by David Lodge
I met all sorts of pilgrims. The most numerous were young Spaniards for whom the pilgrimage was obviously an impeccable excuse to get out of the parental home and meet other young Spaniards of the opposite sex. The refugios are unsegregated. I’m not suggesting any hanky-panky goes on (there’s not enough privacy, anyway), but I sometimes seemed to catch in them of an evening a whiff of that puppyish flirtatiousness I remembered from the Immaculate Conception youth club. Then there were the more sophisticated young backpackers from other countries, bronzed and muscular, attracted by the buzz on the international grapevine that Santiago was a really cool trip, with great scenery, cheap wine and free space to spread your bedroll. There were cycling clubs from France and the Low Countries in matching T-shirts and bollock-hugging lycra shorts – a group much despised and resented by everybody else because they had back-up trucks to transport their luggage from stage to stage – and solo cyclists pedalling pannier-festooned mountain bikes at 78 r.p.m. There were couples and pairs of friends with a common interest in walking, or Spanish history, or Romanesque architecture, who were doing the Camino in easy instalments, year by year. For all these groups, it seemed to me, the pilgrimage was primarily an alternative and adventurous kind of holiday.
Then there were the pilgrims with more particular and personal motives: a young sponsored cyclist raising money for a cancer ward; a Dutch artist aiming to get to Santiago to mark his fortieth birthday; a sixty-year-old Belgian who was doing the pilgrimage as the first act of his retirement; a redundant factory worker from Nancy contemplating his future. People at turning-points in their lives – looking for peace, or enlightenment, or just an escape from the daily rat-race. The pilgrims in this category were the ones who had travelled furthest, often walking all the way from their homes in northern Europe, camping on the way. Some had been on the road for months. Their faces were sunburned, their clothes weather-stained, and they had a kind of reserve or remoteness about them, as if they had acquired the habit of solitude on the long lonely miles, and found the sometimes boisterous and hearty company of other pilgrims unwelcome. Their eyes had a distant look, as though focused on Santiago. A few were Catholics, but most had no particular religious beliefs. Some had begun the pilgrimage in a light-hearted experimental mood and become deeply obsessed with it. Others were probably a little mad when they started. Heterogeneous as they were, it was this group of pilgrims who interested me most, because I thought they were most likely to have met Maureen on the road.
I described her as best I could, but drew a complete blank until I had got as far as Cebrero, a little village high up in the mountains of León, only a hundred and fifty kilometres from Santiago. It’s a curious place, halfway between a folk village and a shrine. The dwellings are of antique design, circular stone-walled huts with conical thatched roofs, and peasants still live in them, probably subsidized by the Spanish government. The church contains relics of some gruesome mediaeval miracle, when the communion bread and wine turned into real flesh and blood, and the place is also said to be associated with the legend of the Holy Grail. It was certainly a crucial stage in my own quest. In the bar-cum-café next to the church, a homely place of bare boards and refectory tables, I got into conversation with an elderly Dutch cyclist who claimed he had met an English pilgrim called Maureen in a refugio near León a week before. She had a bad leg and had told him she was going to rest in León for a few days before continuing her journey. I had been in León recently, but I jumped into the Richmobile and headed back there, intending to check out every hotel in the city.
I was driving eastwards along the N120 between Astorga and Orbigo, a busy arterial road, when I saw her, walking towards me at the edge of the road – a plump, solitary woman in baggy cotton trousers and a broadbrimmed straw hat. It was only a glimpse, and I was doing seventy miles an hour at the time. I trod on the brakes, provoking an enraged bellow from a huge petrol tanker on my tail. With heavy traffic in both directions on the two-lane road, it was impossible to stop until, after a kilometre or two, I came to a drive-in café with a dirt carpark. I did a three-point turn in a cloud of dust and raced back down the road, wondering if I had hallucinated the figure of Maureen. But no, there she was, plodding along ahead of me on the other side of the road – or there was somebody, largely concealed by a backpack, rolled bedmat and straw hat. I slowed down, provoking more indignant hooting from the cars behind me, and turned to look at the woman’s face as I passed. It was Maureen alright. Hearing the noise of the car horns, she threw a casual glance in my direction, but I was concealed behind the Richmobile’s dark-tinted glass, and unable to stop. A few hundred yards further on I pulled off the road where the verge was broad enough to park, got out of the car, and crossed the tarmac. There was an incline at this point, and Maureen was walking downhill towards me. She walked slowly, with a limp, grasping a staff which she plonked down on the road in front of her at every second step. Nevertheless her gait was unmistakable, even at a distance. It was as if forty years had been pinched out of my existence, and I was back in Hatchford, outside the florist’s shop on the corner of the Five Ways, watching her walk down Beecher’s Road towards me in her school uniform.
