That was in line with Sarah’s take. We picked up the conversation again once we’d cleared the traffic around Siena.
‘I agree you’re the better alternative,’ I said, ‘but they’ve been friends forever…bonded…’
Gilbert walked for a while. ‘It was only at the last minute that Camille asked me to contact Zoe. Don’t misunderstand: once she decided she wanted Zoe to come, she was insistent. I made the email less…clear, so Zoe would not feel pressured.’
Another long break. Gilbert seemed to be looking for words.
‘Shall we speak French?’ I asked.
‘Thank you, but language is not the problem. Camille likes you very much, but she is disappointed that Zoe brought you. She wanted a more…I know Zoe is not religious but…Camille did not think this through.’
‘Sorry, I’m a bit lost.’
‘You are not religious?’
I shook my head. ‘I’m nominally Church of England, which is to say, not really. Zoe was brought up in some sort of Southern Baptist tradition—except she came from the North. Guns and Jesus and saving unborn babies. Especially the last one.’
Gilbert nodded—a grave nod. ‘You know about this road trip and what it was for?’
‘I think I do. Camille had an—’
‘Yes. You must understand that Camille is Catholic. If you were Catholic, you would see this story through different eyes. For Camille, it was a terrible sin—a crime. Can I tell you something you cannot tell Zoe?’
‘I’m planning to marry Zoe. I can’t go into a marriage with secrets.’
‘Then I will trust your judgment, but you may choose not to hurt her. When they were young, Camille saw Zoe as conservative. You have described her family’s religious views and Camille assumed she shared them. They were not close friends or Camille would have known better what to expect. She did not want help to have the termination; she wanted Zoe to help her find another way. She does not blame Zoe…directly. I’m sure she was not clear about what she wanted. But imagine you and I had killed a man, and nobody else knew. We would have a bond…’
‘Thelma and Louise.’
‘Who?’
‘It’s a film. They kill a man, as you said. But something here doesn’t make sense to me. If Zoe gave her the wrong kind of help the first time, why ask again?’ I answered my own question with a shot in the dark. ‘To give her a chance to make amends?’
‘Exactly. Penance. She wanted Zoe to come with her so they could be forgiven—together—for their mutual sin.’
‘No wonder she hasn’t told her. Zoe doesn’t see it as a sin. She thinks she did a great thing…’
‘That’s why I suggest you do not tell her.’
We could see Camille and Zoe ahead, Camille limping again. Soulmates, or partners in crime?
‘The two women,’ said Gilbert. ‘Did they find redemption?’
‘Thelma and Louise? I suppose you could say that.’
71
ZOE
I’d got the message from my argument with Martin before we left: it was him or Camille. I guess I knew that already, and Martin should have known too, but I’d never seen him so pissed. Up till now, he’d been a typical engineer, trying to find a solution, but I guess it had been too much for his ego that I was putting my duty to Camille first.
It would have been hard to understand in his analytic way—I was going with feelings. Which I couldn’t explain in the kind of language he wanted. Truth was, there was too much happening in my head to make sense of any of it.
I needed to channel my anger into action, into getting Camille to put her own needs first and accept my help. I had no doubt she wanted it—so what was holding her back? Pride? Care for me, I guess.
It was going to be a longish day and we were walking through some of the most stunning scenery we’d encountered—views across the valleys and back to Siena—so I took a few miles after the fight with Martin to centre myself before beginning the conversation with Camille.
‘Last night, you might not have heard what I said at the end of the evening. We were both pretty tanked.’
‘Zoe, I heard you. I’ve heard you every time. You think because I won’t have Gilbert to take care of me, I will need you.’ She walked faster, despite her leg catching and nearly tripping her. ‘I cannot lie. I am scared of this disease, scared that I have no control of where the white bits will appear next, but I am not going to let you be my carer. I am making a decision for love; I want you to do that also.’
‘Camille, listen to me. You know I don’t believe in exactly what you do, but I believe in some sort of purpose…I guess, in your terms, I’d say I feel this is what God wants me to do.’
