The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (18 page)

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 towards the shore. She wondered where Harold was sleeping, and wished she could say goodnight. Maureen stretched back her neck towards the sky, searching the dusk for the first sprinkle of stars.

15

Harold and the New Beginning

THE END OF
the rain brought a period of wild new growth. Trees and flowers seemed to explode with colour 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 blossom, and bore beads of fruit; bluebells spread thick like water through the woodlands. The dandelions were already fluffheads of seed.

For five days, Harold walked without faltering, passing through Othery, the Polden Hills, Street, Glastonbury, Wells, Radstock, Peasedown St John, and arriving at Bath on a Monday morning. He averaged just over eight miles a day, and on Martina’s advice he stocked up on sunblock, cotton wool, nail clippers, plasters, fresh bandages, antiseptic cream, Moleskin blister protection and a slab of Kendal Mint Cake for emergencies. He replenished his supplies of toiletries, as well as washing powder, and packed them neatly in her partner’s rucksack, along with the roll of duct tape. Passing his reflection in shop windows, the man staring back at him was so upright and appeared so sure-footed, he had to look twice to check it was really himself. The compass pointed a steady north.

Harold believed his journey was truly beginning. He had thought it started the moment he decided to walk to Berwick, but he saw now that he had been naive. Beginnings could happen more than once, or in different ways. You could think you were starting something afresh, when actually what you were doing was carrying on as before. He had faced his shortcomings and overcome them, and so the real business of walking was happening only now.

Every morning the sun crept over the horizon, peaked and set every evening, as one day made way for another. He spent long moments watching the sky, and the way the land changed beneath it. Hilltops became gold against the sunrise, and windows reflecting its light were so orange you could think there was a fire blazing. The evening shadows lay long beneath the trees, like a separate forest that was made of darkness. He walked against an early-morning mist and smiled at the pylons poking their heads through the milk-white smoke. The hills softened and flattened, and opened before him, green and gentle. He passed through the flat stretches of the Somerset wetlands, where waterways flashed like silver needles. Glastonbury Tor sat on the horizon, and beyond that the Mendip Hills.

Gradually, Harold’s leg improved. The bruising turned from purple to green to a gentler shade of yellow, and he was no longer afraid. If anything, he was more sure. The stretch between Tiverton and Taunton had been full of anger and pain. He had wanted more than he could physically give, and so his walk had become a battle against himself, and he had failed. Now he followed a set of gentle stretching exercises each morning and evening, and rested every two hours. He treated the blisters before they became infected and carried fresh water. Taking out his wild-plant book again, he identified hedgerow flowers, and their uses; which bore fruit, culinary, poisonous or otherwise, and which had leaves with medicinal powers. Wild garlic filled the air with its sweet pungency. Once more, it surprised him how much was at his feet, if only he had known to look.

He continued to send postcards to Maureen and Queenie, informing them of his progress, and once in a while he also wrote to the garage girl. On the advice of his guide to Britain, Harold noted the shoe museum in Street and took a look at the shop in Clarks Village, although he still believed it would be wrong to give up on his yachting shoes, having come so far. In Wells, he bought Queenie a rose quartz to hang at her window, and a pencil for Maureen that had been carved from a twig. Urged by several pleasant members of the WI to purchase a Madeira cake, he chose instead a hand-knitted beret in a Queenie shade of brown. He visited the cathedral, and sat in its chilled light, pouring like water from above. He reminded himself that centuries ago men had built churches, bridges and ships; all of them a leap of madness and faith, if you thought about it. When no one was looking, Harold slipped to his knees and asked for the safety of the people he had left behind, and those who were ahead. He asked for the will to keep going. He also apologized for not believing.

Harold passed office workers, dog walkers, shoppers, children going to school, mothers and buggies, and hikers like himself, as well as several tourist parties. He met a tax inspector who was a Druid and had not worn a pair of shoes for ten years. He talked with a young woman on the trail of her real father, with a priest who confessed to tweeting during mass, as well as several people in training for a marathon, and an Italian man with a singing parrot. He spent an afternoon with a white witch from Glastonbury, and a homeless man who had drunk away his house, as well as four bikers looking for the M5, and a mother of six who confided she had no idea life could be so solitary. Harold walked with these strangers and listened. He judged no one, although as the days wore on, and time and places began to melt, he couldn’t remember if the tax inspector wore no shoes or had a parrot on his shoulder. It no longer mattered. He had learned that it was the smallness of people that filled him with wonder and tenderness, and the loneliness of that too. The world was made up of people putting one foot in front of the other; and a life might appear ordinary simply because the person living it had done so for a long time. Harold could no longer pass a stranger without acknowledging the truth that everyone was the same, and also unique; and that this was the dilemma of being human.

He walked so surely it was as if all his life he had been waiting to get up from his chair.

Maureen told him on the phone that she had moved out of the spare room and returned to the main bedroom. He had spent so many years sleeping alone, he was surprised at first, and then he was glad because it was the larger and more pleasant of the two and, being at the front of the house, enjoyed the wide view over Kingsbridge. But he assumed this also meant she had packed his things and carried them to the spare room.

He thought of the many times he had looked at the closed door, knowing she had exiled herself completely beyond his reach. Some times he had touched the handle, as if it were a sentient piece of her.

