61-62wivesbehavingbadly

" hey , minty ." barry's summons was issued via the internal phone ." we need you ."
i was flicking through the daily papers , the phone squeezed between shoulder and neck , ap ose i found usedful for suggesting that i was engaged in top-whack activity . lately . i had noticed that my shoulder and upper arm were stiff and aching .
nathan laughed when i expalined the reason why and murmured that he had missed a trick all these years .
"can you wait while i get this call , barry ?"
"no ." he said ." okay ."
when i arrived at his office , gabrielle and deb were ensconced on the supersized sofa , wedged so far back that their feet were in danger of leaving the ground . from his desk . barry loomed a telling couple of feet over them . he was dressed in leather blouson jacket and chinos . he also wore a white silk evening scarf draped his neck and , when he raised his arm , a red kabbalah wrisnband was prominent on his wrist . but his eyes were sharp and intelligent . he held up a green plastic envelope and kicked off with . " there was mass of stuff in here about middle age . what is it ? who is it ? the girl ...." "- girls was emphasized - ".... agree that this is worth a look at but it needs work to see if it can pull togerrther ."
without a mitigating shred of irony , he handed the doddier to me ." the consensus is , minty , that this one is yours ."
gabrielle and deb exchanged looks ." gabrielle and i don't feel we know enough ." deb ponted put .
a small , but significant note sounded in my head ." and i do ?"
i could choose any number of metaphors to explain the transition from imaggining you are one of the girls to knowing the are not .  depending on my mood , they would make me laugh or weep accordingly . ion this case , i would decid which  later .
db shook back the mass of her wavry hair - very north london , pre-raphaelite hair -and the gesture suggested ( and was intended to ) unfettered vision and youthful boldness that knew exactly where it was heading . gabrielle focused on barry and , as usual , he was pretending not to notice .
"i do sense possibilities here ." barry was passing me the baton ." i think you could deal nicely , minty ."
i skimmed the frist paragraph of an article from the new statesman ." the social and cultural emphasis ogf younth has resulted in a neglect  of th middle years . we have more  than sufficient cultural and financial data on youth and , to an extent , on the old . but what do we know about the important phase in between the two ?"
an urgent phone call took gabrielle  out of the room , which released barry for proper thoughtt and the " creative " discussion that followed .