The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

by Rachel Joyce

  The man who was walking

  PS. I am still doing it.

  IT WAS MID-MORNING. A crowd had gathered around two young men who were eating fire outside the cathedral to the accompaniment of a CD player, while an old man dressed in a blanket rooted through a bin. The flame eaters wore dark, oily clothes and had tied their hair in ponytails; there was something shambolic about their act, as if it might go wrong at any time. They asked people to stand back, and then they started juggling flaming batons, while the crowd gave a nervous clap. The old man seemed to notice them for the first time. He pushed his way to the front of the crowd and stood between the two men, like a piggy in the middle. He was laughing. The two young men yelled at him to move away, but he began to dance to their music. His movements were jerky and unrefined; suddenly the flame eaters seemed both slick and professional. They switched off their CD player and packed away their things, and the crowd diluted itself into passersby, but the old man danced alone outside the cathedral, his arms outspread and his eyes closed, as if both the music and the people were still present.

  Harold wanted to get on with his journey, but equally he felt that the old man was performing for the benefit of strangers and that, as the only one remaining, it would be discourteous to abandon him.

  He remembered David jiving at the holiday camp in Eastbourne, the night he won the Twist prize. Embarrassed, the other contestants had peeled away, leaving only this eight-year-old child with his body jiggering so fast, it was impossible to tell whether he was happy or in pain. The emcee began a slow clap, and made a joke that rang through the dance hall, so that everyone roared. Bewildered, Harold had smiled too, not knowing in that moment how to be anything so complicated as his son’s father. He glanced at Maureen and found she was watching, her hands to her mouth. The smile dropped from his face and he had felt nothing but a traitor.

  There was more. There were David’s school years. The hours in his bedroom, the top marks, the refusal to allow his parents’ help. “It doesn’t matter he keeps to himself,” Maureen would say. “He has other interests.” After all, they were loners themselves. One week David wanted a microscope. Another it was the collected works of Dostoevsky. Then it was German for Beginners. A bonsai tree. In awe of the greed with which he learned new things, they bought them all. He was blessed with an intelligence and opportunities they had never had; whatever they did, they mustn’t let him down.

  “Father,” he would say, “have you read William Blake?” Or, “Do you know anything about drift velocity?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I thought as much.”

  Harold had spent his whole life bowing his head to avoid confrontation, and yet, spilled from his own flesh was someone determined to hold his eye and have it out with him. He wished he had not grinned the night his son jived.

  The old man stopped dancing. He seemed to notice Harold for the first time. Throwing off his blanket, he gave a low bow, sweeping the ground with his hand. He was wearing some sort of suit, though it was so dirty it was hard to tell which of it was shirt and which jacket. He rose again, still gazing directly at Harold. Harold checked behind him in case the old man was looking at someone else, but other people were shooting past, avoiding connection. The person the old man wanted was undoubtedly him.

  He moved toward the old man, slowly. Halfway he got so embarrassed he had to pretend he had something in his eye, but the old man waited. When they were maybe a foot apart the old man held out his arms, as if embracing the shoulders of an invisible partner. There was nothing for it but for Harold to lift his own arms and do the same. Slowly their feet fumbled a passage to the left and then to the right. They weren’t touching but they danced together, and if there was a smell of urine and possibly vomit, it was also true that Harold had smelled worse. The only sound came from the traffic, and the crowds.

  The old man drew to a halt and bowed a second time. Moved, Harold ducked his head. He thanked the old man for dancing, but the old man had already picked up his blanket and was limping away, as if music was the last thing on his mind.

  In a gift shop close to the cathedral, Harold bought an embossed set of pencils that he hoped Maureen would like. For Queenie, he chose a small paperweight containing a model of the cathedral that covered itself in glitter when he tipped it upside down. It struck him as strange but true that tourists bought trinkets and souvenirs of religious places because they had no idea what else to do when they got there.

