The Long Walk Home

by Will North

  Fiona was trying to place the man’s accent. Clearly not British. North American, she guessed, but where?

  “You’re Canadian, then?” she asked.

  “American.”

  “Really! We don’t get many Americans way out here.”

  “Been here before. Stayed across the river, at Ty Isaf.”

  “With Graham and Diana? They’ve moved away now, you know.”

  “So I discovered.”

  “Only to be further misled by our esteemed Tourist Information Center. Look, I’d love to have you, but I’m completely booked. I have a room available tomorrow night—Sundays are often slow—but not tonight.”

  “I understand,” the walker said.

  “Look here,” Fiona said, “why don’t you step inside and I’ll just call Janet, at Rockledge. Perhaps she has a room tonight; then you could come here in the morning.”

  “That’s very kind.”

  “No trouble at all; I’ll just be a tick.”

  The man watched her go. She was nearly a foot shorter than he, but she carried herself in a way that made her seem taller. Her hair swung like a silk curtain across the nape of her neck as she walked. He guessed her to be several years younger than he, and he noticed, with an ache of longing that surprised him, how good she looked in those tight jeans.

  Fiona scurried into the kitchen and dialed her neighbor, a mile back down the road. After several rings, Janet finally picked up.

  “Dolgellau 531,” Janet said, using the old way of answering. Janet was getting on in years and hadn’t taken to all-numerical telephone numbers. She was also hard of hearing.

  “Janet!” Fiona shouted into the phone. “Fi here. Look, I’ve got an American walker chap at the door who needs a room, but I’m booked solid; have you one free? No? Well, yes, I know: the season’s started early this year. Yes, I’m busy, too. No, Bronwen’s gone and closed early again and this fellow’s walked all the way here. I know, I know; it’s just not right, is it? Okay, Janet, must run. Thanks awfully; thanks. Bye!”

  Fiona returned to the front hall. “I’m afraid Janet’s booked as well. I’m so sorry.”

  “I heard. Thanks anyway. Sorry to have troubled you.”

  “No, no trouble at all,” Fiona replied. “Look, may I at least offer you a cup of tea?” She realized she was drawing out the exchange.

  Though the man had few words, his voice was a soft and rumbly baritone; she had the curious sensation of being warmed when he spoke.

  “No thanks. It’s getting late. I’d better find someplace to stay tonight.”

  He turned, paused, then turned back to her again with that same shy smile. “Lovely meeting you, though,” he said. And then he was off.

  Fiona returned to the kitchen and watched him as he turned down the lane. The man had beautiful legs—long, hard, and muscular, but in the way a dancer’s legs are muscular—articulated, but elongated, not massive. Like many Welsh farmers, her husband was dark, fairly short, and big-boned: a strong, sturdy man well suited to raising hill sheep, but also, she had often thought, rather coarsely made. David plodded when he walked; this American chap, now; he was graceful. No, that was too feminine, she corrected herself: lithe, that was it. He moved smoothly and easily despite the heavy pack.

  As she watched him leave, she realized there was something else about her visitor that had affected her, something she struggled to pin down. Though he seemed a cheerful sort, Fiona couldn’t help but sense something beneath the easy smile. Sadness—that was it. It was just the most fleeting of sensations, barely perceptible. But it clung to him like a fragrance.

  two

  ALEC HUDSON WAS TIRED. Bone tired. Soul tired. Tired in that way you are when you think you’ve reached your destination at last but discover there’s yet another hill to climb. He’d been walking all day. In fact, he’d been walking for nearly three weeks, all the way from London’s Heathrow Airport to this remote valley in North Wales.

  He thought of it as a pilgrimage, this walking; each day was like a prayer, each step a kind of incantation. It was as if the horizon toward which he walked, and which kept advancing ahead of him, was an ideal he strove for but could never attain. He was not entirely sure what ideal the horizon represented, but he thought it had something to do with love, with duty, with keeping faith. Maybe he was doing penance.

