The Halted Metronome

The metronome ticked, measuring the empty room.

Its sound was the first thing each morning, before the kettle, before the thin May light had properly committed to the windowpanes, before Ada Penrose had even straightened the music on the stand. She wound the key with a small, precise motion, feeling the mechanism tighten under her fingers, and then released the pendulum. It swayed left, right, left, and the room had its pulse again. The piano lid was already raised. She had polished it the evening before, and the wood held a faint, oily gleam where the light caught it. The Czerny exercises lay open on the stand, the page turned to the one Miss Potts would begin with. Ada had placed the book there at half past eight. Now it was ten to nine, and the room was as it should be.

What was not as it should be was the street.

Ordinarily, by this hour, the milk cart would have rattled over the cobbles at the bottom of the terrace. She would have heard the horse’s hooves, slow and deliberate, and then the clink of bottles. Then the postman’s tread on the pavement, his bag knocking against his hip. Then, further off, the first tram of the morning sounding its bell as it turned the corner onto Gloucester Road, a sound she had stopped hearing years ago because it had become part of the structure of the day, indistinguishable from the ticking of the metronome or the click of the door latch.

This morning there was nothing. No cart. No postman’s tread. No bell.

Ada stood at the piano and listened. The metronome counted out its measure. Outside, the street lay in a quiet so complete that she could hear the shutter cord tapping against the window frame in a draught she had not noticed before. She crossed to the front window. The slats stood open as they always did, wedged fast against the frame. Through the gap, she could see the length of the terrace. The cobbled road ran straight to where it met the junction. No carts. No horses. No children walking to school. The pavement was bare. A woman she did not know by name, from number eight or thereabouts, stood at her own front gate in a grey cardigan, looking up the street as though expecting something to arrive. After a moment the woman went back inside.

The shutter cord stilled. Ada kept her finger on the sill.

At five minutes to nine, the front door of number twelve opened. Ada knew the sound of that door because she heard it twice each day. In the mornings, Frank Hollis left at ten to six, his boots heavy on the step, and she would catch the distant clang of the depot gates as he signed in. In the evenings, he returned at half past seven, slower, the tread uneven, sometimes pausing on the step as though gathering something before he went inside. She had never spoken to him beyond a nod. She had never needed to. He was part of the structure, the morning boot and the evening boot, and the knowledge that a man lived nine doors down and drove the trams.

This morning his tread was different. Not the brisk, purposeful step of a man going to work. Slower. He came down the path and stood at his own gate for a moment, looking left along the terrace in the direction of the depot. Then he turned right, which was not the direction of the depot at all. He walked past number eleven, past ten, past nine, and Ada watched him come. His cap was pulled low. His hands hung at his sides. He did not look at the houses he passed. He did not look at her window. He walked with the gait of a man who has decided to be somewhere and will not be hurried to it, and his face carried the expression of someone who has already had the conversation he is walking toward.

He passed her window. She saw his shoulder, the side of his cap, the back of his hand. Then he was past number two and number one and turning the corner onto the main road. She lost him.

Ada let the slat fall back. The room dimmed by a fraction. She returned to the piano and looked at the Czerny. The notes sat on the staff, small and patient, the first exercise a simple progression of thirds. She wondered if the girl would arrive on time. The lessons were still new enough that the shape of them had not yet settled into routine, and Ada had not yet found the proper distance. There was something in Vi’s presence that unsettled the careful order of the room.

She thought of the expected knock, the formality of the greeting, the way Vi would sit on the edge of the bench, cautious, waiting for instruction. Ada would place a finger on the page. “One must keep to the schedule,” she would say. “It’s what provides the structure.” It was the only way she knew to teach, and the only way she knew to keep the hours from pressing in too closely.

The metronome swayed. The room was warm. The coal scuttle by the grate was full, as it had been since Friday, because she had not needed to draw from it over the weekend and the coalman had come Thursday. She glanced at it now. The black lumps were heaped above the rim, glossy with dust. She did not think about it. She thought about the Czerny, and the fingering of thirds, and whether the girl would prove diligent enough to warrant the time Ada had agreed to give.

Nine o’clock struck on the mantelpiece clock. The single chime filled the room and faded. Ada sat in the piano chair and placed her hands in her lap. The minutes passed. She watched the metronome and counted along with it. At four minutes past nine, she straightened the Czerny on the stand, though it did not need straightening. At seven minutes past, she adjusted the height of the chair, though it was where she always set it. At nine minutes past, she went to the window again.

