The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry: A Novel

by Rachel Joyce

  It was past five. He never did the unexpected. Even the usual noises, the ticking of the hall clock, the hum of the fridge, were louder than they should have been. Where was he?

  Maureen tried to distract herself with the Telegraph crossword, only to discover he had filled in all the easy answers. A terrible thought rushed into her head. She pictured him lying in the road, with his mouth open. It happened. People had heart attacks and no one found them for days. Or maybe her secret fears were confirmed. Maybe he would end up with Alzheimer’s like his father? The man was dead before sixty. Maureen ran to fetch the car keys and her driving shoes.

  And then it occurred to her that he was probably with Rex. They were probably talking about lawn cutting, and the weather. Ridiculous man. She replaced her shoes by the front door, and the car keys on their hook.

  Maureen crept into the room that had become known over the years as the “best” one. She could never enter it without feeling she needed a cardigan. Once they had kept a mahogany dining table, and four upholstered chairs; they had eaten in here every evening with a glass of wine. But that was twenty years ago. These days the table was gone, and the bookshelves stored albums of photographs that no one opened.

  “Where are you?” she said. The net curtains hung between herself and the outside world, robbing it of color and texture, and she was glad of that. The sun was already beginning to sink. Soon the street lamps would be on.

  When the phone rang, Maureen shot into the hallway and plucked up the receiver. “Harold?”

  A thick pause. “It’s Rex, Maureen. From next door.”

  She looked about her helplessly. In her rush to answer the phone, she had stubbed her foot on something angular that Harold must have left on the floor. “Are you all right, Rex? Have you run out of milk again?”

  “Is Harold home?”

  “Harold?” Maureen felt her voice shoot upward. If he wasn’t with Rex, where was he? “Yes. Of course he is here.” The tone she had adopted was not at all her usual one. She sounded both regal and squashed. Just like her mother.

  “Only I was worried something had happened. I didn’t see him come back from his walk. He was going to post a letter.”

  Devastating images were already firing through her mind of ambulances and policemen, and herself holding Harold’s inert hand, and she didn’t know if she was being completely foolish, but it was as if her head was rehearsing the worst possible outcome in order to preempt the full shock of it. She repeated that Harold was at home, and then before he could ask anything else, she hung up. She immediately felt terrible. Rex was seventy-four and lonely. All he wanted was to help. She was about to call back, when he beat her to it and the phone began ringing in her hands. Maureen reassembled her composed voice and said, “Good evening, Rex.”

  “It’s me.”

  Her composed voice rocketed sky-high. “Harold? Where are you?”

  “I’m on the B3196. Just outside the pub at Loddiswell.” He actually sounded pleased.

  Between the front door and Loddiswell there were almost five miles. So he hadn’t had a heart attack and fallen into the road. He hadn’t forgotten who he was. She felt more indignant than relieved. Then a new terrible thought dawned on her. “You haven’t been drinking?”

  “I’ve had a lemonade but I feel brilliant. Better than I’ve felt in years. I met a nice chap who sells satellite dishes.” He paused as if he was about to deliver portentous news. “I’ve made a promise to walk, Maureen. All the way to Berwick.”

  She thought she must have misheard. “Walk? To Berwick-upon-Tweed? You?”

  He appeared to find this very funny. “Yes! Yes!” he spluttered.

  Maureen swallowed. She felt her legs and her voice failing her. She said, “Let me get this clear. You’re walking to see Queenie Hennessy?”

  “I am going to walk and she’s going to live. I’m going to save her.”

  Her knees buckled. She threw her hand out to the wall to steady herself. “I think not. You can’t save people from cancer, Harold. Not unless you are a surgeon. And you can’t even slice bread without making a mess. This is ridiculous.”

  Again Harold laughed, as if this person they were talking about was a stranger and not himself. “I was talking to a girl at the garage and she gave me the idea. She saved her aunt from cancer because she believed she could. She showed me how to heat a burger as well. It even had gherkins.”

