The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry: A Novel

by Rachel Joyce

  Harold tried to speak to Maureen, but worried he was taking up her time. He felt he had mislaid all the normal words and the everyday questions that would lead to an exchange of commonplaces, so that speaking caused further pain. He told her he was doing splendidly. He found the courage to hint that a few people had expressed doubt, hoping Maureen would laugh it away, but instead she said, “Yes, I see.”

  “I don’t even know she’s—” Again the words ran out.

  “She’s—what?”

  “Still waiting.”

  “I thought you did?”

  “Not really.”

  “Have you stayed with any more Slovakian ladies?”

  “I met a physician, and a very famous actor.”

  “Goodness,” said Maureen with a laugh. “Wait till I tell Rex.”

  A bald, thickset man wearing a patterned frock trudged past the kiosk. People were slowing to point him out, and laugh. The buttons on the dress strained at his belly, and his eye was a large closed-up bruise from a recent punch. Harold wished he hadn’t seen, but he had, and he knew it would be unbearable for a while to keep thinking of the man, but that he would do it all the same.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” said Maureen.

  Along came another pause, and he was suddenly afraid he was going to cry, so he told her someone else was waiting for the phone, and that he must get going. There was a red stretch in the western sky, and the sun was beginning to sink.

  “Well, cheerio,” said Maureen.

  For a long time, he sat on a bench close to the abbey, trying to work out where to go. It was as if Harold had taken off his jacket, followed by his shirt, and then several layers of skin and muscle. Even the most ordinary things seemed overwhelming. A shop assistant began to wind up the striped awning and it made such a rattle the noise cut into his head. He looked along the empty street, knowing no one, having nowhere to belong when, emerging from the opposite end, he saw David.

  Harold stood. His heartbeat came so fast he could feel it in his mouth. It couldn’t be his son; he couldn’t be in Bath. And yet, looking at the stooped figure striding toward him, tugging on a cigarette, and with his black coat billowing out like wings, Harold knew it was David, and that they were going to meet. He was shaking so much he had to reach for the bench.

  Even from this distance, he could tell David had grown his hair again. Maureen would be so pleased. She had wept bitterly the day he had shaved his head. His walk was still the same: toppling and long-paced, his eyes fixed to the ground, his head bowed, as if other people were to be avoided. Harold called out: “David! David!” They were no more than fifty feet apart.

  His son staggered as if he had lost his balance or tripped. He was maybe drunk, but that wouldn’t matter. Harold would buy him a coffee. Or a drink, if he preferred that. They could eat. Or not eat. They could do whatever his son wanted.

  “David!” he called. He started to edge toward him. Gently, to show he meant no harm. A few more paces; that was all.

  He remembered the skeletal thinness of David after the Lake District; the way his head balanced on top of his neck, suggesting his body had rejected the rest of the world, and was interested only in consuming itself.

  “David!” he called again, a little louder to make him look up.

  His son caught his eye, but failed to smile. He glanced at Harold as if his father wasn’t there, or was part of the street but not something he recognized. Harold’s insides turned. He hoped he wouldn’t fall.

  It wasn’t David. It was someone else. Another man’s son. He had allowed himself to believe for a few brief moments that David could appear at one end of a street, while Harold sat at the other. The young man took a sharp right and marched swiftly away, becoming smaller and less distinguishable, until with a snap he turned a corner. Harold kept watching, waiting in case the young man changed his mind and was David after all, but he didn’t.

  It was worse than not seeing his son for twenty years. It was like having him, and not having him, all over again. Harold returned to the bench outside the abbey, knowing he must find somewhere to sleep, and unable to move.

  He ended up near the station, in a stuffy room overlooking the road. He wrenched up the sash window for air, but the traffic would not stop, and the trains shrieked in and out of the platforms. From beyond the wall came a voice in a foreign language, shouting into a telephone. Harold lay on a bed that was too soft, where so many people he didn’t know had slept before him, listening to the voice he didn’t understand, and he was afraid. He got up and paced the room, up and down, with the walls too close and the air too still, while the traffic and the trains went to wherever they were going.

