Wait

Waiting is a recurring condition in Mary and Amy’s story, not simply an interval between events. It holds them in uncertainty, gives ordinary time an oppressive weight, and sometimes becomes a way of reaching toward another person. Its meaning changes across the narrative: Mary tries to endure the past while awaiting a next move; she waits for Jamie in a repeated domestic pattern; and Amy waits through a night in which promised return gives way to absence. The motif’s force lies in that range, from patient accommodation to emotional need and, finally, a readiness for an arrival that may never occur.

Enduring uncertainty

Mary’s waiting begins in a period described as turbulent and tiring, even though nothing decisive happens. After her night out with Prince, she carries feelings that range from defiance to numb surrender, but cannot settle on what to do with them. She can only try to be good and keep trying. The phantom of the past remains present, so her effort is not to remove it but to grow accustomed to it and mind it less. Waiting here names a lived practice: proceeding step by step with everyone else while time itself seems to wait. The passage ends by marking a change in possibility. On a Sunday, Mary’s next move becomes clear. Waiting has not resolved her difficulty, but it has lasted until action can take shape.

That interval is not presented as wholly empty. Mary is living through it, adjusting to the past’s continued pressure without knowing what decision will follow. The movement from unsettled feeling to a clear next move is small in outward terms, but it gives the passage its turn: endurance becomes preparation. Waiting neither cures nor erases the past; it allows Mary to continue while its phantom remains.

Waiting for a season and for a response

The approach of winter extends the motif from personal uncertainty into shared, seasonal time. The grass darkens, traffic has the freedom of Sunday, and the days appear to close in and huddle together. People speak of winter with resignation, sometimes with stoical dread, but nobody knows its exact arrival date, and their estimates differ. Mary is not very worried; she expects the season to be interesting. This contrast matters: the same future that others anticipate uneasily is, for her, still open to experience. Waiting for winter is a collective habit of speculation, but Mary does not simply adopt the mood around her.

A more intimate and repetitive form of waiting structures Mary’s nights with Jamie. She lies awake for hours until he stumbles in, then waits as he settles beside her. His treatment of her has become familiar: he no longer asks whether she is asleep, because he knows she is not. Sometimes he embraces her with formal restraint; sometimes he lies rigidly at the far side of the bed. Mary accepts either arrangement, waits until he is nearly asleep, and then cries. The pattern repeats every night. The account says that her crying works, but does not specify exactly what it secures. What it does show is that waiting and crying form a deliberate sequence: Mary holds back her distress until the moment when it can elicit a response. Waiting is no longer only imposed on her; within this relationship, it becomes part of how she acts.

The night Amy waits

In a later episode, a phone caller addresses Amy, asks where she has been, asks her to wait up, and says that there are last things to do before returning that night, though the return is uncertain. The speaker says there will be no further call and ends by addressing Amy by name. The exchange makes waiting an explicit request, while its qualifications leave the promised return unsettled. The identity of the caller is not stated in the exchange itself, so the episode’s emphasis falls on the instruction and Amy’s ensuing vigil rather than on an explanation of who speaks.

Amy has no remedy for the interval but to wait. At one o’clock, she tries to divide her attention between two books, reading them concurrently as she habitually does, but cannot absorb their print. She sets them aside, feeling that continuing would do neither book any good. She then tries a gramophone recording of a piano concerto movement she especially likes. Neither reading nor music can contain the time: the books suggest an ordered world that feels exclusive, while the music seems open-ended. Amy recognizes that she is not yet whole and must fill, waste, or kill the hours herself. These attempts make waiting concrete—not an abstract pause, but time that she tries unsuccessfully to occupy.

Absence and the altered meaning of time

Amy’s remembered fragments do not supply a complete account that could make the night intelligible. She recalls entering a room full of people, waking early on a weekend morning, stopping in a courtyard in the light, weeping at school, and wanting to shine a light into other people’s houses after the boys have gone home. The sequence remains a handful of images rather than a continuous explanation. As the seconds race and dawn arrives, Prince has not come. The contrast between the clock’s movement and the expected arrival gives the waiting a consequence: time has passed, but the hoped-for meeting has not taken place.

Elsewhere, a speaker rejects the idea that life is too short, describing it instead as too long, saying enough has been lived, and expressing readiness for him to come. The passage does not identify the speaker or explain who is meant by “him,” so its significance lies in the change it gives to waiting rather than in a fully specified outcome. Waiting can be endured, used to seek a response, or spent in expectation of someone who does not arrive; here it shades into readiness for an arrival. Across these episodes, time is not a neutral backdrop. It presses on Mary and Amy, and their different ways of inhabiting it reveal what they can still expect, what they try to obtain, and what they have learned to endure.