I threw myself down on the grass, stuffed my fingers in my ears. I could smell wet earth, rich mud, the gamey throbbing scent of spring. Golden celandines were tangled in the grass, tiny purple vetches almost hidden amongst the taller plantains. An insect struggled up a stalk, a pebble shone. The rain was faltering now. I rolled on my back and peered up at the sky. One brave bird was spiralling through the clouds — a hawk perhaps. The only birds I could recognise were sparrows, but this was something classier. Its wide raggedy wings were plunging and soaring high, high above the river. Could God be a bird? Not a Father, but a disembodied spirit, a high free happy thing, a phoenix? I almost craved a God like that. Religion should be light and fire and freedom, not a frowning headmaster with a ruler and a cane.
I couldn’t do what Bernadette had asked me. I knew that, now I’d seen the sick — the babies who were simply swaddled corpses, the boys who had never kicked a ball or kissed a girl, the dying old ladies who had been dying for a hundred years, I couldn’t wrest their only hope from them. They needed that Lady to be the Blessed Virgin. Bernadette was wrong to give them cruel fact instead of faith and fantasy.
I’d fly away. Take the first plane or train or coach I could arrange and return to England. I’d burn all my books on Bernadette, disown her as my sister, return to Leo, get a job. I’d forget the whole cruel Catholic sham, turn my back even on Ray himself, live for my body, not for my soul, further my name through Leo’s kids, not through dead and dusty scientific books.
The hawk had disappeared. There was only a hole in the clouds now, a shining halo touched with gold. In my mind, I saw Bernadette’s dark pleading eyes staring from the centre of it, heard her cry “I trust you”. I sprang up from the grass. Any moment now, she might appear to me again, try and change my mind. Not likely!
I started running across the fields, away from Lourdes, towards the lowlands and the sane non-Catholic North, towards cakes and steaks and pricks and wombs and sheer crazy easy happiness. Bernadette’s voice kept tripping me up, unravelling all the joy.
“It wasn’t the Blessed Virgin,” she was saying. “Tell the people, tell the priests.”
I stopped my ears, fell on my knees. “Lord that I may not hear,” I cried. “That I may not hear.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Rush hour at Victoria. Crowds of grey-complexioned commuters churning their way across the station. People bumping into me or my suitcase because I was dawdling at a time when all the rules said “Rush!” Everyone else obeying — seething and surging past me with dreary gaberdines and set, sullen faces. Out-of-work pigeons chuntering high up in the roof, the odd frail feather drifting down on all the bobbing heads. Trains panting at the buffers and red raucous buses glimpsed through the exits, while a still-early morning shook and stretched itself outside. The smell of morning — coffee, and cold, and sudden wafts of after-shave. A porter swilling tea while all the world rushed by him.
It had taken me twenty-three hours, twenty-seven minutes to exchange Lourdes for London. (The last train had been late.) I’d tried to go by plane, fly away like the hawk that very same Monday afternoon, while the Procession of the Sick was still shambling and sobbing through my soul. But Pax Pilgrims only flew on Saturdays and were most unhelpful when I told them my grandmother was dangerously ill, and (later) that all my favourite relatives had died in a multiple car crash on the motorway. All I could do, they said, was take the ordinary scheduled airline from Toulouse or Biarritz. The only problem was, it cost a little matter of a hundred odd pounds, when I’d already paid my all-in fare with Pax. I spent so long arguing with them, I missed the last decent evening train. I packed my things (leaving the books on Bernadette as a present for Madame) and went to catch the midnight one, which was slower and stopped at all the boring little stations in between. It was only then, I discovered that even the train fare cost more than I had in the world. I was so discouraged, I trailed back to my lodgings and went to sleep in my clothes with my case still packed beside me.
