Tuesday, the ninth of December. Five to three. One day to the burial.
Dot ran.
She ran down the step and into Flax Street with her coat undone and her hat in her hand, and the wind took her scarf and flung it over her shoulder, and she let it. The street was there. She hadn't known how long it was. It went away from her in two straight lines of roofs, chimney after chimney, all the way to Tanyard Road, and every window along it was full of somebody's face.
That was the first strange thing. The faces. For four days Flax Street had been a row of voices: a cough behind a wall, somebody saying mind the step, a lamp that came along at the height of a hand and went away again. Now there were the voices' owners, standing in their doorways in aprons and shirt-sleeves and old army coats, looking up, and looking at each other. Two women on neighbouring steps, who had shouted across a yard at each other for nine years, stood and stared. One of them put a hand to her hair.
"Is that you?" said the first.
"It's me," said the other. "It's always me. Look at the state of your step."
Dot went by them at a run. At the corner of Church Street a man in a white coat was sweeping soot off his own doorstep with a broom, in big slow strokes, and the soot lay on the pavement in a black drift like something that had been poured. She'd said good morning to that man every morning since Thursday. She'd said it to a shape by a shop blind.
"Morning!" she said.
He turned round. He had a red nose and spectacles. Over the door behind him it said H. Tillott, Chemist, in gilt letters that she now saw had always been there.
"Miss Amory!" he said. "I'd know that voice anywhere."
"Everybody does!"
She was past him before he could say anything else. She was into Tanyard Road.
The hearses went right down the middle of it, nose to tail.
There were thirty. She began to count them and lost it at twenty-six, because a boy on a bicycle cut across in front of her and she had to swerve. They were black, and long, and every one of them wore a skin of fog-grease on the roof and the glass, and had been washed in the last hour by somebody with a leather in a hurry, in one clean stripe along the side. They crept along at a walking pace to the cemetery gates with their engines complaining. Behind the glass she could see the lids, and the flowers, and the caps of the drivers, who were all of them looking round at the sky.
Nobody had known there were so many. They'd known it as a number, in a book, on a blackboard, four hundred and twelve. It took the whole of Tanyard Road to hold them, and she ran the length of it.
The sun was low. It sat over the Town Hall like a red penny, clear and round, so that you could look straight at it, and it lit the fronts of the shops on one side of the street only, and the other side went into blue shadow. It lit the Co-op. It lit the register office, and the queue outside it, thirty-one people who had turned round on the pavement to look at the sky.
Everything was black. It stopped her for one breath. Every sill and every railing, every letter box and gutter and bit of window-frame, all of it wore the fog's grease, a coat of black you could have written your name in. On the side of a delivery van a child had drawn a face with one finger, and it looked out at the road from a black square, white where the finger had gone. Nobody had cleaned anything. Nobody was going to for a month.
She put her glove on the railings by the Co-op, as she always did, for the count. Forty-two. It was there. It was still forty-two. She took her hand away, and there was a print in the grease in the shape of a glove, and she left it.
St Saviour's struck the hour, plainly, from right where it had been standing all along. The last of the fog went off the top of Church Street like a sheet off a chair.
Three o'clock.
At the corner of Cinder Row somebody called her name.
"Miss Amory! Registrar! Oi. Come and see him."
It was a woman on a doorstep. She was sitting in a kitchen chair somebody had carried out for her, in a man's overcoat and a shawl, with her feet in slippers and a bundle in her arms. Number three. She was small, and sallow, and so tired her face seemed to be held up by her cheekbones. But she was shining. She was holding the bundle up towards the sky at arm's length, and turning it from side to side, and saying something to it.
"Rita Pardew," said Dot. She had stopped. She hadn't meant to. "Oh, and you've — is that —"
"Friday's boy." Rita turned him round. He was red and creased and furious and no bigger than a loaf, with his eyes screwed shut against a light that no one had told him about. "I said to him, that's your first. First he's had. Four days on this earth and it's the first time he's seen out of a window. I wanted him to know it's not always like that. It's not always like the inside of a kettle, is it, love?"
"He's lovely," said Dot. "He's the loveliest."
"He's a shocker. But he's mine." Rita drew him in against her neck. "Nurse says he's the best she's had this winter, and she's had fifty. Nurse Rhys. You'll know her. They're saying on the Row you've been at her, so you can have this from me, and you never asked. She never let go of me, you know. Half twelve to gone three on the Friday, she had her hand in me, love. Never once said she'd a call. And every house on the Row wanted her that day, I heard them through the wall. She wasn't going anywhere. Neither was I."
