He sat up in bed, accompanied by a chorus of complaining springs, and looked around him. The hotel room was high-ceilinged, and furnished with cheapness and severity. Apart from their large institutional iron bed, the kind of bed to which lunatics were manacled, there was a sawed-oak armchair, a marble-topped washstand, and a grim varnished bureau with an oval mirror on top of it. He let his head drop to his chest and let out a long sigh of resignation.

‘You don’t have to look so miserable,’ the girl said. ‘It’s only Tuesday.’

He turned his eyes towards her balefully. ‘Why shouldn’t I be? I feel it.’

He pushed back the comforter and climbed unsteadily out of bed. The threadbare carpet seemed to tilt and yaw like the deck of a small ship. He groped across to the washstand, and held on to it for a while before he poured a basinful of cold water out of the lily-patterned jug.

The girl lay back on the pillow and watched him splash himself. In the milky light, his body was naked and angular, and a little underweight, so that his ribs showed. He had a long face, with dark curly sidewhiskers, and a sharp straight nose, and rather worried-looking eyes. Even when he was winning at cards, with a whole handful of queens and jacks, you would have thought by his eyes that he was right on the verge of throwing in the sponge, or even of slitting his throat.

‘You don’t have to feel miserable,’ the girl said. ‘You could jump back into bed and feel anything you like.’

He turned and peered at her with one eye closed against the water. He couldn’t find a towel, so he pulled the drapes towards him and dried himself on those. She looked back at him with that little twisted smile, admiring his melancholy leanness.

He said in a thick voice, ‘The only feeling I want right now, apart from my misery, with which I’m quite content, is the feeling of Bromo Vichy salts down the back of my throat.’

She kept on smiling. ‘Misery and Bromo Vichy aren’t the two best feelings you could have.’

‘I know,’ he told her. He went to the oval mirror on top of the bureau and inspected his swollen eyes. ‘But they’ll do.’

She twisted her frayed red curls around her finger. She didn’t say anything for a while, but pouted in what she obviously considered was a sulky and flirtatious manner. ‘Last night, you didn’t seem satisfied with anything,’ she said. ‘I would have called you a tiger.’

‘What a pair,’ he replied absently, as he searched for his cotton combinations. ‘The tiger and the hippopotamus.’

‘The what?’

He was on his hands and knees, looking under the bed. He raised his head and said: ‘The hippopotamus. It’s a large beast from Africa, that likes to wallow.’