The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry: A Novel

by Rachel Joyce

  It was like seeing the truth for the first time, and realizing she had known it all along. Of course there was no stopping terminal cancer. Maureen thought of the many people who had come to trust in Harold’s walk. She thought of Harold, trudging, even while they spoke. A shiver ran through her. “I told you I was a fraud,” said the girl.

  Maureen pummeled her forehead lightly with her fingertips. She could feel more coming from a long way deep inside, but unlike the truth about David, this caused her racking shame. She said slowly, “If anyone is the fraud here, I’m afraid it’s me.”

  The girl shook her head, clearly not understanding.

  Maureen began to tell her story, quietly and slowly, not looking at the girl because she had to focus on tugging out each word from the secret place where she had been hiding it for all this time. She told how, twenty years ago, after David’s suicide, Queenie Hennessy had come to 13 Fossebridge Road, asking for Harold. She had looked very pale, and she was carrying flowers. There was something extremely ordinary and yet very dignified about her.

  “She said, could I give Harold a message. It was about the brewery; there was something she needed him to know. And after she had told me what it was, she gave me the flowers and went away. I suppose I was the last person she saw before she left. I put the flowers in the bin, and I never gave him the message.” She stopped; it was too painful and too shameful to go on.

  “What did she tell you, Mrs. Fry?” said the girl. Her voice was so gentle it was like a hand in the dark.

  Maureen faltered. It had been a difficult time back then, she said. This could not excuse what she had done, or not done, and she wished it had been otherwise.

  “But I was angry. David was dead. I was jealous too. Queenie was kind to Harold, when I couldn’t be. If I gave him her message, I was afraid he would find comfort. And I couldn’t do that. I didn’t want him to find comfort when there was none for me.”

  Maureen wiped her face, and continued.

  “Queenie told me how Harold had broken into Napier’s office one night. She had seen him sitting outside the brewery earlier that evening in his car. She hadn’t gone over. She thought he might be crying and didn’t wish to intrude. It was only when the news went round the following day that she had put two and two together. It was grief, she said; grief made people behave in the strangest ways. In her opinion Harold was on a course of self-destruction. In smashing those Murano glass clowns to smithereens, he was deliberately challenging Napier to do his worst. Their boss was hell-bent on revenge.” Maureen paused and dabbed her nose. “So Queenie took the blame. Being a plain woman, she said, made it easier; Napier was thrown off balance. She told him she had accidentally knocked the clowns while dusting.”

  The girl laughed, but she too was crying. “You mean to say this all happened because your husband smashed some glass clowns? Were they valuable?”

  “Not at all. They had belonged to his mother. Napier was a vicious thug. He had three wives, and he gave them all black eyes. One ended up in hospital with broken ribs. But he loved his mother.” She gave a limp smile, which hung on her face a moment, until she shrugged and cleared it away. “So Queenie stood there and took the blame for what Harold had done; and then she let Napier fire her. She told me all this, and she asked me to tell Harold not to worry. He had been kind to her, she said. It was the least she could do.”

  “But you didn’t tell him?”

  “No. I let him suffer. And then it became another of the things we couldn’t say, and drove us further apart.” She opened her eyes wide and let the tears fall. “You see, he was right to walk out on me.”

  The garage girl didn’t answer. She took a further flapjack and for several minutes she seemed to be thinking of nothing other than the taste of it. Then she said, “I don’t think it’s true that he walked out on you. I don’t think you’re a fraud either, Mrs. Fry. We all make mistakes. But I do know one thing.”

  “What? What?” moaned Maureen, rocking her head in her hands. How could she ever mend the mistakes of so long ago? Her marriage was over.

  “If I were you, I wouldn’t be stuck here, making biscuits and talking to me. I’d be doing something.”

  “But I drove all the way to Darlington. It made no difference.”

  “That was when things were good. A lot has happened since then.” Her voice was so slow and certain Maureen lifted her head. The girl’s face was still pale, but it suddenly shone with disarming clarity. Maureen maybe gave a start, or even cried out, because the garage girl laughed. “Get yourself to Berwick-upon-Tweed.”

