Letter to Sister Benedicta (17 page)

In Vizzavona, they sat on a white wall and listened to the church bells. It was a wedding day and the whole town had stopped to marvel. In the cafés, some of the men wore suits with bits of fern and flowers in their buttonholes; their glasses were filled and refilled with pastis before they got up noisily and made their way to the church. “We sat on our wall and thought the bride might come by,” said Alexandra, “but she went another way and we never saw her and then the church bells stopped and the cafés were empty and we felt left out.”

When they arrived back at the Hotel des Etrangers, Alexandra was tired after the hot, empty day, lay down in the shuttered room and went to sleep. She woke at nine and it was dark and there was no sign of Noel. “I was very hungry,” she told me, “but I didn't want to sit in a restaurant on my own, so I decided to go down to the beach café, which played records in the evening and sold pizza. I couldn't find the car. I suppose Noel had taken it, so I walked. The beach seemed a long way off in the dark.”

When Alexandra got to the beach, she saw that a group of boys had poured petrol over the dead porpoise and were burning it. Oily flames flared up at the water's edge; the burning flesh smelt of charred salt. But the fire, reflected in the sea, seemed to light up the whole beach, and it was in the light of the burning porpoise that Alexandra saw Noel walking away from her along the beach with his arm round the girl who sold pizza at the beach café. Alexandra stood still and watched her. She wanted to believe that it wasn't Noel's arm that held her. She followed. She heard Noel laugh and the girl from the beach café laughed and then the two of them began to run, hand in hand, on and on along the beach, racing into the joy of being together and laughing at the world left behind.

Alexandra walked very slowly back to the room at the Hotel des Etrangers. Madame Gilbertini smiled at her as she handed her the key. Alexandra took the smile with her to the room, knowing it only needed a smile to release in her the inevitable tears, thinking as she cried, I should have been crying and crying ever since the day I first touched Noel. Because she had known all along that he had a soldier's heart and would defeat her.

D
ECEMBER
31

The last day of my long year. I must go to see Leon today, to put the year in its place, to remind him that this is the end of it, and tomorrow we might begin, as I was taught at the Convent School, to make resolutions.

I believe I've already made rather a contradictory resolution, which is to break my habit of obedience to Leon and begin to feel free of him. This doesn't mean that I won't care for him when he comes home. I would do anything for him: I would clean him up and wash him like a baby. But I see, now that I've been without him for a while, that he has been quite free of me all our lives, free to consult his own head and heart, but never mine. And my head and heart have grown so unused to being consulted, so used to being disbelieved, that they have become small and covered themselves and let me go on and on in my confusions, so that my soul is like the soul of Harrods – very small as souls go, and always in pursuit of the unnecessary and the unobtainable.

I have also begun to wonder whether, if I am to discover myself – head, heart and soul – I shouldn't break at once with the illusive God who hides in the silences between thought and action and who never comes, Sister, never once when I've knelt down in the bathroom and prayed with my fists in my eyes, and who never even seems to notice the Faithful in the Oratory, paying the price of a bus ride for a candle, but stands aloof and lets their husbands die and their sons drown and knows He will not be blamed, only that the price of candles will go up as the years go on.

Perhaps it is only that I have lost the habit of loving God, just as I never seemed to get the habit of loving myself. And if I persevered, I might rediscover it and feel His presence like a gleam of light in my skull. I don't know, Sister. Sometimes, when I remember India, I think I only loved God just to please you.

J
ANUARY
1 1978

I did go to see Leon yesterday, but I had no time to write about this, because the evening with Gerald and Davina was very long and tiring and I have crept exhausted into this new year.

