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

  Well, that did it. I was crying again.

  She said, ‘I have a plan. We’re going to write him a second letter. Don’t forget, you opened this can of worms when you sent your first one. So now you need to finish. Only this time, don’t give him the sort of message he might expect from a gift card. Tell him the truth, the whole truth. Tell him how it really was.’

  I looked to the window. Black gossamer scraps of cloud chased across a weak sky. The sun was a thimble of light, and the dark branches of the tree trembled. I pictured you at one end of England, walking down a country lane. I pictured myself at the other, sitting in a bed in a small room. I thought of the miles between us: the railway tracks, the bus routes, the roads, the rivers. I pictured the steeples and towers, the slate roofs and tin roofs, the stations, the cities, the towns, the villages, the fields. And so many people. People sitting on platforms and passing in cars and staring from buses and trudging down roads. Since I left Kingsbridge, I’ve remained single. I made my home in a derelict timber beach house, and I tended my heart in a garden by the sea. My life has been small, it has been nothing to speak of. But the past is still inside me, Harold. I have never let it go.

  ‘You don’t have to write this letter on your own,’ said Sister Mary Inconnue. ‘I will help. There’s an old portable typewriter in the office.’

  I remembered how long it had taken me to spell out my first letter in order for Sister Lucy to copy it on her laptop. And I suppose you noticed the mess I made of both my signature and your address on the envelope. What with all the shenanigans getting that letter in the post, a carrier pigeon might have been quicker.

  But Sister Mary Inconnue was still talking. ‘Every day we’ll do it. You can make notes and I’ll type them. I don’t suppose you know shorthand?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Well, there you are. We will write, you and I, until Harold Fry gets here. I’ll do it in the first person, as if I am you. I’ll transcribe everything. I won’t miss out one word. Your letter will be waiting for Harold Fry when he arrives.’

  And you promise he will read it before he sees me?

  ‘I give you my word.’

  Already there was something appealing about her idea. Already I was composing the opening sentences. I think I closed my eyes, because when I opened them, Sister Mary Inconnue had moved again and this time she was seated beside the slight bump of my feet. She had put on a pair of blue plastic-framed reading glasses that gave her a goggle-eyed look, and she held up a battered leather carrying bag the size of a briefcase. Its key was tied to the handle with a loop of string.

  She laughed. ‘You fell asleep. So I nipped to the office and took the liberty of borrowing the typewriter.’ She opened my notebook to a fresh page. She replaced it on my lap alongside the pencil.

  ‘You see how it is?’ said Sister Mary Inconnue, unlocking the leather bag and removing the typewriter. It was a cream Triumph Tippa. I had the same model once. ‘Harold Fry is walking. But in another way, even though you’re here, even though you’ve done your travelling, you’re starting a journey too. It’s the same and not the same. You see?’

  I nodded. And if I’m not here at least my letter will be.

  Sister Mary Inconnue settled herself and rested the typewriter on her knees. ‘Now then,’ she said, flexing her red fingers. ‘Where’s the tab set key?’

  We worked for the rest of the morning and then after lunch and into the dusk. Once I’d started, I couldn’t stop. I pointed to my writing. Does it make sense to you?

  ‘Perfect sense,’ she said.

  I tore out sheets as I finished, numbering each one, and Sister Mary Inconnue picked them up and typed. I kept telling myself I’d go as far as the next page, and then the next page came and I filled that too. I wrote everything you have read so far, while Sister Mary Inconnue clacked and slapped at her keys. And this is what we are still doing. I am writing and she is typing.

  ‘Good,’ she says. ‘This is good.’

  Tonight the duty nurse performed our evening rituals. She cleaned my mouth with mouthwash and a tiny sponge on a stick. She applied jelly where my lips have cracked, and she changed the dressings. Dr Shah, the palliative care consultant, asked if I had more pain, but I told him no, it was only the same. There was no need for me to be in discomfort, he said. If anything troubled me, a change could be made to my medication. Once the nurse had applied my new pain patch, Sister Lucy massaged my hands. Her smooth, plump fingers travelled my stiff ones, easing the joints and stroking. She fetched her sparkly polish and painted my nails.

