After Purple (36 page)

I trailed back into bed, lay on my back and scrubbed at my sore red eyes. Just above me, on the wall, was the photo of St Bernadette. She'd been there all the time, but I'd been too involved to notice her. She wasn't frowning. She didn't look shocked or cross or even disappointed. In fact, she was smiling at me, a friendly, open, understanding sort of smile. I remembered the prodigal son, the bit in the gospels about all the angels of heaven rejoicing over one reformed sinner. I'd almost forgotten this was the church of sinners, the church of second chances, of forgiveness. Of
course
I could make my Communion. I'd just had a little relapse, that was all — been thrown by the shock of Lionel, tempted by a priest. Two seconds hardly counted anyway — it was too short to be a sin. After all, I was only a new Catholic, a babe in arms squealing from my baptism, still wet behind the ears. Babies had to
learn
. I
needed
my First Communion to make me stronger, help me grow up, turn me into a pro. Meantime, broken vows could always be renewed. Hell, it was almost easier to pledge myself to chastity after the farce of Ray. Who
wanted
sex in socks? Anyway, I knew I had to save myself for Leo. That's what God had been trying to tell me all along. All I had to do was wait for my miracle and then return to London and present it to a man who knew what to do with it.

I stood on the bed and unhooked the photo from its nail. I stared at the large brown eyes, the pale oval face with its heavy jaw and generous mouth, the tiny indentation above the upper lip, the bulky peasant clothes.

“Bernadette,” I whispered.

I laid her on the pillow, her face almost touching mine. Although she was poor, she had made her First Communion in a showy white dress and cape, like a richer child. Someone had lent them to her, pulled her out of her poverty to receive her pauper God. She would do the same for me, stuff the rags and tatters of my sin into my suitcase, and dress me as a shining virgin bride.

I shut my eyes and smiled. It was only four-and-a-half hours till Easter Mass.

The light woke me — the light of Easter morning, streaming in and turning the duvet golden. I bounced to the window and gazed out across the shining new-born world. The Pyrenees were shouting and soaring in a semicircle round the town, sun on their flanks, snow on their topknots, the first buds snapping open, a faint green glaze of life fringing the trees. The air was cold, clean, pure; the sky white and newly hoovered. I could almost
smell
the Resurrection, a scent of cows and almond blossom, fresh-ground coffee, rabbit stew, and the raw, randy tang of cut grass. Only the first week of April and they were already cutting grass! It made everything seem lush, fertile, ripe.

I turned back, stepped on a handkerchief, a grubby chequered one in blue and beige. Ray must have dropped it from his trouser pocket. It looked limp and knackered as he had. But that was last night, and since then, the whole world had resurrected.

Easter had always been important to the world. Even before the Christian Resurrection, the pagans had celebrated the return of light and spring, the death of dark and evil. In fact, Adrian had told me that the Christians simply pinched the pagan ceremonies, but gave them different meaning. Even the rituals were the same — symbolic light and cleansing fire. He'd written a paper on it once, about the god Adonis who died and rose again, and some bitch called Eostre who was the goddess of spring and gave her name to Easter. I'd hardly listened then, but now I could see those new-hatched deities sitting smiling on the mountain peaks, thawing the snow into white spring flowers, making all the centuries join hands, uniting all religions.

Ray would be changed this morning, transfigured, reordained. No more green nylon socks and semen-spotted denim, but sacred white petticoats to symbolise his rebirth as a priest.

I knew I had to match him. I opened my suitcase and took out a pair of dazzling white jeans which I'd washed three times in biological detergent and the frilly white shirt I'd borrowed from a shop. It was the nearest I could get to a dress and veil. This was my marriage to Christ, as well as my Communion day. I'd never had a proper wedding — not one with a showy gown and six tulle bridesmaids and a car with flowing ribbons. Adrian had insisted on Richmond Registry Office in a plain suit. I didn't even carry flowers. I suppose I could have clutched one of Adrian's famous potted primulas, but he hadn't offered me so much as a button-hole. (He was saving up for a second-hand set of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
.) The registrar was bald with a flat South London accent. When he said, “I pronounce you man and wife”, I was thinking of my father and how I might have strutted down the aisle clinging proudly to his arm. My mother would never have stood for it. Even without him there, she was wearing her most put-upon expression and the navy hat she reserved for funerals.

