‘I am dying,’ said William Wagner Bird on the night of August 13^th, turning his face towards the wall for privacy, sighing at the little bunches of forget-me-not on the wallpaper. He felt his body a burden in the bed, a thing he did not know. His feet seemed far away, and it came to him abruptly that he was aware of his feet in an intellectual way only. It passed through Mr Bird’s mind that physical communication with his nether half was forever gone.

‘I am going out feet first,’ said Mr Bird, a wit to the end. ‘My legs have entered their eternal rest. Nurse Clock, I would have you record all this and pass it on to a daily newspaper. Nurse Clock, have you pen and paper?’

The nurse, seated some distance away, reading a magazine, read the message on the printed page: Bingo and whist drives below stairs at Balmoral. ‘I am writing out your very word,’ she said.

‘Then listen to this,’ said William Wagner Bird, and did not ever finish his sentence.

‘Oh, God in heaven,’ murmured Nurse Clock, feeling the presence of death and feeling thus that the invocation was proper. Only at Balmoral do they share a room, she read, and rose with that thought in her mind and covered the face of a man she had known for many a year and had disliked both in sickness and in health.

The gloom gathered in the room as Nurse Clock set about her tasks and saw to it that certain decencies were observed. She did not glance again at the stretched figure on the bed, but worked briskly in her matter-of-fact way, packing away her personal belongings in her nurse’s bag and tidying those of her late patient. The time was nine o’clock. ‘I have been on the go,’ said Nurse Clock aloud.

So it was that William Wagner Bird, a man of sixty-seven who had never married, died in the boarding-house on August 13^th. Later his passing was recorded in a formal way only, by relevant authorities; for like others in the boarding-house, Mr Bird had neither family nor personal ties. His parents had died five years back, in the same month, and had between them left him debts amounting to ninety pounds. He in his earlier lifetime had been in the travel business, a salesman of tickets to faraway places.