by Rachel Joyce
After that, she had carried her clothes in armfuls from the spare room and hung them in the wardrobe, at the opposite end of the rail from Harold’s. She had given herself a challenge: every day without him, she would attempt one new thing. She took the pile of unopened household bills to the kitchen table, along with the cheque book, and began to pay them. She rang the insurance company to make sure Harold’s health care was up to date. She drove the car to the garage and had the air levels checked in the tyres. She even tied an old silk scarf round her hair, like in the old days. When Rex appeared un expectedly at the garden fence, she had to shoot her hand up and tug the knot free.
‘I look silly,’ she said.
‘Not at all, Maureen.’
He appeared to have something on his mind. They would be talking about the garden or Harold’s whereabouts, and then a thought would occur to him, and he would go quiet. When she asked if he was all right, he merely nodded. ‘Just wait,’ he’d tell her. ‘I have a plan up my sleeve.’ She had a hunch it was something to do with herself.
Dusting behind the nets at the bedroom window the previous week, she couldn’t help but notice the postman deliver something in a cardboard tube to Rex’s front door. A day later, and from the same vantage point, she had spied Rex struggling up the path with a window-sized piece of board, which he was trying to hide under a tartan blanket from the Rover. Maureen was intrigued. She had waited for him in the garden; she even took out a basket of dried washing and pegged it again on the line, but he didn’t come out all afternoon.
She knocked to ask if he had enough milk, and he mumbled through a crack in the door that he did, and that he was having an early night. And yet when she went out to check the back garden at eleven o’clock, the lights were still on in his kitchen, and she could see him pottering about.
The next day a rap at the letterbox had brought her rushing into the hallway, where she found a strange square shape against the bobbled glass, with what looked like a small head floating on top. Opening the door, she discovered Rex behind a large flat brown-paper package tied with loops of string. ‘Do you mind if I come in?’ he said. He could barely get the words out.
Maureen couldn’t remember the last time someone had given her a gift when it wasn’t Christmas or her birthday. She had ushered him inside, and into the sitting room, offering tea or coffee. He insisted there was no time for either; she must open her present. ‘Tear the paper, Maureen,’ he said.
She couldn’t. It was too exciting. She had unpeeled one corner of brown paper and found a hard frame of wood, and then she unpeeled the other edge and found the same again. Rex sat with his hands clasped in his lap, and every time she peeled off a new strip his feet lifted as if he were jumping over an invisible rope, and he gasped.
‘Hurry, hurry,’ he said.
‘Whatever is it?’
‘Pull it out. Go on. Have a proper look, Maureen. I made it for you.’
It was a giant-sized map of England mounted on a pinboard. On the back he had attached two small mirror hooks, so that it could be hung from the wall. He pointed to Kingsbridge, and there she found a drawing pin, wound with blue thread, that stretched to Loddiswell. From there, the blue thread crept to South Brent, and on again to Buckfast Abbey. Harold’s route to date was marked up with blue thread and drawing pins, ending at Bath. At the top of England, Berwick-upon-Tweed was marked with fluorescent-green highlighter pen, and a small homemade flag. There was even a separate box of drawing pins so that she could display Harold’s postcards.
‘I thought you could stick them on parts of the country he isn’t visiting,’ said Rex. ‘Like Norfolk, and South Wales. I am sure that would be OK.’
Rex put up nails in the kitchen for the map and they hung it above the table, so that Maureen could see where Harold was and fill in the rest of his journey. It was a little lopsided because he had difficulty with the drill, and the first Rawlplug was swallowed into the wall. But if she looked at the map with a slight tilt to her head, it was barely noticeable. Besides, as she told Rex, it didn’t matter about things not being perfect.
This, too, was a new departure for Maureen.