  The past could not be changed. Inoperable cancer could not be cured. He pictured the stranger dressed as a woman, with the blow to his head. He recalled the way David looked the day of his graduation, and in the months following, as if he were asleep with his eyes open. It was too much. It was too much to keep going.

  As dawn broke, Harold was already on the road, but he did not refer to his compass or his guidebooks. It took all his strength and will to keep putting one foot in front of the other. Only when three teenage girls on horseback asked him the way to Shepton Mallet did he realize he had lost a full day heading in the wrong direction.

  He sat by the roadside, looking over a field ablaze with yellow flowers. He couldn’t remember their name and he couldn’t be bothered to take out his wild plant guide. The truth was, he was spending far too much money. After three weeks of walking, Kingsbridge was still nearer than Berwick. The first of the swallows swooped and dived overhead, playing through the air like children.

  Harold didn’t know how he would ever get back to his feet.

  Maureen and the Garden

  “YES, DAVID,” MAUREEN told him, “he’s still walking. He rings most evenings. And Rex is being very kind. In a funny way, I’m almost proud. I wish I knew how to tell Harold that.”

  Lying on the queen-sized bed she had once shared with Harold, she watched the block of bright morning light trapped behind the net curtains. So much had happened in one week, she sometimes had the feeling she had slipped into a different woman’s skin. “He sends postcards, and occasionally a present. He seems to favor pens.” She paused, afraid she had offended David because he wasn’t replying. “I love you,” she said. Her words trickled to nothing and still he did not speak. “I should let you go,” she said at last.

  It wasn’t that it was a relief to stop, but for the first time she had begun to feel uncomfortable when she talked to her son. She had believed they would enjoy a greater intimacy now that Harold was gone. And yet, faced with hours, if she wished, to tell him how things were, she found she was too busy. Or she would speak, and it would dawn on her with creeping certainty that he wasn’t listening. She found reasons not to tidy his bedroom. She even stopped thinking she might see him.

  It was the trip to Slapton Sands that had marked her turning point. That night, she had fumbled her front door key into the lock, calling her thank-you to Rex across the dividing fence, and then she had climbed the stairs without taking off her shoes and walked straight into the master bedroom. Fully dressed, she had toppled onto the bed and closed her eyes. In the middle of the night she had realized where she was with a prickle of panic, followed by relief. It was over. She couldn’t think what exactly it was, other than an unspecific weight of pain. She had pulled back the duvet and curled into Harold’s pillow. It smelled of Pears soap and him. Waking later, she had felt the same lightness spreading through her like warm water.

  After that, she had carried her clothes in armfuls from the spare room and hung them in the wardrobe, at the opposite end of the rail from Harold’s. She had given herself a challenge: Every day without him, she would attempt one new thing. She took the pile of unopened household bills to the kitchen table, along with the checkbook, and began to pay them. She rang the insurance company to make sure Harold’s health care was up to date. She drove the c
ar to the garage and had the air levels checked in the tires. She even tied an old silk scarf round her hair, like in the old days. When Rex appeared unexpectedly at the garden fence, she had to shoot her hand up and tug the knot free.

  “I look silly,” she said.

  “Not at all, Maureen.”

  He appeared to have something on his mind. They would be talking about the garden or Harold’s whereabouts, and then a thought would occur to him, and he would go quiet. When she asked if he was all right, he merely nodded. “Just wait,” he’d tell her. “I have a plan up my sleeve.” She had a hunch it was something to do with her.

  Dusting behind the nets at the bedroom window the previous week, she couldn’t help but notice the postman deliver something in a cardboard tube to Rex’s front door. A day later, and from the same vantage point, she had spied Rex struggling up the path with a window-sized piece of board, which he was trying to hide under a tartan blanket from the Rover. Maureen was intrigued. She had waited for him in the garden; she even took out a basket of dried washing and pegged it again on the line, but he didn’t come out all afternoon.

  She knocked to ask if he had enough milk, and he mumbled through a crack in the door that he did, and that he was taking an early night. And yet when she went out to check the back garden at eleven o’clock, the lights were still on in his kitchen, and she could see him puttering about.

