The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry: A Novel

by Rachel Joyce

  Yet she felt no physical pain. Not as such. What she felt was more like panic, the agony of panic. It came over her in a rush that left her skin prickling below her hairline. How was she going to get the liver back inside her body without anyone noticing, and when she couldn’t feel any fleshy gap through which to post it? No matter how hard she flicked them below the table, her fingers were stuck all over with the thing. She tried to loosen it with her free hand, but in no time it clung to that too. She wanted to jump up and scream, but she knew she mustn’t. She must remain very still and very quiet and no one must know she was nursing her entrails.

  Maureen woke in a sweat at quarter past four, and reached for her bedside light. She thought of Harold in Exeter, and the pension fund dwindling to nothing, and Rex with his gifts. She thought of the silence that wouldn’t be cleaned away. She couldn’t take any more.

  Sometime after dawn, she spoke with David. She confessed the truth about his father walking to a woman from the past, and he listened. “You and I didn’t know Queenie Hennessy,” said Maureen. “But she worked at the brewery. She had a job in accounts. I suspect she was the spinster type. Very lonely.” After that, she told David she loved him and wished he would visit. He promised it was the same for him. “So what should I do about Harold, love? What would you do?” she said.

  He told her exactly what the problem was with his father, and urged her to visit the doctor. He voiced the things she was too afraid to say.

  “But I can’t leave the house,” she argued. “He might come back. He might come back and I wouldn’t be here.”

  David laughed. A little harshly, she felt; but he had never been one to mince his words. She had a choice. She could stay at home, waiting. Or she could do something about it. She pictured David smiling and tears sprang to her eyes. And then he said something she didn’t expect: He knew about Queenie Hennessy. She was a good woman.

  Maureen gave a small gasp. “But you never met her.”

  He reminded her that while this was true, it was untrue that Maureen and Queenie had not met. She had come to Fossebridge Road with a message for Harold. Urgent, she’d said.

  That settled it. As soon as the surgery was open, Maureen rang to book a doctor’s appointment.

  Harold and the Sign

  THE MORNING SKY was a single blue, combed through with cloud, while a slip of moon still loitered behind trees. Harold was relieved to be back on the road. He had left Exeter early, after purchasing a secondhand dictionary of wildflowers and a visitor’s guide to Great Britain. These he kept in his plastic bag, along with the two presents for Queenie. He also carried replenished supplies of water, biscuits, and, on the advice of a pharmacist, a tube of petroleum jelly for his feet. “I could sell you a specialist cream, but it would be a waste of your time and money,” the shopkeeper said. He also warned there was bad weather coming.

  In the city, Harold’s thoughts had stopped. Now that he was back in the open land, he was once again between places, and pictures ran freely through his mind. In walking, he freed the past that he had spent twenty years seeking to avoid, and now it chattered and played through his head with a wild energy that was its own. He no longer saw distance in terms of miles. He measured it with his remembering.

  Passing the allotment gardens, he saw Maureen in the front plot of Fossebridge Road, wearing an old shirt of Harold’s, her hair tied back against the wind and her face smudged with dirt, as she dug in French bean plants.

  He saw a bird’s broken egg and recalled with splintering tenderness the fragility of David’s head when he was born. He heard the hollow cackle of a crow in the silence, and suddenly he was lying in his bed as a teenager, hearing that same cry, and overwhelmed with loneliness.

  “Where are you going?” he had asked his mother. Already he loomed over his father, but he liked the fact he only reached her shoulders. She lifted her suitcase and arranged a long silk scarf round her neck. It hung down her back like hair.

  “Nowhere,” she said, but she was opening the front door.

  “I want to come.” He took hold of the scarf, just the tassels where she might not notice. The silk was soft between his fingertips. “Can I come?”

  “Don’t be daft. You’ll be fine. You’re practically a man.”

  “Shall I tell a joke?”

  “Not now, Harold.” She eased her scarf from his hold. “You’re making me silly,” she said, wiping her eyes. “Am I smudged?”

  “You’re lovely.”

