"You weren't at dinner, so I thought-"

"Dinner!" He paused, examined the word he'd just said for inflexion and intonation, decided his delivery had been lacking in a proper contempt and repeated himself. "Dinner! Not the hogwash itself which I suppose is palatable enough for those who lack my esoteric tastes. Les the hour at which it's served. Barbaric. Even Attila the Hun-"

"You mean you no sooner pour your aperitif than the bell goes?"

"Exactly. What does a man do?"

Coming from our elderly production manager, the question was purely rhetorical. Despite the baby-clear blue eyes and faultless enunciation Lonnie hadn't been sober since he'd stepped aboard the Morning Rose: it was widely questioned whether he'd been sober for years. Nobody least of all Lonnie-seemed to care about this, but this was not because nobody cared about Lonnie. Nearly all people did, in greater or lesser degrees, dependent on their own natures. Lonnie, growing old now, with all his life in films, was possessed of a rare talent that had never bloomed and never would now, for he was cursed-or blessed-with insufficient drive and ruthlessness to take him to the top, and mankind, for a not always laudable diversity of reasons, tends to cherish its failures: and Lonnie, it was said, never spoke ill of others and this, too, deepened the affection in which he was held except by the minority who habitually spoke ill of everyone.

"It's not a problem I'd care to be faced with myself," I said. "How are you feeling?"

"Me?" He inclined his bald pate forty-five degrees backwards, tilted the bottle, lowered it and wiped a few drops of the elixir from his grey beard. "Never been ill in my life. Who ever heard of a pickled onion going sour?" He cocked his head sideways. "Ah!"