The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry: A Novel

by Rachel Joyce

  David scoffed as if he had just heard a joke that was all about his father. And Harold in turn shut the bedroom door and promised himself that one day, when his son was a full-grown man perhaps, things would be easier.

  From Tiverton, Harold decided to continue with the main roads. He reasoned that this route was the more direct. He would follow the Great Western Way and then cut across country lanes until he reached the A38. It should be twenty miles to Taunton.

  A storm was coming. Clouds drew up like a hood over the earth, and threw an eerie luminous light over the Blackdown Hills. For the first time he missed his mobile phone; he felt unprepared for what lay ahead, and he wished he could speak to Maureen. The tops of the trees shone against the granite swell of the sky, and then shook as the first winds hit them. Leaves and twigs were tossed into the air. Birds cried out. In the distance, sails of rain came into view, and hung between Harold and the hills. He cowered into his jacket as the first drops hit.

  There was no hiding. The rain shot at Harold’s waterproof jacket and down his neck, and even up the elasticized rims of his sleeves. The drops hit like peppercorns. They swirled in pools and rivulets along the gutters, and with each passing car they sloshed over the rims of his yachting shoes. After an hour his feet were water, and his skin itched from the constant chafing of wet clothes. He didn’t know if he was hungry and he couldn’t remember if he had eaten. His right calf spangled with pain.

  A car drew up next to him, and threw water the length of his trousers. It didn’t matter. He could not get wetter. The passenger window steadily rolled downward. There was a warm smell of new leather and heated air. Harold stooped his head.

  The face on the other side was young and dry. “Are you lost? Do you need directions?” it said.

  “I know where I’m going.” The rain stung Harold’s eyes. “But thank you for stopping.”

  “Nobody should be out in weather like this,” insisted the face.

  “I made a promise,” said Harold, straightening up. “But I am grateful to you for noticing me.”

  For the next mile he asked himself whether he had been foolish not to ask for help. The longer he took to walk, the more unlikely it was that Queenie would keep living. And yet he was certain she was waiting. If he failed in his share of the bargain, albeit one without logic, he was afraid he would not see her again.

  What should I do? Give me a sign, Queenie, he said, maybe out loud, maybe to himself. He wasn’t sure any more where he officially stopped and the outside world began.

  A large lorry thundered toward him, blaring a violent horn, and splattered him from head to foot with mud.

  And yet something else happened, and it became one of those moments that he would walk into and realize, even as it was happening, that it was significant. Late in the afternoon, the rain stopped so abruptly it was hard to credit there had been any at all. To the east, the cloud tore open and a low belt of polished silver light broke through. Harold stood and watched as the mass of gray split again and again, revealing new colors: blue, burnt amber, peach, green, and crimson. Then the cloud became suffused with a dulled pink, as if those vibrant colors had bled through, diluting as they met. He couldn’t move. He wanted to witness every change. The light on the land was gold; even his skin was warm with it. At his feet the earth creaked and whispered. The air smelled green and full of beginnings. A soft mist rose, like wisps of smoke.

  Harold was so tired he could barely lift his feet, and yet he felt such hope, he was giddy with it. If he kept looking at the things that were bigger than himself, he knew he would make it to Berwick.

  Maureen and the Intern

  THE RECEPTIONIST APOLOGIZED; due to the installation of an automated service, she was no longer able to check Maureen in for her doctor’s appointment. “But I am standing right here,” said Maureen. “Why can’t you do it?” The receptionist pointed to a screen set a few feet from the main desk, and assured Maureen that the new procedure was a simple one.

  Maureen’s fingers went clammy. The automated service asked if she was male or female, but she tapped the wrong button. It asked for her birth date, and she tapped the month before the day, and had to be helped by a young patient who sneezed all over her shoulder. By the time she had registered, there was a small queue behind her, groaning and creaking with illness. The screen flashed the words Refer to main reception. The small queue gave a uniform shake of its head.

