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burning cloth and the room was full of smoke.
    â€˜It is only bronchitis,’ Torben said meekly. ‘I have it all the time, it is my weakness, something left from years ago.’ He tapped his thin chest; certainly he was very out of breath and his face was quite white. Sweat was in a dense pattern all over his forehead.
    The two women, Weekly drawn in in spite of herself, helped Torben to the bed. He seemed frail suddenly and very clean in his pyjamas.
    â€˜Fetch a Doctor pleeze Veekly,’ Nastasya asked.
    â€˜But it’s after ten o’clock.’ Weekly felt uneasy about going for a doctor so late at night, especially as Mr Torben kept saying, ‘It is not necessary to go for doctor, I am ill all the time. I will be all right, certainly I will be all right.’
    Between them she did not know what to do. She put the dishes in the sink; if only she had refused to come.
    â€˜Go at once!’ Nastasya was severe. ‘He might be dyink! Do you want my husband to die?’ she wailed in a terriblevoice. ‘It is a great privilege to fetch Doctor for my husband.’
    And Weekly went out into the night. She knew from before there were no doctors near who could or would come to the Torbens. Mostly they had quarrelled with all the doctors, including the two in Claremont Street. Before she left Nastasya pushed a scrap of paper into her hand. ‘These peoples, doctors they call themselves, you cannot bring here,’ it was a hastily scribbled list.
    Weekly had to trudge the whole length of Claremont Street and then right to the top of the Terrace in the dark. She had heard that a new doctor had moved in above the fruit shop, someone unknown to the Torbens and who had no idea what was involved in going back with Weekly in the night to an unknown patient.
    The doctor was already in bed but came down to answer the bell. She was rather young and, if she grudged coming out, she did not show it. She was sympathetic to the elderly woman who had obviously walked a long way on behalf of a sick man.
    â€˜What’s wrong?’ she asked as they set off together in the doctor’s car.
    â€˜I’m not sure which of ’em’s worst,’ Weekly replied and could not be persuaded to say more.
    Nastasya opened the door a crack and took a narrow look at Weekly and at the doctor.
    â€˜Her eye make-up is brown like a moth’s wing,’ she said, ‘and her eyes look like insects underneath. Do not bring to my place again!’ and she slammed the door on them.
    Clearly this was a challenge and Weekly could see the doctor was determined to rise to it.
    â€˜I’ll manage, you go home,’ the doctor said to the old woman. ‘Have you far to go?’
    â€˜No, just acrorss the road.’
    â€˜Goodnight then.’
    â€˜Goodnight.’ And Weekly left the young woman banging on the Torbens’ door.
    The next day Weekly, who felt exhausted in mind and body after the experience—she had disliked dragging the doctor out of bed—felt embarrassed too. The doctor had looked as if she thought Weekly was just as selfish and crazy as the Torbens.
    Weekly knocked at the front door of the Torbens’ flat to get her money for the evening’s work. Nastasya opened the door and listened while Weekly told her what was owing to her.
    â€˜But Veekly,’ Nastasya said, ‘remember I invited you for our dinner, remember you were our guest. And no guest comes the next day to be paid.’
    And the Newspaper of Claremont Street had no reply to this.

Seven
    Before Weekly got to the Laceys’ she was tired. The mad wasted evening with no money to add to her mountain and Nastasya’s remark to which Weekly had been unable to reply made her feel she could hardly step out on the pavement. She was making an effort, a supreme effort, to get over the disappointment of not being paid. If the Torbens felt it was a privilege for her to work for them, peeling vegetables