“And you will still need to find yourself a job,” Cissy said. “Earn a living,” she added, as though Freda might not know what a job was. “I’m surprised you didn’t take to the millinery. I would have thought that it was quite artistic. Perhaps my friend Gwen could get you a job in the Library.”
“The Library?” Freda echoed, unable to keep the horror out of her voice. A library—the deathliest place on earth.
“Yes, the Library, stacking shelves or something.”
“I’m not really a reader,” Freda said.
“Well, you don’t have to be a reader to put a book on a shelf,” Cissy chided. “You can read, can’t you?”
“Yes, of course I can.” What a cheek! She had read the entire book of Greek myths, cover to cover.
The twins started throwing their wooden bricks at each other. One caught Bobby on the head and he started to shriek, an unearthly, piercing sound that could have been used as a weapon of war. The enemy would have given in immediately. Cissy merely laughed and, scooping Bobby up, said, “No rest for the wicked,” which was exactly the kind of thing that people like Cissy said. And it was a stupid saying, in Freda’s opinion. The wicked were undoubtedly getting a great deal of rest, idling about drinking sherry from the wood and eating éclairs and iced fancies.
“Come on,” her sister said, “you can help me fetch Barbara from school.”
A tribe of Bedouins preparing to cross the desert with a caravan of camels probably took less time to get underway than Cissy and her brood.
“You know what,” Freda said, halfway through these interminable preparations, “I should be getting home, Mother will be wondering where I am.”
“Will she?” Cissy said dubiously. She dithered for a moment and then said （without any conviction, in Freda’s opinion）， “You know, if you really wanted to come and live here, Freda, I suppose you could always share a room with Bobby.”
The Fisher King
Strangely, in all his time in the force, Frobisher had never had the need to visit the Dead Man’s Hole, as the morgue beneath Tower Bridge was known. The way the currents ran in this stretch of the Thames meant that the piers of the bridge snagged the dead on their way downriver and the Dead Man’s Hole was where the bodies were grappled out and temporarily stored. Some drownings hooked out of the water were accidental, usually drunks, occasionally murders, but many were suicides. Frobisher was not unacquainted with would-be suicides—his wife had been one.
The river this morning was brown and sluggish with a never-ending flotilla of barges and boats, the commerce of the city. No lilacs here. No scent of a hay meadow or of a stand of lime trees, only the stink of a noxious city. Frobisher felt his soul shrivel.
The morgue, he found, was a particularly bleak place, infected with the unhealthy air of the river. Stone steps led up from the Thames to a small concrete platform onto which the bodies were hauled. The open tunnel beyond, into which the bodies were moved, echoed with damp despair, the glazed white tiles redolent of a gentlemen’s convenience and lacking all sympathy. A small door in the wall led to steps that took him down inside the pier into a dank, fetid room where the dead were stored before being sent on their way. Bad enough to be dead, but to be dead and end up here…Frobisher shuddered.
There was no girl, drowned or otherwise. An attendant was winkled out of whatever hidey-hole he occupied when he had no guests and said, “She’s gone to Southwark.”
* * *
—
Frobisher crossed the river, joining the trudging crowds on Tower Bridge. He sensed the misery coming off them like a miasma, the war had undone them—but perhaps it was his own gloom he was feeling. Sometimes he thought he could feel the weight of history in London pressing down on the top of his head. He yearned for the open fields and airy woods of his childhood. He had been brought up amongst horses. His uncle had been the local farrier and his father a ploughman. Recently, Frobisher had caught himself wondering what his life would have been like if he had followed in his father’s footsteps, plodding silently in the steady furrow behind the great yoked horses, their breath steaming in the cold air. Instead he had been given an education—a scholarship to the grammar school in the nearest town. He had to walk five miles there and five miles back, whatever the weather.
He would trade in his books now for the clink of the head brasses on the huge Suffolks and the mist rising off the land in the early morning. This had to stop. He was drowning in nostalgia. It was worrying how fanciful he had suddenly become. Like a disease, almost.