The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry: A Novel

by Rachel Joyce

  THE END OF the rain brought a period of wild new growth. Trees and flowers seemed to explode with color and scent. The trembling branches of the horse chestnut balanced new candle spires of blossom. Umbrellas of white cow parsley grew thick at the roadside. Rambling roses shot up garden walls, and the first of the deep-red peonies opened like tissue-paper creations. The apple trees began to shake off their blossoms, and bore beads of fruit; bluebells spread thick like water through the woodlands. The dandelions were already fluffheads of seed.

  For five days, Harold walked without faltering, passing through Othery, the Polden Hills, Street, Glastonbury, Wells, Radstock, Peasedown St. John, and arriving at Bath on a Monday morning. He averaged just over eight miles a day, and on Martina’s advice he stocked up on sunblock, cotton wool, nail clippers, plasters, fresh bandage, antiseptic cream, moleskin blister protection, and a slab of Kendal Mint Cake for emergencies. He replenished his supplies of toiletries, as well as washing powder, and packed them neatly in her partner’s rucksack, along with the roll of duct tape. Passing his reflection in shop windows, the man staring back at him was so upright and appeared so sure-footed, he had to look twice to check it was really himself. The compass pointed a steady north.

  Harold believed his journey was truly beginning. He had thought it started the moment he decided to walk to Berwick, but he saw now that he had been naïve. Beginnings could happen more than once, or in different ways. You could think you were starting something afresh, when actually what you were doing was carrying on as before. He had faced his shortcomings and overcome them, and so the real business of walking was happening only now.

  Every morning the sun crept over the horizon, peaked, and set, as one day made way for another. He spent long moments watching the sky, and the way the land changed beneath it. Hilltops became gold against the sunrise, and windows reflecting its light were so orange, you could think there was a fire blazing. The evening shadows lay long beneath the trees, like a separate forest that was made of darkness. He walked against an early-morning mist and smiled at the pylons poking their heads through the milk-white smoke. The hills softened and flattened, and opened before him, green and gentle. He passed through the flat stretches of the Somerset wetlands, where waterways flashed like silver needles. Glastonbury Tor sat on the horizon, and beyond that the Mendip Hills.

  Gradually, Harold’s leg improved. The bruising turned from purple to green to a gentler shade of yellow, and he was no longer afraid. If anything, he was more sure. The stretch between Tiverton and Taunton had been full of anger and pain. He had wanted more than he could physically give, and so his walk had become a battle against himself, and he had failed. Now he followed a gentle set of stretching exercises each morning and evening, and rested every two hours. He treated the blisters before they became infected and carried fresh water. Taking out his wild plant book again, he identified hedgerow flowers, and their uses; which bore fruit, culinary, poisonous, or otherwise, and which had leaves with medicinal powers. Wild garlic filled the air with its sweet pungency. Once more, it surprised him how much was at his feet, if only he had known to look.

  He continued to send postcards to Maureen and Queenie, informing them of his progress, and once in a while he also wrote to the garage girl. On the advice of his guide to Britain, Harold noted the shoe museum in Street and took a look at the shop in Clarks Village, although he still believed it would be wrong to give up on his yachting shoes, having come so far. In Wells, he bought Queenie a rose quartz to hang at her window, and a pencil for Maureen that had been carved from a twig. Urged by several pleasant members of the Ladies’ Auxiliary to purchase a Madeira cake, he chose instead a hand-knitted beret in a Queenie shade of brown. He visited the cathedral, and sat in its chilled light, pouring like water from above. He reminded himself that centuries ago men had built churches, bridges, and ships, all of them a leap of madness and faith, if you thought about it. When no one was looking, Harold slipped to his knees and asked for the safety of the people he had left behind, and those who were ahead. He asked for the will to keep going. He also apologized for not believing.

