After Purple

by Wendy Perriam

  For the first time in my life, I had a true vocation, something which kept me busy and fulfilled. There wasn’t time for boring Burton Bureau jobs like Mayfair receptionist now that I had a spiritual career, not to mention check-ups from a social worker and calls from the GP. The whole world seemed to know about my mouth. Busy professional people had me on their worksheets, in their case-notes, on their consciences. I began to feel important.

  I was even learning French. (I’d tried out my first few words on the air hostess when I stepped aboard the plane, but unfortunately she answered me in South Thames English.) There were also all the Lies, which, like the French, took time and preparation. I’d had to lie to Adrian who kept worrying about me not having a Future and travelling on my own; and to Leo who was angry and suspicious when I turned his house into a chapel and spent his money on books called Lourdes, a Modern Miracle, and even to Ray who would keep harping back to Patricia Jane, when I’d long since packed her off to hospital with a badly fractured femur. Then there were the lies about my spending money. I had raised it, actually, by selling one of Leo’s Victorian prints. It was only a mingy one with a besotted nymph and shepherd on it, and Leo was so preoccupied, he didn’t even notice. Anyway, it wasn’t really stealing, because one of the new, vital reasons I was going to Lourdes at all, was to bring him back a miracle. He needed one. In twelve weeks, he still hadn’t got it up. He had refused to even try on more than three or four occasions. Each failure made him so desperate and humiliated, he dared not risk another. I knew I was responsible. By hitting me, he’d somehow disabled himself. Sometimes I felt a horrifying little dart of satisfaction, even pride, but most of the time I just felt anguished for him. He’d developed blinding headaches and dermatitis on his hands. He was rusting, ageing, while I lolled about on sofas reciting the Prayers Before Communion in French and blooming.

  In fact, Leo did go out a lot, striding down the street with Karma trotting on one side and Otto on the other, or blazing off in Otto’s haughty car. I hated that, but at least the house was less tense and agonised without him. He’d tried ginseng and a hypnotist, and when neither worked, he wrapped his headaches around him and made the whole place glower.

  At first, I missed sex. I felt so desperate sometimes, I almost went up to total strangers in the street and begged them to be so kind as to rape me. Then I realised that perhaps it was a Sign. If I were meant to be a Catholic, then I shouldn’t be screwing anyway, whatever Ray might say. I wanted to make my First Communion in a state of virgin purity like his, so I accepted Leo’s limpness as a sort of extra Trial. I even stopped my masturbating. It made me feel odd at first, as if there was a great tall flashing lighthouse stuck inside me, shuddering on and off. I decided later, that was Sanctity.

  I could feel it now, throbbing through my thighs with the motion of the plane. I stared out of my little port-hole window (God or Lady Bountiful had even wangled me a window-seat) and there were yards and yards of sanctity swirling just outside the plane, trailing from the lower rungs of heaven. I watched the whole dazzling cloudscape shift and merge, higher clouds rippling into lower ones, foam breaking on to foam. I had left the earth behind and turned into a bird, a star, a soul. There was no sea or land or cities any more, nothing to hurt, want, stain, roar, die. Just light and space, radiance and God. I touched the Ukrainian’s hand. I wanted to share it with him.

  “Yes, ‘allo,” he said. The conversation ended. I wished, now, I’d learnt a little Ukrainian as well as French. And yet it didn’t matter. It was enough just to waft my joy in his direction, spread it over everyone, like grace. I gazed around the plane at the rows of heads. Half the lips were moving as they recited the rosary, some of the mouths gaped open as their owners snored. Leo would have disowned the lot of them. Adrian would have enrolled them in an adult education class on “Agnosticism, a Rational Approach”. I loved them.

