A small room with a clock in it

The room had a clock and not very much else. There was a chair — a wooden one, painted yellow some long-ago year, the paint now greyed at the seat where ten thousand visitors had sat — and there was a low table, the kind hotels put in their lobbies when they want you to feel that the lobby is also a sitting room. There were no flowers. Edith took this in with the look of someone making notes for a magazine she would not be paid to write.

She set her bag on the table, sat down on the yellow chair, and took her shoes off. The clock ticked. The clock had been ticking before she came in, presumably, but she only noticed it now that she had been in the room for some time, the way one notices a smell after acclimating to it: in reverse, as if her ears had only just begun to disbelieve the silence.

There was no clear protocol for what she was waiting for, and so she waited the way one waits for a kettle: with attention, but not impatience. The room had a window. Through the window the afternoon was doing its usual business — the slow, brown-gold business of October, which she had always preferred to the strident gold of an English September. A bird went past, going somewhere with great commitment. She watched it leave. It did not come back.

After perhaps an hour, the door opened and a young man looked in. He was very tall and very young, with the kind of face she had liked when she was nineteen and had since outgrown — a face full of unearned certainty, but pleasantly so. He looked at her, looked around the room, and said, I’m sorry, are you waiting?

Edith said: Yes. I’m waiting.

The young man considered this. For who?

I’m not sure, she said. That’s part of the wait.

He nodded, as though this were an answer he had heard before, and let himself out, very softly, leaving the door not quite closed.