Harold passed office workers, dog walkers, shoppers, children going to school, mothers and buggies, and hikers like himself, as well as several tourist parties. He met a tax inspector who was a Druid and had not worn a pair of shoes for ten years. He talked with a young woman on the trail of her real father, with a priest who confessed to tweeting during mass, as well as several people in training for a marathon, and an Italian man with a singing parrot. He spent an afternoon with a white witch from Glastonbury, and a homeless man who had drunk away his house, as well as four bikers looking for the M5, and a mother of six who confided she had no idea life could be so solitary. Harold walked with these strangers and listened. He judged no one, although as the days wore on, and time and places began to melt, he couldn’t remember if the tax inspector wore no shoes or had a parrot on his shoulder. It no longer mattered. He had learned that it was the smallness of people that filled him with wonder and tenderness, and the loneliness of that too. The world was made up of people putting one foot in front of the other; and a life might appear ordinary simply because the person living it had done so for a long time. Harold could no longer pass a stranger without acknowledging the truth that everyone was the same, and also unique; and that this was the dilemma of being human.

He walked so surely it was as if all his life he had been waiting to get up from his chair.

♦

Maureen told him on the phone that she had moved out of the spare room and returned to the main bedroom. He had spent so many years sleeping alone, he was surprised at first, and then he was glad because it was the larger and more pleasant of the two and, being at the front of the house, enjoyed the wide view over Kingsbridge. But he assumed this also meant she had packed his things and carried them to the spare room.

He thought of the many times he had looked at the closed door, knowing she had exiled herself completely beyond his reach. Some times he had touched the handle, as if it were a sentient piece of her.

Maureen’s voice crept under the silence: “I’ve been thinking of when we first met.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“It was at a dance in Woolwich. You touched my neck. Then you said something funny. We laughed and laughed.”