Next stop was the Astoria. The last of my aunts and mothers clambered off, along with the courier and both the priests. There was just me and the driver left. At least he spoke a sort of English.
“Sorry Mam’selle,” he said. “Is walking now.”
“What?” I said. I couldn’t remember learning the French for “what”, though I suppose it should have been the first word in the phrase book.
“Walking. Marcher. Aller à pied. How d’you say? Foot, feet …”
“Oh, I see. Look, it’s a bit much, isn’t it? I mean, expecting me to get out and walk when I don’t even know where I’m going and I’ve got a case and everything.”
“You want case, Mam’selle?” He pushed me down the steps, extracted the last piece of luggage from the underbelly of the coach and almost threw it into my arms. “Here is case Mam’selle. Voilà.” Then he squeezed past me to the driving seat, closed the automatic doors, and accelerated off. I stared at the blue and white striped label with the tall blue Virgin on it. I could see twenty identical blue Virgins disappearing through the glass doors of the Astoria. I almost dashed after them, begged them to find room for me, just a crust and a corner would do, so long as they didn’t leave me on my own. Then I remembered Ray. I wasn’t alone at all. I would be meeting the Pax brigade again in just a few short hours, processing down to the great basilica with them, where God and Ray and Bernadette would all be waiting for me. It was only natural to feel a little low today. Any good Catholic would and should, when our Boss had just been crucified and was still lying in His tomb. The whole church was poised and waiting for the Resurrection, and until He soared shining up to heaven, it was only fitting we should mourn.
I picked up my case and studied the little sketch map Ray had drawn for me. It wasn’t easy, especially with the streets so crowded and wheelchairs to avoid. Actually there weren’t as many sick as I’d imagined — it was still early in the season. Most of the pilgrims looked neither well nor ill, but sort of grey and shabby and droopy, as if they suffered not from dramatic diseases shouting out for miracles, but minor ailments like piles and prolapses and acid indigestion. I don’t suppose you bother Our Lady with things like haemorrhoids when she’s busy with cancer of the bowel. I must admit I was a little disappointed. I had somehow expected the place to be littered with men sick of the palsy, who would suddenly leap to their feet and fling away their stretchers, shouting out, “A miracle, a miracle!”
Give them time, I thought. Wait till tomorrow, wait for the Resurrection. Anything could happen by tomorrow. Today they were simply tired or hungry or jet-lagged, or had even lost their lodgings like I had.
After two culs-de-sac and three wrong turnings, I eventually asked for directions in a shop. It said “English spoke” on a notice over the counter, but was mostly full of Italians exclaiming over a shelf display of white plastic Virgins. The statues were all identical, but ranged in height from midget to monumental, so that they looked like the slope of a white plastic mountain beetling upwards. I counted seventy-five before I got dizzy and gave up. Seventy-five gleaming gilt halos reaching higher and higher up to heaven, one hundred and fifty blank blue eyes tracing a graph from shelf to ceiling. The miraculous medals were even more impressive. There were so many, they’d been tipped into a sort of dustbin like a lucky dip, and were more or less uncountable. Ray had told me some of the shops ordered thirty thousand dozen at a time. I bought one to pay for the directions. It must have been miraculous, because Ray’s map made sense for the first time since I’d studied it, and in just three minutes I was standing outside the house in the street he’d marked.
I stopped a moment before daring to go in. It must have been one of the narrowest streets in Lourdes. The houses on one side tried to reach out and touch their fellows on the other, and then gave up and sulked. Number six was very tall and angular, squashed between a butcher’s shop and a seedy pension. Its stained and flaking stucco was criss-crossed with a tangle of electric wires, and a metal balcony dripped rust like sour brown tears. Two dustbins crouched outside it with the first flies of the season crawling over them.
I tried not to look at the butcher’s, which was open to the street and festooned with great bloody haunches of cow and pig, some still with fur and bristles and only missing their tongues, livers and intestines, which were piled on trays in front of them. A large man in what had once been a white apron before the massacre, was grinning and gesturing at me from the counter. I decided Madame Simmoneaux was the lesser of two evils, so I walked up the steps and rang the bell.