  It was the first time I’d flown without Adrian beside me, lecturing me on the geographical features we were flying over, or the cultural treats we were about to sample on our trip. He’d be lecturing now — to Janet. He’d taken her to Poitiers to convalesce, but I suspect it was really an excuse to study the Romanesque churches in the region. I could see him marching her up and down those endless naves, marvelling at the proportions, pointing out the symbolism in worn and crumbling carvings. She’d be bored, baffled, blistered. Adrian wouldn’t notice. I’d had diarrhoea in Delphi and laryngitis in Crete, but we’d still done all the ruins. I’d lost my voice completely for three whole days, but with Adrian doing the talking, it hardly mattered. I wasn’t even missing him. I’d never travelled on my own before. I’d gone straight from my mother and the F.E. College to Adrian, and from Adrian to Leo. Now, I suppose, I’d jumped the gulf to God, which meant I wasn’t alone at all.

  With five priests on the plane, God seemed even closer. Two of them were ours, a dark stocky Dubliner and a grey ethereal wraith from Chorley Wood who looked as if he had prayed himself away and was already in the Next World. It seemed strange, almost magical, to have priests in the family, wearing the same badge as mine. I could see their black shoulders sticking up among the froth of grey perms. And the sixth priest, my own priest, would be meeting me tonight. Ray had promised he would be in the underground basilica for the Easter Vigil, which was the opening ceremony of both our pilgrimages. He’d be accompanied by all his boys, of course, but we were bound to find some chance to be alone. He’d been so busy and committed these last three months, he needed and deserved a break.

  The woman in the row in front of me suddenly turned round. We were so squashed together on the plane that my knees had been almost sticking in her bottom. I thought she was going to complain, but she only smiled and said, “Praise be to God, they’re serving lunch at last! I’m ravenous, aren’t you?”

  I shook my head. Several rows in front of us, two stewardesses were manoeuvring a huge metal trolley along the aisle, doling out trays and snapping open bottles. As they swayed and clattered nearer, I could feel my stomach screaming out for permission to end its fast.

  “No,” I told it firmly. I was determined not to eat a single crumb for two whole days. Good Friday had been the first — all good Catholics starve themselves on that day — but I was going one better. My First Communion would be all the more glorious for having suffered for it. Anyway, I had to pay for Leo’s miracle. I couldn’t expect a return to a full six or seven inches, without first punishing the flesh.

  I took my tray and stared at it. There were four little plastic niches filled with food. One cradled a rubbery boiled egg, split apart and crouching on a mattress of cold cooked peas and carrots, blanketed with mayonnaise, the next a slimy slice of ham, hiding a salad so insubstantial it looked like one of Janet’s “garnishes”, the third held a roll and cheese, both unnaturally pale, and in the fourth, wet glacé cherries bled into whipped cream trifle. All these offerings were tightly covered with a layer of cellophane, stretched taut like a Durex. The Ukrainian ripped his off and started on the trifle, which I think he must have mistaken for some sort of Russian hors d’ oeuvre. I could see shiny mandarins and fat wet sponge quivering on his teaspoon. He left both his cherries till last, and then ate them slowly, rapturously, with a dollop of the cream. I turned away, to try and distract myself, but there was more whipped cream outside, a whole skyful of it, piped in rosettes all the way to heaven. God was the cherry on my own cream trifle. I would swallow Him on Sunday. Who needed mortal food?

  When I looked back again, the Ukrainian had his paper napkin tucked around his neck and was biting into his cheese. I could see a line of large uneven teethmarks trampled over the square of processed Cheddar. I glanced at his teeth to see if they matched the marks. Since my accident I was obsessed by teeth. Before, they’d just been part of people, like nails or hair or necks, something you took for granted and hardly even noticed, but now I saw them everywhere — teeth grinning from posters or leaping out of magazines, bared teeth greeting you before you knew their owners�
�� names. I gave people marks for their teeth — ten out of ten for white, bright even ones, seven out of ten if they had their own at all. The Ukrainian got seven.

  The stewardess brought coffee, which I decided to drink — since the cups were too small, it hardly counted anyway. There were two little paper sachets, one of sugar and one of something called creamer which looked like powdered soul. I ignored them both, as black bitter coffee was more of a penance. The Ukrainian had two sugars and a double Cognac and then started on his roll. I was quite relieved when they took the trays away.

