Saturday evening, the sixth of December. Half past seven. Four days to the burial.
Dot went home by the streets, which took a quarter of an hour and felt like a week, and she talked the whole distance. There was nobody to hear. That made it not count.
"He never coughed," she told the fog. "Not once. Don't say I said. Well, I shan't, Mrs Sallis, who would I say it to?" The fog went in at her mouth and she coughed, which was unkind of it. "Everybody coughs. The King coughed, God rest him. I expect some people don't. I expect some people are made of old boots, and Mr Bracegirdle was one of them, and he's dead of his chest, and it never once made him cough. Which is what a chest does. It's the only thing it does."
The lamp at the corner of Flax Street was a yellow smudge you could have rubbed out with your thumb. She got her glove on the railings and counted the last of them, because she always did. Twenty-eight to the gate of number twenty-two. She had never once got it wrong, which was more than could be said for anything else she'd done since breakfast.
Her own window, on the ground floor, was dark. Up the stairs there was a line of light under Mrs Ruddock's kitchen door and a man's voice saying, "Pass me the small one," and Dot was talking before she had the door open.
"—and it was iron, Mrs R, cold iron, and I'd begged its pardon like it was the vicar, and then the queue went right along the front of the office and round past the—"
The kitchen was small and hot and full. Mr Pike was on his knees on the lino with the back off Mrs Ruddock's wireless and its insides laid out on a sheet of newspaper. Tripe and onions were going on the hob. Mrs Ruddock was at the range with her back to the room, talking over Dot, as she talked over everybody, passing it on.
"Well, the Bishop's gone, I hear. It's all round the Row. His chest, they're saying. I'd have said his heart, if he'd had one. Cyril, mind that wire."
"It's not live," said Pike.
It was. The wireless gave a crack and a blue spit, Mr Pike sat down hard on the lino with his legs straight out in front of him like a child on a beach, and the Light Programme came out of the cabinet at full volume: a dance band in the middle of a quickstep, trombones and all.
"The knob!" shouted Mrs Ruddock. "Cyril! The little one!"
"—AND RIGHT ROUND PAST THE CORNER," Dot shouted, because she'd started, and she was going to finish, "AND THERE WAS A MAN IN A MUFFLER, AND I TOLD EVERYONE HE WAS MY UNCLE, AND HE WASN'T, AND NOBODY MINDED, AND—"
Pike found the little knob. The trombones went away into the wall and became a band playing in somebody else's house, three doors down.
"—and that was all before nine o'clock," Dot said, into the quiet, much too loud. She brought it down. "Before nine in the morning. Evening, Mr Pike. Are you all right down there?"
"It was live," said Pike, from the floor.
"I said mind it," said Mrs Ruddock.
"You said mind it. You didn't say it was live." He looked at his fingers, all ten of them, and put them back to work.
Mr Pike mended half the wirelesses in Lowmarsh and wouldn't take a penny. It was his only vice. Dot had seen him with the back off the Co-op manager's, and Mrs Pollard's at number twenty-four, and the one in the vestry at St Saviour's that only got the Home Service, and she stepped over his legs now as she'd have stepped over a cat and went to the fire.
It was a small fire, slack and coke, banked up tight behind the bars to make it last till bed.
"Don't stand in it," said Mrs Ruddock. "Four and six a hundredweight, that is, and half of it's dust. You'll have the heat off it before it's paid for." She was dishing up. "Tripe. It's gone up. Tenpence, and he gave me the thin end, and I told him so. Sit down. It's going in the book."
"Put it in the book," said Dot. "Put me in the book. Put the whole day in, I don't want it."
Mrs Ruddock put the plate down like a verdict. "And since you're not asking what my week's been."
"I was going to. I was just —"
"Friday." She took the lid off a pan and put it back. "Friday I sent Cyril off with your soup. I had my dinner. I went for my flask, out of my own front door, and I'd not got my foot off my own front step when Norman Gully comes round out of Tanyard Road at me like a hearse with the brakes off and near has me in the railings. 'Mind yourself, you great undertaker,' I said. He didn't like that."
"He is an undertaker," said Pike, from the floor.
"He's a great one." She sat. "I went on round by the road and sat on your radiator, Cyril, being civil, as I told the whole office Friday, and Dorothea down her hole with the books. And at a quarter past four I come home to my back door stood open, and my Coronation tin gone off the dresser, the King and Queen on the lid, my Christmas club and my burial money in it, and my good gloves off the hook."
"I know," said Dot. "You said, last night, I just thought — it's the fog, isn't it? Somebody walked in out of it. It's the only thing it's good for, hiding a —"
"Ernie Bowyer's young constable wrote it in his book on the step and said they'd had forty this week. Forty. I've had a bolt put on, the size of my arm, and I've not had my eyes shut since. Every board in this house. Somebody's been through my kitchen, touching, and who's to say they've finished?"
