B006TF6WAM EBOK Read online

  He should never have let her go like that.

  ‘Excuse me,’ a gentle voice above him said, ‘is this seat free?’

  He shook himself back to the present. A well-dressed man was standing to his left and pointing to the chair opposite. Harold wiped his eyes, surprised and ashamed to discover that once again he had been crying. He told the man that the seat was indeed free, and urged him to take it.

  The man wore a smart suit and deep-blue shirt with small pearl cufflinks. His body was lean and graceful. His thick, silver hair was swept back from his face. Even as he sat he folded his legs so that the crease of his trousers fell in line with his knees. He lifted his hands to his lips, holding them there in an elegant steeple. He looked the sort of man Harold wished he had been; distinguished, as Maureen would say. Maybe he was staring too hard because after the waitress had delivered a pot of Ceylon tea (no milk) and a toasted teacake, the gentleman said with feeling, ‘Goodbyes are always hard.’ He poured tea and added lemon.

  Harold explained that he was walking to a woman he had let down in the past. He hoped it was not a goodbye; he very much hoped his friend would live. He didn’t look the man in the eye, but focused instead on the toasted teacake. It was the size of the plate. The butter had melted like golden syrup.

  The man sliced one half into slim soldiers and listened as he ate. The café was loud and busy; the windows so steamed they were opaque.

  ‘Queenie was the sort of woman people don’t appreciate. She wasn’t a dolly bird, like the other women at the brewery. She maybe had a little hair on her face. Not a moustache or anything. But the other chaps laughed. They called her names. It caused her pain.’ Harold wasn’t even certain he could be heard. He marvelled at the neatness with which the gentleman posted the teacake between his teeth and mopped his fingers after each mouthful.

  ‘Would you like some?’ said the gentleman.

  ‘I couldn’t.’ Harold raised both hands as if blocking the way.

  ‘I only want half. It seems a shame to waste the other. Please. Share it.’

  The silver-haired gentleman took his cut-up pieces and arranged them on a paper napkin. He slid the plate with the intact half towards Harold. ‘Can I ask you a question?’ he said. ‘You seem a decent sort of man.’

  Harold nodded because the teacake was already in his mouth and he couldn’t exactly spit it out again. He tried to stop the butter from running by scooping it up with his fingers, but it shot down his wrist and oiled his sleeve.

  ‘I come to Exeter every Thursday. I get the train in the morning, and I return in the early evening. I come to meet a young man. We do things. No one knows about this part of my life.’

  The silver-haired gentleman paused to pour a fresh cup of tea. The teacake was lodged in Harold’s throat. He could feel the man’s eyes searching for his but he couldn’t possibly look up.

  ‘Can I go on?’ said the gentleman.

  Harold nodded. He gave a gulp that sent the teacake squeezing past his tonsils. It hurt all the way down.

  ‘I like what we do, otherwise I would not come here, but I have also grown fond of him. He fetches me a glass of water afterwards and sometimes he talks. His English is not so good. I believe he had polio as a child, and sometimes it causes him to limp.’

  For the first time the silver-haired gentleman faltered, as if he was fighting something inside. He lifted his tea but his fingers trembled when he steered the cup to his mouth, so that the liquid spilled over the rim and slopped on to his teacake. ‘He moves me, this young man,’ he said. ‘He moves me beyond words.’

  Harold looked away. He wondered if he could get up but realized he couldn’t. He had eaten half the silver-haired gentleman’s teacake, after all. And yet he felt it was an intrusion to witness the man’s helplessness, when he had been so kind and appeared so elegant. He wished the man hadn’t spilled his tea, and that he would mop it up, but he didn’t, he just sat, bearing it, and not caring. His teacake would be ruined.

  The gentleman continued with difficulty. The words were slow and spread apart. ‘I lick his trainers. It’s part of what we do. But I noticed only this morning that he has a small hole at the toe.’ His voice quivered. ‘I would like to buy him another pair but I don’t want to offend him. And yet equally I can’t bear the thought of him walking the streets with a hole in his trainers. His foot will get wet. What should I do?’ His mouth folded over itself, as if pressing back an avalanche of pain.