She stopped, then zipped her finger across her lips. And we were silent until we came into the village of Isola d’Arbia, where she stopped at the small stone church for the candle-lighting ritual.
‘I am going to pray,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you will pray with me.’
Was this my initiation into my future life with Camille: her retreating deeper into religion as her illness and dementia got worse?
I’d lit candles, but praying—even pretending to pray—was different. I tried to push back all the ugly memories of my childhood that came rushing in. The Sunday dressing-up, the threats of hell, the racism and misogyny and small-mindedness of our little Minnesota congregation. And the hypocrisy of my father, who saw sin everywhere except in himself.
I had left my family and their way of thinking when I went to college, and when we visited my mother after the abortion, her irrational, vindictive outpouring had shown me that their values were not mine, and had given me the courage to leave.
The old and often grand, ornate Catholic churches of this section of the Chemin had seemed quite different to those of my childhood, but kneeling in a pew was going to do it. Thanks for that, Camille.
She got up, with the slightly beatific expression she had after meditation and sometimes after lighting a candle. ‘Zoe, you’re right. It’s what God wants. You will care for me.’
Fuck. How about ‘thank you’?
And, now that it was all set, right away a part of me started looking for a way out.
‘Of course, I’ll have to get a visa and…’
Camille waved her hand. ‘The bureaucracy is cumbersome, but Gilbert knows how it works.’
All sorted. So easy. And Gilbert could help to organise his replacement.
And then Camille walked ahead.
I needed to calm myself, and images of Camille in a wheelchair weren’t going to do it. The whole France thing was overwhelming. I stopped, put my pack down, and took myself to my best moment in that country, a country I didn’t feel so bad about, fortunately. It was with Martin, of course, in the new-age hostel, Le Nid de la Palombe, the Dove’s Nest, where we’d made love and listened to the cellos in the storm.
I found my mind wandering back to reality. Could I run a place like that with Camille? I took her out of the picture, put her in the kitchen while I talked to the pilgrims, heard their stories and sketched them. Maybe I could make the future work.
Never let the sun go down on an argument. That was my mother, justifying giving in to my father again. But I couldn’t face an evening of the silent treatment from Martin. Unfairly, I wanted his support, just when I’d rejected him. No: chosen something more important ahead of him. As he’d done with Sarah, three years earlier.
He was waiting on the stoop of our hotel, without his pack. He must have checked in already.
‘Feeling better?’ he said. He wasn’t smiling, but he wasn’t looking angry, either.
‘Physically, yeah,’ I said. ‘Walking must be a good hangover cure. Mentally, spiritually…’
He stood up and hugged me. If I’d finished my answer, maybe I’d have said mentally messed up, spiritually calm. I’d done what I had to do. What God or the universe needed me to do. Martin, of course, didn’t believe in either, so none of this was going to make sense to him.
72
MARTIN
‘All I’m asking is for you to help me make sense of it,’ I said.
Zoe may not have had a hangover when she arrived in Ponte d’Arbia, but she wasn’t in good shape and had accepted my suggestion that we leave any heavy discussion till the following morning. I think she felt I was just delaying the inevitable. I didn’t have a problem with that. Inevitably, we all die, but we live as well as we can in the meantime. That translated into pizza with Camille and Gilbert, and a surprising amount of passion afterwards. Nothing like turmoil to spark up the sex life.
And Camille had given me a heads-up which accorded perfectly with what Gilbert had told me. ‘Please don’t blame me. It is Zoe who needs to do this.’ Needs.
So, I was well briefed when I made my request for clarity as we set out for San Quirico d’Orcia. At the end of today, the Chemin d’Assise and Via Francigena would finally diverge forever. A metaphor there, if I was looking for one.
‘There’s nothing much to make sense of,’ said Zoe. Then, after reflection: ‘I can’t expect you to understand what’s between me and Camille.’
