The new timetable had been up in the depot since the Monday, inside a plastic sleeve pinned to the board with two drawing pins, and it was not a notice nor a letter nor anything with a signature underneath it, it was an A4 sheet with the table on it, where the nineteen had been struck out with a single line, drawn by hand and sloping downwards, and where underneath there was the extended four, hourly, Monday to Saturday, Swadlincote-Ashby, which is the stretch where people actually get on, and which Denise had read twice, the second time to look in it for the two names she had not found the first time, and the second time she did not find them either, not because they had escaped her, but because they were not there, and because a timetable, unlike a letter, has no need to say what it takes away: it is enough for it not to name the thing, and Denise had in fact gone to fetch her vehicle the way one goes to fetch one's vehicle.

The petition had come round to the shop in Overseal on the Wednesday, started by a lad who takes the nineteen to get to college and who, being twenty-three, had done the thing one does at twenty-three, that is, written out in full, at the top of the sheet, the reason a route is needed (and beneath it, in a smaller and narrower hand, as though the second part had come to him afterwards, with the sheet already resting on the counter and the pen tied on with string, the list of the things it is needed for: school, work, the hospital at Burton, and last, with no explanation beside it, the word cemetery).

Denise had seen it under the sweet jar, with twelve names and all the rest of it white, and she had not signed it, which is a different thing from having decided not to sign it.

On the dashboard there is a little tray cut from a screw carton, with the coins divided by denomination, and they are there because for eleven years on the nineteen she has made out tickets by hand for people who pay in cash, which on the strong stretch, where they get on with the app, hardly happens any more.

The two who wait at the stop under the pine are called Pat and Marjorie, and on Tuesdays they go to Swadlincote together and come back on the four-ten, which is Denise's, and it has been so for eleven years, and neither of them has ever needed to say it to anyone, because neither of them drives, which in a village of four hundred houses is not a piece of information but a condition.

The scheduler, whose name is Simon and who is not a hard man and who that Monday had spoken with the sheet in his hand and the voice of someone who has already answered this objection elsewhere, had said the thing that is true, namely that for the same driving hours the four carries more people than the nineteen, and that whoever wants the diversion must say which journey is to be taken off to pay for it; and nobody had answered him, not out of fear and not out of agreement, but because that sentence, in the figures in which it is written, has no answer.

In the four hundred metres that separate the Grangewood sign from the turn-off for Netherseal, straight road, high hedge on the left, ploughed field on the right, which at forty-eight miles an hour are used up in a little more than half a minute, Denise looked at the dashboard clock, which was showing four minutes more than it ought to have been showing; she looked at the mirror, where there was nobody; she looked ahead, where at the stop under the pine two figures stood still, one with her shopping bag set down on the ground, the other standing with her arms folded, in the attitude of someone who has been waiting since before; and while she was looking at them she made the calculation she had been making for eleven years without having to make it, that the round of the two villages cost twelve minutes, that twelve minutes were the connection lost at Ashby, that the connection lost at Ashby, in the week in which the scheduler was going through the times for the September rosters, was not a delay but a line written next to her name; and then, without having finished the calculation, or rather having finished it and having put it away as one puts away a calculation that comes out right, she put on the indicator.

The tick-tock started up. It filled the cab.

She dropped into third, which on that turn-off is compulsory because the bend is blind, and she took the diversion, and in the mirror the main road stayed straight like a thing one has decided not to do, not because it was wrong nor because it was convenient, but because that Monday, in front of the sheet with the new timetable, for the first time in eleven years it had come to her to think that being on time and being of use to somebody were two measurements that somebody, somewhere, had stopped taking together.

Pat picked up the bag before the bus had even stopped.

They got on without saying anything about the stop, the way one gets on a service that always runs, which is the way one gets on the services that are about to stop running, Marjorie first, holding on to the rail with both hands, Pat behind with the bag knocking against her knee, and the only thing that was said was that it was late, first by Pat and then by Denise by way of confirmation, two words in all, enough for the three of them.

The round of the two villages took the twelve minutes it takes, with the halt in front of the church at Netherseal where nobody got on and where the vehicle stands its twenty seconds all the same; then the indicator went off by itself coming out of the last bend, and in the cab there was nothing more to be heard, which on the main road, at that hour, is a silence that lasts a great deal longer than six miles last.

At Ashby the connection for Leicester had gone three minutes before and could still be seen, away at the far end, at the roundabout.

Denise wrote the delay on the service sheet, and under the heading for the reason, where in eleven years she had never written anything, she wrote diversion served.

Then she switched off the engine, bent forward and took the velcro strap off the gear lever.