David Dickinson: Death of a Pilgrim

From the start Alex Bentley regarded the whole thing as an improbable joke. He thought they might get as far as France, but he doubted if this strange collection of Delaneys who passed through his basement office in the Delaney mansion on missions of inspection and research would ever get to the Spanish border, never mind the final promontory beyond Santiago that rejoiced in the name of Finis Terre, the end of the world. But he persisted. He wrote to Irish Delaneys in Donegal and Ballyhaunis, in Macroom and Mullingar, in Westport and Wicklow and Waterford. Across the Irish Sea he wrote to Delaneys in Hammersmith and Kentish Town, in Birmingham and Liverpool. Across the Atlantic he wrote to more of the clan scattered across the eastern seaboard and the Midwest of America. On the wall opposite his desk in the basement Alex Bentley constructed a family tree of Delaneys that grew at the rate of four or five entries a week, each one carefully inscribed in Bentley’s immaculate copperplate. Next to the family tree was his pride and joy. This was a map of the route of the pilgrimage that snaked out from just below the high window, worked its way in a wiggly line down the wall, then turned right once you crossed the Pyrenees by the edge of the carpet and carried on to Santiago. Le Puy-en-Velay, La Roche, Aumont-Aubrac, Espalion. You could, Alex Bentley thought, almost hear the rivers gurgling the sounds of the names, the Lot, the Truyere, the Dourdou, the Cele. Estaing, Espeyrac. Conques, Figeac. Symbols were added to the route as he completed his preparations on every stop of the journey, little signs for hotels, signs for railways, signs for places with acceptable roads. Limogne-en-Quercy, Cajarc, Montcuq, Cahors, Moissac. Names were added to the map as it travelled beneath the window towards the Pyrenees, names of priests and abbots and mayors in all the little towns they would pass through. St-Martin-d’Armagnac, St-Jean-Pied-de-Port, Roncesvalles, Pamplona, Burgos.

The little train, its three carriages full of French and Americans, pulled slowly out of the station in the town of St-Etienne in southern France and began the long climb up into the hills. In the front of the first carriage sat Michael Delaney and his party, on the last leg of their journey towards the starting point of their pilgrimage, Le Puy-en-Velay in the Auvergne. Alex Bentley was very excited, peering out of the window at the rivers and forests they were travelling past. This, for him, was the culmination of months of planning, finding as many Delaneys as he could in Ireland, England and the United States, trying to establish that these were genuine Delaneys, not some freebooters come to scrounge a holiday in Europe at his employer’s expense, inviting them, if suitable, to join the pilgrimage. Now he was coming to see the fruits of his labour.

One grave doubt about his own position was gnawing away all the time in a corner of his mind. He couldn’t understand much of the spoken French. He could read the newspapers. He could understand the great advertisements plastered along the sides of the boulevards. But when they spoke to him, these living Frenchmen, he grasped very little. If he was honest with himself, he knew he could latch on to the occasional word or phrase but complete sentences eluded him. They sped past him like an express train, a torrent he could not, for the moment, comprehend. They could have been speaking Hottentot to him, or Ancient Greek. Alex Bentley’s grandmother, who had taught him French, had died when he was only six years old. His mother had always spoken to him in English. The knowledge seemed to have vanished from his mind, as if a conjuror had spirited it away. For most of his expensive education in French literature and culture he had been concerned with the words of dead Frenchmen. Alex Bentley could remember huge chunks of Baudelaire and Rimbaud. He could read Flaubert and Stendhal, Balzac or Zola as easily as he read the baseball scores. He could have written leaders about the Dreyfus Case for Le Monde or elegant diplomatic memoranda for the French Foreign Office in the Quai d’Orsay. But at one of the greatest universities in America he had spoken no French at all. He had written his essays in English. His lectures were in English. The professors spoke to him about French literature and its glories in English. But when the taxi drivers or the hotel porters of Paris spoke to him in French, he could only guess at what they were saying. He wondered if he should tell Michael Delaney.

Father Kennedy had endured an unhappy crossing of the Atlantic. Even though the great liner they sailed on from New York to Le Havre did not give them a particularly rough passage, the Father was seasick all the way. At first he consoled himself with the thought that it would pass, that after a day or so the illness would abate, and that he would be able to walk the decks like the other passengers and gaze at the vast mystery of the ocean. He dimly remembered reading a book about Nelson which reported that the great Admiral himself suffered from mal de mer , as the French doctor on board called it, for the first few days as he sailed off from Portsmouth or Plymouth to wage war in Egypt or the West Indies. But then, for Nelson, it passed. For Father Kennedy, it did not pass. He had consulted his small travelling library of religious books but could not find what he sought. There appeared to be no patron saint of seasickness to whom he should address his prayers. The liner’s library did not help either. It contained no religious volumes at all. So he spent virtually the entire crossing lying on his bunk, trying not to move.

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.