The nightmare pictures Harold thought he had left behind were back, and there was no escaping them. Awake or asleep, he relived the past, and felt the fresh horror of it. He saw himself flailing with an axe at the wooden planks of his garden shed, his hands ripped and full of splinters, his head swinging with whisky. He saw his fists sprouting blood over thousands of coloured glass pins. He heard himself praying, eyes screwed up, hands clenched, and the words meaning nothing. Other times, he saw Maureen turn her back on him and disappear into a dazzling ball of light. The twenty years that had passed were shorn away. There was no hiding behind the ordinary or even the cliché. Like the detail in the land, these things no longer existed.

No one could imagine such loneliness. He shouted once but no sound came back. He felt the cold deep inside him, as if even his bones were freezing over. He closed his eyes to sleep, convinced he would not survive, and having no will to fight that. When he woke, and felt the stiffness of his clothes cutting his skin, and his face burnt with the sun, or maybe the cold, he got up and plodded on.

A bulging in his shoes made a rip at the seam and the soles were thin as fabric. His toes would be through the leather at any moment. He bound them with the roll of blue duct tape, round and round and round, crossing underneath the foot and up over towards the ankle, so that the shoe was a part of himself. Or was it the other way round? He was beginning to believe they had a will of their own.

On, on, on. These were the only words. He didn’t know whether they were ones he cried out, or words in his mind; or whether someone else was calling them. He thought he might be the only person left in the world. There was no more than the road. He was no more than a body that housed a walk. He was blue-duct-tape feet and Berwick-upon-Tweed.

♦

At three thirty on a Tuesday afternoon Harold smelt salt in the wind. An hour later he reached the brow of a hill and saw a town lying before him, fringed by the endless gap that was the sea. He approached the pinkish-grey town walls but no one stopped, or looked twice, or offered him food.

Eighty-seven days after setting out to post a letter, Harold Fry arrived at the gates of St Bernadine’s Hospice. Including mistakes and diversions, his journey had amounted to six hundred and twenty-seven miles. The building before him was modern and unassuming, flanked by trembling trees. There was an old-fashioned street lamp close to the main entrance, and a sign pointing to a car park. Several bodies sat in deck chairs on the lawn, like clothes set out to dry. A seagull wheeled and barked overhead.