My father watched from his chair. In his dotage he reminded me of an old dog, surveying the passing world from a corner, occasionally sniffing the wind, in that lazy state between sleep and wakefulness, no energy left to judge, or condone, just pleased to be there.
‘I rather miss the smoke,’ he said. ‘Everything is so terribly clear without cigarettes.’
We had dinner in the restaurant. The rain stopped quite suddenly and the clouds drew back, revealing a creamy dusk, a large orange sun and a cargo ship like a spacecraft on the horizon. As the sun hit the water, dolphins appeared by the side of the ship. They jumped and raced in the waves.
‘Aren’t they marvellous?’ Daddy said, looking in another direction altogether where suddenly a submarine appeared out of the ocean. It sailed beside us for a few minutes and then disappeared.
‘That was a very big one.’
‘It was a submarine, Daddy.’
‘Oh. Are you sure?’
We talked about our trip, and the last time he went to Lourdes, with his mother and sister, in 1954.
‘There was a marvellous statue of Our Lady that my mother liked very much. We must find it,’ he said.
‘Well, I don’t expect much has changed.’
‘No, but we have,’ Daddy replied, staring blindly out to sea.
I had been to Lourdes on a pilgrimage with my school, a Catholic monastery in Yorkshire called Ampleforth College. Accompanied by a few congenial priests, we went by train and boat and train down France to look after the sick, whom we pushed in ancient bath chairs towards the grotto every day to take the water. Our choir sang in the basilica.
One evening I escaped from our dormitory with another student and played around all night in the woods outside Lourdes under the full moon. He was one of the most handsome boys in the school and played in the cricket eleven. We had loved and hated each other for a while in one of those typical school relationships in which childish romance is squashed by guilt and fear. Most of the time we avoided each other – but occasionally our eyes locked across a noisy common room, or in the abbey church. Without a word we would both leave, one following the other at a safe distance down long stone passages, round corners, up a turret staircase, to a classics room high up in the eaves of the school, which had a lock on the door, and in which Greek, if not Greek love, was taught. We’d silently undress and have each other among the desks under a blackboard covered in ancient Greek. Later, reclothed, we’d leave the room without a word, merging back into the traffic of the school.
This was the violence of Catholicism in action. But in the hills outside Lourdes it felt different. Maybe the Virgin was watching from above, thinking: God, I wouldn’t mind a bit of that! At any rate something was released in us, and we laughed and talked, and wandered ever further – two escaping puppies – into the woods. By the end of the night, under a sky streaked with thin pink clouds we lay under a tree, exhausted. Looking back, it should have been one of the most beautiful moments of my childish life. But it wasn’t. The religious conditioning was too strong, and post-coital remorse flooded through our veins, so without speaking – actually we hardly ever spoke again – we climbed the hill back to the monastery and silently scaled the wall into the same open window, returning to our separate beds.
It felt important to be telling this story to my dad, now, after all this time, sailing back into the jaws of the Catholic Church, and I was looking out to sea, lost in the drama of it all, when I heard an enormous snore. He was fast asleep. Probably just as well.
Ashen-faced, Fräulein Maria stumbled into my father’s cabin to undress him while I went back up to the bar and had a drink with four truck drivers who loved me in St Trinian’s. When I returned she had passed out on the floor, and my father was lying on the bed with his trousers down.
‘What’s going on?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know what happened to Marianne,’ my father replied. ‘She was here a minute ago. Could you ask her to come back and finish me off?’
‘She’s under the bed,’ I said.
‘Oh really?’
‘Sorry, Rupert,’ murmured Fräulein Maria. ‘Could you take me to my cabin now?’
‘Oh yes, madam.’
The clowns were running the circus.
‘I shall be invoicing Mummy for this, you know,’ I quipped later, as I struggled with Daddy’s underwear.
‘Isn’t she?’ replied my dad obliquely. ‘Leave my bottle by the bed, would you?’
‘Which one? Whisky or …?’
‘Both,’ grunted Daddy, followed by his sing-song ‘Thank you.’
I was dismissed.
The next morning Fräulein Maria made a miraculous recovery so we left the boat and began the six-hour drive along the coast of Spain into France. We had lunch at a truck stop outside Bilbao, and arrived in Lourdes at six o’clock.
