So, drowning men (and woman) as we were, we grabbed at Simon's offer and damn the implications – like the 10% of equity. Maggie – who'd done her time with the nuns and the confessional – even cheerfully referred to Salvation, at one point, but Tim and I nonetheless did our best to co-operate with the Man's plan, contact this bloody Ruth person, make ourselves available for tarting up so that we could be sold to the investment world.
It was not easy. Turned out that the Lady Ruth may have been the apple of her father's eye but she was just another boss to her employees, none of whom seemed to grasp the Saving The Planet importance of what we were trying to do. Instead, we got a whole load of contradictory demands as to what they might require from us – a 'visually effective workplace' was the one that threw me – before they would contemplate even pencilling in dates to do anything vaguely resembling work. And, no, we didn't get Simon involved, play the father card. We were, I realise now, amateurs – worse, we were trying to be fair ...
Eventually, of course, we did get stuff together. Actually, Tim sweet talked the University we'd been using for our hydrodynamic testing into using their facilities for promotional purposes, Mag pretty much redecorated the office/work space and I even rewrote some of our simulation software so that it would – sorry, but I really, really, did this – produce Hollywood style Big Numbers on screen, complete with multi-coloured progress bars and all that shit. And eventually we had a video crew on site, another working simultaneously "elsewhere". I did eventually wonder aloud, one day, watching these guys do their stuff, when or whether we'd ever get to meet the mysterious Ruth. A passing clipboard carrier disabused me.
"On a job this size? Nah ... no chance. Anyway, guv, Queen Bee's away in Strasbourg – some big EU gig... "
+ ++ +++ ++++ +++++ ++++ +++ ++ + 
In fact we only met Ruth for the first time when we finally saw the video – well, it was more a multimedia thing, really, much background information buried in hyperlinks and stuff – at a presentation they organised at our offices. Simon didn't grace us with his presence but, whatever we might have thought of the idea, he did invite our existing investors. So it was just as well that the thing turned out to be good. Very good, in fact.
I mean, from my point of view there was hardly a lot of new information, so I had time to be amused by the 'human interest' side of things being more or less entirely taken up by lingering shots of Maggie – on a beach, by the testing pool, etc etc – while Tim and I were restricted to distant shots of us looking industrious, and in Tim's case working on a large and complex CNC machine that I'd never seen before and which was thus presumably also borrowed from the University. No matter, I thought – male camera crew but then probably also primarily male investors, so ...
Ruth herself was charming but professional. I didn't make anything of the fact that she was, of course, the stunning – sorry. 'drop dead gorgeous' – woman I'd seen Simon hugging on St Pancras station and had assumed to be his trophy wife. Rather, I told her that I thought she'd done a good job.
She looked at me with total disdain, handed me a pile of obviously 'finished product' DVDs.
"No chance of a final edit, or anything, then?", I said, slightly nonplussed.
"At this price, no." Well, that was clear enough. But she went on. "However, my father did say you'd be helpful, so I do need to talk to your engineering bloke ..."
+ ++ +++ ++++ +++++ ++++ +++ ++ + 
And with that, she was gone, leaving Maggie and me with our other guests – our funders to date – all of whom were even more enthusiastic than ever ... and, as ever, no more inclined to cough up the dosh. Still, we kept them entertained and happy for a while – or, at least, until Ruth's crew began to pack away their gear ... which included most of the seats they were sitting on. At which point they got the hint and left.
And I got a bottle of champagne – well, Cava, we were on a budget – from our minimal fridge and Mag went off to collect Tim, given that we reckoned it was now safe to let him back into the office. Except that, as M reported back moments later, Tim was still – umm – locked in discussions with Ruth. Or, as Mag put it, positively drooling over the poor woman. So we had a glass each and talked, in a desultory fashion, about the day we'd had, whether the New Product – the DVD – would actually help produce the Real Product – the generator –, whether the investors had been all that impressed and, if so, by what, whether ... we did all the usual debrief stuff, basically.
I tried to read her emotions while we were talking, get a sense of where she was at in all of this – whether she minded her partner ... well boyfriend, really ... being so obviously besmitten by the photogenic Ruth, came close, perhaps, to asking what on earth she was doing with someone like Tim in the first place ... But I didn't.
We worked together well enough as we were, I thought – Tim and I long standing collaborators if never really friends, Maggie and I sort of nudging up to something like a friendship of our own, and M and T ... well, doing their stuff. So I left well alone, as one does, eventually took a couple of glasses down to Tim and Ruth – they were discussing universal joints and servo motors as I got to the bottom of the stairs – then retreated back to 'my' space ... and Maggie. 
Who was pulling on her coat, as I got back, and clearly about to leave. 
