The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

by Rachel Joyce

  For the second night in a row, Harold slept without dreaming.

  Maureen and the Lie

  AT FIRST MAUREEN was convinced Harold would come back. He would phone, and he would be cold and tired, and she would have to go and fetch him, and it would be the middle of the night, and she would have to put a coat on over her nightdress and find her driving shoes; and all this would be Harold’s fault. She had slept fitfully with the lamp on and the phone beside the bed, but he had neither rung nor come home.

  She kept going over all that had happened. The breakfast, and the pink letter, and Harold not speaking, only weeping in silence. The smallest detail lurked in her mind. The way he had folded his reply twice and slipped it in the envelope before she could see. Even when she tried to think about something else, or nothing at all, she couldn’t stop the picture swimming into her head of Harold staring at Queenie’s letter, as if something deep inside him was undoing. She wanted very much to speak to David, but she didn’t know how she would say it. Harold’s walk was still too confusing and humiliating, and she was afraid that if she spoke to David she would miss him, and it would be more hurt than she could bear.

  So when Harold said he was walking to Berwick, did he mean that once he got there, he was staying?

  Well, he could go if he wanted. She should have seen it coming. Like mother, like son; although she had not met Joan, and Harold never spoke of her. What kind of woman packs a suitcase and leaves, without even a note? Yes, Harold could go. There were times when she herself had been tempted to call it a day. It was David who kept her at home, not marital love. She could no longer recall the details of how she had first met Harold, or what she had seen in him; only that he had picked her up at some municipal dance, and that on meeting him, her mother had found him common.

  “Your father and I had better things in mind,” she had said, in that clipped way of hers.

  In those days Maureen had not been one to listen to other people. So what if he had no education. So what if he had no class. So what if he rented a basement room and did so many jobs he barely slept. She looked at him and her heart tipped sideways. She would be the love he’d never had. Wife, mother, friend. She would be everything.

  Sometimes she looked back to the past and wondered where the reckless young woman was that she had been.

  Maureen went through his papers, but there was nothing to explain why he was walking to Queenie. There were no letters. No photographs. No half-scribbled directions. All she discovered in his bedside drawer was a picture of herself just after they were married, and another crumpled black-and-white one of David that Harold must have hidden there, because she clearly remembered sticking it in an album. The silence reminded her of the months after David had left, when the house itself seemed to hold its breath. She put on the television in the sitting room, and the radio in the kitchen, but still it was too empty and quiet.

  Had he been waiting for Queenie for twenty years? Had Queenie Hennessy been waiting for him?

  It would be rubbish day tomorrow. Rubbish was Harold’s department. She went online and ordered brochures from several companies who ran summer cruises.

  As dusk fell, Maureen saw she had no choice but to do the rubbish herself. She hauled the bag down the path and threw it against the garden gate, as if in being Harold’s neglected duty the rubbish was also to blame for his departure. Rex must have spotted her from an upstairs window because he was at the fence as she came back.

  “Everything all right, Maureen?”

  She said briskly that it was. Of course it was.

  “Why is Harold not doing the rubbish this evening?”

  Maureen glanced up at the bedroom window. Its emptiness struck her so forcefully that an unexpected rush of pain tore at the muscles inside her face. Her throat tightened. “He’s in bed.” She forced a smile.

  “Bed?” Rex’s mouth dropped. “Why? Is Harold poorly?”

  The man worried so easily. Elizabeth had once confided across washing lines that his mother’s fussing had turned him into the most appalling hypochondriac. She said, “It’s nothing. He slipped. He twisted his ankle.”

  Rex’s eyes widened like buttons. “Did this happen during his walk yesterday, Maureen?”

  “It was only a loose paving stone. He will be fine, Rex. What he needs is rest.”

  “That’s shocking, Maureen. A loose paving stone? Dear oh dear.”