After the map present, they had taken an outing every day. She accompanied him to the crematorium with roses for Elizabeth, and afterwards they stopped for tea at Hope Cove. They visited Salcombe and took a boat trip across the estuary, and another afternoon he drove her to Brixham to buy crab. They walked the coastal road towards Bigbury and ate fresh shellfish at the Oyster Shack. He said it was good for him to get out, and that he hoped he wasn’t intruding, and she reassured him that it helped her too to stop thinking things over. They were sitting in front of the dunes at Bantham when she explained how she and Harold had first come to Kingsbridge forty-five years ago when they were newly married. They had so much hope in those days.
‘We knew no one but it didn’t matter. We only needed each other. Harold had a difficult childhood. I think he loved his mother very much. And his father must have had some sort of breakdown after the war. I wanted to be everything he’d never had. I wanted to give him a home and a family. I learned to cook. I made curtains. I found wooden crates and hammered them together to make a coffee table. Harold dug me vegetable plots at the front of the house, and I grew everything. Potatoes, beans, carrots.’ She laughed. ‘We were very happy.’ It was such a pleasure to voice these things, she wished there were more words. ‘Very happy,’ she said again.
The tide was out so far the sand looked glazed under the sun. There was a clear stretch between the shore and Burgh Island. People had brought multicoloured windbreaks and small pop-up tents. Dogs were scampering across the sand, in chase of sticks and balls; children were running up and down with buckets and spades; and far out the sea glittered. She thought of how much David had wanted a dog. Maureen fumbled for her handkerchief and asked Rex to ignore her. Maybe it was coming to Bantham again after all these years. So many times she had blamed Harold for the day that David almost drowned.
‘I say so many things that I don’t mean. It’s as if, even if I think something nice about Harold, by the time it’s got to my mouth it’s become not nice. He goes to tell me something and I’m saying, “I think not,” before he’s finished the sentence.’
‘I always got cross with Elizabeth for leaving the top off the toothpaste. Now I throw it away as soon as I open a new tube. I find I don’t want the lid.’
She smiled. His hand was near hers. She brought her own up and fingered the ridge of bone at her throat where the skin was still soft. ‘When I was young, I looked at people our age and I assumed my life was sorted. It never occurred to me that when I got to sixty-three I’d be in the most appalling mess.’
There were so many things Maureen wished she had done differently. Lying in bed in the morning light, she yawned and stretched, feeling the size of the mattress with her hands and feet; even the cold far corners. Then she moved her fingers to herself. She touched her cheeks. Her throat. The outline of her breasts. She imagined Harold’s hands around her waist, his mouth on hers. Her skin was slack, and her fingertips no longer had the sensitivity of a young woman’s, but all the same her heart beat wildly, and her blood throbbed. From outside came the click of Rex’s front door closing. She sat up sharply. Moments later, his car started and she heard him driving away. She curled back into the duvet, pulling it close against her like a body.
The wardrobe door was partly open, revealing the sleeve of one of Harold’s left-behind shirts, and she felt a stab of the old pain. She threw back the duvet, seeking distraction. The perfect job presented itself as she passed the wardrobe.
For many years it had been Maureen’s system, just as it had been her mother’s, to arrange clothing according to the season. Winter items would be placed at one end of the rail, along with thick pullovers, while summer clothing would be hung at the opposite end, beside lightweight jackets and cardigans. Somehow in her rush to put her own clothes in the wardrobe, she had failed to notice that Harold’s cl
othes hung higgledy-piggledy, with no reference to weather or texture of fabric. She would go through each piece, throwing out those he no longer needed and hanging the rest properly.
There were his work suits, fraying at the lapels; these she lifted out and placed on the bed. There were a number of wool cardigans, all of them thin at the elbow; she would patch those. Skimming through a selection of shirts, some white, some checked, she came across the tweed jacket he had bought especially for David’s graduation. She felt a beating against her chest, like something trapped inside. She hadn’t cast her eyes on the jacket for years.
