The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy (10 page)

Oh, Harold. How did I get that so wrong?

We’re all going one way

T
HE PATIENT
in monster slippers was not in the dayroom when we assembled for morning activities.

Shortly afterwards his family began to arrive. As they rushed past the door of the dayroom, where we sat with Sister Catherine, they looked in briefly and then flew their eyes away, as if seeing us were a mistake, a bad omen. They were dressed in smart, dark clothes, even the little girls. Maybe the family had changed when they got the news. Maybe they felt the need to inhabit their grief. After my father’s death, my mother gave up eating meat. But why? I asked. She’d always loved meat. Because her life was torn in half, she said. I took her favourite cuts, slices of pink ham, tender roast beef, when I went to visit her in hospital.
‘Schön, schön,’
she would murmur, but they stayed wrapped in paper. She never touched meat again. ‘I am like you now,
Liebling
.’ It was almost the last thing she told me.

From my chair in the dayroom I overheard a woman in the corridor. My hearing is not what it was, but emotion had made her less careful. ‘Why didn’t he wait for me?’ she cried. ‘I was only making breakfast for the girls.’ It must have been the patient’s wife. Then someone asked if she needed anything, and the woman began to howl, big wrenching sobs.

‘Why couldn’t it be one of those old people?’ she wept. ‘They just sit there.’

A little while later we watched a small group of mourners gathering in the Well-being Garden. They stood beneath the pagoda, sheltering from the weather. The wind and rain tossed the branches of the cherry
tree so that the grass was dashed with pink petals. The older woman, the man’s mother, made a batting gesture with her hands as if she had something attached to her and couldn’t get it off. Then Sister Philomena cradled the woman in her arms, and the woman hung there, very still at last. Sister Philomena kept hold of the woman and spoke to her, and as she did, the woman wiped her eyes. The group reached for one another’s hands, and whatever it was that Sister Philomena was saying, the others began to listen. They nodded and joined in until one man said something that made them smile. I wondered if they were talking about the patient. Sharing how much they loved him. Then the man must have asked Sister Philomena if they could smoke, because I saw her nod before he took out cigarettes.

‘I think I might pop outside,’ said the Pearly King, rising from his chair and heading straight for the garden.

Finty and I watched the two little girls, Alice and her sister, kneeling on the lawn to pick flowers.

‘They will be OK,’ Finty said. ‘The grass keeps growing.’

The undertaker’s van turned into the drive.

Sister Mary Inconnue reads through my page. She begins to type. When she sees me – not writing, just gazing out of the window, nursing my fingers – she smiles.

‘Penny for your thoughts,’ she says.

No, I think. You wouldn’t want them.

‘Is your right hand all right?’

I hide it so she won’t see.

I must keep writing.

I think that dress looks nice on you

A
LONG
time ago, I met a doctor of philosophy beside my sea garden. I was rehanging some kelp banners where the wind had pulled them free. ‘That’s a nice job you’ve done here,’ my visitor said, leaning over the wall. ‘Have you made this garden yourself?’ Yes, I told him. It had taken many, many years, but the work was all mine. We got talking, he and I. While I tended my garden, he passed me his business card and told me a little about himself.

I had grown used to strangers stopping. As word got round about the garden by the sea, visitors began to park their cars at the golf course and walk the coastal path. They brought cameras. Often they returned with pieces of ironwork for my wind chimes or cuttings from their gardens. Despite my original intention to live apart, there was a time when I was something of a local attraction, along with the footpath to Dunstanburgh Castle, and the golf course and ice cream van. ‘You must have been here a long time,’ said the doctor of philosophy.

‘Yes,’ I told him. I’d spent every day there since the first morning I arrived.

‘You haven’t left once?’

‘Sometimes I make a day trip along the coast. But there’s always something to look after in my sea garden. I couldn’t abandon it.’

I pointed back at my beach house. The place was always at its best in the summer, and its wooden slats shone that afternoon as if they were painted not with bitumen but with gold. The beach house cast a shadow that grew as the light dimmed so that by sunset it almost
touched my sea garden. At night, the many stones glowed in the moonlight, and sometimes, when I picked them up, I could still feel and smell the sun in them.