  He came across as so sure. It completely threw her. Maureen felt a spark of heat. “Harold, you are sixty-five. You only ever walk to get to the car. And in case you haven’t noticed, you left your mobile phone.” He tried to reply, but she sailed straight through him. “And where do you think you are going to sleep?”

  “I don’t know.” The laughter had stopped and his voice sounded stripped away. “But it isn’t enough to post a letter. Please. I need to do this, Maureen.”

  The way he appealed to her, and added her name at the end, childlike, as if the choice were hers, when clearly he had already decided, was too much. The spark of heat ignited to a bolt. She said, “Well, you head off to Berwick, Harold. If that’s what you want. I’d like to see you get past Dartmoor—” The line was staccato’d with pips. She tightened her grip on the handset, as if it were a piece of him she was clinging to. “Harold? Are you still in the pub?”

  “No, a phone booth outside. It’s quite smelly. I think someone may have—” His voice cut off. He was gone.

  Maureen groped her body into the hall chair. The silence was louder than if he had not phoned at all. It seemed to eat up everything else. There was no ticking from the hall clock, no humming from the fridge, no birdsong from the garden. The words Harold, Burger, Walk rolled around her head, and in the midst of them came two more: Queenie Hennessy. After all these years. The memory of something long buried shivered deep inside her.

  Maureen sat alone as the dark fell, while neon lights came on across the hills and bled pools of amber into the night.

  Harold and the Hotel Guests

  HAROLD FRY WAS a tall man who moved through life with a stoop, as if expecting a low beam, or a screwed-up paper missile, to appear out of nowhere. The day he was born his mother had looked at the bundle in her arms, and felt appalled. She was young, with a peony-bud mouth and a husband who had seemed a good idea before the war and a bad one after it. A child was the last thing she wanted or needed. The boy learned quickly that the best way to get along in life was to keep a low profile; to appear absent even when present. He played with neighbors’ children, or at least he watched them from the edges. At school he avoided attention to the point of appearing stupid. Leaving home when he was sixteen, he had set out on his own, until one night he caught Maureen’s eye across a dance hall and fell wildly in love. It was the brewery that had brought the newly wed couple to Kingsbridge.

  Harold had done the same job as a sales rep for forty-five years. Keeping himself apart, he worked modestly and efficiently, without seeking either promotion or attention. Other chaps traveled and accepted jobs in senior management, but Harold had not wanted either. He made neither friends nor enemies. At his request, there was no farewell party for his retirement. And even though one of the girls in admin had organized a quick collection, few of the sales team knew much about him. Someone said they’d heard once that Harold had a story, but didn’t know what it was. He finished work on a Friday, and returned home with no more to show for his lifetime’s employment than a fully illustrated Motorist’s Guide to Great Britain and a voucher for Threshers. The book had been placed in the best room, along with all the other things that no one looked at. The voucher remained in its envelope. Harold was a teetotaler.

  Gnawing hunger woke him with a start. The mattress had both firmed up and moved overnight, and an unfamiliar rod of light fell across the carpet. What had Maureen done with the bedroom, that its windows were on the wrong side? What had she done with the walls, that they were lightly sprigged with flowers? It was then that he remembered: he was in a hotel ju
st north of Loddiswell. He was walking to Berwick because Queenie Hennessy must not die.

  Harold would have been the first to admit that there were elements to his plan that were not finely tuned. He had no walking boots or compass, let alone a map or change of clothes. The least planned part of the journey, however, was the journey itself. He hadn’t known he was going to walk until he started. Never mind the finely tuned elements; there was no plan. He knew the Devon roads well enough and after that, he would simply head north.

