Death of a Pilgrim (7 page)

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 was 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.

Father Kennedy had enjoyed the soup. He took a second helping. He was fond of his food, Father Kennedy, punishing himself from time to time with days of fasting, but he never seemed to last out
the full week he had promised himself at the start. Now the doors into the kitchen were opening again. Great dishes of vegetables were being brought in and placed on the tables. Then the three
waiters reappeared, each bearing an enormous earthenware pot. Even with the lids firmly on, the smell began to percolate through the dining room. One pot was placed in the centre of each table and
the waiters whipped off the lids simultaneously. Steam now rose up to join the cooking aromas and the pilgrims peered forward to inspect the contents, a stew in a light brown sauce with all kinds
of appetizing things floating on the surface.

‘This’, Alex Bentley began, reading from a note in front of him, ‘is a delicacy of the region. Its name is
potée
or pork stew, and the original recipe comes from
a local poet. This’, he looked up brightly at his audience, ‘is what it says: “Take a cabbage, a large succulent cabbage, firm and close and not too damaged by frost, a knuckle of
pork with its bristle just singed, two lumps of pork fat, two good lumps, some fat and thin bacon on the turn but only just, turnips from the Planèze, Ussel or Lusclade.”’ The
waiters were ladling out great helpings of the stuff. The young man Christy Delaney thought the recipe sounded more practical than poetic. Shane Delaney thought, disloyally, that this looked far
better than anything his Sinead had ever produced in all their years of marriage. ‘“Add to the pot”’, Bentley went on, ‘“a well-stuffed cockerel or an old hen, a
knuckle of veal, a rib of beef. Put the meat in the pot, a goodly amount, don’t be afraid, add some water, not too much, and some red wine and stew gently over a wood fire for four to five
hours.”’

There was a brief ripple of applause and then the pilgrims fell to, comparing notes on the taste and taking comforting gulps of their wine. It was Jack O’Driscoll who first noticed that
something was wrong. He was sitting closest to the other set of doors that led out into the entrance foyer and he could hear raised voices. He thought one of them might belong to the hotel owner.
Whatever else he was doing, Jack reflected ruefully, he didn’t think the man was ordering a beer. Then the doors opened and the proprietor walked in, rather sheepishly. Nobody likes their
guests being disturbed in the middle of the finest meal in the hotel repertoire. But it was his companions, a large elderly Sergeant of Police and two constables, who caused the decibel level to
rise as the pilgrims gasped and asked each other what on earth was going on.