The Clocks in This House All Tell Different Times

by Xan Brooks

  But not everyone is like Mr Pritchett. Some are not so robust, or else they had suffered in ways Mr Pritchett had not and their adventures have bent them out of shape. She has seen them out in Edmonton: the halt and the blind and the overwrought; the servicemen who appear to have only half made it home. They can’t return to their old jobs because the work is beyond them, so they get by on war pensions or sell trinkets and matches. Some of these men are outright abject while others are at pains to maintain a front of good cheer. Either way, she has the sense the world has passed them by. They would prefer to be elsewhere. They would prefer to be in different bodies than the ones they are trapped in today.

  Like Mr Pritchett, Lucy Marsh has survived her adventures and taken up her old duties. Like the men on the street, however, she would rather be somewhere else. Having previously disliked school and avoided it when she could, she is faintly surprised to find that she misses the place. School at least provided a framework that she could either rely upon or kick against. Now her days at the Griffin stretch out endlessly, unvaryingly, with nothing to look forward to except her birthday or Christmas – both of which she will in all likelihood spend working. To make matters worse, she has lost her appetite for reading. It is all she can do to pick up a book – the stories are too rich and too thrilling. The events they describe strike her as too far away and the vast yawning gap is enough to make her heart ache.

  Instead, when alone, she tries to recall the songs she was taught in the woods. She sings to herself about the man who danced with a girl who danced with a boy who danced with a girl who danced with the Prince of Wales. She sings the one about the poor puss-cat and the poignant one about the flies. “Lay their eggs and fly away, Come back on the first of May. Hatch their eggs and oh what joy, First a girl and then a boy.”

  “The taxes,” says Mr Marsh, playing pat-a-cake on the bar. “The licensing laws. The arterial road. If it weren’t for the drunks, we’d have no custom at all.”

  How strange her brain is: she can’t work herself out. For instance, she fervently wishes Brinley would ask her out again, as he promised he would; she even catches herself mooning over the memory of him during quiet moments in her bed in the eaves. And yet when Brinley does eventually drop by to see if she is free on the following night, she tells him she’s not, that she is working through a heavy summer cold and that she ought by rights to be tucked up in bed. She is so short with the youth – so sullen and disinterested – that one would never know she had ever liked him at all.

  Her window on the world frames fifty yards of Ermine Street. She can see Mick’s Bric-a-Brac and the café with its white painted lettering advertising “Dinners & Teas”, and the bedraggled butcher’s shop, forever leaking sawdust on the pavement. But the elderly man and the shire horse have stopped walking by. One day they are there and the next they are not, and though she stations herself at the glass out of habit, she never sees them again. She supposes that her grandfather was right and the tottering beast was finally rendered for glue. This is what she had feared would happen all along, what she kept vigil for each afternoon to somehow safeguard against, and yet – horrible though it is to admit – she doesn’t pine for the horse as much as she assumed that she would. One would think she’d be devastated instead of merely downcast, but there it is. The anticipation of the act is what caused her distress, whereas the execution provides something close to relief. Sometimes a murder is necessary to clear the path for fresh traffic.

  Four Sundays after her last trip to the forest she glances up from her barstool to see that a girl has materialised in the empty saloon. The girl is dressed in a crimson blouse and a navy-blue skirt and her hair appears to have been recently set. It takes Lucy a moment to place her.

  “Oh God,” she cries. “Fred.”

  Winifred grins in acknowledgement. All at once it is as if the sun burns brighter and the air tastes sweeter and the noise of the street takes on a musical lilt. Right there, that second, Lucy is convinced she has never been so delighted to see anyone ever.

  Fred says, “Poor Lucy, you really ought to have said. There was I thinking the Ring-o-Bells was a dump. This place is worse. This place is rank.”

  Lucy rises from the stool and then sits down again. Her legs are a-quiver. She says, “What on earth are you doing here? You look so pretty!”

  In a booming stage voice, Winifred says, “Believe me when I say I am your fairy godmother. I came on a pumpkin to take you away from this place. I came to tell Cinderella she can go to the ball.”

  “Seriously Fred.”

  “Seriously Luce, no word of a lie. You’re coming with me and it’s all been decided. While you’ve been sat in here twiddling your thumbs, the gentlemen have been talking and everything has been sorted. Although I’d say your grandad should take whatever he’s given and be grateful for it, but that’s up to you, my grandad’s getting nothing. All for me.” She cackles like a pirate and gestures at her clothes and clean hair. “All for me and not for nobody else.”

  Lucy shakes her head. She has been thirsting for news and conversation, for friendship and action, and now it arrives in a flood; she is bowled over and drenched. She has so many questions she cannot think which to put first. “What gentlemen?”

  “Coach and your grandad, in the taproom. Come on, Lucy, get with it. Have you been drinking or something?”

  “No,” she says. “But I don’t understand.”

