The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry: A Novel

by Rachel Joyce

  “I don’t need a doctor,” Harold said with a hoarse whisper. “Please don’t call an ambulance or a doctor.”

  Harold didn’t want to be in her house. He didn’t want to take up her time, or get close to another stranger, and he was afraid she would send him home. He wanted to speak to Maureen, but he was also afraid he wouldn’t know what to say without troubling her. He wished he hadn’t given in to his fall. It had been in him to keep going.

  The young woman passed a mug of tea, offering the handle so that he wouldn’t burn his fingers. She was saying something else but he couldn’t make it out. He tried to smile as if he had understood but she kept looking at him, waiting for his reply, and then she said it again, with more volume and less speed:

  “What the fuck were you doing out there in the rain?”

  He realized now that she had a thick accent. Eastern European maybe. He and Maureen read about people like her in the news. They came over for the benefits, the papers said. Meanwhile, the dog was increasingly sounding not like a dog and more like a wild beast. It was hurling its full body weight against its temporary imprisonment, and sounded in danger of biting at least one of them when free. You read about dogs like that in the papers as well.

  Harold reassured her that as soon as he had finished his tea, he would get going. He told his story, which she heard in silence. This was why he couldn’t stop or see a doctor; he had made a promise to Queenie and he must not fail her. He took a sip from his mug, and looked at the window. A large tree trunk stood right in front of it. Its roots were probably damaging the house and it needed cutting back. Beyond, the traffic came at fast intervals. The thought of returning outside filled him with dread, and yet he had no choice. When he looked back to the young woman, she was still watching him, and still not smiling.

  “But you’re fucked.” She said it without emotion or judgment.

  “Ah yes,” said Harold.

  “Your shoes are fucked. So is your body. And your spectacles.” She held up two halves of his reading glasses, one in each hand. “Every way you look at it, you’re fucked. How do you think you’re going to make it to Berwick?”

  It reminded him of the very deliberate way in which David swore: as if he had carefully considered all the options and, given what he felt for his father, the foulest expressions were the only ones suitable.

  “I am—as you rightly point out—fucked.” Harold hung his head. His trousers were splattered with mud, and frayed at the knees. His shoes were sodden. He wished he had taken them off at the door. “I admit it is an awfully long way to Berwick. I admit I am wearing the wrong clothes. And I also admit I have not the training, or the physique, for my walk. I can’t explain why I think I can get there, when all the odds are against it. But I do. Even when a big part of me is saying I should give up, I can’t. Even when I don’t want to keep going, I still do it.” He faltered because what he was saying was difficult and caused him anguish. “I am terribly sorry but my shoes appear to have wet your carpet.”

  To his surprise, when he stole a glance at the young woman, she was smiling for the first time. She offered him a room for the night.

  At the bottom of the stairs, she kicked the door that housed the angry dog with the underside of her foot, and told Harold to follow. He was afraid of the dog and he didn’t want her to worry about the amount of pain he was in, so he tried to keep up with her. The truth was that his knees and palms felt spiked after his fall, and he couldn’t put any weight on his right leg. The woman told him that her name was Martina; she was from Slovakia. He would have to excuse this shit hole, she said, and also the noise. “We thought this fucking place was temporary.” Harold tried to make his face look like that of someone who was used to her sort of language. He didn’t want to appear judgmental.

  “I curse too much,” she said, as if reading his thoughts.

  “It’s your house, Martina. You must say what you like.”

  The dog was still barking and clawing at the paintwork from the door below.

  “Shut the fuck up,” she yelled. Harold could see the fillings at the back of her teeth.

  “My son always wanted a dog,” he said.

  “It’s not mine. It’s my partner’s.” She threw open the door of an upstairs room and stood aside to let him enter.