  I was so empty, the coffee had gone right through me, so I squeezed past his knees and walked along to the toilet at the far end of the plane, passing half my family on the way. Several of them smiled and nodded, and the Irish priest called, “How’s it going, Thea?” which thrilled me, because I’d only half mumbled my name to him and it can’t have been an easy one when most of his flock were called Mary. The seventh Mary in our group also remembered me and said, “Nearly there now, darlin’,” and I stood in the queue for the toilet and felt a wave of whipped-cream joy surge over me. I was a darlin’, a daughter, a member of a large and happy family, not just a tourist wasting time and squandering money, but a pilgrim with a purpose in my life.

  The loo was so small and smelly, I decided to count it as another penance. I stared at my face in the mirror above the wash-basin. It was almost beautiful. My scars were fading and I’d covered my forehead with a special camouflage cream I’d got from the doctor. My teeth looked white and at least three-quarters normal. My eyes shone with the glory of my new religion. I sat on the toilet seat and glowed. Through the door, I could hear an announcement crackling over the intercom: “Ladies and gentlemen, in a few minutes we will be arriving at Lourdes. Would you please return to your seats, fasten your seat-belts and extinguish all cigarettes.”

  I almost ran back up the aisle. I mustn’t miss a moment of this glorious, unique descent, the goal I’d longed for since the Upper Fourth. I could already see the land — little patchwork fields tipping sideways and still tangled up with cloud, brown ribbon roads suddenly changing direction as the plane did. Closer now — furrows on the fields, dark splodges of forest, the bowed heads of poplars dodging down from the roar of the engines.

  I gripped my seat. We were lurching, tipping, out of control. Clouds shot away from us, fields swooped up to thwack us and then dived off again. Something had gone wildly, blindly wrong. We were about to crash. Any minute now, the plane would hurtle on to the runway, land sickeningly on its head and roll over, over, over …

  I shut my eyes. It didn’t matter really. Even if we were all smashed to pieces, what more glorious end than to perish in the town of Bernadette? To lie in the peace of the basilica, surrounded by fifty-two dead family, with a hundred priests weeping out a requiem.

  I only hoped my mother wouldn’t ruin everything by demanding my ashes back. She wouldn’t really want them — it would be just convention, or a final attempt to circumscribe me. She’d stopper me into a neat, no-nonsense urn and stand me on her mantelpiece, between the drooping Dresden shepherdess and the coldly correct clock which pounced on every second. I almost screamed in protest. I wanted to lie full-length on my back, tangled up with earth and flowers and nature, and all Bernadette’s townsmen trampling and jostling over my bare body.

  The plane lurched so wildly, I was almost disinterred. We fell five rungs of a ladder in as many seconds. I had already lost my stomach and my heart. Only moments now until all my other organs were just pulp on the tarmac. I sent up a silent plea to Bernadette.

  “Please,” I prayed. “Let me be buried in Lourdes.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  We didn’t crash and it wasn’t Lourdes. The airport was sited six miles north, at Tarbes. They couldn’t put it any nearer — there wasn’t room with all the souvenirs. Tarbes had tricky runways lying north to south when the Pyrenees ran east to west — hence the turbulence. It was the sort of thing Adrian would have told me, but I had to wait for Bridie who’d been to Lourdes twenty-three times and said they often had descents like that, especially if the pilot was C. of E.

  We were still a drive away from the town of Bernadette — six enchanted miles in which our three motor coaches played follow-my-leader along small winding roads edged with mincing poplars, and slowly the mountains in the distance moved closer and closer in, until they were standing up all around us, shouting out a welcome.

  I was sitting next to Doris who came every year at Easter in thanksgiving for her husband’s holy death. She nudged me suddenly in the middle of their last night together, when three priests and two doctors were joining in the Requiem aeternum. I wasn’t listening, really. I was too engrossed in watching the fields dwindle and the urban sprawl begin.

  “Look, Thea, we’re coming into Lourdes! See the sign.”

