The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy: A Novel Read online

  Also by Rachel Joyce

  The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry Perfect

  For more information on Rachel Joyce and her books, see her website at www.rachel-joyce.co.uk

  Copyright © 2014 Rachel Joyce

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Bond Street Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House of Canada Limited.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Joyce, Rachel, author

  The love song of Miss Queenie Hennessy / Rachel Joyce.

  ISBN 978-0-385-68282-4 (bound) ISBN 978-0-385-68283-1 (epub)

  I. Title.

  PR6110.O98L69 2014 823′.92 C2014-903141-6

  C2014-903142-4

  Jacket images: (Woman) Laurence Winram/Trevillion Images;

  (Sky) Javaman/Shutterstock; (Beach, Sea, Birds) Chyrko Olena/Shutterstock

  Published in Canada by Bond Street Books, A division of Random House of Canada Limited, A Penguin Random House Company

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  For my sisters, Amy and Emily, and in memory of a garden in Roquecor

  All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveller is unaware.

  Martin Buber, The Legend of the Baal-Shem

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  The First Letter

  St Bernadine’s Hospice: Berwick-upon-Tweed

  The Second Letter

  St Bernadine’s Hospice: Berwick-upon-Tweed

  All you have to do is wait!

  An unlikely plan

  Sssh now

  The last stop

  Let’s get this bit over and done with, shall we?

  The tall man and the snow

  A harsh reminder

  The doing of small things

  Tin-pot tyrant

  Sunday song

  Monday blues

  A nice pair of sandwiches

  The lonely gentleman

  In which not much happens

  Hang on, would you like my handkerchief?

  An ultimatum

  A different perspective

  Making a friend of bindweed

  Where is Sister Mary Inconnue?

  The long road home

  We’re all going one way

  I think that dress looks nice on you

  Yes, yes, yes

  The nun and the peach

  Three cheers for Martina

  A taste of well-being

  Rebel child

  Homage to Harold Fry

  A one-way ticket to Newcastle

  The puzzle’s progress

  A dance lesson for David

  The maker of chairs

  What shall we sing of when we die?

  Patience on a monument

  The boy who was allergic to blue

  A letter to David

  Midnight phone call

  Further spiritual advice

  Glad tidings from Stroud

  A happy day

  Further news

  The poet

  Fire alarm

  Ways of loving

  Concerning the future

  The Spanish Inquisition

  Poor Barbara

  Morphine madness

  Six white handkerchiefs

  The way forward

  The pilgrims

  What is going on?

  Concerning a beach house

  Further madness

  In which I make a home and a garden

  Wedding bells

  A shock

  Hrr-hrm. No one mention (David Fry)

  Thank you, thank you, thank you

  The loss of a garden

  Mr Henderson surprises me

  The naming of shoes

  Heat

  Murano clowns

  The mystery man

  It was my fault

  A dinner engagement

  An important message and a basket of washing

  The last one to go

  A postcard

  The dog like a leaf

  A lot of fuss and bother

  A last-ditch attempt to stop

  I wonder who I am now

  A poetic interlude

  A fly

  The laughing tree

  A bad night

  The visitor

  The last confession of Miss Q Hennessy

  The last confession of Miss Q Hennessy (2nd attempt)

  Final absolution

  Exit pursued by a nun

  The happy ending

  The Third Letter

  St Bernadine’s Hospice Berwick-upon-Tweed

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  THE FIRST LETTER

  St Bernadine’s Hospice

  Berwick-upon-Tweed

  Monday, 11 April

  Dear Harold,

  This may come to you as some surprise. I know it is a long time since we last met, but recently I have been thinking a lot about the past. Last year I had an operation on a tumour, but the cancer has spread and there is nothing left to be done. I am at peace and comfortable but I would like to thank you for the friendship you showed me all those years ago. Please send my regards to your wife. I still think of David with fondness.

  With my best wishes,

  Q h

  THE SECOND LETTER

  St Bernadine’s Hospice

  Berwick-upon-Tweed

  13 April

  So here it is

  Long ago, Harold, you said to me: ‘There are so many things we don’t see.’ What do you mean? I asked. My heart gave a flip. ‘Things that are right in front of us,’ you said.

  We were in your car. You were driving, as you always did, and I was in the passenger seat. Night was falling, I remember that, so we must have been on our way back to the brewery. In the distance, streetlamps sprinkled the blue velvet skirts of Dartmoor, and the moon was a faint chalk smudge.

  It was on the tip of my tongue to tell the truth. I couldn’t bear it any longer. Pull over, I almost shouted. Listen to me, Harold Fry—

  You pointed ahead with your driving glove. ‘You see? How many times have we come this way? And I’ve never noticed that.’ I looked where you were indicating, and you laughed. ‘Funny, Queenie, how we miss so much.’

  While I was on the edge of a full confession, you were admiring a roof extension. I unclipped my bag. I took out a handkerchief.

  ‘Do you have a cold?’ said you.

  ‘Do you want a mint?’ said I.

  Once again, the moment had passed. Once again, I had not told you. We drove on.

