Monday, the eighth of December. Quarter to nine, and two days to the burial.
Mr Marchbanks was standing on the public side of the counter with his hat on, as if the office might be wanted elsewhere.
Dot had known him for six years, by telephone. In the flesh he was smaller than his voice: a neat grey man in a black overcoat buttoned to the chin, with a furled umbrella, and a face that looked as if it had been ironed flat and put away in a drawer between uses. He had good teeth. Dot thought of Mrs Ruddock at the teapot, top and bottom, at forty, and had to look hard at the blotter.
Beside him, with both hands flat on the mahogany, stood Stanley.
"She lied," said Stanley. "She said it'd run out."
"So I understand," said Mr Marchbanks.
"There is a drawer of it," said Pike, from his stool. "Full."
"Thank you, Mr Pike."
"I only mention it."
Mr Marchbanks turned to Dot. He didn't look at her face. He looked at a point a little to one side of it, where a memorandum might have been pinned.
"Miss Amory. I shall be brief. I have four hundred and six entries outstanding across three boroughs. Item. My instruction of last week allows a registrar to hold the burial certificate one day, pending a word with the certifying doctor. You have held it. The day is up. Item. The coroner's officer has read your report. I have it here." He did have it, folded in his glove. "Item. Dr Kemp telephoned me at eight this morning. He tells me you rang his surgery eleven times, attended it once, and used the word doubt. One more complaint, Miss Amory, and you will be registering from your kitchen."
"Sir, the son said his father was a greengrocer, and he wasn't, and the whole house has been told what to say. I only—"
"Which is why the coroner's officer has read your report and written what he has written." He put the report back in his glove. "The dead cannot wait. Mr Bracegirdle. The entry."
Nobody moved. Then Pike got down from his stool by stages, and opened the register at Saturday's page, and turned it on the mahogany so that the words faced the other way. Retired greengrocer, in Dot's hand. And under it, in the column for the informant, the space the width of a man's hand.
She had left it empty herself, on Saturday, and lied about a drawer.
"The pen," said Mr Marchbanks.
Pike put the office pen into Stanley's fist. Stanley bent over the page with his tongue between his teeth and wrote his name, one letter at a time, as if he were laying bricks. S. Bracegirdle. Son. 14 Cinder Row. His hand shook on the tail of the last letter, and it came out longer than it should. Dot looked away. It seemed rude to watch him do it.
"It says greengrocer," she said. "He wasn't."
"It says what the informant told the registrar," said Mr Marchbanks. "I am not a court of appeal." He held out his hand, palm up, at the level of her chest. "The key, Miss Amory."
She put the key in his palm, and he went to the cabinet marked GREEN and unlocked it himself, and took out a green form, and wrote on it standing up. It was three lines. He signed under them in a single stroke and blotted it with the flat of his hand, as if blotting paper were for other people.
"Miss Amory has had her day," said Mr Marchbanks, to Stanley, giving him the form. "The instruction has been observed. Mr Gully will require this at the cemetery on Wednesday. I am sorry for your loss."
"Ta," said Stanley.
He folded it once and put it in the inside pocket of the overcoat, and stood a moment with his hand flat over the pocket. He looked at Dot.
"I said I'd go over your head."
"You did."
"I never said it for spite."
"I know you didn't."
He went out. The fog took him in three steps. Mr Marchbanks consulted his watch and said he would telephone at noon, and that Mr Pike might oblige him by finding a signalman's death that was still outstanding, and he went out too, the umbrella exactly as furled as it had come.
Pike blotted a page that was dry. Then he opened the drawer under the counter, took out a long wooden pen box, and set on her blotter, quite gently, the good pen: the one with the gold nib that he'd had ground in 1931, and that nobody in the office had been allowed to touch since the day in 1949 that Dot had.
He went back to his stool.
"It's not a present," said Dot. "Is it?"
"It's a pen," said Pike, and bent to his ledger.
She sat with it in front of her, not using it, until half past ten. Then she stood up so fast the stool fell over.
"Mrs Ormerod. At the top of number fourteen. She said she had things to say, and it's Monday."
"I'll mind the counter," said Pike.
The front door of number fourteen stood open, and the hall was full of people who weren't supposed to be there.
The fog had come in with the visitors and hung about the bottom of the stairs in a low brown shelf, and on the newel post someone had put a paraffin lamp that lit a ring of wallpaper the size of a plate. In the front room, Elsie Sallis and Mrs Ruddock were laying the place out for Wednesday, moving chairs.
