The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

by Rachel Joyce

  Spotting Harold, the next-door neighbor waved and steered his way toward the adjoining fence. Rex was a short man with tidy feet at the bottom, a small head at the top, and a very round body in the middle, causing Harold to fear sometimes that if he fell there would be no stopping him. He would roll down the hill like a barrel. Rex had been widowed six months ago, at about the time of Harold’s retirement. Since Elizabeth’s death, he liked to talk about how hard life was. He liked to talk about it at great length. “The least you can do is listen,” Maureen said, although Harold wasn’t sure if she meant “you” in the general sense or the particular.

  “Off for a walk?” said Rex.

  Harold attempted a jocular tone that would act, he hoped, as an intimation that now was not the time to stop. “Need anything posted, old chap?”

  “Nobody writes to me. Since Elizabeth passed away, I only get circulars.”

  Rex gazed into the middle distance and Harold recognized at once the direction the conversation was heading. He threw a look upward; puffs of cloud sat on a tissue-paper sky. “Jolly nice day.”

  “Jolly nice,” said Rex. There was a pause and Rex poured a sigh into it. “Elizabeth liked the sun.” Another pause.

  “Good day for mowing, Rex.”

  “Very good, Harold. Do you compost your grass cuttings? Or do you mulch?”

  “I find mulching leaves a mess that sticks to my feet. Maureen doesn’t like it when I tread things into the house.” Harold glanced at his yachting shoes and wondered why people wore them when they had no intention of sailing. “Well. Must get on. Catch the midday collection.” Wagging his envelope, Harold turned toward the pavement.

  For the first time in his life, it was a disappointment to find that the postbox cropped up sooner than expected. Harold tried to cross the road to avoid it, but there it was, waiting for him on the corner of Fossebridge Road. He lifted his letter for Queenie to the slot, and stopped. He looked back at the short distance his feet had traveled.

  The detached houses were stuccoed and washed in shades of yellow, salmon, and blue. Some still had their pointed fifties roofs with decorative beams in the shape of a half sun; others had slate-clad loft extensions; one had been completely rebuilt in the style of a Swiss chalet. Harold and Maureen had moved here forty-five years ago, just after they were married. It took all his savings to pay the deposit; there had been nothing left for curtains or furniture. They had kept themselves apart from others, and over time neighbors had come and gone, while only Harold and Maureen remained. There had once been vegetable beds, and an ornamental pond. She made chutneys every summer, and David kept goldfish. Behind the house there had been a potting shed that smelled of fertilizer, with high hooks for hanging tools, and coils of twine and rope. But these things too were long since gone. Even their son’s school, which had stood a stone’s throw from his bedroom window, was bulldozed now and replaced with fifty affordable homes in bright primary colors and street lighting in the style of Georgian gas lamps.

  Harold thought of the words he had written to Queenie, and their inadequacy shamed him. He pictured himself returning home, and Maureen calling David, and life being exactly the same except for Queenie dying in Berwick, and he was overcome. The letter rested on the dark mouth of the postbox. He couldn’t let it go.

  “After all,” he said out loud, though nobody was looking, “it’s a nice day.” He hadn’t anything else to do. He might as well walk to the next one. He turned the corner of Fossebridge Road before he could change his mind.

  It was not like Harold to make a snap decision. He saw that. Since his retirement, days went by and nothing changed; only his waist thickened, and he lost more hair. He slept poorly at night, and sometimes he did not sleep at all. Yet, arriving more promptly than he anticipated at a postbox, he paused again. He had started something and he didn’t know what it was, but now that he was doing it, he wasn’t ready to finish. Beads of perspiration sprouted over his forehead; his blood throbbed with anticipation. If he took his letter to the post office on Fore Street, it would be guaranteed next day delivery.

  The sun pressed warm on the back of his head and shoulders as he strolled down the avenues of new housing. Harold glanced in at people’s windows, and sometimes they were empty, and sometimes people were staring right back at him and he felt obliged to rush on. Sometimes, though, there was an object that he didn’t expect; a porcelain figure, or a vase, and even a tuba. The tender pieces of themselves that people staked as boundaries against the outside world. He tried to visualize what a passerby would learn about himself and Maureen from the windows of 13 Fossebridge Road, before he realized it would be not very much, on account of the net curtains. He headed for the quayside, with the muscles twitching in his thighs.