  In my sleep I saw your son. ‘Yes, David,’ I said. ‘Yes.’ I took a blanket and tucked it round him in case he was cold.

  Sssh now

  THE NIGHT is not good. It’s David. David. In my head. I can’t sleep.

  Every time I close my eyes, I see him. In the armchair beside my electric heater. Black overcoat. Shouting for things.

  I ring for help.

  SISTER PHILOMENA: What is it?

  ME: I have nightmare.

  SISTER P: Take this. Morphine.

  (Sip, sip.)

  SISTER P: Put down your pencil, Queenie. Put down your notebook. Sleep now.

  The last stop

  AFTER MY disturbed night, I slept until midday. When I woke, I had a visitor. She had a grapefruit on her head. She’d also brought her horse. The two of them left only when Sister Mary Inconnue arrived with her typewriter.

  I wrote for her that I’d had strange guests who belonged to a circus, not a hospice, and she smiled. ‘People pay good money for drugs like yours.’ Her eyes went crooked behind her reading glasses.

  Do you have a problem with your vision? I spelled out the words.

  ‘Not at all,’ she said. ‘I was winking at you. How do you feel today?’

  The starched cornette on her head shone milk white, as did her habit beneath her belted black tabard apron. She wore sandals over white socks, and the socks bunched a little under the Velcro straps. She pulled a fresh packet of A4 paper from her bag, and also a correction pen. ‘I see you have another message,’ she said, pointing at a postcard propped beside your letter on the bedside table. I had no idea what she was talking about.

  I’d gone and forgotten again, you see. I had forgotten in the night about the walking.

  ‘Oh, Queenie. You’re not going to cry?’ Sister Mary Inconnue laughed, and I knocked back my head to show I wasn’t going to make a fool of myself. ‘Let’s see what Harold Fry has to tell us,’ she said.

  There was a picture of Bantham Beach. One of the nuns must have left the postcard while I was sleeping. Sister Mary Inconnue showed me the writing on the back. ‘Keep faith, Harold Fry.’ You may not know this, Harold, but I’m not a religious person. I hear the nuns pray, their songs from the chapel, but I do not join in. And since when did you know about faith? So far as I remember, you never entered a church. The last time I saw you, well … you did not look like a man who’d found God.

  So far as I remember, you never walked very far, either. I can think of only one occasion. But maybe now is not the time.

  ‘We’d better get back to your letter,’ said Sister Mary Inconnue.

  She opened my notebook and passed the pencil. Cramp. I could barely move my right arm. My hand poked solid from the wrist. It must have been all the writing I did yesterday. I’m not used to working with my hands any more. My fingers trembled like anemones in the rock pools of my garden in Embleton Bay. I made it on a clifftop by the sea, and so I called it a sea garden.

  ‘Help me,’ I honked. ‘I can’t write.’

  Sister Mary Inconnue put down her typewriter and took my hands in hers. She rubbed my fingers and lifted them to her mouth. Then she blew on them as if she expected them to inflate. ‘Look at you, Queenie,’ she said. ‘With your nails all sparkly now.’ She laughed.

  Sometimes a person can smile when you are feeling only the difficulty of a thing and the problem unravels before your eyes and becomes straightforward.
r />   ‘Let’s try again,’ she said.

  She slotted the pencil into my hand. She curled my fingers round it, one by one.

  ‘What do you want to tell Harold Fry?’

  *

  I remember Bantham Beach. I went there when I first arrived in Devon. This was nearly twenty-four years ago. It was before you and I met. It was also Christmas, and I had a lot to think about.

  I hadn’t intended to come to Kingsbridge. All I knew was that I couldn’t stay in Corby. Things had gone wrong for me there, and so I was doing what I always did when something went wrong. I was running away.

  ‘Once a thing is kaput,’ my mother used to say as she snatched up a cracked piece of china and dumped it in the bin, ‘it can never look the same. Get rid of it.’ I can still hear the words, her throaty accent. Chipped plates and glassware, ripped stockings, buttonless cardigans, plaster ornaments lacking heads or feet – nothing met her mercy. My parents were never wealthy – we lived on my father’s salary as a carpenter in a small rented house at the end of a Kent village – and my mother was a large Austrian woman with chunky hands that seemed permanently smeared with goose fat. She was constantly dropping things. It was a wonder we had anything left. My father checked the bin when she wasn’t looking, retrieving what could be fixed and slipping the pieces out to his workshop. Somehow it rarely happened, the fixing, and when it did my mother would only gaze accusingly at a glued-back-together plate as if to say, ‘You? I thought I was done with you.’