  Harold plumped his two pillows, and eased himself to a sitting position. His left shoulder was sore but otherwise he felt refreshed. He had enjoyed his best sleep in many years; there had been none of the pictures that regularly came to him in the dark. The quilt covering his body matched the floral fabric of the curtains, and there was a stripped antique pine wardrobe, below which were parked his yachting shoes. In the far corner stood a small sink, beneath a mirror. His shirt, tie, and trousers were folded small as an apology on a faded blue-velvet chair.

  A picture surfaced of his mother’s dresses scattered through his childhood home. He didn’t know where it had come from. He glanced at the window, trying to have a thought that would smudge the memory. He asked himself if Queenie knew he was walking. Maybe she was thinking about that even now.

  After the phone call to the hospice, he had followed the rising and turning of the B3196. Clear in his direction, he had passed fields, houses, trees, the bridge over the River Avon, and endless traffic had passed him. None of these made any real impression, except as one thing less between himself and Berwick. He had taken regular breaks to calm his breathing. Several times he had to adjust his yachting shoes and mop his head. On reaching the Loddiswell Inn he had stopped to quench his thirst, and it was there that he spoke with the satellite-dish salesman. The chap had been so bowled over when Harold confided his intentions that he clapped Harold on the back and told everyone in the bar to listen up; and when Harold offered the briefest outline (“I’m going to head up England until I hit Berwick”), the satellite-dish chap roared, “Good on you, mate.” It was with those words in mind that Harold had rushed out to telephone his wife.

  He wished she could have said the same thing.

  “I think not.” Sometimes her words sliced down on his before they had even reached his mouth.

  After speaking to Maureen, his steps had grown heavier. You couldn’t blame her for what she felt about him as a husband, and yet he wished it were otherwise. He had arrived at a small hotel, with palm trees growing at a lopsided angle as if cowering from the coastal wind, and inquired about a room. He was used to sleeping alone, of course, but it was a novelty to be in a hotel; when he worked for the brewery, he had always been home by nightfall. Closing his eyes, he had slipped into unconsciousness almost as soon as he was lying down.

  Harold leaned against the soft upholstered headboard and crooked his left knee, clasping the ankle in his hands and drawing it up as far along his leg as he could, without losing balance and keeling over. He slipped on his reading glasses for a closer inspection. The toes were soft and pale. A little tender around the nails, and in the bulbous join at the middle, and there was a possible blister on the way at the top of his heel, but considering his years and his lack of fitness, Harold was quietly proud. He performed the same slow but thorough inspection of his right foot.

  “Not bad,” he said.

  A few plasters. A good breakfast. He’d be ready. He imagined the nurse telling Queenie that he was walking, and that all she had to do was keep living. He could see the features of her face as if she were sitting in front of him: her dark eyes, her neat mouth, her black hair in tight curls. The picture was so vivid he couldn’t understand why he was still in bed. He must get to Berwick. He rolled his legs to the edge of the mattress and poked his heel toward the floor.

  Cramp. The pain roared up his right calf, as if he had just stepped on an electric current. He tried to pull his leg back into the quilt but that made it even worse. What was it you were supposed to do? Point the toes away? Or flex them up? He hobbled out of bed and danced the length of the carpet, wincing and crying out. Maureen was right: he’d be lucky if he got as far as Dartmoor.

  Clinging to the windowsill, Harold Fry peered at the road below. It was already rush hour, and traffic was speeding in the direction of Kingsbridge. He thought of his wife making breakfast at 13 Fossebridge Road and wondered if he shouldn’t go back. He could fetch his mobile, and pack a few things. He could look up the map on the Internet, and order some walking essentials. Maybe the travel book he had been given for his retirement, and had never looked at, would offer useful suggestions? But planning his route would involve both serious consideration and waiting, and there was no time for either of those things. Besides, Maureen would only give voice to the truth he was doing his best to avoid. The days when he might expect her help or her encouragement, or whatever it was he still wanted, were long since gone. Beyond the window, the sky was a fragile blue, almost breakable, flecked with wisps of cloud, and the treetops were bathed in warm golden light. Their branches swung in the breeze, beckoning him forward.

