Sunday, the seventh of December. Quarter to nine. Three days to the burial.
On Sunday the office opened for the dead, by telephone order of Mr Marchbanks, who had not said please, because please was not in the memorandum.
The queue was there before the key was. Dot could hear it through the door while Pike worked the bolt: a low, wet, general noise, a cistern filling. When the door came open it came in with the fog and took the benches, forty people and not one of them talking. They coughed instead. They coughed in turns, politely, passing it along the rows, and between the coughs there was the small dry noise of paper, envelopes opened and shut, a doctor's certificate smoothed on a knee.
Her first was a woman in a brown hat pinned on with two pins, whose husband had died on the platform of a bus.
"He'd never sit," she said. "He said sitting was for women and cripples. So he's hanging on the pole, and the conductor says, 'Move right down, please,' and he doesn't, and then he does, all at once, sideways." She laid her hand flat on the mahogany as if the counter might do it too. "The conductor took his cap off. In the road. With a bus behind him going like a goose."
"What was his trade?" said Dot.
"Railway. Signalman, thirty years."
"Then I'll put signalman."
"Put signalman," said the woman.
She signed, with her tongue between her teeth. Dot pushed a barley sugar across the counter after the green form, and said it wasn't a bribe, it was a sweet, and the woman looked at it for some time and then put it in her glove, carefully, the way you'd put away a ticket.
The next was a man with his mother's certificate in one hand and, in the other, his own wedding ring, which he had brought in case they wanted proof of something. Nobody wanted proof of anything. Dot told him so twice. He put the ring back on with some difficulty and went on holding the finger.
After that it was a long line of the same, and Dot wrote it. She wrote it entry after entry, and between the entries she listened to the room.
St Saviour's struck nine, slow and muffled, and Stanley Bracegirdle came in without waiting his turn. The queue let him by. It was the armband.
He stood at the counter in the overcoat cut for a bigger man and looked at her, and he did not look as if he had slept. She hadn't either. She had lain awake going over a tap on her window and a lamp going up Flax Street, and at six she had given it up and gone out into the fog to be early for the dead. She had rehearsed this on the strongroom stairs and again in the yard, and now she found it had gone, all but the first line, so she said that.
"Mr Bracegirdle. I told you a lie yesterday."
"You said there weren't none."
"It hadn't. It hasn't. There's a whole drawer of it." She put both hands flat on the counter, where he could see them. "I'm holding the green form. That's all this is. No green form, no grave, that's the law. And Mr Marchbanks's rule, this fortnight, gives me one day to hold it if the doctor's paper troubles me. One day, so I can have a word with the doctor who signed it. And not a minute more. I haven't had my word, because his line's been engaged since Friday, so I'm going to go and get it. In person. Today."
Stanley heard it out. He did it as he did everything, from the beginning, without hurrying. She could see him lay each sentence down in his head and stand on it to see if it would bear.
"Then you'll give me the paper tomorrow."
"If Dr Kemp says he's sure, I shall hand it to you myself."
"And if he says it, and you don't."
"Then I can't stop Mr Marchbanks. He's the Superintendent Registrar. He can sign it over my head, and he will, and I'll not blame you for asking him."
"Gully's got Wednesday. Ten o'clock. If it goes, there's no other. He's said. Not till after Christmas." Stanley's hand moved on the counter, a small useless movement, as if the slot were a coin he might find. "He can't be in that room till Christmas."
"He won't be. I'm not going to let —" She heard it, and stopped, and began again, slower. "I'll do it today. I'll go straight there."
"I'll ask him," said Stanley. "I'll sign for it, and I'll go over your head. That's what I'll do."
"Sign for —"
Dot stopped.
The register lay open in front of her at the day's page, and above the day's page was yesterday's, with the last entry in her own hand: Bracegirdle, Alfred Edwin. Male. Aged sixty-eight. Retired greengrocer. It was all there, cause and address and informant. Underneath, where the informant put his name, there was a space the width of a man's hand, and nothing in it.
"I never gave you the pen," she said.
"You never," said Stanley.
"Yesterday. Twenty to eleven. I wrote the lot, and I said the paper had run out, and I never handed you the pen. You never signed. It's not an entry till the informant's signed, and I'm not going to hand you the pen today." She had gone red. She could feel it come up her neck, like water in a glass. "That's the truth. It's a mess, and it's mine, and I made it."
Stanley considered the book. He considered her.
"Monday, then."
"Monday."
