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He wedged his shoes against the corner below the hinges and piled his sodden clothes on top, then padded across the sticky linoleum to the bath. It was cold as stone, and sank at least half an inch with a loud creak as he stepped into it under the blind brass eye of the shower. When he twisted the reluctant squeaky taps it felt at first as though the rain had got in, but swiftly grew so hot he backed into the clammy plastic. He had to press himself against the cold tiled wall to reach the taps, and had just reduced the temperature to bearable when he heard the doorknob rattle. “Taken,” he shouted. “Someone’s in here.”

“My turn.”

The voice was so close the speaker’s mouth must be pressed against the door. When the rattling increased in vigor Shone yelled, “I won’t be long. Ten minutes.”

“My turn.”

It wasn’t the same voice. Either the speaker had deepened his pitch in an attempt to daunt Shone or there was more than one person at the door. Shone reached for the sliver of soap in the dish protruding from the tiles, but contented himself with pivoting beneath the shower once he saw the soap was coated with gray hair. “Wait out there,” he shouted. “I’ve nearly finished. No, don’t wait. Come back in five minutes.”

The rattling ceased, and at least one body dealt the door a large soft thump. Shone wrenched the curtains open in time to see his clothes spill across the linoleum. “Stop that,” he roared, and heard someone retreat—either a spectacularly crippled person or two people bumping into the walls as they carried on a struggle down the corridor. A door slammed, then slammed again, unless there were two. By then he was out of the bath and grabbing the solitary bath towel from the shaky rack. A spider with legs like long gray hairs and a wobbling body as big as Shone’s thumbnail scuttled out of the towel and hid under the bath.

He hadn’t brought a towel with him. He would have been able to borrow one of Ruth’s. He held the towel at arm’s length by two corners and shook it over the bath. When nothing else emerged, he rubbed his hair and the rest of him as swiftly as he could. He unzipped his case and donned the clothes he would have sported for dining with Ruth. He hadn’t brought a change of shoes, and when he tried on those he’d worn, they squelched. He gathered up his soaked clothes and heaped them with the shoes on his bag, and padded quickly to his room.

As he kneed the door open he heard sounds beyond it: a gasp, another, and then voices spilling into the dark. Before he crossed the room, having dumped his soggy clothes and bag in the wardrobe that, like the rest of the furniture, was secured to a wall and the floor, he heard the voices stream into the house. They must belong to a coach party—brakes and doors had been the sources of the gasps. On the basis of his experiences so far, the influx of residents lacked appeal for him and made him all the more anxious to speak to Ruth. Propping his shoes against the ribs of the tepid radiator, he sat on the underfed pillow and lifted the sticky receiver.

As soon as he obtained a tone he began to dial. He was more than halfway through Ruth’s eleven digits when Snell’s voice interrupted. “Who do you want?”

“Long distance.”

“You can’t get out from the rooms, I’m afraid. There’s a phone down here in the hall. Everything else as you want it, Mr. Thomson? Only I’ve got people coming in.”

Shone heard some of them outside his room. They were silent except for an unsteady shuffling and the hushed sounds of a number of doors. He could only assume they had been told not to disturb him. “There were people playing games up here,” he said.

“They’ll be getting ready for tonight. They do work themselves up, some of them. Everything else satisfactory?”

“There’s nobody hiding in my room, if that’s what you mean.”

“Nobody but you.”

That struck Shone as well past enough, and he was about to make his feelings clear while asking for his key when the manager said, “We’ll see you down shortly, then.” The line died at once, leaving Shone to attempt an incredulous grin at the events so far. He intended to share it with his reflection above the sink, but hadn’t realized until now that the mirror was covered with cracks or a cobweb. The lines appeared to pinch his face thin, to discolor his flesh and add wrinkles. When he leaned closer to persuade himself that was merely an illusion, he saw movement in the sink. An object he’d taken to be a long gray hair was snatched into the plughole, and he glimpsed the body it belonged to squeezing itself out of sight down the pipe. He had to remind himself to transfer his wallet and loose coins and keys from his wet clothes to his current pockets before he hastened out of the room.