Today would be different. It had been raining at Richmond, whereas now the sun was shining. All the first shy mountain flowers were opening for me, the trees breaking into leaf. The Pyrenees were bridesmaids, the registrar was Ray. I was fusing Christian and pagan in one ceremony, marrying Christ on one level and Leo on another, uniting all my men. Leo, with his miracle, would be my dead and risen Adonis. Ray would set the seal on it by administering the sacrament. And even Adrian, with his plain suit and
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, could be regarded as a sort of official herald or precursor, like St John the Baptist.

I dressed myself solemnly, as if my clothes were vestments and the robing was a ritual. I left my sheepskin off — that belonged to yesterday, to sin and cold and winter. I brushed my hair a hundred times and wound a wide white ribbon in it. There was no mirror, but I knew already I looked beautiful.

I opened the door and fell over my breakfast tray. I was now so used to being hungry, I'd almost forgotten meals. I stared at the cup of already tepid coffee, the hunk of coarse greyish bread. There wasn't any butter, just a dab of orange jellyish stuff which looked like gum. I didn't want it, anyway. God was about to leap into my stomach — it would be sacrilege to mix Him up with cheap bread and jam. On the other hand, meals cost money, and with a dab of liver sausage or a sliver of cheese, breakfast could be transformed into lunch. I picked up the bread and the two crumbling sugar-lumps, wrapped them in a face-towel and hid them in my suitcase.

As I walked downstairs, the noise of a normal human morning grabbed me by the ears. Madame was quarrelling with another woman and their two shrill voices were rising higher and higher up the house; two of the children were wailing, and a man was shouting what sounded like Algerian obscenities. Various machines like hoovers and coffee-grinders filled in any gaps. I smiled at the happy family and stepped out on to the pavement. At street level, the sun; the spring and the mountains had all disappeared. I shivered. A cat with no tail was sitting in the gutter scratching, two little boys were raiding the dustbins, and a woman two floors up was stringing wet nappies across her balcony. I smiled at all of them. This was Easter, the day of universal brotherhood, of joy, of peace, of hope.

I turned the corner and started running towards the
Rue de la Grotte
which led down to the old bridge and then on further to the basilicas. I was late. Pax Pilgrims would already be sitting expectant in the church. It seemed a hundred years since I had seen them. If you don't live with your family, you soon lose touch. They'd have their own cosy little notice-boards posted in the two hotels, their representatives, their couriers, their nightly cocoa parties. I was just a step-child once again.

The town was crowded, the souvenir shops already open, despite the holy day. Soon I was tangled in a mass of pilgrims, some storming the counters, others making for the Grotto. Nobody else wore white. The colours were predominantly sombre — men in stern grey suits, peasant women dressed all in black except for their ashen faces, navy-blue nurses, sin-black nuns, married couples beige all over. Even the streets were grey, the bridge, the walls, the water. Yet the whole rejuvenated world should have been clad in white, or daubed with singing colour.

The crowds and I surged across the street, through the great gates of St Joseph, and down the slope to the underground basilica. It looked different in the light — heavy, grey again, crouching almost sullen and oppressive, its huge concrete ribs no longer soaring, but pressing down, down, on all the heads. I felt dwarfed as I entered it, lost and insignificant. There was so many throngs of people crowded in the nave and jostling all the entrances, it was impossible to find the English group, let alone Pax Pilgrims. I inched down the ramp into the body of the church and squeezed myself on to an empty scrap of bench at the end of a pew. The fat woman next to me shifted and grumbled a bit, otherwise no one seemed to notice me. I was a refugee here, with no family, no nation. The service had already started, but I had no idea what was happening. It seemed nothing like the Masses we had had at school. The priest was speaking a language I had never heard before. I was further away from the altar than I had been yesterday, so all the priests looked smaller and somehow less impressive. They seemed to be short of vestments. I had imagined all two hundred dressed in richly embroidered gold and silver chasubles, but half of them wore dingy white nightshirts with their grey or navy turn-ups showing underneath. I couldn't spot Ray immediately, but I was almost relieved by that. After last night, it was probably less embarrassing to leave him as a blur.

