by Rachel Joyce
‘Wait here,’ she said. Again she disappeared into the stillness of the house, to return with two fold-up chairs. Harold helped her to open them and repeated that he should get going, but she sank her body down as if she too had made a journey, and urged him to join her. ‘Just for a moment,’ she said. ‘It will do us both good.’
Harold lowered his limbs into the seat beside hers. A heavy stillness crept over him and, after resisting for a moment, he closed his eyes. The light glowed red against his eyelids, and the sounds of birdsong and passing cars merged into one, that was both inside him and far away.
When he woke, she had set a small table at his knees with a plate of bread and butter, and slices of apple. She gestured with the upturned palm of her hand towards the plate, as if she were showing him the way forward. ‘Please. Help yourself.’
Even though he hadn’t been aware of his hunger, now that he saw the apple, his stomach felt scooped out. Besides it would be rude not to accept, after she had taken the trouble. He ate greedily, apologizing, but unable to stop. The woman watched and smiled, and all the while she played with a quarter of apple, turning it between her fingers, as if it were something curious she had picked up from the ground. ‘You’d think walking should be the simplest thing,’ she said at last. ‘Just a question of putting one foot in front of the other. But it never ceases to amaze me how difficult the things that are supposed to be instinctive really are.’
She wet her lower lip with her tongue, waiting for more words. ‘Eating,’ she said at last. ‘That’s another one. Some people have real difficulties with that. Talking too. Even loving. They can all be difficult.’ She watched the garden, not Harold.
‘Sleeping,’ he said.
She turned. ‘Don’t you sleep?’
‘Not always.’ He reached for more apple.
There was another silence. Then she said, ‘Children.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘There’s another one.’
He glanced again at her washing line, and the perfect rows of flowers. He felt the resounding absence of young life.
‘Did you have any yourself?’ she said.
‘Just one.’
Harold thought of David, but it was too much to explain. He saw the boy as a toddler and how his face darkened in sunshine like a ripe nut. He wanted to describe the soft dimples of flesh at his knees, and the way he walked in his first pair of shoes, staring down, as if unable to credit they were still attached to his feet. He thought of him lying in his cot, his fingers so appallingly small and perfect over his wool blanket. You could look at them and fear they might dissolve beneath your touch.
Mothering had come so naturally to Maureen. It was as if another woman had been waiting inside her all along, ready to slip out. She knew how to swing her body so that a baby slept; how to soften her voice; how to curl her hand to support his head. She knew what temperature the water should be in his bath, and when he needed to nap, and how to knit him blue wool socks. He had no idea she knew these things and he had watched with awe, like a spectator from the shadows. It both deepened his love for her and lifted her apart, so that just at the moment when he thought their marriage would intensify, it seemed to lose its way, or at least set them in different places. He peered at his baby son, with his solemn eyes, and felt consumed with fear. What if he was hungry? What if he was unhappy? What if other boys hit him when he went to school? There was so much to protect him from, Harold was overwhelmed. He wondered if other men had found the new responsibility of parenting as terrifying, or whether it had been a fault that was only in himself. It was different these days. You saw men pushing buggies and feeding babies with no worries at all.
‘I hope I haven’t upset you?’ said the woman beside him.
‘No, no.’ He stood and shook her hand.
‘I’m glad you stopped,’ she said. ‘I’m glad you asked for water.’ He returned to the road before she could see that he was crying.
The lower creases of Dartmoor loomed to his left. He could see now that what had appeared to be a vague blue mass on the shoulder of the horizon was a series of purple, green and yellow peaks, unbroken by fields, and topped at the highest points with boulders of stone. A bird of prey, maybe a buzzard, swung over the land, skimming the air; suspended.
Harold asked himself if years ago he shouldn’t have pressed Maureen to have another baby. ‘David is enough,’ she had said. ‘He is all we need.’ But sometimes he was afraid that having one son was too much to bear. He wondered if the pain of loving became diluted, the more you had? A child’s growing was a constant pushing away. When their son had finally rejected them for good, they dealt with it in different ways. There was anger for a while, and then there was something else, that was like silence but had an energy and violence of its own. In the end, Harold had come down with a cold, and Maureen had moved into the spare room. Somehow or other neither of them had mentioned it, and somehow or other she had never moved back.
Harold’s heel stung and his back ached, and now the soles of his feet were beginning to burn. Even the smallest flint caused him pain; he had to keep stopping to remove a shoe and shake it empty. From time to time, he also found that his legs buckled for no apparent reason, as if they had been jellied, causing him to stumble. His fingers were throbbing but maybe that was because they were not used to being swung back and forth in a downward direction. And yet, despite all this, he felt intensely alive. A lawn mower started up in the distance and he laughed out loud.