She sat at the table with its cloth of faded bluebells, worn white at her own place from six years of her elbows, and gave them the day in about a minute, which for Dot was a telegram. The old man on the Co-op step. Stanley Bracegirdle and his armband sewn on crooked. The green paper running out, which it hadn't, because she'd shut the drawer on it with her hip.
"I told a lie," she said. "In a government office. To a man with a black band on."
"With a drawer open," said Pike, screwing something very small into something smaller.
"With a drawer open. Thank you, Mr Pike. So I went round there tonight to say sorry, which I did, very badly, on the step, and they all said it. The lot of them. His chest. In his bed. The nurse's hand. Somebody's told that whole house what to say, Mrs R."
"That's Beth Rhys for you," said Mrs Ruddock. "She'd have the Archbishop's cough told what to say."
"That's what I thought! Well, not first. First I thought, she's being kind, because she is kind, she gave me a lozenge this afternoon and took my pulse like I was a horse. Then I thought something worse, and I've stopped thinking it, because she's a friend and it was the sort of thing you think at four o'clock in a fog with no dinner." She took a mouthful of tripe too fast and burned her tongue on it. "Did you know him? Mr Bracegirdle. Stanley says he was a greengrocer."
"Had a barrow on the corner before the war." Mrs Ruddock sat with her own plate. "Charged a penny over for bruised."
"Stanley says he used to sing."
"They all sing, with a barrow. So you don't hear the price."
"And then the lodger came in at closing. Mr Ferrar. First floor back. He came in to say it before anyone could say it about him, which I thought was the bravest thing I've seen all week, and I've seen a woman register her husband with his pipe in her handbag."
"That coloured lad?" said Mrs Ruddock. "Well. Somebody has to be the lodger."
Dot put her fork down.
"He's got a name. It's Mr Ferrar. He's a conductor, he called all the stops out for me down Tanyard Road like I was on his platform. And a policeman put a lamp in his face, and he never broke step, he told a long story about taking a fare off a duke, with a goose in it. And I told the policeman I was a registrar. Which I am. I don't know what I thought he'd do about it."
Mrs Ruddock shrugged and got up for the teapot.
The rent book came off the dresser with the teapot. Dot knew it by its brown cover and its corners, which were soft as a glove from being opened, and by the look of Mrs Ruddock's reading glasses coming out of her apron pocket after it.
"While I've got you," said Mrs Ruddock. "You're a week and fourpence behind."
"I'm not! Mrs R. I paid you Monday. Half a crown for the suppers, I remember it, it was the half-crown with the dent in, off the bus."
Mrs Ruddock ran her finger down the column and read it out, the way the vicar read the banns, so that everyone could object and nobody would.
"Suppers. Monday. You gave me a florin and four coppers, and one of the coppers was a French one, and I've let you have that, I'm not petty. Two and four, not two and six. I'm not a thief, madam, and I'm not a charity either." She turned the book round. "And fourpence for the tripe."
Dot leaned over and read the figures upside down. They were in pencil, in tidy columns, and there was a French penny written in the margin with a ring round it. "Mr Pike. Tell her."
Pike got up off the lino by stages, like a deckchair being put up, and stood over the book with his hands behind his back.
"Two and four," he said. "Carried down. The addition is correct." He tilted his head. "Upside down as well."
"Whose side are you on?"
"The column's."
"And a third of the bolt," said Mrs Ruddock. "Eleven and threepence, it cost. Three and ninepence. It's your door too."
"It's your back door that got opened!"
"It's still your door."
Dot paid up, laughing, out of her coat pocket: the week, in everything she had, and the fourpence in pennies, and a sweet she hadn't meant to put on the table, which Mrs Ruddock pushed straight back across the bluebells.
"Sweets cost coupons," said Mrs Ruddock. "I'll have it in money."
Pike knelt again to his screws. Mrs Ruddock poured. Dot, warm through for the first time since Friday, put both elbows on her worn place and her chin in her hands and started again, because it wasn't finished, none of it was.
"Here's what I can't get past," she said. "Stanley says his dad collected for someone else. He said it and then he tried to put it back, like you'd put back a cup you'd picked up in a shop. He was an agent, he said. He collected the rents for someone else. Well, who? Who owns the Row?"
"Some firm up the High Street, the tenants say," said Mrs Ruddock. "You pay your rent, you don't ask whose pocket."
"Somebody's pocket. It's a whole street. It's not a firm's pocket, a firm hasn't got pockets, a firm's a brass plate. There's a man behind a brass plate somewhere eating his breakfast off that street."
Pike fitted the back on the wireless and began to screw it home, one corner and then the one across from it, as he did everything.
"Mr Marchbanks telephoned," he said. "At five. After you'd gone. I went back in for my tin."
"On a Saturday? At five?"
"At five. First time in thirty years he's asked me after one name. 'Has the Bracegirdle entry gone through? Who was the informant?'" Pike did Mr Marchbanks exactly. "I told him the entry was written and the informant was the son. Which is true."
"And the form? Did he ask about the form?"
