The marble of the table is cool under your wrists, veined with grey lines that run down toward the edge and stop. A china cup sits in front of you, white, with a faint hairline crack just under the rim, the kind of crack that has stopped travelling years ago. Beside it, a small white pot, its lid not quite straight. On a plate to your right, a slice of seed cake, the caraway dark in the pale crumb. Steam lifts from the spout in a thin grey ribbon and bends toward the window. Outside, the afternoon is the colour of pewter. You take the handle of the pot between thumb and finger, and pour.
The tea comes out the colour of a wet beech leaf, then darkens against the white inside the cup. A few stray leaves slip past the strainer and settle at the bottom, where they will sit, slowly opening, for the whole time you are here. You set the pot down. The lid gives the smallest chime against the rim. You watch the surface of the tea steady itself, a faint trembling at first from the pour, then a slow flat shine that takes the grey of the window and holds it. A bead of condensation gathers on the spout and falls back into the pot without a sound.
Behind the counter, the waitress is wiping a glass. She holds the glass by its base in one hand and turns it slowly inside the cloth, and the cloth makes a soft squeak against the wet rim each time she comes back round to the same place. She sets it down, lifts another. The shelf behind her is lined with cups, saucers stacked in fours, a row of brown teapots with their handles all pointing the same way. A clock above the doorway ticks at half the speed you expect, or it seems to, in the way that clocks in quiet rooms sometimes do. A tram bell sounds, far down the street, and then closer, and then the tram itself goes by the window, slow as a barge, its lit windows pale against the grey, and a face inside it turned toward something further on.
You lift the cup. The china is warm against your lower lip before the tea is, and then the tea, and the taste of it is plain and slightly grassy, with a smoky edge underneath. You hold the cup at your mouth a moment longer than you need to, and the steam goes up around your face, and your glasses, if you wore them, would mist; as it is, you feel the warmth move up across your cheekbones and disperse into the cooler air of the room. You set the cup down on its saucer. The saucer has a faint ring at its centre where a thousand cups have rested before, a paler circle worn into the glaze. You turn the cup a quarter, without thinking, so the handle points toward your hand.
The radiator under the window ticks. It is an old cast-iron one, painted cream, the paint thick and rounded over the ribs from many coats. Each tick is small and metallic and slightly hollow, and between the ticks there is a longer pause than you would expect, so that you are listening for the next one before it comes. A draught moves along the floor from the door and lifts the edge of the tablecloth on the next table, just enough to see it move, and lays it down again. The smell of the room comes to you in layers — first the tea, close and warm, then the seed cake's faint anise sweetness, then somewhere further back the smell of damp wool from a coat hung by the door, and under all of it the cool mineral smell of the marble itself, and of old plaster, and of rain that has been falling for some part of the day already and is about to fall again.
You break a corner from the seed cake with the side of the fork. The crumb is dense and slightly oily, yellow at the heart, and a few caraway seeds come away on the tines. You put it in your mouth. The seeds press between your teeth and release their small dark flavour, and the cake itself is butter and a faint lemon, and the whole thing turns to softness against the roof of your mouth and is gone. You take another sip of tea. The cup is cooler now at the rim, warmer further down, and the second mouthful tastes deeper than the first, the leaves having had their time at the bottom of the pot to open and give. You set the cup down again, in the same worn ring on the saucer.
Outside, the rain begins. It begins as a darkening of the pavement, a shift of tone you catch out of the corner of your eye before you hear it, and then the sound arrives — a soft, almost continuous patter against the window, the kind of rain that has no wind in it, that falls straight down, that will go on for a long time at the same rate. A woman passes under a black umbrella, and the dome of the umbrella beads with water as she goes. The lamp above the doorway across the street comes on, though it is only afternoon, and its yellow makes the grey around it greyer. A pigeon on the sill of the building opposite hunches into itself and stays. The rain finds the gutter and begins to chuckle along it, low, somewhere just under the edge of attention.
Inside, nothing has changed and everything is a degree slower. The waitress has finished the glasses and is folding the cloth into quarters and laying it across the edge of the sink. She moves to the till and counts something there, her finger going down a column. A man at a table near the back turns a page of a newspaper, and the page makes its dry sound, and settles. The clock above the doorway ticks. The radiator ticks, on its own time. You lift the pot to pour a second cup, and the tea comes out darker now, stronger, almost amber at the edges where it thins against the white. You stir it once with the small spoon, though there is no sugar to dissolve, and the spoon makes a fine ringing against the inside of the cup, and you lay it down on the saucer where it leaves a single brown drop that spreads slowly into the glaze.
The light in the room has shifted without your watching it shift. The window is darker now, the marble of the table a deeper grey, the white of the cup more luminous against it. The cream paint of the radiator has gone the colour of old paper. The mirrors behind the counter hold the room doubled and slightly softer, and in them the row of brown teapots is repeated, and the cups, and the back of the waitress as she reaches up to a high shelf. A second tram passes, in the other direction this time, its bell muted by the rain, and the lit windows slide along the dark of the street and are gone. You take the cup in both hands and hold it, and feel the warmth come through the china into the palms of your hands and up into your wrists.
The seed cake is half gone. You leave the rest on the plate for a while. The fork lies across the edge of the plate with a few crumbs on it. A drop of tea has fallen onto the marble between cup and pot, and you watch it find the nearest grey vein and follow it a short way and stop. Somewhere in the kitchen a kettle is filling, the note of the water rising as the kettle fills, then cutting off. A cupboard door closes. The clock ticks. The rain ticks. The radiator ticks, slower than either.
You finish the second cup more slowly than the first. The tea at the bottom is cooler and a little bitter, with the soft grit of the strays that escaped the strainer, and you set the cup down for the last time in its worn ring. The pot is lighter when you lift it to check, almost empty, the last of the heat going out of its sides. Outside, the rain is steady and the street is dim, and the lamp across the way holds its small yellow square against the grey. The waitress passes behind you with a tray, her step soft on the tiles, and the room settles again into its long afternoon. Steam no longer rises from the spout. The marble holds the print of the cup where the cup has been, a faint warm circle fading at its edge, fading, and the grey at the window goes on and on, and the ticking goes on, quieter now, further off, and the rain