Vanished Years (18 page)

Melody directed the traffic. If anyone got too bouncy she slapped
them playfully or wagged a threatening finger. Hers was a kabuki performance, heightened, ridiculous, like everything on that loopy beach, and we all rose to the occasion. And so corks popped, the rosé flowed and the chatter merged with the music. Alfo had slanted green eyes and at some point we looked at one another and the sound cut out. He smiled and shrugged his shoulders. I could hear my heartbeat and nothing else. Then Melody dug me in the ribs with her elbow and the cacophony rushed back: plates, screams, disco music, and Tom, whispering in my ear in a funny American accent.

‘What’s hiding under Mummy’s bedspread?’

That night in town we all sat together on the pavement outside Maggy’s. They were surrounded by a crowd of admirers, and in a moment of desperation I invited them both to move in.

Alfo was simple but knowing, like all the best Italian dishes; a huge hairy bear with elegance and grace. He was funny and sincere, at home in the endless stream of people coming through the house. This first act of our affair was played against the backdrop of a Feydeau farce, on a stage full of surprise entrances and exits, of strangers bursting into rooms, and couples caught in flagrante by the parish priest. Doriano was decoyed by Huge Crack, my trainer from London who was staying that weekend, while I lured Alfo onto the rocks of my bungalow at the bottom of the garden, on the edge of the vines.

There was only one problem. We couldn’t understand a word the other was saying, and so our communication swung from the sureness of body language to a hesitant verbal contact that came and went in bursts, sometimes comical, at others a strain. We were crossed wires, worlds apart, but St Tropez was that kind of no man’s land, and reality was held at bay by the ropy curtains of the holiday package, like the sunshine, as we lay in bed all morning in my darkened room, sleeping or having sex or smoking. My nerve endings were still young enough to explode at a touch, and when he came near the hair on my arms reached out to meet him. I was in a state
of constant breathless anticipation, half ecstasy, half dread, like the expectant bride in the bible.

‘Widow, more like!’ said Tom grimly.

Luckily Bruno was half Italian. When we arrived at a linguistic impasse, lying in bed in the morning, or out at sea on the raft in the afternoon, we would seek him out. The high-pitched yelp of his laugh usually located him in Tom’s caravan. On the morning of his departure, Alfo began to talk earnestly. I didn’t understand a word, but said ‘
Si
’ and ‘
Certo
’ knowingly. It was only when he looked strangely pissed off that I decided to consult the oracle, and so we went in search of Bruno. We knocked on the door of the caravan. Silence. We knocked again. A creak. I opened the door. Inside Tom and Bruno were a frozen guilty tableau, sitting on the unmade bed in the little wooden recess at the end of the caravan. The smoke from an enormous joint was the only thing that moved in the room, curling around in the shafts of light that penetrated the gloom.

‘Hi,’ said Tom, vacantly.

Their affair was beginning to get on my nerves. There was room for only one grand passion in La Bande Rupert, but we climbed on to the bed with them anyway, folding ourselves protectively into one another, toes interlocking, and Bruno put his hair in a bun as he listened to Alfo explain. Bruno’s English, still in its early days, had been learnt from me and his vowel sounds were borrowed from the hooray vernacular, blending spectacularly with his impenetrable Alsatian lilt. Alfo finished and was silent. Bruno fixed a chopstick into his hair, frowning.

‘Ee sehs eetz finish aaahftah today,’ he said finally.

‘What?’

He repeated the phrase, slightly shriller.

Tom and I looked at one another. Bruno tried again.

‘Oh. I see,’ I said finally, taken aback. ‘May I ask why?’

‘
Perchè
?’

There was a long explanation. Tom sat very still, watching like a praying mantis, and I thought I was going to faint. Alfo talked earnestly at Bruno. Bruno yelped with glee.

‘Zees eez quoite eembarasseeng, ak-tuy-ah-lee!’ he giggled. ‘Ee say that euw is leevin’ toe faa anyway an’ eet weel never be geude.’

‘What?’ This time it was Tom.

‘Ohhhla!’ puffed Bruno, swaying his head from side to side, in that gesture of exasperation peculiar to the French. He rummaged around in his little school satchel and produced a small French–Italian dictionary. He threw it at us and stalked out. Tom followed.