If I had scripted the meeting I would have chosen a more romantic setting – the interior of some cool dark old church, perhaps, or a country road with wildflowers blowing in the breeze along its margins, where the bleating of sheep was the loudest noise. There would certainly have been background music (perhaps an instrumental arrangement of “Too Young”). As it was, we met on the edge of an ugly main road in one of the least attractive bits of Castile, deafened by the noise of tyres and engines, choked by exhaust fumes, and buffeted by gusts of gritty air displaced by passing juggernauts. As she approached I began to walk towards her, and she took notice of me for the first time. She slowed, hesitated, and stopped, as if she feared my intentions. I laughed, smiled, and held out my arms in what was supposed to be a reassuring gesture. She looked at me with alarm, clearly thinking I was some kind of homicidal maniac or rapist, and drew back, lifting her staff as if prepared to use it for self-defence. I stopped, and spoke:
“Maureen! It’s all right! It’s me, Laurence.”
She started. “What?” she said. “Laurence who?”
“Laurence Passmore. Don’t you recognize me?”
I was disappointed that she obviously didn’t – didn’t seem even to remember my name. But as she reasonably explained later, she hadn’t given me a thought for donkey’s years, whereas I had been thinking of almost nothing else except her for weeks. While I had been scouring north-west Spain, hoping to run into her at every turn of the road, my sudden apparition on the N120 was to her as bizarre and surprising as if I had parachuted out of the sky, or popped up through a hole in the ground.
I shouted above the howl and whine of traffic, “We used to go around together, years ago. In Hatchford.”
Maureen’s expression changed and the fear went from her eyes. She squinted at me, as if she were short-sighted, or dazzled by the sun, and took a step forward. “Is it really you? Laurence Passmore? What on earth are you doing here?”
“I’ve been looking for you.”
“Why?” she said, and a look of anxiety returned to her face. “There’s nothing wrong at home, is there?”
“No, nothing wrong,” I reassured her. “Bede’s worried about you, but he’s OK.”
“Bede? When did you see Bede?”
“Just the other day. I was trying to trace you.”
“What for?” she said. We were now face to face.
“It’s a long story,” I said. “Get in the car, and I’ll tell you.” I gestured to my sleek silver pet, crouched on the opposite verge. She gave it a momentary glance, and shook her head.
“I’m doing a pilgrimage,” she said.
“I know.”
“I don’t go in cars.”
“Make an exception today,” I said. “You look as if you could do with a lift.”
In truth she looke
d a wreck. As we parleyed, I was mentally coming to terms with the sad fact that Maureen was no longer the Maureen of my memories and fantasies. She had reached that point in a woman’s life when her looks begin irretrievably to desert her. Sally hasn’t quite reached it, and Amy is still several years on the right side of it. Both of them, anyway, are resisting the ageing process with everything short of plastic surgery, but Maureen seemed to have surrendered without putting up much of a fight. There were crowsfeet at the corners of her eyes, and bags under them. Her cheeks, once so plump and smooth, were slack jowls; her neck was creased like an old garment; and her figure had gone soft and shapeless, with no perceptible waistline between the cushiony mounds of her bosom and the broad beam of her hips. The general effect had not been improved by the weeks and months she had spent on the road: her nose was sunburnt and peeling, her hair lank and unkempt, her knuckles grubby and her nails broken. Her clothes were dusty and sweat-stained. I must admit that her appearance was a shock for which the posed and retouched photographs in Bede’s living-room had not prepared me. I daresay the years have been even harder on me, but Maureen hadn’t been nurturing any illusions to the contrary.