I explained to the doctor of philosophy that when I’d first come across the beach house, it was a wreck. There were other beach houses up on the cliff but no one had lived in this one for a long time. There was certainly no hint of a garden, only swathes of brambles, fern and nettles. I explained that I’d bought the plot from a couple who didn’t use it any more. I couldn’t make a home up there, everyone had warned. It was too lonely, too out of the way. I’d never survive a winter, they said. No one spent a winter up on Embleton Bay. I replied that was exactly the reason I wanted to buy the place. In order to be alone in the wind and cold.

I spent a whole year making my beach house habitable, and when I began on the garden it was almost by accident. I was trying to clear a path through the nettles, because in places they’d grown as tall as my shoulders. All I found beneath the nettles were boulders, and so I’d begun to pile them, simply as a way to stack them. By the end of the day I was so exhausted, my bones felt so weak, and my skin was so numb from the nettle stings, that I went straight to bed. I lay very still, with only the crashing of the sea below on the rocks, and the wind, and for the first time, I would say, the sounds didn’t feel like something I had to fight any more. I slept all night without dreaming or crying. It was only the following morning when I stepped out with a cup of tea to watch the sea and noticed instead the pile of stones, some grey, some blue-black, that it occurred to me I had made a rockery.

And so I got more interested. I began to think carefully about the
shape and the size of the stones. My rockery kept me busy even when the rain came so hard that I could barely open my eyes, even when my hands were flayed with sores and cuts. I showed the doctor of philosophy all the things that had followed: the rock pools, the winding paths, the shell beds, the figures, the wind chimes, the flowering gorse topiaries that smelt of coconut when the sun was on them. The wall had come right at the end, along with the picket gate. I put that together from slats of driftwood.

I’d made my sea garden to atone for the terrible wrong I had done to a man I loved, I said. Sometimes you have to do something with your pain because otherwise it will swallow you. I tried to voice your name, and David’s too, but already tears were spilling from my eyes. It was always like that. I could never tell the full story.

The doctor of philosophy was very interested in my sea garden until I mentioned the word ‘love’. Then he laughed. There was no such thing as love, he told me. Hadn’t I heard of Sartre?

Oh, good. A little light debating. I wiped my eyes.

Yes, I said, I’d heard of Sartre. I kept a copy of
Being and Nothingness
next to
The Observer’s Book of Sea and Seashore
on the kitchen windowsill.

‘We are nothing,’ he said. ‘At root we know that we’re nothing. So when we love, it is only to fool ourselves that we are something.’

Now that I’d stopped my work, I noticed that the doctor of philosophy was dressed in sensible walking gear and a red spotted bow tie. It was as if the walking clothes were saying one thing about him and the tie was shouting another. I liked that.

Nevertheless I said he was wrong on the subject of love. I told him about you, how you danced with your shadow in the snow. I described
the way you’d touched my hand in the stationery cupboard, igniting a flurry of sparks and chills that I could still remember if I put my mind to it. I mentioned our drives, how we went out two or three times a week and often made a day of it. While I checked the accounts, you would chat with the landlord and look over the car. I had never asked for your love in return, I said. I had never told you my true feelings.

What I’d described sounded like infatuation, said the doctor of philosophy: a projection of my own needs.

‘No, I only wanted him to be happy. That was all I needed.’

‘It’s easier to tell yourself that you are in love with a person than it is to put up with him day after day. We tell ourselves we are in love in order to stay put.’

‘But I didn’t stay put. I left. I left, and I still love him.’

I told him that I’d seen the essence of you right from the beginning; I never stopped seeing it all the time we worked together, I only saw deeper versions. My love had even matured since I left you. ‘And,’ I said, ‘Sartre may be right about love in theory, but he takes the fun out of it. Doesn’t he?’

‘What do you mean?’ For the first time, my visitor looked uneasy.

‘Sometimes we like to laugh at ourselves. We like to be silly.’ I pointed to some of the features in my garden. The figures that wore necklaces of stone. A wind chime made with washed-up keys from the beach. I had put them there to remind myself how we used to laugh, you and I; how I sang backwards and we played daft games like fig ball. ‘Or maybe we do something else,’ I said. ‘Like wearing a fun tie.’

