The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (13 page)

11

Maureen and the Locum

THE RECEPTIONIST APOLOGIZED;
due to the installation of an automated service, she was no longer able to check Maureen in for her doctor’s appointment. ‘But I am standing right here,’ said Maureen. ‘Why can’t you do it?’ The receptionist pointed to a screen set a few feet from the main desk, and assured Maureen that the new procedure was a simple one.

Maureen’s fingers went clammy. The automated service asked if she was male or female, but she tapped the wrong button. It asked for her birth date, and she tapped the month before the day, and had to be helped by a young patient who sneezed all over her shoulder. By the time she had registered, there was a small queue behind her, groaning and creaking with illness. The screen flashed the words
Refer to main reception
. The small queue gave a uniform shake of its head.

Again the receptionist apologized. Maureen’s regular GP had been called away unexpectedly, but she could take an appointment with a locum instead.

‘Why couldn’t you tell me this when I first arrived?’ cried Maureen.

The receptionist offered her third round of apologies. It was the new system, she said; everyone had to check in electronically, ‘Even OAPs.’ She asked if Maureen would like to wait or come back the next morning, and Maureen shook her head. If she went home, she didn’t trust she would have the will to return.

‘Do you need a glass of water?’ said the receptionist. ‘You look pale.’

‘I just need to sit a moment,’ said Maureen.

Of course David had been right in reassuring her that she could leave the house, but he had no idea of the anxiety she would suffer in making her way to the surgery. It wasn’t that she missed Harold, she told herself; but still it came as a fresh shock to find herself alone in the outside world. Everywhere around her people were doing ordinary things. They were driving cars and pushing buggies and walking dogs and coming home, as if life was exactly the same, when it wasn’t. It was all new and wrong. She buttoned her coat to her neck, and pulled the tips of her collar against her ears, but the air felt too cold, and the sky too open, shapes and colours too forceful. She had rushed down Fossebridge Road before Rex could spot her, and fled to the centre of town. The petals of the daffodils along the quayside were a crumpled brown.

In the waiting room she tried to distract herself with magazines, but she looked at the words without connecting them into sentences. She was aware of couples like herself and Harold, sitting side by side, keeping one another company. The late-afternoon light was sprinkled with dust motes, swirling in the thick air as if it had been stirred with a spoon.

When a young man opened the consulting-room door and mumbled a patient’s name, Maureen sat waiting for someone to get up and wondering why they took so long, until she realized it was her own name and scrambled to her feet. The locum looked barely out of school, and his body didn’t fill his dark suit. His shoes were polished like conkers; an image came to her from nowhere of David’s school shoes, and she felt a twist of anguish. She wished she had not asked for her son’s help. She wished she had stayed at home.

‘What can I do for you?’ murmured the locum, as he folded into his chair. Words seemed to slip out of his mouth without noise, and she had to crane her head closer in order to catch them. If she wasn’t careful, he’d offer her a hearing test.

Maureen explained how her husband had set off to visit a woman he had not seen for twenty years, convinced he could save her from cancer. It was his eleventh day of walking, she said, rolling her handkerchief into a knot. ‘He can’t get to Berwick. He has no map. No proper shoes. When he left the house, he actually forgot his mobile.’ Telling a stranger brought home the rawness of it, and she was afraid she would cry. She dared a glance at the locum’s face. It was as if someone had stepped over to him while she wasn’t looking and drawn in thick worry-lines with a black pen. Maybe she had said too much.

He spoke slowly, as if he were trying to remember the right words. ‘Your husband thinks he is going to save his former colleague?’

‘Yes.’

‘From cancer?’

‘Yes.’ She was beginning to feel impatient. She didn’t want to have to explain; she wanted him instinctively to understand. She was not here to defend Harold.

‘How does he think he will save her?’

‘He seems to believe the walking will do it.’

He scowled, creating further deep lines towards his jaw. ‘He thinks a walk will cure cancer?’

‘A girl gave him the idea,’ she said. ‘A girl in a garage. She made him a burger as well. Harold never eats burgers at home.’

‘A girl told him he could cure cancer?’ If this appointment continued for much longer, the poor boy’s face would be all over the place.

Maureen shook her head, trying to restore order. She was suddenly very tired. ‘I am worried about Harold’s health,’ she said.

‘Is he fit and well?’

‘He is slightly long-sighted without his reading glasses. He has two crowns either side of his front teeth. But it’s not that which worries me.’

‘Yet he believes he can cure her by walking? I don’t understand. Is he a religious man?’

‘Harold? The only time he calls on God is when the throttle goes on the lawn mower.’ She gave a smile, to help the locum realize she was being funny. The locum looked confused. ‘Harold retired six months ago. Since then he has been very—’ She broke off, hunting for the word. The locum shook his head, indicating he didn’t have it. ‘Still,’ she said.

‘Still?’ he repeated.

‘He spends every day in the same chair.’

At this the locum’s eyes lit up and he gave a nod of relief. ‘Ah. Depressed.’ He lifted his pen and snapped off the lid.

‘I wouldn’t say he was depressed.’ She felt her heart quickening. ‘The thing is, Harold has Alzheimer’s.’ There. She had said it.

The locum’s lips parted, and his jaw gave a disconcerting clunk. He returned the pen to his desk without reapplying the lid.

‘He has Alzheimer’s, and he’s walking to Berwick?’

‘Yes.’

