Breakfast, in this house, is not so much a meal as a daily act of charity, of which I am a minor and frequently confused beneficiary.

My wife rises before me, and by the time I reach the kitchen she has already fed, or is feeding, a congregation of creatures whose number exceeds the available chairs and, I suspect, the available floor. There is a great deal of bending and murmuring. Bowls are set down in a sequence she alone understands. Each bowl is addressed by name. I know none of the names, and have given up asking, because to ask is to be told a name I will not retain, attached to a creature I will not afterwards be able to tell from the others.

This morning she informed me, with some concern, that someone named Mortimer was off his food. I expressed sympathy, which cost me nothing, since I have never established who or what he is, and was therefore able to grieve for him in the abstract, as one grieves for a stranger in the newspaper.

She moved about the kitchen narrating the night’s news of the town — who had quarrelled, who was ailing, whose son had at last written — and I followed perhaps one sentence in four, partly because I was not yet fully awake and partly because the cast of the town, like the cast of the kitchen, exceeds my powers of retention. I have come to think of my wife as the one person who holds the entire register of the living, human and animal, in a single warm and tireless head, while I sit at the edge of it holding a fork.

A plate arrived before me. I did not see it dispatched; it simply appeared, the way the furniture appears in new positions, by a process I am not invited to witness. I began to eat, and the eating was good, and for a little while I was at peace.

Something warm leaned against my leg beneath the table. By slow degrees I lowered a single rasher of bacon, and it was accepted by a mouth I never saw, belonging to an animal I could not have identified under oath. I felt, briefly, useful.

It was only when my wife turned, looked at my plate, and went very still, that I understood I had eaten something I ought not to have. She did not say whose it had been. She keeps a particular silence for these occasions, more eloquent than speech, and I have learned not to inquire into it, on the grounds that the answer can only make the meal sit worse.

I do not know, in the end, whose breakfast I ate this morning. I know only that I was fed, at a table I did not lay, by a woman tending a household I cannot fully count, among creatures who tolerate me chiefly because I am from time to time the source of bacon. It is not a bad thing, to be one more creature she feeds. I could not swear to deserving it.