  Again the receptionist apologized. Maureen’s regular GP had been called away unexpectedly, but she could take an appointment with an intern instead.

  “Why couldn’t you tell me this when I first arrived?” cried Maureen.

  The receptionist offered her third round of apologies. It was the new system, she said; everyone had to check in electronically, “Even old-age pensioners.” She asked if Maureen would like to wait or come back the next morning, and Maureen shook her head. If she went home, she didn’t trust she would have the will to return.

  “Do you need a glass of water?” said the receptionist. “You look pale.”

  “I just need to sit a moment,” said Maureen.

  Of course David had been right in reassuring her that she could leave the house, but he had no idea of the anxiety she would suffer in making her way to the surgery. It wasn’t that she missed Harold, she told herself; but still it came as a fresh shock to find herself alone in the outside world. Everywhere around her people were doing ordinary things. They were driving cars and pushing buggies and walking dogs and coming home, as if life was exactly the same, when it wasn’t. It was all new and wrong. She buttoned her coat to her neck, and pulled the tips of her collar against her ears, but the air felt too cold, and the sky too open, shapes and colors too forceful. She had rushed down Fossebridge Road before Rex could spot her, and fled to the center of town. The petals of the daffodils along the quayside were a crumpled brown.

  In the waiting room she tried to distract herself with magazines, but she looked at the words without connecting them into sentences. She was aware of couples like herself and Harold, sitting side by side, keeping one another company. The late-afternoon light was sprinkled with dust motes, swirling in the thick air as if it had been stirred with a spoon.

  When a young man opened the consulting-room door and mumbled a patient’s name, Maureen sat waiting for someone to get up and wondering why they took so long, until she realized it was her own name and scrambled to her feet. The intern looked barely out of school, and his body didn’t fill his dark suit. His shoes were polished like chestnuts; an image came to her from nowhere of David’s school shoes, and she felt a twist of anguish. She wished she had not asked for her son’s help. She wished she had stayed at home.

  “What can I do for you?” murmured the intern, as he bowed into his chair. Words seemed to slip out of his mouth without noise, and she had to crane her head closer in order to catch them. If she wasn’t careful, he’d offer her a hearing test.

  Maureen explained how her husband had set off to visit a woman he had not seen for twenty years, convinced he could save her from cancer. It was his eleventh day of walking, she said, rolling her handkerchief into a knot. “He can’t get to Berwick. He has no map. No proper shoes. When he left the house, he actually forgot his mobile.” Telling a stranger brought home the rawness of it, and she was afraid she would cry. She dared a glance at the intern’s face. It was as if someone had stepped over to him while she wasn’t looking and drawn in thick worry lines with a black pen. Maybe she had said too much.

  He spoke slowly, as if he were trying to remember the right words. “Your husband thinks he is going to save his former colleague?”

  “Yes.”

  “From cancer?”

  “Yes.” She was beginning to feel impatient. She didn’t want to have to explain; she wanted him instinctively to understand. She was not here to defend Harold.

  “How does he think he will save her?”

  “He seems to believe the walking will do it.”

 
He scowled, creating further deep lines toward his jaw. “He thinks a walk will cure cancer?”

  “A girl gave him the idea,” she said. “A girl in a garage. She made him a burger as well. Harold never eats burgers at home.”

  “A girl told him he could cure cancer?” If this appointment continued for much longer, the poor boy’s face would be all over the place.

  Maureen shook her head, trying to reassert order. She was suddenly very tired. “I am worried about Harold’s health,” she said.

  “Is he fit and well?”

  “He is slightly far-sighted without his reading glasses. He has two crowns either side of his front teeth. But it’s not that which worries me.”

  “Yet he believes he can cure her by walking? I don’t understand. Is he a religious man?”

  “Harold? The only time he calls on God is when the throttle goes on the lawn mower.” She gave a smile, to help the intern realize she was being funny. The intern looked confused. “Harold retired six months ago. Since then he has been very—” She broke off, hunting for the word. The intern shook his head, indicating he didn’t have it. “Still,” she said.

