The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry Read online

  Maybe it was because Harold was carrying something too heavy, but he could suddenly picture his young son standing against the wood-chip wallpaper in the hallway, his new satchel dragging down his shoulders. He was wearing his gray uniform; it must have been the day he started primary school. Like his father, David loomed a good few inches over the other boys, giving the impression that he was older, or at least oversized. He had gazed up at Harold from his place against the wall and said, “I don’t want to do this.” There were no tears. No holding on to Harold and not letting go. David spoke with a simplicity and self-knowledge that was disarming. In answer, Harold said— what? What had he said? He had looked down at his son, for whom he wanted everything, and been struck dumb.

  Yes, life is terrifying, he might have said. Or, Yes, but it gets better. Or even: Yes, but it is sometimes good and sometimes bad. Better still, in the absence of words, he might have taken David in his arms. But he had not. He’d done none of those things. He felt the boy’s fear so keenly, he could see no way round it. The morning his son looked up at his father and asked for help, Harold gave nothing. He fled to his car and went to work.

  Why must he remember?

  He hunched his shoulders and drove his feet harder, as if he wasn’t so much walking to Queenie as away from himself.

  Harold arrived at Buckfast Abbey before the gift shop closed. The square limestone profile of the church stood gray against the soft peaks behind. He realized he had come here before, many years ago, as a surprise for Maureen’s birthday. David had refused to get out of the car, and Maureen had insisted she would like to sit with him, and they had gone straight home without setting foot out of the parking lot.

  In the monastery shop, Harold chose postcards and a souvenir pen, and briefly contemplated buying a jar of the monks’ honey, but it was still a long way to Berwick-upon-Tweed and he wasn’t sure it would fit in his plastic bag, or survive the journey without the washing powder getting at it. He bought it anyway and asked for extra bubble wrap. There were no monks, only tourist parties. And there were more people queuing for the newly refurbished Grange Restaurant than the abbey. He wondered if the monks noticed, or minded.

  Harold chose a large portion of chicken curry, and carried his tray to a window by the terrace, overlooking the lavender garden. He was so hungry he couldn’t scoop the food fast enough to his mouth. At the next table a couple in their late fifties seemed to be discussing something, maybe a map. They both wore khaki shorts, khaki sweatshirts, brown socks, and proper hiking boots, so that sitting opposite each other at the table, they looked like male and female models of the same person. They even ate the same sandwiches and drank the same fruit drink. Harold tried but he couldn’t imagine Maureen dressing like him. He began to write his cards:

  Dear Queenie,

  I have come approximately 20 miles. You must keep waiting.

  Harold (Fry)

  Dear Maureen,

  Have reached Buckfast Abbey. Weather good. Shoes holding up, as are feet and legs.

  H.

  Dear Girl in the Garage (Happy to Help),

  Thank you.

  From the man who said he was off for a walk.

  “Could I possibly borrow your pen?” said the hiking man. Harold passed it and the man circled a point on his map several times over. His wife said nothing. Maybe she even frowned. Harold didn’t like to look too closely.

  “Are you here for the Dartmoor Trail?” asked the man, returning the pen.

  Harold said that he wasn’t. He was traveling to a friend by foot, with a very specific purpose. He shuffled his postcards into a neat pile.

  “Of course my wife and I are walkers. We come here every year. Even when she broke her leg we came back. That’s how much we love it.”

  Harold replied that he and his wife also used to take the same holiday each year at a holiday camp in Eastbourne. There had been entertainment every evening, and competitions among the residents. “One year my son won the Daily Mail Twist prize,” he said.

  The man nodded impatiently as if he were hurrying Harold along. “Of course it’s what you wear on your feet that counts. What kind of boots do you have?”

  “Yachting shoes.” Harold smiled, but the hiking man didn’t.

  “You should wear Scarpa. Scarpa is what the pros wear. We swear by Scarpa.”

  His wife looked up. “You swear by Scarpa,” she said. Her eyes were round, as if she had contact lenses that maybe hurt. For a confusing moment Harold was caught in the memory of a game David used to play, where he timed how long he could stare without blinking. His eyes would be streaming but he wouldn’t close them. It was not the sort of competition they would run at the holiday camp in Eastbourne. This one had been painful to watch.

  The hiking man said, “What kind of socks do you wear?”

  Harold glanced at his feet. “Normal ones,” he was about to say, but the man didn’t wait for an answer.

  “You need specialist socks,” he said. “Anything else and you can forget it.” He broke off. “What socks do we wear?” Harold had no idea. It was only when the man’s wife supplied the answer that he realized the hiking man was addressing her and not himself.

  “Thorlo,” she said.

  “Gore-Tex jacket?”

  Harold opened his mouth and closed it.

  “Walking is what makes our marriage. Which route are you doing?”

  Harold explained that he was making it up as he went along, but that he was, in essence, heading north. He mentioned Exeter, Bath, and possibly Stroud. “I’m sticking to the roads because I have driven all my adult life. It’s what I know.”

  The hiking man continued talking. It occurred to Harold that he was one of those people who didn’t require other people in order to have a conversation. His wife studied her hands. “Of course the Cotswold Trail is overrated. Give me Dartmoor any day.”

