LONDON — John Falding finds comfort in talking, even though the memories haunt him: the phone call from his girlfriend, Anat Rosenberg, to say she was on a bus to work. Then screams, then silence.

Amrit Walia wanted to "go out guns blazing" to retaliate for the death of his schoolmate, Anthony Fatayi-Williams, 26. Calmer now, he is thinking about ways of reaching out to angry young Muslims before they strap on explosives.

A month has passed since four suicide attackers blew themselves up on three London subway lines and a double-decker bus, killing 52 passengers, and those left behind are struggling to come to grips with a day that started out in morning rush-hour routine and ripped their lives apart.

The dead and those who mourn them are a multiethnic, multifaith profile of London. Rosenberg was an Israeli Jew, Falding is English and not Jewish. Fatayi-Williams, born in Nigeria, was a Roman Catholic with a Muslim father; Walia is a Sikh.

Shahara Islam, British-born of Bangladeshi descent, was a bank cashier who attended Friday prayers at her mosque and liked to shop at trendy clothes stores.

There was Behnaz Mozakka, a woman from Iran, and Karolina Gluck, a woman from Poland, and Giles Hart, 55, an Englishman honored posthumously by Poland for his support for the anti-Communist Solidarity movement.

Most of those killed July 7 were on their usual commutes, aboard bus No. 30 or deep inside the vast subway system.

There were stories of cruel happenstance, such as the woman who called a relative to say she had emerged safely from the Tube, only for fate to catch up with her minutes later on bus No. 30. Her route to her death was much the same as Rosenberg's.

"It is just so mindless, the whole thing so pointless," said Falding, 62.

He was sitting alone in his central London apartment, surrounded by traces of his girlfriend — photos of her posing in a Roaring '20s glamour outfit, dents from her stiletto heels in the wooden floor.

"The terrible irony," said Falding, "is that it happened here" — in peaceful London, not in her native Israel, where the fear of suicide bombings was burned into her mind.

Rosenberg, 39, had moved to London 18 years ago to pursue her dreams of a dancing career. But she never lost her Israeli antennae. Falding remembered her scolding people who left bags unattended in bars, and she would get nervous before a trip to Israel.

Walia was at first hopeful because a missed call from Fatayi-Williams showed up on his cellphone timed off at 9:57 a.m. — after the bombing. Then he found out the phone's clock was 20 minutes fast.

When the worst was confirmed, he said, "I beat the wall, threw up, cried."

"These terrorists are our age, we listen to the same music, we can see what they are about even if we don't understand it," Walia said. He is 26. The bombers were three Britons of Pakistani descent and a Jamaican, aged from 18 to 30.

For the world, Fatayi-Williams' mother became the face of grief-stricken London as she appeared on TV, awaiting confirmation of her son's death.

"Which cause has been served?" Marie Fatayi-Williams asked. "Certainly not the cause of God, not the cause of Allah ... Anyone who has been misled, or is being misled to believe, that by killing innocent people he or she is serving God should think again because it's not true. Terrorism is not the way."

Falding, a retired Financial Times journalist, said talking about Rosenberg has helped, even in the horrible hours after the attacks when he clung to the hope that she was alive.

She had left for her job at a children's charity and called him from the bus to tell him about mysterious problems on the Tube. She suggested he mention it in his local newsletter.

"As soon as she said 'newsletter,' I heard ghastly screams in the background and the phone went dead," Falding said. All attempts to phone back went straight to voice mail.

Then it was a matter of waiting to find out whether his girlfriend was alive or dead. "As I talked about her, even then, I know my tenses were going back and forth," Falding said.

He remembers how she could disrupt his evening plans with a sudden call to say she was dropping by. "Now, I would give anything for a call like that."

The day after the attacks was Falding's birthday. He went to a restaurant where he'd guessed she was planning a celebratory dinner, and sure enough, "there was her name — reservations for 9 p.m."

He canceled.