"Traffic report," he said.
"Clear," Rowan said. "Light all the way. One chair, stationary, pretending otherwise."
"Spotter?"
"Beside you, not in front. I am not a fence, Harold. I am a neighbour."
He set off. The cane found its rhythm first, as it always did, tap and step, tap and step, and Rowan walked at his left side a half pace back, close enough to be useful, far enough that the walking was his. At the first rest point, by the treatment room door, he stopped because the card said to stop, and stood breathing in the rectangle of light while a younger patient, a woman recovering from a knee reconstruction, applauded him gravely from her chair as if he were passing in a parade. Harold inclined his head like a monarch who found this entirely appropriate.
At the second rest point the breath came harder, and with it the doubt, which always arrived at the same tile. Rowan had seen it arrive for months, the small tightening around his mouth, the glance down at legs that had carried him for seventy two years and had, in his phrase, put in for early retirement without consulting him.
"Tell me again," he said, "why we do not simply do this in two trips."
"Because you asked me not to let you," Rowan said. "In writing. In capital letters. You made Tess witness it."
"Tess would witness a forgery if there were biscuits."
"There were biscuits," Rowan admitted. "But the signature was yours."
He huffed, which was almost a laugh, and the laugh gave him the next section. Tap and step, tap and step, past the kitchen, where someone had burned toast in solidarity with effort everywhere, past the tall windows and the harbour road and a bus sighing at the stop. The chair grew closer with an insolence Harold commented on at length. At the third rest point he did not ask about two trips. He stood with his hand firm on the cane and his eyes on the far wall, and Rowan said nothing at all, because she had learned from years of slow grappling that the most useful thing a person beside you can sometimes offer is not encouragement but room.
"Last stretch," he said finally, to himself more than to her.
"Last stretch," she agreed. "Scheduled arrival. Chair has been notified."
He walked it without stopping. It was not fast, and that was the entire point that the week, the posters, and Kieran Holt's interviewers would never understand. It was deliberate, each step placed, each placement trusted, the cane and the good shoes and the breathing arriving together like members of a small, argumentative team. When he reached the chair he did not collapse into it. He turned, with care, the way he had practised turning, and sat down with the air of a man taking a seat that had been reserved for him by name. Then he looked back down the hall at the strip of blue tape, very far away, and was quiet for a moment.
"Well," he said at last. "September can stop talking now."
"It can," Rowan said, and found, to her mild embarrassment, that her eyes were stinging. She busied herself with the card in her pocket, writing the distance, the rests, the time, in her small exact hand, because feelings, like steps, were easier to trust when they were recorded honestly. "Whole hall, Harold. With the cane. Two planned rests on the way, one arrival. That goes in the notes in ink."
"Ink," Harold repeated, pleased. "Let the record show the chair lost."
Later, when the session notes were filed and Harold was holding court in the waiting area with a cup of tea he was not supposed to want and very plainly wanted, he caught Rowan's sleeve as she passed with a folder under her arm.
"This match of yours," he said. "Saturday. These people saying you are slow."
"It is a showcase, Harold. And yes. Some people."
He considered her over the rim of the cup. "In September I could cross this room if the furniture was kind. Today I crossed the hall because somebody taught me that going slowly on purpose is not the same as failing to go. If your young man has not learned that by twenty eight, that is not a speed problem, Rowan. That is an education problem." He released her sleeve and settled back, satisfied. "Educate him. Politely. I understand politeness is your whole system."