“I don’t want brandy. I want hot chocolate.”

Nursery stuff. But the manager hurried away. Now I was sitting up, my shoulders felt as if they had been racked. Every now and then I had the shakes again. A sensitive type, Wilf Barclay! I shut my eyes, screwed them up and endured the agony of this added link in some chain of farce, this unbudgeted addition to a whole store of recurrent memories, the time Wilf Barclay fell off a cliff and was held up by—

“I didn’t lose my trousers. I hadn’t a round, red nose and ginger hair and a painted squint.”

“Lie down again, Wilf.”

“The very thing, the last bleeding—the only bloody thing that could have happened to reverse everything. How do I do it? What does it? Oh fuck!”

“You better lie down.”

The manager hurried back. He had a cup and saucer. Rick took it from him. The manager hurried away. From outside I heard Mary Lou’s voice.

“Should I come in?”

I shouted, “No!”

Rick put the cup down on the little bedside table. I came over dizzy and lay back. There was a long pause in which doors opened and shut several times, then another pause.

A heavily accented German voice spoke by me.

“He is in some shock, I think. The chocolate was good. The body has its own voice.”

Then I realized that my pulse was being taken. The voice spoke again.

“It is not so bad. How old? That old! Well. Drink your chocolate, Mr Barclay. Professor Tucker? Yes. Just rest, I think. He has the physique of a far younger man.”

I could hear Rick muttering. The doctor spoke again.

“I will send something. Yes, now, it is only a few yards. Do please remember, even in the Weisswald we say the green fields kill more than the white.”

But under my shut eyelids I was stretching antennae of horror out to the edge of the universe. The dice were rolling, three sixes or three ones. They were large as planets.

“I’ll wait to give you the stuff, Wilf.”

He was large as a planet, entering my universe with his necessity and his warmth and his smile and dainty bedpiece all drawn along by that gravity of an ambition not worth suffering for. I opened my eyes to get away from the rolling dice and there he was, large as his life, smiling anxiously by the foot of the bed. I examined myself and found I was in vest and shirt. I sat up, lifted the cup and saucer to me as they rattled against each other. I did not care to look at him.

“Let me—”

“Leave me alone!”

Ungrateful bugger, Wilf Barclay, and now enjoying his ingratitude the way he might enjoy cruelty if he had the courage. Ingratitude and sadism all mixed up—what nonsense! But Professor Tucker still stood there, while my cup and saucer rattled in my hands and I managed at last to drink. It did immediately calm me with its nursery taste and nursery memories. I was able, as they say, to take a hold of myself. I went on drinking until I had finished the lot, then held it out to Rick.