Two Steps Onward

by Graeme Simsion

  The rest wasn’t that easy. The opposite: hard to accept that Camille and I didn’t really love each other; harder to accept that she’d taken it upon herself to save my soul; hardest of all that I had pushed her into doing something—a terrible thing, in her eyes—that had left her with lifelong guilt.

  Lisa. She had called me that. She and the crétin and Mary-Lou. I felt a rush of shame recalling it—something I had somehow repressed all these years. I had so wanted to be part of their crowd, the cool group that everyone wanted in on. But I had just been Camille’s nerdy roommate. Her pious roommate.

  I’d walked nearly a thousand miles with her, for her, but right now I wasn’t sure how, in a couple of hours, I’d face having dinner with her.

  We went to a restaurant with an open fire and a bicycle hanging from the ceiling. Camille didn’t seem to notice that I was quieter than usual. Martin looked worried and sad but gave me space. I was at least steady and holding.

  The next morning, we said goodbye to the tau and dove that had taken us from Cluny and over the Alps, as that path went east to Assisi and we now headed due south. I was going to need time to process everything, and Martin was incredibly restrained in not pushing me for answers or even asking where I was at. We talked a bit about day-to-day stuff: the track, the scenery, how Gilbert and Camille seemed to be doing.

  It was the same the following day. And the next few. There were more rolling hills with silhouetted cypress trees and green farmland, unforgettable views of vineyards, olive groves and ancient oaks, intermingled with smaller towns each with their own ancient history and attractions, many of them now ruins. Just when I thought I had found the most perfect hilltop town, another appeared on the horizon and was soon looming above us.

  Most days I had a bowl of ribollita, the Tuscan bread soup thick with vegetables. It made up for breakfast, which was basically desserts: pastries and cakes. Always della casa—homemade—so I couldn’t say no. And there was no way I could rely on salads. Not a Tuscan speciality. Otherwise, it was pasta: avoiding meat in the sauce or inside was a constant challenge.

  Bernhard was in his element. Most evenings he seemed to eat half a cow; the German—or young male—love of meat was apparently trumping his environmental concerns and Sarah’s example. I even spent time walking with Sarah and enjoyed it more than I expected. It took my mind off Camille.

  ‘We had an amazing time between Aulla and Siena,’ she said. She looked lighter, younger somehow. I was envious but pleased for her.

  ‘Sarah has been awesome,’ Bernhard added. He looked… older. More settled. Maybe I was imagining it all.

  ‘We met these guys who had worked in Africa…’

  The two of them were bubbling with ideas. The people they had met had been volunteers who had helped dig a well in the Congo. Bernhard talked occasionally about the engineering side of it but that didn’t seem to be in Sarah’s head.

  The towns were now smaller—and, though quaint and full of history, not jammed with tourist shops. There were suburbs too, with their canine serenade, each dog seemingly handing a baton to the next as we passed. But the rhythm of days was more like the original Camino. I had time to think. I had a lot to think about.

  Camille hadn’t told me she was trying to save my soul, or that she needed to deliver the whole sinning package to the Pope. She knew that if she’d told me, I wouldn’t have come, given up three months of my life for something I so didn’t believe in.

  Most of all, I went over that crazy time back in St Louis, looking at it with fresh eyes. There was one moment I kept coming back to. The right-to-lifers were picketing the clinic and Camille couldn’t deal with it. She had walked away. That should have been the sign, but instead I’d tracked down this guy in LA that someone knew, and organised to drive there, and Camille went along with it. I’d had to do everything, because she was so distressed. Because she was so distressed. Camille hadn’t wanted a hero. Or she’d wanted a different kind of hero.

  I analysed my motivations, turning them over and over. I couldn’t be that twenty-year-old again, but I could see that I’d acted partly to prove something.

  And then, afterward, I’d gotten pregnant and had the baby. Camille had called me on that, drunk in the bar. How had that felt to her, back then? I could help her have an abortion, but the same didn’t apply to me. I know I’d have kept the baby—Lauren—even if Manny hadn’t stuck around.

