“Oh, Hunt, you are disgusting,” said Kate, averting her eyes politely, and wondering what to do first: undress Hunt, fetch a bucket of water, chuck him out on the steps till he’d finished? She decided on the bucket of water, but by the time she’d got back from the kitchen with it Hunt had dragged himself into the sitting room, where he was lying propped up on a chair. He opened his eyes, stared at her with dignity, and said in his best voice, “So sorry, dear Mrs. Armstrong! It was the whelks,” and passed out.

Whelks it might well have been, for there was a powerful smell of seaweed and vinegar mingled amongst other odours which took a good deal of scrubbing to shift. She managed to get his trousers off, pulling them gingerly over his large feet, and went off to the kitchen to throw them in the washing machine: when she came back, Hunt was snoring, his eyes shut, his long white legs sprawled before him, in mustard-coloured socks. Kate knelt at his feet, and looked up at him curiously. Battered and violently coloured, half-dressed as he was, he had nevertheless a certain lanky elegance. His legs, which clearly never saw the light of day, were blue and white, scarred and bruised, with what looked like a permanent if shifting display of bruises from previous drunken ramblings, oddly youthful compared with his misused beaky broken-veined empurpled face. Grasshopper shanks. Like a dried-up insect, he was. A pickled cockroach. What was that song Stuart used to sing to the children?

Grasshoppers three a-fiddling went,

Heigh ho, never be still,

They earned no money and paid no rent,

But all day long with their elbows bent

They fiddled a song called Rillaby Rillaby,

Fiddled a song called Rillaby Ree.

Should she try to ease off his socks, or would she find inside them a chiropodist’s nightmare? How old was he? Impossible to say, and impossible to be cross with him, really, impossible to be anything worse than irritated, for what stamina he had, the old bat, with what impressive perseverance he had abused his system over the years: how could one feel anything but admiration for such dedication? And how clever of him to choose, perversely, so uncharacteristically clean a floor. She got up, quietly, and fetched a blanket, a blanket which had been used so often for the same purpose that the children called it a Hunt blanket. As she was draping it over him, he stirred, muttered, opened his hooded eyes, and said:

“Thank you, my dear.”

“Any time,” said Kate. “Any time you feel like throwing up, come and do it in my house. How do you feel now?”

“Never felt better,” said Hunt.

“And just when I’d cleaned everything up,” said Kate.

“You should always clean up after a party, not before,” said Hunt, not unreasonably.

“Was it really whelks?”