Harold joined the A3121 towards Exeter, and after a mile of heavy traffic at his back, he took the B3372, following the grass verges. When a group of professional-looking walkers caught him up, Harold stood out of their way and waved them past. They exchanged pleasantries about the good weather and the landscape, but he didn’t tell them about heading for Berwick. He preferred to keep that tucked in his head, like Queenie’s letter in his pocket. As they moved ahead he observed with interest that they all had backpacks, that some of them had loose-fitting tracksuits, and that others were equipped with sun visors, binoculars and telescopic hiking sticks. None was wearing yachting shoes.
A few waved, and one or two laughed. Harold didn’t know if they were doing it because they thought he was a hopeless case or because they were admiring him, but either way, he found, it didn’t really matter. He was already different from the man who had set out from Kingsbridge, and even from the small hotel. He was not someone off to the post box. He was walking to Queenie Hennessy. He was beginning again.
When he had first heard the news about her joining the brewery, he was surprised. ‘Apparently there’s a woman starting in the finances department,’ he had told Maureen and David. They were eating in the best room, back in the days when she loved to cook and it was used for family meals. Now that he thought about this scene, he could see it was Christmas, because the conversation was reliving itself with the added detail of festive paper hats.
‘Is that supposed to be interesting?’ David had said. It must have been his A-level year at the grammar school. He was dressed head to foot in black and his hair almost tipped his shoulders. He was not wearing a paper hat. He had skewered it with his fork.
Maureen smiled. Harold didn’t expect her to stand up for him because she loved her son, and that was right, of course. He only wished that sometimes he didn’t feel so outside, as if what bonded them was their disassociation from him.
David said, ‘A woman won’t last at the brewery.’
‘Apparently she is very well qualified.’
‘Everyone knows about Napier. He’s a thug. A capitalist with sadomasochistic tendencies.’
‘Mr Napier is not so bad.’
David laughed out loud. ‘Father,’ he said, the way he did; suggesting the bond between them was a whim of irony, rather than blood. ‘He had someone kneecapped. Everyone knows.’
‘I’m sure he didn’t.’
‘For stealing from the petty-cash tin.’
Harold said nothing;
he mopped a sprout in gravy. He too knew the rumours, but he didn’t like to think about them.
‘Well, let’s hope the new woman isn’t a feminist,’ David continued. ‘Or a lesbian. Or a socialist. Eh, Father?’ He had evidently finished with Mr Napier, and was moving to subjects closer to home.
Briefly Harold met his son’s challenging eyes. In those days they still had their sharpness; it was uncomfortable to engage with them for long. ‘I don’t object to people being different,’ he said, but his son merely sucked his teeth and glanced at his mother.
‘You read the Daily Telegraph,’ he said. And after that he pushed back his plate, and stood, his body so pale and hollow Harold could barely look.
‘Eat, love,’ Maureen called. But David shook his head and slunk out, as if his father was enough to put anyone off their Christmas lunch.
Harold had looked to Maureen but she was already on her feet, clearing away the plates.
‘He’s clever, you see,’ she said.
And implicit in the remark was the conviction that cleverness was both an excuse for everything and out of their reach. ‘I don’t know about you, but I’m too full for sherry trifle.’ She bent her head and slipped off her paper hat, like something she had outgrown, and then she went to do the washing-up.
Harold arrived at South Brent in the late hours of the afternoon. He trod paving stones again, and was struck both by their smallness and their regularity. He came to cream-coloured houses, and front gardens, and garages with central-locking systems; and he felt the triumph of someone returning to civilization after a long voyage.
In a small shop, Harold bought plasters, water, an aerosol can of deodorant, a comb, a toothbrush, plastic razors, shaving foam, washing powder and two packets of Rich Tea biscuits. He took a room with a single bed and framed prints of extinct parrots on the wall, where he carefully examined his feet before applying plasters to the weeping blister on his heel and the swellings on his toes. His body throbbed with a deep aching. He was exhausted. He had never walked so far in a day but he had covered eight and a half miles and he was hungry for more. He would eat, and call Maureen from a pay phone, and after that he would sleep.
The sun slipped over the edge of Dartmoor, and filled the sky with russet cloud. The hills were shaded an opaque blue and the cows grazing them glowed a soft apricot against the dying light. Harold couldn’t help wishing that David knew he was walking. He wondered if Maureen would talk to him about it, and the words she would use. The stars began to prick the night sky, one after another, so that the growing darkness trembled. Even as he looked he found them.
For the second night in a row, Harold slept without dreaming.
6
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 rang off. She dialled 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 towards the new housing at three in the morning, or even the shrieking of gulls that started up at first light. She lay very still, waiti
ng 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 courgette 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.
7
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.
