Saturday, the sixth of December. Four days to the burial.
The old man on the step of the Co-op had his cap on his knees and his chin on his chest, and Dot said good morning to him, because she said good morning to everybody.
"You want to get inside," she told him. "You'll catch your death out here."
He didn't answer. The fog slid between them and slid away again, and she could see his hands. They were folded on the cap as if he were in chapel, and they were grey. There was grey round his mouth too, a crust of it in the creases of his nose, where the fog had gone in and out of him all night until it stopped coming out.
"Oh," Dot said. "Oh, you poor old love. I thought you were having a sit."
A bicycle lamp came along the kerb at walking pace, held in a policeman's fist. The constable put the beam on the old man's face and kept it there longer than he needed to.
"That's three on this road," he said. "Since six." He wrote in his book and didn't say anything else.
Tanyard Road at ten to nine was as dark as ten at night. The lamps had been left burning, and each one made a dirty yellow ball the size of a hat that lit nothing but itself. The fog tasted of old pennies and struck matches. It got under her scarf and greased her teeth, and when she blew her nose the handkerchief came away black. You couldn't tell your own mother at the next lamp-post. You couldn't see anyone at all, but you could hear them: the whole road was coughing, in front of her and behind her and in the rooms upstairs, a ward with the lights out.
Dot put her glove on the railings and counted, because counting was something to do with her mouth that wasn't crying. Railings from the Co-op to the corner of Church Street: forty-two. It was always forty-two, and this morning it was forty-two again, and she could have kissed the forty-second. Then the corner, then the pillar box, which she walked into.
"Sorry," she said. "I do beg your pardon, I didn't see you there, I'm —" She put out a hand. It was cold iron and slightly tacky. "You're iron. Right. I was wrong, and I've apologised to the Post Office now, and it can't be helped."
Past it, the queue began.
It started at the door of the register office and went along the front of the building and into the fog, and she couldn't see the end of it. A woman holding a baby's knitted bonnet in both hands and no baby. A girl in a mackintosh reading her doctor's envelope as if it might say something different this time. Dot read it too, upside down, before she could stop herself, and then was sorry. An old man in a muffler who coughed and coughed and held on to the wall with both hands while he did it, and when he stopped his lips were the colour of a plum.
"Come on," Dot said, and took his arm. "Registrar. You're coming in first. They'll forgive you, I'll tell them you're my uncle."
The office had a stove, and Mr Pike, and a mahogany counter polished by thirty years of elbows, and this morning the fog had come in under the door and was sitting on the benches with everyone else. Mr Pike was seventy and had been at that counter since 1919. He looked at the old man on Dot's arm and moved his own chair round to the public side without a word.
"Morning, Mr Pike. There's a dead man on the Co-op step. I said good morning to him and told him he'd catch his death."
"Did he answer?"
"No."
"Then he'll come to us on Tuesday," said Pike. "They're taking three days at present."
On the blackboard behind him, where the office chalked its weekly tally of births and deaths, the births column said four. The deaths column had been rubbed out and started again. Mr Marchbanks, the Superintendent Registrar, who could sign over Dot's head and had four hundred deaths to clear across three boroughs, had telephoned at twenty-five past eight to say that Lowmarsh was behind.
"He said," Pike reported, "clear them."
"Did he say how?"
"He said quickly. He said it twice. I've counted the green forms, since you ask. Two hundred and ninety-one."
Her first was Mrs Odell, who had brought her husband's pipe in her handbag in case they asked for proof.
"Albert Odell," she said. "Two Ls in Odell, one in Albert, people put two. Lighterman, forty-one years. Put lighterman. Don't put retired, he'd have hated retired."
"Lighterman," said Dot, writing it into the register, the big bound book where every death in Lowmarsh got one numbered line. "There. Forty-one years on the river and a week of fog, it isn't fair, is it? You'd think the river would've done it first, the river's had every chance."
Mrs Odell stared at her, and then she laughed, a small bark that surprised both of them, and signed, and took her green form and her pipe and went back out into it.
