The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy: A Novel

by Rachel Joyce

  She reached out and stroked my tired fingers.

  ‘Don’t try to see ahead to the nice bits. Don’t try to see ahead to the end. Stay with the present, even if it is not so good. And consider how far you’ve already come.’

  I scrambled to pick up my pencil. I wrote fast: What do you mean, look how far I’ve come?

  Reading my message, she smiled. ‘When I first met you, you were so afraid. You sat apart from the others in the dayroom. You didn’t want to visit the garden. You wouldn’t take your nutritional drinks. You certainly didn’t think you could wait for Harold Fry or eat a peach. It takes a long time to learn that there are other ways of doing things. It doesn’t just happen overnight.’

  Sister Mary Inconnue pursed her mouth and blew out her cheeks. ‘Would you listen to us now. Getting all philosophical.’ She laughed.

  We didn’t do any writing after that. We just watched the clouds come and go. Sometimes they appeared as big as smoky islands, and sometimes they were only silk ribbons. I forgot about everything else. Then the sun came out and it began to rain. The rain cloud glowed, fat and rosy, and the drops fell slantingly in silver sparklets.

  ‘Look,’ she said. ‘Look at that. And it doesn’t cost you a penny.’

  It was so beautiful we had to sit still and not speak, only watch.

  Do you think it is a sign?

  Sister Mary Inconnue swung her large feet and sucked her pen. I like the way she never replies until she has thoroughly absorbed the question. ‘Do you mean a religious sign? A sign to you to keep waiting?’

  I gave a shrug. I suppose that is what I mean, though I am loath to call it religious. There was another pause.

  ‘Maybe,’ she said at last. ‘Maybe it’s a sign. But it is also not a sign. It is a cloud and some rain. Do you fancy a banana?’

  Yes, I said. I did.

  Glad tidings from Stroud

  ‘GOOD NEWS! Good news!’

  Sister Catherine ran into the dayroom so fast I feared she’d shoot straight through and fly out the open doors into the Well-being Garden.

  ‘Harold Fry is heading for Stroud! He is in Nailsworth! He rang from a telephone box! I told him you’re waiting! I told him to keep walking!’ These sentences did not come out in that order. Words tended to get swallowed and chucked about, but remember, she had run from the reception area. She was excited. ‘He will be here in another three weeks!’

  ‘Did you hear that, Babs?’ shouted Finty.

  ‘Oh, he’s racing along now,’ said the Pearly King.

  Finty attempted a high five with Sister Catherine, only Sister Catherine misinterpreted it and the high five turned into a painful handshake. Finty flashed a dentured grin. ‘Didn’t I tell you, Queenie Hennessy? Didn’t I tell you not to give up?’

  For almost a week I have not written to you. There has been death here, yes. The undertaker’s van. There has been grieving. But there have been other things too. There has been music therapy. Birdsong. The nuns wheeled us outside to watch the first swifts. The small leaves on the tree outside my window have stretched into green hands. In the garden, there are buds on the roses, the first columbines. We have had French manicures, massage, lavender oil and hairdressing. Nutritional drinks and card games. Sister Lucy has read more of Watership Down to Barbara and, inspired by Barbara’s new glasses case, a volunteer knitted a selection of similar multi-coloured bags for the syringe drivers. This may seem a small thing, a needless one, but it makes you feel human again to keep something so practical in a pretty knitted case. One patient even felt well enough to return home. We waited by the window to wave as her son helped her to his car.

  ‘What a nice young man,’ said Finty.

  ‘He has a comb-over,’ said Mr Henderson. ‘He’s probably got a bus pass.’

  ‘Well, you can fucking talk,’ said Finty.

  I have slept, and the songs have played in my head, and for once I have not sought the words. The thing on my face has been dressed. I have taken medication and pain relief, and every morning I have practised my finger stretches. There have been trips to the garden with the other patients, and I have dozed beside Sister Lucy and her jigsaw. On Wednesday she gave me a tissue-wrapped gift and when I looked surprised she only straightened her sleeves and said:

  ‘Doesn’t someone have a birthday?’

  It was a new notebook.

