Festering Lilies Read Online Free PDF Page A

momentary amusement seemed to give Barbara the courage to amplify her earlier remarks.
    â€˜Well, it’s just that everyone seems to think… They all know about you and the minister, you see, and they’re saying…’
    â€˜That he threw me over and I killed him, you mean?’ said Willow, who had never even considered the possibility that anyone might suspect her until that moment. Her tone of dry amusement made Barbara look at her directly for the first time since they had stopped working.
    â€˜Well, yes actually. But don’t you mind?’
    Willow, who normally thought about her own emotions as little as it was possible to do, considered for a moment or two.
    â€˜Yes, in fact I do. It’s such an insult, for one thing, and not only to me.’
    â€˜The minister, too, you mean?’ Barbara suggested doubtfully.
    â€˜No, Barbara,’ said Willow more coldly. ‘It suggests that they think that all single women in this office – or for that matter in the whole of the Civil Service – are hanging about hoping for some man to dignify them by selecting them for his own pleasure. Idiotic! I can imagine – just – some men thinking it, or the sort of idle women who spend all day in hairdressers’ shops reading selfishness-inducing magazines, but intelligent women like the ones who work here? It makes me feel ashamed of them.’
    â€˜I thought you were going to say that the insult lay in their assumption that you would ever allow your emotions to overrule your judgment,’ said Barbara, blushing because she, too, was guilty of pining for a particular man to dignify her existence by so selecting her.
    â€˜That too. But Barbara, since we’re wasting time gossiping, tell me: am I the only suspect they’ve dug up? Or are there other victims of their overheated fantasy?’
    â€˜It did occur to someone in the canteen yesterday that perhaps the permanent secretary had been sneered at once too often and decided to act instead of sulking for once, but that only raised a laugh. Everyone knows he’s far too much of a physical coward to hit anyone, let alone a man six inches taller than himself,’ answered Barbara.
    Willow got out of her chair and prowled about her office, trying to excise the sudden, unexpected sympathy that had sprung into her mind. She had never expected to feel remotely sympathetic towards the PUS, but she did experience a sickening lurch of fellow-feeling as she realised that the pair of them must be equally despised and talked over by the denizens of DOAP. Reminding herself of the maxim ‘It’s all good copy’, which had got her through the embarrassing days of Algy’s blatant courtship, Willow turned back to her subordinate.
    â€˜I overheard something in the canteen, too, last week,’ she said. Barbara, clearly bothered about what Willow was going to say, fiddled with the red combs that held her dark hair in place. One fell out and, slipping from her fingers, dropped on the floor. The girl grovelled after it and when she stood up again made an enormous fuss about putting it back. Willow watched with a hint of amusement in her eyes.
    â€˜A bunch of messengers were talking their usual smut and making jokes about the minister’s, er…sexual preferences. Was it true, do you know?’ she asked.
    Barbara, with the relief showing so obviously in her stance and expression that Willow wondered what they had been saying in the canteen about her, answered slowly:
    â€˜Well, I suppose it could be, Willow, but a man like that… I mean, with the kind of womanising reputation that Algy Endelsham had: do you really think it’s likely?’
    â€˜Not very perhaps,’ answered Willow, as though carefully considering, ‘but anyone who displays his conquests so flagrantly might well be hiding something, don’t you think? And despite Wolfenden and all that, I imagine a politician could