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searched a second in the puckered skin and submerged. Charlie felt the hand go rigid and relax, as if passing its pain into his. The lips kneaded themselves in silence as if trying to say more. Then the mouth went slack. He was asleep.

Chapter 4
    HE NEVER RECOVERED CONSCIOUSNESS. AS THE DAY progressed and as the family, making from time to time pathetic pilgrimages upstairs to his room, sensed him going inexorably from them down a lengthening corridor of cold and clinical fact, the practical requirements of the situation impressed themselves on John. Most of the immediate family knew that their father was within a day or two of dying and had been calling in at the house each day or so to find out how he was. In the late afternoon John left to go round them all and inform them that his father was not expected to last out the night. It was a laborious business and he had to be careful to omit no one who would expect to be told. To many, such an oversight would be an offence that no bereavement could extenuate. Even grief had to be practical.
    He was gone a long time and he was hardly back before the first of the mourners followed on his heels. For an hour after that they made a solemn, uneven procession into the house. There was an indefinable sameness about the way they filed upstairs, as if all their thoughts were dressed in uniform black. Every negotiable chair had been taken from other parts of the house and placed in a wide semicircle round the bed and when there were no more chairs left they sat on cushions on the floor or squatted on their haunches against wall or wardrobe. New arrivals were greeted with a muted murmur, a slow sough of sound in which no words were decipherable, a communal sigh which drew the newcomer into it as if their grief were swollen by his. The room filled slowly till it brimmed with people. At other times they met each other only fitfully, in street or shop or at the football or on a quick visit to borrow a tool or bring a little news. Each had his own concerns. For each, habit had laid private roads that none ofthe others frequented. Old familiarities that they had had with each other in their youth were neglected, became overgrown in disuse. Each grew apart into his separate life. Often when they met in the street they would greet each other almost grudgingly, like toll-tax paid for roads they didn’t use. Some did not even like each other. Some remembered the bitter word or imagined slight and filed it away for ever in their minds under the appropriate name. Some were merely indifferent. But all came together unquestioning for this, like amoebae in reverse. And their presence seemed to assume a single pulse that moved in time with that of the man who was dying-
    No one spoke. Someone might offer round his cigarettes to those who were nearest him. Then they were lit and smoked, with the lengthening ash tipped into cupped hands. Small gnats of sound and movement flicked at the grave stillness from time to time. Someone coughed, and the sound was gagged with silence almost at once. Someone eased the position of a leg that hurt irreverently. Someone was picking fragments of clotted dust from the turn-ups of his trousers. For the body had to be occupied, was a troublesome encumbrance here, too skittish to submit for long to this solemnity. Hands moved of their own accord, roamed into pockets, furtively searching for occupation. Feet tapped on empty air, forgetting where they were. Eyes studied palms, escaping through an old scar to the past. It did not matter that the body misbehaved. No movement lived long in the face of that awful quiet. Only the small metal clock was insistent, relentlessly whittling the seconds from a life.
    They sat on through the evening while outside the changing sounds recorded the time in the street. Children clattered past on imaginary hooves, shooting from inexhaustible guns, their voices changing from whoops to raucous argument because someone refused to be dead. A