She was a long time coming, but when she did, she wasn’t evil at all, just tired and shabby. She was wearing an overall and bedroom slippers and had three young children clinging to her skirts. Another case of prolapse, I suspected.
I handed over the little card which Ray had typed for me, with my name on it and how long I was staying. She didn’t seem impressed. I could have been Morton, Jones, O’Reilly, or Lady Bountiful herself, so long as I paid my bill. She asked for the money before she’d even said hallo. Even my French could tell the difference between “Bonjour, Madame”, and “Seven hundred francs in cash, please.” Once I’d handed over the notes, she relaxed a bit, and led me up the stairs which were dark and narrow and covered with several different offcuts of lino, so that the patterns changed every three or four steps. I began to feel dizzy. Madame stopped and panted every few minutes (I added anaemia to prolapse). She had left the children down below and I could hear them quarrelling and grumbling. I’d liked to have made some kind remark about their ages or achievements, or even dropped in a word or two about the weather — anything to break the rather oppressive silence. But the only French I could recall was, “Où va cet autobus?” which I didn’t feel was relevant.
My room was at the very top and looked as if it had crawled on its side in order to squeeze into the space beneath the roof. The walls were painted a sort of blotchy brown and there were three separate sections of some scratchy stuff on the floor, with gaps where they didn’t meet. A narrow iron bed took up most of the floorspace, and opposite, a rail with two broken wooden hangers on it, which I suppose was the French for wardrobe. In the corner was a screen only half-concealing a stained and cracked washbasin, and a bidet with a notice pinned above it saying, “Forbidden to urine”.
I sat on the bed (which sank and shrank away from me) and counted my blessings. I had a room to myself with real running water. I had a chair with three legs. I had a picture of St Bernadette — a real photograph, in fact, just above my head, smiling and encouraging me, reminding me that she had shared a room far worse than this with a whole sweaty, noisy family. I even had a window. I walked over to it, pushed aside the rusty iron-mesh blind, and tugged it open.
I gasped. I was so high up, the dingy streets had dropped away, and I was staring up at a narrow tunnel of sky with a portion of the majestic Pyrenees embedded in it, pointing its craggy finger up to heaven. I leaned out further. The flanks of the mountains were swathed in the last golden light of the fading afternoon, their foreheads streaked with snow. The grey of the streets had changed to green and white and gold. I had only to lift up my eyes to see the glory of the place. So far, I had been rooting around the pavements, snuffling in the gutters, so no wonder I had missed it. Lourdes was only a village when seen against its surroundings — a tiny toy-town tipped into a green valley, with great grown-up mountains towering over it. Through it rushed the headstrong River Gave, tossing and frothing from the mountain peaks, until it bowed its head by the holy shrine itself. I couldn’t see the Grotto, but I glimpsed the tall silver spire of the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception glittering against a golden sky. This was the Lourdes I had come for — it was all there, all waiting. How could my room be cramped when a spire soared just outside it, or dingy, when those mountains ringed it round?
Anyway, I’d turned my back on comforts. If I was following Ray, I should rejoice that there was only one grubby sheet, and that brackish-brown water coughed
and grumbled out of the taps when I tried to turn them on. I could pile penance on privation until tomorrow glorious morning when Christ rose shining from the tomb.
Meanwhile, I’d join Him on His back. I was exhausted from the journey and it was still several hours until the Easter Vigil which began at nine o’clock. There was no evening meal to mop up one or two of them. Not only was I fasting, but I had agreed with Ray that I would pay just for breakfast at Madame’s. He was hoping to wangle me in to some of the meals at his hostel, and the rest of the time I’d buy bread and oranges and eat them in my room.
I fell back on the bed. I longed to see the Grotto, but I’d decided to save it until Ray was at my side. It was the high point of the pilgrimage and I wanted his hand in mine when I first set foot upon that spot where Bernadette had knelt before Our Lady. We would go tonight, together, when the Vigil was over. Meanwhile, I must prepare. I threw the pillow on the floor, kicked the duvet off. Christ had no comforts in the grave and I must follow Him. I closed my eyes, took His hand. While my fellow pilgrims guzzled veal and chips in the Astoria, I would spirit myself to my own tomb — that great underground basilica, from which tonight I would arise triumphantly a Catholic.
