Samuel rocked softly on his box in the middle of the furniture. This was the fullest room in England. How many hundreds of houses had been spilt in here, tables and chairs coming in on a wooden flood, chests and cupboards soaring on ropes through the window and settling down like birds. The other rooms, beyond that jostled door, would be taller and darker even than this, with the mute, black shape of the locked piano mountainous under a shroud of carpets and Rose, with her comb like the prow of a ship driving into their darkness and lying all night motionless and silent where she struck. Now she was dead still on a sunk bed between the column of chairs, buried alive, soft and fat and lost in a grave in a house.

“I’m going to buy a hammock,” George Ring said. “I can’t bear sleeping under all this furniture.”

Perhaps the room was crowded at night with people who could not see each other, stretched under chairs, under sofas, dizzily asleep on the tops of raised tables, waking up every morning and crying out, “Earthquake, earthquake!”

“And then I’ll go to bed like a sailor.”

“Tell Rose to come and get me out of here,” Mr. Allingham said, behind the cloaked hallstand, “I want to eat.”

“She’s sulking, Donald. She’s mad about a Japanese screen now.”

“Do you hear that, Sam? Isn’t there enough privacy in this room? Anybody can do anything, nobody can see you. I want to eat. I want to have a snack at Dacey’s. Are you sleeping here tonight?”

“Who?” Samuel asked. “Me?”

“You can doss down in one of the other rooms, if you think you can get up again. There’s enough beds for a harem.”

“Harem,” George Ring said, pronouncing it another way. "You’ve got company, Rose darling. Do come out and be introduced.”

“Thank you, Mr. Allingham,” Samuel said.

“Didn’t you really have any idea at all?” George Ring bounced, and for a moment his scented head was level with Samuel’s. One wide, bright, horse-toothed smile, and the head was gone. “About sleeping and things. I think it’s awfully brave. You might have fallen in with all kinds of people. ‘He fell among thieves.’ Do you know Sir Henry Newbolt’s poem?”

“He flung his empty revolver down the slope,” Samuel said.

The day was moving carelessly on to a promised end and in a dark room full of furniture where he’d lie down with his bunch of wives in a crow’s-nest bed or rock them in a hammock under the ceiling.

“Goodie goodie! It’s so exciting to find someone who knows about poetry. 'The voices faded and the hills slept.’ Isn’t that beautiful? The voices faded …? I can read poetry for hours, can’t I, Donald? I don’t care what kind of poetry it is, I love it all. Do you know, ‘Is there anybody there, said the traveller?’ Where do you put the emphasis, Mr. Bennet? Can I call you Sam? Do you say, ‘Is there anybody there’ or ‘Is there anybody there’?”