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was it?
    She wore the dress in which he had first noticed her at the office party, the line of small gold buttons on the plum coloured material moulding her bosom to a good figure still. The white lace collar set off her face, though her normally wavy dark hair was as straight as if she had just walked in from a monsoon, which he thought strange, for the hair drier was of the latest powerful make. Even the strongest of men would have been alarmed at her pallid cheeks, as if she had been poisoned by a long afternoon sleep.
    ‘What is it, love?’
    At the press of a switch the sound of his voice couldn’t be denied. He’d heard it before, but is that what it’s like? Scrape, scrape, mumble and snigger. Well, it would be, for something like that, wouldn’t it? Hoping he wasn’t betrayed by the pallor of his own skin brought a laugh up from his ribs when she pressed the machine off.
    ‘Oh, that!’ he said, ‘I was reading a bit of Norman Bakewell’s latest while getting dressed, sort of acting it out. And you thought I was up to something else! What a beautiful, suspicious and adorable person you are! I love you more and more for thinking that, because it shows how much you love me. You don’t need to flatter me to that extent, sweetheart.’
    An ominous sensation told him that his patter wasn’t convincing, not even to himself. You bet it wasn’t. But he went forward to embrace her.
    She stepped away. ‘Who’s Diana, you two-timing fucking rat?’ The tape recorder shed pieces after bouncing against his forehead and hitting the floor.
    He hoped the liquid was sweat rather than blood, recalling Bakewell’s noble stance at Charlotte’s lunch party when Jo Hesborn had clobbered him for far less than this. ‘She’s a character in Norman’s novel. It was so enthralling I took it to Germany with me. Looks like we’ve got another bestseller on our hands. I left it at the office, but I’ll finish it tomorrow. I wouldn’t have put it down, but I wanted to be with you for the evening.’
    ‘Oh, did you?’
    ‘Thought we could go out for a meal.’ He put a hand over his face. ‘God, that really hurt. What did you do it for?’
    There was something to be said for not saying very much, but there was even more to be said for saying so much that she wouldn’t be able to disbelieve the lies he was forced to tell. Failing that, she would be mystified by what she thought he was trying to say – the verbal equivalent of drowning a treaty in ink. All the same, thiswas life on the Heaviside layer. He would have to take even more care, knowing by her blow what a pity it was that technology hadn’t stopped at the bicycle, the battery-run wireless set, and the wind-up gramophone, but had progressed, if you could call it that, to the diabolical invention of a tape recorder set going by the human voice.
    ‘I asked you who she was, you lying deceiving gett.’
    He was disappointed by how easily she went back to her origins, and she could sense him thinking it, which pained her so much that she angled a heavy glass ashtray halfway upwards. ‘Who is she?’
    He flinched. ‘Throw that, and I’ll phone the police.’
    ‘Will you?’ she raged.
    He certainly would. ‘I’d rather them handle you than me kill you. I’ve no intention of running the firm from a prison cell.’
    She lowered it, not her plan to kill him – yet. He would die by a thousand cuts. ‘Why don’t you call mummy and daddy, and tell them what a pathetic fix you’re in?’
    ‘They’re dead, and you know it.’
    ‘I expect you broke their hearts.’
    Better and better. Talking was all she wanted, no one could resist it, proof of his recognition that she was alive, and he was fulfilling his obligations towards her as a human being. ‘They died of old age. I was a late birth, the only son. They loved me, and I loved them. Oh, you know all that.’
    She sat, hands on her knees, skirt rucked up. It excited him, the bastard. She pulled it down. From now