Maureen eased it off the hanger and held it high in front of her, at Harold level. Twenty years fell away, and she saw the two of them again, standing outside King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, uncomfortable in their new outfits, in the exact spot where David had instructed them to wait. She saw herself wearing a satin dress with shoulder pads that, now she thought about it, was the colour of a boiled crustacean, and probably matched her cheeks. She saw Harold with his shoulders hunched, so that his arms shot out stiffly, as if the jacket sleeves were made of wood, not fabric.
It was his fault, she’d complained at the time; he should have checked the arrangements. It was nervousness that made her lash out. They had waited for over two hours, but it was the wrong place after all. They missed the whole ceremony. And even though David apologized when they bumped into him coming out of a pub (you could excuse him for that; it was a day of celebration), he also failed to meet them for the punting trip he had promised. The couple had made the long drive from Cambridge to Kingsbridge in silence.
‘He said he’s going on a walking holiday,’ she said at last.
‘That’s good.’
‘Just as a stopgap. Until he gets a job.’
‘That’s good,’ he said again.
Tears of frustration had caught like a solid lump in her throat. ‘At least he has a degree,’ she fired. ‘At least he can make something of his life.’
David returned home two weeks later, unexpectedly. He didn’t explain why he was back so soon, but he carried a brown holdall that clunked as it hit the banisters and he often took his mother aside to ask her for money. ‘University took it out of him,’ she’d say, to excuse his failure to get up. Or she’d say, ‘He just needs to find the right job.’ He missed interviews; or he went to them, but forgot to wash and comb his hair. ‘David is too clever,’ she’d say. Harold would nod in that easy way of his, and she’d want to shout at him for appearing to believe her. The truth was, their son could barely stand up straight most of the time. There were moments when she stole a glance at him, and she wasn’t even convinced he had graduated. With David, you could look back and there were so many inconsistencies that even the things you thought you knew began to unravel. And then she would feel guilty for doubting her son, and blame it instead on Harold. At least David has prospects, she’d say. At least he has his hair. Anything to throw Harold off balance. Money began to disappear from her purse. First coins. Then notes. She pretended they hadn’t.
Over the years, she had asked David many times if she could have done more; but he had reassured her. After all, it was she who had underlined suitable vacancies in the jobs section of the newspaper. It was she who had fixed the doctor’s appointment and driven him there. Maureen remembered how he dropped the prescription into her lap, as if it were nothing to do with him. There was Prothiaden for the depression and Diazepam to decrease anxiety, and then there was Temazepam if he still couldn’t sleep at night.
‘That’s an awful lot,’ she had said, scrambling to her feet. ‘What did the doctor say to you? What does he think?’
He had shrugged and lit another cigarette.
But at least after that there had been an improvement. She listened out at night but it seemed he was sleeping. He no longer got up to eat breakfast at four in the morning. He no longer went for night walks in his dressing gown, or filled the house with the sick-sweet smell of his roll-ups. David was certain he would find a job.
She saw him again the day he decided to interview for the army, and took it upon himself to shave his scalp. There were curls of his long hair all over the bathroom. There were nicks in the skin where his hand had trembled and the razor slipped. The barbarity inflicted on that poor head, that poor head she loved to distraction, had made her want to scream.
Maureen lowered herself on to the bed, and dropped her face in her hands. What more could they have done?
‘Oh Harold.’ She fingered the coarse tweed of his English gentleman’s jacket.
An urge came over her to do something completely different. It was like a shock of energy right through her, forcing her once more to her feet. She took out the shrimp garment she had worn for the graduation and hung it at the centre of the rail. Then she took Harold’s jacket and arranged it on a hanger beside the dress. They looked lonely and too apart. She scooped up his sleeve, and draped it over the pink shoulder.
After that she paired each of her outfits with one of his. She tucked the cuff of her blouse in his blue suit pocket. A skirt hem she looped around a trouser leg. Another dress she wrapped in the embrace of his blue cardigan. It was as if lots of invisible Maureens and Harolds were loitering in her wardrobe, simply waiting for the opportunity to step out. It made her smile, and then it made her cry; but she didn’t change them back.