  Perhaps I took my mother more literally than she intended, but I applied her rule to my life; after all, we are all searching for them, the rules. We pick them up from the strangest places, and if they appear to work once we can live a whole lifetime by them, regardless of the unhappiness and difficulty they may later bring. So when I failed a dance exam, I refused to continue. It was simpler to walk away than face my teacher’s disappointment. When a friend badly hurt my feelings at holiday camp, I did the same: I insisted on returning home. Years later I applied for Oxford University, and I suppose you could say that in this way I escaped from my parents. Being their sole child had become too complicated.

  Since Corby, I’d been travelling for days. A night here. A night there. Sometimes only hours. Nowhere long enough to know anyone. Nowhere long enough to become known. I barely unpacked my suitcase. I just kept moving and moving until the little bus stopped and I saw the sea. It was the last stop, said the driver. He switched off the lights. He switched off the engine.

  And what happens at the last stop? I thought.

  I made my way past the sand dunes and tall spikes of marram grass. A battering wind blew up from the Channel, and I had to bow my head in order to push forward, gripping my collar to my throat with one hand and dragging my tartan suitcase with the other. The case contained everything I owned. My books, my clothes. My dance shoes. I reached the water’s edge and I felt the terrible despair of someone who is used to running because that is what she has always done, and now she faces a brick wall.

  I still remember the winter sky that evening. Whenever I worked in my sea garden and I saw a sunset like that, I’d think back to Bantham Beach. It was as if the sun had been torn open. Everything was scarlet. The clouds were flames, so wild and vibrant that blue didn’t look like a colour any more. The sea and land served as a mirror. The ribbed sand was on fire. So were the stones and maroon rock pools. The pink crests of the waves. The burning hump of Burgh Island. The red even shone in my hands.

  Why didn’t I keep walking forward? I had little money. No job. No place to stay. The water tipped my toes. In very little time it could be as high as my ankles. Once a thing is broken—

  And then I felt a small flutter in my belly.

  I turned my back on the sea and dragged my suitcase towards the sand dunes. By the time I was up at the road, the wind had dropped and the sun was gone. The sky was a chalky mauve, almost silver, and so was the land. The first of the evening stars pierced the dusk.

  I am starting again, I thought. Because that is what you do when you reach the last stop. You make a new beginning.

  Sister Mary Inconnue clasps her fingertips above her head and performs a short series of stretches for her neck. My pages are spread at her feet. The light has gone from the window, and the moon is back, a white cuticle.

  ‘Look how much you’ve done, Queenie. It’s only your second day of writing, and see how many pages you’ve filled. There is so much to tell. You remember so much.’

  Of course I remember. Songs from the past fill my head. I will confess everything. I will not be afraid.

  ‘How’s the hand?’ asks Sister Mary Inconnue. ‘Not too sore?’

  I try to smile, only it comes out as something else and I need a tissue.

  I turn to a fresh page.

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

  ST BERNADINE’S HOSPICE is a charitable nursing home that offers skilled and compassionate care to patients with any life-limiting illness, said the leaflet. The nuns who live and work here are trained nurses and volunteers. A medical team from the hospital is on hand to offer further support.

  ‘But I don’t want to go there,’ I tried to say to the GP. This was after my last operation, when I could still manage a few sounds that people recognized as words. I returned the leaflet to his desk.

  I knew St Bernadine’s. It was a low black flint building on the edge of town. I passed the hospice on the bus if I had to mend tools for my garden and needed the large hardware store in Berwick-upon-Tweed. I always felt a tenderness for my tools and treated them like friends. But passing the hospice, I’d turn my back on the building to look at the sea instead. I pulled out my notebook. I want to stay in my home, I wrote.

  The GP nodded. He picked up a pen and rolled it between his fingers. ‘Of course you don’t have to go to St Bernadine’s if you don’t want to, Queenie.’

