Sunday, the seventh of December. Half past eleven. Three days to the burial.
The street door opened, and the fog came in first, and then Mrs Ruddock, in her good hat.
She had her prayer book in one hand and her handbag in the other and the look of somebody who had been kept standing through a very long sermon by a very small man. She shut the door with her heel.
"Mr Pike," she said. "You've gone without it again."
"Without what?" said Pike.
She opened the handbag and took out a grey woollen muffler and shook it once, like a flag. Then she came round the end of the counter, which was not allowed, and put it round his neck. Pike stood with his chin up and his hands at his sides and let it be done to him, like a horse at the farrier's.
"That is not my good one," he said.
"It's the one you left."
Dot was on her knees behind the counter, hunting for her second glove, and she talked into the drawer. "It's the hill, Mrs R. I've got to see Dr Kemp, I've got till twelve, he's the only doctor in London who's not engaged, and I've been ringing him since yesterday dinnertime and the operator's stopped answering, she just breathes."
"On the hill? In this? On the Lord's day?"
"I've a right to a word. I've a whole day of Mr Marchbanks's say-so and it's nearly spent." She found the glove. It was in her other glove. "I'll go by the road."
"You'll take my torch." Mrs Ruddock had it out of her coat pocket already and was holding it out by the wrong end. "Two and eleven, that torch, at Woolworth's, and the battery's new Tuesday. It's a good torch, and I want it back. I've had one thing walk out of my kitchen this week."
"Mrs R, you're an angel."
"I'm a woman with a torch," said Mrs Ruddock. "Mr Pike, don't stand in that draught."
The door went, and the fog swung in, and she was gone. She had been in the office two minutes by the clock. Dot got her arm through the strap of her bag and the torch in her fist and stood up, and only then found she'd been left with the whole of a sentence she'd meant to say and hadn't.
"Which way's the road, do you think?" she said.
"You'll not get to the hill and back by the railings," said Pike. He was straightening his muffler, which had come out of its tucks. "Not by twelve. You would be there for one and back for Tuesday. Go by the Drift."
"The Drift? That's the alley behind the Row."
"Behind the Row, and the tanyard, and Flax Street, and this office. Out our back gate, turn left, and keep the wall on your left hand the whole of the way. Three minutes, and you are at the backs of the Row. Number fourteen's yard is the one with the lock-up, then number eleven, then number nine, then two more and you are at the end of Flax Street. There's a flight of steps on your right. At the top of the steps is Tanyard Hill." He tucked the ends in. "Don't talk to the wall."
"It's half a mile, that alley."
"Four hundred and forty yards. I paced it in 1937."
"What for?"
"There was a dispute about a right of way." He looked at the clock. "Go."
The Drift was a cinder path, and in the fog it was a cinder path in the dark inside a bag.
She went out by the back gate, which stuck, and turned left, and put her left hand on the wall, and her torch in her right. The torch lit her own glove. It lit the sleeve of her coat to the elbow, and a pale, close, useless yellow ball of moving grit in front of her nose, and it lit nothing else in the world. She turned it off and it was the same. She turned it on again, for company.
"Left hand on the wall," she said. "Right hand on the torch. Nose on nothing. I have never in my life been so well organised."
The wall was brick, and greasy, and after forty paces it stopped, and there was a gap, and a wet breath of coal smoke and a smell of privies and something burnt, and the wall began again, lower, and it was a different kind of brick. She came into a wide place where the fog hung differently. It was the tanyard, or what the bombs had left of it, a great flat pit of nothing with a broken wall at the far side that you couldn't see, and she knew it was there by the way the cold came off it.
There were voices. That was the worst of the fog and always had been: nobody had a body. She passed a woman telling somebody to come in and get his tea, and neither of them was there. She passed a wireless playing a hymn, loud, out of the sky. A man coughed at her elbow, a big wet cough, and she said good morning to it and it did not answer.
Back gates came, one after another, each with its own stink and its own dog. Then the wall on her left turned into the backs of houses, and she knew where she was, because a girl's voice came over the top of a yard wall, high and cross and one she'd heard yesterday, telling somebody to get in, get in this minute, Mum said. Cinder Row. The backs of it. And above it, from nowhere, a small yellow window with a lamp in it, right at the top of the house, and a wireless going full blast behind the glass.
Number fourteen's yard went by on her left as a gap in the wall with the gate hanging off it. A copper chimney. A coal-hole. A low brick lock-up with a tin door and a padlock the size of a fist. She went past it with her hand on the bricks, counting, because it was that or think, and got to eleven and lost it and started again.