  Harold passed office workers, dog walkers, shoppers, children going to school, mothers and buggies, and hikers like himself, as well as several tourist parties. He met a tax inspector who was a Druid and had not worn a pair of shoes for ten years. He talked with a young woman on the trail of her real father, a priest who confessed to tweeting during mass, as well as several people in training for a marathon, and an Italian man with a singing parrot. He spent an afternoon with a white witch from Glastonbury, and a homeless man who had drunk away his house, as well as four bikers looking for the M5, and a mother of six who confided she had no idea life could be so solitary. Harold walked with these strangers and listened. He judged no one, although as the days wore on, and time and places began to melt, he couldn’t remember if the tax inspector wore no shoes or had a parrot on his shoulder. It no longer mattered. He had learned that it was the smallness of people that filled him with wonder and tenderness, and the loneliness of that too. The world was made up of people putting one foot in front of the other; and a life might appear ordinary simply because the person living it had been doing so for a long time. Harold could no longer pass a stranger without acknowledging the truth that everyone was the same, and also unique; and that this was the dilemma of being human.

  He walked so surely it was as if all his life he had been waiting to get up from his chair.

  Maureen told him on the phone that she had moved out of the spare room and returned to the main bedroom. He had spent so many years sleeping alone, he was surprised at first, and then he was glad because it was the larger and more pleasant of the two and, being at the front of the house, enjoyed the wide view over Kingsbridge. But he assumed this also meant she had packed his things and carried them to the spare room.

  He thought of the many times he had looked at the closed door, knowing she had exiled herself completely beyond his reach. Sometimes he had touched the handle, as if it were a sentient piece of her.

  Maureen’s voice crept under the silence: “I’ve been thinking of when we first met.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “It was at a dance in Woolwich. You touched my neck. Then you said something funny. We laughed and laughed.”

  He frowned with the effort of trying to picture it. He recalled a dance, but all he could see beyond that was how beautiful she had been, and how delicate. He remembered dancing like an idiot, and he remembered, too, her dark, long hair falling like velvet either side of her face. But it seemed unlikely he had been bold enough to walk across a crowded room and claim her. It seemed unlikely he had made her laugh and laugh. He wondered if she was mistaking him for someone else.

  She said, “Well, I must let you get on. I know how busy you are.”

  She was using the voice that she used for the doctor, when she wanted to show she wasn’t going to be an inconvenience. And then she said, “I wish I could think of what you said to me at the dance. It really was so funny.” She hung up.

  For the rest of the day, his mind was full of remembering Maureen, and how it was in the beginning. He thought of the trips to the pictures, and Lyons Corner House, and how he had never seen anyone eat so discreetly, shredding her food into the smallest of scraps before lifting it to her mouth. Even in those days he had begun saving for their future. He had taken an early-morning job on the rubbish trucks, followed by a part-time afternoon job as a bus conductor. Twice a week he did an all-night shift at the hospital, and on Saturdays he worked at the library. Sometimes he was so exhausted he crawled under the bookshelves and fell asleep.

  Maureen had taken to getting the bus from outside her house and staying for the full trip to the terminus. He would issue tickets and ring the bell for the driver, but all he was seeing was Maureen, in her blue coat, with her skin like porcelain and those vivid green eyes. She took to walking with him to the hospital so that he’d be scrubbing down the floors and a
ll he could think of was where she was, what she was seeing as she hurried away. She took to nipping into the library and thumbing through cookery books, and he watched her from the main desk, his head reeling with desire and the need to sleep.

  The wedding had been small, with guests he didn’t know in hats and gloves. An invitation was sent to his father, but to Harold’s relief he had not shown up.

  Alone at last with his new wife, he had watched her across the hotel room as she unbuttoned her dress. He was desperate to touch her, and tremulous with fear. Removing both his tie and jacket, borrowed from another chap at the bus garage and slightly too short in the sleeve, he had looked up and found her sitting on the bed in her slip. She was so beautiful it was too much. He had to bolt to the bathroom.

  “Harold, is it me?” she had called through the door, after half an hour.

  It hurt to remember these things, when they were so far out of his reach. He had to blink several times, trying to lose the pictures, but they still swam back.