Maureen’s voice crept under the silence: ‘I’ve been thinking of when we first met.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘It was at a dance in Woolwich. You touched my neck. Then you said something funny. We laughed and laughed.’

He frowned with the effort of trying to picture it. He recalled a dance, but all he could see beyond that was how beautiful she had been, and how delicate. He remembered dancing like an idiot, and he remembered too her dark, long hair falling like velvet either side of her face. But it seemed unlikely he had been bold enough to walk across a crowded room and claim her. It seemed unlikely he had made her laugh and laugh. He wondered if she was mistaking him for someone else.

She said, ‘Well, I must let you get on. I know how busy you are.’

She was using the voice that she used for the doctor, when she wanted to show she wasn’t going to be an inconvenience. And then she said, ‘I wish I could think of what you said to me at the dance. It really was so funny.’ She hung up.

For the rest of the day, his mind was full of remembering Maureen, and how it was in the beginning. He thought of the trips to the pictures, and Lyons Corner House, and how he had never seen anyone eat so discreetly, shredding her food into the smallest of scraps before lifting it to her mouth. Even in those days he had begun saving for their future. He had taken an early-morning job on the rubbish trucks, followed by a part-time afternoon job as a bus conductor. Twice a week he did an all-night shift at the hospital, and on Saturdays he worked at the library. Sometimes he was so exhausted he crawled under the bookshelves and fell asleep.

Maureen had taken to getting the bus from outside her house and staying for the full trip to the terminus. He would issue tickets and ring the bell for the driver, but all he was seeing was Maureen, in her blue coat, with her skin like porcelain and those vivid green eyes. She took to walking with him to the hospital so that he’d be scrubbing down the floors and all he could think of was where she was; what she was seeing as she hurried away. She took to nipping into the library and thumbing through cookery books, and he watched her from the main desk, his head reeling with desire and the need to sleep.

The wedding had been small, with guests he didn’t know in hats and gloves. An invitation was sent to his father, but to Harold’s relief he had not showed up.

Alone at last with his new wife, he had watched her across the hotel room as she unbuttoned her dress. He was desperate to touch her, and tremulous with fear. Removing both his tie and jacket, borrowed from another chap at the bus garage and slightly too short in the sleeve, he had looked up and found her sitting on the bed in her slip. She was so beautiful it was too much. He had to bolt to the bathroom.

‘Harold, is it me?’ she had called through the door, after half an hour.

It hurt to remember these things, when they were so far out of his reach. He had to blink several times, trying to lose the pictures, but they still swam back.

Harold walked the towns that were full of the sounds of other people, and the roads that travelled the land between, and he understood moments from his life as if they had only just occurred. Sometimes he believed he had become more memory than present. He replayed scenes from his life, like a spectator trapped on the outside. Seeing the mistakes, the inconsistencies, the choices that shouldn’t be made, and yet unable to do anything about them.

He caught himself taking the phone call after Maureen’s mother had died very suddenly, two months after her father. He had pinned her in his arms in order to break the news.

‘There’s only me and you,’ she sobbed.

He had reached for the swell of her growing belly and promised it would be all right. He would look after her, he’d said. And he’d meant it too. There was nothing Harold had wanted more than to make Maureen happy.

In those days she believed him. She believed Harold could be all she needed. He hadn’t known it then; but he did now. It was fatherhood that had been the real test and his undoing. He wondered if he must spend the rest of his life in the spare room.

As Harold made his way north towards Gloucestershire, there were times when his steps were so sure they were effortless. He didn’t have to think about lifting one foot and then the other. Walking was an extension of his certainty that he could make Queenie live, and his body was a part of that too. These days he could take the hills without thinking; he was becoming fit, he supposed.

Some days he was more engrossed in what he saw. He tried to find the right words to describe each shift; only sometimes, like the people he had met, they began to jumble. But there were days when he wasn’t aware of himself, or his walking, or the land. He wasn’t thinking about anything; at least not anything that was related to words. He simply was. He felt the sun on his shoulders, watched a kestrel on silent wings, and all the time the ball of his foot pushed his heel from the ground, and weight shifted from one leg to the other, and this was everything.

Only the nights troubled him. He continued to seek modest accommodation, but the inside world seemed to stand as a barrier between himself and his purpose. He felt a visceral need to leave some part of himself outside. Curtains, wallpaper, framed prints, matching hand and bath towels; these things had become superfluous and without meaning. He threw the windows open, so that he could continue to feel the presence of the sky and the air, but he slept badly. Increasingly he was kept awake by images from the past, or dreamed of his feet lifting and falling. Getting up in the early hours, he watched the moon at the window and felt trapped. It was barely light these days when he paid with his debit card and set off.

Walking into the dawn, he watched with wonder as the sky flamed with strong colour and then faded to a single blue. It was like being in an altogether different version of the day, one that held nothing ordinary. He wished he could describe it to Maureen.

The problem of when and how he would reach Berwick receded into the background, and Harold knew Queenie was waiting, as certainly as he saw his shadow. It gave him pleasure to imagine his arrival, and her place at the window in a sunny chair. There would be so much to talk about. So much from the past. He would remind her how she had once produced a Mars bar from her handbag for the homeward journey.