Ruth had been in the house three hours and she had not cried, which she suspected was the wrong way to empty a life.
She started with the kitchen because kitchens were honest. Mugs. A jar of instant with the lid not on straight. A radio stuck on the farm report, though the farm report had not been on that station for years. She unplugged the radio. She turned the kettle's socket off at the wall, the way the estate agent had told her to, in the bright voice people used around other people's dead.
The clocks had all stopped.
The one in the hall, with the pendulum that used to annoy her when she was fourteen. The carriage clock on the mantel, the one he wound on Sundays. The cooker clock, missing a segment in the first 4, so that it had always looked slightly surprised. Every face said 4:17.
A power cut, she thought, and then she looked again at the carriage clock, which did not take power.
She went upstairs because the bedroom was the place you put off. The bed was made the way he made a bed, hospital corners, a crease you could have used as a ruler. She opened the wardrobe and the smell of him came out, wool and the soap he had not changed since her mother was alive, and she shut it again and stood with her hands on the wood until the smell went back in.
The sock drawer stuck. It had always stuck. She worked it free.
He kept the things he did not want found in with the socks, which meant it was where he kept the things he meant her to find when he was not there to hand them over. A spare pair of glasses. An envelope with her name on it, not yet. And the watch, face-down on a pair of navy argyles, the leather strap cracked at the hole he had used for twenty years.
It ticked in her palm.
4:17.
Her phone, when she thumbed it awake, said 14:03. Tuesday. The day after. She sat on the edge of the bed and listened to the watch, the small, smug sound of a thing that had not been told.
Downstairs, the kettle clicked off.
She knew the sound. The old plastic one he would not replace, the click like a knuckle. She had switched that socket off. She had stood there and done it, because she was being good, because she was being the daughter who followed instructions.
She went down. The kitchen was as she had left it. The socket switch was down. Off. The kettle was hot when she held her hand near the plastic, the ghost of heat, and a thread of steam still stood in the spout and then was not there.
She filled a mug from the tap and did not drink it. The water tasted of the old pipes, of a house that had been shut too carefully. On the windowsill a fly walked the length of a plant pot and fell, and got up, which she watched as if it were a job.
In the hall she opened the front-room door and closed it again. The good furniture. The carpet that still had the vacuum lines from the last time he had been well enough to mind. 4:17 on the mantel. She did not go in.
Ruth set the watch on the table, face-up.
4:17.
She did not pick it up again for a long time. The house made the noises empty houses make: a pipe, a tick in the cooling radiator, a bird in the gutter. No kettle. No radio. She thought about the envelope with her name on it and left it in the drawer. She was not ready for a letter that had been waiting at 4:17.
When she looked at the watch again it said 4:18.
The hall clock said 4:17. The carriage clock said 4:17. The cooker, surprised, said 4:17.
Ruth put on her coat. She left the watch on the table. At the door she stopped, and she went back, and she turned the socket on, and then off again, and the kettle did nothing, which was a relief and was not.
She locked up with his keys and stood on the path with the afternoon still going, ordinary, 14:11 on her phone, and behind her the house kept 4:17 the way a mouth keeps a word it has not decided to say.