The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (Harold Fry, #1)

by Rachel Joyce

They believed in him. They had looked at him in his yachting shoes, and listened to what he said, and they had made a decision in their hearts and minds to ignore the evidence and to imagine something bigger and something infinitely more beautiful than the obvious. Remembering his own doubt, Harold was humbled.

He and Queenie must have driven this way countless times, and yet he had no memory of the scenery. He must have been so caught up in the day’s agenda, and arriving punctually at their destination, that the land beyond the car had been no more than a wash of one green, and a backdrop of one hill. Life was very different when you walked through it.

And sometimes as a boy he had wanted to touch his father; to stand close beside him and know the feeling of an adult arm around his shoulder. Harold had wanted to ask what happened before he was born, and why his father’s hands trembled when he reached for his glass.

It surprised him that he was remembering all this. Maybe it was the walking. Maybe you saw even more than the land when you got out of the car and used your feet.

The truth is,” and here he wiggled his ear with his finger, “we’ve all got a past. We’ve all got things we wish we’d done, or hadn’t. Good luck to you.

David must have been a young teenager. He had gazed back at Harold, with his beautiful brown eyes that were half boy, half man, and he’d shrugged. “I dunno. I was already in shit. It seemed easier to stay in it than come back.”

“You’d think walking should be the simplest thing,” she said at last. “Just a question of putting one foot in front of the other. But it never ceases to amaze me how difficult the things that are supposed to be instinctive really are.” She wet her lower lip with her tongue, waiting for more words. “Eating,” she said at last. “That’s another one. Some people have real difficulties with that. Talking too. Even loving. They can all be difficult.” She watched the garden, not Harold.

Maureen smiled. Harold didn’t expect her to stand up for him because she loved her son, and that was right, of course. He only wished that sometimes he didn’t feel so outside, as if what bonded them was their disassociation from him.

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.

In a gift shop close to the cathedral, Harold bought an embossed set of pencils that he hoped Maureen would like. For Queenie, he chose a small paperweight containing a model of the cathedral that covered itself in glitter when he tipped it upside down. It struck him as strange but true that tourists bought trinkets and souvenirs of religious places because they had no idea what else to do when they got there.

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.

And what no one else knew was the appalling weight of the thing they were carrying inside. The inhuman effort it took sometimes to be normal, and a part of things that appeared both easy and everyday. The loneliness of that.

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 passerby, 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.

In the city, Harold’s thoughts had stopped. Now that he was back in the open land, he was once again between places, and pictures ran freely through his mind. In walking, he freed 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.

“Your shoes are fucked. So is your body. And your spectacles.” She held up two halves of his reading glasses, one in each hand. “Every way you look at it, you’re fucked. How do you think you’re going to make it to Berwick?” It reminded him of the very deliberate way in which David swore: as if he had carefully considered all the options and, given what he felt for his father, the foulest expressions were the only ones suitable. “I am—as you rightly point out—fucked.”

He fell silent, and so did Martina. He felt safe with what he had confided. It had been the same with Queenie. You could say things in the car and know she had tucked them somewhere safe among her thoughts, and that she would not judge him for them, or hold it against him in years to come. He supposed that was what friendship was, and regretted all the years he had spent without it.

He caught her profile at the window and then stepped as boldly as he could, wondering if she was worrying about his blisters, or his yachting shoes, and wishing he was not leaving her alone, with only a dog and some boots. It was hard to have been her guest. It was hard to understand a little and then walk away.

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.

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 been doing 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.

Harold waited for him to finish. He needed the very famous actor to know that you could be ordinary and attempt something extraordinary, without being able to explain it in a logical way.

“When you rang and told us about your walk, I was afraid you’d misunderstood the gravity of things. But, you see, I was wrong. It’s a rather unusual kind of healing. I don’t know how you came up with it. But maybe it’s what the world needs. A little less sense, and a little more faith.”

He saw that when a person becomes estranged from the things they know, and is a passerby, strange things take on a new significance. And knowing this, it seemed important to allow himself to be true to the instincts that made him Harold, as opposed to anyone else.

It was as much of a gift to receive as it was to give, requiring as it did both courage and humility. He

Dear Maureen, Please find enclosed my debit card, etc. I am going to walk without so many things. If I keep it simple, I know I can get there. I think of you often. H.

“I miss her all the time. I know in my head that she has gone, but I still keep looking. The only difference is that I am getting used to the pain. It’s like discovering a great hole in the ground. To begin with, you forget it’s there and you keep falling in. After a while, it’s still there, but you learn to walk round it.”

There were times, he saw, when not knowing was the biggest truth, and you had to stay with that.

“I’m no better than anyone else. I’m really not. Anybody can do what I’m doing. But you have to let go. I didn’t know that at the beginning but now I do. You have to let go of the things you think you need like cash cards and phones and maps and things.”

And as they pulled away, she saw Harold, this stranger who had been her husband for so many years, with a dog trotting at his side, and a group of followers she didn’t know—but she didn’t throw a wave, or toot the horn. Without fanfare or ceremony or even a proper goodbye, she drove away from Harold, and let him walk.

Harold sighed. He knew he had trusted Wilf against the odds, but somehow he had also trusted that there was a basic goodness to be found in everyone, and that this time he could tap into it.

He had walked too much with other people, and listened to their stories, and followed their routes. It would be a relief to listen again only to himself.

He reasoned the animal had made its own decision. It had chosen to walk with Harold for a while, and then it had chosen to stop, and walk instead with the young girl. Life was like that. But in losing his last companion, Harold felt a further layer of skin had been ripped from him. He was afraid of what would come next. He knew he hadn’t got it in him to take much more.

Harold replaced his rucksack on his shoulder and turned from the hospice. As he left the gates, the figures lying in deck chairs did not look up. No one was expecting him and so no one appeared to notice his arrival or his departure. The most extraordinary moment of Harold’s life had come and gone without trace.

If we can’t be open, Maureen thought, if we can’t accept what we don’t know, there really is no hope.