Saturday, the sixth of December. Six o'clock, Cinder Row.
"It didn't," said Dot. "Run out. I mean it didn't run out, the paper, there's a whole drawer of it, there's two hundred and ninety-one, Mr Pike counted them this morning to spite me. I told you a lie, Mr Bracegirdle, and I'm sorry. I panicked. It's a failing, I'm famous for it, there's a whole school in Lowmarsh can tell you, I once told a teacher my grandmother had died so I needn't do my sums, and she came to the funeral. There wasn't one. I had to have a funeral." Her ears were burning in the cold like two coals. "That's not the point. The point is I lied to you at my own counter and it was wicked and I've come to say so."
Stanley looked at her over the lamp.
"It never," he said. "I seen the drawer."
"I know. I shut it with my hip. You saw me."
"I seen you." He looked past her, at Winston on the pavement. "What's he doing with you?"
"I live here, Stanley," said Winston. "I have a rent book says so, in your father's hand."
Stanley's face did something under the lamp that she couldn't read, because the lamp was doing all of it. Behind him the hall was black. The stair went up into it and stopped being a stair after the fourth tread.
Down to the left of the step, in the area, a door opened and a square of light fell up the area steps, and a woman's voice came up with it: sharp, hoarse, amused.
"Let the girl in, Stan, it's perishing. You're letting the fog in the house and the heat out, and there's not so much heat we can spare it."
"Nurse says leave his things," said Stanley.
"She's not going to eat his things. Let her in."
Stanley let her in. He did it by stepping back one step and not saying anything, and Dot went past him into the hall and trod on something soft. Somebody's glove. She picked it up and put it on the newel post, and then, because it was there, her hand found the newel post, which was sticky with a year of hands.
Mrs Sallis came up out of the basement with a candle, a thin woman in a man's cardigan with her hair in a scarf, a baby on her hip and her eyes going everywhere at once: at Dot's coat, at Dot's hat, at Winston behind her, at Stanley, back to Dot.
"You're the registrar," she said. "I've seen you. You did our Brian. Elsie Sallis. Come down after, when you've done in there. I've a fire."
"I'll be up on my landing, Miss Amory," said Winston. "If you want me." He went up past them all into the black, with a stub of candle from his pocket that he lit on Mrs Sallis's, and they listened to him go, the treads complaining one by one.
"Can I see his room?" said Dot.
"What for?" said Stanley.
"I don't know. I like to see. I'm nosy. I'd look in the Pope's wardrobe if he left it open." She heard herself and stopped. "I'm sorry. I just want to see where he was. I've written him down, you see. I wrote him down this morning. It seems rude not to see."
Stanley thought about that for a long, slow, visible time. Then he pushed open the door on the left and went in ahead of her with the lamp, and put it back on the table in the window, and stood by it.
It was a bed-sitting room of the kind half of Lowmarsh lived in, and it was very neat, which surprised her. The bed against the far wall had been stripped to the ticking, and the blankets were folded square at the foot of it, one on top of another, with the pillow on top of those. By the gas fire, which had a brass tap, stood a horsehair chair with its stuffing coming through at one arm. There was a table in the window with an oilcloth on it, and the lamp, and a sauce bottle. On the wall by the door hung a calendar from a coal merchant on Tanyard Road with December showing and a picture of a dray horse over it. The sash window was greasy with fog, and the fog outside it was the colour of weak tea. Along the bottom of the door, on the inside, lay a draught snake, a long grey stocking stuffed hard with something, with a darn in the toe. On the mantelpiece, in a black frame, there was a photograph.
Dot touched things. She always did; her mother used to say she'd have touched the Crown Jewels to see if they were warm. She touched the ticking of the bed, which was cold. She put her hand on the back of the chair, where the stuffing prickled through into her glove. She touched the brass of the fire, and the cold glass of the window, which left a greasy bloom on the fingertip of her glove. She put her toe against the snake, which was heavier than it looked. She went to the mantelpiece and picked up the photograph.
A young man in a flat cap and a long white apron, laughing, with his hand on the handle of a barrow piled with cabbages and a board chalked with prices. Behind him was a shop window with a blind half down. He was laughing at whoever held the camera. He had a big, open, foolish, delighted face.
"He died in his bed," said Stanley, from the window.
Dot put the photograph back, exactly where it had been, in the clean square it had left in the dust.
"I know," she said. "You told me. You told me twice."
"It's how it was."
She wanted, very badly, to ask him how it was. She wanted to ask what time, and who came first, and whether his father had said anything, and whether he'd been frightened, and who had folded the blankets so square. She had her mouth open for it. Then she looked at Stanley standing by the lamp in the overcoat that had been cut for a bigger man.