  The next day a rap at the letterbox had brought her rushing into the hallway, where she found a strange square shape against the bobbled glass, with what looked like a small head floating on top. Opening the door, she discovered Rex behind a large flat brown-paper package tied with loops of string. “Do you mind if I come in?” he said. He could barely get the words out.

  Maureen couldn’t remember the last time someone had given her a gift when it wasn’t Christmas or her birthday. She had ushered him inside, and into the sitting room, offering tea or coffee. He insisted there was no time for either; she must open her present. “Tear the paper, Maureen,” he said.

  She couldn’t. It was too exciting. She had unpeeled one corner of brown paper and found a hard frame of wood, and then she unpeeled the other edge, and found the same again. Rex sat with his hands clasped in his lap, and every time she peeled off a new strip his feet lifted as if he were jumping over an invisible rope, and he gasped.

  “Hurry, hurry,” he said.

  “Whatever is it?”

  “Pull it out. Go on. Have a proper look, Maureen. I made it for you.”

  It was a giant-sized map of England mounted on pin board. On the back he had attached two small mirror hooks, so that it could be hung from the wall. He pointed to Kingsbridge, and there she found a pushpin, wound with blue thread that stretched to Loddiswell. From there, the blue thread crept to South Brent, and on again to Buckfast Abbey. Harold’s route to date was marked up with blue thread and pushpins, ending south of Bath. At the top of England, Berwick-upon-Tweed was marked with fluorescent green highlighter pen, and a small homemade flag. There was even a separate box of pushpins so that she could display Harold’s postcards.

  “I thought you could stick them on the parts of England he isn’t visiting,” said Rex. “Like Norfolk, and South Wales. I am sure that would be OK.”

  Rex had put up nails in the kitchen for the map and they hung it above the table, so that Maureen could see where Harold was and fill in the rest of his journey. It was a little lopsided because he had difficulty with the drill, and the first anchor was swallowed into the wall. But if she looked at the map with a slight tilt to her head, it was barely noticeable. Besides, as she told Rex, it didn’t matter about things not being perfect.

  This, too, was a new departure for Maureen.

  After the map present, they had taken an outing every day. She accompanied him to the crematorium with roses for Elizabeth, and afterwards they stopped for tea at Hope Cove. They visited Salcombe and took a boat trip across the estuary, and another afternoon he drove her to Brixham to buy crab. They walked the coastal road toward Bigbury and ate fresh shellfish at the Oyster Shack. He said it was good for him to get out, and that he hoped he wasn’t intruding, and she reassured him that it helped her too to stop thinking things over. They were sitting in front of the dunes at Bantham when she explained how she and Harold had first come to Kingsbridge forty-five years ago, when they were newly married. They had so much hope in those days.

  “We knew no one but it didn’t matter. We only needed each other. Harold had a difficult childhood. I think he loved his mother very much. And his father must have had some sort of breakdown after the war. I wanted to be everything he’d never had. I wanted to give him a home and a family. I learned to cook. I made curtains. I found wooden crates and hammered them together to make a coffee table. Harold dug me vegetable plots at the front of the house, and I grew everything. Potatoes, beans, carrots.” She laughed. “We were very happy.” It was such a pleasure to voice these things she wished there were more words. “Very happy,” she said again.

  The tide was out so far the sand looked glazed under the sun. There was a clear stretch between the shore and Burgh Island. People had brought multicolored windbreaks and small pop-up tents. Dogs were scampering across the sand, in pursuit of sticks and balls; children were running up and down with buckets and spades; and far out the sea glittered. She thought of how much David had wanted a dog. Maureen fumbled for her handkerchief and asked Rex to ignore her. Maybe it was coming to Bantham again after all these years. So many times she had blamed Harold for the day that David almost drowned.

  “I say so many things that I don’t mean. It’s as if, even if I think something nice about Harold, by the time it’s got to my mouth it’s become not nice. He goes to tell me something and I’m saying ‘I think not’ before he’s finished the sentence.”

  “I always got cross with Elizabeth for leaving the top off the toothpaste. Now I take it off as soon as I open a new tube. I find I don’t want the lid.”