Somebody was coming up behind her.
It was a squeak first, and then a shape. The squeak was a bad wheel. The shape resolved itself, at about the length of her arm, into a boy in a cap too big for him, pushing a handcart, and on the handcart, tied with rope, a small pale box no longer than a drawer. He came level on her right, on the open side of the path, and had to slow down to get by her.
"Mind your feet, Miss," said the boy. "It's the Row's, it's got right of way."
"I know that box," said Dot. Her voice came out odd. "I wrote her down. Christine Tapsell. I put the C-H."
"Then you know it's a small one." The boy stopped, and she could hear him breathing. He was about fifteen. He had the flat, quick, frightened voice of someone who would rather talk than be alone with what was on his cart. "Micky Sprott, Miss. Mr Gully's, Wharf Lane. I'm to take her round Number Nine so her mum can see she's got a lid."
"That's very kind."
"It's Mr Gully's. He's kind at the price." He shifted his feet. He did not go. "I'd sooner it was you than the copper. They come down the Drift asking things. You're the one who's been round about the old man."
"Have I?"
"Everybody says. Mr Gully says. He's been singing since Saturday, Mr Gully. In the workshop. Hymns. He never sings, and now he's singing, and I said to Mr Gully, that's a lot of singing for a man that's lost a good customer, and he said, Micky, the Lord giveth." Micky laughed, a high, short, wrong laugh. "Well, he come in our yard Thursday teatime, the old man. About five. And he said he'd not take Mr Gully's ten bob no more, not a penny, and on Monday he'd tell the council what Mr Gully charges for a place. In the queue, you know. And Mr Gully said, over my dead body." He gave the handcart a shake. "Well. It were his, weren't it."
The laugh went out of the fog in front of her and did not come back.
"Wharf Lane, Miss," said Micky, and the cart went on ahead of her, one wheel screaming, and he was a squeak, and then a rumour, and then there was the wall.
Dot stood with her hand on it.
"Over my dead body," she said to the brick. "That's what he said, Thursday teatime. And on Friday afternoon somebody's dead, and on Saturday Mr Gully finds a slot." She shone the torch at nothing. "He'd sell a slot to the Pope, and he said it in front of a boy. That's not a thing you say if you've done it. Is it? That's exactly what you say."
The wall did not say. She went on. She had two hundred and something yards to do and no more idea than the wall.
Tanyard Hill was a great many steps and a cold, damp, iron rail, and at the top of them, out of the fog as it were by accident, a tall soot-black house with a brass plate and a card in the window that said SURGERY 11–12 and under it, in pencil, PLEASE DO NOT KNOCK AFTER.
She knocked before.
The waiting room was a front parlour with all the chairs against the walls. There were fifteen or sixteen people in it and none of them looked up. Nobody had a book. A man in a railwayman's jacket sat with his eyes shut and his hands on his knees and breathed with a sound like tearing cloth. Beside him a girl held a baby up to her shoulder, and the baby hiccupped, at long intervals, as though it were being wound. The whole room coughed. It did it in the same order as the queue at the office, politely, one after another.
A woman at a table with a list looked up.
"It's twenty to twelve," she said. "He'll not see anyone new."
"I'm not new. I mean, I'm not ill." Dot put the torch on the table. "I'm the Deputy Registrar of Births and Deaths for Lowmarsh. It's about a certificate. I've a right to a word."
The woman regarded her with an expression of enormous weariness and went through a door.
Dr Kemp came out of it to fetch her, which she had not expected. He was a big man gone loose, like a coat on a chair, in a waistcoat with a stain and his tie under one ear, and he had a bun in one hand, from which he took a bite as he came, as if it were a duty. His face was the colour of putty. His eyes had gone in.
"Consulting room," he said. "Two minutes. Mrs Faraday, no one else."
The consulting room had a couch, and a desk, and a skeleton in the corner with a cigarette in its teeth, which somebody had put there and he had not had the energy to remove. Kemp went behind the desk and stood.
"Thirty," he said. "Thirty certificates. Since Friday. Do you know what that is?"
"I know, Dr Kemp. I've been writing them down."
"Then you know."
