The 41 was going to be late again, and everybody on it knew whose fault that was.

At the stop before the bridge, Dev stopped the bus, opened the doors and waited. There was nobody there. There was nobody there most days. The shelter had no glass in it and the timetable inside the frame had faded to the color of weak tea. A man near the front looked at his watch, and then looked at it again, more loudly.

Dev waited about forty seconds. Then he shut the doors and drove on.

He had done it every weekday for two years. Drivers who covered the route on his days off did not do it. Passengers who used the 41 regularly had opinions about him. He was slow. He was jobsworth. Somebody had written to the depot.

What Dev knew, and had never said to anybody on the bus, was that Mrs Iyer came round the corner of Bell Street at about the same time each morning. It took her between thirty and fifty seconds to cover the last stretch to the stop, depending on the weather and on what her knee was doing. From the driver's seat you cannot see round that corner. You can only know, or not know.

He had found it out in his first winter on the route. He had pulled away on time, and watched in the mirror as a woman he did not yet know came round the corner at a run, and went down hard on the wet pavement, and was helped up by a stranger while his bus carried on over the bridge exactly on schedule.

The timetable said the 41 left that stop at 8.14. Dev had decided, that winter, that the timetable was a description of the job and not the job itself.

He was going to be about ninety seconds late into town. He had been about ninety seconds late into town for two years. Nobody had ever missed anything because of it, and one person had stopped falling over.