An idiotic little word follows my thoughts:
mudgen
. While I was sitting with Leon yesterday afternoon, he reached for the first of the photograph albums that I had taken him and his chin jutted sideways and his mouth began to make the Chinese gurgling sounds I've heard before, but this time, he wasn't content with them and struggled on, going red behind his eyes, until he came out with it:
mudgen
. He stared at me, waiting for me to understand. I was shocked that he'd made a word and wanted to ring for a nurse. I didn't like the word, didn't know what to do with it. I stared back at Leon and couldn't speak. I wanted to say: “I can't make anything of that, Leon. Don't ask me to try.” But when Leon saw that I hadn't understood, I could see him getting very angry and confused and he tried to make another word, one that I'd understand, but after another long struggle with his face, he said it again:
mudgen
.

“Do you mean album, dear?” I asked frantically. “Al-bum. Do you mean that? Because I know there are eight, of course I do, but I couldn't bring them all at once, Leon, they're too heavy.”

I waited. Leon shook his head and then began to try yet again to say what he wanted to say, but before the word came out, he lay back and shut his eyes and mouth and more of the tears that he sheds every day now slid down his cheeks and on to his pyjamas. I passed him the slate. (“Write it down, dear!” I heard my grandmother shriek.) He took it crossly and in very strong handwriting put: “Noel”, underlined it three times and handed it back to me. I looked at it and sighed. I took a breath before I said: “I've told you all this before, Leon, only you don't remember things, dear, do you? I've told you, I don't know where Noel is. If I did, I'd bring him here just as you asked me. Alexandra left him in Avignon when she got on the train and came home. She left him her mini, but she didn't know where he was going or what he was going to do. He had very little money, so I expected – we expected, don't you remember? – to get a cable, but no cable's come. Sometimes I think I ought to ring up Interpol, Leon, though how you go about ringing them up I honestly don't know, and perhaps even if they made a global search for Noel they might just miss him. He could be in a room in Avignon waiting for something to turn up, or he could be a waiter or a road cleaner or selling the
Herald Tribune
in the square of the Palais des Papes, though heaven knows if any Americans go to France in the winter when it can be so very cold.”

I felt so angry with Leon for all this questioning about Noel that I found I was shouting at him. I wanted to cry. I wanted to shout: “You think you're the only one in pain, Leon, but my days are almost as empty of life as yours and I have to keep going for you all, up and down the freezing London streets day after day, backwards and forwards, to hold your hand and pray for you and try to be strong enough to help you all in case you all come back to me – just in case.” But I'm glad now that I didn't let my wave of self-pity go tumbling down on Leon. He has begun to try very hard at what Matron calls rehabilitation and this is brave of him and I must keep saying to myself, “he's doing his best”, and try not to mind that he can't manufacture a real word, try to forget that when he said
mudgen
, it sounded like an obscenity.

I was glad to get away from the nursing home. Last night I dreamed I saw a pale crab creeping out of the sea at sunset; the sun on the water was beautiful and I thought, here at last is God's gentle world, silent and perfect. But the crab began skittering on the grey sand as the sun fell lower, and I moved further and further from the water's edge, hating the crab moving like a spider, aware that my feet were bare in the sand and that the crab was following my feet. I ran, and the crab skittered after me. The sun went down behind the sea and in the grey light the crab became invisible, invisible but near, and I thought, if only I had worn shoes I wouldn't be so afraid, if only I had decided to protect myself . . .

When I woke, it seemed very clear to me that I had been running from Leon and the hideous faces he makes and that far from wanting to care for him with my own hands, I don't even want to be near him. I'm terribly afraid of these feelings. My only hope is that I shall shake them off and replace them with love and compassion of the kind Jesus felt for the lumbering dumb cripples who hobbled up the Mount of Olives for a touch of His robe. Or perhaps last night Gerald's rum punch was flowing through me like a lie and my heart wasn't really talking.

