The clock on her mantelpiece had been stopped at twenty to four since the night of Gerald's stroke. She hadn't stopped it deliberately — it had simply run down that night and she hadn't thought to wind it, and then weeks had passed, and then months, and now stopping it seemed to have been a decision, even though it hadn't been.
Visitors noticed it sometimes. They would glance at the stopped clock and then at their own watches with the faint anxiety of people uncertain of the local time, as though they had crossed a border without knowing. Her daughter had asked, once, whether she would like a new battery. She had said no without thinking about why.
There was a reason, she had come to understand, but it had taken a long time to find it. The reason was this: clocks in a house where someone has died continue insisting on time, on the necessity of time, on the fact that time goes forward regardless of what you would prefer, and she had lived with that insistence for long enough. The stopped clock asked nothing of her. It simply stood there, indicating twenty to four, which was a position in time that no longer existed and never would again, and there was something honest in that she could not find in the running ones.
Her son, who lived in another city and came when he could, had taken a different view. He had gently, over two or three visits, suggested that it might be healthy to move on, to let time resume its normal function, to wind the clock or replace it with something new. She understood what he was saying. She knew he was saying it from love. But she had also come to understand, in the years since Gerald died, that people who say "move on" almost always mean "move in the direction I can follow you, because your grief in its current form is difficult for me to accompany."
She did not say this to her son. She said that she would think about it, and then she thought about other things.
What she thought about, on the evenings when the house was very quiet and the stopped clock stood on the mantelpiece indicating its impossible time, was the way he used to sit in the chair by the window on Sunday afternoons reading the paper. He had a particular quality of stillness when he read. He could sit for an hour and not shift his weight or change his position, which had irritated her when she was younger and impatient, and which she now understood had been a gift. A kind of anchorage. A quality of being fully in one place that most people never quite manage.
She had not been able to sit still since he died. She moved through the house on restless circuits, picking things up and putting them down, starting tasks and leaving them half-finished. She had, she realised, been made restless by his stillness all those years — made restless in the way that a boat is made restless by its mooring, pulling against the rope, wanting to drift. And now the mooring was gone, she was simply drifting, and she was not sure she had known, until now, how much of her motion had been defined by the thing she was moving against.
The clock said twenty to four.
She had thought, when she first left it unwound, that it would feel like keeping something. Like pausing one moment of the last day intact in the amber of stopped time. But it didn't feel like that. It felt more like an acknowledgement: that time, for certain purposes, had divided into before and after, and that the before was not recoverable, and that this was simply and permanently true.
Her daughter came at Christmas and wound the clock without asking. She discovered this on Boxing Day morning, when she came downstairs to find it ticking, its hands moving steadily away from twenty to four.
She stood in the doorway for a long time. Then she went to make coffee.
She did not stop the clock again. Her daughter had meant it kindly, and the act of winding it a second time — of deliberately arresting time, of insisting on the stopped position — would have meant something different now. Would have meant something smaller. The clock ran. The days ran. She learned, very slowly, to run with them.
But she remembered the quality of twenty to four. The precise angle of those hands. The way the room had looked in the stillness of a stopped morning. She kept it in the same place the stopped clock had occupied — somewhere specific and warm, a position in time that no longer existed and to which she no longer needed to return.
She had been there. It had been real. That was enough.