“Tea,” said Mrs. Dacey. "Tea with plenty of sugar every five minutes. That’s what I always gave him and it didn’t do a bit of good.”

“Not too much Worcester, George, don’t bury the egg.”

“I won’t,” Samuel said.

“Oh, listen to the birds. It’s been such a short night for the birds, Polly.”

“Listen to the birds,” he said clearly, and a burning drink drowned his tongue.

“They’ve laid an egg,” Mr. Allingham said.

“Try some Coca Cola, Donald. It can’t do any harm, he’s had tea and a prairie oyster and angostura and Oxo and everything.”

“I used to pour the tea down by the pint,” Mrs. Dacey said affectionately, “and it came up, lump sugar and all.”

“He doesn’t want a Coca Cola. Give him a drop of your hair oil. I knew a man who used to squeeze boot-blacking through a veil.”

“You know everybody piggish. He’s trying to sit up, the poor darling.”

Samuel wrestled into the dry world and looked around a room in it, at Mrs. Dacey, now miraculously divided into one long woman, folding her black silk arms in the doorway, at George Ring arching his smile and hair toward the rusty taps, at Mr. Allingham resigned above him.

“Polly’s gone,” he said.

It was then that he understood why the three persons in the bathroom were so tall and far. I am on the floor, looking up, he said to himself. But the others were listening.

“You’re naked too,” Mr. Allingham said, “under the blanket.”

“Here’s a nice wet sponge.” George Ring dabbed and smoothed. “Keep it on your forehead. There, like that. That better?”

“Eau de cologne is for outside the body,” said Mrs. Dacey without disapproval, “and I’ll give our Polly such a dip. I’ll clip her on the earhole every time she opens her mouth.’

Mr. Allingham nodded. “Whisky I can understand,” he said. “But eau de cologne! You put that on handkerchieves. You don’t put whisky on handkerchieves.” He looked down at Samuel. “I don’t.”

“No, mustn’t suck the sponge, Sam.”

“I suppose he thinks red biddy’s like bread and milk,” Mr. Allingham said.

They gathered his clothes from the side of the bath and hurriedly dressed him. And not until he was dressed and upright, shivering along the landing to the dark stairs, did he try to speak again. George Ring and Mr. Allingham held his arms and guided him toward the top of that winding grave. Mrs. Dacey, the one mourner, followed with a rustle of silk.

“It was the brandy from the medicine cupboard,” he said, and down they went into the coarse, earthlike silence of the stairs.

“Give me furniture polish,” Mr. Allingham said. “Crack. Mind your head. Especially when I’m out of sorts in the bath.”

The darkness was settling like more dirt and dust over the silent shop. Someone had hung up a sign, “Closed,” on the inside of the window, not facing the street. “Meths is finicky,” Mr. Allingham said.