The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry Read Free Page A

certainty, and in such a young person; she made it sound obvious. ‘And she got better, did she? Your aunt? Because you believed she could?’
    The strand of hair was twiddled so tightly round her finger he was now afraid it was stuck. ‘She said it gave her hope when everything else had gone—’
    ‘Does anyone work here?’ shouted a man in a pinstripe suit from the counter. He rapped his car keys on the hard surface, beating out wasted time.
    The girl threaded her way back to the till, where the pinstripe made a show of checking his watch. He held his wrist high in the air and pointed to the dial. ‘I’m supposed to be in Exeter in thirty minutes.’
    ‘Fuel?’ said the girl, resuming her place, in front of cigarettes and lottery tickets. Harold tried to catch her eye but she wouldn’t. She had returned to being dull and empty again, as if their conversation about her aunt had never happened.
    Harold left his money for the burger on the counter and made his way to the door. Faith? Wasn’t that the word she had used? Not one he usually heard, but it was strange. Even though he wasn’t sure what she meant by faith, or what there was left that he believed in, the word rang in his head with an insistence that bewildered him. At sixty-five he had begun to anticipate difficulties. A stiffening of the joints; a dull ringing in his ears; eyes that watered with the slightest change in the wind; a dart of chest pain that presaged something more ominous. But what was this sudden surge of feeling that made his body shake with its sheer energy? He turned in the direction of the A381, and promised again that at the next post box he would stop.
    He was leaving Kingsbridge. The road narrowed into a single lane, until the pavement disappeared altogether. Above him, the branches joined like the roof of a tunnel, tangled with pointed new buds and clouds of blossom. More than once he had to crush himself into a hawthorn to avoid a passing car. There were single drivers, and he supposed they must be office workers because their faces appeared fixed as if the joy had been squeezed away, and then there were women driving children, and they looked tired too. Even the older couples like himself and Maureen had a rigidity about them. An impulse to wave came over Harold. He didn’t, though. He was wheezing with the effort of walking and he didn’t want to cause alarm.
    The sea lay behind; before him stretched rolling hills and the blue outline of Dartmoor. And beyond that? The Blackdown Hills, the Mendips, the Malverns, the Pennines, the Yorkshire Dales, the Cheviots, and Berwick-upon-Tweed.
    But here, directly across the road, stood a post box, and a little way beyond it a telephone booth. Harold’s journey was over.
    He dragged his feet. He had seen so many he’d lost count, as well as two Royal Mail vans and a courier on a motorbike. Harold thought of all the things in life he’d let go. The small smiles. The offers of a beer. The people he had passed over and over again, in the brewery car park, or on the street, without lifting his head. The neighbours whose forwarding addresses he had never kept. Worse; the son who didn’t speak to him and the wife he had betrayed. He remembered his father in the nursing home, and his mother’s suitcase by the door. And now here was a woman who twenty years ago had proved herself a friend. Was this how it went? That just at the moment when he wanted to do something, it was too late? That all the pieces of a life must eventually be surrendered, as if in truth they amounted to nothing? The knowledge of his helplessness pressed down on him so heavily he felt weak. It wasn’t enough to send a letter. There must be a way to make a difference. Reaching for his mobile, Harold realized it was at home. He staggered into the road, his face thick with grief.
    A van shrieked to a halt and then skirted past. ‘You stupid fucker!’ yelled the driver.
    He barely heard. He barely saw the post box either.