The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy: A Novel

“[A] deeply affecting novel . . . Culminating in a shattering revelation, [Queenie’s] tale is funny, sad, hopeful: She’s bound for death, but full of life.” — People “Delightful.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune “Joyce’s writing at moments has a simplicity that sings. She captures hope best of all.” — The Guardian “Joyce has a wonderfully evocative turn of phrase and like her other books this is a delightful read. . . . Queenie is an uplifting and moving companion to Harold .” — Daily Express “Joyce nicely calls the book a companion rather than a sequel. But The Love Song is bolder than a retread of the same material from another angle. . . . After two such involving novels, readers are bound to wish for a third.” — The Telegraph “[Joyce] manages to both add depth to an already strong work and build something new and beautiful upon it.” — The A.V. Club “A wonderful read . . . It is not necessary to read Harold’s story before reading Queenie’s to enjoy this bittersweet novel, which is a pleasure in its own right. However, reading both will only serve to double that pleasure.” — The Independent “[A] beguiling follow-up . . . In telling Queenie’s side of the story, Joyce accomplishes the rare feat of endowing her continuing narrative with as much pathos and warmth, wisdom and poignancy as her debut. Harold was beloved by millions; Queenie will be, too.” — Booklist (starred review) “Destined to change your world. One can’t help but see life, and the end of it, differently after experiencing this novel. Full of wisdom and heart, it will overwhelm its readers with a deep sensitivity.” —Bookreporter Rachel Joyce is the author of Miss Benson’s Beetle, The Music Shop , the Sunday Times and international bestsellers The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry , Perfect , and The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy , as well as the digital short story A Faraway Smell of Lemon and a story collection, A Snow Garden & Other Stories . Her books have been translated into thirty-six languages and two are in development for film. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Book Prize and longlisted for the Booker Prize. Joyce was named the Specsavers National Book Awards “New Writer of the Year” in December 2012 and shortlisted for the “UK Author of the Year” 2014. Joyce has also written more than thirty original afternoon plays and adaptations of the classics for BBC Radio 4, including all the Brontë novels. She moved to writing after a long career as an actor, performing leading roles for the RSC, the National Theatre, and Cheek by Jowl. She lives with her family in Gloucestershire. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. All you have to do is wait!Your letter arrived this morning. We were in the dayroom for morning activities. Everyone was asleep.Sister Lucy, who is the youngest nun volunteering in the hospice, asked if anyone would like to help with her new jigsaw. Nobody answered. “Scrabble?” she said.Nobody stirred.“How about Mousetrap?” said Sister Lucy. “That’s a lovely game.”I was in a chair by the window. Outside, the winter evergreens flapped and shivered. One lone seagull balanced in the sky.“Hangman?” said Sister Lucy. “Anyone?”A patient nodded, and Sister Lucy fetched paper. By the time she’d got sorted, pens and a glass of water and so on, he was dozing again.Life is different for me at the hospice. The colors, the smells, the way a day passes. But I close my eyes and I pretend that the heat of the radiator is the sun on my hands and the smell of lunch is salt in the air. I hear the patients cough, and it is only the wind in my garden by the sea. I can imagine all sorts of things, Harold, if I put my mind to it.Sister Catherine strode in with the morning delivery. “Post!” she sang. Full volume. “Look what I have here!”“Oh, oh, oh,” went everyone, sitting up.Sister Catherine passed several brown envelopes, forwarded, to a Scotsman known as Mr. Henderson. There was a card for the new young woman. (She arrived yesterday. I don’t know her name.) There is a big man they call the Pearly King, and he had another parcel though I have been here a week and I haven’t yet seen him open one. The blind lady, Barbara, received a note from her neighbor—xadSister Catherine read it out—xadspring is coming, it said. The loud woman called Finty opened a letter informing her that if she scratched off the foil window, she would discover that she’d won an exciting prize.