I kissed her nose. Ordinarily I would have welcomed her proposal. I looked at her with affection.

'No,' I said. 'Not just now.'

'When, then?'

'In the summer.'

She made a face at me, her eyes full of intelligence. 'You never like to be cluttered when you are deeply involved in something.'

'You're not clutter,' I smiled.

'I'm afraid so- That's why you've never married. Not like most bachelors because they want to be free to sleep with any offered girl, but because you don't like your mind to be distracted.'

'I'm here,' I pointed out, kissing her again.

'For one night in seven. And only then because you had to come most of the way to see your father.'

'My father gets visited because he's on the way to you.'

'Liar,' she said equably. 'The best you can say is that it's two cats with one stone.'

'Birds.'

'Well, birds, then.'

'Let's go eat,' I said; opened the front door and closed it behind us, and packed her into the Jensen.

'Did you know that Aristotle Onassis had earned himself a whole million by the time he was twenty-eight?'

'No, I didn't know,' I said.

'He beat you,' she said. 'By four times as much.'

'He's four times the man.'

Her eyes slid sideways towards me and a smile hovered in the air. 'He may be.'

We stopped for a red light and then turned left beside a church with a notice board saying 'These doth the Lord hate: a proud look, a lying tongue. Proverbs 6. 16-17'.

'Which proverb do you think is the most stupid?' she asked.

'Um- Bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.'

'Why ever?'

'Because if you build a cage round the bush you get a whole flock.'

'As long as the two birds aren't both the same sex.'

'You think of everything,' I said admiringly.

'Oh, I try. I try.'

We went up to the top of the Post Office Tower and revolved three and a half times during dinner.

'It said in The Times today that that paper firm you advised last autumn has gone bust,' she said.

'Well-' I grinned. 'They didn't take my advice.'

'Silly old them- What was it?'

'To sack ninety per cent of the management, get some new accountants, and make peace with the unions.'

'So simple, really.' Her mouth twitched.

'They said they couldn't do it, of course.'

'And you said?'

'Prepare to meet thy doom.'

'How biblical.'

'Or words to that effect.'

'Think of all those poor people thrown out of work,' she said. 'It can't be funny when a firm goes bust.'

The firm had hired people all along in the wrong proportions. By last autumn they had only productive workers for every one on the clerical, executive and maintenance staff. Also the unions were vetoing automation, and insisting that every time a worker left another should be hired in his place.'

She pensively bit into pat‚ and toast. 'It doesn't sound as if it could have been saved at all.'

'Yes, it could,' I said reflectively. 'But it often seems to me that people in a firm would rather see the whole ship sink than throw out half of the crew and stay afloat.'

'Fairer to everyone if they all drown?'

'Only the firm drowns. The people swim off and make sure they overload someone else's raft.'

She licked her fingers. 'You used to find sick firms fascinating.'

'I still do,' I said, surprised.

She shook her head. 'Disillusion has been creeping in for a long time.'

I looked back, considering. 'It's usually quite easy to see what's wrong. But there's often a stone-wall resistance on both sides to putting it right. Always dozens of reasons why change is impossible.'

'Russell Arletti rang me up yesterday,' she said casually.

'Did he really?'

She nodded. 'He wanted me to persuade you to leave Newmarket and do a job for him. A big one, he said.'

'I can't,' I said positively.

'He's taking me out to dinner on Tuesday evening to discuss, as he put it, how to wean you from the gee-gees.'

'Tell him to save himself the price of a meal.'

'Well no-' she wrinkled her nose. 'I might just be hungry again by Tuesday. I'll go out with him. I like him. But I think I'll spend the evening preparing him for the worst.'

'What worst?'

'That you won't ever be going back to work for him.'

'Gillie-'

'It was only a phase,' she said, looking out of the window at the sparkle of the million lights slowly sliding by below us. 'It was just that you'd cashed in your antique chips and you weren't exactly starving, and Russell netted you on the wing, so to speak, with an interesting diversion. But you've been getting tired of it recently. You've been restless, and too full of- I don't know- too full of power. I think that after you've played with the gee-gees you'll break out in a great gust and build a new empire- much bigger than before.'

'Have some wine?' I said ironically.

'- and you may scoff, Neil Griffon, but you've been letting your Onassis instinct go to rust.'

'Not a bad thing, really.'

'You could be creating jobs for thousands of people, instead of trotting round a small town in a pair of jodhpurs.'

'There's six million quid's worth in that stable,' I said slowly; and felt the germ of an idea lurch as it sometimes did across the ganglions.

'What are you thinking about?' she demanded. 'What are you thinking about at this moment?'

'The genesis of ideas.'

She gave a sigh that was half a laugh. 'And that's exactly why you'll never marry me, either.'

'What do you mean?'

'You like The Times crossword more than sex.'

'Not more,' I said. 'First.'

'Do you want me to marry you?'

She kissed my shoulder under the sheet. 'Would you?'

'I thought you were fed up with marriage.'

I moved my mouth against her forehead. 'I thought Jeremy had put you off it for life.'

'He wasn't like you.'

He wasn't like you- She said it often. Any time her husband's name cropped up. He wasn't like you.

The first time she said it, three months after I met her, I asked the obvious question.

'What was he like?'

'Fair, not dark. Willowy, not compact. A bit taller; six feet two. Outwardly more fun; inwardly, infinitely more boring. He didn't want a wife so much as an admiring audience- and I got tired of the play.' She paused. 'And when Jennifer died-'

She had not talked about her ex-husband before, and had always shied painfully away from the thought of her daughter. She went on in a careful emotionless quiet voice, half muffled against my skin.

'Jennifer was killed in front of me- by a youth in a leather jacket on a motor-cycle. We were crossing the road. He came roaring round the corner doing sixty in a built-up area. He just- ploughed into her-' A long shuddering pause. 'She was eight- and super.' She swallowed. 'The boy had no insurance- Jeremy raved on and on about it, as if money could have compensated- and we didn't need money, he'd inherited almost as much as I had-' Another pause. 'So, anyway, after that, when he found someone else and drifted off, I was glad, really-'

Though passing time had done its healing, she still had dreams about Jennifer. Sometimes she cried when she woke up, because of Jennifer.

I smoothed her shining hair. I'd make a lousy husband.'

'Oh-' She took a shaky breath. 'I know that. Two and a half years I've known you, and you've blown in every millennium or so, to say Hi.'

'But stayed a while.'

'I'll grant you.'

'So what do you want?' I asked. 'Would you rather be married?'

She smiled contentedly. 'We'll go on as we are- if you like.'

'I do like.' I switched off the light.

'As long as you prove it now and again,' she added unnecessarily.

'I wouldn't let anyone else,' I said, 'hang pink and green curtains against ochre walls in my bedroom.'