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photocopy, `. . . I quote, "to all my children in whatever shares my wife should decide". Perfectly poisonous will; he should have asked me to draft it, ungrateful sod. I did everything else. He must have been out of his mind.'
    Ànd was he?'
    `Probably, but not provably. The point is, his wife is. Off her rocker, barmy, barking, out of her tree.' He liked to mix metaphors. 'She's never going to be in a position to make a valid will. If she dies intestate, disaster. Terrible tax implications. The children aren't exactly carving each other up, I think they have straws between their teeth, or would it be sand? Needs an outside mind to construct an acceptable arrangement, working out who'll get what and when. Then they can run their lives peacefully until the old lady pops her clogs and even then, the transition will be easy.'
    Sarah rose gracefully. 'You need an estate planner, not me,' she said.
    Ì need a litigation expert who knows how to make people avoid litigation. I think you've got to be on the spot, hopeless otherwise. They'll put you up, always a spare cottage, they rent them out, saves expenses.' He was full of admiration for himself: everything dovetailed so neatly without him thinking at all. In fact, he rarely indulged deep thought.
    She was standing over his desk, reached forward and pinched his cheek.
    `Wake up, Ernest, will you? This is me, Sarah. You must detest these clients, or you wouldn't consider foisting me on them simply because you would like me to be a hundred miles away from Malcolm.'
    `Sarah, nothing was further . .He was blushing like a schoolboy caught smoking in the lavatory, and she was smiling like an indulgent teacher who was going to forgive him.
    `Nothing was closer to your mind, Ernest dear. Don't worry about it, please, but don't treat me like a fool. I may not deserve much, but I deserve better than that. Of course you're right to think I'm all wrong for Malcolm in the long run. I know that; he doesn't. Yet. It may take him some time. Now, do we understand one another?'
    He could have wept. She sat down again.
    `Don't fret, Uncle Ernest, please don't. Worry's infinitely worse for the ulcer than a bacon sandwich.' She looked at the grease-stained photocopy of a badly typed will. But is sending me to this particular part of East Anglia a clause in the master plan? Same village, I see, where Charles Tysall walked off and drowned, mimicking the actions of his wife the year before. You want to punish me or something?'
    `No, no, I promise you . . . Sarah, I swear!'
    `You've just told me not to do that. I believe you, but if you'll excuse the pun, I thought you might have wanted me to lay the odd ghost.'
    Malcolm Cook did not have his stepfather's shrewd business acumen, nor did he think his life was ruined by the omission. He considered that less pay for more enlightenment was a good bargain. As for the rest of his limitless kindness, he had learned his compassion as well as his tolerance on the sharp learning curve of his own loneliness. The metamorphosis from laughable clown to thin athlete also made him an incurable optimist, most of the time, although not on this particular evening. 'You don't know anything about women,' Ernest had warned him, a truism liberally applied to the whole male sex, but one which was, in his case, less accurate than usual.
    Malcolm's former fatness had only preserved a habit of celibacy, not innocence, making him a confidant rather than a practitioner, without rendering him naive. So had childhood illness. Even a once-fat man, helplessly in love and struggling to disguise it, knows when he is being abandoned.
    There was no point in going back over old ground trying to work out where one or the other had failed, no point arguing; no purpose in analysing performance and saying 'if only'. He knew you cannot make a person stay if they want to go any more than you can make a tiger a truly tame beast, and with Sarah the analogy was sound since she had that sleekness,