by Rachel Joyce
What shocked her most when she looked at his photograph in the local paper was how changed he had become. It was just over six weeks since he had set out to post his letter but he looked unfeasibly tall, and at ease with himself. He still wore his waterproof jacket and tie, but his hair was tangled in a mop on top of his head, a mottled beard sprang from his chin, and his skin was so dark she had to keep staring at the photograph to find traces of the man she thought she knew.
THE UNLIKELY PILGRIMAGE OF HAROLD FRY read the caption. The article described how a retired man from Kingsbridge (also home to Miss South Devon), in walking to Berwick without money, phone or maps, was proving himself a hero for the twenty-first century. It ended with a smaller photograph captioned THE FEET THAT WOULD WALK FIVE HUNDRED MILES, and showed a pair of yachting shoes similar to Harold’s. Apparently they were enjoying record sales.
The trail of blue thread crept its passage on Rex’s map north from Bath, in a route that touched Sheffield. She calculated that if he kept going at this pace, he might reach Berwick within weeks. And yet despite his success, despite also the flourishing of her garden, and the friendship with Rex, not to mention the letters of support that arrived from well-wishers and cancer victims every day in the post, there were times when Maureen felt bereft. It seemed to come at her from nowhere. She could be making a pot of tea, and suddenly the solitariness of her single cup would make her want to scream. She never told Rex, but on those occasions she returned to the bedroom, drew the curtains and, lying under the duvet, she wailed. It would be so easy to stop getting up. To stop washing. To stop eating. Being alone required such constant effort.
Out of the blue, a young woman rang Maureen to offer her services as a PR representative. She said that people wanted to hear her side of the story.
‘But I don’t have one,’ said Maureen.
‘What do you think of what your husband is doing?’
‘I think it must be very tiring.’
‘Is it true there are marital difficulties?’
‘I’m sorry, who did you say you are?’
The young woman repeated that she worked in public relations. It was her job to present the general public with the most sympathetic picture, and to protect her clients. Maureen interrupted to ask if she minded holding for a moment. There was a photographer standing on her bean plants, and she needed to tap at the window.
‘There are many ways I can help,’ said the young lady. She mentioned emotional support, breakfast-television interviews and invitations to B-list parties. ‘You only need to name what you want, and I can fix it.’
‘That’s very kind but I’ve never been a party animal.’ Some days she didn’t know which was madder: the world inside her head, or the one you read about in the papers and magazines. She thanked the girl for her generous offer. ‘I’m not sure that I need help, though. Unless, of course, you do ironing?’
When she told Rex he laughed. She remembered how the publicity girl hadn’t. They were drinking coffee in his front room because Maureen had run out of milk, and there appeared to be a small group of fans waiting outside the garden for news of Harold. They had brought gifts of Dundee cake and hand-knitted socks, but, as she had already explained to several fans, she had no forwarding address.
‘One journalist called it the perfect love story,’ she said quietly.
‘Harold isn’t in love with Queenie Hennessy. That’s not what his walk is about.’
‘The publicist asked if we had problems.’
‘You have to have faith in him, Maureen, and in your marriage too. He will be back.’
Maureen studied the hem of her skirt. The stitching had come loose, and a section flapped free. ‘But it’s so hard to keep believing, Rex. It actually hurts. I don’t know if he still loves me. I don’t know if he loves Queenie. Some days I think it would be easier if he were dead. At least I’d know where I stood.’ She glanced up at Rex, and paled. ‘That was an awful thing to say.’
He shrugged. ‘It’s all right.’
‘I know how much you miss Elizabeth.’
‘I miss her all the time. I know in my head that she has gone, but I still keep looking. The only difference is that I am getting used to the pain. It’s like discovering a great hole in the ground. To begin with, you forget it’s there and you keep falling in. After a while, it’s still there, but you learn to walk round it.’
