2

The World’s Guest

Ten years ago, Harold had gone into the world without Maureen. He had left to post a letter to his dying friend Queenie and, on the spur of the moment, made up his mind to walk the 627 miles to her instead. He had met many people along the way. Given up his wallet and slept in the wild. The story even hit the news and briefly made him famous. Left behind, Maureen had gone on a journey, too, but hers wasn’t the kind people talked about or bought postcards of to send home. She was at home. That was the whole point. Harold was walking the length of England to save a woman he had worked with once, while Maureen cleaned the kitchen sink. And when she had finished cleaning the sink, she was upstairs, squirting circles of polish at his bedroom furniture. Keeping herself as busy as possible when there was absolutely nothing left to do. She was even washing things she had already washed, just to find a little more washing inside them. And there were also days—though, again, who had known about them but her?—when she couldn’t think how to get up in the morning. When she crawled out of bed and stared for hours at the laundry and the sink, and asked what was the point in washing or scrubbing when it made not one shred of difference? She was so alone she didn’t know where to look or what to think about. She wasn’t even sure that Harold would come home. The panic that had engulfed her was unfamiliar and frightening.

But that was in the past. Maureen didn’t like to talk about that time any more. She knew it would sound sad, and it wasn’t. There were far worse things. Harold had finished his walk to Queenie. Maureen had traveled to be with him when Queenie died. Together they had returned home and started again. Maureen nursed him slowly back to health, cooking all those dishes he loved when they were first married, bandaging the blisters and welts on his feet that no one else knew about. It was true they were somewhat shy of one another in bed to begin with because they had grown so used to sleeping apart, and she could still recall the bashfulness with which he had first called her “sweetheart” as if she might laugh in his face. But she didn’t. She liked it very much. They had taken daily strolls to the quay and he listened to her ideas for making new vegetable beds and redecorating the house. Sometimes people stopped to shake his hand because they had heard what he’d done, and she would wait, slightly to the side, not quite knowing how to set her face, not even quite knowing what to do with her hands, both proud and bewildered by how at ease with himself he had become. Now he was seventy-five and she was seventy-two: their marriage had arrived at a good new place, like their very own private creek. Once in a while, Harold received a card from one of the women he had walked with—Kate—but Maureen put it out of her mind and they got on with their lives. Then, five months ago, there had been more news about Queenie. The woman was back in their lives all over again.

Light was coming. Lenny’s instructions worked perfectly. Maureen found her way back to the A38, and drove past barrow-shaped earthworks to merge with the M5. In the east there was a darkness that wasn’t entirely dark, and the navy-blue horizon was rimmed with pink and gold, while Venus still hung high and bright. Shapes came seeping back to life. Scribbled outlines of trees. Black shadows she guessed were pylons. More depots and warehouses. A lifeless hump at the roadside that might be a badger or a muntjac. Ice patches along the roadside held reflections of the new light, like pieces of stained glass, but beyond them, the land was still flat and dimmed and empty. Maureen pictured Harold fast asleep at home. Later he would pad down to the kitchen in his bare feet, the way he did every morning, and open the back door to look at the sky. Hours he could spend, doing nothing but gazing upward. He didn’t even wear his watch. He preferred not knowing the time. On a good day he took his wooden cane because his legs were so weak he couldn’t get to the end of the road any more, let alone the quay, and he watered the vegetable beds, entranced by the silver arc of water as it pooled over the earth, or he and Rex set up the drafts board and talked about this and that, but what he loved most was sitting on the patio, watching for birds. Whenever she felt a snatch of impatience, she told herself she was missing the point. At least he was happy, at least he was safe. And his health, too. At least he had that. It wasn’t that he was losing his mind, rather that he was deliberately taking things out of it that he no longer needed.

Maureen indicated left and shifted to the nearside lane. The traffic was getting heavier. It made her anxious and she drove too slowly so that lorries came up behind with their headlights all blazing, and then went thundering past, churning up grit. Cullompton. Tiverton. The pin-sized silhouette of the Wellington Monument on the Blackdown Hills. Taunton. There had been a Slovak woman from Taunton who had been kind to Harold, but she’d got in touch a few years ago to say she was being deported. Harold had been very low about that. Rex asked local people to sign a petition, but it made no difference. And anyway he had three pages of signatures that all looked the same. “Bottom line, Mrs. Fry, the woman doesn’t belong here,” one neighbor told Maureen. Another said he wasn’t racist and he had nothing against the person in question, but it was time to look after your own. That was back in the days, of course, when she wasn’t ashamed to show her face on the high street.

The sun rose, blooming over the frozen land, turning everything the red of a geranium, even gulls and traffic. The moon was still out but no more than a chalk ghost, reluctant to commit either to staying or going. At Bridgwater she passed the giant Willow Man caught in the act of striding south with arms outstretched like long fins. Anti-vax slogans were sprayed on the concrete underside of a bridge. Fake News. Fake Virus. England was a different country from the one Harold had walked through. Sometimes he would tell a story about a person he had met back then, or a view across the hills, and she would listen as if she were watching a film with her eyes closed, unable to find the right pictures. These days it was all safe motorways and Uber. It was paying with your phone, and please keep your distance, not to mention podcasts, milk made of oats and meat made of plants, and everything streamed online. Look for a bank spilling with primroses and you’d more likely find an old blue mask caught in the leaves. Ten years ago she couldn’t have imagined all the change that was coming.

Maureen switched on the radio but it was a news story about a film star who had staged a hate crime against himself to boost his Instagram profile. She turned it off. People expected so much of the world.

I want to be the world’s guest.

The words took her by surprise. It was her son who had spoken them, but she hadn’t thought of them in years. He must have been only six. He had looked straight up at her with his deep brown eyes that seemed to know a sadness she didn’t.

“What on earth do you mean?” she had said.

“I don’t know.”

“Is it because you want a biscuit?”

“No.”

“Then what is it you want? A party?”

“I don’t like parties.”

“Everyone likes parties.”

“I don’t. I don’t like the games. I only like the cake and the going-home present.”

“So what do you mean?”

“I don’t know.”

She had felt pierced. Everything about David had saddened her—his solemn gaze and his slow walk and the way he kept himself apart from other children. “Why don’t you play?” she would say, when she took him to the park. “Those children look nice. I’m sure they’ll play with you.”

“It’s okay, thank you,” he would say. “I’ll stay with you. I think they won’t like me.”

But she’d had the sense, even then, that he did know what he meant about being the world’s guest. That he was just waiting for her to catch up. Forever she had been running after this child. Even now she was doing it.

Maureen felt dizzy suddenly. Almost seasick. She needed coffee and the washroom.