by Rachel Joyce
‘Hello, Queenie,’ you said. All brave.
Hello, Harold, said I. No words.
‘It’s Harold,’ you said. ‘Harold Fry. We worked together a long time ago. Do you remember?’
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. A tear pressed its way from my closed-up eye.
‘Did you get my letter?’ you said.
Do you have mine?
‘Did you get my postcards?’
Can you forgive me?
You got very busy with the contents of your rucksack. ‘I have some small souvenirs. I picked them up as I walked. There’s a hanging quartz that will look very nice at your window. I just have to find it.’ You produced various items, and I think you mentioned honey and pens, but all the time I was thinking: Give me a sign. Tell me you forgive me. You pulled a crumpled paper bag from your rucksack, and when you peered inside your face brightened. You placed the bag a little to the left of my fingers like a small stepping-stone between you and me and then you stood back again. I did not move. Your hand dived forward and you gave the bag a friendly pat, as if to say, Don’t be frightened, little paper bag. This is OK, really.
It dawned on me. Maybe you’d not been given my letter? Maybe you’d missed Sister Mary Inconnue? Maybe you still did not know the truth? I felt a terrible throbbing in my head, because that was the deal, remember. That you must know everything.
I tried to point my hand at the suitcase of pages beneath the bed but my stupid body began to slide sideways. I couldn’t stop. And the panic on your face. You lifted your hands as if to help, but by now you were pressed right against the window; there was no helping to be done from way over there. And I felt nothing but my love for you, because I saw how hard it is to visit a person and discover you would rather leave. I remembered how you used to glance away when I got into your car as if you were afraid I would embarrass myself. More than anything I wished I could sit upright like any dignified human being.
‘Excuse me! She’s—’
You called for help, softly at first and then more violently. And here came dear Sister Lucy, only I could tell she was flustered too because she had turned a heavy pink colour and she kept talking nonsense about morgues and visitors. I thought: Any moment, the poor girl will offer to paint your nails. She lifted me up to sitting with her thick arms. I’ve never heard her talk so loud. In her consternation, a small moustache of wet sweat appeared above her upper lip. She also seemed to have temporarily mislaid your name.
‘Apparently Henry has walked. All the way from— Where are you from, Henry?’
(You know this, Sister Lucy, I thought. You do know this.)
You opened your mouth as if to answer and then shut it again because Sister Lucy was already remembering. ‘Dorset,’ she said with triumph. We really have to hope that no one asks Sister Lucy to lead a walking expedition.
Now you were shouting too. You seemed to be agreeing that yes, you lived in Dorset, and that yes, your name was Henry. By this time Sister Lucy was so frazzled she asked if we should make you a cup of tea. In fact what she suggested was a cuppa. I’ve never heard her call it a cuppa before. ‘There have been so many letters and cards,’ she yelled. ‘Last week a lady even wrote from Perth.’
(She meant Penge.)
‘She can hear you,’ said Sister Lucy, pointing at me. She bundled herself out of the room. And we were alone again. You and I. You took Sister Mary Inconnue’s chair and sat. You slotted your hands between your knees, tidying yourself into a neat profile.
‘Hello,’ you began again. ‘I must say you’re doing very well. My wife – do you remember Maureen? – my wife sends her best regards.’
At the mention of her name, I felt made of air. She forgives me, I thought.
But you were still talking. You glanced back to the door, and I knew you were longing for Sister Lucy and an interruption. After that you got very busy digging something out of the paper bag. Then you sprang to your feet and rushed to the window. For a long time you seemed to remain there, and I watched you lift your hands to the windowsill as if to steady yourself. You looked out over the green-cloaked tree towards the garden and softly, softly you began to cry.
Twenty years of exile slipped away and I saw everything that has brought me here. Something pink spangled at my window. Once again you turned to look at me and I lifted my face to meet yours. I did not hide.
This time there was no snow between us. No street. No window. See me, Harold, I said. And you did. You looked and looked and you saw me. You didn’t step away. You didn’t gasp. You came closer.
You took your place beside me on the edge of the bed. Without words, you reached out your hand and took up mine. And I would say I felt prickles of electricity but they were not attraction; it was something far deeper now. I closed my fingers around yours.
There you were, sitting to my right and staring ahead, while I sat to your left. You in the driving seat, and me at your side. I could picture the sun through the windscreen. I heard you reach for your driving gloves. I smelt the lemon-coffee scent of you. I tasted mint sweets from my handbag. ‘Where to, Miss Hennessy?’ As you put your key in the ignition, I felt a swelling in my heart.
