He shook his head mournfully. From inside the house the phone began to ring, and her heart leapt to her mouth. It was Harold. He was coming home. As she ran for the door, Rex was still at the fence, saying, “You should make a complaint to the council about a loose paving stone.”

“Don’t worry,” she called over her shoulder, “I will.” Her pulse was beating so fast she didn’t know if she was going to laugh or cry. She darted to the phone and lifted the receiver, but the answer machine clicked on and he rang off. She dialled 1471, but the caller’s number was not available. She sat watching the phone, waiting for him to call again or return home, but he did neither.

That night was the worst; she couldn’t understand how anyone slept. She shook the batteries out of the bedside clock, but there was nothing she could do to stop the barking of dogs, or the cars that screeched past towards the new housing at three in the morning, or even the shrieking of gulls that started up at first light. She lay very still, waiting for inertia, and sometimes a moment of unconsciousness stole over her but then she would wake and remember again. Harold was walking to Queenie Hennessy. And reacquainting herself with this knowledge, after the ignorance of sleep, was even more painful than first hearing it on the telephone. It was a double deceit. But that was how it went; she knew that. You had to keep crawling up, not believing it, only to be punched back down again, until the truth well and truly hit home.

She opened Harold’s bedside drawer and stared again at the two photographs he had hidden there. There was David in his first pair of shoes, balancing on one leg, and clinging on to her hand while lifting up his other foot, as if to examine it. And the other was of herself, laughing so much her dark hair fell over her face in long sweeps. She was nursing a courgette that had grown to the size of a small child. It must have been taken just after they moved to Kingsbridge.

♦

When three large envelopes from cruise companies arrived, Maureen dropped them straight in the recycling box.

7

Harold and the Hiking Man and the Woman Who Loved Jane Austen

It had come to Harold’s attention that several of the chaps at the brewery, including Mr Napier, had developed a peculiar walk that caused them to shriek as if it were uncontrollably funny. “Look at this,” he’d hear them bragging from the yard. And one man would stick out an elbow like a chicken wing, and lower his torso as if to widen the shape of his lower half, before waddling forward.

“That’s it! Fuck, that’s it!” the others would scream. Sometimes the whole gang would spit out their cigarettes and have a go.