Maureen bit her lip and nodded. After all, she had known her share of grief. It struck her again what tumult the human heart continues to feel. To a young person, passing Rex in the street, he would look like a helpless old man. Out of touch with reality, and all spent. Yet, beneath his waxen skin, and inside his portly frame, there was a heart that beat with the same passion as a teenager’s.
He said, ‘Do you know what I most regret about losing her?’
She shook her head.
‘That I didn’t fight it.’
‘But Elizabeth had a brain tumour, Rex. How could you have fought that?’
‘When the doctors told us she was dying I held her hand and gave up. We both did. I know it wouldn’t have made any difference in the end but I wish I had let her see how much I wanted to keep her. I should have raged, Maureen.’
He sat bent over his cup of tea, as if in prayer. He didn’t look up. He repeated the words with a quiet intensity she had not seen in him before, so that his cup trembled on its saucer. His knuckles were pure bone. ‘I should have raged.’
The conversation stayed with Maureen. She grew low again, and spent hours staring out of windows, remembering the past, but doing very little. She considered the young woman she had been, who was so sure she could be everything for Harold, and then she considered the one she had become. Not even a wife. She retrieved the two photographs she had found in his bedside drawer; the one of herself laughing in the garden after they were married, and the one of David with his first pair of shoes.
Something about the second image made her start. She had to look again. It was the hand. The hand supporting David as he balanced on one leg. A cold shiver slipped the length of her spine. The hand was not hers. It was Harold’s.
It was she who had taken the photograph. Of course. She remembered now. Harold had held David’s hand while she fetched the camera. How had she blocked that piece of the past from her head? Years she had blamed Harold for never holding their son. For not giving him the love a child needs.
Maureen went to the best room and pulled out the albums that no one looked at. The edges were felted with a layer of dust that she wiped with her skirt. Blotting back tears, she studied every page. They were mostly of herself and David, but tucked among them there were others too. He lay in Harold’s lap as a baby, while his father looked down at him, hands in midair, as if forbidding himself to touch. There was another of David sitting on his father’s shoulders while Harold craned his neck to balance him upright. There was David as a teenager side by side with Harold, the young man in black, and long-haired, the father in jacket and tie, both of them peering over the goldfish pond. She laughed. They had tried for closeness. Not in an obvious way. Not in a way that was everyday. But Harold had wanted it, and even David occasionally. She sat with the album wide open in her lap, and stared into the air, seeing not net curtains but only the past.
She found again the day at Bantham, when David had swum out into the current. She watched Harold fiddling over his laces, and she thought of the years she had spent rebuking him. And then she saw the image through a new perspective, as if she had turned the camera and pointed it back on herself. Her stomach jumped. There was a woman at the water’s edge, shouting and waving her hands, but not running into the sea. A mother half mad with fright; but doing nothing about it. If David had almost drowned at Bantham, she had been equally to blame.
The days that followed were even worse. The photograph albums lay all over the floor of the best room because she couldn’t face putting them back. She put on an early-morning white wash and left it festering all day in the dru
m of the washing machine. She took to eating cheese and crackers because she couldn’t be bothered to heat a pan of water. She was nothing but the remembering.
When Harold managed to ring, she could do no more than listen. ‘Goodness,’ she would murmur. Or, ‘Who’d have thought it?’ He told her the places where he had rested, the log bunkers, toolsheds, huts, bus shelters and barns. The words tumbled out of him with such vigour she felt ancient.
‘I take care not to upset anything. And I never force a lock,’ he’d say. He knew the name of every hedgerow plant, and also its uses. He recited several, but she couldn’t keep up. Now, he told her, he was learning about natural navigation. He described the people he had met, and how they had fed him or repaired his shoes; even the addicts, drunks and drop-outs. ‘Nobody is so frightening once you stop and listen, Maureen.’ He appeared to have time for them all. He was so bewildering to her, this man who walked alone and greeted strangers, that in turn she said mildly high-pitched things she regretted about bunions, or the weather. She never said, ‘Harold, I have wronged you.’ She never said she had been happy in Eastbourne, or that she wished she had agreed to a dog. She never said, ‘Is it really too late?’ But she thought these things all the time as she listened.
