‘Oh really?’ she asks, with unconvincing nonchalance. ‘So what have I done that’s so terrible?’
‘I want Gilly.’ He cushions his head on my breast and I feel that, for all his protests, I might as well be his mother. ‘Don’t go away from me!’ He clasps me so hard that I almost topple over.
‘I’m not going anywhere. We’re both going home,’ I say, with studied neutrality.
‘I know I shouldn’t do things, but I can’t think in a line. I start off all right, then it twists and turns and I end up in a muddle.’
‘I know. It’s not your fault. It’s just that you look so well we sometimes forget how hard it can be for you.’ I think how much easier it would be if he were confined to a wheelchair or had a face as distorted as his brain and hate myself for wishing away his one remaining distinction.
‘Have you got any money for me?’ He grabs my bag and, before I can stop him, tips its contents on to the rumpled sheets.
‘Oh Richard, how many times have I told you not to go through my things?’
‘That would be secrets. We shouldn’t have any secrets, should we, Mother?’ To her credit, Patricia gives him a noncommittal smile. Richard picks up the box containing my crystal angel. ‘What’s this?’
‘Nothing.’ He rattles it. ‘I mean it’s nothing for you. Take care. It’s glass; it might break.’
‘Finders keepers.’
‘It’s mine.’
‘You can’t buy yourself presents.’ He pulls off the lid. ‘It’s an angel.’
‘It’s the one we saw in the shop,’ Patricia says. ‘The one I admired.’
‘Yes.’
‘So you went back to buy it for me!’ Her pleasure is so palpable that I nod.
‘Yes.’
‘What about me? You should have brought something for me.’
‘I planned it to give it to you when we got home. As a thank-you for bringing us here.’
‘It’s beautiful!’ She holds it to the light and examines it from every angle. I pray that Vincent will be more amused than hurt by the recycling of the gift. ‘I’m sorry if I spoke harshly. You mustn’t think I don’t appreciate all the things you do for Richard.’
‘I do things for Gilly too.’
‘Of course you do, my darling.’ She turns back to me. ‘It’s just that I appreciate them so much that it can be frightening to think what would happen if … if …’
‘I know. Don’t worry.’ What is it about me that makes her censure easier to take than her gratitude? ‘Now I must clear up in here and start packing.’
‘Let me do that,’ Patricia says. ‘You’re due at the baths.’
‘I was, but we’re running so late. We have the Grotto Mass at eleven-thirty.’
‘That leaves you more than two hours. You can’t come to Lourdes and not go to the baths.’
‘I was looking forward to it.’
‘The brancadiers will be coming for Richard soon. I’m surprised they’re not here already.’
‘I don’t need a bath. I had a shower.’
‘Don’t be silly, darling. You know it’s not the same.’
‘It’s still water.’
‘You go ahead, Gillian. They won’t keep you waiting long. The Jubilate has priority this morning between nine and ten.’
‘Thank you, I will.’
‘I want to go with you.’
‘You can’t go to the Ladies,’ Patricia says. ‘What would people say?’ Richard giggles. ‘You’ll see Gillian at the Grotto.’
‘Do we have to go there again?’ he asks sulkily.
‘Of course. It’s where St Bernadette saw Our Blessed Lady.’
‘It’s boring. You said it’d be like a cave.’
I slip away and out of the building. My mind is more confused than ever and I long for a sign as explicit as Bernadette’s. But I can hardly expect the Virgin to manifest herself to an adulteress, especially one whose penitence is provisional.
I make my way over the pedestrian bridge, through the John Paul II Centre and down to the Esplanade, stopping only to rub suncream on my face and arms. Two of my fellow pilgrims, clearly identifiable by their sweatshirts, are standing by the statue of the Virgin. I am about to sneak past when I see to my amazement that it is Jenny, hand-in-hand with Matt. I am delighted. After our conversation at Stansted, I was afraid that she would be too shy to make friends even among the girls. Curiosity outweighs discretion, as I seek to learn more about a romance that has run in parallel to my own.
