Monday, the eighth of December. Half past twelve, and two days to the burial.
Dot had walked from Cinder Row to Wharf Lane talking, and by the time she got there she had used up every plan she owned.
She'd try the front. She'd try the back. She would say she was from the Council, which she was, in a way, from the wrong end of it. She would say the son had sent her. She would cry. She could always cry, it was a gift, though she'd sooner have had a good singing voice. She had counted the railings all the way down Tanyard Road, and it had made no difference to the plans.
Wharf Lane ran downhill to the river, and by half past twelve on Monday everything in Lowmarsh that could no longer walk had run downhill after it.
They were waiting in a line down the middle of the cobbles. Handcarts, mostly, and a baker's van with its shelves out, and a pram with a hood, and on the pram's hood, under a tablecloth, a shape that was not a baby. Each had somebody beside it with a hand on the shafts, and nobody spoke. The fog came up off the water thick enough to lean on. It smelled of mud and rope and, very faintly, of varnish, and when Dot got to the end of the line and read the board chalked on Mr Gully's gate, she read it twice.
TUESDAY FULL. WEDNESDAY FULL. THURSDAY FULL. FRIDAY FULL. NEXT ACCOMMODATION MONDAY THE TWENTY-NINTH.
"They're not full," said a woman with a handcart, at her elbow, in a flat voice. "They're only dear."
The woman had a good black hat and a man's overcoat, and a brass-handled tin trunk on the cart, and one hand on it the whole time, flat, as you'd keep a hand on a dog that might get up.
"I've Friday," the woman said. "I paid for Friday. Mr Gully's very good. He gives you a stool."
"A stool?"
"To wait on. Up the yard, in the dry." She looked at the stool, empty, at the head of the line. "I had it Friday, for my knees, the whole afternoon. I don't like to take it twice."
Dot went in under the board.
The yard was the size of a tennis court and had been a tennis court once, before Mr Gully's father had found a better use for it. Now it was stacked to the sky with boards. Planks, elm and deal, in bundles. Wardrobe doors, laid flat, with their mirrors taken out and their little brass keyholes still on them. A dresser's back. Somebody's headboard, carved with roses. Men in leather aprons were sawing at it all under a tarpaulin, in the yellow light of paraffin, and a boy's voice somewhere beyond them was singing "The Old Rugged Cross" through his nose, to keep his hands company.
At the top of the yard, on a raised bit of concrete, there was a workshop with a tin roof, and one window in it lit from inside with a hard white light. It was the only electric bulb in Wharf Lane. Dot looked at it the way you look at a lit window on the other side of a river.
Beside the workshop door was a lean-to office with its own small window, and hung in the window, for the families to choose from, a card of coffin linings: white satin, cream, and one glossy purple that caught the white light and looked like a bruise. On the sill under it lay a tray of offcuts. On a nail by the door hung a wireless in a brown case, turned low, talking to itself about the weather.
Mr Gully was at the workshop door with a man in a good overcoat. Dot went up the yard, and stopped, because she was not meant to hear it and could not help hearing.
"—a cousin," the man was saying, low. "On the council. He said you'd be reasonable."
"Everyone's cousin is on the council, sir, this week," said Mr Gully. He was a round man of fifty-five in black, with a soft black hat and a face made for sympathy, and he wore it as some men wear a good collar. "I don't say no. I'd never say no. There's a schedule, you understand, and we're all bound by it. But I always say, where there's a consideration, there's room for an accommodation."
An envelope went from one hand to another. It seemed to do it by itself. Mr Gully turned his back to look at the sky, the way you do when someone has left something on the mantelpiece and you are too well brought up to notice.
"Thursday," said Mr Gully, to the fog. "Half past ten. We'll say no more."
The man went down the yard with his shoulders up, like a boy leaving the headmaster. Mr Gully turned round, rearranged his face, and saw Dot.
"Miss Amory," he said, and his face did something complicated and then put itself right. "Well. And what can we do for you on a day like this?"
"I'd like to see Mr Bracegirdle."
"Ah," said Mr Gully. He said it as a man says it to a woman who has asked for a rabbit. "I'm afraid we're not in a position. We don't do viewings, Miss, this week. It's a matter of hygiene, you understand. And we don't say coffin, this week. We say accommodation. It's kinder."
"I'm the registrar. He's on my book. I wrote him down."
