At that unwelcome thought, Lindsay reflected with relief on the money she would receive from the Derbyshire House job. It seemed poetic justice that such a bastion of privilege should stake her. Good old Paddy, she mused. Ever since they’d met in Oxford six years before, Paddy had not only been a tower of strength in emotional crises but the first to offer help when life got Lindsay into one of its awkward corners. When Lindsay’s car staged a break-down on a remote Greek mountainside it was Paddy who organized the flying out of a spare part. When Lindsay was made redundant it was Paddy who found the cousin who told Lindsay the best thing to do with her less-than-golden handshake. And when Lindsay’s lover died, it was Paddy who drove through the night to be with her. The daughter of two doctors, with an education begun at the “best” schools and polished off at Oxford, Paddy Callaghan had shaken her family by deciding to become an actress. After four years of only moderate success and limited employment, however, she had realized she would never make the first rank. Always a realist, and fundamentally unaffected by four years of living like a displaced person, she reverted to type and decided to make sure that the rising generation of public schoolgirls would have a better grounding on the stage than she’d had. When the two women first met, Paddy was halfway through the teacher training that would take her back to her old school in Derbyshire to teach English and Drama. It had taken Lindsay quite a long time to realize that at least part of her appeal for Paddy was her streak of unconventionality. She was an antidote to the staid world Paddy had grown up in and was about to return to. Lindsay had argued bitterly with Paddy that to go back to her old environment was copping out of reality. Though the argument never found a solution, the friendship survived.