The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (6 page)

‘So you must have known Napier?’

The question took him unawares. Harold cleared his throat and said Napier had been his boss until he was killed in the car crash five years back.

‘I know you shouldn’t speak ill of the dead,’ said the landlord, ‘but he was a vicious sod. I saw him half kill a man once. We had to pull him off.’

Harold felt a twisting in his gut. It would be better not to speak about Napier. Instead he explained how he had set off with the letter for Queenie, and realized it wasn’t enough. Before the landlord could point it out, he admitted he had no phone, walking boots or map, and that he probably appeared ridiculous.

‘It’s not a name you hear much, Queenie,’ said the landlord. ‘It’s old-fashioned.’

Harold agreed and said she had been an old-fashioned sort of person. Quiet, and always wearing a brown wool suit, even in the summer months.

The landlord folded his arms, resting them over the soft shelf of his belly, and widened his feet, as if he had something to tell and it might take a while. Harold hoped it wasn’t concerning the distance between Devon and Berwick-upon-Tweed. ‘There was this young lady I knew once. Lovely girl. Lived in Tunbridge Wells. She was the first girl I ever kissed, and she let me do a few things besides, if you get my drift. This young lady would have done anything for me. I just couldn’t see it. Too busy trying to get on in the world. It was only years later, when I was invited to the wedding, that I saw what a lucky bastard the chap marrying her was.’

Harold felt he should say that he had never been in love with Queenie, not in that way, but it seemed rude to interrupt.

‘I fell apart. Started drinking. Got myself in a right mess, if you know what I mean.’

Harold nodded.

‘Spent six years in prison in the end. My wife laughs but these days I do craftwork. Table decorations. I get the baubles and the baskets off the internet. The truth is,’ and here he wiggled his ear with his finger, ‘we’ve all got a past. We’ve all got things we wish we’d done, or hadn’t. Good luck to you. I hope you find the lady.’ The landlord removed his finger from his ear and studied it with a frown. ‘If you’re lucky, you should get there this afternoon.’

There was no point in correcting him. You couldn’t expect people to understand the nature of his walk, or even the exact whereabouts of Berwick-upon-Tweed. Harold thanked him and continued on his way. He remembered how Queenie kept a notebook in her handbag to tot up their mileage. It wasn’t in her to tell a lie; at least not one that was intentional. A flicker of guilt propelled him forward.

During the afternoon, his blister became more painful. He found a way of shoving his toes towards the front end of the shoe, to avoid the leather biting into his ankle. He wasn’t thinking of Queenie and he wasn’t thinking of Maureen. He wasn’t even seeing the hedgerows or the horizon or the passing cars. He was the words, You will not die, and they were also his feet. Only sometimes the words marched themselves in different orders, and he realized with a start that his head was chanting, Die you will not, or Not will you die, or even plain Not not not. The sky above him was the same sky that hung over Queenie Hennessy and he knew with increasing certainty that she had learned what he was doing and was waiting. He knew he was going to reach Berwick, and that all he had to do was to place one foot in front of the other. The simplicity of it was joyful. If he kept going forward, he would of course arrive.

The land lay still, interrupted only by the traffic that rustled the leaves as it rushed past. The sound could almost convince him he was back at the sea. Harold found himself halfway through a memory that he was not aware of conjuring into his mind.

When David was six they had gone to the beach at Bantham and he had started swimming out. Maureen had shouted, ‘David! Come back! Come back right now!’ Only the more insistently she called, the smaller the little boy’s head became. Harold had followed her to the water’s edge, and stopped to unlace his shoes. He was about to pull them off when a coastguard had sprinted past, tearing off his T-shirt and hurling it behind him as an afterthought. The chap had gone ploughing into the water until he was waist deep, and then he had plunged his whole body in, slicing through the waves until he reached the child. He had carried David back in his arms. The boy’s ribs stuck out like fingers, and his mouth was blue. ‘He was lucky,’ the coastguard said. He addressed Maureen, not her husband; Harold withdrew a step or two. ‘There’s a strong current out there.’ His white canvas shoes shone wet in the sun.

And Maureen had never said it, but Harold knew what she was thinking because he was thinking the same thing: why had he stopped for his laces when his only son was in danger of drowning?