By half past ten Dot had written twenty-three lines. Bronchitis. Bronchitis. Cardiac failure. Bronchopneumonia. Bronchitis. The old man in the muffler had got his breath back and gone, and she didn't let herself wonder which queue he'd be in on Tuesday. Pike blotted each entry as she finished it.
"Twenty to eleven," Pike said to nobody, as the next man came to the counter.
He was young and heavy, in an overcoat cut for a bigger man. He had a black band sewn crooked on the sleeve. He put the doctor's certificate on the mahogany, the paper that said what had killed his father, and flattened it with his whole hand.
The certificate said, in Dr Kemp's hand, Bronchitis. Cardiac failure. Signed E. Kemp.
"Name of the deceased?" said Dot.
"Alfred Edwin Bracegirdle."
"Age?"
"Sixty-eight."
"Address?"
"Fourteen Cinder Row."
"And you are?"
"Son. Stanley."
"And his occupation?"
"Greengrocer," said Stanley. "Retired."
Dot wrote retired gr and stopped. The name had been knocking at the back of her head since Bracegirdle, and at Cinder Row it came in.
"Oh," she said. "Oh, you mean the Bishop."
Stanley's face shut like a door. "Who says?"
"Mrs Ruddock. She pays a Bracegirdle every Friday, same as half of Flax Street. Everybody calls him the Bishop. Because of the hat, and because he takes a tenth."
Her ears went hot. They always did, a second behind her mouth, like a fire engine arriving after the house has gone.
"Called," she said. "Everybody called him. Oh, Mr Bracegirdle, that was a horrible thing to say to you across a counter. I'm famous for it. They should put it on my door."
"He was a greengrocer," said Stanley. "He had a barrow. On the corner of Tanyard Road. When I was little."
"Yes, before the war, I'm sure he did, only lately —"
"Dad kept his hand in." Stanley looked at the certificate, not at her. "He was an agent. He collected the rents for someone else." Then, as if that had been a mistake and he was putting it back on the shelf: "Put greengrocer. Retired."
Dot was a hopeless liar herself, loud and all at once, like a dropped tray, so she knew the sound of one. This wasn't that sound. This was smooth.
She was supposed to write what the informant told her. That was the whole arrangement: the family came in and said who the dead had been, and the registrar wrote it down. There was no column in the register for I don't believe you, and nobody had ever asked her to rule one.
"Right," she said. "Greengrocer." She finished the word. The ink went on blue and dried black and would still say retired greengrocer when they were all dead. "Can I ask, was it quick? Were you with him?"
"His chest took him," Stanley said. "In his bed. Nurse had his hand."
"Nurse Rhys?"
"Nurse was there."
"And had he been bad long, with his chest? Only this week, I mean, it's everybody, the fog's —"
"His chest took him. In his bed. Nurse had his hand."
Dot's pen stayed where it was.
"Gully's got him for Wednesday," Stanley said. "Ten o'clock. A slot come free."
"Wednesday? People are waiting till Christmas."
"A slot come free," Stanley said again, and there was nearly a smile in it, the first. "He never had no luck, Dad. Not his whole life. He's had some now."
Dot put down the pen. Her hand went to the cabinet marked GREEN, the way it had gone twenty-three times that morning, and stopped with the drawer half open. The green form was the burial certificate. No green paper, no grave. If a certificate troubled her she could hold the form a day, pending a word with the doctor who'd signed it, and not a minute more. That was Mr Marchbanks's rule this fortnight, and he kept it like scripture.
What she ought to say was: I'd like a word with Dr Kemp first, Mr Bracegirdle. It's only a formality. It was a perfectly good sentence. She had it ready.
"The green paper's run out," said her mouth.
Stanley looked at the drawer. Dot shut it with her hip.
"This week," she said. "You can imagine. We've never known a week like it. It comes on a van."
"You've gone red," said Stanley.
"It's the stove. I sit too near the stove. Mr Pike's always saying."
From the stove, without lifting his head from the blotter, Mr Pike said, "The green paper has run out."