  From Heathrow, he had walked a few miles south to the river Thames and then followed the footpath along its banks upstream to the west, halfway across England. When the river turned north toward Oxford, he kept his heading, climbing up to the edge of the rolling Berkshire Downs. Here he followed the Ridgeway, a track cut into the brilliantly white chalk soil of the downs by ancient feet more than five thousand years ago—before Rome, before Greece, at the dawn of recorded history. By the end of the first week, he was in the southern Cotswolds, roughly halfway between the once-Roman cities of Cirencester and Bath. At the Tormartin interchange above the M4 Motorway, a truck driver picked him up and carried him across the older of the two bridges spanning the broad mouth of the Severn River. Alec had been standing in the sun with a handmade sign that read just across the bridge.

  “Not supposed to do it,” the driver said, “but Reg, I says to myself, a bit ’ard for the bloke to fly across the river wot wit that bloody great thing on his back, innit?”

  Alec tried to pay the bridge toll but the driver wouldn’t hear of it. He dropped Alec off on the other side of the Severn, near Chepstow Castle, before driving west to Cardiff to deliver a load of kitchen cabinets from Devizes. Alec turned north to follow the twisting valley of the river Wye, which for part of its length serves as the border between England and Wales. He stopped briefly at Tintern Abbey, the picturesque ruin Wordsworth had immortalized, and then walked on to Monmouth. From there he headed west to the narrow and peaceful Llanthony Valley, and followed a single-track road north all the way to the crest of Hay Bluff, high in Wales’s Black Mountains. A few miles farther along, he rejoined the meandering river Wye and followed it to Builth Wells, reaching the town at the end of his second week and marveling at how much landscape one could cover simply by putting one foot in front of the other, mile after mile, day after day. He’d calculated that he averaged between two and three miles an hour, depending on the terrain. Up most days with the sun, he put eight to ten miles behind him before lunch and another eight or ten, sometimes more, before calling it a day. From Builth Wells, he pressed north and west up into the bleak moorland of the Cambrian Mountains, reaching Machynlleth, on the river Dovey near the Welsh coast, toward the end of the third week. He’d been lucky; with the exception of a few misty mornings, he’d had clear and exceptionally warm weather the whole way. As he strode north, spring advanced with him. Daffodils bloomed in cottage gardens and along the roadside. Wild garlic sent up plumes of delicate white umbrels. Primroses burst lemon yellow from the chinks in stone walls. He noticed that in many species of plant, the yellow-flowered varieties seemed to blossom first, as if to add more light to the dun-colored landscape and heat to the weak spring sun.

  When evening came on, Alec alternated between bed-and-breakfast accommodations and camping out. Often there wasn’t a choice. After ten or more hours of walking he stopped wherever he ran out of steam. Sometimes it was a village with a place to stay; sometimes it was in the middle of nowhere and he pitched his tent. During the day, he’d stop in a village to shop so he always had a picnic dinner if he needed it: some salami, a chunk of farmhouse cheddar, a small loaf of chewy brown granary bread, an apple, sometimes even a bottle of red wine.

  The people he met asked him where he was going. That was easy: North Wales. They asked him why he was walking, and that was a harder question to answer. “It just felt like the right thing to do, under the circumstances” is what he usually said, and when he told them the story, people seemed to understand.

  ***

  “THERE’S SOMETHING I need you to read,” Alec’s ex-wife had announced from her hospital bed a year earlier.
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  He and Gwynne had been divorced for years, lived on opposite sides of the country, in fact—he in Seattle, she in Boston—but they had never quite managed to fall out of love. Alec had tried, but it didn’t work: Gwynne Davis was the kind of woman who lit up rooms when she entered. Part of it was sheer presence: she was six feet tall in her stocking feet and another three inches taller in her signature stilettos. Part of it, too, was spirit. She radiated an almost childlike joy of life. She wasn’t just lively, she effervesced. In the early days, at least, it had been magical, as if he were being showered with fine particles of delight.

  They had met in the mid-1970s, in New York—the city where he was born and raised. His friend Karen, whom he’d known since high school and who, it seemed to him, had been matchmaking for him ever since, had decided he spent too much time alone writing his books and announced one day that she had arranged a double date. There was no denying Karen; she assumed capitulation. Karen had met Gwynne while shopping at Bergdorf’s on Fifth Avenue, where Miss Davis, as she was known, worked in the fashion office. Well, he’d thought glumly, at least she’ll be well dressed.