This time she pressed two slats apart and looked through the wider gap toward the main road. She could see the junction where the tram line curved. The tracks ran along the center of the road, steel rails set into the cobbles, and on a normal morning the nine-oh-five would be rounding that curve now, its bell sounding twice to warn the junction. She could see the curve of the rail catching the light. She could see the empty road beyond it. And beyond the road, on the wide stretch of pavement that fronted the depot, she could see men standing.

They were not in a line. They were not in a crowd. They stood in small groups of two and three, some with their hands in their pockets, some with their arms folded. A few smoked. She counted them. Six, seven, nine, twelve. She could not see their faces at this distance, but she could see the shape of them, the stillness, the way they faced the depot gates as though those gates might open. They did not look like men going to work. They looked like men who had come to watch something stop.

One of them was Frank Hollis. She knew this because of the cap, and because of the way he stood, slightly apart from the others, his weight on one foot, his hands in his trouser pockets. She had seen him stand that way before, on evenings when he paused on his front step. He was standing like a man who has already made his decision and is waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.

She watched him. He did not move. None of them moved. The depot gates were closed. Beyond them, she knew, were the trams, the fleet of them lined in the long shed, their windows dark, their engines cold. She had never been inside the depot. She had only seen the trams from the outside, passing her window, their yellow paint bright in the rain, the conductor’s bell ringing as they pulled away from the stop. She had seen Frank Hollis in the driver’s cab once, years ago, when she was walking to the shops. He had been leaning on the window frame, waiting for the signal, and the tram had been bright and loud and moving. She had thought, without thinking it fully, that he looked like a man who belonged where he was.

Now he stood on the pavement with the other men, and the depot was closed behind its gates, and nothing moved on the line.

She let the slat fall back. The room dimmed again. She stood at the piano and looked at the metronome. It swayed, left, right, left, and the sound of it was the only sound in the room. Her thumb found the pendulum. The brass was cool under her skin. She pressed, gently, and the pendulum stopped. The tick ceased. The room was quiet, and in the quiet she could hear, very faintly, the sound of her own breathing and the tap of the shutter cord in the draught.

She kept her thumb on the pendulum. The brass grew warm under it. She could feel the mechanism inside, wound tight, holding its energy against the pressure of her thumb. It wanted to swing. She held it. Through the gap in the slats, a thin stripe of light fell across the piano lid and caught the edge of the Czerny, the first note of the exercise, a middle C, black and round on the staff.

She released the pendulum. It did not swing. The mechanism had wound down in the minutes she had held it, the last of its tension spent against her thumb. She would need to wind it again before the next lesson. She would need to wind it, and straighten the music, and angle the chair, and open the Czerny to the correct page, and all of it would be ready, and all of it would be in its place, and the room would be as it had always been kept, and the door would open, and Vi would sit down, and the exercise would begin.

But the door did not open. The minutes passed, and the door did not open, and the street outside was silent in a way she had not heard before. Not the silence of an early morning, which held the promise of sound. Not the silence of Sunday, which was expected and therefore comfortable. This was a different quiet. This was the silence of something broken in the machinery of the day, and she could feel it in the room with her, pressing against the piano, pressing against the closed shutters, filling the space where the tram bell should have been.

Her hands rested on the keys without pressing. The ivory was cool and smooth. She had not played a note of her own in three years. She played only for teaching, only the exercises, only the careful, measured pieces her father had marked in the books. Her fingers knew the Czerny by heart. They knew the fingering, the positions, the shapes. They did not know how to begin without a pupil sitting beside her, and there was no pupil, and so her hands lay still.

The coal scuttle caught the light from the gap in the shutter. The black lumps gleamed. She had enough coal for a week, perhaps longer. The coalman came on Thursdays. Thursday was three days away. She did not think about it. She thought about the shutter, which was closed against the morning, and the street, which was silent, and the metronome, which had stopped.

She went to the shutter and pressed it open again, wider this time, enough to see the full length of the terrace. The doors stood in their row, each one painted a different shade, some fresh, some peeling. Number twelve’s door was dark green, the paint flaking at the threshold. His boots had worn the step. She could see the mark of them from here, the slight depression in the stone where he stood each morning. The door was closed now. He was at the depot, standing with the men. The door would stay closed until he came back, and she did not know when that would be.

She let the shutter close. The room was dim. The metronome sat on the piano, its pendulum at rest, its brass face holding a last thin stripe of light. The Czerny lay open on the stand, the first measure waiting, the notes small and black and patient on the staff. The chair was angled correctly. The polish smelled of her father’s hands. Everything was ready. Everything was in its place. The only thing that was not in its place was the world outside, which had stopped.