She was interrupted by the sound of Rex’s Rover drawing up outside. Soon afterwards, she was aware of a scraping sound from her front garden. Lifting the net curtains, she found he had marked rectangles of turf with string and posts, and that he was cutting into them with his spade.
He waved up at her. ‘If we’re lucky, we might be in time for runner beans.’
Wearing an old shirt of Harold’s, Maureen planted twenty small shoots and tied them to bamboo stakes without damaging their soft green stems. She patted the soil at their roots, and watered them. At first she watched in fear, lest they were pecked by seagulls or killed by a May frost. But after only a day or so of constant watching, her worry subsided. In time, the plants thickened at the stems, and grew new leaves. She planted rows of lettuce, beetroot and carrots. She cleared the rubble from the ornamental pond.
It was good to feel the soil under her nails, and nurture something again.
18
Harold and the Decision
‘GOOD AFTERNOON. I am ringing about a patient called Queenie Hennessy. She sent me a letter just over four weeks ago.’
On the twenty-sixth day, and six miles south of Stroud, Harold decided to stop. He had retraced the five miles to Bath, and kept walking from there for a further four days along the A46, but the mistake he had made about his direction deeply disturbed him, and the going was hard. Hedgerows reduced to ditches, and drystone walls. The land opened out, and stretched to the left and right. Giant pylons marched as far as he could see. He observed these things but felt no interest as to why they occurred. Whichever way he looked at it, the road was something that never stopped, and never yielded its promise. It took every scrap of himself to keep moving when he knew in his heart he could not make it.
Why had he wasted so much time, looking at the sky and the hills, and talking to people, and thinking about life, and remembering, when all along he could have been in a car? Of course he couldn’t do it in yachting shoes. Of course Queenie couldn’t keep living, just because he’d told her to do so. Every day, the sky hung low and white, lit by a silvery spoke of sunlight. He lowered his head so that he would not see the birds swooping overhead, or the traffic passing in a flash. He felt more lonely and left behind than he would have done up a faraway mountain.
In making his decision, he wasn’t only thinking of himself. There was Maureen too. He missed her more and more. He knew he had lost her love, but it was wrong to walk out and leave her to pick up the pieces; already he had caused her too much sorrow. And there was David. In the days since Bath, Harold had felt a painfully long distance from him. He missed them both.
; Finally there was the money. The guesthouses had been cheap, but all the same he couldn’t afford to keep spending like this. He had checked his account at the bank, and been shocked. If Queenie was still alive, and if she was interested in a visit, he would take the train. He could be in Berwick by the evening.
The woman on the other end of the line said, ‘Have you rung before?’ He wondered if she was the same nurse with whom he had left his original message. This voice was Scottish, he thought, or was it Irish? He was too tired to know.
‘Could I talk to Queenie?’
‘I’m very sorry, but I’m afraid you can’t.’
It was like hitting a wall he hadn’t seen. ‘Is she—?’ His chest was smarting. ‘Is she—?’ He couldn’t say it.
‘Are you the gentleman who was travelling by foot?’
Harold swallowed something sharp. He said that yes, he was. He apologized.
‘Mr Fry, Queenie has no family. No friends. When people have no one to stay for, they tend to pass quickly. We have been hoping for your call.’
‘I see.’ He could barely speak. He could only listen. Even his blood was still and cold.
‘After you rang, we all noticed the change in Queenie. It was very marked.’
He saw a body on a stretcher, stiff with not living. He felt what it was to be too late to make a difference. He said with a hoarse whisper, ‘Yes.’ And then, since she said nothing, he said again, ‘Well, of course.’ He slumped his forehead against the glass of the booth, followed by his palm, and closed his eyes. If only it was simple to stop feeling.
The woman gave a fluttery noise, like a laugh, but it surely couldn’t be. ‘We’ve never seen anything like it. Some days she sits up. She shows us all your postcards.’
