The last showing at the Regal finished at ten past eleven, and by twenty past the audience had gone out into the rain and the house lights were up on four hundred empty seats, and Grace, in the projection room, was rewinding reel six.

It was Sunday, which meant film. Not the digital box that ran the rest of the week and did its job and asked for nothing, but the old machine, the big grey one with the two towers, and the reels on it, and the actual film going through the gate at twenty-four frames a second with that sound it made, that tick, tick, tick, like a small tireless clock. Sundays were film because the owner, old Mr Vance, liked film, and because a few dozen people in the town liked it too and came every week whatever was showing, and sat in the same seats, and Grace knew most of them by the backs of their heads.

The rewind bench was under the window. Grace stood at it with one hand on the crank and the other flat on the reel, feeling the film go through, the way you would feel a rope going through. You could tell a lot from the feel. A splice coming. A bit of dryness. Tonight there was nothing, just film going smoothly from one reel to the other, the take-up growing and the feed shrinking, and she let her mind go where it wanted, which was nowhere in particular.

The door opened behind her. It was Leo, from downstairs, with two cups on a tray and a bag of popcorn that had not sold.

“Salted,” he said. “Sorry.”

“Salted’s fine.”

He put the tray on the stool where it always went and stood beside her and watched the reel go round, because he liked watching the reel go round, and had liked it for as long as he had been coming up here, which was two years now, give or take, since the night the lift broke and he had brought her tea up the back stairs and never quite stopped.

The Regal was not a big cinema. There was a screen, and a kiosk, and a lobby with a carpet that had seen better decades, and the projection room up under the roof, where it was warm in winter and warmer in summer and always smelt very faintly of hot metal and old film and the particular dust of that particular place. Grace had worked there eleven years. She was the last projectionist in the county who could lace a print, and she was aware of this, and did not make anything of it.

Reel six finished with a flap and a click. She took it off and put it in its can and wrote the number on the lid, and lined it up with the other five, ready for the courier in the morning.

“Done?” said Leo.

“Done.”

She turned the bench light off. The room went dim, lit now only by the small red bulb over the door and the two square windows onto the auditorium, through which the house lights showed a warm, empty amber. They took their cups and went and stood at the windows and looked down.

Four hundred seats. Red plush, rubbed pale on the arms. The screen a great pale rectangle at the far end with its curtains half drawn. Somebody had left a programme on a seat in row F. A cleaner would get it. The rain was on the roof above them, a steady, patient sound, the kind that is not going anywhere and does not need you to do anything about it.

“Quiet,” said Leo.

“It’s always quiet.”

“Quieter, then.”

It was. There is a particular quiet in a room built for a crowd when the crowd has gone. It is not empty. It has the shape of all the people who were just there in it, all the laughs and the held breaths and the rustle of coats, and it is holding the shape for a little while before it lets it go.

They ate the popcorn. It was not very good. They ate it anyway.

“Go on, then,” said Leo, after a while, in the voice he used when he was about to ask for something and wanted her to know it was a small thing.

“Go on what?”

“You know.”

She did know. In the cupboard by the door, in a can with no label, there was a reel that had come with the building, or had been found in it, nobody was sure, and it was five minutes of something black and white from a long time ago, a man and a woman on a station platform in a fog, saying goodbye and then not quite saying goodbye, and there was no sound on it at all, and nobody knew what film it was from, and Grace had run it once for him on a night like this one and he had asked for it, on and off, ever since.

She sighed, which was for form.

She threaded it. It took a minute. The machine woke up with a hum you felt in your feet more than heard, and she checked the gate and checked the loop and said, “House lights,” and Leo, who had learnt where the switch was, dimmed the auditorium down to nothing.

Then she started it.

Through the square window the beam went out over four hundred empty seats, silver in the dark, with the dust turning in it, and on the screen at the far end the fog came up, and the platform, and the two of them in their old coats, saying their goodbye that never quite got said. The projector ticked. The rain ticked on the roof. Nobody in the world was watching this except the two of them, up in the warm, with their cups going cold on the sill.

Leo put his arm round her. Grace leaned into it and kept one eye on the gate, because she always would.

The man on the screen took the woman’s hand. The woman looked at him. The train was somewhere behind them, you could tell from the steam, and it was going to go, and they both knew it was going to go, and for five minutes it did not.

Then the film ran out, with a flap, and the screen went white, and then dark.

Grace shut the machine down. The hum went out of the floor. Leo brought the house lights up, just to half, so the amber came back over the empty seats and the programme in row F and the curtains and the screen.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Every time,” said Grace, which was not a complaint.

She put the reel in its can and the can in its cupboard. They collected the cups. She checked the machine one more time, the way she always did, a hand on its warm grey side, and turned off the red bulb, and they went down the back stairs in the dark, which they both knew by heart.

The lobby was dim. The rain was still on. Leo held the door and she went out under it and he came after, and they stood a moment under the awning with the lights of the Regal going off behind them one by one, the way they did on the timer.

Then just the sign, glowing red, and the rain.

“Next Sunday,” said Leo.

“Next Sunday,” said Grace.

They walked home under one umbrella, and it was only a small umbrella, and it did not matter.

Above them, the projection room sat dark and warm under the roof, with six reels in their cans, and one that had no label, and the rain going on all night, tick, tick, tick, like a small, tireless clock.