His hands still hooked in her armpits, Enderby was shocked to see the image of his stepmother in the big Gilbey's Port mirror on the wall opposite. Shaken, he nearly dropped his burden to the floor again. The image nodded to him, as out of some animated painting in a TV commercial, raised its glass in New Year salutation, then seemed to hobble out of the picture, into the wings, thus disappearing.

"Get on with it, Enderby," said the peevish major-general. "Put her back on her seat."

"Sho very kind," said the woman, trying hard to focus on her gin-glass. Enderby looked in the room for a source of that mirror-image, but saw only a bent back hobbling to the Gents. That might be it, a trick of the light or the New Year. It was his stepmother, strangely enough, who had told him as a child that, on New Year's Day, a man walked the streets with as many noses on his face as there were days in the year. He had gone looking for this man, thinking of him fearfully as of the family of the Antichrist that walked the world before the day of judgement. Long after he had seen through the trick, New Year's Day still possessed for him an irritating macabre flavour, as a day of possible prodigies. His stepmother was, he was pretty sure, dead and buried. She'd done her work, as far as he was concerned. There was no point in her staying alive or coming back from the grave.

"Now," said the major-general, as Enderby sat down again with a new whisky, "what did you say your rank was?"

"Lieutenant-general," said Enderby. In speech a comma is as good as a hyphen.

"I don't believe you."

"Look it up." Enderby was almost sure he saw his step mother leave the jug-and-bottle department, a quarter-bottle of Booth's in her bag.