After Purple (19 page)

Tom had been best man at our wedding. I didn't see them any more. Adrian had taken Janet there instead They'd probably conceived their baby in Tom and Maggie's double bed.

“No,” I said. “I hate Barnstaple.” Barnstaple was Devonshire and Devonshire was where Janet had grown up. “I'd rather convalesce here. It's just as quiet.”

“Thea, it's
impossible
, I've told you at least five times.” He was getting impatient now, like he did when the Upper Fourth confused the Peasants' Revolt with Cade's Rebellion. “Anyway, they need the bed. Sister Ursula said they're very short of rooms. Apparently, they're closing half of the …”

“Don't shout,” I said. “It hurts my mouth.” I felt betrayed. So it was the bed they wanted, was it? I was just a lump in it, like a piece of embedded tooth, something to be cut out and thrown away. I wasn't a person any more, just a hulk on a mattress who had out-stayed her time. People weren't important, only beds. Patients were just transitory objects which came and left, were born and died, conceived and murdered.

I lurched out of bed and groped over to the window. I wouldn't stay where I wasn't wanted. I had avoided windows up to now — they were too like mirrors. For the first time, I looked out. I couldn't see much of the building since it was mostly underneath me, and anyway, the light was fading, but there was a crew-cut lawn and some manicured rhododendrons and a statue of Christ who had just undergone open-heart surgery and was pointing proudly to His scar. I could also see the bottom of my tree. It wasn't the soaring slender beauty I'd imagined, but a gnarled and misshapen thing, its trunk twisted and its bark mottled. Even the one last leaf had fallen now.

“All right,” I said. “I'll go to Leo's.”

“
No
.” Adrian almost spat. He had joined me by the window and laid his arm across my shoulders. It felt heavy like a dead branch.

“But all my
things
are there,” I said. “I belong there.” I didn't, but I belonged even less at Tom and Maggie's, or in some gimcrack convalescent home constructed on the cheap. I knew what such places were like — bare and dreary and tinny like that row of breech-born hospital maisonettes I could see at the far end of the lawn. They were obviously a new addition and looked brashly out of character with their more elegant surroundings.

Adrian swung back from the window and rammed his fist so hard against the sill, the crucifix twitched and rattled on the wall. “I simply don't understand how you can bring yourself even to mention that … that bastard's name. After what he's
done
to you. For Christ's sake, Thea, you should be feeling absolutely
murderous
towards him.”

“Murderous?” I tried to bury the word. Leo had only hit me because I'd murdered Janet's baby first. It was justice of a sort. No, I didn't kill the baby. It fell on stone.

“I mean, has he said he's
sorry
? Offered some restitution? He should have gone down on his knees to you instead of making a fuss about the bill.”

I tried to see Leo on his knees. All I could see were his tensed, weeping hands, clenching and unclenching. His hands had made restitution, his eyes had. The custard creams were his way of saying sorry. All the same, I wished he'd said it outright. Apologies were special. If he'd said sorry, he might have gone on to saying other things. I love you, for example.

“He brought me lots of … presents,” I faltered.

“What,
this
trash?” Adrian gestured towards my locker as if he had found its contents on a rubbish dump. “Sister told me you hadn't even got a nightdress.”

“I'm borrowing one.”

“Borrowing! It's absolutely
monstrous
that you should …”

“I'm afraid you'll have to go now, Mr Morton.”

It was Sister Robert, slinking through the door. I had never liked her and now I knew why. She was bloody aunt to Louis de Gonzague. Her fingers on my bed were sharp as swords.

“No!” I said, grabbing the bit of Adrian nearest me. He was tidying away the biscuits, picking up both St Bernadettes who had fallen on the floor, putting their jackets straight. It was like a last, desperate effort to straighten up my life.

“That's
our
job, thank you, Mr Morton.”

The carnage had seeped even into Sister Robert's bloodshot eyes. She shut the door on Adrian. At least she hadn't turfed me out as well. I still had the bed and the room and my supper on a tray. I didn't touch the supper. You never knew, meals might be charged as extras, and a hundred and twenty pounds was bad enough for Leo.

