I knew what he was getting at. No doubt Ray would have thought the same himself, had he ever believed my story in the first place. Why should a saint pick a common whore, a slut, a liar who even lied about the fact that she wasn’t a Catholic? There were precedents, of course. Mary Magdalen was a real live prostitute who probably had crabs and clap and God alone knows what else besides, and St Augustine had made his mother weep for his excesses, and even St Francis himself had been a raver and a gambler before he turned to wildlife. “Yes, I know it sounds ridiculous, but …”
“Honestly, Val, this is the second knees-up in a row, and we’ve only just arrived here. Can’t we ever be left to sleep?”
Mary-Lou was stumbling through the door in a thigh-length nightie, with her long fair hair floating round her shoulders. She looked sulky, sleepy, irritable, and quite depressingly attractive. I was suddenly aware of my own torn and muddy clothes, shoes scuffed, hair tangled, hands scratched by thorns and brambles. No wonder they had labelled me deranged.
Val had bounced back to the stove and was starting on the pancakes. “Shall we have savoury ones, or sweet?”
“Champagne ones, I suggest,” quipped Doc. “We should be celebrating. Thea here’s seen Bernadette.”
“Bernadette!” said Val. “Gosh.”
“Oh, come off it, Thea,” growled Mary-Lou. “I’m not in the mood for jokes.”
“It’s not a joke,” I muttered. “I did see her. I went down to the Grotto about half-past twelve at night and she was …”
Mary-Lou had seated herself as near to Ray as possible and was tossing her hair all over him. “The Grotto’s locked at night,” she said smugly.
“There’s a path, for heaven’s sake. Ray told me that himself and anyway …” I stopped. If people wanted to believe in strange and supernatural happenings, even miracles, they’d witness them. Eyes would be opened and ears unstopped. But, equally, if they clung to the safe, the accepted, the so-called rational and normal, then nothing in the world would change their minds. All those bureaux and commissions, all that sifted evidence, was so much dross. The only thing that mattered was a person’s state of mind. Leo would believe my story. He hobnobbed with sixteenth-century murderers, so a nineteenth-century shepherdess would hardly pose a problem. But the rest of the world, especially the priestly, professional, superior, well-educated world, refused to look further than their own narrow, lying, blinkered senses.
Here I was, with a friar, a doctor, a midwife and a nurse, people who had witnessed miracles all their professional lives — amazing things like organ transplants and wonder drugs, the miracle of the body itself — sex, conception, birth and death. They were all Catholics, clinging to a religion which smashed natural laws as easily as tea-cups, and which trumpeted screaming inconsistencies like Three-In-One, Life After Death, Virgin Birth, World Without End. They pinned their faith on a God who died and rose again, who floated up to heaven, walked on water, cured incurables. They attended Mass where fusty bread was changed into living flesh. How could they swallow all those bombshell paradoxes, those holy impossibilities, yet still refuse to accept one simple fact because it wasn’t printed in their missals or their Gray’s Anatomy? They hadn’t even listened — just fobbed me off with tea and jokes and condescension. I was beginning to understand how Bernadette had felt. She, too, had been faced with arrogant doctors, deaf and scoffing priests.
“Look, forget it,” I said. I could feel my anger bubbling up like the butter in the frying-pan, turning black and hot and frothy. I hated them for ruining everything, for making me a laughing stock when I was a heavenly instrument, for driving me from dignity to fury. Even Ray was worse than useless. He kept hovering around me, but feebly, almost defiantly, as if he was scared I was going to burst into tears and start blabbing about the sex thing. I wouldn’t say a word. All I wanted was to shut everybody out and stay only with the simple truth of Bernadette. I stuck my head in my hands, my fingers in my ears.
“Where’s Thea? Where’s Thea? Val says she’s come to visit us. Oh, there she is! Hallo, Thea. Why have you woken everybody up?”
“She’s crying, Thea’s crying!”
“No, she’s not. She’s sleeping.”
“She’s not. Shove over, Barry, will you? I can’t get in if you block the door like that.”
“What are we having breakfast for? It’s still pitch dark.”
“Pancakes! Who said pancakes?”
