If he went home now, if he even consulted a map, he knew he would never go to Berwick. He washed quickly, dressed in his shirt and tie, and then he followed the smell of bacon.

♦

Harold hovered outside the breakfast lounge, hoping it might be empty. He and Maureen could pass hours without saying a word, but her presence was like a wall that you expected to be there, even if you didn’t often look at it. Harold took hold of the doorknob. It shamed him that after all those years at the brewery, he was still shy about a roomful of strangers.

He swung the door open and so many heads swivelled to shoot a look at him that he remained glued to the handle. There was a young family, dressed in holiday clothes, a pair of older ladies, both wearing grey, and a businessman with a newspaper. Of the two remaining free tables, one was in the centre of the room and the other was in the far corner, beside a potted fern on a stand. Harold gave a small cough.

“Top of the morning to you,” he said. He didn’t know why; he hadn’t a drop of Irish blood in him. It was the sort of thing his old boss, Mr Napier, might have said. He hadn’t a drop of Irish blood in him either, but he liked laughing at people.

The hotel guests agreed that it was indeed a fine morning, and returned to their English breakfasts. Harold felt conspicuous standing up but thought it would be rude to sit when no one had invited him.

A woman in a black skirt and top rushed through a pair of swinging saloon doors with a laminated sign above them: KITCHEN. NO ENTRY. She had auburn hair that she had somehow or other puffed up, the way women could. Maureen had never been one for blow-drying. “No time for beautification,” she’d say under her breath. The woman delivered poached eggs to the two grey ladies and said, “Full breakfast, Mr Fry?”

With a stab of shame, Harold remembered. This was the same woman who had shown him to his room the night before. This was the woman whom, in a fit of exhaustion and elation, he had told he was walking to Berwick. He hoped she had forgotten. He tried to say, “Yes, please,” but he couldn’t even look at her now and the words came out as more of a tremble.

She pointed to the table in the centre of the room, which was the one he had been hoping to avoid, and as he moved he realized that the odd sour smell that had been dogging him all the way down the stairs was in fact himself. He wanted to rush up to his room and scrub himself all over, but that would look rude, especially since she had asked him to sit, and he was now doing so. “Tea? Coffee?” she said.

“Yes, please.”