The four-minute clock

The four-minute clock (an extract)

The man from the council arrived at ten past nine, which Ansel Ruiz noted, as he noted most things, against the harbour clock above his head. By the clock it was only six minutes past. He did not mention the discrepancy. In forty years of keeping the clock he had learned that people who noticed it generally had opinions, and he had no use for opinions before his second cup of tea.

“It's slow,” said the man, whose name was Pryce and whose shoes had clearly been bought for offices. “By four minutes. I checked it against my phone on the way down.”

“It has been slow for thirty-one years,” said Ansel.

“Then it's overdue for adjustment.” Pryce said this kindly, in the voice one uses with a relative who has insisted on driving long past the sensible age. “The council has money for a new mechanism, an electric one. You'd never have to climb those stairs again.”

Ansel looked at the water. The morning ferry was edging towards the quay, trailing a pale seam of foam, and on the pier a few passengers had begun the small, half-embarrassed jog of people who suspect they are late. They were not late. They never were, because the clock was slow and the ferry, as every islander knew, ran to the clock.

“Everything here runs to it,” he said at last. “The ferry, the school bell, the baker. If I put it right, we'd all be four minutes early for the rest of our lives, or four minutes late. Either way, someone would have to learn to be different.”

“People adapt,” said Pryce.

“They do,” Ansel agreed. “That is rather what they have done.”

It was not the whole truth, and he suspected Pryce knew it. The whole truth lay in a ledger on the shelf at the foot of the tower, in his wife's tidy handwriting, recording the day in October when she had set the hands back four minutes so that he could finish a repair and still, by the clock, be home in time for supper. She had been teasing him; she had meant to correct it the next morning. She had not been able to, and he had never found it in himself to do it for her.

Pryce was looking at the ledger now, which Ansel had not noticed him take down. He read the page, closed the book with the care of a man handling someone else's letter, and returned it to its shelf. “I'll tell them the mechanism needs further assessment,” he said. “These things can take years.”

“I imagine they can,” said Ansel. He put the kettle on, and above them the clock, with a small, unhurried shudder, struck the quarter, four minutes behind the world.