Saturday, the sixth of December. Twenty to five, and four days to the burial.
Winston Ferrar got as far as "Thursday night, about nine" before Mr Pike put the snuffer back over the second lamp.
"You can believe him walking," said Pike. "I'm not burning paraffin for it."
"Mr Pike. He's come all this way."
"From Cinder Row," said Pike. "Which has lamps of its own." He went into the back to try the bolt on the Drift door, and they heard him try it twice, and then the strongroom door, which he always tried three times. Dot got her coat off the peg and her scarf over her mouth and her gloves on the wrong hands, and changed them. Winston waited by the front door with his cap against his chest, looking at the blackboard with the deaths rubbed out on it, and didn't say anything.
Pike came back in his overcoat and hat, and let them out, and locked the front door behind them, and tried it.
"Six years a conductor," he said, to the keyhole. "I'd believe him about a passenger."
Then he turned his collar up and walked off towards Church Street, and the fog had the back of his coat in four steps and the rest of him in six.
"Is he always like that?" said Winston.
"No," said Dot. "Sometimes he's rude."
It was darker than it had been at ten to nine that morning, which she wouldn't have said was possible. The lamps on Tanyard Road had given up pretending. Each hung in its own yellow ball of fog, with a yard of wet pavement under it and the dark starting again at the edge. Winston put himself on the kerb side of her without asking, as if the kerb were part of his job. She let him.
"Thursday," she said. "Nine. Go on."
"Nine o'clock," said Winston, "because the wireless upstairs was doing the news. Mrs Ormerod on the top floor has her wireless so loud that the news comes down through my ceiling like the Lord through a cloud. I had been on the early turn. I had my boots off. I had my feet in a basin of hot water, which you don't need to know, Miss Amory, so forget my feet."
"I've forgotten them."
"Then he starts. Downstairs. The gas on the stairs is out. The mantle's been broken since Guy Fawkes and he won't have it mended, he says it's the tenants breathing on it that breaks them. So I open my door, and it's black as the inside of a hat, and I come out on the landing in my socks. He's on the half-landing below me. Shouting down the stairwell. I could have put my hand out and touched the top of his head if I'd wanted, and I did not want. Twenty minutes."
"You said. Twenty minutes, you're sure?"
"I timed it by the wireless. The news, and the weather, and half the dance band after. Kerb."
"What was he shouting?"
"Rent." Winston laughed, not happily. "Rent, the rent, rent. I've heard that word more times in that house than I heard amen in my grandmother's. I didn't take in the rest of it. You don't, when a man's roaring. You take in the size of it. They could have heard him in the cemetery, and some of them could have answered."
"At you?"
"At me, I supposed. A week ago it was at me. Who else does he shout at?" He shrugged inside the big coat. "So I stood there in my socks, waiting for him to turn round and come up to me. He didn't come up."
"What did he do?"
"Somebody answered him. Once. Low, down in the hall or the passage, I couldn't tell you which. I couldn't swear man or woman. Then the back door. Then he went into his room and shut it, and the house was quiet, and Mrs Ormerod's wireless played a waltz."
"Somebody," said Dot. "Well. There's people in that house."
"Step."
It was a step, up, where the pavement changed its mind outside the ironmonger's.
"Friday," she said. "Tell me Friday."
"Friday they took my bus off the road at the river end. Quarter past two. The driver couldn't see his own radiator, and he'd been walking in front of it with a flare since the bridge, and an inspector came down the line with a torch and said, 'That's it, gentlemen, walk.' So I walked. I was in at a quarter to three."
"From the river? In this?"
"I know every kerb from the river to Lowmarsh Green. I could walk it dead."
"And when you got in?"
"When I got in," said Winston, "there was his snake."
"His what?"
"His draught snake. A stocking full of rags." He made the shape of it with his hands in the fog: long, fat, sorry for itself. Every door in Lowmarsh had one this week, laid along the bottom to keep the fog out. Dot's own was a rolled bath towel and did nothing. "And it's lying out in the hall. Crooked. On the hall side of his door, like somebody'd put the cat out the wrong way."
Dot laughed before she could stop herself, and then felt bad, because the man was dead, and then felt better, because Winston had nearly laughed too.
"Perhaps he'd kicked it out going to the lavatory," she said.
"Perhaps. I'm not acquainted with his arrangements. I kicked it straight. Along the gap. Tidy. My mother and the Royal Air Force between them, Miss Amory, I can't walk past a thing that's lying crooked."
"Did you knock?"
"On that man's door, a Friday afternoon? No. I went up on my toes and thanked God for the quiet."
"What was the hall like? Was it cold, was there — I don't know. I don't know what I'm asking. I always ask."
"Dark. Fog in it thick as the street, because nobody shuts that front door properly, and a smell." He thought about it honestly. "No. Nothing. The whole house smells of the gasworks, it's the fog. Every house does."
"Then by teatime," Winston said, and his voice went flatter, "they were all at me. At five the nurse put her bag in my hands to carry up to the old lady, and on every stair she told me. His chest. Mrs Sallis on the basement steps, his chest. Stanley at his door, face like a boiled pudding, his chest, his bed."
"There's something else," said Winston. "And now I'll tell you the part you'll write in your book in red."
"I haven't got a book. I've got a register, and nobody writes in it in red, it's not allowed."
"Last Friday he came up for my rent. He put it up on me. Third time since the summer. And I told him, in the King's English, which I speak better than he did, what he could do with his rent book. And he said, 'You're out after Christmas, Ferrar. Out. There's plenty of your sort'll pay double for a room.'" Winston spread one hand, the other holding his cap on against nothing. "There. From my own mouth. Now you have it before Stanley gives it you."
"And did you shout back? On Thursday, I mean, when he was on the stairs, did you —"
Winston stopped dead under a lamp.
