“It isn’t natural,” Mr. Allingham said, “for a man not to be able to see anybody when he’s sitting right next to them. I’m not grumbling, but I can’t see anything, that’s all. It’s like not being in the room.”

“Oh, do be quiet, Donald. Sam and I are having a perfectly serious discussion. Of course you’re in the room, don’t be morbid.”

“I think I’d put about the same emphasis on all the words,” Samuel said.

“But don’t you find it tends to make the line rather flat? ‘Is there anybody there, said the traveller,’” George Ring murmured, pacing the mattresses, his head on one side. “I feel you do want a stress somewhere.”

Will I be alone tonight in the room with the piano, Samuel wondered. Alone like a man in a warehouse, lying on each bed in turn, opening cupboards and putting my hand in, looking at myself in minors in the dark.

“Don’t call me morbid, George Ring,” Mr. Allingham said. He tried to move, but the statue fell against his chair. “I remember once I drank forty-nine Guinnesses straight off and I came home on the top of a bus. There’s nothing morbid about a man who can do that. Right on the top of the bus, too, not just in the upper deck.”

Or will the room be full as a cemetery, but with the invisible dead breathing and snoring all around me, making love in the cupboards, drunk as tailors in the dry baths? Suddenly a warm body might dive in through the door and lie in my bed all night without a name or a word.

“I think forty-nine Guinnesses is piggish,” said George Ring.

“It was raining,” Mr. Allingham said, “and I never get truculent. I may sing and I may have a bit of a dance, but I never get nasty. Give me a hand, Sam.”

Samuel took the carpet off the hallstand and pushed the statue away. It had fallen between Mr. Allingham’s legs. He came up slowly into sight and rubbed his eyes like a man waking.

“I told you,” he said, “you get trapped. Coming to Dacey’s, George?”

“I’ll have to stay for hours, you know that,” George Ring said. “You know I’m the only person who can humor Rosie when she’s in one of her states. Oh, come on Rosie, don’t be temperamental. It’s ninety per cent temper and ten per cent mental. Just because you’re an actress you think you can stay under the furniture all the afternoon. I’ll count five …”

Samuel followed Mr. Allingham to the door.

“Five, six, seven,” George Ring said, as Mr. Allingham slammed the door hard, and his voice was lost in the noise of furniture falling. They went down the stairs into the hallway that smelt of cabbage, and out onto the grey street.

“I think it must have been the rocking-chair,” Samuel said.

“Mrs. Dacey’s is just round the corner,” Mr. Allingham said. “There you are. See the Cadbury sign?”