I could hear myself screaming and choking in my sleep.
Chapter Twenty-Two
When I woke, it was dark. I think the laxative must have contained a sedative because I’d slept eleven and a quarter hours and that in daytime. Easter Day had simply vanished off the calendar. Ordinary people had been eating spring lamb and simnel cake, sampling their Easter eggs, picking pussy-willow in the woods. Back in London, funfairs were grinding and jangling on Hampstead Heath and Clapham Common, the first tulips and the first tourists admiring each other at Hampton Court. And I’d been unconscious through it all, lying in my shroud on the day of resurrection. I grinned. It pleased me somehow. I wasn’t a proper sanctioned Catholic, so why should I celebrate their sham? Now that everyone else was going to bed, I’d get up and out.
My stomach felt as if some great wild beast had trampled through it, leaving jagged clawmarks. The room smelt stuffy and airless. I pushed open the window and cold black air rushed in and almost raped me. The moon had dwindled to a sliver as if it, too, had been fasting, and had now wasted away to almost nothing.
I put on my thickest cords and two sweaters under the sheepskins, and crept downstairs. The streets were almost deserted except for the tailless cat, who was crouching under a van licking out the last dregs of oil from a sardine tin. All the shops were shuttered, the pilgrims had disappeared, and even the cafés were closing up. Lourdes doesn’t have a night life. The only drinkers are the holy water addicts, the only strippers those who take the baths. There were a few odd youths roaring around on motorbikes and the odd tourist trailing home. The streets were still pot-holed with puddles but at least it wasn’t raining. The night smelt clear and fresh and a soft glow from the street-lamps prettied up the pavements. Lourdes looked almost appealing in the dark. Maybe even the Grotto would seem holy and impressive without the rabble and the rain.
I hardly knew why I was going there, except that all the roads in Lourdes lead down to it. The natural flow of traffic is always westwards towards the river and the shrine. All the cars, all the pilgrims, turn in that direction as if magnetised. Almost unthinkable to go any other way, to climb uphill instead of down, or turn your back on Mary. Anyway, it would be a peaceful spot at night, a safe one, like a sort of sanctuary, and I needed somewhere quiet where I could think. I had glooms enough, for heaven’s sake. My stomach was still an empty bag, Ray was incommunicado and might be angry, revengeful or even plain despairing, and my First Communion had turned out a disaster. And yet I wasn’t gloomy. I stopped at the bridge for a moment and tried to work it out.
There was a swirling feeling in my head, almost like relief. I felt like a nun who realises she hasn’t got a vocation after all, and has just ripped off her habit and rolled naked down a grassy slope. I knew now I didn’t want religion in the form Ray had offered it. Why should holiness mean a grumbling belly and a padlocked cunt? He couldn’t keep his own vows, so why inflict them on a girl whose ma had flung God in the waste-bin along with joy and love, and whose father had only gone to church to chat up all the hats? My true vocation was a worldly one. I was needed back with Leo to be a mistress and a mother — a calling no less holy, but requiring a high-protein diet of substantial meals and even more substantial sex. Now I thought about it, Leo’s impotence had probably only been caused by my religion. He had sensed it like an alien cloak around me and feared to sully it. Once I returned without that thick nun’s habit clinging to my body, his loins would spring to life and power again. That would be our miracle.
I stared down at the water slapping black and glossy against the river bank. The stars had fallen into it and were frothing like effervescent pills. I felt light and frothy myself. Perhaps it was nothing to do with religion or Leo or miracles, but simply that I was no longer constipated. Constipation itself is a type of impotence. Adrian had a book on Martin Luther which attributed most of his doubts and ragings to a lazy bowel. Odd to think the entire Reformation might have been prevented had Luther had his Branflakes. Maybe that was all Ray needed — more bulk, or senna pods. I wondered what he was doing at that moment. Was he asleep, or on his knees in prayer, or ministering to his handicapped? Did he feel bitter towards me, or simply embarrassed or ashamed? I shivered suddenly, sprinted across the bridge and ran down the Avenue Bernadette-Soubirous. It was too cold to hang about.
