by Rachel Joyce
He was replacing his wallet in his back pocket when the door of the breakfast lounge burst open. The waitress emerged, followed by the two grey ladies and the businessman.
‘We were worrying you’d left,’ said the waitress, smoothing her red hair and slightly out of breath.
‘We wanted to say bon voyage,’ piped up the plump lady.
‘I do hope you make it,’ said her tall friend.
The businessman pressed his card into Harold’s palm. ‘If you make it as far as Hexham, you should look me up.’
They believed in him. They had looked at him in his yachting shoes, and listened to what he said, and they had made a decision in their hearts and minds to ignore the evidence and to imagine something bigger and something infinitely more beautiful than the obvious. Remembering his own doubt, Harold was humbled. ‘That is so kind,’ he said softly. He shook their hands and thanked them. The waitress nipped her face towards his and kissed the air above his ear.
It was possible that as Harold turned to leave, the businessman snorted or even grimaced, and it was also possible that from the breakfast lounge came a shout of laughter, followed by a suppressed giggle. But Harold did not dwell on that; such was his gratitude, he heard and laughed with them. ‘I’ll see you in Hexham,’ he promised, and threw a large wave as he strode towards the road.
The pewter sea lay behind, while ahead of him was all the land that led to Berwick, where once again there would be sea. He had started; and in doing so Harold could already see the end.
5
Harold and the Barman and the Woman with Food
IT WAS A perfect spring day. The air was sweet and gentle and the sky stretched high, an intense blue. Harold was certain that the last time he had peered through the net drapes of Fossebridge Road, the trees and hedges were dark bones and spindles against the skyline; yet now that he was out, and on his feet, it was as if everywhere he looked, the fields, gardens, trees and hedgerows had exploded with growth. A canopy of sticky young leaves clung to the branches above him. There were startling yellow clouds of forsythia, trails of purple aubrietia; a young willow shook in a fountain of silver. The first of the potato shoots fingered through the soil and already tiny buds hung from the gooseberry and currant shrubs like the earrings Maureen used to wear. The abundance of new life was enough to make him giddy.
With the hotel behind him, and few cars on the road, it occurred to Harold how vulnerable he was, a single figure, without his mobile phone. If he fell, or if someone sprang out of the bushes, who would hear his cries? A cracking of branches sent him scurrying forward; only to look back, with his heart wildly beating, and discover a pigeon regaining its balance in a tree. As time passed and he found his rhythm, he began to feel more certain. England opened beneath his feet, and the feeling of freedom, of pushing into the unknown, was so exhilarating he had to smile. He was in the world by himself and nothing could get in the way or ask him to mow the lawn.
Beyond the hedgerows, the land fell away to his left and right. A small copse of trees had been shaped by the wind into a quiff. He thought of his own thick hair when he was a teenager, slicked to a peak every day with gel.
He would head north towards South Brent, where he would find modest accommodation for the night. From there, he would follow the A38 to Exeter. He couldn’t recall the exact mileage, but in the old days he would allow a comfortable hour and twenty minutes for the drive. Harold walked the single-track lanes, and the walls of hedgerow were so dense and high, it was like journeying through a trench. It surprised Harold how fast and angry cars seemed when you were not in one. He took off his waterproof jacket and folded it over his arm.
He and Queenie must have driven this way countless times, and yet he had no memory of the scenery. He must have been so caught up in the day’s agenda, and arriving punctually at their destination, that the land beyond the car had been no more than a wash of one green, and a backdrop of one hill. Life was very different when you walked through it. Between gaps in the banks, the land rolled up and down, carved into chequered fields, and lined with ridges of hedging and trees. He had to stop to look. There were so many shades of green Harold was humbled. Some were almost a deep velvety black, others so light they verged on yellow. Far away the sun caught a passing car, maybe a window, and the light trembled across the hills like a fallen star. How was it he had never noticed all this before? Pale flowers, the name of which he didn’t know, pooled the foot of the hedgerows, along with primroses and violets. He wondered if, all those years ago, Queenie had looked out from her passenger window and seen these things.
