After Purple (41 page)

Tell everyone, she'd said. But
how
? Should I walk about the town stopping people and saying, “Sorry, but it wasn't Mary after all. You'd better all go home”? They'd merely assume I was one of the mentally sub-normal and pray for a miracle for
me
.

“The priests first,” Bernadette had advised. She'd spoken as if I could count priests on the fingers of both hands. True, I knew more now than I ever had before, but none of them would listen. Ray would regard it as some trick to get him into bed again, and the two Pax priests would hardly be sympathetic when their whole role in life and Lourdes was to help people believe, not take away their certainties. There was also Father Sullivan back at the hospital, but he
knew
I was a liar, and anyway, the hospital was tricky territory since I hadn't paid my bill. (There'd been endless fuss and correspondence about it. Leo was ignoring it and Adrian was querying it and the accounts office had added a threatening letter to the third demand.)

I walked slowly, wearily, up the zig-zag path again, trying to calm the turmoil in my mind. Lourdes was
packed
with clergy. Surely one of them would be kind or tolerant enough to listen. In fact, the
Maison des Chapelains
was only a hundred yards or so in front of me, the home of the most important priests in Lourdes and where all the visiting dignitaries were offered board and lodging.

I slipped through the gate, crossed the road, up the hill, and almost ran towards the huge barred and bolted doors. The place looked like a prison, with bars on the lower windows and a stern forbidding facade which growled, “Get out, keep out, watch out!” I trailed away. Even if they heard my puny knock through all that stone and steel, were they really likely to admit me, knock up their bishops at the dead of night to listen to some fable? Anyway, they would be ninety per cent foreign. My feeble phrase-book gropings could hardly explain a story which, even in the most lucid and carefully chosen English, would still sound quite preposterous.

I kept on walking. I recognised the road now which led up the hill, out to the open countryside and on at last to the hostel for the handicapped. I really had no choice. Ray at least would listen, open his door to me, offer me a glass of water. Thank God I'd slept all day. I'd need my strength to endure so long a trek on an empty stomach and a rough path. The road was already narrowing, the lamp-posts dwindling. I stumbled in the shadows. Only an hour or so ago, I had decided to turn my back on all the dangers and excesses of religion. Yet now I had been chosen to play an almost religious role. To establish Truth. Bernadette could have picked almost anyone from the whole teeming universe and she had chosen me. It was a dazzling, terrifying honour. I realised suddenly that the whole thing had been
meant
. It was some sort of mysterious supernatural plan. Why else should I have crept down to the Grotto at the dead of night when everyone else was sleeping, stumble on the unlocked gate, the zig-zag path? Even the shock and muddle of my First Communion I saw now as intended. Had it been as rewarding as I'd hoped, I might have been less willing to listen to a story which threw my new religion into disarray. As it was, I had become the ideal person to pass on a message of mistake and disillusion.

I walked a little faster. The road was running steeply uphill now, the lights of Lourdes thinning out behind me. I wouldn't look back again. I would go only forward, upward. I could see the huge crouching flanks of the Pyrenees closing in around me like lumbering animals. The night was full of noises — rustlings in the trees, tiny cries from small scared creatures in the grass, the endless rushing of the river, my own gasping breath.

A damp grey fog began to grope its way towards me from the mountains, blotting out the peaks, catching in my hair, stroking cold clammy fingers down my face. A bat blundered through the darkness, a train rumbled somewhere far below. I kept on walking.

“Tell the priests,” Bernadette had said.

I mustn't be afraid. I was on my way to telling one of them.

I was almost crying when I arrived at the hostel — cold, blistered, limping and exhausted. Struggling halfway up a mountain when you've been starving for three whole days is hardly the most restful way of passing Easter night. The place was completely in darkness. I stood outside the door, hearing the blank black silence heaving back at me. When I knocked, the noise echoed like a stone bumping and clattering down a dry well-shaft. No one answered. I looked around me. Solid mountains had turned into shifting, swirling waves of fog. The sky was a huge black hole. I knocked again, tugged at the bell-pull, hammered with my hands. I could hear someone stumbling to the door. I prayed it would be Ray, not Mary-Lou, not Cammie, least of all not Lionel.