Years later, he had said to David, ‘Why did you keep swimming? That day on the beach? Couldn’t you hear us?’

David must have been a young teenager. He had gazed back at Harold, with his beautiful brown eyes that were half-boy, half-man, and he’d shrugged. ‘I dunno. I was already in shit. It seemed easier to stay in it than come back.’ Harold had said it was better not to swear, especially in his mother’s hearing, and David had said something like, Bug off.

Harold wondered why he was remembering all this. His only child ploughing an escape into the sea, and telling him years later to bug off. The pictures had come to him whole, as if they were part of the same moment; points of light dropped on the sea like rain, while David gazed at Harold with an intensity that seemed to undo him. He had been afraid; that was the truth. He had untied his laces because he was terrified that when there were no more excuses, he would not be up to saving his son. And what was more, they all knew it; Harold, Maureen, the coastguard, even David. Harold pushed his feet forward.

He feared there would be more. The images and thoughts that crammed his head at night, keeping him awake. Years later Maureen had accused him of almost drowning their son. He fixed his attention on what was outside.

The road stretched between the dense corridors of hedgerow, and light sieved through the cracks and fissures. Fresh shoots speared the earth banks. Far away a clock chimed three. Time was passing. He drove his feet faster.

Harold became aware of a dry sensation in his mouth. He tried not to imagine a glass of water, but now that his head had produced the image, it also conjured the feel and taste of cold liquid in his mouth, and his body grew weak with the need for it. He walked very carefully, trying to stabilize the ground while it tipped beneath his feet. Several cars slowed, but he waved them on, not wanting their attention. Each breath seemed too angular to pass through the cavities of his chest. There was no choice but to stop at the first home he came to. He secured the iron gate and hoped there weren’t dogs.

The bricks of the house were new and grey; the evergreen hedging shaved hard back like a wall. Tulips grew in pert rows in beds that were without weeds. To the side hung a line of washing: several large shirts, trousers, skirts and a woman’s bra. He looked away, not wanting to see things he shouldn’t. As a teenager, he had often gazed at his aunts’ pegged-up corsets, brassieres, support knickers and stockings. It was the first time he had realized the female world held secrets he wanted to know. He rang the doorbell of the house, and leaned against the wall.

When a woman answered, her face dropped. He wanted to reassure her not to worry, but his insides felt stripped. He could barely move his tongue. She hurried to fetch him a drink, and as he took the glass his hands trembled. The iced water broke over his teeth, his gums, the roof of his mouth, and rushed to his throat. He could have cried at the rightness of it.

‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ she said, after she had fetched him a second glass and he had emptied that too. She was a wide woman, wearing a creased dress; childbearing hips, Maureen would have said. Her face was so weathered the skin looked slapped. ‘Do you need to rest?’

Harold promised he was feeling better. He was eager to get back to the road, and didn’t want to intrude on a stranger. Besides, he felt he had already broken an unspoken English rule in asking for help. To do more would be to align himself with something both transient and unknown. In between the words he sought quick rasping breaths. He assured her he was walking a long way but probably hadn’t got the hang of it yet. He hoped it would raise a smile, but she didn’t seem to see the funny side. It was a long time since he had made a woman laugh.

‘Wait here,’ she said. Again she disappeared into the stillness of the house, to return with two fold-up chairs. Harold helped her to open them and repeated that he should get going, but she sank her body down as if she too had made a journey, and urged him to join her. ‘Just for a moment,’ she said. ‘It will do us both good.’

Harold lowered his limbs into the seat beside hers. A heavy stillness crept over him and, after resisting for a moment, he closed his eyes. The light glowed red against his eyelids, and the sounds of birdsong and passing cars merged into one, that was both inside him and far away.

When he woke, she had set a small table at his knees with a plate of bread and butter, and slices of apple. She gestured with the upturned palm of her hand towards the plate, as if she were showing him the way forward. ‘Please. Help yourself.’

Even though he hadn’t been aware of his hunger, now that he saw the apple, his stomach felt scooped out. Besides it would be rude not to accept, after she had taken the trouble. He ate greedily, apologizing, but unable to stop. The woman watched and smiled, and all the while she played with a quarter of apple, turning it between her fingers, as if it were something curious she had picked up from the ground. ‘You’d think walking should be the simplest thing,’ she said at last. ‘Just a question of putting one foot in front of the other. But it never ceases to amaze me how difficult the things that are supposed to be instinctive really are.’

