Passing allotments, he saw Maureen in the front garden of Fossebridge Road, wearing an old shirt of Harold’s, her hair tied back against the wind and her face smutched with dirt, as she dug in French-bean plants. He saw a bird’s broken egg and recalled with splintering tenderness the fragility of David’s head when he was born. He heard the hollow cackle of a crow in the silence, and suddenly he was lying in his bed as a teenager, hearing that same cry, and overwhelmed with loneliness.

“Where are you going?” he had asked his mother. Already he loomed over his father, but he liked the fact he only reached her shoulders. She lifted her suitcase and arranged a long silk scarf round her neck. It hung down her back like hair.

“Nowhere,” she said, but she was opening the front door.

“I want to come.” He took hold of the scarf, just the tassels where she might not notice. The silk was soft between his fingertips. “Can I come?”

“Don’t be daft. You’ll be fine. You’re practically a man.”

“Shall I tell you a joke?”

“Not now, Harold.” She eased her scarf from his hold. “You’re making me silly,” she said, wiping her eyes. “Am I smudged?”

“You’re lovely.”

“Wish me luck.” She took a deep breath as if she were about to plunge into water, and stepped out.

The detail was so clear it was more real than the earth beneath his feet. He could smell her musk scent. See the white powder on her skin and know, even without her being there, that if she had allowed him to kiss her cheek it would have tasted of marshmallows.

“I thought you might like these for a change,” said Queenie Hennessy once. She had prised the lid from a small tin and revealed squares of white confectionery, dusted in icing sugar. He had shaken his head and continued to drive. She didn’t bring marshmallows again.

Sunlight broke through the trees so that the young leaves, rippling in the wind, shone like foil. At Brampford Speke, the roofs turned into thatch, and the brick was no longer the colour of flint but a warmer shade of red. Branches of spiraea bowed under sleeves of blossom and delphinium shoots nudged the soil. With the help of his guidebook, Harold identified old man’s beard, hart’s tongue, red campion, herb Robert, cuckoo pint, and discovered that the star-shaped flowers whose beauty he had marvelled at were wood anemones. Buoyed up by this, he covered the further two and a half miles to Thorverton with his head deep in his wild-plant dictionary. Despite the chemist’s warning, it did not rain. He felt blessed.