Sapphire

The Lessons

Alderley Edge, Cheshire. 1919 to 1938.

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Cradle song
Holly Bank. March 1919.

The first thing she knows is a voice.

She does not know it is a voice. She knows nothing yet. She is eleven days old, in a cot in the night nursery at the top of the house, and the room is dark and very cold, because Mrs Fairchild believes warm nurseries make soft children. Everything in the world is a large grey shape or a smaller grey shape, and all of them are far away. The only thing that is near is the sound. It comes from above her, low and flat and even, and it goes on and on, and while it goes on nothing is frightening.

Golden slumbers kiss your eyes,
Smiles awake you when you rise;
Sleep, pretty wantons, do not cry,
And I will sing a lullaby.

The girl singing it is twenty-three. Her name is Henrietta, and she has been Hettie since she could walk. She has been at Holly Bank for two years, first as a housemaid and now, because the nurse Mrs Fairchild hired from London gave notice after nine days, as whatever the baby needs at three in the morning. She comes from a farm near Nantwich. She does not know many songs. She knows this one because her own mother sang it, and her mother's mother, and nobody in her family has ever known where it came from.

She rocks the cot with one foot and sings it over and over in the dark until the baby's fists uncurl.

Downstairs, in the good bedroom, Mrs Constance Fairchild sleeps through the night for the first time since the confinement. In the morning she will tell her husband that the London nurse was right to be dismissed and that the housemaid seems to manage. She will not ask how.

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Speak when you are spoken to
The Ashworths' garden, Werneth, Oldham. June 1923.

She is four, and she has been told three things in the motor car on the way. She is to curtsey when she is presented. She is to speak when she is spoken to. And she is to be kind to Edmund.

She does not know who Edmund is. She is presented to a great many people on a great many lawns that summer, all of whom smell of cigars or of lily of the valley and all of whom say she has her mother's eyes, which is not true, because her mother's eyes are grey and hers are nearly black. She curtseys to each of them. She has been practising the curtsey since Easter on the landing at Holly Bank, with Hettie standing at the bottom of the stairs saying lower, love, and don't look at your feet, your feet know where they are.

Edmund is eleven. He is sitting on the steps of the terrace with a plate of cake on his knees, in a sailor suit he is too old for, looking at the mill.

You can see it from the Ashworths' garden, over the wall, down the hill: a great red block with rows of windows and a chimney with letters down it. She can't read the letters yet. She knows it is a mill because her mother said so in the car, in the voice she uses for things that matter.

"This is Edmund," says Mrs Ashworth, who is tall and wears a hat like a tray of fruit. "Edmund, this is Charlotte. You've heard all about Charlotte."

Edmund looks at her for about a second. Then he looks back at the mill.

Charlotte stands on the gravel in her white frock. Nobody has spoken to her, so she does not speak. After a while, because she has been told to be kind, she takes a piece of cake from the stand on the terrace table, the smallest one, with a sugared violet on top, and holds it out to him.

He takes it without looking at her and eats it in two bites, and goes on looking at the mill.

"Isn't that sweet," says Mrs Ashworth to Mrs Fairchild. "They'll suit."

On the way home in the motor car Charlotte asks her mother what suit means.

"It means you are a very lucky little girl," says Mrs Fairchild, looking out of the window. "Sit up straight. You're creasing."

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How to lie still
The night nursery, Holly Bank. Winter 1925.

Hettie comes in at nine to see that she is asleep, and she is not asleep. She is lying on her side with her knees drawn up and one arm flung over her head and the sheet in a knot, the way she has always slept, the way she likes to sleep.

Hettie sighs. She sets the candle down on the washstand and comes to the bed.

"Madam's been in again," she says. "She says you sleep like a stable boy."

"I don't know how a stable boy sleeps."

"Like that." Hettie turns her over onto her back, gently, and straightens her legs one at a time, and draws the sheet up smooth and tucks it in. She takes Charlotte's hands and folds them one over the other on the turned-down edge of the sheet. "Like this. A lady lies on her back. Feet together. Hands folded. Like the ladies on the tombs in church."

"They're dead."

"They're ladies," says Hettie. "They got that way by lying still."

She is six. She lies like a lady on a tomb until Hettie's candle has gone down the passage and the door at the end has shut, and then she turns over onto her side again with her knees drawn up and her arm over her head, because it is her bed.

In the morning Madam comes in at seven and finds her like that, and does not say anything, and goes away.

That night there are two tapes sewn to the sides of her nightdress, and two to the sheet, and Hettie ties them. Hettie does not look at her while she does it. Her mouth is a straight line.

"It's only till you learn," Hettie says. "Only till you've got it. Then they come off."

It takes eleven weeks. By Easter the tapes come off, and she lies on her back with her feet together and her hands folded every night of her life, and she has no idea any longer how she used to sleep.

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Which fork
The dining room, Holly Bank. 1927.

Luncheon on Sundays is in the dining room, all three of them, with Mr Fairchild at one end reading something folded small beside his plate and Mrs Fairchild at the other end watching. It is the only meal of the week Charlotte takes downstairs. She is eight.

There are four forks. She has been learning them for a month from a diagram Hettie drew on the back of a laundry list, and she knows them: from the outside in, one for each course, the little one for the fish. There is a fish today. She has been waiting for the fish all week.

She takes the little fork and the fish knife, and eats a piece of sole the way she was shown, and looks up, pleased, to see if her mother has noticed.

Her mother has noticed. She is looking at Charlotte's left hand.

"You are holding it like a pencil."

Charlotte looks at her hand. She is holding the fork the way she holds a pencil, because a pencil is what she holds most.

"Put it down."

She puts it down.

"Now pick it up again. Properly."

She picks it up again. She does not know what properly is, for a fork. Nobody drew that on the laundry list. She holds it a different way, and her mother says no, and she tries another, and her mother says no again, in exactly the same voice, and her father turns a page, and the sole goes cold on the plate, and the parlourmaid stands by the sideboard looking at the wall.

On the ninth try her mother says nothing, which means it is right.

"Thank you," says Mrs Fairchild. "You may eat."

Charlotte eats the cold sole with the fork held correctly. It is the first time she notices that she is not tasting anything. She does not know yet that this is a thing that can happen, that you can put food in your mouth and chew it and swallow it and it can be as if nothing has been there at all. It seems strange to her, and then after a while it seems ordinary, and after that she forgets it was ever strange.

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Young ladies draw flowers
The schoolroom, Holly Bank. 1929.

Mr Pennock comes on Tuesdays and Fridays at two, on a bicycle, in a jacket with leather at the elbows, and he is the only person in Holly Bank who has ever asked her what she would like to do.

He is meant to teach her to draw flowers. There is a book, Floral Studies for the Young Lady, with engravings of roses and lilies and sweet peas to be copied in pencil, and then in watercolour, and Mrs Fairchild has had it bound in green morocco. For the first month they draw roses. Then one Tuesday Mr Pennock sits back in his chair with his hands behind his head and looks at her rose for a long time and says, "You're bored stiff, aren't you."

She is ten. Nobody has ever said anything like this to her. She does not know what she is supposed to answer, so she answers the truth, which is also new.

"Yes."

"What would you draw if you could draw anything at all?"

She thinks about it. Nobody has ever asked her this either.

"Hettie's hands," she says.

He looks at her. Then he gets up and goes to the schoolroom door and opens it and calls down the back stairs, and after a while Hettie comes up in her apron with flour to the wrist, very alarmed, and Mr Pennock asks her if she would be so kind as to sit at the table for half an hour with her hands on the cloth. Hettie sits. She does not know where to look. And Charlotte draws her hands, red and square and cracked across the knuckles, with the flour still in the creases, and when it is done Mr Pennock looks at it for a long time and says, "Well. That's something, isn't it."

After that they draw what she likes. The coal scuttle. The kitchen range. Ada's back bent over the mangle. The rooks in the elms. The view from the schoolroom window, all of it, the roofs and the chimneys and the smoke going up from Manchester miles away on the horizon, because on a clear day you can see it.

In November Mrs Fairchild comes up to the schoolroom unannounced, for the first time in a year, and turns over the drawings on the table one by one. There are no roses among them.

Mr Pennock does not come on the Friday.

Nobody says why. When Charlotte asks, her mother says that Mr Pennock has taken another position and that the new drawing mistress will start after Christmas. Young ladies, says her mother, draw flowers. The new drawing mistress is a Miss Crossley, who is very kind and very dull and draws the most beautiful roses Charlotte has ever seen.

She keeps the drawing of Hettie's hands. She keeps it under the paper lining of her bottom drawer for nine years, and when she is married and goes to Oldham, she takes it with her, folded very small in the lining of her dressing case. It is the only thing from Holly Bank she takes that nobody gave her.

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Ask him about his work
The kitchen, Holly Bank. 1930.

It is raining, and Madam is in Harrogate taking the waters, and on days when Madam is away Charlotte is permitted in the kitchen after lessons, on the stool at the end of the long scrubbed table, so long as she does not touch anything.

Mrs Clough is at the range. Ada is at the copper in the scullery, singing. Hettie is at the table making pastry, with her sleeves rolled to the elbow and her hands white to the wrist, and she is teaching Charlotte about men, because Madam has said it is time somebody did and it is not going to be Madam.

Charlotte is eleven. She has met perhaps twenty men in her life and spoken to perhaps five.

"When you're grown," Hettie says, "and you're at a dinner, and you're sat next to a gentleman, you'll not know what to say to him. Nobody does. Young ladies never do. So here's what you do." She stops rolling and holds her floury hands up away from her apron, and looks Charlotte very straight in the eye, the way she looks when a thing matters.

"Ask him about his work, Miss Charlotte. Ask him how a thing is done, and then let him tell you. All of it, however long it takes. There's not a man born who doesn't like being asked."

Charlotte thinks about this. She thinks about Mr Pennock, who asked her what she liked, and how it felt. She thinks it must be very nice for the gentleman.

"What if it's boring?" she says.

Mrs Clough laughs at the range, a short bark, and turns it into a cough. Ada stops singing in the scullery.

Hettie does not laugh. She goes back to her pastry, and rolls it once each way, and turns it a quarter turn. When she answers, she does not look up.

"It's not for you to be interested in, love," she says. "It's for him."

Charlotte sits on the stool at the end of the scrubbed table. She says nothing more. She watches Hettie's hands on the rolling pin, and her face goes quiet and smooth, and her own hands, which were swinging, go still in her lap.

Hettie glances at her once, and then again, a little longer. Then she goes on rolling.

---

The right sort of songs
The servants' hall, Holly Bank. 1932.

Upstairs, there is the pianoforte.

It stands in the drawing room under a fringed shawl, and Miss Thurlow comes on Mondays to teach it, and on Sunday evenings after dinner Charlotte plays for her parents and whatever guests there are. She plays the right sort of songs. Old English airs, a little Schubert, Early One Morning and The Ash Grove and Where the Bee Sucks, in a white dress with a sash, sitting very straight. When she finishes, the guests clap with the tips of their fingers and say what an accomplished girl she is, and Mrs Fairchild says she is coming along.

Downstairs, there is the wireless.

It came in the spring of 1931. Mr Fairchild bought it for the drawing room and disliked it within the week, and it went down to the servants' hall, where it stands on a shelf between the bell board and the clock, a brown cabinet with a fretwork sun on the front. And at half past ten at night, when the family has gone up and the house is quiet, the servants turn it on very low and listen to the dance bands.

Charlotte found this out in October, when she couldn't sleep and went down for a glass of milk and heard it through the baize door. She has come down nearly every night since. She is thirteen.

She never goes in. She sits on the bottom step of the back stairs in her nightdress with her knees drawn up and her ear against the door, in the dark, and listens.

She doesn't know what it is called. She doesn't know the names of the bands or the songs or the singers, only that it sounds like nothing upstairs has ever sounded. It is loose and it is warm and it swings, and the singers do not sing the way Miss Thurlow sings. They sing as though they are leaning against something, as though they have been out very late and do not care who knows it, and some of the singers are women, and the women sound as if they know a secret and are deciding whether to tell you.

In the servants' hall somebody laughs. Somebody gets up, and there is the scrape of a chair, and she hears feet on the stone floor, two people dancing. Ada, she thinks, and the boy who does the boots.

In January Hettie opens the baize door on her.

She is standing in the passage in her nightgown with a candle, and she looks down at Charlotte on the bottom step, and Charlotte looks up at her, and neither of them says anything for a long time. Through the door behind Hettie the band is playing something slow.

"How long's this been going on?"

"Since October."

Hettie looks back through the door at the wireless, and at the room full of servants pretending not to have heard, and then down at Charlotte again.

"Madam finds out, I'm finished," she says. "You understand that? Not you. Me."

"Yes."

Hettie thinks about it for as long as it takes the band to get to the end of the song.

"Ten minutes," she says. "On the step. Not in the hall. Not a word to anyone, ever. And if I say bed, it's bed."

It is ten minutes, three or four nights a week, for six years. She never goes into the hall. Hettie never once says bed before the ten minutes are up.

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Father never saw the point of rope drives
The dining room, Holly Bank. Christmas 1932.

The Ashworths come for Christmas dinner, all three of them, and Charlotte is allowed down for it in her first long frock, grey silk with a lace collar. She is thirteen. Edmund is twenty-one, and just down from Cambridge, where he did not take a degree.

She is seated next to him. It is the first time. She understands, sitting down, that it is not an accident.

He is taller than at the garden party and a good deal heavier, with a moustache he is not yet sure of and a way of looking round a room as though he were pricing it. He says good evening to her, and asks if she's still at her lessons, and does not wait for the answer. Then he turns to her father on his other side.

She sits with her hands in her lap and remembers the kitchen, and when there is a pause in his talk to her father over the goose, she says, very clearly, in the voice Hettie has been helping her with for two years:

"Mr Ashworth, how does the mill work?"

He turns and looks at her properly for the first time in her life.

And then he tells her. He tells her through the goose, and the pudding, and the brandy butter, and the walnuts. He tells her about the blowing room and the card room and the mules, and the ring frames that are coming in, which are the future, which his father will not hear of. And then he tells her about the engine. He talks about the engine the way the singers on the wireless sing, as though he were leaning against something. It is called Margaret, after his grandmother, and it was put in in 1874, and it is twenty-four feet across the flywheel, and it drives the whole mill by gearing, great iron wheels with wooden teeth, hornbeam, each one fitted by hand.

"Father never saw the point of rope drives," he says, and cracks a walnut. "Said a cog was a cog and you knew where you were with it."

She asks him what a rope drive is. He tells her.

She is interested in none of it. She listens to all of it. She watches his face while he talks, and sees how it changes when she asks the next question, and the next, how it opens, how pleased he is. It is exactly as Hettie said. There is not a man born who does not like being asked.

At the other end of the table, Mrs Ashworth leans toward Mrs Fairchild and says something behind her hand, and they both look down the table at the two of them, and smile.

---

Bend at the knee
The day nursery, Holly Bank. February 1933.

Ada has influenza, and so has the tweeny, and so for four days there is nobody to carry coal to the upper floors but Hettie. On the third day Hettie comes up to the day nursery with the scuttle and sets it down by the grate, and straightens, and puts her hand to the small of her back, and her face goes grey.

Charlotte gets up from her French.

"Sit down, Miss Charlotte."

"I'll do it."

"You will not. It's not fitting."

"Nobody's here," says Charlotte, and it is true, and they both know it. Madam is in bed with a headache. The fire is nearly out. She goes to the scuttle and bends to pick it up the way you would pick up anything, from the waist, and Hettie says sharply, "Not like that."

Charlotte stops.

Hettie looks at the door, and at the fire, and back at her.

"If you're going to do it," she says, "do it right, or you'll put your back out and I'll have that to answer for as well. Bend at the knee, love. Not the waist. Get down to it. Take a good hold with both hands, close in to you." She watches Charlotte do it. "That's it. Now stand. Let your legs do it."

Charlotte stands, with the scuttle in both hands, and it comes up off the floor as though it weighed almost nothing.

"There," says Hettie. "It's all in the legs. You'd be surprised what you can lift if you go about it right."

Charlotte makes up the fire. Hettie sits in the nursing chair for a quarter of an hour with her eyes shut, and nobody ever speaks of it again.

---

Interested but not forward
The Midland Hotel, Manchester. April 1935.

She is sixteen, and she has a corset now, a real one with bones, and she has been wearing it since Christmas. She has been taught to stand in it, which is to say to stand a little stooped, with her arms in close, because she is tall and has what her mother calls a figure in the voice she uses for damp. She has been taught not to look as though she knows about it.

Today she is to have tea with Edmund Ashworth.

Everyone calls it tea. Everyone knows what it is. Her mother sits four tables away in the Palm Court with Mrs Ashworth, where they can see and not hear, and Charlotte sits across a small round table from Edmund, who is twenty-three and runs the mill now, or says he does, and there is a silver stand of sandwiches between them and a string quartet by the palms playing something from an operetta.

This morning, in the bedroom at Holly Bank, Hettie did her hair. She did it the new way, up, pinned in soft rolls, with a great many pins, because it is very long and very heavy and very black and it takes forty pins to keep it where it is put. She brushed it out first, a hundred strokes, the way she has done every night since Charlotte was four. Halfway through, Charlotte met Hettie's eyes in the glass.

"Is it today they tell me?" she said.

Hettie went on brushing.

"They told you when you were born, love," she said. "Today's just when they say it out loud."

Now Edmund is telling her about the new ring frames, which his father is at last beginning to come round to, and Charlotte is listening with the smile Hettie spent a month teaching her in the glass at the top of the stairs. It is a small smile. It shows interest and nothing else. The lips are closed. The eyes do the work. Interested but not forward, Hettie called it. It says, go on. It doesn't say anything else. You want them to think you'd like to hear more, not that you'd like anything more.

