Letter to Sister Benedicta by Rose Tremain

silence she had created by dying and which would never again be filled.
    I unwrapped my Australian daffodils intended for Leon and scattered them on Godmother Louise’s mound.
    â€œI shall insist that she goes to Highgate!” Max had said, “She was a good Marxist,” and he had made a huge bureaucratic fuss to slip her emaciated body into its little corner of this most famous of cemeteries. I remember that at her funeral, I pondered the idea of Godmother Louise being “a good Marxist” and found it rather strange. I think I decided that she was only a good Marxist deep down in her soul and that she let the rest of herself be rather a bad Marxist. And the bad Marxist in her kept on and on going to five-star hotel rooms where enormous bouquets arrived “courtesy of the management” and where she sipped away, guiltless, at the finest champagne a bourgeois capitalist society can produce.
    At least she had been right about India. Her loathing for the idea of empire had been as strong as Queen Victoria’s love of it. She despised my parents for their snobbishness and their loveless ways. It was a kind of sickness, she said, their terrible pride and reserve, and I must be cured of it. I must forget the school for the daughters of the high-ranking officers, no longer think of myself as a daughter of a high-ranking officer, or even as a Catholic, because these were the masks to hide behind and until I threw them away, these masks, threw them away and never put them on again, I wouldn’t know myself.
    â€œThis is why so many of us are lost, Ruby,” she said, “this is why your mother and father are so lost: they are crouching down behind their masks; they believe they are their masks and without them they will be nothing!”
    Godmother Louise had a very gentle but clear voice. I remember much of what she said because of that voice of hers and when she died, I missed it. It was as if a little fountain where I had often gone to drink had suddenly dried up, like the healing waters of Streatham dried up and there is nothing left to remember them by except the tiny pump house, and the traffic and the ugly high street buildings roar and thrive, ignorant that here was once a spring where people came to sip and be healed. Today, at the cemetery, I longed for the wisdom of Godmother Louise who surely would have laughed at my superstitious candles and my half-remembered prayers. She would have led me quite differently through this time and I would have followed, just as I followed her when I was young and married a Jew as she had done and thought so mistakenly, now my life will be like hers – a thing of beauty.
    I was very hungry after my walk to the cemetery, and in Highgate village I found one of those all-purpose restaurants run by Italians, where you can have cups of tea and slices of battenburg cake or spaghetti bolognese at almost any time of the day or night, and where you find people having lunch at eleven and tea at two and dinner at one in the morning and no one seems to mind or even notice and the cooks in the basement go patiently on, resting for only a few hours and waking again to make cannelloni for breakfast.
    I ordered chicken cacciatora and a glass of red wine. I rather enjoyed the meal out. I enjoyed being in Highgate, high up and away from Knightsbridge. I sat at my table until after three o’clock, ordering a second glass of wine and following this with three cups of coffee. I was waiting for the darkening afternoon to creep on. I thought of the sunlight slanting over Leon’s bed, imagined it disappearing and the room becoming shadowy. I knew I was still afraid, but Louise had helped a little. The Australian daffodils were gone, so I would have to go to Leon empty-handed. This, of course, doesn’t really matter when tomorrow I could take Rhodesian sunflowers or gardenias grown in a solarium on Mont Blanc.

D ECEMBER 21

    I was too tired after my visit to