  “You’ll like her,” Karen had said. Then, employing yet another of her endless supply of non sequiturs, she added, “She’s tall.”

  Then the day had come and he was standing, somewhat uncomfortably, in the designer lingerie department, which was just outside the fashion office. Karen had left him there while she went to find his date. Alec was idly thumbing through one of the racks, wondering how the prices for things so flimsy could be so breathtakingly high, when a slightly husky female voice behind him said, “Don’t you think those will be a little small for you?”

  He turned to respond, tilting his head down to the place where women’s faces generally were, and found himself staring directly at the woman’s chest. He raised his head slowly, his jaw dropping as he did so, until he was almost certain he was actually looking up into the woman’s hazel eyes. Uncharacteristically, he was speechless.

  “Alec,” he heard Karen’s voice say, “meet Gwynne.”

  Anticipating the usual question, she put her hands on her hips and said, “The answer is, six feet even. Six-three in heels.” Then she flashed him a dazzling smile.

  Still trying to recover, Alec blurted, “It’s just that I’ve never ...”

  “No, I don’t suppose you have,” she said. Then, opening a little window into herself, she leaned a little closer. He could smell her perfume—something earthy—as she whispered, “Relax; it’s really nice to meet a tall man for a change, even a speechless one.”

  Then she turned to Karen and said, “Are we having dinner or are we all going to stand here and starve to death in the lingerie section?”

  While Karen and Gwynne talked over the evening’s plan, Alec registered what his date was wearing: over a pair of tight black jeans, which he had trouble believing anyone made that long, she had tossed an old, award-bedecked Boy Scout shirt she’d found in a secondhand store on the Lower East Side. She’d sewn in dramatic shoulder pads and replaced the khaki buttons with red ones to match some of the award patches. The oversized shirt was cinched tight at her narrow waist with a thin red leather belt. Several of the top buttons were unbuttoned and she wore a modest black silk camisole beneath. Wrapped several times around her swanlike neck and then draped carelessly over both shoulders was a long, black silk crepe scarf that echoed the jeans. Her high heels matched the red belt. Her long, softly wavy, light-brown hair had reddish highlights and fell to her shoulders. She wore no jewelry, which, given her professional position, surprised him. The only makeup he could detect was a hint of color on her lips and possibly a blush that highlighted her cheekbones.

  Later he would realize that the whole outfit was classic Gwynne: creative, mischievous, unpretentious, and yet—on her, at least—stunning. The fact that she could put things together in a way that looked fabulous but cost almost nothing drove the other women in the fashion office crazy and delighted Bergdorf’s president. She was his “goldenhaired girl” and he had plans for her.

  Alec fell for her immediately. A few weeks later, his mother asked, as mothers do, “Is she pretty?” He thought about this for a moment and answered, “No, not pretty, Mom ... striking. Beautiful in a handsome sort of way—the way Katharine Hepburn is beautiful.” What was captivating about Gwynne, what galvanized nearly everyone she met, was the energy she radiated. She was luminescent.

  Now, more than twenty years later, she was dying and Alec was at her side. The doctors thought they’d caught her breast cancer but the malignancy had spread. Alec had come east to care for her. She hadn’t eaten anything solid in two months. For more than a week, she hadn’t been able to drink anything and keep it down. The veins in her arms, hands, and legs, through which she’d been receiving fluids, had collapsed. Her skin had become mottled—a sure sign, the nurse told him, that she was dying. And yet her spirit seemed undiminished, even as her body withered. Each morning she’d wake up, flash Alec that searchlight smile, and say, “Well, I guess I’m not dead yet!” The nurses adored her. One said, “She’s incredible: we go in there to care for her but she ends up making us feel better.”

  On this particular morning she gestured to a manila envelope on her tray table. The label said “Last Will and Testament.”