First thing in the morning, I trekked up to the hostel and asked Doc for a loan. (Ray wasn’t there — thank God. He was saying Mass in the hospital where Mike was dying, more or less.) At least Doc was up and semi-dressed this time. He even laughed and said, “Why not ask St Bernadette for a handout next time she appears to you?” When he realised I was serious, he got quite piqued and uppity, and went on about things like collateral and guarantees. I was forced to resort to tears and the grandmother saga again, and even then, he only forked out a mingy half of what I’d asked. I still had Leo’s spending money which I’d hardly touched at all, and a tenner I’d earmarked for emergencies, so in the end I scraped together just enough for the basic ticket, so long as I avoided frills like meals or sleepers. Doc drove me to the station, which was just as well, since the porter was waving flags and slamming doors as we stampeded on to the platform. I made it with a second to spare, like one of those dramatic sequences in films where they build the tension by playing “she’ll-never-make-it-music” and superimposing pictures of the breathless heroine with the almost departing train. I stuck my head out of the window and waved to Doc who was still wearing his pyjama top above a pair of tartan golfing trews. The train from Amiens was in, and my last view of Lourdes was of hundreds more handicapped being lifted down like parcels in their wheelchairs, the whole sombre station blooming with blue and white nurses’ caps and a new instalment of holy hope and fraud.
I knew, then, I was right to get away. Wasting fifty pounds on a train fare when I’d already paid via Pax was hardly economical, yet the thought of five more days in that weeping, bleeding, hollow, swindling town filled me with such gloom and almost panic, I think I’d have shelled out double to escape it. I realised, too, I was escaping Bernadette. I was terrified she’d appear to me again, saddle me with some new impossible instructions. I couldn’t carry them out. The Blessed Virgin was more valuable to those hopeless hoping sick than all the drugs, doctors and priests put together.
I stopped for a moment in the swarming, fuggy station, leaning against the window of Victoria’s Pantry, one of the British Rail buffets which was crowded with commuters and reeling with the scent of bacon. I’d travelled so long, my legs felt strange and choppy, as if there was still a jolting train or a lurching channel ferry underneath them. I’d spent the entire journey trying to undo the last three months. I’d booted Ray’s religion out of the train window and flung it overboard into the seething Dover Straits. As we’d chugged through Bordeaux and Angoulême, Poitiers and Blois, past fields and cows and vineyards and the first shining splinters of spring wheat, I’d gulped down great mouthfuls of nature and fertility, prayed to a pagan god, embraced Leo and Adonis. Every time Bernadette’s sad eyes flicked into my mind, or Ray’s limp prick or stricken face, I replaced it with an instant snapshot of Leo erect and radiant. He would be my new religion. I’d been vowing that, the very night that Bernadette appeared to me — she’d simply messed things up. True I hadn’t brought his miracle, but he wouldn’t need it now. It was only my religious hocus-pocus which had turned him off. All that Latin and jargon and asceticism and mugging up Masses in his bedroom must have been a put-down. Once I returned without a soul, he’d rush back to my body and respond the way he always had. Ray and the church had somehow cast a spell on him, but now I’d run away from them. I heard the train wheels singing “Free free free”, saw Leo’s strong dark body soaring past in all the tree-trunks, felt his power throbbing through the rails.
I’d practised my new religion for twenty-three and a half hours. I’d sung, slept, sworn, indulged, rubbed myself sore in smelly train toilets, flirted with railway men and passengers — even managed to stuff myself, despite being skint. It was almost a holy principle now to feast instead of fast. A nun with a cheese and salami roll and a bag of macaroons had shared them with me on the first lap of the journey. When I’d changed at Paris, I’d found a half-eaten sandwich in a litter bin, and had then toured all the station bars and cafés, picking thi
ngs off plates and raiding sugar bowls. On the boat, I was feeling peckish again, so I changed into my skimpiest sweater and my tightest jeans and sat around looking hungry. That always works. A sales rep from Châtillon brought me a sausage and a double gin, and was so intent on trying out his English, he left his change on the bar top. I pinched it when he wasn’t looking and used it later to buy a synthetic cream mille-feuille.
I was almost relieved to be nicking things again. It cut me off from Bernadette, proved I couldn’t be a saint. I was secretly scared that seeing Bernadette had branded me for ever, made me a seer, a guru, a visionary, someone special and elect. Supposing I had other apparitions, further messages, which flung me into chaos, tore my soul apart? Life with Leo was hardly silk and roses; it was rarely even predictable, but at least it didn’t smash up natural laws. Leo didn’t die and then turn up again, speak in riddles, vanish into thin air. I must return to him and cling to simple, solid things — sex and pricks and bodies, jobs and dogs and food.