  Harold and Queenie

  AFTER WRITING HIS letter, Harold had persuaded a young man to buy him an envelope and a first-class stamp. It was too late to visit Queenie, so he spent the night in his sleeping bag on a bench in the municipal park. Come the early morning, he visited the public lavatories, where he washed and combed his hair with his fingers. Someone had left a plastic razor on the sink, and he pulled it through his beard. It didn’t give him a proper shave but the bulk of it was gone, so that it was more like prickles than curls and the odd tuft. The flesh around his mouth looked bleached, and somehow disconnected from the leathery skin that held his nose and eyes. He lifted his rucksack over his shoulder, and made his way to the hospice. His body felt hollowed out, and he wondered if he needed food. He had no appetite. If anything, he felt sick.

  The sky was covered with thick white cloud, although the salt air smelled already warm. Cars of families were arriving with picnics and chairs to set up home on the beach. Far out on the horizon, the metal sea sparkled against the morning light.

  Harold knew an end was coming, but had no idea how it would be, or what he would do afterwards.

  He turned into the drive of St. Bernadine’s Hospice, and once more walked the length of the tarmac. It had been recently laid; his feet fell softly. He pressed the buzzer, without hesitating, and while he waited he closed his eyes and groped for the wall. He wondered if the nurse who would greet him might be the same woman he had spoken with on the telephone. He hoped he wouldn’t have too much to explain. He hadn’t the energy for words. The door opened.

  Before him stood a woman whose hair was covered, and who wore a long cream high-collared robe, with a belted black over-garment. His skin shivered all over.

  “I’m Harold Fry,” he said. “I have walked an awfully long way to save Queenie Hennessy.” He was suddenly desperate for water. His legs trembled. He needed a chair.

  The nun smiled. Her skin was soft and smooth; what he could see of her hair was gray at the roots. She reached out her hands and took Harold’s between her own. They were warm, and rough: strong hands. He was afraid he would cry. “Welcome, Harold,” she said. She introduced herself as Sister Philomena and urged him to enter.

  He wiped his feet, and then he did it again.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, but he couldn’t stop. He was pounding his shoes on the threshold. He lifted them to check there was nothing, and he was right, but still he kept scraping his soles against the stiff mat; the way he used to have to do for his aunts before they would allow him into the house.

  He stooped to unpeel the duct tape but it took a while and kept attaching itself to his fingers. The longer he took, the more he wished he wasn’t doing it.

  “I think I should leave my yachting shoes at the door.” The air inside was cool and still. There was a smell of disinfectant that reminded him of Maureen, and another that was hot food, possibly potato. He used the toe of one shoe to ram his other foot free, and then he repeated the process. Standing in his socks, he felt both naked and small.

  The nun smiled. “I’m sure you’re longing to see Queenie.” She asked if he was ready to follow and he nodded.

  Their feet marked the passage along the blue carpet in silence. There was no applause. There were no laughing nurses; no cheering patients. There was simply Harold, following the loose silhouette of a nun down a clean and empty corridor. He wondered if he could hear singing in
the air, but listening again, he thought he was probably imagining it. Maybe it was the wind trapped in the skylights ahead, or someone calling. He realized he had forgotten to bring flowers.

  “Are you all right?” she said.

  Again he nodded.

  As they reached them, Harold noticed the windows to his left opened out over a garden. He looked with longing at the closely cropped lawn, and imagined his bare feet sinking into its softness. There were benches set out, and a sprinkler, whipping the air with bowing curves of water that caught the light from time to time. Ahead there stretched a series of closed doors. He was sure Queenie must be behind one of them. He fixed his gaze toward the garden and felt a powerful surge of dread.

  “How long did you say you had been walking?”

  “Oh,” he said. The significance of his journey was reducing to nothing even as he followed her. “A long time.”

  She said, “I’m afraid we didn’t invite those other pilgrims inside. We watched them on the television. We found them altogether rather noisy.” She turned and he thought she gave a wink, though that was surely not possible.