As she hesitated, leaning forward in her scuffed trainers to balance the weight of her backpack, I noticed that she had placed some lumps of sponge rubber under the shoulder straps to protect her collarbone from chafing. For some reason this seemed the most pathetic detail of all in her general appearance. I felt an overwhelming rush of tenderness towards her, a desire to look after her and rescue her from this daft, self-lacerating ordeal. “Just to the next village,” I said, “Somewhere we can get a cold drink.” The sun was basting my bald pate and I could feel sweat trickling down my torso inside my shirt. I added coaxingly, “The car’s air-conditioned.”
Maureen laughed, wrinkling her sunburned nose in the way I remembered so well. “It had better be,” she said. “I’m sure I stink to high heaven.”
She sighed and stretched out luxuriously in the front seat of the Richmobile as we moved off down the highway with the silent speed of an electric train. “Well, this is very swish,” she said, looking round the interior of the car. “What make is it?” I told her. “We have a Volvo, at home,” she said. “Bede says they’re very safe.”
“Safety isn’t everything,” I said.
“No, it isn’t,” she said, with a little giggle.
“This is a dream come true, you, know,” I said. “I’ve been fantasizing for months about driving you in this car.”
“Have you?” She gave me a shy, puzzled smile. I didn’t tell her that in my fantasies she was still in her teens.
A few kilometres further on we found a bar with some chairs and tables outside in the shade of an old oak, away from the jabber of television and the hiss of the coffee machine. Over a beer and a citron pressé we had the first of many conversations that slowly filled in the information gap of thirty-five years. The first thing Maureen wanted to know, naturally enough, was why I had sought her out. I gave her a condensed account of what I have already written in these pages: that my life was in a mess, personally and professionally, that I had been suddenly reminded of our relationship and how shabbily I had treated her at the end of it, and had become consumed with a desire to see her again. “To get absolution,” I said.
Maureen blushed under her sunburn. “Goodness me, Laurence, you don’t have to ask for that. It was nearly forty years ago. We were children, practically.”
“But it must have hurt, at the time.”
“Oh, yes, of course. I cried myself to sleep for ages –”
“There you are, then.”
“But young girls are always doing that. You were the first boy I cried over, but not the last.” She laughed. “You look surprised.”
“You mean, Bede?” I said.
“Oh no, not Bede.” screwed up her face in a humorous grimace. “Can you imagine anybody crying over Bede? No, there were others, before him. A wildly handsome registrar I was hopelessly in love with, like every other student nurse at the hospital. I doubt if he even knew my name. And after I qualified there was a houseman I had an affair with.”
“You mean … in the full sense of the word?” I stared incredulously.
“I slept with him, if that’s what you mean. I don’t know why I’m telling you all these intimate details, but somehow the older you get, the less you care what people know, don’t you find? It’s the same with your body. In hospital it’s always the young patients who are most embarrassed about being washed and bedpanned and so on. The old ones couldn’t give a damn.”
“But what about your religion? When you had the affair.”
“Oh, I knew I was committing a mortal sin. But I did it anyway, because I loved him. I thought he would marry me, you see. He said he would. But he changed his mind, or perhaps he was lying. So after I got over it I married Bede instead.”
“Did you sleep with him first?” The question sounded crude as I formulated it, but curiosity overcame good manners.
Maureen rocked with laughter. “Good heavens, no! Bede would have been shocked at the very idea.”
I pondered these surprising revelations in silence for a few moments. “So you haven’t been bearing a grudge against me all this time?” I said at length.
“Of course not! Honestly, I haven’t given you a thought for … I don’t know how many years.”
I think she was trying to reassure me, but I was hurt, I have to admit. “You haven’t followed my career, then?” I said.
“No, should I have done? Are you terribly famous?”
