Miss Brewster

Miss Brewster is the head nurse at the almshouse who shows the narrator to the room in which his father lays dying. The narrator's description of her evokes images of death which express his anxieties about his dying father: "She is old and haggard. And she looks as if she has looked once too often on the face of death; and now she herself resembles a half-dead, dried-out flying fish, wrapped in the grease-proof paper of her nurse's uniform."

Cynthia

Cynthia is the narrator's girlfriend. She is of a significantly wealthier family and higher socioeconomic class than the narrator. Her class status is symbolized by her Jaguar sports car. When the narrator tells her that his father is dying, she laughs and says she didn't even know he had a father. Cynthia promises the narrator that she will be at the airport to see him off when...