"Morning, Mrs R," she said.
"Your hat's on crooked," said Mrs Ruddock, and turned back to Elsie. "—and they want boiling. Hair oil. It's gone right into the crochet. You'll want a copper."
"Mine's split. Reg's been going to see to it since Michaelmas."
"Then you'll borrow mine. Tuppence to the boy for the coal. And that skirting wants a cloth, I've never seen a skirting like it."
Mrs Ruddock had a pie dish on her arm, the one the mutton pie had come in, which she would want back. Stanley was in the hall, at the foot of the stairs, with a large man in a black coat that had once had a velvet collar and now had the shape of one. The man was Mr Gully's. He had been to the funerals of half of Lowmarsh, and it showed on him, like coal on a coalman.
"Mr Gully wants his money," said the man. He said it kindly, as if he'd been sent to deliver a birthday present. "And he seals at five Tuesday. That's tomorrow. Council orders."
Five o'clock tomorrow the lid went on, and nobody would dig up a fog death in Lowmarsh this winter for love or for a lawyer. She put her hand on the newel post, which was sticky.
"I've the green form," said Stanley. "Mr Marchbanks give me it. I'm to hand it Wednesday."
"That's not money."
"It's what I've got."
"Everybody's asking has he got Gully's money," Stanley said to Dot, over the man's shoulder, like somebody reporting the weather. "I never asked for elm. I never asked for nothing."
"You never asked for deal," said Gully's man. "Nobody asks for deal."
"Stanley," said Dot. "Can I see him? Before Wednesday. I only want to look."
"He's Mr Gully's."
"You're the son. If you said."
Stanley considered it, slowly, with his lips moving. "He's Mr Gully's till Wednesday," he said. "Ask Mr Gully."
From the back of the house, through the open yard door, came a sound like a small animal being strangled, and a voice, flat, hoarse, hopeless, that she knew. "Come on. Come on, damn you. I haven't the."
The strangled sound coughed, caught, and died.
"That's the doctor," said Stanley. "He comes Mondays for his car. It's in the lock-up. It's never once started for him."
The street door, which nobody had shut, let in a cape and a helmet. It was the young constable from Tanyard Road on Saturday night, with the chapped chin and the bicycle lamp, which he had brought indoors and forgotten to turn off. He stood in the hall with it lit, lighting nobody.
"Morning," said Constable Garrard, to the house in general. "I'm to ask for the lodger. Ferrar. The Sergeant's compliments. Just to know where he'll be."
"At the depot," said Stanley, before anybody else could. "Till twelve. He's always somewhere."
Garrard wrote it down. He looked at Dot, and remembered her, and went red from the collar. "Miss," he said. Then he went out again, with the lamp still on, and the fog closed over it at the top of the step.
Dot stood with her hand on the newel post and found she had not breathed since the lamp came in, which was not like her. She let it go, and started up the stairs.
It took her eleven minutes to climb two flights, flattening herself to the wall on every tread. Nurse Rhys came down from Mrs Ormerod's with her bag, Gully's man went up with a coat-hanger for Stanley's suit, and Mrs Ruddock went up with her pie dish for Stanley's black tie. Nobody spoke. Elsie Sallis, who was collecting, stopped on the ninth stair, which sagged, and rattled a cocoa tin under Dot's nose.
"For the wreath," she said. "Whatever you can. It's mostly pennies."
Dot found tuppence. It went into the tin with a small flat noise like a lid.
On the first-floor landing she had to stand back once more. Gully's man came away from the back door with the coat-hanger empty in his fist, and looked across at the front one, which was Stanley's.
"Wrong door, Miss," he said. "They're all the same in this light."
"Everything's the same in this light," said Dot. "I said good morning to a dead man on Saturday."
"Ah," said Gully's man, agreeably, and went across into Stanley's room and shut the door.
Mrs Ormerod's room was at the top of the house, at the back, and it was the only room in the building that had a view.
She lay in an iron bed pushed hard against the window, shawls up to her chin, a very small, very old face with the eyes of a hen. A wireless on a tea-chest beside her head was talking about the price of eggs, at a volume that made the glass shiver, and she was looking not at Dot but out of the window, down into the yard.
"Mrs Ormerod. It's Miss Amory. From the register office. You said Monday."
"What?"
"IT'S MONDAY."
