After Purple (17 page)

I was thunderstruck. “But it was a
miracle
,” I said. The girls at school had been to Lourdes every year. It was part of the convent calendar, like Reverend Mother's Feast Day, or the ice-cold baths and all-day fast on Ash Wednesday. They had stood on the very spot where St Bernadette had knelt, kissed the rock where Our Lady's feet had rested. I had never gone myself. My mother pronounced the name “Lourdes” with the sort of shudder other people reserve for words like “scab” or “flasher”. While my classmates recited the rosary on the channel ferry or knelt in all-night vigils before the shrine, I would be dragged for quiet weekends to Harrogate or Eastbourne, to ease my mother's asthma. We came back with vapour rubs and woollen gloves and headaches. They returned with miracles — Tizer bottles full of holy water, magic mints made of Our Lady's toenails, Ave Maria inscribed on the head of a pin, musical boxes which played the Lourdes hymn and were strung with fairy lights, miniature television sets which flashed colour pictures of the apparitions to a tiny Bernadette trapped deep inside.

They pitied me, of course. They prayed for me. They even sent me cards. I had seen so many postcards of the place, I felt I almost knew it. One girl told me she'd counted the Virgin Marys in all the shops and had reached a thousand thousand before she'd given up — shelves and shelves of Blessed Virgins made in plastic, plaster, glass, wood, even mother-of-pearl. Puny Virgins shivering in little glass-ball snowstorms, plump Virgins basking in beribboned chocolate boxes, gigantic Virgins which cost you extra baggage on the plane. A thousand thousand Virgins couldn't be attributed to contaminated bread.

“But what about the
cures
?” I objected. “There've been
thousands
of them. Eating fungus wouldn't make blind people see or cripples leap off their stretchers. One of my friends at school even
saw
a miracle.”

“I doubt it,” muttered Ray. He had hardly touched his sausages. “There've been only sixty-four real, hard-and-fast, official accredited miracles in the whole history of Lourdes. Cures are different. There might always be another explanation for them — something like wishful thinking or mass hysteria or even a sort of self-hypnosis. I mean, in the nineteenth century, most illnesses were seen as strictly physical. Now, we're more aware of the psychological element. The mind has enormous power, you know.”

He was sounding more like Adrian, every moment. I turned away. I didn't want the wings pulled off those miracles, my classmates' wonders reduced to self-hypnosis. You can destroy anything if you have enough books and words and theories. Just talking about something can change its shape and meaning, and records and statistics take it by the throat and squeeze all the magic out of it. When Jesus said, “Take up thy bed and walk”, I bet a load of cavilling statisticians didn't pour in and start measuring up the mattress and pulling out the stuffing.

I think Ray sensed my irriration. “Mind you,” he said,” I don't deny there's been some pretty amazing events in Lourdes. I mean, I'm not opposed to miracles, as such. Some of them even happen sort of naturally.”

“Come off it,” I said. “They wouldn't
be
miracles if they happened naturally.”

“I'm not so sure. I read in
The Sunday Times
only a month or two ago about a man who had been blind since birth. He was struck by lightning in a perfectly ordinary thunderstorm and regained his sight there and then.”

“Perhaps it
was
n't lightning,” I objected. “But a sort of flash from God. You know, like St Paul.”

“Perhaps.”

“You don't sound very convinced.”

“No. Anyway, does it really matter?”

I stared at him. Of
course
it mattered. Flashes of lightning and flashes from God were totally and fiercely different. One meant blind chance, the other meant a caring, healing Father.

Ray screwed the top back on the mustard jar. “St Bernadette herself wasn't too happy about the miracles.”

“Oh?”

“She wasn't even cured herself, remember. She died in racking pain. With sores all over her body and raging TB.”

“You seem to know a hell of a lot about it. Have you read all the books?”

“Well, not really
read
. To tell the truth, I hardly ever read a book right through. I find it more or less impossible. I'm a skipper and a skimmer. Sometimes I read every other page, other times I just dip in here and there. It always seems to work. I mean, I've never lost a plot yet, or muddled up the characters.”

