The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (14 page)

Harold lowered his head. On the desk stood Mr Napier’s prized collection of Murano glass clowns, some with blue faces, some lounging on their backs, others playing instruments.

‘Don’t touch,’ said Napier, and his forefinger shot out like a gun. ‘They were my mother’s.’

Everyone knew they were his prize possessions, but to Harold the figures looked misshapen and lurid, as if their limbs and faces had contorted like slime in the sun, and the colours congealed. He couldn’t help feeling they were mocking him, even these glass clowns, and felt a wave of anger lick deep in his belly. Mr Napier twisted his cigarette in the ashtray, and moved to the door.

As Harold passed, he added, ‘And keep an eye on Hennessy, will you? You know what those bitches are like.’ He tapped his nose with that forefinger, as if it was now the pointer to a shared secret, and not a gun, except of course Harold had no idea what he was talking about.

He wondered if, despite her aptitude, Mr Napier was already trying to get rid of her. His boss never trusted the people who were better than himself.

The first drive came a few days later. Queenie appeared at his car, gripping her square handbag, as if she was off on a shopping trip instead of an inspection of a pub’s account books. Harold knew the landlord of the pub; he was a slippery chap at the best of times. He couldn’t help feeling afraid for her.

‘I hear you’re driving me, Mr Fry,’ she said, slightly imperious.

They travelled in silence. She sat beside him, very neat, her hands tucked in a tight ball in her lap. Harold had never felt so conscious of how he took the corners, or pressed his foot into the clutch, or pulled at the handbrake when they arrived. He leapt out to open the passenger door, and waited as her leg slowly emerged and groped for the pavement. Maureen’s ankles were so slim they made him weak with desire. Queenie’s on the other hand were thick. Rather like himself, he had felt, she lacked physical definition.

When he glanced up he was mortified to find her staring straight back at him. ‘Thank you, Mr Fry,’ she said at last, clipping away, with the handbag wedged on her arm.

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 back, 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 poppers 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 grey moved over the sky and land, bringing sheets of rain that smudged the colour 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. Hedgerows. 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 well. 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 pyjamas 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 box, 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 whizz by. I hardly notice you’ve gone. And you?’

‘I’m very well 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 was 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 lies between two human 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 was 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 travelled 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’Groats. ‘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 carer 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 doorlock 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 whisky 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.