Strange to see the streets so empty, when they’d been thronged and jostling only hours before. Now there was just a little knot of nurses standing on the corner and one lonely waiter cycling home. I felt I almost owned the town. The pilgrims had soiled and crowded it all through Easter Day; now it was mine to stretch my soul in. I crossed the road which skirted the Domain and stared around me. Something was different. Not just the peace, the lack of crowds, the hushed black muslin sky, but something else: the huge iron gates of St Joseph were locked and barred.
The nuns had told us the gates were always open, ready to admit the sinner and the pilgrim at any hour of day or night. Perhaps it was just another lie. Childhood is probably only bearable because it’s built on lies. Growing up is finding the scrawny shreds and scraps of truth between them. I pressed my whole body against the gates, but they didn’t yield. A gendarme shouted something at me, so I moved away. I didn’t want trouble, not after midnight on my own. I walked up the hill to the Chapel of Reconciliations (which sounds like a place where quarrelling couples sort out their grievances, but is really a sort of gigantic confessional with forty-seven separate boxes. Just one lone box is enough to turn me on, so forty-seven was more or less an orgy). I tried the door, but it was also locked. Even confessions were restricted to a timetable. You couldn’t sin after midnight — only from eight am till noon, or from two pm till ten. The times were posted on the door, plus a sort of chart showing all the different languages. Adrian would have loved it. There were also other notices — details of the services, Easter treats and music. I had slept through all the highlights — the Blessing of the Sick, the Torchlight Procession. I didn’t care. I could always catch up with them tomorrow.
I crossed the road again and stood a moment in the shadows, listening to the faint plop-plop of raindrops falling from wet trees. I could see the stars tangled in their branches, seeming to bend a little nearer as I gazed at them. I must have been standing right above the Grotto. Ray had told me there was a little zig-zag path winding down to it, which a lot of pilgrims didn’t even know existed. I groped my way along the wall and found the gate. It wasn’t locked. I pushed it open and stared down through banks of massed trees and tangled evergreens to a blaze of lighted candles gleaming at the bottom. The flames made their own bright pathway through the trees, flinging grotesquely spindly shadows across my own. A notice said “Silence” in three languages, but the river was ignoring it, shouting and singing on its way to the Atlantic. I longed to sing myself. Nobody at Lourdes showed any joy. All the crowds were chastened, gloomy, grey. No one ran or jumped or yelled with laughter. Even their hymns were dirges. It was like the nuns at school. They’d always insisted that we slink and creep and whisper. Running was unladylike, shouting was a sin.
Suddenly I ran. Round and round, down and down, zig-zagging faster and faster as trees pushed past me and the disobedient river called and encouraged from the bottom. I stood panting by its banks, gazing at the water frothing white and feverish over the tumbled stones, the same water as that which flowed so sluggishly beneath the old bridge, but now quickened and transformed. I could smell hot wax, wet leaves, the lush rangy smell of damp meadows oozing in the dark. I turned towards the Grotto. The harsh concrete was glistening now with gold. The three basilicas were floodlit and poured their million-watt bounty over the surrounding arc of earth and sky. No wonder the moon looked cheated — weak and anorexic against their dazzling light. Above me, the glittering fortress soared like a magic castle in a fairy story. Beyond me, a line of shivering poplars stared at their trembling faces in the river. Nature and beauty had come rushing, whooping back.
I knelt before th
e shrine. The candles were alight now, leaping and flickering in the breeze. The rock itself seemed to writhe and ripple as the tiny flames reached out their fingers to it. I stretched out my own arms at shoulder level on either side, as I had seen the more devout of the pilgrims doing. I felt like a bird, a huge broad-winged, proud-beaked phoenix which had been mended and restored and which could now fly a thousand thousand miles above the grief and pain of Lourdes. I gazed up at the statue hoping it would look less ugly in the shadows.
It wasn’t there.
I gasped and rubbed my eyes, pinched myself, stood up, peered nearer. No, I was not mistaken. The niche where it had stood that morning was only a black and empty hole. The statue had completely disappeared. Impossible! It had been installed in 1864 and had stood there ever since, the focus of the entire Catholic world. Candles were lit before it, pleading letters dropped in the hollow beneath its feet, prayers and novenas addressed to it, donations left in front of it, endless photos taken of it, and a million million copies of it made in plastic, plaster, wood, stone and wax.
