The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

by Rachel Joyce

  When she returned from work, Martina presented him with a brown paper bag inside which he found his yachting shoes, resoled and polished. She had even given them fresh laces.

  “You don’t get service like that on the National Health Service,” she said, moving away before he could thank her.

  That night they ate together, and Harold reminded her she must let him pay for the room. She said they would see one another again in the morning, but Harold shook his head. He would be gone with the first light; he needed to make up for lost time. The dog sat at his feet, its head resting on Harold’s lap. “I’m sorry I didn’t get to meet your partner,” he said.

  Martina frowned. “He isn’t coming back.”

  The shock hit him like a blow. He was suddenly having to reconfigure his idea of Martina and her life, and the abruptness of that seemed brutal. “I don’t understand,” he said. “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know.” Martina’s face buckled. She pushed aside her plate, although she had not finished.

  “How can you not know?”

  “I bet you think I’m fucking crazy.”

  Harold thought of the people he had already met on his journey. All of them were different, but none struck him as strange. He considered his own life and how ordinary it might look from the outside, when really it held such darkness and trouble. “I don’t think you’re crazy,” he said. He offered his hand, and she studied it a moment as if a hand was something she had not considered holding before. Her fingers touched his.

  “We came to England so that he could get better work. We’d only been here a few months. Then one Saturday a woman turns up with two suitcases and a baby. He has a kid, she says.” Martina gripped harder and crushed his wedding ring against his fingers. “I didn’t know about the other woman. I didn’t know about the kid. He came back and I thought he was going to boot them out. I knew how much he loved me. But he didn’t. He picked up his baby and it was like seeing a man I didn’t know. I said I was going for a walk. When I got back, they had gone.” Martina’s skin was so pale he could see the veins on her eyelids. “He left all his things. His dog. His gardening tools. Even the new boots. He loves walking. Every day I wake up and I think, Today is the one he will come back. And every day, he doesn’t.”

  For a while there was only the silence that carried her words. It struck Harold afresh how life could change in an instant. You could be doing something so everyday—walking your partner’s dog, putting on your shoes—and not knowing that everything you wanted you were about to lose. “He might come back.”

  “It was a year ago.”

  “You never know.”

  “I do.” She gave a sniff as if she had a cold coming, although she wasn’t fooling either of them. “And yet here you are, walking to Berwick-upon-Tweed.” He was afraid she was going to point out again that he couldn’t make it, but she said, “If only I had a shred of your faith.”

  “But you do.”

  “No,” she said. “I’m waiting for something that will never happen.”

  She sat, not moving, and he knew she was thinking of the past. He knew too that his faith, such as it was, was a fragile thing.

  Harold cleared her plate, and took it to the kitchen, where he ran hot water into the sink and rinsed the dirty pans. He gave the leftover scraps to the dog and thought of Martina waiting for a man who would not return. He thought of his wife, scrubbing away at stains he could not see. He felt in a strange way that he understood better, and wished he could tell Maureen that.

  Later, as he packed his plastic bag in his room, a slight rustling from the hall, followed by a knock, took him to the door. Martina handed him two pairs of walking socks, as well as a roll of blue duct tape. Then she hooked an empty rucksack over his wrist, and placed a brass compass in his palm. They had been her partner’s things. He was about to insist he couldn’t take anything more, but she nipped her face toward his, and planted a soft kiss on his cheek. “Go well, Harold,” she said. “And you owe me nothing for the room. You were my guest.” The compass was warm and heavy in his hand.

  Harold left as he had said he would, with the first light. He propped a postcard against his pillow, in which he thanked Martina; and also the set of laminated place mats because her need for them might be greater than Queenie’s. To the east the night had cracked open, revealing a pale band of light that began to climb and fill the sky. He patted her partner’s dog at the foot of the stairs.

