‘No,’ he said sharply. Much too vehemently. I was surprised. Then it came to me suddenly that all he had been doing with his rocks and his offer of a place for my convalescence was to engineer a meeting between me and the weekend guests. He offered me rest. He offered Mr van Dysart, or perhaps Mr Kraye, rocks. Both of us had swallowed the hook. I decided to give the line a tug, to see just how determined was the fisherman.

‘I’d be better upstairs. You know I can’t eat normal meals.’ My diet at that time consisted of brandy, beef juice, and some vacuum-packed pots of stuff which had been developed for feeding astronauts. Apparently none of these things affected the worst shot-up bits of my digestive tract.

‘People loosen up over the dinner table… they talk more, and you get to know them better.’ He was carefully unpersuasive.

‘They’ll talk to you just as well if I’m not there — better in fact. And I couldn’t stand watching you all tuck into steaks.’

He said musingly, ‘You can stand anything, Sid. But I think you’d be interested. Not bored, I promise you. More brandy?’

I shook my head, and relented. ‘All right, I’ll be there at dinner, if you want it.’

He relaxed only a fraction. A controlled and subtle man. I smiled at him, and he guessed that I’d been playing him along.

‘You’re a bastard,’ he said.

From him, it was a compliment.

The transistor beside my bed was busy with the morning news as I slowly ate my breakfast pot of astronaut paste.

‘The race meeting scheduled for today and tomorrow at Seabury,’ the announcer said, ‘has had to be abandoned. A tanker carrying liquid chemical crashed and overturned at dusk yesterday afternoon on a road crossing the racecourse. There was considerable damage to the turf, and after an examination this morning the Stewards regretfully decided that it was not fit to be raced on. It is hoped to replace the affected turf in time for the next meeting in a fortnight’s time, but an announcement will be made about this at a later date. And here is the weather forecast…’