After Purple (28 page)

I shut my eyes. It didn't matter really. Even if we were all smashed to pieces, what more glorious end than to perish in the town of Bernadette? To lie in the peace of the basilica, surrounded by fifty-two dead family, with a hundred priests weeping out a requiem.

I only hoped my mother wouldn't ruin everything by demanding my ashes back. She wouldn't really
want
them — it would be just convention, or a final attempt to circumscribe me. She'd stopper me into a neat, no-nonsense urn and stand me on her mantelpiece, between the drooping Dresden shepherdess and the coldly correct clock which pounced on every second. I almost screamed in protest. I wanted to lie full-length on my back, tangled up with earth and flowers and nature, and all Bernadette's townsmen trampling and jostling over my bare body.

The plane lurched so wildly, I was almost disinterred. We fell five rungs of a ladder in as many seconds. I had already lost my stomach and my heart. Only moments now until all my other organs were just pulp on the tarmac. I sent up a silent plea to Bernadette.

“Please,” I prayed. “Let me be buried in Lourdes.”

We didn't crash and it wasn't Lourdes. The airport was sited six miles north, at Tarbes. They couldn't put it any nearer — there wasn't room with all the souvenirs. Tarbes had tricky runways lying north to south when the Pyrenees ran east to west — hence the turbulence. It was the sort of thing Adrian would have told me, but I had to wait for Bridie who'd been to Lourdes twenty-three times and said they often had descents like that, especially if the pilot was C. of E.

We were still a drive away from the town of Bernadette — six enchanted miles in which our three motor coaches played follow-my-leader along small winding roads edged with mincing poplars, and slowly the mountains in the distance moved closer and closer in, until they were standing up all around us, shouting out a welcome.

I was sitting next to Doris who came every year at Easter in thanksgiving for her husband's holy death. She nudged me suddenly in the middle of their last night together, when three priests and two doctors were joining in the
Requiem aeternum
. I wasn't listening, really. I was too engrossed in watching the fields dwindle and the urban sprawl begin.

“Look, Thea, we're coming into Lourdes! See the sign.”

I looked. It said “Lourdes”, just as it might have said Luton or Southend. Surely the name should have been surrounded with a halo or picked out in fairy lights. The streets were grey, the shops busy. Buildings squashed against each other on both sides of the street. It was a town — just a town — an ordinary, bustling, crowded sort of no-man's land, with petrol fumes and litter bins on the lamp-posts, and women in headscarves, and big lumbering coaches. I had expected a village, a tiny white hamlet with a cloud of holiness curling up from it like smoke. Oh, I know I'd read all the books, pored over statistics about growth and expansion, swelling tourist figures, problems of traffic circulation. I knew that even since my schooldays, another million visitors had been added to the annual total. But somehow, I'd never quite believed it. I still saw Lourdes in terms of my school-friends' photographs — mysterious and sacred and very sort of rural, with all my classmates standing in blue cloaks and white veils against soaring churches or banks of lighted candles, flanked by priests and nuns. Now there wasn't a church or priest in sight, just more and more stalls and shops choked with souvenirs, more and more cheap hotels. It could have been the Costa Brava, without the Costa.

“But where's the
Grotto
?” I asked. “And the basilicas? The place where Our Lady actually appeared?”

“Oh, way away yet, dear. This is just the commercial part. Lourdes sprawls a bit, you see.”

I nodded. No point being disappointed. After all, it was really a proof of Bernadette's power that she had transformed a tiny hamlet into this great metropolis, brought more pilgrims here than journeyed even to Mecca and Jerusalem. All important places had their commercial side. There'd probably be souvenir stalls outside heaven, selling plastic St Peters and spun-sugar angels. It didn't matter really. Anyway, the Grotto would be different. Ray had told me they didn't allow any shops or new development on what they called Our Lady's Domain, a whole thirty acres, set apart like a sanctuary for baths and basilicas, Masses and processions. That was the real, essential Lourdes, the nucleus, the holiness. These were just the wrappings, the outer layer, the twopenny-ha'penny sideshows outside the Great Top.

