Helen had the clock in pieces on the bench, and she was not worried about it.

It was a longcase clock, a tall one, a farmhouse clock from a farmhouse that no longer existed, and it had come to her in the back of a van with its case wrapped in blankets and its movement in a cardboard box that had once held apples. It had not gone for forty years. The man who brought it had said this apologetically, as if the clock were a relative who had let the family down.

“They usually go again,” Helen had said. “Give me a month.”

That had been three weeks ago. Now it was evening, and the workshop lamp was on, and the movement lay in front of her on a square of green cloth, plate by plate, wheel by wheel, each piece where she had put it, in the order she had taken it out, so that it could go back the same way.

She had cleaned everything. That had taken most of the three weeks. Forty years of oil gone to varnish, and dust gone to felt, and one dead spider, quite small, who had died with a good view. The brass, now, was brass again. The steel was bright. The wheels turned when she blew on them.

Tonight she was putting it back together, and she was doing it slowly, because there is no other way.

The back plate first, on the little wooden stand. Then the pillars. Then the wheels, the great wheel and the centre wheel and the third wheel and the escape wheel, each one dropped into its place with its arbor standing up like a pin, and then the front plate lowered over the top of them, gently, gently, with the tips of her fingers, feeling for each pivot to find its hole. This was the part that could not be hurried. This was the part where she held her breath without meaning to and then remembered, and let it out, and the plate went down the last quarter inch and every arbor found its home.

The pins in. The clicks and the springs. The pallets. The crutch.

Outside, it had got dark. She had not noticed. The window over the bench had gone from grey to black and had her in it now, bent over, with the lamp beside her.

She hung the movement on its seat board and hung the pendulum on the crutch and the weights on their cords, and stood back, and gave the pendulum a push.

Nothing, for a second.

And then, tick. And then, after a pause that seemed longer than a second and was not, tock. And then tick. And tock. And the escape wheel went round one tooth at a time under the pallets, and the second hand, which she had put on last, moved, and moved again.

Helen sat down on the stool.

Forty years. A farmhouse that was not there any more. Somebody had wound this clock every Sunday night for a hundred years and then somebody had stopped, and now it was going again, in her workshop, at a quarter to nine on a Tuesday evening, as if none of that had happened.

She listened to it.

A longcase clock does not tick fast. It ticks once a second, and there is space around each tick, and in the space you can hear the lamp humming and the wind outside and your own breathing, and then the next tick comes and puts everything in order again.

Tick.

Tock.

She would let it run tonight, and tomorrow she would see how it had kept time, and it would be a little fast or a little slow, and she would move the nut on the pendulum a quarter turn, and try again. That was tomorrow.

Tonight she turned off the lamp and stood for a moment in the dark with the clock going.

It did not know it had been asleep. It only knew it was going.

Tick. Tock.

She shut the workshop door softly behind her, and the clock went on in the dark, one second, and the next, and the next, all the way through until morning.