St Bernadine's Hospice

St Bernadine's Hospice is the fixed point toward which the entire novel moves, the destination that transforms an old man's impulse to post a letter into a 627-mile pilgrimage across England. It is the place where Queenie Hennessy, Harold Fry's former colleague, lies dying of cancer, and it is the address typed on the letter that reaches Harold at his home on Fossebridge Road in Kingsbridge, South Hams, setting the whole story in motion. The hospice functions as the novel's sacred site, the shrine at the end of a secular pilgrimage, where the promise to walk and the promise to wait finally meet, and where the novel's deepest reckonings with death, guilt, and love take place.

The Letter and the Call

The hospice first enters the story as a name on an envelope, a place Harold does not know. The letter is typed, addressed from St Bernadine's Hospice, and begins with the words "Dear Harold, This may come to you as some surprise." Harold studies the envelope's delicate pink, a shade he compares to Turkish Delight, and reads the letter with his reading glasses propped back, his wife Maureen watching him. When he reaches the signature, he announces, "Good lord. It's from Queenie Hennessy." The name of the hospice thus arrives as a mystery, a place Harold has never heard of, and it is only through the telephone that its reality begins to press on him. When he calls the number on the letter, a heavily accented voice answers, "St Bernadine's Hospice. Good afternoon," and Harold asks to speak to Queenie Hennessy. The pause that follows chills his spine; he fears she is dead and that he is too late. But the voice tells him Miss Hennessy is asleep, and Harold, standing in a phone box at the other end of England, makes his decision. He pictures Queenie dozing at one end of the country and himself at the other, with roads, fields, rivers, woods, moors, peaks and valleys, and so many people in between. "Tell her Harold Fry is on his way," he says. "All she has to do is wait. Because I am going to save her, you see. I will keep walking and she must keep living." The hospice, in this moment, becomes the anchor of a vow, the place where a dying woman waits and a walking man believes his steps can keep her alive.

The Journey's End

Eighty-seven days after setting out to post a letter, Harold Fry arrives at the gates of St Bernadine's Hospice. His journey, including mistakes and diversions, has amounted to six hundred and twenty-seven miles. The building before him is modern and unassuming, flanked by trembling trees, with an old-fashioned street lamp close to the main entrance and a sign pointing to a car park. Several bodies sit in deck chairs on the lawn, like clothes set out to dry, and a seagull wheels and barks overhead. Harold walks the soft curve of the tarmac drive and lifts his finger to the buzzer, wishing the moment would hold itself, like an image cut out of time, his dark finger against the white button, the sun on his shoulders, the seagull laughing. But at the threshold of his triumph, his mind flees back over the miles, and he sees roads, hills, houses, fences, shopping centres, streetlights and post boxes, and there is nothing extraordinary about any of them. The thought fills him with sudden anguish, and he is afraid at the point where he had least expected to feel anything other than triumph. His finger remains suspended over the buzzer, not pressing it, as he asks himself what it had all been about. The hospice, which should be the site of vindication, becomes instead the site of doubt, the place where the meaning of the entire pilgrimage is called into question.

The Second Arrival

Harold's first arrival at the hospice is not his final one. After a breakdown in a Berwick café and a period of collapse, he returns. He turns into the drive of St Bernadine's Hospice once more and walks the length of the tarmac, which has been recently laid, his feet falling softly. This time he presses the buzzer without hesitating, and while he waits he closes his eyes and gropes for the wall, wondering if the nurse who will greet him might be the same woman he spoke with on the telephone. He hopes he won't have too much to explain, for he hasn't the energy for words. The door opens, and before him stands a woman whose hair is covered, wearing a long, cream high-collared robe with a belted black over-garment. His skin shivers all over. "I'm Harold Fry," he says. "I have walked an awfully long way to save Queenie Hennessy." He is suddenly desperate for water, his legs tremble, and he needs a chair. The hospice, in this second encounter, is no longer a distant goal but a place of arrival, where the pilgrim presents himself at last, exhausted and stripped of certainty, to the woman he has walked to save.

The Place of Death and Reconciliation

Within the hospice, Harold finally meets Queenie, and it is there that she dies. Queenie parts her lips, hunting for the next intake of air, and when it doesn't come, but something else does, it is as easy as breathing. The death is quiet, almost childlike, and one of the younger nuns, Sister Lucy, believes she heard Queenie call something just before she died, as if she were reaching for a person she knew. Sister Philomena, however, dismisses the younger nun's account. The hospice, which Harold believed he could make Queenie leave by walking, becomes the place where she dies anyway, and where the promise to save her is revealed as both fulfilled and impossible. After the death, Maureen takes the news quietly. She has booked a double room close to the seafront, and she and Harold have eaten a light meal, after which she runs him a bath and washes his hair, shaves his chin carefully and moisturizes the skin. As she trims his nails and rubs his feet, she tells him all the things she has done in the past which she so regrets, and he says it is the same for him. The hospice, the site of death, becomes the site of their reconciliation, the place where the estranged couple, who have not shared a bedroom for years, finally begin to speak. It is here, in the shadow of Queenie's death, that Harold and Maureen begin to heal, and the hospice, which began as a place of waiting, ends as a place of letting go.