  Exeter took Harold by surprise. He had developed a slow inner rhythm that the fury of the city now threatened to overturn. He had felt comfortable in the security of open land and sky, where everything took its place. He had felt himself to be part of something bigger than being simply Harold. In the city, where there was such short-range sight, he felt anything might happen, and that whatever it was he wouldn’t be ready.

  He looked for traces of the land beneath his feet and all he found was where it had been replaced with paving stones and tarmac. Everything alarmed him. The traffic. The buildings. The crowds pushed past, shouting into their mobile phones. He smiled at each face and it was exhausting, taking in so many strangers.

  He lost a full day, simply wandering. Each time he resolved to leave, he saw something that distracted him, and another hour passed. He deliberated over purchases that he hadn’t realized he required. Should he send Maureen a new pair of gardening gloves? An assistant fetched five different types, and modeled them on her hands, before Harold remembered his wife had long since abandoned her vegetable beds. He stopped to eat and was presented with such an array of sandwiches that he forgot he was hungry, and left with nothing. (Did he prefer cheese or ham, or would he like the filling of the day, seafood cocktail? Or would he like something else altogether? Sushi? Peking duck wraps?) What had been so clear to him when he was alone, two feet on the ground, became lost in this abundance of choices and streets and glass-fronted shopping outlets. He longed to be back in the open land.

  And now that he had the opportunity to buy walking equipment, he also faltered. After an hour with an enthusiastic young Australian man, who produced not only walking boots but also a rucksack, a small tent, and a talking pedometer, Harold apologized profusely and bought a wind-up torch. He told himself that he had managed perfectly well with his yachting shoes and his plastic bag, and with a little ingenuity he could carry his toothbrush and shaving foam in one pocket, and his deodorant and washing powder in the other. Instead he went to a café close to the railway station.

  Twenty years ago Queenie must have made her way to Exeter St. David’s. Had she gone straight from here to Berwick? Had she family there? Friends? She had never mentioned either. Once, a song had come on the car radio and she had wept. “Mighty like a Rose.” The male voice filled the air, steady and deep. It reminded her of her father, she said between gulps; he had died only recently.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  “It’s all right.”

  “He was a good man.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “You’d have liked him, Mr. Fry.”

  She had told a story about her father; how he played a game when she was a child where he pretended she was invisible. “I’m here! I’m here!” she’d be laughing; and all the time he’d look straight down at her, saying, as if she wasn’t there, “Come here this minute. Where are you, Queenie?”

  “It was so funny,” she said, nipping the end of her nose with her handkerchief. “I miss him very much.” Even her grief possessed a compact dignity.

  The station café was busy. Harold watched the holidaymakers negotiating the small spaces between the tables and chairs with their suitcases and backpacks, and he asked himself if maybe Queenie had sat in this same spot. He pictured her, alone and pale, in her old-fashioned suit, her neat face staring resolutely forward.

  He should never have let her go like that.

  “Excuse me,” a gentle voice above him said, “is this seat free?”

  He
shook himself back to the present. A well-dressed man was standing to his left and pointing to the chair opposite. Harold wiped his eyes, surprised and ashamed to discover that once again he had been crying. He told the man that the seat was indeed free, and urged him to take it.

  The man wore a smart suit and deep blue shirt with small pearl cufflinks. His body was lean and graceful. His thick, silver hair was swept back from his face. Even as he sat he folded his legs so that the crease of his trousers fell in line with his knees. He lifted his hands to his lips, holding them there in an elegant steeple. He looked the sort of man Harold wished he had been; distinguished, as Maureen would say. Maybe he was staring too hard because after the waitress had delivered a pot of Ceylon tea (no milk) and a toasted teacake, the gentleman said with feeling, “Goodbyes are always hard.” He poured tea and added lemon.

  Harold explained that he was walking to a woman he had let down in the past. He hoped it was not a goodbye; he very much hoped his friend would live. He didn’t look the man in the eye, but focused instead on the toasted teacake. It was the size of the plate. The butter had melted like golden syrup.

