The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry: A Novel

by Rachel Joyce

  “Steady on there,” laughed Rich. It was a rare moment of affection, albeit a little stumbling, but locked in this embrace, Harold struggled for breath as if he were being slowly suffocated.

  A photograph appeared next day in the papers, with the caption “Can Harold Fry make it?” He appeared to be collapsing into Rich’s arms.

  Maureen and Harold

  MAUREEN COULD BEAR it no longer. She confided in Rex that, against David’s advice, she was going to find Harold. She had spoken with her husband on the phone; he hoped the pilgrims would reach Darlington by the following afternoon. She knew it was too late to make amends for the past, but she would have one last stab at persuading him to come home.

  As soon as it was light, she fetched the car keys from the hall table and slipped a coral lipstick into her handbag. Locking the front door, she was surprised to hear Rex call her name. He was wearing a sun hat and a pair of shades, and he was clutching a hardback road atlas of the British Isles.

  “I thought you might need someone to navigate,” he said. “According to the Internet, we should be there by late afternoon.”

  The miles sped past, but she barely saw them. She said things while knowing that none of them added up; as if she were saying words that were only the tip to the huge mountain of feeling beneath. What if Harold didn’t want to see her? What if the other pilgrims were with him?

  “Supposing you’re wrong, Rex?” she said. “Supposing he is in love with Queenie after all? Maybe I should write? What do you think? I feel I might say it better in a letter.”

  When he said nothing, she turned to Rex and found him looking peaky. “Are you all right?”

  He gave a tight nod, as if he were afraid of moving. “You have overtaken three articulated lorries and a coach,” he said. “In single-lane traffic.” He added that he thought he would be fine, if he sat very still and looked out of the window.

  It was easy to find Harold, and the pilgrims. Someone had arranged a photo shoot for the tourist board in the pedestrianized market square and Maureen joined a small crowd. There was a tall man ushering photographers, and also a gorilla who appeared to need a chair, as well as a stout woman eating a sandwich, and a young man looking shifty. Catching sight of Harold as if she were no more than a stranger, Maureen was disarmed. She had seen him on the local news, and she kept the newspaper clippings in her handbag, but none of it had prepared her for seeing him “in true life,” as David used to say. Harold surely couldn’t have grown taller or broader, but looking at this weather-beaten pirate of a man, with his skin like dark leather and his curling hair, she felt she had become both one-dimensional and more fragile. It was the pared-down vitality of him that made her tremble; as if he had at last become the man he should have been all along. His PILGRIM T-shirt was stained and frayed at the neck. The color was gone from his yachting shoes, and the shape of his feet was practically through the leather. Harold caught Maureen’s eye, and stopped short. He said something to the tall man and broke free.

  As Harold walked toward her he laughed so openly she had to look away, unable to meet the fullness of his smile. She didn’t know whether to offer him her lips or her cheek, and at the last minute she changed her mind so that he kissed her nose instead and prickled her face with his beard. People were watching.

  “Hello, Maureen.” His voice was deep and assured. She felt her knees weaken. “What brings you all the way to Darlington?”

  “Oh,” she shrugged. “Rex and I fancied a drive.”

  He looked round, his face beaming. “Goodness. Has he come too?”

  “He’s gone to WH Smiths. He needed paper clips. After that he was keen to visit the railway museum. You can see the Locomotion.”

  He was standing right over her, gazing into her face and not looking away. It was like being under lights. “It’s a steam train,” she added, because he still didn’t seem to be doing anything, just smiling. She couldn’t stop staring at his mouth. Despite the beard, his jaw had lost its rigid set. His lips looked soft.

  An old fellow shouted into a megaphone to the crowd, “Shop all you can! This is the word of the Lord! Shopping is what gives our lives purpose! Jesus came on earth to shop!” He had no shoes.

  It broke the ice. Harold and Maureen smiled, and she felt there was a conspiracy between them, as if they were the only people in the world who saw it right. “People.” She shook her head knowingly.