It was difficult to sleep that night. Every time a nun walked by, I thought she was coming in to strip my sheets and slip another patient into the bed. Leo hadn't visited. He hadn't even phoned. How did I know he'd even have me back? He hadn't bought the Chinese vase because it was too expensive. And he couldn't afford the fees. It was almost like a choice between me and the
feng huang
. Perhaps he couldn't choose. I felt like a smashed, devalued thing myself, lying on the floor in smithereens, with no one rich or concerned enough to restore me. I felt I had lost my place in Leo's drawing-room. I'd been banished to the cellar, thrown out with the junk.

Hadn't St Bernadette felt much the same? She'd compared herself to a broom, once, which had been used by the Blessed Virgin to sweep the floor, then stuck back in its corner. I lay on my back and floated off to Lourdes. You didn't need cash to get round Madame Soubirous. She took me in exactly as I was, made me one of the family. It solved the problem of my job, my digs and my convalescence, all in one. I was lying next to Bernadette in her little wooden truckle bed (they were too poor and cramped for separate sleeping quarters), and though she was saying her rosary and refused to chat, at least it was warm and safe and comfortable. Père Soubirous brought us maize porridge on a tray and tucked us in. It was nice to have a father. He even smelt of Capstan Navy Cut. By the time the moon came up across the Pyrenees, Bernadette and I were fast asleep.

Ray arrived, next day, in time for lunch.

“You're a
priest
,” I said accusingly.

He nodded.

“I thought you were an occupational therapist.”

“They're pretty much the same, sometimes. They shouldn't be, of course. But a lot of priests spend half their time on church bazaars and bingo.”

“So what do
you
do? Apart from eating people's meals in hospitals?” I knew that wasn't fair. He had hardly touched his food again, and they'd brought us Raspberry Ripple in his honour, instead of the blancmange.

“I'm a Franciscan, Thea.”

I almost sniggered. A Franciscan was even more unlikely than a priest. Adrian knew all about Franciscans. They were thirteenth-century freaks who wore brown robes and dusty sandals and went about chatting up the wildlife.

“Friars live in friaries,” I retorted.

“Not always.”

“Friars wear dresses.”

“Sometimes.”

He had the same clothes on as yesterday, only the hole in his elbow was slightly larger now, and he had gym shoes on instead of moccasins.

“Where's yours, then?”

“In a carrier bag, in my suitcase.”

“Why? Are you ashamed of it?”

“No, not ashamed. But those robes are expensive, Thea. They take nine yards of cloth per friar. Ten for the really tall ones. And it's
good
cloth. They're more or less impossible to wash. That means more expense — dry-cleaning bills and so on.”

He was sounding worse than Adrian. Adrian had drawn a chart up once, proving how much I cost him if I left the lights on all night or used the washing-machine for only half a load.

“I thought monks had
pots
of money. I mean, all those acres of land and fancy chapels and stained glass windows and vintage ports and …”

“But we're
not
monks, Thea. That's the whole point. We're not
meant
to own things or shut ourselves away. St Francis didn't want that. He went out into the world and wore ordinary ragged clothes like the peasants he saw around him.”

Christ! This was worse than pop priests. Ray sounded like some half-baked revolutionary. I'd almost rather he strummed a guitar than jawed on about Lady Poverty. Adrian had written a paper on St Francis once, examining his credentials as the first real Communist.

“So you beg in the streets, I s' pose?”

“I sometimes think we ought to.” He was grinning, but I could see he really meant it. His face had lit up. He was so thin and pale and scraggy, he looked almost under-nourished. He probably lived on bread and water, when he wasn't toying with Sister Anselm's soup. (I had eaten
both
the shepherd's pies.) “Life's far too comfortable, even in the friaries. Three meals a day and full central heating. In my community, we've got stately corridors and a stereo cassette-player and Dunlopillo mattresses and lime trees in the garden with lawns and rose beds. We must have more than fifty square feet per friar, while bang next door there's a school with five hundred kids squashed together in a tiny tarmac playground, and their mums and dads slumming it in grotty little semis with sooty cabbage patches and outside toilets.”

