Therapy

message from Maureen to Bede: “Dear Bede: Am taking a rest here for a few days before tackling the mountains. All right except for blisters. Love, Maureen.” I would have recognized the round, girlish hand anywhere, even though there were dots instead of bubbles over the is. The card was postmarked about three weeks ago. Hearing Bede in the hall, I hastily replaced the card and scuttled back to my seat.
    “So, how’s Maureen?” I said, as he came in with a tray. “What has she been doing with herself while you were climbing the ladder in the DES?”
    “She was a qualified nurse when I married her,” he said, pushing down the plunger in the cafetière with both hands, like a man detonating dynamite. “We started a family almost immediately, and she gave up work to look after the children. She went back to nursing when our youngest started junior school, and became a sister in charge of a ward, but it’s frightfully hard work, you know. She gave it up when we no longer needed the money. She does a lot of voluntary work, for the Church and so on.”
    “You both still go to church, then?” I said.
    “Yes,” he said curtly. “Milk? Sugar?” The coffee was grey and insipid, the digestive biscuits damp. Bede asked me some technical questions about writing for television. After a while, I pulled the conversation back to Maureen. “What’s this pilgrimage she’s on then?”
    He stirred restively in his seat, and looked out of the window, where a boisterous wind was blowing, shaking the trees and sending blossom through the air like snowflakes. “It’s to Santiago de Compostela,” he said, “in north-west Spain. It’s a very ancient pilgrimage, goes back to the Middle Ages. St James the Apostle is supposed to be buried there. ‘Santiago’ is Spanish for St James, of course. ‘St Jacques’ in French. Maureen read about the pilgrimage route somewhere, a library book I think. Decided she wanted to do it.”
    “On foot,” I said.
    “Yes, on foot.” Bede looked at me. “How did you know?”
    I confessed to having peeped at her card.
    “It’s absurd of course,” he said. “A woman of her age. Quite absurd.” He took off his spectacles and massaged his brow as if he had a headache. His eyes looked naked and vulnerable without the glasses.
    “How far is it?” I asked.
    “Depends on where you start.” He replaced his spectacles. “There are several different starting-points, all in France. Maureen started from Le Puy, in the Auvergne. Santiago is about a thousand miles from there, I believe.”
    I whistled softly. “Is she an experienced walker?”
    “Not in the least,” Bede said. “A stroll across Wimbledon Common on Sunday afternoon was her idea of a long walk. The whole idea is completely mad. I’m surprised she got as far as the Pyrenees, to be honest, without injuring herself. Or being raped, or murdered.”
    He told me that when Maureen first proposed doing the pilgrimage he offered to accompany her if they went by car, but she insisted on doing it the hard way, on foot, like the mediaeval pilgrims. It was apparent that they’d had a major row about it. In the end she went off defiantly on her own, about two months ago, with a rucksack and a bedroll, and he’s only had two cards from her since, the latest being the one I had just seen. Bede is obviously worried sick as well as angry, and feeling not a little foolish, but there’s nothing he can do except sit tight and hope she gets to Santiago safely. I found the story fascinating and, I must admit, derived a certain amount of Schadenfreude from Bede’s plight. Nevertheless it seemed a surprisingly quixotic adventure for Maureen to undertake. I said something to this effect.
    “Yes, well, she’s been under a lot of stress, lately. We both have,” Bede said. “We lost our son Damien last November, you see.”
    I blurted out some words of commiseration, and asked about the circumstances. Bede went to a bureau and took a framed photograph from one of the drawers. It was a colour snap of a young man, healthy and handsome, dressed in T-shirt and shorts, smiling at the camera, leaning against the front mudguard of a Land Rover, with a background of blue sky and brownish scrub. “He was killed in Angola,” Bede said. “You may have read about it in the newspapers. He was working for a Catholic aid organization there, distributing relief supplies to refugees. Nobody knows exactly what happened, but it seems that some maverick