, dear? Noel seemed to be part of his confusions. He couldn't say ‘Noel', of course. He made noises.”

“Didn't he say any words at all?”

“Only one. It was a made-up word.”

“What was it?”

“I'd rather not say it.”

“Why?”

“I don't like hearing it.”

“Why?”

“Don't make me say it, Alexandra.”

A fortnight is a long time.

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ANUARY
27

But then, when Alexandra had gone and I was alone again and Leon's clothes still hung in the wardrobe and his books and papers in the study lie untouched, then I missed her, even though her ways are cold and strange and she is altogether like someone lost.

J
ANUARY
28

The smell of Leon is in his clothes. I open the cupboard and put my face into his suits and it's as if his body was inside one of them. The smell of his makes me so ashamed that I couldn't go near his dead face. Did I imagine his death was contagious?

J
ANUARY
29

Such a bad night again, Sister, and the mating cats are like sirens. When the light comes, my eyes are swollen and there is such an ache in my legs, I wonder if I can get out of bed. I am ageing surely, ageing quite out of time. If I see Gerald again, or Betty Hazlehurst, they will say: “Good heavens, Ruby, you've aged out of all proportion . . .”

Out of all proportion to the paper-thin life, led in silence for quite some years now, ever since Leon went away in search of paradise, out of all proportion to these hundreds of pale days is the hurting weight of Leon's death.

I remember at the Convent School, when one of the Sisters died of heat and old age in the middle of the summer term, we were told that there would be “a suitable period of mourning”. We stood in silence for a minute each day at the end of morning prayers, thinking of Sister Jordana's soul, but the “suitable period” didn't last very long, and after that we were allowed to forget about her soul and only a few of you remembered it, I suppose, Sister, and sometimes said prayers for it. And if you were here with me now, Sister Benedicta, you might say to me: “Don't let the period of mourning be too long, Ruby. Don't let it be longer than ‘suitable'.” And we would kneel down together in the bathroom and pray for Leon's Jewish soul side by side, and then one day you would say: “That's enough. Let the dead bury the dead.” And you would help me to forget him. You would bundle his suits off to Oxfam and call the removal men to come and take away all his books and papers and his real leather-topped desk, and in your heart you would be saying: “It's a blessed release. Now she is free again to love Jesus.”

“Once you have loved,” Louise said to me, “you will never again want to be without love.” Louise couldn't see that in hundreds of lives, lovelessness slips in silently, almost unnoticed like a stiffening of the joints, and that
wanting
to love is purposeless, like wanting to be a child again and it is very idiotic even to try. Louise kept love like a nutmeg in her palm, kept it safe and warm all her life, took it half-way round the world and still held on to it, and of all the things I loved about Louise, I admired most her safe keeping of her love. At twenty, I thought I could do the same. But I told you Sister, ten years was all I managed, and it is those ten, not all the rest that followed, that press on me now – the years when I smiled in photographs and the Fleet Street gymnasts marched and vaulted and climbed and balanced from dawn to dusk seven days a week. It is those years I would like to be rid of now. The albums are back on their shelf in Leon's study and I never look at them, but my heart echoes with those old years and all the paraphernalia of Leon's life that still lies around me reminds me not of the man who has just died, but of the man I once loved.