  “Still?” he repeated.

  “He spends every day in the same chair.”

  At this the intern’s eyes lit up and he gave a nod of relief. “Ah. Depressed.” He lifted his pen and snapped off the lid.

  “I wouldn’t say he was depressed.” She felt her heart quickening. “The thing is, Harold has Alzheimer’s.” There. She had said it.

  The intern’s mouth parted, and his jaw gave a disconcerting clunk. He returned the pen to his desk without reapplying the lid.

  “He has Alzheimer’s, and he’s walking to Berwick?”

  “Yes.”

  “What medication is your husband on, Mrs. Fry?” The silence was so solemn she shivered.

  “I say Alzheimer’s,” she said slowly, “but it’s not diagnosed as yet.”

  The intern relaxed again. He almost laughed. “Do you mean that he is forgetful? That he has senior moments? Just because we forget our mobile phone doesn’t mean we all have Alzheimer’s.”

  Maureen gave a tight nod. She couldn’t decide which irritated her most: the way he batted the term senior moments in her direction or the patronizing smile he was now showing her. “It’s in his family,” she said. “I recognize the signs.”

  From here, she gave a brief account of Harold’s history: How his father had returned from the war an alcoholic, prone to depression. How his parents had not wanted a child, and his mother had packed her suitcase, never to return. She explained that his father had taken up with a succession of women until he showed Harold the door on his sixteenth birthday. After that, the two men had remained estranged for many years. “Then, out of the blue, a woman rang my husband and said she was his stepmother. You’d better fetch your father, she said; he’s mad as a hatter.”

  “This was the Alzheimer’s?”

  “I found him a nursing home but he was dead before he was sixty. We visited several times but his father shouted a lot, and threw things. He had no idea who Harold was. And now my husband is going the same way. It isn’t just forgetting things. There are other symptoms.”

  “Does he substitute words with inappropriate ones? Forget entire conversations? Does he leave things in strange places? Suffer rapid mood swings?”

  “Yes, yes.” She gave an impatient flick of her hand.

  “I see,” said the intern, chewing his lip.

  Maureen smelled victory. She watched him carefully as she said, “What I want to know is—if you, as a doctor, thought Harold was putting himself in danger by walking, could he be stopped?”

  “Stopped?”

  “Yes.” Her throat felt stripped. “Could he be forced to return home?” The blood beat so hard through her head it hurt. “He can’t walk five hundred miles. He can’t save Queenie Hennessy. He must be made to come back.”

  Maureen’s words rang through the silence. She placed her hands on her knees, palm against palm, and then she tidied her two feet, one beside the other. She had said what she had set out to say, but she wasn’t feeling what she had set out to feel, and needed to impose physical order on an uncomfortable emotion that was swelling inside her.

  The intern grew still. From outside she heard a child crying, and wished to goodness someone would pick it up. He said, “It sounds as if we have a strong case for getting the police involved. Has your husband ever had a psychiatric evaluation?”

  Maureen rushed from the doctor’s surgery, sick with shame. In explaining both Harold’s past and his walk, she had been forced to see things for the first time from his point of view. The idea was insane and completely out of character, but it wasn’t Alzheimer’s. There was even a beauty in it, if only because Harold was doing something he believed in for once, and against all the odds. She had told the intern she needed time to think, and that she was worrying over nothing; Harold was just a little senior. He would be home soon. He might even be there already. She had ended up with a prescription for low-dosage sleeping tablets for herself.

  As she walked toward the quay, the truth came as bright as a light snapping on through the dark. The reason she had stayed with Harold all these years was not David. It wasn’t even because she felt sorry for her husband. She had stayed because, however lonely she was with Harold, the world without him would be even more desolate.

  Maureen bought a single pork chop and a yellowing bunch of broccoli at the supermarket.

  “Is that all?” said the girl at the cash point.

  Maureen couldn’t speak.