It was Doc, looking paunchier in pyjamas and with a lock of greyish hair falling over one bloodshot eye.

“What's up?” he asked. I wasn't even sure if he recognised me, but I could tell he was used to dealing with emergencies. He hadn't bothered with hallos, but was already revving into action, ready to seize his scalpel or his oxygen, according to my story.

I almost wished I could announce a car crash or a heart attack, make the whole thing simpler. But Bernadette seemed still to stare and plead in front of me, as vast and eternal as the sky, imploring me to speak.

“It's … er …
Ray
I really want,” I mumbled.

“What's the trouble? Can't
I
help? I mean, Father Murphy's only just got to bed. He's absolutely shattered. We've had an emergency.”

“So have I,” I said. “I wouldn't bother him otherwise. It's a …

spiritual
emergency.” Those deep, dark, desperate, hurt saint's eyes were boring into me. I couldn't turn my back on them.

“No such thing!” grinned Doc. “If it's not actually festering or haemorrhaging or hanging on a thread, best to leave it alone. OK? Look, come in and have a cup of tea or something.”

The little jokes again, the panacea teapot. I'd just seen the saint who had set up the whole of Lourdes and now ordered me to pull it down again, and here was Doc downgrading me to out-patients.

“I don't want
tea
— I want a priest.”

“Look, lass — what's your name, by the way?”

“Thea Morton. I met you yesterday. You've probably forgotten.”

“No, no. Of course not — I remember now. Look, be a dear and don't disturb Ray. He's not been too well today.”

That hardly surprised me, remembering the cognac (and its aftermath). But what were guilt and hangover compared with the shock and wonder of my vision? They were still so bogged down in trivial things — in sleep, in sex, in headaches, in jokes, in normal life. I had bumped into another century, stumbled on to Truth. The world should be shouting with it, yet all it could do was whimper excuses and go back to sleep again.

“Ray really needs his rest, my dear. We've had one heck of a day. Only been in bed an hour or so. Can't it wait till the morning?”

“No, Dr Bradbury,” I said. “I'm afraid it can't. And if it
could
have done, I'd hardly have scrambled four miles up a sheep track in the pitch dark merely to have a cup of tea with you. There's a café where I'm staying.” I knew I sounded insolent, but if I gave up now, I might never find the guts to start again.

“All right, keep your hair on. I'll go and wake the Boss if you're absolutely sure it's urgent.” He swung round and grinned at me. “But what about that cup of tea
first
?”

They'd offered me tea when I'd lost Lucian. I'd been crying so hard then, I couldn't even hold the cup. Tea is a sort of escape-hatch, I suppose. In times of danger, or sickness or embarrassment, people just hide behind the pot and hope you'll go away. Even a blazing vision they try to drown in Typhoo.

“Look, if you don't hurry up, I'll have to go and pull him out of bed myself. I'm sorry, but this is serious.”

“OK, OK, you win. I can see it's Casualty Department stuff. Look —
what's
your name again? Ah yes — Thea. Unusual name, isn't it? Look, Thea, why don't you go and wait in the kitchen. It's warmer there.”

I trailed into the dingy jumbled mess-room which had rusty waterpipes running down one wall and oilcloth on the tables. Mary-Lou or someone had done the washing-up, but there was still a rank, greasy odour clinging to all the surfaces. I perched myself on a fold-up chair and tried to calm down by squeezing B's (for Bernadette) out of the plastic ketchup dispenser. My mind was blazing with her — her small stocky body, the open trusting frankness of her gaze. She was a wanderer from another century, yet she had seemed as real, as solid, as tangible, as Doc had done just now.

There was a long row of B's across the oilcloth and even a few smaller R's, but Ray still hadn't come. It crossed my mind that perhaps he hadn't been sleeping at all, but kneeling in the fog outside, naked except for a hair shirt, weeping for his sin, unable even to face me. Once he'd heard my message, petty things like screwing would fade into insignificance. He could join with me then, not for hopeless, joyless fumbles, but in working for the Truth.