‘Hi there!’ I shout. Jenny drops Matt’s hand as though confronting her mother. He grabs hers back with deliberate defiance. ‘It’s a beautiful morning. Have you come for a final look round?’
‘A final look round,’ Jenny echoes.
‘We’ve been out all night,’ he says, in what sounds like a challenge. ‘We didn’t go to bed.’
‘Or anywhere else,’ Jenny adds quickly.
‘But that’s wonderful,’ I say, eager to move off and put them out of their misery but afraid of appearing to disapprove. ‘How long have you been…?’ An item; a pair; a couple: I search for a less forbidding word. ‘Together?’
‘Two days,’ he says.
‘Since Saint-Savin,’ she adds. ‘I was struggling to push Mrs Clunes up to the Abbey. Matt came to help.’
‘So your eyes met across a crowded wheelchair?’ I ask lightly.
‘It was fingers first,’ Jenny says, prompting Matt to squeeze her hand.
‘Well I think it’s wonderful,’ I say, both touched and troubled by a love that is so much freer than mine. I long to make common cause but am afraid of seeming ridiculous. The spontaneity that is the stuff of youth feels suspect – almost dangerous – in early middle age. ‘Any plans for when we get back to England?’ I ask, sticking to practicalities. ‘How close to each other do you live?’
‘I’m from Stoke,’ Jenny says. ‘But if I get my two As and a B, I’m off to Warwick.’
‘And I’m in Solihull.’
‘That’s not too bad,’ I say, alert to their mournful faces, ‘it could have been John O’Groats and Land’s End.’
‘You don’t understand,’ Jenny says. ‘Matt isn’t flying home with us; he’s in the van with the equipment. It takes them two days to drive through France. I’ve asked everyone if they’ll swap places. I don’t care about feeling sick. But they all said they had too much fun on the way down.’
‘Two days.’ I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. ‘I had a great aunt who married the day before my uncle went off to fight in North Africa.’
‘It’s easy for you,’ Jenny says. ‘If you were our age, you’d understand.’
‘Yes, of course, I’m sorry. I’ll leave you in peace.’
‘No, we have to get back to the Acceuil,’ Matt says. ‘We only came to say our Hail Marys.’
‘What? Oh yes. You were on Father Dave’s walk.’
‘How about you?’ Jenny asks, with affecting credulity. ‘Have you said yours?’
‘No, not yet. I think I’d rather leave it to fate.’
I walk through the Basilica Square and under the ramp, past the drinking fountains and the Grotto to join the pilgrims on their way to the baths. I pause for a moment by the candle burners, with the forest of flames in various stages of extinction, and picture all the faith, all the hope and all the entreaties that they represent. I want to add some words of my own but fail even to formulate them in my head. It is not just my throat but my entire being that is parched.
The crowds at the women’s baths plunge me into panic. Convinced that the wait will be too long, I decide to turn back. All at once I am spotted by Louisa, who lives up to the emblem emblazoned on her chest by bellowing my name.
‘Gillian! Over here!’ I smile apologetically at the people in front, but the queuing system is so erratic that no one – not even the Italians – seems to blame me for jumping it. ‘You sit here,’ she says, directing me to a bench next to a trim, well turned-out woman who, if it weren’t for
the wheelchair beside her, might have been lining up for the summer sales. ‘Most of our lot have already gone in. I’m just keeping an eye out for stragglers.’ That puts me firmly in my place but, as I glimpse my neighbour’s friendly smile, it no longer feels such a lonely place to be.
No sooner has she found me a seat than Louisa moves away. I settle on the bench and examine the figure in the wheelchair. Both her arms and waist are strapped in position and she wears a woollen cardigan in spite of the heat. Her neck is stretched back on a pillowed ledge, making it hard to determine her age, although I detect the faint outline of a bust beneath the baggy clothes.
I watch as my neighbour stands and, with infinite solicitude, lifts the lifeless head from the pillow and holds a bottle of water to her lips. ‘Is this your daughter?’ I ask, trusting that I have not confused a wizened mother or a flat-chested friend.
