'Talking to Quayle, was he?'
With himself out of the office, it would be a good opportunity for them to arrange a meeting and plan tactics. Elgood felt he could afford to smile at the thought. Each of them imagining he was using the other! And both doomed to get nowhere! The board meeting at which the question of the new financial director would be resolved was only a week away. Elgood was pretty certain that, with his authority confirmed by the successful cut-back negotiations, he could now face down Quayle, but he was taking no chances. Yesterday he had made a phone call to London and put into action another little scheme which with a bit of luck would give him enough ammunition to shoot down Aldermann's nomination once and for all.
'And you decided that a touch of sunshine and old Dick was just what the doctor ordered?' he went on. 'Grand. I'm glad you've come.'
He took her hand, ready to draw her towards him if the moment felt ripe. But those powers of empathy which were the basis of his amorous success, and which functioned even when he was physically most aroused, told him she wasn't ready, so holding her hand lightly in his, he set off for the cottage, saying, 'Let's have a coffee and plan our day. How long can you stay?'
She didn't answer and Elgood chattered on amiably as they clambered up over the chunks of eroded rock and earth which formed a rough flight of steps to the cliff top. Once there he paused by the white-painted stake which he drove into the ground every spring to measure the winter's deprivation. Sometimes he had had to move it a couple of yards or more, sometimes only a couple of feet. Only once in twenty years had it remained still.
Daphne said, 'Doesn't it bother you, that stick? Watching it tap-tap-tapping towards you like a blind man's cane year after year?'
Elgood laughed and said, 'That's a bit fanciful, isn't it, love? Not to say morbid!'
'I'm sorry,' said Daphne, it was just the thought of the sea burrowing away underneath. It suddenly seemed so sinister.'
'Sinister? Well, mebbe it's different for me, being a miner's son brought up in a mining village where at any hour day or night you knew there was someone down there, burrowing away beneath your feet; not the sea, mark you, but your dad mebbe, or your brother, or your best mate; someone, any road, you knew by name. So it doesn't bother me. In fact, it pleases me being able to sit in the cottage odd times in the winter, listening to the burrowing and sometimes hearing a great rending and a crashing as the earth falls, and knowing it's only the old sea down there, not me dad, or me brother, or me best mate, nor any poor devil I know by name.'
'Yes, I can see that,' said Daphne earnestly. 'It's just that it's so pretty here, but so impermanent.'
'Not like your husband's precious Rosemont, you mean? Not even Rosemont will last for ever! There's worms down there, and moles; mice and rats too, I shouldn't wonder; all manner of burrowing creatures. And where they burrow was once level ground too, do you ever think of that? Miners know that. Shapes of leaves they find, and shells, and bones, and footsteps too, printed in the very rock half a mile under the earth. Slow change like that makes a man feel like nowt, his existence like the width of an eyelash. Now, if the old sea gets to the cottage before Old Nick gets to me, that'll make me feel I can live forever!'
Daphne smiled and said, 'And you accuse me of being fanciful!'
Elgood, his verbal tonic having done the hoped-for trick of relaxing his visitor, said, 'Let's go in and get that coffee.'
Once inside, he dispatched Daphne to the small kitchen while he got dressed. For his age, he knew he was well preserved. In athletic motion such as swimming, or in the sultry build-up to - or the torpid wind-down from - the act of love he was happy to stand examination. But however well preserved his body, at sixty, he was not prepared to let it be a still target for the cool appraisal of an uncommitted woman's eyes.
And Daphne, he guessed, was now uncommitted. In fact, he doubted if she'd ever been anything else.
Her first words as she brought the tray of coffee into the simply but comfortably furnished living-room confirmed this without ambiguity.
'Dick, I wanted to tell you that it's over between us.'
'Oh yes,' said Elgood. A postcard would have done as well, he thought. One of his rules was never to resist a woman who said she wanted to finish. Either she meant it, in which case resistance would be foolish. Or she didn't mean it, in which case resistance would be what she wanted and therefore insane.
So he said easily, 'Well, drink your coffee, love, and here's a toast. To friendship. We had a good day and hurt no one. So no need for guilt or recriminations.'
He smiled at her over his coffee cup, and wished her long gone. Hard experience in the past had taught him that the most unexpected successes often turned out to be the most troublesome. His success with Daphne Aldermann had been one of the most unexpected he had ever known.
He had met her shortly after Aldermann had joined the firm as part-time assistant to that awkward bugger, Chris Burke. It had been an act of charitable patronage for old time's sake. And chatting up the wife had been an act of instinct for the sake of keeping his hand in. His instinct also marked her down as a non-starter, but he didn't know how not to try.
It had been second nature to him to hint in a manner so subtle as to be easily deniable that Daphne's beauty as much as Aldermann's deserts had won him Burke's job. And again as he stood in a corner with her at the bunfight after Timothy Eagles's funeral, even though by now the battle of the Board was well under way, he had not been able to resist hinting that Aldermann's permanent elevation to the Chief Accountant's job might well depend on Daphne's bonny blue eyes. This was the mere rhetoric of flirtation, artificial and hollow. But to his surprise there was a response, or rather a reaction, for later he doubted if she really paid much heed to his amorous hints at that time. But she certainly reacted to the mention of jobs and salaries. She had something on her mind. Suddenly businesslike, he had suggested that perhaps here at a funeral feast was not the place to talk. They had met for a lunch-time drink a couple of days later, and again the following week. The atmosphere remained businesslike with an undertone of honest friendship. Elgood had been uneasy because uncertain. Part of him saw the meetings as a means of getting inside information on Aldermann's unsteady finances which might be useful in the forthcoming battle. Part of him saw these meetings as erotic foreplay. And another part, whose location he had not been able to discover, had taken to waking him in the night and telling him his behaviour was indecent, immoral and squalid.
So he had tried to tell her at their last lunch-time meeting that her husband had the Chief Accountant's job simply because he was
