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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.

“What we always have,” she said as if to a child or to someone who’d reverted to that state. “It’s what we need to keep us going.”

The heaps were of potatoes and vegetables and some kind of mince with an increased flavor of the broth. He did his utmost to eat naturally, despite the round of applause this brought him. Once his innards began to feel heavy he lined up the utensils on his by no means clear plate, attracting Daph to stoop vigorously at him. “I’ve finished,” he said.

“Not yet.”

When she stuck out her hands he thought she was going to return the fork and spoon to either side of his plate. Instead she removed it and began to clear the next table. While he’d been concentrating on hiding his reaction to his food the residents had gobbled theirs, he saw. The plates were borne off to the kitchen, leaving an expectant silence broken only by a restless shuffling. Wherever he glanced, he could see nobody’s feet moving, and he told himself the sounds had been Daph’s as she emerged from the kitchen with a large cake iced white as a memorial. “Daph’s done it again,” the hugest resident piped.

Shone took that to refer to the portrait in icing of a clown on top of the cake. He couldn’t share the general enthusiasm for it; the clown looked undernourished and blotchily red-faced, and not at all certain what shape his wide twisted gaping lips should form. Snell brought in a pile of plates on which Daph placed slices of cake, having cut it in half and removed the clown’s head from his shoulders in the process, but the distribution of slices caused some debate. “Give Tommy Thomson my eye,” a man with bleary bloodshot eyeballs said.

“He can have my nose,” offered the woman he’d seen in the bath.

“I’m giving him the hat,” Daph said, which met with hoots of approval. The piece of cake she gave him followed the outline almost precisely of the clown’s sagging pointed cap. At least it would bring dinner to an end, he thought, and nothing much could be wrong with a cake. He didn’t expect it to taste faintly of the flavor of the rest of the meal. Perhaps that was why, provoking a tumult of jollity, he began to cough and then choke on a crumb. Far too eventually Daph brought him a glass of water in which he thought he detected the same taste. “Thanks,” he gasped anyway, and as his coughs and