The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy: A Novel

by Rachel Joyce

  I am waiting at the bus stop when I see your car draw up outside the funeral parlour. I see you get out and move to the passenger door, only before you get there the door flies open, almost hitting you, and a small, slight woman, a little taller than me, springs out. Maureen wears a black summer dress and dark sunglasses and she carries a pillow and a teddy bear. Something for the coffin; of course. Her steps are fast, brittle. She is impatient to get inside the funeral parlour. You in contrast move slowly. You walk behind her, carrying nothing in your hands, and you seem unable to lift your head. At the door Maureen pauses and says something to you, because you nod and step aside. Once you are alone, you pull out a cigarette and ask a passer-by for a light. I hear a shriek, a terrible female cry, resound from inside the funeral parlour. I imagine the funeral director has guided her to the room he would not allow me to enter. You rush to the corner and vomit over a litter bin.

  From the opposite side of the street, I see it all. But you don’t see me.

  A few days later we met. This time there was no avoiding you. I was in the chemist’s, searching the shelves for something to help me sleep, when you opened the door. Quietly you asked the assistant behind the counter about a prescription for your wife. You were trying to be discreet, but the shop had become so stiff and solemn on your arrival that it was as if you were the only living thing inside it. The sight of you made my heart churn over and over.

  The chemist was in a hurry to find Maureen’s tablets. When he passed you the bag, he said, ‘Please accept my condolences, Mr Fry.’ Another woman in the shop, the customer who was the closest to you, repeated in an uncomfortable way that she too was very sorry ‘for your loss’. Nobody seemed to have the right words at their disposal and so it was safer to say nothing or at least stick to the well-worn phrases. You, in turn, gave a listless nod, as if you wished everyone would stop all this and let you go.

  You were a different man, Harold.

  Your shoulders, which you had once held so erect, were hunched over. Your jacket wore a grease stain, and your hair looked uncombed. You had shaved, but a tuft of sharp hairs grew in the hollow of your left cheek. Maybe you hadn’t noticed. Or maybe even as you were shaving, you had thought of David and asked, What does it matter? What difference does it make if I am clean-shaven or grow a beard? But it was the stoop in your shoulders that undid me. That, and the golf club tie.

  People say sometimes of another person that they have become a shell, or a shadow of their former selves, but you were neither of these things. You were all liquid. It was impossible to imagine you laughing or dancing or doing anything so daft as fig ball. Those parts of you were gone. You appeared smaller, slower, older too, and almost naive. You were stripped back to your very basics. You collected the prescription and shuffled towards the door.

  ‘Oh, hello,’ you said. I must have moved. I may even have made a noise.

  You sent me a smile across the chemist’s shop. There was I, a guilty woman, the person who had failed both you and your son, the friend who had meddled with your life and lied and lied, and there you stood in your brown jacket and tie, smiling at me.

  You asked if I would care to walk down the High Street. At least I think you did. I noticed how people made way for us as we headed for the door. No one spoke. I remember that. You fixed your eyes to the ground, searching for the thing that had gone from your life, while another customer rushed to open the door and set us free.

  ‘How is Maureen?’ I asked outside.

  ‘Pardon?’

  You tried to smile again, but your face couldn’t do it. Your eyes filled with tears. ‘My son is dead,’ you said. You told me again: ‘David is dead.’ Those were the only words in your life.

  I said I knew. I’d heard. I was so sorry, I said. So sorry—

  ‘Yes.’ You stared at the ground. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is there anything I can do?’

  ‘Do?’ You repeated the word as if you had temporarily mislaid the meaning of it, and were very sorry about that.

  ‘To help?’

  You closed your eyes and slowly opened them again. Then you said gently, ‘That’s very kind, Queenie, but I think not. Not now.’

  You asked me how things were and I said they were only so-so. So-so? you repeated. Yes, I said. And your face crumpled as you said slowly that you were sorry but you couldn’t remember what we were talking about. You turned to walk away.

  It was because I thought you were about to go that I dared to call out, ‘How are you, Harold?’

