Not Every Clock

Mara was early for lunch and too late to go back. She had left her bicycle against the railings by the church, in the one place where nobody could put another bike across her handlebars. She had set her bag behind the shop counter and gone to the little sink. A cup stood there with two teabags in it. She took them out, squeezed them between two teaspoons and only then realised she hadn't needed the cup at all.

Ada came out of the side room with her glasses on her head.

‘I haven't eaten one yet,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Those rolls. If that's why you're looking at the bag.’

Mara glanced at the clock above the door. Not to check whether her mother was eating on time; she herself had to be back at the office by one. The client had brought the meeting forward. They were setting up the exhibition's first venue on Thursday, ready to open on Friday. Hester van Roon wanted to add one more portrait. There were enough portraits already. Mara had said they would look at it, because that sounded less final than no.

‘You said twelve,’ Ada said.

‘It's ten to.’

‘I can see that.’

She didn't point at the clock. She cleaned her hands, moved an empty tray to the other end of the workbench and switched off the lamp. Mara picked up the bag of rolls. She had deliberately bought two different ones. If her mother chose the first, Mara would be left with her own choice; if Ada took the other, that would be the one she had really wanted. At the bakery it would have been easier simply to buy two the same.

They sat at the back of the shop. The door to the little room stayed open so Ada could hear the bell. A dark cloth covered a movement. Mara recognised nothing else. She did notice that her own planning sheet wasn't there. She had taken it away, she knew that, yet some small part of her had expected Ada to have made a neat copy.

‘How was your weekend?’ her mother asked.

‘I worked at home.’

‘The whole time?’

‘No. Washing. Supermarket. The show with Ellen didn't happen.’

It hadn't been the show. Ellen had moved and found a box containing two tickets that had expired long ago. They had laughed about it in messages. Mara had rolled the separate things into a single visit. She took a bite and said Ellen was on a lower floor now, with a balcony.

‘That's handy,’ Ada said.

‘Two flights less. But the living room's narrower than she thought.’

She wanted to tell her about a shelving unit they couldn't get round the turn through the doorway on moving day. Instead she reached for her phone because the screen lit up. Hester. She left it there. The name stayed on the screen long enough for her mother to read it. Ada didn't ask.

At her second bite the shop bell rang. Ada checked the time.

‘He's early.’

Mara put her roll down. ‘Shall I—’

Her mother had already stood up.

Remco de Wit was at the counter with a paper shopping bag and a roll of tape. His jacket bore the badge of De Zoom sports club. He said he had waited at the bakery because he couldn't find anywhere to park, then thought he might as well come early. He set the bag down to free both hands.

Ada pointed to the customer's chair. ‘I was still eating. Two minutes.’

‘I can stand.’

‘That won't make me eat faster.’

She came back and took the last two bites of her roll. Mara stayed seated. Through the open door she could see the bag's brown paper and a round white label on one side. No clock stuck out. She wondered why the man had brought tape, then decided it was none of her business.

Ada drank some water and set the glass aside. She looked at Mara.

‘Do you want to stay? Or do you need to get back?’

‘I've still got half an hour.’

She took her own roll towards the customer's chair, but Remco was in it. Mara stood at the end of the counter. It felt less polite than she had intended, as though she had come to supervise his request. Remco nodded at her roll.

‘I've got omelette. Hardly anything else left.’

‘I could have gone for one of those,’ Mara said.

‘Get there earlier next time.’

He wasn't joking. He took two rolls from the bag and put one in his jacket pocket. The white label was the price. He laid the tape on the counter.

Ada already had the large round clock's job sheet in front of her. She went through it with Remco. The fault was that it wouldn't keep running reliably. The outside didn't have to look new, the dial had to remain legible, and the pendulum belonged with this clock. Ada had agreed a date in early December. Mara listened and watched Remco enter it in his phone. The clock hadn't been hanging in the clubhouse for some time.

‘We've got one from the DIY shop now,’ he said. ‘When it's busy you can only see the big hand.’

‘So this one's not getting a different dial,’ Ada said.

‘No, that's not what I'm saying. The one from the DIY shop.’

‘Right.’

She showed him how the wooden case was stored. A protective strip covered the bottom edge. Remco bent down, hitched his jacket up at the shoulders and read the name on the card. Then he returned to the counter.

‘We've got two more,’ he said.

Ada's hand had already moved towards her pen.

‘One in the committee room and one at the back of the old equipment store. The committee-room one's getting slower. The other doesn't work. We're clearing out for the volunteers' evening.’

Mara looked at the tape.

‘We've been numbering everything,’ Remco said, as if he had caught her looking. ‘Otherwise somebody takes away something somebody else thinks is theirs.’

Ada turned her job sheet over. ‘What sort of clocks?’

Remco searched for photographs on his phone. First came a dog with its nose in a plastic crate. He swiped it away and laid the phone flat on the counter. Ada leaned over. Mara could see her reflected face in the screen: a stern half-chin above a rectangular clock.

‘I can't assess this from a photograph,’ Ada said.