  She smiled. His hand was near hers. She brought her own up and fingered the ridge of bone at her throat where the skin was still soft. “When I was young, I looked at people our age and I assumed my life was sorted out. It never occurred to me that when I got to sixty-three I’d be in the most appalling mess.”

  There were so many things Maureen wished she had done differently. Lying on the bed in the morning light, she yawned and stretched, feeling the size of the mattress with her hands and feet, even the cold far corners. Then she moved her fingers to herself. She touched her cheeks. Her throat. The outline of her breasts. She imagined Harold’s hands around her waist, his mouth on hers. Her skin was slack, and her fingertips no longer had the sensitivity of a young woman’s, but all the same her heart beat wildly, and her blood throbbed. From outside came the click of Rex’s front door closing. She sat up sharp. Moments later, his car started up and she heard him driving away. She curled back into the duvet, pulling it close against her like a body.

  The wardrobe door was partly open, revealing the sleeve of one of Harold’s left-behind shirts, and she felt a stab of the old pain. She threw back the duvet, seeking distraction. The perfect job presented itself as she passed the wardrobe.

  For many years it had been Maureen’s system, just as it had been her mother’s, to arrange clothing according to the season. Winter items would be placed at one end of the rail, along with thick pullovers, while summer clothing would be hung at the opposite end, beside lightweight jackets and cardigans. Somehow in her rush to fetch her own clothes into the wardrobe, she had failed to notice that Harold’s clothes hung higgledy-piggledy, with no reference to weather or texture of fabric. She would go through each piece, throwing out those he no longer needed and hanging the rest properly.

  There were his work suits, fraying at the lapels; these she lifted out and placed on the bed. There were a number of wool cardigans, all of them thin at the elbow; she would patch those. Skimming through a selection of shirts, some white, some checked, she came across the twee
d jacket he had bought especially for David’s graduation. She felt a beating against her chest, like something trapped inside. She hadn’t cast her eyes on the jacket for years.

  Maureen eased it off the hanger and held it high in front of her, at Harold level. Twenty years fell away, and she saw the two of them again, standing outside King’s Chapel, Cambridge, uncomfortable in their new outfits, in the exact spot where David had instructed them to wait. She saw herself wearing a satin dress with shoulder pads that, now she thought about it, was the color of a boiled crustacean, and probably matched her cheeks. She saw Harold with his shoulders hunched, so that his arms shot out stiff, as if the jacket sleeves were made of wood, not fabric.

  It was his fault, she’d complained at the time; he should have checked the arrangements. It was nervousness that made her lash out. They had waited for over two hours, but it was the wrong place after all. They missed the whole ceremony. And even though David apologized when they bumped into him coming out of a pub (you could excuse him for that; it was a day of celebration), he also failed to meet them for the punting trip he promised. The couple had made the long drive from Cambridge to Kingsbridge in silence.

  “He said he’s going on a walking holiday,” she said at last.

  “That’s good.”

  “Just as a stopgap. Until he gets a job.”

  “That’s good,” he said again.

  Tears of frustration had caught like a solid lump in her throat. “At least he has a degree,” she fired. “At least he can make something of his life.”

  David returned home two weeks later, unexpectedly. He didn’t explain why he was back so soon, but he carried a brown holdall that clunked as it hit the banisters and he often took his mother aside to ask her for money. “University took it out of him,” she’d say, to excuse his failure to get up. Or she’d say, “He just needs to find the right job.” He missed interviews; or he went to them, but forgot to wash and comb his hair. “David is too clever,” she’d say. Harold would nod in that easy way of his, and she’d want to shout at him for appearing to believe her. The truth was, their son could barely stand up straight most of the time. There were moments when she stole a glance at him, and she wasn’t even convinced he had graduated. With David, you could look back and there were so many inconsistencies that even the things you thought you knew began to unravel. And then she would feel guilty for doubting her son, and blame it instead on Harold. At least David has prospects, she’d say. At least he has his hair. Anything to throw Harold off balance. Money began to disappear from her purse. First coins. Then notes. She pretended they hadn’t.