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tall bear of a man, with very dark hair that was greying at the temples and red veins on his nose,
which probably came from years of wine tasting. He was dressed in corduroy trousers, a checked
shirt and a tweed jacket, the kind of thing that people wore at the country shows my mum used to take
us to when we were growing up.
‘It’s very kind of you to come in,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t necessary.’
I’d found somewhere to take him and we’d just sat down opposite one another.
‘What I have to tell you might be best said face to face,’ he said. ‘It’s about my wife, but it’s a very
delicate situation because I have four daughters to consider.’
There was a quality of warmth about him that I hadn’t anticipated. He had a kind, patient manner
that was appealing, even under the circumstances.
‘I believe,’ he said, ‘that you might have been under the impression that my wife was living at our
family home in Salisbury?’
‘Entirely under that impression, because that’s what Mrs Forbes informed us.’
‘I’m afraid that she hasn’t been living at that address for just over a month. She moved out at the
end of September.’
He spoke quietly and clearly while my mind frantically tried to process what this meant.
‘Do you know where your wife moved to?’
‘She’s living in the cottage where she grew up. It’s in the Pewsey Vale, about a forty-five-minute
drive north of Salisbury.’
‘Did your daughters go with her?’
I wondered if this had been an acrimonious separation, if he was here to cast blame on a wife he
loathed, to muddy the waters around her in advance of a custody dispute.
‘No. Nicky didn’t just leave me; she left all of us.’
‘Can I ask why?’
‘The specific occasion was –’ he cleared this throat – ‘the specific catalyst for her to actually pack
her bags and leave was an argument we had.’
‘What did you argue about?’
‘It’s a bit complicated, but we had recently talked about having another child.’
‘A fifth child?’
His reply bounced off my surprise.
‘Yes. I’m aware that some people might think that five children is an excessive number, but Nicky
wanted to try again, and I’d previously agreed to support her wish, happily I might say, because of
something she’d suffered. I felt I should support her. Do I need to explain about her background?’
‘We know about that.’
‘So you understand she has a longing for a son. To replace Charlie.’
Those words felt solid to me, like a remnant jettisoned from an explosion, a twisted shard of metal,
turning in mid-air, glinting.
‘I understand,’ I said. ‘You said you’d previously agreed to having another child, so had something
changed? Did you no longer feel that way?’
He looked like a man who was having to haul up strength from a great depth.
‘My wife gives the appearance of coping, always coping, she makes a career of it, but it takes its
toll. She’s become very controlling of our time. That was the source of the argument. I was trying to
ask her to relax, to give us space to breathe in the house. This scheduling of the girls’ time down to the
last minute affects them, and affects us too. In my view, life had become a bit joyless. We had no time
to do things together as a couple, or a family, ever, and I told her that I’d begun to wonder if another