Chapter Seventeen
Five hours later, I entered the basilica, not in dreams this time. I gasped. It was like the tomb. I was groping my way through a huge mausoleum in almost total darkness.
Nothing had quite prepared me for the size and strangeness of the place. I’d seen pictures of it, of course; knew it was one of the largest underground buildings in the world, with wide sloping ramps leading down to it and huge concrete ribs straining up to the pre-stressed concrete roof. People had compared it to a massive underground car-park or an aircraft hangar. It reminded me more of a giants’ air-raid shelter, but perhaps that was just the dark and all the scurrying people jostling for a place. Easy to have been lost, swept aside by all those thronging crowds, trampled underfoot. I huddled close to Bridie, kept my eye on our two Pax priests who were shepherding us through the gloom to the section where the English pilgrims sat. We were all arranged by nation — Belgians next to English, across from them the Germans, then Spanish, Poles, Italians, Austrians, French. The place held twenty-five thousand worshippers. My family had swollen now to twenty-five thousand relatives, pressing and milling all around me, each of us grasping an unlighted candle, symbol of our spiritual darkness. Slowly, their bodies began to take shape and substance in the gloom. I even made out features — fifty thousand eyes, a hundred thousand arms and legs, give or take a few for the blind and handicapped. I could see rows and rows of wheelchairs banked round the altar, stretchers, crutches, trolley-beds, with their nurses and attendants. Ray would be among them. I couldn’t see him, of course — the faces were only blurs — but I could almost feel his prayers breaking over me.
Suddenly, the whole congregation sort of rippled as if a wind had sprung up across it and set up little waves. Bridie nudged me in the ribs. “Here they come!” she whispered. I looked where she was pointing, saw a stream of white-robed figures frothing into the basilica like a white wake behind the dark hulk of a ship. Never before had I seen so many priests. At school we were lucky to have our one scrawny Father Murphy and perhaps a visiting chaplain on high days and Holy Days; at Westminster Cathedral I’d seen up to half a dozen at the altar, with two or three more patrolling the aisles. But here were two hundred. Two hundred radiant white seraphim dispersing the gloom, two hundred representatives of God on earth. There was even a bishop. Some of my swankier schoolfriends had been introduced to bishops, kissed their rings, curtseyed to them, begged them to bless a prayer-book or a rosary. They had told me this with the same hushed awe and pride my mother reserved for Rothschilds. Yet here was my own tame bishop, parading up the aisle for me, welcoming me into his fold, resplendent in his snow-white chasuble and gold-encrusted mitre, and carrying a gleaming crosier. I had never seen a crosier before. I knew it was the pastoral staff, the shepherd’s crook. Christ was the shepherd, we His lambs. It felt safe and warm and sacred to be a lamb.
The priests had reached the altar now, and the entire congregation (handicapped excepted) risen to its feet. There was no sound except the shuffling. The massive organ was dumb, the choir silent. And yet the hush was so tense, so expectant, it was more like a stifled scream. Muffled coughs choked through it, a sudden groan from an invalid or gasp from an idiot sliced it in half. Hopes, fears, prayers, longings, clogged and stained that winding-sheet of silence.
Suddenly, a tiny point of light sprang through the shadows, a pinprick in a huge lowering cave. The weak flame flickered, wavered, almost went out. Twenty-five thousand people held their breaths. This was the paschal candle which would illuminate the world, the flame which would pierce the sin and death and darkness of the Lenten night.
The flame shuddered, sagged, and then miraculously revived, flared higher, almost sang. Every eye was on it as slowly it tipped sideways to light a second candle, a third, a fourth, a fifth, and suddenly there were five, six, seven quivering tongues of light. Every candle lit another candle, priest illuminating priest, until there was a circle of golden flame around the altar, two hundred candles holding hands. The first candle moved outwards now, bobbing down towards the altar-rails, reaching out to the darkness all around it, until every pilgrim, every nation, was lighting its candle from the next. The whole gigantic basilica and its throbbing congregation were coming alive, coming alight, as little by little, one by one, twenty-five thousand candles turned from cold wax to leaping flame. Rock-hard pillars seemed to move and tremble. The solid roof dissolved into shadows. Eyes, medals, buttons, buckles, glinted in the gloom. Faces thawed from blank stares into rippling, flickering surfaces, candle flames were trapped in every eye. We had all left the base element of earth behind and been transmuted into fire.
