by Rachel Joyce
He was in it now with these other people. After all, they had suffered too in different ways. Wilf still got the shakes at night, and Kate often sat by the fire with tears shining on her cheeks. Even Rich, when he spoke of his boys, had to flap open a handkerchief and pretend he had hay fever. No matter how much he regretted their decisions to join him, it was not in Harold’s nature to let his companions down. Sometimes he broke free, and washed himself with water, or took lungfuls of air. He reminded himself there were no rules to his walk. He had been guilty once or twice of believing he understood, only to discover he did not. Maybe it was the same with the pilgrims? Maybe they were the next part of the journey? There were times, he saw, when not knowing was the biggest truth, and you had to stay with that.
News about the pilgrimage continued to gather momentum as if it had acquired an energy of its own. Word had only to get round that they were approaching and everyone with an Aga began to bake. Kate narrowly missed injury from a woman in a Land Rover hell bent on delivering a tray of goat’s cheese slices. Rich suggested over the camp fire that Harold should begin each meal with a few words about what it meant to be a pilgrim. When Harold declined, Rich offered to speak instead. He wondered if anyone would care to take notes? The gorilla man obliged, although it was difficult to write with a hairy glove and he had to keep asking Rich to stop.
The press also continued to run testimonies to Harold’s goodness. He did not have time to read the papers, but it seemed that Rich was more up to date. A spiritualist in Clitheroe claimed the pilgrim had a golden aura. A young man who’d been on the verge of jumping from the Clifton Suspension Bridge gave a moving account of how Harold had talked him down.
‘But I didn’t go to Bristol,’ Harold said. ‘I went to Bath, and from there to Stroud. I remember it clearly because it was the point when I almost gave up. I never met anyone on a bridge. And I am certain I didn’t talk them down.’
Rich claimed this was a minor detail. Petty, in fact. ‘Maybe he didn’t say he was about to commit suicide. But meeting you gave him hope. I expect you’ve forgotten.’ Again he reminded Harold that he had to look at the bigger picture; no publicity was bad publicity. It occurred to Harold that even though Rich was forty, and therefore about the right age to be his son, he talked as if it was Harold who was the child. He said that Harold was cornering a rich market. You had to strike while the iron was hot. He also mentioned cherry-picking ideas, and singing from the same hymn sheet, but Harold was getting a headache. He had such a congestion of incoherent images in his mind – cherry trees and hymn sheets and steam irons – that he had to keep stopping in order to work out what exactly it was that Rich was talking about. He wished the man would honour the true meaning of words, instead of using them as ammunition.
It was already mid June, and Wilf’s estranged father gave a moving interview about the courage of his son (‘He’s never even met me,’ said Wilf ). The council of Berwick-upon-Tweed commissioned placards and bunting to welcome the pilgrims’ arrival. The owner of a corner shop in Ripon accused them of stealing several items, including whisky.
Rich called a meeting, during which in no uncertain terms he accused Wilf of theft and suggested he should be sent home. For once, Harold stood up and disagreed; but it pained him to be put in a place of confrontation and he saw he could not do it again. Rich listened with his eyes narrowed into slits so that Harold lost words mid-sentence. Rich finally conceded that Wilf should be given another chance, but he avoided Harold for the rest of the afternoon. Then half the group went down with stomach cramps and temperatures, when the boy mistook some mildly poisonous mushrooms for the friendly ones that looked disarmingly similar. Just as they were recovering, the abundance of redcurrants, cherries and raw gooseberries in their diet brought on a compromising spate of diarrhoea. The gorilla man was badly stung while taking notes for Rich when it transpired there was a wasp in his glove. For two days they did not walk at all.
The horizon was a series of blue peaks that Harold longed to climb. The sun hung high in the eastern sky, leaving the moon so pale it looked made of cloud. If only these people would go. Would find something else to believe in. He shook his head, berating himself for his disloyalty.