‘I should head off now,’ said the doctor of philosophy.

I folded his business card into a white bird and fixed it to a branch.

*

During the course of our drives together, I came to know you better. At the start, we travelled mainly in silence. I’d point out the leaves or I’d say, ‘Nice day,’ but nothing more. I didn’t know the names of trees or flowers in those days. They were only a backdrop to where we were heading. Then after a week or so I began to ask you questions. Small things. Not to intrude or alarm you, just to be polite. The first time I asked about David, you said your son was very clever. That’s all. But you cleared your throat, trying to move away from a difficult thought. I remember that I watched you for a little too long, and when you glanced at me you flushed, as if you were afraid I had noticed something odd about you. I hadn’t. I was only admiring the blue of your eyes and trying not to smile but wanting to smile because they were so very blue, you see.

I remember too the first time I caught sight of your bare arms. It was a warm day. You unbuttoned your cuffs and rolled back your sleeves. I couldn’t stop staring at the softness of your skin. I’d expected your arms to be different, but they were almost boyish. My heart was going cock-a-hoop. I knew I’d give myself away if I wasn’t careful, but I couldn’t stop drinking you in. I couldn’t stop seeing them, your bare arms, even when the air grew cool and you stopped the car to put your jacket on.

So I stuck to my polite questions about David. His intelligence was nothing to do with you, you told me. ‘He doesn’t get it from me, Miss Hennessy. He doesn’t get much from me, actually.’ And the way you said this, in a humble way suggesting that no one could get
anything
from you, you’d be lucky if they even noticed you walking into a room,
made me want to give you something, you know, a little something to bring you pleasure and show you that you weren’t nothing, that for me you were very definitely somebody. I’ve noticed you, Harold Fry, I wanted to say. I see you. Every day I see you. I spent the weekends in a daze, waiting, waiting for Monday. I bought my groceries, did the washing, but I was thinking only of being with you again.

One day in early May, I produced a Mars bar from my handbag. I didn’t tell you, but it was my fortieth birthday and I’d bought the chocolate as a treat for myself. Only once I was at your side, I couldn’t think of anything I wanted more than to give it to you. That seemed a better use for it.

‘Here you are,’ I said.

‘Is that for me?’

Your face glowed. Had no one given you a bar of chocolate before?

‘Well, I can’t see anyone else in the car,’ I said.

You gave an embarrassed laugh. ‘I’ll get fat.’

‘You? There’s nothing of you.’ And then it was my turn to be embarrassed, because the remark betrayed that I watched you, that I had taken you in, your arms, your eyes, the way your trousers drooped at your waist, and so I urged you to take the chocolate bar before the ruddy thing melted in my hands.

‘Thank you, Miss Hennessy.’

‘Oh, call me Queenie. Please.’

You twitched your mouth as if you were trying to teach it the new word.

‘Do you want me to unwrap the Mars bar for you?’

‘Would you mind?’

‘Not at all. Let me help.’

So I tore off the corner of the paper and passed you a paper tissue from my handbag, and while you ate I gave you a little story to go with it. I told you that as a child I had hated my name. My father loved ‘Queenie’, but I found it old-fashioned. I’d always wished I was called ‘Stella’, I said. And you looked a little perplexed, as if it had never occurred to you that you might be something you weren’t.

‘I never liked my nose,’ you said, taking another bite.

‘What’s wrong with your nose?’

‘It has a bump.’

Now that I looked at your nose I could see this. It did seem to begin as a slim nose and conclude as a big one. You adjusted the rear-view mirror and told me your mother had always promised that your face would grow into your nose, and instead your nose had only grown out of your face. You made me laugh, and then you laughed too. I got the impression you had never laughed about your nose or your mother before.

I bought you chocolate bars regularly after that. I stopped at the newsagent’s on the way to work. It became part of what I did, just as some people stop to feed the birds, just as others used to visit my sea garden and throw a penny for good luck into one of the mussel-blue rock pools.