  I wondered if Lauren knowing she wasn’t planned had affected who she was as an adult. Had her need to win every point, to prove herself worthy, come from that? And what about her disconnection from Tessa—and me? I hadn’t expected my reflections to take me there, but once they did, it felt like a place I had to go.

  Martin broke his silence about my angst just once: ‘Don’t beat yourself up for your part in something that happened so long ago. None of us know our unconscious motivations at the time—by definition. And we can’t hold ourselves responsible for the unintended consequences of them.’ All engineering-analytical, but it helped.

  Sutri marked nine weeks on the trail and Camille’s forty-ninth birthday. Another ancient Roman town, with a church cut from the rock of Etruscan tombs and an amphitheatre I explored with Martin when we arrived. We’d travelled from late summer deep into fall and were now only three days from Rome. I don’t think either of us wanted to break the bubble; we would have to make decisions soon enough.

  Though I was still shaken by it, I felt I’d come to terms with what Martin had told me.

  My anger toward Camille had gone; it had always been anger with myself, anyway. What hadn’t changed was my need to care for her. Whatever science might say, Camille’s truth was that the multiple sclerosis was divine punishment for a sin that I should never have helped her commit. It didn’t matter that I didn’t believe in her church: Camille did. And if, as Martin had said, when Camille prayed there was no one at the other end, then God’s instruction that I should care for Camille was an expression of her own deepest wish.

  Before we set out in the morning, we showered Camille with birthday gifts—flowers (Bernhard), breakfast in bed (Sarah), and the gold dove I’d bought for her in San Francisco. My dove had brought me here, for better or worse; this was a more elegant version.

  Martin gave her a small gift-wrapped box. She opened it, and broke into a huge smile. It was a stamp and pad. He must have ordered it online and collected it, I guessed in Siena. She pressed the stamp into the ink, then onto the back of her hand and showed us all the outline of a dove.

  ‘For your hostel,’ said Martin.

  She slipped the charm I’d given her onto the chain next to her wooden tau. We hadn’t talked about our pact, but I thought of the warmth between us as we had lit candles together, warmth that hadn’t been there before. Perhaps, like me, she felt this was something that had to happen and we were now reconciled to it. We’d be okay. The Chemin, like the Camino, had shown me I was strong and capable. I would find the courage—the luck and the strength and the love—that I needed to get us through.

  74

  MARTIN

  Camille’s birthday dinner was in Campagnano di Roma’s best hotel—which was also our accommodation—on the old carriage path, the Via Cassia. We were on the outskirts of Rome but a nature reserve was keeping us apart from the urban sprawl.

  Even by Gilbert’s standards, and certainly by the standards of a pilgrimage, the meal was over the top. If Zoe and I were to stay together, I hoped she wouldn’t be taking Gilbert as her benchmark for indulgence.

  We had a degustation menu, but not the regular one. Gilbert had ordered in advance, specifying Camille’s favourite Italian dishes.

  ‘Gilbert,’ said Camille, stating the obvious, ‘this must be costing you so much.’ You not us.

  Gilbert waved his hand dismissively, then pointed to the decanter. ‘The food is less expensive than the wine. Which is Italian, and worth the money. If you appreciate Italian wine, as all of us now do.’

  Could I have taken m
y share in cash? The others’ expressions suggested they were thinking the same thing. But Camille was smiling. She patted Gilbert’s hand and addressed us all.

  ‘Thank you, everybody, for helping us to get to Rome. It is hard for me to believe we are nearly there. So many kilometres!’

  ‘Many fine restaurants,’ said Gilbert. ‘New experiences. Especially Italy. This is a good way to live.’

  ‘Are you set free, then?’ Bernhard asked. He was looking at Camille.

  Her expression was hard to read. ‘Not until the end, when I see the Pope.’

  ‘What about you two?’ I asked Sarah and Bernhard. ‘Are you ready to share those benedictions?’

  They looked at each other, then Sarah gave me a quick glance.

  ‘I am free. To make my own choices, my own mistakes. Thanks to Bernhard.’