Rich informed the group that something was needed to distinguish the real pilgrims from their followers. He had the solution. He had been in touch with an old friend in PR, who owed him a favour. The friend in turn had contacted the distributors of a health drink and they would be delighted to provide all official walkers with T-shirts with the word PILGRIM on the front and back. The T-shirts would be available in white and come in three sizes.
‘White?’ Kate scoffed. ‘Where are we going to wash these things?’
‘White stands out,’ said Rich. ‘And its image is pure.’
‘There speaks a man; and bollocks,’ said Kate.
The company would also provide a limitless supply of healthy fruit drinks. All they wanted in return was for Harold to be seen holding one as often as possible. As soon as the T-shirts arrived, a press call was organized. Harold was to be joined on the A617 by Miss South Devon for the photoshoot.
Harold said, ‘I think the others should be in it too. They have made a commitment to the walk as well as me.’
Rich said that clouded the message about faith for the twenty-first century, and also weakened the Queenie love story.
‘But I was never trying to make a point about those things,’ said Harold. ‘And I love my wife.’
Rich handed him a fruit drink and reminded him to hold the bottle with the label facing towards the camera. ‘I’m not asking you to finish it. I just want you to hold the thing. And did I say you’ve been invited to dinner with the mayor?’
‘I’m honestly not very hungry.’
‘You need to take the dog. His wife is something to do with the Blue Cross.’
It seemed that people were taking offence if the pilgrims did not visit their town. The mayor of a resort in North Devon gave an interview claiming Harold was ‘white middle-class elitist’, and Harold was so shaken he felt the need to apologize. He even wondered if he would have to walk home, taking in all the places he had failed to pass en route to Berwick. He admitted to Kate the fruit drinks were playing havoc with his digestive system.
‘But Rich told you,’ she said, ‘you don’t have to drink them. You can throw it away as soon as the photo’s taken.’
He smiled sadly. ‘I can’t hold the bottle and remove the lid and then not drink it. I’m a postwar child, Kate. We don’t talk up our achievements, and we don’t throw things away. It’s how we were brought up.’
Kate reached up her arms and gave him a damp hug.
He wanted to return it, but he stood rather helpless in her embrace. Maybe that was another symptom of his generation? Certainly he looked at the people around him in their vest tops and their shorts, and wondered if he had become superfluous.
‘What’s troubling you?’ she said. ‘You keep wandering off.’
Harold straightened himself. ‘I can’t help feeling this is wrong. All the noise. All the fuss. I appreciate how much everyone has done but I don’t see any more how it’s going to help Queenie. We only covered six miles yesterday. And seven the day before that. I wonder if I should go.’
Kate swung round very suddenly, as if she had received some sort of blow to her chin. ‘Go?’
‘Get back on the road.’
‘Without us?’ she said. There was panic in her eyes. ‘You can’t. You can’t leave us. Not now.’
Harold nodded.
‘Promise me.’ She gripped his arm. The gold of her wedding ring caught the sunlight.
‘Of course I won’t go without you.’ They walked on in silence. He wished he had not mentioned his doubts. It was clear she had no room for them.
Yet despite his promise, Harold remained troubled. They had good periods of walking but – with illness and injury and so much public support – it took almost two weeks to cover sixty miles; they were
not yet in Darlington. He imagined Maureen seeing pictures of him in the newspapers and he was ashamed. He wondered what she thought when she saw them. If she thought him a fool.
One night, as supporters and well-wishers took out guitars and began to sing by the fire, Harold fetched his rucksack and slipped away. The sky was so clear and black, it throbbed with stars, and the moon was losing its fullness once more. He thought back to the night he had slept in the barn near Stroud. No one knew the real truth about why he was walking to Queenie. They had made assumptions. They thought it was a love story, or a miracle, or an act of beauty, or even bravery, but it was none of those things. The discrepancy between what he knew and what other people believed frightened him. It also made him feel, as he looked back at the camp, that even in the midst of them he was unknown. The fire was a glow of light in the blackness. Voices and laughter came to him, and they were all strangers.