Left alone, she sat in the cold light of the night sky and cried for what felt like hours, as if she and the solitary moon were the only ones who understood. It wasn’t even in her to talk to David.
Maureen stared at the streetlights piercing the dark over Kingsbridge. The safe, sleeping world held no place for her. She couldn’t stop thinking of Rex, and how much he still raged for Elizabeth.
21
Harold and the Follower
SOMEONE WAS BEHIND Harold. He could feel it in his spine. He quickened his pace, but the person following him along the hard shoulder did the same, and although they were not yet close enough to become a shadow they would catch up soon. Harold scanned the road ahead for people, but there was no one. Harold turned to look behind him. The ribbon of tarmac stretched towards the horizon between fields of yellow rape, so hot in the afternoon sun it shimmered. Cars appeared to come out of nowhere and vanish as quickly. You couldn’t even see the people inside. But there was no one walking. There was no one on the hard shoulder.
However, as he continued he could sense in his skin, all the way up his neck and into his hair, that there was certainly a person behind, and that they were still following. Not wanting to stop again, he found a gap in the traffic and darted into the road, crossing fast at an angle, while also casting an eye to his left. Nobody came into view, and yet minutes later he knew that the person following had also crossed the road. He walked faster, with his breath and heart pounding. A sweat had broken out all over him.
He continued like this for another half-hour, stopping and looking back and seeing no one, but knowing he was not alone. Only once, when he turned, did he notice a low shrub quivering, although there was no wind. For the first time in weeks, he regretted he had no mobile phone. He took refuge that night in an unlocked toolshed, but lay very still in his sleeping bag, listening for the person he knew in his bones was waiting outside.
The following morning, and due north of Barnsley, Harold heard someone shout his name from the opposite side of the A61. A slight young man in reflective shades and a baseball cap dodged between traffic. Gasping for breath, he said he had come to join Harold. He spoke fast. His cheekbones were like pencils. His name was Lf. Harold frowned. ‘Ilf,’ repeated the boy. And then again: ‘Wilf.’ He looked undernourished and barely twenty. On his feet he wore trainers with fluorescent-green laces.
‘I am going to be a pilgrim, Mr Fry. I’m going to save Queenie Hennessy too.’ He lifted a sports bag and held it suspended. It was clearly new, like the trainers. ‘I’ve got my sleeping bag and everything.’
It was like talking to David. Even the young man’s hands were shaking.
There was no time to object, because the young man called Wilf had already fallen in beside Harold, and was striding at his pace, chattering nervously. Harold tried to listen but every time he looked at Wilf he found further reminders of his son. The fingernails bitten to the quick. The way he slipped out words as if they weren’t really for your hearing. ‘I saw your picture in the paper. And then I asked for a sign. I said, “Lord, if I should go to Mr Fry, show me.” And guess what He did?’
‘I don’t know.’ A passing van slowed. The driver pointed a mobile phone out of the window and appeared to take Harold’s photograph.
‘He gave me a dove.’
‘A what?’ The van drove on.
‘Well, maybe a pigeon. But the point is, it was a sign. The Lord is good. Ask the way, Mr Fry, and He will show you.’
There was something about the way the young man used his name that caused Harold further confusion; as if Wilf knew something about him, or had a claim to him, but Harold didn’t know it. They continued to walk along the grass verge, although sometimes it narrowed and it was difficult to keep side by side. Wilf’s steps were smaller than Harold’s so that he cantered at a sideways angle.
‘I didn’t know you had a dog.’
‘I don’t.’
The young man pulled a face and glanced over his shoulder. ‘Then whose is it?’