"I expect you know why we're here," says Edmund, when the ring frames have run out.

"Yes, Mr Ashworth."

"Edmund. Surely."

"Edmund."

He looks at her across the sandwiches, pleased, in the way he was pleased at Christmas, the way that looks a little like counting.

"Father and your father have always had it in mind. Since you were a baby. I'm sure you know." He takes a sandwich, cucumber, and eats it in two bites. "I think we'll suit. Don't you? When you're old enough. Two years or so, your mother says. Three at the outside."

The string quartet finishes the piece from the operetta. There is a scattering of applause. Four tables away her mother is not looking at them, very carefully, and Mrs Ashworth is.

Charlotte sits in the Palm Court of the Midland Hotel with her hands folded in her lap on the table napkin. Something happens in her face, and she can feel it happening, although she could not have said what it was: something going quiet and smooth all over, like a pond when the wind drops. Her hands go still.

"I think we'll suit very well," she says.

She smiles the small smile. He smiles back.

He does not ask her anything else all afternoon.

---

Cradle song
The night nursery, Holly Bank. September 1938.

It is the night before, and she is nineteen, and she cannot sleep.

She is not in the night nursery. She has not slept in the night nursery for eight years; she has the blue bedroom on the first floor now, with the window over the drive. But at two in the morning she gets up, in the dark, and goes up the back stairs to the top of the house, and opens the door of the night nursery, and it is cold in there, as it has always been, and empty. The cot is gone. The bed she had after the cot is gone. There is a trunk under a dust sheet and a broken rocking horse, and nothing else.

She stands in the middle of the room in her nightgown.

After a while the door opens behind her, and there is a candle, and it is Hettie, in her own nightgown, with her grey hair down her back in a plait. Hettie is forty-two. She has been at Holly Bank for twenty-one years.

"Thought it'd be you," Hettie says. "I heard the stair."

"I couldn't sleep."

"No. Well. You wouldn't."

Hettie sets the candle down on the trunk. She looks round the room, at the rocking horse and the dust sheet and the place on the floor where the cot stood, where the boards are paler.

"You were a terrible sleeper," she says. "The worst I ever knew. Madam sent the London nurse packing after nine days because she couldn't settle you, and they sent me up, and I didn't know what to do either. So I sang to you. It was all I could think of." She laughs, very quietly. "Every night for two years I sang you to sleep in this room. You'd not go off without it."

"What did you sing?"

Hettie looks at her. She seems surprised, and then something else.

"You don't remember?"

"No."

"No," says Hettie. "You wouldn't. You were only small."

She sits down on the trunk beside the candle. After a moment, not looking at Charlotte, looking at the pale boards where the cot used to be, she begins to sing, very low and flat and even, the way she sang it in 1919.

Golden slumbers kiss your eyes,
Smiles awake you when you rise;
Sleep, pretty wantons, do not cry,
And I will sing a lullaby.

Charlotte stands in the middle of the empty nursery in her nightgown and listens. She does not remember it. She does not remember it at all. And yet something in her goes quiet at the sound of it, all the way down, deeper than she knew she went, a stillness that is not the stillness she has been taught but something older, something that was there before any of the lessons. She stands in the cold with her hands at her sides and her eyes closed, until Hettie has sung it through twice and stopped.

"There," says Hettie. "That's the one."

They go down the back stairs together without saying anything else, and Hettie sees her to the door of the blue bedroom, and does not come in.

"Get some sleep, Miss Charlotte," she says. "Big day."

Charlotte lies down on her back in the blue bedroom with her feet together and her hands folded on the turned-down sheet, the way she was taught, and does not sleep.

---

To love, cherish, and to obey
St Philip's Church, Alderley Edge. Saturday, 17th September 1938.

The church is full. Holly Bank has sent its whole household to the back pews, in their best, and Hettie is at the end of the last row by the font, in a navy coat and a hat she bought for the day, sitting very straight.

The Ashworths have the pews on the right. Mrs Ashworth in lilac. Mr Joseph Ashworth, who has perhaps a year to live and does not know it, red in the face in a morning coat. The mill has sent a charabanc of foremen and their wives, and Mr Howarth is among them, narrow and grey, looking at the roof.

Charlotte comes up the aisle on her father's arm in ivory satin cut long and narrow the way the magazines say, which does not suit her, over a corset laced so tight that her mother had to call Hettie up to finish it. Her hair is up in forty pins under a veil of old lace that was her grandmother's. She walks the way she was taught on the landing at Holly Bank when she was four: not quickly, and not looking at her feet, because her feet know where they are.

Edmund is waiting at the chancel step. He turns to watch her come, and he looks, for just a moment, a little frightened, which she will not remember afterward because it does not fit anything else she knows about him.

Her father gives her away. She has been told he will. It takes one sentence.

The vicar is old, and the Fairchilds are old-fashioned, and so it is the old words, the ones the new prayer book lets a bride leave out. Her mother saw to it. Mrs Fairchild said that she did not hold with modern services, and Mrs Ashworth agreed, and nobody asked Charlotte.

Edmund says his part first, loudly, too fast, and stumbles on worldly goods.

Then the vicar turns to her.

She lifts her chin. She folds her hands, the way she was taught. She looks at the vicar and not at Edmund, and her face goes quiet and smooth all over, like a pond when the wind drops. At the end of the last pew, by the font, Hettie sees it happen from forty feet away, and does not move.

Charlotte speaks very clearly. She has always had a good carrying voice; Miss Thurlow said so. Every word reaches the back of the church, exactly as she was taught.

"I, Charlotte, take thee, Edmund, to my wedded husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love, cherish, and to obey, till death us do part."

---

The Tour

Oldham, Lancashire. August 1939.

---

Charlotte wakes at twenty past six and lies exactly as she woke: on her back, feet together, hands folded on the counterpane. Hettie spent years correcting the way she slept, and somewhere in those years the corrections went deeper than sleep does.

Beside her Edmund breathes through his mouth. He sleeps across the middle of the bed with one arm thrown out, and the arm lies over her hip the way a coat lies over the back of a chair. She leaves it there. At a quarter to seven he will wake, and if she has moved it he will want to know why she can't lie still like a normal person, and if she hasn't he will take it back without noticing it was ever anywhere. She has had a year to learn which of those mornings she prefers.

The curtains are the heavy new ones his mother had hung in June, after the Council men came round with their leaflets about lighting. Where the two halves don't quite meet, a grey line of Oldham morning lies across the carpet. Down in the valley the buzzers begin, one mill and then the next and then the next, a few seconds apart, like dogs answering each other across fields. Theirs is the fourth. She knows its note the way she knows the crack in the ceiling above the wardrobe, which runs from the cornice toward the light fitting and stops two inches short, as though it lost its nerve.

At a quarter to seven Edmund wakes, takes the arm back, and says, "God, my head."

Then, "Ring for tea, would you."

She rings for tea.

---

Dorothy dresses her. Dorothy is sixteen and frightened of the house, and her fingers on the hooks at Charlotte's back are quick and cold. Charlotte chooses the navy crêpe with the white collar, because it is Wednesday and Mrs Ashworth receives on Wednesday afternoons, and a woman dresses for where she is going and not for where she has been. Hettie said that. Hettie said a great many things, and Charlotte can still hear most of them in the flat Cheshire vowels Hettie never lost, not in twenty-two years of service in a house where everyone else spoke like the wireless.

"The pearls, madam?"

"The small ones."

Dorothy fetches the small ones. In the glass, Charlotte watches a young woman be finished off: collar straightened, a curl pinned back where it has escaped, a touch of powder where the pillow left a crease. The young woman looks pleasant, which is what she is for. She is twenty years old and has never once been asked what she would like for breakfast.

---

At breakfast Edmund reads the Manchester Guardian and his mother, still in black, reads the Oldham Chronicle, and between them they make a wall of newsprint with a toast rack in the gap.

"Danzig," Edmund says, to nobody. "It's going to be Danzig. You mark me."

"Must you, dear," says Beatrice Ashworth.

"I'm only saying. And when it comes, the War Office will want yarn by the mile, and they'll want it from people who can deliver." He folds the paper back on itself with a crack. "Father always said a war was the best thing that ever happened to Lancashire."

"Your father said a great many things at breakfast."

Charlotte butters her toast to the edges and cuts it into four. Beatrice lowers the Chronicle far enough to look over it, first at the toast and then at Charlotte.

"Has there been any news, Charlotte?"

She means a child. There is only ever one kind of news.

"Not yet, Mother Ashworth."

"A year in September." Beatrice raises the paper again. "Well. These things are sent when they're sent."

"Not for want of trying," says Edmund, and laughs, and turns the page.

Charlotte eats her toast, one quarter at a time, and does not taste it.

---

The morning belongs to the house, which is to say it belongs to Beatrice, but Charlotte is permitted to hold it for her. She goes through the week's menus with Mrs Bentley in the housekeeper's room and approves the lamb for Friday and suggests the fish be moved to Thursday, because the man from Fleetwood comes on Thursdays and Friday's fish is Thursday's fish anyway. Mrs Bentley writes it down with the particular stillness of a woman who has run the house for thirty years and is being told how to do it by a girl.

"Very good, madam."

"Thank you, Mrs Bentley."

She does the flowers in the hall. On the hall stand, beside the silver salver for calling cards, sit three cardboard boxes on lengths of string, delivered in July and never opened: the gas masks. Beatrice has written on each lid in her upright hand. E. Ashworth. B. Ashworth. C. Ashworth. Charlotte arranges delphiniums in the tall vase and looks at the third box, at the initial written for her by someone else, and moves the vase two inches to the left so the flowers hide it.

The second post brings a letter from Alderley Edge. Her mother's hand is small and slanted and very correct.

My dear Charlotte,

Your father's knee is troubling him again and Dr Pryce has forbidden port, which you may imagine has done nothing for anyone's temper. The Fanshawes were here on Sunday. Cecily is engaged at last, to a naval man, which her mother appears to regard as a kind of compromise. We had the vicar to luncheon.

Mrs Ashworth mentions in her last that Edmund's collars are not always as they should be. I am sure it is the laundry, but do see to it, dear. Small things are what a house is made of.

Your father asks whether there is any news.

With love,

Mother

She reads it twice. Then she folds it along its own creases and puts it in the bureau drawer with the others. She will answer it this evening, three sides, as she answers all of them.

Twenty-two years of Hettie, and not one of those years involved a school. There were governesses for French and the pianoforte, for a while, and a drawing master who was dismissed for reasons nobody explained, but mostly there was Hettie, and Mrs Clough in the kitchen, and Ada who did the linen. They taught her what a girl in her position needed. How to walk into a room. How to leave one. How to sit so that a man could look at her without her appearing to know it. Which fork, which glass, which subjects, how to say no to a second helping so that it sounded like yes to the cook. How to make a man comfortable. That one Hettie taught her most carefully of all, standing at the foot of the kitchen table with her sleeves rolled and her floury hands held away from her apron.

Ask him about his work, Miss Charlotte. Ask him how a thing is done, and then let him tell you. All of it, however long it takes. There's not a man born who doesn't like being asked.

She was eleven. She said, "What if it's boring?"

It's not for you to be interested in, love, said Hettie. It's for him.

---

Edmund comes back from the mill at one for his lunch, as he does every day. His father went down to Ashworth's at six every morning of his life and came home at seven at night smelling of oil and cotton, and died at his desk of a stroke at fifty-nine, and Edmund has taken this as a lesson in how not to do it. He goes in at ten, lunches at home, goes back at two for an hour or so. Mr Howarth runs the mill. Everyone knows Mr Howarth runs the mill, except, sometimes, Edmund.

Lunch is cold ham and a salad and new potatoes from the kitchen garden. Beatrice talks about the Women's Voluntary Service, which she has joined, and about Mrs Ogden, who has also joined and is being impossible about it. Edmund talks about the new ring frames, the ones from Platt's that he has been talking about since March.

"Twelve thousand spindles on the one floor," he says. "Twelve thousand. When they're all in we'll be doing the work of the old mule room with half the hands."

Charlotte sets down her fork.

"I should so like to see them."

Edmund looks at her. So does Beatrice. In a year of lunches, it is the first time Charlotte has asked for anything at this table except the salt.

"See what?"

"The frames. The mill." She smiles, a small smile, the one Hettie called interested but not forward. "You talk about it so much, and I've never been further than your office. I can't picture any of it. I'd love you to show me."

"The mill is no place for a woman in good shoes," says Beatrice.

"Oh, nonsense, Mother." Edmund leans back and looks at his wife with something like surprise, and then with something like pleasure, which on Edmund's face always looks a little like a man counting money. "Why shouldn't she see what's paying for them?"

"Edmund."

"No, I mean it. Come down with me at two, old girl. Howarth can walk you round the rooms, and after that I'll show you Margaret myself."

He means the engine. Old Joseph Ashworth named it for his wife when he installed it in 1874, and his son kept the name, and his grandson talks about it the way other men talk about horses. It is the one thing Charlotte has ever heard him speak of with love. She has heard him describe it at dinner parties, over port, to the vicar, to her own father. The flywheel twenty-four feet across. The great gearing in the pit beneath it, cast iron and hornbeam. Father never saw the point of rope drives. Said a cog was a cog and you knew where you were with it. And by God he was right, she's run sixty-five years without a day's trouble.

"I'd like that very much," says Charlotte.

Beatrice looks at her for a long moment over the potatoes. Then she says, "Mind you're back by four. Mrs Hartley is coming."

---

Upstairs, Dorothy lays out the grey kid gloves, the good ones, soft as a mouse.

Charlotte puts them back in the drawer and takes out the dark cotton pair she wears for gardening.

"Those old things, madam?"

"It's filthy down there, Dorothy. Everything's covered in oil." She draws them on and flexes her fingers, and they close cleanly over her hands. "And the brown shoes, I think. There will be stairs."

---

Edmund drives the Rover himself, too fast, down the hill into the valley, with one hand on the wheel and the other draped over the back of her seat. From the top of the road the valley is a forest of chimneys, forty or fifty of them, and under each chimney a mill, and every mill the same great red block with rows of windows like a bookcase. Theirs has ASHWORTH laid down the chimney in white brick, eight letters, each as tall as a man. You can read it from the moors. Edmund once told her that his grandfather had the letters put in after a rival built a taller chimney, and that it had cost more than the chimney.

The noise begins before they are through the gate. It is not a sound so much as a condition, like weather. It comes up through the tyres and the soles of her shoes, a deep ceaseless trembling as though the ground itself were being worked.

Mr Howarth meets them in the yard. He is a narrow grey man in a brown overall coat with a pencil behind his ear, and he takes his cap off to Charlotte and holds it against his chest.

"Mrs Ashworth. You'll want to mind your skirt near the frames."

"I'll be careful, Mr Howarth. Thank you."

"The wife's taken an interest," says Edmund, and claps Howarth on the shoulder. "Next thing you know she'll want your job."

Howarth smiles the way a man smiles at weather.

---

He takes her through the mill from the bottom up, in the order the cotton goes, and he does it properly. It's clear he has never been asked to do this for a woman, and has decided that the only way to do it is exactly as he would for a buyer from Manchester. She likes him for that.

In the blowing room the bales are torn open and beaten, and the air is so thick with fibre that the light from the windows stands in the room like something solid. In the card room the cotton passes over great rollers set with wire teeth and comes out the other side as a white web as thin as breath, gathered into a soft rope that coils itself into tall tin cans. Everything is covered in fly, the loose white fluff that drifts off the machines, so that the rails and the window ledges and the caps of the men look lightly snowed on in August.

"You'll be breathing it for a day," Howarth shouts. "Everybody does."

Edmund walks a pace behind them with his hands in his pockets, looking at his watch.

On the third floor are the mules.

Charlotte has known the word her whole married life and never seen one. She stops in the doorway. The room is longer than any room she has ever stood in, lit from both sides by the tall windows, and down its whole length the mules run in pairs, each one a great iron carriage bristling with spindles, hundreds of spindles to a carriage, and the carriages roll slowly out across the floor for five feet, drawing the thread out fine, and then run back in, and out again, and in, all of them together and all of them slightly out of step, so that the whole room seems to breathe.

The heat is terrible. They keep it damp for the thread, Howarth says, and it's true: the air sits on her skin like a wet cloth. The spinners work barefoot on floors slick with oil. Boys and girls not much older than Dorothy crouch and dart beneath the moving threads, piecing the broken ends back together with a twist of the fingers faster than her eye can follow.

"Scavengers," Howarth says, pointing to a small boy flat on his stomach beneath a carriage, sweeping fly from the floor under the running machinery. "They're not supposed to be under there while she's running. The Act says. But they all do it."

The carriage rolls back in over the boy. He moves out of its way without looking up, as though he were stepping around a sleeping dog.

Near the window, two women are talking. Charlotte watches them. They face each other across the alley between two mules, and their mouths move in great exaggerated shapes, and neither of them makes a sound, or if they do it is lost in the roar. One of them says something with her lips and the other one throws her head back and laughs, silently, and glances toward the door, toward the mill owner's wife in her navy crêpe, and says something else.

"Mee-mawing," Howarth shouts in her ear, following her look. "Lip talk. Can't hear yourself think in here, so they talk with their mouths. Been doing it since before my mother's day. They can have a whole conversation across the room and you'd never know what was said."

A whole conversation, across a room, and nobody could ever know what was said.

"How wonderful," says Charlotte.

