As I walked downstairs, the noise of a normal human morning grabbed me by the ears. Madame was quarrelling with another woman and their two shrill voices were rising higher and higher up the house; two of the children were wailing, and a man was shouting what sounded like Algerian obscenities. Various machines like hoovers and coffee-grinders filled in any gaps. I smiled at the happy family and stepped out on to the pavement. At street level, the sun; the spring and the mountains had all disappeared. I shivered. A cat with no tail was sitting in the gutter scratching, two little boys were raiding the dustbins, and a woman two floors up was stringing wet nappies across her balcony. I smiled at all of them. This was Easter, the day of universal brotherhood, of joy, of peace, of hope.
I turned the corner and started running towards the Rue de la Grotte which led down to the old bridge and then on further to the basilicas. I was late. Pax Pilgrims would already be sitting expectant in the church. It seemed a hundred years since I had seen them. If you don’t live with your family, you soon lose touch. They’d have their own cosy little notice-boards posted in the two hotels, their representatives, their couriers, their nightly cocoa parties. I was just a step-child once again.
The town was crowded, the souvenir shops already open, despite the holy day. Soon I was tangled in a mass of pilgrims, some storming the counters, others making for the Grotto. Nobody else wore white. The colours were predominantly sombre — men in stern grey suits, peasant women dressed all in black except for their ashen faces, navy-blue nurses, sin-black nuns, married couples beige all over. Even the streets were grey, the bridge, the walls, the water. Yet the whole rejuvenated world should have been clad in white, or daubed with singing colour.
The crowds and I surged across the street, through the great gates of St Joseph, and down the slope to the underground basilica. It looked different in the light — heavy, grey again, crouching almost sullen and oppressive, its huge concrete ribs no longer soaring, but pressing down, down, on all the heads. I felt dwarfed as I entered it, lost and insignificant. There was so many throngs of people crowded in the nave and jostling all the entrances, it was impossible to find the English group, let alone Pax Pilgrims. I inched down the ramp into the body of the church and squeezed myself on to an empty scrap of bench at the end of a pew. The fat woman next to me shifted and grumbled a bit, otherwise no one seemed to notice me. I was a refugee here, with no family, no nation. The service had already started, but I had no idea what was happening. It seemed nothing like the Masses we had had at school. The priest was speaking a language I had never heard before. I was further away from the altar than I had been yesterday, so all the priests looked smaller and somehow less impressive. They seemed to be short of vestments. I had imagined all two hundred dressed in richly embroidered gold and silver chasubles, but half of them wore dingy white nightshirts with their grey or navy turn-ups showing underneath. I couldn’t spot Ray immediately, but I was almost relieved by that. After last night, it was probably less embarrassing to leave him as a blur.
There was still no colour in the place — apart from the flags of the different nations grouped around the altar. The nations themselves were dressed in mourning. I had pictured the church piled high with Easter flowers, their scent choking through the nave, blending with the incense, but there were only five sparse lilies standing stiffly in a vase. Five lilies for twenty thousand people. I’d be lucky if I got a stamen.
Suddenly, the organ pealed out, and the chief celebrant lifted up his hands to heaven and thundered forth ‘Credo in Unum Deum’. The entire congregation rose to its feet and joined in. Awe and excitement pierced me like silver arrows as the great bellow of sound hurled itself up to God. Now, at last, I knew where we were up to — the Creed — that great love song to the Catholic faith. Credo is my favourite word. I believe. I yearned to believe in everything, not only in the mysteries and marvels the congregation were crooning (the Holy Ghost, the remission of sin, the resurrection of the dead), but also in peace, in joy, in sons, in fathers, in Leo’s miracle and Ray’s spring-clean.
It was almost an anti-climax to sit down again and listen to some long, fidgety sermon in a foreign language. I knew I should be concentrating, preparing myself for First Communion, but somehow, when the dramatic bits were over, I kept getting distracted by the crowds. I consoled myself by the thought that the First Communicants at school had also been inattentive.