She laughed, and it turned into a cough, and she held the baby up out of the way of it.
"Good," said Dot. "That's good. That's — good. Well done. Both of you."
The door behind the chair opened, and Nurse Rhys came out on to the step in her navy cape with her bag in her hand. She'd have heard every word; it was a small house. She looked at Dot, and Dot's ears went, and there was nothing whatever to be done about it.
"I never asked her," said Dot. "She called me over. I was only passing, I swear it, I was running —"
"I know you were. Rita, in." Rhys tucked the shawl over the baby's face against the air. "Five minutes of sky, I said, and it's been ten."
Rita went in, grumbling, and Rhys lifted the kitchen chair in after her and came back out without it. She stood on the step in the red light and looked at Dot, for about as long as it takes to count three.
"Go on, then," said Rhys. "You're letting the light go. And do your coat up, Dorothea, you'll catch your death."
Dot did her coat up.
She ran.
Wharf Lane was full of the sun.
It came up the lane from the river end, low and orange, and lit every brick, and the whole lane was moving in it. Carts. Handcarts. A hearse with its bonnet up, and a man under it. Wardrobe doors, stacked against a wall, with the bevelled mirrors taken out. Families standing about in twos and threes in their best black, with their hats in their hands, because there was nowhere to put them. Somebody's small boy had climbed a coffin.
Norman Gully was in the yard, in his shirt-sleeves and black waistcoat, with a tape measure round his neck and a pencil, and a woman in a widow's hat talking at him from one side. He saw Dot come through the gate. He stopped listening to the woman. He came across the cinders, slowly, with his hands held together in front of him as if about to say grace.
Behind him, through the open door of the workshop, somebody was using a screwdriver. It made a small flat rasp, and stopped, and made it again.
"Miss Amory. Suspended, I hear." He had a soft round face and a smile that went on after he'd finished. "News travels when you can see."
"Who told you?"
"Mr Marchbanks rang at two. Very clear. No standing." He said it as though it were a price. "You'll appreciate, Miss, I'm not able to have you about the premises. We're at a very delicate time. There are families. It's all in order." He turned his hands over, one on the other. "Paid in full, Miss. I've forty waiting on that trestle. Three o'clock, it was arranged, and it's gone three. You'll oblige me by not making it a scene."
Dot went past him.
She did it without deciding to. She went across the cinders and stood in the doorway of the workshop, and it was the length of the room from her to the trestle under the window, and the two men in black aprons were bent over it with the elm lid on, squared down, the brass heads of the screws standing in their row along one edge. Six in. Six in a chipped saucer with a rim of tea, waiting.
At the trestle's foot stood Stanley Bracegirdle in the overcoat that was too big for him, with his cap held in both hands, as he'd stood in Mrs Ruddock's passage. He didn't look round. He had come at five to three, and paid, and stayed to see it done, because nobody had told him it was a thing you could leave.
The screwdriver went round, and stopped.
"Miss Amory," said Gully, behind her, very gently. "Mr Bracegirdle's paid. He's paid in full. I never stood in a man's way who'd paid."
She turned round. She did it slowly, to make room. She had no authority, no keys, no pen, no piece of paper, and there was one thing left in the world that she was good at, and she'd never in her life been sure it was a talent. She went back out past him, into the middle of the yard, and filled her lungs.
"EXCUSE ME," she said. "EVERYBODY. Can I have a moment?"
The yard turned. The woman in the widow's hat. A man with a cap in his hands. A girl with a pram. Three carters. A boy up on a coffin. It was a lot of people, and a lot of black.
"Only I'm a registrar," said Dot, "and I've been told I'm not, but I was for six years, and I've a question. Does anyone in this yard know what it costs to move up the queue? Because I do. You pay a man a sum, in cash, and he moves you up the accommodation, and the more fog there is the more it costs, and if you've a Wednesday it's a different price from a Friday, and there's a man in Cinder Row who was going to tell the Council about it on Monday, and he's dead, and that's —"
"Ten minutes," said Gully.
He'd gone the colour of suet. He had one hand up. The widow in the hat had put hers to her mouth. In the silence, one of the carters said, very clearly, "I paid him for Mum," and a second man said, "Give over," and the girl with the pram looked, thoughtfully, at Gully's waistcoat.
"Ten minutes," said Gully again, lower. "We don't say queue in my yard, Miss. We say accommodation. And you'll oblige me by not saying it at all." He turned his head towards the workshop, and the rasping there had stopped, for the men in it had heard every word. "Micky. Tell them: take it off, the pair of you. The lot."