  I have watched the light at the window as it turns from white to blue to black, with sometimes a pinkening in between. I have lain in the dark and listened to Barbara’s songs or the wind in the tree. And we wait, all of us, Harold; the singing, the wind, the night. We wait for you.

  It is four and a half weeks since you began your walk. I can get to the end of my letter.

  ‘Good,’ says Sister Mary Inconnue. ‘This is all good.’

  A happy day

  IT’S LATE October. One of those beautiful mellow days when the light is blue-gold and the trees haven’t yet lost all their leaves. The greens are tinged with red and brown, and that gives them more definition. Michaelmas daisies make banks of purple along the road. Summer is gone, and yet here is the sun again, and it is a kinder, older version of its August self.

  You and I travel with our car windows down. The air is soft and warm and it strokes our faces. It occurs to me to ask how things are going in Cambridge, but I don’t want to spoil this late afternoon so I choose to stay silent.

  And then the car gives a splutter and you glance at the dashboard and the car gives another shudder. When you pull over and turn off the ignition, the engine emits a heavy hiss, as if it is sighing.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ you say. You open the driver’s door. Step out of the car. I remember the silence in the country lane. There is nothing but birdsong, the buzzing of insects. The stillness of a warm road. Ahead of us there are only trees. Behind us too. You rub your hands and lift the bonnet. I close my eyes a moment. Feel the autumn sun on my skin.

  ‘What is it, Harold?’

  No reply.

  When I step out of the car, you are puzzling over the engine. The light falls gold on your shoulders. You scratch your head. When you stop, a smear of black grease sits above your left eye.

  ‘Is there a problem?’ I ask.

  It seems there is. We need a garage. But this is South Devon. The nearest one will be in Kingsbridge. Also, you add, there is another more significant problem. You have no idea where we are.

  ‘Do you mean we’re lost?’

  ‘I was sort of hoping you wouldn’t notice.’

  I look at the empty lane ahead and behind us. A watery haze shimmers above the tarmac in both directions. ‘What should we do?’

  ‘I need to go and fetch help.’

  ‘But you don’t know where we are.’

  You grimace. You sigh. ‘Ah, no.’

  ‘Do you have a map?’

  Ah, yes. A map. You dive into the car and produce the Ordnance Survey. After slamming down the bonnet, you unfold the map very carefully and spread it out. We both bend over it, trying to work out where we are. For a moment I forget about you, I forget about the autumn light, I am completely absorbed in deciphering the map. And so it surprises me to realize that we are almost touching, arm against arm, face against face, the smell of you so close it is on my skin too, and yet I am able to look at the map and see the roads, the contours, the marked farm buildings and churches.

  ‘Here we are,’ I say. I point my finger triumphantly at the spot. ‘This is where we are.’

  To my surprise you begin to laugh. I straighten up, and frankly if anyone should be laughing it is me, because you are the one with oil grease above your left eye. What is so funny? I ask.

  Whatever is so funny has robbed you of the ability to communicate. You hold your stomach and laugh, a high hee hee noise.

  So I pull your sleeve, and you whimper as if I am going to tickle you, and you giggle, ‘Get off, will you?’ And when again I ask what has been so funny, you pull an altogether straighter face and you say, ‘You.’ />
  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes. You always have to get there first.’

  You are right, of course. I am fastidious. I have an eye for detail. I’m a hard worker. And yes, I am competitive. But here you are laughing at me and I don’t mind. In fact I see the funny side. I smile too. ‘It’s because I’m an only child.’

  ‘I’m an only child.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know. You’re nicer than me.’

  ‘That is true, of course,’ you say.

  For this I pluck up the map and swat you. You cower with your arms in a gesture of mock defence, and I can’t think why but even that is funny.

  I am happy. That’s why. I am very happy.

  ‘At least I know where we are,’ I say. And it dawns on me that I know this in more than one way. I know where you and I are on the map. But I also see where we are as friends. My love has moved to a deeper place. I can almost touch your arm and swat you with an Ordnance Survey. I can be beside you and still see other things. You don’t obliterate the landscape for me any more. In fact, the sight of you makes everything else a little better, a little finer. The faint scent of wood in the air, I get that. The white ribbon of a vapour trail in the sky as it turns to gold and dissipates, I get that too. The way the berries on a honeysuckle shine so red in this light they almost shout. Loving you makes the world more beautiful. I see things now that I didn’t see before.