"I know it's Monday." Mrs Ormerod put out a hand like a bird's foot and turned the knob, and the eggs went away. The silence was so sudden that Dot heard her own ears ring. "I only turn it up so I can't hear them downstairs. All that scraping. Sit where I can see you. I've things to say and I'll say them once."
Dot sat on the edge of the only chair. It was a good window: the yard, a cinder lane beyond it, and beyond the lane the great blank wall of the old tanyard with the fog moving on it like a slow tide. She could see the roof of the lock-up. She could see the privy door.
"He never coughed," said Mrs Ormerod. "Bracegirdle. Alfred. Nurse says his chest. It wasn't ever his chest. I'd have heard. I hear nothing else in this house, dear. Only what I'm not meant to."
"Yes. That's what I think. Mrs Ormerod, did you see anything? On Friday? You can see the whole yard from here."
"I can see the yard. I can't see the fog, it's in the way." She said it with contempt. "Friday dinnertime, somebody come up the yard with a bag."
Dot didn't breathe.
"Before Woman's Hour come on," said Mrs Ormerod. "I'd have it turned up for that, it's my treat. The fog was thin still. About two. Thin, you understand, that's a privy door and a wall, it's not thin like a Tuesday in June. I took them for Nurse."
"A man or a woman?"
"In that? A coat, and a bag. From up here they're all hats." She shifted on the pillow. "I took them for Nurse. Nurse always comes up the yard. After that, mind, she always comes after. She's a proper time for it, Nurse, she's a clock. So I thought, that's early, and I thought no more."
"Did you tell her?"
"I told Nurse. On Friday teatime when she come up to tell me about his chest. I said, somebody come before you, up the yard. And Nurse said it were her."
"It was her."
"That's what she said."
"But you said she comes after."
"I said after. She said it were her." The hen's eyes swung round and rested on Dot, and something in them was tired and not at all stupid. "She's a good girl. She'll have got her times mixed. Everyone does. It's the fog."
Dot put her hands between her knees.
It was too many things. She said them out loud, because she could only ever hold a thing by saying it. "So if it was Nurse she was in the yard before two. And she said she was with him at the end. She never said anything about two. But she'd say it was her, she'd say it was her whatever it was, because she'd say anything to save a—" She stopped. "Or it wasn't. And it was somebody else in a coat with a bag, and they came up the yard, before two, on the one afternoon a man's dead in his room. Mrs Ormerod, would you know them again?"
"I'd not know them again. It was a fog, dear, even thin. I've told you what I saw." Mrs Ormerod put her hand on the knob. "That's all. That's all you get, dear. I'm tired."
"One more. It's nothing to do with any of this." Dot went hot, and found she didn't mind. "A woman called Lil Neave. On the Row. Do you remember her?"
"Lil Neave." The hand came off the knob. Something crossed the old face, a small distant opening, like a door in a corridor. "Number eleven. Everybody knew Lil. Went off in 'forty-one. Nobody goes anywhere from the Row, but she went."
"Where?"
"Went," said Mrs Ormerod. "That's all I know. That's all anybody said." She turned the knob, and the Home Service came back, a man on the shipping, and rose to meet the glass.
Elsie was on the first-floor landing when Dot came down, with the tin held against her stomach, and Dot told Elsie about it in a whisper that was mostly breath. Somebody had come up the yard with a bag, about two.
Elsie laughed. It was a proper laugh, short and hoarse.
"That'll be me. Going up the yard with the slop pail about one. She thinks everybody's the nurse. I've done it a dozen times, she says Nurse and I say it's Elsie, Mrs O., and she says what?" She rattled the tin. "Don't go putting it in a report, love. The whole street'd have it by dinner."
"About one," said Dot. "She said about two."
"She'd say five past midnight if the wireless was on. She can't tell."
Dot took it, because it was warm and reasonable and had a pail in it. Very likely it was Elsie.
Feet came up the stairs from the hall, slow, one at a time, and it was Winston, with his cap in his hand.
"No bus," he said, before she asked. "The river end's shut again. I'd have got a ride sooner from a hearse." He looked at her face. "It's signed."
"He signed it over my head. Before nine. In front of Pike and Stanley and the whole register."
Winston turned his cap round once by the brim, and put it on, and touched the brim to Elsie, and went past them both along the landing.
Dot went down. She was on the front step when the man in the black coat came out behind her, with Stanley's suit over his arm in brown paper. He touched his hat to her, kindly, as to a bereaved family.
"Wharf Lane, Miss," he said. "And Mr Gully don't do viewings for registrars."