The tiny kitchen was filling and shrilling with them. Barry had bashed into the door-posts with his wheelchair, two boys clattering in on callipers, Sam and Cammie singing arm in arm, Desmond tickling Jim. Val was shouting above the whir and drone of the mixer, Alan clashing plates. The jokes, the chatter, the imbecilities, were all starting up again. I realised, suddenly, they were not as saintly or as special as I had first assumed. All they cared about was japes and jaunts and as many parties as they could cram into a so-called pilgrimage. Bernadette had promoted me above the lot of them. Even with all my faults and lies and frailties, it was my voice she had favoured to proclaim her message to the world. Doc had scoffed, “Why you”, and yet Bernadette had chosen me above all the priests and helpers and doctors in the place. A lot of good they had done me, anyway. I should either have started with the simple accepting peasants like Bernadette herself, or gone right to the top and tackled a bishop or a cardinal.
“Look, I’m sorry I ever disturbed you in the first place. Just tell me one thing and then I’ll leave you to your binge. Where does the nearest bishop live? Any bishop, so long as he speaks English.”
“Search me!” said Doc. “I’ve always steered clear of Messeigneurs since the time I removed an episcopal gall bladder, only to find it was a case of simple nervous dyspepsia.”
Ray disentangled himself from Mary-Lou and came and stood beside me, stroking my hair very gently as if I were an injured pony. “Look, Thea, my girl, I don’t think you’re quite well enough to go. At least, not back to those lodgings on your own. You look very strange, you know. Let me take you to St Catherine’s. You’ll be better there. I know the Reverend Mother and the infirmarian. They’re both very kind.”
“No!” I almost shouted. I knew what St Catherine’s was — a loony bin. You spoke the truth and people locked you up for it. I remembered all the brave and lonely souls who had been persecuted for nothing worse that trying to set the record straight — people I’d picked up from Leo’s dinner parties or Adrian’s textbooks — Socrates and Abelard, Galileo and Darwin, Jesus Christ Himself. Now I was one of them. It didn’t feel noble or exhilarating, just exhausting.
“Look,” I said. “I’m tired. I’m flaked bloody out. I’ve been walking for …”
Ray picked up my coat and put it round my shoulders. “Of course you are, Thea. You need a really good night’s sleep. You’ll feel better in the morning, you see. They’ve got a lovely little guest room at St Catherine’s with a real …”
“No, Ray, not St Catherine’s.” I snatched my coat from him and struggled into it. “I wouldn’t set foot there if you paid me. I’m going back to my room.”
“Well, at least let me drive you there. It won’t take a minute in the van.”
That was almost proof he thought I was delirious. Nothing else would have induced him to risk a second soul-endangering excursion to my bedroom.
Mary-Lou jumped up and forced her way between the two of us. I could see her plump pink knees dimpling under the nightdress. “That’s stupid, Ray. You must be around in case the hospital phones. Mike would never forgive you if you weren’t there, when … if … Look, I’ll take her. I know we’re not insured, but just this once. She ought to have some Valium first, in any case.”
So I was “her” now, was I? They were talking about me as if I wasn’t there; doping me, even, so I wouldn’t upset their cosy little house-parties. Of course they didn’t want to hear my message. Mary-Lou wouldn’t be able to flirt with Ray in her flagrant night attire, if there was no Lourdes left to give her the excu
se for pancake parties and package tours with priests. I had to get away. I couldn’t stand their pettiness, their footling, jarring noise. Someone had put the stereo on in the rumpus-room and it was blasting through the door. Sam was playing drums with a saucepan and two serving spoons, the whole hare-brained, raucous night deaf to the urgent pleading of St Bernadette.
Ray was still fluttering round me. “Would you mind that, Thea? Mary-Lou’s a very careful driver, I can vouch for that. And I tell you what — I’ll come and see you first thing in the morning, shall I? I’m saying early Mass in the Grotto; and I’ll call straight round afterwards. All right?”
“No, it’s not all right,” I snapped. I had important work to do and couldn’t hang around. I’d planned to go to the Grotto myself as soon as it was light. It was obviously my duty to check the place in public and in daylight. Bernadette might even reveal herself again. I prayed this time she would address the thousands, speak to the priests themselves.
