Alone at last with his new wife, he had watched her across the hotel room as she unbuttoned her dress. He was desperate to touch her, and tremulous with fear. Removing both his tie and jacket, borrowed from another chap at the bus garage and slightly too short in the sleeve, he had looked up and found her sitting on the bed in her slip. She was so beautiful it was too much. He had to bolt to the bathroom.

“Harold, is it me?” she had called through the door, after half an hour.

It hurt to remember these things, when they were so far out of his reach. He had to blink several times, trying to lose the pictures, but they still swam back.

Harold walked the towns that were full of the sounds of other people, and the roads that travelled the land between, and he understood moments from his life as if they had only just occurred. Sometimes he believed he had become more memory than present. He replayed scenes from his life, like a spectator trapped on the outside. Seeing the mistakes, the inconsistencies, the choices that shouldn’t be made, and yet unable to do anything about them.

He caught himself taking the phone call after Maureen’s mother had died very suddenly, two months after her father. He had pinned her in his arms in order to break the news.

“There’s only me and you,” she sobbed.

He had reached for the swell of her growing belly and promised it would be all right. He would look after her, he’d said. And he’d meant it too. There was nothing Harold had wanted more than to make Maureen happy.

In those days she believed him. She believed Harold could be all she needed. He hadn’t known it then; but he did now. It was fatherhood that had been the real test and his undoing. He wondered if he must spend the rest of his life in the spare room.

♦

As Harold made his way north towards Gloucestershire, there were times when his steps were so sure they were effortless. He didn’t have to think about lifting one foot and then the other. Walking was an extension of his certainty that he could make Queenie live, and his body was a part of that too. These days he could take the hills without thinking; he was becoming fit, he supposed.