For, as we can now see, it only causes lots and lots of worry and trouble to other people.’ He beamed, a fat youngish man in a white coat not too clean, with the unhealthy complexion of a sweet-eater. ‘For example, it didn’t do our poor old landlady’s heart any good, did it? She had to run up the stairs and then down the stairs’ – he illustrated this with up-and-then-down-the-air wiggling fingers – ‘and she was most agitated when the ambulance finally got there. We must consider others, mustn’t we? The world wasn’t made just for us and nobody else.’ Enderby cringed from the nanny-like substitution of first plural for second singular. ‘Everybody gives trouble when they’re dying,’ he mumbled. ‘That can’t be avoided.’ ‘Ah,’ pounced Dr Greenslade, ‘but you didn’t die. When people die in the normal decent way they give a normal decent leisurely kind of trouble which harms no one. But you were just caught more or less in the act of sailing off. That meant rushing about and worry for everybody, particularly for your poor old landlady.
