After Purple

by Wendy Perriam

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  I entered the first café I came to which was open. It was almost empty, but the noise made up for the lack of customers. A jukebox was playing some wailing heartbreak song with extra sobs from three electric guitars; a coffee machine was whooshing and whirring on the counter; and the radio was turned up full volume so that the waiter could hear it over the clattering of his cups. Even the cafés thrived on Our Lady’s presence. It was she who swelled their profits and left the tips. I felt more and more like a messenger of doom. How many cafés would I close, how many waiters would I turf out into the street?

  “Bonjour, Mam’selle!” It was the barman come to take my order. He looked fat, almost glossy, as if starving in the gutter was a long way from his plans. “Que prenez-vous, Mam’selle? Du café au lait? Des croissants?”

  I was ravenous. I’d assumed my hunger had faded, but now that food was all around me, I felt weak and dizzy with desire for it. A baker’s boy had just walked in, staggering under a tray of fresh-baked croissants. Their scent wafted behind him like a golden vapour trail. A man at the table opposite was dunking his brioche into a mug of steaming chocolate, ruffed with a high white collar of whipped cream. Someone had left a crust and a sugar lump on a dirty plate on my table. I crammed them into my mouth, swilled the dregs from the almost empty coffee cup. The prices were appalling. Bacon and eggs cost more than I’d allowed for lunch and supper combined, let alone a paltry little breakfast. Even coffee took a chunk out of your wallet. Ray had warned me that the prices got higher the nearer you approached the Grotto, which was good business but rotten religion. I should have walked on further, but I was so famished now, I stayed where I was and ordered the two cheapest things on the menu which were hot milk and plain bread. When they arrived, I mixed them together into a sort of gruel, which made them easier to eat. Although my teeth had been temporarily fixed, the gums were shrinking slowly as they healed, so that my denture slipped a bit and couldn’t be trusted to cope with things like crusts. Anyway, gruel was more comforting than plain unbuttered bread.

  I felt I needed comfort. I was the only person in the whole of Lourdes who knew that it was hollow. And here in the café, I was the only woman and the only English customer. The radio spoke French, the waiters looked Algerian, and the four other break-fasters were resolutely foreign. Even the pilgrims streaming past the café window on their way to the basilicas were mostly aliens. The food itself was French. No comforting English toast and marmalade, or homely fried bread soggy with Heinz baked beans. Only swarthy strangers sipping red wine for their breakfast, or gulping pale gutless tea from smoked glass toothmugs with one anorexic teabag floating on a tide of lemon pips. I longed for the sizzle of bacon, the Kellogg’s packet with its consoling list of vitamins, boil-in-the-bag kippers with their frozen pat of butter slowly melting into fishy yellow juice. Breakfast with Leo — Bran-flakes and The Listener and peanut butter kisses. I felt weak and sick with loss. True, Leo was a foreigner, but he didn’t count as one because he lived in England and bought English watercolours and proper Fortnum’s tea. God Himself would be a Middle Easterner. So would His Blessed Mother, come to that. I’d always pictured her pale and smug like Janet, but in fact she’d be Jewish like some of the mothers of Adrian’s private pupils, with their coiled black hair and dark eyes.

  But, wait a minute — the Lady whom Bernadette had seen had blue eyes. I remembered that distinctly. One of the books had described them as azure, and another as forget-me-not. Wasn’t that a perfect piece of evidence to back up Bernadette’s words? Surely no woman of Galilee could be born with forget-me-not eyes. They belonged strictly to the West. In fact, true blue eyes are exceptionally rare. Adrian had done some research on it once, and worked out that not much more than one per cent of the world could boast blue eyes. They were a product of the gloomy north, he said, specially adapted for seeing more acutely in overcast conditions of fog and haze. Mary wouldn’t need them — she was a southerner who lived with blazing sun and cloudless skies.