  ‘And the Chemin.’

  ‘Yes, and the Chemin.’

  ‘The same,’ said Bernhard.

  Then Camille turned back to Gilbert. ‘You have made me a wonderful birthday. Possibly my last before I can no longer appreciate it.’

  Gilbert was looking like a nervous young man who had risked taking his girlfriend to a fancy restaurant for dinner and been given the nod that he’d done all right. And to complete the impression, he pulled a small box from his jacket—the sort of box that would, in a stereotypical proposal scenario, hold a diamond ring.

  Camille simpered, opened it, and revealed that it did indeed contain a ring, apparently diamond—a fat one, to boot. Dinner must have been a mere bagatelle after buying that.

  ‘Gilbert, this is wonderful. It is so beautiful.’

  No hesitation, no sense of awkwardness. Had Gilbert pulled off a miracle?

  I asked Zoe the question as Gilbert and Camille, hand in hand, led us back to the foyer.

  ‘I think Camille was just being kind. Not wanting to let him down.’

  ‘Setting him up to be let down even harder.’

  ‘I don’t think so. I think they both know the score.’

  And possibly because he did know the score, Gilbert collared me before I could head upstairs.

  ‘You will share a digestif with me? Please?’

  I had been pondering a healthier and more enjoyable way of ending the evening with Zoe, in our much-too-stylish-for-pilgrims hotel room. There was also an email I’d received from Jim that I wanted to discuss with her. Both would have to wait. She gave me a disappointed nod and headed to the lifts.

  Gilbert and I had the bar to ourselves.

  ‘Cognac,’ he said, returning from the bar with two glasses, and sniffing his own contemplatively.

  ‘Brilliant evening,’ I said.

  ‘Perfect evening. Today, I have everything I want. The best day of my life.’

  ‘And tomorrow?’ More specifically, two days’ time.

  ‘As you have said, this is the lesson of the Chemin. One day at a time. Today is perfect and I do not wish to think about tomorrow.’ He swirled the pale liquid in his glass and looked into it. ‘When I think about life beyond Rome, even Rome itself, all I see is black.’

  ‘You mean blank?’

  ‘No, black. Before, my days with Camille were…compromised…because I was always thinking that she would leave me. Now, I enjoy today. So much we worry about does not come to pass.’

  Fine in principle. I wondered what conversation we’d be having in Rome if Camille gave him the worst day of his life. And perhaps me. Though while we walked I’d played with an alternative theory about the Big Lie that I hadn’t shared with Zoe. What if Camille had done more than flirt with Manny—Zoe’s boyfriend of the time and later her husband? He was demonstrably a guy who took risks with contraception. If Camille laid that on Zoe it would hardly encourage her to spend the rest of her life caring for her. Assuming Zoe believed her, given Camille’s track record of confabulation.

  Gilbert finished his glass. ‘I am not a fatalist. I make every effort, but I am now almost sure what the outcome will be. But tomorrow evening—not tonight, because Camille will be asleep soon and today has been a perfect day for me—I will apologise to her. For leaving her. Of course, I cannot use those words. I will apologise for the femme de ménage, because that is what she believes. Say a prayer for me.’

  75

  ZOE

  Camille was not down for breakfast when the rest of us were ready to leave. Gilbert had been up to their room twice.

  ‘She is enjoying a lie-in,’ he told us after the first time.

  After the second: ‘She would like to speak with you, Zoe.’

  She was still in bed, but it seemed like she was physically okay—sitting up with a half-finished coffee next to her on the table. She smiled when she saw me.

  ‘You and I must talk.’

  There wasn’t a chair, so I perched on the bed, but she waved me off. ‘Not here. Tell the others to walk. You and I will make our own day.’

  ‘All good,’ I told the other four downstairs. ‘We’ll see you in La Storta.’

  Martin raised an eyebrow. ‘Maybe you’ll catch up.’

  It wasn’t going to happen unless they waited for us. Camille was in no rush, and when I finally got her up and dressed and we’d had breakfast, she wanted to stop right away for another coffee.