There was still no colour in the place — apart from the flags of the different nations grouped around the altar. The nations themselves were dressed in mourning. I had pictured the church piled high with Easter flowers, their scent choking through the nave, blending with the incense, but there were only five sparse lilies standing stiffly in a vase. Five lilies for twenty thousand people. I'd be lucky if I got a stamen.

Suddenly, the organ pealed out, and the chief celebrant lifted up his hands to heaven and thundered forth ‘
Credo in Unum Deum
'. The entire congregation rose to its feet and joined in. Awe and excitement pierced me like silver arrows as the great bellow of sound hurled itself up to God. Now, at last, I knew where we were up to — the Creed — that great love song to the Catholic faith.
Credo
is my favourite word.
I believe
. I yearned to believe in everything, not only in the mysteries and marvels the congregation were crooning (the Holy Ghost, the remission of sin, the resurrection of the dead), but also in peace, in joy, in sons, in fathers, in Leo's miracle and Ray's spring-clean.

It was almost an anti-climax to sit down again and listen to some long, fidgety sermon in a foreign language. I knew I should be concentrating, preparing myself for First Communion, but somehow, when the dramatic bits were over, I kept getting distracted by the crowds. I consoled myself by the thought that the First Communicants at school had also been inattentive.

Sometimes they got so nervous before the ceremony, they even wet themselves and had to change their dresses. I was always jealous of those dresses, the snowy frills, the petticoats, the wreaths of roses on their heads, the tiny golden crosses. Every year I knelt there, sick with envy, watching the new batch of seven-year-olds flow up to the altar-rails, tip back their heads, join their hands. The priest would approach with golden vestments, blazing eyes, the soft-lipped organ throbbing out the
Pange Lingua
, the nuns exultant. Seven-year-olds! I'd been fifteen, for heaven's sake, and still banned from that table.

Not now. The ban was lifted now and, any moment, I would receive the sacred host from Ray's own hands. The only problem was I still hadn't spotted him. True, I was some distance from the altar and there were even more priests than yesterday — all of them looking more or less the same — but even so, flame-red hair is difficult to hide. I counted thirty-three fair heads, eighty grey or thinning, and every variety of brown from mouse to burnt almond. Nothing carrotty. Next I tried the footwear. In all those rows and rows of shiny black toecaps, moccasins or sneakers would shout out loud, even at that distance. The only unconventional shoes I saw were a pair of ox-blood slip-ons, but they belonged to a six-foot-six Nigerian. There was one small priest who had the same build as Ray, and even wore dirty shoes, but when I looked higher, he was completely shiny bald. It struck me for a second that Ray might perhaps have shaved off all his hair as a penance for the sex, but then I realised he wasn't wearing spectacles. Even Ray wouldn't renounce his glasses as a second penance. He was so short-sighted, he'd have bumped into the altar.

So he wasn't there; wasn't redeemed, reborn, and dressed in shining white. Maybe he was still slumped on his bed in dirty denims, sleeping off the brandy. No, Mary-Lou would have brought him Alka-Seltzer and no one could have slept through early morning with Cammie's “greats!” and all the jokes and clatter of the boys. Something else had happened —something worse. He was in mortal sin and all two hundred priests had refused him absolution. Franciscans' sins were probably trickier to forgive than mine. He'd told me, once, St Francis had rolled in the snow to cool his lust, and that was merely for
thinking
of a woman. Perhaps Ray had been banished to the highest snow-capped peak of the Pyrenees to shiver away his lechery. I felt a tiny plume of pride. My body had the power to banish a priest, to bar him from the Communion table, to send him like the Emperor to Canossa. I was truly Eve — the first woman, the first sinner, but also the mother of the human race. Eve was in every art gallery in the world. Leo even had a picture of her in his lavatory, a pale deep-breasted hussy with the serpent in her hair. Christ had
died
for Eve.

All the same, I wished Ray would return. His absence was a deep sharp nagging pain underneath my ribs. He might still come in, of course — late or sick or flinching pale from his confession. He
had
to. For three long months I'd planned to receive Communion from his hands. No other priest would do. He was my private confessor, my book-skipper, my dental nurse, my Adam.