  He kept his eyes fixed on that pen of his, and every once in a while a sigh slipped from his mouth as if an explosion had gone on somewhere deep inside his chest. ‘The cancer is advanced. There’s no more surgery we can do now. You know the prognosis is not—?’ he whispered. ‘You do know?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I reached for my walking sticks, though I wasn’t going to leave. I didn’t want him to have to say any more, and holding on to my sticks was about the best thing I could think of.

  ‘I’m not forcing you to go to St Bernadine’s. Of course I’m not. But they can make sure you’re comfortable there. I’m concerned about you in that beach house. No one else spends the winter on Embleton Bay. I know you have electricity but you don’t have proper heating. And the coastal path is almost inaccessible in this weather. We couldn’t get an ambulance to you. If we needed one.’

  I have Simon. The hospital volunteer. He comes.

  ‘But only three times a week. You need full-time care.’

  The air seemed so thick that I had to concentrate in order to breathe. I sort of didn’t hear any more, or if I did I heard only select words, like ‘complicated’ and so on.

  Nevertheless, I would have stuck to my guns. I would have stayed in my wooden home, but my whole face began to drop and shift shape. My mouth wouldn’t work, and my eye wouldn’t open. It was difficult to eat. It was difficult to speak. I stopped my daily walk and I stopped going to the shop. I didn’t want people to see me. I was so ashamed. If visitors came, I didn’t answer the door. I even avoided working in my sea garden, for fear they’d find me. I thought, I will sleep now, sleep, sleep, but it never came, the sleep. I didn’t want to trouble anyone. I just wanted to be able to let go. But every time I thought of letting go, I wanted only to hold on. I admit I cried. The rain kept coming, and so did the wind. I watched my sea garden from the door, the gales upending the driftwood figures, the rain drowning the rock pools. Winter seemed to have no end.

  When Simon, the volunteer, heard I’d chosen St Bernadine’s he said, Oh, his aunt went there. ‘It’s a very special place,’ he promised. ‘You
don’t have to be religious. They do all sorts. Music and art and stuff. And there’s a nice garden. You’ll like that. My aunt was happy right until the—’

  And then he smiled as if he had completely forgotten how to speak.

  Simon is a bear of a person, and he wears a duffel coat with toggles that don’t quite reach. I sat very still while he packed my nightclothes, slippers, towels. We have been everywhere together, that suitcase and I. Simon asked if there was anything else I would like to take and I couldn’t think because it was too strange to think I was leaving. I had lived in that beach house for twenty years, ever since I left you and Kingsbridge. The place was a part of me in the same way that the past was a part of me and you were a part of me and so were my bones. I looked at the painted grey walls, the bare board floors, the second-hand paisley throws I had found in thrift shops and the multi-coloured rag rug I made one winter. The old cooker, the copper pans, the blue wood shutters, the glass bottles and books on the windowsill. The pea-green china cups and saucers with gold rims I’d bought all those years ago in Kingsbridge in case you ever visited and stayed for tea. Already it was so cold without the heat of the woodburner that Simon’s breath was a great cloud of smoke above his head. Mine was only a trickle.

  Simon carried me down the sand path to his car. All the other beach houses were still shut up for winter. I was like a little bird, Simon laughed, and I knew that if I really were a bird I’d be dead already. I tried not to stay any more with that idea because it frightens me, Harold, when those thoughts come. He carried me past the public golf course and the clubhouse. No one was at the window and I was glad. Simon switched on the car radio to keep me company while he went back to fetch my suitcase, but the solitude and the silence are what I am used to.

  As we drove away I turned my head for a glimpse of my sea garden. I saw the flint walls. The coloured flags. The tips of seed heads and the driftwood figures. They were silhouettes up on the cliff against a dense sea mist. In the village we passed the rows of black flint and whitewashed cottages, and the land opened like a winter book. Hedgerows were bare sticks. Last year’s leaves clung to the trees like little bats, and a belt of Norwegian spruce swayed in the wind. There was no sign of the Cheviots. Only later did I realize that I’d looked for all these landmarks instead of saying goodbye. But sometimes you don’t say the word because you think a thing is ongoing when actually it is already over.