Sunday night, the seventh of December. Half past nine, and three days to the burial.
Dot got in at twenty-eight minutes past nine by the clock over the range, and was told she had saved herself a penny.
"Street door shuts at ten," said Mrs Ruddock. "Penny after, and tuppence if I've gone up. Boots. Not on my lino."
Dot stood on the mat in her stockings and steamed. It was the only warm room in the house, and it owed its warmth to a coke fire, six years of Mrs Ruddock's arithmetic, and a rooted objection to opening a window. On the hob a pan of cocoa had grown a skin, and there was one cup on the table and another, upside down, on the drainer.
"Help yourself," said Mrs Ruddock. "It's a halfpenny. And the tripe's off, before you ask. You left half of it Saturday, and that was tenpence in the bin."
"Book."
"Book." She stood at the range with her arms folded on her apron, and she had not sat down since Dot came in. She had looked at the door twice. "Go on, then. You've been bursting since the street door. I heard you on the stairs. You were doing it to the banister."
"I wasn't talking to the banister."
"You said 'Winston' to it twice."
Dot gave her the day in a sentence, which was the coroner's officer, the doctor, and a sergeant with a pencil, and Mrs Ruddock said "Well."
"Forty," she said, to the kettle. "That's what the young constable told me on my step. Forty in Lowmarsh since Friday with something gone out of their kitchen. And the fog's a godsend to them, I'm told. They can walk in a front door and out a back and nobody's the wiser." She moved the kettle to the other hob, and then back. "My club, and I'd put by every Friday since March."
"They'll find the tin, Mrs R."
"They'll find a tin. I'd sooner have the money."
"And Mr Marchbanks is coming in the morning to sign the entry over my head and hand the green form to Stanley," Dot said, into the cocoa, "and then that's it. He's bronchitis. It's in the ink."
Something went over downstairs.
It was a clatter and then a long iron roll, the noise of a thing that has been set down badly in a stone passage. It came up the back stairs as if it had been sent, and the lamp flame on the dresser leaned over to look. Mrs Ruddock turned round with the poker in her hand, and Dot had not seen her pick it up.
She had gone the colour of the tablecloth.
"That's him back," said Mrs Ruddock.
"Who?"
"Him. Whoever. That's the back stairs, that is, and there's nobody on the back stairs. My club money and my good gloves, and he's come back for the kettle. Well, he'll not have it."
"Mrs R, stay there."
"It's my house."
"It's my turn. I'm the Deputy Registrar." Dot took the lamp off its hook, and the pan of cocoa off the hob, for the weight. "If anybody wants a fuss they can have a fuss. I'll go down. You hold the poker at the top, and if I say Mrs Ruddock you come down, and if I say Mr Pike you don't."
"Why would you say Mr Pike?"
"I don't know! It's the first name I thought of."
She went down the back stairs with the lamp held out in front of her, which lit the stairs a yard at a time and left the yard after it black, and announced herself at every turn in the voice of a woman giving evidence. "This is the Deputy Registrar of Births and Deaths for Lowmarsh. I have a lamp. I am armed."
"With what?" said Mrs Ruddock, from the top.
"With cocoa."
A scuttle rolled out of the dark and rang on the bottom step. It was followed by a hand, and then a cuff, and then the rest of Mr Pike, who had been on all fours in the passage picking up coal and now rose, in his good trousers, with a brown-paper shine of coal dust on both knees, and looked into the lamp.
"Good evening, Miss Amory," said Pike. "I am fetching coal."
"You might have knocked."
"It was not a door one knocks at. It was a scuttle." He picked a piece of coal off his lapel. "I came up the back stairs so as not to wake the house."
"It's half past nine!"
"So as not to wake it, in principle."
"On a Sunday?"
"The fire has need of it."
"In your good trousers?"
Pike looked down at them. He took some time about it.
"Cyril Pike," said Mrs Ruddock, who had come down four stairs with the poker and stopped, "you took a year off me."
"I am sorry for it, Mavis."
"Mavis," said Dot.
There was a silence on the back stairs in which everybody looked at a different wall. Pike put the last of the coal into the scuttle, one lump at a time. "That is two shillings' worth," he said to Mrs Ruddock, "and I shall pay for it, and I shall go out by the front, and I shall say good night." He did, to both of them, and went down the passage with the dignity of a bishop and the knees of a coalman, and they heard the street door.
They went up. Mrs Ruddock put the poker back in its place, and the scuttle by the range, and said it was tuppence on the bill whoever's knees it was.
Dot moved a muffler to sit down.
It was on the settle by the dresser, long and grey and unloved, with a scorched end. She picked it up to make room, and Mrs Ruddock took it out of her hands, and folded it in three, and put it on the dresser out of reach.
"That's Mr Pike's muffler," said Dot.
"It's a muffler."
"It's Mr Pike's good muffler. It's got the burn on the end from the office stove. He came for his tea, on a Sunday, and he's gone home without it." She turned round, slowly, and looked at the drainer. "There's two cups. And you're in your good apron at half past nine at night. Mrs R. Is he ill? Have you been nursing him? It's not his chest, is it? Look at you."
Mrs Ruddock had gone red from the collar up, which was a great improvement on white.
"We're walking out," she said, to the range.
"You're what?"
