After Purple (40 page)

“You'll need strength, Thea, courage.”

“Look … I …
have
n't much strength. I've been fasting for the last three days. I'm weak and empty and …” I stopped. I could hardly tell her that, when she and her family had been more or less
permanently
hungry. I remembered the coarse maize porridge, the watery cabbage soup eked out among too many grabbing hands. I almost regretted now that I'd wormed my way into her family. Fine to have her as a sister so long as she stayed flat and two-dimensional, made no trouble or demands. She was there to help
me
, for heaven's sake, not the other way round.

“Well, what? What is it? What d'you want me to
do
?” I was shivering now. The night had turned colder, and a fine white mist was creeping from the meadow, closing round me like a shroud.

Bernadette had moved forward to the very edge of the niche. Her eyes were so dark and sharp and brilliant, they seemed to pierce my skull. “Are you listening, Thea?”

God Almighty! I didn't have much choice. Even the river had gagged itself so that her voice could reach me better.

I nodded. A tiny dart of terror scuttled down my back like a rat. I didn't
want
to eat grass or be burdened with some pointless, joyless penance. The mist tasted cold and phlegmy on my tongue. I stared at Bernadette. Her lips were moving again.

“Thea,” they said, slowly, solemnly. “It wasn't Our Lady who appeared to me.”

I collapsed back suddenly on to a bench. I knew now why the river was so silent. Its roar had got trapped inside my head and was pounding and surging through my ears.

“Wh … what?” I stuttered.

“I didn't see the Blessed Virgin. It was somebody else, but not her.”

“But …” I gazed around at the altar with its flowers and candlesticks, the dangling crutches — witness to Our Lady's miracles, the pavement where the thousands knelt in prayer to her, the rock worn smooth by a million million lips.

“Yes, I know it must be quite a shock for you. It was for
me
. But I've come to ask if you could help to put it right.”

“You've come to do
what
?” I murmured, aghast.

“I want you to tell people that it wasn't Our Lady.”

“
Tell
people?” I felt like a fool repeating all her words, but somehow I just couldn't take it in. “Tell
who
?” I muttered. Who in heaven's name would listen? People yawned and fidgeted if I even tried to tell them who I was, or finish a funny story at a dinner party.

“Everybody. The priests first, and then the public.”

“But why
me
?” I almost shouted. “You don't think they'd
believe
me, do you? Look, I'm not even a proper Catholic. Even my First Communion went wrong. They'd just assume it was sour grapes or revenge or something. Anyway, I don't
know
any priests. Well, only one and he's in mortal sin.”

I don't think she was listening. She'd caught her shawl on a rough place in the rock and was trying to work it free. She had taken off the mitts. I couldn't see any burn scars, but her hands were peasant hands, rough and chapped, with short stubby fingers. Leo hated peasant types. He always went for pale slender hands, as much like his own as possible. He wouldn't approve of me hobnobbing with a low, illiterate shepherdess. OK — I know I'd accepted favours from her family — Ma Soubirous fishing me out the best bits from her stockpot, her father carrying me triumphant on his back, but that was only safe in bed at night. For Bernadette to burst out of that flat, sheltered, picture-postcard world and make her presence real, to change my vague, soothing comforts into her harsh and impossible demands, was something like a sick joke. Except it wasn't funny, only terrifying.

I jabbed my foot against the base of the marble altar. Lourdes was
full
of marble — bronze, mosaics, silver, gold — precious, dazzling things in honour of the dazzling Queen of Heaven, who had not, in fact, appeared.

“Look,” I faltered. “I don't understand. I …”

“You don't
need
to understand, Thea. All you have to do is pass on my message to the world.”

“The
world
?” Things were getting worse now. I had no proper friends and almost no family, no connections, no sway with anyone, and here was Bernadette commanding me to make a universal broadcast, to undo over a hundred years of history, to shatter marble, trample gold.

“Ask someone
else
,” I pleaded. “Please don't mix me up in it. I've got troubles enough of my own. I don't feel well. My mouth's still sore. I've got to have my teeth fixed. I'm starving. I haven't got a penny. I'm no one. I'm nothing. I…”

My voice was petering out. Bernadette had been a nobody herself, an invalid with asthma and a delicate stomach, a peasant's child who hadn't owned a sou. Yet she'd never said, “Why me?”

