Therapy

say no, so I lifted the sheet and blanket and snuggled up to her. She was wearing a thin, sleeveless cotton nightgown. A pleasant warm odour, like the smell of fresh-baked bread, rose from her body. Not surprisingly, I had an erection.
    “I think perhaps you’d better go back to your own bed,” Maureen said.
    “Why?”
    “You might get a nasty shock if you stay here,” she said.
    “What do you mean?” She was lying on her back and I was massaging her stomach very gently through her nightgown with my finger-tips — it was something Sally liked me to do when she was pregnant. My head was pillowed on one of Maureen’s big round breasts. Very slowly, holding my breath, I moved my hand up to cup the other one, just as I had done all those years ago, in the damp dark basement area of 94 Treglowan Road.
    But it wasn’t there.
    “I did warn you,” Maureen said.
    It was a shock, of course, like climbing the stairs in the dark and finding there is one step fewer than you expected. I pulled my hand away in a reflex action, but put it back again almost immediately on the plateau of skin and bone. I could trace the erratic line of a scar, like the diagram of a constellation, through the thin fabric of the nightgown.
    “I don’t mind,” I said.
    “Yes you do,” she said.
    “No I don’t,” I said, and I unbuttoned the front of her nightdress and kissed the puckered flesh where her breast had been.
    “Oh Tubby,” she said, “that’s the nicest thing anybody ever did to me.
    “Would you like to make love?” I said.
    “No.”
    “Bede will never know.” I seemed to hear the echo of another conversation from the past.
    “It wouldn’t be right,” she said. “Not on a pilgrimage.”
    I said I took her point, kissed her, and got out of the bed. She sat up, put her arms round me and kissed me again, very warmly on the lips. “Thanks Tubby, you’re a darling,” she said.
    I went back to my room and lay awake for some time. I won’t say that the problems and disappointments of my life seemed trivial beside Maureen’s, but they certainly seemed smaller. Not only had she lost a beloved son — she had lost a breast, the part of a woman’s body which defines her sexual identity perhaps more obviously than any other. And although Maureen herself would certainly have said that the former loss was the greater, it was the latter which affected me more, perhaps because I had never known Damien, but I had known that breast, known it and loved it — and written about it. My memoir had turned into an elegy.
     
    I walked the whole of the last stage of the pilgrimage with Maureen. I put a few overnight things in her rucksack, and we shared carrying it. I left the car in Labacolla, a hamlet about twelve kilometres outside Santiago, near the airport, where the pilgrims of old used to wash themselves in preparation for their arrival at the shrine. The name literally means, “wash your bottom”, and the bottoms of the mediaeval pilgrims probably needed a good scrub by the time they got there.
    It was a warm, sunny morning. The first part of the route was through a wood and across some fields with pleasant open country to our left and the grumble of traffic from the main road to our right. Then we came to a village, at the far end of which is the Monte del Gozo, the “Mount of Joy”, where pilgrims get their first view of Santiago. In olden times there used to be a race to the top, amongst each group, to be the first to see the long-desired goal. It’s a bit of an anticlimax nowdays, because the hill has been almost entirely covered with a huge amphitheatre, and from this distance Santiago looks like any other modern city, ringed by motorways, industrial estates and tower blocks. If you look very hard, or have very good eyes, you can just make out the spires of the Cathedral.
    Nevertheless, I was very glad I walked into Santiago. I was able to share something of Maureen’s excitement and elation as she reached the finishing line of her marathon; I even felt a modicum of excitement and elation myself. You notice much more on foot than you do in a car, and the slowness of walking itself creates a kind of dramatic tension, delaying the consummation of your journey. Trudging through the ugly modern outskirts of the city only heightens the pleasure and relief of reaching its beautiful old heart, with its crooked, shady streets, odd angles and irregular rooflines. You turn a corner and there, suddenly, you are, in the