"Walking out. Since the King died. And you'll not say it like that."
"Like what? I've said nothing! I'm doing it with my whole face." Dot sat down, got up, sat down again. "That's February! Ten months. Mrs Ruddock, he's seventy-two."
"Seventy."
"Well, seventy-two if he's a day. I've seen him sit down."
"Seventy-one in March. Don't let him tell you different. He knocks a year off every Christmas, the vain old thing."
Dot put her face in her hands and her shoulders shook.
"Don't you laugh at me."
"I'm not laughing at you. I'm laughing at him. He's courting. He blots his full stops."
"He's a good man," said Mrs Ruddock, sharply, and then, because she could never leave a thing where it lay, "He mends the wireless and he won't take a farthing, and he's never once said a word about my rent book. Which is more than some."
"And I'm to say nothing to him in the morning."
"You'll say good morning. In a normal voice."
"Good morning, Mr Pike," said Dot, in a normal voice.
"You sound like a woman selling a bad fish. You'll go red, and he'll know, and he'll say nothing for a week to punish us both."
"He does that anyway."
"He does it better when he's got something to do it about."
The fire ticked. Above them the pipes gave their nightly knock. Dot drank the last cold mouthful of cocoa, and the joke went out of her all at once.
"They'll hang him, you know."
"Who?"
"Winston. If it's murder. They'll want one man, and there he is on a board with a pin through him, and he's the one who said out loud it wasn't Mr Bracegirdle's chest." She turned the cup round. "It's my mouth. It's always my mouth."
"They'll not hang a lad for a rent quarrel, love," said Mrs Ruddock. "They'll have a word with him, and he'll go home to the sunshine."
"He is home."
"I only meant—"
"He's been home six years. He pays on the nail. He told me a long story about a duke and a goose."
"I know how long he's been in Lowmarsh." Mrs Ruddock picked up the cloth and wiped a table that was already clean. "I'm not saying he's not a nice lad. Don't look at me like that. You'll not change it tonight."
They left it there.
"There's one more thing," said Dot. "And it's not about Mr Bracegirdle."
Her hand went to her cuff and came out with a scrap of paper, folded very small. It had been in and out of that cuff since ten that morning and was soft as cloth. She smoothed it flat on the bluebells. On it, in her smallest pencil writing, were two lines.
"Entry two hundred and twelve," she said. "In the nineteen-forty book. I've never told you. It's my mother's, Mrs R. It says she died on the Thursday in a shelter on Tanyard Road, and she went out on the Tuesday and never got near a shelter, I know she didn't, I was standing at the front door. I've gone down and looked at it for years. This morning, in the strongroom, it fell open, and the page was wrong. It's been cut out and another stuck in. And there's a strip of the old one left in the crack, with the ends of words on it, in a browner ink. I copied them. I've been carrying them about all day like a sweet."
Mrs Ruddock put on her glasses. She read the scrap as she read the rent book, with a finger.
"The first is the end of a word. Inder, and then an R. I keep thinking Cinder Row. But everything's Cinder Row this week. And the second says moved by, and a capital L, and a full stop, and then Nea. And then it stops. Where they cut."
"Nea," said Mrs Ruddock. She kept her finger on the paper. "Neal. Neagle." She frowned. "Neave? There was a Neave on the Row, Lil, or Lily. I couldn't swear. Ask old Mrs Ormerod at fourteen. She knows everyone's business back to the old Queen."
"Neave," said Dot, and didn't move.
I'll fetch Mrs Neave from the Row. She'll not come down on her own. Her mother's voice, and her mother's coat, and her hands doing up the buttons from the bottom. It was short. She had always said it was short.
"I said it was short," said Dot, and her face went, all at once, without any warning.
She cried with her mouth open, like a child, ugly and loud, and Mrs Ruddock, who was not made for it, said, "Oh, for goodness' sake," and patted her shoulder, three times, hard, as if putting out a small fire. A handkerchief arrived, folded square and ironed.
"It's Cyril's," said Mrs Ruddock. "It's clean. Don't blow on it, it's a good one. You'll ruin your face."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be sorry. Be quiet. They'll hear you in Church Street."
Dot blew on it anyway. The room came back: the cups, the range, the muffler folded in three. Her voice came out wet and reasonable, and it was going again, because it always was.
"And Nurse Rhys's mother died at number eleven, in 'forty-seven, and Mr Bracegirdle's at fourteen, and everything I've touched this week is on that street. I keep going up and down it like a bus. And she's told me Monday already, Mrs Ormerod, she shouted it down the stairwell, tell her Monday, I've things to say, and I thought it was about Mr Bracegirdle. I'll ask her both."
"Half the Row's died in number eleven, love," said Mrs Ruddock. "It's the damp."
She took the handkerchief back, and looked at it, and put it in her apron.
"Bed," said Mrs Ruddock. "It's ten to. You'll have your penny to pay."
Dot let herself into her own room in the dark. It was cold enough that her breath showed. She undressed, and got in between sheets like ice, and lay on her back with her hands on her chest. Upstairs a door shut, and somebody's feet went along the landing, and the pipes knocked.
"Neave," she said to the ceiling.
It came out lower than her own voice, and quicker, somebody already halfway to the door.
"Mrs Neave," said her mother. "I'll be ten minutes."