  The room smelled of emptiness and new paint. The walls were a stark white, with a purple bedspread that matched the curtains, and three sequined cushions over the pillows. It touched Harold that Martina, for all her bitterness, had taken such care over her soft furnishings. At the window, the upper branches and leaves of the tree crushed themselves against the glass. She said she hoped Harold would be comfortable, and he assured her that he would. Left alone, he eased his body onto the bed, and felt every muscle throbbing. He knew he should examine the cuts, and wash them, but he hadn’t the will to move. He hadn’t even the will to remove the shoes from his feet.

  He didn’t know how he was going to carry on like this. He was frightened, and he felt alone. It reminded him of his teens; of hiding in his room, while his father crashed into bottles or made love to the aunts. He wished he hadn’t accepted Martina’s offer to stay the night. Maybe she was already phoning a doctor? He could hear her voice downstairs, although listening hard he didn’t recognize any of the words. Maybe it was her partner. Maybe her partner would insist on driving Harold home.

  He pulled Queenie’s letter from his pocket, but without his reading glasses the words spilled into one another.

  Dear Harold,

  This may come to you as some surprise. I know it is a long time since we last met, but recently I have been thinking about the past. Last year I had an operation on a tumor, but the cancer has spread and there is nothing left to be done. I am at peace, and comfortable, but I would like to thank you for the friendship you showed me all those years ago. Please send my regards to your wife. I still think of David with fondness.

  With my best wishes

  He could hear her steady voice as clearly as if she were standing before him. But the shame. The shame of being the one who had let down a good woman, and never done anything about it.

  “Harold. Harold.” He must get there. He must get to Berwick. He must find her. “Are you all right?” He stirred himself. The voice wasn’t that of Queenie. It was the woman whose room he was using. It was Martina. He was finding it hard to distinguish the past from the present. “Can I come in?” she called.

  Harold tried to stand, but the door opened before he made it to his feet, so that she caught him in an odd crouched position, half on the bed, and half not. She stood at the threshold, holding a washing-up bowl, and two towels over one arm. In the other she held a plastic first aid box. “For your feet,” she said, nodding her head in the direction of his yachting shoes.

  “You can’t wash my feet.” Harold was standing now.

  “I’m not here to wash them, but you’re walking funny. I need to look.”

  “They’re fine. There is no problem.”

  She frowned impatiently, and slouched the weight of the plastic bowl on her hip. “So how do you take care of them?”

  “I put on plasters.”

  Martina laughed but not in a way that suggested she was amused. “If you think you’re going to get to fucking Berwick, we need to get you right, Harold.”

  It was the first time anyone had referred to his walk as a shared responsibility. He could have wept with gratitude, but instead he nodded and sat back down.

  Martina knelt, and retied her ponytail, and then she carefully spread one of her towels on the carpet, smoothing out the folds. The only sound came from the traffic and the rain and the wind, jamming the branches of the tree with shrill cries at the glass. The light was dimming, but she did not put on a lamp. She held out her cupped hands, waiting.

  Harold removed his socks and shoes, although it hurt to bend, and unpeeled the most recent set of plasters. He could sense her watching carefully. As he set his naked feet side by side, he couldn’t h
elp but see them through the eyes of a stranger and he was shocked, as if he were noticing them for the first time. They were an unhealthy white, verging on gray, the indent of his socks making ridges into the skin. Blisters swelled from his toes, heels, and instep; some bleeding, others inflamed sacs of pus. The nail of his big toe was tough as a hoof, and a dark blueberry color where it had rammed against the end of his shoe. A thickened layer of skin grew over his heel, cracked in places and also bleeding. He had to hold his breath against the smell.

  “You don’t want to see any more.”

  “I do,” she said. “Roll up your trouser leg.”

  He winced as the fabric brushed over his right calf and scalded it. He had never let a stranger touch his bare skin before. He remembered how he had stood on his wedding night in the hotel bathroom in Holt, frowning at the reflection of his bare chest, and fearing Maureen would be disappointed.

  Martina was still waiting. She said, “It’s OK. I know what I am doing. I’m trained.”

  Harold’s right foot shot of its own accord behind his left ankle, and hid there. “You mean you’re a nurse?”