  Harold walked the towns that were full of the sounds of other people, and the roads that traveled the land between, and he understood moments from his life as if they had only just occurred. Sometimes he believed he had become more memory than present. He replayed scenes from his life, like a spectator trapped on the outside. Seeing the mistakes, the inconsistencies, the choices that shouldn’t have been made, and yet unable to do anything about them.

  He caught himself taking the phone call after Maureen’s mother had died very suddenly, two months after her father. He had pinned her in his arms in order to break the news.

  “There’s only me and you,” she sobbed.

  He had reached for the swell of her growing belly and promised it would be all right. He would look after her, he’d said. And he’d meant it too. There was nothing Harold had wanted more than to make Maureen happy.

  In those days she believed him. She believed Harold could be all she needed. He hadn’t known it then; but he did now. It was fatherhood that had been the real test and his undoing. He wondered if he must spend the rest of his life in the spare room.

  As Harold made his way north toward Gloucestershire, there were times when his steps were so sure they were effortless. He didn’t have to think about lifting one foot and then the other. Walking was an extension of his certainty that he could make Queenie live, and his body was a part of that too. These days he could take the hills without thinking; he was becoming fit, he supposed.

  Some days he was more engrossed in what he saw. He tried to find the right words to describe each shift; only sometimes, like the people he had met, they began to jumble. But there were days when he wasn’t aware of himself, or his walking, or the land. He wasn’t thinking about anything; at least not anything that was related to words. He simply was. He felt the sun on his shoulders, watched a kestrel on silent wings, and all the time the ball of his foot pushed his heel from the ground, and weight shifted from one leg to the other, and this was everything.

  Only the nights troubled him. He continued to seek modest accommodation, but the inside world seemed to stand as a barrier between himself and his purpose. He felt a visceral need to leave some part of himself outside. Curtains, wallpaper, framed prints, matching hand and bath towels: these things had become superfluous and without meaning. He threw the windows open, so that he could continue to feel the presence of the sky and the air, but he slept badly. Increasingly he was kept awake by images from the past, or dreamed of his feet lifting and falling. Getting up in the early hours, he watched the moon at the window and felt trapped. It was barely light these days when he paid with his debit card and set off.

  Walking into the dawn, he watched with wonder as the sky flamed with strong color and then faded to a single blue. It was like being in an altogether different version of the day, one that held nothing ordinary. He wished he could describe it to Maureen.

  The problem of when and how he would reach Berwick receded into the background, and Harold knew Queenie was waiting, as certainly as he saw his shadow. It gave him pleasure to imagine his arrival, and her place at the window in a sunny chair. There would be so much to talk about. So much from the past. He would remind her how she had once produced a Mars Bar from her handbag for the homeward journey.

  “You’ll get me fat,” he’d said.

  “You? There’s nothing on you.” She’d laughed.

  It had been a strange moment, not uncomfortable in an unpleasant way, but it marked a shift in how they spoke to one another. It revealed she had noticed him, and that she cared. She carried a piece of confectionery for him every day after that and they called each other by their first names. They spoke easily when they were traveling. Once they had stopped at a Little Chef and, face-to-face across a laminated table, they found the words dried up.

  “What do you call two robbers?” he heard her ask. This time they were back in the car.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “It’s a joke,” she’d said.

  “Oh I see. Very good. I don’t know. What do you call them?”

  “A pair of knickers.” She had gripped her hand over her mouth but she was shaking so much that a violent snort shot between her fingertips, and turned her crimson. “My father loved that one.”

  In the end he had been forced to stop the car, they were laughing so much. He had repeated it that night to David and Maureen over spaghetti carbonara and they had both stared so blankly that the punch line, when he reached it, sounded not hilarious but vaguely smutty.

  Harold and Queenie often talked about David. He wondered if she would remember that too? Having no children herself, and no nephews or nieces, she was very interested in his progress at Cambridge. How does David find the town? she’d say. Has he made lots of friends? Does he like punting? Harold assured her his son was having the time of his life, although in truth he rarely answered Maureen’s letters and calls. There was no mention of friends, or studying. There was certainly no mention of punting.