  “Personally I liked the Cotswolds,” said his wife. “I know it’s more flat, but it’s romantic.” She twiddled her wedding ring so hard it looked as if she might unscrew her finger.

  “She loves Jane Austen,” laughed the hiking man. “She’s seen all her films. I’m more of a man’s man, if you know what I mean.”

  Harold found himself nodding, although he had no idea what the man meant. He had never been what Maureen called the macho type. He had always avoided the after-hours parties with Napier and the chaps at the brewery. Sometimes it struck him as strange that he had worked all those years with alcohol, when it had played such a terrible part in his life. Maybe people were drawn to what they feared.

  “We like Dartmoor best,” said the hiking man.

  “You like Dartmoor best,” corrected his wife.

  They looked at each other, as though they were complete strangers. In the pause that followed, Harold returned to his postcards. He hoped there wouldn’t be a row. He hoped they weren’t one of those couples who said in public the dangerous things they could not voice at home.

  He thought again about the holidays in Eastbourne. Maureen would pack sandwiches for the journey, and they would arrive so early the gates were closed. Harold had always thought affectionately of those summers until recently, when Maureen told him David referred to life’s low points as being as dull as bloody Eastbourne. These days of course Harold and Maureen preferred not to travel, but he was sure she was wrong about the holiday camp. They had laughed. David had found a playmate or two. There was the night he won the dancing. He had been happy.

  “Dull as bloody Eastbourne.” Maureen hit the word so hard it sounded like an invasion of her mouth.

  He was interrupted by the couple at the next table. They had raised their voices. Harold wanted to get away, but there appeared to be no safe slice of silence in which he might stand and excuse himself.

  The woman who loved Jane Austen said, “Do you think it was funny cooped up here with a broken leg?” Her husband kept on looking at his map as if she had not spoken, and she continued to speak as if he was not ignoring her. �
��I never want to come here again.”

  Harold wished the woman would stop. He wished the man would smile or take hold of her hand. He thought of himself and Maureen, and the years of silence at 13 Fossebridge Road. Had Maureen ever felt the impulse to say, where everyone could hear, such truths about their marriage? The thought had never occurred to him before, and was so alarming he was already on his feet and heading for the door. The couple didn’t seem to notice that Harold had gone.

  Harold checked into a modest guesthouse that smelled of central heating, boiled giblets, and air freshener. He was sore with tiredness, but once he had unpacked his few things and inspected his feet, he sat on the edge of the bed, wondering what to do next. He was too unsettled to sleep. From downstairs came the sound of the early evening news. Maureen would be watching too, while she did the ironing. For a while he stayed, listening without hearing, comforted by the knowledge they were joined in this way at least. He thought again of the couple in the restaurant, and missed his wife so much he could think of nothing else. If he’d played it otherwise, could he have made a difference? If he’d pushed open the door to the spare room? Or even booked a holiday and taken her abroad? But she would never have agreed. She was too afraid of not talking to David, and the visit she was always waiting for.

  Other things came too. The early years of their marriage, before David was born, when she had grown vegetables in the garden of Fossebridge Road, and waited for Harold every evening on the corner beyond the brewery. They would walk home, sometimes taking in the seafront, or stopping at the quay to watch the boats. She made curtains out of mattress ticking and, with the remnants, a shift dress for herself. She took to looking up new recipes from the library. There were casseroles, curries, pasta, beans. Over dinner, she would ask about the chaps at the brewery, and their wives, although when it came to the Christmas party, they never went.

  He remembered setting eyes on her in a red dress, with a little sprig of holly she had pinned to her collar. If he closed his eyes, he fancied he could smell the sweetness of her. They had drunk ginger beer in the garden, and watched the stars. “Who needs other people?” one or other of them had said.

  He saw her holding out the wrapped-up body of their baby and offering him to Harold. He wouldn’t break, she’d said through a smile: “Why won’t you hold him?” Harold had said the baby liked her best and maybe dug his hands in his pockets.

  So how was it that a truth that could make her smile once, and rest her head on his shoulder, would years later become the source of such resentment and fury? “You never held him!” she had howled when things reached their worst. “All his childhood you never even touched him!” It hadn’t been strictly true and he had said something along those lines, although she was right in essence. He had been too afraid to hold his own son. But how was it that once she had understood, and then years later she didn’t?

  He wondered if David might come to her, now that Harold was at a safe distance.

  It was too much to stay inside, thinking these things, and regretting so many others. Harold reached for his jacket. Outside a curve of moon hung above flakes of cloud. Noticing him, a woman with violent pink hair stopped watering her hanging baskets and stared, as if he were strange.

  From a public phone booth he rang Maureen, but she had no news to report and their conversation was brief and halting. Only once she referred to his walk, when she asked if he had thought of looking at a map. Harold said he was intending to buy proper walking equipment once he had made it as far as Exeter. There would be more choice in a city, he told her. He gave a knowing reference to Gore-Tex.

  She said, “I see.” The sound was flat, suggesting he had trodden in something unpleasant that she had been expecting all along. In the silence that followed he could hear the click of her tongue against the roof of her mouth, and the rattle of her swallowing. Then she said, “I suppose you have worked out how much this is all costing.”

