The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry: A Novel

by Rachel Joyce

  He wondered how much longer he was going to have to go through this. He got up, with the quartz swinging on its thread between his fingers, and pretended to look for a suitable place to hang it. The sky beyond the window was so white he couldn’t tell if it was cloud or bright sun. Down in the garden, a nun in a straw hat pushed a patient in a wheelchair across the grass, talking gently. He wondered if she was praying. He envied her certainty.

  Harold felt the stir of old emotions and images from the past, buried for all this time, because living with them every day was more than a human being could bear. He gripped the windowsill, taking deep breaths, but the air was hot too and brought no relief.

  He lived again the afternoon he had driven Maureen to the funeral director’s to see David one last time in the coffin. She had packed a few things; a red rose, a teddy bear, and a pillow to go beneath his head. In the car, she had asked Harold what he was going to give, knowing he had nothing. The sun had shone very low, torching his eye as he drove. They both wore sunglasses. Even at home, she didn’t take them off.

  At the funeral director’s she had surprised him by saying she wanted to say goodbye to David alone. He had sat outside with his head in his hands, waiting his turn, until a passerby had stopped to offer a cigarette and Harold had taken it, although he had not smoked since the days on the buses. He tried to imagine what a father said to his dead son. His fingers shook so hard on the cigarette the passerby used three matches to light it.

  The thick nicotine caught in his throat and wound through his insides, causing them to tip upwards. As he stood and bent over a rubbish bin, he was met with the bitter stench of decay. Then, from behind him, the air was pierced with a harsh, deep sobbing cry, so animal in its intensity he was struck still, braced over the contents of the bin.

  “No!” Maureen screamed from inside the funeral parlor. “No! No! No!” The words seemed to reverberate through him and beat against the metal sky.

  Harold had heaved a white spume of foam into the bin.

  When she came out, she caught his eye once, and then her hand shot to her sunglasses. She had been crying so hard her whole being seemed liquid. He realized with shock how thin she’d grown; her shoulders were like a hanger inside her black dress. He wanted to walk to her, to hold her, and be held, but he smelled of the cigarette and his vomit. He hovered beside the bin, pretending he had not seen her, and she walked straight past him to the car. The space that set them apart shone in the light like glass. He wiped his face and his hands, and eventually he went after her.

  As they drove home in silence, Harold knew that something had passed between them which could never be undone. He had not said goodbye to his son. Maureen had; but Harold had not. There would always be this difference. There followed a small cremation, but she wanted no mourners. She hung up net curtains to stop people prying, although sometimes he felt it was more to stop herself from seeing out. For a while she railed, and blamed Harold, and then even that stopped. They passed each other on the stairs and were no more than strangers.

  Harold thought of the day when she came out of the funeral director’s and looked at him before snapping down her sunglasses, and he felt that in that one glance they had made a pact that would oblige them for the rest of their lives to say only what they did not mean, and to wrench apart what they most loved.

  Remembering all this in the hospice where Queenie lay dying, Harold trembled with pain.

  He had believed that when he saw her he could say thank you and even goodbye. That there would be a meeting of a kind, and that somehow it would absolve the terrible mistakes of the past. But there could not be a meeting, or even a goodbye, because the woman he had once known had already left. Harold thought he should stay, leaning on the windowsill, until he could accept this. He wondered if he should sit again; if being in the chair would make a difference. But even before he sat, he knew it wouldn’t. Sitting or standing, he knew that it would take a long while before he could sew into the fabric of his life the knowledge that Queenie was reduced to this. David was dead too; there was no bringing him back. Harold tied the quartz to a curtain ring with a quick knot. It hung against the light, and twisted, so slight it was barely noticeable.

  He remembered fiddling with his laces the day David almost drowned. He remembered driving from the funeral parlor with Maureen, knowing everything was over. There was more. He saw himself as a boy, after his mother had left, prostrate on his bed, and wondering if the stiller you kept, the greater the chances might be of dying. And yet here, years later, was a woman he had known briefly, but tenderly, fighting to keep the small amount of life that was left. It was not enough. It was not enough to stay on the sidelines.

  In silence, he walked to Queenie’s bedside. And as her head turned, and her eye found his, he sat in the space beside her. He reached for her hand. Her fingers were fragile, barely flesh at all. They curled imperceptibly and touched his. He smiled.

  “It seems a long time since I found you in the stationery cupboard,” he said. At least he wanted to say that; but maybe it was only a thought. The air remained still and empty for a long time, until her hand slipped out of his, and her breathing grew slow.

  A rattle of china caused him to start. “Are you all right, Henry?” asked the young sister, jollying into the room with a tray.

  Harold looked again at Queenie. She was dozing.

  “Do you mind if I leave the tea?” he said. “I have to go now.”

  And Harold did.

  Maureen and Harold

  ALONE, A BROKEN figure sat on a bench, hunched against the wind, and looking out toward the water’s edge as if he had been there all his life. The sky was so gray and heavy, and the sea so gray and heavy, that it was impossible to tell where one began and the other ended.

