He turned his eyes again to the beach and the poor shivering wraiths scattered about the sand. Shaky as he might be in matters of geography, at least he knew better than to bare his blue-grey shanks to the chill spring breeze skimming to shore over the crests of those rolling Atlantic breakers.

There were a few Spaniards among the people on the beach, male, for the most part, easily identifiable by their glistening, mahogany-hued pelts. They were on the prowl after the buttermilk-pale northern girls, new flocks of whom came down on charter flights every week. The would-be Don Juans seemed not to care whether the girls were good-looking or not – paleness was all, the paleness of thick, pulpy flesh that hadn’t seen the sun since last year’s package trip to the suntanned south.

He drained the last bitter dregs of the coffee and put the cup aside, feeling as if he had dosed himself with an emetic. He would have preferred tea, but in Spain only the English could order tea without self-consciousness.

With an effort he stirred himself out of his torpor, and went into the bathroom, with its unfamiliar appurtenances. Part of his dislike of holidays was that they required him to stay in hotels. He returned to the bedroom, hitching up his pyjamas. He told himself he should do something about his paunch, though he knew he wouldn’t.

How was it, he wondered, not for the first time, that people seemed oblivious to the brazen confidence trick that was played on them in hotels? Did it never occur to them to think how many greasy holidaymakers, leaky honeymooners, how many oldsters with unpredictable bladders and flaking skin, had slept already in the very bed in which they were themselves just now reclining? Did it never cross their minds that over the years God knows how many poor souls had breathed their last on the same mattress on which they stretched themselves out so luxuriously at the end of another fun-filled day spent prone on the stoneless beach or gambolling in the sea as blue as Reckitt’s dye?