  Harold sat in silence. The silver-haired gentleman was in truth nothing like the man Harold had first imagined him to be. He was a chap like himself, with a unique pain; and yet there would be no knowing that if you passed him in the street, or sat opposite him in a café and did not share his teacake. Harold pictured the gentleman on a station platform, smart in his suit, looking no different from anyone else. It must be the same all over England. People were buying milk, or filling their cars with petrol, or even posting letters. And what no one else knew was the appalling weight of the thing they were carrying inside. The superhuman effort it took sometimes to be normal, and a part of things that appeared both easy and everyday. The loneliness of that. Moved and humbled, he passed his paper napkin.

  ‘I think I would buy him new trainers,’ said Harold. He dared to lift his eyes to meet those of the silver-haired gentleman. The irises were a watery blue; the whites so pink they appeared sore. It tore at Harold’s heart, but he didn’t look away. Briefly the two men sat, not speaking, until a lightness filled Harold and caused him to offer a smile. He understood that in walking to atone for the mistakes he had made, it was also his journey to accept the strangeness of others. As a passer-by, he was in a place where everything, not only the land, was open. People would feel free to talk, and he was free to listen. To carry a little of them as he went. He had neglected so many things, that he owed this small piece of generosity to Queenie and the past.

  The gentleman smiled too. ‘Thank you.’ He wiped his mouth and his fingers, and then the rim of his cup. As he stood he said, ‘I don’t suppose our paths will cross again but I am glad we met. I am glad we talked.’

  They shook hands and parted, and left the remains of the teacake behind.

  9

  Maureen and David

  MAUREEN DIDN’T KNOW which was worse, the numbing shock that came with the first knowledge that Harold was walking to Queenie or the galvanizing fury that replaced it. She had received his postcards, one of Buckfast Abbey and another of the Dartmouth Railway (Hope you are well. H.), but neither of these offered any real comfort or explanation. He phoned her most evenings but he was so tired he made no sense. The money they had set aside for their retirement would be squandered in weeks. How dare he leave her, after she had put up with him for forty-seven years? How dare he humiliate her so painfully she could not even tell her son? A small number of household bills were arranged in a pile on the hall table, addressed to Mr H. Fry, and reminding her of his absence every time she rushed past.

  She fetched out the hoover, searching out traces of Harold, a hair, a button, and sucking them into the nozzle. She shot his bedside table, his wardrobe, his bed, with disinfectant spray.

  It wasn’t simply anger that preoccupied Maureen. There was also the problem of what to say to her neighbour. She was beginning to regret the lie about Harold being in bed with a swollen ankle. Almost every day Rex appeared at the front door, asking if Harold would like a visitor and bearing small gifts: a box of Milk Tray, a packet of playing cards, an article he had cut out of the local paper about lawn feed. It had come to the point where she dreaded looking up at the frosted glass of the front door for fear of discovering his stout silhouette. She wondered about saying her husband had been rushed to A&E overnight, but it would cause Rex such anxiety she couldn’t bear it. Besides, he would probably start offering her lifts to the hospital. She felt even more of a prisoner in her own home than she had done before Harold left.

  Nearly a week after he had gone, Harold rang from a phone box to
tell Maureen he was staying a second night in Exeter, and would head early the next morning towards Tiverton. He said, ‘Sometimes I think I’m doing this for David … Did you hear me, Maureen?’

  She had heard. But she couldn’t speak.

  He said, ‘I think of him a lot. And I remember things. About him being a boy. I think it might help.’

  Maureen drew in a breath so cold that her teeth felt stripped. She said at last, ‘Are you telling me David wants you to walk to Queenie Hennessy?’

  He said nothing and then he gave a sigh. ‘No.’ It was a dull sound, like something dropping.

  She went on. ‘Have you spoken to him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Seen him?’

  Again, ‘No.’

  ‘Well then.’