I turned away from a window display of pink and purple rosaries, dangling over wooden plaques with plaster roses on them and inscriptions saying,
‘J'ai prié pour vous à la Grotte
.' I would pray for Leo at the
Grotte
, bring him back not a pink and purple rosary, but a new resplendent prick. All would be well. Even the rosaries were holy testimony to how many pious people were praying here, that God and His Mother were the chief tourist attractions, instead of heated pools or sun-drenched sands. We even had the sun, still weak perhaps, but smiling from a blue sky, whereas back in London there was fog and drizzle.

“Which hotel are
you
at?” asked Doris, as we crawled past a pâtisserie and I closed my eyes against the lure and sacrilege of strawberry tarts. “I'm in the
Notre Dame de
what-d'you-call-it. I should have booked the
Astoria
. Edie's just told me it's got the cheapest booze in Lourdes.”

I was almost shocked. Most of our group had already bought gin and whisky on the plane, but I'd assumed it was to take back home with them, along with the Holy Water.

“I'm … er … not at a hotel,” I said.

“You must be. All our lot are either in the
Notre Dame
or the
Astoria
. Except for a few toffs who can afford the
de la Grotte
. That's four-star and frogs' legs.”

“No, I'm staying with a Madame Simonneaux.”

“Madame
who
?”

“Well, I don't quite know how you pronounce it, but she takes in lodgers, cheap. She's very vaguely related to Bernadette. Her uncle's father's niece's sister was …”

Doris looked at me with new respect. “You mean, you actually know a relative of St Bernadette?”

“Well, not exactly
know
, but …”

We had already stopped at the first hotel which was pinioned between two larger ones, but had a shop on its ground floor with souvenirs encroaching right across the pavement. We had reached the centre of the newer, lower town and the streets were really crowded now, hotels all but bumping into each other, and traffic-logged drivers swearing on their horns.

“Right, this is us,” said Doris, collecting up her bags. “Hey, Mary, listen to this — Thea here's staying with one of St Bernadette's family. Mind you get her to pray for you. She's got the right connections.”

Mary looked as if she was about to ask me to bless her rosary, but the driver shooed her off. She and all the other Marys were collecting up their bags and struggling down the steps. At least two thirds of my new Pax family had already turned their backs. Only one or two of them had even stopped to wave.

Next stop was the
Astoria
. The last of my aunts and mothers clambered off, along with the courier and both the priests. There was just me and the driver left. At least he spoke a sort of English.

“Sorry Mam'selle,” he said. “Is walking now.”

“What?” I said. I couldn't remember learning the French for “what”, though I suppose it should have been the first word in the phrase book.

“Walking.
Marcher. Aller à pied
. How d'you say? Foot, feet …”

“Oh, I
see
. Look, it's a bit much, isn't it? I mean, expecting me to get out and walk when I don't even know where I'm going and I've got a
case
and everything.”

“You want case, Mam'selle?” He pushed me down the steps, extracted the last piece of luggage from the underbelly of the coach and almost threw it into my arms. “Here is case Mam'selle.
Voilà
.” Then he squeezed past me to the driving seat, closed the automatic doors, and accelerated off. I stared at the blue and white striped label with the tall blue Virgin on it. I could see twenty identical blue Virgins disappearing through the glass doors of the
Astoria
. I almost dashed after them, begged them to find room for me, just a crust and a corner would do, so long as they didn't leave me on my own. Then I remembered Ray. I wasn't alone at all. I would be meeting the Pax brigade again in just a few short hours, processing down to the great basilica with them, where God and Ray and Bernadette would all be waiting for me. It was only natural to feel a little low today. Any good Catholic would and should, when our Boss had just been crucified and was still lying in His tomb. The whole church was poised and waiting for the Resurrection, and until He soared shining up to heaven, it was only fitting we should mourn.

I picked up my case and studied the little sketch map Ray had drawn for me. It wasn't easy, especially with the streets so crowded and wheelchairs to avoid. Actually there weren't as many sick as I'd imagined — it was still early in the season. Most of the pilgrims looked neither well nor ill, but sort of grey and shabby and droopy, as if they suffered not from dramatic diseases shouting out for miracles, but minor ailments like piles and prolapses and acid indigestion. I don't suppose you bother Our Lady with things like haemorrhoids when she's busy with cancer of the bowel. I must admit I was a little disappointed. I had somehow expected the place to be littered with men sick of the palsy, who would suddenly leap to their feet and fling away their stretchers, shouting out, “A miracle, a miracle!”