  If he went home now, if he even consulted a map, he knew he would never go to Berwick. He washed quickly, dressed in his shirt and tie, and then he followed the smell of bacon.

  Harold hovered outside the breakfast lounge, hoping it might be empty. He and Maureen could pass hours without saying a word, but her presence was like a wall that you expected to be there, even if you didn’t often look at it. Harold took hold of the doorknob. It shamed him that after all those years at the brewery, he was still shy about a roomful of strangers.

  He swung the door open and so many heads swiveled to shoot a look at him, he remained glued to the handle. There was a young family, dressed in holiday clothes, a pair of older ladies, both wearing gray, and a businessman with a newspaper. Of the two remaining free tables, one was in the center of the room and the other was in the far corner, beside a potted fern on a stand. Harold gave a small cough.

  “Top of the morning to you,” he said. He didn’t know why; he hadn’t a drop of Irish blood in him. It was the sort of thing his old boss, Mr. Napier, might have said. He hadn’t a drop of Irish blood in him either, but he liked laughing at people.

  The hotel guests agreed that it was indeed a fine morning, and returned to their English breakfasts. Harold felt conspicuous standing up but thought it would be rude to sit when no one had invited him.

  A woman in a black skirt and top rushed through a pair of swinging saloon doors with a laminated sign above them: KITCHEN. NO ENTRY. She had auburn hair that she had somehow or other puffed up, the way women could. Maureen had never been one for blow-drying. “No time for beautification,” she’d say under her breath. The woman delivered poached eggs to the two gray ladies and said, “Full breakfast, Mr. Fry?”

  With a stab of shame, Harold remembered. This was the same woman who had shown him to his room the night before. This was the woman whom, in a fit of exhaustion and elation, he had told he was walking to Berwick. He hoped she had forgotten. He tried to say, “Yes, please,” but he couldn’t even look at her now and the words came out as more of a tremble.

  She pointed to the table in the center of the room, which was the one he had been hoping to avoid, and as he moved he realized that the odd sour smell that had been dogging him all the way down the stairs was in fact himself. He wanted to rush up to his room and scrub himself all over, but that would look rude, especially since she had asked him to sit, and he was now doing so. “Tea? Coffee?” she said.

  “Yes, please.”

  “Both?” said the waitress. She gave him a patient look. Now he had three things to worry about: that even if she couldn’t smell him, or remember about the walking part, she still might think him senile.

  “Tea would be very kind,” said Harold.

  To his relief the waitress nodded and disappeared through her swing doors, and the room fell briefly silent. He adjusted his tie and
placed his hands in his lap. If he sat very still perhaps the whole thing might go away.

  The two gray ladies began saying something about the weather, but Harold didn’t know if they were speaking to each other or the guests in general. He didn’t want to appear rude, but neither did he want to appear to be eavesdropping, so he tried to appear busy. He studied the sign on his table, NO SMOKING, and then he read the one at the window: WOULD GUESTS KINDLY REFRAIN FROM USING MOBILE PHONES. He wondered what had happened in the past that the owners felt the need to prohibit so many things.

  The waitress reappeared with a teapot and milk. He let her pour.

  “At least you have a nice day for it,” she said.

  So she did remember. He took a sip of tea but it scalded his mouth. The waitress was still hovering beside him.

  “Do you do this sort of thing often?” she said.

  He was aware of a tense stillness in the room that caused her voice to amplify. He glanced briefly up at the other guests, but none of them was moving. Even the potted fern seemed to hold its breath. Harold gave a small shake of his head. He wished the waitress would move on to someone else, but nobody seemed to be doing anything except looking at Harold. As a small boy he had been so afraid of attention, he crept like a shadow. He could watch his mother applying lipstick or staring at her travel magazine without her knowing he was there.

  The waitress said, “If we don’t go mad once in a while, there’s no hope.” She briefly patted his shoulder, and at last she retreated through the forbidden swing doors.