"Miss," called Elsie Sallis, from the top of the basement stairs. "Come down where there's a fire, you'll freeze stood in there."
The basement landing smelled of camphor and damp. The kitchen at the bottom was hot and wet and smelled of washing, and the walls ran with it. A small fire burned in a range that had been blacked that morning and was grey again already. Three children sat in a row on a bench along the wall, eating bread and dripping and watching Dot as if she were the pictures. The baby went into a drawer on the dresser, which seemed to be its bed. A man sat at the table in his vest, washing his arms in an enamel bowl, and the water in the bowl was black, and his arms coming out of it were white to the elbow and black above.
"Reg," said Elsie. "It's the registrar."
"Evening," said Reg Sallis. "Mind the bowl."
Dot minded the bowl. She sat where Elsie put her, on a box by the fire, and held her gloves out to it, and began to thaw painfully from the fingers inwards.
The biggest of the children, a girl of eight or nine with one plait, said, "Are you the lady that writes them down?"
"I am," said Dot.
"Did you write our Brian?"
"I wrote your Brian when he was born. In the other book. The nice one." Dot looked at the drawer on the dresser. "Is that him?"
"That's him," said Elsie. "Nine months, and bawls like a docker."
"It's his chest they're all saying," Dot said. "Everybody. Stanley, and you, and Mr Ferrar says the lady at the top as well. His chest, his bed, the nurse's hand. You all say it the same."
"Well, we would," said Elsie. "Nurse said his chest. It's a kindness to say it. Nobody wants the coroner in this week."
The coroner could say a death wanted looking into. That meant men in the house asking questions, and the dead man cut open by a stranger, and the funeral put back. Dot had typed the letters.
"So it was Nurse Rhys told you."
"She never told us. She said." Elsie hitched her cardigan up. "There's a difference, isn't there, Reg?"
"Is there?" said Reg, into the bowl.
"She come down about quarter past four. Friday. The fog was coming on thick then. She stood where you're sitting and she said, 'He's gone, Elsie, his chest took him, in his bed, I was with him.' And she said, 'It's a kindness to say his chest, and you'll say it, won't you, if anybody asks.' And I said I would. And I have. Nobody's asked but you."
Dot sat with her gloves out to the fire. Her face went hot and her fingers stayed cold, both at once.
Nurse Rhys had given her a lozenge at three o'clock that afternoon and told her she sounded like a coal barge.
"She's been good to us," said Elsie, watching her. "When our Brian come. I'll not have her talked about."
"I'm not talking about her," said Dot. "I'm only talking. I always am. Ask anyone." And because she always did, she went on. "And that's all it is, isn't it? That's all right, then. A nurse run off her feet, with a bossy mouth, and she tells a house to say his chest so nobody comes and cuts him up. That's a kindness. And his son was ashamed of the rents, and that's a kindness too, of a sort, to his dad. Two kindnesses. And I've come all down Tanyard Road in the dark and upset a man in his own hall over two kindnesses." She laughed. It came out thin. "I'm probably wrong. I'm sure I'm wrong. I'd be glad to be."
Reg lifted his arms out of the bowl and looked at them, and reached for a towel that had been white once.
"The Bishop never coughed," he said. "But he's dead, ain't he, so he had a chest."
Nobody said anything to that. One of the children on the bench laughed, and was elbowed.
"When did you last see him?" Dot asked. "Alive, I mean. I'm sorry, I don't mean to — it's only I've written him down, and I don't know anything about him but his trade, and that wasn't —" She stopped herself, a little late.
"I took his dinner in," said Elsie. "Friday. I always do, he pays me for it. Quarter to one, it was, because Reg's sister come at half past twelve with the pram and she'd just gone. Scrag end and potatoes. And he was sat at his table like a Christian, boots and all, right as rain. Never looked at me. Never said ta. He never did. Thursday afternoon, now, him and Stan were at it through the floor, hammer and tongs."
"At what?"
"Money. What else? It's always money with Stan. Stan wanting it and his dad having it and not giving. Went on half an hour. Four o'clock, about." Elsie shifted the baby's drawer an inch along the dresser with one hand, without looking. "And then Friday morning, before the dinner, he comes to our door himself and stands there on the area steps in his hat and says, 'There's no rent this week, Elsie.' No rent this week, he says. Four half-crowns every Friday for twenty year, same as the whole Row pays, and never once a day off. Reg thought he'd been at the drink."
"I thought he'd been at the chapel," said Reg.
