Therapy

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.”
    I wasn’t sure how serious she was. When I asked her if she believed St James was really buried in Santiago, she shrugged and said, “I don’t know. We’ll never know for sure, one way or the other.” I said, “Doesn’t it bother you that millions of people may have been coming here for centuries all because of a misprint?” I was showing off a bit of knowledge gleaned from one of my guidebooks: apparently the