The grotto of Lourdes is in a deep valley with a wild slate-coloured river running through it. There is a magnificent dam, and the water thunders down it from the mountains. It is the roar of God in a place largely deafened by the industry of faith, but actually, if you can see past the basilica with its Disneyland towers and mawkish statuary – Our Lady should have appeared in Hollywood. Then she would have had statue approval – the kingdom of heaven is all around you in Lourdes. Strangely, it comes as no surprise, even to the hardened cynic, that divinity briefly congealed into human form and appeared here as a woman.
Bernadette Soubirous was a fragile little shepherdess living in one room with her large family during the middle of the nineteenth century. She was weak from having cholera as a child, semi-literate and, some say, backward. One day she was gathering firewood by the cliffs on the banks of the river when she looked up and saw a beautiful young woman standing on a small niche in a kind of half-cave where rubbish was dumped. They began to chat, and Bernadette ran home afterwards and told her mother. She described a small lady in white with a blue mantle, holding a long rosary, with yellow roses on her feet. At first nobody believed her story, but the lady kept appearing, and soon people became intrigued. The local priest told her to ask the lady who she was, but when she did, the lady just smiled and looked down. During one of the visions (sources vary as to which), the lady told Bernadette to dig in the ground, saying that a spring would come up, and that she should drink from it, and eat the surrounding plants.
By now the whole town followed her each day to the grotto, so in front of an audience of hundreds she dug in the mud and tried to suck water from it, covering her face with dirt in the process, but no water came. Then she began to eat the plants as instructed. With her muddy face, and a mouth full of dock leaves, she must have looked unhinged. The townsfolk jeered and drifted off while her mother cleaned the little girl’s face. Suddenly the whole family was facing disgrace, but a few days later water began to pour from the spot where Bernadette had been digging. The spring has been active and miraculous ever since. Finally the lady introduced herself: ‘I am the Immaculate Conception.’
Interestingly, at that time, the Mother of Jesus had been largely ignored for the previous few hundred years by the Catholic Church. But only a few years before, the pope had issued new dogma concerning the Virgin Mary, claiming that she had been born without sin and was to be known henceforth as ‘the immaculate conception’. How could an illiterate peasant girl know these words when few priests at the time were even familiar with them?
The lady instructed Bernadette to tell the local priest to build a chapel over the grotto, and that people should come and drink from the spring and pray for forgiveness. And so a cult was born. Today Lourdes is the most popular pilgrims’ destination in Christendom, and countless inexplicable cures have been scientifically witnessed.
Three or four years after the visions ended, Bernadette was unable to cope with the endless scrutiny of the faithful and not so faithful. She took orders and retired to a faraway convent, for a life of contemplation. On her first day the Mother Superior assembled the nuns and ordered her
to tell the whole story for the thousandth time. Then she was forbidden to mention it ever again. In the convent, she contracted TB of the knee, and when asked if she would go to Lourdes to bathe in the water, she apparently said, ‘It is not for me.’ According to Catholic propaganda she lived happily and humbly, loved by her sisters, although I doubt it. The Mother Superior wanted to plead Devil’s advocate during the Vatican inquiry thirty years later into Bernadette’s sanctity. Nuns were a mean bunch in those days. She was not allowed go to the inauguration of the basilica at Lourdes. In fact, she never went back, nor saw her beloved family again.
The world is cruel to saints while they are on earth. According to a witness, on her deathbed – she was only thirty-three – Bernadette was racked for several hours by a terrible anxiety. Maybe it had all been a dream, the fantasy of an imaginative child. Certainly the yellow flower slippers she described the lady as wearing sound more like the wish-list of a little girl for her Christmas stocking than traditional footwear from BC Judaea. We will never know. Either way, the sisters sat around the bed murmuring the rosary, and slowly she began to calm down. Somehow it is a picture of utter desolation. A sweet little peasant girl, exiled for a vision from her beautiful mountainside home, from rivers and forests that she loved, punished and imprisoned for being simple and trusting and maybe magical, ending her life on a gurney surrounded by the stern, withered faces of a swarm of nuns in starched wimples and snoods buzzing around the honeycomb. ‘Je vous salue, Marie, pleine de grâce. Le Seigneur est avec vous.’
