THE HUB

She was not the mayor, not the priest, not the councillor. She was the woman who stood behind the bar of the King's Arms on Commercial Road from half past eleven in the morning until half past eleven at night, six days a week, every week, for thirty-four years. Her name was Margaret Doyle, called Maggie by everyone who stepped through the door, and she had come to the East End in 1951 from County Mayo with a cardboard suitcase and the address of a cousin who had since moved to Birmingham. She married Jack Doyle in 1953, a man who had inherited the pub from his father and who drank half the profits before the decade was out, and when Jack died of his liver in 1961 Maggie took over the license and the ledger and the taps and never looked at another man again. She knew the name of every regular and the name of every regular's children and the name of every regular's dead. She knew who owed money to whom, who was sleeping with whom, who had lost a job and who was about to, who was drinking too much and who was drinking too little and should be watched for signs of despair. She cashed pension cheques and held keys to six flats and three shops and knew where the spare fuse wire was kept in every house within a quarter mile. She was the node through which information passed and around which the neighborhood orbited, and on the second of March 1985, while pulling a pint of bitter for Dennis Croft, she put her left hand to her temple and said, in a voice that was entirely conversational, I think I've got a headache, Dennis, and then she dropped the pint glass on the floor and collapsed behind the bar.

DENNIS CROFT — THE DOCKER

Dennis Croft had been drinking at the King's Arms since 1960, the year he started at the West India Docks, and he had been drinking there through the closure of the docks in 1981, through the eighteen months on the dole, through the short-lived job at the warehouse in Stratford that ended when the warehouse burned down in 1983, through the second stretch of unemployment that was still going and showed no sign of stopping. He was forty-five years old and his hands had the permanent curl that comes from forty years of gripping ropes and crates and pint glasses, and he sat on the same stool at the end of the bar, the stool closest to the door of the gents, every afternoon from one o'clock until closing. Maggie poured his first pint without asking what he wanted, and she poured his second and his third, and somewhere between the third and the fourth she would lean across the bar and say That's your last, Dennis, and he would say I know, Mags, and he would drink the last pint slowly and walk home to the council flat on the Burdett Road and sit in the dark until morning.

On the afternoon of the second of March, Dennis watched Maggie fall, and he watched the ambulance men carry her out on a stretcher with an oxygen mask over her face, and he watched the door of the pub close behind them, and he stood on the pavement outside with his hands in the pockets of the coat he had bought in 1977 and had not replaced, and he waited for someone to tell him what to do. No one told him. The other regulars milled on the pavement for eleven minutes and then dispersed, and Dennis walked home to the Burdett Road and sat in the dark and did not drink anything.

The pub stayed closed for three days. On the fourth day a nephew of Jack Doyle's, a man named Kevin Doyle who had been running a wine bar in Chelmsford, arrived with a set of keys and a new price list and opened the doors at five o'clock. Dennis came at one o'clock. He sat on his stool. Kevin poured him a pint of bitter without being asked, but it was not the same bitter, and Dennis drank it and ordered another and Kevin poured it and Dennis drank it and ordered another and Kevin poured it and Dennis drank it and ordered another and Kevin poured it and at half past ten Kevin leaned across the bar and said I'm closing now, mate, and Dennis said all right and walked home and fell down the stairs of his building and spent five hours on the landing before the postman found him.

After that the social worker came, a woman named Patricia Okonkwo from the Tower Hamlets office who sat in Dennis's flat with a clipboard and asked him questions about his drinking and his employment and his state of mind. She asked if he had family. He said no. She asked if he had friends. He said Maggie. She asked who Maggie was, and Dennis explained that Maggie was the woman who had run the King's Arms, and Patricia Okonkwo wrote on her clipboard in a handwriting that was small and round: Patient has inadequate social support network. Recommend referral to alcohol dependency service.

Dennis stopped going to the King's Arms. Kevin's bitter gave him heartburn, and the stools had been reupholstered in a red vinyl that stuck to his trousers, and the television above the bar was now tuned permanently to the racing. In May 1985 he enrolled in the dependency service, where a counselor named Gary with a beard and a degree in psychology asked him to keep a diary of his drinking. The diary contained only one entry, dated the second of June: I used to talk to a woman who knew my name and I have not said my name out loud to anyone since March, and I am not sure I exist.

