She found again the day at Bantham, when David had swum out into the current. She watched Harold fiddling over his laces, and she thought of the years she had spent rebuking him. And then she saw the image through a new perspective, as if she had turned the camera and pointed it back on herself. Her stomach jumped. There was a woman at the water’s edge, shouting and waving her hands, but not running into the sea. A mother half mad with fright; but doing nothing about it. If David had almost drowned at Bantham, she had been equally to blame.

The days that followed were even worse. The photograph albums lay all over the floor of the best room because she couldn’t face putting them back. She put on an early-morning white wash and left it festering all day in the drum of the washing machine. She took to eating cheese and crackers because she couldn’t be bothered to heat a pan of water. She was nothing but the remembering.

When Harold managed to ring, she could do no more than listen. “Goodness,” she would murmur. Or, “Who’d have thought it?” He told her the places where he had rested, the log bunkers, toolsheds, huts, bus shelters and barns. The words tumbled out of him with such vigour she felt ancient.

“I take care not to upset anything. And I never force a lock,” he’d say. He knew the name of every hedgerow plant, and also its uses. He recited several, but she couldn’t keep up. Now, he told her, he was learning about natural navigation. He described the people he had met, and how they had fed him or repaired his shoes; even the addicts, drunks and drop-outs. “Nobody is so frightening once you stop and listen, Maureen.” He appeared to have time for them all. He was so bewildering to her, this man who walked alone and greeted strangers, that in turn she said mildly high-pitched things she regretted about bunions, or the weather. She never said, “Harold, I have wronged you.” She never said she had been happy in Eastbourne, or that she wished she had agreed to a dog. She never said, “Is it really too late?” But she thought these things all the time as she listened.

Left alone, she sat in the cold light of the night sky and cried for what felt like hours, as if she and the solitary moon were the only ones who understood. It wasn’t even in her to talk to David.

Maureen stared at the streetlights piercing the dark over Kingsbridge. The safe, sleeping world held no place for her. She couldn’t stop thinking of Rex, and how much he still raged for Elizabeth.

21

Harold and the Follower