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 Hotel 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 Hotel 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.