Death of a Pilgrim

by David Dickinson

  There were five other Americans in the party. One, Michael Delaney’s cousin Maggie, had been a last-minute entry. She was single, in her early sixties, with thinning hair that was nearly white and a semi-permanent frown on her face. She told everyone who had ever asked that she was married to Mother Church and that being a Bride of Christ was far far better than being joined to some man who might neglect you most of your life and occasionally perform acts of unmentionable violence upon your person. Michael Delaney couldn’t stand the woman. He had sworn violently when Alex Bentley told him that she too wished to come under starter’s orders for the pilgrimage. Bentley found it easier to communicate with his employer using sporting analogies. It had taken all Father Kennedy’s diplomatic skills to persuade Michael Delaney to take her along. And, for once, the Father misjudged his example from the Gospels.

  ‘Remember our Lord’s words to the woman taken in adultery, Michael,’ he had said. ‘Go thou and sin no more.’

  Delaney was on to him in a flash. ‘Woman taken in adultery, Father? That old cow has never been taken in any kind of ultery with or without the add-ons. More’s the pity. Might be better if she had been. Might have been better if she’d committed a few sins too. Can you imagine? That dried-up old bag coming with us thousands of miles across the world? God save us all. Sorry, Father.’

  At length Delaney was persuaded that he had no right, even as the organizer and paymaster of this pilgrimage, to exclude certain of God’s people merely because he didn’t like them. So now Maggie Delaney, clad in a dark suit that was far too heavy for the climate of southern France in the middle of June, perched primly on the edge of her seat, and fingered her rosary beads. A couple of elderly Frenchwomen, who had inspected the Americans with ill-disguised venom and distaste, nodded to each other and smiled frostily as they looked at this transatlantic visitor. They too had rosary beads in their pockets or their bags. They recognized Maggie Delaney as one of their own.

  Sitting on the same bench, but a few feet away, was a much younger Delaney, ‘Wee Jimmy’ Delaney. People often thought Wee Jimmy was an ironic nickname, for the young man stood over six feet four inches tall, with dark hair and a wavy moustache. He had been given the name because he was very small as a child, only shooting upwards between seventeen and twenty. By then it was too late to change the name. Wee Jimmy was a skilled steel worker from Pittsburgh, come on the pilgrimage, he told Alex Bentley, because it was free and he had always wanted to travel.

  The train now seemed to be making heavy weather of the slope. Tall trees lined the route as the engine panted upwards and sent out great bursts of steam. The herons, standing to attention in the river, took no notice. Trains were now as familiar to them as fish.

  Opposite Wee Jimmy sat another young man in his mid-twenties with light brown hair and very delicate hands. Girls, he had observed, often looked at his hands as if they would like to take them off him. Charlie Flanagan, a Delaney on his mother’s side, was a carpenter by trade and he had spent the Atlantic crossing making a model of a ship from a piece of wood he had brought with him from his little workshop in Baltimore. He had worked right through the voyage, whittling away in a corner of the sun deck where he wouldn’t create any disturbance. After every session Charlie would tidy up his shavings neatly and place them carefully in the bin. As they travelled further and further east across the Atlantic, word spread among the passengers and crew that a beautiful model ship was being created on the vessel and people came to watch him work, some of them mesmerized by the flashing blade as he shaped his wood. Indeed, by the end, he had a commission from the captain himself, a handsome commission too, for another wooden model, to be delivered shortly after his return from Europe.

  Charlie came from a deeply religious family but his main motive for going on pilgrimage was to see some of the cathedrals and castles. Charlie would much rather have been an architect than a carpenter but he was one of ten brothers and sisters so there was little money.

  Next to Charlie on the bench was a slightly older man, a handsome man in his early thirties, clean-shaven with curly brown hair and dancing dark eyes that were almost black. Waldo Mulligan, who told Alex Bentley he was a Delaney on his mother’s side, worked for an important senator in Washington. For the last year and a half he had been conducting a passionate love affair with the wife of a colleague. He was trying to break it off. He was, he said ruefully to himself, trying to break his own heart. He had come on pilgrimage to beg forgiveness of his sins and the courage to start a new life without his darling.

