“He’s all right,” said his Aunt Vera, who took Muriel’s side of the bed when she left. “He’s got some good jokes. He just mumbles the punchline.”

Weary and forlorn, Harold ordered a meal at the Fisherman’s Cot, overlooking the river. He spoke with several strangers who informed him that the bridge crossing the troubled water was the inspiration for the song by Simon and Garfunkel, and all the time he felt that he was nodding and smiling, and trying to look like someone who was listening, while in reality his thoughts were preoccupied with his journey, the past, and what was happening in his leg. Was it serious? Would it go away? He retired early, promising himself that sleep would heal. It didn’t.

Deer son, read Joan’s only letter. New Zeeland is a wonderful plase. I had to go. Muthering was not me. Send my best regads to your dad. It wasn’t her leaving that was the worst part. It was the fact she couldn’t even spell her explanation.

On Harold’s tenth day, there was not an isolated moment in his walking, not one muscular flex, that did not fizz the length of his right calf and remind him he was in trouble. He remembered the urgency with which he had made his promise to the hospice nurse about walking to Queenie, and it seemed childishly inappropriate. Even his conversation with the social worker shamed him. It was as if something had happened overnight; as if the walk and his belief in it had broken into two separate pieces, and he was left only with the relentless slog. For ten days he had walked, and all his energy had been focused into the sheer act of putting one step in front of the other. But now that he had discovered his faith in his feet, the practical anxieties had been replaced by something far more insidious.

The three-and-a-half mile stretch along the A396 to Tiverton was his hardest yet. There were few spaces to hide from cars, and even though the hedges had been recently cut, offering silvery flashes of the River Exe, it gave them a barbaric appearance, and he preferred not to look. Drivers blared their horns and shouted at him to get off the road. He berated himself for managing so few miles; at this rate it would be Christmas before he reached Berwick. A child, he told himself, could have done better.