  The man sliced one half into slim soldiers and listened as he ate. The café was loud and busy, the windows so steamed they were opaque.

  “Queenie was the sort of woman people don’t appreciate. She wasn’t a dolly bird, like the other women at the brewery. She maybe had a little hair on her face. Not a mustache or anything. But the other chaps laughed. They called her names. It caused her pain.” Harold wasn’t even certain he could be heard. He marveled at the neatness with which the gentleman posted the teacake between his teeth and mopped his fingers after each mouthful.

  “Would you like some?” said the gentleman.

  “I couldn’t.” Harold raised both hands as if blocking the way.

  “I only want half. It seems a shame to waste the other. Please. Share it.”

  The silver-haired gentleman took his cut-up pieces and arranged them on a paper napkin. He slid the plate with the intact half toward Harold. “Can I ask you a question?” he said. “You seem a decent sort of man.”

  Harold nodded because the teacake was already in his mouth and he couldn’t exactly spit it out again. He tried to stop the butter from running by scooping it up with his fingers, but it shot down his wrist and oiled his sleeve.

  “I come to Exeter every Thursday. I get the train in the morning, and I return in the early evening. I come to meet a young man. We do things. No one knows about this part of my life.”

  The silver-haired gentleman paused to pour a fresh cup of tea. The teacake was lodged in Harold’s throat. He could feel the man’s eyes searching for his but he couldn’t possibly look up.

  “Can I go on?” said the gentleman.

  Harold nodded. He gave a gulp that sent the teacake squeezing past his tonsils. It hurt all the way down.

  “I like what we do, otherwise I would not come here, but I have also grown fond of him. He fetches me a glass of water afterwards and sometimes he talks. His English is not so good. I believe he had polio as a child, and sometimes it causes him to limp.”

  For the first time the silver-haired gentleman faltered, as if he was fighting something inside. He lifted his tea but his fingers trembled when he steered the cup to his mouth, so that the liquid spilled over the rim and slopped onto his teacake. “He moves me, this young man,” he said. “He moves me beyond words.”

  Harold looked away. He wondered if he could get up but realized he couldn’t. He had eaten half the silver-haired gentleman’s teacake, after all. And yet he felt it was an intrusion to witness the man’s helplessness, when he had been so kind and appeared so elegant. He wished the man hadn’t spilled his tea, and that he would mop it up, but he didn’t, he just sat, bearing it, and not caring. His teacake would be ruined.

  The gentleman continued with difficulty. The words were slow and spread apart. “I lick his trainers. It’s part of what we do. But I noticed only this morning that he has a small hole at the toe.” His voice quivered. “I would like to buy him another pair but I don’t want to offend him. And yet equally I can’t bear the thought of him walking the streets with a hole in his trainers. His foot will get wet. What should I do?” His mouth folded over itself, as if pressing back an avalanche of pain.

  Harold sat in silence. The silver-haired gentleman was in truth nothing like the man Harold had first imagined him to be. He was a chap like himself, with a unique pain; and yet there would be no knowing that if you passed him in the street, or sat opposite him in a café and did not share his teacake. Harold pictured the gentleman on a station platform, smart in his suit, looking no different from anyone else. It must be the same all over England. People were buying milk, or filling their cars with petrol, or even posting letters. And what no one else knew was the appalling weight of the thing they were carrying inside. The inhuman effort it took sometimes to be normal, and a part of things that appeared both easy and everyday. The loneliness of that. Moved and humbled, he passed his paper napkin.

  “I think I would buy him new trainers,” said Harold. He dared to lift his eyes to meet those of the silver-haired gentleman. The irises were a watery blue; the whites so pink they appeared sore. It tore at Harold’s heart, but he didn’t look away. Briefly the two men sat, not speaking, until a lightness filled Harold and caused him to offer a smile. He understood that in walking to atone for the mistakes he had made, it was also his journey to accept the strangeness of others. As a passerby, he was in a place where everything, not only the land, was open. People would feel free to talk, and he was free to listen. To carry a little of them as he went. He had neglected so many things that he owed this small piece of generosity to Queenie and the past.