"Have a good evening", she said, as she made for the door.
"And chuck a bucket of water over the love birds, if you happen to leave before they do ..."
+ ++ +++ ++++ +++++ ++++ +++ ++ + 
Next morning, Tim was in before either of us, working away at some CAD drawings when I arrived. A glance at the screen over his shoulder revealed something that looked very like a hugely complicated boom – presumably for use with a camera or microphone and rather obviously nothing remotely to do with the turbine project. Not that it mattered, I thought – there wasn't much to be done on the engineering side for the moment – and took myself up to the office.
Where I found, amongst other things, an e-mail from Simon, simply telling me to phone him. So I did.
"Told you she was good, didn't I?", he said without preamble, then proceeded to give me a list of the people he was going to distribute the disks to. Which I bridled at, a bit – I mean, it was our bloody company – but his logic was simple enough. None of these guys would have heard of us, they all got a lot of approaches every day ... and, by implication, they would have heard of him. Which seemed fair enough, especially when he proceeded to go through the list and I realised that I'd never heard of any of them, either. 
Only one name – or rather, address – did cause me a problem ... some professor in California. I mean, we still hadn't patented our stuff in the States, this guy was a prof – what if he just nicked the entire concept?
Simon laughed at the suggestion. "What, Hal? Hell, no – he's an economist, for a start, not an engineer or anything, and, trust me, he – and his wife – are seriously rich. And they've been putting a lot of money into energy generation and storage recently. You do not want to exclude him from the list."
Which left me feeling that I'd just been pretty firmly put in my place and also – as far as Simon was concerned – ended the conversation. I was still standing there with the phone in my hand – wondering what I'd just agreed to – when Maggie came in. So I told her what had just happened, let her know that Tim was in – they usually arrived together – and took some time to notice that she was most definitively not her normal cheerful self. In fact, she looked pretty terminally hacked off about something.
And even I, I felt, could make a reasonable guess as to what that might be.
+ ++ +++ ++++ +++++ ++++ +++ ++ + 
The morning passed. We had a few things to deal with, none of them out of the ordinary, just settling a few bills, chasing a few invoices of our own, even answering one or two enquiries – sadly not from potential financiers, just contacts from suppliers or sub contractors we'd dealt with before, looking out for future work, or from others working in the same sort of field, fishing for information.
Not that anyone was giving anything away, of course, but it was nice to keep in the loop, especially since none of us knew quite who's work – if anyone's – would finally pay off and who would thus maybe be in the market for recruiting experienced staff ... or which of us would be ringing round looking for a proper job when we finally realised that our particular effort was not going to be the one to make the breakthrough. So we kept relationships friendly, as a rule, had been known to join some of the guys also working on wave generators for the occasional drink when they were in town, certainly didn't snarl at them when they phoned and generally take out our inner conflicts on them.
Except that that's precisely what Mag did, about half way through the morning – took a routine type call from a guy called Steve we knew – he was working in a lab on the south coast, building very big bendy balloons, routinely pooh poohed our more rigid approach, as he put it, and had been known to share genuine information – given that, balloon or steel mesh, all our designs had to work in a similar, hostile environments and ...
And so I wasn't brilliantly happy to hear Maggie tell him to go fuck himself, or words to that effect. I mean, I knew the guy routinely flirted with her, maybe to a degree a little beyond the conventional limits, but she'd never shown signs of taking offence before. Then again, I thought, wondering how I was supposed to react to such an unexpected situation, she never normally slammed the phone down on people and started to cry, either.
What I did was, immediately, absolutely nothing. Which is to say, I didn't make a big scene about events, didn't rush round to offer her sympathy or a hug or whatever, I just stayed calm, waited to see what would happen. What I wanted to avoid was making a crisis out of a drama, as they say – so, Mag was clearly pretty wound up and I didn't for a moment think that anything Steve might have said was the direct cause. I also knew that it would be easy enough to sort any future difficulties with him – he was a fairly easy going bloke, in my experience – whilst getting myself into some sort of argument with Maggie, volatile as she currently seemed to be – well, that could cause long term problems. So I did nothing – didn't ignore what I'd just seen but I didn't overtly react to it either. Thought I'd give Maggie the time to get herself together, let her tell me about stuff – or not – in her own time. It was the right thing to do, I'm convinced. 
And it very probably would have worked. Except that Tim chose that moment to stroll into the office, fail totally to notice that his girlfriend was rather visibly upset and stroll back out again, pausing only to inform me that he was going to take some designs over to 'Ruth's place', that he might or might not be back later in the day.
He'd hardly got out of the door before Maggie started throwing things around the office.

### To be continued ...