  Harold said nothing. Maureen stood and paced up and down the hall carpet, feeling the size of her victory with her feet. ‘If you are going to this woman, if you are going to walk the length of England without a map and your mobile and without even telling me first, then at least have the goodness to own up to what you’re doing. This is your choice, Harold. It’s not mine and it certainly wouldn’t be David’s.’

  Ending on such a blaze of righteousness, she had no alternative but to hang up. She instantly regretted it. She tried to ring him back, but the number wasn’t available. Sometimes she said these things but she didn’t mean them. They had become the fabric of the way she talked. She tried to find something to distract her, but the only thing left to wash was the net curtains and she couldn’t face taking them down. Another evening came and went, and nothing happened.

  Maureen slept fitfully. She dreamed she was at a social event, with a lot of people in black tie and evening dresses, whom she didn’t know. She was sitting at a table to eat when she glanced down and found her liver in her lap. ‘How lovely to meet you,’ she said to the man beside her, smothering it with her hand before he could see. And all the time her liver was slithering between her fingers, squelching in at the gaps beneath her nails, until she was at a loss to know how she might contain it. The waiters began delivering plates covered with silver domes.

  Yet she felt no physical pain. Not as such. What she felt was more like panic; the agony of panic. It came over her in a rush that left her skin prickling below her hairline. How was she going to get the liver back inside her body without anyone noticing, and when she couldn’t feel any fleshy gap through which to post it? No matter how hard she flicked them below the table, her fingers were stuck all over with the thing. She tried to loosen it with her free hand, but in no time it clung to that too. She wanted to jump up and scream, but she knew she mustn’t. She must remain very still and very quiet and no one must know she was nursing her entrails.

  Maureen woke in a sweat at quarter past four, and reached for her bedside light. She thought of Harold in Exeter, and the pension fund dwindling to nothing, and Rex with his gifts. She thought of the silence that wouldn’t be cleaned away. She couldn’t take any more.

  Some time after dawn, she spoke with David. She confessed the truth about his father walking to a woman from the past, and he listened. ‘You and I didn’t know Queenie Hennessy,’ said Maureen. ‘But she worked at the brewery. She had a job in accounts. I suspect she was the spinster type. Very lonely.’ After that, she told David she loved him and wished he would visit. He promised it was the same for him. ‘So what should I do about Harold, love? What would you do?’ she said.

  He told her exactly what the problem was with his father, and urged her to visit the doctor. He voiced the things she was too afraid to say.

  ‘But I can’t leave the house,’ she argued. ‘He might come back. He might come back and I wouldn’t be here.’

  David laughed. A little harshly, she felt; but he had never been one to mince his words. She had a choice. She could stay at home, waiting. Or she could do something about it. She pictured David smiling and tears sprang to her eyes. And then he said something she didn’t expect; he knew about Queenie Hennessy. She was a good woman.

  Maureen gave a small gasp. ‘But you never met her.’

  He reminded her that while this was true, it was untrue that Maureen and Queenie had not met. She had come to Fossebridge Road with a message for Harold. Urgent, she’d said.

  That settled it. As soon as the surgery was open, Maureen rang to book a doctor’s appointment.

  10

  Harold and the Sign

  THE MORNING SKY was a single blue, combed through with cloud, while a slip of moon still loitered behind trees. Harold was relieved to be back on the road. He had left Exeter early, after purchasing a second-hand dictionary of wild flowers and a visitor’s guide to Great Britain. These he kept in his plastic bag, along with the two presents for Queenie. He also carried replenished supplies of water, biscuits and, on the advice of a chemist, a tube of petroleum jelly for his feet. ‘I could sell you a specialist cream but it would be a waste of your time and money,’ the shopkeeper said. He also warned there was bad weather coming.

  In the city, Harold’s thoughts had stopped. Now that he was back on the open land, he was once again between places, and pictures ran freely through his mind. In walking, he unleashed the past that he had spent twenty years seeking to avoid, and now it chattered and played through his head with a wild energy that was its own. He no longer saw distance in terms of miles. He measured it with his remembering.