A pity she hadn't, in the circumstances. If it wasn't the Blessed Virgin, then who the hell
was
it who showed up eighteen times and sent all those impertinent instructions? Adrian would have demanded all the facts, drawn up a dossier, worked out a chart. I longed to have his vigorous, ordered mind. There were probably things I should be checking on — dates and records, fingerprints, questions to be asked and answered, evidence to be amassed. Yet I was simply standing there, shivering and trembling, my brain crumbling like a biscuit.

“Look, Bernadette, who … er …
did
you see then? I mean, if it wasn't Mary.”

“I'm sorry, Thea, I can't say.”

What sort of answer was that? She sounded worse than Ray hedging about his life and habits at the friary.

“Could it have been the devil, perhaps?” I tried to pump her — anything to get more information.

“Oh no, no. No one
evil
.”

“A holy soul in purgatory?” That's what some of Bernadette's contemporaries had thought. Even her mother had first assumed it was the soul of a dead relative come back to beg for prayers.

“No-o.”

“Well
who
?”

“It's not easy to explain, Thea, and even if I tried, I doubt if …”

“You mean I'm too damned stupid to understand, is that it?”

“No, Thea, of course I don't mean that.”

“Look, you
must
tell me. Everyone will ask. They're bound to. You see, Adrian says I never get the facts and …”

“I'm sorry, Thea, but I'm afraid I have to leave now. Please don't get upset. It won't be easy, but I know you can do it for me. Just tell the priests and people that it wasn't the Mother of God. Make sure they understand. I trust you, Thea.” And she disappeared.

Oh, I know it sounds ridiculous. People don't vanish into thin air, except in fairy tales. But Bernadette
did
. I didn't imagine it, I know I didn't. I've said already it wasn't even dark. The candles and the floodlighting saw to that. I was stunned, of course I was, but absolutely sane. I tried out little tests on myself to prove it. I ran through the alphabet backwards and then forwards. I added and subtracted figures. I repeated the words of the Credo, in English first and then in Latin. I could tell my mind was working, was razor sharp, in fact.

“Bernadette,” I called. “Bernadette!” I had to get her back, ask more questions, insist she told me everything.

No answer. Only the river swallowing up my words, the hollow cry of an owl, jeering at me, jeering. I had no information, nothing solid or convincing. Bernadette had given me no reasons to change a story which stuck like a limpet to the town which had spawned it, no sharp, lucid facts to use as bulldozers. My mind felt like Bank Holiday on Brighton beach. There were so many thoughts and fears and speculations jostling and crowding through it, it was almost trampled into pulp. If Bernadette's Lady hadn't been the Blessed Virgin, then the whole of Lourdes was one gigantic sham. All those priests and bishops, doctors and magistrates who had worn themselves into a frazzle trying to confirm the facts, now looked like fools or charlatans. Even so, it wasn't simple. What about the miracles, for instance — each one so slowly and nit-pickingly tested to outlaw fraud or chance? Or Bernadette's own cross-examination at the time — a real out-and-out relentless grilling, in which they had
tried
to find her out?

Even the statistics of the place itself were something of a miracle. Four hundred plus hotels in a town of only eighteen thousand permanent inhabitants; four thousand seasonal workers with a language laboratory built especially for their benefit; a post office handling six and a half million postcards every year; an International Medical Committee with posh professors from a score of different countries; a municipal tourist office with a crazy annual total of three hundred thousand documents; a ton of candles churned out every day from the local wax factory. All this — and more — had sprung from Bernadette. I'd read it in a score of trumpeting books. She'd turned a sleepy one-horse village into a pulsing commercial centre, built three soaring churches where there was only a piddling mill-stream. And now she had commanded me to overturn it.

Me, Thea Morton, of no fixed address, scarred, sick, starving and divorced, with neither permanent teeth nor temporary job, was expected to stand up to the entire Catholic world and tell them their shrine, their Mecca, their international centre for both miracles and money-making was a lie, a fraud, a stupid little error. They wouldn't even listen. They'd lock me up, label me a madman, send me to another Dr Davies.