  “Wish me luck.” She took a deep breath as if she were about to plunge into water, and stepped out.

  The detail was so clear it was more real than the earth beneath his feet. He could smell her musk scent. See the white powder on her skin and know, even without her being there, that if she had allowed him to kiss her cheek it would have tasted of marshmallows.

  “I thought you might like these for a change,” said Queenie Hennessy once. She had pried the lid from a small tin and revealed squares of white confectionery, dusted in icing sugar. He had shaken his head and continued to drive. She didn’t bring marshmallows again.

  Sunlight broke through the trees so that the young leaves, rippling in the wind, shone like foil. At Brampford Speke, the roofs turned into thatch, and the brick was no longer the color of flint but a warmer shade of red. Branches of spiraea bowed under sleeves of blossom, and delphinium shoots nudged the soil. With the help of his guidebook, Harold identified old man’s beard, hart’s tongue, red campion, herb Robert, cuckoo pint, and discovered that the star-shaped flowers whose beauty he had marveled at were wood anemones. Buoyed up by this, he covered the further two and a half miles to Thorverton with his head deep in his wild plant dictionary. Despite the pharmacist’s warning, it did not rain. He felt blessed.

  The land fell away to the left and right, opening toward the faraway hills. Harold overtook two young women with buggies, a boy on a scooter with a multicolored baseball cap, three dog walkers, and a hiker. He spent the evening with a social worker who wanted to be a poet. The man offered to top up Harold’s lemonade with beer but Harold declined. Alcohol had brought unhappiness in the past, he said; both to himself and those close to him. For many years he had chosen to avoid it. He talked a little about Queenie; how she liked to sing backwards, and tell a riddle, and had a sweet tooth. Her particular favorites were pear drops, sherbet lemons, and licorice. Sometimes her tongue would be a violent shade of red or purple, although he hadn’t liked to tell her. “I fetched her a glass of water and hoped that would do the trick.”

  “You’re a saint,” said the man, when Harold told him about walking to Berwick.

  Harold crunched on a pork rind and insisted that he wasn’t. “My wife would back me up on that.”

  “You should see the people I have to deal with,” said the social worker. “It’s enough to make you give up. You really believe Queenie Hennessy is waiting?”

  “I do,” said Harold.

  “And that you can get to Berwick? In a pair of yachting shoes?”

  “I do,” he repeated.

  “Don’t you ever get scared? All on your own?”

  “At first I did. But I am used to it now. I know what to expect.”

  The social worker’s shoulders rose and dropped. He said, “But what about other people? The sort I deal with? What will happen when you come across one of them?”

  Harold thought of the people he had already met and passed. Their stories had surprised and moved him, and none had left him untouched. Already the world had more people in it for whom he cared. “I’m an ordinary chap, passing by. I’m not the sort who stands out in a crowd. And I don’t trouble anyone. When I tell people what I’m doing, they seem to understand. They look at their own lives and they want me to get there. They want Queenie to live, as much as I do.”

  The social worker was listening so carefully, Harold felt a little hot. He reached for his tie and straightened it.

  That night he dreamed for the first time. He got up before the images
could settle, but the memory of blood sprouting from his knuckles was in his head, and if he wasn’t careful, worse would follow. He stood at the window, staring at the black scope of sky, and thought of his father glaring at the front door the day his mother left, as if persistence alone was enough to make it swing open and reveal her. He had set a chair there and two bottles. Hours he seemed to sit.

  “She’ll be back,” he had said, and Harold lay in his bed, his body so taut with listening he felt he was more silence than boy. In the morning, her frocks were strewn like empty mothers all over the small house. Some were even perched in the scrap of grass they called a front lawn.

  “What’s been going on?” said the lady from next door.

  Harold had collected the clothes in his arms and screwed them into a ball. His mother’s deep smell was so vividly present it was impossible to credit she wasn’t coming back. He had had to shove his nails into his elbows in order not to make a noise. Playing the scene again, he watched the darkness loosen from the night sky. Once he was calm, he returned to bed.

