by Rachel Joyce
Harold removed his socks and shoes, although it hurt to bend, and unpeeled the most recent set of plasters. He could sense her watching carefully. As he set his naked feet side by side, he couldn’t help but see them through the eyes of a stranger and he was shocked, as if he were noticing them for the first time. They were an unhealthy white, verging on grey, the indent of his socks making ridges into the skin. Blisters swelled from his toes, heels and instep; some bleeding, others inflamed sacs of pus. The nail of his big toe was tough as a hoof, and a dark blueberry colour where it had rammed against the end of his shoe. A thickened layer of skin grew over his heel, cracked in places and also bleeding. He had to hold his breath against the smell.
‘You don’t want to see any more.’
‘I do,’ she said. ‘Roll up your trouser leg.’
He winced as the fabric brushed over his right calf and scalded it. He had never let a stranger touch his bare skin before. He remembered how he had stood on his wedding night in the hotel bathroom in Holt, frowning at the reflection of his bare chest, and fearing Maureen would be disappointed.
Martina was still waiting. She said, ‘It’s OK. I know what I am doing. I’m trained.’
Harold’s right foot shot of its own accord behind his left ankle, and hid there. ‘You mean you’re a nurse?’
She gave him a sardonic look. ‘A doctor. Women are these days. I trained in a hospital in Slovakia. That’s where I met my partner. He worked there too. Give me your foot, Harold. I won’t send you home. I promise.’
He had no choice. Gently she lifted his ankle, and he felt the soft warmth of her palms. She touched the skin, working her path to the sole of his foot. Catching sight of the bruising above his right ankle, she winced and stopped, and craned her face closer. Her fingers crept over the damaged muscle, and sent a spasm fireworking deep inside his leg.
‘Does that hurt?’
It did. Very much. He had to clench the insides of his buttocks, in order not to grimace. ‘Not really.’
She lifted his leg and peered at the underside. ‘The bruise goes all the way to the back of the knee.’
‘It doesn’t hurt,’ he repeated.
‘If you continue to walk on this leg, it will get worse. And these blisters need treating. The bigger ones I will drain. Afterwards we’ll bandage your feet. You need to learn how to do that.’
He watched as she punctured the first pocket of pus with a needle. He didn’t flinch. She pressed out the fluid, careful to leave the flap of skin intact. Harold allowed her to guide his left foot towards the bucket of soft, warm water. It was an intensely private act; almost between the woman and his foot, and not the rest of him. He looked at the ceiling so as not to look in the wrong place. It was such an English thing to do, but he did it anyway.
He had always been too English; by which he supposed he meant that he was ordinary. He lacked colour. Other people knew interesting stories, or had things to ask. He didn’t like to ask, because he didn’t like to offend. He wore a tie every day but sometimes he wondered if he was hanging on to an order or a set of rules that had never really existed. Maybe it would have been different if he’d had a proper education. Finished school. Gone to university. As it was, his father had presented him with an overcoat on his sixteenth birthday and shown him the door. The coat wasn’t new; it smelt of mothballs, and there was a bus ticket in the inside pocket.
‘It seems sad to see him go,’ said his Aunty Sheila, though she didn’t cry. Of all the aunts she had been his favourite. She bent towards him to offer a kiss, bringing such waves of scent he had to walk away in order not to be silly and hug her.
It had come as a relief to leave his childhood behind. And even though he had done what his father never had – he had found work, supported a wife and son, and loved them, if only from the sidelines – it sometimes occurred to Harold that the silence of his early years had followed him into his marital home, and lodged itself behind the carpet and curtains and wallpaper. The past was the past; there was no escaping your beginnings. Not even with a tie.
Wasn’t David the proof of that?
Martina lifted his foot to her lap and dried it in a soft towel, taking care not to rub. She squirted antibiotic cream on to her finger and applied it in small strokes. A deep blush mottled the soft dip below her throat. Her face was knotted with concentration. ‘You should be wearing two pairs of socks. Not one. And why haven’t you got walking boots?’ She didn’t look up.
‘I intended to buy them when I got to Exeter. But then, after so much time on the road, I changed my mind. I looked at the shoes on my feet and they seemed perfectly all right. I couldn’t see why I needed new ones.’
Martina caught his eye and smiled. He felt he had said something that pleased her, and which forged a connection between them. She told him her partner liked walking. They were planning a summer holiday in the Fells. ‘Maybe you could borrow his old boots? He bought a new pair. They’re still in their box in my wardrobe.’ Harold insisted he was happy with yachting shoes. He felt a sort of loyalty to them, he said.
‘If my partner’s blisters are really bad, he binds them with duct tape to keep going.’ She wiped her hands with a paper towel. The movement was slick and reassuring.
‘I think you must be a good doctor,’ said Harold.
She rolled her eyes. ‘I only get cleaning work in England. You think your feet are bad. You should see the fucking lavatories I have to scrub at.’ They both laughed, and then, ‘Did your son ever get his dog?’ she said.
A sharp pain bolted through him. Her fingers stopped suddenly and she looked up, afraid she had found another bruise. He held his body taut and calmed his breathing, until he was able to form words. ‘No. I wish he had, but he didn’t. I am afraid I failed my son very badly twenty years ago.’
