Joe had been killed, said Halloran.

Mrs Barnett stood and held the postcard, the foreign stamp, on it the pretty colours, the foreign words. Outside what had happened was the dripping of a tap. Our Joe, said Mrs Barnett, remotely. She remembered the time he cut his knee, he would clart about with that knife, and the drops of blood in the backyard. He kept pigeons as a boy. There was always a smell of dung in the yard, and the silly, dozy, drooling sound the fantails made. Mrs Barnett began to feel she wanted to sit down. She sat on the upright chair, moving from foot to foot, exhausted and, in a way, resigned.

The poor, more often than not, are more detached in their attitude to death, as if a closeness to possible disaster prepares for the inevitable. And death, even as a personal blow, adds a kind of distinction. Mrs Barnett wiped at her eyes with the hard underside of her fingers. Sundays she sang in chapel, the fierce and saddening hymns that rocked across the yellow varnished wood. As a public mourner, and from conversation with the undertaker, she had appreciated already the dignity of death. This was something to be shared, exalted, not shut away with tears in a room. Mrs Barnett creaked from her chair. She swept back the dank hair from her face. She began to go out at the yard door, where a thin sun touched the cheek. Out of the scent of dung, the dead and distant fantails, as distant as the living Joe, Mrs Barnett went to get her share of pity, to share the dignity of sorrow.

Mrs Barnett’s Joe, they said, the teapot frozen on the oilcloth, the spoon halted in a midday stew. It began to go from house to house. A child, sucking his finger, wondered at the back door. It began to weave across the street, the conventional demonstration of a mass sorrow. They began to make a legend for the dead.

When Julia got in, it was her afternoon, the faces turned to communicate, the women who sat or stood. There was particularly old Mrs Viner, whose husband hit her with a kettle, and the thin young Mrs Cotty, standing stiffly with a belly underneath her apron. Mrs Cotty’s mouth hung open. She stared still at the foreign stamp.

There was a stirring of bone, of breath, of silence, as waiting for an explanation. It was Mrs Barnett’s privilege.

She sat in the nest of women. She faced Julia as upright as a chair.

It’s our Joe, Mrs Barnett was saying. Who’d of thought that our Joe?

Who can ever tell? sighed Mrs Viner. Yes.

No, said Mrs Barnett. When it’s done, it’s done.

You never know as who, the women echoed.

Julia put down her case on the table. It made the cheap, cardboardy sound of an almost empty cheap case. Voices grated round about her.

But, said Julia Fallon. But –

It came on the postcard, said Mrs Cotty.