  Slightly alone, towards the middle of the carriage, was the last member of the American Delaney party, another young man, Patrick MacLoughlin, twenty-two years old with small eyes and a small nose, from Boston. He was studying for the priesthood and had signed up because he was convinced that the faithful of today had much to learn from the faithful of centuries past. Indeed he planned to go on a whole series of pilgrimages before he was thirty to help him in his ministry. He was very excited about kneeling down and praying in front of one of Le Puy’s most famous objects, the Black Madonna in the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Patrick MacLoughlin looked forward to visiting religious relics in the same way other people might feel about going to major football matches or the Niagara Falls.

  And Michael Delaney himself? He was wearing one of his louder suits today, a bright green check with a cream silk shirt and a bright red cravat. He was still wearing the same broad-rimmed hat he had worn on the liner across the Atlantic that took them back to the Old World. They had stopped for a night and a day in Paris on the journey south and Delaney had been most impressed with the layout of the centre of the place, those great boulevards radiating outwards across the city like spokes in a wheel. Delaney took himself on a short guided tour, astonished when he learnt that the choices for the duration ranged between six and eight hours in a single day. ‘Take me round in three,’ he said to his guide, ‘and there’s a bonus if you can do it in two.’

  The Arc de Triomphe and the Champs-Élysées impressed him. The Louvre he found disappointing. Too many damned paintings in the place, he said to his guide. Why can’t they put all the finest stuff in a couple of rooms at the front so people can pick up the best bits? No point wandering through all those wretched rooms or saloons as he thought they were called. Americans are busy people. Put the best things at the front and the people would pass through quicker. Quicker visits, in Delaney’s view, could mean more visits. More visits would mean more money. Much better management all round. Notre Dame, he thought, wasn’t a patch on St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. Napoleon’s tomb impressed him, however. Anybody who could organize that many military campaigns would be certain to succeed in America. Not necessarily on Wall Street, with all those stocks and complicated bonds he felt the Corsican might not understand, but in any difficult business that needed proper organization, management by vertical integration. Oil, perhaps, coal, coke and steel, that would be thing. In a rare moment of fancy, Delaney could see himself, hand tucked inside his tunic in the best Imperial fashion, tricorne on his head, a faithful marshal or two by his side. Buonaparte Coke Works, he said to himself, Napoleon Steel, that would be a mighty fine name for a business.

  The town of Le Puy is one of the most extraordinary sites in France. Located in the bowl of a volcanic cone, three enormous outcrops of rock shoot up hundreds of feet above the ground and give the impression that they might actually lift off into the sky. On the smallest of these giant fingers is the complex of buildings around the cathedral and its cloisters; on another is the huge statue of Notre Dame de France, made from hundreds of cannon captured at Sebastopol in the Crimean War, an enormous reddish pink Virgin clutching an enormous reddish pink child, their colour matching the shade of the slate of the roofs of the town, towering up into the heavens. And the third is the Chapelle of St Michel d’Aiguilhe, an enormous needle of rock with a belfry at the top lifting it even higher towards God and his angels, over two hundred and fifty feet above ground level. Even
Michael Delaney was impressed. New York might have its tall buildings and the Statue of Liberty lording it over Ellis Island, but here they had three of the things, all occurring through the forces of nature rather than the energies of man. Alex Bentley thought they looked as if they might hurtle off into the skies, leaving Le Puy, the Auvergne and France far behind. Patrick MacLoughlin, the young man training for the priesthood, marvelled at God’s work, sent to impress the humble sinners here on earth.

  Their hotel, the St Jacques, was in the centre of the town. It boasted the heavy decorations of the Second Empire, with dark red paper on its walls and dark wooden banisters. The furniture was dark too, great armoires and secretaires and commodes cluttering up the public rooms. The bedrooms were dark, and the dining room, a vast area that could seat over a hundred and fifty gourmands at a sitting, was gloomy however many lights were turned on. You would never have thought that you were in the country that produced Versailles centuries before, with the light flooding in through those high elegant windows. The Hôtel St Jacques was where the respectable citizens of Le Puy would congregate for Sunday lunch, the doctors and the lawyers and the schoolteachers in their Sunday best, the wives showing off the latest fashions to arrive in the Auvergne, the children looking starched and polished in their frocks and sailor suits.