"It's the one I came about. Alfred Bracegirdle. Fourteen Cinder Row." She'd got it ready; she'd said it on the steps. She said it slowly, all the way through, without stopping, which for her was hard. "If a certificate troubles me I can hold the green form one day and have a word with the doctor. That's the rule. That's now. That's me. I'd like to know how you were sure. Because his son's told the same story to everybody, and his lodger says the whole house has been taught it, and you signed bronchitis, and I need to ask you if you examined him."
The bun stopped an inch from his mouth.
"I saw him," said Kemp. "From the." He shut his mouth and started again. "I saw him."
"From where?"
"In bed. Lamplight. The nurse was there." He put the bun down on the blotter, carefully, as though it had gone off. "I stood in the — I was at the — he was in his bed. Yes."
"Was he cold?"
"Cold." Kemp looked at the skeleton. "It was Friday. Half past four. I'd done twelve. I'd been up since Wednesday. The nurse told me his chest, and his chest was — he had a chest. I've known his chest for years. And a window open. Open, in a fog, Miss Amory, fog coming in over the floor. She'd opened it. For the soul, she said." He made a sound that was nearly a laugh. "Welsh nonsense."
"To let it out?"
"So they say. Chapel. My wife's mother." He rubbed his eyes with the back of the hand that had the bun-grease on it. "I don't say a thing against it. I couldn't get to my car."
"Your car?"
"In the lock-up in the yard of that house. Since Thursday. I go out on my feet. Can't take it out in this, can't see the bonnet." He turned his head, and it was nearly the look of a man at a bus stop who has been asked the time. "What I write is what he died of. That is what it is. It's my name on it."
"But if it turned out —"
"If one's wrong they'll open them all."
"Dr Kemp, I only —"
"All of them." His voice had gone up, and cracked. "Do you understand? I've signed since Friday, and every one of them's the same. Bronchitis. Cardiac failure. Do you know what they do when they open one? They open the next. They'll have me in front of the — they'll strike me off, Miss Amory, and this street will have no doctor at all. Not one. Not a bad one. None."
The skeleton grinned round its cigarette. Somewhere below, in the waiting room, the baby hiccupped again.
"I'm not saying you're wrong," said Dot. "I'm saying I don't know. I'm asking."
"Sign the form, Miss Amory," said Kemp. He said it in a slow, tired, level voice. "Sign it and go home, or I'll have your job by Tuesday. I mean that. I've the Superintendent's number in my head and I've rung it once already."
He picked up the bun. He looked at it. He put it down again, and held the door for her, and she went out through the fifteen people, who watched her go without moving their heads.
"Why would you open a window in a fog?" said Dot.
She was back on the Drift, which was worse in that direction because now she knew what was in it. She had the wall on her right hand, and the torch, which she was holding the wrong way round and lighting her own chin.
"Say you're the nurse. It's Friday, it's black, it's four o'clock, you've a dead man. You'd shut everything, you'd stuff the cracks, you'd put the snake back across the door and keep the cold out. You open a window in a fog when you want something out of a room. Not a soul. Something." She stopped. "Death. Death has a smell. If you'd been dead an hour in a warm room, with the fire on. Or a bedpan. Or drink." She was walking again. "Drink! There we are. He'd been at the drink. She opens the window because the room stinks like the Coopers' Arms on a Saturday, and she doesn't want the son to know his dad was drunk on the day he died. That's a kindness. That's very Nurse Rhys."
"Except nobody's said he drank. Not Stanley, not the Sallises. I made it up because it was tidy." She hit the wall with the flat of her glove. "I'm wrong. Right. I'm wrong, and I'll say why. I have a man with a window and a nurse with a lie and a doctor with a bun, and I've stood in a fog and I've got nothing. Nothing except a boy on a cart."
"That's what he said," she told the fog, and the fog gave it back to her in the wet cough of somebody's yard. "Well, then it's Mr Gully, isn't it. Thursday teatime he says it. Friday teatime somebody's dead. Monday he was going to be told on. And Saturday morning he's singing hymns."
She went by nine, and eleven, and a lamp burning at the top of the house, and the wireless up there still playing to nobody. She went by the lock-up. She went by the tanyard. She said it to the fog once more, very quietly, so that only the fog could hear how it sounded in her mouth.
The office's back gate came out of the murk at the end of her hand, and it was open.
Pike stood in it. He had the muffler on. He was holding out the telephone receiver at the full length of its cord, with the other hand held flat against the mouthpiece, and the cord ran out of the back office door across the yard and stretched as taut as a clothes line. He had been standing like that, she thought, for some time.
"It's Mr Marchbanks," he said.