  It is my idea that we walk back to Kingsbridge. You suggest that I should sit in the car and wait, and when I ask who you think I am, the Queen? you say no, but you can’t resist a joke about my name.

  So we set off. Your feet make a steady pad-pad noise on the tarmac. Mine are more of a clip-clip. Clouds of summer flies swarm around our heads. You walk with a firm stride, and sometimes I have to skip a little to keep up.

  ‘Oo, oo,’ you say once or twice.

  ‘I don’t know why you wear those things.’

  ‘What exactly is wrong with yachting shoes?’

  ‘Nothing. If you’re on a yacht.’

  You stop to laugh. ‘I can’t even swim.’ You wipe your eyes.

  After that we don’t talk so much. We pass beneath the tunnels of green leaves hanging over the lanes. Your face is flushed, and so, I am sure, is mine. We walk without meeting another soul. And sometimes you ask if I am OK, and sometimes I am so deep in thought, about you and me, and what will come of this, that I forget to answer, or at least it takes me a while.

  You say, ‘I never walk.’

  ‘Me neither,’ I say.

  We go on for another half-hour. I can feel a warm wetness beneath my armpits. My knees are beginning to feel weak. As we reach Kingsbridge the road opens and a pavement emerges, as do streetlamps, houses, gardens and cars. Only as I see these things does it occur to me that we are walking side by side, my pace in rhythm with yours, almost touching we are so close.

  Almost touching and once again you didn’t see it.

  *

  For the rest of the year, I heard no news from David. No letter. No postcard. I asked you every now and then in the car. ‘Any word from your son?’

  I tried to gauge from your answers whether or not David had mentioned anything about my poetry. Clearly he hadn’t. I asked too how he was getting along. I asked how he liked the town, how he was finding the course. I even said once, ‘Does he like punting?’

  You stared at the road ahead and repeated the word. ‘I am not sure,’ you said. ‘Maureen has not mentioned any punting.’ I don’t know why, but we laughed. It suddenly seemed such a daft word.

  Even if David had my poems, as I feared, he could have no idea they were for you. There was no mention of your name. No physical description of you. The poems were more about the nature of love than a history of our time together. If David had taken them, they were certainly in a bin by now. Perhaps he’d done me a favour. Perhaps it was time to let go of my poems.

  Now that David had left, I was back to dancing with strangers at the Royal. Men with weak hair. Nervous feet. Clammy hands. The woman at the kiosk said to me one night, ‘It’s a shame your son stopped coming. I enjoyed his dancing.’ She wore her dyed black hair in a giant beehive, which appeared to make it difficult for her to move her head. But that is by the by.

  ‘Oh, he’s at Cambridge now,’ I said. ‘He’s reading classics.’

  ‘Classics?’ She lifted one eyebrow. A doorman came to stand beside her. ‘Brainy, then?’

  ‘Very.’ This will seem ludicrous to you, but I felt a swell of pride.

  ‘Maybe he’ll come again in the holidays.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Oh, a boy always loves his mum.’ From the way she looked at me, very fixed, and then shared a smile with the doorman, it was clear the conversation was far more complicated than I had first presumed. She saw straight through me. Though what she saw I can only imagine. I avoided the kiosk woman after that.

  It was Maureen I felt for. You told me another time that she was still waiting for David to call or write. ‘She misses him. She misses him very much. She always talked to him, you see. They were always at it. Whenever I walked into a room. They were just – you know – talking. It was as if I wasn’t there.’ Somehow this picture had never come to me before. Of David and Maureen talking. Somehow in my mind I’d pictured him silent at home and prowling, like an animal that has outgrown its cage.

  ‘I’m sure he’ll be in touch with her very soon,’ I said.

  Early December, there you were. Back with the empties in the yard. Rain was falling hard, like black pins it came, but you lifted the cans from your coat and placed them carefully in the bins.