  A few hours later, he couldn’t understand what had changed. He could hardly move. The blisters he could bear if he cushioned them with plasters, but every time he put any weight on his right foot it caused a spasmodic pain to shoot from the back of his ankle into his calf. He did all his usual things—he showered, ate, and repacked his plastic bag before paying his bill—but every time he tested it, the pain in his lower leg was still there. The sky was a cold cobalt blue, with the sun low over the horizon, so that vapor trails shone a luminous white. Harold followed Silver Street toward the A396, but failed to see what he passed. He had to stop every twenty minutes to roll down his sock and pinch at the muscle in his leg. To his relief there was no sign of damage.

  He tried to distract himself with thinking about Queenie, or David, but none of these thoughts took shape. He would find a memory and lose it as quickly. He would recall his son saying, “I bet you can’t name all the countries in the continent of Africa”; but even as he tried to think of one, his leg would flash with pain and he would forget what it was he was trying to remember. After half a mile, it was as if his shin had been cut; he could barely put any weight on the leg. He had to use a heavy long step with his left foot, and only a skittish hop on his right. By mid-morning, the sky had filled with a dense blanket of cloud. No matter how he looked at it, he couldn’t help feeling that walking north, walking up England, had become the same as climbing a hill. Even the flat stretches of road suddenly appeared to have an upward slant.

  He couldn’t lose the picture in his mind of his father slumped on a kitchen chair, waiting for his mother. The image had always been there, but he felt he was seeing it for the first time. His father had maybe been sick down his pajamas. It was best not to breathe through your nose.

  “Go away,” he said. But his eyes swerved so fast from Harold to the walls, it was hard to tell which he found most offensive.

  When they heard, neighbors consoled his father. Joan was her own person, they said. It’s a blessing; at least you’re young enough to start again. Suddenly there was an unprecedented abundance of female life in the house. Windows were thrown open, cupboards emptied, bedding aired. Casseroles, pies, and jellied meat appeared, along with suet puddings, jams, and fruitcake wrapped in brown paper. There had never been so much food; mealtimes were not of particular interest to his mother. Black-and-white photographs disappeared into handbags. Red lipsticks vanished from the bathroom, as did her bottles of scent. He saw her on street corners, and crossing roads. He even caught sight of her waiting for him after school, only to dash out and discover she was a lady he didn’t know, wearing one of his mother’s hats or skirts. Joan always liked the bright colors. His thirteenth birthday came and went, with no word from her. After six months, Harold couldn’t even smell her in the bathroom cabinet. His father began to fill the spaces that had held his wife with distant relations.

  “Say hello to your Aunty Muriel,” he’d say. He was out of his dressing gown. Instead he was wearing a suit that stuck out from his shoulders. He had even shaved.

  “Goodness, he’s big.” The woman was a wide face poking out of a fur coat, with fingers like sausages around a bag of macaroons. “Would he like one?”

  Harold’s mouth drenched at the memory. He ate all the biscuits in his plastic bag, but they did not satisfy the craving for something that he thought was food, but was not appeased by it. His spittle was thick and white as paste. Approaching passersby, he hid his mouth behind his handkerchief, hoping not to cause alarm. He bought two pints of long-life milk and drank in gulps that spilled down his chin. He took it too fast but the need was so intense he couldn’t reason with it; he tugged again and again at the carton with his mouth. The milk wouldn’t flow swiftly enough. A few feet on, he had to stop to be sick. He couldn’t stop thinking of the time his mother left.

  In packing her suitcase, she had robbed him not only of her laughter but also of the only person taller than himself. You could never describe Joan as affectionate, but at least she stood between her son and the clouds. The aunts passed him sweets, or went to pinch his cheek, or even asked his opinion about the fit of a dress, but the world seemed suddenly to have no edges, and he shrank from their touch.

  “I’m not saying he’s odd,” his Aunty Muriel had said. “He just doesn’t look at you.”

  Harold made it as far as Bickleigh, where according to his guidebook he should visit the small red-brick castle nestling on the banks of the River Exe. However, a long-faced man in olive trousers informed him that his guidebook was sadly out of date, unless Harold was interested in a luxury wedding or a murder mystery weekend. Instead he directed Harold to the craft and gift shop at Bickleigh Mill, where he might find something more to his taste and budget.

