Metz and I hit the bridge and the signs of a city become apparent. The railway lines bunch and rattle the bike so my arms are made numb. A man signals for me to turn and I pass by lines of housing on my left, a high brick wall of what I imagine is a prison on my right. I think decisively that I will not be able to finish the stage. That I should crawl against the stone and sit resting my head and let Bruce and Ernie pick me up out of the grass. I coast. I remember the stories of men in the early years being dragged by wire, a length of it tied securely to the rear of their support vehicle, a cork at the other end on which they bit with their teeth. I imagine the same and let myself be pulled by the idea of it, the rubber-like wood. I bite the cork and head on to a new river’s edge. In the end I am the final shadow to see the sight of it, the glow of Saint-Étienne de Metz high above the river. The afternoon is full of dark clouds, but the windows are bright with the gigantic glow coming from inside the cathedral. A grand throb of light held in the globe of an ancient chapel. Behold this thing. Do not step back. I spit the cork; all symbol tastes sour at such a sight. I wonder if Louvière has seen this. I’ll ask him in my dreams what he said to himself at the sight of it.
Harry and Oppy take me from my bike whilst I am still pedalling. I know I am crying. I know that all about me men cry. I take on water but throw it up. They hold me up at control and I sign at my name. I write, ‘This Man Died Three Hours Ago.’ The officials don’t blink at the extra syllables.
I sit with the boys at the side of the courtyard where we have gathered. There I open my musette and pull out what food I haven’t consumed on the road. I find a raw egg still in one piece, I crack it and swallow the contents. One gulp. I slowly come back as water is put into my system. I hear how Opperman punctured once, Osborne twice, each waited for the other in the verges as the sun grew larger. How they lost two minutes at the gates of a railway crossing closed against them. They rode together over the finishing line with their arms locked: 19th, 20th. Hubert is now in 17th in General Classification, a slip by one place. What could have been if he’d some real riders, not us sick men in need of sleep, water, food, bed and home, in need of him to drag us to the end. To think of this is to think of other worlds.
I hear Frantz was penalised for interference, but still he held on to win the stage. He and Leducq scrapping it out. It’s another race they ride. I’ve seen a photo of the two of them from last year. Their arms around each other as they ride, great smiles, great friends by the look. But I know this is not true, can’t be true.
I drink wine in the evening. I lie on a bench and listen to Oppy. He is one full of facts and he gives a new one each day for my book of wonders. This is the town from which Gregorian chants arose, where voices found their invention in the back of monks’ throats. He has a slight look of joy when he offers these morsels up, as if in each word he gains karma and deeper worth, and I don’t doubt it. At each new town his fight to keep alive in this race is celebrated, the number of lips that have grazed his cheeks are uncountable. I ask him what they sound like, these chants. He shrugs for me. Gives a full French shrug with his bottom lip protruding and Percy puts his arm around his shoulders. It is a quiet evening, one of candles and half-light.
Tomorrow is a short run to Charleville, a distance of 86 miles. We will be riding out at 10am. An easier day by some kind of measurement and I’m not concerned for my late night wandering. I walk back to where the racing was completed and soon find the street lit up enough that I know the direction I must follow. I find myself walking towards the great lantern above the waters’ run. I come closer and the building seems to grow, to loom as if the walls of a sheer valley carved by glacier and time. From this angle it seems the church is built on top of the five-storeyed buildings I can see beneath. I walk slowly then feel myself rushing uphill; I fear the cathedral is about to shut out its lights and close its doors. I can hear singing, the shuddering harmony of a massed choir. It diminishes and rises up. It seems to float, so much glass lifting it, and it seems floating in the air out over the river. Each wall constructed by the spectral array of stained-glass windows spilling out the light of how many thousand candles. I try to hurry as I come to the lane that puts you at its doors.
I run my hand along the surface of the exterior of stone, almost a millennium since it was put down here, a thousand years after the man it honours walked about the desert land of Palestine and Judea. I have no concept of history, I have no means to consider its depth. Nothing this old touches the earth in our land, nothing we have made. Only mountains and trees reach this far back, and even those we have turned into other things, ships to take us away from the island, buildings to lift us up. No man had set foot on our shores when this was put in place. This stone upon stone. I touch the doors, I enter the cathedral.