  They passed a half-open door. He wouldn’t look inside.

  “Sister Philomena!” called a voice, frail as a whisper.

  She stopped, looking into another room, her arms stretched out between the doorframe. “I’ll only be a moment,” she said to whoever was inside. The nun stood, with one foot slightly lifted and pointed behind her, as if she were a dancer, but wearing trainers. Turning back to Harold, she gave a warm smile, and said they were close. He was cold, or tired, or something that seemed to bleed the life out of him.

  The nun walked a few more paces and stopped to knock gently at a door. She listened a moment, with her knuckles resting on the wood and her ear flat against it, and then she opened the door a crack and peered inside.

  “We have a visitor,” she said to the room he could not yet see.

  Pushing the door to the wall, she flattened herself against it as he passed. “How exciting,” she said. He took a deep breath that seemed to come from his feet, and lifted his gaze to the room ahead.

  There was no more than a window, with thin curtains partially drawn, and beyond that a sky that appeared far away. There was a simple bed set under a wooden cross, with a pan beneath it and an empty chair at its foot.

  “But she’s not there.” He felt a giddying wave of unexpected relief.

  Sister Philomena laughed. “Of course she’s there.” She nodded in the direction of the bed, and looking at it again he found a slight profile beneath the ice-white sheets. Something stretched at its side, like a long white claw, and then as Harold peered again it occurred to him that this was Queenie’s arm. He felt the blood rush to his head.

  “Harold,” came the nun’s voice. Her face was close to his, the skin a web of fine wrinkles. “Queenie is confused, and in some pain. But she has waited. As you said she should.” She withdrew to let him pass.

  He took a few steps closer, and then a few more, with his heart throbbing. And as Harold Fry finally arrived at the side of the woman for whom he had traveled so many miles, his legs almost gave way. She lay, not moving, only a few feet from his touch, her face toward the light at the window. He wondered if she was sleeping, or maybe drugged, or waiting for something that wasn’t him. It was intensely private; the way she did not move, or notice his arrival. Her body made almost no shape against the sheets. She had the smallness of a child.

  Harold pulled the rucksack from his shoulder and held it flat against his stomach, as if to keep the image in front of him at bay. He ventured one step closer. Two.

  What was left of Queenie’s hair was thin and white like a seed head in a hedgerow; puffed over her scalp, and pulled sideways, as if she’d been caught in a violent wind. He could see the papery thin skin of her skull. Her neck was bandaged.

  Queenie Hennessy looked like someone else. Like someone he had never met. A ghost. A shell. He glanced behind him for Sister Philomena, but the door was empty. She had gone.

  He could drop the presents and go. Maybe with a card. The idea of writing seemed by far the best idea; he could say something comforting. A burst of energy shot through him. He was about to retreat when Queenie’s head began a slow and steady journey from the window, and he was struck still again, watching. First came the left eye, then the nose, then the right side of her cheek, until she was facing him, and they met for the first time in twenty years. Harold’s breath stopped.

  Her head was all wrong. It was two heads in one, the second growing out of the first. It began somewhere above her cheekbone and protruded over the jaw. It was so big, this growth, this second face without features, it looked as if it would erupt through her skin at any moment. It had forced the right eye to close and was tugging it toward her ear. The lower half of her mouth was jammed sideways and sliding toward her jaw. It was inhuman. She lifted her claw fingers, as if to hide, but there was no not seeing. Harold groaned.

  The noise was out of him before he was aware of making it. Her hand groped for something she didn’t find.

  He wished he could pretend it wasn’t horrible to look at. But he couldn’t. His mouth opened and two words shuffled out. “Hello, Queenie.” Over six hundred miles, and that was all he could come up with.

  She said nothing.

  “It’s Harold,” he said. “Harold Fry.” He was aware he was nodding, and shaping the words with exaggeration, and directing them not at her disfigured face but at her claw hand. “We worked together a long time ago. Do you remember?”