I pressed my nose against the steamy window of the Victoria cafeteria. There everything was simple — tycoons snatching breakfast, typists swilling tea. A bank clerk in a bowler hat had just attacked a doughnut. I watched the sugar sparkle on his fingers, waited for the jam to drool triumphant down his chin. I had less than a pound left in the world. I stood there dithering, trying to decide whether to splurge it on two and a quarter doughnuts or the tube fare back to Notting Hill. The tube fare won. I was far too tired to walk three miles with a suitcase, and anyway, the thought of Leo was growing more and more insistent. If there was any miracle at all, it would be the one of our reunion.
I could see him now, scowling in the hall as he heard the doorbell ring, thinking it was the postman or the man who reads the meter. Groping to the door, half-asleep and crotchety, Karma growling at his heels. His eyes kindling when he sees me, his whole body suddenly awake. He grabs my hair, pushes me against the wall, loses his mouth and face and tongue in mine. He’s screwing me on the lino now, because it’s nearer than the bed. Later — on the bed as well, the twenty dragons joining in, the mulberry tree shaking its hair across the window to hide us from the light. The smell of dark and pain and velvet and Leo’s sperm. Everything long drawn out. No more quick splashes in bad-tempered bidets, but an hour’s hot soak in pine-green water. Then lunch. Not litter bins or leftovers, but six or seven courses of hot steaming complicated things, and wine in tumblers. And Leo again, tasting of wine and sin and garlic now, screwing me under the table with the dirty dishes still sitting there on top of us.
I turned my back on the buffet and ran down the steps to the tube. There was a long queue for tickets which I joined. (Victoria is one of those smug, spoilsport stations where you can’t slip by without paying.) I sat in the tube train and gazed around me. It was strange being in London after Lourdes. There were hardly any handicapped and no one was singing hymns or crying out to God to heal them. People had bosoms and buttocks and thighs again, whereas in Lourdes they’d done without them. The clothes were brighter (and tighter) and the women’s faces lipsticked and mascara-ed instead of pious grey. There were far more men than women, while at Lourdes the females had outnumbered them by almost three to one. Even the smell was different — fug and tweed and cigarette smoke and sudden nudges of women’s sharp fruity perfumes, instead of candle-wax and wet plastic wheelchair covers.
I glanced at the advertisements. There was one for brandy with a St Bernard dog sitting on the headline. I tried to avoid its eye — its name made me nervous. I’d assumed I’d run away from Bernadette, but if she could step into a different century, then eight hundred miles and a paltry channel crossing would do nothing to deter her. Apparitions don’t need planes or passports. They can turn up anywhere, in the time it takes them just to think about it. Bernadette might even appear to me on this crowded lurching tube train. I tried to calm myself by reading the racing page over my neighbour’s shoulder. After all, it was hardly sensible for Bernadette to waste her time in England. Half the English had never heard of Lourdes. When I’d told a man in the chemist I was going, he thought I’d said Lords and warned me the cricket season hadn’t started yet. Far more practical for Bernadette to choose a fellow countryman, someone braver and better qualified than I was, preferably a business speculator who could develop Lourdes as something new and different. If Our Lady was no longer the centrepiece, then perhaps they could discover oil or wildlife or ski-runs, even a Gallic version of the Loch Ness monster — anything to give the tourists a new goal or purpose for their pilgrimages.
I arrived at Leo’s station while I was still wondering whether you could turn the Grotto into a funfair and the Gave into a marina. It was good to leave the fug and dark behind and step out into light and air at street level. Notting Hill was as frowsty and frenetic as ever, but Leo’s road looked as if it had dressed itself up to welcome me. It’s one of the few in London with decent greenery and gardens which are more than just a drooping bay tree or a window-box. Most of the trees are planes and sycamores but there was one flowering cherry, iced with thick pink fondant clusters along its black boughs. Little splinters of white almond blossom lay in the road like the fragments of a shattered windscreen. The sky was a deep trusting blue. Strange to travel so far south and find only rain and storm, and then return north again to the sort of weather you see in holiday brochures.