Edmund comes up behind her and puts his hand on her waist, just above the hip, and squeezes, the way he squeezes the bannister at the top of the stairs.

"Two hundred thousand spindles, all told," he shouts. "Two hundred and ten, isn't it, Howarth?"

"Hundred and eighty-four, Mr Edmund."

"Hundred and eighty-four." Edmund's hand stays where it is. "Near enough."

---

They are on the stairs to the fourth floor, where the new ring frames are, when a boy comes pelting up behind them with fly in his hair and says something to Howarth that Charlotte can't hear. Howarth's face changes.

"Belt's come off on number four card," he tells Edmund. "I'd best see to it. If you'll give me ten minutes, Mrs Ashworth, I'll show you the frames."

"Don't bother, Howarth," says Edmund. "She's seen enough spindles to last her. I'll take her down to the engine."

"Clegg's with her."

"Then Clegg can show her too." Edmund is already turning back down the stairs, his hand on Charlotte's elbow. "Go on, man. See to your belt."

Howarth hesitates, just for a moment, looking at Charlotte. Then he puts his cap back on and goes.

---

The engine house stands apart from the mill across a narrow yard, a tall brick building with arched windows like a chapel. Inside it is cooler, and quieter, and very clean.

Charlotte stops just inside the door, the way she stopped in the doorway of the mule room, because she has not expected it to be beautiful.

The walls are tiled to shoulder height in cream and green. The floor is scrubbed stone. The engine fills the room: two tall cylinders painted a deep bottle green and lined out in gold, polished brass rails around everything, brass oil cups winking in rows, and the great connecting rods rising and falling as slow as breathing. At the far end the flywheel turns in its pit, twenty-four feet across, its rim sliding past the edge of the floor and down out of sight and up again, endlessly, a wall of iron in motion. On a brass plate bolted to the engine bed, in raised letters: MARGARET. 1874.

The noise here is a different noise. Upstairs it was a roar. Here it is a deep, rhythmic, ordered sound, hush-thud, hush-thud, that she feels in the bones of her chest.

An old man in a clean white jacket is wiping down a brass rail with a rag. He straightens when he sees them.

"Mr Edmund."

"Afternoon, Clegg. I've brought my wife to meet the other woman in my life." Edmund laughs. "Go and get your tea. I'll mind her for ten minutes."

Clegg looks at the engine, and then at Edmund, and then, briefly, at Charlotte.

"She's running sweet, Mr Edmund. You'll not touch the governor."

"I've been coming in here since I was four years old, Clegg."

"Aye." Clegg folds his rag. "That's what I'm saying." But he goes, out through the side door toward the boiler house, and the door swings shut behind him.

Then there is only Edmund, and Charlotte, and Margaret.

---

He shows her all of it. She lets him. She asks how the steam gets into the cylinders and he tells her, at length, and some of it is even right. She asks what the spinning balls on top are for and he tells her they are the governor, which keeps the engine from running away with itself, and she says, "How clever," and he says, "Watt. James Watt. Everyone knows that," and she says, "I didn't," and he looks pleased.

She asks how the engine turns the whole mill. How one wheel, down here, makes every spindle on five floors spin.

"Ah," says Edmund. "Now that's the beauty of it. Come here."

He leads her along the brass rail to the edge of the pit. The rail is waist high on him and a little higher on her. Below it, the floor falls away into a brick-lined chamber, and in the chamber is the gearing.

She has heard him describe it so often that she almost knows what she'll see, and still it is more than she expected. Beside the flywheel, on the same great shaft, turns a second wheel, nearly as large, and its whole rim is set with teeth, and the teeth are pale wood, row on row of them, each as long as her hand. Where the wheel meets a smaller wheel of black iron, the pale teeth drive between the dark ones and out again, in and out, with a soft, heavy, grinding sound, like someone chewing. Oil gleams on everything. From the smaller wheel a shaft runs away into the wall, toward the mill, toward the mules and the cards and the scavenger boys and the two women talking without sound.

"Hornbeam," Edmund shouts. He leans out over the rail, one hand gripping it and the other pointing down into the pit. "Every one of those cogs is hornbeam. Hardest wood there is. Each one cut and fitted by hand, and when one wears you knock it out and put a new one in, same as a tooth. Father always said the wood takes the shock so the iron doesn't have to. You see? Right there, where they mesh."

"I can't quite see."

"Here." He leans further. His belly is against the rail now, his weight on it, the way men lean over the side of a boat. One of his feet lifts from the floor, as feet do when a man leans out to look at something that pleases him, and hangs there, the toe of his shoe an inch above the stone. "Right there. Look at that. Sixty-five years."

Charlotte looks at his shoe.

It is a brown brogue, very well polished, and she can see the small tear in the stitching on the heel that she noticed on Saturday and meant to tell Dorothy about and didn't. His trouser leg has ridden up over a grey sock with a darn in it. His other foot is on the ground, but only just, the heel raised, the whole of him balanced on the ball of that foot and on the rail.

Nobody is in the engine house. Clegg is at his tea. Howarth is at his belt. Beatrice Ashworth is at home, waiting for Mrs Hartley. The engine goes hush-thud, hush-thud, and the pale teeth go in and out, in and out, below.

Hettie taught her how to lift a coal scuttle without straining her back. You bend at the knee, love, not the waist. Let your legs do it.

She bends at the knee.

She takes an ankle in each gloved hand.

She stands up.

---

It takes almost nothing. That is what she will remember afterward, when she remembers it, which will be rarely: how little it took. The rail does the work, the way Howarth said the carriages of the mules run back on their own weight. Edmund goes over it the way a sack goes off the back of a cart, with a sound that isn't even a shout, more a sort of surprised breath, hah, as if he has just been told a joke he doesn't understand.

She doesn't look into the pit. She hears it.

The chewing sound changes. For a moment the wheel goes on turning as though nothing has happened. Then there is a crack, sharp and splintering, like a branch breaking, and then another and another, and a long iron groan that she feels in her teeth, and the engine's rhythm stumbles, hush-thud, hush, thud, and the great rods shudder, and the governor balls on top fly outward and then sag.

The flywheel slows.

She watches it slow. Twenty-four feet of iron, which has turned every day for sixty-five years, turning more and more slowly, the rim sinking into the pit and rising, sinking, rising, until it rises no more than halfway, and hangs there, and rocks back a few inches, and stops.

The engine is silent.

And then, spreading out from the engine house across the yard and into the mill, floor by floor, she hears the quiet come. The shafting in the walls winding down. The cards on the ground floor falling still, then the frames above them. On the third floor the mules running out one last time across the oily boards and not running back. Two hundred people, three hundred, looking up from their machines at the ceiling, at each other, at a silence none of them has heard in working hours in their lives.

The whole building holds its breath.

Charlotte stands on the scrubbed stone in her navy crêpe, with her feet together and her hands folded at her waist in their dark cotton gloves, and something rises in her from somewhere far below her stays. It is warm and it is enormous, and she has never felt it before in her life, so it takes her a moment to recognise it.

It is joy.

Somewhere across the yard a door bangs open and a man starts shouting, and then another, and then feet on stone, running.

In the silent engine house, alone, Charlotte laughs. She throws her head back like the woman at the window and laughs with her whole body, with her mouth wide open, and not a sound comes out.

---

The Widow's Ledger

Oldham, Kendal, Manchester, Alderley Edge. 1939 to 1946.

---

COUNTY BOROUGH OF OLDHAM. INQUISITION.
Taken at the Town Hall, Oldham, the 18th day of August 1939, touching the death of EDMUND JOSEPH ASHWORTH, aged 27 years, cotton spinner.

Evidence was heard from Mr James Clegg, engine tenter to Messrs Ashworth & Sons Ltd, who stated that the deceased had sent him from the engine house some minutes before the occurrence, with the remark that he would "mind her" himself; that he, Clegg, had cautioned the deceased against interfering with the engine; and that the deceased had replied that he had been coming into the engine house since the age of four. Witness returned upon hearing the engine stop and found Mrs Ashworth standing at the rail of the gear pit.

Evidence was heard from Mrs Charlotte Ashworth, widow of the deceased, who was present at the time. Mrs Ashworth stated that her husband had been showing her the gearing and had leaned out over the rail to point out the teeth where they meshed. She did not see him fall. She had been looking at the wheel. The Coroner did not press the witness further, having regard to her evident distress.

Evidence was heard from Mr Albert Howarth, manager, as to the construction of the rail, which was of brass, stood some three feet six inches from the floor, and had been in its present position since 1874.

The Jury returned a verdict of Accidental Death.

The Coroner remarked that the Factories Act of 1937 requires dangerous parts of machinery to be securely fenced, and that a rail of three feet six inches over an open gear pit could not in his opinion be so described. He expressed the hope that the firm would attend to the matter, and extended the sympathy of the Court to the widow and to the deceased's mother.

---

ASHWORTH & SONS LTD. PRIVATE LEDGER.
In the hand of Mr T. Whitehead, cashier.

---

Printed card.

Mrs Edmund Ashworth and Mrs Joseph Ashworth thank you most sincerely for your kind expression of sympathy in their great loss.

Beechcroft, Werneth, Oldham.

---

Letter.

Holly Bank, Alderley Edge.
20th August 1939.

My dear Charlotte,

Your father and I were deeply shocked to receive your telegram. We shall of course come to Oldham for the funeral and will stay at the Midland, as we would not wish to be a burden on Mrs Ashworth at such a time.

I know you will conduct yourself as you should. Deep mourning for a full year, dear, and half mourning for six months after, whatever other people may be doing now. I have seen girls go into grey after three months and I cannot tell you what is said about them. Do not receive callers for the first month except family. Black-bordered paper only.

It is a terrible thing to be a widow at twenty. But you are young, and in time, with care, there is no reason at all why you should not marry again.

Your father sends his love and asks whether Edmund's affairs were in order.

With love,
Mother

---

ASHWORTH & SONS LTD. MINUTES OF A MEETING OF THE DIRECTORS.
Held at the office, 14th September 1939.

Present: Mrs B. Ashworth (in the chair), Mrs C. Ashworth, Mr A. Howarth (Secretary).

1. The Chairman informed the meeting that under the will of the late Mr E. J. Ashworth his shares pass to his widow, and that Mrs C. Ashworth accordingly sits as a director. The Chairman stated that she did not regard this as a satisfactory state of affairs but that it was the law.

2. The Secretary reported that since the declaration of war on the 3rd inst. enquiries have been received from the Cotton Control regarding yarn for Government contract. The Secretary is of the opinion that the mill is well placed to tender.

3. Mrs C. Ashworth asked what the mill would require in order to tender. The Secretary told her.

4. Mrs C. Ashworth asked a number of further questions. The Secretary answered them. The Chairman observed that the meeting had been running for an hour and three quarters.

5. Resolved that the Secretary prepare a tender. Resolved that the gear pit in the engine house be fenced in accordance with the Factories Act, at a cost not exceeding £40.

---

Letter.

Beechcroft, Werneth, Oldham.
29th October 1939.

Dear Mother,

Thank you for your letter and for the stockings, which were very welcome, as they are already difficult to get here.

Mother Ashworth has not been well. She is at the mill most days, which the doctor does not like, and in the evenings she is very tired. I sit with her after dinner. She has taken to going over the order books with me, I think because it comforts her to explain things to someone, and I let her. We are tendering for Government yarn and there is a great deal of work.

I am quite well. Please do not worry about me.

Your loving daughter,
Charlotte

---

Letter.

Dr Lionel Farrant, M.D., 22 St John Street, Manchester.
3rd November 1939.

PRIVATE.

Dear Mrs Ashworth,

I write to confirm what I told you at my consulting rooms on Tuesday. Your supposition was correct. On my reckoning you may expect to be confined toward the end of April.

I have given careful thought to the other matter you raised. It is irregular, but it is not unheard of, and I do not think it beyond arrangement. There is a small private nursing home near Kendal, in Westmorland, where I have sent patients before who required rest and discretion in equal measure. The matron is a sensible woman and asks no questions she has not been paid to ask.

As to the remainder of your instructions, I will make the necessary enquiries in the new year.

My account will follow. I should be obliged if you would destroy this letter.

Yours faithfully,
L. Farrant

---

The Oldham Chronicle. Deaths.
16th December 1939.

ASHWORTH. On December 13th, at her residence, Beechcroft, Werneth, after a short illness, BEATRICE MARY, widow of the late Joseph Henry Ashworth and mother of the late Edmund Joseph Ashworth, aged 58 years. Interment at Greenacres Cemetery, Tuesday. No flowers by request.

---

Letter.

Beechcroft, Werneth, Oldham.
14th December 1939.

Dear Mother,

Mother Ashworth died yesterday evening. It was her heart, Dr Holt says, and he says too that the work and the grief and the other thing were too much for it. I will not write the other thing, but you will know what I mean. I had cleared the decanters out of the drawing room in November. She had found others.

I was with her at the end. She held my hand and called me Edmund twice, and once she told me the carding room was running two per cent over waste and I was to see to it.

I will see to it.

Your loving daughter,
Charlotte

---

Letter.

Holly Bank, Alderley Edge.
18th January 1940.

My dear Charlotte,

I was glad to have your news. If Dr Farrant thinks a rest cure is required then it is certainly required, and Westmorland is the very place. Three deaths in one family in a single year is more than any young woman should be asked to bear, and I have thought for some time that your letters were not quite yourself.

Take plenty of warm things. They say the lakes are bitter in February.

You need not worry about the mill. I am sure Mr Howarth is perfectly capable, and it will all be the same when you come home.

With love,
Mother

---

HERON HOLME PRIVATE NURSING HOME. Near Kendal, Westmorland.
Account rendered to Dr L. Farrant, 22 St John Street, Manchester, in respect of MRS C. FAIRCHILD.

Received with thanks. A. Dunmore, Matron.

---

CERTIFIED COPY OF AN ENTRY OF BIRTH.
Registration District: Kendal. Sub-district: Kendal.

---

Letter.

Heron Holme, near Kendal.
19th May 1940.

Dear Dr Farrant,

I am writing as you asked me to write if there were any change.

Mrs Fairchild was not in her room this morning when Nurse Gregson went in at seven. Her bed had not been slept in, or had been made again very neatly, which comes to the same thing. Her case is gone and her coat. The child was in his cot and quite well. There is no note.

I have made no enquiries outside the house, as I understand from your letters that you would not wish it.

I do not know how to put the next part so that it will not sound foolish, and so I will simply put it. I have been matron here for eleven years and I have never seen a mother like her with a child. She would not let the nurses take him. She carried him about the house and the garden all day and sat up with him at night, and the girls used to go and look in at the door to watch her sing to him. Nurse Gregson says she did not once put him down on the last day. I cannot make it agree with this morning.

The child is well. He is feeding. He cries for her a good deal, as much as one so small can be said to cry for anyone.

I await your instructions as to his placing.

Yours faithfully,
Agnes Dunmore, Matron

---

ASHWORTH & SONS LTD. PRIVATE LEDGER.
From this date in the hand of Mrs C. Ashworth.

---

BOARD OF TRADE. COTTON INDUSTRY: CONCENTRATION OF PRODUCTION.
Cotton Control, Royal Exchange, Manchester.
12th May 1941.

Dear Sir,

I am directed to inform you that, following examination of your application and of the representations made on behalf of your firm at this office on the 2nd and the 6th inst., the Board have decided to designate Messrs Ashworth & Sons Ltd, Werneth, Oldham, as a nucleus firm under the scheme.

Your mill will accordingly continue in operation at not less than 90 per cent of its single-shift capacity, and will receive the transferred production and such operatives as may be allocated from firms in the district whose mills are to be closed.

I am to express the Board's appreciation of the very complete figures supplied.

I am, Sir,
Your obedient Servant,
R. H. Cartwright

Pencilled beneath, in Mr Howarth's hand:

Dear Sir. She went down there twice herself with the books under her arm and sat in the corridor four hours the first time. Eleven mills in this valley closed this month. We are not one of them. A.H.

---

Letter.

Holly Bank, Alderley Edge.
3rd August 1941.

Dear Charlotte,

Mrs Fanshawe tells me that she saw you in Manchester on Saturday evening coming out of the Ritz Ballroom. I told her that she was mistaken, that you were in half mourning and would not dream of it. She said that you were in blue.

I should be glad to hear that she was mistaken.

Mother

---

Letter.

Beechcroft, Werneth, Oldham.
6th August 1941.

Dear Mother,

Mrs Fanshawe was not mistaken. It was sapphire, actually, not blue. Kendal Milne have the most wonderful silk if you know which girl to ask for.

Your loving daughter,
Charlotte

---

Dance card.
The Ritz Ballroom, Whitworth Street West, Manchester. Saturday, 14th March 1942.

On the back, in pencil, in a hand not hers: Who is R.?

Beneath it, in hers: Nobody. I only write it to keep the card free.

---

Letter.

Holly Bank, Alderley Edge.
2nd February 1943.

Charlotte,

Your mother has shown me your last letter. I have also received, from a source I will not name, particulars of an account at the Midland Hotel in November last for a Mr and Mrs Ashworth, which I am given to understand is not an account that my son-in-law can have run up.

Your mother and I have had a great deal to bear these three years. We have borne it without complaint. I will not bear this.

You will not be received at Holly Bank until you have given your mother and myself a full assurance as to your conduct in future. Until that time I do not wish you to write to her, as it distresses her beyond what is reasonable.

Your father,
G. H. Fairchild

---

Letter.

Beechcroft, Werneth, Oldham.
4th February 1943.

Dear Father,

Thank you for letting me know.

Charlotte

---

Letter from Mrs Bentley, housekeeper.

Beechcroft.
1st April 1943.