  And so it is that Winifred, after an exasperated harrumph, proceeds to explain in her Winifred manner. Inside the gloomy saloon bar she lets fly a flurry of information, augmented throughout by extravagant hand motions and vaudevillian dumb-shows. She explains that the Eye-tie Falconio broke the old bastard’s arm with a hammer, after which he only went and broke up the whole pub, at which point she thought, ‘Well, to hell with this, I can do better elsewhere’. And then she remembered where they lived, out in the country, because Tinny had told her, except that she had no idea at the time it was in the middle of nowhere and she had a devil of a job, what with three different buses and then a walk on the road. And who was to say they wouldn’t turn her away? But luckily for her they didn’t turn her away, especially as she had no cash to get home, even if it was her home, which it isn’t of course, probably never was. But anyway, where was she? Oh yes, she remembers and now she has been there a week and they’ve put her up in the cottage and she eats pink salmon from the tin and bloody hell, the whole place is totally out of this world, they’ve got an African camel, no word of a lie. She says she earns a pound a week which really isn’t too shabby because the bed and board’s free, but she’s told them she is prepared to come down to fifteen bob if they get Lucy along too and pay them fifteen bob each. And really that’s not bad either because the bed and board’s thrown in, or did she say that already?

  “Stop, stop!” orders Lucy. “You’re still making no sense. Go with you where?”

  “To Grantwood, you idiot, I think you must have been drinking.” She throws her arms wide. “There’s this massive old mansion, very nearly a palace, but we’re not allowed there because the nobs wouldn’t like it. Tinny and the rest live in a little house on the grounds and that’s where we stay and I said I was bored and I wanted you there as well and they said all right, because the more the merrier and besides, they always did like us more than they liked Edith and John.”

  “But wait. Go for how long?”

  “Miles and miles. I told you already. I had to take three buses and then walk on the road.”

  “No, how long do they want us to stay?”

  Fred scrunches her face; the question has thrown her. She has never been a girl to think more than two steps ahead. “A week, I don’t know? Stay as long as you like. I’ve been there a week and I’m going back for another.”

  And sitting dazed on the edge of her stool at the bar, Lucy realises that at this point she has just two further questions, at least for the tim
e being: all of the others can wait. First she asks, “Why me?”

  “Because I like you, stupid, even when you have been drinking. And because they like you too and there’s enough Mench to go round. Also I get bored, so why not bring a pal?”

  Next she asks, “When?”

  Winifred hoots. “See, that’s why I like you, that’s the Lucy I know. Edith would say, ‘Ooh, I don’t know, my monthlies have come on’. Bloody Luce says, ‘When? Let’s go’. No time like the present, that’s what I say. Run and pack some things. You don’t need much.”

  And yet upstairs, alarmingly, she finds herself worrying that the whole thing was a joke. That she will return to the bar, dragging her packing case, to find Winifred in peals of laughter. Or worse: that she will haul her case into the bar to find Winifred gone, vanished like the old man and his horse, never to be laid eyes on again.

  “No,” she murmurs. “That’d be too cruel.”

  She wants to tell Tom what has happened but the boy is away on his wanderings. And so, horribly conscious of the time, she scribbles a note. She writes that she is off to earn money and will be away for a few days or a week and that when she returns she’ll bring him something nice. She tells him she loves him and to stay away from Higgs’ shop. Then she clatters her case down the stairs to find Fred standing with her grandparents in the hall by the door.

  Her grandmother says, “How long will you be gone?”

  Her grandfather says, “You send that money straight here. They got postboxes up there.”

  She assures Mr Marsh that she will bring it with her next week. A moment later, staring at the linoleum floor, she adds, “I’ll bring the money for Tom. But I’m keeping half for myself.”

  “You what?”

  Winifred cackles again. “She’s working for herself now. We both are.”

  Mr Marsh stares at the girl with a violent distaste. “Oh yes,” he says. “There’s a word for the job that your sort do.”

  Outside on the road, big as life, the old Maudslay. Coach has the engine cranked and is so keen to be off he barely tips her a nod. Lucy has the impression that the groundsman has been somewhat deflated by recent events. Either that or he’s feeling excluded. If the funny men have been paying Winifred direct then it follows that Coach is no longer brokering any deals. The current arrangement must be a humiliation for him. In one stroke he has been reduced to the role of driver, of servant.

  Adding to this indignity, Fred cries, “Onward, dear Coachy. And don’t spare the horses.”

  “You post me that money,” Marsh shouts from the kerb.

  “For Tom,” she shoots back. “Not for you.”

  And so it is that not forty-five minutes since Lucy looked up from her study to find Winifred in the bar, she is out and gone, the Griffin receding and a fresh adventure before her. She sits in the bed that once held four children but now contains only two, and the truck comes rolling down the length of Ermine Street, which is a better road than its namesake in France but not significantly so – at least not for Mr Pritchett and probably not for her either. And perhaps for the first time in her life she sees the place plainly, as though she is studying a two-dimensional frieze or a formal tableau. Its furniture has all been arranged for her scrutiny; the inhabitants summoned to the kerb to bid her an oblivious, unseeing farewell. She spots the hapless Higgs, his back half-turned as he labours to construct a pyramid of green apples. She sees callow Brinley Roberts, engaged in lighting one cigarette from the stub of another. She passes Dinners & Teas and the three collapsed Catholics and finally, sitting alone on the wall beside the church of St Peter, she sees her brother Tom. His head is bowed and his boot heels drum the bricks as his sister glides by scarcely five yards away. If he glanced up he would see her and if she called out he would hear her, but it is as if the boy’s name has temporarily stuck in her throat, and anyway, what could she say in those few seconds that she hasn’t already spelled out in her letter? You don’t shout ‘I love you’ in public places. It is dangerous enough to write the words on a page.