‘This car smells of sugar,’ Maureen had said once, pulling at the air with her nostrils. ‘Violet sweets.’ He had taken care after that to drive home at night with the windows open.
When he arrived in Berwick, he would buy a bouquet. He pictured himself striding into the hospice, and Queenie sitting in a pleasant chair by a sunny window, waiting for his arrival. The nursing staff would stop whatever they were doing and watch him pass, and the patients would be cheering, maybe even clapping, because he had come such a long way, of course; and Queenie would be laughing in that quiet way of hers, as she took the flowers in her arms.
Maureen used to wear a sprig of blossom or an autumn leaf in the buttonhole of her dress. It must have been just after they were married. Sometimes, if there wasn’t a button, she’d slide it over her ear, and the petals would fall into her hair. It was almost funny. He hadn’t thought of that in years.
A car slowed and drew to a halt. It was so close Harold had to crush his body into the nettles. The window lowered. There was loud music, but he couldn’t see the faces. ‘Off to see your girlfriend, Granddad?’ Harold gave a thumbs-up, waiting for the stranger to pass. His skin fizzed where it had been stung.
On he went, one foot in front of the other. Now that he accepted the slowness of himself, he took pleasure in the distance he covered. Far ahead the horizon was no more than a blue brushstroke, pale as water, and unbroken by houses or trees, but sometimes it blurred as if the land and the sky had bled into one another and become matching halves of the same thing. He passed two vans, nose to nose, their drivers arguing over which of them should reverse to a passing point. His body ached for food. He thought of the breakfast he had not eaten and his stomach twisted.
At the California Cross junction, Harold stopped for an early pub lunch and chose two rounds of ready-made cheese sandwiches from a basket. Three men coated in plaster dust, like ghosts, were discussing a house they were renovating. A few other drinkers glanced up from their pints, but this had never been his patch, and thankfully he knew no one. Harold carried his lunch and lemonade to the door, blinking at the onslaught of light as he stepped out into the beer garden. Lifting the glass to his mouth, a swell of saliva pooled his tongue, and when he dug his teeth into the sandwiches, the nuttiness of the cheese and the sweetness of the bread exploded on to his taste buds with such vigour it was as if he had never eaten before.
As a boy, he tried to chew without noise. His father didn’t like to hear him masticate. Sometimes he said nothing, only held his ears and closed his eyes, as if the boy were a pain inside his head; other times he said Harold was a dirty beggar. ‘Takes one to know one,’ his mother would answer, screwing out a cigarette. It was nerves, he heard a neighbour say. The war had made people funny. And sometimes as a boy he had wanted to touch his father; to stand close beside him and know the feeling of an adult arm around his shoulder. He had wanted to ask what happened before he was born, and why his father’s hands trembled when he reached for his glass.
‘That boy’s staring at me,’ said his father sometimes. His mother would swipe his knuckles, not hard but as if she were brushing off a fly, and say, ‘Leave off, sonny. Go and play outside.’
It surprised him that he was remembering all this. Maybe it was the walking. Maybe you saw even more than the land when you got out of the car and used your feet.
The sun poured like warm liquid on Haro
ld’s head and hands. He removed his shoes and socks under the table, where no one would see or smell them, and examined his feet. The toes were moist and an angry crimson. Where the shoe met his heel the skin had become inflamed; the blister was a tight pod. He paddled the arches of his feet in the soft grass and closed his eyes, feeling tired, but knowing that he mustn’t sleep. It would be difficult to keep going if he stopped for too long.
‘Enjoy it while it lasts.’
Harold turned, afraid of finding someone he knew. It was only the landlord, partially eclipsing the sun. He was as tall as Harold, but of wider build, dressed in a rugby shirt and long shorts, and those sandals that Maureen said looked like Cornish pasties. Harold returned his feet quickly to his yachting shoes.
