The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy (25 page)

‘We need to send him a message,’ announced Finty. ‘So that he knows about the developments here.’

‘What developments, exactly?’ asked Mr Henderson. He sat still while the duty nurse changed his syringe driver.

‘He needs to know that we’re all waiting,’ said Finty, pointing at the large group in the dayroom. ‘If he knows how many of us are waiting, he might get here quicker.’

‘If Harold Fry finds out how many of us are waiting,’ said Mr Henderson, ‘he might go straight home. And how exactly do you propose to send a message to a man who is walking the length of England?’

Finty ignored this. She addressed instead the table of volunteers. ‘We need to start making plans. Harold Fry could get here any day. We have to be prepared.’ Here she had to pause to cough something into a tissue.

While Sister Philomena and the duty nurse handed out nutritional drinks and pain relief, Finty began to outline her plans. They were surprisingly substantial. ‘First up, we need to make a WELCOME, HAROLD FRY banner. Anyone fancy that?’

Sister Catherine was appointed to head a team responsible for the making of a banner. She fetched the sticky shapes, as well as felt, scissors, glue and a long stretch of white canvas.

Finty also proposed that we write a song in music therapy to welcome you. ‘Maybe the local paper will take our photograph. Another thing; we need to think about fundraising.’

‘Please could I have my phone back now?’ whispered the marathon lady.

‘Do you mind?’ snapped Finty. ‘I’m tweeting here. I’m multitasking.’

‘Why do we need to think about fundraising?’ asked a new patient.

‘To subsidize a party. He’ll need a party when he arrives. He won’t just wanna get here and, like, and … sit down.’

I looked over the room of chairs. Apart from sitting, I couldn’t think what else you were going to do. I glanced to Mr Henderson and he frowned.

‘What about a sweepstake?’ growled the Pearly King.

‘Fab idea,’ said Finty. She asked someone to grab the pencil and notebook from my hands. She needed to make a list.

One of the volunteers offered to make gift cards in order to raise funds. Another suggested cupcakes.

‘I am not certain that we should be throwing a party,’ said Sister Philomena quietly. ‘This is a hospice. If you want to prepare for Harold Fry’s arrival, we might persuade Sister Lucy to bring out her blow-dryer.’

‘If you like,’ said Sister Lucy, warming to this theme, ‘I could even do haircuts.’

There were murmurs of assent. Finty went quiet briefly and tugged on her hat. (A brightly coloured wool Rastafarian hat. But we needn’t go into that now.) A few of the patients’ friends said they would like a haircut if Sister Lucy was offering. There had not been time recently, they agreed, to think about things like hairdressers when you’re making hospital trips every day and so on.

‘How short can you do mine, Sister Lucy?’ asked one of the volunteers. Her hair flew out like a static halo.

‘Oh, very short,’ said Sister Lucy brightly. ‘If you like, you can have a Brazilian.’

For the rest of the day, the activities continued. Sister Catherine supervised the banner. Sister Lucy’s face went pink from the heat of her blow-dryer. Finty put herself in charge of media relations. The Pearly King said he could contact a few people he knew for contributions to a raffle prize. I sat beside the window with my notebook.

‘I gather Finty has a thousand followers,’ said a soft voice beside me. I was surprised to discover Mr Henderson. I had been so absorbed in my writing, I had not noticed his approach. ‘What do you do with a thousand followers?’ He settled in the chair beside mine. ‘I had a wife and a best friend. That was all I needed.’

He looked out over the Well-being Garden. Swifts were swooping between the trees and the wooden pagoda threw a long shadow over the grass. Mr Henderson and I watched. I did not write. The leaves of the garden have become one gentle green.

Finty gave a yelp from the other side of the room. ‘Yay!’ she squawked. ‘I’m fucking trending!’ There were cheers and wolf whistles.

Mr Henderson smiled to the swifts
. ‘How oft,’
he murmured,
‘when men are at the point of death, Have they been merry!’

In which I make a home and a garden

I
WALKED
out of my new beach house and put my foot straight through a fruitcake.

Placed also among the nettles were a casserole dish, a pint of milk, a packet of Craster smoked kippers and a flask.