  Passing allotments, he saw Maureen in the front garden of Fossebridge Road, wearing an old shirt of Harold’s, her hair tied back against the wind and her face smutched with dirt, as she dug in French-bean plants. He saw a bird’s broken egg and recalled with splintering tenderness the fragility of David’s head when he was born. He heard the hollow cackle of a crow in the silence, and suddenly he was lying in his bed as a teenager, hearing that same cry, and overwhelmed with loneliness.

  ‘Where are you going?’ he had asked his mother. Already he loomed over his father, but he liked the fact he only reached her shoulders. She lifted her suitcase and arranged a long silk scarf round her neck. It hung down her back like hair.

  ‘Nowhere,’ she said, but she was opening the front door.

  ‘I want to come.’ He took hold of the scarf, just the tassels where she might not notice. The silk was soft between his fingertips. ‘Can I come?’

  ‘Don’t be daft. You’ll be fine. You’re practically a man.’

  ‘Shall I tell you a joke?’

  ‘Not now, Harold.’ She eased her scarf from his hold. ‘You’re making me silly,’ she said, wiping her eyes. ‘Am I smudged?’

  ‘You’re lovely.’

  ‘Wish me luck.’ She took a deep breath as if she were about to plunge into water, and stepped out.

  The detail was so clear it was more real than the earth beneath his feet. He could smell her musk scent. See the white powder on her skin and know, even without her being there, that if she had allowed him to kiss her cheek it would have tasted of marshmallows.

  ‘I thought you might like these for a change,’ said Queenie Hennessy once. She had prised the lid from a small tin and revealed squares of white confectionery, dusted in icing sugar. He had shaken his head and continued to drive. She didn’t bring marshmallows again.

  Sunlight broke through the trees so that the young leaves, rippling in the wind, shone like foil. At Brampford Speke, the roofs turned into thatch, and the brick was no longer the colour of flint but a warmer shade of red. Branches of spiraea bowed under sleeves of blossom and delphinium shoots nudged the soil. With the help of his guidebook, Harold identified old man’s beard, hart’s tongue, red campion, herb Robert, cuckoo pint, and discovered that the star-shaped flowers whose beauty he had marvelled at were wood anemones. Buoyed up by this, he covered the further two and a half miles to Thorverton with his head deep in his wild-plant dictionary. Despite the chemist’s warning, it did not rain. He felt blessed.

  The land fell away to the left and right, opening towards the faraway hills. Harold overtook two young
women with buggies, a boy on a scooter with a multicoloured baseball cap, three dog walkers and a hiker. He spent the evening with a social worker who wanted to be a poet. The man offered to top up Harold’s lemonade with beer but Harold declined. Alcohol had brought unhappiness in the past, he said; both to himself and those close to him. For many years he had chosen to avoid it. He talked a little about Queenie; how she liked to sing backwards, and tell a riddle, and had a sweet tooth. Her particular favourites were pear drops, sherbet lemons and liquorice. Sometimes her tongue would be a violent shade of red or purple, although he hadn’t liked to tell her. ‘I fetched her a glass of water and hoped that would do the trick.’

  ‘You’re a saint,’ said the man, when Harold told him about walking to Berwick.

  Harold crunched on a pork scratching and insisted that he wasn’t. ‘My wife would back me up on that.’

  ‘You should see the people I have to deal with,’ said the social worker. ‘It’s enough to make you give up. You really believe Queenie Hennessy is waiting?’

  ‘I do,’ said Harold.

  ‘And that you can get to Berwick? In a pair of yachting shoes?’

  ‘I do,’ he repeated.

  ‘Don’t you ever get scared? All on your own?’

  ‘At first I did. But I am used to it now. I know what to expect.’

  The social worker’s shoulders rose and dropped. He said, ‘But what about other people? The sort I deal with? What will happen when you come across one of them?’

  Harold thought of the people he had already met and passed. Their stories had surprised and moved him, and none had left him untouched. Already the world had more people in it for whom he cared. ‘I’m an ordinary chap, passing by. I’m not the sort who stands out in a crowd. And I don’t trouble anyone. When I tell people what I’m doing, they seem to understand. They look at their own lives and they want me to get there. They want Queenie to live, as much as I do.’