I took off my sheepskin and shifted the case to the other hand. I was almost at Leo’s door. He’d still be in his dressing-gown, his body naked under the rough caressing camelhair. I picked up a handful of blossom and scattered it through my hair. This was my real wedding. I was married to Leo in everything but name. Ray and God had merely been adulteries.
I pushed open the gate, passed the prickly bush whose name I never knew and the tangled plants my mother called weeds and suckers. The front door beetled up, black and heavy-featured with a brass nose which I thumped. Leo had refused to let me take my key away, since the time I’d left it on a beach and forgotten that tides come in.
I knocked again, louder. Perhaps Leo had the radio on or both bath-taps running full blast. He might even be asleep. He’d taken to sleeping later these last few weeks. He claimed it was an effect of the hypnosis, but I knew he was drinking more, to try and forget that the hypnosis wasn’t working. It was whisky which was keeping him in bed when he should have been blazing to the door and melting in my arms. I tried the bell instead, kept my finger throbbing on it for a full two minutes. The house seemed to frown and mutter in disgust. It hated vulgar and unnecessary noise, like Leo did himself. I walked down the chipped stone steps to the basement door and hammered on it. Silence. Peered in through the window. Everything looked normal — coffee mugs making dirty pawmarks on a copy of The Listener, a score of Scriabin’s “Dance of Ecstasy” open on the table. I like the word ecstasy. You can’t rush or gabble it. All those hissy consonants mean you have to spell it out. If Leo was still in bed, then I’d join him there and start on the ecstasy as soon as he opened his eyes. His bedroom’s in the basement at the back, so I walked round and tried to reconnoitre. The curtains were still drawn which meant nothing, as Leo never lets the light in, even if he’s been up and dressed for hours. I squinted through a gap in the velour and saw his bed unslept in, the Indian rug drawn over it, and all twenty dragons quietly dozing in a neat, unruffled line.
I swallowed a tiny shred of panic like a crumb. He’d made his bed, that’s all, and gone out for an early morning stroll. Or was breakfasting with Otto in a café or a club, or had rushed to an auction room to inspect a Chinese vase. Perhaps he’d planned moussaka for lunch and was out buying aubergines, or had taken Karma for a run in Holland Park. For the first time ever, I actually longed for Karma — that hoarse throaty bark, those howls of black clotted fury which meant that Leo was there. He and his master always went in and out together.
I tried all the doors and windows at the back, but every one was locked, so I went round to the front again and waited on the step. He wo
uldn’t be long — he never was at this time. He worked at home in the mornings and left his social and business calls for later on. I amused myself by writing his name in pebbles on the path, and then in leaves, and then in almond blossom. The woman next door came out to collect her milk. She had a white jowly chin and a pink hairnet over sparse grey curls.
“Seen Mr Rzevski?” I called.
“No,” she snapped, and slammed the door. She hated Leo. Most of his neighbours did, or they were either mad or foreign or bad-tempered, so even if I called on them, I doubted if they’d help. It would have been nice to wait in comfort in somebody’s sitting-room, instead of on a doorstep.
Every few minutes, someone passed the gate. At each set of footsteps I jumped up, peered over the hedge, then sank down disappointed. After the fifth foreign student or dumpy waddling housewife, I refused to even check — just shut my eyes and prayed it would be Leo. It never was.
Forty minutes passed. I went out into the road and stretched my legs a bit. Easier there to see him coming. A child was playing on a tricycle, a cat’s green eyes gleamed at me from under an abandoned car, a little knot of Indian women giggled on the corner. I started walking up and down, each time a little slower than the last, to give Leo time to return from his shopping or his brooding or his breakfast. Actually, it was nearer to elevenses, so I nicked a bottle of milk from one of the doorsteps and drank it for my breakfast and lunch combined. When Leo did return, it would line my stomach for the celebration wine.
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