He could keep walking. There was nothing to stop him. Yes, he had made a promise to Kate but his loyalty to Queenie was greater. After all, he had everything he needed. His shoes. The compass. Queenie’s gifts. He could take a more indirect route, across the hills perhaps, and avoid people altogether. His pulse quickened as his feet drove forwards. He could walk the nights. The dawns again. He could be in Berwick in weeks.
Then he heard Kate’s voice, thin against the night air, calling his name, and the dog barking at her feet. He heard other voices – some he recognized, some he didn’t – all shouting ‘Harold’ into the darkness. His loyalty to them was not the same as his loyalty to Queenie, but they deserved more than to be abandoned without so much as an explanation. Slowly he returned.
Rich emerged out of the shadows just as Harold hit the circle of soft light from the fire. Spotting the old man, he ran towards him and bundled Harold into his arms.
‘We thought you’d gone.’
His voice shook. He had maybe been drinking. There was certainly the smell of it. Rich clung so hard that Harold lost his balance and almost fell.
‘Steady on there,’ laughed Rich. It was a rare moment of affection, albeit a little stumbling, but locked in this embrace, Harold struggled for breath as if he were being slowly suffocated.
A photograph appeared next day in the papers, with the caption CAN HAROLD FRY MAKE IT? He appeared to be collapsing into Rich’s arms.
23
Maureen and Harold
MAUREEN COULD BEAR it no longer. She confided in Rex that, against David’s advice, she was going to find Harold. She had spoken with her husband on the phone; he hoped the pilgrims would reach Darlington by the following afternoon. She knew it was too late to make amends for the past, but she would have one last stab at persuading him to come home.
As soon as it was light, she fetched the car keys from the hall table and slipped a coral lipstick into her handbag. Locking the front door, she was surprised to hear Rex call her name. He was wearing a sunhat, a pair of shades, and he was clutching a hardback road map of the British Isles.
‘I thought you might need someone to navigate,’ he said. ‘According to the AA, we should be there by late afternoon.’
The miles sped past, but she barely saw them. She said things while knowing that none of them added up; as if she were saying words that were only the tip of the huge mountain of feeling beneath. What if Harold didn’t want to see her? What if the other pilgrims were with him?
‘Supposing you’re wrong, Rex?’ she said. ‘Supposing he is in love with Queenie after all? Maybe I should write? What do you think? I feel I might say it better in a letter.’
When he said nothing, she turned to Rex and found him looking peaky. ‘Are you all right?’
He gave a tight nod, as if he were afraid of moving. ‘You have overtaken three articulated lorries and a coach,’ he said. ‘In single-lane traffic.’ He added that he thought he would be fine, if he sat very still and looked out of the window.
It was easy to find Harold, and the pilgrims. Someone had arranged a photoshoot for the tourist board in the pedestrianized market square and Maureen joined a small crowd. There was a tall man ushering photographers, and also a gorilla who appeared to need a chair, as well as a stout woman eating a sandwich, and a young man looking shifty. Catching sight of Harold as if she were no more than a stranger, Maureen was disarmed. She had seen him on the local news, and she kept the newspaper clippings in her handbag, but none of it had prepared her for seeing him ‘in true life’, as David used to say. Harold surely couldn’t have grown taller or broader, but looking at this weather-beaten pirate of a man, with his skin like dark leather and his curling hair, she felt she had become both one-dimensional and more fragile. It was the pared-down vitality of him that made her tremble; as if he had at last become the man he should have been all along. His pilgrim T-shirt was stained and frayed at the neck. The colour was gone from his yachting shoes, and the shape of his feet was practically through the leather. Harold caught Maureen’s eye, and stopped short. He said something to the tall man and broke free.
As Harold walked towards her he laughed so openly she had to look away, unable to meet the fullness of his smile. She didn’t know whether to offer him her lips or her cheek, and at the last minute she changed her mind so that he kissed her nose instead and prickled her face with his beard. People were watching.
‘Hello, Maureen.’ His voice was deep and assured. She felt her knees weaken. ‘What brings you all the way to Darlington?’
