The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy: A Novel

by Rachel Joyce

  Spring came. The fulmars made nests in the rocks, and so did the kittiwakes. When the weather began to clear, I bought black bitumen paint – my most expensive purchase yet – and redecorated the entire exterior. That was a day of celebration. Other beach-house owners had begun to open up their summer homes. I invited them over, along with all the people who had helped me. My guests brought guitars and picnics and we danced long into the night on the sand. The window frames I painted later in blue and it was the same with the wooden shutters. I made the inside walls a soft grey. The curtains I replaced with silk drapes I’d picked up at a jumble sale.

  So now, you see, I had a home and I loved it, my beach house, because I had rescued it from almost nothing and brought it back to life. I also had at least ten weekly engagements with local people, teaching them the skills I had learned along the way. And sometimes I stopped with them and we shared a plate of food, sometimes we walked along the coastal path to the ruined castle. Sometimes I drank with them or we watched the birds at Newton Pools or we sat down by Craster harbour and ate crab. But I never spoke about where I had come from or the terrible thing I believed I’d done. And always, always, there was the absence of you.

  With the arrival of summer, I’d expected to feel at peace. Instead I began to dream of David again. I left my windows open at night, hoping to be soothed by the sea but it didn’t work and I often woke crying. That was when I decided to clear the nettles and discovered I had inadvertently begun a rockery.

  I found a black boulder down on the beach that was big enough to sit on. It took me and several golfers a full morning to push the thing up the coastal path. I placed it in a central position a few feet in front of the house. It marked the centre of the space like the hub in a wheel. I liked to watch it from my window, the way it changed colour in the sun or rain, the way its shadow lengthened and then shrank as the hours passed. It was one of the golfers who suggested I should carve sand steps directly down from my garden to the beach. If you walk along the sand at Embleton Bay towards Craggy Reef, you can still see the skeleton of the path to my garden, though recently I let the sea take it and the steps are no longer so easy to find.

  A little later I dug a hole and filled it with compost and planted a dog rose. It was a fragile thing, and I worried that the combination of the poor soil and the wind would be too much for it. Walking on the beach one morning, I picked up a piece of driftwood about the size of a cane. I screwed it into the soil beside the rose to act as a stake. So now there was a rockery, a black boulder and a rose. My garden had begun.

  My inspiration came from what I saw. I studied other people’s gardens, as I have told you, and the footpaths, but I also studied the patterns in the sand; the rills, the spokes, the ridges, the rows of indentations like vertebrae. I could lose a morning trying to identify the colours and shapes in a rock pool; anemones with long black tentacles, rust-green flowers, silvery barnacles, skittering black crabs and pinkspotted starfish. I watched the sea mists roll over the land as the tide came in or I’d sit on the black boulders that looked like a beach of seals beneath Greymare Rock. I collected seaweeds and hung them to dry on my wooden porch so that when the storms came they danced like plastic ribbons.

  In time I began to see that I had been wrong when I said that nothing grew in my garden. Plenty grew in this barren place. I simply didn’t know how to value it. I unearthed sea kale and columbines, poppies and gorse, thrift and wild geraniums. I made a place for each of them.

  I built my rock pool in my second year at the beach house. It is about four feet in diameter and composed of whinstone flints. I lined it carefully to protect the water level. Roaming the beach, I found tiny sea-coal stones, the size of beads, and I used them to make an outer rim for the rock pool. Later I made two further rock pools, with black granite slabs and grey pebbles. Sometimes I placed the stones and the setting was right the first time, other times it took many days of placing and looking and placing again. I found out what was right only by getting it wrong. The stone paths followed the rock pools, leading from one part of my garden to the next. I became more ambitious with my planting.

  People began to stop and admire my work. They returned with their friends. They’d wander up from the beach or the golf course or they’d drive over on the way home from work. There was a summer I made wind chimes from broken tools and washed-up ironwork. I erected a washing line in lieu of a boundary wall and I hung the chimes so that you could hear them jangling even from the beach. People brought me things – pieces of junk they had no use for. I placed each item in my garden. With every season it grew bigger.

