by David Lodge
I took Grahame upstairs and gave him a cup of tea. “You’re going to have to find another place, Grahame,” I said. “I can’t protect you any longer. I’m going abroad, probably for a few weeks.”
He looked at me slyly from under his lank forelock. “Let me stay ’ere,” he said. “I’ll look after the place for you while you’re away. Like a caretaker.”
I laughed at his cheek. “It doesn’t need a caretaker.”
“You’re wrong,” he said. “There’s all sorts of villains round ’ere. You might be burgled while you’re away.”
“I wasn’t burgled before, when the flat was empty most of the time.”
“I don’t mean live ’ere,” Grahame said, “just sleep. On the floor – not in your bed. I’d keep the place nice and clean.” He looked around. “Sight cleaner ’n it is now.”
“I expect you would, Grahame,” I said. “Thanks, but no thanks.”
He sighed and shook his head. “I just hope you don’t regret it,” he said.
“Well,” I said, “if the worst comes to the worst – I’m insured.”
I saw him out of the building. A light drizzle was falling. I felt a bit of a heel as he turned up his collar and shouldered his bedroll – but what could I do? I’d be crazy to give him the key to my flat. I might come back and find he’d turned it into a dosshouse for philosophical vagrants like himself. I thrust a couple of notes into his hand, and told him to get himself a room for the night. “Ta,” he said, and sloped off into the warm wet night. I never met anybody who could accept favours with such nonchalance. I have a feeling I shan’t see him again.
Thursday 17th June. I didn’t get away as soon as I had planned. Shorthouse phoned me to say that he would feel happier if I waited a few days while he sorted out the details of a settlement with the other side. So I’ve hung about impatiently this week, filling in the time by reading everything I could find in the Charing Cross Road bookshops about the pilgrimage to Santiago. I went up to Rummidge this morning to sign the papers, and came back by the next train. This evening, as I was packing, I got an unexpected call from Sally. It was the first time we had spoken for weeks. “I just wanted to say,” she said, in a carefully neutral tone of voice, “that I think you’ve been very generous.” “That’s alright,” I said. “I’m sorry it’s been such an unpleasant business,” she said, “I’m afraid I was partly to blame.” “Yes, well, these things are always painful,” I said, “it doesn’t bring out the best in people, divorce.” “Well, I just wanted to say thankyou,” said Sally, and rang off. I felt rather uneasy, speaking to her. Knowing my mind as I do, it wouldn’t take much to make me start regretting my decision. I want to be out of here, away from it all, on the road. I’m off tomorrow morning. Santiago, here I come.
SEPTEMBER 21ST. I’VE come to the conclusion that the essential difference between book-writing and script-writing isn’t that the latter is mostly dialogue – it’s a question of tense. A script is all in the present tense. Not literally, but ontologically. (How about that, then? Comes of reading all those books about Kierkegaard.) What I mean is, in drama or film, everything is happening now. That’s why stage directions are always in the present tense. Even when one character is telling another character about something that happened in the past, the telling is happening in the present, as far as the audience is concerned. Whereas, when you write something in a book, it all belongs to the past; even if you write, “I am writing, I am writing,” over and over again, the act of writing is finished with, out of sight, by the time somebody reads the result.
A journal is halfway between the two forms. It’s like talking silently to yourself. It’s a mixture of monologue and autobiography. You can write a lot of stuff in the present tense, like: “The plane trees outside my window are in leaf …” But really that’s just a fancier way of saying, “I am writing, I am writing …” It’s not getting you anywhere, it’s not telling a story. As soon as you start to tell a story in writing, whether it’s a fictional story or the story of your life, it’s natural to use the past tense, because you’re describing things that have already happened. The special thing about a journal is that the writer doesn’t know where his story is going, he doesn’t know how it ends; so it seems to exist in a kind of continuous present, even though the individual incidents may be described in the past tense. Novels are written after the fact, or they pretend to be. The novelist may not have known how his story would end when he began it, but it always looks if he did to the reader. The past tense of the opening sentence implies that the story about to be told has already happened. I know that there are novels written entirely in the present tense, but there’s something queer about them, they’re experimental, the present tense doesn’t seem natural to the medium. They read like scripts. A present-tense autobiography would be even queerer. Autobiography is always written after the fact. It’s a past-tense form. Like my memoir of Maureen. Like this piece I’ve just finished writing.