He was right. On the other side of the road, a dog had stopped and was studying the sky, panting, with its tongue to one side. It was a small thing, the colour of autumn leaves, with rough fur like a brush. It must have waited all night outside the toolshed.
‘That dog is nothing to do with me,’ said Harold.
As he started off again, with the young man gambolling to keep up, he could see out of the corner of his eye that the dog had crossed the road and was also trotting behind. Whenever Harold stopped and looked back, the dog shrank into the hedgerow with its head dropped, as if it wasn’t there, or was something else. Perhaps a statue of a dog.
‘Go away,’ called Harold. ‘Go home.’
The dog tilted its head as if Harold had just told it something interesting. It trotted up to Harold, and carefully placed a stone beside his shoe.
‘Maybe it doesn’t have a home,’ suggested Wilf.
‘Of course it has a home.’
‘Well, maybe it doesn’t like its home. Maybe it gets beaten or something. That happens. It hasn’t got a collar.’ The dog picked up its stone and placed it beside Harold’s other shoe. It sat on its back legs, looking up at him patiently, not blinking and not moving its head. On the horizon grew the dark moors of the Peak District.
‘I can’t look after a dog. I don’t have food. And I’m walking to Berwick on busy roads. It’s too dangerous. Go home, dog.’
They tried to fool it by throwing the stone into a field and hiding behind a hedge, but the dog fetched the stone and sat beside the hedgerow, wagging its tail. ‘The trouble is, I reckon it likes you,’ whispered Wilf. ‘It wants to come too.’ They crawled out from the hedge and continued, with the dog now sauntering openly at Harold’s side. It wasn’t safe to stick with the A61. Harold took a diversion on the quieter B6132, although the going was slow. Wilf had to keep stopping to pull off his trainers and shake them. They covered only a mile.
It came as a further surprise to Harold that he was recognized by a woman deadheading roses in her front garden. ‘You’re the pilgrim, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘I have to say I think what you are doing is absolutely marvellous.’ She opened her purse and offered him a twenty-pound note. Wilf wiped his forehead with his cap and whistled.
‘I couldn’t possibly take it,’ said Harold. He felt the young man’s eyes boring holes into his side. ‘But a round of sandwiches would be kind. And maybe some matches and a candle for tonight. A bit of butter. I don’t have any of those things.’ He glanced at Wilf’s nervous face. ‘I think we may need them.’
She urged him to join her for a light supper, and extended her invitation to Wilf, also offering the men bathroom facilities and the use of her telephone.
It gave seven r
ings before his wife answered. She sounded tense. ‘You’re not that PR girl again?’
‘No, Maureen. It’s me.’
‘It’s gone mad,’ she told him. ‘Sometimes people ask to come inside the house. Rex found a young man trying to remove a piece of flint from the front wall.’
By the time Harold had showered, it seemed that his hostess had also invited a small number of chums for an impromptu sherry party on the lawn. On greeting him, they raised their glasses and toasted Queenie’s health. He had never seen so much backcombed grey-blue hair, or so many corduroy trousers in shades of mustard, gold and russet. Underneath a table, laid out with canapés and cold meats, sat the dog, chewing on something between its paws. Occasionally someone threw the stone, and the dog retrieved it and waited for them to do it again.
The men told stories about their own adventures involving yachts and shooting, and Harold listened patiently. He watched Wilf talking animatedly to their hostess. Her laughter had a shrill quality Harold realized he had almost forgotten. He wondered if anyone would notice if he slipped away.
He was swinging his rucksack up on to his shoulders when Wilf broke free of the woman and caught up. ‘I had no idea it was like this,’ he said. He crammed a smoked salmon blini into his mouth with all five fingers, as if it were alive. ‘Why are we leaving?’
‘I need to get on. And it isn’t usually like this. I find a place for my sleeping bag and no one notices. I’ve been living for days on bread rolls and what I find. But you should stay here, if you’d like to. I’m sure you’re very welcome.’