PROLOGUE
Saturday 2 October 2005, 1643hrs
Harry Crabtree had just seen his beloved Villa go 2-3 behind in the 88th minute and was in dismay at the certainty that they would stay in the bottom three relegation area for the next fortnight. Then, he felt his Palm PDA vibrate to show he had received an email. Glancing at his mate Gary, who was using Harry's wife's season ticket seat for this game, he apologised saying, "I must just check this out."
Harry's wife was absent from this game because of a last-minute wedding present shopping for her best friend Karen's granddaughter, and other pre-wedding shopping, otherwise she never missed a match. However, the preparations for her friend's Christmas Day church wedding was reaching a critical stage. It was probably her now, asking if it was all right to spend some ludicrous amount on something. Harry and his wife both knew he'd approve anything that she asked for, but she would still call him to ask, just as he would call her if he wanted permission to buy a new set of golf clubs. It was these little niceties that reinforce a good marriage and Harry thought he had a great one.
He pulled the Palm out and checked his message. It wasn't from the missus, but from someone called "kayleigh.wilson@hostname.com", a name he'd never heard of before. He opened it, holding his breath as the message unfolded in front of his eyes.
"You dont no me mr crabtree but Ive workd in mrs crabtrees office as summer intern & no 4 certain that shes in adulterous affair with coworker im a christian & cant let this sin go by sorry im barer of sad nuws."
Almost automatically, he took off his gloves and typed a brief reply on his thumbs, "
Seventy-five-year-old Harry was in shock. The last two minutes of the match were a complete blur to Harry as he awaited a reply and thoughts about his sixty-four-year-old wife and near thirty year marriage flashed before him.
***
From Spring 1976 until October 2005, twenty-nine and a half years, I thought that Gina and I were a strongly devoted couple and the pivotal part of a loving family.
When I found out about her affair, that fateful day in 2005, I resigned from all the boards and broke all contact with King's. I was only pleased that Gina's sweet parents were no lo,nger around to be disappointed by her betrayal.
Chapter 1
Saturday 2 October 2005, 1729hrs
I tried to ring a dozen times in the previous half hour, as soon as I left the built-up area around Aston Villa and got on the motorway. Normally, on the rare occasions that Gina didn't attend the matches with me, our season ticket seats were next to each other, I would've expected her to answer. Now that every businessman or businesswoman carried a mobile phone and was ready to answer even if they were in the middle of shopping, I increasingly feared the worst, that this was not a one-off tryst, but this was time stolen by lovers from our expected afternoon together. I stopped at a service station, copied the text I had received and sent it to her in an email with an added, 'is it true?'
It took ten minutes before my phone rang. It was her.
"Harry—"
"Answer the question, Gina, is it true?"
"... yes, but —"
"Goodbye, Gina, hope you both have a good life."
I broke the connection, but Gina kept on ringing me. I didn't answer, except a couple of times I pressed the decline switch. She pinged texts, she rang me again and again. I was on a motorway but not really heading anywhere, and certainly not heading home, it was no longer 'home' for me. I just needed to do something, anything but talk to Gina. Then she bloody well rang me again, this time using someone else's number. I answered.
"H, we need to talk—" she said.
I hung up and threw the phone on the passenger seat.
This was an emergency, I felt, so pulled off onto the hard shoulder. I took the phone that was ringing again, walked up to the corrugated road barrier, and hurled that phone as far into the unlit inky blackness of the empty countryside as I could.
Almost as soon as it left my hand I knew I would have trouble contacting my two kids because their numbers were recorded on that phone and nowhere else. I knew I had Sophia Elizabeth's work number on my laptop in the boot of the car, because she was working for King & Son now that her children had left home shortly after her divorce. She would have the other numbers. My eldest son Gerald was in his fifties by now, still teaching maths and completely indifferent to me. Sophia would speak to him on my behalf. My adopted son Giles will have heard his mother's side of the story by Monday at work, Giles was Deputy Chairman of Gina's company. Bobby and Maisie had their own lives to lead and could contact me through Sophia Elizabeth. Funnily enough, they never did. Gina must've got her version of the story in before me and they believed her.
Sophia Elizabeth was still able to write her occasional letters to me via a Post Box number, which I sent her in a text a few days later. I was able to pick the letters up when I drove into that town for shopping every couple of weeks. She was the only member of the family that bothered to contact me, sending me a birthday card and letter, then a Christmas card and letter that first couple of years. I eventually gave my postcode and the number 3, my number on the door of the cottage. I never got any visitors from anyone in the family. I'd left no forwarding address so I got no other letters or bills, not even the divorce papers. Basically, from October 2005 I lived the life of a bitter recluse.
