Deadheads

'Nothing. I've told you. Nothing. Just leave it, Pascoe. Please.'

'He was attentive. Interested. Amusing. All in a rather old-fashioned way. Old too, yes, but old-fashioned is how it struck me. Not fuddy-duddy. Certainly not that! But playing to rules that pre-dated this modern permissive make-your-choice- you're-a-free-agent stuff. Very sexy with it? Six inches shorter and thirty years older than me - I would never have believed it possible! I suppose, perhaps, I wanted a father-figure, but that's no excuse. And I did drink a lot of wine that lunch-time. But even that usually makes me sleepy rather than randy!'

Daphne laughed, then put her hand over her mouth, half in embarrassment as though she'd started laughing in church.

In fact, she almost had. She and Ellie were sitting on a bench set on a small green formed where a crescent of red-and-cream bricked almshouses reached its arms out possessively as if to embrace a little age-blackened tall- steepled church, built in 1669 to replace one destroyed three years earlier when a local lunatic, jealous of Yorkshire's good name, had decided to start a fire which would be to London's as a pitch-link to a taper. The fire had gone no further than the medieval church. God had sent his rain to put it out, the City Fathers had rebuilt in a more Protestant mould in thanksgiving, and two hundred years later their Victorian successors had added charity to piety in the form of the almshouses.

It formed a pleasant quiet backwater within a hundred yards of the city's main shopping streams, too quiet for some of the old people who lived in the crescent (now an official civic sheltered-housing project), who complained, half-jocularly, that it was a bit too convenient for the boneyard most of them could see from their sitting-room windows.

'Are things bad with you and Patrick?' asked Ellie.

'No. Or rather I don't know. I never thought about it until recently. We seemed to move along in such a tranquil state. Patrick's so unworried about things. You know that feeling, when you're sitting in the sun at a table in some Italian square and you've had a couple of glasses of wine, and you feel perfectly at one with the world? Well, Patrick seems to be like that permanently!'

'That doesn't sound a bad way to be,' said Ellie.

'To be, perhaps. To live with is different. It's all right when you're in the moment too. But moments like that pass. A breeze comes up, you get a little chilly, there's the dishes to wash, you're woken up in the night by your daughter's bad cough, your period comes, you're reminded in a hundred different ways that life is movement. And yet there he is, your helpmeet, your husband, back there somewhere, quite content, quite still! After a while it stops being an irritant, it becomes a worry.'

'And you ease your worry by jumping into bed with a sixty-year-old Don Juan?' said Ellie.

'I thought you'd be more help than this,' said Daphne accusingly.

'Sorry, sorry, sorry.'

'And perhaps we should get it straight. I didn't jump. I moved hesitantly, uncertainly. It was stupid, but you know what put me in Dick's way to start with? My desire to talk about Patrick! I wanted to know how things were at work. I'd detected signs of a change in recent weeks, a sort of suppressed excitement, or unease, I couldn't tell which, he never shared it with me. I'd begun to wonder if his contentment mightn't all be a front and perhaps things were seriously wrong somewhere in his life. I see now it must have looked like manna from heaven to Dick. I didn't know to start with, of course, that he'd already decided to block Patrick's promotion to the board! We met for drinks a couple of times, usually at lunch-time. He never put a foot wrong. A hand occasionally, just brushing me half accidentally, or a sympathetic squeeze of the arm, or the knee. I knew there was desire there too, don't mistake me. I didn't mind it. I suppose I even responded to it. But it was still innocent.'

Ellie's ears pricked at the choice of word, but she had sense enough not to make it an issue..

'To do Dick justice,' Daphne continued, 'he never made a direct proposition, though perhaps he was clearing the decks, so to speak, the Friday before I went to the cottage when we had a lunch-time drink together and he suddenly spelt it out that he was actively opposing Patrick's elevation to the board. He said he was sorry if I'd been relying on this financially, but I had to understand, he didn't think Patrick was the man for the job. I brooded about this all Saturday. I'd never really thought of our having money problems. I vaguely knew how large our expenses were. And I suppose I vaguely wondered how Patrick managed to get by with no apparent trouble on what I assumed couldn't be a huge salary. But that Sunday, when I'd been more than usually irritated by that secret-happy manner of his, I let fly. I still wasn't really worried, you understand. I knew there'd be some investment income, from Patrick's own capital and also from the money I'd inherited from Daddy. Patrick had taken charge of it when we married and tied it up, so I thought, in some long-term high-yield investment. All I wanted was to pierce his shell, to get some kind of response out of him.

'Well, I got more than I bargained for.

'He told me without batting an eyelid that my little inheritance hadn't existed as such for seven or eight years. It had just been eaten away by necessary capital expenditure! I couldn't believe it! I asked about his own money. There'd been some other money left to him by some old client at Capstick's. He told me that had gone too and that in fact as far as capital went, we had precious little to fall back on. And he admitted that even with his salary as Chief Accountant since Mr Eagles died, it was difficult to make ends meet. You have to understand he spoke with no anxiety whatsoever!

'I demanded to know how we could go on living at the rate we did. He said that, yes, it was hard, but he had every confidence in the future. In fact, things should be looking up very soon now. I screamed at him that if he imagined he was just going to walk on to the Perfecta board, he had another think coming. He looked puzzled and said that getting on the board would be nice and he could see no real obstacle, but even if he didn't, it wouldn't be the end of the world. I was furious now, furious and a bit frightened. I asked him how the hell he, an accountant, could justify continuing to live in a house as large as Rosemont with all those gardens to maintain when we could solve our problems of income and capital at a blow by selling up and moving to somewhere more manageable.

'That got to him at last. It must have been the mention of selling Rosemont that did it. Not that he got angry or anything. He just went on very earnestly about how something had always come up in the past to maintain his position at Rosemont and that he had every reason to believe all future obstacles would fade away with similar ease.

'I was sick at heart. All this meant to me was that he'd conned himself into believing the seat on the board was his. I rang Dick. I had to talk to him, I said. He suggested we should spend next day together. We arranged to meet in the car park. I'd heard stories about his seaside cottage, of course, but I didn't see this as a lovers' tryst. I was frightened by what seemed to me to be Patrick's lack of balance. Also, of course, I was bloody furious that he'd spent all my money without a by-your-leave!

'So Monday morning came, I met Dick, we headed for the coast.'

She fell silent. Two old ladies circumambulating the green paused to admire Rose noisily, and to deplore silently