We sat on either side of the bed. Alfo held his head in his hands. We were silent for a while in that rickety old wooden tomb. Dust played in the light, and someone giggled near by.

‘
Mi dispiace
,’ said Alfo finally, offering his hand across the bed, but I didn’t take it, because my eyes were filling up with tears and I needed to concentrate.

Was this real, or was I acting? Long ago I had stopped being able to tell the difference. That’s what a career in front of the camera does to you. There are only so many times a man can say I love you, and most actors have said it with the most sparkle to a camera rather than a camarade. On top of that I had made my whole life into a film, a drama in which I took the leading role, and the line between fantasy and reality was at best a smudge. Who knew what was going on in my head? Certainly not me.

Alfo sighed. He knew. There was no way he could compete with my plotting.

‘
Non piange, bello
.’ He sighed.

‘
Non
,’ I whispered, and on cue the tears rolled out of my eyes and onto my face. (Or at least one of them.) Alfo looked at me, half smiling, half groaning, and put his huge arm around my shoulder.

By the time we came out of the caravan, the whole household had congregated at the table outside the kitchen door to say goodbye to the two Italians. In front of them lay our kitchen garden. One tomato plant clung to its pole in a ring of parched lettuces. This vision was my very own circus. I had conjured it up myself. Gypsies, tramps and thieves sprawled across a table in front of a tumbledown house. An overweight Labrador and a scruffy little half-fox fighting in the dust,
a strong man leaning out of the door of a gypsy caravan, and, behind him in the shadows, the ventriloquist and the dummy, the Master of Ceremonies, Me. Now I would crack my whip and the pink elephants would lumber off. It was all too good to be true.

La Bande Rupert looked apprehensively at us as we emerged from the caravan. This love affair was everybody’s concern. It would make life much easier if it were kept on track. La Rupert could be a tricky number.

‘Well?’ said Tom.

‘Everything’s fine. In fact, Alfo’s coming back next weekend,’ I said as casually as I could.

And so the two boys of unimaginable beauty, one of them now mine, got into their car crammed with camping equipment, top-heavy with canoes, kissing, laughing and hugging, as the doors slammed and they clanked away down the steep dirt track towards Monte Carlo, Menton and the frontier. Huge muscular arms waved from either window, and we all waved back, unaware of the drama that was about to unfold.

A
nd so I was there but not there, wheeling Daddy towards a village church high up in the Pyrenees on the first morning of our pilgrimage. I hadn’t slept. I had spent the night excavating the ruins of that ancient affair I’d stumbled upon yesterday. How could I have forgotten that Alfo and me ended at Lourdes in a torchlight procession, snaking through the hills in a conga line of faith and ill health, praying desperately for redemption or a miracle cure. I had simply wiped it from my mind. Was this selective memory at play or the first notes of that Golden Oldie – Dementia? Either way, my poor brain screeched to a halt and must have sent a shock wave to the sludgy backwater where memories of failed romances were stored, because now all the summer hits and street corners of the affair, all its twists and turns, were being dragged from the shadows to the frontal lobe in 3D Technicolor and Sensurround, obliterating the Knights and Dames, my father, his nurse and even Lourdes itself, in waves of crystal-clear recollection.

*

Bartrès is a beautiful hamlet tucked into the hills a few miles outside Lourdes. When her family became too poor to look after her, Berna dette was sent there to live with some slightly wealthier relations. You could walk along the same footpath she took from the valley below and there was a mysterious silence hanging in the air. One half expected to see Bernadette herself – she was certainly there – but instead a pair of patrician English priests sauntered round the corner, arm in arm, engrossed in some urbane celestial debate that led us to the appointed place. Outside the church an eccentric crowd was gathered. Here, finally, were the people we had come to meet.