Chapter 2
Sunday 5 February 2015, 1525hrs
After parking the Rolls-Royce at the farm, I had only been back at the cottage for about half an hour and had only managed to light the wood burner in the parlour and put the electric kettle on for a mug of tea. I was sitting out on my back veranda, really well wrapped up against the cold, looking at the sunset gleaming off the iced-over canal, warming my hands on the tea and thinking about what to have for supper. At my age, 84 and approaching 85 by the spring, I didn't like to eat too late in the afternoon.
It is so quiet where I live that I could hear someone crunching down the frozen towpath, which wasn't the wisest approach, when the path was covered in six centimetres of fresh snow over the six centimetres of frozen ice from several days before, and the natural camber of the path was designed to drain water into the presently deeply frozen canal.
"Walk on the grass near the fence, away from the canal, it's safer!" I stood up and shouted to the walker. The walker waved back and fortunately moved over away from the edge to where the ice underneath was less compacted. Now I could see that it was a woman and she was having trouble dragging along a wheeled suitcase behind her.
'No it couldn't be,' I thought, 'I'd literally only spoke to the woman for a few minutes at lunchtime, for the first time in ten years. We had called a truce and I then invited her to visit me anytime she liked. Not that I actually told her where I lived. I assumed she'd take me up on it in the spring or summer, not in the middle of the big freeze ... and bringing a suitcase it looks like she means to stay!'
I stepped down into the back garden and met her at the back gate. I had already swept and salted the stone path because, although I rarely came in that way from the garden gate, except to inspect the bee hives, I often started my daily 10k run that way, the circuit taking me round the back to finish at the front of the cottage, but still re-enter through the back door. The front door opens directly into my bedroom and is blocked by an internal thick woollen curtain to reduce the draughts. You might think running 10k daily in my middle eighties was a remarkable feat, but in our local running club we had a number of keen runners of my age and above. And I had kept fit all my life although not seriously taking up road running until I left Gina ten years ago and moved here.
As soon as she came through the gate, all muffled up and almost unrecognisable in hat, coat and scarf, I took the handle of the case out of her gloved hands and lifted it up. It was light, so at least she hadn't brought the kitchen sink with her. She preceded me into the kitchen and kicked the snow off her shoes inside instead of outside. I blame it on her upbringing, they always had welly rooms in the backs of the big houses she lived in and had housekeepers to clean up the mess after them. I set her case down while she pulled off her hat, scarf and gloves, while I looked out the mop and bucket from the cupboard to clean up her mess.
"Brrrr! It's cold out there. You could've warned me about that treacherous path," Gina complained, in only our second conversation in a decade. "I almost fell in the canal twice. And because I couldn't see your car in the car park back there I wondered if I had got the wrong address or you had gone out somewhere and might not get back for hours. I couldn't get a signal on my phone. Then I noticed the frozen canal and Soph had said you mentioned you lived right by the canal, so I pressed on."
"I suppose you got the postal address off Sophia Elizabeth? The only daughter that ever writes to me and in common with all my old family refuses to actually come and visit me here?"
"Yes."
"Well. If you had written to me to say you were coming I could have given you the postcode of the farmyard at the other end of the bridle path that crosses the canal. The farmer there always keeps that path clear of snow and ice and it's not dangerously next door to deep freezing water."
"Well, as this christening was the first family event you'd been to since ... whenever," Gina said, "Anyway, why come to this particular christening, after you had ignored all the invitations to the christenings and marriages of all the others in the family?"
"Sophia Elizabeth sends me two cards a year and two long letters full of news, I assume, although some of them may be begging letters, I wouldn't know. Sometimes, mostly, the letters are tucked in with the cards, sometimes they are posted separately. About eight or nine years ago I was reading the letter and on the very first page she started going on about my ex-first wife —"
"Mavis."
"Yes, her. Apparently, Sophie Elizabeth reported, she who I haven't named for forty years was getting divorced from her second husband. I stopped reading immediately and wrote back to Sophie Elizabeth saying I don't want anything in her letters about ex-wives, nothing, absolutely nothing, they are not my family any more and I wasn't interested. I told her that if she sends any more letters with any mention of either you or your predecessor in it, I ... I told her I'll stop reading them, any of them."
"And?"
"When I got the very next letter, at Christmas I remember, I was half a paragraph into reading the details that came out during my ex-wife's divorce, before I realised what I was reading, and that her soon-to-be-ex-husband had evidence that Mavis was sleeping around within the first month of their marriage —"
"They had an open marr —"
