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listened; listened in such silence that now I found that I had made a quite incomprehensible mistake, for I could hear clearly how the alarm clock was still hurrying on towards the hysterical explosion, hurrying on, brittle, trivially insistent, tick tick tick.
     
    Did our lodger subscribe to some burial insurance? I remember the stately car that came for him so that his body was much more important to the Row dead than alive. Rotten Row believed in death as a ritual and spectacle, as a time to mourn and rejoice. Why then did I never see his body? Did the Row cheat me or is there some mystery here? Normally, the dead held higher court than the newly born. They were washed, straightened out, tidied; and received homage as if they were Pharaoh bandaged and with a belly full of spices. I cannot think ofdeath in Rotten Row without the word “royal” coming to mind. To the backward sight which hangs events in their symbolic colours, Rotten Row is draped for death in matchments of black and violet and purple, is big with the enjoyment of booze and sorrow.
    Why then did I not see his or any other body? Had those shadowy adults from the snug, some lore or theory of my nightmare knowledge? Did I know too much? I had a special reason for feeling cheated. I was told that under his trilby there was a thatch of that same swan’s feather whiteness; and in my mind it became a precious thing, exquisite as the cap that fits the head of the Swan Maiden herself. Evie told me about the swan’s feathers under the hat. She saw him in his box. She had touched him, too—been made to touch him by her mother. That way, went our belief, the child will never fear a dead body. So Evie touched him, reaching out her right forefinger to his sharp nose. She showed me the finger, I looked, I saw, I was awed and admired Evie. But I never saw or touched him. Death rolled by me in the high black car behind panes of chased and frosted glass. Then, as always, I stood, only partly comprehending, on the pavement. But Evie was always at the heart of things. She was a year or two older and she bossed me. How could I be jealous of Evie who knew so much? Even though he had been our own private lodger with use of our bog, not Evie’s mum’s, I could not grudge her the sharp nose of death. She was majestic. It was her right. But I could feel insufficient and I did. For me there was no thatch of white but only the frosted glass rolling away down the street. I made fantasies of myself daring the most awful and gruesome loneliness to know the very feel of death. But it wastoo late. I can see that time in my mind’s eye if I stoop to knee height. A doorstep is the size of an altar, I can lean on the sloping sign beneath the plate-glass of a shop window, to cross the gutter is a wild leap. Then the transparency which is myself floats through life like a bubble, empty of guilt, empty of anything but immediate and conscienceless emotions, generous, greedy, cruel, innocent. My twin towers were Ma and Evie. And the shape of life loomed that I was insufficient for our lodger’s thatch, for that swan-white seal of ultimate knowing.
    I wonder if he had a thatch at all? As I ponder the empty bubble from knee-height, I see for the first time that I only had Evie’s word for it. But Evie was a liar. Or no. She was a fantasist. She was taller than I was, brown and thin, with a bob of lank brown hair. She wore brown stockings with wrinkles concertina’d under each knee. She had a variety of immense and brilliant hair-ribbons; and I adored these and desired them with hopeless cupidity. For what was the good of a hair-ribbon without the hair to tie it in? And what was the good of that symbol without the majesty and central authority of Ma and Evie? When she bent sideways to talk out of the world of what people ought really to be, her hair fell and leaned out and the pink bow flopped sideways, august and unattainable.
    Yet I was in her hands and content to be so. For now I was