The frame story deals with the elderly Dr Harshom, who lives in Herefordshire and has a very rare family name, all of whose bearers are in one way or another related and are in some contact with each other.
It is similar to ours, but there was a divergence that is not precisely identified, but seems to have occurred in late 1926 or early 1927, preventing or greatly diminishing the effects of the Wall Street crash in 1929.
Trafford also catches a glimpse of his late wife Della, who in the original timeline died after a year of what he calls "satisfactory marriage", but who in the alternate world is alive, accompanied by another man, and does not recognise him.
All he has is her maiden name, Ottilie Harshom, and there is no record of her at Somerset House (home of the General Register Office for Births, Deaths and Marriages when the story was written).
Feeling sympathetic to the young man and half-believing his story, Dr Harshom worried about Trafford's obsessive "chasing after a ghost" and hopes that he will find another woman to love.
The story concludes as Trafford finds that an analogue of Ottilie does exist, though in this world her name is Belinda Gale and she lives unmarried in Canada with her mother.
It turns out that Dr Harshom's son, killed in a car accident in 1928, had left a pregnant girlfriend who was never introduced to his parents.
The film made on the base of the story resolves all these problems, by having the other world's Ottilie die suddenly of a congenital heart defect of which she was tragically not aware.
[4]Dean Koontz's comic book Nevermore has a similar theme: its protagonist – in a desperate attempt to bring back his wife, Nora, who died of an aggressive brain cancer – invents a way to travel to parallel earths and searches for a living Nora on the infinite number of Earths.
[5] In Michael G. Coney's Charisma (1975) the protagonist travels among the alternate timelines, again and again meeting the same girl and falling in love with her – only to have her get killed again and again, in all kinds of accidents.
In Eric Bress, & J. Mackye Gruber's (2004) film The Butterfly Effect, a young man (Ashton Kutcher) blocks out harmful memories of significant events of his life.