LETTER TO SISTER BENEDICTA

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 there 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.

“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.

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.

“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.”