Diary fragment · 3 min read ·
The Tea Timer
He still winds the timer for a guest he no longer expects, and the kitchen has begun stopping it at four minutes each time.
- dated: "Late winter into spring"
- narrator: "Gidion Male, retired sacristan"
Third of March, after evensong. Gidion Male winds the brass timer at four o'clock, as he has done every year since his wife went into the ground. The timer was hers, a kitchen thing, four minutes, bought from the hardware stall on Marsh Road the year they married, and Gidion Male sets it for a guest he no longer expects. The kettle goes on. Two cups come down from the hook, hers and his, and the tea steeps while the sand runs. This has been the shape of his afternoons for nine years and Gidion Male does not call it grief. He calls it keeping the house ready.
Fourth of March. A small baffling thing to set down plainly. This afternoon Gidion Male wound the timer as usual and left it on the dresser while he fetched the milk, and when he came back it had stopped at four minutes. Not run down — stopped, wound tight, standing at the mark, the sand unmoving in its glass. He tapped it, as one does. It ran on and rang, a minute late by the kitchen clock. He made Wilden's tea and thought no more about it, or told himself he hadn't.
9th of March. It has happened every day since, without exception. Gidion Male winds the timer, turns his back, and the sand has stopped at four minutes — at the very mark it would take a guest's cup to reach. It rises fresh when he taps, always late, always by the length of a poured pot. He has tested it at other hours with the second kettle. Alone in the house at ten at night, winding it for nothing, it runs to the ring unbroken. It only stops in the four o'clock hour, in the four o'clock light, when the second cup is already down from the hook.
18th of March. Gidion Male has begun setting the second cup out anyway, instead of leaving it on the hook, and marking what the timer does. This is not sense and he knows it, but there is an order to things in a sacristan's keeping, and the order says: if a thing arrives at an hour, providence it a place. The cup sits opposite his own. The timer still stops at four minutes. He has stopped tapping it. He lets it stand at the mark while the tea steeps, and sets both cups full, and drinks his own, and washes hers, and puts it back on the hook until tomorrow.
2nd of April. Nothing further to record of the timer, except that today it did not stop. At four o'clock exactly, wound as always, it ran straight down and rang on the minute, and Gidion Male stood in the kitchen with two cups down and the water not yet boiled. He does not know what it means, whether something came or something went, and the house is too quiet now for further questions. He has locked the timer in a drawer with Wilden's gloves. Tomorrow at four he will take it out and wind it. He finds he will not tap it. He will let it stand at the mark if it stops, and he will let it ring if it doesn't, and either way, he is coming to understand, the guest poured first.