Madam,

I beg to give one month's notice of my intention to leave your service.

I served the late Mrs Ashworth for thirty-one years and I have tried to serve you. But I cannot any longer keep a house where the gramophone is played in the drawing room until two and three in the morning, and where I am asked to lay breakfast for persons I have not been told the names of, and one of them an American.

I have no complaint as to wages.

Yours respectfully,
E. Bentley

---

ASHWORTH & SONS LTD. PRIVATE LEDGER.
In the hand of Mrs C. Ashworth.

---

Letter.

4 Cheadle Road, Wilmslow.
Whit Sunday 1944.

Dear Miss Charlotte,

I will go on calling you that and you can lump it.

Your mother came to see me at our Nellie's where I am lodging now since I finished at Holly Bank. She sat in the kitchen in her good coat and she cried, and I made her a cup of tea and let her. She told me all of it. The dancing and the Americans and that business at the Midland and your father's letter, and what you wrote back, which I laughed at after she went, and I am not sorry.

She asked me did I ever think you would turn out like this. I said no, Mrs Fairchild, I never did, because it was not my place to say otherwise. I will say otherwise to you.

I always knew. I knew it the day you were eleven and asked me what if it's boring. I knew it every time you went quiet. You were never a noisy child, you were a still one, and I used to watch you go still at that kitchen table the way the sky goes still before it thunders, and think, that one's saving it up. I thought if it came out at all it would come out at some poor husband. I never thought of a ballroom.

Well, it has come out. I am glad. I don't hold with Americans but I expect you know your own business, and it seems you do, by what they say about the mill.

I heard about Mr Edmund at the time, and I heard about his mother. I have not asked you anything about any of it and I will not.

Look after yourself, Miss Charlotte. Eat properly, you never did.

Your old
Hettie

P.S. Your mother says you have cut your hair. Not too short I hope, it was the best thing about you.

---

Postcard.
Picture side: The Tower Ballroom, Blackpool. Postmarked Blackpool, 9th May 1945.

Charlie. They're all singing in the street and I can't get near a telephone. I'm to be shipped home in a fortnight. I know what you'll say and you're right to say it, so I'm not asking, I'm only telling you I'd have asked. Don't ever stop singing. Everybody in that room went quiet for you last Friday. D.K.

---

ASHWORTH & SONS LTD. PRIVATE LEDGER.
In the hand of Mrs C. Ashworth.

---

Handbill.
The Plaza, Oxford Street, Manchester. September 1945.

FRIDAY NIGHTS
Dancing 8 till 11.30
TED RIGBY AND HIS BAND
with vocal refrain by
MRS C. ASHWORTH
Admission 2/6. H.M. Forces 1/6.

---

Handbill.
The Plaza, Oxford Street, Manchester. January 1946.

FRIDAY NIGHTS
Dancing 8 till midnight
TED RIGBY AND HIS BAND
AND INTRODUCING
SAPPHIRE
Admission 3/-.

---

Handbill.
The Plaza, Oxford Street, Manchester. May 1946.

THIS FRIDAY AND EVERY FRIDAY
SAPPHIRE
with Ted Rigby and his Band
Dancing 8 till 1.
House Full after 9.30

---

Card.
Heavy cream stock, very old. No crest, no address. Left at the stage door of the Plaza, 24th May 1946, and passed on by the doorman.

You sing as though you are the only person in the room who knows what the song is about, and as though you would kill the first one who guessed.

I should very much like to hear it again, somewhere quieter. A car will be at the stage door on Tuesday at midnight. You need not come.

But you will.

---

The Collector

Manchester. Spring 1946.

---

Genevieve found her in March, in a dance hall that smelled of wet wool and hair oil, which was not the kind of place Genevieve went.

She had come to the Plaza for a man. He played the trumpet in Ted Rigby's band, and a Kindred of her acquaintance in Liverpool had written to say that he played it the way certain people pray, as though he expected to be overheard and did not care. Genevieve had driven thirty miles in the rain on the strength of that sentence. She stood at the back of the hall in a grey coat that made her invisible, which was the purpose of the coat, and listened to him for two numbers, and found that her acquaintance had been generous. He played well. He prayed like a man who had been told to.

She was already turning toward the door when the band went into something slow, and a woman walked out to the microphone.

Genevieve stopped with one glove half on.

It was not the voice, at first. The voice came later. It was the walk. The woman crossed eight feet of bare boards from the side of the stage to the microphone stand, in a dress of blue silk that had been altered by someone who knew what they were doing, and she crossed them the way a person crosses a room they own. Not quickly. Not for anyone. She was large, as women went in that decade of rationing and thin girls, broad in the shoulder and the hip, and she did not apologise for an inch of it. Her hair was black, very long, drawn up high at the back of her head, with a heavy fringe cut straight across her brows in a way no respectable woman in Lancashire would have worn. Her mouth was painted so dark it was nearly black.

She put one hand on the stand. She waited, with her eyes half closed, for the band to reach her, and in that moment of waiting the whole hall seemed to lean toward her very slightly, the way a room leans toward a fire.

Then she sang, and Genevieve took her glove off again.

---

She was not the best singer Genevieve had heard. That distinction belonged to a woman in Paris, in the winter of 1832, whose name Genevieve no longer said aloud because it still hurt, a little, a hundred and fourteen years on. This one had not been trained. Her breath was badly managed and she sat under the note sometimes where she should have been on it. But none of that mattered, because of what she did with the words.

It was a foolish song, one of the American ones about a man who had gone, and the woman sang it as though she knew exactly where he had gone and had sent him there. There was heat in it, a great deal of heat. It came off her like weather. The soldiers and the shopgirls on the floor had stopped dancing to watch her, and she let them watch, and she gave them every ounce of it: the dark mouth, the lowered eyes, the slow turn of the hand on the stand.

And underneath the heat, Genevieve heard the other thing.

It was a kind of stillness. The voice was all warmth and invitation, and behind it, very far back, there was a place where nothing moved at all, where the song was being carried out rather than felt, the way a surgeon carries out an operation. The woman was giving the room everything and keeping nothing back, and yet none of it came from anywhere. It was like standing in front of a great fire in a house and realising, slowly, that the house was empty, that no one lived there, that the fire had been lit for the benefit of the street.

Genevieve had collected beautiful things for a hundred and fourteen years. She had never seen that.

She stayed until the end of the set. When the woman left the stage she did not look at the audience at all.

"Who is she?" Genevieve asked the doorman on her way out, and let a little of herself into the question, just enough that he would want to please her and would not wonder afterward why he had.

"That's Mrs Ashworth, miss. The widow. Owns a mill up Oldham way, if you'll believe it." He leaned in. "Husband got killed before the war. Fell into his own machinery. And now look at her."

"Yes," said Genevieve. "Now look at her."

---

She was methodical about it, because she always was, and because the pleasure of a thing was doubled by knowing its provenance.

She went to Oldham. She stood in the rain on the hill above Werneth and looked down at the chimney with the name laid down it in white brick, eight letters as tall as men, and found it vulgar and rather touching. She went into the Town Hall on a wet Thursday night, when there was only a clerk and a caretaker, and the clerk was very glad to bring her the inquisition book from 1939 and very glad afterward to forget her.

She read the evidence by the light of a green-shaded lamp.

Mrs Ashworth stated that her husband had been showing her the gearing and had leaned out over the rail to point out the teeth where they meshed. She did not see him fall. She had been looking at the wheel.

Genevieve laughed aloud, alone in the records room, and the caretaker two floors below looked up at the ceiling and did not know why.

She had been looking at the wheel.

The mother-in-law had died four months after, of the heart and the bottle. The widow had nursed her. The widow had then gone away to the Lakes for her nerves, for a whole spring, and come back and taken the mill in hand. The cashier at Ashworth's, a Mr Whitehead, was a lonely man with a weakness for being listened to, and one evening at the Werneth Liberal Club Genevieve listened to him for an hour and a half. He told her that Mrs Ashworth had got them designated nucleus when half the valley shut. He told her the managing director was the old manager now, Howarth, and that everybody knew it was still her mill. He told her she kept the private ledger herself, in her own hand, and that he had seen it, and that there was nothing in it a man could object to except the gramophone records, and a doctor in Manchester paid every quarter until last summer.

"Nerves," said Mr Whitehead, and tapped the side of his nose. "After the Lakes. Widows get them."

"Do they," said Genevieve.

"Oh, you'd not think it to look at her now. But they do."

It did not interest her. Every woman of that class had a doctor paid quarterly for something, and they were never interesting things. She thanked Mr Whitehead for the evening, and left him with the pleasant feeling that he had met someone who understood him, which in the morning would be the only thing he remembered.

On the drive back to Didsbury she arranged what she knew, the way she arranged a new acquisition on a shelf before deciding where it would finally stand.

A girl from nowhere, raised in a cage of good manners. Married off to a fool. A year of it, and then one afternoon she had put him into the gears of his own engine and stood there looking at the wheel. No remorse. The mother-in-law nursed dutifully to the end and not one tear in any account of it. And then this: five years of being precisely the woman her world had forbidden her to be, and doing it so well that she had run a cotton mill through a war on the side.

All that heat, on the outside.

And inside, where other women kept their griefs and their guilts, nothing. Ice. A heart frozen so completely that it had not even cracked when she killed a man.

It was the most perfect contrast Genevieve had ever come across, and she had spent a century looking. She drove home through the wet dark and felt something she had not felt in a long time, which she eventually identified as greed.

---

She wrote the card on a Friday in May, after the second set, in the car outside the stage door, on a sheet of the heavy cream stock she had carried with her from Paris and never found a use for. She wrote it three times and burned the first two. She was particular about the last line.

You need not come.

But you will.

It was not a threat, nor a use of what she was. She could have done it that way. She could have stood in the alley by the stage door and called, the way her kind could call, and the woman would have come down the steps to her like water running downhill and never known why. She did not do that, because it would have been like putting her thumb on the scale she was trying to read. She wanted to know if the woman would come of her own accord, on the strength of a sentence. That would tell her the last thing she needed to know.

She gave the card to the doorman, who was very glad to take it.

---

On the Tuesday, at a quarter past midnight, the car came back up the drive at Didsbury, and Mercer got out and opened the rear door, and the woman got out.

Genevieve watched from the window of the music room. The woman stood on the gravel in a dark coat with the collar turned up and looked up at the house. It was a large, gloomy villa of the 1860s with too many gables, standing in a garden that had been allowed to go to seed, and Genevieve had rented it for its music room and for the fact that no one had lived in it for years. The woman looked at the gables and at the dead garden, and at the single lit window, and then directly at Genevieve behind the glass, as if she had known exactly where she would be standing.

She did not smile. She came in.

---

"You're younger than I thought," the woman said, in the doorway of the music room. "From the handwriting."

"I am a great deal older than you think," said Genevieve. "Come in, Mrs Ashworth. There is sherry, or there is gin. I am afraid I do not drink either."

The woman came in. She took off her coat and laid it over the back of a chair without being asked, and under it she was wearing the blue silk again, and she stood in the middle of Genevieve's music room with the lamp behind her and looked around it the way she had looked at the house: the piano, the tall windows, the shelves.

The shelves held Genevieve's things. A fan that had belonged to a Spanish dancer. A death mask. Seven snuffboxes, one of them empty. A small glass jar containing a single dried rose. A child's shoe. A pistol that had been fired once, in 1847, to some purpose. None of them were labelled, and Genevieve had long since stopped explaining them to anyone.

The woman looked at the shelves for a long time.

"You collect things," she said.

"I do."

"And I'm to be the next thing."

It was not a question and Genevieve did not answer it as one. She sat down on the long sofa by the fireplace, where there was no fire, and arranged her skirt.

"I would like you to sing for me," she said. "That's all, for now. Not the songs you sing on Fridays. I have heard those. I want to hear the one you would sing if there were no one in the room at all."

The woman looked at her. For a moment Genevieve thought she would refuse, and was curious to see how. Then the woman went and stood by the piano, not at it, with one hand on its closed lid, the way she stood at the microphone stand on Fridays.

"There's no one to play."

"No."

The woman closed her eyes, and was quiet for so long that Genevieve thought she had changed her mind. Then she sang.

It was not a dance-hall song. It was very old, older than Genevieve, a cradle song, one of the Elizabethan ones that English nursemaids had been singing over English cots for three hundred years.

Golden slumbers kiss your eyes,
Smiles awake you when you rise.

She sang it very quietly, with none of the heat. There was nothing in her voice at all. It was the flattest, most carefully empty singing Genevieve had ever heard, every note placed and none of them lived in, as though the song were an object being handed across a counter by someone who wanted nothing to do with it. When she reached the end of the second verse she stopped, not because the song had finished, but as though she had come to a wall.

Genevieve was delighted. A cradle song, of all the songs she could have chosen, from a childless woman who had put her husband in the gears, sung in a voice like a locked door. It was the cruellest joke Genevieve had heard in years, and the woman had not even smiled at it. She had simply made it, and let it stand.

"Thank you," said Genevieve. "That was exactly what I hoped."

The woman opened her eyes. For a moment, only a moment, something moved in her face, and Genevieve, who had been reading faces since before Waterloo, watched it and knew what it was. It was contempt. The woman despised her for enjoying it. Good. Contempt was cold. Contempt was a thing ice made.

"Why am I here, Miss..."

"Genevieve."

"Why am I here, Genevieve?"

So Genevieve told her.

---

She told her all of it, because she did not lie. It was the one fastidiousness she had kept from being alive, and it had turned out, over the years, to be the most useful. People expected a thing like her to lie, and so they never knew what to do when it did not.

She told her what she was. She told her how old she was, and where she had come from, and that there were others, and roughly how many, and what they called themselves. She told her what they ate. She told her why she had come to the Plaza in March, and what she had heard there, and what she had read in Oldham Town Hall by the light of a green lamp, and that she had laughed. She told her about Mr Whitehead.

The woman listened with her hand on the piano lid and her face perfectly still. At the part about the inquest, and the laughing, the corner of her mouth moved very slightly. At no other point did anything move at all.

"And now," said Genevieve, "I am going to make you what I am."

The room was quiet. Outside, somewhere in the dead garden, a bird that had misjudged the hour tried a few notes and gave up.

"You're not asking," said the woman.

"No."

"If I said no."

"Then you would have said it," said Genevieve, "and I would have heard it, and it would make no difference. I told you. I don't lie to people. I am not going to pretend I would have taken no for an answer."

She had seen a great many people receive that news, and she watched this one receive it with enormous interest. Most wept. Some ran, which was tiresome. A few went for the pistol on the shelf, or the poker, or her eyes. One, in Lisbon, had laughed.

The woman did none of these. She went still. Not the stillness of fright, where a creature freezes and waits to be passed over. It was another stillness altogether, a total and absolute quiet that seemed to come up from somewhere inside her and fill her to the skin. Her hands folded themselves at her waist. Her feet came together. Her face emptied out.

Genevieve had never seen anything so cold in her life, and she had once watched a woman poison her own sister at a christening. She felt, looking at it, the way she had felt at nineteen in the Salon Carré, standing in front of a painting she could not afford.

"Well," said the woman at last, very quietly, "you'd better get on with it, then."

---

It was not gentle. It never was, whatever the stories said, and Genevieve had long ago stopped pretending otherwise, for the same reason she did not lie.

She took the woman down onto the sofa and held her there and drank, and the woman did not fight, which surprised her. She had braced for it. Instead the woman lay on her back with her head turned a little to one side, her feet together, her hands folded on her breast, as though she had lain like that a great many times before and had learned that it went more quickly if you did not move. Her blood was very hot. It tasted of gin and hair oil and cigarette smoke and underneath all of those, faintly, of something Genevieve could not name, like the smell of a room where milk has been warmed.

Near the end, when the heart was slowing and the long black hair had come down all over the cushions, the woman's lips moved. Genevieve lifted her head to listen, because they very often said something, and it was always worth hearing.

"Henry," said the woman. It was barely a breath. "Henry."

Then nothing.

Genevieve considered it for a moment, with the woman's blood still on her mouth. Some American, she supposed, from the war, or some boy from before it. The dance-hall gossip had been full of Americans. It did not matter. They all said a name at the end. It was nearly always a man's, and nearly always the wrong one, and none of them had ever meant anything that outlasted the night.

She opened her own wrist on her teeth and put it to the woman's mouth.

---

The woman woke a little after three.

She woke all at once, the way they did, with the hunger already on her, and Genevieve had Mercer's girl waiting in the next room for exactly that reason. She did not need to explain anything. The woman came up off the sofa and through the door and took the girl the way a fire takes a curtain, and Genevieve stood in the doorway and watched it with professional interest. She had seen fledglings frenzy a hundred ways. This one was fast and silent and entirely without grace, and at the end of it she knelt on the carpet over the girl with her hair all down and her mouth black and wet, breathing, although she no longer needed to breathe.

"She's not dead," said Genevieve. "She's paid for this and she'll be well by Thursday. You stopped in time. Most don't, the first night."

The woman did not look up.

"There's a basin in the corner. And a clean towel. You'll want to see to your face before Mercer comes in, he's sentimental."

The woman got up. She went to the basin and washed her face and her hands, slowly and thoroughly, and dried them, and folded the towel in three and laid it over the edge of the basin. Then she turned around.

Genevieve had expected many things. Tears, perhaps, at last. Rage. Questions. She had answers ready to all of them.

The woman looked at her for a long time. Then she said, in the same quiet voice she had used to sing the cradle song:

"You didn't ask me."

"No," said Genevieve. "I told you I wouldn't."