  Maureen paused. Her heart hammered inside her ribs. She walked toward Harold, and then she stopped again, standing right beside him, although he didn’t look up or speak. His hair touched the collar of his waterproof jacket in soft curls that she ached to reach out and stroke.

  “Hello, stranger,” she said. “Do you mind if I sit with you?”

  He didn’t answer, but he tucked his jacket close to his hips and shunted along the bench to make a space. Waves came at the beach and broke in white fringes of foam, flinging forward small stones and broken pieces of shell, and then leaving them behind. The tide was coming in.

  She made her place beside him but a little way apart. “How far do you think those waves have traveled?” she said.

  He shrugged and shook his head, as if to say, That is a very good question, and I really don’t know. His profile was so hollow it looked eaten away, and shadows hung beneath his eyes, dark as bruises. He was a different man yet again. He seemed to have aged years. What was left of his beard was pitiful.

  “How was it?” she said. “Did you visit Queenie?”

  Harold kept his hands slotted between his knees. He nodded. He didn’t speak.

  She said, “Did she have any idea you were arriving today? Was she pleased?”

  He gave a sigh like something cracking.

  “You did—see her?”

  He nodded, but the nod kept moving up and down, as if he had omitted to send his brain the message to stop.

  “So did you talk? What did you say? Did Queenie laugh?”

  “Laugh?” he repeated.

  “Yes. Was she pleased?”

  “No.” His voice was weak. “She didn’t say anything.”

  “Nothing? Are you sure?”

  Another series of nods. His reticence was like a disease. It seemed to creep over Maureen too. She tugged her collar closer to her chin. She had expected him to be sad and exhausted; but that, she had assumed, would come from finishing his journey. This was a sort of apathy that sucked the life out of you.

  She said, “What about her presents? Did she like them?”

  “I left the rucksack with the nuns. I thought that was best.” He spoke quietly and carefully, balancing on the words,
but suggesting he was in danger at any moment of falling off into the crater of feeling beneath. “I should never have done it. I should have sent a letter. A letter would have been enough. If I had simply stuck with the letter, I could have—” She waited but he stared out at the horizon. He seemed to have forgotten that he was talking.

  “Still,” she said, “I’m surprised—after everything you did—that Queenie said nothing.”

  At last he turned and met her eye. His face, like his voice, was drained of life. “She can’t. She has no tongue.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Maureen’s gasp walloped the air.

  “I believe they’ve cut it out. Along with half her throat, and some of her spine. It was a last-ditch attempt to save her, but it hasn’t worked. The cancer’s inoperable because there are no operable bits of her left. Now she has a tumor growing out of her face.”

  He looked away, back toward the sky, with his eyes half closed, as if he was blocking out the external world in order to see more clearly the truth that was taking shape inside his head. “That’s why she could never talk to me on the telephone. She can’t speak.”

  Maureen turned once more to the sea, trying to understand. Far out the waves were flat, and metal-colored. She wondered if they knew the end of their journey lay ahead.

  Harold’s voice came again. “I didn’t stop because there were no words for me to say. There weren’t when I first read her letter. Maureen, I’m the kind of man who thanks the talking clock. What difference was I ever going to make? How did I ever think I could stop a woman from dying?”

  A violent surge of grief seemed to force its way through him. His eyes crumpled shut, and his mouth opened, and he sat tall as his mouth emitted a series of soundless sobs. “She was such a good woman. She wanted to help. Every time I drove her, she brought something nice for the journey home. She asked about David, and Cambridge—” He couldn’t finish. His body was shaking with it. His face twisted as fierce tears screwed up his eyes and his cheeks. “You should see. You should see her, Maw. It’s not fair.”

  “I know.” She reached her left hand around Harold’s and held it tight.

  She looked at the darkness of his fingers on his lap, the blue ridges of his veins. Despite the strangeness of the last weeks, she knew this hand so well. Even without looking she knew it. She kept hold as he wept. He grew calmer; a quiet flow of tears.

  He said, “As I walked, I have been remembering so much. Things I didn’t know I’d forgotten. Things about David, and you and me. I have even remembered my mother. Some of the memories have been hard. But most of them have been beautiful. And I’m frightened. I’m frightened that one day, maybe soon, I will lose them again, and this time it will be forever.” His voice wavered. Taking a new, brave breath, he began to tell her all he had remembered, the moments from David’s life that had opened up for him like the most precious scrapbook. “I don’t want to forget his head when he was a baby. Or the way he slept when you sang. I want to keep all those things.”

  “Of course you will,” she said. She tried to laugh, not wanting to continue with this conversation, although she could tell from the way he kept on looking at her that he wanted more.

  “I couldn’t remember David’s name. How could I have forgotten that? I can’t bear the thought that I might look at your face one day, and not even know you.”

  She felt pain pricking at her eyelids and shook her head. “You’re not losing your memory, Harold. You’re just very, very tired.”

  When she met his gaze, it was naked. He held her eye, and she held his, and the years fell away. Maureen saw again the wild young man who had danced like a demon all those years ago, and filled every vein of her with the chaos of love. She blinked hard, and wiped her eyes. The waves kept throwing themselves further and further up the shoreline. All that energy, all that power, crossing oceans, carrying ships and liners, and ending just a short distance from her feet, in a last flume of spray.