We were one. Each individual candle flame was swallowed up in the total glare and roar of light. Mine was one of them. It was impossible to be an outcast any more. My candle had been lit by Bridie’s and hers by Paddy’s and his by a swarthy woman in the Belgian group, and hers by a nun’s and the nun’s by a child on crutches and the child’s by a priest, and the priest was God on earth, so my candle had been lit by God Himself. I stood clutching it in front of me, watching the huge, saw-toothed shadows of the Easter palms fling themselves across the altar, knowing my own light had helped to banish the darkness of the world. I was fiery, radiant, as strong as one of the gigantic thrusting pillars supporting the heaviest concrete roof in Christendom. I belonged. Not only to my own Pax family but to all the nations shimmering around me, all the billion million Catholics who had ever lived since Christ and now sat smiling on their fat white clouds.
“Alleluia, alleluia,” sang the chief celebrant, his voice leaping like a hawk to heaven.
“Alleluia, alleluia!” thundered the whole church in response, and the sea of lighted candles swept up, up, as if twenty-five thousand puppet masters had all pulled their strings at the same instant. I, too, had lifted my candle high above my head. I wasn’t even a Catholic, yet I was following the ritual. It was like dancing when you don’t know the steps. If your partner is skilled enough, you go along with him, never stumbling, never treading on his feet. My partner was God, so every time I had to kneel or stand or sit or raise my candle, I did it exactly as I should. If there are angels (which Leo doubts and Adrian classes under “Paranormal”), then they had all flocked here to join us. I could sense them filling all the empty spaces in the church, their soft white wings brushing the rough grey concrete of the walls.
My brain had been kindled as well as my candle, because slowly, gropingly, I began to understand lines and fragments of the service. I recognised the Latin from my schooldays, but there were other languages alternating with it and I realised now that every nation was allowed a share of the prayers and readings in its own tongue. Adrian would have understood them all. I could make out odd words here and there, different accents, different intonations. And
then suddenly, the high electric voice of the English priest cut through the congregation like a saw on stone. Every word he said was addressed to me:
“This is the night when Christ
broke the bonds of death
and rose triumphant from the grave …”
I had broken the bonds of sin and death myself. This was my own glorious baptism. I knew from all my homework that the early Christian catechumens were baptised on this Easter Saturday night, before they received the Body and Blood of Christ. I was following their example. I loved the word catechumen. It sounded mysterious and special. It was special — I was the only catechumen in that whole thronging congregation. All the others were cradle Catholics who had been baptised long ago, so in a sense, the entire ceremony was for my benefit alone. All those thousands had only gathered there to witness my admission to the Church. They would renew the baptismal promises made for them as babies, as a symbol and an echo of my own vows. My years of schoolgirl prayers would at last be answered, as the outcast was admitted, the leper made clean.
Latin, Italian, German, French, washed over me. Incense soared to the ceiling like the soft smoky wings of the Holy Ghost. They had switched on all the lights now, and the church blazed with splendour. The English priest was standing at the lectern, directly facing me, his eyes piercing down almost into mine. I recognised the lines from Genesis.
“And God created man in His own image. In the image of God He created him, male and female both. And He blessed them, saying, ‘Increase and multiply and fill the earth.”
I knelt. The hard stone floor bit into my knees. I knew now that this was the time to pray for Leo’s miracle. The priest had just declared sex holy and therefore Leo’s prick was holy. I prayed that it would swell and harden like a paschal candle and that he and I would increase and multiply and fill the earth. That had been God’s first command to man, therefore my life was sacred. All I had been doing with my forty-seven men was seeking to procreate. My record was poor as yet — only one four-month foetus pickled in a jar, but after these rituals of fire and water, I would pour out sons upon the earth. Janet would be shamed as Leo’s sallow features were reproduced a score of times between my loins. The English priest was already prophesying it:
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