  I spotted him once or twice that Christmas, though he didn’t see me. He was striding down Fore Street in his greatcoat and also a black fedora with a feather. The hat made me laugh. People stopped to watch him as he passed, and I would say that he knew and liked it. You have outgrown Kingsbridge, I thought. And even though this would be hard on Maureen, I was happy for David. He needed to be free.

  So we had known each other over a year, you and I. I had loved you for nearly a year. I had also begun to date a man called Bill. I no longer left the Royal alone at night. I danced with Bill every Thursday, and met him again on Saturday. We’d see a film. Get a bite to eat. But never in Kingsbridge. Bill had been recently widowed and lived with his two grown-up daughters. ‘Why can’t I come to your place?’ he’d say, and I made excuses about the other residents or the smallness of my flat. Once he said, You’re ashamed of me, aren’t you? And I reassured him quickly that I wasn’t. But even as I said it, I felt my shoulders sink, because he was right. I was ashamed, and now that it was out in the open there was no pretending. I didn’t love him the way I loved you. And I couldn’t. I didn’t want to. I had room for only one man.

  I caught you once staring hard at my bare ring finger.

  ‘Nobody wants me,’ I smiled.

  You gave a guffaw, but you didn’t say, ‘I do.’

  I wondered if it was a romance that was occupying David because he barely showed his face in the Easter holidays. I remember feeling that must have been another hardship for Maureen. I thought too of my own parents and wished I had been kinder to them when I was David’s age. But it was a relief that he was no longer coming between you and me.

  My forty-first birthday arrived. I brought you cream puffs from the bakery. We stopped and ate them by the roadside. ‘Any special reason?’ you asked. ‘Not at all,’ I told you. This time you didn’t say, ‘You’ll get me fat,’ which was an irony because you were a little plumper at the waist and jowls. Those trousers of yours didn’t droop any more.

  To my surprise, Bill was waiting for me at the gates of the brewery with flowers and a HAPPY BIRTHDAY balloon. He just wanted to see where I worked, he said. I practically frogmarched him down the street in my efforts to hide him – though it is difficult to hide a man with a foil HAPPY BIRTHDAY balloon. He insisted on taking me for dinner in Kingsbridge, and I’m ashamed to say it was a dreadful eveni
ng. Over tiramisu, Bill began to get impatient. ‘You’re bored, aren’t you? You have someone else, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course not,’ I heard myself say.

  ‘You’re always looking out of the window.’ He produced a small box from his pocket. He tried to put it into my hand. ‘Marry me.’

  Outside the sky was still light. I remember because I watched the window for a long time, trying to work out what to do. If I married Bill, I could look after him. Look after his daughters. I could make a home. I kept my eye fixed on the pavement outside in order to concentrate, but then it occurred to me I wasn’t concentrating, I was only looking for you.

  Bill shifted in his chair. ‘I knew there was someone else,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I told him. ‘I’m really sorry.’

  He sat very still for a moment. Then he finished his tiramisu. He scraped the glass bowl clean. It’s strange how, even when the big things in life happen, we attempt to make them small. ‘It’s OK, though, if you love someone else,’ he said. ‘I can make do with that.’

  ‘No. You can’t.’ I reached for my coat. ‘It’s over.’ It was over with the Royal too. As it happens, it was also the end of courtship for me. I didn’t date a man again. And don’t feel sorry for me, Harold. It was my choice.

  I kept up with Bill’s daughters, though. When the younger woman married, I sent her a set of wine glasses. The girls wrote to me, once in a while. Even when I lived in Embleton Bay, I sent them cards. I only stopped when my illness came. I stopped all my friendships when my illness came.

  That summer you took your annual holiday but you didn’t go anywhere. David had told you he’d be InterRailing, and apparently Maureen had decided she’d prefer to stay at home. And when I asked afterwards what you had done – it had been so lonely for me at the brewery without you – you said, ‘I mowed the grass.’

  We laughed a lot about that.

  Further news

  WE HAVE a new postcard. ‘Historic Warwick’. You can’t imagine the stir it caused in the dayroom when Sister Catherine arrived with her postbag.