  I picked up the menu and scribbled “Blue eyes” on the back of it, next to the soupe du jour. Odd, really, that no one had puzzled about it at the time. Even odder that in another vision, a good three centuries earlier, the Madonna had had brown eyes. I remembered that from school. Mother Perpetua had read the story to us during our embroidery lessons. I was always pricking my finger or losing my thimble while she rattled on about the dark-eyed, dark-skinned Virgin who had appeared in Guadalupe in 1531. Surely the Blessed Virgin wouldn’t keep on changing her appearance in every different century and country — a Mexican Indian one time, a blue-eyed northerner the next? It seemed neither honourable nor fair. I’d have to mug up all the other times and places Mary had appeared to people and see if she looked alike in any of them. Maybe the whole lot of them were shams. At this rate, I’d be destroying not just Lourdes, but Fátima, Knock, La Salette, Guadalupe itself — all the Marian shrines.

  One thing was clear — I hadn’t time to waste. It was already Monday, and we were due to depart on Saturday — five short days to undo centuries of falsehood. I still needed a plan of action, even more now that my task had been extended. Truth and simplicity just hadn’t proved enough, science had misfired, and Ray was confusing sex with insanity. There were other priests, of course. Bernadette had commanded me to start with them. I mustn’t forget her words and go gallivanting off on some vaguer, wider mission of my own. I wrote “Priests” as the next heading underneath the sorbets and sat staring at it while I scraped out the last tepid morsels of my gruel.

  Almost as if in answer to a prayer, a priest walked in. He was wearing a grubby black cassock with hobnailed boots underneath it, and a small black beret perched on top of untidy greying hair. He had dirty fingernails and a rough red complexion criss-crossed with tiny broken veins. I knew he wasn’t English. English priests (bar Ray) are always posh and have pale, pasty skins and manicure sets for Christmas, and finicky housekeepers who handwash everything. He chose a seat in the furthest corner from me, but I refused to be deterred. I picked up my bill and the menu and marched across.

  “Bonjour!” I said and seated myself beside him.

  He didn’t look surprised. I suppose he thought he was meant to recognise me. Priests meet so many people, they probably learn to smile at total strangers, just in case they turn out to be last night’s communicant or the multi-murderer in Saturday’s confessional.

  “Do you speak English?” I asked. The bonjour had exhausted my only general French, and I didn’t want to start on big ends or sparking-plugs or municipal museums.

  When he nodded, I almost threw my arms around his neck. The waiter had brought him a glass of cold colourless liquid, three croissants and a plastic pot of something called gelée de groseilles which sounded vaguely obscene, but looked much the same as jam.

  “You like?” he asked, offering me one of the croissants already spread liberally with butter. Its fresh greasy fragrance wafted up to my nostrils, tempting me, enticing me, little golden flakes crumbling off it into the glowing pool of jam.

  “No,” I said firmly. I must keep my message pure. Bernadette herself had never accepted a morsel, preferred to starve rather than risk anyone accusing her of graft. I removed my eyes from the breakfast and fixed them on a poster of the bare and starving Pyrenees. “I have a message for you,” I told him. “From St Bernadette.”

  He smiled, but continued chewing. “St Bernadette, yes.”

  I stared at him. How could he calmly carry on with breakfast when I was about to bulldoze his life and Lourdes’ at once.

  “Bernadette appeared to me,” I said, in case he hadn’t understood.

  Little morsels of half-masticated croissant sprayed from his lips.

  His fingers were stained with nicotine, and there were grease stains down his front. “Very good,” he murmured.

  “She spoke to me,” I insisted, making the words as clear and distinct as possible, like the tight-arsed lady on the Linguaphone re
cords. I only had half his attention, anyway. The other half was on his spirits glass. I wondered what it was. It looked decadent like absinthe.

  “She told me to tell you it wasn’t the Blessed Virgin that she saw.”

  “Good,” he repeated. “Very good.”

  “Do you understand?”I almost shouted. He was drinking the liquor now. It shocked me, really. First Ray with an erection and now a priest with an aphrodisiac.

  “Yes, yes, I understand.” There was a little ruff of butter along his upper lip. “The Blessed Virgin. La Sainte Vierge. I understand.”

  “No!” I howled. “Not the Sainte Vierge.” Even my phrase-book French could cope with that. “It wasn’t the Blessed Virgin who appeared to her.”

  He smiled again and nodded. “The Blessed Blessed Virgin. Mère de Dieu. Notre Dame. Our church in Amiens, we calls ’im Notre Dame. You understand?”