  “Ah,” he said, making light of the situation the way they always did, “instructions for distributing your vast fortune.” It was a joke; Gwynne was not wealthy.

  “Read it carefully, love,” she said. “You’re my executor.”

  Alec read the will. The terms of her bequest were pure Gwynne: both generous and mischievous. Her modest assets were to be equally divided among the members of her family and his—she had always said his zany family felt more like hers than her own. But there was a catch: the money could only be used to do something that the beneficiaries had never felt they could afford to do. And it had to be fun.

  Alec leaned across the hospital bed and kissed her. “That’s perfect,” he said. “That’s you.”

  “Keep reading,” she ordered, smiling as if she had a secret. A few paragraphs later came this: “I direct that my ex-husband and executor shall scatter my cremated remains atop Cadair Idris in Wales.”

  He looked up, dumbfounded. True, Gwynne was part Welsh, and they had climbed the mountain together years earlier, but still he was stunned. “Why there?” he asked.

  “Because,” she said, “climbing it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done physically and the thing I’m most proud of.”

  Alec had never known. Gwynne was secretive about many things.

  The next day, when the doctors confessed there was nothing more they could do for her, Gwynne asked Alec to take her home to her own bed. A week later, after a terrifying descent into dehydration-induced confusion and paranoia, she slipped into a morphine haze and quietly died in his arms. She was fifty years old, a year older than Alec. They’d always joked about him being her “toy boy.”

  It had taken him a full year to book a flight to England to honor her request. It felt so very far away. He thought that by taking her there he was somehow abandoning her. This was selfishness on his part, he knew: even in death he wanted her close to him. The box holding Gwynne’s ashes sat on a shelf in his bedroom, admonishing him. “I know,” he’d say to it. “I will. Soon. I promise.”

  When spring came again he knew it was time. Gwynne loved springtime in Britain—the sheer range of greens splashed across the landscape, the emerging wildflowers, the hawthorn hedgerows in frothy bloom, the exuberant birdsong, the tiny lambs bouncing stiff-legged across daisy-dappled meadows.

  Gwynne hadn’t asked him to walk; that had been his idea. It seemed only fitting: the two of them had spent so many magical days walking through the English countryside during their marriage; it was where they’d always been happiest, a place where the troubles between them vanished, at least for a time. Yet Alec also knew the long walk was something he had to do to save himself. The divorce had be
en hard enough—something both of them later agreed they should have been smart enough to avoid. But they had always been able to pick up the phone and hear each other’s voices, listen to each other’s troubles, poke fun at each other’s foibles, those quirks and habits only someone you’ve lived with a long time ever truly understands. They could laugh, and they did, often.

  Now there was no more laughter. The finality of Gwynne’s death, its unfairness, the incredible velocity of it, had left him stunned and numb. Then again, numbness was a protective device Alec had developed early in life. His father had been the kind of alcoholic who dealt with his own inadequacies by being verbally abusive to his family, tearing them down so as to make himself feel bigger. If you let it get to you, the viciousness was corrosive. His mother, who worked to support them, lived on tranquilizers to lessen the hurt. His younger sister simply withdrew into a world of her own. Alec, who was often the target of his father’s tirades, learned to go numb. It can’t hurt you if you don’t feel it. He also learned how to cope with chaos, the everyday condition of his family. In a crisis, Alec became icily calm and coolly rational. He could be counted on when everyone else dithered, ducked, or collapsed altogether. But he was not an automaton; he had inherited a big heart from his mother and fell naturally into the role of caretaker. Years earlier, he and Gwynne had agreed that this caretaker characteristic was one of the things that had drawn her to him, like a flower turning to the sun. But it had burned them, too; her need for care and his eagerness to provide it eventually drove them apart. When cancer struck and she was dying, she joked that at last her need for his care was legitimate.

  “No, Gwynne,” he’d said, “it’s a gift you’ve given me.”

  In the year since her death, he’d felt perpetually adrift. It was only in her absence that he realized how much—despite their divorce a decade earlier—she had been an anchor in his life. He struggled with verb tenses now when he thought or spoke about her: Gwynne is, Gwynne was; she will, she would have.