When I bought the beach house and the plot of land where nothing much grew, local people watched with curiosity as if I were not quite in my senses and therefore might need looking after. Initially there were rumours that I had bought the plot in order to develop it, and even though no one wished to live in the beach house, neither did anyone want to see it demolished and replaced. A protest meeting was called in the Castle Hotel. Aside from the protester and two of his friends (a plumber and his wife), I was the only person who turned up. We drank cider, and the plumber and his wife ended up offering to help me renovate my beach house. In exchange, I agreed to look at their account books. And although it hurt me, the work, because it took me back to Kingsbridge and you and David, I accepted that sometimes you cannot clear the past completely. You must live alongside your sorrow.

The protester lent me a tent and a tarpaulin until my roof was fixed. He helped me to pitch it inside my beach house. He said there was nothing I could do to pay him except possibly re-word his campaign to save the ozone layer.

I slept on a wooden pallet, an old mattress and a sleeping bag given to me by a neighbour of the plumber and his wife. In exchange the neighbour asked me to coach her son in O-level Latin. So now I had
three jobs. The accounts, the teaching and the protest. I slept fully clothed.

The food offerings continued. Sometimes they made a small edible path through the nettles. Cake tins and Tupperware containers and ovenproof dishes wrapped in foil to keep them warm. If I was desperate, I walked down to the golf course and ordered a hot dish in the clubhouse. When I spoke to the kitchen staff our subject was the weather and in time that became our language, just as you and I had a language in your car. Nice day. Rotten day. We described our emotions in terms of the temperature. And sometimes one of them would ask, ‘You all right up there, pet? Had enough?’

The plumber and his wife and I made supports for the roof in order to prevent it from collapsing. We had to push them up the path on wheelbarrows. We cleared the roof of moss and debris so that the rainwater would no longer form stagnant pools in the corrugated roof and leak through it down into the rooms. Another friend of the plumber installed gutters and replaced the rotted window frames. Perspex sheets were glued where there had been only broken glass. As payment I agreed to take on the friend’s accounts and also to help him once a week in confidence skills. He felt his shyness held him back in life, and even though I had never thought of myself as a particularly forthright woman, I found that my dealings with Napier had a use.

The timber floor was replaced by three builders I met on the golf course. In exchange I barbecued fish and sausages for their families and carried bottles of cider from the pub. The door was rehung with new hinges. I paid for those with what my mother would have called ready money. Just before my first Christmas in the beach house, I was given
a second-hand woodburner by a couple I met in the post office. I learned their marriage was on the verge of collapse. In return for the woodburner, I offered them dance lessons every Sunday afternoon in their kitchen. Slow, slow, quick quick slow, slow. I thought of my mother shelling peas, my shoes resting on my father’s boots. And I don’t know whether it was the dancing or the festive season, but either way that couple stayed together. In later years, they’d come down to my garden and foxtrot on the shingle paths. We’d set up their cassette player by the window and if one of them asked, What about you, Queenie? What happened to your dancing partner? I might light a lamp in the garden and think of you.

I spent most of my first winter trying to work out how to keep a woodburner going. I lay in bed at night shivering, even though I was dressed in fisherman’s socks, a knitted jumper and a wool hat (all donated by a woman from the hotel; in exchange I helped her write a weekly letter to her daughter in Australia). The beach house swayed in the wind, and the wooden boards cracked. The sea threw up waves like walls. But I was safe. I had done what no one said I could. I had spent a winter alone on Embleton Bay.

Spring came. The fulmars made nests in the rocks, and so did the kittiwakes. When the weather began to clear, I bought black bitumen paint – my most expensive purchase yet – and redecorated the entire exterior. That was a day of celebration. Other beach-house owners had begun to open up their summer homes. I invited them over, along with all the people who had helped me. My guests brought guitars and picnics and we danced long into the night on the sand. The window frames I painted later in blue and it was the same with the wooden
shutters. I made the inside walls a soft grey. The curtains I replaced with silk drapes I’d picked up at a jumble sale.

So now, you see, I had a home and I loved it, my beach house, because I had rescued it from almost nothing and brought it back to life. I also had at least ten weekly engagements with local people, teaching them the skills I had learned along the way. And sometimes I stopped with them and we shared a plate of food, sometimes we walked along the coastal path to the ruined castle. Sometimes I drank with them or we watched the birds at Newton Pools or we sat down by Craster harbour and ate crab. But I never spoke about where I had come from or the terrible thing I believed I’d done. And always, always, there was the absence of you.