  The tide was out and dinghies lolled in a moonscape of black mud, needing paint. Harold hobbled to an empty bench, inched Queenie’s letter from his pocket, and unfolded it.

  She remembered. After all these years. And yet he had lived out his ordinary life as if what she had done meant nothing. He hadn’t tried to stop her. He hadn’t followed. He hadn’t even said goodbye. The sky and pavement blurred into one as fresh tears swelled his eyes. Then through them came the watery outline of a young mother and child. They seemed to be holding ice cream cones, and bore them like torches. She lifted the boy and set him down on the other end of the bench.

  “Lovely day,” said Harold, not wanting to sound like an old man who was crying. She didn’t look up, or agree. Bending over her child’s fist, she licked a smooth path to stop the ice cream from running. The boy watched his mother, so still and close it was as if his face was part of hers.

  Harold wondered if he had ever sat by the quay eating ice cream with David. He was sure he must have done, although searching in his mind for the memory, he found it wasn’t readily available. He must get on. He must post his letter.

  Office workers were laughing with lunchtime pints outside the Old Creek Inn, but Harold barely noticed. As he began the steep climb up Fore Street, he thought about the mother who was so absorbed in her son she saw no one else. It occurred to him it was Maureen who spoke to David and told him their news. It was Maureen who had always written Harold’s name (“Dad”) in the letters and cards. It was even Maureen who had found the nursing home for his father. And it raised the question—as he pushed the button at the pelican crossing—that if she was, in effect, Harold, “then who am I?”

  He strode past the post office without even stopping.

  Harold and the Garage Girl and a

  Question of Faith

  HAROLD WAS NEAR the top of Fore Street. He had passed the closed-down Woolworths, the bad butcher (“He beats his wife,” Maureen said), the good butcher (“His wife left him”), the clock tower, the Shambles, as well as the offices of the South Hams Gazette, and now he was at the last of the shops. The muscles in his calves pulled with every step. Behind him, the estuary shone like a sheet of tin against the sun; boats were already tiny flecks of white. He paused at the travel agent, because he wanted to take a rest without anyone noticing, and pretended to read about bargain holidays in the window. Bali, Naples, Istanbul, Dubai. His mother used to talk so dreamily about escaping to countries where there were tropical trees, and women with flowers in their hair, that as a boy he had instinctively distrusted the world he did not know. It had not been very different once he was married to Maureen, and they had David. Every year they spent two weeks in the same holiday camp in Eastbourne. Taking several deep breaths to steady his chest, Harold continued north.

  The shops turned into homes, some built in pinky-gray Devon stone, some painted, others fronted with slate tiles, followed by cul-de-sacs of new housing. Magnolias were coming into flower; frilled white stars against branches so bare they looked stripped. It was already one o’clock; he had missed the midday collection. He would buy a snack to tide him over and then he would find the next postbox. After waiting for a gap in the traffic, Harold crossed toward a petrol station, where
the houses stopped and the fields took over.

  A young girl at the till yawned. She wore a red smock over a T-shirt and trousers, with a badge that said HAPPY TO HELP. Her hair hung in oily strips on either side of her head so that her ears poked through, and her skin was pockmarked and pale, as if she had been kept inside for a long time. She didn’t know what he was talking about when he asked for light refreshments. She opened her mouth and it remained hanging ajar, so that he feared a change in the wind would leave her like that. “A snack?” he said. “Something to keep me going?”

  Her eyes flickered. “Oh, you mean a burger.” She trudged to the fridge and showed him how to heat a BBQ Cheese Beast with fries in the microwave.

  “Good lord,” said Harold, as they watched it revolve in its box behind the window. “I had no idea you could get a full meal from a garage.”

  The girl fetched the burger from the microwave and offered packets of ketchup and brown sauce. “Are you paying for fuel?” she asked, slowly wiping her hands. They were small as a child’s.