  Harold closed the front door quietly, not wishing to wake Martina, but she was watching from her bathroom window, with her face pressed to the glass. He didn’t look back. He didn’t wave. He caught her profile at the window and then stepped as boldly as he could, wondering if she was worrying about his blisters, or his yachting shoes, and wishing he was not leaving her alone, with only a dog and some boots. It was hard to have been her guest. It was hard to understand a little and then walk away.

  Maureen and Rex

  AFTER HER CONVERSATION with the intern, Maureen sank into a further decline. She thought with shame of the visit Queenie Hennessy had paid her twenty years ago, and wished she had been kinder.

  Now, without Harold, the endless passage of days flowed one into the other and she watched them with apathy, not knowing how to fill them. She would decide to strip the beds only to realize there was no point, since there was no one to witness her slamming down the wash basket, or complaining that she could manage perfectly well without help, thank you. She opened the road map on the kitchen table, but every time she looked at it, trying to picture Harold’s journey, she felt her loneliness more keenly. Inside her stretched such an emptiness, it was as if she were invisible.

  Maureen heated a small tin of tomato soup. How had it happened that Harold was walking to Berwick while she sat at home, doing nothing? What were the steps she had missed? Unlike him, she had left school with decent qualifications. She had done a secretarial course, and when David was at primary school she had taught herself French with the Open University. She used to love gardening. There once wasn’t an inch of the plot at Fossebridge Road that didn’t bear fruit or flowers. She had cooked every day. She had read Elizabeth David and took pleasure in seeking out new ingredients. “Today we are Italian,” she’d laugh, kicking open the door to the dining room and presenting David and Harold with an asparagus risotto. “Buon appetito.” The regrets about all she had let go flooded her. Where had all that enterprise gone? All that energy? Why had she never traveled? Or had more sex when she could? She had bleached and annihilated every waking moment of the last twenty years. Anything, rather than feel. Anything, rather than meet Harold’s eye and say the unspeakable.

  It was not a life, if lived without love. Maureen poured the soup down the sink, sat at the kitchen table, and pressed her face in her hands.

  It was David’s idea that she should confess to Rex the truth about Harold’s walk. He told her one morning that he had been thinking about her situation, and felt it would do her good to talk. She laughed and protested she hardly knew the man, but he pointed out that Rex was her neighbor; of course they knew each other.

  “That doesn’t mean we talk,” she said. “They’d only been here six months when his wife died. Besides, I don’t need to talk to other people. I have you, love.”

  David said that while of course this was true, it might do Rex some good if Maureen came clean. She couldn’t keep hiding the truth forever. She was about to say she missed him, when he told her she should do it right away.

  “Will I see you soon?” she said. He promised she would.

  Maureen found Rex in his garden, where he was trimming the borders of the grass with a blade in the shape of a half-moon. She stood at the fence that divided their gardens, slightly lopsided because of the slope, and asked in an airy way how he was getting along.

  “Keeping busy. That’s the best you can hope for. How’s Harold?”

  “He’s good.” Her legs were trembling. Even her fingers felt light. She drew a new breath, l
ike starting a fresh paragraph. “The fact is, Rex, Harold isn’t at home. I’ve been lying. I’m sorry.” She smothered her lips with her fingertips, forbidding further words. She couldn’t look.

  In the beating silence, she heard the lawn edger being laid on the grass. She felt Rex’s presence as he drew close. There was a smell of mint toothpaste as he said softly, “Did you think I didn’t realize something was up?”

  Rex held out his hand and placed it on her shoulder. It was the first time anyone had touched her in a very long time, and the relief was so intense that grief came shuddering up through her body, and tears slanted her cheeks. She had thrown away everything.

  “Why don’t you come over, and I’ll put the kettle on?” he said.

