Norm moved uneasily around the fringes of the action at the ball. He felt very much out of his element, after all he had served some of these people recently as customers at the building society. He felt a particularly strong case of 'not one of us'.

Indeed, he was only here through the generosity of Miss MacKenzie, his fiance. That was still a strange word for him to use to describe her. To Norman, she was an exotic beauty from a distant land, who had hatched the maddest of ideas - that they wed for familial gain. That she had schooled him like Antipodean Aphrodite was a quiet bonus.