Martina leaned back, as if she needed a new perspective. ‘Your son and Queenie? You failed them both?’
She was the first person to ask about David in a long time. Harold wanted to say something else, but he had no idea where to begin. Sitting in a house he didn’t know, with his trousers rolled up to his knees, he missed his son very much. ‘It isn’t good enough. It never will be.’ Tears stung his eyes. He blinked to hold them back.
Martina broke off a ball of cotton wool to wash the cuts on his palms. The antiseptic stung the broken skin, but he didn’t move. He offered his hands and let her clean them.
Martina lent him her phone, but when Harold rang Maureen the line was bad. He tried to explain where he was, but she didn’t seem to understand. ‘You’re staying with whom?’ she kept saying. Not wanting to mention his leg, or his fall, he told her that his walk was going well. Time was flying.
Martina gave him a mild painkiller but he slept badly. The traffic kept waking him, and the rain thrashing at the tree by the window. Periodically he checked his calf, hoping the leg was better, flexing it softly but not daring to put weight on it. He pictured David’s room, with the blue curtains, and his own with the wardrobe that held only his suits and shirts, and then the spare room that smelt of Maureen, until slowly he fell asleep.
The following morning Harold stretched first his left side and then his right, pulling each joint one by one, yawning until his eyes watered. He could hear no rain. The light from the window passed through the leaves of the tree outside, sending shadows that rippled like water on the whitened wall. He stretched again and immediately fell back to sleep, not waking again until it was past eleven.
After examining his leg, Martina said it looked a little better, but she would not advise him to walk. She changed the bandages on his feet, and asked if he would spend one more day resting; her partner’s dog would like the company while she worked. The animal was too much alone.
‘An aunt of mine had a dog,’ he said. ‘It used to bite me when no one was looking.’ Martina laughed, and so did Harold; although it had been a source of great loneliness and not inconsiderable pain at the time. ‘My mother left home just before my thirteenth birth
day. She and my father were very unhappy. He drank and she wanted to travel. That’s all I remember. After she went, he got worse for a while, and then the neighbours found out. They loved mothering him. My father suddenly blossomed. He brought home many aunts. He became a bit of a Casanova.’ Harold had never spoken so openly about his past. He hoped he didn’t sound pitiful.
Martina gave a smile that wriggled on her lips. ‘Aunts? Were they real ones?’
‘Metaphorical ones. He met them in pubs. They would stay for a while and then they would go. Every month the house smelt of new scent. There was always different underwear on the washing line. I used to lie on the grass, looking up. I had never seen anything so beautiful.’
Her smile tipped into another laugh. He noticed how Martina’s face softened when she was happy, and how the colour suited her cheeks. A strand of hair escaped from the tight ponytail. He was glad she didn’t scrape it back.
For a moment all he could see in his mind’s eye was Maureen’s young face; gazing up at his, opened up, almost stripped, her soft mouth parted, waiting for what he might say next. The recalled thrill of landing her attention was so powerful Harold wished he could think of something else to amuse Martina; but he couldn’t.
She said, ‘Did you never see your mother again?’
‘No.’
‘You never looked for her?’
‘Sometimes I wish I had. I would have liked to tell her I was all right, in case she was worrying. But she wasn’t cut out to be a mother. Maureen was the opposite. She seemed to know how to love David right from the start.’
He fell silent, and so did Martina. He felt safe with what he had confided. It had been the same with Queenie. You could say things in the car and know she had tucked them somewhere safe among her thoughts, and that she would not judge him for them, or hold it against him in years to come. He supposed that was what friendship was, and regretted all the years he had spent without it.
In the afternoon, while Martina did her cleaning job, Harold fixed his reading glasses with plasters and then he wedged open the back door, in order to clear the small garden. The dog sat watching him with interest, but it didn’t bark. Harold found her partner’s tools and tidied the edges of the lawn, and pruned back the branches of the hedge. His leg was very stiff, and since he couldn’t remember what he had done with his shoes, he walked with bare feet. The warm dust worked on his heels like velvet, and melted the tension. He wondered if he had time to tackle the tree that obscured the bedroom window, but it was too high and there was no ladder.
When she returned from work, Martina presented him with a brown paper bag inside which he found his yachting shoes, resoled and polished. She had even given them fresh laces.
‘You don’t get service like that on the NHS,’ she said, moving away before he could thank her.
That night they ate together, and Harold reminded her she must let him pay for the room. She said they would see one another again in the morning, but Harold shook his head. He would be gone with the first light; he needed to make up for lost time. The dog sat at his feet, its head resting on Harold’s lap. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t get to meet your partner,’ he said.
Martina frowned. ‘He isn’t coming back.’
The shock hit him like a blow. He was suddenly having to reconfigure his idea of Martina and her life, and the abruptness of that seemed brutal. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘Where is he?’
‘I don’t know.’ Martina’s face buckled. She pushed aside her plate, although she had not finished.
‘How can you not know?’
‘I bet you think I’m fucking crazy.’