  “Yes, but you don’t,” I blurted out. “Look, she said she was the Immaculate Conception, but that didn’t mean Mary. Well, not necessarily. The priests just assumed it. There may have been another one. I mean anyone could be conceived immaculate. It’s up to God, I suppose. If He did it once, He could do it several times.”

  I’d lost him now. The croissants were finished, but he was scooping up the last scattered crumbs with a moistened finger and cramming them into his mouth. He kept on smiling through the guzzling, but I knew he hadn’t understood a word.

  “You nursing?” he asked.

  I glanced down at my meagre, unmaternal breasts. “What?” I exclaimed. Surely he couldn’t think …

  “You teaching?”

  “Oh, I see. No, neither. Look, what I’m trying to tell you is …”

  “Touriste?”

  “No!”

  He jumped when I shouted. It was simply a waste of breath. Half the clergy were imbeciles and drunkards, and the other half sexual cripples who couldn’t keep their vows.

  “Bishop,” I demanded. “Where does the bishop live?”

  He stopped suddenly, with his mouth open and his glass poised motionless before his face. “You work for bishop?” he asked incredulously, and with new respect.

  “Oh fuck,” I said and got up. I suppose he thought it was some sort of English au revoir, because he jumped to his feet and shook my hand and kept on saying, “Bishop. Good, very good,” over and over.

  A sort of damp, lumpy fury was seeping out of my body like wet sawdust. I was almost surprised he couldn’t feel it sticky on my hand. All my simple joy at coming to Lourdes had crumbled into horror and frustration. Even the fact of being chosen by St Bernadette I now saw less as an honour and more as a crippling burden. Judging by my lack of results so far, I would need at least a year in Lourdes, not one paltry week — yet how could I survive on a pocketful of centimes? Truth wouldn’t fill a belly.

  I snatched my hand from the priest’s and turned to go. Someone was blocking my way — a waiter with a three-foot silver serving platter piled high with an authentic English breakfast. More than authentic. There was not only bacon, eggs and sausages, but steak and chips as well. The steak itself was a good two inches thick, oozing blood and juices. It was like a miracle, an answer to my prayer. The only problem was, the waiter was setting it down in front of the priest — not me — and then besieging him with napkin, mustard, salt, coffee, bread. I stared. Mon père had already demolished three whole croissants and a glass of booze, yet here was a full cooked breakfast (dinner, almost), when I was starving, hollow, weak. I sat straight down again. I wasn’t leaving now — I was going to have it out with him.

  “Is that yours?” I asked. “I mean, who’s paying for it? What about your Vow of Poverty? Your conscience? All those slums in Preston with communal lavatories and families of seven who can’t afford a decent meal?”

  He beamed, tucking his napkin tight beneath his chin and gesturing with his fork towards the steak. “Bifteck. Good. You ’ave in England, yes?”

  “No, I don’t ’ave. Can’t afford. Can’t even afford one mingy little croissant. You had three — I counted. No wonder you don’t care about Bernadette. You’re too busy with the fleshpots.”

  The smile cracked a bit. His English might only be rudimentary, but bitterness sounds the same in any tongue.

  “You ’ ave pain?” he inquired. “You ’ave sad?”

  “Oh no,” I said. “I’m only bloody starving. Don’t mind me. You go ahead and eat.”

  He was. He had already salted his sausages and blasted his bacon with the peppermill. He was now uncapping the mustard.

  “No!” I shouted, suddenly. “Don’t — please don’t. You’ll ruin it. I loathe mustard on my food.”

  I snatched the jar away. Little flecks of moutarde à l’ estragon sprayed across his sleeve. He was goggling at me, astonished, almost scared.

  “I’m sorry,” I muttered. “It’s not mine, is it — it’s yours. That’s priests’ perks, I suppose.” I remembered the huddle of faithful, queuing for Masses. Thirty-three francs a Mass cost — three pounds-fifty, English money — except it wasn’t Mass, it was meat. Those wretched, patient, conned and simple pilgrims were buying egg and chips and absinthe, not hosts and God and prayers. “D’ you realise,” I quivered, “they’re not only sick and crippled, they’re bankrupting themselves as well, to subsidise your fancy five-course breakfasts, your finest fillet steak.”