  Leaving Campagnano, we had a view over the countryside we had been travelling through, and then we walked through the magnificent Veio Park, crossing the inhabited area to join a long track. At last, Camille started talking.

  ‘You know I will no longer live with Gilbert. I needed to make my final decision. He made me a wonderful birthday and I thought…’

  ‘…If this is as good as it gets, no?’

  ‘I was tempted. Practically, he is so good. But I will not let the disease make me take him back. You know he has never apologised.’

  ‘Would that change things?’

  ‘I am not talking about…hypotheticals.’

  ‘Have you told him? That it’s over?’

  ‘Not yet. But he knows.’

  She’d said I had become practical. Someone had to be. So, I added: ‘But he gave up his business, right? Does he have anywhere to live?’

  ‘The house has enough space. He will stay until he finds somewhere else. Or I find my hostel. Life is short.’

  ‘Remind me if I get annoyed with you, that I think you are truer to yourself and what you believe than anyone I know. And you are brave.’

  Camille smiled sadly. ‘I am not so brave. But I have choices, and this one I make, even if it does not make Gilbert happy. We were not happy together and he forgets this.’

  We walked for half an hour in silence.

  ‘You can come and live with me in Bastien’s room. But if you change your mind…’

  She was giving me the out I wanted. Why couldn’t I take it?

  ‘Why didn’t you talk to Mary-Lou when you found out you were pregnant?’ I blurted out. ‘Back when you needed help?’ I wanted to hear it from her.

  Camille neither spoke nor looked at me for some time. Then she stopped and turned. The sunlight filtered behind her through the deep-green leaves on the tree that framed her face. She looked hardly older than she had been when, instead, it was my help she had asked for.

  ‘Because I thought I could trust you to do what was right.’ Then, limp and all, she strode ahead.

  It occurred to me that there was something even harder to accept about what had happened between us all those years ago. Worse than my self-congratulation. My mother’s anger—the anger that had estranged us for years, that I’d only forgiven after she’d died—had been at me. I had wanted her to choose me rather than her beliefs, and been driven subconsciously to make her choose. Camille had been collateral damage.

  Yet my mother had been right in Camille’s case, even if I could never agree with either on the principle of it being a woman’s choice, not God’s rule. Camille would have been better off if I’d helped her to tell her parents and not have the abortion. Ironically, if I had my time again
, with what I understood now, I would never have taken that trip: a trip that defined me. Who, then, would I have become? Would that version of me have taken the way out that Camille might be offering now?

  By the time I caught her up, I could see Martin ahead. And I sensed that something was very wrong.

  76

  MARTIN

  Gilbert had been struggling, and I wasn’t surprised when he stopped to catch his breath. But then he dropped to the ground, leaning against his pack, which was still on his back.

  ‘Heartburn,’ he said. ‘It would not happen with French food.’ Then, ‘Don’t tell Camille I said that.’

  Sarah had crouched next to him and Bernhard was beside her. I was the only one standing, watching from above.

  ‘Have you had this before?’ said Sarah.

  ‘I’m all right,’ said Gilbert. ‘A few minutes’ rest. There are pills in my pack.’

  Bernhard helped him release his pack, and together they extracted the bag of drugs we’d once had to go back for. Gilbert swallowed a couple.

  ‘What are they?’ said Sarah.

  ‘For indigestion. In an hour—less—the problem will be gone.’

  ‘Do you have a history of heart disease? Problems?’

  ‘History? No.’ Gilbert shook his head and managed a laugh.

  Sarah got up and pulled me aside.

  ‘I’m not happy, Dad. He could be having a heart attack. I’ve got a phone signal.’

  Bernhard was right behind her. ‘This has happened before. It’s the food. Very unhealthy meal last night. Even I have some discomfort today.’

  ‘What if we’re wrong?’

  ‘We are close to Rome. It would not take long for help to get here. We should wait and see if it worsens.’

  We were in a national park but not too far from roads. Gilbert presumably knew his own health as well as anyone and didn’t seem fussed.