‘So you keep saying. You know, you probably should. Expect me to understand. If it’s going to break us apart. Or even if it doesn’t. I don’t want us to end up going separate ways because we didn’t communicate properly. Can you indulge my engineering mindset and just tell me in words of one syllable what you think is going on?’
Zoe took a while to think. I reflected, not for the first time, that the Chemin was good that way. None of the pressure to answer that you’d feel in a coffee shop, over dinner or even in bed. We had all day.
It gave me time to think, too. What did I want Zoe to say? At one level, I suppose I wanted her to say that her love for me trumped everything else, but that would be wanting her to lie. Like it or not, Camille came first. But why?
Zoe put down her pack, pulled out her water bottle and took a drink. ‘I suppose the question is why I feel so obligated to Camille.’
That was a better question. The right question. ‘And whatever the answer, part of you wants Gilbert to leave her so you can step up. And prove how much you care.’
I wasn’t sure if it was related to Zoe’s daughters not needing her or because Camille had replaced Zoe’s mother as the closest woman in her life at the end of the fated road trip. Those speculations were beyond my pay grade as a therapist.
Zoe put her water bottle away and set off again. ‘Emotionally, maybe, I’d want to be the one to take care of her. But in real life I just wish she’d accept Gilbert. Except she’s not going to. Unless maybe the Pope tells her to.’
‘It’s no small thing for you to take on. She says, “Thanks for that, Zoe, now I know how much you care about me.” And then you stay with her for the rest of her life. And I don’t want to be brutal, but from what Sarah tells me, it could be a long life and a difficult one.’
Zoe half-laughed. ‘I know; I lived with her once before.’
‘Whereas Gilbert wants to: it’s his mission. He has to be the best option. I mean, he’d be a good option even if she wasn’t sick.’
‘When Camille wasn’t sick, she didn’t want him. In her mind, she threw him out and wasn’t trying to get him back. I don’t want to play God by trying to keep them together; Camille’s a bit crazy with her decisions with men, but she’s always been that way. I wouldn’t want someone doing it to me.’
‘But we’ve got to let Gilbert try. I think he’s made a bit of progress.’
‘He’s trying. It’s not enough. But you’re right, I think something in me needs to do this thing.’
‘Maybe it’s a way out of the relationship with me. If it is, just tell me. You don’t have to condemn yourself to being someone’s carer for twenty or thirty years because you don’t want to let me down.’
Zoe stopped and looked at me. ‘Martin, it’s not the reason. I love you, and this is tearing me up. I think I could do—can do—the caring for Camille, but I’m not sure I can cope with walking away from you. And I don’t really understand why.’
‘Because you love me, I hope.’
She laughed. ‘That much I understand. It’s the Camille part.’
She started walking again, not looking at me, speaking to the air. ‘It’s weird. It’s not like I’ve thought of her every day as my BFF when I was home, and we’ve gone whole years without… anything. I didn’t even know she was back with Gilbert.’
I did my therapist impression and waited.
‘Maybe I just identify with her because of my guilt over Keith…and knowing we might not have stayed together if he’d lived. I guess she and Gilbert are a bit like that.’
‘If it were the other way around, would you be expecting Camille to come from nowhere and step in for you?’
‘Well…no.’
Time to be brutal. ‘Would you even want her to?’
‘I guess…like I said…’
‘I used to be a scout.’
‘What?’
‘You have scouts in America.’
‘You were a boy scout? I hope this is going somewhere.’
‘Plenty of time. But in scouts, we had a rule that you had to do somebody a good turn every day. So this boy scout tells his dad that he’s late home because he spent an hour helping an old lady across the road, the archetypal good deed. And his dad says, “An hour?” and the son says, “Well, she didn’t really want to cross the road.”’
‘That’s meant to be a joke? It’s not a good one.’ Zoe undermined her criticism by laughing.
‘It’s a dad joke. Literally. My dad told me. But you hear what I’m saying?’
‘About you and Sarah?’