‘Don’t let me disturb you,’ said the landlord, rather loud, and without moving. In Harold’s experience, publicans often behaved as if it was their responsibility to suggest there was a conversation happening, even in silence, and that it was hugely entertaining. ‘The nice weather makes people want to do something. Take my wife. First sunny day, she cleans out the kitchen cupboards.’
Maureen seemed to clean all year round. Houses don’t clean themselves, she’d mutter. Sometimes she cleaned the bits she had just cleaned. It wasn’t like living in a house, but more a question of hovering over the surfaces. He didn’t say that, however. He merely thought it.
‘I haven’t seen you before,’ said the landlord. ‘Are you visiting?’
Harold explained that he was passing through. He had retired six months ago, he said, from the brewery. He belonged to the old days, when the reps drove out every morning and there was less technology.
‘So you must have known Napier?’
The question took him unawares. Harold cleared his throat and said Napier had been his boss until he was killed in the car crash five years back.
‘I know you shouldn’t speak ill of the dead,’ said the landlord, ‘but he was a vicious sod. I saw him half kill a man once. We had to pull him off.’
Harold felt a twisting in his gut. It would be better not to speak about Napier. Instead he explained how he had set off with the letter for Queenie, and realized it wasn’t enough. Before the landlord could point it out, he admitted he had no phone, walking boots or map, and that he probably appeared ridiculous.
‘It’s not a name you hear much, Queenie,’ said the landlord. ‘It’s old-fashioned.’
Harold agreed and said she had been an old-fashioned sort of person. Quiet, and always wearing a brown wool suit, even in the summer months.
The landlord folded his arms, resting them over the soft shelf of his belly, and widened his feet, as if he had something to tell and it might take a while. Harold hoped it wasn’t concerning the distance between Devon and Berwick-upon-Tweed. ‘There was this young lady I knew once. Lovely girl. Lived in Tunbridge Wells. She was the first girl I ever kissed, and she let me do a few things besides, if you get my drift. This young lady would have done anything for me. I just couldn’t see it. Too busy trying to get on in the world. It was only years later, when I was invited to the wedding, that I saw what a lucky bastard the chap marrying her was.’
Harold felt he should say that he had never been in love with Queenie, not in that way, but it seemed rude to interrupt.
‘I fell apart. Started drinking. Got myself in a right mess, if you know what I mean.’
Harold nodded.
‘Spent six years in prison in the end. My wife laughs but these days I do craftwork. Table decorations. I get the baubles and the baskets off the internet. The truth is,’ and here he wiggled his ear with his finger, ‘we’ve all got a past. We’ve all got things we wish we’d done, or hadn’t. Good luck to you. I hope you find the lady.’ The landlord removed his finger from his ear and studied it with a frown. ‘If you’re lucky, you should get there this afternoon.’
There was no point in correcting him. You couldn’t expect people to understand the nature of his walk, or even the exact whereabouts of Berwick-upon-Tweed. Harold thanked him and continued on his way. He remembered how Queenie kept a notebook in her handbag to tot up their mileage. It wasn’t in her to tell a lie; at least not one that was intentional. A flicker of guilt propelled him forward.
During the afternoon, his blister became more painful. He found a way of shoving his toes towards the front end of the shoe, to avoid the leather biting into his ankle. He wasn’t thinking of Queenie and he wasn’t thinking of Maureen. He wasn’t even seeing the hedgerows or the horizon or the passing cars. He was the words, You will not die, and they were also his feet. Only sometimes the words marched themselves in different orders, and he realized with a start that his head was chanting, Die you will not, or Not will you die, or even plain Not not not. The sky above him was the same sky that hung over Queenie Hennessy and he knew with increasing certainty that she had learned what he was doing and was waiting. He knew he was going to reach Berwick, and that all he had to do was to place one foot in front of the other. The simplicity of it was joyful. If he kept going forward, he would of course arrive.
The land lay still, interrupted only by the traffic that rustled the leaves as it rushed past. The sound could almost convince him he was back at the sea. Harold found himself halfway through a memory that he was not aware of conjuring into his mind.
