``I expect you mean Jock Grant-Menzies.''

``Yes, that's the name. You don't by any chance know where I can find him, do you?''

``He's in the book but I don't suppose he'll be at home now. You might be able to get him at Brat's at about one. He's almost always there.''

``Jock Grant-Menzies, Brat's Club. Thank you so very much. It is kind of you. I hope you will come and see me some time: Goodbye.''

After that the telephone was silent. At one o'clock Beaver despaired. He put on his overcoat, his gloves, his bowler hat and with neatly rolled umbrella set off to his club, taking a penny bus as far as the corner of Bond Street.

The air of antiquity pervading Brat's, derived from its elegant Georgian faзade and finely panelled rooms, was entirely spurious, for it was a club of recent origin, founded in the burst of bonhommie immediately after the war. It was intended for young men, to be a place where they could straddle across the fire and be jolly in the card room without incurring scowls from older members. But now these founders were themselves passing into middle age; they were heavier, balder and redder in the face than when they had been demobilized, but their joviality persisted and it was their turn now to embarrass their successors, deploring their lack of manly and gentlemanly qualities.

Six broad backs shut Beaver from the bar. He settled in one of the armchairs in the outer room and turned over the pages of the New Yorker, waiting until someone he knew should turn up.

Jock Grant-Menzies came upstairs. The men at the bar greeted him saying, ``Hullo, Jock old boy, what are you drinking?'' or simply ``Well, old boy?'' He was too young to have fought in the war but these men thought he was all right; they liked him far more than they did Beaver, who, they thought, ought never to have got into the club at all. But Jock stopped to talk to Beaver. ``Well, old boy,'' he said. ``What are you drinking?''