  As the pilgrims dispersed to their rooms to unpack, Bentley and Delaney found some more pilgrims who had arrived earlier that day sitting in the bar. These were the Irish pilgrims. Two older men of about forty were sharing a bottle of wine. They had discovered something in common on the boat from England. The balding man was Shane Delaney, a railway worker trained in Dublin but now with a different railway company in Swindon. His wife, Sinead, was suffering from a terminal disease. The doctors said she had less than two years to live. Shane was coming on the pilgrimage at her request. ‘I’m too ill to travel,’ she told her husband. ‘I’ve been to all the holy sites in Ireland and England now, so I have. I’d never get to that Lourdes place the priests all go on about, I’m too ill. I want you to go in my place, Shane. It’s as near as I’m going to get to going myself, don’t you see? Pray for me every step of the way now, pray that I may recover. Those doctors will never make me better, so they won’t. Only God can do that. So you pray for me and my immortal soul and don’t you go drinking too much of that French wine on the way. My sisters will look after me.’

  The case of Shane’s drinking companion, Willie John Delaney, was slightly different. He was short and single with a small beard and worked as a debt collector in north London. He was dying from an incurable disease. He had come to parley with God for his life.

  On the other side of the bar two young men were sitting at a table well stacked with empty beer bottles. Christopher, commonly known as Christy, Delaney came from Greystones in County Wicklow. He had bright blue eyes and a great shock of sandy hair. He looked absurdly young, much younger than his eighteen years. His parents were comfortably off and he was going up to Cambridge to read history in the autumn. He thought he could learn some French and see some of the great sites of France. His mother, a deeply religious woman, hoped that the pilgrimage would be good for her boy’s immortal soul. Already she had doubts about it.

  His companion was about twenty-five, slim and wiry, brown eyes darting round the room to take in the details of his surroundings. Jack O’Driscoll was a reporter on one of the Dublin newspapers. His editor had given him leave of absence because he thought the experience might broaden his outlook. This pilgrimage, the editor – a pious man in an impious profession – told him, should make him a better reporter. He also offered to take some articles about the journey for his paper. Jack O’Driscoll was one of those fortunate people who seem at home in any surroundings. Before they came to the bar, he pulled out a battered document from his waistcoat.

  ‘Chap on the paper gave me this,’ he said to Christy cheerfully. ‘He says it’s all you need to order a drink in France. It’s in a sort of pidgin French. Phonetics, I think they call it.’

  ‘Oon bee air,’ said Christy doubtfully. ‘Oon bee air?’

  ‘That’s a beer in French,’ said Jack. ‘You’ve got to run the words together, mind you. Hold up two fingers for two beers and so on.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ said Christy.

  ‘I am sure,’ said Jack. ‘If you want to impress them with your knowledge of the French language, this is what you say when you need a refill. On core oon bee air.’

  ‘On core oon bee air,’ Christy sounded more confident now. ‘How do you pay when you get to the end, if you follow me?’

  ‘Easy,’ said Jack, pointing to the last entry on the piece of paper. ‘Say “com bee yon?” You’ve got to put the question mark at the end of the “yon” now, or it won’t work.’

  Miraculously the O’Driscoll method of ordering beers worked well. Christy took the plunge and ordered rounds three, five and seven. They even ordered two more beers for Michael Delaney and Alex Bentley when they joined them and the introductions were made.

  The pilgrims dined well that evening in the Hôtel St Jacques. Alex promised them even better fare the following night when the chef was going to cook them an Auvergne meal with some of the specialities of the region. The next day the pilgrims were to inspect the town and generally make themselves at home in France. The last little band of pilgrims, the ones from England, were to arrive in the morning.

  The head waiter made his dispositions carefully the next evening. He sectioned off part of his dining room. The tables were reorganized so that one long table ran across in front of the kitchen entrance, flanked by two others. The tables were adorned with dark red candles and crisp white tablecloths and napkins. Three types of wine glasses were lined up to the side of each place setting. Bottles of white and red were placed at strategic intervals along the tables. Through a judicious use of sign language, acquired during his years of service with the French Army in North Africa, he managed to extract from Alex Bentley a seating plan for the occasion, name cards in Bentley’s immaculate copperplate adding formality to the scene.

