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pride, no dignity left. He
    said: "Please don't hurt me anymore." Tony Cox smiled and put his coat
    on. "Not just yet," he said. Then he went away.
     
    THE HON. DEREK HAMILTON woke up with a pain.
     
    He lay in bed with his eyes shut while he traced the discomfort to his
    abdomen, examined it, and graded it bad but not incapacitating. Then he
    recalled last night's dinner. Asparagus mousse was harmless; he had
    refused seafood pancakes; his steak had been well done; he had taken
    cheese in preference to apple tart. A light white wine, coffee with
    cream, brandy.
     
    Brandy. Damn, he should stick to port.
     
    He knew how the day would go. He would do without breakfast, and by
    midmorning the hunger would be as bad as the ulcer pain, so he would eat
    something. By lunchtime the hunger would be back and the ulcer would be
    worse.
     
    During the afternoon some trivial thing would irritate him beyond all
    reason, he would yell at his staff, and his stomach would ball into a
    knot of pain which made him incapable of thinking at all.
     
    He would go home and take too many pain-killers.
     
    He would sleep, wake with a headache, eat dinner, take sleeping pills,
    and go to bed.
     
    At least he could look forward to bedtime.
     
    He rolled over, yanked open the drawer of the bedside table, found a
    tablet, and put it in his mouth. Then he sat up and picked up his cup of
    tea. He sipped, swallowed, and said: "Good morning, dear."
     
    "Morning." Ellen Hamilton sat on the edge of the twin bed, wearing a
    silk robe, perching her cup on one slender knee. She had brushed her
    hair already. Her nightwear was as elegant as the rest of her large
    wardrobe, despite the fact that only he ever saw it, and he was not
    interested.
     
    That did not matter, he surmised: it was not that she wanted men to
    desire her only that she should be able to think of herself as
    desirable.
     
    He finished his tea and swung his legs to the floor. His ulcer protested
    at the sudden movement, and he winced with pain.
     
    Ellen said: "Again?"
     
    He nodded. "Brandy last night. Ought to know better." Her face was
    expressionless. "I suppose it has nothing to do with yesterday's
    half-year results."
     
    He heaved himself to his feet and walked slowly across the expanse of
    oyster-colored carpet to the bathroom. The face he saw in the mirror was
    round and red, balding, with rolls of fat under the jaw. He examined his
    morning beard, pulling the loose skin this way and that to make the
    bristles stand up. He began to shave. He had done this every day for the
    last forty years, and still he found it tiresome.
     
    Yes, the half-year results were bad. Hamilton Holdings was in trouble.
     
    When he had inherited Hamilton Printing from his father it had been
    efficient, successful and profitable. Jasper Hamilton had been a printer
    fascinated by typefaces, keen on the new technology, loving the oily
    smell of the presses. His son was a businessman. He had taken the flow
    of profits from the works and diverted it into more businesses--wine
    importing, retailing, publishing, paper mills, commercial radio. This
    had achieved its primary purpose of turning income into wealth and
    thereby avoiding tax. Instead of Bibles and paperbacks and posters, he
    had concerned himself with liquidity and yields. He had bought up
    companies and started new enterprises, building an empire.
     
    The continuing success of the original business disguised the flimsiness
    of the superstructure for a long time. But when the printing complex
    weakened, Hamilton discovered that most of his other businesses were
    marginal; that he had underestimated the capital investment needed to
    nurse them to maturity; and that some of them were very long-term
    indeed. He sold forty-nine percent of his equity in each of the
    companies, then transferred his stock to a holding company and sold
    forty-nine percent of that. He raised more money, and negotiated an
    overdraft running into seven figures. The