"And I'll tell him you lied."
"Tell him. Tell him the whole of it. It's true." She held out her hand. "I'll need the doctor's paper, Stanley. The certificate stays with the office."
By rights it should have come to her from the surgery, with only the doctor's notice in the family's pocket; but the post had given up on Thursday, and every doctor in the borough was handing the certificate itself to the families to carry in.
He took it out of the inside of the overcoat, folded in four, and laid it on the mahogany, and flattened it with his whole hand, as he had on Saturday. Then he turned round and went out through the forty people, who moved their knees.
"He'll tell Mr Marchbanks I lied," said Dot.
"You did lie," said Pike. "You also came to the counter, before forty witnesses, and said so. That is not in any procedure I have. I shall have to think what to call it."
Pike took the certificate to the stamp and rocked the stamp down on it, and blotted the wet corner, and read it aloud as he blotted, in the voice he used for the shipping forecast.
"Bronchitis. Cardiac failure. Last seen alive by me, fifth December. Signed E. Kemp, M.B." He set it on the pile. "That's twenty for you, this morning."
"Twenty? I make twenty-one. There was the signalman."
"Nineteen," said Pike. "You have counted Mrs Pole twice. She came in at ten past with the wrong sister."
"She had two sisters."
"She had one. And the other was a hat."
Dot looked at the chalk on the blackboard and at the tally in her head, which was always right, and found that it wasn't. She rubbed out a stroke. Pike went back to his blotter. It was very hard to be furious with somebody who was correct about a hat.
By ten the day's volume was full. She took the keys and the hurricane lamp and went down to the strongroom, which was under the stairs and smelt of paste and cold paper, and stood on the box to reach the new volume on the top shelf. Then, because she was up there and her hand was already going, she took down 1940.
It slid. The whole volume came away from the shelf in her arms, too heavy, and she went off the box backwards and sat down hard, with the book across her knees and the lamp rocking on the floor. It opened where it always opened. But the spine, which had held together for twelve years, gave a small dry crack, like a knuckle, and the book fell open a little further than it ever had.
Entry two hundred and twelve. The steady clerical hand. Amory, Rose Ellen.
"Sorry," she said to it. "I'm sorry, I dropped you." She put her face nearer, and then her palm. It was cooler than the others, and stiffer, a page with no history. The rest of the volume had gone soft from twelve years of being turned to by nobody and dusted by everybody. This one crackled.
The page sat proud of its neighbours by the thickness of a hair. It had a slightly different grain, a fatter, whiter paper. It hadn't been sewn in with the others. It had been tipped in, stuck at its edge with a paste that had gone yellow, and where the crack had opened the gutter, there was a strip of something left behind. It was narrow as a finger, and brown as tea. It was the stump of a page that had been cut out with a blade.
There was writing on it. She turned the lamp. Along the stub ran the tails of words, the bottoms of letters and no more, in an ink that had gone browner than the rest. Two lines had left enough to read. One was the end of a word: inder R. The other, further down, was moved by L. Nea. Then the cut.
She read them three times.
"Inder R," she said to the stub. "Cinder Row. Cinder Row, Cinder Row, that's what it is, that's where she said she was going. Or it's Kinder Road, or Winder Rise, there's a Winder Rise in Clapham, I'm being a fool." She tried the other. "L. Nea. Neal. Neary. Neagle. It's a whole alphabet of Irish, Dorothea, stop it." Nothing answered, in this room, ever.
She got the pencil out of her hair and wrote the broken words on the back of a receipt, exactly as they lay, gaps and all, and she put the receipt in her cuff, where the number had been.
"Mr Pike," she said, without turning. He was in the door. She had known he was there for some time, by the lamplight getting bigger. "This isn't the page. This has been put in. Someone took the real one out, and wrote it out again on new paper, and stuck it back, and left this."
Pike came in. He held his own lamp up and bent and looked, and it took him longer than it needed to.
"Who kept this book in October nineteen-forty?" said Dot.
"Mr Marchbanks was deputy then," said Pike. "I was at the front counter. The war had a great many hands."
"That's not an answer."
"It's what I have."
He straightened, and he took the lamp with him, and went up the stairs. The strongroom went dark behind him, all but her own small light on the floor. She sat where she was, with her mother's line in her lap.
Rhys came at half past ten. She had the same navy cape and the same strong tired face as ever, and a clean apron showing under the hem, so that somebody had at least made her change. She had her bag on one arm and a flask under the other, and put the flask on the counter as if she'd been sent to deliver it.
