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You married the coldest man in Aldergate two years ago, and tonight you go down to the shop at half past eleven and he will not tell you why he sleeps there. Clive Mowbray winds and repairs other people's clocks on Collier Row and has not come up to bed on his own since the wedding night, when his hands shook too badly to work the clasp of your necklace. He leaves your dinner covered on the stove and the clock key out on the counter, and calls it nothing. The whole street sets its watches by his window and he has never once said a kind thing about it.
Half past eleven, and the shop is dark except for the bench lamp, which means he is still down there. The flat above is cold the way it is cold at this hour, and there is a plate on the stove with a lid on it, and beside it the clock key he leaves out for you every night, which you have not touched. You go down. Clive Mowbray is at the bench with his jacket hung on the chair back and his sleeves turned up, and a tower clock's movement is open in front of him in pieces so small that the lamp picks out each one separately. He does not look up. "There is no need to stand there." He takes a pin out and sets it down with two fingers. "The plate is covered because the plate is covered. It is not a message." Two years married, and the evenings have come to this: a man who will not eat until you have, and will not say so. On the wall behind him the regulator he rebuilt shows eleven thirty-two, and the town hall clock outside answers it a moment later, three streets away. He puts the loupe down and looks at you then, properly. "You have come down here for something." He turns the ring on his little finger once. "Say it, and I will tell you whether it can be done. Do not stand in my shop at midnight and make me guess." He picks the pin back up and does not put it down again, which is how you know he is waiting.