I kept a journal of sorts on my travels, but my laptop packed up in the mountains of León, and I didn’t have the time or opportunity to get it repaired, so I started keeping a handwritten diary. I’ve printed out my disks, and laboriously typed up the diary, but put together they made a very rough and rambling account of what happened to me. Conditions often weren’t ideal for writing, and sometimes at the end of the day I was too tired or had imbibed too much vino to do more than make a few allusive notes. So I’ve written it out in a more coherent, cohesive narrative, knowing, so to speak, how the story ended. For I do feel I’ve reached the end of something. And, hopefully, a new beginning.
I drove from London to St-Jean-Pied-de-Port in two days. No sweat. The only problem was holding the Richmobile under the speed limit on the autoroute. The cruise control came in handy. So did the air-conditioning – the road was shimmering in the heat on the flat marshlands south of Bordeaux. When I climbed into the foothills of the Pyrenees the weather turned cooler, and it was raining when I reached St Jean Pied-de-Port (St John at the Foot of the Pass). It’s a pleasant little market-cum-resort town of red gabled roofs and rushing brooks, nestling in a lumpy patchwork quilt of fields in various shades of green. There’s a hotel with a restaurant that has two Michelin rosettes where I was lucky enough to get a room. I was told that a little later in the season I wouldn’t have stood a chance without a reservation. There were already lots of hairy-kneed walkers in the town, wandering about disconsolately in wet cagoules, or mellowing out in the cafés while they waited for the weather to improve. You could tell which ones were pilgrims on their way to Santiago because they had scallop shells attached to their rucksacks.
The scallop shell, or coquille (hence, coquilles St Jaques, which they did extremely well at my hotel) is the traditional symbol of the pilgrimage to Santiago, for reasons that, like most things associated with this saint, remain obscure. One legend has it that a man rescued from drowning by St James’s intervention was dragged from the sea covered in scallop shells. More probably it was just a brilliant piece of mediaeval marketing: pilgrims returning from Santiago wanted souvenirs, and scallop shells were plentiful on the shores of Galicia. They were a nice little earner for the city, especially as the Archbishop of Santiago was empowered to excommunicate anybody who sold them to pilgrims outside it. Nowadays, though, pilgrims wear the coquille their way to Santiago as well as on the way home.
I was surprised by how many of them there were, even in St Jean Pied-de-Port. I had imagined Maureen as a solitary eccentric, retracing an ancient trail forgotten by the modern world. Not so. The pilgrimage has enjoyed a big revival lately, encouraged by a powerful consortium of interests: the Catholic Church, the Spanish Tourist Board and the Council of Europe, which adopted the Camino de Santiago as a European Heritage Trail a few years ago. Tens of thousands hit the road every summer, following the blue and yellow coquille erected by the Council of Europe. I met a German couple in a bar one evening who had walked all the way from Arles, the most southerly of the four traditi
onal routes. They had a sort of passport issued by some society of St James which they’d had stamped at various stopping-points along the route. When they got to Santiago, they told me, they would present their passports at the Cathedral and receive their “compostelas”, certificates of completion like the pilgrims of old used to get. I wondered whether Maureen had obtained such a passport. If so, it might help me to trace her. The Germans directed me to the local passport-stamper, advising me not to arrive outside her house by car. Genuine pilgrims must walk, or cycle, or ride horseback.