Hundreds standing in the mass. Somehow I have no problem hearing the words coming from the far end at the apse. I look up in the nave and feel a giddy rush. The roof is impossibly high. I walk softly to the aisle on the gospel side where the congregation is sparse, I have my hands out, feeling for the pews. I sit as the congregation sits in a rumble of shifting wood and shoes.
I watch proceedings, the priests at the front distributing incense and the smell of it is quickly everywhere and I wonder where it originally came from, what part of the world gifted that particular technology to this ritual. The liturgy begins, the tone of rich words so many times spoken. No one looks around, all eyes to the front, though some seem not to focus, faces limp, others smiling and others still frowning, the deep lines of concentration, the moods of many as we heed the word.
There, off to the side, are the robed figures; I’m guessing the descendants of Oppy’s chanting monks. They blend in here, seem quite a fixture as if statues or carvings in wood. Each face hidden behind the shadow of their hoods. Gradually I realise you don’t look for faces, for eyes and features; you take them as a whole, as another mass within the mass. Sacraments themselves. They are the low hum in response to the presiding priest’s recitation.
I listen and understand nothing. But my ignorance is trivial and extraneous, as if the invisible thing of a child’s complaint. It’s the fact the words are said. It’s not the words so much; it’s the extraordinary fact they are spoken at this moment, at this time, in this place alongside this carving under these windows in this light. This physical instant. Latin, Greek, French, rhythm and the stage. Here’s the blood, here’s the bread. I sit through the moments when the congregation are seated, I arise when they get to their feet. The choir stands and they open their mouths in harmony. Colossal, massed. There are boys singing in robes. The whole building rumbles with the sound. Nothing separates me from the voices, certainly not comprehension, that is the last thing I need to be concerned about. It is in this moment, this physical moment, that these words come the nearest they will ever be to having a relationship with the hard edge of physics. That is the effect. Germ-like, hopping from breath to mouth, breath to mouth. All a remedy for miles, for the invisible miles and the distances we make.
Don’t believe everything you think.
The singing gathers once more, a swelling that reaches around you, holds the small elements of yourself in the whole of the cathedral. This is the sound of hope on a scale that lurks over mountains and divides seas. The things of religion: they are the relics of the great lost love story. Hope and song and the nearness of dreams. Everyone here is hope, hope surrounded by hope. The song of a thousand-strong voices willed by the promise of victuals and drink, by the collapse of the chasm over which faith makes its bounds. Somewhere within it I hear a voice. A note whose timbre sits alone above or below, or beside the rest. I look around for a mouth, the face emptying out this familiar tone. It is so close, I look down rows, I peer over heads, over families, over young men separated from the young women and children dressed so fine. I see two riders from the Tour, I see five more and I put up my hand to wave, though I don’t wave. Faces flicker in the candlelight, men holding on to notes they can’t hear but for the mass they are within. Then something, something else. An ear, a neck, a shoulder. I hear a voice apart from the others, a breach in the side of all this sound. Slowly she turns, a book of hymns in her hands, her mouth open so I can see it is her breaking the song.
Through the last three days I have ridden without white pills, the cocaine, without the help of the ephedrine, and my body has felt the weight of itself, the weight of its damage. My knees are weakened, the muscle weary and (as we keep saying) eaten at by our inability to make them anew. Tendons seem to sag and ache. I drink constantly to rehydrate but it seems to have no effect; the weakness expands. Celia has me lie on the bed. I do not remember how we made our way here, though I recall voices. She certainly would’ve needed help: if I did not walk, she did not carry me. I have not mentioned her size. But she is small. For her to have carried me she’d have to be part monster.
We eat slowly a meal of fruit and nuts and berries. She orders a salmon and it arrives under a silver dome.
I can’t decide to ask her whether she has ever been to Algiers, or whether it was a kind of lie to make me love harder.
We speak, I’m talking. I say to her: ‘At a dance. 1919, I think.’
‘You think?’
‘I believe so. No. ’18. It was 1918.’
‘She’s your wife.’
‘She’s my wife.’
‘A dance, where?’
‘Out of the town, on the coast in a little town hall. My younger brother took me there.’
‘Little brother. How old?’
‘He sat me in the shadows and I was bleeding. Had been bleeding.’
‘Show me where –’ She puts her hand on my face.
