A pity she hadn’t, in the circumstances. If it wasn’t the Blessed Virgin, then who the hell was it who showed up eighteen times and sent all those impertinent instructions? Adrian would have demanded all the facts, drawn up a dossier, worked out a chart. I longed to have his vigorous, ordered mind. There were probably things I should be checking on — dates and records, fingerprints, questions to be asked and answered, evidence to be amassed. Yet I was simply standing there, shivering and trembling, my brain crumbling like a biscuit.
“Look, Bernadette, who … er … did you see then? I mean, if it wasn’t Mary.”
“I’m sorry, Thea, I can’t say.”
What sort of answer was that? She sounded worse than Ray hedging about his life and habits at the friary.
“Could it have been the devil, perhaps?” I tried to pump her — anything to get more information.
“Oh no, no. No one evil.”
“A holy soul in purgatory?” That’s what some of Bernadette’s contemporaries had thought. Even her mother had first assumed it was the soul of a dead relative come back to beg for prayers.
“No-o.”
“Well who?”
“It’s not easy to explain, Thea, and even if I tried, I doubt if …”
“You mean I’m too damned stupid to understand, is that it?”
“No, Thea, of course I don’t mean that.”
“Look, you must tell me. Everyone will ask. They’re bound to. You see, Adrian says I never get the facts and …”
“I’m sorry, Thea, but I’m afraid I have to leave now. Please don’t get upset. It won’t be easy, but I know you can do it for me. Just tell the priests and people that it wasn’t the Mother of God. Make sure they understand. I trust you, Thea.” And she disappeared.
Oh, I know it sounds ridiculous. People don’t vanish into thin air, except in fairy tales. But Bernadette did. I didn’t imagine it, I know I didn’t. I’ve said already it wasn’t even dark. The candles and the floodlighting saw to that. I was stunned, of course I was, but absolutely sane. I tried out little tests on myself to prove it. I ran through the alphabet backwards and then forwards. I added and subtracted figures. I repeated the words of the Credo, in English first and then in Latin. I could tell my mind was working, was razor sharp, in fact.
“Bernadette,” I called. “Bernadette!” I had to get her back, ask more questions, insist she told me everything.
No answer. Only the river swallowing up my words, the hollow cry of an owl, jeering at me, jeering. I had no information, nothing solid or convincing. Bernadette had given me no reasons to change a story which stuck like a limpet to the town which had spawned it, no sharp, lucid facts to use as bulldozers. My mind felt like Bank Holiday on Brighton beach. There were so many thoughts and fears and speculations jostling and crowding through it, it was almost trampled into pulp. If Bernadette’s Lady hadn’t been the Blessed Virgin, then the whole of Lourdes was one gigantic sham. All those priests and bishops, doctors and magistrates who had worn themselves into a frazzle trying to confirm the facts, now looked like fools or charlatans. Even so, it wasn’t simple. What about the miracles, for instance — each one so slowly and nit-pickingly tested to outlaw fraud or chance? Or Bernadette’s own cross-examination at the time — a real out-and-out relentless grilling, in which they had tried to find her out?
Even the statistics of the place itself were something of a miracle. Four hundred plus hotels in a town of only eighteen thousand permanent inhabitants; four thousand seasonal workers with a language laboratory built especially for their benefit; a post office handling six and a half million postcards every year; an International Medical Committee with posh professors from a score of different countries; a municipal tourist office with a crazy annual total of three hundred thousand documents; a ton of candles churned out every day from the local wax factory. All this — and more — had sprung from Bernadette. I’d read it in a score of trumpeting books. She’d turned a sleepy one-horse village into a pulsing commercial centre, built three soaring churches where there was only a piddling mill-stream. And now she had commanded me to overturn it.
Me, Thea Morton, of no fixed address, scarred, sick, starving and divorced, with neither permanent teeth nor temporary job, was expected to stand up to the entire Catholic world and tell them their shrine, their Mecca, their international centre for both miracles and money-making was a lie, a fraud, a stupid little error. They wouldn’t even listen. They’d lock me up, label me a madman, send me to another Dr Davies.
