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Fred’s own paper only gave him half a column. On the front page was another photograph—the new Kolley Kibber: he was going to be at Bournemouth tomorrow. They might have waited, she thought, a week. It would have shown respect.
    ‘I’d like to have asked them why he left me like that, to go scampering down the front in that sun.’
    ‘He had his job to do. He had to leave those cards.’
    ‘Why did he tell me he’d wait?’
    ‘Ah,’ the sombre man said, ‘you’d have to ask him that,’ and at the words it was almost as if he
was
trying to answer her, answer her in his own kind of hieroglyphics, in the obscure pain, speaking in her nerves as a ghost would have to speak. Ida believed in ghosts.
    ‘There’s a lot he’d say if he could,’ she said. She took up the paper again and read slowly. ‘He did his job to the end,’ she said tenderly. She liked men who did their jobs: there was a kind of vitality about it. He’d dropped his cards all the way down the front: they’d come back to the office: from under a boat, from a litter-basket, a child’s pail. He had only a few left when ‘Mr Alfred Jefferson, described as a chief clerk, of Clapham’ found him. ‘If he did kill himself,’ she said (she was the only counsel to represent the dead), ‘he did his job first.’
    ‘But he didn’t kill himself,’ Clarence said. ‘You’ve only got to read. They cut him up and they say he died natural.’
    ‘That’s queer.’ Ida said. ‘He went and left one in a restaurant. I knew he was hungry. He kept on wanting to eat, but whatever made him slip away like that all by himself and leave me waiting. It sounds crazy.’
    ‘I suppose he changed his mind about you, Ida.’
    ‘I don’t like it,’ Ida said. ‘It sounds strange to me. I wish I’d been there. I’d have asked ’em a few questions.’
    ‘What about you and me going across to the flickers, Ida?’
    ‘I’m not in the mood,’ Ida said. ‘It’s not every day you lose a friend. And you oughtn’t to be in the mood either with your wife just dead.’
    “She’s been gone a month now,’ Clarence said. ‘You can’t expect anyone to go on mourning for ever.’
    ‘A month’s not so long,’ Ida said sadly, brooding over the paper. A day, she thought, that’s all he’s been gone, and I dare say there’s not another soul but me thinking about him: just someone he picked up for a drink and a cuddle, and again the easy pathos touched her friendly and popular heart. She wouldn’t have given it all another thought if there had been other relations, besides the second cousin in Middlesbrough, if he hadn’t been so alone as well as dead. But there
was
something fishy to her nose, though there was nothing she could put her finger on except that ‘Fred’—and everyone would say the same: ‘He wasn’t Fred. You’ve only to read. Charles Hale.’
    ‘You oughtn’t to fuss about that, Ida. It’s none of your business.’
    ‘I know,’ she said. ‘It’s none of mine.’ But it’s none of anybody’s, her heart repeated to her: that was the trouble: no one but her to ask questions. She knew a woman once who’d seen her husband after he was dead standing by the wireless set trying to twiddle the knob: she twiddled the way he wanted and he disappeared and immediately she heard an announcer say on Midland Regional: ‘Gale Warning in the Channel.’ She had been thinking of taking one of the Sunday trips to Calais, that was the point. It just showed: you couldn’t laugh at the idea of ghosts. And if Fred, she thought, wanted to tell someone something, it wouldn’t be to his second cousin in Middlesbrough that he’d go; why shouldn’t he come to me? He had left her waiting there; she had waited nearly half an hour: perhaps he wanted to tell her why. ‘He was a gentleman,’ she said aloud, and with bolder resolution she cocked her hat and smoothed her hair and rose from the wine barrel. ‘I’ve got to be going,’ she said. ‘So long,