  He snatched one more glance at the gargantuan tumor. It was a shining bulbous mass of threadlike veins and bruising, as if it hurt the skin to contain it. Queenie’s one open eye blinked at him. From the other slid a trail of something wet toward her pillow.

  “Did you get my letter?”

  The look was naked, like an animal trapped inside a box.

  “My postcards?”

  Am I dying? said her marble eye. Will it hurt?

  He couldn’t look. Pulling open the rucksack, he rooted through its contents, although it was dark inside the bag and his fingers were trembling, and he was so aware of Queenie watching him he kept forgetting what he was looking for. “I have some small souvenirs. I picked them up as I walked. There’s a hanging quartz that will look nice at your window. I just have to find it. And some honey somewhere.” It dawned on him that with a growth that size she probably couldn’t eat. “You may not like honey, of course. But the pot is nice. For putting pens in, maybe. It’s from Buckfast Abbey.”

  He pulled out the paper bag containing the rose pendant, and offered it to her. She didn’t move. He laid it a little way from her clawed hand. He patted it twice. When he looked up, his skin froze. Queenie Hennessy was slipping down the pillow, as if the weight of her terrible face was dragging her earthwards.

  He didn’t know what to do. He knew he should help, but he didn’t know how. He was afraid that underneath her bandaged neck there would be more. More butchery. More brutal evidence of her human frailty. He couldn’t bear that. Harold called for help. He tried to do it quietly at first, so as not to alarm her. But then he called again, getting louder and louder.

  “Hello, Queenie,” called the nun entering the room; only it seemed this was not the same one as before. Her voice was younger, her body fuller and her manner more bold. “Let’s get some light. It’s like a morgue in here.” She walked to the curtains and tugged them back with a yank so that the rings screamed on the metal pole. “How nice to have a visitor.” Everything about her struck Harold as too alive for the room, and for Queenie’s fragile condition. It made him angry they had let her look after someone so delicate as Queenie, although he was relieved she was able to take over.

  “She’s—” He couldn’t finish the sentence. He pointed.

  “Not again,” said the nun, all bright, as if Queenie were a child and had spilled food down her blouse.

  From the other side of the bed, she adjusted Queenie
’s pillows and pulled her upright, hooking under the armpits and lifting. Queenie submitted like a rag doll, and that was how Harold thought he would always remember her; enduring and enduring, while someone hoisted her against a pillow and made funny comments that he hated.

  “Apparently Henry has walked. All the way from— Where are you from, Henry?”

  Harold opened his mouth to explain that he wasn’t Henry, and that he lived in Kingsbridge, but the will to say either disappeared. It didn’t seem worth the effort of correcting her. At that moment it didn’t even seem worth being himself.

  “Dorset, did you say?” said the sister.

  “Yes. That’s right,” said Harold, adopting the same tone, so that it sounded for a moment as if they were both shouting over the sea wind. “Down south.”

  “Shall we offer him tea?” she asked Queenie, without looking at her. “You sit yourself down, Henry, and catch up while I make us all a cuppa. It’s been pretty busy for us, hasn’t it? There have been so many letters and cards. Last week a lady even wrote from Perth.” She turned to Harold as she left. “She can hear you,” she said. He thought that if Queenie could really hear, it wasn’t considerate to go talking about it. But he didn’t say that. They were down to basics now.

  Harold took the chair at Queenie’s bedside. He scraped it back a few inches, so as not to be in the way. He slotted his hands between his knees.

  “Hello,” he said again, as if they were meeting for the first time. “I must say, you’re doing very well. My wife—do you remember Maureen?—my wife sends her best regards.” It felt safer now that he had conjured Maureen into the conversation. He wished Queenie would say something to break the ice, but she didn’t.

  “Yes, you’re doing well.” And then: “Really, really well.” He looked behind to see if the nun was on her way with the tea, but they were still alone. He gave a long yawn, although he felt wide awake. “I walked a long time,” he said weakly. “Shall I hang up your quartz? In the shop, they had it at the window. I think you’ll like it. It’s supposed to have healing powers.” Her opened eye met his. “But I don’t know about that.”