Read Online Letter to Sister Benedicta by Rose Tremain - Free Book Online

telephone and his white telephone have never made him lose that faith, and as far as anyone can tell, it must be with him still.
    When Noel was born, Leon came into the ward and took the baby out of my arms, held it up and looked at it very closely and then said a strange thing. He said: “I see myself,” as if the red-faced baby was a mirror and I laughed. But Leon was serious. All through Noel’s life, he has wanted the boy to be like him. It was Leon’s idea – and once this was in his head, it wouldn’t come out of it – to call the baby Noel, his own name spelt backwards. And he kept on looking at Noel, trying to see himself take shape in him. “My son is very like me!” he so often announces to people who’ve never met Noel and then I always think, there he goes again with that old twaddle, because Noel isn’t really at all like Leon and I don’t think he ever will be. He doesn’t look a bit like Leon, for a start, but resembles my mother and all her rather tall relatives who were narrow-boned, straight-haired and freckled. There’s not a freckle on Leon’s body. And Noel is a loud person, clumsy, too big for the room; he’s inherited nothing of Leon’s neatness and sharp efficiency.
    I don’t know why Leon has always wanted Noel to be like him. It sounds very like conceit, but I know it isn’t this – it’s far too desperate a hope. I once asked Grandma Constad if she understood why Leon clung to this hope, but all she said was: “Sons, oh my Lord, and sons of sons!” which revealed to me only that she didn’t know, just as she didn’t seem to know about a great many things in the world such as where the Pope lived (she though it was Dublin) and why the seats on London buses weren’t wider. “I only know about being poor. That’s all I know about,” she once announced to me. But she said this long after she was rich and Leon had bought her a house in Chelsea, and whenever I think about her now, I have to conclude that she was rather a stupid woman and only said meaningless things like “Sons, oh my Lord!” to fill up all the blanks in her mind.
    I discovered that talking to Evelyn Wainwright had made me tired. I’m not used to talking to anyone. I say my monologues in Leon’s room with the nurses coming and going, but there I can stop talking whenever I like and I never have to listen to anyone else because Leon is mute. I think the listening tired me. I found that after I had wondered a little about the Wainwright case, and its place in Leon’s subconscious, I felt a terrible weariness seeping into me, as if my blood was flowing so slowly it could hardly get round me, and I didn’t know what to do with my body except lie it down.
    One of the painters on his trolley was painting my bedroom window. He is Irish and the cheeriest of painters and I long for him to say “top o’ the mornin’”, only he never does and I really can’t blame him because the mornings are all cold and grey as sorrow. I waved to him and he gave me a kind of salute with his brush and then I caught a brief glimpse of his startled eye as I drew the bedroom curtains and shut him out. It was lunchtime, but I wasn’t hungry and I knew that unless I could rest for a while, I wouldn’t get to the nursing home in the afternoon.
    I didn’t get to the nursing home. I dreamed away the whole afternoon, not waking when it got dark, sleeping an exhausted, dream-filled sleep.
    I was on my train again going towards Norfolk, but this time the snow had fallen so thickly, drifted so dangerously, that the train had to keep stopping. There were great mountains of snow on the line that had to be shovelled away before the train could go on. Men came up with shovels. The men were dressed like the navvies who broke their backs building the Stockton and Darlington in the 1820s, and I thought with all the