Yet, I couldn’t help remembering it had been no less difficult for Bernadette herself. She, too, had been laughed to scorn, accused of lying, madness, even obscenity. At least I was middleclass and could read and write. I’d been married to a teacher and mixed with professional people who could do at least three-quarters of the Times crossword, and wrote self-important letters to the Guardian, and were Friends of Covent Garden. Bernadette’s father was a casual labourer when he wasn’t unemployed or in prison. Her mother took in other people’s washing and scrubbed it on the riverbank. My ma used a high-class laundry service and throw-away handkerchiefs. She’d no more enter a launderette than a bordello. If a peasant girl whose only skills were darning socks and herding sheep could build a new Jerusalem on the dregs of a peasant village, then was it really so impossible for me to pull it down again?
The trouble was, nobody wanted it pulled down. In Bernadette’s day, people had craved for signs and miracles. Maybe that explained how she herself was gulled. Visions were all the rage in the 1850s, Blessed Virgins spotted up and down the land like UFO’s a century later. Easy for a highly-strung and groggy child to imagine she’d seen another. The crowds were equally eager to believe her. There was no National Health Service, no wonder drugs or equal opportunities, so holy springs and miracles were the only hope they had. If Bernadette had been conned, then the whole panting town had gone willingly along with her, preferring mumbo-jumbo to a deaf, uncaring God. And now the thing had mushroomed. It wasn’t just miracles they wanted, but booming business, full employment, a hundred different layers.
Who was I to block and deny the lot of them, empty their crowded shops and packed hotels, muddy their million-dollar water? And for what purpose? Merely to establish truth. People didn’t want truth. They’d far rather cling to the belief that Mary had appeared there and made them and their city special. It suited everyone — pious peasants and greedy speculators, busy nurses, bustling restaurants — all thrived on the apparitions. Adrian’s brand of pseuds like Keats and Blake and Socrates might rave on about Truth with a capital T, but ordinary folk have never gone for it. It’s too uncomfortable.
Anyway, what was the truth? If I told the world it wasn’t the Blessed Virgin, I still had to explain who the hell it was. It might have been another saint, of course. If that was so, I could still save Lourdes. They’d have to re-make all the statues, change the inscriptions and the prayers, but there’d still be a shrine and focus, a reason for it all. But if it were merely an illusion, the result of Bernadette’s hunger or illness or over-active imagination, or even a hallucination caused by that fungus stuff Ray had mentioned once, then things were much more serious. My “announcement” might perhaps bring still more fame and uproar to the town — at least in the beginning. Four million tourists could even swell to six. Perhaps Thea Morton’s photograph would smirk from all the hoardings, sharing the billings with the Mother of God herself. I must admit I was tempted. Adrian would find me immediately more interesting once I was an historical phenomenon with dates. Leo loved fame in any form and even Ray would get a certain spiritual frisson from a girl who was chosen as Bernadette’s confidante.
Had I really seen her? The first tiny serpent of doubt flickered across my mind. After all, I was weak and starving myself, and though I hadn’t eaten fungus, there could have been something in the laxative. I looked around. There were hardly any witnesses — just an old man slumped on a bench and a woman walking further down by the bath-house.
>
No — even without witnesses, I was absolutely certain. I had noticed all the tiny details, the heavy eyebrows which a Mayfair receptionist would have long since plucked, the sallow skin with blackheads round the nose, the high smooth forehead, the little indentation above the upper lip exactly like the one in my photograph. I’d even spotted a darn in her shawl, neatly worked, but in a slightly different colour, so it showed. You wouldn’t see things like darns and blackheads if you were hallucinating. The Bernadette I’d seen was a peasant girl of flesh and blood with dark rings underneath her eyes and a slack chin, not a ghost or a visionary who spoke in tongues or arrived in a cloud of angels. Bernadette’s Lady had appeared in radiant light and a gust of wind. But not Bernadette herself. She had just showed up as naturally, as matter-of-factly as Adrian might have done, or Ray, or my sister if I had one. Anyway, if I had to imagine things, why not something glorious and uplifting — Bernadette assuring me I was loved by God and destined for heaven — rather than burdening myself with the most unwelcome tale to tell since Adam’s fall from paradise?