SHIRLEY BHATT — THE CORNER SHOP

Shirley Bhatt had opened the corner shop on the junction of Commercial Road and Cannon Street Road in 1977, two years after she arrived in London from Kampala, where her family had been expelled by Idi Amin along with all the other Asians. She was thirty-eight years old in 1985, and she ran the shop from seven in the morning until ten at night, selling cigarettes and newspapers and milk and bread and the specific brands of Indian spices and lentils that the other Bengali and Gujarati families in the neighborhood required. Her English was excellent, her Gujarati was passable, and her Swahili was fading. She spoke Hindi only to her mother, who lived in Leicester and called every Sunday.

The first person to speak to Shirley when she had opened the shop in 1977 was Maggie Doyle. Maggie had come in at half past eight on a Tuesday morning and bought a packet of Benson and Hedges and a copy of the Daily Mirror and had said, in a voice that cut through Shirley's accent and her nervousness and her terror of this city that was gray and cold and nothing like Kampala, You're the new one, then. What's your name, love. Shirley told her. Maggie nodded and said, Right then, Shirley, I'm Maggie from the King's Arms, and if anyone gives you trouble you come and find me first before you call the police, understand. Shirley did not understand, but she nodded, and over the following eight years she came to understand.

Maggie introduced her to the man who delivered the newspapers, to the woman who rented the flat above the shop, to the inspector from the council who came about the rat problem in the alley, to the Pakistani family who ran the laundrette on the next street, to the Bengali doctor who had a surgery on Whitechapel Road, to the old Jewish tailor on Brick Lane who could alter anything, to the Irish plasterer who fixed the ceiling when it leaked, to the Afro-Caribbean woman who sold vegetables at the Ridley Road market. Each introduction came with a small piece of information that Maggie had stored in her head for exactly this purpose: He's all right but don't let him run a tab. She's honest but her son is not, don't let him in the back. He knows the council man who does the license, be nice to him. Shirley had built her life in London on these introductions, and by 1985 she had a business that broke even and a flat in Bow and a daughter who was in her second year at Queen Mary College studying pharmacy, and she had not needed to call on Maggie for anything in three years except to buy her newspaper and her cigarettes and to say good morning.

After Maggie's stroke, Shirley continued to say good morning to the empty space where Maggie had been. She said it silently as she unlocked the shop each morning. She said it to the pavement outside the King's Arms as she walked past on her way to the cash-and-carry. She discovered that without Maggie there was no one who knew all the threads of the neighborhood, no one who could tell her that the new laundrette on Mile End Road was run by a cousin of the old laundrette family and was trustworthy, no one who could warn her that the council had changed the licensing officer and the new man was strict about fire regulations. She learned these things through trial and error, and each error cost her something small but cumulative: a fine for a blocked fire exit, a delivery of newspapers that went to the wrong shop for three weeks because the new distributor did not know her name, a window broken by a boy whose father had lost his job and who would not have broken the window if Maggie had been there to have a word with the father.

In September 1985 Shirley closed the shop two hours early and took the train to Essex to visit Maggie in the care home. Maggie was in a chair by a window that overlooked a car park. She recognized Shirley, and she asked about the shop, and she asked about the daughter, and then she fell asleep in the middle of a sentence, and Shirley sat for forty minutes watching her sleep and then took the train back to London and did not visit again.

TERRY O'CONNELL — THE BOY

Terry O'Connell was nineteen years old in 1985, and he had been coming to the back door of the King's Arms since he was fourteen. His mother, Eileen O'Connell, had worked as a barmaid for Maggie from 1979 to 1982, and when Eileen died of an overdose in a squat in Hackney in 1983, Maggie had paid for the funeral out of the till. Terry had been fifteen and living with an aunt in Plaistow, and Maggie had told him that he could come to the pub any time he needed a meal or a place to sit or someone to talk to, and she had meant it. He came on Tuesday evenings and Saturday afternoons, and Maggie fed him shepherd's pie and asked about school and told him about the docks and about Ireland and about what the East End had been like before the war. She told him he was smart, which no one else had ever told him, and she told him to stay away from the National Front boys who hung around the dog track, and she told him that his mother had been a good woman who had been eaten by a sickness that was not her fault, and she told him all of these things in a way that made him believe them.