I was impressed, despite myself. Father Murphy at school had eaten steak and claret in the parlour, and even Father Sullivan had quite a belly on him. Most priests had cars and housekeepers and quartz digital watches and holidays abroad. You often saw them in the theatre in the front stalls, quaffing whisky in the interval. I'd even spotted two or three at Ascot. Ray would have been
banned
from Ascot, except as a hot-dog seller or a man who picked up litter from the stands. It seemed strange to hear him talking like a worker priest.

“St Francis would have
hated
us living soft like that. Do you know, Thea, they tried to build him a house once, a proper one made of stones and mortar, instead of his mud hut or pigsty or whatever it was he lived in, and he was so upset, he shinned up on to the roof and started flinging all the roof tiles down.”

I tried to smile, but I was beginning to feel a bit uncomfortable. Here I was, queening it in a private hospital, with
five
meals a day if you counted tea and elevenses, and extensive grounds outside, and people waiting on me hand and foot. I didn't want to give it up. I'd skip the meals, make my own bed, turn off the central heating — anything — so long as they let me stay there. It wasn't the frills I craved, but the sanctuary. Ray had power. Nuns go crackers over any priest, even one with holes and dotty principles. He could use that power to help me keep my bed.

“Listen, Ray,” I said. “They're making me leave this place.”

“Yes, I know.” How could he sound so calm about it? The stern white life of the hospital had hardened round me like a shell, and I was safe inside it. World population had shrunk to a flock of nuns, a doctor and dentist; nature was just a yellow primula and the top part of a tree; wildlife the flash of wings past my window or a caterpillar in my salad. Seas and rivers were reduced to a bottle of mouthwash. I preferred this smaller world.

“I don't
want
to leave, Ray.”

“It
is
tough, isn't it?”

I rather liked the way he didn't contradict me. Everyone else was always telling me what was good for me, or what I ought to think, or why what I
did
think was totally misguided.

“Adrian wants me to go to Tom and Maggie's. But that's where Janet conceived the baby.”

He nodded. He seemed to understand. Adrian tripped himself up over what he called my
non sequiturs
and lectured me about logical connections and coherent narrative. Leo rarely listened. But Ray popped in and out of all my culs-de-sac and didn't say boring things like “Who's Tom?” or “Why Janet?” He was rather like a brother. I never had a brother and my mother certainly wouldn't have produced one who looked anything like Ray. I wondered if the Soubirous would have room for him as well. He could help in the fields or at the mill. With him as a brother and Bernadette as sister, I'd have some handhold on the world.

“Convalescence might be
fun
,” he said. “I mean, if you chose a place you fancy. What about the seaside?”

“No,” I said. The sea was too big to tackle on my own.
Any
where on my own is usually too big.

“The thing is, Ray, I don't want to go alone.”

“Of course you don't.” We had reached the icecream now. Or
I
had. I doubt if St Francis approved of Raspberry Ripple. It cost 54p for the small size. Ray was sipping water.

“What about a relative? Somebody you really like. Or an old school friend? You've got to go somewhere you feel
good
about. A nice fat cosy aunt with flour up to her elbows, or a place where you were happy as a child.”

He understood exactly. The trouble was, I didn't have floury aunts and as a child I hadn't gone anywhere exciting. We either went to places where the air was good for asthma, or we stayed at home and saved my mother's money for what she called a decent education, which meant speaking like Lord Harewood and using butter-knives.

“There must be some place you fancy. Somewhere you've read about, or …”

“No,” I repeated. I wished he'd let me off. They wanted the bed, that's all, and had ordered him to come and turf me out of it. He'd be renouncing his Raspberry Ripple to somebody else next week. It was simply part of the service. Father Sullivan for conventional, conforming Catholics and Father Murphy for the murderers and the fornicators.

“Yes,” I shouted, suddenly. “There
is
!”

He squeezed my hand. “Well?”

“Lourdes!” I whispered, kicking Bernadette in the shin and begging her to support me. “I want to go and convalesce in Lourdes.”