"Tea. Drink that. Both of you, it's hot, don't make faces." She poured it into the cup that was the lid and pushed it at Pike. "Your chest is no better."
"It is the fog," said Pike.
"It's the fog and you. Drink."
The queue had thinned. Dot took the second cup, and the heat went straight into her hands and stayed in them, and she looked at Rhys over the rim, at the navy cape with its fog-beads and the tired face, and thought of a great many things to say. She said the first one.
"You told them to say his chest."
"I did." Rhys did not even pause. "Four hundred dead in this borough and a coroner working out of a church hall. You want that house full of men in boots? Leave the family be."
"He never coughed."
"He didn't cough in front of you." She unbuttoned her cape with one hand. "I was with him. Half past three. I had his hand. He went easy."
"And Stanley?"
"At the Coopers'. He came in at twenty to four, and I'd closed his father's eyes." She said it flatly. "He's a good boy, and he can't add. Leave him be."
"You say it the same as Stanley says it," said Dot. "Same words, same stop. Like a hymn."
Rhys took off the cape and folded it over her arm.
"I buried my mother out of number eleven in 'forty-seven, a long illness," she said. "There's nothing to see, and nothing to find. Leave it."
And Dot, whose mouth had never once waited for her, said it, all of it, at speed, in a low voice with her face getting hotter, in front of Pike, who was drinking his tea with his eyes on the ceiling.
"I'll tell you what I think, and you can tell me it's silly. I think you were with him. I think he was old, and in pain, and he'd never have said. I think somebody with a bag like yours, who was good, and kind, and tired, and had a little brown bottle — I think you've got morphine in there, haven't you, you must have, for the dying. And I think you gave it him. To help. And I think it was a kindness, and it's what you'd tell a house to say, and I'd have done the same, God help me, I'd have done —"
She had looked at the bag. She hadn't meant to. It stood open on the counter by the flask, with its mouth gaping: a roll of lint, a brown bottle with a chemist's label that said Camphorated Oil in copperplate, a flat tin, a black case the length of a pencil.
Rhys had gone white. It went from the collar upward, all at once, as if a blind had been pulled down on her face, and Dot stopped talking. Then the red came in after it, hard, along the cheekbones.
She shut the bag. The catch snapped like a small bone.
"Don't you ever look in my bag again," said Rhys. "There's things in there that'd stop a horse, and they're for people. They're not for your nose."
She got her cape on, and got her arm through the strap, and went out. The door swung back on its spring and hung there, letting the fog come in and go.
The flask stood on the counter. Nobody touched it.
"Did you see her face?" said Dot.
"I was looking at the ceiling," said Pike.
"You do that."
"It has a very good crack in it. It's the shape of the Thames."
"Mr Pike, she went white."
"I saw her hat," said Pike. "Which was straight."
Dot's voice, when she found it, had gone up. She brought it down. "I'm going to say where I was on Friday, Mr Pike, because I can't stand here and do nothing, and I'll do it the way I do everything. Where was I at half past three? Here. With soup in me. You brought it at dinnertime."
"Mrs Ruddock's soup," said Pike. "I passed her door."
"And I was down in the strongroom for a new volume when she came for her flask. I heard St Saviour's strike half past two through the grating. And when I came up she was on that radiator telling you your muffler was a disgrace, and she sat there till four."
"About twenty to," said Pike. "In at the front, in a temper about Mr Gully and her step. The news was long over. I was looking at my muffler."
"And the lamp outside went out at four. So at that hour I was eating soup, and Nurse Rhys was holding his hand, and I can't prove a thing by soup."
She picked up the cup she'd put down and found it had gone cold, and drank it anyway.
"I can't prove a thing by anything," she said. "I've got a brown bottle and a nurse going white. That's what I've got. If I wrote it on a form they'd send it back."
She rang Dr Kemp's surgery on the office telephone, because it was there. It was engaged. She rang the operator, who said every doctor in south London was engaged, dear, and would she like to try Tuesday.
Pike went behind the counter and began to rule the next day's page. He did it very slowly.
"Mr Marchbanks telephoned while you were downstairs," he said.
"Oh, God."
"He'll telephone again at one. He said" — and here Pike put down the ruler — "and I quote, 'She will have spoken to the doctor.'"
Dot took the key out of the GREEN cabinet, where it had been all morning, and locked it. Then she unlocked it and looked in at the forms, and locked it again.