In the spring of 1984 Maggie had introduced Terry to a man named Bill Hawthorne who ran a carpentry workshop in Bethnal Green. Bill was a regular at the King's Arms who came in on Thursday nights for two pints of mild and a game of darts, and Maggie had told him about Terry, and Bill had agreed to take Terry on as an apprentice. Terry learned to plane and to saw and to join and to measure twice and cut once, and he was good at it, and Bill told him so, and Terry began to imagine a life in which he was not his mother's son but his own man.

After Maggie's stroke, Terry continued to go to the workshop and he continued to do good work, but he stopped going to the pub. Kevin Doyle did not know who he was, and Terry did not have the words to explain. He tried once, in April, to walk through the front door of the King's Arms and order a Coke and sit at the back table where he had always sat, but Kevin looked at him with the blank politeness of a man who does not know you and does not want to, and Terry drank his Coke in eight minutes and left and did not return.

In June Bill Hawthorne retired and sold the workshop to a company that made fitted kitchens for new-build flats in Canary Wharf. The new owners kept Terry on for three months and then let him go when the contract ended. He found work as a laborer on a construction site in Stratford, lifting and carrying and doing nothing that required the skills that Bill and Maggie had taught him, and in November he was laid off again and went on the dole and began to spend his afternoons at the dog track, standing at the rail with the other young men who had nowhere else to be.

In December 1985 Terry walked past the care home in Essex. He had taken two buses and a train to get there, and he stood on the pavement outside the gate for twenty-two minutes, and then he turned around and went home. He did not know how to tell Maggie that he was failing, and he did not know how to tell anyone else, because the only person who had ever listened was on the other side of the glass.

ALICE CHEN — THE SEAMSTRESS

Alice Chen was fifty-two years old in 1985, and she had come to London from Hong Kong in 1968 with her husband, who had died of stomach cancer in 1974, and her son, who had moved to Vancouver in 1982 and called twice a year. She ran an alteration shop in a basement on Whitechapel Road, three steps down from the street, with a Singer sewing machine and a dressmaker's dummy and a rack of finished garments wrapped in clear plastic. Her English was functional but not conversational, and she had lived in the East End for seventeen years without making a single friend, because the Chinese families in Limehouse were from a different province and spoke a different dialect, and the English people in the neighborhood were polite but not warm, and the other immigrant communities had their own networks into which Alice had never been invited.

The exception was Maggie Doyle. Maggie had brought a coat to Alice's shop in 1972, a green wool coat with a torn lining, and she had watched Alice work for twenty minutes and then said, You're better than the woman I used to go to on Oxford Street, and Alice, who understood praise in any language, had smiled and charged her half price. After that Maggie brought all her mending to Alice, and she came once a week whether she had mending or not, and she sat on the wooden stool beside the sewing machine and talked about the weather and the neighborhood and the customers at the pub and the state of the country, and Alice understood approximately half of what she said and was grateful for all of it. Maggie was the only person in London who sat in Alice's shop and talked to her as though she were not a foreigner but a neighbor.

In the years that followed, Maggie sent other customers to Alice. She sent the woman who needed a wedding dress altered at short notice. She sent the man who had torn the sleeve of his best suit. She sent the Bengali mother who needed school uniforms taken in. She sent them all with the same instruction: Tell her Maggie sent you, and she'll do you a fair price. Alice's business survived and then prospered on these referrals, and Alice herself survived on the weekly visits from Maggie, which were the only conversations she had that were not about hemlines and buttonholes and the cost of thread.

After Maggie's stroke, the referrals stopped. The customers who had come because Maggie sent them found other seamstresses or made other arrangements, and the customers who remained were the ones who had found Alice on their own, and there were fewer of them. Alice's income dropped by forty percent in the first three months, and she began to take in work from a dry cleaner in Leytonstone who paid by the piece and did not ask her name.

In July 1985 Alice closed the shop for a day and took the Underground to Victoria and then the train to Essex and then a taxi to the care home. She brought a gift: a silk scarf that she had made herself, a square of pale green silk with a hand-rolled hem, folded in a box that had once held chocolates. The nurse at the reception desk told her that Mrs. Doyle was asleep and could not have visitors. Alice left the box with the nurse, who promised to give it to Maggie, and she took the taxi and the train and the Underground back to Whitechapel, and she sat in her basement shop with the Singer sewing machine and the dressmaker's dummy and the rack of garments wrapped in plastic, and she sewed hems for the dry cleaner in Leytonstone until her hands ached.

