It surprised him that he was remembering all this. Maybe it was the walking. Maybe you saw even more than the land when you got out of the car and used your feet.

The sun poured like warm liquid on Harold’s head and hands. He removed his shoes and socks under the table, where no one would see or smell them, and examined his feet. The toes were moist and an angry crimson. Where the shoe met his heel the skin had become inflamed; the blister was a tight pod. He paddled the arches of his feet in the soft grass and closed his eyes, feeling tired, but knowing that he mustn’t sleep. It would be difficult to keep going if he stopped for too long.

“Enjoy it while it lasts.”

Harold turned, afraid of finding someone he knew. It was only the landlord, partially eclipsing the sun. He was as tall as Harold, but of wider build, dressed in a rugby shirt and long shorts, and those sandals that Maureen said looked like Cornish pasties. Harold returned his feet quickly to his yachting shoes.

“Don’t let me disturb you,” said the landlord, rather loud, and without moving. In Harold’s experience, publicans often behaved as if it was their responsibility to suggest there was a conversation happening, even in silence, and that it was hugely entertaining. “The nice weather makes people want to do something. Take my wife. First sunny day, she cleans out the kitchen cupboards.”

Maureen seemed to clean all year round. Houses don’t clean themselves, she’d mutter. Sometimes she cleaned the bits she had just cleaned. It wasn’t like living in a house, but more a question of hovering over the surfaces. He didn’t say that, however. He merely thought it.

“I haven’t seen you before,” said the landlord. “Are you visiting?”

Harold explained that he was passing through. He had retired six months ago, he said, from the brewery. He belonged to the old days, when the reps drove out every morning and there was less technology.

“So you must have known Napier?”

The question took him unawares. Harold cleared his throat and said Napier had been his boss until he was killed in the car crash five years back.

“I know you shouldn’t speak ill of the dead,” said the landlord, “but he was a vicious sod. I saw him half kill a man once. We had to pull him off.”

Harold felt a twisting in his gut. It would be better not to speak about Napier. Instead he explained how he had set off with the letter for Queenie, and realized it wasn’t enough. Before the landlord could point it out, he admitted he had no phone, walking boots or map, and that he probably appeared ridiculous.

“It’s not a name you hear much, Queenie,” said the landlord. “It’s old-fashioned.”

Harold agreed and said she had been an old-fashioned sort of person. Quiet, and always wearing a brown wool suit, even in the summer months.