  I looked. It said “Lourdes”, just as it might have said Luton or Southend. Surely the name should have been surrounded with a halo or picked out in fairy lights. The streets were grey, the shops busy. Buildings squashed against each other on both sides of the street. It was a town — just a town — an ordinary, bustling, crowded sort of no-man’s land, with petrol fumes and litter bins on the lamp-posts, and women in headscarves, and big lumbering coaches. I had expected a village, a tiny white hamlet with a cloud of holiness curling up from it like smoke. Oh, I know I’d read all the books, pored over statistics about growth and expansion, swelling tourist figures, problems of traffic circulation. I knew that even since my schooldays, another million visitors had been added to the annual total. But somehow, I’d never quite believed it. I still saw Lourdes in terms of my school-friends’ photographs — mysterious and sacred and very sort of rural, with all my classmates standing in blue cloaks and white veils against soaring churches or banks of lighted candles, flanked by priests and nuns. Now there wasn’t a church or priest in sight, just more and more stalls and shops choked with souvenirs, more and more cheap hotels. It could have been the Costa Brava, without the Costa.

  “But where’s the Grotto?” I asked. “And the basilicas? The place where Our Lady actually appeared?”

  “Oh, way away yet, dear. This is just the commercial part. Lourdes sprawls a bit, you see.”

  I nodded. No point being disappointed. After all, it was really a proof of Bernadette’s power that she had transformed a tiny hamlet into this great metropolis, brought more pilgrims here than journeyed even to Mecca and Jerusalem. All important places had their commercial side. There’d probably be souvenir stalls outside heaven, selling plastic St Peters and spun-sugar angels. It didn’t matter really. Anyway, the Grotto would be different. Ray had told me they didn’t allow any shops or new development on what they called Our Lady’s Domain, a whole thirty acres, set apart like a sanctuary for baths and basilicas, Masses and processions. That was the real, essential Lourdes, the nucleus, the holiness. These were just the wrappings, the outer layer, the twopenny-ha’penny sideshows outside the Great Top.

  I turned away from a window display of pink and purple rosaries, dangling over wooden plaques with plaster roses on them and inscriptions saying, ‘J’ai prié pour vous à la Grotte.’ I would pray for Leo at the Grotte, bring him back not a pink and purple rosary, but a new resplendent prick. All would be well. Even the rosaries were holy testimony to how many pious people were praying here, that God and His Mother were the chief tourist attractions, instead of heated pools or sun-drenched sands. We even had the sun, still weak perhaps, but smiling from a blue sky, whereas back in London there was fog and drizzle.

  “Which hotel are you at?” asked Doris, as we crawled past a pâtisserie and I closed my eyes against the lure and sacrilege of strawberry tarts. “I’m in the Notre Dame de what-d’you-call-it. I should have booked the Astoria. Edie’s just told me it’s got the cheapest booze in Lourdes.”

  I was almost shocked. Most of our group had already bought gin and whisky on the plane, but I’d assumed it was to take back home with them, alon
g with the Holy Water.

  “I’m … er … not at a hotel,” I said.

  “You must be. All our lot are either in the Notre Dame or the Astoria. Except for a few toffs who can afford the de la Grotte. That’s four-star and frogs’ legs.”

  “No, I’m staying with a Madame Simonneaux.”

  “Madame who?”

  “Well, I don’t quite know how you pronounce it, but she takes in lodgers, cheap. She’s very vaguely related to Bernadette. Her uncle’s father’s niece’s sister was …”

  Doris looked at me with new respect. “You mean, you actually know a relative of St Bernadette?”

  “Well, not exactly know, but …”

  We had already stopped at the first hotel which was pinioned between two larger ones, but had a shop on its ground floor with souvenirs encroaching right across the pavement. We had reached the centre of the newer, lower town and the streets were really crowded now, hotels all but bumping into each other, and traffic-logged drivers swearing on their horns.

  “Right, this is us,” said Doris, collecting up her bags. “Hey, Mary, listen to this — Thea here’s staying with one of St Bernadette’s family. Mind you get her to pray for you. She’s got the right connections.”

  Mary looked as if she was about to ask me to bless her rosary, but the driver shooed her off. She and all the other Marys were collecting up their bags and struggling down the steps. At least two thirds of my new Pax family had already turned their backs. Only one or two of them had even stopped to wave.