Letter to Sister Benedicta (20 page)

This morning I walked past Sheila's house. She keeps it very nicely, with flowers in the window-boxes and newly painted railings. It is Saturday, and I could see Sheila in her kitchen which was yellow in Grandma Constad's day and now looks very changed, thought I didn't dare to stop long enough to see what colour Sheila has painted it, not wanting her to catch sight of me and think, why's she come snooping round, when Leon is dead now and nothing signifies any more? Two streets past the house, and I contemplated going back. I thought of knocking and saying to Sheila: “Help me to remember that for years he hasn't loved me, but has gone on loving you. Tell me how often he came to see you: Did he always come burdened down with love and take you in his arms? Did he tell you that he felt tired when he came back from America? Why do you think he felt so tired? Did he love not just you, Sheila, but lots of girls, five or ten a year in rotation and a new one each night in Beverly Hills?”

But I didn't go back not even to ask Sheila if it was her, the visitor to the nursing home, in a coat like Alexandra's. Only two more days and it will be February.

J
ANUARY
30

The Smiths announced themselves at my door.

“We thought we'd wait a while before we called,” they said. “We didn't think you'd want to see anyone for a while. We won't come in. We'd only like to say . . .”

They have never been inside this flat, nor I inside theirs. London neighbours only seem to talk to each other on staircases or in car parks, as if this is all convention allows and the first one to cross a threshold is breaking some inviolate law.

I asked the Smiths to come in and they hesitated, looking worriedly at each other.

“No, really, we won't bother you, Mrs Constad.”

“It wouldn't be bothering me. It seems dreadful that you've never been into the flat. But now you're here, I'd love to put a kettle on.”

So they came in. They tiptoed, as if there was a child in the flat who mustn't be woken. I sat them down in the drawing-room and went to make coffee for them and I knew that they were sitting very still and in silence. When I took in the coffee, they sipped it in silence until Mrs Smith (who seems to talk more than Mr Smith, according to the snatches of their life I hear on the landing) said: “What we'd really like to say to you, Mrs Constad, is that if ever you feel you need someone – to talk to, perhaps, or for anything at all – we're here.”

I nodded.

“I know you are,” I said, “I hear some of your comings and goings, just as you hear mine, and sometimes, I admit, it's rather reassuring to hear you. At Christmas, you see, when there was all that fog on the M4, I was awfully worried about you.”

The Smiths looked at each other. I could tell they thought this was eccentric of me, inappropriate.

“Oh we were fine,” said Mrs Smith with a smile.

“Yes, we were fine,” said Mr Smith.

“Christmas in the country is rather nice, isn't it?” I said.

“Well, we prefer it.”

“We used to go now and then, when friends invited us. That extraordinary noise that pheasants make!”

“It's been a good year for pheasants,” said Mr Smith.

“Has it?” I said. “My grandmother used to love the sound of a shoot. ‘Aha!' she used to say, ‘the wonderful shooting season! A good hot breakfast and the excitement of the first drive and the ground all covered with frost.'”

“That's it.”

“Not that she'd been to a shoot in thirty years, because my grandfather died long before I was born. She just remembered it.”

The Smiths were silent again. I dare say their hearts were bursting with condolences they found they couldn't utter, because they were people who didn't utter things easily and lived their lives in cardigans.

There was quite strong sunlight coming through the drawing-room windows, revealing to me that the windows were very grimy and I thought, why hasn't the window cleaner come for so long, when now of all times, I mustn't let everything slip and fall into decay.

“Has the window cleaner been to you lately?” I asked the Smiths, and once again they looked astonished.

“Has he dear?” Mr Smith asked his wife.

“Well, he came just after Christmas. He always comes near Christmas, so that we'll give him something.”

“He didn't come to me, and I was just noticing my windows . . .”

“I'll send him round, shall I, the next time he comes to us?”

“Yes, thank you. I don't know why he didn't come to me when he doesn't normally miss a month. It'll be spring soon.”

Mr Smith slapped his knee. “That's the right attitude, if I may say Mrs Constad. Think ahead!” Then he hushed his voice to say: “We lost a child, you know. She was five years old. And quite honestly, I didn't know how we were going to get on after that. But we did.”

“Of course, we've never forgotten her,” added Mrs Smith, “we couldn't really forget her. I mean, one can't, can one? But as Hugh says, life does go on.”

I thought of you, Sister, and a thing you once said: “There is great sorrow in the heart of mankind over the death of a child.” And I wanted to say to the Smiths that in India children die easily and in great numbers because of the fly-borne and water-borne diseases that still crawl round the sub-continent, and in the great days of Anglo-India, hundreds of parents of white children sent them back to England and never saw them for months or years on end, because their fear that the children would die was so great. I was never sent back to England, though there was some whispered talk of putting me on a boat for Wiltshire, and I'm glad that I stayed in India and went to the Convent School, even if that was all I really knew of India – the high white wall that never changed colour with the seasons.