He said it as he'd have said the date. Stanley looked from one of them to the other.
"When's the van?"
"Monday," said Dot. "Or tomorrow. Tomorrow, possibly, possibly Monday. It depends on the van."
"I'll come tomorrow," said Stanley. He folded his father's certificate and put it back inside the big overcoat. "First thing. He's going in Wednesday."
He went out. The fog took him before the door had finished closing.
Dot sat down.
"Two hundred and ninety-one," said Pike, after a while.
"I know."
"You have told a lie in a government office. In front of a member of the public. With a drawer open."
"Did you see my ears?"
"I could warm my hands at them."
"You said it too."
"I repeated what the deputy registrar told me," said Pike. "That's procedure."
"It's the trade," Dot said. "No, it isn't. People lie about trades every day of the week. I've had three sea captains this year who drove the number forty. That's just love, that is, that's not anything. So it's the Wednesday. No, it isn't, Gully'd sell a slot to the Pope."
"Then what is it?" said Pike.
"He said it twice. His chest, his bed, her hand. The same both times, with a stop after bed. Like the Collect."
"Then you will telephone Dr Kemp," said Pike, "and have your word with him, which is the procedure, and which is what you should have said."
"I'll telephone him."
"His line has been engaged since Friday."
"Then I'll telephone him lots."
At one Pike went into the back with his tin of sandwiches and Dot took the keys to the strongroom, because the day's volume was nearly full and she needed a new one, which was true.
The strongroom under the stairs smelt of paste and cold paper. She found the new volume. Then she stood on the box and took down 1940, which she didn't need, and it fell open where it always fell open now.
Entry two hundred and twelve said, in a steady clerical hand that belonged to nobody she knew: Amory, Rose Ellen. Female. Aged forty-four. Domestic duties. Died seventeenth October 1940, Public Shelter, Tanyard Road. Injuries due to war operations. Certificate received from Civil Defence.
"You weren't domestic duties," Dot told it. "You were a book-keeper. You had ink on your finger the whole of my life."
It had been twelve years. Her mother had gone out on a Tuesday night, in the sirens, to fetch a neighbour up from the Row, and never come back, and the register said Thursday, in a shelter she'd never set foot in. Dot had come to work in this office because the book was here. She had never told a soul how often she came down to look at it. Not even Pike.
She took the pencil out of her hair and wrote 212 on her cuff, small, as she always did, as if she might forget it.
"I told a lie this morning," she said to her mother's line. "To a man with his armband on crooked. It comes on a van, I said."
The book didn't say anything.
At three Nurse Rhys, the district nurse, came in out of the fog in her navy cape with her bag on her arm, steering a girl ahead of her by the elbow like a pram.
The girl was nineteen or so and had no coat on, only a cardigan buttoned wrong. Rhys put her on the bench by the stove and put the certificate in Dot's hand herself.
"Christine Tapsell," said Rhys. "Nine Cinder Row. Maureen's the mother. Maureen, give Miss Amory the date of birth."
"Twenty-third of October," said Maureen. She looked at the stove, not at anyone. "Christine with a C-H. She were six weeks Thursday."
The certificate said, in Dr Kemp's hand again, Bronchopneumonia. Dot wrote it. She made the C-H very clear. She didn't make a joke.
"Sign there, Maureen," said Rhys. "Go on. Hold the pen properly. There."
While Maureen signed, Rhys held the girl's other wrist, two fingers on the inside of it and her eyes on the watch pinned upside down on her cape. She did it to everybody. She'd once done it to Dot at a bus stop, in the middle of a sentence about hats.
Dot tore off a green form, the same size for a baby as for anybody, and gave it to Rhys, who put it in Maureen's cardigan pocket and buttoned the pocket over it.
"Pike," said Rhys, turning. "Your cough. I heard it from the door. Open."
"It's the fog," said Pike.
"Open."
Pike opened. Rhys looked into him briskly, as if into a drain, and gave him a lozenge from her bag, and gave Dot one too.