“Right, first batch up!” bawled Val. “These are plain, but I’m making cheese ones next. Get your nose out, Barry, I don’t want germs all over them.”
“But you didn’t toss them, Val. That’s the whole point of pancakes. Here, let me do it.”
“No, love. It’s too late now. They’re already cooked. Oh — damn! — now look what you’ve done. Sam, get a floor-cloth, please.”
Barry hacked with laughter. “They’re dust-and-fluff pancakes now, not plain.”
“Well, you can jolly well eat them dusty. There were three whole eggs in that lot.”
“I’m not eating dust. Give them to Thea.”
A wheelchair was bearing down on me, the grimy corpse of a pancake pushed against my mouth. I blundered to the door.
“Goodbye,” I stormed. “I’m going!”
I almost crashed into Lionel who was standing just outside the kitchen. I tried to mutter an apology, knowing already that he couldn’t hear it — he was hearing something else. I stared at him in wonder. His ears were in touch with heaven, his mind in tune with mine. He wasn’t smiling any longer, but gazing right inside my soul. I realised suddenly he knew about my vision. If he had words like ’ flu or nightmare on his card, he wouldn’t point to them, but only to God and Truth and Mission. The deaf and dumb are always less scared and scoffing of the supernatural than ordinary people — closer to it, perhaps. Although I had libelled the boy, he alone could see I was transformed, and was bearing silent witness to my calling.
Our eyes met and spoke for one fleeting second, and then I stumbled past him. Ray and Mary-Lou were both clucking and fretting after me, but I hardly saw them now. OK, I’d let them drive me back, but I didn’t need their Valium, their Ovaltine, their good night’s sleep. They were too limited, too blinkered, to realise I had been entrusted with a universal mission. But Lionel understood it. Dumbly, loyally, rapturously, he was shouting to the whole crass mob of them that there was only Thea Morton against the entire Roman Catholic world.
She hadn’t time to sleep.
Chapter Twenty-Four
I turned my back firmly on the bed. If Ray wouldn’t help me, then Adrian could. I’d follow his methods, his order, his careful pernickety scholarship, and prove to Bernadette she was right to have chosen me. It wasn’t easy in a room with no desk, no proper light, a three-legged chair, and nothing to write on except a paper bag and some stolen toilet roll which felt more like sandpaper. Nor had Adrian ever tackled a major project without a good square meal inside him. I was sick, dizzy, starving, and so light-headed I found it difficult to read or write at all.
Nonetheless, I rigged up a sort of makeshift study by propping my suitcase on the bidet and squatting in front of it on a pile of books. I dared not work in bed, in case I simply fell asleep. I took each book from under me in turn, and made careful notes and jottings from it. All the pages and the frontispieces were emblazoned with the hospital library stamp — to deter pilferers, I suppose. I wondered if Sister Ursula would believe my story about seeing Bernadette. I doubted it. Once you’ve seen a psychiatrist, you’re always suspect. Safer to label people mad than have all your own beliefs and structure overturned. That’s why I had to try and build some evidence. Since Bernadette herself had given me no reasons for her sudden change of story, no background explanation, then I’d have to find my own. I knew already no one would even listen unless I was armed with what Adrian called a foolproof case.
It surprised me really that supernatural messages should be so vague and flimsy. If the Powers Above wanted something done, why couldn’t they assist us mortals by supplying all the facts? Bernadette herself had been told so little, no wonder she had got it wrong. When she’d asked the apparition to identify herself, back in 1858, the Lady had only smiled and categorically refused to write her name down, even when offered the local bailiff’s pen and inkstand. ‘N’ey pas necessári,’ she’d replied. But it was bloody necessary. My present dilemma and confusion only proved it.