  Visitors spoke of my garden as a work of beauty, a piece of magic. And I have to be honest with you, it made me feel good. Sometimes I knelt at the heart of my garden, adjusting a stone, perhaps, angling the white of it towards the sun, but not really doing anything, only waiting for someone to stop. I made tiny blue fish out of shells and sailed them in the rock pools beside the emerald-green limpets.

  The figures came when my garden was at its height. The first I made was you, of course. I placed you beside the stone boulder, right at the centre. Then came David and I made him a bed with the spiny burnet rose. Others followed. After all, I had endless time. I roamed the beach, choosing carefully, and if I did not find what I needed, I stopped and resumed my search another day. In the end, Napier was a shiny small piece of sharp flint that made me laugh. Maureen was a fragile piece of driftwood with a hole in her heart. For Sheila I found two plump rocks. My father was a tall spade leaning towards a stout branch that was my mother. (I gave her a beautiful red seaweed hat.) The female artists from Soho were seven feathers that were always blowing away. Even the Shit had a small damp corner of his own. I made a place for each of them because they had been a part of my life, and even though they were gone I would not leave them behind. In the moonlight they shone, those figures, and seemed to come alive.

  But it was the tall figure at the very centre of my garden that I loved the most.

  Wedding bells

  A YOUNG male patient was helped into the dayroom by his boyfriend. The patient was wearing jogging trousers and a T-shirt that drooped from his shoulders. His boyfriend wore a crisp blue suit. ‘Hello, everyone,’ called the boyfriend. ‘Do you mind if we sit with you?’

  ‘Go ahead,’ said Finty. She moved her cut-out shapes and carefully folded her WELCOME, HAROLD FRY banner.

  ‘Harold Fry?’ said the boyfriend. ‘I think I’ve heard of him.’

  ‘Yeah, he’s walking for us,’ said Finty, indicating everyone in the room. ‘We expect him any day.’

  The boyfriend helped his partner to sit and asked if he needed anything, like water or a blanket. His partner lifted his hand to say no, I am OK. He rested his head on his boyfriend’s shoulder. The boyfriend stroked his partner’s cheek and whispered into his ear. They were only small, still words, like There, there. OK. I love you. Here I am.

  ‘Are you gay, or what?’ interrupted Finty.

  The boyfriend said, ‘Do you want us to sit somewhere else?’

  ‘Fuck no,’ trilled Finty. ‘You’re the first man I’ve seen with his own hair in weeks. You stay right there.’

  ‘Peter and I are getting married today,’ said the boyfriend. ‘You can all come if you like.’

  ‘I don’t think we’re going to make it to a church, mate,’ growled the Pearly King. He pointed to the knitted blue bag on his lap containing his syringe driver.

  ‘Neither will we,’ said the boyfriend. ‘Sister Philomena held a meeting with the staff. They have agreed we can have a blessing in the dayroom.’

  ‘What about God?’ asked Mr Henderson.

  ‘Sister Philomena’s view is that God takes a broader view.’

  ‘A wedding?’ yelled Finty. ‘Does that mean I get to borrow a new hat?’

  As it was, there was no time for borrowing hats. There was no time for confetti. An hour later, we sat in a circle, with the new patient and his boyfriend at the centre. The nur
ses joined us, and so did a few of the nuns. Those who were uncertain about a gay wedding in a Catholic hospice were given the opportunity to do work elsewhere. The boyfriend slipped a ring over Peter’s bone-slim finger, and then he supported Peter’s hand so that Peter could fix a ring on the finger of the boyfriend. A woman in a fuchsia-coloured trouser suit conducted a brief civil ceremony. She told us how much it meant to Peter that we were there to witness his wedding. ‘I wouldn’t have missed this for the world,’ sobbed Finty. ‘You two look so fucking happy.’

  ‘Can you hear me, Peter?’ whispered the boyfriend. ‘Can you hear that I’m your husband now?’

  Peter smiled and closed his eyes.