Tell everyone, she’d said. But how? Should I walk about the town stopping people and saying, “Sorry, but it wasn’t Mary after all. You’d better all go home”? They’d merely assume I was one of the mentally sub-normal and pray for a miracle for me.
“The priests first,” Bernadette had advised. She’d spoken as if I could count priests on the fingers of both hands. True, I knew more now than I ever had before, but none of them would listen. Ray would regard it as some trick to get him into bed again, and the two Pax priests would hardly be sympathetic when their whole role in life and Lourdes was to help people believe, not take away their certainties. There was also Father Sullivan back at the hospital, but he knew I was a liar, and anyway, the hospital was tricky territory since I hadn’t paid my bill. (There’d been endless fuss and correspondence about it. Leo was ignoring it and Adrian was querying it and the accounts office had added a threatening letter to the third demand.)
I walked slowly, wearily, up the zig-zag path again, trying to calm the turmoil in my mind. Lourdes was packed with clergy. Surely one of them would be kind or tolerant enough to listen. In fact, the Maison des Chapelains was only a hundred yards or so in front of me, the home of the most important priests in Lourdes and where all the visiting dignitaries were offered board and lodging.
I slipped through the gate, crossed the road, up the hill, and almost ran towards the huge barred and bolted doors. The place looked like a prison, with bars on the lower windows and a stern forbidding facade which growled, “Get out, keep out, watch out!” I trailed away. Even if they heard my puny knock through all that stone and steel, were they really likely to admit me, knock up their bishops at the dead of night to listen to some fable? Anyway, they would be ninety per cent foreign. My feeble phrase-book gropings could hardly explain a story which, even in the most lucid and carefully chosen English, would still sound quite preposterous.
I kept on walking. I recognised the road now which led up the hill, out to the open countryside and on at last to the hostel for the handicapped. I really had no choice. Ray at least would listen, open his door to me, offer me a glass of water. Thank God I’d slept all day. I’d need my strength to endure so long a trek on an empty stomach and a rough path. The road was already narrowing, the lamp-posts dwindling. I stumbled in the shadows. Only an hour or so ago, I had decided to turn my back on all the dangers and excesses of religion. Yet now I had been chosen to play an almost religious role. To establish Truth. Bernadette could have picked almost anyone from the whole teeming universe and she had chosen me. It was a dazzling, terrifying honour. I realised suddenly that the whole thing had been meant. It was some sort of mysterious supernatural plan. Why else should I have crept down to the Grotto at the dead of night when everyone else was sleeping, stumble on the unlocked gate, the zig-zag path? Even the shock and muddle of my First Communion I saw now as intended. Had it been as rewarding as I’d hoped, I might have been less willing to listen to a story which threw my new religion into disarray. As it was, I had become the ideal person to pass on a message of mistake and disillusion.
I walked a little faster. The road was running steeply uphill now, the lights of Lourdes thinning out behind me. I wouldn’t look back again. I would go only forward, upward. I could see the huge crouching flanks of the Pyrenees closing in around me like lumbering animals. The night was full of noises — rustlings in the trees, tiny cries from small scared creatures in the grass, the endless rushing of the river, my own gasping breath.
A damp grey fog began to grope its way towards me from the mountains, blotting out the peaks, catching in my hair, stroking cold clammy fingers down my face. A bat blundered through the darkness, a train rumbled somewhere far below. I kept on walking.
“Tell the priests,” Bernadette had said.
I mustn’t be afraid. I was on my way to telling one of them.
Chapter Twenty-Three
I was almost crying when I arrived at the hostel — cold, blistered, limping and exhausted. Struggling halfway up a mountain when you’ve been starving for three whole days is hardly the most restful way of passing Easter night. The place was completely in darkness. I stood outside the door, hearing the blank black silence heaving back at me. When I knocked, the noise echoed like a stone bumping and clattering down a dry well-shaft. No one answered. I looked around me. Solid mountains had turned into shifting, swirling waves of fog. The sky was a huge black hole. I knocked again, tugged at the bell-pull, hammered with my hands. I could hear someone stumbling to the door. I prayed it would be Ray, not Mary-Lou, not Cammie, least of all not Lionel.
