The sun pressed warm on the back of his head and shoulders as he strolled down the avenues of new housing. Harold glanced in at people’s windows, and sometimes they were empty, and sometimes people were staring right back at him and he felt obliged to rush on. Sometimes, though, there was an object that he didn’t expect; a porcelain figure, or a vase, and even a tuba. The tender pieces of themselves that people staked as boundaries against the outside world. He tried to visualize what a passer-by would learn about himself and Maureen from the windows of 13 Fossebridge Road, before he realized it would be not very much, on account of the net curtains. He headed for the quayside, with the muscles twitching in his thighs.

The tide was out and dinghies lolled in a moonscape of black mud, needing paint. Harold hobbled to an empty bench, inched Queenie’s letter from his pocket and unfolded it.

She remembered. After all these years. And yet he had lived out his ordinary life as if what she had done meant nothing. He hadn’t tried to stop her. He hadn’t followed. He hadn’t even said goodbye. The sky and pavement blurred into one as fresh tears swelled his eyes. Then through them came the watery outline of a young mother and child. They seemed to be holding ice-cream cones, and bore them like torches. She lifted the boy and set him down on the other end of the bench.

“Lovely day,” said Harold, not wanting to sound like an old man who was crying. She didn’t look up, or agree. Bending over her child’s fist, she licked a smooth path to stop the ice cream from running. The boy watched his mother, so still and close it was as if his face was part of hers.

Harold wondered if he had ever sat by the quay eating ice cream with David. He was sure he must have done, although searching in his mind for the memory, he found it wasn’t readily available. He must get on. He must post his letter.

Office workers were laughing with lunchtime pints outside the Old Creek Inn, but Harold barely noticed. As he began the steep climb up Fore Street, he thought about the mother who was so absorbed in her son she saw no one else. It occurred to him it was Maureen who spoke to David and told him their news. It was Maureen who had always written Harold’s name (“Dad”) in the letters and cards. It was even Maureen who had found the nursing home for his father. And it begged the question – as he pushed the button at the pelican crossing – that if she was, in effect, Harold, “Then who am I?”

He strode past the post office without even stopping.

2

Harold and the Garage Girl and a Question of Faith

Harold was near the top of Fore Street. He had passed the closed-down Woolworths, the bad butcher (“He beats his wife,” Maureen said), the good butcher (“His wife left him”), the clock tower, the Shambles, as well as the offices of the South Hams Gazette, and now he was at the last of the shops. The muscles in his calves pulled with every step. Behind him, the estuary shone like a sheet of tin against the sun; boats were already tiny flecks of white. He paused at the travel agent, because he wanted to take a rest without anyone noticing, and pretended to read about bargain holidays in the window. Bali, Naples, Istanbul, Dubai. His mother used to talk so dreamily about escaping to countries where there were tropical trees, and women with flowers in their hair, that as a boy he had instinctively distrusted the world he did not know. It had not been very different once he was married to Maureen, and they had David. Every year they spent two weeks in the same holiday camp in Eastbourne. Taking several deep breaths to steady his chest, Harold continued north.