  She turned into Fossebridge Road and thought of the silence of the house that lay waiting for her. The unpaid household bills, in their neat but no less intimidating pile. Her body grew heavy, her feet slow.

  Rex was trimming the hedge with clippers as she reached the garden gate.

  “How’s the patient?” he said. “Getting better?”

  She nodded her head and went inside.

  Harold and the Cycling Mothers

  STRANGELY, IT WAS Mr. Napier who had teamed Harold and Queenie together all those years ago. He had summoned Harold to his wood-paneled office and told him he required Queenie to check the pubs’ account books on-site. He didn’t trust the landlords, and wanted to take them unawares. Since the lady didn’t drive, however, someone was required to take her. He had thought carefully about the matter, he said, tugging on a cigarette; as one of the more senior reps, and also one of the few married ones, Harold was the obvious candidate. Mr. Napier stood with his legs wide, as if by claiming more floor space he became bigger than everyone else, although actually he was a wily figure in a shiny suit who barely reached Harold’s shoulder.

  Harold had no choice, of course, but to agree. Privately he was anxious. He had not spoken to Queenie since the embarrassing episode in the cupboard. And besides, he had seen his time in the car as his own. He didn’t know if she would like Radio 2, for instance. He hoped she wouldn’t want to talk. It was bad enough with the chaps. He was uncomfortable with female things.

  “Glad that’s sorted,” said Mr. Napier. He held out his hand. It was disconcertingly slight and moist, like taking hold of a small reptile. “How’s the wife?”

  Harold faltered. “She’s well. How’s—?” He felt a cold panic. Mr. Napier was on his third wife in six years, a young woman with high blond hair, who had worked briefly as a barmaid. He didn’t take it kindly when people forgot her name.

  “Veronica is splendid. I hear your boy got into Cambridge.”

  Mr. Napier broke into a grin. His chain of thought shifted on a sixpence; Harold never knew what was coming next. “All brain and no dick,” he said, spitting out a shot of smoke from the side of his mouth. He stood, watching and laughing, waiting for his employee to come back at him, and knowing that he wouldn’t.

  Harold lowered his head. On the desk stood Mr. Napier’s prized collection of Murano glass clowns, some with blue faces, some lounging on their backs, o
thers playing instruments.

  “Don’t touch,” said Napier, and his forefinger shot out like a gun. “They were my mother’s.”

  Everyone knew they were his prize possessions, but to Harold the figures looked misshapen and lurid, as if their limbs and faces had contorted like slime in the sun, and the colors congealed. He couldn’t help feeling they were mocking him, even these glass clowns, and felt a wave of anger lick deep in his belly. Mr. Napier twisted his cigarette in the ashtray, and moved to the door.

  As Harold passed, he added, “And keep an eye on Hennessy, will you? You know what those bitches are like.” He tipped his nose with that forefinger, as if it was now the pointer to a shared secret, and not a gun, except of course Harold had no idea what he was talking about.

  He wondered if, despite her aptitude, Mr. Napier was already trying to get rid of her. His boss never trusted the people who were better than himself.

  The first drive came a few days later. Queenie appeared at his car, gripping her square handbag, as if she were off on a shopping trip instead of an inspection of a pub’s audit books. Harold knew the landlord of the pub; he was a slippery chap at the best of times. He couldn’t help feeling afraid for her.

  “I hear you’re driving me, Mr. Fry,” she said, slightly imperious.

  They traveled in silence. She sat beside him, very neat, her hands tucked in a pink ball in her lap. Harold had never felt so conscious of how he took the corners, or pressed his foot into the clutch, or pulled at the hand brake when they arrived. He leapt out to open the passenger door, and waited as her leg slowly emerged and groped for the pavement. Maureen’s ankles were so slim they made him weak with desire. Queenie’s on the other hand were thick. Rather like himself, he had felt, she lacked physical definition.

  When he glanced up, he was mortified to find her staring straight back at him. “Thank you, Mr. Fry,” she said at last, clipping away, with the handbag wedged on her arm.