Pushed by a tall Jamaican nurse, the trolley bearing the tea urn advanced towards the polished table, on which some forty cups and saucers were laid out in ranks. Five minutes earlier, a barely perceptible movement of patients had begun. Dressing gowns fastened, spectral figures appeared from the lavatories and dormitories. Other patients stood up without a word and drifted away from their relatives, pausing to shake the shoulders of the sedated men and women asleep in their chairs. None dared to approach the table, waiting as the nurse, with much officious rattling of the tea urn, set out the biscuit plates.

“It’s kind of you to come, Jim.” David held my arm, but the black king had temporarily left the board. “To be honest, I don’t get too many visitors.”

“David, I’m glad to come. Peggy and I are doing everything we can. We’re trying to get you released as an outpatient.”

“The old Shanghai firm—never escape from that. It’s interesting here—I thought it might give you a few ideas.”

“It has…”

Beside us, the young woman with the plump calves and everted eyes slept in her deep largactil stupor, unaware of the wraith-like figures advancing past her. They froze whenever the nurse glanced imperiously over her shoulder, as if all the ordeals of their lives obliged them once again to play a childhood game. Still unaware of the tea urn, the elderly woman in the nightdress was laying a row of daffodils along the strip of carpet that separated the recess of the bay window from the rest of the dayroom. Watching her, I tried to guess at the significance of this floral threshold, perhaps a gateway through which her lost children might one day appear.

“Doreen! Stop messing with those daffs!” The nurse banged the lid of the tea urn, glaring at the row of dripping flowers taken from their vases. “Now help me with these teas.”

Reluctant to leave her handiwork, Doreen began to line the cups beside the urn. David leaned back in his armchair, stretching towards the tea trolley, as if about to put his hand up the skirt of this imposing Jamaican woman. He was looking at the tray of biscuits, his hand moving to and fro like the head of a cobra. Every eye in the ward was fixed on him, and even the drowsing young woman had straightened her eyeballs to watch him.

“Doreen, you’re getting behind.” The nurse stepped forward, her massive legs putting an end to David’s dream. Doreen was holding a cup filled with tea, eyes fixed on the brimming liquid. She stared at the trembling surface, clearly struck by the unbearable contrast between the infinitely plastic fluid and the polished hardness of the table. She held the cup at arm’s length, unable to bear the contrast between these opposing states of geometry. At last, testing a desperate hypothesis, she inverted the cup in a defiant gesture.