The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

by Rachel Joyce

  It therefore came as a surprise, when he was checking the beer levels, to find the landlord beetroot-faced and dripping sweat.

  “Fuck me,” he said; “that little woman’s a demon. You can’t get a thing past her.”

  Harold felt a small rush of admiration, touched with pride.

  On the journey home, she was silent and still again. He even wondered if she was asleep, but it seemed rude to look, in case she wasn’t. He pulled into the yard at the brewery and she said suddenly, “Thank you.”

  He muttered something awkward about it being a pleasure.

  “I mean thank you for a few weeks ago,” she said. “The time in the stationery cupboard.”

  “Don’t mention it,” said Harold, meaning exactly that.

  “I was very upset. You were kind to me. I should have said thank you before but I was embarrassed. That was wrong.”

  He couldn’t meet her eye. He knew, without looking at her, that she was biting her lip.

  “I was glad to help.” He reapplied the snaps on his driving gloves.

  “You’re a gentleman,” she said, spreading the word into two halves so that for the first time he saw it for what it meant: a gentle man. With that, she opened her door before he could do it for her, and stepped out of his car. He watched her pick her way across the yard, steady and neat, in her brown suit, and it broke his heart. The honest plainness of her. He had got into bed that night and silently promised that whatever Mr. Napier had meant by his obscure remark, Harold would be true to it. He would look out for Queenie.

  Maureen’s voice had sailed through the dark. “I hope you’re not going to snore.”

  On the twelfth day, an endless bed of gray moved over the sky and land, bringing sheets of rain that smudged the color and contours out of everything. Harold stared ahead, straining to find a sense of direction, or the break in the cloud that had so delighted him, but it was like looking at the world through net curtains again. Everything was the same. He stopped referring to his guidebooks because the gap between their sense of knowing and his own of not knowing was too unbearable. He felt he was fighting his body, and failing.

  His clothes no longer dried. The leather of his shoes was so bloated with water, they lost their shape. Whitnage. Westleigh. Whiteball. So many places beginning with W. Trees. Hedgerow. Telegraph poles. Houses. Recycling bins. He left his razor and shaving foam in the shared bathroom of a guesthouse, and lacked the energy to replace them. Inspecting his feet, he was alarmed to discover that the burning in his calf had taken physical shape, and was a violent stain of crimson beneath the surface of the skin. For the first time, he was very frightened.

  In Sampford Arundel, Harold phoned Maureen. He needed to hear her voice, and he wanted her to remind him why he was walking, even if she did it in anger. He didn’t want her to suspect the doubt he was suffering, or the difficulty with his leg, so he asked how she was, and also the house; and she told him they were both good. She in turn asked if he was still walking, and he said that he had passed Exeter and Tiverton and was on his way to Bath, via Taunton. Was there anything he wanted sending on? His mobile, his toothbrush, his pajamas or spare clothes? There was a kindness in her voice, but he was surely imagining it.

  “I’m all right,” he said.

  “So you must almost be in Somerset?”

  “I’m not sure. I suppose I must.”

  “How many miles today?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe seven.”

  “Well, well,” she said.

  The rain beat the roof of the phone booth, and the dim light beyond the windows was like something fluid. He wanted to stay, talking to Maureen, but the silence and the distance, which they had nursed for twenty years, had grown to such a point that even clichés were empty, and they hurt.

  At last she said, “Well, I must get going, Harold. Lots to do.”

  “Yes. Me too. I just wanted to say hello and everything. Check you were all right.”

  “Oh, I’m very well. Very busy. The days whiz by. I hardly notice you’ve gone. And you?”

  “I’m very good too.”

  “That’s all right, then.”

  “Yes.”

  Eventually there was nothing left. He only said, “Well, goodbye, Maureen,” because it was a sentence. He didn’t want to hang up any more than he wanted to walk.

  He looked out at the rain, waiting for it to break, and saw a crow with its head bowed, its feathers so wet they shone like tar. He wished the bird would move, but it sat sodden and alone. Maureen was so busy she had hardly noticed Harold had gone.