“And, Queenie, something for you.” Sister Catherine crossed the room, holding out an envelope. “Don’t look so frightened.”I knew your writing. One glance and my pulse was flapping. Great, I thought. I don’t hear from the man in twenty years, and then he sends a letter and gives me a heart attack.I stared at the postmark. Kingsbridge. Straight away I could picture the muddy blue of the estuary, the little boats moored to the quay. I heard the slapping of water against the plastic buoys and the clack of rigging against the masts. I didn’t dare open the envelope. I just kept looking and looking and remembering.Sister Lucy rushed to my aid. She tucked her childlike finger under the flap and wiggled it along the fold to tear the envelope open. “Shall I read it out for you, Queenie?” I tried to say no, but the no came out as a funny noise she mistook for a yes. She unfolded the page, and her face seeped with pink. Then she began to read. “It’s from someone called Harold Fry.”She went as slowly as she could, but there were a few words only. “I am very sorry. Best wishes. Oh, but there’s a P.S. too,” said Sister Lucy. “He says, Wait for me.” She gave an optimistic shrug. “Well, that’s nice. Wait for him? I suppose he’s going to make a visit.”Sister Lucy folded the letter carefully and tucked it back inside the envelope. Then she placed my post in my lap, as if that were the end of it. A warm tear slipped down the side of my nose. I hadn’t heard your name spoken for twenty years. I had held the words only inside my head.“Aw,” said Sister Lucy. “Don’t be upset, Queenie. It’s all right.” She pulled a tissue from the family-xadsize box on the coffee table and carefully wiped the corner of my closed-xadup eye, my stretched mouth, even the thing that is on the side of my face. She held my hand, and all I could think of was my hand in yours, long ago, in a stationery cupboard.“Maybe Harold Fry will come tomorrow,” said Sister Lucy.At the coffee table, Finty still scratched away at the foil window on her letter. “Come on, you little bugger,” she grunted.“Did you say ‘Harold Fry’?” Sister Catherine jumped to her feet and clapped her hands as if she was trapping an insect. It was the loudest thing that had happened all morning, and everyone murmured “Oh, oh, oh” again. “How could I have forgotten? He rang yesterday. Yes. He rang from a phone box.” She spoke in small broken sentences, the way you do when you’re trying to make sense of something that essentially doesn’t. “The line was bad and he kept laughing. I couldn’t understand a word. Now I think about it, he was saying the same thing. About waiting. He said to tell you he was walking.” She slipped a yellow Post-xadit note from her pocket and quickly unfolded it.“Walking?” said Sister Lucy, suggesting this was not something she’d tried before.“I assumed he wanted directions from the bus station. I told him to turn left and keep going.”A few of the volunteers laughed, and I nodded as if they were right, they were right to laugh, because it was too much, you see, to show the consternation inside me. My body felt both weak and hot.Sister Catherine studied her yellow note. “He said to tell you that as long as he walks, you must wait. He also said he’s setting off from Kingsbridge.” She turned to the other nuns and volunteers. “Kingsbridge? Does anyone know where that is?”Sister Lucy said maybe she did but she was pretty sure she didn’t. Someone told us he’d had an old aunt who lived there once. And one of the volunteers said, “Oh, I know Kingsbridge. It’s in South Devon.”“South Devon?” Sister Catherine paled. “Do you think he meant he’s walking to Northumberland from all the way down there?” She was not laughing anymore, and neither was anyone else. They were only looking at me and looking at your letter and seeming rather anxious and lost. Sister Catherine folded her Post-xadit note and disappeared it into the side pocket of her robe.“Bull’s-xadeye!” shouted Finty. “I’ve won a luxury cruise! It’s a fourteen-xadnight adventure, all expenses paid, on the Princess Emerald!”“You have not read the small print,” grumbled Mr. Henderson. And then, louder: “The woman has not read the small print.”I closed my eyes. A little later I felt the sisters hook their arms beneath me and lift my body into the wheelchair. It was like the way my father carried me when I was a girl and I had fallen asleep in front of the range. “Stille, stille,” my mother would say. I held tight on to your envelope, along with my notebook. I saw the dancing of crimson light beyond my eyelids as we moved from the dayroom to the corridor and then past the windows. I kept my eyes shut all the way, even as I was lowered onto the bed, even as the curtains were drawn with a whoosh against the pole, even as I heard the click of the door, afraid that if I opened my eyes the wash of tears would never stop.Harold Fry is coming, I thought. I have waited twenty years, and now he is coming. Read more