  You were weeping now and didn’t want me to see, so I glanced at my feet to facilitate that, but I wish I had done something else, I wish I’d had the gumption to hold you and let you cry. ‘It’s worse, of course, for Maureen,’ you said. ‘Always worse for the mother.’ You apologized and you began to move away with heavy pulling steps, as if it hurt you to move. In order to avoid a woman with a pushchair, you stepped to one side and staggered a little. The shape of a spirits bottle swung from your coat pocket. You were drinking now.

  A few days later I read in the local newspaper that David’s funeral would be a private event. Only family. I realized this meant you and Maureen. You had no other family. There was no further mention of David at the brewery. Your son died and the world swallowed that piece of information and moved on. I never heard anyone refer to him after the first week.

  So you buried your son. And the only time I ever saw you not in fawn was the afternoon you came back to work in a black suit.

  ‘Harold?’ I asked gently. ‘Should you be here?’ Reps were steering out of your way.

  You cowered like a man who has had a beating and expects another and is trying to be brave.

  ‘Yes,’ you said.

  That was all.

  Thank you, thank you, thank you

  FOR THREE days it has been difficult, Harold, to find time to write my letter to you or think about my sea garden. It has been difficult even to sit in stillness with Sister Mary Inconnue and watch the clouds at my window. There have been too many other things to attend to. The walls of the dayroom are pinned all over with cards from well-wishers. There have been so many deliveries of flowers that several volunteers have hay fever. Already this morning I have composed ten thank-you notes. My eye is sore from straining to see. My hand is tired. Also, I am not sleeping at night. No one is.

  ‘There’s gonna be an all-night vigil,’ said Finty. (This was on Tuesday, I think. She was working on her banner.)

  ‘A what?’ said the Pearly King. He was trying to help but mostly he was asleep.

  ‘One of them new patients told me. It was on the radio. People are gonna bring candles and stuff and pray for us outside.’

  As it turned out, the all-night vigil was more of a party. Whenever the staff came to check on me, they looked short-tempered and tired. As if we haven’t got enough to think about, I overheard one of them complain. It didn’t help that Finty was up all night singing along with them from her window. The vigil keepers intend to stay until you arrive.

  ‘Haven’t they got homes to go to?’ said the duty nurse.

  After so much excitement, Finty has taken to her bed.

  The loss of a garden

  IT WASN’T that I regretted coming to Embleton Bay or making my home or even creating a sea garden. But it was getting to be too much. All the people. All the fuss. Sometimes I felt I had to change the garden just for the sake of showing something new. It wasn’t a garden for love any more. It was an attraction. And it wasn’t about me. It was about other people and the things I felt they expected to see.

  Now that my garden was so precious, or at least now that it carried the weight of so much expectation, I had to think about protecting it. After all, there was a small harbour at Craster to keep the fishing boats safe. I began collecting stones for walls, large ones to go at the bottom and smaller flints for the middle and shells for the top. It took me another summer to build the wall, not least because people began to help. They took weekends in the sun to se
arch for stones on the beach and they offered assistance with the building. But here was the thing: they did not listen to me when I explained about the large stones at the bottom and the shells on top. Sometimes I’d spend a whole night pulling down what other people had made and throwing out all the crushed shells that someone had stuck through the middle. You see what I am saying. My garden was no longer the thing I’d started.

  One night I lay in bed, thinking of a new idea for my garden, and it dawned on me how fragile it still was, despite the stone wall and my efforts to protect it. Supposing the wind got it, or gulls? The following morning I took the bus to Berwick-upon-Tweed and bought squares of tarpaulin from the hardware shop. I used stones to keep the tarpaulins in place and I painted a wooden sign asking people to take care when walking round the garden. Even when I wasn’t there, even when I was supposed to be asleep, my mind was caught up in thinking of ways to keep it safe. I was wrong, though, about the threat coming from wind or gulls. Five years ago, something else got it.

  A flock of sheep.

