"He'd just turned eighty," said a man just turned eighty. "Not all that old."

"Taylor gone," said the general. "I didn't know." He accepted rum from obsequious Crump. Crump accepted silver with an obsequious inclination of a broken and mended torso. "I thought I'd go before him," said the general, "but I'm still here."

"You're not all that old yourself," said the tremulous parchment man.

"I'm eighty-five," said the general in puffy indignation. "I call that very old."

Higher bids came from the corners. One woman confessed coyly to ninety. As if somehow to prove this, she performed a few waltz-twirls, humming from The Merry Widow. She sat down again to genteel shocked applause, her lips blue, her heart almost audibly thumping. "And," asked the Sibelius-man, "how old might you be, Enderby?"

"Forty-five."

There were snorts of both contempt and amusement.

One man in a corner piped, "If that's meant to be funny, I don't think it's in very good taste."

The major-general turned sternly and deliberately towards Enderby, both hands resting on the ivory bulldog-head of his malacca. "And what is it you do for a living?" he asked.

"You know that," said Enderby. "I'm a poet."

"Yes, yes, but what do you do for a living? Only Sir Walter made a living out of poetry. And perhaps that Anglo-Indian man who lived at Burwash."

"A few investments," said Enderby.

"What investments precisely?"

"I.C.I, and B.M.C. and Butlin's. And local government loans."

The major-general grunted, as though none of Enderby's replies was above suspicion. "What was your rank in the last war?" he asked, a last throw.

Before Enderby could give a lying answer, a widow in antique tweeds, a long thin woman with black-rimmed spectacles, fell from a low stool by a wicker table. Old men reached trembling for their sticks, that they might lever themselves up and help. But Enderby was there first. "Sho kind," said the woman genteelly. "Sho shorry to cauzhe all thish trouble." She had evidently been tanking up at home before opening-time. Enderby lifted her from the floor, as light and as stiff as a bundle of celery. "Thezhe thingzh," she said, "happen in the besht of familiezh."