"Suck that. You sound like a coal barge, Dorothea."
"Nurse Rhys," Dot said, low, under the scrape of Maureen standing up. "Mr Bracegirdle. Number fourteen. Stanley said you were with him."
"I was."
"At the end?"
"At the end." Rhys closed her bag. "He went easily. Easier than most this week."
"It's only that Stanley told me a fib about the trade, and he said his chest and his bed and your hand twice over, exactly the same, like a —"
Rhys took Dot's wrist, two fingers under the cuff, and looked at her watch.
"You're galloping," she said. "Let him bury his father, love. He's lost the only one he had."
Then she had Maureen by the elbow and the door open, and the fog took them both, the navy cape last.
Dot sat with the lozenge in her cheek. She rang Dr Kemp's surgery at ten past three, and it was engaged. At a quarter to four the operator told her that every doctor in south London was engaged, dear, and had been since Friday.
At half past four Pike turned the card on the door to CLOSED and began, in his unhurried way, to put out the first of the lamps. The queue had gone, all but the fog. Dot was blotting the last line.
The door opened anyway.
The man who came in was tall, in a London Transport greatcoat with the collar up, and he took his conductor's cap off inside the door, as if the office were a chapel or a lady's parlour, and held it against his chest. He was a young West Indian, thirty or so, with the fog beaded grey in his eyebrows and a mouth that looked as if it would rather be telling a joke.
"We're closed," said Pike.
"I can see that, sir. I can read a card. I've been reading cards in windows in this borough for six years." He turned to the counter. "Miss Amory? The registrar? Winston Ferrar. Kingston, Jamaica, by way of the Royal Air Force and a great deal of rain. I lodge at fourteen Cinder Row, over the late Mr Bracegirdle, God rest him, though I don't suppose He'll hurry."
"Oh, come in," said Dot. "You are in. Sit down, there's a bench, it's warm-ish."
"I'll stand, thank you." He stayed by the door. "Stanley came home dinnertime saying the registrar wouldn't give him his paper. That the paper had run out. He's telling the whole street: the registrar won't let his father be buried. Now, Miss Amory, I've lived on that street eleven months, and I know what the next sentence is. The next sentence is, why not? And the sentence after that is, the lodger. So I've come to say it first, before anybody says it about me."
"Nobody's saying anything about you," said Dot. "I only —"
"Not yet," said Winston.
"What is it you've come to say, Mr Ferrar?" said Pike.
"I did not like him. Put that in your book first." Winston turned the cap once in his hands. "There are people in that house who will tell you so, and I would rather you heard it from my mouth, because I say it better. The walls in that house are made of cigarette paper. I hear the old lady at the top turn over in her bed. Eleven months, and I never once heard that man cough. Thursday night he stood on the half-landing and shouted about the rent for twenty minutes. Twenty minutes! I have sat through shorter sermons, and I'm a Methodist. A man with bronchitis cannot do that."
Dot opened her mouth. Pike looked at her, and she shut it.
"And since last night," said Winston, "every soul in that house has told me about his chest. The nurse, the son, Mrs Sallis on the stairs, the old lady through her door. His chest. His bed. The nurse, his hand. Word for word, Miss Amory, like people who've been to the same chapel." He put the cap back against his chest.
Dot looked at Pike. Pike, with the lamp glass in one hand and the snuffer in the other, looked at the ceiling.
"I'm probably wrong," Dot said. "I'm wrong most mornings, ask him. I walked into a pillar box today and apologised to it. But Stanley said it to me twice. Chest, bed, hand. Somebody's taught them it. I thought it was only me."
"Then be wrong quickly, Miss Amory," said Winston Ferrar. "They bury him Wednesday."
Pike put the snuffer down on the counter with a small, deliberate click, and left the second lamp burning.
Dot came round the end of the counter, still holding the blotter.
"Right," she said. "Tell me all of it. From the beginning. When did it start?"
"Thursday night," said Winston. "Or it might have been before."
"Start at Thursday. And go slowly, please. I'm terribly bad at slowly."