It was worse than not seeing his son for twenty years. It was like having him, and not having him, all over again. Harold returned to the bench outside the abbey, knowing he must find somewhere to sleep, and unable to move.

♦

He ended up near the station, in a stuffy room overlooking the road. He wrenched up the sash window for air, but the traffic would not stop, and the trains shrieked in and out of the platforms. From beyond the wall came a voice in a foreign language, shouting into a telephone. Harold lay on a bed that was too soft, where so many people he didn’t know had slept before him, listening to the voice he didn’t understand, and he was afraid. He got up and paced the room, up and down, with the walls too close and the air too still, while the traffic and the trains went to wherever they were going.

The past could not be changed. Inoperable cancer could not be cured. He pictured the stranger dressed as a woman, with the blow to his head. He recalled the way David looked the day of his graduation, and in the months following, as if he were asleep with his eyes open. It was too much. It was too much to keep going.

As dawn broke, Harold was already on the road but he did not refer to his compass or his guidebooks. It took all his strength and will to keep putting one foot in front of the other. Only when three teenage girls on horseback asked him the way to Shepton Mallet did he realize he had lost a full day heading in the wrong direction.

He sat by the roadside, looking over a field ablaze with yellow flowers. He couldn’t remember their name and he couldn’t be bothered to take out his wild-plant guide. The truth was, he was spending far too much money. After three weeks of walking, Kingsbridge was still nearer than Berwick. The first of the swallows swooped and dived overhead, playing through the air like children.

Harold didn’t know how he would ever get back on his feet.

17

Maureen and the Garden

“Yes, David,” Maureen told him, “he’s still walking. He rings most evenings. And Rex is being very kind. In a funny way, I’m almost proud. I wish I knew how to tell Harold that.”

Lying on the queen-sized bed she had once shared with Harold, she watched the block of bright morning light trapped behind the net curtains. So much had happened in one week, she sometimes had the feeling she had slipped into a different woman’s skin. “He sends postcards, and occasionally a present. He seems to favour pens.” She paused, afraid she had offended David because he wasn’t replying. “I love you,” she said. Her words trickled to nothing and still he did not speak. “I should let you go,” she said at last.