The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy (24 page)

‘Jolly nice day for paddling,’ I said to a young family wrapped in coats. They watched with open mouths.

I returned to the coastal path.

The pilgrims

W
HEN
S
ISTER
Catherine wheeled me into the dayroom, Finty was not in her reclining seat. My stomach dropped. Not Finty. Please, not her. I couldn’t help myself. I felt hollowed.

‘What’s up with you?’ I had no idea where her voice was coming from. Maybe she was already haunting me. It was the sort of thing Finty would get up to.

I scanned the room. All the other seats were occupied, even the one that had belonged to Barbara. The Pearly King dozed with a parcel in his lap. Mr Henderson stared at the newspaper, failing to turn the pages. Sister Lucy sat at the table, bent over her jigsaw, without picking up any pieces. New patients held hands with family and friends, none of them speaking, only waiting. At the window there was also a fisherman with a yellow sou’wester hat and a pair of binoculars trained towards the North Sea. But no Finty. No sign of her. Finty was gone.

‘Over here, gal!’

The fisherman turned. He plucked off his sou’wester. He was bald. He was—

‘Finty?’ The noise came out of my mouth before I could stop it.

‘I’m waiting for Harold Fry!’ She lifted her binoculars and fixed them once more on the horizon.

No one spoke. Everyone got on with doing nothing as if the yellow hat was not there. I opened my notebook to begin a fresh page but the sound of the pencil scratching at the paper was so loud in that stillness it was enough to make me stop again.

‘Where are you, Harold Fry?’ muttered Finty.

Mr Henderson put down his newspaper. ‘You’re looking at the North Sea, woman. I don’t know if this has occurred to you but Harold Fry is not coming by boat. And even if he was, I doubt he would make his passage via the Orkneys.’

Finty found this very funny, but it did not seem to deter her. (‘Make his passage? Ha ha ha.’) Mr Henderson shared a despairing look with me.

Finty said, ‘I’ve been thinking. Since Babs went, it’s been no fun at all in this place. Now I may be dying but I’m not fucking dead yet. If Harold Fry is serious about walking, he might as well do it for me as well. All I gotta do is wait. That’s easy.’

My throat felt full, as if I would cry, though I didn’t know whether the feeling that came with it was one of joy or sadness.

‘You are waiting, Finty?’ said Sister Catherine slowly. ‘For Harold Fry?’

‘Too right I am, sister.’

Finty proposed an extra round of nutritional drinks, followed by a nap and some afternoon prayers. She has not attended chapel before. From now on, she said, she has to keep up her strength and widen her options. ‘’Cos I’m not dying till the man gets here. An’ that’s final.’ She returned to her post at the window, complete with the binoculars and sou’wester hat.

The Pearly King began to make a strange rattling noise that had Sister Lucy rushing to his aid with a glass of water. ‘Bless you. I’m laughing,’ he rumbled. And when she asked if there was anything he needed, he mentioned he would like to join Finty at the window. ‘I’m with her,’ he
said, as he moved slowly beside Sister Lucy. ‘I’m waiting too. If you ask me, Harold Fry sounds a diamond geezer.’ So now there was a slight fisherman in a yellow hat and also a huge one-armed Pearly King with the air of a pirate on the lookout for you. I sank a little into my chair.

‘Henny?’ said Finty. ‘Are you gonna wait?’

Everyone turned to Mr Henderson. He in turn glanced at me and gave a chivalrous bow of his head. ‘If Harold Fry is a friend of Miss Hennessy’s, he is a friend of mine.’

‘Yay!’ shrieked Finty. ‘Henny’s in too. Come on, you lot. Anyone else waiting for Harold Fry?’

I could barely look. I thought, No one else will say yes. No one will even answer. And I knew they would be right because what am I doing? Waiting for you when death is everywhere, and I don’t mean only in a hospice.

One by one, and in silence, the patients raised their hands. Sunken faces. Skeletal wrists. Bandages and tubes. Sunlight poured through the windows, and the air shone with dust motes, billowing like silvered snow. The friends and families of the patients began to raise their hands too, and so did the volunteers and nuns. At last everyone in the dayroom had a hand in the air. Tall, small, young, old, fat ones, thin ones, healthy, dying. They looked from one person to the next with a dawning sense of wonder. Something new was happening. It was palpable.

