would be required to complete such a project generated a kind of proleptic mental fatigue so overwhelming that he invariably abandoned it before he had properly begun. An article of this kind would probably be read by only a few hundred people, if you were lucky, which was incentive enough if you cared what they thought of it, if it enhanced your standing in your peer group and contributed usefully to your Department’s RAE rating (as Head of Linguistics he had felt obliged to give a lead in this respect); but once you retired, the professional incentive melted away. Needless to say there was no economic incentive: academic journals did not pay their contributors, and even if you were fortunate enough to have the article reprinted in a book the permission fees were modest.There had been a time when he made a little extra money as a consultant, acting as an expert witness in cases that involved linguistic evidence - interpreting covertly recorded conversations, determining the authorship or authenticity of documents, and suchlike - and he had enjoyed this work as well as profited from it. But since a humiliating experience in court in the first year of his retirement, when he had difficulty hearing the questions put to him by his own side’s barrister in a thick Scottish accent, and the opposing QC seized the opportunity to question his competence to give an opinion on a recorded telephone conversation which was at the heart of the case - since that occasion, which still made him twitch and grimace when he recalled it, he had received very few offers of such work, and those he had declined for fear of repeating the experience. Apart from his pension, the only income he received was from the steadily declining royalties of a textbook, which he privately referred to as Discourse Analysis for Dummies, first published some twenty-five years ago.
It was fortunate therefore that Winifred’s business began to be profitable at just about the time that he retired. A tax-free bond linked to the FTSE-100 index which her first husband had purchased in her name in some fit of generosity or remorse, or perhaps as a tax reduction device, matured and yielded a large lump sum which she used to start up an interior design and soft furnishings business with her Health Club friend Jakki, who had a diploma in textiles from Manchester Polytechnic, and some experience of spreadsheets and computerised accounting from working in the office of her husband’s Japanese car franchise before she divorced him (obtaining a generous settlement which provided her stake in the business). Winifred’s qualifications for the enterprise were more nebulous: one half of a Combined Honours degree in Art History, and an amateur enthusiasm for decorating and furnishing her own home, but in due course she showed an aptitude for retail trade that surprised Desmond. It was an opportune time to discover it. In the Nineties the northern city which had seemed so dour and drab to him and Maisie when they first came to it, and whose native citizens traditionally prided themselves on their frugality and thrift, was overtaken by the global craze for consumption. Shops with internationally famous names opened branches there, and new malls sprang up to accommodate them along with the national chain stores - rather too many malls all at once, in fact. Fred and Jakki were able to lease a spacious unit in the city centre at a very reasonable rent from developers desperately anxious to fill the space (nothing looks less inviting to punters than a row of vacant shops). It was on the ground floor, so that anybody who entered the Rialto mall from the street, enticed by gleaming vistas of stainless steel, ceramic tile and plate glass, or by the soothing murmur of muzak and tinkling water features, had to pass the frontage of Décor (as it was called - Jakki’s suggestion of ‘Swish Style’ fortunately having been discarded) on their way to the escalators which wafted them to the higher levels of the building. In spite of this location, however, Décor struggled to break even for two or three years, until a sought-after and very expensive hairdresser moved his operation into the mall on the first floor. His clientele - women from the affluent outer suburbs or green-belt villages, with time to spare and money to spend on beautifying themselves and their homes - were just the right kind of customers for Décor. Winifred and Jakki specialised