"Perhaps he knew," said Dot. "People do sometimes, don't they, at the end? They go kind all of a sudden, like somebody clearing out a drawer before a move. My mother's Aunt Florrie gave her whole sideboard to the coalman the week before she —"
"Not him," said Elsie.
"No?"
"Not him. He never knew nothing. He'd have charged God for the Last Supper."
When she came up out of the basement, the lamp was still lit in the front room, and Stanley was sitting on the end of the stripped bed with the photograph in both hands.
Dot stood in the doorway. She thought of three things to say and they were all wrong, and she said the fourth, which was wronger.
"He was very handsome," she said. "In that."
Stanley didn't look up.
"He was a greengrocer," he said. "When I was little."
"I know. I know he was. And I think —" Here it came, the whole thing, out of her mouth before her brain had signed for it. "I think you told me greengrocer this morning because you were ashamed. Of the rents. Of what people called him. And I don't blame you, I'd have told them he was an archdeacon, I'd have told them he was the Lord Mayor of London —"
"It were because he was," said Stanley.
He looked at her then, heavily, patiently.
"He was a greengrocer," he said again. "He had a barrow."
Dot opened her mouth, and for once nothing came out of it at all.
"I'd like to say good evening to Mrs Ormerod," she said, when she had her voice back. "At the top. Mr Ferrar says she told him too. I won't stay. I'd only like to hear."
Stanley said nothing, which she decided to take as permission. She went out into the black hall and felt for the newel post and found it, sticky, and started up.
Above her a door opened and a small yellow light came out onto the first-floor landing: Winston, with the stub of candle held up, so that she could see the next six treads and the half-landing where the stair turned.
"Mind the ninth," he called down. "It's a liar."
She minded the ninth. It sagged under her like a mattress anyway. She got to the half-landing and stopped, because behind her there were other feet on the stairs, heavy and slow, and she turned round and it was Stanley, coming up out of the dark with nothing in his hands.
"Ask him," said Stanley. He wasn't talking to her. He was looking past her and up, at the candle. "Ask him where he was Friday. Ask him about the rent."
"Stanley," said Winston, from the landing. He came down one step. The candle came with him. "Say it to me. Not to the lady. You've a mouth, use it on me."
"Dad was going to have you out."
"Your dad was going to have all sorts. He was going to have that mantle mended in November." Winston came down another step. His voice had gone up, and something had come into it that hadn't been in it on the walk, a crack of temper under the courtesy. "I paid him every week I lived here. On the nail. Which is more than you'll say, Stanley Bracegirdle, because you've never paid anybody anything in your —"
Stanley came up two stairs at once.
Dot put herself between them. She did it without deciding to, as she did most things, and found herself on the half-landing with Stanley's overcoat against her back and Winston's candle an inch from her hat, and she'd got her hands out of her pockets with a barley sugar in each of them.
"Have one," she said. "Both of you. Go on. They're on the ration, you know, they're coupons, it's a great sacrifice on my part. Have one and stop it."
Nobody took one. Nobody hit anybody either. The candle flame leaned and straightened. Stanley breathed through his nose behind her like a horse.
From the top of the house came a bang, and another, and a third, as of a stick on bare boards, and then a voice, old and cracked and very loud, loud in the way of someone who couldn't hear themselves:
"Is that the registrar?"
They all three looked up the black stairwell.
"Tell her Monday," the voice shouted. "I've things to say. I'm too tired tonight."
A wireless went on up there, a man talking about the weather in the west of Scotland, and was turned up, and up, until you could have heard the weather in the west of Scotland from Tanyard Road.
Stanley took her out. He didn't touch her. He went down the stairs in front of her with the lamp he'd fetched from his father's table, and she followed the lamp, and at the bottom he opened the front door onto the fog and stood beside it until she understood.
On the step she turned round. He was a big dark overcoat in the doorway with the lamp low in his hand now, so that the light was on his boots.
"Wednesday," said Stanley. "Ten o'clock. Gully's got him. Once he's under, he's under, and you'll not stop it."
"I'm not trying to stop it. I only —"
"You give me that paper tomorrow," said Stanley, "or I'll go over your head."
He shut the door. She heard the bolt go across, and then his feet going away down the hall, and then nothing.
Dot stood on the step of number fourteen with the two sweets still in her fists and the fog pressing on her face like a wet flannel. The lamp outside number fourteen hissed. Down the street, somebody coughed and coughed and stopped. She pocketed them and turned towards Flax Street, and put her hand out for the first of the railings, and counted one.
"Miss."
It came from below her, from the area steps, a whisper. Elsie Sallis stood at the bottom of them in the dark with the cardigan held shut at her throat and no candle.
"Miss. He never coughed. Not once. Don't say I said."