‘That’s it, then,’ said Finty. ‘It’s a unanermous yes vote. From now on, no one dies. We’re all waiting for Harold Fry.’

What is going on?

A
CHANGE
has occurred in the last few days. With so much attention, it has been difficult to find the quiet time to write to you.

Tuesday: Mr Henderson took out his pen and said he would attempt the crossword in the newspaper. I was able to help with several cryptic clues. Sister Catherine’s postbag contained three greeting cards from well-wishers in St Boswells, Urmston and Peterborough. Sister Lucy pinned them up in the Harold Fry corner. It took me the rest of the day to reply to my Get Well cards.

Wednesday: Mr Henderson waved his newspaper in the air and said, ‘Good grief. Harold Fry has even hit the local news today.’ Whatever did he mean? asked a volunteer. With a look of confusion, Sister Lucy read out a short article about Harold Fry and the pluck of the baby-boomer generation. Later Sister Catherine showed me a peony in the Well-being Garden. I confess I wept.

Thursday: A woman visiting a new patient turned to me, and I swear she smiled. A tattooed man who was visiting his father gave me the thumbs-up and said, ‘God bless you, madam.’ We also received a gift delivery of a basket of muffins, brownies and cupcakes. (‘Bloody hell,’ said Finty. ‘Can you liquidize those things?’) Sister Lucy asked if anyone would like to help with her jigsaw and three patients said they would. They finished Wales and the south of England and are now racing towards the Midlands.

*

Friday: A woman tried to take a photograph on her mobile phone of Sister Catherine mixing me a milkshake, and Sister Philomena rushed in, calling, ‘No, no, not here. Please.’ Later, a man with a long-lens camera had to be escorted from the Well-being Garden. I received six further greeting cards from well-wishers, flowers from a cancer unit in Wales, homemade jams donated by the local WI, as well as olive oil, body cream, a head massager and three hot-water bottles. Mr Henderson said to me, ‘It will be a partridge in a pear tree next. Eh, Miss Hennessy?’

This morning, when the duty nurse changed my dressing, et cetera, she said, ‘The world is a crazy place.’

I wrote,
What is going on?

‘Has no one told you?’

I shook my head.

‘Have you heard of Twitter?’

I knew about it, of course, because Simon, the volunteer who used to come to my beach house to help me, had talked about it. Sometimes he played on his phone while I sat in a tent of blankets in my garden. I wrote about the days when there were flowering topiaries and rose bowers, when people came to visit my garden and brought offerings, and sometimes he said, ‘Aw, cute,’ and sometimes he only nodded to his phone. I spent many hours sitting side by side with Simon in my garden.

The duty nurse dressed my face. She spoke close to my ear so that her voice was a tickle of words. She said, ‘Hashtag Harold Fry. Hashtag
Queenie Hennessy. Hashtag unlikely pilgrimage. Hashtag hospice. Hashtag respect. Hashtag live forever. I don’t know. Your names seem to be all over the place.’

Finty spent the afternoon learning to tweet with one of the volunteers. She now has three hundred followers.

Concerning a beach house

T
HIS MORNING
I lay very still and thought about my sea garden. I wasn’t ready for the dayroom. Instead I thought of the wind chimes, and the longer I pictured them, the more I remembered. When a breeze came outside, the green leaves of the tree all took it up with a rustle and I smiled because I swear I could hear the tinkle of shells and iron keys.

Sister Mary Inconnue sat in her chair, eating a packed lunch from a Tupperware box and reading her new magazine (
Inside the Vatican
. I can’t imagine it has many jokes but she seemed to find it hilarious).

‘Maybe you should write about your sea garden,’ she said at last, mopping her mouth with a paper napkin.

I want to tell you, Harold, how I made my home in Northumberland.

The sky was a turquoise blue with only pufflets of cloud; the sun lay on my neck and arms; far out, a flat sea shimmered like a blue cloth. There was nothing but the constant shuffle and flip and trickle of the tide lapping the shore.

That day, twenty years ago, when I walked out of the sea and back to land, I had no thought of building a garden. I had no thought of finding a house. I yanked my suitcase up the sand dunes at Embleton Bay and I had no idea where I was heading any more, I only knew I was searching for something, without knowing what that was. A little way out to sea, a stone outcrop made a perch for the birds, and as the waves met it, they threw themselves up in white curls. I could hear only the gulls and the waves.