  She gave him a sardonic look. “A doctor. Women are these days. I trained in a hospital in Slovakia. That’s where I met my partner. He worked there too. Give me your foot, Harold. I won’t send you home. I promise.”

  He had no choice. Gently she lifted his ankle, and he felt the soft warmth of her palms. She touched the skin, working her path to the sole of his foot. Catching sight of the bruising above his right ankle, she winced and stopped, and craned her face closer. Her fingers crept over the damaged muscle, and sent a spasm fireworking deep inside his leg.

  “Does that hurt?”

  It did. Very much. He had to clench the insides of his buttocks in order not to grimace. “Not really.”

  She lifted his leg and peered at the underside. “The bruise goes all the way to the back of the knee.”

  “It doesn’t hurt,” he repeated.

  “If you continue to walk on this leg, it will get worse. And these blisters need treating. The bigger ones I will drain. Afterwards we’ll bandage your feet. You need to learn how to do that.”

  He watched as she punctured the first pocket of pus with a needle. He didn’t flinch. She pressed out the fluid, careful to leave the flap of skin intact. Harold allowed her to guide his left foot toward the bowl of soft, warm water. It was an intensely private act; almost between the woman and his foot, and not the rest of him. He looked at the ceiling so as not to look in the wrong place. It was such an English thing to do, but he did it anyway.

  He had always been too English; by which he supposed he meant that he was ordinary. He lacked color. Other people knew interesting stories, or had things to ask. He didn’t like to ask, because he didn’t like to offend. He wore a tie every day but sometimes he wondered if he was hanging on to an order or a set of rules that had never really existed. Maybe it would have been different if he’d had a proper education. Finished school. Gone to university. As it was, his father had presented him with an overcoat on his sixteenth birthday and shown him the door. The coat wasn’t new; it smelled of mothballs, and there was a bus ticket in the inside pocket.

  “It seems sad to see him go,” said his Aunty Sheila, though she didn’t cry. Of all the aunts she had been his favorite. She bent toward him to offer a kiss, bringing such waves of scent he had to walk away in order not to be silly and hug her.

  It had come as a relief to leave his childhood behind. And even though he had done what his father never had—he had found work, supported a wife and son, and loved them, if only from the sidelines—it sometimes occurred to Harold that the silence of his early years had followed him into his marital home, and lodged itself behind the carpet and curtains and wallpaper. The past was the past; there was no escaping your beginnings. Not even with a tie.

  Wasn’t David the proof of that?

  Martina lifted his foot to her lap and dried it in a soft towel, taking care not to rub. She squirted antibiotic cream onto her finger and applied it in small strokes. A deep blush mottled the soft dip below her throat. Her face was knotted with concentration. “You should be wearing two pairs of socks. Not one. And why haven’t you got walking boots?” She didn’t look up.

  “I intended to buy them when I got to Exeter. But then, after so much time on the road, I changed my mind. I looked at the shoes on my feet and they seemed perfectly all right. I couldn’t see why I needed new ones.”

  Martina caught his eye and smiled. He felt he had said something that pleased her, and which forged a connection between them. She told him her partner liked walking. They were planning a summer holiday in the Fells. “Maybe you could borrow his old boots? He bought a new pair. They’re still in their box in my wardrobe.” Harold insisted he was happy with yachting shoes. He felt a sort of loyalty to them, he said.

  “If my partner’s blisters are really bad, he binds them with duct tape to keep going.” She wiped her hands with a paper towel. The movement was slick and reassuring.

  “I think you must be a good doctor,” said Harold.

  She rolled her eyes. “I only get cleaning work in England. You think your feet are bad. You should see the fucking lavatories I have to scrub at.” They both laughed, and then, “Did your son ever get his dog?” she said.

  A sharp pain bolted through him. Her fingers stopped suddenly and she looked up, afraid she had found another bruise. He held his body taut and calmed his breathing, until he was able to form words. “No. I wish he had, but he didn’t. I am afraid I failed my son very badly twenty years ago.”

  Martina leaned back, as if she needed a new perspective. “Your son and Queenie? You failed them both?”

