The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy: A Novel

  ‘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.

  The next time you mentioned David, you told me he was hoping to go to Cambridge after the summer. ‘He wants to do the classics.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say that before?’

  ‘He doesn’t like me to talk about it.’

  ‘But I was at Oxford. St Hilda’s. I read classics too.’

  ‘Gosh,’ you said. ‘Golly.’

  ‘Is that all you can say?’ I smiled to show you there was no spike in the comment, I was only being friendly.

  ‘What do you want me to say?’

  ‘I don’t know. They’re such funny words. It’s like “Gor blimey”. Or “Blow me down”. I thought no one said things like that.’

  ‘Perhaps I say them when I am nervous.’

  ‘Do I make you nervous?’

  ‘A bit.’

  You blushed, and I wished I could take your hand but of course I couldn’t. I could only sit there with my handbag. Instead I asked if David might like to borrow one of my university textbooks; I’d kept a few on my travels. Those books were incredibly precious to me, but I didn’t admit that. The truth is, I was trying to find ways of connecting with you, and offering my books to your son was all I could think of.

  ‘Do you think David would be interested?’ I asked.

  Your reply, when it came, astonished me. ‘I think that dress looks nice on you.’ I assumed I had misheard. I glanced up and bumped straight into your eyes. I felt my body shower with pleasure.

  ‘It’s a brown suit,’ I said.

  ‘Well, it’s still nice.’

  In my bedsit I had a midnight-blue ballroom dress sewn at the bodice with sequin clusters. I had a pair of black velvet dance shoes. But what did you admire? A plain wool suit the colour of a nut.

  ‘Gor blimey,’ I said.

  By June, it was done. There was no going back for me. I watched you carefully fixing the button on your driving gloves, or chatting with one of the landlords, gentle laugh lines at the corners of your eyes; and me, I wanted to halloo, I wanted to shout. I could barely contain myself. Sometimes I had to give a funny cough or worse – it came out as a snort. Anything rather than tell you my true feelings. It wasn’t even because what we said was funny. To an outsider, it might have seemed rather ordinary. But once in a while simply being with a person is enough and so anything he says or does can set you off. I loved your voice, your walk, your marriage, your hands, your zigzag socks, the sensible knot in your scarf, your white bread sandwiches, for God’s sake, everything about you. It was the giddying first stage when everything about the person is so new and full of wonder that you have to keep stopping, to watch, to listen, to take him in, and there is nothing else. The rest of the world turns to grey and is obliterated. On a brewery day, we sometimes shared a table in the canteen or you dropped by my office to discuss the next route, but there were always other people close by on those occasions. It was when we were alone in your car that you were mine.

  After all I’d been through, I felt human again. I woke in the mornings and the day wasn’t something to hide from. I’d sit on the bus, getting nearer and nearer to the brewery, with my heart beating wild in my chest, and that is a gift: it is being alive. I knew you’d never leave Maureen. You were too decent for that. Another reason, of course, to love you.

  I began to write poems. Love poems. How else could I express myself? I kept them in the zipped-up compartment of my handbag. I’d reach inside, touch the corners of the pages with my fingertips, and I’d wonder, Will I do it today? Will I tell Harold Fry how I feel? Instead, I’d offer you a boiled sweet.

  So when I turned my head away in the passenger seat and said nothing, it wasn’t because I was sleeping, Harold. I was picturing you and me. I imagined what it would be like to exist permanently at your side. Or I’d gaze out of the window and look places over, just for fun, to see if we might live in one of them. A nice pink detached house with a bit of lawn for you to mow, handy for shops and the laundrette. Or a cottage by the beach, more remote, but with sea views. Inside my head I put us on dining chairs at a small round table. I put us on an upholstered sofa. And yes, I even put us in a bed. I watched your hands on the steering wheel – and I am sorry to say this but I promised at the beginning you would get the truth – and I imagined those hands on my hands. On my breasts. Between my thighs.

  When you are imagining a man naked beside you and actually he is wearing fawn casuals and driving gloves and is married to another woman, you have to do things to throw him off the scent. Once I said I could sing backwards and you looked astounded and said, Can you really? I couldn’t, of course I couldn’t, what did you take me for? I’d been a classics student. It was my father who could sing backwards. He did it as he planed a piece of wood or rubbed a plank with linseed oil. Nevertheless I went home after you asked that question and I taught myself ‘God Save the Queen’.

  (The more traditional version.)

  Backwards.

  What else had I to do?

  ‘Good Lord,’ you laughed when I got to the end of it. It was the way my father used to laugh when I was a child, full of wonder that I knew things and he didn’t.

  Now, I could have said to you, Let me tell you about Socrates. Or I might have asked, What are your views on Bertrand Russell? But we had got ourselves to a place, you and I, that was both unreal and supremely ordinary. We were a tall, married man who was kind and a short, single woman who loved him. It was better to eat sweets and sing backwards than risk unbalancing the small thing that we had. And after a while it became our routine, it became our language, in the way that some people like talking about the weather or driving routes instead of saying the bigger things. There was a boundary.

  ‘I don’t have many,’ you said to me another time. It must have been early summer, because we were sharing lunch by the side of the road. I was in my suit. You were head to toe in fawn. We looked like two winter shrubs off for a picnic.

  ‘Many what?’ I smiled. ‘Whatever are you talking about, Harold?’

  ‘Friends,’ you said. ‘Friends.’ You pi
cked the shell from a hard-boiled quail’s egg and dipped the egg in celery salt. I’d supplied both items, as well as the spread of carved ham, chutney, grapes, tomatoes, napkins and paper plates. ‘I have Maureen. And David. But no one else.’ You mentioned your mother. How she’d left just before your thirteenth birthday. You said something about your father too. Drink, it was. I assumed that was the reason you were now teetotal, and I felt a rush of tenderness. It was the most you’d ever confessed about yourself. Your eyes wore a pained expression, as if you’d made a mistake and had no idea what to do next.

  It was like the day my father told me that things had not always been good with my mother. You’d let your guard slip, almost by accident, just as my father had, and I wanted to put that right for you.

  ‘You have me,’ I said. ‘I’m your friend, Harold.’ It was important to say those words. I could hear the beat of my blood.

  You went back to picking at another egg. You said to your fingers, ‘By the way, you know, that dress-thing looks nice on you.’

  I realized then it was your way of saying thank you.

  Everything had made a place for itself, Harold. You seemed happy. Your job was safe. And I was happy too. I’d got over the loss of my baby. I’d given up the room in the B&B and had rented a ground-floor flat on the edge of Kingsbridge with views towards the estuary. There was no garden, but I was not interested in those days. I found a place to go ballroom dancing on Thursday nights, and sometimes I danced with a stranger, sometimes I didn’t. I imagined lifting my hands to your shoulders and taking a waltz.

  So long as I could see you every weekday, I was happy to love you from the sidelines.

  We would grow old … we would grow old. You would wear the bottoms of your trousers rolled. I would keep the truth untold.