‘An hour before he collected me from the pub where I was fighting. Outside, I was fighting. He collected me and took me home and had me bathe and change into a suit and he took me there. He must have been 16. I didn’t speak, I didn’t know how to speak, not yet. Speech was cold and not moving my mouth. Katherine was there. I saw her in the light of the dance hall and the band played and she walked around in her dress, the pleats made it seem she was walking on air, which I guess is the desired effect. I can’t say.
‘It was winter so the only thing keeping us warm in that hall was bodies, a hundred or so bodies in this little wooden hall with a band with a violin, a piano, a banjo, and boy with a drum and some brushes. My brother went to her first. He asked if she would dance with me. What a thing for a little brother to do. He was covered in spots, the kind that later make your face hard when the sores empty out and scar. She was sitting, I remember that. Perhaps it was out of sympathy but she agreed, I can’t say why, but he took her hand and she stood up and put her arm under his elbow and he walked her over to me. She took my hands and asked me if I would like to dance. Which I know is forward, which I know should not have happened, but she did it and we danced slow in the hall. That was the first time I met her. She let me cry in her hair. Or maybe that was the next time. Maybe that was in 1919, when I saw her next.
‘My brother took me home and that night I saw Marya walking in the hall, she went into the kitchen and came out again. She seemed quite awake and I tried to talk to her, but she gave nothing in reply. She was quite oblivious to my presence. Some days I want to go to her and stand with her, but that can’t happen anymore.’
‘Come back to England with me, when this is done,’ she says and lies back again. ‘Come back and stay for a while.’
‘You’re from England then,’ I say.
‘Thereabouts. When did you get married?’ Celia asks, and rolls so she is facing me. She’s been on her back and and I liked talking with her in that position; lying supine together seems to be the place from which stories come.
‘It was later. First the war ended. I heard it on the wireless. Dad and Mother and the rest of the family were in Wellington at my uncle’s house. They were there for two weeks and I walked the house alone for hours at a time. I would walk from the lounge to the dining room. From the kitchen to the lounge to the parlour, from the dining room to Marya’s room. From my room to my parents’. From the kitchen to the parlour. From the parlour to Marya’s room. From Marya’s room to my room. I made sure I covered every variation I could. It was how I passed the days. I listened to the wireless at noon until dusk as I walked, the volume dialled full in the dining room where the radio sat. Each day I made the journey about the house, making the exploration complete. I’d listen to the reports from Europe, the day-old news. I’d listen to the predicted dates of return for the infantry. I waited on those days. On the particular invasion of the town by the town’s very inhabitants who had been gone for all those months and years. I waited for men like me to return.’
‘Where was Katherine?’
‘I have no idea. Somewhere at her parents’ house I believe. We didn’t see her again until March, she wasn’t in my mind, maybe my brother’s, not mine, not yet. I was waiting on the end of the town’s empty years, that’s how it felt during those months since I had come home from Scotland. Empty and waiting. Waiting for empty men like me. My family returned and they were cautious around me. I felt it. The end had come and they were cautious around me. Finally the first men returned and I went to the train station to watch them come off the rail. Men like me. I drank with them when they arrived. Men like me. I fought with them. I hugged them, we drank all the beer in the White Hart there was to drink. I stood on the upstairs balcony and swayed with men still with their sea legs making them unsteady. Men full of illness from the front. From the ships. A lot of the men were sick, but what was I to care? I embraced them. We poured beer on one another, we danced to invisible music running through the crowd. If we sang, I recall no tune. It was summer then, and everything spread like a fire in scrub.’
‘And that, that was how Marya, that was how she died? The flu?’
‘Aha. That’s how she died. Or, close enough. Irresponsibility and idiocy. Two things, they always play their part. My family had returned. I came home from the White Hart and I must have stunk but I came home and I walked about the house. I started walking like I did. I was tracing my steps from the kitchen to the parlour and that’s when I saw her. She was standing in the middle of the hall looking I don’t quite know where. I went to her and stood in front of her. I watched her and put out my hand and she took it. I moved close to her and I put my arms around her and held her. It must have been for a full two minutes. I held her. I whispered in her ear and she whispered back. She opened her eyes. She was the only one. The only one I came close to killing in that whole war. They call it the Spanish flu, but really, it must have been born out here, somewhere out here.’
‘And she screamed?’
‘She screamed,’ I say. ‘She screamed and God, if the house didn’t wake up.’