"Nobody has ever asked me." The woman said it as a statement of fact, the way she might have read out a line from a ledger. "About anything. Not once. And I killed a man so that I would never have to be asked again, and then I spent five years doing whatever I liked, and I thought that was the end of it." She tilted her head. "And you've taken it."

"I have."

"Why?"

"Because I wanted you," said Genevieve, honestly. "And because I could."

The woman nodded slowly, as though that were an answer she had been expecting all her life and had only now received.

"Then I'll tell you something honestly too," she said. "Since that's the fashion in this house. I'll never forgive you for it. Not once. Not as long as this lasts, however long that is. Whatever you want me to be, I'll be the other thing. Whatever you teach me, I'll do the opposite until I find out whether you were right, and if you were right I'll do the opposite anyway. You've got me. You haven't got a single inch of me you didn't take."

Genevieve felt it again: the greed, very pure.

"Yes," she said. "I rather hoped you'd say that."

---

In the first nights, she taught her the necessary things.

She taught her the sun, and what it would do, and how long she had before it did it. She taught her the hunger and how to measure it, and how to take a man in a doorway on Oxford Street so that he walked away afterward with a headache and a vague feeling of having been lucky. She taught her the Masquerade and the Prince and the six old laws, briefly, the way one teaches a child to cross a road: not so that the child will understand the road, only so that it will not be run over.

The woman did the opposite of everything she was told, precisely as she had promised, and it was more entertaining than Genevieve had dared hope. Told to feed on the first night at eleven, she fed at four and cut the dawn so fine that Genevieve found her sitting on the back step with her skin beginning to smoke and had to drag her inside by the hair. Told not to go back to the Plaza, she went back on the Friday and sang both sets and was, according to the doorman, better than she had ever been. Told the house at Oldham must be closed up, she drove there in the Rover alone and slept a whole day in the coal cellar under a tarpaulin, and came back the next night black to the elbows and quite pleased with herself.

On the fifth night Genevieve took her to a supper at a house in Knutsford, where six mortals were being kept pleasantly entertained by one of the local Kindred, and showed her the thing their clan could do.

It was a small thing. Genevieve stood by the mantelpiece and let herself be seen, the way she had let herself into the doorman's question in March, and every mortal in the room turned to her like flowers to a lamp. The conversation died. A man put down his glass without knowing he had done it. A girl of eighteen got up from her chair and came and stood near Genevieve, not too near, simply wishing to be near, with her face open and shining and quite empty.

"You see," Genevieve said quietly, over the girl's head, "we are not only what we eat. This is ours too. They'll love you for it. They'll give you anything."

The woman looked at the girl for a long moment. Then she looked at Genevieve, and it was the look from the music room again, the contempt, but more than that.

"They're not choosing it," she said.

"Choosing is overrated."

"You would say so."

She turned and walked out of the room, and out of the house, and did not come back until nearly dawn. Genevieve never managed to teach her that trick. In six years she did not once see her so much as try it.

---

On the seventh night she asked the woman what she wished to be called.

They were in the music room. The woman was sitting at the piano, not playing it, turning over the pages of a book of Schubert that she could not read, since she read no music at all.

"Not Charlotte," said the woman, without looking up.

"No. I'd gathered."

"Charlotte was the one they built. I'm not going to wear her." She turned another page. "There's a name on the bills at the Plaza."

"The jewel."

"The colour," said the woman. "It was only ever the colour of a dress."

"It will do very well," said Genevieve.

---

Later, after the woman had gone down to the cellar for the day, Genevieve sat alone in the music room with the curtains drawn and took down from the highest shelf a book bound in dark green leather, very worn.

She had kept it since 1832. There were three hundred and eleven entries in it. Each one was an object, and each object was on the shelves of whatever room she happened to be living in, and next to each entry, in her small and very correct hand, was a date, a place, a price, and a line or two of description, such as a collector might write.

She uncapped her pen and wrote the three hundred and twelfth.

Sapphire. Manchester, May 1946. Price: nothing she was asked.

Burning without. Ice within. The finest contrast I have seen. I looked with great care for anything beneath the ice, as one taps the back of a panel for a hidden drawer, and there is nothing there. It is ice all the way down.

Flawless.

She blotted the page, and closed the book, and put it back on the highest shelf, beside the child's shoe.

---

The Question

Hamburg, 1964 to 1965. Written in Philadelphia, 1996.

---

Philadelphia. July 1996.

The name on the lease is Ellen Marsh. It has been other names in between, and before all of them it was Ellen Tiedemann, and the woman who carried that one would not recognise much of the woman writing this. She would recognise the handwriting. She would disapprove of the notebook.

I have never kept a diary. My mother kept one for fifty-one years and it contained the weather, the menus, and who had been seen at church, and when she died my brother and I burned it in the garden at Harvestehude without reading a page, because we both knew exactly what was in it. Nothing was in it. That is what the Tiedemanns write down.

But this is a new city, and the third country, and it is hot here in a way Hamburg never once managed in all my years there. The place she has taken is in the south of the city, among streets of little brick houses that remind me more of Altona than I expected. There is a great deal to do and I have done most of it. Tonight she is out and there is nothing left to arrange, and I find I want to put one thing down on paper before it gets any further away.

Not the whole of it. Only the first half-year. Only the question.

---

Tuesday, 17th November 1964.

The third man was found in a doorway in the Hein-Hoyer-Straße at a quarter to five in the morning by a baker's boy, who thought he was dead and ran to the Davidwache, and by the time I was sent down from the office he was sitting up on a bench in the charge room drinking sweet tea and asking for his shoes.

He had them on. I pointed this out. He looked at his feet for some time.

His name was Kuddel Jessen, he was a stoker off a Danish coaster, he was forty-one, and he was the colour of a sheet. He remembered drinking. He remembered a woman. He did not remember her face, or where he had met her, or what they had said, or how he came to be in a doorway in the Hein-Hoyer-Straße with his collar undone and a small, very clean mark on his neck like a bruise that had changed its mind. His money was in his pocket. His watch was on his wrist. Nothing had been taken, and he had not been hurt in any way the police surgeon could describe, except that he was so weak he could not stand without holding the wall.

The first two had been the same. A merchant seaman in October in the Talstraße. A clerk from the Hamburg-Süd office, who should not have been on the Kiez at all and was very anxious that his wife should not hear of it. Both pale, both weak, both robbed of nothing but an evening. Both mended in a week.

It was not a crime. Kommissar Rehder said so, twice, with his feet on his desk. Drunk men fall down in St. Pauli every night of the year, Fräulein Tiedemann; it is practically what the district is for. I had been given it because nobody else wanted it, and because it involved a woman, and anything that involved a woman in St. Pauli came to the Weibliche Kriminalpolizei whether or not it had anything to do with the work we were there for.

I asked Kuddel Jessen where he had been drinking.

He had been in four places. So had the clerk. So had the seaman. Only one of the four was the same for all three: a cellar bar off the Große Freiheit, down eleven steps from the street, called Die Schwarze Katze.

---

Wednesday, 18th November 1964.

I went down the eleven steps at a quarter to ten in the evening, in my coat, and showed my card to the man on the door, who was large and Swedish and had the grace to look ashamed of himself.

It was a small room with a low vaulted ceiling, brick, painted black. Fifteen tables, a bar along one wall, a stage at the end hardly larger than a kitchen table. It was full. There was a band from Liverpool on the stage, four boys with the haircut they all had that year, and they were very loud and not very good, and the room did not mind.

The woman I wanted was behind the bar. I did not know yet that she was the woman I wanted. I only knew that the Swede on the door had looked toward her when I showed him my card, the way a dog looks toward its owner.

She was tall. That was the first thing, because I am tall myself and I am not used to meeting women at my own eye level. She was dressed in black, with a great deal of black hair pinned up high and a fringe cut straight across. Her mouth was painted nearly black as well. She was pouring a beer, and she went on pouring it until the head was correct, and then she set it down in front of a sailor and wiped her hands on a cloth and looked at me.

"Kriminalpolizei," she said. Her German was good. Very good, and very correct, in a way that had been learned rather than grown into. She was English. "How exciting. Is it about the noise? They are terrible, aren't they. I'll have them off by midnight."

"It is not about the noise."

"Then I'm afraid I can't think what it's about." She smiled. It was a very good smile. "You'll have to tell me, Fräulein Kommissarin."

"Kriminalobersekretärin."

"Is there a difference?"

"About six years," I said, "and a pay grade."

She laughed. The sailor laughed too, without knowing why, because people did around her. I told her about the three men. I said their names, and when they had been in, and what state they had been found in, and watched her face while I did it, because that is the work. Most people's faces do something when you tell them a thing they already know. They try too hard to look surprised, or they try too hard not to.

Her face did nothing whatsoever. It was the most attentive, interested, sympathetic face imaginable, and there was nothing behind it. It was like looking through a lit window into a room and realising the room was painted on the glass.

"How awful," she said. "Poor men. Half the port drinks in here, you know. I shouldn't wonder if they'd all been here at some point. Were they very ill?"

"No. They are quite well. Nothing was taken from them."

"Then I'm glad."

"Where were you on the night of the sixteenth, between midnight and four?"

"Here," she said. "Singing. Until two. Then clearing up until half past three, with Lars and Inge. Then home." She tilted her head toward the Swede on the door and toward a thin girl collecting glasses. "Ask them. Ask the whole room, if you like. I'm hard to miss when I'm singing."

I asked them. They said the same, in the same words. That told me nothing. People who work for someone always say the same thing, true or not.

I left my card on the bar. She picked it up and read it and put it in the pocket of her dress, and said: "Ellen. That's a good name. Plain."

"It was my grandmother's."

"Come back when you're not working, Ellen. You look as though you could use a drink."

I did not tell her that I do not drink on the Kiez. I went back up the eleven steps. It had started to rain.

---

Friday, 27th November 1964.

I went back when I was not working.

I told myself it was for the case, and it was true that I learned a good deal. I learned that the bar opened at nine every night and that she was never once seen in it before nine. I learned that she had come to Hamburg in 1961 with money nobody could account for and bought the lease outright from a man called Paulsen, who had been glad to get out. I learned that nobody on the Große Freiheit knew her surname, or where she lived, or whether she had ever had a husband. I learned that the men of the district were a little afraid of her in a way they could not have explained, and that the women were not afraid of her at all, which in St. Pauli is unusual enough to make a note of.

And I learned that she sang.

She did not sing every night. The English bands had the stage most nights, and she stood behind the bar and poured and let them have it. But some nights, late, when the band had finished and gone up the steps for air and the room had thinned to the ones who had nowhere else to go, she went and stood on the little stage without any band at all and sang in English with nobody to accompany her.

I have tried for thirty years to describe to myself what that was like, and I have never done better than this: she sang as though it were the easiest thing in the world to be looked at. The whole room looked. She let it. She took everything the room gave her and gave it back doubled, hot, generous, laughing, and none of it cost her anything at all.

That was the thing I noticed first, as a policewoman. That it cost her nothing. Everybody who performs pays for it somewhere, and I have seen a great many performers in my years on the Kiez, most of them on a bed. She did not pay. Somewhere very deep inside all that heat there was a place where no song reached and nothing she was giving away was ever missed. Cold, and entirely still, and quite comfortable.

Anyone else would have been afraid of it. It is what you see in the ones who have done something very bad and put it away.

I was not afraid of it. I found I wanted very much to know what she had put away.

---

Thursday, 3rd December 1964.

That night I asked her if she had ever been married.

We were at the end of the bar after closing. She had begun letting me stay after closing, without either of us mentioning it, while Lars stacked the chairs and Inge counted the till. She had poured me a Korn, which I did not drink, and one for herself, which she did, slowly, as though tasting something she remembered liking.

"Once," she said.

"What happened to him?"

"There was an accident."

She said it lightly, looking at her glass, and then she looked up at me. It was the look of a woman who knows perfectly well what a policewoman hears in a sentence like that and is interested to see what the policewoman will do about it.

I have sat across a table from eleven people who killed someone. Three of them were women. One of them had put rat poison in her husband's pea soup every day for four months, and told me about it the way you tell someone a recipe. I know what it looks like when a person has done that and does not intend to be sorry.

This was that. And under it, where I kept looking, there was something else I did not have a name for then. Not guilt. Something like relief that had turned to stone.

"I'm sorry," I said.

"I'm not," she said. "But thank you."

I finished my Korn after all. It was the first drink I had taken on the Kiez in nine years, and I did not tell her so.

---

Monday, 14th December 1964.

Monika Wendt went to Frankfurt today with a man called Horst, who is not called Horst.

I have written her name in a great many reports. I first took her off the Herbertstraße when she was fifteen and a half, in the spring of 1962, and she spat at me. I took her home to her mother in Harburg, and her mother slapped her, and she was back on the Kiez within the month. I took her off the Reeperbahn in the winter and got her a place in a home in Ohlsdorf where the nuns taught her to sew. She sewed for four months and then climbed out of a window. I took her off the Talstraße last summer with a split lip and a man's name she would not tell me, and I sat with her in the charge room at the Davidwache until morning and talked to her about the future, which I believed in at the time.

She listened to all of it. At the end she put her hand on my arm, quite kindly, and said: "You can't get me out, Fräulein Tiedemann. You keep trying and I know you mean it. But nobody gets anybody out. You go yourself or you don't go."

This morning she went to Frankfurt with Horst. She left a note at the Davidwache addressed to me. It said: Don't come. She is eighteen.

I did not go back to the office. I went and walked by the Elbe until it got dark, and then I went down the eleven steps.

She saw it on me before I reached the bar. She did not ask. She poured the Korn, and I drank it, and she poured another, and after the third I told her about Monika Wendt, all of it, from the spitting in 1962 to the note, which is more than I have ever told anyone about anything.

She listened the way she sang, with her whole attention. When I had finished she was quiet for a while.

"She's right, you know," she said.

"I know she's right."

"Nobody gets anybody out." She turned her glass on the bar, a quarter turn, and another. "You find the door yourself. And if there isn't one, you make one. With whatever you've got to hand."

She did not say what she had had to hand. She did not need to. I sat at her bar with three Korns in me and understood with complete clarity that the woman opposite me had once been in a room with no door, and had made one, and walked through it, and had never looked back and never once been sorry, and that I had spent twelve years standing in the doorways of other people's rooms trying to hold them open for girls who would never walk through.

I should have been appalled. I was a police officer.

I was not appalled. I was, for the first time in a long time, not tired.

---

Saturday, 9th January 1965.

There have been no more men.

Not one since November. Not a stoker, not a clerk, not a sailor in a doorway. I have read every report from the Davidwache for seven weeks, and the drunks are falling down in St. Pauli in the usual numbers and the usual places and waking with the usual headaches, and none of them are pale, and none of them have a small clean mark on the neck, and none of them have been to the Schwarze Katze.

It stopped the week I went down the eleven steps.

I have thought about that for seven weeks. I have thought about the three men, weak and white and robbed of nothing. I have thought about some drug, some preparation, some woman's revenge on a certain kind of man. She had every reason to hate that kind of man, I think. But there was no motive I could put on paper, no gain, no pattern beyond the bar, no evidence of any substance, and a room full of witnesses for every night.

And it stopped when a policewoman started coming in. Which means that she noticed, and she cared enough to stop, and she did not stop coming to the bar or change a single thing about her manner toward me. She simply stopped, and went on pouring my Korn.

Tonight I said to her: "There have been no more collapses."

"Collapses?"

"The men in the doorways."

"Oh, them." She wiped the bar. "I'm glad. I'd hate for anyone to think this was an unhealthy establishment."

"Nobody thinks that."

"Good." She looked at me. "I heard the police were interested in my customers."

"Only in their health."

"Then we want the same thing, you and I," she said, and smiled, and that was all either of us ever said about it.

---

Sunday, 7th February 1965.

Lunch at Harvestehude. My mother, my brother Jürgen and his wife, the two little boys, the Pastor. Roast pork. The good silver, the Meissen.

My mother asked whether I was still doing that work. I said I was. The Pastor asked what exactly the work involved, and there was a pause at the table of the kind that always follows that question in my family. I told him, briefly and accurately, and his wife put down her fork. Jürgen's wife asked whether there wasn't something at the Senate, some post in an office, where a woman of my background might be of use without all that. My mother said that I was thirty-three.

I have been thirty-three since October. My mother has been saying it since October, in the tone other families reserve for a diagnosis.

I did not tell them where I had been every night that week. I thought about it, over the red cabbage. I thought about saying, quite calmly, in the voice we use at that table: I have been sitting in a cellar on the Große Freiheit with an Englishwoman who I believe murdered her husband, and it is the only place in this city where I have felt awake in ten years.

I asked for the salt.

On the way home I realised that I had not once, all afternoon, wanted a drink. And that I wanted, very badly, to be eleven steps below the Große Freiheit at nine o'clock, watching her come in from the street with the rain on her coat.

That is what I wrote in the car, on the back of a parking receipt, which I then tore up. It is the only thing from that year I did not keep.

---

Friday, 5th March 1965.

Kommissar Rehder closed the file today. No crime, no motive, no further incidents. He said I had done good work on a waste of time and that he was glad to have it off the board.

I went down the eleven steps that night the same as always, and for the first time since November I had no reason whatever to be there.

I sat at the end of the bar. She poured the Korn. The English band played something about a girl who didn't care. She went and stood on the little stage after they had finished, as she did, and sang, and on the second song she looked straight at me across the room for the whole of the last verse and did not look away once, and I did not look away either.

I know what my mother would call that. I know what the Pastor would call it. I have spent thirty years since trying to decide what I would call it, and I have not decided, and I no longer think it matters. It was not that. It was not any of the things they had words for at Harvestehude. It was the look of one person in a room recognising another person in a room, and neither of them being able to pretend afterward that it had not happened.

