Tuesday, the ninth of December. Nine o'clock at night, and clear.
The key turned in the front door at the first try, which surprised her. She had expected it to stick out of principle.
She'd stood on the steps of the police station for a quarter of an hour before her feet would go. Then they'd gone, without consulting her, by the streets, in the frost, past a pub with its door open and a piano going and a whole room of people singing, and she had not once counted a railing. She had walked the entire way to Tanyard Road with the key shut in her fist like a sweet.
Dot let herself in and shut the door and shot the bolt, and stood in the dark of the office with her back against it, listening to the place breathe. Old paper, cold ashes, damp wool, polish. The mahogany counter came up out of the gloom like the side of a ship. On the blackboard behind it the week's tally was still chalked in Mr Pike's square hand, and the deaths column was so long he'd had to start a second.
She didn't put on the light. There was no light to put on. Only the paraffin lamps. She wouldn't have known where he kept the matches if he hadn't, with his usual tact, left the box on the stove beside the lamp with the wick already trimmed.
The stove was laid. She lit it one-handed, kneeling, with her bandaged mitten held up out of the way like somebody being sworn in. It took four matches. When the paper caught she sat back on her heels and watched it. The hearth-plate began to tick. The smell of the office came up warm out of its own walls.
Then she went upstairs with the lamp.
There was a window at the back of the first-floor landing, a small square one, which nobody had cleaned since the Jubilee. She held the lamp up to it. It showed her her own face. She put the lamp on the sill, and turned it down, and looked.
She'd looked out of it a hundred times. She had never seen it. The bombed tanyard lay below in the starlight like a black lake, and the wall along the far side of it, and the Drift in a thin pale line of cinders with two lamps burning on it, small, plain, and yellow, exactly as far apart as they were. Beyond that were the backs of Cinder Row, stepping down the hill. Every house had a window lit. There was a light in the yard of fourteen. At the top, in the very roof, there was one more, a small orange square with a wireless going in it, so faintly that it might have been in her head. Somebody talking about the weather.
"Dry," said Dot, to the glass. "Frost. Clear, with a light wind from the west."
She took the lamp and went down.
The 1940 volume was where it always was, on the second shelf of the strongroom under the stairs. She had to stand on the box. She had once tried to count how many times she'd done it, and given up at ninety. It came out into her arms heavy and cold, and it opened by itself on the counter as if it had been waiting to.
Two hundred and twelve.
She held the lamp close. The hand was steady and clerical. It belonged to no one. The leaf was the wrong shade of white, a shade too clean, and in the gutter beside it stood the narrow brown stub of what had been there before.
She wasn't going to think about that yet. She took a fresh certificate form from the pigeonhole, the printed kind with a border and the Royal Arms in the corner, and she took the second-best pen, the one with the split nib that Pike hated, and she dipped it, and wrote.
It was a great deal harder than she'd expected. Her right hand was in a lint mitten the size of a pudding, and she had to hold the pen in a fist, like a child with a crayon, and press with the ball of her thumb. Every stroke made her eyes water. The first A came out like a dropped hairpin. She wrote it again on the back of a spoilt form and it was better, and she began.
Amory, Rose Ellen. Female. Aged forty-four.
She copied the date of death, which was two days late, and the shelter she'd never set foot in, and domestic duties, and the words Certificate received from Civil Defence. She wrote down the lot, in her poor bandaged hand, every letter of it as wrong as the day it went in, and the ink went on wet and shining and began to dry as she watched.
She blew on it. It would do.
At the bottom there was a place for a signature. Deputy Registrar, it said, in small type. She held the pen over it for a long while.
She had no right to it. She had been suspended at two o'clock, with her keys on a blotter.
She signed D. Amory and, after a moment, drew a line through the printed words beneath.
The fee for a certified copy was two shillings and sevenpence. She counted it out of her own purse on to the counter, twice, because her left hand was clumsy and one of the coppers rolled off the edge, and she went on her knees under the counter after it and knocked her head on the drawer. She put the money in the till. In the fees book, in the next line, in her hand, she wrote: Amory, D. Certified copy, entry 212, 1940. Paid.
Then she sat on the public bench, with the certificate on her knee and the stove ticking, and found she was shaking so hard she couldn't have held the pen if she'd been asked.
The tracing took longer.
She got tissue paper from the pigeonhole where they kept it for wrapping the certificates. She held the volume open to the leaf under the lamp, on the counter, with the tips of her fingers, and slid the tissue into the gutter behind. She pressed. The stub showed through it faintly, a strip no wider than her thumb, cut with a very sharp knife by somebody who'd wanted no ragged edge. The ink on it was browner than the rest, the ink of a different year. There were the tails of words on two lines, one near the top and one below.
She did it with the pencil from her hair, in her left hand, in tiny wobbling strokes: a stem, a curve, the leg of a letter that had been cut off at the knee. It took her twenty minutes. She rubbed out twice. When she'd done there were the two broken lines on the tissue, and no more than that.
She didn't have to read them. She'd had them by heart since Sunday. …inder R… And, on the line beneath: …L. Nea…
Under the tracing, in pencil, in her own best left hand, she wrote what the tails had been waiting twelve years to say. Neave. And a little below: 11 Cinder Row.
She looked at it until the lamp flickered. Then she folded it in four, small, and slid it into her cuff with the number.
The bolt shot back. She hadn't heard the key.
"You have a lamp showing in the front window," said Mr Pike. "Anybody in Tanyard Road can see it."
He stood in the door in his greatcoat with his hat in his hand, and the frost came in behind him and lay along the floor. He shut the door with his heel and turned the key and tried it, twice, and then a third time, as he'd have tried a strongroom.
