THE NIGHT WATCH
Sarah Waters
To Lucy Vaughan
1947
1
So this, said Kay to herself, is the sort of person you''ve become: a person whose clocks and wristwatches have stopped, and who tells the time, instead, by the particular kind of cripple arriving at her landlord''s door.
For she was standing at her open window, in a collarless shirt and a pair of greyish underpants, smoking a cigarette and watching the coming and going of Mr Leonard''s patients. Punctually, they came-so punctually, she really could tell the time by them: the woman with the crooked back, on Mondays at ten; the wounded soldier, on Thursdays at eleven. On Tuesdays at one an elderly man came, with a fey-looking boy to help him: Kay enjoyed watching for them. She liked to see them making their slow way up the street: the man neat and dark-suited as an undertaker, the boy patient, serious, handsome-like an allegory of youth and age, she thought, as done by Stanley Spencer or some finicky modern painter like that. After them there came a woman with her son, a little lame boy in spectacles; after that, an elderly Indian lady with rheumatics. The little lame boy would sometimes stand scuffing up moss and dirt from the broken path to the house with his great boot, while his mother spoke with Mr Leonard in the hall. Once, recently, he''d looked up and seen Kay watching; and she''d heard him making a fuss on the stairs, then, about going on his own to the lavatory.