‘I think we’d better not disturb him any more,’ said the sister definitely. They went away. He felt an intoxicating sense of Machiavellian triumph. It was all so easy: you just said you were tired and they had to stop. He was going to feel tired every time they asked him anything. Every time they asked him if Bernard Roderick and Veronica had fallen off the pillion of Harry Dog­son’s motor-cycle, if Mr. Blearney had nose-dived out of the sky on a motor-cycle, if Harry Dogson had run over Froulish on his motor-cycle, leaving him with injuries not usually associated with people who could remember if they had been drinking.

One day when the nurse came to wash him she told him he was lucky. ‘You’re lucky,’ she said. He asked her what she meant.

‘You’re being moved to the Private Block, with a room of your own,’ she said.

‘Using what for money?’ he asked.

‘A friend of yours is paying,’ she said, plying the flannel. ‘Haven’t you heard anything about it?’

‘You must be making a mistake,’ he said round the edges of the flannel. ‘No friend of mine could possibly pay for me to go into a private ward, and anyway they don’t know I’m here.’

‘Oh, but they do. There was something in the paper,’ she re­torted. ‘Mr. Perkins cut it out. I’ll show it you when I come round this afternoon.’

That afternoon she brought him a tiny cutting from one of the more gossipy evening newspapers. He looked at it and read, ‘The Shah declared at a press conference that it was the will of Allah that he should take a tenth wife. Miss Wadder, speaking on the telephone from Los Angeles, said that the wedding was scheduled for the fourteenth.’

‘You’re looking at the wrong side,’ she said.

He turned it over and read: ‘HIT AND RUN. Charles Lumley (23) was admitted to hospital last night suffering from severe internal injuries, after being found lying unconscious by the roadside,’ the paper was torn and he could not make out a line or two, ‘believed to be another case of a motorist failing to stop after knocking down a pedestrian.’

‘What’s this about internal injuries?’ he asked the nurse.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘that’s what they always put when they don’t know. The reporter didn’t know anything about you except that you were injured, but he thought it would sound as if he knew if he just called it “internal”. We often get them doing that.’