Letter to Sister Benedicta (2 page)

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.

But the flat was quiet when I got home. No sign of Noel and Leon was sitting where he'd been asleep, staring worriedly at the room. I put the cakes on the kitchen table and thought, they're a waste of money, the cakes, they'll never be eaten.

Then I sat down by Leon and took his neat hand in my podgy one (I remember on my wedding day seeing our hands side by side for the first time and smiling at the difference in them) and said: “We're bound to hear, Leon, sooner or later.” Leon nodded. “Thoughtless little sod!” he said, turning away and I nodded, recalling that Leon said “thoughtless little sod” quite often about all sorts of people who arrived late or stayed too long or forgot to deliver his drink order or drove cars in any way inimical to him, and I found it odd that he put the word “little” in there when he himself, though a neat and quite handsome man, only measures five foot eight.

“Noel's not little,” I said.

“Little of spirit,” he declared, “if he can let his mother down like this!”

I pondered this, remembering how surely Leon had let his own mother down by marrying not merely a gentile but an alleged Catholic and that he had tried all his life until her death in 1970 to atone for this by buying her presents and bits of her favourite Jewish food and by letting her who had been poor all her life and widowed at thirty-one come to see him in his huge office to prove that he hadn't failed her.

“It's not me so much, dear,” I said quietly, “as you.”

But Leon didn't reply to this, lit one of his small cigars and puffed away at it in silence until it was gone.

I haven't mentioned Alexandra, Sister. Alexandra was twenty then. When she was eighteen she left London and her room that seemed still to be a little girl's room and went to an art school in Norwich. Leon bought her a mini. She moved into a cottage near Wymondham with a friend called Sue. “We love the cottage,” Alexandra told me, “even though it's cold and Sue says why not keep our own chickens?” So of her life I knew scarcely more than this. “You'd hate the cottage, Mummy,” she told me, “so don't come up and see us and anyway it's only got two bedrooms.” And obedient even to her, I've never been there, but used to imagine her there in the cottage with her paintings and her friend Sue whom I've never met. I worried about her when really I shouldn't she kept telling me because she'd never been so happy and if ever she felt overtired from all the painting she was doing she'd just go and feed the hens (because of course Sue had bought the hens and a hen coop straight away, no sooner mentioned than there they were free-ranging all over the garden) and listen to their little noises until she felt peaceful again. “So please don't
worry
,” she kept saying, “not about me!” And I believe I did try not to think of her, saying to myself, she is quite free.

“We don't have favourites,” you used to say, Sister Benedicta, “in this school. You are all God's children and we are here to do God's work.” But how then could I have stayed whispering in your room with its narrow bed and raffia blinds on countless late afternoons with sundown coming on, whispering about poetry and all the young poets who were dying of love for somebody, writing of a love they could die for and I had never felt any love except the love of your immaculate quietness, Sister Benedicta, and your little room with the blinds where you made tea. Did
all
the girls come creeping to your room to whisper about Keats? Did they have tea? If you were here now, Sister, when we knelt down by the bath and said our prayers for Leon, I could ask you, “wasn't I your favourite?” And then I wouldn't be afraid to say that it's very hard for me to let Alexandra be free because of my two children I love her so much the best that if Leon's going to die in spite of the candles and the prayers I would want to go and be with her. Quite often I pass on my walks a small shop that sells paraffin stoves and I think to myself, if I took a paraffin stove or even two paraffin stoves to Alexandra's cottage, then all of us would be warm. Not that she'd want me there in her life that she's trying so hard to rearrange. I'd be in her way all the time and in Sue's way and I dare say the hens would stop laying.

The telephone call from Noel came very late on the Friday night when Leon and I were in bed with our beside lights on and through my spectacles I was peering once again at the Margaret Drabble. Leon has the telephone on his side of the bed in case one of his famous clients – who never seem to go to bed at all or else keep popping over to California where night is day – ring him at two in the morning, just like you might ring a doctor or a Samaritan, believing that Leon is quite happy to talk to them any time, even at sundown in Beverly Hills, which he is. So Leon answered the telephone and kept saying. “Speak up, speak up Noel. I can't hear what you're saying.” But then it turned out that what Noel was saying made Leon wish he hadn't heard it because I put down the Margaret Drabble and watched Leon and his face did, in the manner of a stage direction I once read, “register extreme disappointment” so that I knew then and there just by looking at Leon's face that Noel wasn't coming for Christmas. “Your mother,” Leon kept pronouncing angrily, “will be extremely disappointed. I hope you clearly understand, Noel, that she goes to a great deal of trouble to make Christmas here for us all and it was quite bad enough Alexandra not wanting to come because of her supposed work, but at least she had the decency to let us know several weeks ago and I can't begin to describe to you how disappointed your mother will be!”

When Leon put the receiver down, he lay on his back, not looking at me but up at the ceiling and said nothing. After a while I said: “It's not as if I
have
been to a great deal of trouble this year, Leon. I only bought the teasels because the barrow boy was so wet and I've done nothing about ordering a turkey and—”

“That's not the point!” snapped Leon. “Noel must learn that if he says he will do something, then he must do it. He'll never make a good lawyer unless he learns this.”

I returned to the Margaret Drabble. Her heroine was giving birth to a baby in her own bed; the bed was saturated with the broken waters.

“Where is Noel?” I asked suddenly and I heard Leon sigh.

“He's with Alexandra,” he said, “at the cottage.”

D
ECEMBER
7

The thought that Leon may die illuminates for me how poorly I love myself. I really don't know what I shall do with this self, only let it trudge purposelessly about, legs taking it here and there – even to a new home, away from London which seems to me to be dying year by year just as Leon may be dying minute by minute – but soul in the deepest confusion, Sister, and heart with so feeble a love for the whole self that I sometimes feel, why did no one ever teach me to love myself, only taught me that I must put the whole world and everything in it, even the things I cannot see, before the self, so that all the world goes marching ahead of me and then round and round and round me and I am quite afraid of it. Last night I thought, if Leon dies, I must learn to love myself better and that perhaps what I should do is go back to India because from India seem to come compassionate and patient voices and in their quietness I might begin to learn. You see, even in the Oratory, Sister, whose echoing body gives me a little sense of wonder as I find the money for my candle, even in there, well, I say my prayer so quietly that no one hears it and my prayer is for Leon and not for me and I come out into the Brompton Road and I think, if only I didn't feel ashamed of everything I do.