  He shook his head mournfully. From inside the house the phone began to ring, and her heart leapt to her mouth. It was Harold. He was coming home. As she ran for the door, Rex was still at the fence, saying, “You should make a complaint to the council about a loose paving stone.”

  “Don’t worry,” she called over her shoulder, “I will.” Her pulse was beating so fast she didn’t know if she was going to laugh or cry. She darted to the phone and lifted the receiver, but the answer machine clicked on and he hung up. She dialed 1471, but the caller’s number was not available. She sat watching the phone, waiting for him to call again or return home, but he did neither.

  That night was the worst; she couldn’t understand how anyone slept. She shook the batteries out of the bedside clock, but there was nothing she could do to stop the barking of dogs, or the cars that screeched past toward the new housing at three in the morning, or even the shrieking of gulls that started up at first light. She lay very still, waiting for inertia, and sometimes a moment of unconsciousness stole over her but then she would wake and remember again. Harold was walking to Queenie Hennessy. And reacquainting herself with this knowledge, after the ignorance of sleep, was even more painful than first hearing it on the telephone. It was a double deceit. But that was how it went; she knew that. You had to keep crawling up, not believing it, only to be punched back down again, until the truth well and truly hit home.

  She opened Harold’s bedside drawer and stared again at the two photographs he had hidden there. There was David in his first pair of shoes, balancing on one leg, and clinging on to her hand while lifting up his other foot, as if to examine it. And the other was of herself, laughing so much her dark hair fell over her face in long sweeps. She was nursing a zucchini that had grown to the size of a small child. It must have been taken just after they moved to Kingsbridge.

  When three large envelopes from cruise companies arrived, Maureen dropped them straight in the recycling box.

  Harold and the Hiking Man and the Woman Who Loved Jane Austen

  IT HAD COME to Harold’s attention that several of the chaps at the brewery, including Mr. Napier, had developed a peculiar walk that caused them to shriek as if it were uncontrollably funny. “Look at this,” he’d hear them bragging from the yard. And one man would stick out an elbow like a chicken wing, and lower his torso as if to widen the shape of his lower half, before waddling forward.

  “That’s it! Fuck, that’s it!” the others would scream. Sometimes the whole gang would spit out their cigarettes and have a go.

  It had dawned on him, after several days of watching from a window, that what they were up to was being the new woman in finances. They were being Queenie Hennessy and her handbag.

  Remembering this, Harold woke with an intense need to be back outside. Bright daylight frilled the curtains, as if straining to get at him. To his relief, while his body was unyielding and his feet tender, he could move both, and the blister on his heel appeared less angry. His shirt, socks, and underpants were strung on the radiator; he had rinsed them in hot water and washing powder the previous night. They were stiff and not quite dry, but they would do. He applied a tidy parade of plasters to both feet, and carefully repacked the contents of the plastic bag.

  Harold was the only resident in the dining room, which was really a small front room with a three-piece suite pushed flat against a wall and a table for two positioned at the center. It was lit by an orange lampshade and smelled of damp. A glass-fronted cabinet exhibited a collection of Spanish dolls and dead bluebottles, dry as twists of tissue paper. The woman who owned the B&B
said that the girl who helped was off. She spoke the word as if there was something unsavory about the girl’s absence, as if she were maybe a piece of food that had to be disposed of. She put his breakfast on the table and watched him from the doorway, her arms folded. Harold was glad not to have to explain. He ate greedily and impatiently, staring out at the road beyond the window, and calculating how long it would take a man who wasn’t used to walking to cover the six miles to Buckfast Abbey, let alone the further four hundred and eighty plus to Berwick-upon-Tweed.

  Harold read the words of Queenie’s letter, although he knew them now without looking. Dear Harold, This may come to you as some surprise. I know it is a long time since we last met, but recently I have been thinking about the past. Last year I had an operation—

  “I hate South Brent,” said a voice.