“We must be going,” said Mr Smith, and they both stood up together and thanked me for the coffee.

“But do remember,” said Mrs Smith, “if ever you feel lonely, there's nearly always one of us here, and what are neighbours for?”

J
ANUARY
31

The crocuses are coming up in Hyde Park. I walked there today in bright sunshine with a bag of scraps for the ducks on the Serpentine. The nannies look younger than they used to, otherwise Hyde Park hardly changes, and when you're down by the water with the noisy ducks you can scarcely hear the traffic noise. One or two boats were out on this fine day and I thought, if Noel was with me he'd take my arm roughly and say: “Come on, Ma! Let's go for a row!” And I would enjoy being out on the water with Noel's laughter for company.

I have had no word from Noel or from Al Orkiss, who may never have gone back to Paris after all, and it seems very wrong to think of Noel in France, not
knowing
, not even suspecting that something might be wrong. I think I should try sending a letter to the department store called the Bon Marché, just putting: Département de Musique, Bon Marché, Paris, and hope that every postman knows the store as well as the London postmen know Harrods and there is no need to write a street name or a zone number, or anything at all by way of direction.

If I wrote to Noel and the letter reached him, he might come home. But I would have to tell him in the letter that Leon left him nothing. I put off as long as I could my visit to the solicitors “concerning the Last Will and Testament of your husband, which is lodged with us”, but when at last I got there, the document shown to me was very short and simple: Leon has left me everything he had, and there is no mention of anyone else in the Will, nothing for the children, nothing for Sheila. And this was so unexpected that I said to the solicitor: “This can't be right. He can't have forgotten them!”

And what do I want with all Leon's money earned from the famous co-respondents, fifteen guineas an hour for his innate understanding of the law and the thousands of invisible words that poured out of him year after year? All my life, I have been left sums of money – from my mother, from my grandmother whom I couldn't bear to be near, even from Louise and Max who had no children to leave it to. I am rich. Riches have made me fat and silent.

F
EBRUARY
1

Today I got an invitation to Gerald's wedding. I won't go to it. With the invitation, a note was enclosed (Gerald, in his new happiness, hadn't wanted to ring me).

If Leon had come home and recovered his speech and stopped all the crying he did in the nursing home, I would have told him, sooner or later, about my sexual voyage with Gerald and we both would have laughed about it, because Leon often said to me in the days when he loved Sheila, “It would do you good, Ruby, to have an affair; I wouldn't mind.” But I never did have an affair. There was nobody to have an affair with.

The only other man I've ever longed to love, years ago before I met Leon, was Max Reiter. My loyalty to Louise – I hope – would have made me refuse Max if he had crept up to my cold room one night, and yet I often lay there, at the top of his house, imagining him and Louise in their big bed, imagining in my virgin head how the weight of Max's body would feel on mine, his great rollocking, noisy body, whose smell I breathed ecstatically each time I was near him. But the only time I held Max's head on my shoulder was when he was sitting in his armchair, soundless and dying of heartbreak, and chose one day to reach out for me and weep. The smell of him seemed to have changed by then. He smelled sour and musty, and only the years of my loving him and Louise made me stay close to him.

F
EBRUARY
2

I wrote to Noel today. I should have written before, Sister. Tomorrow and it'll be a month since Leon died, and I've made no effort to reach Noel, so that when he gets my letter – if he ever does – he'll say to himself, why did it take her so
long
? I keep re-reading the letter and wondering about it:

Only the letter to you, Sister, is important. It is helping me to make sense of my world. Sometimes, I write for most of the day and forget to eat, and when I see myself in Knightsbridge windows, I notice that I am thinner than on the evening we went to the Hazlehurst's dinner party and I wore my mauve cocktail dress. If I were to try it on, I think my mauve dress would need taking in.

F
EBRUARY
3

A month today since Leon died. A fortnight since Alexandra went back to Norfolk. My letter to Noel is on an aeroplane. In a few days, I might have word from Noel that he's on his way, or word from Alexandra that the hens are laying again and the crisis of the year is passing, a little each day as her garden begins to push out signs of spring.

But I tell myself I mustn't think of Noel and Alexandra because they are as they are, just as the seats on London buses are of a certain size and shape and no amount of wailing and noise can change them, so that all the noise and wailing are utterly pointless and it is much better to endure the bus ride in silence, not giving a thought to the seats, glad to be on a bus, going somewhere.