The Knights and Dames of Malta were busy with their sick: ‘
malades
’ they called them. At first I thought they were talking about ducks. They outnumbered their ‘
malades
’ three to one, and they buzzed around them like a swarm of killer bees. Even if these blue-blooded pilgrims weren’t particularly used to helping others, they had at least all mucked out stables at some point in their lives, so wiping bottoms was something they grimly accepted, not so different from curry-combing a favourite pony, but they were sweetly attentive, although possibly getting more out of the experience than the poor malade himself. The buzz of chatter reminded one of a cocktail party in Belgravia or a first night at Glyndebourne. The only things missing were nibbles and drinks laid out on the tombs.

The Knights are an extraordinary sect within the Catholic Church. They date back to the sixth century, when they built and ran a hospital in Jerusalem for sick pilgrims. Originally they were nurses, but they soon developed a militant side and became famous fighters, defending themselves to the death in Rhodes and later Malta, where they were besieged by the Spanish in Valletta. They are a very grand organisation, proud and rich. They will tell you how much money they raise each year for various causes, and it is a great deal, but as we know charity is often the net curtain behind which we conduct our real business. Theirs has always been the discreet acquisition of power, and within the Church, along with the Opus Dei, they are the ghoulish
éminences grises
of Christendom. You
must have at least four quarterings in your coat of arms to become a Knight, and if you want to be a ‘professed Knight’, an actual monk, you must submit yourself to poverty, chastity and obedience.

They are a sovereign state, and their ancient centre of operations, in the Eternal City, looks directly down a long vista at the shimmering Vatican. Their leader is traditionally one of the pope’s chief advisors, which gives one a little insight into how deeply out of touch the Catholic Church is with the unwashed world it still controls, because apart from being perfectly nice upper-class people – all of them charming, eccentric, humorous, the last generation of an extraordinary species, weaned on that curious mixture of rationing and opulence, of baked-bean suppers under a Van Dyck – they tend to see things through the blinkered perspective of all their tree-lined avenues, where the real world is glimpsed only through dilapidated park gates at one end, shut and padlocked, from an ancient palace window at the other.

The Knights and Dames were mostly older, although some were middle aged. They were dressed for the pilgrimage as if for charades, the men in black dungarees, extras from
Dad’s Army
, and the women in cloaks and starched headdresses. Every actor knows the power of dressing up. It is like putting on a mask. One loses oneself and can suddenly do all sorts of strange things. (Like wiping bottoms.) So the Knights and Dames were all feeling sexy and punch drunk at lunch in a marquee after Mass.

I parked my dad at a table with our lovely local vicar from Wiltshire, who, I decided, must have been a bit of a masochist, because being an Anglican vicar in this exclusive group of Catholic monseigneurs was similar to being a leading light of the village amateur dramatics society thrust suddenly into the Comédie Française. At communal services, he and the other Anglicans had to stand one step below the Catholic clergy. He never complained, he was ‘a very good man’ as my mother loved to say, and, unlike some of the others, had taken seriously the notion of humility.

A Dame my father adored, called Patricia, once a beauty and still
strikingly handsome, came over and sat down. A bishop ambled around filling glasses. Various other priests sipped their drinks and leant over the ‘
malades
’, beaming assurance and the wages of gin. All of London’s celebrity padres were there. Famous Father Ronald had arrived from Brompton Oratory, the only monastic order where a monk is encouraged to have a private income, and where, until recently, a butler served dinner every night. He had come by private jet ‘with darling Rupert Loewenstein’ (Mick Jagger’s former financial master wizard) and ‘was only staying a few days, before going on to a spa’.

Everyone was having a marvellous time. Maybe this was salvation after all, and heaven was nothing more than a giant flapping marquee in the sky. God ambling over, tipsy, slightly overweight, a bottle of red in one hand, white in the other, saying nothing complicated like, ‘I am who is,’ just ‘Aren’t we lucky with the weather? Chablis?’

I left them all talking and wandered around the tent, meeting people I had not seen for forty years. I found myself chatting to a man I had known in France, where, according to rumour, he had systematically pilfered the collection box of his local church. Now he drawled that he was taking orders and becoming a professed monk.

‘God, how will you manage, Kieran? You were always such a bon viveur.’ I was impressed, remembering him from the old days at the Club Sept.

‘Well, obedience and chastity are really not a problem. One hasn’t bonked for yonks. As for poverty, I’ve worked that one out too.’

‘Oh, how?’ I asked, intrigued.