‘Touché. But maybe Camille doesn’t really want you to do this.’ No point holding back now. ‘She’s told me she doesn’t. This isn’t just politeness. She’ll feel guilty forever for splitting us up, if that’s what the result is. You say I don’t understand what’s between you, but I don’t think anyone watching you two over the last few weeks would think you’re close friends.’
I was about to say that Camille’s take-off of Zoe’s accent back in the restaurant in Piedmont had crossed the line into mockery, but it would have been overkill. She’d got the point, and it was sinking in. At last.
And then: ‘You’re right. About Camille. She’s always driven me a bit crazy. But she thinks it’s what God wants.’
‘To hell with God. If you don’t want it and she doesn’t want it, and I don’t want it and bloody Uncle Tom Cobley doesn’t want it, why are you doing it?’
‘Please don’t shout. You’ve spoken to your uncle about this?’
I had to laugh, which didn’t necessarily bring us any closer to a resolution, but it broke the tension.
‘Sorry, didn’t mean to shout. It’s an expression. From a folk song.’
‘British folk song.’
‘All folk songs are British.’
‘Stop it. Why do you think I’m doing it?’
‘Therapists only ask questions.’
‘You’re not a therapist. You’re my…lover.’
‘Partner. In fact, fiancé, at least till Rome.’
She laughed. ‘It does sound better.’
‘I’ll consider myself a super-therapist. My superpower is being able to lay it out instead of waiting for you to excavate it from your subconscious.’
‘Just tell me.’
‘All right. Camille didn’t want the abortion—at some level, anyway. She thought you’d talk her out of it because she saw you as religious. Instead, you moved heaven and earth to make it happen. It doesn’t matter what your reasons were, and I’m sure she asked for it and didn’t try to stop you. And she was vulnerable and messed up, et cetera, et cetera. Camille thinks she’s been punished all her life for it. You know all this and you have to make it up to her. So you can feel absolved. All subconscious, of course, or we wouldn’t be having this discussion.’
There was a stillness across Zoe’s face as she stopped walking. S
he closed her eyes and took three deep breaths. When she spoke it didn’t sound like her. ‘Is that all?’
‘I’d have thought it was enough for now.’
‘If there’s more, tell me. Please. Get it done.’
‘This Big Lie. Maybe there is one, maybe there isn’t. Camille hasn’t told me, but I’m telling you, the reason she’s walking a thousand miles to Rome to see the Pope isn’t because she told a porky. She’s doing this to atone for the abortion. And you’re here because you were part of it.’
I looked at Zoe again. There was a reason therapists didn’t lay it out.
73
ZOE
I walked alone for the rest of the day. My first reaction to what Martin told me had been anger. It had surged inside me with such intensity that I wasn’t sure anyone else was safe to be near me. It scared me. I don’t do anger. Anger belonged to my parents.
On the Camino de Santiago I had raged at God and Keith and then myself as I had grieved—but the flash of anger I had felt when Martin told me that Camille blamed me for her abortion was different. It was white hot. Like my father’s before he’d hit my mother and my brothers and me.
I wasn’t sure why. Or who it was directed at. Martin would have probably suggested I get therapy. Instead, when I got to San Quirico d’Orcia I sat in a church, alone, and meditated. After screaming and crying and kicking trees.
The universe didn’t give me all the answers, but eventually I made sense of my anger at least. Camille had brought me to this walk on a false premise. She had roped me into her belief system and wanted me to be ‘saved’ when I hadn’t done anything wrong.
My anger was again at the Catholic Church—or Camille’s acceptance of its doctrine—that had made her feel guilty all these years for doing what was the most sensible thing. But it was also at Camille for deceiving me about the reason she wanted me to come. I guess that was the Big Lie.
Martin probably felt he’d given me the key to unlock my motivations. He figured that if I understood what was driving me, I would resolve my relationship with Camille—without having to become her carer. But what calmed me now was that I’d chosen to come on the walk, even if I didn’t know the facts, and I believed the universe intended me to be here. It had brought me time to reflect on my life—and it had brought me Martin.
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