  Finty emptied an entire family-size box of tissues. She said it was a shame they weren’t going to have a party and Peter’s new husband gave an easy shrug. ‘But we’re going to have a party for Harold Fry when he gets here,’ she said. ‘You can come to that instead. Do you know that other gay bloke? Whatshisname? That singer? Maybe he could come an’ all.’

  The husband kissed Peter’s forehead and laughed that no, he didn’t know any singers, gay or straight or indeed both ways.

  ‘Ah, well,’ said Finty. ‘Never mind. You can join us, if you like. You two buggers can wait for Harold Fry.’

  Peter’s husband flexed his right hand and gazed at his wedding ring with a sort of rapture, as if he had never seen anything so beautiful.

  Peter was not in his chair this morning.

  I watched while, in the Well-being Garden, Sister Philomena held his husband in her arms. Afterwards she showed him the blossom. She lifted a branch of philadelphus and he stooped to get the orange-sweet smell of it.

  The undertaker parked his van and stepped out to meet them.

  A shock

  ‘BLOODY HELL! GET HERE QUICK!’

  I was in my room with Sister Mary Inconnue, not writing in my notebook, not even remembering anything in particular, only staring at a large pigeon that was trying to maintain its balance in a particularly twiggy part of the tree, when we were interrupted by a caterwauling from the dayroom.

  ‘Harold Fry is on the telly! Quick, everyone! Quick!’

  Sister Mary Inconnue gave a weary shake of her head as Sister Lucy hurried through the door. The young nun lifted me out of bed and bundled me into my wheelchair. As she rushed me down the corridor, other doors flew open and patients emerged, helped by family or volunteers.

  When I arrived in the room, people turned and made a space for me at the front. Sister Philomena took the remote control and increased the volume.

  There seemed to be a party happening on the television. We watched a group of people walking down a country road, some dressed professionally with sticks and boots and so on, others playing bells and drums. At the head of the procession strode a tall man with weather-tanned skin, little hair and a very serious beard.

  It was you.

  My insides swerved as if I had missed a step and was about to fall.

  ‘The man on the TV said that Harold Fry has some new people with him now,’ said Finty. She got up and tapped the television screen with her red fingernail. Several people complained that she was in the way and that they couldn’t see without falling out of their wheelchairs, but she ignored them and continued to point at the assembled group of walkers. ‘There’s a gorilla, right, and a twat in a hat. Then there’s this boy who seems a right fucker and another woman who looks like she’s sucking a lemon. They’ve just passed Harrogate. They’re all walking to save us.’

  My heart took another plunge. It was the boy at your side that undid me. For a moment, I could have sworn you were walking with David.

  Hrr-hrm. No one mention (David Fry)

  I DIDN’T know what to do, Harold, when I heard the news. The reps were talking about you in the corridor. ‘Have you heard what’s happened to Fry?’ They seemed in a hurry to tell one another because it was a story, it was a tragedy, but it didn’t really touch them in any way. I listened in frozen stillness. My first impulse was to come straight to your home and find you. I wanted to confess everything. Instead I went to the washroom and almost fainted. It was shock. I felt as if the world had just had a great big hole punched out of it and that, without anyone knowing, I was directly responsible. I could barely walk in a straight line.

  ‘You look terrible,’ said Sheila. She lifted the back of her hand to my forehead and held it there. ‘My God,’ she whispered. ‘You’re boiling.’ The gesture reminded me of my mother, and thinking of her I was overwhelmed. For the first time in years I missed her desperately, in the same way I had missed her after her death. I wanted her and my father to take me out of this. I wanted his hand around mine. ‘You should go home,’ said Sheila.

  I don’t remember my bus journey that afternoon. I don’t know if I paid my fare, or if I spoke to anyone. I remember the heat, I do remember that. More than anything, I longed to be alone. But when I got into the flat, I felt even worse.

  It was the silence. I saw the chair where David used to sit and bearing witness to the armchair without him in it was like looking right into the loss of him. Outside there were cars, there were seagulls, there were people taking a late afternoon stroll along the estuary. Everything was as it should be. Except there was no David Fry. I thought of you, and him, and I cried for many hours.