  Apparently they had escaped from a local farm. They chewed what they could of the golf course and then made their way along the coastal path in single file. They jumped my wall and ate the contents of my garden.

  I took in the devastation, the scattered stones, the smashed rock pools, the snapped sticks, the strewn seaweed and broken shells, and it was so painful my mind emptied. There was no sign of my protective tarpaulin. Where there had been a garden there were now only thirty sleepy sheep.

  I cried for a long time. I stayed in my beach house, where no one could interrupt me or try to help. For days I couldn’t look at my garden. Every time I left the beach house I had to stare at the sky because it hurt too much to see that ruined place – all that work and for nothing. I even wondered about selling up and moving on, though somehow I didn’t have the stomach for travel any more. It was about this time that I felt a lump, low in my jaw. Neighbours were kind when they heard I was going to hospital. But after a while, as the news got worse, it was easier to close my door and hide from the world.

  I was wandering on the beach a year or so later when I picked up a piece of driftwood. I used it as a walking stick to help me up the path. When I got back to my beach house I shoved it into the ground and left it.

  In the morning I opened the shutters and to my surprise, there it was, glowing like a golden mast. My garden had started again. But this time it was a relief to have nothing to maintain, because there was no longer any reason to be afraid of losing it. I didn’t need to show other people the beauty of my love any more. I was ill and I only had the energy to keep it in my heart.

  Mr Henderson surprises me

  ‘THERE IS a photograph of you in the Berwick Gazette,’ said Mr Henderson.

  ‘Let’s see! Let’s see!’ clamoured Finty. The paper was passed from patient to patient, until it finally reached my hands. The image showed a young woman in her late teens with a mane of thick brown hair. It must have been taken at Oxford.

  I can’t believe that young woman was me.

  Mr Henderson pointed to another photograph. A tall man in a PILGRIM T-shirt, sporting a thick beard. It took a moment to realize it was you, and when I did I felt my pulse race. ‘And have you seen?’ said Mr Henderson. ‘Have you seen what the man is wearing on his feet?’

  Not—? I began to smile. Not—?

  ‘Yachting shoes!’ He held on to his stomach and hooted.

  It is the first time I have seen Mr Henderson look so happy.

  So thank you for that.

  The naming of shoes

  TODAY, HAROLD, I have been thinking about you in your yachting shoes. You should probably buy walking boots, but as I suppose you’ve never worn walking boots and you’ve always worn yachting shoes, you should probably not buy something that you are not.

  I spent the afternoon with Sister Mary Inconnue remembering every pair of shoes I’ve ever had. It’s a humbling exercise. You won’t remember, but my feet are small and wide. The type of shoe I have wanted has not been the type of shoe that has fitted.

  I’ve already mentioned the shoes I bought in Kingsbridge – my accountant shoes. They had a rounded toe and a stout heel and they made a solid noise as my feet hit the concrete. Remember?

  Besides those, I have counted three pairs of black lace-ups worn during my school years, cork wedges that my mother hated, flip-flops, slip-ons, red patent-leather heels (barely worn), the velvet ballroom shoes I left behind, brogues, wellington boots, gardening shoes, tennis shoes, two sets of blue court shoes (why?), and a pair of white trainers that I have worn almost everywhere in the last five years. It is the ballroom shoes I liked most. No question.

  I have measured out my life in ladies’ shoes.

  Once I met a woman beside my sea garden. This was after the sheep. I’d started to re-create it, but it was an altogether plainer and humbler place now. You could walk past and not notice, or see only some stones and sticks. People had forgotten about visiting and I let the sand steps go.

  The woman was leaning on my wall to shake something out of her shoe. I didn’t see her footwear. I saw only her crisp white jacket with shoulder pads and gold buttons. When I asked if she needed help, she jumped. She hadn’t seen me, she exclaimed, laughing. Or rather, she’d mistaken me for one of the stones in my garden. The woman told me she was attending a wedding reception at the golf club and had escaped to smoke in private.