  He was feeding his face again, munching stolidly through my monologue, egg yolk glistening on his upper lip, little threads of bifteck stuck between his teeth. I think he’d stopped trying to understand me, was just shrugging me off as a crackpot like Ray and the rest had done. Easy to label someone loony when they were simply crazed with hunger. Anyway, it wasn’t just the food I craved — it was the sudden sight and taste of England — that same crisped and streaky bacon which we had at home, the fat familiar sausages with little uneven knobs on the end of them, the greasy “Fred’s caff” chips. I longed to cling to their safe and solid solace, to stuff myself with them until I was whole and strong again.

  I almost genuflected as the priest sliced into his egg. I tried to shut out everything but that slimy viscous white quivering from his knife-blow, the rich gummy yellow spurting towards the breakwater of his sausage. If I kept my eyes fixed only on his plate, I could imagine I was sitting safe with Adrian, sharing a fry-up in our cramped and steamy kitchen, or back at school, gorging a bumper breakfast on Reverend Mother’s Feast Day, with the scent of stocks outside the refectory, and the nuns’ cool white voices echoing from the chapel. I watched him cut a chunk of sausage off — a plump pinkish bolster studded with tiny jewels of fat. He left it idling on his plate while he laid his knife and fork down and poured his coffee. The sausage stump was almost speaking to me, throbbing across the table, flinging me its smell. My entire body ached and slavered for it. I waited till the priest was blockaded by his cup, then — grap, gulp, gone. He hadn’t even noticed, so I pinched the largest chip on his plate and then the second largest. I hardly dared to chew them in case he saw my lips moving, just forced them down, whole and fat and greasy. He caught me with the fourth — it was red-hot in my hand as his eyes looked up and followed it from his platter to my mouth. I didn’t falter, just swallowed it unflinchingly.

  “Go on,” I challenged him. “Criticise me, tell me I’m a glutton.”

  Now that he had caught me, I might as well continue. I seized a piece of bread from the piled-high wicker basket, leaned across and dipped it in his egg-yolk. I almost choked as I crammed it huge and scratchy in my mouth. Tears were streaming down my face. The food was so dear and safe and beautiful, I couldn’t bear to have to snatch and snarl it up like this, ram it down my gullet like an animal.

  Tears splashed on to my hands. I was weeping not just for my own shock and disappointment, but for all the empty bellies in the world, the whole aching sham of Lourdes.

  People were staring at me. A nun at the next table had come clucking over and passed me a large white handkerchief to dry my tears. I t
ied it round my neck like a napkin. The priest and I were both robed for eating now, but it was my turn for the plate. I yanked it over to my side of the table. The smell of grease, of meat, of plenty, was like incense in my nostrils. Almost reverently, I picked up the sacred implements and knifed into the steak.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered to the gawping, plundered priest. “I know you don’t understand, but I’ve been given a mission to the world and I can’t cope with it until I’ve eaten. My stomach’s rumbling so loudly, it blocks out all the words.”

  The fork felt so heavy in my hands, it was as if the whole burden of Bernadette’s message was bleeding and sobbing into it. Staunchly, I clung on — swallowed bacon, sausage, comfort, nurture, strength — the strength to continue my calling. I mustn’t mewl or falter any longer. This afternoon at the Blessing of the Sick, I would take up my task again. The whole of Lourdes would be gathered together then, in the most important ceremony of all — every nation processing round the square with their sick and handicapped, their laymen and their priests. The procession didn’t start till half-past four — I couldn’t starve till then. Bernadette had sent this blessed breakfast to feed and fortify me, had broken my fast through the bounty of a priest.

  Even so, I was still sobbing into his chips. The relief of food, the wonder of it, had touched me like God’s finger. There were other hands on mine. The nun had joined our table and was crooning at me in a language so strangely guttural, I couldn’t even guess which half of the globe it came from. Two waiters had waltzed over and were shouting and gesturing at my plate. I was terrified they’d charge me chip for chip. I shoved in another mouthful. A knot of people were gathering round me now, all jabbering, all staring. Alien words lashed at me like hail. All those different languages were almost proof that God was a muddler. Any rational, orderly deity like Adrian would have insisted on one universal tongue, with compulsory demotion for anyone claiming to be a foreigner.