All these years, Harold, I have waited to tell you that I loved you. All these years I thought a piece of my life was missing. But it was there all along. It was there when I sat beside you in your car and you began to drive. It was there when I sang backwards and you laughed or I made a picnic and you ate every crumb. It was there when you told me you liked my brown suit, when you opened the door for me, when you asked once if I would like to take the long road home. It came later in my garden. When I looked at the sun and saw it glow on my hands. When a rosebud appeared where there had not been one before. It was in the people who stopped and talked of this and that over the garden wall. And just when I thought my life was done, it came time and time again at the hospice. It has been everywhere, my happiness – when my mother sang for me to dance, when my father took my hand to keep me safe – but it was such a small, plain thing that I mistook it for something ordinary and failed to see. We expect our happiness to come with a sign and bells, but it doesn’t. I loved you and you didn’t know. I loved you and that was enough.
‘It seems a long time since I found you in the stationery cupboard,’ you said at last. You gave a Harold Fry laugh.
CANTEEN, I thought. We met in the CANTEEN.
But what did it matter? I wrote at the beginning of my letter that you must know everything. The need to confess the truth has been with me so long it was an illness in itself. But now that I have waited here and told my whole story, I no longer see the waste. I see only the different parts of my life as if I were a child on the banks of a river and setting each one to drift, small as flowers on water.
I pressed my fingers tight around yours and closed my eyes. I smiled. I hope you saw that. I smiled so deeply I was filled with it. Even inside my bones, I smiled. And then all I wanted was sleep. I was not frightened any more.
Rattle, rattle. Here came dear Sister Lucy and her cuppa. I have an awful feeling that she went and called you Henry again. She had difficulties with the tray and the door, so she banged it first with her elbows and afterwards with her behind, and finally with the tray itself.
‘Do you mind if I leave the tea?’ you said to no one in particular. ‘I have to go now.’
I opened my eye long enough to find your tall profile at the door. The room began to melt, and when I looked again, you were gone and so was Sister Lucy.
You have walked far enough. Please, my friend: Go home.
The happy ending
SISTER MARY Inconnue sits in my chair. She has not used the door. She has no typewriter.
I make notes but I am slow. I find it hard to lift the ? and I keep losing words.
I remember that she is supposed to help and I point to her lap.
‘But we’ve finished now,’ she says.
It is hard to find her face because all I can see is the lamp at t
he window. The walls are gone and I smell the sea. I hear the leaves in the tree and the buzzing of the fly.
Sister Mary Inconnue says, ‘Are you in pain, dear Queenie?’
I remember that I have been in pain in the past. But there is none of that now – or if there is, it no longer hurts.
She says, ‘I can wait as long as you like. If you want to finish your page.’
I nod. There is a little more to go and it is as small as breathing. The next time I look, she is standing beside the window. I would like to touch her.
‘You have done it,’ she says. ‘People think you have to walk to go on a journey. But you don’t, you see. You can lie in bed and make a journey too. What’s funny?’
I can’t help it. I am listening but I am laugh laugh laugh.
Tree, I say. Do I say that? I am not sure. After all there is no need. She already knows.
‘Oh, yes.’ Her smile shoots into a happy. ‘Tree!’ She grips her stomach. She howls.
I see Sister Mary Inconnue and I see other things. The hospice. The Well-being Garden. The water that is the sea. And so many people going about their lives, millions of them, being ordinary, doing ordinary things that no one notices, that no one sings about, but there they are nevertheless, and they are filled with life. I see my father, my mother. I see David. I see Finty, Barbara, the Pearly King, and Mr Henderson. Patients whose names I never knew. On the beach I see you, I see Maureen. I see the dayroom and Sister Lucy rushing down the corridor, towards my door. I see the undertaker fetch his keys for the van and his wife hand him a packed lunch.
See you later, he says.
Have a good day, she replies.
I feel the wind in my sea garden and I hear a thousand shells chime. It is all, all inside me.
Queenie? Where are you? Where is that girl?
Here I am! I’m here! I was here all along. From the very beginning here I was.
A light twists at the window and a shower of stars fills the air. They are many colours. Pink and yellow and blue and green. Oh, so much beauty. In one small thing.
‘Are you ready?’ says Sister Mary Inconnue, reaching out a hand. It is like touching light.