  “It takes all sorts,” said Harold.

  There was nothing condescending about his remark, nor was there anything reprimanding. It was more generous than anything else, as if the strangeness of other people was a marvelous thing, but it made her feel overwhelmingly parochial. She said, “Do you have time for a cuppa?” She never normally referred to a pot of Earl Grey as a cuppa. And fancy trying to make up for your plain Englishness by suggesting tea.

  “I would love that, Maureen,” said Harold.

  They chose a coffee outlet on the ground floor of a department store because she said you could always trust the things you knew. The girl behind the counter stared as if she was trying to place him, and Maureen felt both proud and in the way. She had put on a pair of brand-new trainers at the last minute and they shone on the ends of her legs like beacons.

  “So much choice,” said Harold, gazing at the muffins and cakes, each one in its own paper case. “Are you sure you don’t mind paying, Maureen?”

  More than anything, she wanted to stare. It was years since she’d seen those blue eyes look so vibrant. He rubbed the curls of his giant beard between his forefinger and thumb so that they stuck out in peaks like royal icing. She wondered if the girl behind the counter realized she was Harold’s wife.

  “What will you have?” she said. She wanted to add “darling” but the word was too shy to come out.

  He asked if he might have a slice of Mars Bar Tray Bake with a strawberry frappé. Maureen gave a shrill laugh that sounded as if she had just emptied it out of a packet.

  “And I’ll have tea, please,” she told the girl behind the counter. “Milk, no sugar.”

  Harold shone his benign smile in the direction of the girl, whose name was pinned on her black T-shirt just above her left bosom. To Maureen’s amazement, the young woman flushed from her neck upwards and grinned back.

  “You’re that guy off the news,” she said. “The pilgrim. My mates think you’re awesome. Would you mind signing this?” She held out her arm and a felt-tip pen and Maureen was astonished a second time to witness Harold inscribing his name with indelible ink on the soft flesh above the girl’s wrist: Best wishes, Harold. He didn’t even flinch.

  The girl cradled her arm and stared long and hard at it. Then she set the drinks and the Mars Bar cake on a tray, along with one extra scone. “Have this on me,” she said.

  Maureen had never seen anything like it. She let Harold lead the way, and it was as if the room opened and hushed to make space for him. She noticed the other customers staring hard at Harold, and saying things behind cupped hands. At a table in the corner three ladies of her own age were drinking tea. She wondered where their husbands were: if they were playing golf, or dead maybe, or if they had walked out on their wives as well.

  “Afternoon,” he said brightly, greeting complete strangers.

  He chose a table beside the window so that he could keep an eye on the dog. It lay on the pavement outside, chewing on a stone, as if very interested in the business of waiting. She felt a swell of kinship with the animal.

  Maureen and Harold sat opposite, not side by side. And even though she had drunk tea with him for forty-seven years, her hands shook as she poured. Harold’s cheeks hollowed as his frappé shot up through a straw and entered his mouth with a honk. She waited a polite moment for the drink to go down; only she waited too long, and she opened her mouth to speak at the exact moment he did.

  “It’s nice to—”

  “Lovely to—”

  They gave a laugh as if they didn’t know each other terribly well.
/>   “No, no—” he said.

  “After you,” she said.

  It was like another collision, and they each retreated back to their drinks. She added milk to her cup but her hand shook again and the whole lot sloshed out in a rush. “Do people often recognize you, Harold?” She sounded like a woman interviewing him for the television.

  “What gets me, Maureen, is how nice everyone is.”

  “Where did you sleep last night?”

  “In a field.”

  She shook her head in awe but he must have misunderstood because he said in a rush, “I don’t smell, do I?”

  “No, no,” she rushed back.

  “I washed in a stream, and then again by a drinking fountain. Only I don’t have soap.” He had already finished his Mars Bar cake and was slicing open the complimentary scone. He ate food so fast he seemed to inhale it.

  She said, “I could buy you some soap. I’m sure I passed a Body Shop.”

