The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy (34 page)

A light twists at the window and a shower of stars fills the air. They are many colours. Pink and yellow and blue and green. Oh, so much beauty. In one small thing.

‘Are you ready?’ says Sister Mary Inconnue, reaching out a hand. It is like touching light.

Put down pencil. Put down notebook. Sleep now.

Well. There it was.

THE THIRD LETTER

St Bernadine’s Hospice
Berwick-upon-Tweed

12 July

Dear Mr Fry,

I enclose pages written by Queenie Hennessy in the last twelve weeks of her life. She began when she first heard about your walk and she finished in the last hour before her death.

You will see that the pages are not written in words, but mainly a series of squiggles, dashes and marks. One of my colleagues believes these hieroglyphics are shorthand, another thinks they are Morse code, but I am afraid that since I can read neither shorthand nor Morse code, I am none the wiser. Only a few words are recognizable and your name is one of them. Our patients often leave cards and messages for family and friends, though this is the first time I have seen such a proliferation of pages.

I want you to know that I believe Queenie died in peace. Moments before her death, Sister Lucy passed Queenie’s door and heard a burst of joyful laughter, as if another person was with her and had told her something funny. Sister Lucy is certain she heard the words,
Here I am
. She fetched me. When we entered, minutes later, Queenie was alone and at peace. There was no sign of a visitor.

Sister Lucy told me later that Queenie had asked several times for a
volunteer, a nun with a French name, who she said was helping to write her letter. No volunteer with a French name has worked in the hospice.

I reassured Sister Lucy she had misheard. It was hard to understand Queenie. The young woman had also formed a strong attachment to our patient; this can confuse one’s objectivity. Sister Lucy is currently taking a break from hospice work in order to explore her skills as a beauty therapist. (She is a gifted young lady.) Her co-worker, Sister Catherine, is making a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela.

However, Sister Lucy’s observations have stayed with me, as has your unlikely pilgrimage and, indeed, the courage of the woman who sat in silence and waited for you. They have caused me to reflect further on the nature of my belief.

This is the conclusion I have come to: if we work at it, it is always possible to find a rational explanation for what we don’t understand. But perhaps it is wiser once in a while to accept that we don’t understand, and stop there. To explain is sometimes to diminish. And what does it matter if I believe one thing and you believe another? We share the same end.

Queenie’s ashes will be scattered, as she asked, over her sea garden. She bequeathed it, along with her beach house, to the residents of Embleton Bay.

Please send my best wishes to your wife. I don’t suppose our paths will cross again, but it was a pleasure to meet you, Harold Fry.

Sister Philomena, Mother Superior, St Bernadine’s Hospice

Acknowledgements

My thanks to:

Paul Venables, as always; to my editor Susanna Wadeson and my agent Clare Conville.

Also, to Benjamin Dreyer, Deborah Adams and Kate Samano for copy-editing. To Andrew Davidson for giving Queenie wood engravings and to Micaela Alcaino for the map of her sea garden. To Susan Kamil, Kristin Cochrane and Kiara Kent; to Larry Finlay, Clare Ward, Alison Barrow, Elspeth Dougall, Claire Evans and ‘the team’ at Transworld. To all at Conville & Walsh.

There are a number of other people whose medical advice and anecdotes played an invaluable part in the writing of Queenie’s story. Thank you to Libby Potter, Charlie Hall, Jacqui Sparkes, Carol Chapman and to Cotswold Care Hospice, Minchinhampton. The book
Head and Neck Oncology Nursing
was a constant reference point, as was a pamphlet titled
End-of-Life Experiences: A Guide for Carers of the Dying
.

Philip Pearson lent my imagination the use of his wooden bungalow as Queenie’s beach house and offered detailed advice about repairing it. He also provided me with maps and guides to the Northumberland coast. I thank, too, the Bernardine Cistercian Community at the Monastery of Our Lady and St Bernard, who live in the same village as me and whose presence here is a part of the landscape in the way that the trees are a part of it, or the sky.

Lastly, my quiet thanks to my mother, Myra Joyce; to Hope, Kezia, Jo and Nell. And in memory of my father, who saw a man in his garden, and tried to reach this stranger before he died.

Rachel Joyce
is the author of the
Sunday Times
and international bestsellers
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
and
Perfect. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Book Prize and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and has been translated into thirty-four languages. Rachel Joyce was awarded the Specsavers National Book Awards ‘New Writer of the Year’ in December 2012.

She is also the author of the digital short story
A Faraway Smell of Lemon
and is the award-winning writer of over thirty original afternoon plays and classic adaptations for BBC Radio 4.

Rachel Joyce lives with her family in Gloucestershire.