“I left the rucksack with the nuns. I thought that was best.” He spoke quietly and carefully, balancing on the words, but suggesting he was in danger at any moment of falling off into the crater of feeling beneath. “I should never have done it. I should have sent a letter. A letter would have been enough. If I had simply stuck with the letter, I could have – ” She waited but he stared out at the horizon. He seemed to have forgotten that he was talking.

“Still,” she said, “I’m surprised – after everything you did – that Queenie said nothing.”

At last he turned and met her eye. His face, like his voice, was drained of life. “She can’t. She has no tongue.”

“I beg your pardon?” Maureen’s gasp walloped the air.

“I believe they’ve cut it out. Along with half her throat, and some of her spine. It was a last-ditch attempt to save her, but it hasn’t worked. The cancer’s inoperable because there are no operable bits of her left. Now she has a tumour growing out of her face.”

He looked away, back towards the sky, with his eyes half closed, as if he was blocking out the external world in order to see more clearly the truth that was taking shape inside his head. “That’s why she could never talk to me on the telephone. She can’t speak.”

Maureen turned once more to the sea, trying to understand. Far out the waves were flat, and metal-coloured. She wondered if they knew the end of their journey lay ahead.

Harold’s voice came again. “I didn’t stop because there were no words for me to say. There weren’t when I first read her letter. Maureen, I’m the kind of man who thanks the talking clock. What difference was I ever going to make? How did I ever think I could stop a woman from dying?”

A violent surge of grief seemed to force its way through him. His eyes crumpled shut, and his mouth opened, and he sat tall as his mouth emitted a series of soundless sobs. “She was such a good woman. She wanted to help. Every time I drove her, she brought something nice for the journey home. She asked about David, and Cambridge – ” He couldn’t finish. His body was shaking with it. His face twisted as fierce tears screwed up his eyes and his cheeks. “You should see. You should see her, Maw. It’s not fair.”

“I know.” She reached her left hand around Harold’s and held it tight. She looked at the darkness of his fingers on his lap; the blue ridges of his veins. Despite the strangeness of the last weeks, she knew this hand so well. Even without looking she knew it. She kept hold as he wept. He grew calmer; a quiet flow of tears.