---

Saturday, 17th April 1965.

A man came down the steps tonight who should not have.

He was called Kalle Bruns, and he ran four girls out of a house in the Davidstraße, and one of them had been in my charge room twice. He was drunk and he had heard something about the Englishwoman at the Katze who poured drinks for the WKP, and he had come down to see for himself. Lars was at the top of the steps having a cigarette.

He went to the bar. He leaned on it. He said something to her in the Kiez German they speak down there, about what she was and what she must be doing with a policewoman every night, and what he would do with the pair of us, and he put his hand on her wrist.

She did not move. She looked at his hand on her wrist the way she might have looked at a wasp that had landed on her glass: not afraid, only considering what to do with it. And I saw, for a fraction of a second, something come up behind her eyes that was not anything I had seen before, not the heat and not the cold. Something older than either. The room felt it. Two sailors at the nearest table stood up without knowing why.

I did not wait to find out what it was. I got up from my stool, took Kalle Bruns by the back of the collar and the belt, and put him over my hip and onto the floor, the way they taught us in 1953 at the police school in Eppendorf and I had used perhaps four times since. He landed very hard. When he tried to get up I put my knee on his back and told him quietly who I was, and what I knew about the house in the Davidstraße, and what would happen to it by morning if he ever came down those steps again.

Lars came down and carried him up them.

When I sat down again she was looking at me with an expression I had not seen on her before. She looked at me for a long time. Then she said, quite softly, "Nobody has done that for me before."

"You didn't need it done."

"No," she said. "That's what makes it interesting."

She did not pour me a Korn. She poured me a whisky, from the bottle she kept under the bar that she never sold to anyone, and we sat at the end of the bar until the room was empty and Lars and Inge had gone, and talked until nearly five. It was the first time I saw her look at the clock. At twenty to five she stood up quite abruptly, in the middle of a sentence, and said she had to go. She put on her coat and went up the eleven steps as though something were after her.

I sat in the empty bar and thought about that. About how in five months I had never once seen her in daylight. About the collapses that had stopped. About the thing that had come up behind her eyes when Kalle Bruns touched her wrist.

I thought about it for a long time, and at the end of it I did not have an answer. I had a question that did not make sense, and I put it away.

---

Tuesday, 11th May 1965.

I resigned from the Weibliche Kriminalpolizei at ten o'clock this morning.

I handed in my card and my notebooks to Kommissar Rehder, who looked at me for some time over his desk and then asked whether I was getting married. I told him I was not. He asked whether I had another position. I said I believed so. He wished me luck and said he had always thought I was wasted on the Kiez. It was the kindest thing he had said to me in twelve years and I believe he meant it.

I did not go home. I walked by the Elbe until nine o'clock, and then I went down the eleven steps for what I knew, somehow, would be the last time as the person I had been.

She was behind the bar. I went and sat at the end, and she came down to me and put her hands flat on the bar, and looked at me, and saw it on me the way she had seen Monika Wendt on me in December.

"You've done something," she said.

"I resigned this morning."

She did not say anything.

"I would like to work for you," I said. "I don't mean pouring beer. You have money nobody can account for, and a lease bought outright, and no surname, and no address, and nobody in this city who can do anything for you in daylight. I have a surname and an address and twelve years of knowing where everything in this city is and who to ask for it. I can do the things you can't. I want to."

It was the longest speech I had made in her bar.

She was quiet for a long time. The band was playing. Nobody was listening to them. She took her hands off the bar and folded them at her waist, and her face went still, and it was not the pleasant, interested stillness she wore for customers. It was the other one. The one from very far back, where the song never reached.

"You don't know what I am," she said.

"No," I said. "I know who you are. That will do."

---

She closed the bar at eleven that night, an hour and a half early, and sent everyone up the steps, even Lars. She locked the door at the top and came back down and turned off every light but the one over the bar, and stood under it, and told me.

She told me plainly. I had not known until then that she could speak plainly; everything she had said to me in six months had had some second thing under it, and this had nothing under it at all. She told me what she was. She told me what the men in the doorways had been, and why they had stopped. She told me there were others, and that they had laws, and that if she had told me any of this without asking the question she was going to ask, those others would have killed me for it before the week was out, and probably her as well.

I did not believe her. I have been a police officer too long to believe anything because a person tells it to me, however plainly.

So she took the little knife she used for the lemons, and drew it across the inside of her own wrist, not deeply, and held her wrist out to me under the light. I watched the cut close. It took perhaps half a minute. At the end there was nothing, not even a mark, only a little dark blood drying on her skin, darker than blood should be.

She looked at me the whole time I looked at her wrist.

"There," she said. "Now you know what I am. Now it's fair."

I did not understand then what she meant by fair. I understand it now. It took me years, and a great deal I learned afterward, about how she had been made and by whom. Nobody had told her the truth before they took her. Nobody had shown her anything. They had simply decided, and done it, and she had woken up changed. So she would not do that to me. She would not let me choose anything I had not first been shown. She had cut her own wrist in an empty bar so that whatever I said next would be mine.

She put down the knife.

"I've never wanted one of you," she said. "A servant. Someone tied to me by the blood, who can't leave because the blood won't let them. I think it's a filthy thing. I think making someone need you is the filthiest thing there is. And I'm going to ask you anyway, because you've decided, and I can see you've decided, and if I send you away without asking then I'm the one deciding for you. And I won't do that. Not to you."

She stood very straight under the one light, with her hands folded, and asked me.

"Leave, and never come back. Or stay, and be mine forever."

---

I did not answer at once.

I heard the words. And I heard behind them what they meant, which is not what they would have meant in any other mouth in Hamburg. Forever is a word people say to each other in bars on the Große Freiheit every night of the year, and they do not mean it and they are not expected to. She meant it. She meant my forever as well as hers. She meant a life that would not end when it should, tied to hers by something I did not yet understand, in cities I had never seen, under names I did not yet have, doing things for her in daylight that I could not yet imagine. She meant never Harvestehude again. Never the Meissen and the Pastor. Never my mother's voice saying thirty-three. Never Kommissar Rehder saying I had been wasted, and never again the doorway of a room I could not make anyone walk out of.

I thought of Monika Wendt's note. Don't come.

I thought: nobody gets anybody out. You go yourself, or you don't go.

The band upstairs in the next club was playing something. The refrigerator under the bar hummed. She stood under the light and waited, and did not move, and did not say anything to help me, and I understood that she never would. It was mine. She had made very sure it was mine.

"Ich bleibe," I said.

---

Philadelphia. July 1996.

She has just come in. I can hear her on the stairs, and I can hear from the way she is coming up them that it was a good night, and that she has fed, and that she will want to tell me about it and will pretend she does not.

She has never asked me anything since. In thirty-one years she has not once needed to.

I am going to lock this away now and go down.

---

The Rumour

West Berlin. November 1978 to January 1979.

---

I. The Hostess

Oranienstraße, Kreuzberg.

The chairs went first.

Ellen took them out on the Thursday, in daylight, while the bar was shut: eleven chairs, carried one at a time up from the cellar and stacked in the back of the van with a blanket over them, as if the Schwarze Katze were having them re-upholstered. That left thirty-nine. On the Friday morning she went through the book with a pencil and made sure that thirty-seven of the thirty-nine were spoken for by people who would certainly come, which in Kreuzberg in 1978 meant people who had been promised free beer.

The two that remained were at the corner table by the pillar, facing each other across a slab of oak barely wide enough for two glasses. It was the worst table in the room. You could see the stage from it only by turning your head, and the pillar was painted with a portrait of a woman with no face.

The paintings had gone up on the Wednesday. There were nine of them, all by a girl of twenty-two called Dörte Lemke who lived in a squat on the Mariannenplatz and painted the junkies on the Kottbusser Tor in black oils, very large, very slowly, with their eyes open. She had never sold one. On the Monday, Ellen had taken a small printed card announcing the exhibition to the art shop on the Fasanenstraße, the only shop in West Berlin that stocked the particular French charcoal a certain painter from the East preferred, and asked the owner, as a favour, to put it by the till.

On the Tuesday she had written a letter to the Bezirksamt, on plain paper, under the name of a retired schoolteacher in the Adalbertstraße, complaining about the Friday concert at the Schwarze Katze: the band called Kaltfront, who had last played there in September, and whose audience had broken two windows and a policeman's nose. Every word of it was true. The Bezirksamt would not read it for a month. But a certain man in Charlottenburg paid a clerk in that office to copy every complaint about Kreuzberg to him the day it arrived, because a certain man in Charlottenburg was collecting them.

None of this was Sapphire's doing. She had simply mentioned to Ellen, some weeks before, over the accounts, how odd it was that the two people in the city she least wanted in her bar should both be so predictable. And Ellen had listened, the way Ellen listened, and asked nothing.

---

Konrad Albers came down the steps at a quarter past eleven, in a grey overcoat that had cost more than the building, with a notebook in the inside pocket.

He was a Ventrue of the seventh generation, a hundred and eighty years old, and he had been Prince Wilhelm's man in matters of order since before the Wall. He looked like what he had been in life, a Prussian notary, pale and correct and faintly pained, and he stood at the foot of the steps and took in the room the way a man takes in a flooded cellar. The room was very full. Kaltfront were tuning, which in their case was hard to distinguish from playing. A boy with a safety pin through his cheek was being sick, carefully, into a pint glass.

Sapphire came out from behind the bar to meet him. She was wearing black, and her hair was up, and she smiled at him the way she smiled at everyone, as though he were the one guest she had been hoping for all night.

"Herr Albers. What a surprise."

"Sapphire." He did not bow. "I have heard a great deal about your establishment."

"All of it true, I expect. I'm afraid we're very full." She looked round the room with a small helpless gesture. "There's the corner by the pillar. It's not a good table."

"I'm not here to be comfortable."

"No," she said. "I can see that."

She took him to the corner table and pulled out the chair that faced the room, so that he would have the whole of Kreuzberg in front of him to write down, and brought him a glass of red wine he would not drink, and went back behind the bar.

At twenty to twelve Thomas De Lutrius came down the steps.

He came from the East, as he always did, by a route nobody asked about, and he looked as he always looked: nineteen years old, American, fair, dressed entirely in black, with a sketchbook under his arm. He stood at the foot of the steps and did not look at the room at all. He looked at the walls. He saw the first of Dörte Lemke's paintings, a girl on the steps of the U-Bahn with her arms wrapped round her knees and her face turned up, and he stood in front of it for a full three minutes without moving, and then he went on to the next.

When he had seen all nine he came to the bar. His face had the look people's faces have after they have been struck.

"Who painted these?"

"A girl from the Mariannenplatz. She'll be thrilled. Nobody's ever looked at them for that long." Sapphire leaned on the bar. "I'm afraid we're rather full tonight. There's one chair, in the corner by the pillar. You'd be sharing."

He did not ask with whom. He did not care. He took his drink and went through the crowd to the corner, and Sapphire watched him reach the table, and stop, and look down at Konrad Albers, and watched Konrad Albers look up.

For a moment, neither moved. The room was very loud. There was nowhere else to sit. It would have been a small, sharp discourtesy for either of them to turn and leave, a thing noticed, and neither of them was the kind of Kindred who wished to be noticed doing a small, sharp discourtesy in a crowded bar.

Thomas De Lutrius sat down.

Sapphire went back to pouring beer.

---

She did not listen. She did not need to. She watched, the way she watched everything from behind the bar, between one pint and the next.

She watched Albers say something stiff and correct. She watched Thomas answer at length, leaning forward, one finger jabbing at the table, at the room, at the painting on the pillar of the woman without a face. She knew what he was saying, because Thomas De Lutrius said it to everyone within the first five minutes: that all of them, Kindred and kine alike, were evil under the skin, and the only honest art was the art that showed it. She watched Albers disagree, which was a mistake, because Thomas liked nothing better. She watched the argument go on through Kaltfront's whole first set and into the second, while around them the boy with the safety pin fell asleep on a speaker and a girl with green hair tried to start a fight with the pillar.

At a quarter to one, in the middle of a sentence, Thomas opened his sketchbook and began to draw.

He did not ask. He did not stop talking. He drew Konrad Albers across the corner table as he argued with him, fast and savage, in the French charcoal from the Fasanenstraße, and Albers, who had not sat for a portrait since 1791, found to his own evident surprise that he did not tell him to stop. He sat quite still. He went on disagreeing, but he sat still for it, with the particular stillness of a vain man being looked at closely by someone who is good at it.

They sat there together until half past two.

When Thomas left, he tore the page out and left it on the table, face up, among the rings from the wine glasses, and went up the steps without saying goodbye to anyone. Albers looked at the drawing for a long time. Then he stood, and buttoned his grey coat, and went up the steps as well, and left it lying where it was.

Sapphire went over when the bar was nearly empty. The drawing was very good. It had caught him exactly, the notary's mouth and the careful eyes, and under them something weak and hungry that Albers would not have known he had.

She did not touch it. She left it on the table for the cleaners, and in the morning it was gone, though the cleaners swore they had never seen it.

---

Six nights later, at Anntoinette's Thursday salon in the Grossbeerenstraße, Sapphire found herself standing by the tall windows with Hans Vroenik, who was talking about Mahler. She let him finish. It took some time. Then, when he paused to drink, she said lightly, looking out at the rain:

"Do you know, I watched Thomas De Lutrius draw Konrad Albers in my bar on Friday. Two hours, at the corner table. I've never seen Albers sit still for anyone."

Every word of it was true.

She did not say anything else about it all night.

---

II. The Maestro

A penthouse near the Philharmonie.

Hans Vroenik did not care about Konrad Albers. He did not care about Thomas De Lutrius, beyond a general conviction that the boy could not draw hands. He did not care about the Princes, or the East, or the price of blood in Kreuzberg, or who had been seen with whom at which bar. He cared about music, and about Anntoinette, and about very little else, and he had arranged his long unlife so that the little else could be delegated.

But the Englishwoman's remark stayed with him, as her remarks tended to, because it was about art.

A portrait. De Lutrius had made a portrait. The boy did not make portraits; he made accusations with charcoal, and he made them of strangers in the U-Bahn, of whores and addicts, of the evil under the skin of people who could not object. He did not make portraits of Ventrue. And Albers had sat for it. Two hours.

It was a curious thing, and Hans liked curious things if they were artistic, because they gave him something to say to Anntoinette that was not about Mahler. He knew she found the Mahler tiresome. She was too gracious to show it.

So on the Saturday, in her private cinema at the Film Museum, while she ran a reel of something silent and Swedish that he did not understand, he mentioned it.

"The American has been painting Albers," he said.

Anntoinette did not take her eyes from the screen.

"Painting him?"

"A portrait. Albers sat for him for two hours. In Kreuzberg, of all places. I had it from the Englishwoman, who saw it done."

"How very odd," said Anntoinette.

"I thought so."

"Albers doesn't sit for anyone."

"So she said."

On the screen, a woman in a white dress walked into the sea. Hans thought the music was wrong for it, and said so, and Anntoinette agreed with him, and he was happy for the rest of the evening.

He never thought about Konrad Albers again.

---

III. The Elder

The Film Museum, Grossbeerenstraße.

Anntoinette thought about it a great deal.

She thought about it after Hans had gone, alone in her projection room with the Swedish film running on without sound. She had been the Toreador elder of West Berlin for thirty years, and she had not survived thirty years of two Princes by assuming that anything was only what it appeared to be.

Thomas De Lutrius was Gustav's creature. Everyone knew that. He sat on Gustav's Primogen and carried Gustav's opinions into every Toreador salon on both sides of the Wall like a dog carrying a stick, and he had been causing her clan trouble for thirty years. He did not paint the Ventrue of the West. He despised the Ventrue of the West.

And Konrad Albers did not sit for anybody. He had refused the Toreador three times, graciously, and she had been one of them.

But he had sat for Gustav's painter. In Kreuzberg. For two hours. In a bar that Albers had been telling the Prince for a year ought to be closed down.

It might be nothing at all. It very probably was nothing at all. But she would not have lasted thirty years in this city if she had let a very probable nothing go unchecked, and there was one creature in Berlin who would know.

On the Monday she sent a note down into the sewers by the usual means, and on the Wednesday a reply came back up, unsigned, in a hand like a spider walking through ink. It named a price. She paid it. The reply that followed was a single sentence.

It is true: the American drew Albers at the Schwarze Katze on the 17th, from a quarter to one until half past two, and they spoke without pause the whole time.

It did not say what they had spoken about. Anntoinette noticed that. She noticed, too, that she had not been told there was nothing in it.

She sat for a long time with the note in her lap. Then she burned it, carefully, in the ashtray by the projector. When the Prince came to her on the Friday, as he did on Fridays, she said nothing to him about it at all.

She did not need to. She had asked the question, and it had been answered, and that was enough. In Berlin it was always enough. Anntoinette had not become what she was by repeating rumours. She had become it by asking questions of people who sold the answers to everyone.

---

IV. The Truth in the Walls

Beneath the Landwehrkanal.

Ellison did not lie. It was the whole of his power, and he had understood this about himself since the sixteenth century. A liar could be caught. A liar could be refuted, and then disbelieved, and then ignored. But a creature who told both Princes only the truth, always, for four hundred years, could never be ignored by either of them, because the truth was the one thing neither could afford to be without.

He had told Anntoinette the truth.

He told Peter Kleist the truth as well, three nights later, in the old pumping station under the canal, where the water came through the brickwork in a thin black thread and ran away into the dark. Kleist had come down to buy something else, about a shipment through Tegel. At the end of it Ellison said, as though it had only occurred to him:

"The Toreador elder has been asking about Konrad Albers."

