Bill Moorhead stood by the luggage carousel, keeping an eye out for his cases, but also regretting the sky-blue linen suit he had bought himself as a rejuvenating present, only to find that on its first outing it was already more creased and wrinkled than its owner’s handsome but weather-beaten face. Caroline seemed to have gone completely mad. After thirty years of tolerant, sophisticated and civilised marriage, he had suddenly received a letter from a firm of solicitors banging on about the infidelity, anguish and years of humiliation she had suffered. ‘Frailty, thy name is woman.’ Could the timing have anything to do with the sale of the second half of YouGenetics? Opportunistic bitch. She knew that all his life he had wanted to retire in just the kind of house that a knighted Oxford professor (or at least one with entrepreneurial gusto) should be able to live in. When Little Soddington Manor had come on to the market, a failed hotel that needed to be carefully restored to its natural place as the big house on the edge of a charming Cotswold village, he had snapped it up. It included the land on which the village cricket ground and its black and white pavilion enjoyed their immemorial slumber, waiting silently through most of the year for the crack of bat and ball, the roar of catch and wicket; three large fields let out to local farmers for grazing and, of course, the magnificent garden; the copse at the foot of the garden and the little river that paid its respects to the manor house before gossiping its way through the village, beneath two picturesque stone bridges that only allowed the passage of one car at a time. By demanding half his capital, Caroline knew that she was sabotaging a lifelong dream. Well, it wasn’t going to be that easy to prise Little Soddington from his grip. He still had his consultancy at YouGenetics, his Fellow’s rooms and rights in college and, in a bold move that he must keep under the radar until the divorce was finalised, he had strongly indicated his preparedness to accept, for a very handsome sum indeed, an offer made by the University of Riyadh to spend five years as a Distinguished Visiting Professor. Why not break the back of the British winter in the Saudi capital, and then return for the crack of bat and ball, the long summer evenings and bibulous weekends with splendid old friends in his splendid new house?

Bad luck, Caroline, thought Moorhead, as he dragged his clattering suitcase towards the unattended Customs, he may be bloodied but he was unbowed.