  She considered all the things that must happen from here. There would be regular visits to the GP. There might be colds that turned to pneumonia. There would be blood tests, hearing tests, eye tests. Maybe, God help them, there would be operations, and periods of convalescence. And then, of course, there must also follow a day when one of them was alone for good. She shivered. Harold was right: it was too much to bear. To have come all this way and discovered what it was you wanted, only to know that you must lose it again. She wondered if they should drive home via the Cotswolds, and stop a few days; or maybe take a detour and go to Norfolk. She’d love to return to Holt. But maybe they wouldn’t. It was all too big to contemplate, and she didn’t know. The waves fell over, and over, and over.

  “One day at a time,” she murmured. She moved close to Harold and lifted her arms.

  “Oh Maw,” he cried quietly.

  Maureen held him tight until the grief passed. He was tall, and stiff, and her own. “You dear man.” She groped for his face with her mouth and kissed his salt wet cheeks. “You got up, and you did something. And if trying to find a way when you don’t even know you can get there isn’t a small miracle; then I don’t know what is.”

  Her mouth trembled. She cupped his face in her palms; they were so close now that his features lost distinction and all she could see was the feeling she had for him.

  “I love you, Harold Fry,” she whispered. “That is what you did.”

  Queenie and the Present

  QUEENIE STARED AT the blurred world and found something she had not seen before. She narrowed her eye, willing it into focus. A pink shining light that somehow hung in the air, twisting, and every now and then sent a myriad of color across the wall. It was beautiful for a while and then to keep hunting for it was too tiring and she let it go.

  She was almost nothing. Blink a moment, and she’d be gone.

  Someone had come, and now they had gone. Someone she liked. It wasn’t the nuns, although they were all kind. It wasn’t her father, but it was another good man. He had said something about walking, and that was right, she remembered; he had walked. But she couldn’t remember how far he had come. Maybe it was from the parking lot. She had a pain in her head, and she wanted to call for water, and she would do that, in a moment, but just for now she would stay here, lying very still and easy at last. She would sleep.

  Harold Fry. She remembered now. He had come to say goodbye.

  Once she had been a woman called Queenie Hennessy. She did sums, and wrote with an impeccable hand. She had loved a few times, and she had lost, and that was all as it should be. She had touched life, played with it a little, but it is a slippery bugger, and finally we must close the door, and leave it behind. A frightening thought for all these years. But now? Not frightening. Not anything. She was so tired. She dropped her face against her pillow, and felt something opening like a flower in her head, as it grew heavy.

  There came a memory long forgotten. It was so close Queenie could almost taste it. She was running down the stairs of her childhood home, in her red leather shoes, and her father was calling her, or was it the good man, Harold Fry? She was rushing, and laughing because it was so funny. “Queenie?” he was calling. “Are you there?” She could see the shape of him, tall against the light, but he kept calling her and casting his eyes everywhere except where she stood. The breath caught with a knot in her chest. “Queenie!” She longed for him to find her at last. “Where are you? Where is that girl? Are you ready?”

  “Yes,” she said. The light was very bright. Even behind her eyelids, it was silvery. “Yes,” she called, a little louder so that he would hear. “Here I am.” Something twisted at the window and showered the room with stars.

  Queenie parted her lips, hunting for the next intake of air. And when it didn’t come, but something else did, it was as easy as breathing.

  Harold and Maureen and Queenie

  MAUREEN TOOK THE news quietly. She had booked a double room, close to the seafront. They had eaten a light meal, and afterwards she had run Harold
a bath and washed his hair. She had shaved his chin carefully and moisturized the skin. As she trimmed his nails and rubbed his feet, she told him all the things she had done in the past which she so regretted. He said it was the same for him. He seemed to be coming down with a cold.

  After she had taken the call from the hospice, she reached for Harold’s hand. She told him exactly what Sister Philomena had said: that Queenie looked peaceful at the end. Almost childlike. One of the younger nuns believed she had heard Queenie call something just before she died, as if she were reaching for a person she knew. “But Sister Lucy is young,” said Sister Philomena.

  Maureen asked Harold if he would like to be alone, but he shook his head.

  “We’ll do this together,” she said.

  Already the body had been moved to a room beside the chapel. They walked behind the young nun, without speaking, because words at that moment felt too hard and too brittle. Maureen could hear the sounds of the hospice, the hushed voices, a brief peal of laughter, the slushing of water in pipes. From outside she briefly caught birdsong, or was it singing? She felt she had been swallowed by an inside world. At a closed door, they stopped and again Maureen asked Harold if he would like to be alone. Again he shook his head.

  “I’m frightened,” he said, his blue eyes searching hers.

  She saw the panic in them, the anguish and the reluctance. And then it dawned on her, very suddenly. The only dead body he had ever seen was David’s, in the shed. “I know. But it’s all right. I’m here too. It will be all right this time, Harold.”

  “It was a gentle end,” the sister said. She was a plump girl with a rosy bloom to her cheeks. Maureen was comforted that such a young, vibrant woman could care for the dying, and remain so full of life herself. “Just before she went, she gave a smile. As if she’d found something.”