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

by Rachel Joyce

He peered at his baby son, with his solemn eyes, and felt consumed with fear. What if he was hungry? What if he was unhappy? What if other boys hit him when he went to school? There was so much to protect him from, Harold was overwhelmed. He wondered if other men had found the new responsibility of parenting as terrifying, or whether it had been a fault that was only in himself. It was different these days. You saw men pushing buggies and feeding babies with no worries at all. “I hope I haven’t upset you?” said the woman beside him. “No, no.” He stood and shook her hand. “I’m glad you stopped,” she said. “I’m glad you asked for water.” He returned to the road before she could see that he was crying.

Harold asked himself if years ago he shouldn’t have pressed Maureen to have another baby. “David is enough,” she had said. “He is all we need.” But sometimes he was afraid that having one son was too much to bear. He wondered if the pain of loving diluted, the more you had? A child’s growing was a constant pushing away.

He had developed a slow inner rhythm that the fury of the city now threatened to overturn. He had felt comfortable in the security of open land and sky, where everything took its place. He had felt himself to be part of something bigger than being simply Harold. In the city, where there was such short-range sight, he felt anything might happen, and that whatever it was he wouldn’t be ready.

He lost a full day, simply wandering. Each time he resolved to leave, he saw something that distracted him, and another hour passed. He deliberated over purchases that he hadn’t realized he required. Should he send Maureen a new pair of gardening gloves? An assistant fetched five different types, and modeled them on her hands, before Harold remembered his wife had long since abandoned her vegetable beds. He stopped to eat and was presented with such an array of sandwiches that he forgot he was hungry, and left with nothing. (Did he prefer cheese or ham, or would he like the filling of the day, seafood cocktail? Or would he like something else altogether? Sushi? Peking duck wraps?) What had been so clear to him when he was alone, two feet on the ground, became lost in this abundance of choices and streets and glass-fronted shopping outlets. He longed to be back in the open land.

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 inhuman effort it took sometimes to be normal, and a part of things that appeared both easy and everyday. The loneliness of that.

It struck Harold afresh how life could change in an instant. You could be doing something so everyday—walking your partner’s dog, putting on your shoes—and not knowing that everything you wanted you were about to lose.

it surprised him how much was at his feet, if only he had known to look.

He visited the cathedral, and sat in its chilled light, pouring like water from above. He reminded himself that centuries ago men had built churches, bridges, and ships, all of them a leap of madness and faith, if you thought about it. When no one was looking, Harold slipped to his knees and asked for the safety of the people he had left behind, and those who were ahead. He asked for the will to keep going. He also apologized for not believing.

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.

Without love, nothing had—what? What was the word for it? He couldn’t remember. He thought it began with a V, and he wanted to say vulva, but that surely wasn’t right.

“You got up, and you did something. And if trying to find a way when you don’t even know you can get there isn’t a small miracle; then I don’t know what is.”

They were part of the air he walked through, just as all the travelers he had met were part of it. He saw that people would make the decisions they wished to make, and some of them would hurt both themselves and those who loved them, and some would pass unnoticed, while others would bring joy.