With the arrival of summer, I’d expected to feel at peace. Instead I began to dream of David again. I left my windows open at night, hoping to be soothed by the sea but it didn’t work and I often woke crying. That was when I decided to clear the nettles and discovered I had inadvertently begun a rockery.

I found a black boulder down on the beach that was big enough to sit on. It took me and several golfers a full morning to push the thing up the coastal path. I placed it in a central position a few feet in front of the house. It marked the centre of the space like the hub in a wheel. I liked to watch it from my window, the way it changed colour in the sun or rain, the way its shadow lengthened and then shrank as the hours passed. It was one of the golfers who suggested I should carve sand steps directly down from my garden to the beach. If you walk along the sand at Embleton Bay towards Craggy Reef, you can still see the skeleton of the path to my garden, though recently I let the sea take
it and the steps are no longer so easy to find.

A little later I dug a hole and filled it with compost and planted a dog rose. It was a fragile thing, and I worried that the combination of the poor soil and the wind would be too much for it. Walking on the beach one morning, I picked up a piece of driftwood about the size of a cane. I screwed it into the soil beside the rose to act as a stake. So now there was a rockery, a black boulder and a rose. My garden had begun.

My inspiration came from what I saw. I studied other people’s gardens, as I have told you, and the footpaths, but I also studied the patterns in the sand; the rills, the spokes, the ridges, the rows of indentations like vertebrae. I could lose a morning trying to identify the colours and shapes in a rock pool; anemones with long black tentacles, rust-green flowers, silvery barnacles, skittering black crabs and pinkspotted starfish. I watched the sea mists roll over the land as the tide came in or I’d sit on the black boulders that looked like a beach of seals beneath Greymare Rock. I collected seaweeds and hung them to dry on my wooden porch so that when the storms came they danced like plastic ribbons.

In time I began to see that I had been wrong when I said that nothing grew in my garden. Plenty grew in this barren place. I simply didn’t know how to value it. I unearthed sea kale and columbines, poppies and gorse, thrift and wild geraniums. I made a place for each of them.

I built my rock pool in my second year at the beach house. It is about four feet in diameter and composed of whinstone flints. I lined it carefully to protect the water level. Roaming the beach, I found tiny sea-coal stones, the size of beads, and I used them to make an outer rim for the rock pool. Later I made two further rock pools, with black granite
slabs and grey pebbles. Sometimes I placed the stones and the setting was right the first time, other times it took many days of placing and looking and placing again. I found out what was right only by getting it wrong. The stone paths followed the rock pools, leading from one part of my garden to the next. I became more ambitious with my planting.

People began to stop and admire my work. They returned with their friends. They’d wander up from the beach or the golf course or they’d drive over on the way home from work. There was a summer I made wind chimes from broken tools and washed-up ironwork. I erected a washing line in lieu of a boundary wall and I hung the chimes so that you could hear them jangling even from the beach. People brought me things – pieces of junk they had no use for. I placed each item in my garden. With every season it grew bigger.

Visitors spoke of my garden as a work of beauty, a piece of magic. And I have to be honest with you, it made me feel good. Sometimes I knelt at the heart of my garden, adjusting a stone, perhaps, angling the white of it towards the sun, but not really doing anything, only waiting for someone to stop. I made tiny blue fish out of shells and sailed them in the rock pools beside the emerald-green limpets.

The figures came when my garden was at its height. The first I made was you, of course. I placed you beside the stone boulder, right at the centre. Then came David and I made him a bed with the spiny burnet rose. Others followed. After all, I had endless time. I roamed the beach, choosing carefully, and if I did not find what I needed, I stopped and resumed my search another day. In the end, Napier was a shiny small piece of sharp flint that made me laugh. Maureen was a fragile piece of driftwood with a hole in her heart. For Sheila I found two plump rocks.
My father was a tall spade leaning towards a stout branch that was my mother. (I gave her a beautiful red seaweed hat.) The female artists from Soho were seven feathers that were always blowing away. Even the Shit had a small damp corner of his own. I made a place for each of them because they had been a part of my life, and even though they were gone I would not leave them behind. In the moonlight they shone, those figures, and seemed to come alive.