“I hope I haven’t upset you?” said the woman beside him.

“No, no.” He stood and shook her hand.

“I’m glad you stopped,” she said. “I’m glad you asked for water.” He returned to the road before she could see that he was crying.

♦

The lower creases of Dartmoor loomed to his left. He could see now that what had appeared to be a vague blue mass on the shoulder of the horizon was a series of purple, green and yellow peaks, unbroken by fields, and topped at the highest points with boulders of stone. A bird of prey, maybe a buzzard, swung over the land, skimming the air; suspended.

Harold asked himself if years ago he shouldn’t have pressed Maureen to have another baby. “David is enough,” she had said. “He is all we need.” But sometimes he was afraid that having one son was too much to bear. He wondered if the pain of loving became diluted, the more you had? A child’s growing was a constant pushing away. When their son had finally rejected them for good, they dealt with it in different ways. There was anger for a while, and then there was something else, that was like silence but had an energy and violence of its own. In the end, Harold had come down with a cold, and Maureen had moved into the spare room. Somehow or other neither of them had mentioned it, and somehow or other she had never moved back.

Harold’s heel stung and his back ached, and now the soles of his feet were beginning to burn. Even the smallest flint caused him pain; he had to keep stopping to remove a shoe and shake it empty. From time to time, he also found that his legs buckled for no apparent reason, as if they had been jellied, causing him to stumble. His fingers were throbbing but maybe that was because they were not used to being swung back and forth in a downward direction. And yet, despite all this, he felt intensely alive. A lawn mower started up in the distance and he laughed out loud.

Harold joined the A3121 towards Exeter, and after a mile of heavy traffic at his back, he took the B3372, following the grass verges. When a group of professional-looking walkers caught him up, Harold stood out of their way and waved them past. They exchanged pleasantries about the good weather and the landscape, but he didn’t tell them about heading for Berwick. He preferred to keep that tucked in his head, like Queenie’s letter in his pocket. As they moved ahead he observed with interest that they all had backpacks, that some of them had loose-fitting tracksuits, and that others were equipped with sun visors, binoculars and telescopic hiking sticks. None was wearing yachting shoes.

A few waved, and one or two laughed. Harold didn’t know if they were doing it because they thought he was a hopeless case or because they were admiring him, but either way, he found, it didn’t really matter. He was already different from the man who had set out from Kingsbridge, and even from the small hotel. He was not someone off to the post box. He was walking to Queenie Hennessy. He was beginning again.