  From his position at the centre of the top table Michael Delaney surveyed his flock shortly after half past seven. There was just one empty space, a pilgrim who had not arrived to take up his station, praying in the cathedral perhaps, or fallen asleep in his room. They were sampling, suspiciously at first and then with growing delight, the chef’s amuse-bouches, tiny tasters of croutons with a lemon and garlic flavour topped with small pieces of pickled vegetable or dried fish. On Delaney’s right sat Father Kennedy, Alex Bentley to his left. He observed that Alex had mixed up the Irish and the Americans but left the English sitting in a group. Delaney had met them all that morning.

  Sitting at the far end of the table to his left was a shifty-looking man of about thirty-five years with a small moustache and a greasy jacket. Girvan Connolly would have described himself as a merchant in his native quarters of north-west London. Others would have said he was something more than a stall-holder and something less than a shopkeeper. He dealt in things, pots and pans, wool, second-hand clothes, plates and knives and cups, buying them in bulk cheaply wherever he saw a bargain and trying to make a living off the profit. But business did not always go well for Girvan. Many of his suppliers had not been paid. Some of his customers found that the goods quite literally came apart in their hands. There were rumours that one or two of them were going to come and sort him out. In Kentish Town people knew what that meant. Free board and lodging for three months would be a godsend. So Connolly had pressed his remaining funds on his wife and fled. He doubted very much if his creditors would find him in Espalion or Figeac, Roncevalles or Burgos. He was on the run.

  The great doors behind Delaney opened at this point and three steaming silver tureens of soup were carried in proudly by the waiters. It smelt of the countryside, of little farms up in the hills, of vegetables ripening under the sun. Alex Bentley had translated the details of the menu from the head waiter. He informed the company that this wa
s known as Shepherd Soup. It had, he said, been cooked to this formula by shepherd mothers and shepherd wives for centuries up there in the vast desolate spaces of the Aubrac they would travel through in the coming days. From there it had passed into the culture of the wider Auvergne. The principal ingredients were the famous Le Puy lentils, flavoured with meat bones, carrots, turnips, swedes, local potatoes, a few chestnuts and whatever other delicacies the chef might have to hand. It went down very well with the dry white wine.

  Beside Connolly, Delaney watched a forty-year-old Christian Brother in his black gown begin the attack on the soup. Brother White, Brother James White, taught Religion at one of the leading Catholic schools for boys in England. He felt the call to pilgrimage, as he had felt the call to join the Brothers all those years before. He knew he could do no other. He persuaded his abbot to give him leave of absence.

  The waiters were clearing the empty plates now, filling up the glasses. Opposite Brother White was a prosperous gentleman of about fifty-five years, wearing a business suit with a flower in his buttonhole. He was quite short, and round, with a kindly face, looking as if he might be a sympathetic bank manager or a friendly headmaster. In fact, Stephen Lewis, a Delaney on his mother’s side, was the senior partner at Daniel and Lewis, the leading firm of solicitors in the little town of Frome in Somerset. His children were grown up. His wife was more interested in the garden than in routes of pilgrimage. Stephen Lewis had two reasons for coming on this journey. He had always been passionate about railway travel. He did not intend to dirty his expensive boots walking across the dusty roads of France and Spain. Bentley had fixed it so that he could travel most of the way by train, and they would, he knew, be different sorts of train. Stephen Lewis could have told you about the different gauges operating in the two countries, the different sorts of engines that would pull the passengers, the different bridges they would cross. He had the Baedeker Guide to European Train Travel by his bedside. Lewis’s second reason was much more irrational. He sold a lot of insurance policies in his office in Frome, looking out at the sluggish river and the dirty façade of the George Hotel where the stagecoach used to leave for London before the railways came. This pilgrimage was a form of insurance policy. It would, he felt, buy him a credit entry in God’s bank, a favourable note in the celestial account book that might mean that the days the Lord his God gave him here on earth would be long and healthy. Beside him was the empty seat, the name John Delaney standing out in Alex Bentley’s handwriting. The empty place troubled the pilgrims. It was as if there was a hole in the table, a gap left in a face where a malevolent tooth had just been extracted by the dentist.