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opinion of herself. But she wasn’t the first in Henekey’s. ‘Hullo, you old ghost,’ she said, and the sombre thin man in black with a bowler hat sitting beside a wine barrel said, ‘Oh, forget it, Ida. Forget it.’
    ‘You in mourning for yourself?’ Ida asked, cocking her hat at a better angle in a mirror which advertised White Horse: she didn’t look a day over forty.
    ‘My wife’s dead. Have a Guinness, Ida?’
    ‘Yes. I’ll have a Guinness. I didn’t even know you had a wife.’
    ‘We don’t know much about each other, that’s what it is, Ida,’ he said. ‘Why, I don’t even know how you live or how many husbands you’ve had.’
    ‘Oh, there’s only been one Tom,’ Ida said.
    ‘There’s been more than Tom in
your
life.’
    ‘You ought to know,’ Ida said.
    ‘Give me a glass of Ruby,’ the sombre man said. ‘I was just thinking when you came in, Ida, why shouldn’t we two come together again?’
    ‘You and Tom always want to start again,’ Ida said. ‘Why don’t you keep tight hold when you’ve got a girl?’
    ‘What with my little bit of money and yours—’
    ‘I like to start something fresh,’ Ida said. ‘Not off with the new and on with the old.’
    ‘But you’ve a kind heart, Ida.’
    ‘That’s what you call it,’ Ida said, and in the dark depth of her Guinness kindness winked up at her, a bit sly, a bit earthy, having a good time. ‘Do you ever have a bit on the horses?’ she asked.
    ‘I don’t believe in betting. It’s a mug’s game.’
    ‘That’s it,’ Ida said. ‘A mug’s game. You never know whether you’ll be up or down. I like it,’ she said with passion, looking across the wine barrel at the thin pale man, her face more flushed than ever, more young, more kind. ‘Black Boy,’ she said softly.
    ‘Eh, what’s that?’ the ghost said sharply, snatching a glance at his face in the White Horse mirror.
    ‘It’s the name of a horse,’ she said, ‘that’s all. A fellow gave it me at Brighton. I was wondering if maybe I’d see him at the races. He got lost somehow. I liked him. You didn’t know whatever he’d be saying next. I owe him money, too.’
    ‘You saw about this Kolley Kibber at Brighton the other day?’
    ‘Found him dead, didn’t they? I saw a poster.’
    ‘They’ve had the inquest.’
    ‘Did he kill himself?’
    ‘Oh, no. Just his heart. The heat knocked him over. But the paper’s paid the prize to the man who found him. Ten guineas,’ the ghost said, ‘for finding a corpse.’ He laid the paper bitterly down on the wine barrel. ‘Give me another Ruby.’
    ‘Why,’ Ida said. ‘Is that picture the man who found him? The little rat. That’s where he went to. No wonder he didn’t need his money back.’
    ‘No, no, that’s not
him
,’ the ghost said. ‘That’s Kolley Kibber.’ He took a little wooden pick out of a paper packet and began to scrape his teeth.
    ‘Oh,’ Ida said. It was like a blow. ‘Then he wasn’t trying it on,’ she said. ‘He
was
sick.’ She remembered how his hand had shaken in the taxi and how he had implored her not to leave him, just as if he had known he was going to die before she came back. But he hadn’t made a scene. ‘He was a gentleman,’ she said gently. He must have fallen there by the turnstile as soon as she had turned her back, and she had gone on down without knowing into the ladies. A sense of tears came to her now in Henekey’s; she measured those polished white steps down to the wash-basins as if they were the slow stages of a tragedy.
    ‘Ah well,’ the ghost said gloomily, ‘we’ve all got to die.’
    ‘Yes,’ Ida said, ‘but he wouldn’t’ve wanted to die any more than I want to die.’ She began to read and exclaimed almost at once: ‘What made him walk all that way in that heat?’ For he hadn’t dropped at the turnstile: he’d gone back all the way they’d come, sat in a shelter. . . 
    ‘He’d got his job to do.’
    ‘He didn’t say anything to