Yet, I couldn't help remembering it had been no less difficult for Bernadette herself. She, too, had been laughed to scorn, accused of lying, madness, even obscenity. At least I was middleclass and could read and write. I'd been married to a teacher and mixed with professional people who could do at least three-quarters of the
Times
crossword, and wrote self-important letters to the
Guardian
, and were Friends of Covent Garden. Bernadette's father was a casual labourer when he wasn't unemployed or in prison. Her mother took in other people's washing and scrubbed it on the riverbank. My ma used a high-class laundry service and throw-away handkerchiefs. She'd no more enter a launderette than a bordello. If a peasant girl whose only skills were darning socks and herding sheep could build a new Jerusalem on the dregs of a peasant village, then was it really so impossible for me to pull it down again?

The trouble was, nobody
wanted
it pulled down. In Bernadette's day, people had craved for signs and miracles. Maybe that explained how she herself was gulled. Visions were all the rage in the 1850s, Blessed Virgins spotted up and down the land like UFO's a century later. Easy for a highly-strung and groggy child to imagine she'd seen another. The crowds were equally eager to believe her. There was no National Health Service, no wonder drugs or equal opportunities, so holy springs and miracles were the only hope they had. If Bernadette had been conned, then the whole panting town had gone willingly along with her, preferring mumbo-jumbo to a deaf, uncaring God. And now the thing had mushroomed. It wasn't just miracles they wanted, but booming business, full employment, a hundred different layers.

Who was I to block and deny the lot of them, empty their crowded shops and packed hotels, muddy their million-dollar water? And for what purpose? Merely to establish truth. People didn't
want
truth. They'd far rather cling to the belief that Mary had appeared there and made them and their city special. It suited everyone — pious peasants and greedy speculators, busy nurses, bustling restaurants — all thrived on the apparitions. Adrian's brand of pseuds like Keats and Blake and Socrates might rave on about Truth with a capital T, but ordinary folk have never gone for it. It's too uncomfortable.

Anyway, what
was
the truth? If I told the world it wasn't the Blessed Virgin, I still had to explain who the hell it
was
. It might have been another saint, of course. If that was so, I could still save Lourdes. They'd have to re-make all the statues, change the inscriptions and the prayers, but there'd still be a shrine and focus, a reason for it all. But if it were merely an illusion, the result of Bernadette's hunger or illness or over-active imagination, or even a hallucination caused by that fungus stuff Ray had mentioned once, then things were much more serious. My “announcement” might perhaps bring still more fame and uproar to the town — at least in the beginning. Four million tourists could even swell to six. Perhaps Thea Morton's photograph would smirk from all the hoardings, sharing the billings with the Mother of God herself. I must admit I was tempted. Adrian would find me immediately more interesting once I was an historical phenomenon with
dates
. Leo loved fame in any form and even Ray would get a certain spiritual
frisson
from a girl who was chosen as Bernadette's confidante.

Had I
really
seen her? The first tiny serpent of doubt flickered across my mind. After all, I was weak and starving myself, and though I hadn't eaten fungus, there could have been something in the laxative. I looked around. There were hardly any witnesses — just an old man slumped on a bench and a woman walking further down by the bath-house.

No — even without witnesses, I was absolutely certain. I had noticed all the tiny details, the heavy eyebrows which a Mayfair receptionist would have long since plucked, the sallow skin with blackheads round the nose, the high smooth forehead, the little indentation above the upper lip exactly like the one in my photograph. I'd even spotted a darn in her shawl, neatly worked, but in a slightly different colour, so it showed. You wouldn't see things like darns and blackheads if you were hallucinating. The Bernadette I'd seen was a peasant girl of flesh and blood with dark rings underneath her eyes and a slack chin, not a ghost or a visionary who spoke in tongues or arrived in a cloud of angels. Bernadette's Lady had appeared in radiant light and a gust of wind. But not Bernadette herself. She had just showed up as naturally, as matter-of-factly as Adrian might have done, or Ray, or my sister if I had one. Anyway, if I had to imagine things, why not something glorious and uplifting — Bernadette assuring me I was loved by God and destined for heaven — rather than burdening myself with the most unwelcome tale to tell since Adam's fall from paradise?