  This is my second letter to you, Harold, and this time it will be different. No lies. I will confess everything, because you were right that day. There were so many things you didn’t see. There are so many things you still don’t know. My secrets have been inside me for twenty years, and I must let them go before it is too late. I will tell you everything, and the rest will be silence.

  Outside I see the battlements of Berwick-upon-Tweed. A blue thread of the North Sea crosses the horizon. The tree at my window is pointed with pale new buds that glow in the dusk.

  Let us g
o then, you and I.

  We don’t have long.

  All you have to do is wait!

  YOUR LETTER arrived this morning. We were in the dayroom for morning activities. Everyone was asleep.

  Sister Lucy, who is the youngest nun volunteering in the hospice, asked if anyone would like to help with her new jigsaw. Nobody answered. ‘Scrabble?’ she said.

  Nobody stirred.

  ‘How about Mousetrap?’ said Sister Lucy. ‘That’s a lovely game.’

  I was in a chair by the window. Outside, the winter evergreens flapped and shivered. One lone seagull balanced in the sky.

  ‘Hangman?’ said Sister Lucy. ‘Anyone?’

  A patient nodded, and Sister Lucy fetched paper. By the time she’d got sorted, pens and a glass of water and so on, he was dozing again.

  Life is different for me at the hospice. The colours, the smells, the way a day passes. But I close my eyes and I pretend that the heat of the radiator is the sun on my hands and the smell of lunch is salt in the air. I hear the patients cough, and it is only the wind in my garden by the sea. I can imagine all sorts of things, Harold, if I put my mind to it.

  Sister Catherine strode in with the morning delivery. ‘Post!’ she sang. Full volume. ‘Look what I have here!’

  ‘Oh, oh, oh,’ went everyone, sitting up.

  Sister Catherine passed several brown envelopes, forwarded, to a Scotsman known as Mr Henderson. There was a card for the new young woman. (She arrived yesterday. I don’t know her name.) There is a big man they call the Pearly King, and he had another parcel though I have been here a week and I haven’t yet seen him open one. The blind lady, Barbara, received a note from her neighbour – Sister Catherine read it out – spring is coming, it said. The loud woman called Finty opened a letter informing her that if she scratched off the foil window, she would discover that she’d won an exciting prize.

  ‘And, Queenie, something for you.’ Sister Catherine crossed the room, holding out an envelope. ‘Don’t look so frightened.’

  I knew your writing. One glance and my pulse was flapping. Great, I thought. I don’t hear from the man in twenty years, and then he sends a letter and gives me a heart attack.

  I stared at the postmark. Kingsbridge. Straight away I could picture the muddy blue of the estuary, the little boats moored to the quay. I heard the slapping of water against the plastic buoys and the clack of rigging against the masts. I didn’t dare open the envelope. I just kept looking and looking and remembering.

  Sister Lucy rushed to my aid. She tucked her childlike finger under the flap and wiggled it along the fold to tear the envelope open. ‘Shall I read it out for you, Queenie?’ I tried to say no, but the no came out as a funny noise she mistook for a yes. She unfolded the page, and her face seeped with pink. Then she began to read. ‘It’s from someone called Harold Fry.’

  She went as slowly as she could, but there were a few words only. ‘I am very sorry. Best wishes. Oh, but there’s a PS too,’ said Sister Lucy. ‘He says, Wait for me.’ She gave an optimistic shrug. ‘Well, that’s nice. Wait for him? I suppose he’s going to make a visit.’

  Sister Lucy folded the letter carefully and tucked it back inside the envelope. Then she placed my post in my lap, as if that were the end of it. A warm tear slipped down the side of my nose. I hadn’t heard your name spoken for twenty years. I had held the words only inside my head.

  ‘Aw,’ said Sister Lucy. ‘Don’t be upset, Queenie. It’s all right.’ She pulled a tissue from the family-size box on the coffee table and carefully wiped the corner of my closed-up eye, my stretched mouth, even the thing that is on the side of my face. She held my hand, and all I could think of was my hand in yours, long ago, in a stationery cupboard.

  ‘Maybe Harold Fry will come tomorrow,’ said Sister Lucy.

  At the coffee table, Finty still scratched away at the foil window on her letter. ‘Come on, you little bugger,’ she grunted.

  ‘Did you say “Harold Fry”?’ Sister Catherine jumped to her feet and clapped her hands as if she was trapping an insect. It was the loudest thing that had happened all morning, and everyone murmured ‘Oh, oh, oh’ again. ‘How could I have forgotten? He rang yesterday. Yes. He rang from a phone box.’ She spoke in small broken sentences, the way you do when you’re trying to make sense of something that essentially doesn’t. ‘The line was bad and he kept laughing. I couldn’t understand a word. Now I think about it, he was saying the same thing. About waiting. He said to tell you he was walking.’ She slipped a yellow Post-it note from her pocket and quickly unfolded it.

  ‘Walking?’ said Sister Lucy, suggesting this was not something she’d tried before.

  ‘I assumed he wanted directions from the bus station. I told him to turn left and keep going.’

