Letter to Sister Benedicta by Rose Tremain Read Free Book Online

will never creep in, I will never come face to face with India as long as I live.
    When Alexandra described the peace she thought she had found, I didn’t say: “There is no peace anywhere, unless perhaps it is the peace of God that passeth all understanding and certainly passeth mine and always has done”, but I listened and listened and tried to come close to imagining her life with Sue in the cottage that I’ve never seen. Alexandra knew and Sue knew that the peace had gone the night Noel walked in. It was as if a soldier had come to arrest them.
    I went to see Leon this afternoon. He showed no sign of having noticed my absence yesterday. One of the nurses looked at me accusingly, but I’ve often noticed that nurses have a way of looking at people accusingly, even at patients lying there with their legs on pulleys or their stomachs stitched up from top to bottom, and so I won’t infer anything from the look this nurse gave me and on the contrary feel rather cheered that Leon picked up his slate today and wrote “How long”. I couldn’t answer this of course, not knowing for certain whether it was a question or a comment and, if a question, to what it referred. “How long have I been here?” “How long shall I have to stay?” “How long will it be before I can get up?” “How long will it be before I know who I am and who you are and what has happened?” It could be any of these. I just don’t know. So I took the slate and rubbed out Leon’s “How long” and wrote “I don’t know” and showed this to him, hoping it might prompt him to ask a more explicit question in order to get a more satisfactory answer. But he stared at the slate quite blankly for a few seconds and then closed his eyes and never opened them again, even when it was time for me to go.
    I tried talking to him as I often do. But today I didn’t talk about the difficulty of getting taxis or the price of flowers; I asked him if he remembered things. I asked him if he remembered being a law student in London and meeting me for the first time. “Do you remember, Leon,” I said, “how we met in the house of Max Reiter, the Austrian Jewish composer who had married my godmother Louise and teased her out of her Catholic ways until she wrapped up all her pictures of the Holy Family in calico and packed them away with mothballs? Do you remember Max Reiter? You came to dinner and I was there. You came with another Jewish boy, a student of Max’s. The Reiters always liked everyone to bring their friends, and chairs and place mats and extra portions of food appeared as if by magic for all these friends and no one ever complained, not even the cook. Do your remember Godmother Louise? She was in love with Max Reiter all her life. They used to make love very often, even when they were old, she told me. And yet they never had any children. They hadn’t got the time really because Max Reiter was always off on tours to Paris and Salzburg and Vienna and Rome and Godmother Louise always went with him so that they could make love in hotel bedrooms and never be separate from each other.
    â€œMy mother always used to say Godmother Louise was barren. My mother said God had punished Louise with barrenness because she’d wrapped her pictures of the Virgin Mary in calico and stuffed them away. My mother didn’t like me going to see Louise after she wasn’t a Catholic any more; she tried to divest Louise of her godmothership! But I used to love the Reiters’ house in St John’s Wood that was always full of friends and friends of friends and where you never saw a soldier and no one talked about tea parties or tennis. I used to ask myself there as often as I could and I never believed in Louise’s barrenness – even though I was still a Catholic then and went to Mass every Sunday – because Max Reiter once said: ‘We don’t need