  She was the first person to ask about David in a long time. Harold wanted to say something else, but he had no idea where to begin. Sitting in a house he didn’t know, with his trousers rolled up to his knees, he missed his son very much. “It isn’t good enough. It never will be.” Tears stung his eyes. He blinked to hold them back.

  Martina broke off a ball of cotton wool to wash the cuts on his palms. The antiseptic stung the broken skin, but he didn’t move. He offered his hands and let her clean them.

  Martina lent him her phone, but when Harold rang Maureen the line was bad. He tried to explain where he was, but she didn’t seem to understand. “You’re staying with whom?” she kept saying. Not wanting to mention his leg, or his fall, he told her that his walk was going well. Time was flying.

  Martina gave him a mild painkiller but he slept badly. The traffic kept waking him, and the rain thrashing at the tree by the window. Periodically he checked his calf, hoping the leg was better, flexing it softly but not daring to put weight on it. He pictured David’s room, with the blue curtains, and his own with the wardrobe that held only his suits and shirts, and then the spare room that smelled of Maureen, until slowly he fell asleep.

  The following morning Harold stretched first his left side and then his right, pulling each joint one by one, yawning until his eyes watered. He could hear no rain. The light from the window passed through the leaves of the tree outside, sending shadows that rippled like water on the whitened wall. He stretched again and immediately fell back to sleep, not waking again until it was past eleven.

  After examining his leg, Martina said it looked a little better, but she would not advise him to walk. She changed the bandages on his feet, and asked if he would spend one more day resting; her partner’s dog would like the company while she worked. The animal was too much alone.

  “An aunt of mine had a dog,” he said. “It used to bite me when no one was looking.” Martina laughed, and so did Harold; although it had been a source of great loneliness and not inconsiderable pain at the time. “My mother left home just before my thirteenth birthday. She and my father were very unhappy. He drank and she wanted to travel. That’s all I remember. After she went, he got worse for a while, and then the neighbors found out. They loved mothering him. My father suddenly blosso
med. He brought home many aunts. He became a bit of a Casanova.” Harold had never spoken so openly about his past. He hoped he didn’t sound pitiful.

  Martina gave a smile that wriggled on her lips. “Aunts? Were they real ones?”

  “Metaphorical ones. He met them in pubs. They would stay for a while and then they would go. Every month the house smelled of new scent. There was always different underwear on the washing line. I used to lie on the grass, looking up. I had never seen anything so beautiful.”

  Her smile tipped into another laugh. He noticed how Martina’s face softened when she was happy, and how the color suited her cheeks. A strand of hair escaped from the tight ponytail. He was glad she didn’t scrape it back.

  For a moment all he could see in his mind’s eye was Maureen’s young face: gazing up at his, opened up, almost stripped, her soft mouth parted, waiting for what he might say next. The recalled thrill of landing her attention was so powerful Harold wished he could think of something else to amuse Martina; but he couldn’t.

  She said, “Did you never see your mother again?”

  “No.”

  “You never looked for her?”

  “Sometimes I wish I had. I would have liked to tell her I was all right, in case she was worrying. But she wasn’t cut out to be a mother. Maureen was the opposite. She seemed to know how to love David right from the start.”

  He fell silent, and so did Martina. He felt safe with what he had confided. It had been the same with Queenie. You could say things in the car and know she had tucked them somewhere safe among her thoughts, and that she would not judge him for them, or hold it against him in years to come. He supposed that was what friendship was, and regretted all the years he had spent without it.

  In the afternoon, while Martina did her cleaning job, Harold fixed his reading glasses with plasters and then he wedged open the back door, in order to clear the small garden. The dog sat watching him with interest, but it didn’t bark. Harold found her partner’s tools and tidied the edges of the lawn, and pruned back the branches of the hedge. His leg was very stiff, and since he couldn’t remember what he had done with his shoes, he walked with bare feet. The warm dust worked on his heels like velvet, and melted the tension. He wondered if he had time to tackle the tree that obscured the bedroom window, but it was too high and there was no ladder.