‘I can fetch them tomorrow. Or Thursday. I'd rather have everything ready together, then we can get that wall done.’

‘When's the evening?’

He named the Friday in the week after their agreed delivery. It was just after the date for the big clock. Mara could almost see the two appointments falling into a column, one beneath the other. Her mother didn't write down the Friday. She was still holding the pen.

‘I'd have to see them first,’ Ada said.

‘We're happy to budget for it. We're not asking you to squeeze it in round everything else.’

He pushed the phone closer. Ada enlarged a corner of the dial. The whole picture blurred. She pinched it smaller again and looked at the other clock. The glass reflected a fluorescent tube. Remco held a hand above it to cut out the reflection. That couldn't help, of course; it was a photograph of a reflection. He realised and withdrew his hand.

Mara picked up her bag. She should have stayed seated or left. Standing here with her coat over her arm turned every pause into a question addressed to her.

‘I've taken on the first one,’ Ada said. ‘I want to keep that commitment. I can't fit these two in for the same date.’

‘Not even if we put it back a week?’

‘Then I've got other work I've already taken on.’

Remco looked at the protected case against the wall. ‘But the big one's definitely for then?’

‘As agreed on this sheet.’

‘Just asking. We can't hang everything once the tables are in.’

Ada turned the sheet towards him. She pointed at the line he had just entered in his phone. No earlier finish, no promise that perhaps the second and third clocks might fit in after all. Mara saw a tiny hole her mother had made in the paper with the pen tip. There wasn't a new word.

‘I'll have to find somebody for the other two, then,’ Remco said.

‘Yes.’

‘We'd rather have kept them all together.’

‘I understand.’

Ada put down the pen. It wasn't an answer that solved anything for Remco. Still sitting in the chair, he rang somebody on his committee. He spoke a different language to this person: less explanation, more isolated names and a day that wouldn't do. Mara heard that they were going somewhere on the other side of the canal next week. Evidently somebody who might look at them had already been mentioned.

‘Henk says he's got time to examine them,’ Remco said when he hung up. ‘Whether that means they'll be ready in time, I don't know.’

Ada nodded. She gave him a copy of the job sheet for their big clock. He folded it in half and tucked it behind his phone. Then he picked up the tape and his roll. He asked whether he could put the empty bag in her paper-recycling bin. Ada showed him where it was.

Once the door had closed, Mara looked at her mother.

‘There is somebody else who can do it,’ she said.

Ada gathered the papers. ‘We'll see.’

‘At least he had a name.’

‘That's not the same thing.’

Mara felt the disappointment that sometimes came when her mother wouldn't help her put an ending to something. She had wanted to say it had gone well. Ada went back to her sandwich bag and brushed the crumbs off the workbench. The conversation might have brought her two new jobs. Instead it had mostly cost her twenty minutes.

Mara ate her last bite. The omelette she hadn't chosen at the bakery had disappeared into Remco's jacket pocket. She needed to leave before one.

‘Those two from Monday,’ she asked at the door. ‘Do you know anything yet?’

Ada understood which she meant. The man had had his promised call on Thursday. He had agreed to an assessment followed by an ordinary repair date, without Mara's Friday. The other clock was waiting for an answer about parts. Both were still in the shop, with a new note. Mara had nobody to ring back.

‘Good,’ she said.

‘Your sandwich bag.’

She had left it on the counter. She took it with her.

By her bicycle she rang Hester back. She didn't walk as she talked; the lane beside the church was too narrow to steer past a florist's cargo bike while holding a phone. Hester wanted to know whether that fourth portrait could still go on the last panel. The file was in the right folder already, she said. Mara checked the time.

‘I need to look at it with Lotte,’ she said.

‘I thought so. I spoke to her myself yesterday.’

So there had been a conversation she hadn't heard. Mara immediately felt excluded, and knew it wasn't a good reason to say yes. She asked what exactly Lotte had promised. Hester said there seemed to be room if the text stayed short. That could mean anything. Mara promised an answer that afternoon, after they had discussed it. She gave no new print deadline.

At the office Lotte was standing over two paper proofs on the floor. She had taken off her shoes so she wouldn't dirty them and was nudging the sheets together with her socked feet. The fourth portrait lay beside the last panel. It almost fitted.

‘That's precisely the problem,’ Lotte said when Mara looked.

Mara hung up her coat. The folder containing measurements for the first venue was on her desk. On the top page she herself had copied two figures from a photograph Hester had sent. There were no initials from the installation team beside them. She wanted to look at the portrait first, because somebody was standing next to it who could explain it.

She stayed beside Lotte until they had agreed which image could go on the later panels. Then she rang Hester. The new portrait wasn't going in this time. Hester sighed, asked whether it could still be included at the second venue and accepted the answer. Only when Mara sat down again did she pull the measurements folder out from under her keyboard. Thursday had a thick line across her diary. Below it, in a different colour, was Ellen. Six o'clock. Help with the boxes still waiting to be unpacked.

She left both appointments where they were.