  Maureen had not stepped inside Rex’s house since Elizabeth’s funeral. In the intervening months, she had imagined there would be a felting of dust and a general level of mess, because these were not things men noticed; especially when mourning. But to her astonishment the surfaces shone. Potted cacti stood at intervals along the windowsill, so regular it was as if he had measured them with a ruler. There was no pile of unopened letters. No muddy steps on the mushroom carpet. It even looked as if Rex had bought himself a length of plastic protector and laid it down as a path from the front door, because she was certain it wasn’t there when Elizabeth was alive. Maureen checked her face in the circular mirror, and blew her nose. She looked pale and tired, and her nose glowed like a warning light. She wondered what her son would say about her weeping in front of a neighbor. She tried so hard not to cry when she talked to David.

  Rex called out from the kitchen that she should wait in the sitting room.

  “Are you sure I can’t do anything to help?” she said, but he insisted again that she should make herself comfortable.

  The sitting room, like the hall, was so quiet and undisturbed Maureen felt her presence was an intrusion. She made her way to the mantelpiece and glanced at the framed photographs of Elizabeth. She had been a tall woman with a bovine jaw, a gravelly laugh, and the distracted look of a guest at a cocktail party. Maureen had never said this to anyone except David, but she had always felt a little overpowered by Elizabeth. She wasn’t even sure she liked her.

  There was a rattling of cups and the door nudged open. She turned and found Rex at the doorway with a tray. He poured the tea without spilling and had even remembered a jug of milk.

  Once she started, it surprised Maureen how much she had to say about Harold’s walk. She told Rex about Queenie’s letter, and his sudden decision to leave. She told him about the visit to the intern, and her shame. “I’m frightened he won’t come back,” she said at last.

  “Of course he’ll come back.” Rex’s voice, slightly milky at the consonants, came with such simplicity she was immediately reassured. Of course Harold would come back. She felt a sudden lightness and wanted to laugh.

  Rex passed her a cup. It was delicate china, set on a saucer that matched. She pictured Harold making coffee, and the mug full to the brim so that you couldn’t lift it without spilling it first and scalding your hand. Even that seemed funny.

  She said, “At first I thought it might be a midlife crisis. Only, being Harold, he’s doing it rather late.” Rex laughed; a little politely, she felt, but at least the ice was broken. He offered her a plate of party cream biscuits and a napkin. She took one. She hadn’t realized how hungry she was.

  “Are you sure Harold can do this walk?” he said.

  “He’s never done anything like it in his life. Last night he stayed in the house of a young Slovakian lady. He didn’t even know her.”

  “Good heavens.” Rex cupped his hand under his chin to catch the crumbs from a pink wafer. “I hope he’s all right.”

  “I’d say he seems very full of it.”

  They smiled and fell into a silence that seemed to set them apart so that they gave another smile, politer this time.

  “Maybe we should go after him,” said Rex, “to check that he’s all right. I’ve got petrol in the Rover. I could make sandwiches and we might head straight off.”

  “Maybe.” Maureen bit her lip, thinking this through. She missed Harold almost as much as she missed David. She wanted to see him very much. But when she imagined the next part, where she caught up with her husband, she floundered. How would she feel, if he didn’t want her after all? If he really was leaving for good? She shook her head. “The truth is, we don’t talk. Not any more. Not properly. The morning he left, I was nagging him about white bread and the jam, Rex. The jam. It’s no wonder he walked off.” She was sad again. She thought of their cold beds, in separate rooms, and the words they shared, which skimmed the surface and meant nothing. “It hasn’t been a marriage for twenty years.”

  In the silence, Rex lifted his cup to his mouth, and Maureen did the same. And then he said; “Did you like Queenie Hennessy?”

  It wasn’t the question she was expecting. She had to swallow her tea very quickly, and it washed an undigested crumb of ginger nut with it, causing her to cough. “I only met her once. But that was a long time ago.” She patted her chest, easing the passage of the biscuit. “Queenie disappeared very suddenly. That’s all I remember. Harold went to work one day and when he came back he said there was someone new in accounts. A man, I think.”

  “Why did Queenie disappear?”