  The gentleman smiled too. “Thank you.” He wiped his mouth, and his fingers, and then the rim of his cup. As he stood he said, “I don’t suppose our paths will cross again but I am glad we met. I am glad we talked.”

  They shook hands and parted, and left the remains of the teacake behind.

  Maureen and David

  MAUREEN DIDN’T KNOW which was worse, the numbing shock that came with the first knowledge that Harold was walking to Queenie or the galvanizing fury that replaced it. She had received his postcards, one of Buckfast Abbey and another of the Dartmouth Railway (Hope you are well. H.), but neither of these offered any real comfort or explanation. He phoned her most evenings, but he was so tired he made no sense. The money they had set aside for their retirement would be squandered in weeks. How dare he leave her, after she had put up with him for forty-seven years? How dare he humiliate her so painfully she could not even tell her son? A small number of household bills were arranged in a pile on the hall table, addressed to Mr. H. Fry, and reminding her of his absence every time she rushed past.

  She fetched out the Hoover, searching out traces of Harold, a hair, a button, and sucking them into the nozzle. She shot his bedside table, his wardrobe, his bed, with disinfectant spray.

  It wasn’t simply anger that preoccupied Maureen. There was also the problem of what to say to her neighbor. She was beginning to regret the lie about Harold being in bed with a swollen ankle. Almost every day Rex appeared at the front door, asking if Harold would like a visitor and bearing small gifts: a box of Milk Tray, a packet of playing cards, an article he had cut out of the local paper about lawn feed. It had come to the point where she dreaded looking up at the frosted glass of the front door for fear of discovering his stout silhouette. She wondered about saying her husband had been rushed to the ER overnight, but it would cause Rex such anxiety she couldn’t bear it. Besides, he would probably start offering her lifts to the hospital. She felt even more of a prisoner in her own home than she had done before Harold left.

  A week after he had gone, Harold rang from a phone booth to tell Maureen he was staying a second night in Exeter, and would head early the next morning toward Tiverton. He said, “Sometimes I think I’m doing this for David.… Did you hear me, Maureen?”
<
br />   She had heard. But she couldn’t speak.

  He said, “I think of him a lot. And I remember things. About him being a boy. I think it might help.”

  Maureen drew in a breath so cold that her teeth felt stripped. She said at last, “Are you telling me David wants you to walk to Queenie Hennessy?”

  He said nothing and then he gave a sigh. “No.” It was a dull sound, like something dropping.

  She went on. “Have you spoken to him?”

  “No.”

  “Seen him?”

  Again, “No.”

  “Well then.”

  Harold said nothing. Maureen stood and paced up and down the hall carpet, feeling the size of her victory with her feet. “If you are going to this woman, if you are going to walk the length of England without a map and your mobile and without even telling me first, then at least have the goodness to own up to what you’re doing. This is your choice, Harold. It’s not mine and it certainly wouldn’t be David’s.”

  Ending on such a blaze of righteousness, she had no alternative but to hang up. She instantly regretted it. She tried to ring him back, only the number wasn’t available. Sometimes she said these things but she didn’t mean them. They had become the fabric of the way she talked. She tried to find something to distract her, but the only thing left to wash was the net curtains and she couldn’t face taking them down. Another evening came and went, and nothing happened.

  Maureen slept fitfully. She dreamed she was at a social event, with a lot of people in black ties and evening dresses, whom she didn’t know. She was sitting at a table to eat when she glanced down and found her liver in her lap. “How lovely to meet you,” she said to the man beside her, smothering it with her hands before he could see. And all the time her liver was slithering between her fingers, squelching in at the gaps beneath her nails, until she was at a loss to know how she might contain it. The waiters began delivering plates covered with silver domes.