Queenie Hennessy Character Analysis

It was not like Harold to make a snap decision. He saw that. Since his retirement, days went by and nothing changed; only his waist thickened, and he lost more hair. He slept poorly at night, and sometimes he did not sleep at all. Yet, arriving more promptly than he anticipated at a postbox, he paused again. He had started something and he didn’t know what it was, but now that he was doing it, he wasn’t ready to finish.

“You have to believe. That’s what I think. It’s not about medicine and all that stuff. You have to believe a person can get better. There is so much in the human mind we don’t understand. But, you see, if you have faith, you can do anything.”

Harold gazed at the girl in awe. He didn’t know how it had happened, but she seemed to be standing in a pool of light, as if the sun had moved, and her hair and skin shone with luminous clarity.

[…]

“I don’t mean, like, religious. I mean, trusting what you don’t know and going for it. Believing you can make a difference.”

Harold thought of all the things in life he’d let go. […] The people he had passed over and over again, in the brewery car park, or on the street […] The neighbors 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.

They believed in him. They had looked at him in his yachting shoes, and listened to what he said, and they made a decision in their hearts and minds to ignore the evidence and to imagine something bigger and something infinitely more beautiful than the obvious. Remembering his own doubt, Harold was humbled. “That is so kind,” he said softly. He shook their hands and thanked them.

Life was very different when you walked through it. Between gaps in the banks, the land rolled up and down, carved into checkered fields, and lined with ridges of hedging and trees. He had to stop to look. There were so many shades of green Harold was humbled. Some were almost a deep velvety black, others so light they verged on yellow. Far away the sun caught a passing car, maybe a window, and the light trembled across the hills like a fallen star. How was it he had never noticed all this before? Pale flowers, the name of which he didn’t know, pooled the foot of the hedgerows, along with primroses and violets. He wondered if, all those years ago, Queenie had looked out from her passenger window and seen these things.

What he said? He had looked down at his son, for whom he wanted everything, and been struck dumb.

Yes, life is terrifying, he might have said. Or, Yes, but it gets better. Or even: Yes, but it is sometimes good and sometimes bad. Better still, in the absence of words, he might have taken David in his arms. But he had not. He’d done none of those things. He felt the boy’s fear so keenly, he could see no way round it. The morning his son looked up at his father and asked for help, Harold gave nothing. He fled to his car and went to work.

Why must he remember?

He hunched his shoulders and drove his feet harder, as if he wasn’t so much walking to Queenie as away from himself.

And yet something else happened, and it became one of those moments that he would walk into and realize, even as it was happening, that it was significant. Late in the afternoon, the rain stopped so abruptly it was hard to credit there had been any at all. To the east, the cloud tore open and a low belt of polished silver light broke through. Harold stood and watched as the mass of gray split again and again, revealing new colors […]

Harold was so tired he could barely lift his feet, and yet he felt such hope, he was giddy with it. If he kept looking at things that were bigger than himself, he knew he would make it to Berwick.

Harold closed the front door quietly, not wishing to wake Martina, but she was watching from her bathroom window, with her face pressed to the glass. He didn’t look back. He didn’t wave. He caught her profile at the window and then stepped as boldly as he could, wondering if she was worrying about his blisters, or his yachting shoes, and wishing he was not leaving her alone, with only a dog and some boots. It was hard to have been her guest. It was hard to understand a little and then walk away.

How had it happened that Harold was walking to Berwick while she sat at home, doing nothing? What were the steps she had missed? […] The regrets about all she had let go flooded her. Where had all that enterprise gone? All that energy? Why had she never traveled? Or had more sex when she could? She had bleached and annihilated every waking moment of the last twenty years. Anything, rather than feel. Anything, rather than meet Harold’s eye and say the unspeakable.

It was not a life, if lived without love.

For the rest of the afternoon, Harold continued to tread the streets but without knowing where he was going. He needed someone to share his faith in his walk so that he could believe in it too, but he barely had the energy to talk. […] No one said what he longed to hear. No one said, You are going to get there, and Queenie will live. No one said, There will be crowds applauding because this, Harold, is the best idea we have ever heard. You must definitely finish.

Again, he felt in a profound way that he was both inside and outside what he saw; that he was both connected, and passing through. Harold began to understand that this was also the truth about his walk. He was both a part of things, and not.

In order to succeed he must remain true to the feeling that had inspired him in the first place. It didn’t matter that other people would do it in a different way; in fact this was inevitable. […] He would also stick to his yachting shoes because, despite the wear and tear, they were his. He saw that when a person becomes estranged from the things they know, and is a passerby, strange things take on a new significance. And knowing this, it seemed important to allow himself to be true to the instincts that made him Harold, as opposed to anyone else.

He thought back to the night he had slept in the barn near Stroud. No one knew the real truth about why he was walking to Queenie. They had made assumptions. They thought it was a love story, or a miracle, or an act of beauty, or even bravery, but it was none of those things. The discrepancy between what he knew and what other people believed frightened him. It also made him feel, as he looked back at the camp, that even in the midst of them he was unknown. The fire was a glow of light in the blackness. Voices and laughter came to him, and they were all strangers.

“I miss you too. But, Maureen, I’ve spent my life not doing anything. And now at last I am doing something. I have to finish my walk. Queenie is waiting. She believes in me. You see?”

“Well yes,” she said. “I do see that. Of course I see it.” She took a sip of tea. It was cold. “I just—I’m sorry, Harold—I don’t see where I fit in. I know you’re a pilgrim now and everything. But I can’t help thinking about myself. I’m not as selfless as you. I’m sorry.”

“I’m no better than anyone else. I’m really not. Anybody can do what I’m doing. But you have to let go. I didn’t know that at the beginning but now I do. You have to let go of the things you think you need like cash cards and phones and maps and things.”

Harold was sure he would be better once he was back on his feet. But he wasn’t. There was no escaping what he had realized as he fought for warmth in the night. With or without him, the moon and the wind would go on, rising and falling. The land would keep stretching ahead until it hit the sea. People would keep dying. It made no difference whether Harold walked, or trembled, or stayed at home.

What began as a flat, subdued feeling grew over the hours into something more violently accusing. The more he dwelt on how little he mattered, the more he believed it.

People think I am walking because there was a romance between myself and Queenie all those years ago, but it isn’t true. I walked because she saved me, and I never said thank you. And this is why I am writing to you. I want you to know how much you helped me all those weeks ago, when you told me about your faith and your aunt, although I fear my courage has never matched yours.

He had believed that when he saw her he could say thank you and even goodbye. That there would be a meeting of a kind, and that somehow it would absolve the terrible mistakes of the past. But there could not be a meeting, or even a goodbye, because the woman he had once known had already left. Harold thought he should stay, leaning on the windowsill, until he could accept this. He wondered if he should sit again; if being in the chair would make a difference. But even before he sat, he knew it wouldn’t. Sitting or standing, he knew that it would take a long while before he could sew into the fabric of his life the knowledge that Queenie was reduced to this. David was dead too; there was no bringing him back.

He couldn’t say how he knew it, or whether the knowledge made him happy or sad, but he was sure that Queenie would remain with him, and David too. There would be Napier, and Joan, and Harold’s father with those aunts; but there would be no more fighting them, and no more anguish for the past. They were part of the air he walked through, just as all the travelers he had met were part of it. He saw that people would make the decisions they wished to make, and some of them would hurt both themselves and those who loved them, and some would pass unnoticed, while others would bring joy. He did not know what would follow from Berwick-upon-Tweed, and he was ready for that.