“Not famous, exactly. But I’ve had some success as a TV writer. Do you ever watch The People Next Door?”
“Is that a comedy programme – the kind where you can hear a lot of people laughing but you can’t see them?”
“It’s a sitcom, yes.”
“We tend to avoid those, I’m afraid. But now I know you write for it …”
“I write all of it. It was my idea. I’m known as Tubby Passmore,” I said, desperate to strike some spark of recognition.
“Are you really?” Maureen laughed and wrinkled her nose. “Tubby!”
“But I’d rather you called me Laurence,” I said, regretting the revelation. “It reminds me of the old days.”
But from then on she called me Tubby. She seemed delighted with the name and said she couldn’t get it out of her head. “I try to say ‘Laurence’, but ‘Tubby’ comes out of my mouth instead,” she said.
The day we met, Maureen was aiming to get to Astorga. She refused to let me drive her there from the café, but, admitting that her leg was painful, agreed to let me take her backpack on ahead. She was planning to spend the night at the local refugio, uninvitingly described in the pilgrim’s guidebook as an “unequipped sports hall”. Maureen pulled a face. “That means no showers.” I said I would be bitterly disappointed if she wouldn’t be my guest for dinner on this red-letter day, and she could shower in my hotel room. She accepted the offer with good grace, and we arranged to meet in the porch of the Cathedral. I drove to Astorga and checked into a hotel, booking an extra room for Maureen in the hope of persuading her to take it. (She did.) While I waited for Maureen I did the tourist bit in Astorga. It has a cathedral which is Gothic inside and baroque outside (I was just about able to tell the difference by this time) and a Bishop’s Palace like a fairy-tale castle built by Gaudí, who designed that weird unfinished cathedral-sized church in Barcelona with spires like enormous loofahs. Astorga also boasts a lot of relics, including a chip off the True Cross and a bit of a banner from the mythical battle of Clavijo.
Maureen turned up at the Cathedral about three hours after we had parted, smiling and saying that, without the weight of her backpack, the walk had been like a Sunday-afternoon stroll. I asked to see her leg and didn’t much like what I saw under the grimy bandage. The calf was bruised and discoloured and the ankle joint swollen. “I think you should show that to a doctor,” I said. Maureen said she had seen a
doctor in León. He had diagnosed strained ligaments, recommended rest, and given her some ointment which had helped a little. She had rested the leg for four days, but it was still troubling her. “You need more like four months,” I said. “I know a bit about this sort of injury. It won’t go away unless you pack in the pilgrimage.”
“I’m not going to give up now,” she said. “Not after getting this far.”
I knew her well enough not to waste breath trying to persuade her to drop out and go home. Instead I devised a plan to help her get to Santiago as comfortably as possible with honour. Each day I would drive with her pack to an agreed rendezvous, and book us into some modest inn or b. & b. Maureen had no principled objection to such accommodation. She had treated herself to it occasionally, and the refugios were, she said, becoming increasingly crowded and unpleasant the nearer she got to Santiago. But her funds were low, and she hadn’t wanted to ring up Bede and ask him to send her more money. She agreed to let me pay for our rooms on the understanding that she would repay her share when we got back to England, and kept scrupulous note of our expenses.
We inched our way to Santiago in very short stages. Even without her backpack, Maureen wasn’t capable of walking more than ten to twelve kilometres a day without discomfort, and it took her up to four hours to cover even that modest distance. Usually, after arranging our accommodation, I would walk back along the Camino eastwards to meet her, and keep her company on the home stretch. It pleased me that my knee stood up well to this exercise, even when the going was steep and rugged. In fact, I realized that I hadn’t felt a single twinge in it since I got to St Jean Pied-de-Port. “It’s St James,” Maureen said, when I remarked on this. “It’s a well-known phenomenon. He helps you. I’d never have got this far without him. I remember when I was climbing the pass through the Pyrenees, soaked to the skin and utterly exhausted, feeling I couldn’t go any further and would just roll into a ditch and die, I felt a force like a hand in the small of the back pushing me on, and before I knew where I was, I found myself at the top.”