Adrian would have
killed
him. Skipping books was an Insult to the Author, a Danger to the Dissemination of True Fact and a lot of other Frightening Things. Adrian read not only the whole text, twice through, word for word, including all the commas and the semi-colons, but also devoured indexes, appendices, bibliographies, tables of contents, acknowledgements, translators' notes, epilogues and footnotes to footnotes. I was liking Ray better all the time. Unfortunately, he seemed to have reached his own epilogue. He was pulling on his anorak, brushing down his knees. “I'm sorry, Thea, but I'm afraid I've got to go.”

I grabbed his arm. “No,” I said. I didn't know who he was or why on earth he'd come to see me, but I knew he mustn't go. He was a sort of minor miracle himself — a book skimmer who muddled up French kings and fancied Bernadette and didn't mind me swearing. And something of a saint. He'd tamed and softened all his breakfast and offered it to me, torn out the softest pieces from the inside of his toast and slid them gently between my lips. He'd even held my hand. Both hands.

“Stay,” I pleaded.

“I'm afraid I'm needed elsewhere.” He was probably going to fetch his wicker baskets, or take a class in potato-printing. “But I'll come again — if you want me to, that is.”

“Of
course
I want you to.”

“OK then.”

“Promise?”

“Promise. How about tomorrow lunch?” It sounded like a date or an assignment. I remembered the waiter at the Café Royal. But it wasn't like that with Ray. He didn't turn me on at all. He was one of the plainest men I'd ever met. Red hair is fine in Titians or on Irish setters, but disastrous on men. It was something else I liked about him, something hidden. He was like a plain, serviceable coat with a plush fur lining.

“Make sure it's not blancmange,” he called. He was already halfway through the door. “I
loathe
it.”

“It's
always
blancmange,” I shouted.

When he'd gone, I nicked the baby cereal packets and hid them in my locker. Perhaps Adrian would have bought them if we'd ever had a family. Children like things small. I sat and thought about my marriage. Mondays we had Sugar Puffs and Adrian took Assembly. Tuesdays, it was Ricicles and Dinner Duty. Wednesdays he put hot milk on the Weetabix to warm him up for soccer practice. Thursdays …

Adrian felt very far away. I picked up the spoon and dribbled an R in marmalade on the last abandoned piece of toast. I couldn't eat it, but I felt it kept Ray there a little longer. I needed someone. I was feeling rather lonely. I had a nasty feeling Leo wouldn't appear, and there was still no sign of Father Sullivan.

Sister Ursula glided in without him. She doled out my penicillin and my tranquillisers, and removed the breakfast debris from the bed.

“Well,” she said. “How d'you like our Father Murphy?”

“
Who?
” I asked. That was the name of the chaplain at our school. He must have been almost dead by now. He was pensionable then.

“Father Raymond Murphy,” she repeated. She looked smug, as if she'd just discovered penicillin, without benefit of Fleming.

“You mean …”

“Well, I know he hides his dog collar, but he's a holy anointed priest, just the same.”

“A
priest
!” I almost shouted. My breakfast sat up and kicked me in the gut. “He
can't
be. Priests don't wear cords with holes in.”

“Oh, but they
do
, dear. You're out of touch. Priests wear anything these days — overalls and anoraks, running shoes and T-shirts, tatty jeans. I even saw one in a flying-suit.”

“But he put
marmalade
on his sausages, I saw him. And he …”

“Priests have stomachs, Thea. Even Our Blessed Lord had a stomach. Don't you remember the Marriage Feast at Cana? The loaves and fishes?”

“Yes, but …” I felt furious, betrayed. Ray had barged into my room, bluffed his way into my confidence, let me think he was a student or a whiz with wickerwork. I'd blurted out all sorts of things I'd never have admitted had I known he was a priest. He'd turned our friendly little breakfast into a forced confession, and I hadn't even noticed. Traps again, like oily Dr Davies.

One thing I hated was pop priests. They'd exploded in the sixties when I was just a kid, but even now they were still bursting out of their boiler-suits, running youth clubs and roaring around on motorbikes and using your Christian name before they'd even met you. It was all a trick to knock you off your guard. They lulled you into saying things like “shagged” or “shitty” and then whispered “pray” or “Lord” as their own four-letter words. Or tried to pretend they didn't believe in miracles, only to appear in a cloud of white light when they'd finished shining up their Kawasakis. They turned church into a disco and hymns into folksongs, and once they'd conned you into whistling the chorus, they'd slip religion in like the pill in the sugar. It wasn't even
real religion
. They took out all the mystery and the backbone and the sin, and left a bland, bed-sit Jesus who played lead guitar and ate in health-food restaurants. At least the collared and the cassocked ones had the decency to play it straight.
They
still believed in Hell and rubric and solemnity, and didn't bleat and sneak into your room like sheep in wolf's clothing.

