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the substitution in the first place. So she didn't even have a motive.'
    'She could have realized something was wrong later,' Jemima countered. 'We've agreed that the boy himself must be about twenty now. Twenty years is a long time in which to bring up somebody else's child and suspect nothing. It depends a good deal on what the boy looks like, of course. I never got a chance to ask Nurse Elsie about any of the details. We all know what Lord St Ives looks like even if we do tend to see him in terms of Marc's cartoons, a series of long thin terribly aristocratic lines, that long straight nose and single na rrow line for a mouth. But what about her? I have an image of a typical English lady of a certain type forever meeting her husband at airports with a brave smile.'
    At which point Cass Brinsley said very firmly, 'Enough of this. I'm going to distract you forever with an enormous therapeutic draught of Buck's Fizz. I have in mind filling one of your numerous television awards to the brim: there must be a silver goblet amongst them.'
    'Unfillable statuettes in the main, I fear.' All the same Jemima allowed herself to be distracted.
    Under the circumstances it was hardly surprising that by Monday morning Jemima was in a very different frame of mind. She certainly did not expect to hear of the late Nurse Elsie Connolly again, nor of Sister Imelda of Pieta House, still less of the youthful heir Lord Saffron. Besides, Monday morning was to be the occasion of a full-dress confrontation with Cy Fredericks on the subject of their rival concerns - crabbed age, in the case of Jemima Shore, or at any rate the approach of same, and youth 'full of pleasance' in the case of Cy Fredericks. The nature of the new series had to be decided shortly, or at least the nature of the first programme.
    It never did to have your mind in anyway distracted when confronting Cy, as Jemima knew to her cost; while the information, derived from Cy's secretary via Cherry, that Cy Fredericks was currently pursuing a gilded moppet called Tiggie, filled her with additional dread. Cy Fredericks' romantic attachments were closely monitored by those in the know at Megalithic House, since all too often they provided the vital clue to what otherwise seemed a totally irrational enthusiasm for a particular programme.
    If only Cy would stick to Lady Manfred! thought Jemima as she wheedled her little white Mercedes sports car into the Megalithic car park. Cultured, music-loving, above all gracefully middle-aged, Lady Manfred demanded no more of Megalith than a generalized support of the opera, of which Jemima for one thoroughly approved. But an attachment for the notorious Tiggie Jones (Tiggie forsooth! could anyone with a name like Tiggie bode well for Megalith?), twenty-three-year-old Tiggie, the darling of the gossip columns according to Cherry, Tiggie of the long legs and roving eyes, according to the photographers, that was definitely bad news. It also helped to explain why Cy was being at once devious and obstinate in his determination to make a programme tentatively entitled - by him - 'Golden Lads and Girls'. (Had he, Jemima wondered, ever read the actual poem from which the quotation came? The conclusion might come as a surprise to him.)
    Cy Fredericks' opening ploy at the meeting was also his valediction.
    'You deserve a holiday, Jem, and this, in effect, is going to be it.' Jemima pondered inwardly on the potential menace contained in those two little words 'in effect' on the lips of the Chairman of Megalith.
    Outwardly she merely smiled sweetly, that charming smile which made people watching television think what a nice warm human being she was.
    'I'm afraid I don't find the idea of investigating a lot of poor-little-rich kids at university quite my notion of a holiday. It's now the eighteenth of January. How about that programme on the growth of feminism in the West Indies? An interesting subject and an interesting location. I could be ready to leave for