  On Sunday it was almost lunchtime when he woke. The pain in his leg was no better, and the rain was still falling. He could hear the world outside, going about its business; the traffic, the people, all rushing to other things. No one knew who or where he was. He lay not moving, not wanting to face another day’s walking, and yet knowing he couldn’t go home. He remembered how Maureen used to lie at his side, and he pictured her nakedness; how perfect it was, and how small. He yearned for the softness of her fingers as they crept their passage over his skin.

  When Harold reached for his yachting shoes, they were paper thin at the soles. He didn’t shower or shave or inspect his feet, although putting them into his shoes felt like cramming them into cases. He dressed without thinking of anything because thinking would only lead to the obvious. The landlady insisted he could have a late breakfast, but he declined. If he accepted her kindness, if he so much as caught her eye, he was afraid he would cry.

  Harold kept going from Sampford Arundel but hated every step. He screwed his face against the pain. It didn’t matter what people thought; he was outside them anyway. He wouldn’t stop, though his body cried out for rest. He was angry with himself for being so frail. The rain drove at him in slants. His shoes were so spent, he might as well not be wearing them. He missed Maureen and could think of nothing else.

  How was it that things had gone so wrong? They had been happy once. If David had caused a rift between them as he grew, it had been a complicit one. “Where’s David?” Maureen might ask, and Harold would simply reply that he had heard the front door shutting as he cleaned his teeth. “Ah yes,” she would say, to show it wasn’t a problem that their eighteen-year-old son had taken to wandering the streets at night. To voice Harold’s private fears would only compound hers. And the fact was she still cooked in those days. She still shared Harold’s bed.

  But such unspoken tensions could not hide themselves for ever. It was just before Queenie’s disappearance that things had finally ripped open and splintered apart. Maureen had railed. She had sobbed. She had beat his chest with her fists. “Call yourself a man?” she had howled. And another time: “It’s your fault. All this. It would have been fine, if it hadn’t been for you.”

  It had been unbearable to hear those things, and even though she had wept in his arms afterwards, and apologized, they were in the air when he was alone, and there was no unsaying them. It all came from Harold.

  And then it had stopped. The talking, the shouting, the catching his eye. This new silence was different from before. Whereas once they had wished to spare one another pain, now there was nothing left to salvage. She didn’t even have to give voice to the words in her head. He knew simply by looking at her that there was not a word, not a gesture he could say or do to make amends. She no longer blamed Harold. She no longer cried in front of him; she wouldn’t allow him the comfort of holding her.

  She moved her clothes into the spare room and he lay in their marital bed, not going to her because she didn’t want him, but tortured by her sobs. Morning would come. They would use the bathroom at different times. He would dress and eat breakfast while she paced from room to room, as if he were not there, as if never keeping still was the only way to contain a person’s feelings. “I’m off.” “OK then.” “See you later.” “Yes. OK.”

  The words meant nothing. They might as well have been Chinese. There was no bridging the gap that lay between two huma
n beings. Just before his retirement, he had suggested they might for once go to the brewery Christmas party and she had stared back at him with her mouth gaping as if he were guilty of assault.

  Harold stopped looking at the hills, the sky, and the trees. He stopped looking for the road signs that would mark his journey north. He walked against the wind, with his head bowed, seeing only rain because that was all there was. The A38 was far worse than he had imagined. He stuck to the hard shoulder, and walked behind the barrier when he could, but traffic tore past at such speed he was drenched and constantly in danger. After several hours, he realized he had been so lost in remembering and mourning the past, he had wasted two miles heading in the wrong direction. There was nothing for it but to retrace his steps.

  Walking the road already traveled was even harder. It was like not moving at all. It was worse, like eating into a part of himself. West of Bagley Green, he gave up and stopped at a farmhouse advertising accommodation.

  His host was a worried-looking man, who said he had one available room. The others were occupied by six female cyclists on the trail from Land’s End to John o’Groat’s. “They’re all mothers,” he said. “You get the impression they’re letting their hair down.” He warned Harold it might be better to keep a low profile.