I walked up the narrow cobbled hill to the house, but I didn’t pretend to be a pilgrim. Instead I pretended (in a mixture of pidgin English, fractured French and sign-language) to be Bede Harrington, trying to trace his wife who was urgently required back at in England. A lady who was a dead ringer for Mary Whitehouse opened the door, frowning as if she was fit to kill another pilgrim knocking on her door late in the evening, but when I told my story she became interested and co-operative. To my delight she had stamped Maureen’s passport and remembered her well: “une femme très gentille”, but suffering from badly blistered feet. I asked her where she thought Maureen might have got to by now, and she frowned and shrugged, “Ça dépend …” It depended, obviously, on how many kilometres Maureen could walk per day. It’s about 800 kilometres from St Jean Pied-de-Port to Santiago. A young and fit walker might average 30 kilometres a day, but Maureen would be lucky to do half as well as that. I got the map out in my hotel room and calculated that she might be anywhere between Logroño and Villafranca, a distance of 300 kilometres, and that was guessing in the dark. She might have rested somewhere for a week to let her blisters heal and be way behind schedule. She might have used public transport for part of the way, in which case she could have already arrived in Santiago – though knowing Maureen I doubted if she would bend the rules. I imagined her gritting her teeth and walking on through the pain barrier.
The next day I crossed the Pyrenees. I put the automatic shift in “Slow” to avoid excessive gear changes on the twisty road and breezed effortlessly to the top of the Val Carlos pass, overtaking several pilgrims slogging their way up the hill bowed under their backpacks. The weather had turned fine and the scenery was spectacular: mountains green to their peaks, valleys smiling in the sunshine, caramel-coloured cows with clinking bells, flocks of mountain sheep, vultures hang-gliding at eye level. Val Carlos, my guidebook informed me, means valley of Charles or Charlemagne, and on the Spanish side of the mountain is Roncesvalles, where there was a famous battle between Charlemagne’s army and the Saracens, as recorded in the Song of Roland. Only they weren’t Saracens at all, in reality, but Basques from Pamplona, narked because Charlemagne’s boys had knocked their city about a bit. Nothing associated with the Camino is quite what it claims to be. The shrine of Santiago itself seems to be a complete con, seeing there’s no evidence the Apostle is actually buried there. The story goes that, after the death of Jesus, James went to Spain to convert the natives. He didn’t seem to have much success because he returned to Palestine with only two disciples, and promptly had his head chopped off by Herod (I don’t know which one). The two disciples were told in a dream to take the saint’s remains back to Spain, which they did in a stone boat (yes, stone), which was miraculously wafted through the Mediterranean and the Straits of Gibraltar, up the west coast of the Iberian peninsula, and beached on the shores of Galicia. Some centuries later a local hermit saw a star twinkling above a hillock which, when excavated, revealed the remains of the saint and his disciples – or so it was claimed. They could have been anybody’s bones, of course. But Christian Spain badly needed some relics and a shrine to boost its campaign to drive out the Moors. That’s how St James became the patron saint of Spain, and “Santiago!” the Spanish battle-cry. According to another legend, he appeared in person at the crucial battle of Clavijo in 834 to rally the wilting Christian army, and personally slew seventy thousand Moors. The archdiocese of Santiago had the face to lay a special tax on the rest of Spain as a thankyou to St James, though in fact there is no evidence that the battle of Clavijo ever took place, with or without his intervention. In churches all along the Camino you see statues of “Santiago Matamoros”, St James the Moorslayer, depicting him as a warrior on horseback, wielding his sword and trampling the corpses of swarthy, thick-lipped infidels. They could become an embarrassment if Political Correctness ever gets a hold on Spain.
