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chin. 'You're not good for my insides.'
    `The bread's wholemeal,' said Sarah, tranquilly, as if that made all the difference. 'Full of fibre.'
    She never had believed in diet, ate anything which was not moving. Looked at him with that complete acceptance she granted the human race. What she thought behind those great big eyes, he never questioned for fear of being told. Looking at his fidgeting, she thought how it was just as well that she and Malcolm and Malcolm's lovely mother had conspired to subvert Ernest's post bag and save him from the worst demands, as well as the hateful revelations, of his clients. Also, how she and Malcolm had managed to excuse her absence last year by saying she had suffered an accident.

    She was a gifted liar. Making him ooh! and aghh! about the effects of a broken windscreen had been far better for his explosive ulcer and fragile heart than telling him the truth about a client.
    Charles Tysall had done enough damage, most of it still unmended. Some people needed the truth. Others needed saving from their own beliefs that all clients were good chaps. Ernest was one of the latter. He might not have been once, but now his health made him so.
    `Tell me about this case, then. I need amusement.'
    `Very important client,' Ernest mumbled again.
    Ìt can't be, or you wouldn't be sending me.'
    Ernest sighed. 'Important by my standards, not by those of the partnership. Clients I've had for a long time.' He meant clients not eligible for the seduction of his junior partners, who rubbed grey-suited shoulders with bankers and accountants, captains of industry and Government officials, drinking mineral water at lunch-time, for God's sake, not a human being among them.
    Ernest was well aware of being slightly redundant in the new generation, retained for the weight of his age and the number of nasty facts he knew about others, but Sarah had no chance. She was tolerated in the attics of the low-earning litigation department because someone had to do the odds and ends. The someone was preferably a woman without ambition. No partner would miss her for the summer. None of them guessed how valuable she was.
    `Well, if these clients are important to you, I'll make them important to me. Why out of town?
    When do I go? And what nasty thing do you want me to do?'
    Ernest nearly fell out of his chair. For an idea with such a difficult, if spontaneous conception, this was all growing suspiciously fast. Not that she was usually unamenable to suggestion; the passivity hid the obstinacy of a mule, just like her smile hid depths of despair and a strange knowledge beyond her years, touching the parts other women did not reach. Too late, Ernest remembered Charles Tysall and where he had died.
    A family estate,' he began, 'needs sorting out. By the sea. You're always saying you like the sea.'
    Ì know nothing about probate. Or the sea.'
    `What's that got to do with anything? Look, we're only talking about a family who need their heads knocking together. Just stick around, work out what they want, get a draft agreement on who should have what . . . the boffins and the Court of Protection can do the rest.'
    Sarah dusted crumbs off her skirt. Ernest so admired the way she ate, like a delicate wolf.
    Ì haven't got the faintest idea what you're talking about. You'd better explain,' she said. He took a deep breath, prepared to mix fact with fiction in order to make the prospect more appealing.
    `Large house in the country, right? No, not an ancestral mansion, but plenty of land, and . . . no, I'm not going to tell you why the estate is as big as it is. You can let that titillate the imagination and find out for yourself. It needs an entirely fresh mind, so the less you know the better. Family consists of two sons, one daughter, eighteen to thirty-four, I think, all of them at war.
    Why? Dad died two years ago, left the whole caboodle to his wife for life, and then,' he rummaged on the desk, flicked the pages of a grease-stained