Maureen heated a small tin of tomato soup. How had it happened that Harold was walking to Berwick while she sat at home, doing nothing? What were the steps she had missed? Unlike him, she had left school with decent qualifications. She had done a secretarial course, and when David was at primary school she had taught herself French with the Open University. She used to love gardening. There once wasn’t an inch of the plot at Fossebridge Road that didn’t bear fruit or flowers. She had cooked every day. She had read Elizabeth David and took pleasure in seeking out new ingredients. “Today we are Italian,” she’d laugh, kicking open the door to the dining room and presenting David and Harold with an asparagus risotto. “Buon appetito.” The regrets about all she had let go flooded her. Where had all that enterprise gone? All that energy? Why had she never travelled? Or had more sex when she could? She had bleached and annihilated every waking moment of the last twenty years. Anything, rather than feel. Anything, rather than meet Harold’s eye and say the unspeakable.

It was not a life, if lived without love. Maureen poured the soup down the sink, sat at the kitchen table and pressed her face in her hands.

♦

It was David’s idea that she should confess to Rex the truth about Harold’s walk. He told her one morning that he had been thinking about her situation, and felt it would do her good to talk. She laughed and protested she hardly knew the man, but he pointed out that Rex was her neighbour; of course they knew each other.

“That doesn’t mean we talk,” she said. “They’d only been here six months when his wife died. Besides, I don’t need to talk to other people. I have you, love.”

David said that while of course this was true, it might do Rex some good if Maureen came clean. She couldn’t keep hiding the truth for ever. She was about to say she missed him, when he told her she should do it right away.

“Will I see you soon?” she said. He promised she would.

Maureen found Rex in his garden, where he was trimming the borders of the grass with a blade in the shape of a half-moon. She stood at the fence that divided their gardens, slightly lopsided because of the slope, and asked in an airy way how he was getting along.

“Keeping busy. That’s the best you can hope for. How’s Harold?”

“He’s good.” Her legs were trembling. Even her fingers felt light. She drew a new breath, like starting a fresh paragraph. “The fact is, Rex, Harold isn’t at home. I’ve been lying. I’m sorry.” She smothered her lips with her fingertips, forbidding further words. She couldn’t look.