He stood in the yellow with the fog round him like wool round a bulb. Fog in his eyebrows, tiredness under his eyes, his mouth nowhere near a joke.
"You too?" he said. "Five minutes, and you're asking it too?"
Then he walked on, out of the light, and she had to trot to keep him.
"I'm sorry. Mr Ferrar. I'm sorry, it's not you, it's my mouth, it goes off without me, it's got no manners, it was brought up by wolves. I ask the milkman if he's happy. I asked a canon once, a real one, at a christening, whether he believed in it. I haven't got far enough to think."
He didn't say anything for three lamps.
At the fourth, he said, in quite a different voice, a loud, flat, carrying one: "Church Street. Mind the step."
At the corner of Church Street she put her glove on the railings and counted, and he let her count. It was forty-two from the corner to the Co-op, as it had been in the morning. He slowed down to it without being asked.
The old man who had been sitting on the Co-op step at ten to nine with his cap on his knees had gone. Somebody had come for him.
"There was a man dead on that step this morning," Dot said. "I said good morning to him."
"They've taken him?"
"They've taken him."
A bicycle came out of the fog with its lamp in front of it, at a walking pace, and stopped across the pavement. The young man behind it wore a cape and a chapped chin. He put the bicycle on its stand, unhooked the lamp, and held it up at Winston's face, close, the way a man reads a meter.
"Where are you off to, this time of night?"
It was ten past five. Winston looked at the lamp and not at the man. "Home," he said. "I've a rent book says so."
"Name?"
"He's with me," said Dot, much too loud. "I'm the registrar."
The lamp came round to her, which was worse. There was a white disc and, behind it, a face going the colour of a brick from the collar upward.
"Garrard, Miss," it said, as if she'd asked. He took the lamp down and wheeled the bicycle off the pavement to let them by, and the light went with him, lighting nobody's feet.
Winston walked on six paces. Then he put his cap straight, and turned, and told the cape in the fog, in a pleasant, carrying, conversational voice:
"Did I ever tell you, Constable, about the time I took the fare of a duke? Nineteen forty-nine, raining like Noah. He gave me a card with a crown on it for his fare. I said, 'Sir, London Transport does not take crowns.' He said, 'Do you know who I am?' I said, 'Sir, you are a gentleman going to Piccadilly for three ha'pence.' There was a lady with a goose. It paid more attention than the duke did."
The cape had stopped. It said nothing. Then the lamp swung round and went away the other way, up Church Street, and got smaller.
"Mind the kerb," said Winston.
She minded it. She was laughing, and so angry that her hands shook inside her gloves.
"Where do you live, Miss Amory?" said Winston. "So I know where I'm walking you back to."
They had come to the end of Flax Street. You couldn't see Flax Street, only the lamp on its corner and the name board under it.
"Flax Street. Under my landlady. Some devil walked in her back door yesterday while she was out and had her club money and her good gloves, so she's bolted everything in the house, including me."
"Then you're safe," said Winston. "I remember safe."
They crossed the end of Flax Street, and Dot started to talk, because it had been nearly a minute.
"Here's what I think," she said, "and you can tell me it's silly. If I'd done something, I'd come in first. Same as you. I'd come in with my cap on my chest at closing time and say it before anyone said it about me. That's the first thing I think."
Winston didn't stop this time. "And the second thing?"
"The second thing is that you'd never have told me about the rent if you had. Out after Christmas, from your own mouth. Nobody's that clever. I'm not, and I've been trying all day."
"And the third?" said Winston.
"The third took me longer. I believe you about the stairs. And the snake. And the chest, I believe you about the chest, I believed that before you came in, Stanley said it to me twice. So." She took a breath of fog, coughed, and went on. "So I want to see. I want to see his room. I want to hear them say it. Will they let me in?"
"They'll let you in the hall," said Winston. "It's a lodging house, the hall belongs to everybody and nobody sweeps it. After that it's up to Stanley. Or up to Mrs Sallis, and Mrs Sallis would let in the Devil if he'd tell her something she didn't know."
"Tell me who's where. I'm hopeless in a house I don't know, I go in the airing cupboard."
He told her, going down the last of the long road. The Sallises in the basement, Reg who heaved coal and Elsie who heaved everything else, and three children, and a copper they boiled the washing in and the children in after it. The old man on the ground floor, in the front room, with his kitchen behind and the passage out to the yard. Stanley on the first floor, the front. Winston on the first floor, the back, over the kitchen. And at the top of the house, Mrs Ormerod, eighty-four, who couldn't get out of her bed and wouldn't hear the last trump unless it came on the wireless.
"Cinder Row," Winston said, and turned her by the elbow, lightly, with two fingers, as you'd turn a lady on a platform.
It went off to the left, and downhill, and you could hear it before you could see anything of it: a cough behind every door, and every door on the pavement, and behind the doors a wet, breaking, patient coughing, as far down the street as the fog let sound go.
"It's not a street," said Winston. "It's a cough with houses on."
He found the doors for her, because the numbers had come off most of them in the war and nobody had put them back. The lamp outside number fourteen was lit, and in the ground-floor window of fourteen there was another lamp, an oil lamp on a table, and the curtain half across, and by it the shoulder of an overcoat cut for a bigger man. Somewhere behind them St Saviour's struck six, slow and muffled, each stroke arriving as if it had come the long way round.
Dot went up the step. She had her speech ready. She'd had it ready since the Co-op. It began Mr Bracegirdle, I owe you an apology, and went on, in her head, very well.
The door opened before she could knock. Stanley stood in it with the oil lamp held under his chin, so that his face was all underneath, nostrils and jaw and the dark of his eyes, and the light shook very slightly.
"You said the paper run out."