Sometimes they got so nervous before the ceremony, they even wet themselves and had to change their dresses. I was always jealous of those dresses, the snowy frills, the petticoats, the wreaths of roses on their heads, the tiny golden crosses. Every year I knelt there, sick with envy, watching the new batch of seven-year-olds flow up to the altar-rails, tip back their heads, join their hands. The priest would approach with golden vestments, blazing eyes, the soft-lipped organ throbbing out the Pange Lingua, the nuns exultant. Seven-year-olds! I’d been fifteen, for heaven’s sake, and still banned from that table.
Not now. The ban was lifted now and, any moment, I would receive the sacred host from Ray’s own hands. The only problem was I still hadn’t spotted him. True, I was some distance from the altar and there were even more priests than yesterday — all of them looking more or less the same — but even so, flame-red hair is difficult to hide. I counted thirty-three fair heads, eighty grey or thinning, and every variety of brown from mouse to burnt almond. Nothing carrotty. Next I tried the footwear. In all those rows and rows of shiny black toecaps, moccasins or sneakers would shout out loud, even at that distance. The only unconventional shoes I saw were a pair of ox-blood slip-ons, but they belonged to a six-foot-six Nigerian. There was one small priest who had the same build as Ray, and even wore dirty shoes, but when I looked higher, he was completely shiny bald. It struck me for a second that Ray might perhaps have shaved off all his hair as a penance for the sex, but then I realised he wasn’t wearing spectacles. Even Ray wouldn’t renounce his glasses as a second penance. He was so short-sighted, he’d have bumped into the altar.
So he wasn’t there; wasn’t redeemed, reborn, and dressed in shining white. Maybe he was still slumped on his bed in dirty denims, sleeping off the brandy. No, Mary-Lou would have brought him Alka-Seltzer and no one could have slept through early morning with Cammie’s “greats!” and all the jokes and clatter of the boys. Something else had happened —something worse. He was in mortal sin and all two hundred priests had refused him absolution. Franciscans’ sins were probably trickier to forgive than mine. He’d told me, once, St Francis had rolled in the snow to cool his lust, and that was merely for thinking of a woman. Perhaps Ray had been banished to the highest snow-capped peak of the Pyrenees to shiver away his lechery. I felt a tiny plume of pride. My body had the power to banish a priest, to bar him from the Communion table, to send him like the Emperor to Canossa. I was truly Eve — the first woman, the first sinner, but also the mother of the human race. Eve was in every art gallery in the world. Leo even had a picture of her in his lavatory, a pale deep-breasted hussy with the serpent in her hair. Christ had died for Eve.
All the same, I wished Ray would return. His absence was a deep sharp nagging pain underneath my ribs. He might still come in, of course — late or sick or flinching pale from his confession. He had to. For three long months I’d planned to receive Communion from his hands. No other priest would do. He was my private confessor, my book-skipper, my dental nurse, my Adam.
Maybe he was even in the church, sitting somewhere in the congregation, still tending to his boys. Maybe Mike had choked or Lionel vomited up my kiss. I gazed around. The huge basilica was oval-shaped, with the altar in the middle, so wherever you looked there were banks of people, rows of heads. I’d never find him there. I’d simply have to trust him, keep sending up my own private credo until he stepped radiant up the altar steps. Meanwhile, I’d try to pray.
It wasn’t easy. A man had oozed into the last six inches of bench and was shunting me up against the fat woman’s overflow. The boy in front wa
s cleaning his ears out with his little finger. People were shuffling and fidgeting all around. Some even strolled about as if they were in Selfridges. Others took photographs with flashlights, or jiggled babies on their knees, or offered drinks to the sick and handicapped. Someone seemed to be offering me a drink. A sort of jug on a long handle was suddenly shoved beneath my nose. I wasn’t sure whether it was a loving cup, or holy water to sprinkle on myself. It looked, in fact, like one of those bottles men pee into in hospitals. Everyone was digging in their pockets. It was only then I realised it was their version of the collection plate. The woman beside me dropped a fifty-franc note into the jug. I almost fished it out again. Fifty francs would have kept me for a week. I struck a bargain with God. “Look,” I said, “I’ll leave it there, if you send Ray back in time for my Communion.”
