I was back home in Norwich, reading up on Pete Best, the Beatles' forgotten first drummer, when the e-mail popped up in the bottom corner of my screen.

From: angelina.brown@tpg.com.au Hi

That was it. Hi. After twenty-two years, twenty without any contact at all, out of the blue, Angelina Brown, my Great Lost Love, decides to change the world and writes Hi.

There was a song to mark the moment. "My Sentimental Friend," a hit for Herman's Hermits in 1969, was, thanks to the physics of headphones, playing in the middle of my skull. It would now have a place in the jukebox musical of my life, with the line about the girl he once knew who left him broken in two. Not quite Wordsworth, but sufficiently resonant that, when the message arrived, I was thinking about its sender.

Was this the first time she had thought about me, letting her mind drift to a time when "Like a Prayer" was top of the charts, wondering what happened to that guy she met in a Melbourne bar and fell in love with? Just a browse of her contacts list and a casual Wonder what he's doing now?

Click on Adam Sharp, type two letters, Send.

There had to be more to it. For a start, I would not have been in her contacts list. We had not been in touch since e-mail was invented.

The address suggested that she was still in Australia. I checked the World Clock Web site: 1:15 P.M. in Norwich was a quarter after midnight in Melbourne. Was she drunk? Had she left Charlie? Had he left her? Maybe they had split up fifteen years ago.

She was still using her maiden name. No surprise there. She hadn't changed it the first time around.

I knew barely anything about Charlie — not even his surname. In my mind it was the same as hers. Charlie Brown. The little bald cartoon character in his baseball mitt: It's a high fly ball, Charlie Brown. Don't miss it, Charlie Brown. In real life, I was the one who had missed it.

One night, after a few pints, I had Googled her. I got nowhere. Angelina shared a name with an equal opportunity commissioner and a newspaper columnist, and finding her among the litigation and opinions had been too much for my beer-addled brain. Unless I searched images. I stopped myself. Angelina was — had been — an addiction, and the only way to deal with an addiction is abstinence.

Maybe. Time passes. Every alcoholic wants to prove they're cured. Surely, after twenty years in a committed relationship, I could exchange an e-mail or two with my ex-lover, who had, as the Americans say, reached out.

She might have a terminal illness and want to tie up the loose ends. I could blame the breakfast conversation with my mother for that thought. Perhaps she and Charlie just wanted advice on holiday options in northern England: Looking for somewhere cold and miserable to get away from this interminable sunshine. What would it say about my relationship with Claire if I felt too vulnerable to respond to an innocuous query?

* * *

I let Angelina's e-mail sit until the evening. I was still weighing my options when Claire arrived home. Our conversation was shouted between my room and the bottom of the stairs, but I could picture her in her important-meeting gray suit with the green scarf and the chunky-heeled boots that brought her up to a neat five foot four.

"Sorry. Meeting went a bit over. Dinner smells good."

"Jamie Oliver. Chicken casserole. I've had mine."

"Do you want a glass of wine?"

"Ta — bottle open in the fridge."

"How's your mum?"

"Haven't got the results yet. I think she's a bit scared."

"Did you give her my love?"

"Forgot."

"Adam ... better not have. Have you fed Elvis?"

"You'd know if I hadn't."

That was a fair snapshot of the relationship that Angelina's email might test. We were a functioning household. We didn't fight; we enjoyed meals together on the weekends; we looked out for each other. Good friends. Nobody writes songs about those things, but there is a lot to be said for them. We had done better than my pub-quiz teammate Sheilagh and her husband, Chad, who cared for everyone except each other. Or our friends Randall and Mandy, whose battle for custody of their IVF twins had left casualties from San Jose to Liverpool. Or my parents, for that matter.

But the last few years had seen a fading of what was left of the romance. Two months earlier, I had purchased a single bed for my study, ostensibly because of my snoring and Claire needing her sleep because she had a lot going on with the prospective sale of her software company. Our sex life had followed me out of the bedroom and I didn't miss it as much as I thought I would. I wasn't sure if that was a good or bad thing.

Our situation was probably not so different from that of many couples our age. It would be a stretch to blame any shortcomings on a relationship that had ended twenty-two years earlier. I didn't think about Angelina when I was deep in a database-tuning problem, or trying to recall the name of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band's lead singer, or giving Claire a kiss on the forehead as she left for work. It was only when I was listening to music or on the rare occasion I played a song on the piano. For those few minutes or hours, I would be back in 1989.

* * *

I was playing in a bar — not a pub, a bar — in Melbourne, up a staircase off Victoria Parade in the inner-city suburb of Fitzroy. It was one of the few places that stayed open late, drawing a mix of yuppies and baby boomers. In those days, a baby boomer was a person born shortly after the war, not someone like me who came along almost twenty years later.

Most nights the boomers outnumbered the yuppies, and my sixties and seventies repertoire got a good workout. There was a steady trickle of customers early in the evening, but it only got busy with the after-dinner crowd and the stragglers from the pubs shaking out their umbrellas, piling their winter coats and woolen hats on the stand and ordering an ice-cold lager. It was early July, midwinter, and Australia had yet to deliver on its promise of sunshine.

The place would not have won any prizes for interior decoration. There was a bar that seated eight or ten on stools, a dozen small tables, a couple of leather sofas, and old movie posters on the walls. No meals — just bar snacks. But once a crowd built up, with more patrons standing than sitting, the noise and smoke provided enough atmosphere to compensate.

I had been in Australia three weeks. A local insurance company was implementing a new-generation database and I had landed a fifteen-month consulting assignment that would give me a tour of its branches around the world. I was twenty-six, barely five years out of a computer science degree, riding a wave of technology that the old-timers in their thirties had failed to catch. Computing was my passport out of my lower-middle-class, comprehensive-school origins — after I had abandoned the more obvious option of becoming a rock star.

In my first week in Melbourne, I tagged along to the bar with a few workmates to celebrate one of them becoming a father and ended up playing a couple of songs on the piano. I remember doing "Walk Away Renée" in homage to the new arrival, who had been given that name. The barman, a knockabout bloke named Shanksy, gave me a half pint — a pot — of lager. I thanked him for letting me use the piano and he...