“I’m no better than anyone else. I’m really not. Anybody can do what I’m doing. But you have to let go. I didn’t know that at the beginning but now I do. You have to let go of the things you think you need, like cash cards and phones and maps and things.” He looked at her with his eyes shining, and his steady smile.

She reached again for her tea and remembered as it hit her mouth that it was cold. She wanted to ask if pilgrims travelled without wives as well, but she didn’t. She forced another of those jolly faces that seemed to hurt, and then she glanced towards the window where Harold’s dog was still waiting.

“He’s eating a stone.”

He laughed. “He does that. You have to be careful not to throw it for him. If you do, he thinks you like throwing stones and he follows you. He doesn’t forget.” She smiled again. This one didn’t hurt.

“Have you given him a name?”

“Just Dog. It didn’t seem right to give him anything else. He’s-his-own-animal sort of thing. I felt a name might sound as if I thought I owned him.”

She nodded, all out of words.

“You know,” Harold said suddenly, “you could walk with us.”

He reached for her fingers and she let him take them. The palms of his hands were so stained and calloused and her own were so pale and slight, she couldn’t see how these fingers had ever fitted together. Her hand lay in her husband’s, and all the rest of her was numb.

Moments from their marriage passed through her head, like a series of photographs. She saw him creeping out of the bathroom on their wedding night; the nakedness of his chest so beautiful she had gasped out loud, and caused him to dive straight back into his jacket. There was Harold at the hospital, gazing at his new baby son, and stretching out his finger. She saw too all those images in the leather albums that over the years she had cleaned from her memory. They passed through her mind in a flash, recognizable to no one but herself. She sighed.

It was all so far away, and there were so many other things lodged now between them. She saw herself and Harold twenty years ago, side by side in their sunglasses and unable to touch.

His voice parted the blanket of her thoughts. “What do you think? Do you think you might come, Maureen?”

She eased her hand from Harold’s and pushed back her chair. “It’s too late,” she murmured. “I think not.”

She stood but Harold didn’t, so that she felt she was already out of the door. “There’s the garden. And Rex. Besides, I don’t have my things.”

“You don’t need your – ”

“I do,” she said.