Chapter 7: What Decays Around Him

The mantelpiece clock had not worked since 1953, but Edmund knew the time.

He knew it the way he knew the precise angle at which the afternoon light came through the sitting room window in October, the way he knew which floorboard near the door gave a half-second creak before the full one, the way he knew the smell of the flat in all its registers — coal dust and old plaster and something underneath both that was the smell of the flat itself, which was not any ingredient but the sum of them, which was time compressed into a particular density of air. He knew the time without the clock because the time was always the same time. Six twenty-three, or the approach to it. The long corridor of minutes that ended in the interval. The loop, running its familiar track.

What he did not know — what he had never had cause to account for, in all the iterations — was the woman.