  He looked at the glass trinkets and lavender bags and a selection of locally carved hanging bird feeders, but none of them struck him as desirable, or even necessary. This made him sad. He wanted to leave but since he was the only person in the shop, and the assistant was staring, he felt obliged to make a purchase. He came away with four tablemats for Queenie, offering laminated views of Devon. For his wife he chose a ballpoint pen that shone a dull red when you pressed the nib, so that she could write in the dark, if she ever felt the inclination.

  Harold no-mum, the boys called him at school. He began to take days off, weeks, until his classmates seemed such strangers he felt he was a different species. His Aunt Muriel wrote notes: “Harold had a headache”; “Harold looks pasty.” Sometimes she fetched out the dictionary and got more creative: “Harold had a spot of biliousness at about 6 P.M. on Tuesday.” When he failed his exams he stopped going altogether.

  “He’s all right,” said his Aunt Vera, who took Muriel’s side of the bed when she left. “He’s got some good jokes. He just mumbles the punch line.”

  Weary and forlorn, Harold ordered a meal at the Fisherman’s Cot, overlooking the river. He spoke with several strangers who informed him that the bridge crossing the troubled water was the inspiration for the song by Simon and Garfunkel, and all the time he felt that he was nodding and smiling, and trying to look like someone who was listening, while in reality his thoughts were preoccupied with his journey, the past, and what was happening in his leg. Was it serious? Would it go away? He retired early, promising himself that sleep would heal. It didn’t.

  Deer son, read Joan’s only letter. New Zeeland is a wonderful plase. I had to go. Muthering was not me. Send my best regads to your dad. It wasn’t her leaving that was the worst part. It was the fact she couldn’t even spell her explanation.

  On Harold’s tenth day, there was not an isolated moment in his walking, not one muscular flex, that did not fizz the length of his right calf and remind him he was in trouble. He remembered the urgency with which he had made his promise to the hospice nurse about walking to Queenie, and it seemed childishly inappropriate. Even his conversation with the social worker shamed him. It was as if something had happen
ed overnight; as if the walk and his belief in it had broken into two separate pieces, and he was left only with the relentless slog. For ten days he had walked, and all his energy had been focused into the sheer act of taking one step after another. But now that he had discovered his faith in his feet, the practical anxieties had been replaced by something far more insidious.

  The three-and-a-half-mile stretch along the A396 to Tiverton was his hardest yet. There were few spaces to hide from cars, and even though the hedges had been recently cut, offering silvery flashes of the River Exe, it gave them a barbaric appearance, and he preferred not to look. Drivers blared their horns and shouted at him to get off the road. He berated himself for managing so few miles; at this rate it would be Christmas before he reached Berwick. A child, he told himself, could have done better.

  He remembered David dancing like a demon. He thought of the boy swimming out at Bantham. He saw again the occasion he had tried to tell his son a joke, and how David’s face had creased. “But I don’t get it,” he’d said. He looked on the verge of tears. Harold had explained that the joke was funny. It was meant to make you laugh. He had told it a second time. “I still don’t understand,” the boy had said. Later Harold had heard him repeat the joke to Maureen in the bath. “He said it was funny,” David had complained. “He said it twice and it didn’t make me laugh.” Even at that age he made the word sound dark.

  And then Harold thought of his son as an eighteen-year-old; his hair flowing well below his shoulders, his arms and legs too long for clothes. He saw the young man lying on his bed with his feet on the pillow, staring so hard at nothing that Harold had briefly wondered if he saw things that Harold couldn’t. His wrists were bone.

  Harold heard himself saying, “I hear from your mother you got into Cambridge.”

  David had not looked at him. He kept staring at the nothing.

  Harold had wanted to take him in his arms and hold on tight. He wanted to say, You beautiful boy of mine; how do you get to be so clever, when I am not? But he had looked at David’s impenetrable face and said, “Well, gosh. That’s good. Golly.”