Harold thought of the people he had already met on his journey. All of them were different, but none struck him as strange. He considered his own life and how ordinary it might look from the outside, when really it held such darkness and trouble. ‘I don’t think you’re crazy,’ he said. He offered his hand, and she studied it a moment as if a hand was something she had not considered holding before. Her fingers touched his.
‘We came to England so that he could get better work. We’d only been here a few months. Then one Saturday a woman turns up with two suitcases and a baby. He has a kid, she says.’ Martina gripped harder and crushed his wedding ring against his fingers. ‘I didn’t know about the other woman. I didn’t know about the kid. He came back and I thought he was going to boot them out. I knew how much he loved me. But he didn’t. He picked up his baby and it was like seeing a man I didn’t know. I said I was going for a walk. When I got back, they had gone.’ Martina’s skin was so pale he could see the veins on her eyelids. ‘He left all his things. His dog. His gardening tools. Even the new boots. He loves walking. Every day I wake up and I think, Today is the one he will come back. And every day, he doesn’t.’
For a while there was only the silence that carried her words. It struck Harold afresh how life could change in an instant. You could be doing something so everyday – walking your partner’s dog, putting on your shoes – and not knowing that everything you wanted you were about to lose.
‘He might come back.’
‘It was a year ago.’
‘You never know.’
‘I do.’
She gave a sniff as if she had a cold coming, although she wasn’t fooling either of them. ‘And yet here you are, walking to Berwick-upon-Tweed.’ He was afraid she was going to point out again that he couldn’t make it, but she said, ‘If only I had a shred of your faith.’
‘But you do.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m waiting for something that will never happen.’
She sat, not moving, and he knew she was thinking of the past. He knew too that his faith, such as it was, was a fragile thing.
Harold cleared their plates, and took them to the kitchen, where he ran hot water into the sink and rinsed the dirty pans. He gave the leftover scraps to the dog and thought of Martina waiting for a man who would not return. He thought of his wife, scrubbing away at stains he could not see. He felt in a strange way that he understood better, and wished he could tell Maureen that.
Later, as he packed his plastic bag in his room, a slight rustling from the hall, followed by a knock, took him to the door. Martina handed him two pairs of walking socks, as well as a roll of blue duct tape. Then she hooked an empty rucksack over his wrist, and placed a brass compass in his palm. They had been her partner’s things. He was about to insist he couldn’t take anything more, but she nipped her face towards his, and planted a soft kiss on his cheek. ‘Go well, Harold,’ she said. ‘And you owe me nothing for the room. You were my guest.’ The compass was warm and heavy in his hand.
Harold left as he had said he would, with the first light. He propped a postcard against his pillow, in which he thanked Martina; and also the set of laminated place mats because her need for them might be greater than Queenie’s. To the east the night had cracked open, revealing a pale band of light that began to climb and fill the sky. He patted her partner’s dog at the foot of the stairs.
Harold closed the front door quietly, not wishing to wake Martina, but she was watching from her bathroom window, with her face pressed to the glass. He didn’t look back. He didn’t wave. He caught her profile at the window and then stepped as boldly as he could, wondering if she was worrying about his blisters, or his yachting shoes, and wishing he was not leaving her alone, with only a dog and some boots. It had been hard being her guest. It was hard to understand a little and then walk away.
14
Maureen and Rex
AFTER HER CONVERSATION with the locum, Maureen sank into a further decline. She thought with shame of the visit Queenie Hennessy had paid her twenty years ago, and wished she had been kinder.
Now, without Harold, the endless passage of days flowed one into the other and she watched them with apathy, not knowing how to fill them. She would decide to strip the beds only to realize there was no point, since there was no one to witness her slamming down the wash basket, or complaining th
at she could manage perfectly well without help, thank you. She opened the road map on the kitchen table, but every time she looked at it, trying to picture Harold’s journey, she felt her loneliness more keenly. Inside her stretched such an emptiness, it was as if she were invisible.
Maureen heated a small tin of tomato soup. How had it happened that Harold was walking to Berwick while she sat at home, doing nothing? What were the steps she had missed? Unlike him, she had left school with decent qualifications. She had done a secretarial course, and when David was at primary school she had taught herself French with the Open University. She used to love gardening. There once wasn’t an inch of the plot at Fossebridge Road that didn’t bear fruit or flowers. She had cooked every day. She had read Elizabeth David and took pleasure in seeking out new ingredients. ‘Today we are Italian,’ she’d laugh, kicking open the door to the dining room and presenting David and Harold with an asparagus risotto. ‘Buon appetito.’ The regrets about all she had let go flooded her. Where had all that enterprise gone? All that energy? Why had she never travelled? Or had more sex when she could? She had bleached and annihilated every waking moment of the last twenty years. Anything, rather than feel. Anything, rather than meet Harold’s eye and say the unspeakable.
It was not a life, if lived without love. Maureen poured the soup down the sink, sat at the kitchen table and pressed her face in her hands.
It was David’s idea that she should confess to Rex the truth about Harold’s walk. He told her one morning that he had been thinking about her situation, and felt it would do her good to talk. She laughed and protested she hardly knew the man, but he pointed out that Rex was her neighbour; of course they knew each other.