  Harold slept poorly. He was dreaming again, and the mother-cyclists seemed to be having a party. Harold slipped between sleep and consciousness, afraid of the pain in his leg but desperate to forget it. The women’s voices became those of the aunts who had replaced his mother. There was laughter, and a grunt as his father emptied himself. Harold lay with his eyes wide and his leg throbbing, wishing the night was over and he was somewhere else.

  In the morning the pain had worsened. The skin above his heel was streaked with purple, and so swollen it would barely fit inside the shoe. He had to ram it home, wincing at the pain. He caught his face in the mirror, and it was haggard and burnt, covered in sharp stubble like pinheads. He looked ill. All he could picture was his father in the nursing home, with his slippers on the wrong feet. “Say hello to your son,” the caregiver had said. Catching sight of Harold, his father had begun to shake.

  Harold hoped to finish his breakfast before the cycling mothers awoke, but just as he was draining his coffee they descended on the farmhouse dining room in a burst of fluorescent Lycra and laughter.

  “You know what,” said one. “I don’t know how I am going to get on that bike again.” The others laughed. Of the six women, she was the loudest and gave the impression of being the ringleader. Harold hoped that by remaining quiet he would go unnoticed, but she caught his eye and winked. “I hope we didn’t disturb you,” she said.

  She was dark-skinned with a skeletal face and hair cropped so close her scalp looked fragile. He couldn’t help wishing she had a hat. These girls were her life support, she told Harold; she didn’t know where she’d be without them. She lived in a small flat with her daughter. “I’m not the settling kind,” she said. “I don’t need a man.” She named all the things she could do without one. It seemed to Harold there were an awful lot, though she spoke at such speed he had to concentrate on her mouth in order to understand. It took effort to keep watching and listening, and taking her in, when within himself there was such pain. “I’m free as a bird,” she said, and she stuck out her arms to show what she meant. Puffs of dark hair sprouted from her armpits.

  There was a round of wolf whistles, and cries of “Go, girl!” Harold felt the need to join in, but could only go so far as a light clapping of his hands. The woman laughed and smacked her palm against theirs, although there was something febrile about her independence that made him nervous on her behalf.

  “I sleep with who I want. I had my daughter’s piano teacher last week. I had a Buddhist on my yoga retreat, and he was sworn to celibacy.” Several of the mothers whooped.

  The only woman with whom Harold had slept was Maureen. Even when she threw away her cookery books, and had her hair cut short, even when he heard her door lock click at night, he had not looked for anyone else. He knew other chaps at the brewery had affairs. There had once been a bar lady who laughed at his jokes, even the poor ones, and nudged a glass of whiskey across the bar so that their hands almost touched. But he hadn’t the stomach for more. He could never imagine himself with anyone other than Maureen; they had shared so much. To live without her would be like scooping out the vital parts of himself, and he would be no more than a fragile envelope of skin. He found himself congratulating the cycling mother, because he wasn’t sure what else to do, and then he stood to make his excuses. A flash shot up his leg so that he stumbled and had to reach for the table. He pretended to be scratching his arm while it came and went, and came again.

  “Bon voyage,” said the cycling mother. She rose to embrace him, bringing a thick smell of citrus and sweat that was half pleasant and half not so.

  She laughed as she pulled back and rested her arms on his shoulders. “Free as a bird,” she told him; her face very full of it.

  He felt a chill in his heart. Glancing beyond himself, he saw that the underside of her arm was lacerated with two deep scars that scissored the flesh between her wrist and elbow. In places, one still wore the beads of a scab. He nodded stiffly, and wished her luck.

  Harold couldn’t go for more than fifteen minutes without needing to stop and rest his right leg. His back, neck, arms, and shoulders were so sore he thought of little else. The rain drove at him in thick pins that bounced off the roofs and tarmac. After only an hour, he was stumbling and desperate to stop. There were trees ahead and something red that was maybe a flag. People left the strangest things at the roadside.