‘What medication is your husband on, Mrs Fry?’ The silence was so solemn she shivered.

‘I say Alzheimer’s,’ she said slowly, ‘but it’s not diagnosed as yet.’

The locum relaxed again. He almost laughed. ‘Do you mean that he is forgetful? That he has senior moments? Just because we forget our mobile phone doesn’t mean we all have Alzheimer’s.’

Maureen gave a tight nod. She couldn’t decide which irritated her most; the way he batted the term senior moments in her direction or the patronizing smile he was now showing her. ‘It’s in his family,’ she said. ‘I recognize the signs.’

From here, she gave a brief account of Harold’s history; how his father had returned from the war an alcoholic, prone to depression. How his parents had not wanted a child, and his mother had packed her suitcase, never to return. She explained that his father had taken up with a succession of women until he showed Harold the door on his sixteenth birthday. After that, the two men had remained estranged for many years. ‘Then, out of the blue, a woman rang my husband and said she was his stepmother. You’d better fetch your father, she said; he’s mad as a hatter.’

‘This was the Alzheimer’s?’

‘I found him a nursing home but he was dead before he was sixty. We visited several times but his father shouted a lot, and threw things. He had no idea who Harold was. And now my husband is going the same way. It isn’t just forgetting things. There are other symptoms.’

‘Does he substitute words with inappropriate ones? Forget entire conversations? Does he leave things in strange places? Suffer rapid mood swings?’

‘Yes, yes.’ She gave an impatient flick of her hand.

‘I see,’ said the locum, chewing his lip.

Maureen smelt victory. She watched him carefully as she said, ‘What I want to know is – if you, as a doctor, thought Harold was putting himself in danger by walking, could he be stopped?’

‘Stopped?’

‘Yes.’ Her throat felt stripped. ‘Could he be forced to return home?’ The blood beat so hard through her head it hurt. ‘He can’t walk five hundred miles. He can’t save Queenie Hennessy. He must be made to come back.’

Maureen’s words rang through the silence. She placed her hands on her knees, palm against palm, and then she tidied her two feet one beside the other. She had said what she had set out to say, but she wasn’t feeling what she had set out to feel, and needed to impose physical order on an uncomfortable emotion that was swelling inside her.

The locum grew still. From outside she heard a child crying, and wished to goodness someone would pick it up. He said, ‘It sounds as if we have a strong case for getting the police involved. Has your husband ever been sectioned?’

Maureen rushed from the doctor’s surgery, sick with shame. In explaining both Harold’s past and his walk, she had been forced to see things for the first time from his point of view. The idea was insane and completely out of character, but it wasn’t Alzheimer’s. There was even a beauty in it, if only because Harold was doing something he believed in for once, and against all the odds. She had told the locum she needed time to think, and that she was worrying over nothing; Harold was just a little senior. He would be home soon. He might even be there already. She had ended up with a prescription for low-dosage sleeping tablets for herself.

As she walked towards the quay, the truth came as bright as a light snapping on through the dark. The reason she had stayed with Harold all these years was not David. It wasn’t even because she felt sorry for her husband. She had stayed because, however lonely she was with Harold, the world without him would be even more desolate.

Maureen bought a single pork chop and a yellowing bunch of broccoli at the supermarket.

‘Is that all?’ said the girl at the check-out.

Maureen couldn’t speak.

She turned into Fossebridge Road and thought of the silence of the house that lay waiting for her. The unpaid household bills, in their neat but no less intimidating pile. Her body grew heavy, her feet slow.

Rex was trimming the hedge with clippers as she reached the garden gate.

‘How’s the patient?’ he said. ‘Getting better?’

She nodded her head and went inside.

12

Harold and the Cycling Mothers

STRANGELY, IT WAS
Mr Napier who had teamed Harold and Queenie together all those years ago. He had summoned Harold to his wood-panelled office and told him he required Queenie to check the pubs’ account books on site. He didn’t trust the landlords, and wanted to take them unawares. Since the lady didn’t drive, however, someone was required to take her. He had thought carefully about the matter, he said, tugging on a cigarette; as one of the more senior reps, and also one of the few married ones, Harold was the obvious candidate. Mr Napier stood with his legs wide, as if by claiming more floor space he became bigger than everyone else, although actually he was a wily figure in a shiny suit, who barely reached Harold’s shoulder.

Harold had no choice, of course, but to agree. Privately he was anxious. He had not spoken to Queenie since the embarrassing episode in the cupboard. And besides, he had seen his time in the car as his own. He didn’t know if she would like Radio 2, for instance. He hoped she wouldn’t want to talk. It was bad enough with the chaps. He was uncomfortable with female things.

‘Glad that’s sorted,’ said Mr Napier. He held out his hand. It was disconcertingly slight and moist, like taking hold of a small reptile. ‘How’s the wife?’

Harold faltered. ‘She’s well. How’s—?’ He felt a cold panic. Mr Napier was on his third wife in six years; a young woman with high blonde hair, who had worked briefly as a barmaid. He didn’t take it kindly when people forgot her name.

‘Veronica is splendid. I hear your boy got into Cambridge.’

Mr Napier broke into a grin. His chain of thought shifted on a sixpence; Harold never knew what was coming next. ‘All brain and no dick,’ he said, spitting out a shot of smoke from the side of his mouth. He stood, watching and laughing, waiting for his employee to come back at him, and knowing that he wouldn’t.