  “Thank you. That’s really kind. But I don’t want to carry too much.”

  Maureen felt afresh the shame of not getting it. She longed to show him all her colors, and here she was, a suburban shade of gray. “Oh,” she said, dipping her head. The pain rose, tightening her throat, making it impossible to speak.

  His hand passed her a bundled handkerchief, and Maureen nipped her face into its crumpled warmth. It smelled of him, and long ago. It was no good. The tears came.

  “It’s just seeing you again,” she said. “You look so well.”

  “You look well too, Maureen.”

  “I don’t, Harold. I look like someone left behind.”

  She wiped her face, but tears were still leaking between her fingers. She was sure the girl at the counter must be looking, and the shoppers, and the ladies without their husbands. Let them. Let them all stare.

  “I miss you, Harold. I wish you would come home.” She waited with her blood thumping up and down her veins.

  At last Harold rubbed his head, as if he had an ache there or something he needed to dislodge. “You miss me?”

  “Yes.”

  “You wish I would come home?”

  She nodded. It was too much to repeat it. Harold scratched his head again and then lifted his gaze to hers. She felt her insides pick up and spring over and over.

  He said slowly, “I miss you too. But Maureen, I’ve spent my life not doing anything. And now at last I am doing something. I have to finish my walk. Queenie is waiting. She believes in me. You see?”

  “Well yes,” she said. “I do see that. Of course I see it.” She took a sip of tea. It was cold. “I just—I’m sorry, Harold—I don’t see where I fit in. I know you’re a pilgrim now and everything. But I can’t help thinking about myself. I’m not as selfless as you. I’m sorry.”

  “I’m no better than anyone else. I’m really not. Anybody can do what I’m doing. But you have to let go. I didn’t know that at the beginning but now I do. You have to let go of the things you think you need like cash cards and phones and maps and things.” He looked at her with his eyes shining, and his steady smile.

  She reached again for her tea and remembered as it hit her mouth that it was cold. She wanted to ask if pilgrims traveled without wives as well, but she didn’t. She forced another of those jolly faces that seemed to hurt, and then she glanced toward the window where Harold’s dog was still waiting.

  “He’s eating a stone.”

  He laughed. “He does that. You have to be careful not to throw it for him. If you do, he thinks you like throwing stones and he follows you. He doesn’t forget.” She smiled again. This one didn’t hurt.

  “Have you given him a name?”

  “Just Dog. It didn’t seem right to give him anything else. He’s-his-own-animal sort of thing. I felt a name might sound as if I thought I owned him.”

  She nodded, all out of words.

  “You know,” Harold said suddenly, “you could walk with us.”

  He reached for her fingers and she let him take them. The palms of his hands were so stained and calloused and her own were so pale and slight, she couldn’t see how these fingers had ever fitted together. Her hand lay in her husband’s, and all the rest of her was numb.

  Moments from their marriage passed through her head, like a series of photographs. She saw him creeping out of the bathroom on their wedding night; the nakedness of his chest so beautiful she had gasped out loud, and caused him to dive straight back into his jacket. There was Harold at the hospital, gazing at his new baby son, and stretching out his finger. She saw too all those images in the leather albums that over the years she had cleaned from her memory. They passed through her mind in a flash, recognizable to no one but herself. She sighed.

  It was all so far away, and there were so many other things lodged now between them. She saw herself and Harold twenty years ago, side by side in their sunglasses and unable to touch.

  His voice parted the blanket of her thoughts. “What do you think? Do you think you might come, Maureen?”

  She eased her hand from Harold’s and pushed back her chair. “It’s too late,” she murmured. “I think not.”

  She stood but Harold didn’t, so that she felt she was already out of the door. “There’s the garden. And Rex. Besides, I don’t have my things.”

  “You don’t need your—”

  “I do,” she said.

  He chewed his beard and nodded, but without looking up, as if to say, I know.