Bernadette herself had never called her Lady the Blessed Virgin —that was a strong point in my case. She’d used the term “Aquerò”, a neuter word in her own local dialect which meant “that thing”. I wrote “Aquerò” on my toilet paper and underlined it twice. Other people had soon assumed it was the Virgin, but perhaps only because they hankered for some heavenly presence in the midst of poverty and illness. There was such a hunger for excitement that fifty other villagers were soon claiming to have seen Our Lady as well, plus half the local schoolkids. They were all suppressed. Now it seemed that Bernadette herself was merely number fifty-one. Certainly, she’d seen something — that was not disputed. Thousands had witnessed her ecstasies, her conversations, and she herself had told me in the Grotto that it was “someone else”. But who?
At the sixteenth apparition, the Lady had introduced herself at last. “I am the Immaculate Conception,” she told Bernadette. That was the turning point. Or so the standard biography said. Even the Dean himself felt now that such words could only come from the Blessed Virgin. Who else but Christ and His Mother could be conceived immaculate? I rubbed my eyes. It was cold in the room and the light was so dim, I could hardly see the print. I tried to think of Adrian, his concentration on the task in hand, his slow laborious reasoning. “Immaculate Conception”, I jotted down. I couldn’t even spell it and I very much doubted whether Bernadette could either. She admitted herself she hadn’t understood it. She knew as much theology as I knew Higher Maths. She may even have got it wrong, muddled up the words perhaps. The theologians themselves were buggered by the phrase. They felt a living person couldn’t or shouldn’t call herself an abstraction. That’s what one of the books claimed, though I was feeling so weak and weary, even the word “abstraction” whirled around in my head without meaning much, and the authorities seemed to contradict each other.
The whole thing struck me as fishy, anyway. If it had been the Blessed Virgin, then surely she’d have announced herself clearly and simply as the Mother of God or Our Lady of Lourdes, instead of using high-flown jargon to an illiterate peasant girl. After all, Mary herself had come from humble stock. She had been the wife of a carpenter. Actually, I’d never met a carpenter, but I knew our local painter’s wife in Twickenham, and the only fancy words she used were the ones on the Dulux colour cards like Indigo and Persimmon. She’d even suggested Aconite for Adrian’s study walls, but Immaculate Conception would really have stymied her.
I was getting off the point again. It was difficult to concentrate. The books felt hard and uncomfortable underneath my bottom, but when I tried the floor, that was harder still and scratchier. I yawned and stretched a bit, then smoothed out the paper bag and wrote on it:
“Could anyone else but Mary be conceived immaculate?
Did Bernadette mishear or mistake the phrase?
What else could it mean?”
I must admit I’d never been quite certain what it meant myself until the nuns had dinned it into me at school. It’s one of the things they labour at Catholic convents, li
ke the Cardinal Virtues, or the Dangers of Disco Dancing, or wearing your blouses loose so they don’t show off your breasts. Lots of non-Catholics still misunderstand it. They think Immaculate Conception means that Mary conceived Jesus without recourse to man or prick. The Holy Ghost just hovered over her, and — presto! — she was pregnant. That’s what happened, in fact, but it’s called the Virgin Birth — another of those R.C. Technical Terms we spent most of our precious school time sorting out. (The nuns were so coy about the word conception that lots of the smaller girls thought it meant something hard and cold and boring like prie-dieu or ciborium.) What Immaculate Conception really means is that Mary was born sinless, the only human creature unstained by Original Sin (yet another of their terms!) from the first moment of her conception. It’s nothing to do with pricks or sex and semen.
Actually, the whole subject was beginning to depress me, because words like conceive and sin reminded me of the whole mess and loss and tangle of wombs and babies and Confession and Ray and Lucian. I decided to move on, and wrote MIRACLES in large block capitals on the other side of the paper bag, and then “64” underneath it. Such a mingy figure was another point in my argument, especially with so many million invalids. If the Lady had been Mary, then surely she’d have acted faster and more generously. An all-powerful Queen of Heaven could have cured the whole damn lot of them just by lifting a finger. On the other hand, if she wasn’t Our Lady, then how could I explain the sixty-four, let alone all the myriad other cures, non-miraculous but still disturbing? The power of the mind, perhaps, as Ray had hinted, when we’d discussed it in the hospital — hysteria, wishful thinking, self-hypnosis. I decided to try it out myself:
“My brain is working vigorously and well,” I said slowly and out loud, in one of those doomy mysterious voices I imagine hypnotists use.
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