  “No, no, I am just passing. Walking actually.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “I’m posting a letter to someone I knew once. I’m afraid she has cancer.” To his horror, he found that he paused before saying the word and lowered his voice. He also found he had made a small nugget shape with his fingers.

  The girl nodded. “My aunt had cancer,” she said. “I mean, it’s everywhere.” She cast her eyes up and down the shop shelves, suggesting it was even to be found tucked behind the road maps and Turtle Wax polish. “You have to keep positive, though.”

  Harold stopped eating his burger and mopped his mouth with a paper napkin. “Positive?”

  “You have to believe. That’s what I think. It’s not about medicine and all that stuff. You have to believe a person can get better. There is so much in the human mind we don’t understand. But, you see, if you have faith, you can do anything.”

  Harold gazed at the girl in awe. He didn’t know how it had happened, but she seemed to be standing in a pool of light, as if the sun had moved, and her hair and skin shone with luminous clarity. Maybe he was staring too hard, because she gave a shrug and chewed at her lower lip. “Am I talking crap?”

  “Gosh, no. Not at all. It’s very interesting. I’m afraid religion is not something I ever quite got the hang of.”

  “I don’t mean, like, religious. I mean, trusting what you don’t know and going for it. Believing you can make a difference.” She twined a strand of hair round her finger.

  Harold felt he had never come across such simple certainty, and in such a young person; she made it sound obvious. “And she got better, did she? Your aunt? Because you believed she could?”

  The strand of hair was twiddled so fast round her finger he was now afraid it was stuck. “She said it gave her hope when everything else had gone—”

  “Does anyone work here?” shouted a man in a pinstripe suit from the counter. He rapped his car keys on the hard surface, beating out wasted time.

  The girl threaded her way back to the till, where the pinstripe made a show of checking his watch. He held his wrist high in the air and pointed to the dial. “I’m supposed to be in Exeter in thirty minutes.”

  “Fuel?” said the girl, resuming her place, in front of cigarettes and lottery tickets. Harold tried to catch her eye but she wouldn’t meet his. She had returned to being dull and empty again, as if their conversation about her aunt had never happened.

  Harold left his money for the burger on the counter and made his way to the door. Faith? Wasn’t that the word she had used? Not one he usually heard, but it was strange. Even though he wasn’t sure what she meant by faith, or what there was left that he believed in, the word rang in his head with an insistence that bewildered him. At sixty-five he had begun to anticipate difficulties. A stiffening of the joints; a dull ringing in his ears; eyes that watered with the slightest change in the wind; a dart of chest pain that presaged something more ominous. But what was this sudden surge of feeling that made his body shake with its sheer energy? He turned in the direction of the A381, and promised again that at the next postbox he would stop.

  He was leaving Kingsbridge. The road narrowed into a single lane, until the pavement disappeared altogether. Above him, the branches joined like the roof of a tunnel, tangled with pointed new buds and clouds of blossom. More than once he had to crush himself into a hawthorn to avoid a passing car. There were single drivers, and he supposed they must be office workers because their faces appeared fixed as if the joy had been squeezed away, and then there were women driving children, and they looked tired too. Even the older couples like himself and Maureen had a rigidity about them. An impulse to wave came over Harold. He didn’t, though. He was wheezing with the effort of walking and he didn’t want to cause alarm.

  The sea lay behind; before him stretched rolling hills and the blue outline of Dartmoor. And beyond that? The Blackdown Hills, the Mendips, the Malverns, the Pennines, the Yorkshire Dales, the Cheviots, and Berwick-upon-Tweed.

  But here, directly across the road, stood a postbox, and a little way beyond it a telephone booth. Harold’s journey was over.