  A few of the volunteers laughed, and I nodded as if they were right, they were right to laugh, because it was too much, you see, to show the consternation inside me. My body felt both weak and hot.

  Sister Catherine studied her yellow note. ‘He said to tell you that as long as he walks, you must wait. He also said he’s setting off from Kingsbridge.’ She turned to the other nuns and volunteers. ‘Kingsbridge? Does anyone know where that is?’

  Sister Lucy said maybe she did but she was pretty sure she didn’t. Someone told us he’d had an old aunt who lived there once. And one of the volunteers said, ‘Oh, I know Kingsbridge. It’s in South Devon.’

  ‘South Devon?’ Sister Catherine paled. ‘Do you think he meant he’s walking to Northumberland from all the way down there?’ She was not laughing any more, and neither was anyone else. They were only looking at me and looking at your letter and seeming rather anxious and lost. Sister Catherine folded her Post-it note and disappeared it into the side pocket of her robe.

  ‘Bull’s-eye!’ shouted Finty. ‘I’ve won a luxury cruise! It’s a fourteen-night adventure, all expenses paid, on the Princess Emerald!’

  ‘You have not read the small print,’ grumbled Mr Henderson. And then, louder: ‘The woman has not read the small print.’

  I closed my eyes. A little later I felt the sisters hook their arms beneath me and lift my body into the wheelchair. It was like the way my father carried me when I was a girl and I had fallen asleep in front of the range. ‘Stille, stille,’ my mother would say. I held tight on to your envelope, along with my notebook. I saw the dancing of crimson light beyond my eyelids as we passed from the dayroom to the corridor and then past the windows. I kept my eyes shut all the way, even as I was lowered on to the bed, even as the curtains were drawn with a whoosh against the pole, even as I heard the click of the door, afraid that if I opened my eyes the wash of tears would never stop.

  Harold Fry is coming, I thought. I have waited twenty years, and now he is coming.

  An unlikely plan

  ‘QUEENIE? QUEENIE HENNESSY?’ When I woke, a new volunteer was standing against my window. For a moment he seemed made of light.

  ‘You were crying,’ he said. ‘In your sleep.’ Only now that I looked properly, I found he was not a man after all. He was a tall and big-boned she, dressed in a nun’s habit, a wimple and a knitted navy-blue cardigan. I shot up my hand to hide. But the stranger didn’t stare and neither did she drop her gaze, as people usually do, to my fingers or my feet or any bit of me that was not my face. She just smiled.

  ‘Are you upset about this man called Harold Fry?’ she said.

  I remembered your news. That you were walking to see me. But this time I couldn’t see the hope in it, I could see only the miles. After all, I’m at one end of England and you’re at the other. The wind has a softness in the south, but up here it’s so wild it can chuck you off your feet. There’s a reason for this distance, Harold. I had to get as far from you as I could bear.

  The nun shifted from the window, taking with her a small potted cactus plant from the sill. She said she’d heard about your very exciting message. She knew that you were walking from Kingsbridge to Berwick-upon-Tweed and that all I had to do
was wait. She stooped to rescue the cactus from the floor. ‘I don’t know Mr Fry personally, of course, but it appears you called into the void and an echo came back. What a good man.’ She smiled at the cactus as if she had just blessed it. ‘By the way, I am Sister Mary Inconnue.’ She pronounced it An-con-noo, like in the French. ‘Pleased to meet you.’

  The nun drew up the chair and sat beside my bed. Her hands lay in her lap, large and red. A washing-up set of hands. Her eyes were a sharp, clear green.

  ‘But look at me,’ I tried to say. It was no good. Instead, I reached for my notebook and HB pencil. I wrote her a message: How can I do this? How can I wait for him? I tossed the pencil aside.

  I’d thought I would never see you again. Even though I’ve spent twenty years in exile, even though I’ve lived with a piece of my life missing, I thought you had forgotten me. When I sent you my first letter, it was to put my affairs in order. It was to draw a veil for myself over the past. I didn’t expect you to post a reply. I certainly didn’t expect you to walk with it. There is so much to confess, to atone for, so much to mend, and I can’t do it. Why do you think I left Kingsbridge and never came back? If you knew the truth, I’m afraid you’d hate me. And you must know the truth, you see. There cannot be a meeting between us without it.

  I remembered the first time I spotted you in the yard of the brewery. Then I pictured your son in my red wool mittens and I saw Maureen too, her eyes blazing, beside a basket of washing in your garden at 13 Fossebridge Road. Don’t walk, I thought. The nun with a funny name was right: you’re a good man. I had the chance to speak twenty years ago and I failed. Over and over, I failed. I am words without a mouth. Don’t come now.

  I wrote, It’s too late.

  Sister Mary Inconnue read the message in my notebook and said nothing. For a long time she remained with her hands in her lap, so still that I began to wonder if she’d dropped asleep. Then she rolled up her sleeves like a nun who means business. Her arms were smooth and weather-tanned. ‘Too late? It’s never too late. It seems to me you have something else to say to Harold Fry. Isn’t that why you’re upset?’