And it wasn’t there.
I closed my eyes a moment. Maybe it was just some trick of the shifting light. When I opened them again, the statue would be back in place. I’d probably had a blackout for a second, some side-effect of the laxative, perhaps, or I’d lost my balance and my bearings by stretching out my arms. I stood completely still now, breathing deeply, and holding on to a bench to steady myself. I counted to ten, then to twenty, then to a hundred, before I dared look back again. I wanted to be sure I was strong and sane and completely calm.
At a hundred and one, I opened my eyes. There was still no statue, but in its place was a short plumpish girl with a broad oval face (no cheekbones) and a pale rather blemished skin like mine when I have my period. Her eyebrows were heavy, her dark hair almost hidden beneath a coloured kerchief. She had a full, generous mouth, with a tiny indentation above the upper lip. She was wearing the local old-fashioned Pyrenean dress of coarse striped cotton with an apron and a heavy patterned shawl. The clothes were bulky and voluminous, but even so, she looked no more than a child. It was only the expression on her face which made me realise she was older, the suffering in those great dark glowing pleading eyes.
“Bernadette!” I said.
It was impossible to mistake her. I had seen her picture in a dozen books, slept with her photograph, adopted her as my sister, devoured everything I could about her for the last three months. Even without all that, she stared from every shop and hotel and hoarding in the town — giant-sized on posters, thumb-sized on bookmarks, three-dimensional in statues, even lifelike in waxworks. She didn’t look quite as attractive in reality. Her figure was shapeless, her clothes unflattering, and that sallow, almost liverish complexion had obviously been tinted and retouched in all the photographs. It was the eyes that were beautiful, eyes almost black, but then changing their mind to brown again, with deep glowing lights flecked and sparkling in them, and a brilliance which cut through all the shadows.
She smiled. An honest, open, friendly sort of smile. I noticed her teeth, of course. They were small and fairly even, but not as white as they could have been. Everything I had read about her was seething and churning in my mind. Today was April the seventh, the very day that Bernadette herself had had her seventeenth apparition, the last one to be witnessed by the crowds. I’d read the story more than twenty times — how the flame of a lighted candle burned between her palms for a full ten minutes without leaving so much as a blister. Thousands were convinced by that, including Dr Dozous, a rational man of science who had been a sceptic up till then, and like Adrian suspected so-called miracles.
I tried to peer at her hands to check the story, but she was wearing those woolly half-mitts bus conductors use. I seized a candle from the giant candelabra burning in front of her and held it in my joined hands. I made sure the flame was safely clear of them. I couldn’t rely on miracles myself. But at least I must seem reverent and prepared. I felt something was expected of me, some gesture or salutation. I remembered Bernadette herself had always made the sign of the cross when Our Lady had appeared to her. I tried to copy her.
She smiled again. “No need for that,” she said. Her voice was soft, but very clear and high. I was surprised I understood her, for she was speaking a language I had never heard before. I replaced the candle in the stand. The flame had gone out, in any case. I just stood there looking flustered and confused, wondering whether to pray or kneel or simply greet her as a friend.
There wasn’t time for greetings. She was speaking herself, solemnly, emphatically.
“Thea,” she said. “I want you to help me, please.”
I was instantly on my guard. I know from experience that when people ask your help, it’s often something dodgy or even dangerous which they shrink from doing themselves. I tried to avoid her urgent, searching gaze.
“I’m afraid it won’t be easy,” she was saying. She sounded awkward, almost embarrassed, as if she were apologising to me in advance.
I knew the Blessed Virgin had asked outrageous things of her — commanded her to eat grass and scrabble in the dirt and daub mud and water on her face. I was terrified she’d ask the same of me. I’d had enough of penance. Hadn’t I just decided my own way to religion was through joy and sex and fulfilment, not grovelling and self-abasement?
“You’ll need strength, Thea, courage.”
“Look … I … haven’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 Firs
t 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?”
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