Some Superman ought to invent a ray that would stop them all simultaneously. Then people wouldn't send you a lot of fool nonsense when you were flat on your back, and bossy bits of Meissen wouldn't expect you to read them.

He heard the door open, but did not stir himself to look. He had turned his face to the wall, literally and metaphorically.

He heard someone come across to his bed, and closed his eyes against possible conversation. He wanted neither Gloucestershire sympathy nor Lancashire briskness just now. In the succeeding pause a faint enticement, a nostalgic breath of all the fields of Grasse, teased his nostrils and swam about his brain. He savoured it and considered. The Midget smelt of lavender dusting powder, and The Amazon of soap and iodoform. What was floating expensively about his nostrils was L'Enclos Numéro Cinq. Only one person of his acquaintance used L'Enclos Number Five. Marta Hallard.

He opened an eye and squinted up at her. She had evidently bent over to see if he was asleep, and was now standing in an irresolute way – if anything Marta did could be said to be irresolute – with her attention on the heap of all too obviously virgin publications on the table. In one arm she was carrying two new books, and in the other a great sheaf of white lilac. He wondered whether she had chosen white lilac because it was her idea of the proper floral offering for winter (it adorned her dressing-room at the theatre from December to March), or whether she had taken it because it would not detract from her black-and-white chic. She was wearing a new hat and her usual pearls; the pearls which he had once been the means of recovering for her. She looked very handsome, very Parisian, and blessedly unhospital-like.

'Did I waken you, Alan?'

'No. I wasn't asleep.'

'I seem to be bringing the proverbial coals,' she said, dropping the two books alongside their despised brethren. 'I hope you will find these more interesting than you seem to have found that lot. Didn't you even try a little teensy taste of our Lavinia?'

'I can't read anything.'

'Are you in pain?'

'Agony. But it's neither my leg nor my back.'

'What then?'

'It's what my cousin Laura calls "the prickles of boredom".'

'Poor Alan. And how right your Laura is.' She picked a bunch of narcissi out of a glass that was much too large for them, dropped them with one of her best gestures into the washbasin, and proceeded to substitute the lilac. 'One would expect boredom to be a great yawning emotion, but it isn't, of course. It's a small niggling thing.'

'Small nothing. Niggling nothing. It's like being beaten with nettles.'

'Why don't you take up something?'

'Improve the shining hour?'

'Improve your mind. To say nothing of your soul and your temper. You might study one of the philosophies. Yoga, or something like that. But I suppose an analytical mind is not the best kind to bring to the consideration of the abstract.'

'I did think of going back to algebra. I have an idea that I never did algebra justice, at school. But I've done so much geometry on that damned ceiling that I'm a little off mathematics.'

'Well, I suppose it is no use suggesting jigsaws to someone in your position.