"And on mine, Miss. And on the Council's." He studied her hair. "Is that a pencil?"
It was. It was in her hair, over her ear, where it had been since seven, and she had forgotten it.
"I'd be obliged if you'd not, in my yard," said Mr Gully. "It's nothing personal. It's only that a pencil, in a yard like this, is an instrument."
"I haven't written anything."
"No. But you might."
Dot took the pencil out and put it in her pocket, where it lay beside a sweet with fluff on it and the corner of a handkerchief, and the whole yard got a little easier. Mr Gully was afraid of her. Nobody was afraid of Dot, as a rule. Dogs sat on her feet.
"Mr Gully. On Saturday morning Stanley Bracegirdle was told a place had come free. On Wednesday, at ten. When there was nothing until after Christmas."
"So there was, so there was. A gentleman found himself otherwise accommodated." He spread his hands, and they were clean, and soft, and plump as a baby's. "It happens, Miss, in my trade. A family finds other arrangements. I'd never like to say more."
"And who paid?"
"The street had a whip-round."
"The street?"
"The Row. Poor Alfred was well thought of." He said it with a straight face, and Dot, who had heard four hundred people say four hundred things about him, kept hers as straight as she could. "A lady brought it Saturday morning. All in a lump. A lady from the street, on behalf of the street, and it was very moving. She was in tears."
"Which lady?"
"Well, now. I couldn't tell you, Miss. All you ladies look alike in a headscarf and a fog."
"But you must know her, if she was in tears, if she came in and paid. Which lady? The nurse? Mrs Sallis? Someone on the Row? Was she tall? Was she short? Was she—"
"A lady with half-crowns," said Mr Gully.
It came out quicker than the rest. He heard it, and his hands went into his pockets, and for a second the sympathy slid off the front of his face and there was a man behind it, working something out.
"A manner of speaking. Now, if you'll excuse me, I've a Wednesday to see to, and it isn't yours. Micky! Micky! Where's that boy? Sawdust!" He went off down the yard, at a fast walk, calling, and the sawyers looked up and looked down again. She saw him stop by a cart, and take off his hat to a woman there, and put it on again, and say something kind.
Dot stood in the middle of the yard with her hands in her pockets. She said, to nobody, "A manner of speaking," and a boy behind her said, "That's Mr Gully, Miss. He's got one for everything."
He was fifteen and looked twelve: a thin boy in a man's leather apron that came to his boots, with a cap pushed back and a face that had been washed that morning by somebody else. He had a broom. It hadn't touched the ground.
"Micky Sprott," said Dot. "Mr Gully's boy. You told me about Mr Bracegirdle, in the fog, with the coffin. You were frightened."
"I wasn't frightened."
"You were. So was I. I talked to the wall the whole way."
"I sing," said Micky, with dignity. "That's not the same." He put his back to the sawyers and brought the broom round in front of them both like a fence. "You want to see him."
"I want to see him. I want—I don't know what I want, I've been shut out of every door in Lowmarsh since Saturday and I'd like to stand on one side of a single one. He's in there? In the workshop?"
"On the trestles. Under the bulb." Micky glanced at her, and at her pocket. "I could tell you things. It's a shilling."
"A shilling!"
"It's the price," said Micky. "I've a mother."
Dot found the coin. Micky looked at it the way a dog looks at a biscuit held up, and made a little noise of despair. "After," he said. "When I've told you. Right. Not here. Back of the boards."
He took her round behind a stack of wardrobe doors as tall as a house. It was dark and cold in there, and smelled of cedar and other people's Sundays. Micky took down a Huntley and Palmers biscuit tin from a shelf hammered into the boards, and opened it, and tipped it out on the flat top of a small deal coffin: silver, rolling and ringing and settling in the sawdust.
"Saturday's," he said. "Mr Gully said put it by for the bank Tuesday."
He pushed the coins into a row with the flat of his hand, a small dirty hand with the nails bitten to the quick, and they went into columns of ten, four columns, big grey coins with the old King's head, each the size of a small biscuit.
"Forty," said Micky. "Like the rent."
"Like the rent?"
"Mum pays hers in them. Fridays. Everybody on the Row does. Mr Bracegirdle wouldn't have paper. He said paper had a way of going missing. So it's all silver." He pushed the fourth column straight. "It's a lot of silver for a collection, that's all I'm saying. Nobody on the Row's got silver to give away. They've got it to keep."