The mustard spoon had slipped down between the sheets. I picked it up and hurled it on the tray.

“If you don't mind, Sister Ursula,” I said, “I don't want to see any more priests at all.”

I snatched up St Bernadette and opened her at the thirteenth apparition — the one which had caused her all the problems with the parish priest. I felt a surge of fellow feeling. We'd both had trouble enough with clergymen.

“Get out!” the Abbe Peyramale had shouted, as she stood trembling in his presence with her aunts.

“Get out,” I whispered myself. I was addressing it to all of them. To Ray, to Father Sullivan, to the doctor and the dentist, to Josie Rutherford, even to my sacred, hated Leo.

“Get
out
!”

I stuck with St Bernadette the rest of the day. Nuns and cleaners and paper boys barged in and out of my room, but I was kneeling in ecstasy in front of radiant white ladies, or relaying Our Lady's instructions to open-mouthed French priests, or tending my sheep on the mountain slopes at Bartres. I said we had lots in common, but the differences between us were also pretty great. Bernadette had grown up in a dozy country town, grinding grain and minding lambs, while I was a child of a sprawling suburb, familiar only with petrol pumps and supermarkets. She'd had a father — a down-at-heel, out-of-work one who'd lost his job and an eye at more or less the same time, but a big, bony, doting man who supported her against all the opposition. She'd lived among brothers and sisters, cousins and aunts, whereas I was an only child with a mother who kept the blinds drawn down. Bernadette was a saint. She didn't swear or nick things. She wouldn't even take an apple when it was offered to her as a gift. She'd never had sex and I doubt if she'd even masturbated. She prayed for poor depraved sinners like myself.

I felt, though, she
could
have been a sinner. In different circumstances, perhaps, or with different parents. She had pride and verve, strong passions, even if she kept them under wraps. She answered back the priests and stood up to the Imperial Procurator. She laughed and teased and played practical jokes on people. She'd never had a proper job. Her Mother Superior said the only thing she was good for was grating carrots. I liked her even better after I'd read that.

She was fourteen years and one month when she first saw the Blessed Virgin. I was fourteen and two months when my crowing classmates first visited the town she'd built from nothing. Father Murphy (old style) had accompanied them, and another priest who actually looked like a man and could be called handsome if you didn't peer too closely, and at least six or seven of our nuns, including a withered, shrunken little sister who had Bright's disease and was going for a miracle. I was left behind. While they breakfasted on Christ's body and blood in some sublime basilica reeling with the scent of lilies, I wept into my Weetabix in a cut-price guest-house eight hundred miles away, where the only devotions were homage to the lap-dog or community singing on the radio. It was bad enough being odd one out among three hundred girls, but Lourdes received more than three million visitors a year. I was one in three million — the only outcast, the single unbaptised pariah.

I vowed I would get there somehow — more than that — I would make my First Communion in that very same basilica, even if I had to wait till I left school. I wouldn't defy my mother — that would put a stain on it — but once I was eighteen, I would be free to go my own way. I would join the church and on Easter Sunday of my nineteenth year, I would travel to Lourdes in the company of cripples, lepers and untouchables, and receive the Body of Christ among the lilies, with the Holy Ghost perching on my shoulder and a thousand angels shouting out Hosanna.

Two years later, I left convent school for the local F.E. College and swapped nuns and lilies for bummers and the weed. I still wore Our Lady's blue, but in skin-tight Levis rather than limp gym-slips. Lourdes began to fade. The following year, Adrian came to teach there part-time — history and general studies on Thursday afternoons. A year after that, he asked me to marry him. There weren't any angels present. He was helping me with George III and the American War of Independence, and he slipped in the proposal between the Boston Tea Party and the Surrender at Yorktown. I said “yes” partly out of gratitude and partly out of shock. On Easter Sunday of my nineteenth year, I was lying in Guy's Hospital, bequeathing them their foetus. If it had been a girl, I might have called it Bernadette. I still remembered, see. But Adrian chose the names. We tried again, almost every day for five years, but there were no more foetuses until Janet's came along. She achieved in five minutes what I failed to do in five years. And didn't even interrupt her education.