The Spirit of Ecstasy

"You're right, honey. I'm not physically or mentally at my best right now, the stress of the funeral, the realisation that I have a new life to live must've have brought me on. I do love you, H, and I want a new start with you being in the forefront of my life."

"Pick a day, a night or a weekend in one or two weeks' time, Gina, and we can make it a special occasion for both us, something that both of us can remember as an event in itself. Our first time as lovers with no holds barred, the first in a long lifetime of every one of our nights being as good as the first."

So she decided that we would have a long weekend, Friday to Monday, in early February in Barcelona. She planned that we would do what we had always done on the weekend, except that Saturday night and Sunday morning we would make physical love to each other.

We flew out in the morning and we had a good relaxing time on the Friday and during the day on Saturday, telling each other by word and whisper, touch and gesture, that we were each in love with the other. Once we had committed ourselves to each other, we spent all Saturday night trying to kill ourselves with lovemaking, each resurrecting the other when we felt we had nothing left but find the reservoir virtually bottomless and we were rubbed raw in body yet as high as kites emotionally, declaring our undying love with every heaving breath as we tried to bring our pulse rates down to sustainable levels.

Chapter 8

Friday 15 May 1976, 3.15pm

I thought, no, I had quite simply assumed, that Gina was on birth control. We must've rung the bell while we were in Barcelona. Silly, careless me, leaving it all to Gina. Early in the spring Gina proudly announced that she was pregnant. She hadn't directly asked me, but she had determined that as we had discussed and agreed that children would feature in our future before Eric's death, and neither of us was getting any younger, so she just let nature run its course, hence the heavy and slightly unpredictable the periods of late.

I got down on my bended knee, as soon as the news of the baby sunk in, and I asked Gina to marry me.

She immediately said "Yes".

I asked Fred for her hand after the event and he gave it gladly. Pam's only comment, accompanied by a big smile and a hug, was, "You took your sweet time about it. But never mind, you make such a lovely couple, so give me a hug and call me 'Mum' from now on."

"Mum, thank you for welcoming me to your family. I have never been so loved in all my life and I owe your family more than I can ever repay."

"Nonsense," Fred said, "you are family, son, and you've been a part of us for so long that this marriage is simply confirmation of the fact."

We wanted a quiet wedding, but it outgrew our ambitions, and it was Gina who persuaded my estranged son Gerald and my daughter to attend. By then my daughter Sophia Elizabeth was the size of a small house and I finally had a wedding day dance with her on our May wedding day after just a two-week engagement.

Gina and I had two lovely children together, Robert "Bobby" Alfred Crabtree, who was born in December 1976 and Margaret "Maisie" Eleanor Crabtree in June 1979.

In 1996 I retired from the job of selling screws, nuts and bolts, but continued as a board member of King's and several other companies that I had been invited to join, through business contacts made over the years. For King's, I was invited to monthly board meetings, attended the AGM and other get togethers in my own right as a director, as well as by being Gina's husband.

Gina and Fred wanted me to join the board at King & Son, very much on a part-time basis. I spoke to my bosses in Birmingham and it turned out that most of the directors of my company served on several boards at the same time, without any conflict of interest. Through my new contacts with King's and Tremblett's I had picked up a lot of business, so my bosses encouraged me to accept the offer.

I sat down with Gina and Fred and agreed that I would serve as a part-time member but my director's token remuneration would be donated to the different annual charity that the company chose and sponsored each year. I didn't want to be regarded as only in place because I was married to the female Chairman of the company. I also wanted to have a role or portfolio which would be my main contribution to the work of the board rather than just turn up for monthly meetings. Fred thought I could formulate and keep updated all the policies of the company, regarding race relations, labour relations, disciplinary procedures, working practices, ethics, fair pay, emergency evacuations policy, security, etc, which I readily agreed to. Over the years, with increasing legislation, there were more and more policies to oversee and that made me feel useful to the company, even long after I retired from full-time work.

Epilogue

Thursday 15 September 2005, noon

I am enjoying my retirement and, although Gina still runs the Group as Chair person, she is reducing her hours as my adopted son Giles Tremblett takes over more of the reins of power until she fully retires next year.

I see our son Bobby's two young children almost every day as they only live about eight miles from us. Maisie was married last year to an airline pilot who flies long haul, so they are still living with us but we have installed upstairs and downstairs internal locked doorways and a new "front door" into what used to be the mud room, which separates their suite of rooms so they can regard themselves as living independently. Maisie has a brand new modern kitchen and she often invites us to join them as guinea-pigs for her improving cooking skills. They are expecting their first child, Gina's third grandchild and my eighth, next spring.

I am driving my wife Gina in my original 1968 Silver Shadow, which has over 400,000 miles on the clock and it feels like a comfortable old glove to me. We are off to enjoy a meal at the Coach & Horses to privately celebrate our wonderful 30 years together. We have booked a room for the night, although the hotel part of the pub, an annexe added in the past twenty years, is hardly five star, it is the celebration of the event and the actual setting which matters, and means we can over indulge in our celebrations in all aspects of the word. We are planning on celebrating our 30th wedding anniversary next year with all our large family and friends.

Gina has just bought me a brand new Phantom Rolls-Royce which was delivered a few days ago to celebrate the occasion. Of course I still wanted to use the car in which our relationship started and has continued unbroken since for our little celebration.

Gina wanted me to have this new model and it is pretty fantastic and smells of newness, with every conceivable gadget and safety feature you'd need. But it lacks the familiar majestic beauty that my Roller and my heavenly wife each have in spades, so I am sure I know which model I'll opt for when Gina and I have any future celebrations. Neither of the "old girls" in my life are ready for moth balling quite yet.

We exchange meaningful glances and smiles as I drive along the old familiar bypass, a road now superseded by the mighty ring road, and if in some ways life has passed us by as we enjoy less complicated lives, who cares?

With a glance from Gina full of promise and a mutual squeezing of our continually held hands, I believe the years have melted away from us and the Spirit of Ecstasy is alive and well and about to be put into practice again.

The End