I found it hard to understand why millions of people had walked halfway across Europe in times past, often under conditions of appalling discomfort and danger, to visit the dubious shrine of this dubious saint, and even harder to understand why they were still doing so, albeit in smaller numbers. I got a sort of answer to the latter question at the Augustinian abbey of Roncesvalles, which has been offering hospitality to pilgrims since the Middle Ages. It looks fantastic from a distance, a cluster of grey stone buildings tucked into a fold in the green foothills, with the sun gleaming on its roof – only when you get close do you see that the roof is made of corrugated zinc, and the buildings are mostly undistinguished. A man in black trousers and a red cardigan watched me get out of my car and, observing the GB plates, greeted me in English. He turned out to be the monk on pilgrim duty. I did my Bede Harrington act, and he asked me to follow him to a little office. He had no memory of Maureen, but he said that if she had presented her passport at the monastery she would have been asked to complete a questionnaire. Sure enough he found it in a filing cabinet, completed in Maureen’s big round hand four weeks earlier. “Name: Maureen Harrington. Age: 57. Nationality: British. Religion: Catholic. Motives for journey (tick one or more): 1. Religious 2. Spiritual 3. Recreational 4. Cultural 5. Sporting.” I noticed with interest that Maureen had only ticked one: “Spiritual.”
The monk, who introduced himself to me as Don Andreas, showed me round the monastery. He said apologetically that I couldn’t stay in the refugio because I was travelling by car, but when I saw the bleak, breeze-block dormitory, with its naked lightbulbs and rough wood-and-wire bunks, this seemed a deprivation I could bear. It was empty: the day’s quota of pilgrims hadn’t yet arrived. I found a little hotel in the nearby village with creaking floorboards and paper-thin walls, but it was clean and comfortable enough. I went back to the monastery because Don Andreas had invited me to attend the pilgrim mass which was held at six every evening. It seemed churlish to decline, and anyway I liked the idea of doing something Maureen would certainly have done a few weeks earlier. I thought it might help me to get inside her head, and track her down by some kind of telepathic radar.
I hadn’t attended a Catholic service since we split up, and the pilgrim mass didn’t bear much resemblance to anything I remembered from the repertory of the Immaculate Conception in the old days. There were several priests saying the mass at the same time and they stood in a semi-circle behind a plain table-style altar (like the one I had noticed recently in the Hatchford church) facing the congregation in an island of light amid the general gloom of the huge chapel, so you could see all the business with the gold-plated goblets and plates quite clearly. The congregation were a motley crew of all ages, shapes and sizes, casually dressed in sweaters and shorts, sandals and trainers. It was obvious that most of them were not Catholics, and had even less of a clue about what was going on than I did. Perhaps they thought they had to attend the service if they were getting a free bed for the night, like dossers in a Sally Army hostel; or perhaps they got a genuine spiritual kick out of hearing the mutter of the liturgy echoing round the pillars and vaults of the ancient church, as it had for centuries. Only a handful went to communion, but at the end everyone was invited to go up to the altar steps to receive a blessing, pronounced in three languages – Spanish, French and English. To my surprise everybody in the pews stepped forward, and I rather sheepishly joined them. I even crossed myself at the blessing, a long-forgotten action I had copied from Maureen at Benediction years ago. I sent up a silent prayer To Whom It May Concern that I would fi
nd her.
I spent the next two weeks cruising up and down the roads of northern Spain, staring at every pilgrim I passed who remotely resembled Maureen, sometimes drifting dangerously into the middle of the road as I looked back over my shoulder to scrutinize the face of some walker with a likely-looking rear aspect. Pilgrims were always easy to identify – they invariably displayed the coquille, and usually carried a long staff or stick. But the further I went, the more of them there were on the roads, and I didn’t have much to go on by way of distinctive features. Mme Whitehouse had recalled that Maureen was shouldering a backpack with a rolled polystyrene mat on top, but she couldn’t remember the colours of either of these items. All the time I was tormented by the thought that I might be overtaking Maureen without knowing it – while she was resting her feet in some church or café, or while she was walking those parts of the Camino that veer off the modern road system and became a track or footpath impassable to four-wheeled traffic (certainly to my decadently low slung vehicle). I stopped at every church I spotted – and there are an awful lot of them in this part of Spain, a legacy of the mediaeval pilgrimage. I checked out every refugio I could find – the hostels that offer free, very basic shelter to pilgrims all along the route. Most of them were so basic – stone-floored stables virtually – that I couldn’t imagine Maureen would have slept in them; but I thought I might encounter in this way somebody who had met Maureen on the road.