The Clock Repairer – Part 2: Striking the Hour

"The clock, or me?" asked Margo, smiling.

"Both." Pieter flushed. "The clock is yours, of course. But I would like you to keep coming back for other reasons."

"Such as?"

"Dinner. Walks. A very large amount of time doing nothing in particular."

"Yes," said Margo. "To all of it."

They ate fish soup in a tiny restaurant on the canal, walked home through the lamplit lanes and stopped on a humpbacked bridge to watch the swans drift. Pieter took her hand carefully, like a man handling something delicate. The night was cool, the city quiet.

"Come up," he said at his door. "Only if you want."

"I want."

His flat above the workshop was warm and full of ticking, all those little clocks counting the same evening together. Margo laughed softly. "How do you sleep?"

"You stop hearing it. And then, if it stops, you wake up."

She kissed him in the lamplight, and he kissed her back with a patient, thorough tenderness she had not known she was missing. He lifted the glasses from his forehead, set them on the shelf, and took her face in both hands. She slipped her coat off her shoulders. They moved together slowly into the bedroom, where the canal threw wavering light on the ceiling, and the clocks went on ticking in the next room. For a long while, neither of them noticed.

At midnight, all the clocks struck, slightly out of step, a gentle crashing chorus of chimes.

"Twelve," murmured Margo, tucked against his chest.

"Twelve," said Pieter. "And no one has anywhere to be."

The exhibition opened on time, with the repaired clock gleaming in a glass case, ticking steadily. On the card beside it, in the curator's small neat hand: Repaired in Bruges. It was only waiting.

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