"You said you'd another," said Dot.
"I said I had another. I did not say I should not use it." He put his hat on the peg. He didn't look at her, nor at the volume open on the counter, nor at the certificate on her knee. He looked at the stove. "It is a good deal warmer than my rooms."
"You don't have to —"
"I find I don't wish to be in them." He said it to the stove. "There is a chair."
He sat down on the bench opposite, at the far end, with his hands on his knees and the lamp between them. Neither spoke. The stove ticked. Down on Tanyard Road a bus went by, its engine loud in the clear cold, and its lights came across the ceiling and went off. An ordinary bus, in the dark, with a light in it, and a conductor calling the stops.
He looked at the counter then. It took him a moment to see it. She watched him see it: the volume, the form, the tissue paper, the split-nibbed pen laid across the blotter, and the fees book open at its last line.
"You have entered the fee," said Mr Pike.
"Two and seven."
"That is an offence, Miss Amory. It is the issue of a certified copy by an officer under suspension." He got up and crossed to the counter, and took out his handkerchief and wiped the nib of the second-best pen, carefully, both sides, and laid it in the tray with the other. "I have been standing at the stove. I have not seen it. I have a very bad memory for anything that has occurred after six."
"You've the best memory in Lowmarsh."
"Then it will be a great trial to me." He folded the handkerchief.
"There is a slip on the blotter," said Mr Pike.
"That's Stanley's."
He held it at arm's length. She had written it before he came, in block capitals, so there could be no mistake: Bracegirdle, Alfred Edwin. Informant asks a marginal note against occupation. Rent collector.
"A marginal note requires the informant, a witness, and a registrar in good standing," said Mr Pike.
"I know."
"Of the three you supply one, and I doubt it."
"Stanley'll come. He'd come to the moon if you told him to."
"Then it will wait for him." He put the slip under the corner of the blotter and squared it to the edge. "It will be here."
"Who asked?" said Dot.
She hadn't meant to. It came out quietly.
"For it to be written out again. The page. Somebody sat where you're sitting and did my mother over, with a knife, and left a stub in the gutter like a — like a note to nobody. It wasn't the doctor. It wasn't Civil Defence. It was somebody in this building, in October or November of nineteen-forty, and I'd like to know who."
Mr Pike sat down again. He took a long time about it. His hands went back to his knees, and he looked at the stove with his chin up, and the lamp made two small round lights in his spectacles so that she couldn't see his eyes.
"It was re-copied," he said. "Not by me."
Dot waited.
"It was done on a written instruction, in November of nineteen-forty, in Mr Marchbanks's hand. He was deputy. Entry two hundred and twelve to be copied fair on a fresh leaf, and the old one cut close. His initials at the foot, and nothing else." Mr Pike looked at the stove. "I filed it, as I was told. In 'forty-six I took it out of the file, and it has been in my own drawer since. The bottom one. Under the stamps."
"Why?"
"I don't know why."
"Why he wrote it, or why you kept it?"
"Either." He said it as he'd have given a distance. "I have never known why. I have had twelve years to think of a reason, Miss Amory, and I have not found one."
She sat there with the mitten on her knee and the tissue in her cuff, and looked at him, and he looked at the stove. Mr Marchbanks, who had drawn her keys in off the blotter at two o'clock. Deputy then. In a good hand.
"You can read it in the morning," said Mr Pike. "It says no more than I have said."
For a while neither of them spoke. Then Mr Pike touched the muffler at his throat with two fingers.
"She winds it too tight," he said. "I never said."
At midnight he locked up.
He did it in his order. The stove door and the damper. The lamps, with the snuffer, so that each one gave a little sigh and a smell of hot glass. The strongroom, three times. The back door on the Drift, twice, and its bolt. Then he stood in the dark by the counter with the certificate in its envelope in his hand, and held it out.
"You will want this," he said.
"It's not mine. I'm not allowed to have written it."
"It is a certified copy. It belongs to whoever paid the fee." He put it in her left hand. "Good night, Miss Amory."
"Tomorrow —"
"Tomorrow at nine the queue will be to the Co-op. I shall take the entries myself. I did them for twenty-seven years before you came, and I have a perfectly good hand."
"You've a hand like a fence."
"It is a legible fence," said Mr Pike, and opened the door.
The night came in. It was so clear it hurt: a black sky with a hundred thousand stars, a road of white frost, the lamps of Tanyard Road all the way to the end. She could see the Co-op step. She could see the pillar box on the corner of Church Street, and the church tower, and a light at the top of it, small. She could see everything for a mile.
He locked the door and tried it three times. He turned his collar up. He touched his hat.
Then he walked away up Tanyard Road towards Church Street, alone, a small black upright figure under a great many stars. She'd seen him do it on a hundred nights and never once seen him go. She stood on the step and watched him the whole way, past the first lamp and the second and the third. He didn't look round. He got very small, and she could still see him. When at last he turned the corner she was looking at the corner.
Dot took the tissue from her cuff and held it up to the lamp. Two broken lines, on a strip no wider than her thumb, and under them, in her own pencil, a name and a street.
She would find Lil herself.
Lil had gone off in 'forty-one, when nobody went anywhere from the Row. But nobody moved house in the war without telling the Food Office where, or they went without their sugar. There'd be a card. There was always a card, in a drawer, in somebody's hand, and Dot had spent six years finding things in drawers.
Her breath came out white and hung under the lamp, clear. There wasn't any fog to take it.
"The Food Office," said Dot. "Town Hall. Nine o'clock, when they open the doors."