Rex's bereavement

Rex's bereavement begins six months after Elizabeth's death, at roughly the time of Harold's retirement. In Kingsbridge, Rex is known as a short, round-bodied neighbour whose physical appearance gives Harold the comic image of a barrel rolling down the hill, yet the joke sits beside a serious emotional fact: since Elizabeth died, Rex has made a habit of describing how difficult life has become and asking others to listen at length. His grief is therefore both private suffering and a repeated social performance, one that Maureen recognises even when Harold experiences it as an interruption.

Identity and Immediate Expression

Rex's widowhood is introduced through ordinary neighbourhood contact rather than through a formal account of Elizabeth's illness or death. He steers towards Harold at the adjoining fence while Harold is trying to leave, and Harold attempts to discourage the conversation by asking whether Rex has anything to post. The exchange establishes the pressure of Rex's mourning: it follows him into casual encounters, turns the neighbour's attention into an obligation, and makes listening itself part of what grief demands. Maureen has already told Harold that the least he can do is listen, though Harold is uncertain whether her instruction is general or directed specifically at him.

Rex's house preserves a different form of mourning. When Maureen visits, the sitting room is as quiet and undisturbed as the hall, and she feels that her presence intrudes upon it. The mantelpiece holds framed photographs of Elizabeth, remembered by Maureen as tall, broad-jawed, gravel-voiced, and somewhat overpowering. Maureen has never said aloud that she did not particularly like Elizabeth, but the thought reveals how bereavement can complicate the expected language of tribute. Elizabeth is absent, yet her images organise the room and make the surviving household feel occupied by memory.

Grief as Recognition and Regret

Rex's most revealing conversation with Maureen occurs when she comes to tell him about Harold's letter from Queenie, his sudden departure, and her fear that he will not return. Once she begins speaking, she discovers how much she has been holding inside. Rex's loss gives him a position from which he can hear the emotional stakes of Harold's walk, while Maureen's account gives him an occasion to articulate a regret that has been waiting beneath his complaints.

He says that he misses Elizabeth constantly and knows intellectually that she is gone, but remains caught by the recurring act of looking for her. He compares grief to a hole in the ground: at first a person forgets it is there and keeps falling in; later the hole remains, but the survivor learns to walk around it. The image describes bereavement not as a wound that closes but as an altered geography. Loss stays fixed in the world, while the living person must acquire new habits of movement around it.

Rex's deeper regret concerns the period when doctors told him and Elizabeth that she was dying. He believes that both of them gave up, and wishes he had shown her how fiercely he wanted to keep her alive, even though such resistance could not have changed the final outcome. His grief therefore includes self-accusation: he does not merely mourn Elizabeth's death but judges his own response to its approach. Bent over his tea as if in prayer, he repeats that he should have raged, with such quiet intensity that his cup trembles and the knuckles of his hands appear almost skeletal. The scene converts a talkative widower's familiar complaint into a concentrated confession of emotional failure.

Relationship with Maureen

Rex's bereavement becomes legible to Maureen because she carries her own share of grief. She is already withdrawn, spending hours looking from windows and remembering the past while doing little, and she has begun to see herself as no longer even a wife within her estranged marriage to Harold. Rex's admission about Elizabeth does not erase Maureen's suffering, but it gives her a companion in the complicated aftermath of loss: someone whose pain is not visible merely as sadness, but as habit, regret, silence, and the altered meaning of domestic objects.

The conversation also produces a mutual contrast. Rex wishes he had expressed more resistance to Elizabeth's death, whereas Maureen has been left with the consequences of holding too much inside. Her fear that Harold will not return, her shame about visiting the temporary doctor, and her memories of David make her vulnerable to the same movement between speech and repression. Rex's willingness to name his regret becomes a form of testimony that Maureen cannot dismiss, even when it lowers her mood and turns her back toward the past.

His loss also changes how Maureen reads the apparently ordinary people around her. To a young passer-by, Rex might look like a helpless old man, detached from reality and exhausted by life. Maureen instead recognises that beneath his waxen skin and portly body is a heart capable of the same intensity as a teenager's. Bereavement has not diminished his emotional life; it has made that life less visible, forcing it to emerge through repetitive talk, belated confession, and the sudden force of a single phrase.

Narrative Function and Wider Pattern

Rex's grief is set against the losses that structure Harold's journey. Harold's walk begins after Queenie's letter and is driven towards St Bernadine's Hospice, but the journey repeatedly opens older memories: the memory of Maureen in the garden, the fragility of David as a newborn, loneliness from Harold's adolescence, and the catastrophe surrounding David's death. The narrative thus treats bereavement as recursive rather than completed. One person's account of loss summons another person's memories, and apparently separate griefs become connected through listening.

This pattern is especially clear in the contrast between Rex's static mourning and Harold's movement. Rex remains in his house among photographs and undisturbed rooms, while Harold leaves Kingsbridge and crosses roads, fields, towns, and open land. Yet the walk does not leave grief behind. Once Harold is outside the city, his thoughts become freer and the past he has spent twenty years avoiding returns with wild energy; distance is measured not only in miles but in remembered experience. His physical progress therefore resembles Rex's image of learning to walk around the hole: movement is possible, but only in relation to what remains.

The journey eventually gives this movement a concrete form when Rex makes Harold's map of England for Maureen. The map is mounted on a pinboard, its route marked with blue thread and drawing pins from Kingsbridge through Loddiswell, South Brent, Buckfast Abbey, and onward to Bath, while Berwick-upon-Tweed is marked by fluorescent green and a homemade flag. Rex even supplies spare pins so Maureen can display Harold's postcards in places he is not visiting. His bereavement is not stated in this scene, but it informs the gesture's emotional intelligence: he understands that a person left behind needs a visible structure through which to follow an absent loved one's movement. The imperfectly drilled, slightly lopsided map becomes a practical answer to the helplessness of waiting.

Significance

Rex's bereavement gives the novel one of its clearest accounts of grief as both endurance and belated knowledge. Elizabeth's death cannot be repaired, and Rex's imagined rage cannot alter what happened, but speaking the regret allows it to be witnessed by Maureen. The scene does not offer a cure. Instead, it shows how the survivor may continue carrying the dead while learning a different way to move through the world.

That insight resonates with Harold's later pilgrimage. He refuses equipment, planned routes, and unnecessary supplies, insisting on the instincts that make him himself, yet he gradually learns to accept kindness and to understand receiving as requiring courage and humility. His movement towards St Bernadine's Hospice ends after eighty-seven days and six hundred and twenty-seven miles, but the emotional journey is not a victory over loss. Like Rex's hole in the ground, the past remains. What changes is the possibility of walking around it with greater honesty, and of allowing another grieving person to listen.