  He dragged his feet. He had seen so many he’d lost count, as well as two Royal Mail vans and a courier on a motorbike. Harold thought of all the things in life he’d let go. The small smiles. The offers of a beer. The people he had passed over and over again, in the brewery car park, or on the street, without lifting his head. The neighbors whose forwarding addresses he had never kept. Worse: the son who didn’t speak to him and the wife he had betrayed. He remembered his father in the nursing home, and his mother’s suitcase by the door. And now here was a woman who twenty years ago had proved herself a friend. Was this how it went? That just at the moment when he wanted to do something, it was too late? That all the pieces of a life must eventually be surrendered, as if in truth they amounted to nothing? The knowledge of his helplessness pressed down on him so heavily he felt weak. It wasn’t enough to send a letter. There must be a way to make a difference. Reaching for his mobile, Harold realized it was at home. He staggered into the road, his face thick with grief.

  A van shrieked to a halt and skirted past. “You stupid fucker!” yelled the driver.

  He barely heard. He barely saw the postbox either. Queenie’s letter was in his hands before the door of the telephone kiosk had closed behind him.

  He found the address and telephone number, but his fingers shook so hard he could barely tap the buttons to enter his PIN code. He waited for the ringing tone, and the air hung still and heavy. A trickle of sweat slid between his shoulder blades.

  After ten rings there was at last a clunk, and a heavily accented voice: “St. Bernadine’s Hospice. Good afternoon.”

  “I’d like to speak to a patient, please. Her name is Queenie Hennessy.”

  There was a pause.

  He added, “It’s very urgent. I need to know that she’s all right.”

  The woman made a sound as if she was breathing out a long sigh. Harold’s spine chilled. Queenie was dead; he was too late. He clamped his knuckle to his mouth.

  The voice said, “I’m afraid Miss Hennessy is asleep. Can I take a message?”

  Small clouds sent shadows scurrying across the land. The light was smoky over the distant hills, not with the dusk but with the map of space that lay ahead. He pictured Queenie dozing at one end of England and himself in a phone booth at the other, with things in between that he didn’t know and could only imagine: roads, fields, rivers, woods, moors, peaks and valleys, and so many people. He would meet and pass them all. There was no deliberation, no reasoning. The decision came in the same moment as the idea. He was laughing at the simplicity of it.

  “Tell her Harold Fry is on his way. All she has to do is wait. Because I am going to save her, you see. I will keep walking and she must keep living. Will you say that?”

  The voice said she would. Was there anything else? Did he know visiting hours,
for instance? Parking restrictions?

  He repeated, “I’m not in a car. I want her to live.”

  “I’m sorry. Did you say something about your car?”

  “I’m coming by foot. From South Devon all the way up to Berwick-upon-Tweed.”

  The voice gave an exasperated sigh. “It’s a terrible line. What are you doing?”

  “I’m walking,” he shouted.

  “I see,” said the voice slowly, as if she had picked up a pen and was jotting this down. “Walking. I’ll tell her. Should I say anything else?”

  “I’m setting off right now. As long as I walk, she must live. Please tell her this time I won’t let her down.”

  When Harold hung up and stepped out of the phone booth, his heart was pounding so fast it felt too big for his chest. With trembling fingers, he unpeeled the flap of his own envelope and pulled out the reply. Cramming it against the glass of the kiosk, he scribbled a PS: Wait for me. H. He posted the letter, without noticing its loss.

  Harold stared at the ribbon of road that lay ahead, and the glowering wall that was Dartmoor, and then the yachting shoes that were his feet. He asked himself what in heaven’s name he’d just done.

  Overhead a seagull cracked its wings and laughed.

  Maureen and the Telephone Call

  THE USEFUL THING about a sunny day was that it showed up the dust, and dried the laundry in almost less time than the tumble drier. Maureen had squirted, bleached, polished, and annihilated every living organism on the worktops. She had washed and aired the sheets, pressed them, and remade the beds for both herself and Harold. It had been a relief to have him out of the way; in the six months of his retirement he had barely moved from the house. But now that she had nothing left to achieve, she was suddenly anxious and this in turn made her impatient. She rang Harold’s mobile, only to hear a marimba tone coming from upstairs. She listened to his faltering message: “You have reached the mobile phone of Harold Fry. I am very sorry but—he isn’t here.” From the long pause he took in the middle, you’d think he was actually off looking for himself.