  ‘These bloody heels,’ she said. She told me she always changed her shoes if she felt low. It is the noise you make in the world that is the key to happiness, she said. She was wearing tiger-print six-inch heels at the time. When she walked away, her feet went ping ping ping as they hit the stones.

  A little later I caught sight of her again. This time she was waving to me from farther down the bay. On closer inspection I discovered that her stiletto heel was caught in the crack of a rock. She wasn’t merely waving. She was stuck.

  We came – barefoot, in her case – for early afternoon tea in my beach house. Though in truth we drank gin in the garden and watched the waves. She was a lecturer in physics, it turned out. Which only goes to show you should never judge a woman by her heel.

  Heat

  I HAVE not been so well again. The vigil leaders are outside every night, and I know it is kind of them to pray for us and dance and chant but I wish they would do it in silence.

  I struggled today with the heat. The sun fell into the window in a great channel of light that landed right on me here in the bed, and it was so bright, this light, so white and thick, it made my head hurt. The duty nurse opened the window but it made no difference. The air outside was stiff and hung with seed heads. Sister Lucy bathed my head but even the water felt hot.

  DR SHAH: Is she comfortable?

  NURSE: I can’t cool her down.

  DR SHAH: There is further swelling.

  NURSE: The pain patch was fresh this morning.

  DR SHAH: Can she still take liquid?

  NURSE: A little.

  DR SHAH: You can increase the oral dose to every four hours.

  No matter which way I turned, the sheets felt too tight, too hard on my skin. The heat was like a force sucking all the energy from me. I spent the morning fighting the heat and the sheets and the frustration inside me. All I wanted was to get away.

  ‘You have to be the heat,’ said Sister Mary Inconnue.

  If I’d had the strength, I’d have thrown a pillow at her.

  As if I had said something to this effect, she laughed. ‘The heat is there, and nothing you can do is going to stop it.’

  So instead I gave in to the fieriness of it. I felt the slippery film on my skin and tight prickliness below and the dryness of my throat and the white at my eyes. I was not an old woman who didn’t want to be hot; instead, I was the heat. It is only a small difference but I slept.

  ‘Are you feeling a little better now?’ asks Sister Mary Inconnue. The light has gone and a cool wind plays through the curtain
s. I can hear the leaves of the tree. ‘I know it has been very jolly in the last few days,’ she says. ‘All these greeting cards. All this activity and so on. But perhaps you’d better get back to your own letter, dear heart.’

  Murano clowns

  I KNEW it was you, Harold, who broke into the brewery. I knew it was you who’d smashed Napier’s glass clowns. I’d have guessed even if I hadn’t been there, but I was. I saw everything.

  After David’s funeral, I found it hard to leave the brewery at night. More specifically, I found it hard to return to my flat. I invented reasons to stay out: I watched the same film several times on the trot. I took walks along the quay (though I was careful not to look at the bench where David and I had sat together and I had given him my mittens). Anything to delay that moment when I steered the front door open with my key and saw David’s empty chair. Even though you were back at work, Napier had not sent us out on any drives. I was relieved. I wasn’t ready to be alone with you.

  One night I tried to work late. I’d found a box of old account books and even though they were ten years out of date, I told myself I needed to go through them. I’d been alone in the building for a few hours maybe, not even looking at the numbers in front of me, absorbed in thoughts of my own, when something gave a crack downstairs. The noise brought me to the present and I realized I was sitting in almost-darkness. The only light was a wash of silver coming from a full moon at the window.

  I listened but there was no further sound. I tried to concentrate on my work.

  It came again. The noise. A dull knocking against an internal door. A tap, tap. Someone was trying to break into a locked room.

  I slipped off my shoes and moved in silence. The concrete walls of the corridors were dark and cold against my fingers, almost damp. I continued as rapidly as I could in the direction of the stairs. Every time the building gave a creak or bang, I was startled. As I neared the well of the staircase, a torrent of light from the ground floor poured into the blackness. I was in full view now and it was hard to see anything else. I took the stairs one at a time. I had to swallow my breathing before it hit the silence.