  Harold didn’t tell Queenie about the empty vodka bottles he found stashed in his shed after the holidays. Nor did he mention the cannabis in a brown envelope. He told no one; not even his wife. He boxed them up and dumped them on his way to work.

  “You and Maureen must be so proud, Harold,” Queenie would say.

  He went over their shared time at the brewery, although neither of them had been part of the crowd. Would Queenie remember the Irish barmaid who claimed she was pregnant with Mr. Napier’s baby, and stopped working very suddenly? People said he had fixed for the girl to lose the child, and that there had been complications. There was another time when one of the new young reps got so drunk he was found tied to the gates of the brewery, stripped to his underpants. Mr. Napier had talked about setting dogs on him in the yard. It would be a crack, he said. The boy was screaming by the end. A trickle of brown liquid streaked his legs.

  Living it again, Harold felt a nauseous stirring of shame. David had been right about Napier. It was Queenie who had shown the courage.

  He saw her smiling the way she used to: slowly, as if even the happy things had a sadness.

  He heard her saying, “Something happened at the brewery. It was in the night.”

  He saw her swaying. Or was it himself? He thought he might fall. He found her small hand gripping at his sleeve, and shaking it. She had not touched him since the stationery cupboard. Her face was white.

  She said, “Are you listening? Because this is serious, Harold. It’s very serious. Napier won’t let it go.”

  It was the last time he’d seen her. He knew she’d guessed the truth.

  Harold wondered why she had taken the rap for him, and whether she understood how much he regretted what he had done. Again he asked why, all those years ago, she had not stopped to say goodbye. And thinking all this, he shook his head and kept walking north.

  She had been fired on the spot. Napier’s abuse was heard all over the brewery. There was even a rumor he hurled a small round object, an ash
tray possibly but maybe a small paperweight, that narrowly missed Queenie’s forehead. Mr. Napier’s secretary confirmed afterwards to a few of the reps that he had never liked the woman. She also confirmed that Queenie stood her ground. She couldn’t hear Queenie’s exact words because the door was closed, but from Mr. Napier’s screaming you could get the gist of what Queenie had said, and it was along the lines of “I don’t know what the fuss is about. I was only trying to help.” “If she’d been a man,” someone told Harold, “Mr. Napier would have kicked the living shit out of her.” Harold had been sitting in a pub at the time. Feeling sick, he had reached for his double brandy and downed it in one.

  Harold’s shoulders hunched at the memory; he had been an unforgivable coward, but at least he was doing something about that now.

  The city of Bath came into view, the crescents and streets cutting into the hillside like small teeth; the cream stone blazing against the morning sun. It was going to be a hot day.

  “Dad! Dad!”

  He looked round, startled, with the clear impression that someone was calling. The passing traffic rustled the trees, but there was no one.

  Harold and the Physician and the Very Famous Actor

  HAROLD INTENDED TO keep his stay in Bath brief. He had learned from Exeter that a city diluted his purpose. He needed to get his shoes resoled but the cobbler was closed until midday, due to family affairs. While Harold waited, he would use the time to choose another souvenir for Queenie and Maureen. The sun fell in stark slabs of light in the abbey churchyard. It was so dazzling he had to shield his eyes with his hand.

  “Could I ask you all to form a proper line?”

  Glancing behind, Harold found himself included in a party of foreign tourists, wearing canvas sun hats and visiting the Roman Baths. Their guide was an English girl, barely out of her teens, with a fragile face and an upper-class trill to her voice. Harold was about to explain he was not one of the party, when she confessed this was her first tour as a professional. “None of them has a clue what I’m talking about,” she whispered. She sounded so startlingly like Maureen as a young woman that he couldn’t move. Her mouth wobbled as if she were about to cry, and Harold was undone. He tried lingering at the back, and also attaching himself to a party that was almost finished; but each time he was on the verge of escape, he remembered his young wife in her blue coat and couldn’t let the guide down. Two hours later, her tour ended in the gift shop where he bought postcards and mosaic key rings for both Maureen and Queenie. He had especially enjoyed her introduction to the Sacred Spring, he told her; they really were extremely clever, the Romans.