Kleist was a small, neat man with the patient face of a senior civil servant, which he had been in life, and which he still was. He did not move.

"What has she been asking?"

"Whether he sat for a portrait by Thomas De Lutrius." Ellison let the water run for a while. "He did. At the Englishwoman's bar in Kreuzberg, on the seventeenth. Nearly two hours. They were deep in conversation throughout."

"About what?"

"I don't know," said Ellison, which was true. "They were very close together, and the band was very loud."

He reached into the rags he wore and took out a sheet of paper, folded twice, soft with damp, and unfolded it on the lid of an iron drum between them. It was a drawing in charcoal of Konrad Albers. It was very good. It had caught him exactly: the notary's mouth, the careful eyes, and underneath them something weak and hungry that nobody who knew Albers would ever have put into words, and everybody who looked at this would recognise at once.

In one corner, small, in a rapid American hand, it was signed: T. De L.

"One of mine found it on the table," said Ellison. "Albers left it there. He didn't take it with him. I thought that was interesting."

Kleist looked at the drawing for a long time. Then he asked the price, and paid it, and folded the drawing and put it inside his coat.

When he had gone, Ellison sat by the black thread of water for a while and considered whether he had done anything to Konrad Albers. He decided he had not. He had told the truth, all of it, exactly as it was. It was hardly his fault how it looked.

He did wonder, idly, as he often did about such things, who had wanted it to look that way. It was not Anntoinette; she was asking, not telling. It was not the painter, who had no more interest in politics than a hurricane. He thought about the Englishwoman who owned the bar, and put her aside, because she had done nothing at all but pour the drinks.

He would remember that later, and admire it.

---

V. The Right Hand

The Charlottenburg Palace.

Peter Kleist did not show the drawing to the Prince.

He had served Wilhelm Waldburg for a very long time, and he knew the Prince's mind the way a clerk knows the filing system he himself devised. If he showed the Prince the drawing, the Prince would ask him what it meant. Then Kleist would have to say, and anything he said would be a charge, and a charge against a man of Albers' age and standing had to be proved, and there was nothing to prove. Two Kindred had sat at a table in a crowded bar. One had drawn the other. That was all that anybody knew.

No. That was not the way.

He sat in his office in the east wing with the drawing flat on the blotter and thought instead about Kreuzberg.

For a year Konrad Albers had been coming to the Prince with his notebook and his complaints and his copies of letters from the Bezirksamt, saying that the clubs of Kreuzberg were a danger to the Masquerade and must be broken up. The drugs, the violence, the police, the newspapers, the risk of some fool of a neonate feeding in public in the middle of a riot. It was a sensible argument. Kleist had half agreed with it.

But it would mean a great deal of work, breaking up Kreuzberg. It would mean Wilhelm's people spending a winter tangled in the squats and the police and the district offices, attention drawn west, resources spent. And the Kreuzberg clubs were, when you thought about it, very useful as they were: a whole generation of West Berlin's young kine, too busy and too furious and too drunk to look at anything else.

Who would want the Prince to spend a winter on that? Who would benefit from Wilhelm's eye being turned inward on his own worst streets?

He did not think it through to the end. He did not need to. He had been a civil servant, and civil servants know that the end of a thought is where the trouble starts.

At his audience that Friday he said to the Prince, in the course of a great many other things, that on reflection he no longer thought the Kreuzberg question urgent. The clubs kept the young kine occupied. The police had matters in hand. It might be wiser to leave the district alone for the present, and perhaps to take less account in future of certain counsel on the subject, which might be more energetic than wise.

He named no name. He did not need to.

Wilhelm looked at him for a moment across the great desk. Then he nodded once, and turned to the next paper.

Kleist burned the drawing that night, in the stove in his office, and watched the notary's face go brown and curl and vanish. He regretted it slightly. It was very good.

---

VI. The Notary

Charlottenburg. December 1978 to January 1979.

Konrad Albers noticed nothing, at first. Then he noticed a great many small things, and could not make them add up to anything.

The Prince did not refuse to see him. The Prince saw him on the usual night, at the usual hour, and listened to what he had to say about Kreuzberg with the usual grave attention, and thanked him, and moved on to other business, and nothing was done. That was all. Nothing was done.

In December he was not invited to Anntoinette's Christmas salon. He had never much enjoyed it, but he had always been asked. When he sent a small note of enquiry, in case the invitation had gone astray, Anntoinette sent back a charming reply regretting that the numbers had been so dreadfully tight this year.

At Frau von Seyditz's, in the second week of January, he said something about the East at supper, a perfectly ordinary thing, the sort of thing he had said a thousand times, and there was a small pause at the table, very small. Then somebody changed the subject.

Peter Kleist was perfectly cordial to him on the stairs of the palace. He asked after Albers' health. He did not ask after his opinions.

Nobody accused him of anything. Nobody so much as looked at him sideways. If he had gone to any one of them and asked what he had done, each of them would have been astonished at the question, and each of them would have been telling the truth. He had done nothing. There was nothing. The invitations were just a little fewer, and the silences just a little longer, and the Prince's attention just a little further away. He had been listened to for fifty years, and now he was merely heard.

He went over and over it at night in his rooms in the Mommsenstraße, and could never find the place where it had turned.

Once, near the end of January, he stood at his window looking east, toward the dark line of the Wall and the lights of Gustav's half of the city beyond it. He thought, not for the first time, that the old man over there at least knew what order was. That the old man over there would never have let the district of Kreuzberg fester for a year for want of a decision.

He did not act on the thought. Not then.

But he did not dismiss it, either.

---

VII. The Hostess

Oranienstraße, Kreuzberg. January 1979.

The news came back to the Schwarze Katze on a Thursday, in the mouth of a Toreador neonate called Pia, who was twenty-three and had been Kindred for eighteen months and wanted very badly to be the sort of person who had news.

She leaned on the bar and lowered her voice, although the band was so loud it made no difference.

"Have you heard about Albers?"

"No," said Sapphire, pouring. "What about him?"

"Nobody's quite sure. But they say he's out of favour. They say the Prince doesn't listen to him any more." Pia's eyes were very bright. "Someone told Hans that someone told Anntoinette that he's been seen with people from the East. And the Prince has decided to leave Kreuzberg alone. Completely. He said the clubs are good for keeping the kine busy. Isn't that wonderful? For you, I mean."

"It's wonderful for all of us," said Sapphire.

"Do you think it's true? About Albers?"

Sapphire set the glass down in front of her and considered the question honestly, the way she considered every question she was asked.

"I think," she said, "that people in this city will believe anything, if they work it out for themselves."

Pia laughed, as people did around her, without knowing why, and took her drink away to the stage to tell someone else.

---

At a quarter to five, when the bar was empty and the chairs were up on the tables, Ellen came down the steps from the street with her collar turned up against the snow. She stood at the foot of the steps and looked round the room.

"The chairs," she said. "The eleven in the van. Shall I bring them back in?"

Sapphire was wiping down the corner table by the pillar, where the woman with no face looked out from the painted brick.

"Yes," she said. "We're not expecting anyone in particular."

Ellen went back up the steps for the first of them. Sapphire finished wiping the table, and folded the cloth in three, and stood for a moment with her hand flat on the oak, where a drawing had lain for a night among the rings from the wine glasses.

Then she went to help carry the chairs.

---

The Ninth of November

Kreuzberg, West Berlin. Thursday, 9th November 1989, to Friday, 10th November.

---

16:41

The light goes out of the Oranienstraße a little after half past four, the way it does in November, all at once, as if someone upstairs had been told to economise. Sapphire wakes in the dark under the bar and lies for a moment listening to the building.

A tram of feet on the pavement above. A moped. Somebody's radio, two floors up, playing the news. The Schwarze Katze has been hers for twenty-one years, and she can tell from the ceiling alone what kind of night it is going to be. It sounds like a Thursday. A cold one, people walking fast with their heads down, nobody lingering.

She dresses by feel. She goes up the back stairs into the bar, where Ellen has already put the lights on and the heating up and is sitting at the end of the counter with the accounts, reading glasses on the end of her nose, a cup of coffee going cold at her elbow.

"Guten Abend."

"Evening." Sapphire looks at the coffee. "You've been up all day."

"Since ten. The brewery rang about Monday." Ellen turns a page. "There is nothing on the radio but the Politbüro. They have been talking since four. Nobody understands a word of it, including them."

Sapphire goes behind the bar and looks at herself in the long mirror between the bottles, the way she does every night before she opens, and finds herself exactly as she was the night before, and the night before that, and every night since a music room in Didsbury in 1946. Black hair, up. The fringe. The mouth. She paints the mouth darker, and blots it, and is ready.

---

18:57

Micha, who does the bar on Thursdays, has brought the little television out from the back room and balanced it on the end of the counter, where it shows a grey man at a long table in East Berlin reading from a piece of paper, slowly, in the voice of a man who has not read it before.

There are nine people in the bar. None of them are watching. Uwe, who came to West Berlin from Stuttgart in 1979 to get out of the army and has never left, is doing a crossword. Two girls from the squat on the Manteuffelstraße are arguing about a film. The jukebox is playing something from 1981.

Sapphire watches.

The grey man is asked a question from the floor. He shuffles his papers. He puts on a pair of glasses and reads something out, and somebody asks him when it takes effect, and he looks at the paper again, and then up, and says that as far as he knows it takes effect at once. Immediately. Without delay.

Nobody in the Schwarze Katze looks up.

"What did he just say?" says Sapphire.

Micha glances at the screen. "Something about travel. They're always saying something about travel."

Ellen has taken off her reading glasses. She is looking at the television with the particular stillness Sapphire has learned, over twenty-four years, to pay attention to. It is the look of a policewoman hearing a witness say something the witness does not understand the weight of.

"Say it again," Ellen says quietly to the screen, in German. "Say it again, you idiot."

He does not. The press conference ends. The news moves on to something about the weather.

---

20:15

By eight the bar is half full and the radio has started to change its voice.

It is not anything anyone could point to. It is the same newsreader on SFB, the same flat Berlin vowels. But the news is coming round every quarter of an hour now instead of every hour, and each time it comes round it is a little longer, and the newsreader sounds a little more like a man who has been told something off the record and is trying not to smile. People at the Bornholmer Straße. People at the Invalidenstraße. The East Berlin border police have no instructions. Nobody on either side of anything has any instructions at all.

Uwe has given up on the crossword. Somebody has turned the jukebox off so they can hear the radio. The two girls from the Manteuffelstraße have stopped arguing.

"It's nothing," says Micha. "They'll send them home. They always send them home."

"Ellen," says Sapphire.

Ellen is already putting on her coat.

"Checkpoint Charlie first," she says. "It is closest. I will ring from the box on the Friedrichstraße."

"Take money for the telephone."

"I have money for the telephone."

"Take more."

Ellen looks at her. Then she takes the handful of coins Sapphire pushes across the bar, and puts them in her coat pocket without counting them, and goes out into the cold.

---

22:48

The telephone behind the bar rings three times before Micha can get to it through the crowd. He holds the receiver out across the counter without a word. The room is full now, and loud, and every face in it has the same expression, which is the expression of a person who has been told something wonderful by someone they do not trust.

"Ja."

Ellen's voice comes down the line very small, with a great roaring behind it like the sea.

"There are thousands here. On both sides. The guards are standing in the booth doing nothing. Nobody knows anything. Somebody said Bornholmer Straße is opening and somebody else said they are shooting at Bornholmer Straße. People are singing." A pause. The roaring gets louder, and then quieter, as if Ellen had turned her back on it. "It is going to happen. Tonight. I can feel it."

"You've never felt anything in your life," says Sapphire.

"I feel this."

Sapphire stands with the receiver against her ear and the whole of her bar roaring in front of her, and behind the bar, in the long mirror, a woman she has looked at every night for forty-three years. She looks at the woman in the mirror for a moment, and the woman looks back.

"Go to the Heinrich-Heine-Straße," she says. "That's the one they'll come through, if they come. Come back when you've seen it."

"And you?"

"I'll be here," says Sapphire. "Someone has to open the bottles."

---

23:40

The newsreader on SFB stops pretending. It is somewhere after half past eleven and he says it plainly, in a voice that cracks on the second sentence: that the crossing at the Bornholmer Straße is open, that the East German guards have raised the barrier, that people are walking through.

For a second the Schwarze Katze is completely silent, in the way Sapphire has only heard a building go silent once before, in an engine house in Oldham fifty years ago.

Then everyone is shouting.

Uwe is standing on a chair. One of the girls from the Manteuffelstraße is crying into the other's hair. Micha has put both hands flat on the bar and is staring at them as though they belonged to someone else. People are hugging strangers. People are running for the door, up the steps, into the street, toward the east, toward the nearest crossing and the nearest piece of Wall, and people are coming in off the street to take their places, shouting the news down the steps as if nobody could possibly have heard it yet.

Sapphire opens the first bottle of Sekt.

Then the second, and the third. She stands behind her bar and pours for everyone who comes down the steps, and she will not take their money, and she is laughing, really laughing, with her head thrown back. Somebody puts the jukebox back on as loud as it will go, and she knows the record. She was in the room in Hansa when half of it was made, twelve years ago, sitting in a corner with a glass nobody saw her drink from, listening to a thin Englishman try the same line eleven times until it was right.

She is happy. She notes it with interest. She has been happy perhaps a dozen times in fifty years, and she knows the shape of it, and this is it: a room that has forgotten to be afraid.

---

00:52

The first of them come down the Oranienstraße a little before one.

Sapphire is at the top of the steps, in the doorway, in her coat, because the bar has become too hot and too full and she has come up for air she does not need. She sees them before anyone else does. A little knot of people coming along the pavement from the direction of the Moritzplatz, walking slowly, looking up at everything. They are in anoraks and cheap jeans, and a man is carrying a child on his shoulders. They walk the way people walk in a museum.

Then a Trabant, coughing blue smoke, going down the middle of the Oranienstraße at a walking pace, with people from the pavements running out to thump its roof with their fists and shout, and the driver thumping the horn back at them and crying.

Then more of them, and more.

A woman in her fifties stops at the foot of the steps and looks down into the Schwarze Katze, at the light and the noise and the painted walls, with an expression Sapphire recognises. She has seen it before, on a boy in a cellar on the Große Freiheit in 1962, the night he first heard an electric guitar played in a small room.

"Kommen Sie rein," says Sapphire. "It's all free tonight."

The woman looks at her. "Wirklich?"

"Tonight, everything," says Sapphire, and stands aside.

---

01:34

They keep coming. By half past one the bar is half East and half West, and nobody can tell which is which unless they look at the shoes.

Sapphire goes back behind the bar and pours. She pours Sekt, and Korn, and Jägermeister for a very old man who asks for it in a whisper, as though it might still be illegal, and she pours beer for a table of boys from Friedrichshain who have never drunk anything from a tap in a Western bar and keep holding the glasses up to the light.

A girl sits down at the end of the counter, where Ellen's accounts were, and asks for whatever is cheapest, and then laughs when she remembers it is free. She is perhaps twenty, with a shaved head and a leather jacket too thin for the weather, and she talks. She talks the way the whole city is talking tonight, without stopping, as though she has been saving it up for twenty years and cannot get it out fast enough.

Her name is Katrin. She is from Prenzlauer Berg. She is studying to be a graphic designer at a school she hates. She has a boyfriend who plays bass in a band nobody has heard of, because bands like his are not allowed to play anywhere, and they rehearse in the cellar of a house on the Kastanienallee where the roof fell in during the war and nobody has ever repaired it.

"Nobody owns half of it over there," she says. "Did you know that? Whole buildings. Whole streets. They built them before the war and then the owners went west or died and nobody ever came back for them and the state doesn't care, it just lets them rot. There are factories. There are empty factories with nothing in them. My boyfriend knows a place under the old power station where you could fit a thousand people." She drinks, and looks round the Schwarze Katze, at the painted brick and the low ceiling and the jukebox, with her bright, greedy, twenty-year-old eyes. "You could do anything over there now. Anything at all. It's all just sitting there empty, waiting for someone."

"Yes," says Sapphire. "I expect it is."

She pours the girl another, and smiles at her, and moves on down the bar.

---

02:10

Pia arrives at ten past two, and nearly takes the door off its hinges.

Eleven years have not changed her face, of course. They have changed everything else. She came to the Schwarze Katze in 1978 as a nervous little neonate who wanted to be the kind of person who had news, and she has become, over eleven years, exactly that person, and she has never in all that time had news like this.

"Have you seen it? Have you been out? You have to go out. There are people on the Wall at the Brandenburger Tor. On top of it. Dancing. The guards are just standing there." She grabs Sapphire's hands across the bar. Hers are cold, of course, and so are Sapphire's, and neither of them notices. "They're saying Wilhelm hasn't come out of the palace all night. They're saying Gustav has locked himself in his castle and won't answer anybody. Ellison's people can't move in the tunnels for all the neonates crossing. Half the Primogen are going mad about the Masquerade, there are a million kine in the streets and nobody can hunt and nobody can hide and nobody cares." She laughs, wildly. "Nobody cares! Isn't it wonderful? It's all over. Everything's over."

"Yes," says Sapphire. "It is, isn't it."

Pia is already gone again, back up the steps into the street, into the noise, carrying her news to someone who might not have heard it yet.

---

03:05

At about three someone turns the jukebox off, and the room turns toward the little stage at the end, where nobody has sung all night, and looks at Sapphire.

She did not plan to. She has not sung in the Schwarze Katze for three months. But the regulars have started it, Uwe and the girls from the Manteuffelstraße, banging on the tables, and the Easterners have taken it up without knowing what they are asking for, and the whole room is asking.