Gerald had made an enormous bowl of punch, set fruit swimming in it like flotsam and called it “my own invention, Ruby, very alcoholic”. And the five of us there – Gerald, Davina, the Hazlehursts and myself – kept raising our silver-plated goblets to toast the slow arrival of 1978, until at last a tired midnight came and Gerald kissed Davina on the mouth and I wanted to say “that's that, then” and drive home. But the announcement of the New Year released in Gerald a very uncharacteristic urge to make a speech, all through which George and Betty Hazlehurst stared at the carpet and Davina did tentative battle with a purple paper hat that kept slipping over her face. I watched Gerald's eyes darting about in search of the goodwill he wanted us all to feel. “I can honestly say,” he declared, “that I feel this year to be
New
! I don't expect any of you to understand the extent to which my wonderful Davina has changed my outlook on life; I can only tell you that she is the most wonderful, patient girl I've ever met and that I shall be a very, very proud man the day she becomes Mrs Tibbs.”

I couldn't help feeling that it was the rum punch that had enabled Gerald to refer to Davina as a girl, and that when his eyes are seeing clearly, they can't fail to miss the signs of her unspoken journey towards fifty. She is a sandy-coloured person with grey eyes awash in a face that doesn't often smile. She talks as if she was balancing a china teacup in her hands; she has walked her way through a childless life on fragile legs in heavy shoes. As I watched her little mouth open for Gerald's kiss, I thought, she is a strange object for passion – even for Gerald's rather English and unpassionate passion – but at least this probably makes her safe from Italians and perhaps this is the most important thing, because, whatever happens, we must pray that Gerald stays in one piece now that he's so completely mended.

“Are you completely mended?” I whispered to him when Davina was out of the room, but he turned his reddening eyes on me like firebrands and said accusingly: “Davina doesn't like it talked of!” and wandered away from me. And I know now that Gerald will spend the rest of his life pretending that he never loved Sarah and that Davina is no more than the angel of his forgetting.

I wondered if Gerald had told Davina about his ride on my roundabout of a body, because it was very clear to me all through the evening that Davina didn't want to look at me or come near me and was wishing that Gerald had never invited me. She seemed quite happy to stand under the screeching roof of Betty Hazlehurst's voice and didn't jump away at George Hazlehurst's Churchillian growling, but she hardly spoke to me, only to say: “I didn't make the rum punch, Gerald did. And we got the caterers in to do the food, because I'm not used to cooking for a party.” And I thought, this is probably what Gerald likes in her, this uselessness and trepidation, and when he holds her, he knows he is holding a child who will remain a child for ever and stay in the shelter of his arm.

I had thought Gerald's teenage children might be there at the party, but there was no sign nor mention of them and I didn't dare ask him where they were in case, after paying for all that expensive hot chocolate in Austria, he'd decided to pack them off to Milan. If I was them, I think I'd rather be in Italy with a brown step-father, and a mother learning to do homemade ravioli, than waking every day to Davina's timid eyes and the thump of her shoes like club feet. But perhaps they were still there in the house in Kensington and had merely gone to a New Year's party of their own, wearing satin vests and with their hair frizzed. Teenage children seem to come and go from their homes like cats – or so the Smiths, who have teenage nephews and nieces, once said to me on the stairs – and have lost all sense of night and day and sometimes I feel rather relieved that I don't know any of them, because on the whole they look rather cruel.

There were some inquiries about Leon from the Hazlehurst's at Gerald's party, and it was after these that I left. I found that all the questioning about Leon, combined with the punch, made my head ache and I longed to lie down and give no thought to Gerald or Davina or Gerald's children, or indeed to Leon or Noel or Alexandra, because it seemed to me, Sister, as I drove unsteadily home, that each year becomes another, becomes five, becomes twenty, and I have listened as patiently as I can to the noises of these people, but the noises are familiar and as sad as the dry leaves that blew down the corridors of the empty Convent School. Around them all is a high wall that allows no glimpse of a “beyond”. The wall has told me there is no “beyond”. But I am tired to death of the noises, Sister, and tired to death of the wall.

I read my library book for a while when I got home. I read that half the population of India earns less than £3 a month and that with this they can buy “one egg or two tomatoes or a little boiled millet” each day. I wonder how, with only this in their bellies, they can work from dawn to dusk in the fields under the hot sun that I remember?

J
ANUARY
2 1978