COLIN BRAITHWAITE — THE CONSTABLE

Colin Braithwaite was fifty-eight years old in 1985, a police constable with thirty-seven years of service, all of it in H Division, the Metropolitan Police district that covered Whitechapel and Stepney and Mile End and the streets around the docks. He had walked a beat on Commercial Road for twenty-two of those years, and he had been coming to the King's Arms since 1963, when he had been called to the pub to deal with a fight between two merchant seamen and Maggie had defused the situation before he arrived by pouring both men a double whiskey and telling them that if they wanted to kill each other they could do it outside, and if they wanted to drink they could shut up and sit down.

Colin came to the pub on Wednesday and Friday evenings, always in plain clothes, always alone, and he sat at a table in the corner farthest from the bar and drank one pint of Guinness and ate one pickled egg. Maggie brought the Guinness and the egg without being asked, and she sat with him for ten minutes and told him the things that a constable needed to know and could not learn from reports. She told him which families were in trouble, which boys were running with the wrong crowd, which old people were not being visited and might be dead in their flats, which shops were selling stolen goods, which landlords were harassing tenants, which husbands were beating wives. She told him these things not because she was an informant but because she believed that a neighborhood was a thing that had to be maintained, and the police were part of the maintenance, and Colin Braithwaite was the only policeman she trusted.

In return Colin told Maggie the things that a publican needed to know: when the licensing inspectors were coming, when the vice squad was running an operation, when the council was planning to close a road or demolish a building or change a regulation. They had been exchanging information for twenty-two years, and in that time Colin had solved fourteen crimes on the basis of what Maggie had told him, and Maggie had avoided seventeen prosecutions on the basis of what Colin had told her, and neither of them had ever written anything down.

After Maggie's stroke, Colin continued to walk his beat and continued to drink his Guinness at the King's Arms, but Kevin Doyle did not know anything about the neighborhood and did not want to know, and Colin found himself policing blind. In April 1985 he failed to notice that a family on Jubilee Street was in crisis until the father set fire to the flat with a can of paraffin. In May he arrested a boy for shoplifting at Shirley Bhatt's shop and did not know that the boy's mother had died in February and the boy had been living alone, and he charged the boy instead of finding him a place with the social services. In June he responded to a domestic disturbance on Nelson Street and did not know that the husband had been beating the wife for three years and that Maggie had been sheltering the wife on Tuesday afternoons in the back room of the pub, and he took the husband's statement and left the wife with a pamphlet about women's aid that she could not read.

In October 1985 Colin Braithwaite submitted his retirement papers, one year earlier than he had planned. On his last day he walked the length of Commercial Road from Aldgate to the Limehouse Cut and back, and he stopped in front of the King's Arms and looked through the window at Kevin Doyle polishing glasses behind the bar, and he did not go in. He took the bus to Essex and found the care home and sat with Maggie for an hour. She did not recognize him. She called him John, which had been her husband's name, and she talked about a horse that she had owned as a girl in Mayo, a horse that had been dead for sixty years. Colin held her hand and listened, and when the nurse came to take her to dinner he stood up and straightened his coat and walked out of the care home and took the bus back to London and never returned to the East End.

THE DRIFT

By the winter of 1985 the five orbits had diverged. Dennis Croft was in a hostel in Hackney, sober for three months and taking a course in industrial cleaning, his diary still blank after the first entry. Shirley Bhatt was running the corner shop with the help of her daughter, who had graduated from Queen Mary and was managing the accounts, and she had learned to manage without Maggie's introductions and was thinking of expanding into the vacant unit next door. Terry O'Connell was at the dog track on a Tuesday afternoon in December with four pounds in his pocket and no plan for the evening. Alice Chen was sewing hems in her basement shop, alone, her fingers moving with a precision that required no thought, her mind on the green silk scarf and whether it had ever been given to Maggie or whether it was still in the drawer of the nurse's station. Colin Braithwaite was in a bungalow in Leigh-on-Sea with a view of the estuary and a collection of model ships that he was building from kits and a telephone that he did not answer.

None of them spoke to each other. The thread that had connected them — the woman who had known all their names and all their stories and all the ways in which their stories intersected — had been cut on the second of March, and in the months that followed each of them had become a separate point in the geography of the city, moving along trajectories that would never intersect, carrying a version of Maggie Doyle that grew fainter with each passing week, a signal attenuating over distance, the network collapsing into isolated nodes.