Finally she died, saying the prayer that would make her – and her patron – famous, and Mary, Mother of God, would be the clever new image of late nineteenth-century Catholicism, neatly embracing the exploding women’s movement, but also subliminally inferring that only a virgin could know God. Bernadette was disinterred in the 1930s. Her body had not decomposed at all, though some daft nuns washed it with soap and water, and it turned black. This was another sign of her sanctity. (Mind you, Lord Byron’s body was exhumed that same year – a hundred after his death – and was found to be in an equally sprightly condition. But then many virgins had appeared to him.)
Whatever the truth, it was a magical May evening as we arrived in Lourdes. The woods and fields were that green one sees on a TV when the colour is turned up too high. The countryside literally blazed. The road wound down a hill towards the basilica, which stood on the remains of the famous cliff in the pastures at the bottom of the valley, and the old village rose above it, cut into the side of the mountain like the backdrop of provincial pantomime. Suddenly we were in the rush-hour traffic, bumper to bumper with the faithful returning from the grotto, through a maze of steep ancient streets crammed with hotels and boarding houses. The Solitude. (Three stars.) The Pope Pius XIV. (Air-conditioned.) The St Francis of Assisi. (Hot and cold in all rooms.) Nurses in capes and starched headdresses pushed wheelchairs up the hills. It was like an evacuation scene from a war film. My dad looked out of the window, and I wondered what was going through his mind.
Later that night we pushed the wheelchair down the hill to the basilica, really fast; my dad holding on for dear life with his legs out straight – for some reason he didn’t like the footrests on his chair; I think they made it feel too permanent – Marianne running beside us, past the bars overflowing with revelling pilgrims, and the souvenir shops with their rows of statues at all prices, to the amphitheatre in front of the basilica, where pilgrims were preparing for the regular torchlight procession through the hills. It was stunningly beautiful. Blind devotion under the silver moon. A snake of flames winding through the black hills. The hymn to Mary surging on the breeze, ghostly and distant, then suddenly up close. And my dad, incredibly, still alive, me and Marianne beside him, weaving through the crowds. A group from some town in Poland were clustered around the steps of the church, in their nurse’s garb, with their sick in chairs in a semicircle in front of them, holding their candles, and in the guttering waxy light they were Rembrandts and Vermeers. Their eyes glittered with belief.
‘Ave, ave, ave Maria’ sang the torchlight procession from the hills, and the sound was not unlike the roar of a distant football stadium, ecstatic at a goal that was about to be scored.
‘I’ve been here before,’ I suddenly remembered.
‘Yes, when you were at Ampleforth,’ said my dad.
‘No, after. Long after. I came here with my dog. My God, I had completely forgotten.’
‘One does that,’ answered my father knowingly, but I was no longer there.
CHAPTER TEN
Two Boys of
Unimaginable Beauty
The house was on a hill above the beach, up a steep bumpy track, hidden by umbrella pines and verging on the vineyard of an aristocratic family whom, by chance I had met once as a child. It was going to be a pretty house one day, pale yellow with blue shutters, but for now, it was the shell of an unfinished dream. Inside, it was mostly a building site where work was often suspended for lack of funds, so that for one whole summer a cement mixer stood defiant in the middle of the sitting room, or a hole in the bathroom floor had to be circumnavigated at one’s own risk late at night on the way to the loo. There was no heating. In the winter the wind shook the windows in their frames, and my dog and I huddled in front of an electric fire, wondering what had become of us. The umbrella pines outside scratched against the roof like zombies and we pricked up our ears, ready for the attack. But once the summer came, the slow months by the granite sea were forgotten, and the lonely mists of winter dispersed in the Mediterranean spring. The water sparkled blue and white again. The beach clubs opened, and the season began. The empty house was suddenly alive.
My best friend Tom came from Madrid. He spent every summer in my gypsy caravan wearing a sarong and flip-flops, and that year a group of Hobbity kids from Alsace squatted in various nooks and crannies of the house. Their leader was an hysterical imp called Bruno, a tiny creature with waist-length hair and a laugh like a hyena. He had a little dog, Geppie, that was half fox. Tom was falling in love, I could tell, and together they flirted over the stove as they made dinner every night for the other guests.
