Vanished Years (17 page)

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.

T
he 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 fringe, 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.

The most seasoned seducer on the beach was Antoine, one of the Maggy brothers. Well built, sexy and confident – after all, he owned the beach – he swaggered across the scalding sand to where they were lying and stood over them, arms akimbo, as the rest of us strained every nerve not to drop everything we were doing and run over. The boys sat up on their elbows. Antoine said something and they threw their heads back laughing. We all gasped. What teeth, what jaws, what necks these creatures had.

‘Look at the hands.’

‘And the ankles.’

‘Ankles?’

‘Oh yes, dear. Didn’t you know?’

They were both from Turin. The taller one, Alfo, worked in a bank. The other, Doriano, was a gym instructor. Alfo was a colossus with Venetian colouring – sandy-coloured hair, brows, lashes and skin, all slightly burnished by salt and sun. Large beckoning lips curled into an earth-shattering smile, replete with Dracula incisors. Doriano was smaller and darker, a gladiator with close-set eyes and a
broken nose. Unfortunately, they didn’t seem anxious to participate in the back and anal rites of endless coffees and cocktails that the rest of us enjoyed. They had canoes and paddled away every morning to the accompaniment of our collective groan, and came back only at sunset, dripping black silhouettes against the orange sea. They sat on the shore until night fell, and the modest Mediterranean waves gurgled and splashed between their legs while they chatted and laughed or just looked out to sea. Then they disappeared and no one knew where they went after that.

Until Melody arrived.

‘They are staying at a camping site vicino a St Raphael,’ she said with relish.

‘Where are they from?’ asked a newcomer.

‘Turin!’ we all shouted angrily.

‘
La città rococo
,’ explained Melody through half-closed eyes to the boy who had turned red.

‘Pardon?’

Melody leant in, pouting. ‘
Ro-co-co
, baby!’

Her voice was ethereal, pitched high, and when she giggled it was like the engine of a car turning over on a frosty morning. She was quite a genius and we all looked forward to her arrival because it was officially high season when she stalked on to the beach with her girlfriends in leopard-skin bikinis and Egyptian tans. They were a caravan of musk emerging from the desert haze, clinking with bangles, the last survivors of some ancient tribe. The only things missing were their spears. Tall and severe, with a handsome, ageless face framed by Cleopatra hair, Melody wore coloured contact lenses of apple green with pupils like cat’s eyes and she carried a small dog in a Louis Vuitton shoulder bag.

She raised one eyebrow and thought for a moment, as if she were weighing something up.

‘Trash from Torino,’ she said finally and waved.

The boys lumbered to their feet, and everyone held their breath as they walked across the beach towards the bar.

‘Oh my God!’ whispered Tom. ‘Look. The big one is wearing shorts made out of your mother’s bedroom curtains in London.’

It was true. Recently my mother had redecorated her room. The walls, the curtains, the bedspread and the lampshades – everything, even the ceiling – was covered in the same dizzying fabric of tiny blue squiggles against a white background. The effect made you feel faint and lose your balance.

‘Do they have Peter Jones in Turin?’ I asked, trying not to stare.

‘Fasten your seat belts!’ replied Tom. ‘This is going to be a bumpy flight.’

Melody sat them down at the bar and began a blatant interrogation, punctuating their story with little asides that dripped with innuendo, undermining them brilliantly and placing herself at the same time just where she liked it – centre stage – and she brought down the ever-enlarging house with every gasp. The boys had a big tent.

‘
Ah, si?
’ (Huge laugh.) But it was so hot they could hardly sleep. ‘
Ah, non!
’ (Hysteria.) But they didn’t want to return to Italy for another couple of days. ‘Probably they will be stopped at the frontier, by the police.’ (The house came down.)

They spoke in Italian and Melody translated into English, Spanish and then Portuguese, as the crowd around the bar soon included the old Brazilian fairy with a wooden leg. She pretended to know them only vaguely, but it was a vague acquaintance that had clearly gone on for years and there was definitely blood under the bridge between these three. They lobbed one-liners back and forth over the head of the little dog, which peeped out growling from the Louis Vuitton bag. But the boys were good-humoured and let her make fun of them. They were on her turf, and anyway it was water off a broad duck’s back, and the fact remained that Melody knew a meal ticket when she saw one. They were the real spaghetti, and quite soon everyone was buying them drinks and waving phone numbers on strips of paper napkins.