  Surprised, Harold looked up. There was no one except him and the owner, and it seemed unlikely she had spoken. She was still leaning against the doorframe, with her arms folded, and jigging her leg so that her slipper dangled from her foot, on the verge of escape. Harold returned to his letter and his coffee, when the voice came again.

  “We get more rain in South Brent than anywhere else in Devon.”

  Clearly it was the woman, although she still didn’t look at him. Her face remained fixed toward the carpet, her lips an empty O, as if her mouth was speaking despite the rest of her. He wished he could say something helpful but he couldn’t think what it might be. Maybe his silence or simply his hearing was enough, because she went on.

  “Even when it’s sunny I can’t enjoy it. I think to myself, Oh yes, it’s nice now, but it’s not going to last. I’m either watching rain, or waiting for it.”

  Harold refolded Queenie’s letter and returned it to his pocket. Something was bothering him about the envelope, but he couldn’t find in his mind what it was; besides, it seemed rude not to give the woman his full attention, since she was evidently talking to him.

  She said, “I won a holiday to Benidorm once. All I had to do was pack my suitcase. But I couldn’t do it. They sent me the ticket in the post, and I never opened the envelope. Why is that? Why, when the chance to escape came, couldn’t I take it?”

  Harold frowned. He thought of all the years he hadn’t spoken to Queenie. “Maybe you were afraid,” he said. “I had a friend once but it took me a long time to see that she was. It was actually rather funny because we first met in a stationery cupboard.” He laughed, remembering the scene, but the woman didn’t. It was probably difficult to imagine.

  She stopped the foot that had been swinging like a pendulum, and studied her slipper as if she had not noticed it before. “One day I will leave,” she said. She looked across the drab room and caught Harold’s eye, and then at last she smiled.

  Contrary to David’s predictions, Queenie Hennessy had not turned out to be a socialist, feminist, or lesbian. She was a stout, plain-looking woman with no waist and a handbag tucked over her forearm. It was well known that Mr. Napier considered women to be little more than ticking hormone bombs. He gave them jobs as barmaids and secretaries and expected in return the odd favor in the back of his Jaguar. So Queenie marked a new departure at the brewery, and one that Mr. Napier would not have made, had anyone other than her applied for the job.

  Her manner was quiet and unassuming. Harold overheard a young chap saying, “You forget she’s a woman really.” Within a matter of days there were reports that she had brought an unprecedented order to the financial department. But this did not seem to stop the impersonations and laughter that now filled the corridors. Harold hoped she didn’t hear. He watched her sometimes in the canteen with her sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper. She had a way of sitting with the young secretaries and listening, as if she, or they, were not there at all.

  It was when he picked up his briefcase to go home one evening that he heard a snuffling sound from behind a cupboard door. He tried to walk past, but the noise didn’t stop. He turned back.

  Edging the door open, to his relief he had found nothing at first, just boxes of paper. Then the sound had come again, more like a sob, and he had discovered a squat profile, pressed against the wall, with her back to him. Her jacket tugged at the seam that ran the length of her spine.

  “I do beg your pardon,” he’d said. He had been on the point of closing the door again and rushing away, when she had wept.

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s I who should apologize.” Now he was standing half in the cupboard, and half outside it, with a woman he didn’t know crying into manila envelopes.

  “I’m good at my job,” she said.

  “Of course.” He glanced down the corridor, hoping one of the younger chaps would appear and talk to her. He had never been very good with emotion. “Of course,” he said again, as if saying it repeatedly would be enough.

  “I’ve got a degree. I’m not stupid.”

  “I know,” he said, although, of course, this was not strictly true; he knew almost nothing about her.

  “Then why is Mr. Napier always watching? As if he’s waiting for me to make a mistake? Why must they all laugh?”

  Their boss was a mystery to Harold. He didn’t know whether the rumors about the kneecapping were true, but he had seen the man reduce the toughest landlords to jelly. Only the previous week Napier had fired a secretary for touching his desk. He said, “I’m sure he thinks you are a very good accountant.” He simply wanted her to stop crying.