Put down pencil. Put down notebook. Sleep now.
Well. There it was.
THE THIRD LETTER
St Bernadine’s Hospice
Berwick-upon-Tweed
12 July
Dear Mr Fry,
I enclose pages written by Queenie Hennessy in the last twelve weeks of her life. She began when she first heard about your walk and she finished in the last hour before her death.
You will see that the pages are not written in words, but mainly a series of squiggles, dashes and marks. One of my colleagues believes these hieroglyphics are shorthand, another thinks they are Morse code, but I am afraid that since I can read neither shorthand nor Morse code, I am none the wiser. Only a few words are recognizable and your name is one of them. Our patients often leave cards and messages for family and friends, though this is the first time I have seen such a proliferation of pages.
I want you to know that I believe Queenie died in peace. Moments before her death, Sister Lucy passed Queenie’s door and heard a burst of joyful laughter, as if another person was with her and had told her something funny. Sister Lucy is certain she heard the words, Here I am. She fetched me. When we entered, minutes later, Queenie was alone and at peace. There was no sign of a visitor.
Sister Lucy told me later that Queenie had asked several times for a volunteer, a nun with a French name, who she said was helping to write her letter. No volunteer with a French name has worked in the hospice.
I reassured Sister Lucy she had misheard. It was hard to understand Queenie. The young woman had also formed a strong attachment to our patient; this can confuse one’s objectivity. Sister Lucy is currently taking a break from hospice work in order to explore her skills as a beauty therapist. (She is a gifted young lady.) Her co-worker, Sister Catherine, is making a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela.
However, Sister Lucy’s observations have stayed with me, as has your unlikely pilgrimage and, indeed, the courage of the woman who sat in silence and waited for you. They have caused me to reflect further on the nature of my belief.
This is the conclusion I have come to: if we work at it, it is always possible to find a rational explanation for what we don’t understand. But perhaps it is wiser once in a while to accept that we don’t understand, and stop there. To explain is sometimes to diminish. And what does it matter if I believe one thing and you believe another? We share the same end.
Queenie’s ashes will be scattered, as she asked, over her sea garden. She bequeathed it, along with her beach house, to the residents of Embleton Bay.
Please send my best wishes to your wife. I don’t suppose our paths will cross again, but it was a pleasure to meet you, Harold Fry.
Sister Philomena, Mother Superior, St Bernadine’s Hospice
Acknowledgements
My thanks to:
Paul Venables, as always; to my editor Susanna Wadeson and my agent Clare Conville.
Also, to Benjamin Dreyer, Deborah Adams and Kate Samano for copy-editing. To Andrew Davidson for giving Queenie wood engravings and to Micaela Alcaino for the map of her sea garden. To Susan Kamil, Kristin Cochrane and Kiara Kent; to Larry Finlay, Clare Ward, Alison Barrow, Elspeth Dougall, Claire Evans and ‘the team’ at Transworld. To all at Conville & Walsh.
There are a number of other people whose medical advice and anecdotes played an invaluable part in the writing of Queenie’s story. Thank you to Libby Potter, Charlie Hall, Jacqui Sparkes, Carol Chapman and to Cotswold Care Hospice, Minchinhampton. The book Head and Neck Oncology Nursing was a constant reference point, as was a pamphlet titled End-of-Life Experiences: A Guide for Carers of the Dying.
Philip Pearson lent my imagination the use of his wooden bungalow as Queenie’s beach house and offered detailed advice about repairing it. He also provided me with maps and guides to the Northumberland coast. I thank, too, the Bernardine Cistercian Community at the Monastery of Our Lady and St Bernard, who live in the same village as me and whose presence here is a part of the landscape in the way that the trees are a part of it, or the sky.
Lastly, my quiet thanks to my mother, Myra Joyce; to Hope, Kezia, Jo and Nell. And in memory of my father, who saw a man in his garden, and tried to reach this stranger before he died.
Rachel Joyce is the author of the Sunday Times and international bestsellers The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry and Perfect. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Book Prize and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and has been translated into thirty-four languages. Rachel Joyce was awarded the Specsavers National Book Awards ‘New Writer of the Year’ in December 2012.
She is also the author of the digital short story A Faraway Smell of Lemon and is the award-winning writer of over thirty original afternoon plays and classic adaptations for BBC Radio 4.
Rachel Joyce lives with her family in Gloucestershire.