When David was six they had gone to the beach at Bantham and he had started swimming out. Maureen had shouted, ‘David! Come back! Come back right now!’ Only the more insistently she called, the smaller the little boy’s head became. Harold had followed her to the water’s edge, and stopped to unlace his shoes. He was about to pull them off when a coastguard had sprinted past, tearing off his T-shirt and hurling it behind him as an afterthought. The chap had gone ploughing into the water until he was waist deep, and then he had plunged his whole body in, slicing through the waves until he reached the child. He had carried David back in his arms. The boy’s ribs stuck out like fingers, and his mouth was blue. ‘He was lucky,’ the coastguard said. He addressed Maureen, not her husband; Harold withdrew a step or two. ‘There’s a strong current out there.’ His white canvas shoes shone wet in the sun.
And Maureen had never said it, but Harold knew what she was thinking because he was thinking the same thing: why had he stopped for his laces when his only son was in danger of drowning?
Years later, he had said to David, ‘Why did you keep swimming? That day on the beach? Couldn’t you hear us?’
David must have been a young teenager. He had gazed back at Harold, with his beautiful brown eyes that were half-boy, half-man, and he’d shrugged. ‘I dunno. I was already in shit. It seemed easier to stay in it than come back.’ Harold had said it was better not to swear, especially in his mother’s hearing, and David had said something like, Bug off.
Harold wondered why he was remembering all this. His only child ploughing an escape into the sea, and telling him years later to bug off. The pictures had come to him whole, as if they were part of the same moment; points of light dropped on the sea like rain, while David gazed at Harold with an intensity that seemed to undo him. He had been afraid; that was the truth. He had untied his laces because he was terrified that when there were no more excuses, he would not be up to saving his son. And what was more, they all knew it; Harold, Maureen, the coastguard, even David. Harold pushed his feet forward.
He feared there would be more. The images and thoughts that crammed his head at night, keeping him awake. Years later Maureen had accused him of almost drowning their son. He fixed his attention on what was outside.
The road stretched between the dense corridors of hedgerow, and light sieved through the cracks and fissures. Fresh shoots speared the earth banks. Far away a clock chimed three. Time was passing. He drove his feet faster.
Harold became aware of a dry sensation in his mouth. He tried not to imagine a glass of water, but now that his head had produced the image, it also conjured the feel and taste of cold liquid in his mouth, and his body grew weak with t
he need for it. He walked very carefully, trying to stabilize the ground while it tipped beneath his feet. Several cars slowed, but he waved them on, not wanting their attention. Each breath seemed too angular to pass through the cavities of his chest. There was no choice but to stop at the first home he came to. He secured the iron gate and hoped there weren’t dogs.
The bricks of the house were new and grey; the evergreen hedging shaved hard back like a wall. Tulips grew in pert rows in beds that were without weeds. To the side hung a line of washing: several large shirts, trousers, skirts and a woman’s bra. He looked away, not wanting to see things he shouldn’t. As a teenager, he had often gazed at his aunts’ pegged-up corsets, brassieres, support knickers and stockings. It was the first time he had realized the female world held secrets he wanted to know. He rang the doorbell of the house, and leaned against the wall.
When a woman answered, her face dropped. He wanted to reassure her not to worry, but his insides felt stripped. He could barely move his tongue. She hurried to fetch him a drink, and as he took the glass his hands trembled. The iced water broke over his teeth, his gums, the roof of his mouth, and rushed to his throat. He could have cried at the rightness of it.
‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ she said, after she had fetched him a second glass and he had emptied that too. She was a wide woman, wearing a creased dress; childbearing hips, Maureen would have said. Her face was so weathered the skin looked slapped. ‘Do you need to rest?’
Harold promised he was feeling better. He was eager to get back to the road, and didn’t want to intrude on a stranger. Besides, he felt he had already broken an unspoken English rule in asking for help. To do more would be to align himself with something both transient and unknown. In between the words he sought quick rasping breaths. He assured her he was walking a long way but probably hadn’t got the hang of it yet. He hoped it would raise a smile, but she didn’t seem to see the funny side. It was a long time since he had made a woman laugh.