He remembered David dancing like a demon. He thought of the boy swimming out at Bantham. He saw again the occasion he had tried to tell his son a joke, and how David’s face had creased. “But I don’t get it,” he’d said. He looked on the verge of tears. Harold had explained that the joke was funny. It was meant to make you laugh. He had told it a second time. “I still don’t understand,” the boy had said. Later Harold had heard him repeat the joke to Maureen in the bath. “He said it was funny,” David had complained. “He said it twice and it didn’t make me laugh.” Even at that age he made the word sound dark.

And then Harold thought of his son as an eighteen-year-old; his hair flowing well below his shoulders; his arms and legs too long for clothes. He saw the young man lying on his bed with his feet on the pillow, staring so hard at nothing that Harold had briefly wondered if he saw things that Harold couldn’t. His wrists were bone.

Harold heard himself saying, “I hear from your mother you got into Cambridge.”

David had not looked at him. He kept staring at the nothing.

Harold had wanted to take him in his arms and hold on tight. He wanted to say, You beautiful boy of mine; how do you get to be so clever, when I am not? But he had looked at David’s impenetrable face and said, “Well, gosh. That’s good. Golly.”

David scoffed as if he had just heard a joke that was all about his father. And Harold in turn shut the bedroom door and promised himself that one day, when his son was a full-grown man perhaps, things would be easier.

From Tiverton, Harold decided to continue with the main roads. He reasoned that this route was the more direct. He would follow the Great Western Way and then cut across country lanes until he reached the A38. It should be twenty miles to Taunton.

A storm was coming. Clouds drew up like a hood over the earth, and threw an eerie luminous light over the Blackdown Hills. For the first time he missed his mobile phone; he felt unprepared for what lay ahead, and he wished he could speak to Maureen. The tops of the trees shone against the granite swell of the sky, and then shook as the first winds hit them. Leaves and twigs were tossed into the air. Birds cried out. In the distance, sails of rain came into view, and hung between Harold and the hills. He cowered into his jacket as the first drops hit.