  “I thought I’d use my retirement fund. I’m sticking to a budget.”

  “I see,” she said again.

  “It’s not as if we had plans.”

  “No.”

  “So is that OK?”

  “OK?” she repeated, as if the word was not one she had come across before.

  For one chaotic moment he wanted to say, Why don’t you come with me, only he knew she would stamp on that with her I think not, so instead he said, “Is it OK with you? That I’m doing this? That I’m walking?”

  “It has to be,” said Maureen, and then she hung up.

  Again Harold left the phone booth, wishing he could make Maureen understand. But for years they had been in a place where language had no significance. She only had to look at him and she was wrenched to the past. Small words were exchanged and they were safe. They hovered over the surface of what could never be said, because that was unfathomable and would never be bridged. Harold returned to his temporary room, and rinsed his clothes. He pictured their separate beds at 13 Fossebridge Road and wondered when exactly she had stopped opening her mouth as they kissed. Was it before, or after?

  Harold woke at dawn, surprised and thankful that he could walk, but this time he was weary. The heating was too much and the night had seemed long and confined. He couldn’t help feeling that, even though Maureen had not said it, what she was implying about his retirement fund was correct. He should not be spending it solely on himself and without her approval.

  Though, God knows, it was a long time since he had done anything to impress her.

  From Buckfast Harold took the B3352 via Ashburton, stopping overnight at Heathfield. He passed other walkers, and they spoke briefly, acknowledging the beauty of the land and the coming of summer, before they wished one another a safe journey and went their separate ways. Harold turned bends, followed the contours of the hills, his path always the road ahead. Crows scattered from trees with a clatter of wings. A young deer shot out from the hedgerow. Cars roared up from nowhere, and disappeared. There were dogs behind gates, and several badgers, like furred weights against the gutter. A cherry tree stood in a dress of blossom, and as the wind took up it loosened a drift of petals like confetti. Harold was ready for surprise, whatever form it took. Such freedom was rare.

  “I am Father,” he had told his mother when he was maybe six or seven.

  She had looked up, interested, and it shocked him that he had been so bold. He had no idea what he was going to do next. There was nothing for it but to put on his father’s flat cap, and his dressing gown, and stare accusingly at an empty bottle. His mother’s face set like a jelly; he feared at least a slap. Then, to his shock and profound delight, she stretched back her soft neck and the air tinkled with her laughter. He could see her perfect teeth and the pink of her gums. He had never made his mother laugh like that before.

  “What a clown,” she had said.

  He had felt as tall as the house. Grown up. Despite himself, he had laughed too; first as a grin and then with a great bellyful that sent him doubling over. After that, he sought out ways to amuse her. He learned jokes. He pulled faces. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes he hit on things without even knowing how they were funny.

  Harold walked the streets and lanes. The road narrowed and widened, and rose and curved. Sometimes he was almost flat against the hedgerows; others he walked the pavements freely. “Don’t walk in the cracks,” he heard himself call after his mother. “If you walk in the cracks there are ghosts.” Only this time she had looked at him as if she had never seen him before, and then stepped on every one of them, so that he had been forced to run after her, holding out his arms and flapping wildly. It had been hard to keep up with a woman like Joan.

  A new set of blisters began to bulge on both Harold’s heels. By the afternoon, further blisters rose also on the pads of his toes. He had no idea that walking could hurt so much. All he could think of were plasters.

  From Heathfield, he walked to Chudleigh Knighton along the B3344, and on again to Chudleigh. It
was an effort to get that far, with such exhaustion deep inside him. He took a room for the night, disappointed he had barely managed five miles, although the following day he pushed himself hard and walked from dawn, covering another nine. The early sun shone through the trees in spokes of light, and by mid-morning the sky was pasted with small stubborn clouds that, the more he looked, resembled gray bowler hats. Midges shot through the air.

  Six days after leaving Kingsbridge, and approximately forty-three miles from Fossebridge Road, the waistband of Harold’s trousers drooped from his stomach and patches of sunburnt skin peeled from his forehead, nose, and ears. Referring to his watch, he found he already knew the hour. Morning and evening, he studied the toes, heels, and arches of his feet, applying plasters or cream where the skin was broken or chafing. He preferred to take his lemonade outside, and sheltered with the smokers when it rained. The first of the forget-me-nots shone in pale pools under the moon.

  Harold promised himself he would buy serious walking equipment in Exeter, and a further souvenir for Queenie. As the sun sank behind the city walls and the air chilled, he remembered again that there was something not right about her letter, but couldn’t put his finger on what it was.

  Harold and the Silver-Haired Gentleman

  Dear Maureen,

  Writing this from a bench beside the cathedral. Two chaps are doing street theater, though they seem to be in danger of setting themselves on fire. Have marked my position with an X.

  H.

  Dear Queenie,

  Do not give up.

  Best wishes,

  Harold (Fry)

  Dear Girl in the Garage (Happy to Help),

  I have been wondering whether you pray? I tried once but I was too late. I am afraid that did it for me.

  Kind regards,