  In bed that night, I lay fully clothed with my arms clamped round my knees and my feet tucked up high. No matter how many layers I added, I could not stop shuddering. When I closed my eyes, all I could picture was David, blue in the dark, swinging from the central beam of your garden shed. If only I hadn’t heard the reps mention that. My head offered further images of him tying the noose, looking for something to stand on, fitting the rope around his neck. Had he wanted to die? Even as he choked? Had he hoped to be saved? How I longed for him to kick at my door, holler my name through the letterbox. When I slept, it was only briefly.

  I woke some time in the early hours of the morning, so hot I couldn’t move. I felt I’d been swallowed in concrete. Somehow I got up, and all I could do was not be still. Kitchen, bathroom, sitting room, doorway. I hardly paused. I dressed in a hurry. I couldn’t bear to be alone another moment. I had to get back to the brewery.

  I overheard the reps saying that you would be away for at least two weeks. There’d be an autopsy before the funeral. It didn’t bear thinking about, Sheila said. It didn’t seem to bear much talking about either because it wasn’t mentioned again.

  I had no idea how I would ever look you in the eye. I knew that when I confessed the truth, you must hate me. And equally I knew that of all the men I passed on the street, on the bus, in the canteen, the one I most needed to find was you.

  *

  It is a blisteringly hot afternoon. A week has passed since David’s death. If anything I’m feeling worse. No sleep. No appetite. I can’t stop thinking of him. I haven’t seen you since before he died.

  I take the bus to the funeral parlour. I have to mark his passing in some way because it’s unendurable, this pretending I am one thing and knowing I am another. The sun scorches my eyes. Everything – the sky, the pavement, the passing traffic – is too white, too fierce. I push open the door to the funeral parlour. The place has a chilled, sweet smell that I know is to do with embalming. Nevertheless it’s like walking into a different universe. My shoes echo on the cold floor. I wish I had a coat.

  A man in a suit greets me. Asks how he can help. He wears a black tie, cuff links; there is a professional air of mourning about him, not the chaos of us amateurs. I assume he’s the undertaker.

  I ask to see David Fry. Hearing David’s name, the man’s face softens towards me and for the first time it seems possible someone understands the grief I am suffering. There is a place for it here.

  ‘Do you have an appointment?’ he asks.

  I explain that I don’t exactly have an appointment but I am a friend of the family. I repeat that I would like to see David. I need to see him, I add.

 
My reply is not the right one. The undertaker grows uncomfortable. He steps back from me and reaches for some sort of notepad and fountain pen. My mouth dries up. The undertaker will need to telephone his client, he says. I cannot visit the deceased unless I have an appointment.

  ‘But he’s hardly going anywhere,’ I answer, raising my voice. By the end of the sentence I’m also beginning to cry. There seem to be no boundaries any more between normal and grief-stricken.

  The undertaker’s face hardens. Maybe he suspects I am a journalist. I don’t know. ‘I can’t allow you to stay, madam,’ he says. Already he’s heading for the door, opening it for me, and the rush of heat and light from outside is so intense it is like noise. I want to remain inside. I can’t bear to be thrown out, when it has taken so much strength to face coming, and now I am here I’ve achieved nothing.

  Maybe he senses my pain, because the undertaker asks if I have anything for the coffin. He can pass it on to his client; he can do that much for me. I assume he’s asking for money, like they do at church when the silver plate gets passed round, and such is my guilt, my pain, I’d give every penny I’ve saved if I believed it might bring you some sort of comfort. I am opening my handbag when another suited man emerges from a room at the far end of the reception. I see almost nothing of the room; a soft blue wall perhaps, behind the polish of a wooden coffin, the brass handles. I don’t even know that it is David’s coffin. But it is like being punched.

  I hurt all over. Even inside my lungs there is hurting.

  I ask the funeral director to give David his red mittens. They are in my handbag. They’ve been there since the day I found he’d left them behind. Did they belong to the deceased? Yes, they belonged to the deceased. The undertaker will consult his client. Don’t bother consulting your client, I say. Just take the things, will you? Just let me get them out of my handbag. Because I am in torture here. This is all too much. I place the mittens in his hands and I leave before he can give them back to me.