  “I don’t know. There were rumors. But it was a difficult time for me and Harold. He never said, and I never asked. It’s who we are, Rex. Everybody these days is spilling the beans about their darkest secrets. I look at those celebrity magazines at the doctor’s and my head reels. But that’s not how it was for us. We said a lot of things once. Things we shouldn’t have said. When it came to Queenie disappearing, I didn’t want to know.”

  She hesitated, afraid she had confessed too much and unsure how best to continue. “I heard she had done something she shouldn’t have done at the brewery. Their boss was a deeply unpleasant man. He wasn’t one to forgive and forget. It was probably best all round that she disappeared.” Maureen saw Queenie Hennessy as she had done all those years ago, on the doorstep of Fossebridge Road, her eyes swollen, and holding out a bunch of flowers. Rex’s sitting room seemed suddenly very cold, and she hugged her arms around her waist.

  “I don’t know about you,” he said at last, “but I could do with a small sherry.”

  Rex drove Maureen to the Start Bay Inn at Slapton Sands. She could feel the passage of the alcohol, cold at first and then almost burning, as it slipped down her throat and loosened her muscles. She told Rex it was strange to set foot in a pub again; since Harold had become a teetotaler, she rarely drank. They agreed that neither of them was in the mood for cooking, and ordered an early bar meal with a glass of wine. They made a toast to Harold’s journey and she felt a lightness in her stomach that reminded her of being a young woman, and in love for the first time.

  Since it was still light, they walked along the spit of land between the sea and the ley. After the two drinks, she felt warm inside, and slightly indistinct at the edges. A pack of gulls flew with the wind. You could find warblers here, he told her, and great crested grebes. “Elizabeth was never very interested in wildlife. She said it all looked the same.” Sometimes Maureen listened and sometimes she didn’t. She was thinking of Harold, and replaying in her mind the scene where they had met forty-seven years ago. Strange how she had mislaid the details of that night for so long.

  She had noticed Harold straight away. She couldn’t miss him. Jiving by himself in the middle of the dance floor, the flaps of his coat flying out like great dogtooth-check wings. It was as if he were dancing something out that was locked inside himself. She’d never seen anything like it; the young men her mother introduced were all stiff partings and black tie. Maybe he had sensed her watching, even across that dark, throbbing hall, because he had stopped suddenly and caught her eye. He had danced some more, and she had continued watching. She was transfixed. It was the raw energy of him that moved her; the com
pleteness of what he was. He had stopped again. Caught her eye again. Then he had threaded his way through the crowd, and halted so close she could smell the heat of his skin.

  Now she had the moment in her mind, she saw it vividly: the way he stooped with his mouth toward her ear, and parted a small lock of her hair so that he could speak. The boldness of the gesture had sent prickles of electricity shooting the length of her neck. Even now she felt a distant fluttering under her skin. What was it he had said next? It was very funny, whatever it was, and they had laughed so much it brought on an embarrassing bout of hiccups. She remembered how the coat had swung as he strode to the bar to fetch a glass of water, and how she had not moved, waiting for him. In those days, it was as if the world only put its lights on when Harold was near. Who were those two young people who had danced and laughed so completely?

  She grew aware that Rex had stopped speaking. He was watching her.

  “Penny for your thoughts, Maureen.”

  She smiled and shook her head. “It’s nothing.”

  They stood side by side, and looked out over the water. The sinking sun laid a red path from the horizon toward the shore. She wondered where Harold was sleeping, and wished she could say good night. Maureen stretched back her neck toward the sky, searching the dusk for the first sprinkle of stars.

  Harold and the New Beginning

  THE END OF the rain brought a period of wild new growth. Trees and flowers seemed to explode with color and scent. The trembling branches of the horse chestnut balanced new candle spires of blossom. Umbrellas of white cow parsley grew thick at the roadside. Rambling roses shot up garden walls, and the first of the deep-red peonies opened like tissue-paper creations. The apple trees began to shake off their blossoms, and bore beads of fruit; bluebells spread thick like water through the woodlands. The dandelions were already fluffheads of seed.