Therapy

Finisterre and just kept going. I must have heard the name a thousand times on the radio in shipping forecasts and gale warnings without knowing that it was in Spain or twigging that it means “end of the world” in Latin. It was a long way — further than it looked on the map. The rolling wooded hills of the country around Santiago gave way to a more rugged, heath-like terrain of windblown grass broken by great slabs of grey rock and the occasional stubborn, slanting tree. As we approached the tip of the peninsula the land seemed to tilt upwards like a ramp, beyond which we could see nothing but sky. You really felt as if you were coming to the end of the world; the end of something, anyway. We parked the car beside a lighthouse, followed a path round to the other side of the building, and there was the ocean spread out beneath us, calm and blue, shading almost imperceptibly into the sky at the hazy horizon. We sat down on a warm, flat rock, amid coarse grass and wildflowers, and watched the sun, like a huge communion wafer behind a thin veil of cloud, slowly decline towards the wrinkled surface of the sea.
    “No,” said Maureen, “I couldn’t leave poor old Bede. What would he do without me? He’d crack up completely.”
    “But you have a right to happiness,” I said. “Not to mention me.”
    “You’ll be alright, Tubby,” she smiled.
    “I like your confidence. I’m a notorious neurotic.” “You seem very sane to me.”
    “That’s because of being with you again.”
    “It’s been wonderful,” she said. “But it’s like the whole pilgrimage, a kind of kink in time, when the ordinary rules of life don’t apply. When I go home, I’ll be married to Bede again.”
    “A loveless marriage!”
    “Sexless, perhaps, but not loveless,” she said. “And I did marry him, after all, for better or for worse.”
    “Haven’t you ever thought of leaving him?”
    “No, never. It’s the way I was brought up, I suppose. Divorce just wasn’t thinkable for Catholics. I know that it’s caused a lot of misery for a lot of people, but it’s worked for me. It simplifies things.”
    “One less decision to make.”
    “Exactly.”
    We were quiet for a while. Maureen plucked and chewed a stalk of grass. “Have you thought of trying to get back together with your wife?” she said.
    “There’s no point. Her mind is made up.”
    I had of course told Maureen all about the break-up with Sally, in the course of our conversations over the past few weeks, and she had listened with a keen and sympathetic interest, but without making any judgements.
    “When did you last see her?” Maureen asked. I worked it out: it was about three months. “You may have changed in that time, more than you know,” Maureen said. “You told me yourself you were a little bit off your head in the spring.” I admitted that that was true. “And Sally may have changed too,” Maureen went on. “She may be waiting for an approach by you.”
    “That hasn’t been the tenor of her lawyer’s letters,” I said.
    “You can’t go by them,” Maureen said. “Lawyers are paid to bluster.”
    “True,” I conceded. I recalled Sally’s rather surprising phone call, just before I left London. If I hadn’t been in such a hurry to be off, I might have interpreted her tone as conciliatory.
    We sat and talked until the sun set, and then we had supper at a restaurant on the beach that looked as if it had been built out of driftwood, where we chose our fish from a sea-water tank and they grilled it for us over charcoal. Nothing we had tasted at the Reyes Catolicos could touch it. We drove home in the dark, and somewhere in the middle of the heathland I stopped the car and doused the lights and we got out to look at the stars. There was not an artificial light for miles, and hardly any pollution in the atmosphere. The Milky Way stretched across the sky from east to west like a pale, glimmering canopy of light. I had never seen it so clearly. “Gosh!” Maureen exhaled. “How wonderful. I suppose it looked like this everywhere in the olden days.”
    “The ancient Greeks thought it was the way to heaven,” I said.
    “I’m not surprised.”
    “Some scholars think that there was a sort of pilgrimage here long before Christianity: people following the Milky Way as far as they could go.”
    “Goodness, how do you know all these things, Tubby?”
    “I look them up. It’s a habit.”
    We got back into the car and I drove back fast to