The carpet in the passage was damp with footprints, more of which he would have avoided if he hadn’t been distracted by sounds in the rooms. Where he’d seen the teddy bear someone was murmuring “Up you come to Mummy. Gummy gum.” Next door a voice was crooning “There you all are,” presumably to the photographs, and Shone was glad to hear no words from the site of the lopsided knitting, only a clicking so rapid it sounded mechanical. Rather than attempt to interpret any of the muffled noises from the rooms off the darker section of the corridor, he padded downstairs so fast he almost missed his footing twice.

Nothing was moving in the hall except rain under the front door. Several conversations were ignoring one another in the television lounge. He picked up the receiver and thrust coins into the box, and his finger faltered over the zero on the dial. Perhaps because he was distracted by the sudden hush, he couldn’t remember Ruth’s number.

He dragged the hole of the zero around the dial as far as it would go in case that brought him the rest of the number, and as the hole whirred back to its starting point, it did. Ten more turns of the dial won him a ringing padded with static, and he felt as if the entire house was waiting for Ruth to answer. It took six pairs of rings—longer than she needed to cross her flat—to make her say “Ruth Lawson.”

“It’s me, Ruth.” When there was silence he tried reviving their joke. “Old Ruthless.”

“What now, Tom?”

He’d let himself hope for at least a dutiful laugh, but its absence threw him less than the reaction from within the television lounge: a titter, then several. “I just wanted you to know—”

“You’re mumbling again. I can’t hear you.”

He was only seeking to be inaudible to anyone but her. “I say, I wanted you to know I really did get the day wrong,” he said louder. “I really thought I was supposed to be coming up today.”

“Since when has your memory been that bad?”

“Since, I don’t know, today, it seems like. No, fair enough, you’ll be thinking of your birthday. I know I forgot that too.”

A wave of mirth escaped past the ajar door across the hall. Surely however many residents were in there must be laughing at the television with the sound turned down, he told himself as Ruth retorted “If you can forget that you’ll forget anything.”

“I’
m sorry.

“I’m sorrier.”

“I’m sorriest,” he risked saying, and immediately wished he hadn’t completed their routine, not only since it no longer earned him the least response from her but because of the roars of laughter from the television lounge. “Look, I just wanted to be sure you knew I wasn’t trying to catch you out, that’s all.”

“Tom.”

All at once her voice was sympathetic, the way it might have sounded at an aged relative’s bedside. “Ruth,” he said, and almost as stupidly, “What?”

“You might as well have been.”

“I might … you mean I might …”

“I mean you nearly did.”

“Oh.” After a pause as hollow as he felt he repeated the syllable, this time not with disappointment but with all the surprise he could summon up. He might have uttered yet another version of the sound, despite or even because of the latest outburst of amusement across the hall, if Ruth hadn’t spoken. “I’m talking to him now.”

“Talking to who?”

Before the words had finished leaving him Shone understood that she hadn’t been speaking to him but about him, because he could hear a man’s voice in her flat. Its tone was a good deal more than friendly to her, and it was significantly younger than his. “Good luck to you both,” he said, less ironically and more maturely than he would have preferred, and snagged the hook with the receiver.

A single coin trickled down the chute and hit the carpet with a plop. Amidst hilarity in the television lounge several women were crying “To who, to who” like a flock of owls. “He’s good, isn’t he,” someone else remarked, and Shone was trying to decide where to take his confusion bordering on panic when a bell began to toll as it advanced out of the dark part of the house.

It was a small but resonant gong wielded by the manager. Shone heard an eager rumble of footsteps in the television lounge, and more of the same overhead. As he hesitated, Daph dodged around the manager towards him. “Let’s get you sat down before they start their fuss,” she said.

“I’ll just fetch my shoes from my room.”

“You don’t want to bump into the old lot up there. They’ll be wet, won’t they?”

“Who?” Shone demanded, then regained enough sense of himself to answer his own question with a weak laugh. “My shoes, you mean. They’re the only ones I’ve brought with me.”