"Who brought them? The lady?"
"Didn't see. I was in the back with the sawdust. Mr Gully never lets me see the customers, I've got a face." He said it as one states a weather report. "She come Saturday, early. He shut the office door. And I heard her say a thing about elm, and Mr Gully said he'd see to it, and she went. He come out and did the Wednesday board himself."
"An elm."
"A proper one, he said. Not deal." Micky swept the coins back into the tin with his forearm, in one go, and shut the lid on them, and looked pleased. "He never puts them on the Council's account. That one's cash."
Dot said, half to the tin, "It isn't a whip-round, then. That's coppers and threepenny bits, every mother in the street giving up something. It doesn't come in forty of anything. It comes in a jam jar." She rubbed her forehead. "Somebody had forty of them, Micky. That's a person with a purse, it's not a street. And somebody wanted him in the ground on Wednesday enough to pay for it. And I keep saying it's a lady, and Mr Gully keeps saying it's a lady, and I don't—"
"He's got no watch," said Micky.
"Who?"
"Mr Bracegirdle. No watch come in with him." He had the tin under his arm and he was already looking at the yard, where Mr Gully's voice was going away and coming back. "Stanley asked me twice. Everybody comes with a watch or a ring, they always do. He'd not a thing. His clothes on the nail, and that's all. His dad's watch was gold. Stanley says. I said, I never seen it."
"I don't suppose it matters," said Dot. "The watch."
"He come up pink, Miss."
It was said so quietly that she thought at first she'd misheard.
"What did?"
"Mr Bracegirdle. Saturday, eight in the morning, when Mr Gully put the big light on to do his hands and face. That's the only one in the yard, the bulb. He had it put in for the hands. You can't do a man's hands by a candle, it's all yellow." Micky's voice was rapid now, and pleased with itself, and a little afraid. "We've had thirty through since Thursday and they're all the same. Grey. Grey as a bad tooth. That's the fog, Mr Gully says. And then Saturday the big light's on, and he's lying there, and his face and hands are the colour of a boiled ham in a shop."
Dot said, "Pink."
"I said, Mr Gully, look. And he says, it's the cold does it. The cold brings the blood up. He says it happens with the old ones, when they've been left in a cold room." Micky shrugged, in his apron, with his whole thin frame. "I never seen it before. Not that colour. He looked ever so well."
Something caught.
"What?" said Micky. "What is it?"
"I don't know. I had it. It's a form. It's a form I wrote."
"That's not much use."
"No, it isn't." Dot pressed the heels of both hands into her eyes, and saw colours. "It's gone. It was a family. It was somebody's wife, I think. She said—" She dropped her hands. "It's gone. I'm sorry. I can't get hold of it. It's like trying to remember a tune."
"I want my shilling," said Micky. "I told you all of it."
She gave him the shilling. He bit it, and put it in his apron.
"You're a funny lady," he said.
"I've been told."
"Miss Amory."
Mr Gully was standing at the end of the wardrobe doors with his hat off and his face on. He was a good deal quieter than he had been, and he had one hand on the edge of the top door as if he might have to hold it up.
"I came round to see if you'd lost yourself," said Mr Gully. "And I find you with my boy. In my yard. With my tin."
"It's not your tin," said Micky. "It's Huntley and Palmers'."
"Micky, go and find something to sweep."
Micky went. He went so fast that the broom fell over. Mr Gully waited until the sound of him was gone. The sympathy had come off his face, and what was left was a small tired man in black who had been up since five with four hundred people.
"Whatever you've got in your head," he said, "you'll be so good as to take it out of my yard. There's not a thing in it that's any business of the registrar's. I've people who can't be seen to, and I'm one man. Out. And stay out."
"Mr Gully, I only wanted to—"
"Out."
She went. She went down the yard between the sawyers, past the line of the handcarts, past the woman with the pram, and out under the board that said FULL, and the fog at the gate took her by the face like a wet cloth. She stood with her back against the gatepost and her heart going, and she said out loud, quite steadily, "Forty of them," and the fog said nothing back.
"Miss."
It came from the other side of the gatepost, at knee height. It was Micky, crouched down behind the post with his broom, with his cap over his eyes.
"Come at dusk," he whispered. "He goes to the Mission for his tea at five."