The beach houses took me by surprise. It was like coming across a party when you think you are alone. They were mainly boarded up, though a few were still open, with deck chairs set out on the grass. No two huts were alike. Some were no more than wooden sheds. Others were painted and had verandas, steps, circular windows. They were set apart from one another, without any sense of pattern or order, or indeed path, as though someone had taken a handful of beach houses and dropped them on a sandy clifftop. Mine was the last I found. A hand-painted sign read
FOR SALE
.

The exterior was clad in broken timber slats, and the roof, such as it was, was made of corrugated tin. The window frames were rotten and held no glass, so every time the wind came, the torn red curtains of the sea-facing windows spat out like tongues. Shutters hung loose. A stone chimney poked from one side of the beach house and an elder tree grew from the other. The place was surrounded by undergrowth.

I left my suitcase in the sunshine and kicked my way up to the porch, a sheet of plyboard supported by two paint-peeled wooden poles. When I pushed on the front door, I was met with resistance. Not a slider, though. I checked. The door was propped and tied to the frame with bootlaces. I had to loosen them and lift the door to one side.

Even before I entered, I was met with the dark smell of damp and rotting vegetation. Where the rain had come in, the floor joists were rotted away, and in the gaps sprouted clumps of pink-flowered thrift. Paint flaked from the wooden walls. I had to tread carefully. One wrong move and my foot might go straight through. I tried the tap that hung over a stone sink, and the thing snapped straight off in my hand.

The beach house was divided into four equal-size rooms, each with
a window. The front two rooms looked towards the sea. The back two – one of which became my bathroom – overlooked the grassy cliffs. I peered out from each broken window, but there were no other beach houses in view. There was only the bed of nettles, which stopped at the edge of the cliff. Below, there was the sea, the ragged black-tipped shoreline fringed with white foam, the distant silhouette of the broken castle. The beach house gave the impression of being rooted neither on land nor at sea. I left my suitcase beside it and returned to the coastal path.

I asked down at the golf course but no one knew anything about the beach house. They suggested I tried the shop. I was halfway to the village when I realized I wasn’t walking any more, I was running. No, they told me at the village shop. No one lived there. It had been for sale a long time, both the house and the plot of land (half an acre) it stood on. The owners hadn’t spent a summer on the bay for many years. Who could blame them? The house was falling down. It probably wouldn’t survive another winter. I took the telephone number of the owners and I also bought a loaf of bread and a bottle of water.

I returned to the beach house. I sat in the sun with my suitcase, and while I ate the bread and drank the water I gazed out over the bay. The sun was high and threw stars at the sea. The air shimmered with heat, like a veil of water. Beyond it, I made out a cruise ship on the horizon and it was so still it seemed to be pasted there, until I looked again and found it had moved. Black-headed gulls circled the shoreline, and dropped hard as stones, for fish. People made their way along the coastal path, tiny specks, en route to the ruins of Dunstanburgh Castle. All of us, going about our lives. The guests on the cruise ship. The
weekend walkers. The gulls. The fish. Me, with a suitcase. The nettles swayed.

The Northumberland coast was not like Devon after all, or if it was, it was a simplified version. The crumples and folds of the southern landscape were flattened here. Where the Devon lanes had been narrow and high with overhanging hedgerows, so that I could not know what was around a corner, in Embleton the land lay wide and open. I looked out over the bay, the golf course, the clifftops, the higgledy-piggledy castle, and it was like breathing again. I could see everything.

I will live here, I thought. I
need
to live here. And already I felt a flutter of tenderness for that broken-down place.

I rang the owners that same evening and offered to buy their beach house.

Further madness

Dear Queenie, There has been an unexpected turn of events. So many people ask after you. Best wishes, Harold Fry

PS A kind woman at the post office has not charged me for the stamp
.

She also sends her regards
.

Your latest postcard has arrived. This time the dayroom was so packed – so many volunteers, nurses, patients, family and friends had assembled to hear your news – that Finty made Sister Lucy stand on a dining chair to read it out. There followed a lively discussion about the kindness of the lady in the post office, the slowness of the postal service and acts of charity performed by various people in the room. One woman, for instance, who is the sister of a patient, told us she runs three marathons every year in aid of the local children’s home. Finty said, since the lady was so kind, could she lend her her mobile phone because Finty needed to check her Twitter account? Sister Lucy pinned up your postcard in the Harold Fry corner. I didn’t like to make a fuss and ask what the picture was.