“I’ll find you something once you’re in your place,” she said, opening the door opposite the television lounge, and stooped lower to hurry him. As soon as he trailed after her she bustled the length of the dining room and patted a small isolated table until he accepted its solitary straight chair. This faced the room and was boxed in by three long tables, each place at which was set like his with a plastic fork and spoon. Beyond the table opposite him velvet curtains shifted impotently as the windows trembled with rain. Signed photographs covered much of the walls—portraits of comedians he couldn’t say he recognized, looking jolly or amusingly lugubrious. “We’ve had them all,” Daph said. “They kept us going. It’s having fun keeps the old lot alive.” Some of this might have been addressed not just to him, because she was on her way out of the room. He barely had time to observe that the plates on the Welsh dresser to his left were painted on the wood, presumably to obviate breakage, before the residents crowded in.

A disagreement over the order of entry ceased at the sight of him. Some of the diners were scarcely able to locate their places for gazing at him rather more intently than he cared to reciprocate. Several of them were so inflated that he was unable to determine their gender except by their clothes, and not even thus in the case of the most generously trousered of them, whose face appeared to be sinking into a nest of flesh. Contrast was provided by a man so emaciated his handless wristwatch kept sliding down to his knuckles. Unity and Amelia sat facing Shone, and then, to his dismay, the last of the eighteen seats was occupied by the woman he’d found in the bath, presently covered from neck to ankles in a black sweater and slacks. When she regarded him with an expression of never having seen him before and delight at doing so now he tried to feel some relief, but he was mostly experiencing how all the diners seemed to be awaiting some action from him. Their attention had started to paralyze him when Daph and Mr. Snell reappeared through a door Shone hadn’t noticed beside the Welsh dresser.

The manager set about serving the left-hand table with bowls of soup while Daph hurried over, brandishing an especially capacious pair of the white cloth slippers Shone saw all the residents were wearing. “We’ve only these,” she said, dropping them at his feet. “They’re dry, that’s the main thing. See how they feel.”

Shone could almost have inserted both feet into either of them. “I’ll feel a bit of a clown, to tell you the truth.”

“Never mind, you won’t be going anywhere.”

Shone poked his feet into the slippers and lifted them to discover whether the footwear had any chance of staying on. At once all the residents burst out laughing. Some of them stamped as a form of applause, and even Snell produced a fleeting grateful smile as he and Daph retreated to the kitchen. Shone let his feet drop, which was apparently worth another round of merriment. It faded as Daph and Snell came out with more soup, a bowl of which the manager brought Shone, lowering it over the guest’s shoulder before spreading his fingers on either side of him. “Here’s Tommy Thomson for you,” he announced, and leaned down to murmur in Shone’s ear. “That’ll be all right, won’t it? Sounds better.”

At that moment Shone’s name was among his lesser concerns. Instead he gestured at the plastic cutlery. “Do you think I could—”

Before he had time to ask for metal utensils with a knife among them, Snell moved away as though the applause and the coos of joy his announcement had drawn were propelling him. “Just be yourself,” he mouthed at Shone.

The spoon was the size Shone would have used to stir tea if the doctor hadn’t recently forbidden him sugar. As he picked it up there was instant silence. He lowered it into the thin broth, where he failed to find anything solid, and raised it to his lips. The brownish liquid tasted of some unidentifiable meat with a rusty undertaste. He was too old to be finicky about food that had been served to everyone. He swallowed, and when his body raised to protest he set about spooning the broth into himself as fast as he could without spilling it, to finish the task.

He’d barely signaled his intentions when the residents began to cheer and stamp. Some of them imitated his style with the broth while others demonstrated how much more theatrically they could drink theirs; those closest to the hall emitted so much noise that he could have thought part of the slurping came from outside the room. When he frowned in that direction, the residents chortled as though he’d made another of the jokes he couldn’t avoid making.

He dropped the spoon in the bowl at last, only to have Daph return it to the table with a briskness not far short of a rebuke. While she and Snell were in the kitchen everyone else gazed at Shone, who felt compelled to raise his eyebrows and hold out his hands. One of the expanded people nudged another, and both of them wobbled gleefully, and then all the residents were overcome by laughter that continued during the arrival of the main course, as if this was a joke they were eager for him to see. His plate proved to bear three heaps of mush, white and pale green and a glistening brown. “What is it?” he dared to ask Daph.