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good-looking woman in that rather toothy English middle-class way which lasts while firm young flesh and rangily athletic movement divert the eye from the basic equininity of the total bone structure. Four years younger than her husband, she still had some way to go. She had married young, announcing her engagement on her eighteenth birthday to the mild perturbation of her widowed father, a Church of England Archdeacon with fading episcopal ambitions. A wise man, he had not exerted his authority to break the engagement but merely applied his influence to stretching it out as long as possible in the hope that it would either prove equal to the strain, or snap. Instead, death had snapped at him, and his objections and presumably his ambitions had been laid to rest with him in the grave.
    After a short but distressingly intense period of mourning, Daphne had embraced the comforts and supports of marriage. Her elderly relatives had not approved the haste. There had been talk and reproving glances and even some accusatory hints, though with that magnanimity for which upper-middle-class High Anglicans are justly renowned, a comfortable majority agreed that Daphne's contribution to her father's untimely death had been one of manslaughter by distraction rather than murder by design.
    Happily Daphne, even in the guilt of grief, was clear-headed enough to feel conscientiously disconnected from the slab of rotten masonry which, falling from the tower of the sadly neglected early Perpendicular parish church he was inspecting with a view to launching a restoration appeal, had dispatched the Archdeacon. Now, twelve years and two children later, she too was aware she had many blessings to count, but close communion with her husband was not one of them. He wore around him an unyielding carapace of courtesy against which her anxieties beat in vain. Perhaps 'carapace' was the wrong image. It was more like an invisible but impenetrable time-capsule that he inhabited, which hovered in, but did not belong to, simple mortal linear chronology. He treated the future as if it were as certain as the past. It was odd that in the end such certainties should have driven her to the edge of panic. And over.
    The leaky byways which formed their winding route from Rosemont were awash with morning sunshine, but clouds were waiting above the main trunk road and by the time they entered the stately outer suburb in which St Helena's stood, the sky was black. Aldermann regarded it with the complacency of one whose application of systemic insecticide the previous evening would already have been absorbed into the capillaries of his roses.
    Daphne said, 'Oh bother.'
    'I can easily wait and drive you into the town centre,' offered Aldermann, thinking she was referring to the weather.
    'Thanks, but don't worry. I rather fancy the walk and I'm sure it'll only be a shower. No, it was that lot I was oh-bothering about.'
    Aldermann had already observed 'that lot' with some slight curiosity as he slowed down outside the large Victorian villa which had been converted into St Helena's School. The 'lot' consisted of four women each carrying a hand-painted placard which read variously: WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU'RE PAYING FOR? WHAT PRICE EQUALITY? PRIVATE SCHOOLS = PUBLIC SCANDALS and, at more length, ST HELENA FOUND THE TRUE CROSS, THE REST OF US ARE BEARING IT. Two of the women were carrying small children in papoose baskets.
    Aldermann drove slowly along a row of child-delivering Volvos till he found a kerbside space.
    'Isn't it illegal?' wondered Aldermann as he parked. 'Obstruction, perhaps?'
    'Evidently not. They don't get in the way and they only speak if someone addresses them first. But it could upset the children.'
    Aldermann looked at his daughter. She did not seem upset. Indeed she looked very impatient to be out of the car. She also looked very pretty in her blue skirt, blue blazer with cream piping, cream blouse, and little straw boater with the cream and blue