‘Oh,’ she shrugged. ‘Rex and I fancied a drive.’
He looked round, his face beaming. ‘Goodness. Has he come too?’
‘He’s gone to WH Smith’s. He needed paper clips. After that he was keen to visit the railway museum. You can see the Locomotion.’
He was standing right over her, gazing into her face and not looking away. It was like being under lights. ‘It’s a steam train,’ she added, because he still didn’t seem to be doing anything, just smiling. She couldn’t stop staring at his mouth. Despite the beard, his jaw had lost its rigid set. His lips looked soft.
An old fellow shouted into a megaphone to the crowd, ‘Shop all you can! This is the word of the Lord! Shopping is what gives our lives purpose! Jesus came on earth to shop!’ He had no shoes.
It broke the ice. Harold and Maureen smiled, and she felt there was a conspiracy between them, as if they were the only people in the world who saw it right. ‘People.’ She shook her head knowingly.
‘It takes all sorts,’ said Harold.
There was nothing condescending about his remark, nor was there anything reprimanding. It was more generous than anything else, as if the strangeness of other people was a marvellous thing, but it made her feel overwhelmingly parochial. She said, ‘Do you have time for a cuppa?’ She never normally referred to a pot of Earl Grey as a cuppa. And fancy trying to make up for your plain Englishness by suggesting tea.
‘I would love that, Maureen,’ said Harold.
They chose a coffee outlet on the ground floor of a department store because she said you could always trust the things you knew. The girl behind the counter stared as if she was trying to place him, and Maureen felt both proud and in the way. She had put on a pair of brand-new trainers at the last minute and they shone on the ends of her legs like beacons.
‘So much choice,’ said Harold, gazing at the muffins and cakes, each one in its own paper case. ‘Are you sure you don’t mind paying, Maureen?’
More than anything, she wanted to stare. It was years since she’d seen those blue eyes look so vibrant. He rubbed the curls of his giant beard between his forefinger and thumb so that they stuck out in peaks like royal icing. She wondered if the girl behind the counter realized she was Harold’s wife.
‘What will you have?’ she said. She wanted to add ‘darling’ but the word was too shy to come out.
He asked if he might have a slice of Mars Bar Tray Bake with a strawberry frappé. Maureen gave a shrill laugh that sounded as if she had just emptied it out of a packet.
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�And I’ll have tea, please,’ she told the girl behind the counter. ‘Milk, no sugar.’
Harold shone his benign smile in the direction of the girl, whose name was pinned on her black T-shirt just above her left bosom. To Maureen’s amazement, the young woman flushed from her neck upwards and grinned back.
‘You’re that guy off the news,’ she said. ‘The pilgrim. My mates think you’re awesome. Would you mind signing this?’ She held out her arm and a felt-tip pen and Maureen was astonished a second time to witness Harold inscribing his name with indelible ink on the soft flesh above the girl’s wrist: Best wishes, Harold. He didn’t even flinch.
The girl cradled her arm and stared long and hard at it. Then she set the drinks and the Mars Bar cake on a tray, along with one extra scone. ‘Have this on me,’ she said.
Maureen had never seen anything like it. She let Harold lead the way, and it was as if the room opened and hushed to make space for him. She noticed the other customers staring hard at Harold, and saying things behind cupped hands. At a table in the corner three ladies of her own age were drinking tea. She wondered where their husbands were: if they were playing golf, or dead maybe, or if they had walked out on their wives as well.
‘Afternoon,’ he said brightly, greeting complete strangers.
He chose a table beside the window so that he could keep an eye on the dog. It lay on the pavement outside, chewing on a stone, as if very interested in the business of waiting. She felt a swell of kinship with the animal.
Maureen and Harold sat opposite each other; not side by side. And even though she had drunk tea with him for forty-seven years, her hands shook as she poured. Harold’s cheeks hollowed as his frappé shot up through a straw and entered his mouth with a honk. She waited a polite moment for the drink to go down; only she waited too long, and she opened her mouth to speak at the exact moment he did.