The screws came out one at a time, in the order they'd gone in, and Dot stood and listened to each one land in the saucer.
The workshop was long and low, and it smelled of elm and glue. At the far end, above the bench, was one long dirty pane, with the whole west in it. The sun had got under the last of the cloud, and it came down the room level and gold: not the yellow of a lamp, but the plain colour of a day. It fell on the trestle under the window.
He was there. Alfred Bracegirdle, in his coffin, with the lid stood against the wall beside him and the screws back in their saucer on the bench, twelve brass screws in a chipped saucer with a rim of tea. Somebody had washed his hands. Somebody had put a fold of white cloth under his chin.
He wasn't grey.
Under the white bulb on Monday Dot had been able to tell herself it was the bulb, or her own nerve. It wasn't the bulb. It was no colour anyone would call a mistake. He was pink from the forehead to the collar, warm and even and healthy, like somebody who has come in from the cold and is sitting down in front of a fire; and on his neck and the sides of his face, where the blood had settled, there were bright patches, deeper, like the flush on an apple. In that light, in that room, in the coffin, in his good collar, he looked like the best-looking man in Lowmarsh.
Behind her, Gully had come in and shut the door. He stood looking. He opened his mouth.
"It's the cold does it," he said. "The cold, Miss, in a. It's —"
He didn't finish. He looked at the face a second time, in the plain light, from a yard away, and something went out of his own.
"Well," said Gully, to nobody, "he's a good colour."
Dot got her pencil out of her hair. She did it slowly, for no reason. Gully's eyes went straight to it, and stayed there, as another man's might have gone to a knife.
"I'm not writing anything," said Dot.
"No, Miss."
"Micky."
Micky Sprott was at the door with his cap in both hands and his eyes on the coffin, and he jumped as though he'd been put down for something.
"Run," she said. "Number nine, Cinder Row, the Tapsells' basement, and if he's not there, the surgery on Tanyard Hill, and if he's not there, run till he is. Dr Kemp. Tell him Maureen says come and look."
"Did she say?"
"She will. Tell him it's light. Say that, Micky, say it just like that. It's light."
Micky went. She heard his boots go across the cinders, and the yard, and the gate. They went very fast, and then she couldn't hear them.
It was twenty past three.
She stood at the end of the trestle with her arms round herself. Neither she nor Gully said anything, and Stanley, at the foot, had not said anything since she came. She thought of Winston, who had been told he'd be put to a man in a white collar at seven, and who could not see this window; and of Sylvie on the steps in her felt hat. Outside, a cart went by with a clatter and someone shouted a name. The square of light from the window lay across the flags, and as she watched it it moved: it slid, very slowly, up the side of the trestle, and along the edge of the coffin, and left the floor. Then it climbed the far wall a brick at a time. Sunset was at eight minutes to four. It was already three-quarters of an inch further up than when she'd come in.
On the bench beside the saucer lay a screwdriver, long-handled, with the wood gone dark from Gully's palm. He'd put it down when the yard went quiet. Every now and then his eye went to it, and then away.
"You said five," Dot said, at last. "On Monday. Council orders. It's not just a thing you say?"
"Five's the latest, Miss. Hygiene." Gully put his hands together. "A family that's settled in full, I see to them when they're settled. It's a courtesy. I can't keep forty waiting on a. On one gentleman, for a kindness. I'd like to. I have the accommodation, you see, Wednesday. It's a matter of the clock."
"I know."
He hadn't looked at her. "I don't say what I think, Miss Amory. It's not my — I'm not a man with a pen."
Stanley had stood where he was since she came, at the foot of the trestle, with his cap in both hands and his face to the wall, as a man stands at the foot of a bed he has been told to leave. The lid had come off over his head. He had not turned round for it. Now he turned his head, slowly, towards the window, and stopped.
His father lay in the low gold light, in his good collar, with a colour in his face.
"He looks well," said Stanley.
His voice was slow, and puzzled.
"He looks better than Saturday. He looks like he done when I was little. When he come in off the barrow in winter, he'd be red, all over, with the cold, and he'd stand by the fire and sing. Mum'd say, you'll do yourself a mischief, Alf." He turned the cap over in his hands. "I never seen him look like that in years."
Dot opened her mouth. There was nothing to say to that, and she shut it. Stanley put his cap down on the bench, next to the screwdriver, and stood there.
The light had reached the top of the wall.
Behind them the door was thrown back, and a man stood in it, bareheaded, with his coat open and his bag in his hand, breathing as if he'd run the whole length of Cinder Row and up the lane, and all his grey hair standing on end.
"Where is he?" said Dr Kemp.