Therapy

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 find 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.
    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