"He did not ask about the form. I did not volunteer it. Volunteering is not procedure." He turned the second screw. "I asked him why he wanted to know. He said, 'Totals, Mr Pike.'"
Dot sat up so fast the table rocked.
"He owns it."
"Owns what?"
"Cinder Row! Mr Marchbanks owns Cinder Row. He's the someone else. No, listen, listen, it goes together, he's up in the Town Hall, he's on the High Street, he rings on a Saturday at teatime about one name, one, out of four hundred, and he never asks about names, he asks about totals, he said totals, that's what a landlord says, a landlord's all totals—"
"Mr Marchbanks," said Pike, "owns a telephone."
"He might own a street as well."
"He owns a telephone, and a Hillman with a dent in the wing that I'm not supposed to know about. He hasn't the imagination for a street."
"Had all his teeth out at forty, Marchbanks," said Mrs Ruddock, from the teapot. "His char told Ada Pollard."
"That doesn't mean he doesn't own Cinder Row."
"I never said it did."
Dot looked from one to the other of them. Then she laughed, and put her face in her hands, and said through her fingers, "I've been wrong four times today and it's only half past eight. I'm going to bed before I'm wrong again."
Pike wound his muffler twice round his neck at the door and was going to leave it at that. Mrs Ruddock went after him, and unwound it, and wound it again properly, crossed over the chest and the ends tucked into his coat.
"You'll not go out like that," she said. "You'll catch your death and I'll get the blame."
"I've been going out in a muffler since the old Queen," said Pike.
"And look at the state of it."
"Night, Mr Pike," said Dot, going past them both to the stairs. "Mind the kerbs. Keep to the railings. Don't talk to anybody, there's nobody out there but the dead and the police." She stopped on the top step. "And me. Night, Mrs R. Thank you for the tripe."
"It's in the book," said Mrs Ruddock.
Her own room was so cold that the glass on the washstand had a skin on it. She undressed in the dark and fast, the way you'd get into the sea, and her blouse went over the back of the chair with its cuff turned up. Even with the light off she knew what was on the cuff. Two hundred and twelve, in pencil, small, as if she'd forget it.
She got into bed and lay on her back and did what she did when the number was on her cuff. She went home.
Tuesday night. October. Nine o'clock, and the sirens starting over the river, first one and then the rest, and her mother standing up from the table with the Co-op ledger still open and her pen still wet. Her mother always had ink on her middle finger, a little blue callus of it that no soap got off. She had her coat on before the second siren. She did up her buttons from the bottom, as if she were climbing into them.
"Put the kettle on," she'd said. "We'll be down there a while."
"Where are you going?"
"To fetch Mrs —" and then a name, and "— from the Row. She'll not come down on her own, she never does. I'll be ten minutes."
A name. Dot had been trying to hear it for twelve years. It was two words away from her in the dark, on the other side of her mother's mouth, and every time she reached for it there was only the sound of the siren, going up, going round. Mrs Something. Mrs Somebody from the Row. It was a short name. She was nearly sure it was short.
She'd put the kettle on. She'd stood at the front door with it open, to hear the feet coming back, and the guns had started, and she'd counted her mother's ten minutes, and then another ten, and another, and in the kitchen behind her the kettle had boiled dry and gone on and on, ticking, and she hadn't gone in to it.
Dot turned over and put her face in the pillow and said, "Mrs," into it, as she'd said it a thousand times, and waited for the rest to come.
The tap on the glass came at midnight, by St Saviour's.
She thought it was the fog at first. Then it came again, three knuckles on the pane by her head, and a lamp outside, held low, lighting a face from underneath: a chin, a mouth, the rim of a navy hood.
Dot got out of bed with her coat round her and pushed the sash up four inches. The fog came in over the sill.
"Nurse Rhys? What's happened? Who's—"
"Dorothea." Rhys's voice was low and quick. The lamp didn't move. "Don't go asking on the Row. Not this week. For the street's sake."
"I wasn't asking. I went to say sorry to Stanley, that's all, I told him a lie at the counter this morning and it was on my conscience, and then Mrs Sallis let me in, and I was only—"
"I know where you were. The whole Row knows where you were. You were in his room touching his things."
"I touch everybody's things, I can't help it, I'm famous for it. Nurse Rhys, listen, if it was just his chest, then why does everybody in that house say it in the same words? Because they do. Mr Ferrar says so, and I heard it with my own—"
"Go to bed."
"I'm in bed. I was. I'm freezing, I'm standing here in my nightgown, and you've come down Flax Street at midnight to tell me not to ask, and that's the one thing guaranteed to make me—"
"Shut that window. You'll have pneumonia by Monday," said Rhys. "And go to bed."
The lamp went back from the glass. It was a lamp, and then it was a smaller lamp, a round yellow smear going up Flax Street at a walking pace, the navy hood gone out of it, and then it was the fog with a light somewhere in it.
"Stay off the Row, love," said Rhys, from further away than a voice ought to carry. "I mean it."