Give them time, I thought. Wait till tomorrow, wait for the Resurrection. Anything could happen by tomorrow. Today they were simply tired or hungry or jet-lagged, or had even lost their lodgings like I had.

After two culs-de-sac and three wrong turnings, I eventually asked for directions in a shop. It said “English spoke” on a notice over the counter, but was mostly full of Italians exclaiming over a shelf display of white plastic Virgins. The statues were all identical, but ranged in height from midget to monumental, so that they looked like the slope of a white plastic mountain beetling upwards. I counted seventy-five before I got dizzy and gave up. Seventy-five gleaming gilt halos reaching higher and higher up to heaven, one hundred and fifty blank blue eyes tracing a graph from shelf to ceiling. The miraculous medals were even more impressive. There were so many, they'd been tipped into a sort of dustbin like a lucky dip, and were more or less uncountable. Ray had told me some of the shops ordered thirty thousand dozen at a time. I bought one to pay for the directions. It
must
have been miraculous, because Ray's map made sense for the first time since I'd studied it, and in just three minutes I was standing outside the house in the street he'd marked.

I stopped a moment before daring to go in. It must have been one of the narrowest streets in Lourdes. The houses on one side tried to reach out and touch their fellows on the other, and then gave up and sulked. Number six was very tall and angular, squashed between a butcher's shop and a seedy
pension
. Its stained and flaking stucco was criss-crossed with a tangle of electric wires, and a metal balcony dripped rust like sour brown tears. Two dustbins crouched outside it with the first flies of the season crawling over them.

I tried not to look at the butcher's, which was open to the street and festooned with great bloody haunches of cow and pig, some still with fur and bristles and only missing their tongues, livers and intestines, which were piled on trays in front of them. A large man in what had once been a white apron before the massacre, was grinning and gesturing at me from the counter. I decided Madame Simmoneaux was the lesser of two evils, so I walked up the steps and rang the bell.

She was a long time coming, but when she did, she wasn't evil at all, just tired and shabby. She was wearing an overall and bedroom slippers and had three young children clinging to her skirts. Another case of prolapse, I suspected.

I handed over the little card which Ray had typed for me, with my name on it and how long I was staying. She didn't seem impressed. I could have been Morton, Jones, O'Reilly, or Lady Bountiful herself, so long as I paid my bill. She asked for the money before she'd even said hallo. Even my French could tell the difference between “
Bonjour, Madame
”, and “Seven hundred francs in cash, please.” Once I'd handed over the notes, she relaxed a bit, and led me up the stairs which were dark and narrow and covered with several different offcuts of lino, so that the patterns changed every three or four steps. I began to feel dizzy. Madame stopped and panted every few minutes (I added anaemia to prolapse). She had left the children down below and I could hear them quarrelling and grumbling. I'd liked to have made some kind remark about their ages or achievements, or even dropped in a word or two about the weather — anything to break the rather oppressive silence. But the only French I could recall was, “
Où va cet autobus
?” which I didn't feel was relevant.

My room was at the very top and looked as if it had crawled on its side in order to squeeze into the space beneath the roof. The walls were painted a sort of blotchy brown and there were three separate sections of some scratchy stuff on the floor, with gaps where they didn't meet. A narrow iron bed took up most of the floorspace, and opposite, a rail with two broken wooden hangers on it, which I suppose was the French for wardrobe. In the corner was a screen only half-concealing a stained and cracked washbasin, and a bidet with a notice pinned above it saying, “Forbidden to urine”.

I sat on the bed (which sank and shrank away from me) and counted my blessings. I had a room to myself with real running water. I had a chair with three legs. I had a picture of St Bernadette — a real photograph, in fact, just above my head, smiling and encouraging me, reminding me that she had shared a room far worse than this with a whole sweaty, noisy family. I even had a window. I walked over to it, pushed aside the rusty iron-mesh blind, and tugged it open.