So she goes and stands on the little stage, without a band, without a microphone, with one hand on the brick of the wall the way she once had a hand on a microphone stand in Manchester, and waits for the room to be quiet.

It is quiet.

She sings the old one. The English one she has sung at the end of the night in every bar she has ever owned, a torch song from before the war about a man who has gone. She does not sing it the way she has sung it for forty years, all heat and invitation, with the cold place at the back where nothing reaches. She sings it the way a person sings when a whole room of strangers has spent the night learning they are allowed to go anywhere they like.

Half the room does not speak English. It does not matter. The woman in her fifties from the foot of the steps is crying. The very old man with the Jägermeister has his eyes closed. Katrin from Prenzlauer Berg is watching her with her mouth slightly open, the way she might watch a building she had just decided to move into.

Sapphire looks out at the room, at all of them. For a moment, the length of a single held note, she thinks she might never sing better than this. She thinks she might never again have a room like this one, on a night like this one, in a city like this one.

She finishes the song. The room roars.

She steps down from the stage and goes back behind the bar and pours another round, and does not sing again.

---

04:48

In the quiet before dawn, if anything can be called quiet tonight, she stands at the long mirror behind the bar with a cloth in her hand, not wiping anything.

She is remembering a night in June two years ago. A huge stage on the lawn by the Reichstag, backed against the Wall, the speakers turned so that half the sound went over to the other side, whether anyone over there wanted it or not. She stood in the crowd on the grass, just after dark, and the thin Englishman who had spent three years of the seventies in a flat in Schöneberg came out onto the stage. Somewhere in the second half of the set he played the song he had made in Hansa, about the lovers by the Wall. And from over the Wall, very faint, from the Unter den Linden where the East Berlin police were trying to clear the street, came the sound of thousands of people who had come to stand as close as they were allowed and listen, and who were singing along.

She had turned her back on the stage to hear them. She had stood there with her back to the most famous man in the world and listened to a city on the other side of a wall singing his song back to him, and it was the most beautiful thing she had heard in forty years. She had not told anyone. Not even Ellen.

Those people are in her bar tonight. Some of them, anyway. Some of the ones who stood on the Unter den Linden in June 1987 listening to a song through a wall are downstairs in the Schwarze Katze, drinking her Sekt.

She is very happy, and she knows perfectly well what comes next.

---

05:36

Ellen comes back down the steps at twenty-five to six, with her face raw from the cold and her hair come loose from its pins for the first time Sapphire can remember in twenty-four years, and a piece of concrete the size of a fist in her coat pocket.

"From the Wall," she says, and puts it on the bar. "By the Brandenburger Tor. A boy was knocking pieces off with a hammer and handing them out. They are standing on top of it, Sapphire. Hundreds of them. The guards have given up. There is a boy from the East up there playing a trumpet."

"You were up there."

"I was not." Ellen sits down heavily on the last stool, where Katrin sat, and takes the glass of Korn Sapphire pours her and drinks it in one swallow, which is not a thing Ellen does. "I was at the bottom, holding coats."

She looks round the bar. It has emptied a little, the way rooms empty toward morning, but it is still full: East and West asleep against each other on the benches, a couple dancing to nothing, Uwe explaining something at length to a policeman from Pankow who has taken off his hat.

"I walked back along the Leipziger Straße," Ellen says. "On their side. The whole way. Nobody stopped me. There is nothing there, Sapphire. Half of it is empty lots. Holes where the houses were bombed and nobody built anything. From the Potsdamer Platz to here, you could buy half the centre of Berlin for the price of a flat in Charlottenburg." She says it in the voice she uses for the accounts, flatly, as a fact to be noted. "Everything on this side will be worth money now. Every building. Every lease. The whole city is going to be sold."

Sapphire says nothing. She takes the piece of the Wall off the bar and turns it over in her hand. It is heavier than it looks. One side of it is painted, a streak of blue and a streak of red from some slogan nobody will ever read again.

She puts it on the shelf behind the bar, between the Jägermeister and a bottle of whisky she has never sold from.

---

06:44

At a quarter to seven the sky over the Oranienstraße is beginning to go grey at the edges, and the last of them are going up the steps into it, arm in arm, singing.

Sapphire stands at the end of the bar and watches them go. She can feel the morning coming the way she always feels it, a pressure behind the eyes, a heaviness in the arms. She has perhaps half an hour.

Ellen is sitting on the stool beside her. She has not said anything for some time. She has been watching Sapphire the way she used to watch witnesses in a charge room on the Davidwache, patiently, missing nothing, waiting for the thing under the thing.

"Du bist still," she says.

"I'm happy," says Sapphire.

Ellen looks at her for a long time. Then she looks away, at the steps, at the grey light coming down them, at the last of the crowd going up into the day.

"Ich weiß," she says.

That is all. It is the whole conversation. Neither of them has ever needed more.

---

07:06

She goes down the back stairs to the room under the bar, where the walls are thick and the door locks from the inside, and takes off her coat and her shoes, and lies down in the dark on her back with her feet together and her hands folded, the way she has lain down every morning for forty-three years, and every night, before that, for one year of a marriage.

Above her the city is still celebrating. She can hear it through the ceiling. Car horns on the Oranienstraße. Somebody singing. Somebody else, very far off, letting off fireworks in the daylight, which is a waste of fireworks. The whole of Berlin, East and West, making the loudest noise it has made in twenty-eight years.

She lies in the dark and listens to it.

It is the most beautiful sound she has ever heard, and she knows exactly what it means. She thinks of Katrin from Prenzlauer Berg, and the empty power station where you could fit a thousand people. She thinks of Ellen saying, in her flat accounts voice, that the whole city is going to be sold. She thinks that the island is not an island any more, and that the reasons people came to it, to hide, to drink all night, to be nobody's business, are going to walk out of it through the open gates by the thousand, starting tomorrow.

She thinks: not tonight. Tonight it was mine.

The day comes down on her like a hand, and she sleeps.

---

Closing Time

Kreuzberg, Berlin. 2nd to 8th July 1995.

---

I. Sunday

The contract is on the bar when she comes up, squared to the edge of the counter the way Ellen squares everything, with a coffee cup on one corner to hold it down against the draught from the open door.

Sapphire reads the last page. A company in Munich with three surnames and an ampersand. A sum, written out in figures and then again in words, because in Germany nobody trusts figures. It is a great deal of money. It is a little more than four times what she paid Herr Brandes for the lease in 1968, when Kreuzberg was a place people left, and it is Ellen's signature at the bottom, because it has always been Ellen's name on everything.

"They wanted to see the cellar," says Ellen, from the end of the bar. "I showed them the cellar. They are going to put the servers in it. For the computers."

"What computers?"

"Offices. Upstairs. All of it." Ellen takes her cup off the contract and drinks from it. "They asked what the room under the cellar was for. I said storage."

Sapphire puts the contract down.

The bar is open this week. It will be open every night until Saturday, because she said so, and because the Schwarze Katze has never been shut on a Sunday in twenty-seven years except the one Sunday in 1977 when the pipes froze. Tonight there are four people in it. The jukebox plays something from 1983. Outside the door the Oranienstraße is light until half past nine and does not get properly dark until nearly ten, and by a quarter to five the sky over the rooftops is already going pale, and the nights are so short in July that there is hardly room in them for anything.

At four she sends the last of the four up the steps into the grey.

She locks the door.

---

II. Monday

Uwe comes in at eleven and sits where he has sat since 1979, on the stool by the till, and orders a Schultheiss, and does not mention it for an hour and a half.

He is forty-four. He came to West Berlin from Stuttgart at twenty-eight to get out of the army, and six years ago the army stopped wanting him and so did the reason for being here, and he stayed anyway. He is a printer now, in the Wrangelstraße. He has grey in his beard.

At half past twelve he says, looking at his beer: "They say you've sold."

"Yes."

"Offices."

"Yes."

He nods for a while.

"I got a letter from the Kreiswehrersatzamt in March," he says. "The army. After sixteen years. A form. They wanted to know if my address was still correct." He laughs, not very much. "It's the Wall that kept them off, you know. All those years. Not me. I thought it was me."

"It was a bit of you."

"It was nothing of me." He finishes his beer. "It was the whole city. Being what it was. And now it's just a city."

She pours him another without being asked, and he drinks it, and at two he puts a twenty-mark note on the bar that she does not pick up, and goes.

She sits for a while on his stool after he has gone, looking at the room from where he has looked at it for sixteen years. Then she gets up and turns off the jukebox, and locks the door.

---

III. Tuesday

She does not open until midnight. She goes to see the Reichstag.

It has been wrapped for ten days. She has heard about it every night from every mouth in the bar and has not gone, the way you do not go to see a thing in your own city because it will always be there. It will not always be there. On Friday they start to take it down.

She walks from the Brandenburger Tor across the grass in the last of the dark, among thousands of people who have come to sit on the lawn with bottles and blankets and guitars and simply look at it, as if it were a fire. It is the size of a cathedral. Every inch of it, the towers and the columns and the great blank front where the Kaiser once put his dedication to the German people, has been covered in silver fabric and bound with blue rope, so that the building is still exactly there and at the same time entirely hidden. The floodlights catch the folds. In the breeze off the Spree the whole thing moves very slightly, like something breathing in its sleep.

Eight years ago, almost to the week, she stood on this lawn with her back to a stage and listened to East Berlin singing along through a wall. The stage is gone. The wall is gone. There is a building in front of her so completely covered that you could not say what it is, only that it is something, and that it is very old, and that it has been through a great deal. It is being looked at by more people than have looked at it in a century.

She sits on the grass among the students until nearly two, and thinks that she has never seen anything so beautiful in her life. She has thought that often, in fifty years. It is always true when she thinks it.

Then she walks back to Kreuzberg, and opens for an hour, for nobody, and locks the door.

---

IV. Wednesday

Katrin comes down the steps at one in the morning in a vest and combat trousers, her head still shaved, with sweat on her face and a bass drum somewhere in her ears that she has brought all the way from Mitte.

She is twenty-six. She is not studying graphic design any more. She runs a club with her boyfriend and two others in a cellar under what used to be a department store on the Leipziger Straße, where the vaults still have the old safes in the walls, and it has no licence and no name and a thousand people in it every weekend, and they play nothing but the new music, the machine music, all night until noon.

"You have to come," she says. "Before you go. You have to see it. It's like the first night. It's like it's always the first night."

Sapphire pours her a Korn. Katrin drinks it, and makes a face, and laughs.

"Nobody drinks this over there any more. Just water. Water and the other thing."

"I expect not."

"Will you come?"

Sapphire looks at her across the bar: the shaved head, the bright greedy eyes that looked at the Schwarze Katze six years ago the way you look at a building you have just decided to move into. They have moved into something. It is not this.

"No," she says. "But thank you. I'm glad it's yours."

Katrin looks at her for a moment, puzzled, and then shrugs the way the young shrug at the old, and goes back up the steps into the warm night, east, toward the noise.

At four Sapphire locks the door. Through it, very faint, she can hear a bass drum from somewhere across the canal, going on and on and on, never changing, like a heart that will not stop.

---

V. Thursday

She packs.

It does not take long. It never has. She has left England, and Hamburg, and a great many rooms in between, and she has learned that almost everything can be left and that the few things that cannot are always small.

The piece of the Wall comes down off the shelf behind the bar. She turns it over. The blue and the red have faded a little in six years. She wraps it in a bar towel.

Then the bottle.

It has stood on that shelf since 1968, and before that it stood under a bar on the Große Freiheit, and before that it came from a shop on the Jungfernstieg in 1963 and cost a great deal. It was never for sale. A quarter of it is gone, and nearly all of that quarter went on a single night in April 1965, poured for a policewoman who had just thrown a pimp called Kalle Bruns over her hip. Since then Sapphire has poured from it perhaps four times in thirty years, and she remembers every one. She checks the cork. She wraps it in a second towel.

Then the painting.

It has hung by the pillar since the winter of 1978: a girl on the steps of the U-Bahn at the Kottbusser Tor, painted very large and very slowly in black oils, with her arms round her knees and her face turned up. Dörte Lemke sold nine paintings in her life, and seven of them to the Schwarze Katze. She died in 1984, in the squat on the Mariannenplatz, of the needle, like half the people she painted. Sapphire lifts the canvas down off its nail and stands it against the bar and looks at it for a long time.

The girl on the steps looks back at her, up, as though waiting for someone to come down and tell her where to go.

Ellen comes down from the street at two with an envelope of photographs and a small grey document, and sits at the end of the bar and opens it.

"Marsh," she says.

"Marsh?"

"It is a nothing name. English enough. Nobody has ever looked twice at a marsh." She turns the document to the light. "Ellen Marsh. Born Bristol. I have never been to Bristol."

"Nobody has," says Sapphire.

Before she locks the door she writes a card, on a plain white card from the stationer's on the Oranienplatz, in her own hand, and addresses it to the Film Museum in the Grossbeerenstraße, for the attention of Madame Anntoinette. She does not sign it. She writes one sentence, and every word of it is true.

Berlin was the best room I ever had.

She puts it in the box on the corner on her way back from posting it, and locks the door.

---

VI. Friday

Pia comes at midnight, and she already knows. She has known since Monday. She has been saving it.

"Everyone's talking about it," she says, radiant, leaning across the bar. "Everyone. Anntoinette's people. Hans. Somebody said Ellison was asking. Twenty-seven years! Nobody thought you'd ever go. They're saying you were the last of old Kreuzberg." She takes both of Sapphire's hands. "Where are you going? Tell me. You have to tell me. I won't tell anyone. I'll only tell everyone."

Sapphire laughs.

"I don't know," she says.

Pia's face falls, slowly, all the way down, like a child's watching a balloon go up into the sky.

"You don't know?"

"Not yet."

"But everyone will ask me."

"Then you'll have to tell them you don't know," says Sapphire. "It'll be the first time in seventeen years."

Pia stares at her, appalled. Then she starts to laugh too, helplessly, holding onto the bar. She laughs until there are thin red tears at the corners of her eyes and she has to dab them with a napkin so nobody at the tables will see.

She stays until closing. At the top of the steps she turns and says, "You'll write. When you know. Won't you. So I can be the one."

"You'll be the one."

Pia goes. Sapphire locks the door.

---

VII. Saturday

The Love Parade goes down the Kurfürstendamm in the afternoon, while she sleeps, and she hears it through the ceiling anyway: a noise like the sea, if the sea had a bass line, coming in across the whole city from the west, a quarter of a million people and forty lorries and a single beat that does not stop. By the time she wakes it has broken up into a hundred smaller noises in a hundred clubs, and every one of them is the same noise, and the whole city is thumping with it like a single enormous chest.

The Schwarze Katze is full on its last night. She did not tell anyone it was the last night. Everyone knows anyway. The regulars from twenty-seven years, and their children, and people she has never seen before in their lives. Uwe is on his stool. Micha is behind the bar with her, because he asked to be.

At about one a boy comes down the steps who does not belong to any of them.

He is American. That is the first thing. He is perhaps twenty-five, sunburned, soaked in sweat, with a whistle round his neck and glitter on his face and a T-shirt with a cartoon of a man in a tricorn hat on it. He has come for the Love Parade and got separated from his friends and followed the first staircase he saw down out of the noise. He sits at the bar and orders a beer in terrible German, and then in English, and she answers him in English, and he nearly weeps with relief.

He talks, the way they all talk at one in the morning. He is from Philadelphia. He has never been anywhere before. He saved for two years for this. He talks about the Parade, and the clubs, and the girls, and then, after the second beer, because she asks him, about home.

"Nobody goes there," he says. "I mean, people live there. But nobody goes. It's dying, kind of. Or it's been dying my whole life." He turns his glass on the bar. "My grandpa worked in a mill. Kensington. The whole neighbourhood was mills, textile mills, huge brick things with chimneys, block after block. Carpets, hosiery, you name it. They're all empty now. Some of them since the fifties. You can walk down streets and it's just empty mills and row houses, and half the row houses are empty too." He shrugs. "Rents are nothing. You could buy a whole building for what a car costs. Nobody wants it. Nobody from anywhere would ever think of going there."

Sapphire stands behind her bar with a cloth in her hand, not wiping anything.

"Tell me about the mills," she says.

So he tells her. The brick, the rows of windows like a bookcase, the chimneys with the names of the families who built them laid down the sides in white brick, the loading docks, the rust. The grass growing out of the gutters. His grandfather, who ran a spinning frame for forty years and went deaf from it, and could talk to his friends across a room by moving his lips.

She listens to all of it.

At four the boy goes up the steps with his whistle and his glitter, into the pale sky and the thumping city, to look for his friends. The bar empties behind him. Uwe goes last, with his hand on her shoulder for a moment on the way past, which in sixteen years he has never done.

Ellen comes out of the back with her coat on.

Sapphire is standing in the middle of the empty room. The chairs are up on the tables. The pillar where the painting hung has a pale rectangle on it, like a window. On the bar, wrapped in towels, are a piece of a wall and a bottle and a canvas, and nothing else in the room belongs to her any more.

"Philadelphia," she says.

Ellen looks at her.

"Where is that?"

"I have no idea," says Sapphire. "Somewhere nobody goes."

Ellen considers this for a moment, the way she considers everything. Then she nods, once, and picks up the painting.

They carry the three things up the steps into the morning. At the top Sapphire turns, and looks down into the Schwarze Katze one more time, at the dark room and the chairs on the tables and the pale shape on the pillar. She does not sigh. She thought she would. She finds she is smiling instead.

Then she turns the key, and hears it catch, and locks the door.