‘Yes, my Anna,’ she says, in an indeterminate accent.
‘Was there … was she in an accident?’
‘Birth,’ she replies flatly, putting my twelve years of nursing Richard into perspective. However much he may have changed, I at least retain the memory of the man he was. She only has the elusive image of the girl her daughter might have been.
‘Is this your first time at the baths?’ I ask, taking the shortcut to intimacy that has defined my week in Lourdes.
‘No, we come every year. Every year since Anna is three. She is now sixteen years old.’ My hopes of the water’s miraculous properties begin to founder. ‘We come here from Groningen in the Netherlands. Perhaps you know of it?’
‘Of course,’ I say, eager to offer her what little support I can.
‘And you?’
‘From Surrey in England. Oh, I see what you mean. Yes, this is my first time. My husband had a brain haemorrhage twelve years ago. In many ways he is like a child.’
‘There is no hope?’
‘Not for him, no … Do you have any other family?’ I lower my voice in case Anna’s condition should turn out to be congenital.
‘Just Anna and me. She is the first child. The only child. I used to wish that I had other children before, but now I am glad that it is just us. With others there would have been comparing. There would have been too much time with Anna and not enough time with them. There would have been “please do not bring her out when my friends are nearby”. No, it is better like this.’
‘And your husband?’ I ask, trying not to let myself be distracted by the flies circling above Anna’s head.
‘He is no more. I mean he is no more my husband. He has a new wife and family in Rotterdam. Please do not think he is a bad man for leaving.’
‘No, I’m the last person to think that.’
She gives me a searching glance. ‘He tried to do his best but he couldn’t make a life with Anna. To him there is only one life. He is not like us.’ It is unclear whether she is alluding to our faith or our gender. ‘He wanted to put Anna in a home, a good home, a home that he would have to pay for … a home that he would find it hard to pay for, but then he wanted it to be hard. I said “no”. I wouldn’t permit him to shut her away because she was not perfect. My parents grew up in a world like this, a world where not perfect people were thrown out from the rest.’ She swats at the flies and I realise that, far from not noticing them, she is sensitive to every detail of her daughter’s state.
‘Do you have friends? Old friends who are there for you when it all gets too much?’
‘One or two, yes. But not so many any more. There are the mothers of the children at the centre where Anna goes three mornings each week. With three of these I play tennis. But with my old friends it is harder … for them as it is for me. They have their lives and I have Anna. How can they talk to me about the things they have wrong in their lives when I have Anna? How can they talk about the things they have right in their lives when I have Anna?’
‘Oh yes, I know that syndrome so well. They start by wanting to help and end up blaming you for their failure.’
‘It is not their fault. But it is better not to wish for too much.’
‘I’m amazed – full of admiration but also puzzled – by the way you can be so accepting of everything. Do you never think of packing a suitcase, running off and not looking back?’ I am so desperate for an answer that I no longer worry about giving offence.
‘Sometimes, yes.’ She seems to be struggling with her inner self. ‘But only at night.’ She stands and wipes her daughter’s face with a damp cloth. ‘And you must not feel sorry for me. I have so many happy things in my life. Small things that are no longer small. The sounds Anna makes when I rub her skin with lotion or when I scratch, you know, like a mouse behind her knees. Jörgen, my husband, he said it was just the gas in her stomach: the air in her throat. But I know it is so much more.’
‘You’re very brave.’
‘If you knew me, you would not say that. I am frightened of so many things. But, most of all, I am frightened of my Anna dying. I used to be frightened that I would die before and leave her on her own. But not any more. I know it is selfish. I know I am a bad woman –’ She brushes aside my protests as casually as she did the flies. ‘But she is my life; without her, I could not go on.’
‘Madame!’ The woman starts as an official in a navy sash summons her into the building with a flick of the wrist that cuts through the confusion. She releases the brake on her daughter’s chair, ready to wheel it inside. Then, confident that we will never meet again, she leans towards me and whispers: ‘Most of all I am frightened of the pills, the pills I give Anna to help her sleep … that, when she is sleeping for ever, I will take them for me. It is then that I will know that my life is no longer worth living. It is then that I will turn my heart against God.’