  Ermine Street unspools, winds out and is gone. Winifred says, “Oh yes, my pretties. Oh yes indeed. There’s a terrible name for the job that your sort do.”

  Now Coach presses the pedal and they rip through the industrial skirts. Here come the brickworks and chimneys and the tangle of silver tracks where the goods trains run. They flash past Mrs Ghoulardi who operates a spiritualist stand. She is sat on a stool behind her thumb-marked crystal ball. The rip tide of the Maudslay is such that it tears the patterned scarf from her head, so that Mrs Ghoulardi has to abandon the stall and pursue it out into the open road. Lucy wants to shout an apology, but the engine is loud and they are moving too fast.

  At her back, Winifred says, “Independent traders. That’s the name he was looking for.”

  The awful truth is that she is glad Tom didn’t see her. She is relieved to be able to leave him behind; it’s like shaking a burden. With each turn of the road and every jouncing pothole she can feel her chest loosen – and now the balance has shifted because it is Fred who turns quiet whereas she wants to talk. Lucy asks about Grantwood, and whether there is really a camel on the grounds. Excitably she points out that spot in the suburbs where John jumped that time. She’d thought he was dead. Thank heavens he wasn’t.

  She says, “You know what this lorry is, don’t you? I was just thinking about it and I know what it is.”

  “Hunk of junk is what it is.”

  “It only looks that way on the outside. But what it is, Fred, it’s a time machine. And when it’s out on the road it’s like it’s travelling through time.”

  “Madness,” says Fred. “Lock her up, the girl’s gone potty.”

  “Think about it. I know I’m right. Back there is the past. Up ahead’s the future. And that’s what we’re doing, we’re travelling to the future.”

  Coach bypasses the forest and points his truck to the north. Presently the girls look over the side to see that they have entered a rolling rural country of timber mills, grain silos and rust-coloured meadows. Mountainous horse chestnuts stand shackled in ivy. Blue wood smoke drifts against a distant scarp. This far afield, the land still risks running wild. A man might go to ground, forage for his food and not be seen for weeks on end. And when the roads are this clear the motorists can’t help but go faster. They bear down on the pedal and hit the fauna so hard that the fauna explodes, so that the tarmac is decorated with smeared foxes and badgers and rabbit and deer. It is a joyous, murderous country and it leads all the way to the gates of the Grantwood estate and the long shingled drive behind the Palladian lodge. The past is at their backs and before them is the future, where the girls will discover their lives changed and their fortunes improved, and will consider themselves blessed, if only for a spell.

  20

  Should a guest choose to investigate the land immediately to the rear of Grantwood House, his route would lead him on a gentle descent of sandstone steps and through the sunken Italian loggia where the classical gods stand watch and the carp stir the primordial soup of the ornamental pond. From here a raked gravel path separates the kitchen gardens from the apple orchard and then extends past the rolled lawns of a tennis court, which has in its time been graced by no fewer than four Wimbledon champions. At the back are the stables and behind these an iron gate in the wall, which creaks open to reveal a set of interconnecting workshops and service cottages clustered conspiratorially about a cobbled yard. The cottages have pitched roofs, small windows and low doors. The first is occupied by Coach and Crisis and Coach’s wife, who works as a housemaid and is up and out before dawn. The middle building, empty for years, has been given over to storage. Its rooms are packed with mouldering books, broken furniture and stacks of antique oil paintings that have been judged as outmoded and therefore not fit to be shown. Some of these oils should by rights be sold off or thrown out, although others retain a certain sentime
ntal value. A buttery likeness of the sixth Earl of Hertford hangs askew in the gloom above the sitting-room hearth.

  The funny men live in the third service cottage and they have been assured it is theirs for as long as they wish. Grantwood provides for servicemen whose injuries were so severe that they are now in need of constant care. But it also provides for those whose wounds were such that they took the decision to spare their families fresh torment and set themselves apart.

  The Grantwood Foundation, established by Lord Hertford and then passed on to his son, might be counted as one of the few truly successful ventures in the family’s extensive portfolio. Disabled veterans rattle buckets in the shopping districts of every English city. There are collection boxes inside church vestibules and fund-raising dinner-dances at costly London hotels. The head office occupies the ground floor of a town house in Hanover Square where a team of accountants channel the funds to hospitals and soup kitchens and community projects in remote rural pockets. And while it’s true that, unbeknownst to Lord Hertford, some of the funds have lately been diverted to plug outstanding holes in Grantwood’s other accounts, this remains a small, ring-fenced percentage, easily covered under general administrative costs. It is therefore not so different from the Foundation’s other hidden expenditure: a small weekly stipend for the unfortunate souls who live behind the main house.