I only wished he’d hurry. I was so tense now, I could feel the sweat prickling between my breasts. There were great gaps and silences in the service, when the priests just sat or stood about or mumbled things or passed each other various bits of silverware. When they did say something, it was largely double Dutch, though occasionally they tossed us a morsel of English, or a word like “amen” which I suppose is universal. I think I must have been sitting with the Germans. The man beside me smelt of garlic sausage and he had one of those small green feathers in his hat you see in commercials for Kronenberg.
Suddenly he shook my hand. I almost pushed him off. I’d had trouble enough with Ray, and didn’t want a Kraut on top of it. Then I realised that all the congregation were shaking hands. This was the famous Kiss of Peace. It had been a real kiss in the early days, a sign of affection and commitment to each other. But then the Church had lost its nerve. Kiss is a four-letter word for bishops, so they’d pared it down to a handshake. In one English diocese, they’d tried even to forbid that, on the grounds that any physical contact whatsoever might incite dangerous and uncontrollable passions. But this was France, not England, so I turned to my other neighbour and shook her warmly by the arm. She was dressed in a sort of damask tablecloth with a medal round her neck. She took my hand very gingerly, as if she feared I hadn’t washed it. I yearned for the whole vast congregation to really kiss and cuddle, to cast aside all barriers, lie down on the concrete floor and unite in true affection. Why was the church so terrified of passion, the slightest stirrings and twitchings condemned immediately as sin? I thought of Ray — outlawed from that band of priests merely because he’d fitted one bit of his anatomy into a slot in mine and kept it there two seconds. I closed my eyes. I could see twenty thousand worshippers rolling naked in the aisles, nuns and priests included, humping and thrusting in their paschal joy. Only last night God had requested us to increase and multiply. What better place to do it than in His own temple which had floorspace enough for everyone and even an organ.
The German tablecloth was trying to retrieve her arm. I’d been pumping it for a good two minutes. My vision faded. I was aware only of Ray’s absence now. The huge crowded church was empty because he wasn’t there. “Credo,” I whispered. “I believe.” He could still slip in, late but fervent, a newly-shriven sinner with all the angels of heaven rejoicing in his wake. Everyone was kneeling now, as if they were expecting him — twenty thousand people on their knees in relief and gratitude because my Ray had come. The English priest was speaking:
“Lord Jesus Christ,
I eat your body and drink your blood.
Let it not bring me condemnation,
but health in mind and body.”
We had reached the Communion! Christ had exploded from a wafer into living, breathing flesh and I hadn’t even noticed. He was there, now, in our midst, waiting to slip inside me. This was the moment I had longed and prayed for since the age of thirteen. I ached to share it. The girls at school had always had their parents present. I remember the mums looking brightly dressed and almost blasphemous among the chaste black nuns. The fathers were more sober, but still too broad and booming for that quiet cramped convent chapel. Vast hairy hands spread-eagled on flimsy prayer-books, resounding baritones making the ceiling flinch. My only parents now were a fat Bavarian Hausfrau on one side, and a man with garlic breath on the other. My real father was an out-of-focus snapshot tucked inside my soul, and my mother would have no more gone to Lourdes than to Sing Sing. Even my priest was missing still. Or hiding.
I was suddenly pushed almost off the bench. Everyone was surging and milling past me like a football crowd. Some forty or fifty priests were processing down the aisles, each preceded by a deacon with a lighted candle, each with his chalice full of God, ready to dispense Communion from a dozen different sections of the church. I could hear my stomach rumbling, crying out for Christ. I felt a wild, tearing hunger as if I were standing in a bakery surrounded by fresh-baked loaves, or touring a chocolate factory with rows and rows of candies chugging past. I longed to cram God in my mouth, grow fat and glossy on Him, swallow Him a hundred thousand times. It was all I could do not to rush up to those fifty priests in turn, receive the host from each of them, then double back and beg a second helping, a third, a fourth, a fifth. I wondered how many times you could receive Communion at a single Mass. Could you even attend all the different Masses throughout the day and keep on and on receiving it, glut yourself on God?
No, that was forbidden. Greed was a sin — even greed for God. One single host would be a banquet, as long as Ray had laid it on my tongue.