She makes her way inside and I resist the urge to ask for an address or a number or even a name that might compromise the essential anonymity of our association. I shuffle up the bench, soaking up its residual warmth, while moving one step closer to my goal. I watch while entrants are selected seemingly at random until, at last, the all-powerful finger beckons me and I walk into a long low room, dominated by a row of green-and-white curtained cubicles, resembling a municipal swimming pool. I take a seat to the right of the door between an albino girl, surrounded by shopping bags, noiselessly saying her rosary, and a gnarled nonagenarian with filmy eyes and a toothless smile. Every few minutes a glowing woman emerges from one of the cubicles and a replacement is ushered in. I strive to empty my mind of worldly concerns but find it filling with more speculation about the men’s cubicles than at any time since school. Is Vincent in there filming, his innocent camerawork later to be subverted by a lethal voiceover? Is Richard behaving? I pray that he will be neither prurient nor coy, dipping one toe into the icy water and refusing to venture further, when a woman in a damp T-shirt printed with a portrait of the Virgin leaves the extreme right cubicle and the attendant summons me.
I enter the cramped space to find five women in varying states of undress. In semaphored French, the attendant tells me to strip to my bra and pants and then slips out through a second curtain. I smile encouragingly at my Slavonic-featured neighbour, who sits hugging her chest in a vain attempt to hide the rolls of flab that spill over her knees, but she seems so wretched that I turn away, taking off my jumper and skirt and folding them with studied precision in a bid to delay the moment when I must turn back and face the room.
I am distracted by a delicate young woman who returns from the inner sanctum. She makes straight for the pile of clothes to my left and I watch in awe as the beads of moisture on her neck and shoulders evaporate like water on a hotplate. The force of Vincent’s jibes dries up with them. It is clear that we have no need of towels.
‘L’eau était froide?’ With no clues as to her nationality, I choose the courteous option. She fails to respond, and it is not until she puts on her clothes that I realise her plain grey dress is a habit and her mind will be full of God. Twenty years after leaving school, I still ex
pect nuns to be old.
Each of the women takes her turn to go through to the bath until finally it is mine. I shiver so violently at the prospect of the glacial water that they must think I have come to be cured of a tremor. The attendant leads me into a small granite-lined room with a tub like an outsize hip bath at the centre. The air is damp with a metallic tang, and a layer of condensation lines the walls. I am welcomed by two more attendants wearing light plastic aprons.
‘English?’ one of them asks.
‘Yes,’ I say, wondering if it is the Marks and Spencer pants that give me away.
She nods at her companion, who tells me in a soft Scottish burr to remove my underwear and place it on the shelf. She then holds up a small piece of wet linen, wrapping it around me like a sarong and tying it loosely at the back. Taking my arm, she guides me into the bath and down its three inner steps. The water is so biting that it feels like treading in a tub of broken glass. With her companion holding my other arm, she instructs me to sit. I lower my bottom gingerly into the arctic depths.
‘No, no, bend your knees as if you’re on a stool!’ I do so, pressing heavily on their arms and leaving my bottom suspended. ‘Now you must make your intentions.’
This is the moment of truth: the moment when I am planning to ask St Bernadette to intercede for Richard, to give me back the man I loved, the man I married, or, at the very least, the man. She herself said that the water of Lourdes had no power without faith. Well, mine is a faith that has never faltered even at the bleakest prognosis. This is the chance for it to reap its reward. Or is the clear-cut faith of my catechism irredeemably muddied by desire?
I look into my heart and wish that I saw nothing. I pray for Richard’s recovery as intently as ever, but my motives are no longer pure. Should a miracle occur and he regain the forty years he has lost during the last twelve, my Te Deums would ring across the Pyrenees, but I fear that, even then, St Bernadette would find them wanting. Knowing that he no longer depended on me, would I at last be able to leave him with a clear conscience, or would I feel obliged to stay out of gratitude for my deliverance?
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