I was almost despairing of Truth when the door opened and Ray grouched in. He was not on his knees — in fact he looked taller, somehow, and extremely dangerous. He was wearing faded green pyjamas and somebody else's dressing-gown, too short in the sleeve. His hair was tousled, his skin blotchy, but the expression on his face was that of a tiger who had been caged up in a small enclosure with neither food nor exercise for several weeks on end. If he could have eaten me alive, he would have done, bones and all.

“Look here, Thea, I don't
want
you just barging in like this, least of all at night. Do you realise what time it is?”

I cowered on my chair. I hardly recognised him. He had never used that tone before, not even to a dog. “Well, I suppose it must be …”

“It's
bloody
three o'clock.”

“Yes, it … er … would be. I … I'm sorry. I didn't think you'd …”

“No, you
don't
think, do you? I told you very loud and clear that if you came to Lourdes, I wouldn't be available. I'd have thought by now you might have understood that I have to put the boys first.”

I jabbed at the R's with my finger, smeared them into each other until they were just a pool of ketchup blood. “You didn't put them first on Saturday night,” I said.

The tiger almost sprang. I knew I had sounded petty and vindictive. The last thing I wanted was to bring the sex thing up. St Bernadette had cancelled it, had wiped out everything except the shattering shining startle of her presence. But if Ray flung me only anger and reproaches, how could I show him that the world and I were changed? He pulled out a chair and slumped on to it at the table, facing me, but staring at the floor. Silence stifled both of us like smog. I longed to speak, but I didn't have the words. Ordinary speech was too flat and constipated to deal with apparitions. If only I were a conjuror and could call up Bernadette again — flesh and blood and blackheads — or trap her voice in a seashell and send it roaring through Ray's ears. I opened my mouth and shut it. Ray sat as silent as I did, but I could feel his soul tap-tapping towards me like a blind man with a stick. At last, he groped a hand across the oilcloth and left it there, about an inch or two from mine, as if it were a present or a peace-offering. I realised with a sort of joyous shock that his hands and Bernadette's were similar. Ray's were larger, of course, but both of them had red, rough, holy, peasant hands.

“I'm … er … sorry I snapped,” he faltered. “I'm a bit on edge. Look, I … I owe you an apology, I know that.”

“You
don't
, Ray — it doesn't matter. It's not that I've come about. It's …”

“I was
going
to come and see you, but we had a crisis here. Mike went into a coma in the middle of last night. We took him up to the hospital, of course, and I've been there with him almost ever since, but it's still touch and go. It's thrown us all. That's why I …”

“Gosh! I'm
sorry
, Ray. It must have been a shock. But listen — I've …”

“We
will
talk, Thea, but not now, if you don't mind. You see, the hospital may phone me any minute and I'll have to drop everything and go dashing up to Mike. That wouldn't be fair on you. Let me just say I behaved very badly and I deeply regret it.”

At any other time, I might have enjoyed this new hang-dog, grovelling penitent, but now I was so enslaved by Bernadette, I had no desires beyond her. I longed to entrust the whole thing to Ray's hands, to draw on his priestly strength, so I was less flimsily and frighteningly alone with the terror of my mission.

“Look, I don't
mind
about Saturday. It's something else, something far more vital. You see …”

Ray hardly seemed to hear me. He was crouching over the table as if he were too exhausted even to sit up straight. He had found a small stray crust of bread which he was shredding with his thumbnail. “On the other hand, Thea, I do think you owe me an apology as well, or, more strictly speaking, you owe it to Lionel. I had a word with Sam about that … business. He said he was bathing Jimmy in the downstairs bathroom the entire time you and Mary-Lou were washing up. He swore to me that neither you, nor Lionel, nor anyone else ever came
near
the toilet.”

“Well, no,” I muttered. “Actually, it
was
n't the toilet. I mean, what I said was …”

“You
said
the toilet, Thea, quite distinctly and more than once — I heard you. If you must lie to me. I'd rather you didn't do it about my boys. Especially one who can't even speak up in defence of himself. I can hardly credit your story now at all. I mean, if you lied about the place and the circumstances, then have I any reason to believe that Lionel even touched you?”