Where was he? My heart was thumping with fear and hope and longing. He might have just slipped in, arrived that very second, or be round the other side. The trouble was, it was more or less impossible to see. The entire basilica was a tangled mass of bodies, people converging from every aisle and angle, those returning bumping into those still fighting their way towards the priests. I jumped up on the bench and scanned the whole swarming space. I had to have my Communion from Ray. Only then could last night be cancelled and Ray restored to his priesthood. Even without last night, I knew it was essential. My faith and Ray were totally entangled. Even the fact that his surname was the same as our school chaplain’s somehow mattered to me. I had knelt in that convent chapel every day, watching a Father Murphy dispense Communion to everyone else but me. Now at last I could receive mine from a Murphy. No other name could really compensate. I jumped off the bench and struggled round to the far side of the altar. Perhaps Ray was hidden there or about to burst in from the other door. “Oh, please,” I murmured. “Please.”
The crowds were returning now with God in their mouths. They still looked grey, grim, dyspeptic, grudging —jostling and obstructing one another, treading on each other’s feet. There was no harmony, no order, not even any Communion rails. The crowds just stampeded towards the priests, who might well have been mobbed or injured, had the brancardiers not linked arms to keep them back. The organ was almost sobbing, the choir singing something sad and spiky which sounded as if it had been stolen from a funeral service. Christ was in twenty thousand stomachs and there was still no jubilation.
By now I had panted and elbowed my way round the entire basilica. Ray simply wasn’t there. If I dithered any longer, Communion would be over and I’d have to wait another twenty years. I wouldn’t get so much as a morsel or a crumb of Christ, let alone a blow-out. Swiftly, I scanned the three priests nearest me, chose the one who looked most like Leo, a dark skinny fellow who could have been Bulgarian. I joined the dregs of the queue, feeble old wrecks who had been pushed aside by the young and strong. A crone with one eye stood just in front of me. She received the host in her hand as if it were a government hand-out, peered at it almost in disappointment, and crammed it in her mouth.
Now it was my turn. Someone in the queue behind me was shoving me almost into the hard golden rim of the ciborium. I opened my mouth, tipped back my head. I only hoped my tongue looked pink and healthy, not furred by my long fast. Bad breath is always a problem with lovers — I’d never really thought of it in the context of Holy Communion. I wished I’d chewed an Amplex now,
or gargled with Listerine. Hours seemed to ache and hobble by. My neck hurt, my tongue lolled out, but there was still nothing on it — except a sour and prickly fear. Perhaps the priest had guessed I wasn’t a normal cradle Catholic, or Ray had reported me immediately and every priest in Lourdes now knew I’d profaned their profession. Would God send down a thunderbolt, or the entire basilica come crashing down in ruins? Already the organ had stopped crying and started threatening, the choir taken up an angry battle cry.
I squinted through my eyelids. The priest had his back towards me, but it wasn’t disapproval. He’d merely run out of hosts and was being refilled from a huge ciborium borne by a younger deacon. Behind their heads I could see the stern white trumpets of the Easter lilies. I closed my eyes again. Relief had made me dizzy. I tried to concentrate. I had been nervous and distracted almost all the Mass — this was my last chance. I remembered the great Prayer of St Bonaventure which the nuns had always recited in the chapel:
“Be thou alone ever my hope and my whole confidence, my riches, my delight, my pleasure and my joy; my rest and tranquillity; my peace my sweetness and my fragrance; my sweet saviour; my food and refreshment; my refuge and my help; my wisdom, my portion, my possession and my treasure, in whom may my mind and my heart be ever fixed and firm, and rooted immovably. Amen.”
It was so beautiful, I almost wept. I had tried with all my men to make them my riches, my pleasure, my food, my refuge, my portion, yet I was lucky if I even went six weeks without a bust-up or a broken vase. I’d never met a man called Bonaventure. If I had, maybe things would have worked out differently. Now I was meeting God. I tensed. The priest had turned towards me again and I could feel the host falling on my tongue. It was bigger than I’d imagined, with rough scratchy edges which hurt my convalescing mouth. I couldn’t swallow it. There was no wine, not even any of Ray’s famous water, to wash it down. I had been pushed away from my place in front of the priest, and the old man behind me was already gulping down his slice of God. I waited for the miracle to fizz and froth inside me. The host tasted slightly fusty like my mother’s biscuits which she bought in bulk to save money, and then rationed to three a week to save still more.
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