Therapy

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 Órbigo, 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