It was Doc, looking paunchier in pyjamas and with a lock of greyish hair falling over one bloodshot eye.
“What’s up?” he asked. I wasn’t even sure if he recognised me, but I could tell he was used to dealing with emergencies. He hadn’t bothered with hallos, but was already revving into action, ready to seize his scalpel or his oxygen, according to my story.
I almost wished I could announce a car crash or a heart attack, make the whole thing simpler. But Bernadette seemed still to stare and plead in front of me, as vast and eternal as the sky, imploring me to speak.
“It’s … er … Ray I really want,” I mumbled.
“What’s the trouble? Can’t I help? I mean, Father Murphy’s only just got to bed. He’s absolutely shattered. We’ve had an emergency.”
“So have I,” I said. “I wouldn’t bother him otherwise. It’s a …
spiritual emergency.” Those deep, dark, desperate, hurt saint’s eyes were boring into me. I couldn’t turn my back on them.
“No such thing!” grinned Doc. “If it’s not actually festering or haemorrhaging or hanging on a thread, best to leave it alone. OK? Look, come in and have a cup of tea or something.”
The little jokes again, the panacea teapot. I’d just seen the saint who had set up the whole of Lourdes and now ordered me to pull it down again, and here was Doc downgrading me to out-patients.
“I don’t want tea — I want a priest.”
“Look, lass — what’s your name, by the way?”
“Thea Morton. I met you yesterday. You’ve probably forgotten.”
“No, no. Of course not — I remember now. Look, be a dear and don’t disturb Ray. He’s not been too well today.”
That hardly surprised me, remembering the cognac (and its aftermath). But what were guilt and hangover compared with the shock and wonder of my vision? They were still so bogged down in trivial things — in sleep, in sex, in headaches, in jokes, in normal life. I had bumped into another century, stumbled on to Truth. The world should be shouting with it, yet all it could do was whimper excuses and go back to sleep again.
“Ray really needs his rest, my dear. We’ve had one heck of a day. Only been in bed an hour or so. Can’t it wait till the morning?”
“No, Dr Bradbury,” I said. “I’m afraid it can’t. And if it could have done, I’d hardly have scr
ambled four miles up a sheep track in the pitch dark merely to have a cup of tea with you. There’s a café where I’m staying.” I knew I sounded insolent, but if I gave up now, I might never find the guts to start again.
“All right, keep your hair on. I’ll go and wake the Boss if you’re absolutely sure it’s urgent.” He swung round and grinned at me. “But what about that cup of tea first?”
They’d offered me tea when I’d lost Lucian. I’d been crying so hard then, I couldn’t even hold the cup. Tea is a sort of escape-hatch, I suppose. In times of danger, or sickness or embarrassment, people just hide behind the pot and hope you’ll go away. Even a blazing vision they try to drown in Typhoo.
“Look, if you don’t hurry up, I’ll have to go and pull him out of bed myself. I’m sorry, but this is serious.”
“OK, OK, you win. I can see it’s Casualty Department stuff. Look — what’s your name again? Ah yes — Thea. Unusual name, isn’t it? Look, Thea, why don’t you go and wait in the kitchen. It’s warmer there.”
I trailed into the dingy jumbled mess-room which had rusty waterpipes running down one wall and oilcloth on the tables. Mary-Lou or someone had done the washing-up, but there was still a rank, greasy odour clinging to all the surfaces. I perched myself on a fold-up chair and tried to calm down by squeezing B’s (for Bernadette) out of the plastic ketchup dispenser. My mind was blazing with her — her small stocky body, the open trusting frankness of her gaze. She was a wanderer from another century, yet she had seemed as real, as solid, as tangible, as Doc had done just now.
There was a long row of B’s across the oilcloth and even a few smaller R’s, but Ray still hadn’t come. It crossed my mind that perhaps he hadn’t been sleeping at all, but kneeling in the fog outside, naked except for a hair shirt, weeping for his sin, unable even to face me. Once he’d heard my message, petty things like screwing would fade into insignificance. He could join with me then, not for hopeless, joyless fumbles, but in working for the Truth.
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