  “I need this job. It’s not as if the rent pays itself. But I’m going to resign. Some mornings I don’t even want to get up. My father always said I was too sensitive.” It was more information than Harold knew what to do with.

  Queenie dropped her head low, so that he could see the soft dark hairs at the nape of her neck. It reminded him of David, and he felt a rush of pity.

  “Don’t resign,” he said, stooping a little and softening his voice. He was speaking from the heart. “I found it hard to begin with too. I felt out of place. But it will get better.” She said nothing, and he wondered for a moment if she had even heard him. “Would you like to come out of the stationery cupboard now?”

  To his surprise, he held out his palm for her and, again to his surprise, she took it. Her hand was soft and warm against his.

  Outside the cupboard, she pulled it away quickly. Then she smoothed her skirt, as if Harold were a crease and she needed to brush him off.

  “Thank you,” she said, a little coldly, although her nose was a violent red.

  She walked away from the stationery cupboard with her back straight and her neck tall, leaving Harold feeling that he was the one who had behaved out of turn. He supposed she had stopped thinking about resigning after that, because he looked out for her at her desk every day and she was there, working alone and without fuss. They rarely spoke. In fact he began to notice that if he entered the canteen, she seemed to pack up her sandwiches and leave.

  Morning sun spilled gold over the highest peaks of Dartmoor, but in the shadows the ground was still brushed with a thin frost. Shafts of light struck the land ahead like torches, marking his journey forward. It would be another good day.

  Leaving South Brent, Harold met a man in his dressing gown who was leaving food on a saucer for the hedgehogs. He crossed the road to avoid dogs, and farther on he overtook a young tattooed woman bawling beneath an upstairs window: “I know you’re there! I know you can hear me!” She paced up and down, kicking at garden walls, her body brittle with fury, and every time she appeared on the point of giving up, she returned to the foot of the house and yelled again: “You bastard, Arran! I know you’re there!” Harold also passed an abandoned mattress, the entrails of a sabotaged fridge, several single shoes, many plastic bags, and a hubcap, until once again the pavements stopped, and what had been a road narrowed itself to a lane. It surprised him how relieved he felt to be under the sky again, and hedged between trees, and the earth banks that were thick with ferns and brambles.

 
Harbourneford. Higher Dean. Lower Dean.

  He opened the second packet of Rich Tea biscuits, dipping into the bag for them as he went, although some had an unfortunate grainy texture and the slightly sulfuric taste of washing powder.

  Was he fast enough? Was Queenie still alive? He mustn’t stop for meals, or sleep. He must press on.

  By the afternoon, Harold was aware of an occasional shooting pain along the back of his right calf, and a locking of his hip joints as he hit the downward slant of the hills. Even their upward slopes he took slowly, with his palms cupping the small of his back, not so much because he was sore as because he felt the need of a helping hand. He stopped to check the plasters on his feet, and replaced the ones on his heel where the blister had bled.

  The road turned and rose and fell again. There were times when he could see the hills and fields and others when he saw nothing. He lost all sense of where he was in remembering Queenie, and imagining what her life might have become in the last twenty years. He wondered if she’d married? Had children? And yet from the letter it was clear she’d kept her maiden name.

  “I can sing ‘God Save the Queen’ backwards,” she told him once. And she did, while also sucking a Polo mint. “I can also do ‘You Don’t Bring Me Flowers,’ and I have almost got ‘Jerusalem.’ ”

  Harold smiled. He wondered if he had done so at the time. A herd of cows, chewing grass, looked up briefly, their mouths paused. One or two moved toward him, slowly at first but building to a trot. Their bodies looked too big for stopping. He was glad to be on the road, even though it was hard on his feet. The plastic bag with his shopping thumped against his thighs, and dug white ridges into his wrists. He tried lodging it over one shoulder, but it kept careering back toward his elbow.