  The rain plashed on the leaves, making them shiver, and the air smelled of the soft leaf mold at his feet. As Harold grew closer to the flag, his shoulders hunched. The splash of red was not a flag. It was a Liverpool football T-shirt, hanging from a wooden cross.

  He had passed several roadside memorials but none of them disturbed him so much as this one. He told himself to walk on the other side and not look, but he couldn’t. He was drawn to it, like something he shouldn’t see. Evidently a relative or friend had decorated the cross with glittery Christmas baubles in the shape of pine trees, and a plastic wreath of holly. Harold examined the wilting flowers in cellophane, bled of color, and a photograph in a plastic wallet. The man was maybe in his forties, thickset, with dark hair, and a child’s hand trailing his shoulder. He was grinning at the camera. To the best dad in the world, read the words on a sodden card.

  What eulogy would you write for the worst one?

  “Fuck you,” David had hissed, as his legs failed him and he seemed to be in danger of catapulting down the stairs. “Fuck you.”

  Harold wiped the rain from the photograph with a clean corner of his handkerchief, and flicked it from the flowers. As he walked on, all he could think of was the cycling mother. He wondered when it was that she had felt so desolate she had cut her arms, and left them to bleed. He wondered who had found her, and what they had done. Had she wanted to be saved? Or had they dragged her back to life, just as she believed she was free of it? He wished he could have said something; something to make her never do it again. If he had comforted her, he could have let her go. As it was, he knew that in meeting her, and listening, he was carrying another weight in his heart and he wasn’t sure how much more of that he could take. Despite the pain in his calf and the cold in his bones, despite the trouble in his mind, he drove himself harder.

  Harold reached the outskirts of Taunton by late afternoon. The houses were packed together, and studded with satellite dishes. At the windows hung gray net drapes; some were boarded with metal shutters. The few gardens that were not concrete had been flattened by rain. The blossoms of a cherry tree lay scattered like wet paper across the pavement. The traffic sped past so loud it hurt and the roads looked oiled.

  A memory surged into his mind, one of those that Harold most feared. He was normally so good at repressing them. He tried t
o think about Queenie, but even that wouldn’t work. He shot his elbows out sideways to go faster and drove his feet against the paving stones with such fury he hadn’t the breathing to keep up. But nothing would hide him from the memory of an afternoon twenty years ago when it had all come to an end. He could see his hand reaching for the wooden door; feel the warmth of the sun on his shoulders; smell the moldering, heated-up air; hear the stillness of a silence that is not what it should be.

  “No,” he shouted, batting out at the rain.

  Suddenly his calf exploded as if the skin side of the muscle had been sliced open. The ground tipped at an angle, and seemed to swell. He reached out a hand to stop it, but in the same moment his knees buckled and his body lurched to the ground. He felt his hands and knees smart.

  Forgive me. Forgive me. For letting you down.

  The next thing he knew, someone was tugging at his arms, and shouting about an ambulance.

  Harold and the Doctor

  HAROLD’S COLLAPSE CAUSED cuts to his knees and hands, and bruising on both elbows. The woman who rescued him had spotted his fall from her bathroom window. She helped Harold to his feet and retrieved the contents of his plastic bag, and then she supported him across the road, waving at traffic. “Doctor, doctor!” she shouted. Inside her house, she led him to an easy chair and loosened his tie. The room seemed sparse and cold; a television had been angled on top of a packing box. Close by, a dog was barking at a closed door. Harold had never been comfortable with dogs.

  “Did I break anything?” he said.

  She said words he couldn’t understand.

  “There was a pot of honey,” he said, more panicky. “Is it still in one piece?”

  The woman nodded and reached for his pulse. She covered his wrist with her fingertips and stared into the middle distance, as if seeing shapes beyond the walls, while she counted under her breath. She was young, but her face had a scraped-back look, and her jogging trousers and sweatshirt hung from her body, suggesting they belonged to someone else. A man, perhaps.