  “I better get back. Rex says hello, by the way. And I brought you some plasters. As well as one of those fruit drinks you like so much.” She slid them into the neutral spot on the table midway between herself and Harold. “But maybe pilgrims don’t use plasters?”

  Harold leaned back to slip both her presents into his pocket. His trousers hung loose at his hips. “Thank you, Maureen. They’ll come in very handy.”

  “It was selfish of me to ask you to give up your walk. Forgive me, Harold.”

  He sunk his head so low she wondered if he had fallen asleep on the table. She could see down his neck to the soft white skin of his back, where the sun hadn’t reached. She felt a shiver shoot straight through her, as if she were seeing him naked again for the first time. When he lifted his head and met her eye, she blushed.

  He spoke so softly, the words were part of the air. “I’m the one who needs forgiveness.”

  Rex was waiting in the passenger seat with coffee in a polystyrene cup, and a doughnut wrapped in a napkin. She sat beside him, and took small gulps of air to stop more weeping. He offered her the drink and the food, but she had no appetite.

  “I even said ‘I think not.’ I can’t believe I said that.”

  “You have a good cry.”

  “Thank you, Rex. But I’ve cried enough. I’d prefer to stop now.”

  She dabbed her eyes and glanced out at the street, where people were going about their business. All around her there seemed to be men and women, old ones, young ones; walking apart, or together. The coupled world looked so busy, so sure of itself. She said, “Years ago, when Harold and I first met, he called me Maureen. Then it changed to Maw, and that was how it was for years. These days it’s Maureen again.” She touched her mouth with her fingers, pressing for silence.

  “Would you like to stay?” said Rex’s voice. “Talk to him again?”

  She twisted the keys in the ignition. “No. Let’s go home.”

  And as they pulled away, she saw Harold, this stranger who had been her husband for so many years, with a dog trotting at his side, and a group of followers she didn’t know—but she didn’t throw a wave, or toot the horn. Without fanfare or ceremony or even a proper goodbye, she drove away from Harold, and let him walk.

  Two days later, Maureen woke to a bright sky full of promise and a light breeze that played at the leaves. The perfect washing day. She fetched the stepladder and took down the net curtains. Light, color, and texture fell over the room as if they had been trapped in the space behind the nets all along. The curtains we
re white and dry within the day.

  Maureen folded them into bags and took them to the charity shop.

  Harold and Rich

  SOMETHING HAPPENED AFTER Harold walked away from Maureen. It was as if a door closed on a part of him that he wasn’t sure he preferred to leave open. He no longer took pleasure in imagining the welcoming party of nurses and patients at the hospice. He could no longer visualize the end of his journey. The going was slow and troubled with so much argument that it took the group almost a -week to cover the stretch from Darlington to Newcastle. He lent Wilf the willow cane and never got it back.

  Maureen had said she missed him. She wanted him home. He couldn’t get that out of his mind. He found excuses to borrow mobile phones and ring.

  “I’m fine,” she would say. “I’m good.” She would tell him about a moving letter that had arrived in the post, or a small gift; or maybe she would describe the progress of her runner beans. “But you don’t want to hear about me,” she’d add. He did, though. He wanted that so much.

  “On the phone again?” Rich would ask, with a grin but no empathy.

  He accused Wilf of stealing again, and privately Harold was afraid he was right. It was painful to keep defending the boy, when he knew in his gut he was as unreliable as David. Wilf didn’t even hide his empty bottles.

  It could take an embarrassingly long time to wake him, and as soon as he was on his feet he complained. Trying to protect him, Harold told the others the old injury on his right leg was playing up. He suggested longer periods of rest. He even suggested they might like to go on ahead. No, no, they chorused; Harold was the walk. They couldn’t possibly do it without him.

  For the first time, he felt relief on reaching the towns. Wilf seemed to snap alive again. And seeing other people, looking into shop windows, thinking about what he didn’t need, offered Harold distraction from his own doubts about what had happened to his journey. He didn’t know how he had created something that had grown beyond his ability to keep hold of it.