“I’m in the bath now.”

“I’m undressing too. Can you hear me?” she said softly. “That’s my dress rustling. Now I’m taking my petticoat off. Now I’m naked.” A cold hand touched him on the face. “Here’s the brandy, Sam. Sam, my dear, drink it up and then I’ll climb in with you. I’ll love you, Sam. I’ll love you up. Drink it all up then you can touch me.”

He felt the glass in his hand and he lifted it up and drank all that was in it.

“Christ!” he said in a clear, ordinary voice. “Christ!”

Then the birds flew down and kicked him on the head, carefully between the eyes, brutally on each temple, and he fell back in the bath.

That was all the birds singing under the water, and the sea was full of feathers that swam up his nostrils and into his mouth. A duck as big as a ship sailed up on a drop of water as big as a house and smelt his breath as it spurted out from broken, bleeding lips, like flames and waterspouts. Here came a wave of brandy and birds, and Mr. Allingham, naked as a baby, riding on the top with his birthmark like a rainbow, and George Ring swimming breaststroke through the open door, and three Mrs. Daceys gliding in yards above the flowing ground.

The darkness drowned in a bright ball of light, and the birds stopped.

4

Voices began to reach him from a great distance, travelling in lavatories in racing trains along a liquid track, diving from the immeasurably high ceiling into the cold sea in the enormous bath.

“Do you see what I see?” That was the voice of the man called Allingham, who slept under the furniture. “He’s taking a little dip.”

“Don’t let me look, Donald, he’s bare all over.” I know him, Samuel thought. That’s George Ring the horse. “And he’s ill too. Silly Sam.”

“Lucky Sam. He’s drunk, George. Well, well, well, and he hasn’t even got his bottle off. Where’s Polly?”

“You look over there,” Mrs. Dacey said. “Over there on the shelf. He’s drunk all the eau de cologne.”

“He must have been thirsty.”

Large, bodiless hands came over the bath and lifted him out.

“He’s eccentric,” Mr. Allingham said, as they laid him on the floor, “that’s all I’m saying. I’m not preaching, I’m not condemning. I’m just saying that other people get drunk in the proper places.”

The birds were singing again in the electric dawn as Samuel fell quietly to sleep.

III. FOUR LOST SOULS

He sank into the ragged green water for the second time and, rising with seaweed and a woman under each arm and a mouthful of broken shells, he saw the whole of his dead life standing trembling before him, indestructible and unsinkable, on the brandy-brown waves. It looked like a hallstand.

He opened his mouth to speak, but a warm wave rushed in.