She thought she must have misheard. “Walk? To Berwick-upon-Tweed? You?”

He appeared to find this very funny. “Yes! Yes!” he spluttered.

Maureen swallowed. She felt her legs and her voice failing her. She said, “Let me get this clear. You’re walking to see Queenie Hennessy?”

“I am going to walk and she’s going to live. I’m going to save her.”

Her knees buckled. She threw her hand out to the wall to steady herself. “I think not. You can’t save people from cancer, Harold. Not unless you are a surgeon. And you can’t even slice bread without making a mess. This is ridiculous.”

Again Harold laughed, as if this person they were talking about was a stranger and not himself. “I was talking to a girl at the garage and she gave me the idea. She saved her aunt from cancer because she believed she could. She showed me how to heat a burger as well. It even had gherkins.”

He came across as so sure. It completely threw her. Maureen felt a spark of heat. “Harold, you are sixty-five. You only ever walk to get to the car. And in case you haven’t noticed, you left your mobile phone.” He tried to reply, but she sailed straight through him. “And where do you think you are going to sleep?”

“I don’t know.” The laughter had stopped and his voice sounded stripped away. “But it isn’t enough to post a letter. Please. I need to do this, Maureen.”

The way he appealed to her, and added her name at the end, childlike, as if the choice was hers, when clearly he had already decided, was too much. The spark of heat ignited to a bolt. She said, “Well, you head off to Berwick, Harold. If that’s what you want. I’d like to see you get past Dartmoor – ” The line was staccato’d with pips. She tightened her grip on the handset, as if it was a piece of him she was clinging to. “Harold? Are you still in the pub?”

“No, a phone box outside. It’s quite smelly. I think someone may have – ” His voice cut off. He was gone.

♦

Maureen groped her body into the hall chair. The silence was louder than if he had not phoned at all. It seemed to eat up everything else. There was no ticking from the hall clock, no humming from the fridge, no birdsong from the garden. The words Harold, Burger, Walk, rolled around her head, and in the midst of them came two more: Queenie Hennessy. After all these years. The memory of something long buried shivered deep inside her.

Maureen sat alone as the dark fell, while neon lights came on across the hills and bled pools of amber into the night.

4

Harold and the Hotel Guests

Harold Fry was a tall man who moved through life with a stoop, as if expecting a low beam, or a screwed-up paper missile, to appear out of nowhere. The day he was born his mother had looked at the bundle in her arms, and felt appalled. She was young, with a peony-bud mouth and a husband who had seemed a good idea before the war and a bad one after it. A child was the last thing she wanted or needed. The boy learned quickly that the best way to get along in life was to keep a low profile; to appear absent even when present. He played with neighbours’ children, or at least he watched them from the edges. At school he avoided attention to the point of appearing stupid. Leaving home when he was sixteen, he had set out on his own, until one night he caught Maureen’s eye across a dance hall and fell wildly in love. It was the brewery that had brought the newly wed couple to Kingsbridge.