And so our summer days were spent surveying the shoals of tourists that washed up on the beach, and our nights trawling them into our nets at the various bars and discos of St Tropez, luring them back to the beach in the dead of night, where the beam of the lighthouse at Cap Camarat grazed my rumpled bed, briefly sketching in silver the tangle of our inert, salty bodies knocked senseless by sun, sea and sex.
We were a famous force, known by the ‘gens du coin’ as ‘La Bande Rupert’, neither fish nor fowl, locals nor tourists, and that was the thing I liked best. We took promising newcomers under our wings, and issued fatwahs against our enemies. We were loved by some, loathed by others and mistrusted by all. Everything was on tick, and we were always broke, but somehow we got along. By August our numbers sometimes swelled to fifteen or twenty, as people came and went like the waves on the shore, slapping into the house and being sucked back out a week later, leaving odd bits of driftwood that accumulated over the years, and added to the general feeling of chaos in my unfinished home. Chinese hats, wicker baskets, a solitary espadrille, my dog and I were all that was left by the end of another summer.
In town at night, there were two bars for those of a liberal disposition, on either side of a narrow street behind the port. In a way the whole of France could be understood, grasped, within a week or so of meandering back and forth between the two.
Chez Nano didn’t set out to be a gay bar, but its owner, a legendary Tropézien fairy from the glorious sixties, was a man named Nano. She may have looked fairly butch in those early days, when long hair and afghan coats and winding scarves were a man’s attire, but by the time I got to St Tropez she was a lady cow, old, silent and unmilkable, her good looks submerged under a pink quilt of quivering flesh. Long nights on the bottle and days on the beach had done her in, although her hair was still long and thick, cut with a f
ringe, whiter in winter, blonder in summer, and she dressed, like Antonia Fraser, exclusively in white.
The bar was small; an old cave really, and the jungle-red walls were covered with framed, faded photographs of Nano and the stars. Anyone who was anyone who had ever been beached on that particular strip of the Côte d’Azur was there, laughing intimately with this creature they had never met, sharing some unfunny joke, always glossy, in their prime, while Nano’s entire pilgrimage through life was chronicled in uncompromising close-up: winter, spring, summer and fall. The fall came in the eighties when the bar was requisitioned by the cackling old queen world, and it was there, when I got to St Tropez, that they conducted their business, still dressed for Some Like It Hot in sailor hats and striped jerseys, while the beauties of Toulon and Nice, Paris, New York and Rome, sprawled next to them on the banquettes wrapping the room, sucking umbrella-ed cocktails through straws.
On the other side of the road was Chez Maggy, owned by two brothers from Toulon who also had a restaurant on the beach. They were tough movers with jet-black Provençal hair and local accents, and they appealed to a younger crowd, the kids who worked the season, and the flocks of visiting drag queens who arrived side-saddle on scooters from the north of Italy. The night-time explosion of sunburnt revellers overflowed from both bars onto the pavement. In high season the whole street was jammed and a car had to honk its way through the jeering crowd, as Nano peeked out, frowning, from across the road, but it was all part of the fun.
One morning two boys of unimaginable beauty appeared on the beach. Binoculars came out of bags as the early bird queens, slithery with suncream, rose as one like Lazarus from their mats and watched the two men as they undressed, wrestling each other, laughing, into the sea. Their two bodies were sheer Michelangelo, although by the looks of things rather more encouragingly sculpted where it mattered. They ploughed into the water, splashing and diving until their thick necks and ears resurfaced far out in the milky void, and a hundred queens flopped back down on their mats. By the time our group came down the hill everyone had agreed that two finer specimens of manhood would not be found that summer and, as if some secret switch had been turned on, the energy level rose and the frenetic, sleepless party mood for which the beach was famous suddenly kicked in. Disco music blared from loudspeakers, and queens danced by the bar. Flags waved, plates clattered, waiters screamed, and the beach was suddenly a magnet, drawing cars, families, bikers, helicopters, yachts – anything metal, in fact – towards it but through the mayhem we all watched out of the corner of our eyes for the boys’ return.
Vanished Years Page 13
