In a small shop, Harold bought plasters, water, an aerosol can of deodorant, a comb, a toothbrush, plastic razors, shaving foam, washing powder and two packets of Rich Tea biscuits. He took a room with a single bed and framed prints of extinct parrots on the wall, where he carefully examined his feet before applying plasters to the weeping blister on his heel and the swellings on his toes. His body throbbed with a deep aching. He was exhausted. He had never walked so far in a day but he had covered eight and a half miles and he was hungry for more. He would eat, and call Maureen from a pay phone, and after that he would sleep.

The sun slipped over the edge of Dartmoor, and filled the sky with russet cloud. The hills were shaded an opaque blue and the cows grazing them glowed a soft apricot against the dying light. Harold couldn’t help wishing that David knew he was walking. He wondered if Maureen would talk to him about it, and the words she would use. The stars began to prick the night sky, one after another, so that the growing darkness trembled. Even as he looked he found them.

For the second night in a row, Harold slept without dreaming.

6

Maureen and the Lie

At first Maureen was convinced Harold would come back. He would phone, and he would be cold and tired, and she would have to go and fetch him, and it would be the middle of the night, and she would have to put a coat on over her nightdress and find her driving shoes; and all this would be Harold’s fault. She had slept fitfully with the lamp on and the phone beside the bed, but he had neither rung nor come home.

She kept going over all that had happened. The breakfast, and the pink letter, and Harold not speaking, only weeping in silence. The smallest detail lurked in her mind. The way he had folded his reply twice and slipped it in the envelope before she could see. Even when she tried to think about something else, or nothing at all, she couldn’t stop the picture swimming into her head of Harold staring at Queenie’s letter, as if something deep inside him was undoing. She wanted very much to speak to David, but she didn’t know how she would say it. Harold’s walk was still too confusing and humiliating, and she was afraid that if she spoke to David she would miss him, and it would be more hurt than she could bear.

So when Harold said he was walking to Berwick, did he mean that once he got there, he was staying?

Well, he could go if he wanted. She should have seen it coming. Like mother, like son; although she had not met Joan, and Harold never spoke of her. What kind of woman packs a suitcase and leaves, without even a note? Yes, Harold could go. There were times when she herself had been tempted to call it a day. It was David who kept her at home, not marital love. She could no longer recall the details of how she had first met Harold, or what she had seen in him; only that he had picked her up at some municipal dance, and that on meeting him, her mother had found him common.