She wet her lower lip with her tongue, waiting for more words. ‘Eating,’ she said at last. ‘That’s another one. Some people have real difficulties with that. Talking too. Even loving. They can all be difficult.’ She watched the garden, not Harold.

‘Sleeping,’ he said.

She turned. ‘Don’t you sleep?’

‘Not always.’ He reached for more apple.

There was another silence. Then she said, ‘Children.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘There’s another one.’

He glanced again at her washing line, and the perfect rows of flowers. He felt the resounding absence of young life.

‘Did you have any yourself?’ she said.

‘Just one.’

Harold thought of David, but it was too much to explain. He saw the boy as a toddler and how his face darkened in sunshine like a ripe nut. He wanted to describe the soft dimples of flesh at his knees, and the way he walked in his first pair of shoes, staring down, as if unable to credit they were still attached to his feet. He thought of him lying in his cot, his fingers so appallingly small and perfect over his wool blanket. You could look at them and fear they might dissolve beneath your touch.

Mothering had come so naturally to Maureen. It was as if another woman had been waiting inside her all along, ready to slip out. She knew how to swing her body so that a baby slept; how to soften her voice; how to curl her hand to support his head. She knew what temperature the water should be in his bath, and when he needed to nap, and how to knit him blue wool socks. He had no idea she knew these things and he had watched with awe, like a spectator from the shadows. It both deepened his love for her and lifted her apart, so that just at the moment when he thought their marriage would intensify, it seemed to lose its way, or at least set them in different places. He peered at his baby son, with his solemn eyes, and felt consumed with fear. What if he was hungry? What if he was unhappy? What if other boys hit him when he went to school? There was so much to protect him from, Harold was overwhelmed. He wondered if other men had found the new responsibility of parenting as terrifying, or whether it had been a fault that was only in himself. It was different these days. You saw men pushing buggies and feeding babies with no worries at all.

‘I hope I haven’t upset you?’ said the woman beside him.

‘No, no.’ He stood and shook her hand.

‘I’m glad you stopped,’ she said. ‘I’m glad you asked for water.’ He returned to the road before she could see that he was crying.

The lower creases of Dartmoor loomed to his left. He could see now that what had appeared to be a vague blue mass on the shoulder of the horizon was a series of purple, green and yellow peaks, unbroken by fields, and topped at the highest points with boulders of stone. A bird of prey, maybe a buzzard, swung over the land, skimming the air; suspended.

Harold asked himself if years ago he shouldn’t have pressed Maureen to have another baby. ‘David is enough,’ she had said. ‘He is all we need.’ But sometimes he was afraid that having one son was too much to bear. He wondered if the pain of loving became diluted, the more you had? A child’s growing was a constant pushing away. When their son had finally rejected them for good, they dealt with it in different ways. There was anger for a while, and then there was something else, that was like silence but had an energy and violence of its own. In the end, Harold had come down with a cold, and Maureen had moved into the spare room. Somehow or other neither of them had mentioned it, and somehow or other she had never moved back.

Harold’s heel stung and his back ached, and now the soles of his feet were beginning to burn. Even the smallest flint caused him pain; he had to keep stopping to remove a shoe and shake it empty. From time to time, he also found that his legs buckled for no apparent reason, as if they had been jellied, causing him to stumble. His fingers were throbbing but maybe that was because they were not used to being swung back and forth in a downward direction. And yet, despite all this, he felt intensely alive. A lawn mower started up in the distance and he laughed out loud.

Harold joined the A3121 towards Exeter, and after a mile of heavy traffic at his back, he took the B3372, following the grass verges. When a group of professional-looking walkers caught him up, Harold stood out of their way and waved them past. They exchanged pleasantries about the good weather and the landscape, but he didn’t tell them about heading for Berwick. He preferred to keep that tucked in his head, like Queenie’s letter in his pocket. As they moved ahead he observed with interest that they all had backpacks, that some of them had loose-fitting tracksuits, and that others were equipped with sun visors, binoculars and telescopic hiking sticks. None was wearing yachting shoes.