When she came to give him the guitar back, in that November, she said one sentence to him.
She wouldn’t want it from you.
He has had it for thirty-nine years. It has been in the loft of a house in Ashmere in a case with the catches shut.
PART 5 — THE HEADSTOCK
Gil Hartigan died on the Sunday. Five days.
I was there for four of them.
His sons have been extraordinary to me and I did not expect that, and Casper has told me that his father told them the whole of it in the January when he got the results, because he had decided he was not going to leave them a version of it.
Marianne knew. That is the thing I keep going back to.
He told her in 1994 and she stayed and they had another twenty-four years, and Casper says she used to ask about me. Not bitterly. She called me the girl with the guitar, and she is the reason it was kept in the loft instead of sold.
