by Nina Allan
Dearest Owen, she began. I have thought of you every day.
* * *
The work took him over completely. Time seemed to shrink and compress. Owen had known this would happen – indeed it seemed to him now that the fortnight of walking and planning had been a respite, a breathing space. He cut templates and formulated diagrams, calibrating the wheel train. Morton kept out of sight, and there were days when Owen glimpsed him only at breakfast, or occasionally in the saloon bar of The Almoners much later in the evening. He asked no questions about the work, or how it was going, and Owen was glad. He was too tired to talk, even if he had wanted to. The long hours with the loupe, the lathe, the hand saw and the callipers, the reduction of his world to four square feet of bench space meant that by the end of the day his hands were shaking and his eyes, red and raw from close focus, seemed incapable of taking in the wider world. Leaving the workshop, he suffered bouts of vertigo and nausea as the real world teetered around him, brash and unwieldy, its brutal colours and textures too vast and crude to bear.
The only peace to be found came in the hour or two before he turned down the light, when he would either write to Angela or reread her letters. To her alone he charted his progress, his letters a daily record of travails and triumphs. In her own letters, Angela would report the latest adventures of the rare snails in the Mermaids’ Garden, or the peculiarities of a problem of calculus set by her teacher. Sometimes, if she was having difficulties, she would copy out the problem in full and ask Owen if he had any ideas.
Every time she did this it made him laugh aloud. He had tried to explain to her that his own mathematical ability was of the kindergarten in comparison with hers, the rude practice of a mechanic, that her theoretical flights of fancy were beyond him. Nonetheless, he liked to gaze at her blue sheets of paper with their deftly etched symbols. They seemed to tell a story, even if it was in code. He even loved the way she formed her numbers, their blunt, squared-off corners, the pluses and minuses and square roots as smoothly and mysteriously executed as musical notation.
In the moments before he slept, he liked to imagine her in her room, in the lamplight, her hair pushed back from her face as she commanded her hordes of numbers as a general might command his armies. When towards the end of the summer Angela wrote that she intended to travel to London and meet with him – that it was a matter of urgency – Owen’s first reaction was to feel disconcerted. He had grown used to things the way they were, the soothing symmetry of their days, the close companionship that had grown up between them without any of the constraints or embarrassment that would inevitably have been a part of any fuller liaison. Angela’s physical absence was a part of their closeness. Owen was nervous, he supposed – nervous in case they were unable to translate the intimacy of their letters into real life. He had disclosed so much of himself to her that it was difficult to believe they had met only once, that they had spent less than half an hour alone together. What if he had moulded his idea of her to suit his needs, creating an ideal in his mind that she could not possibly live up to in reality?
Angela planned to travel on one of the many days when Lionel Norman was away on business. It would be easy, she wrote, so long as she was careful. She could get up to town and back without Norman ever knowing she had left the house. Owen wondered, all the same, what could be so urgent that she would risk a journey to London without her father’s permission? There was also the question of his work, which was at a delicate stage. He did not relish the prospect of being interrupted, even for a day.
He stifled his worries and wrote that she should come, of course she should come if she could, they would spend the day together and it would be wonderful. This was Angela, after all, he could refuse her nothing, and if she really was in trouble then he needed to know. As the hour of their meeting came closer, his doubts receded, his stomach alternately heavy and light at the prospect of seeing her, speaking with her, holding her hand.
Her train came in on time. Owen saw her approaching from the other side of the barrier. She was wearing a red summer dress, belted at the waist, and carrying a leather satchel. She had brushed her unruly dark hair into smooth-flowing waves.
“Hello, Owen,” she said. She smiled, her cheeks flushed from the heat. Other passengers were streaming past them on to the concourse. Owen found himself holding her hands, realising he had made no plans at all for the day, that he had thought no further than the moment of her arrival. He wondered about taking her for lunch at The Almoners, but rejected the idea almost immediately. Morton might be there, the students from Guy’s. He had no wish to answer their questions, then or later.
“What would you like to do?” he asked, lamely. All he wanted was to find somewhere private where they could sit close together with no one watching and keep holding hands.
“Is there a coffee house near here?” she said at once. “We really do need to talk, Owen. There are things I must tell you.”
They left the station by the Tooley Street entrance. There was an eating place Owen knew close by, The Bridge Lounge, popular with commuters and businessmen, busy enough for them not to be noticed and to speak in private. It was still relatively early, so not too crowded, and they managed to find a table by the window.
“Have you been up to London often?” Owen asked.
“Only with my father. He has a lot of friends here, people he knows through his business.” She fell silent, and a warmth emanated from her, a scent of the sea that reminded Owen immediately of the Mermaids’ Garden. A memory came to him of his mother reading him a story from the book of Hans Andersen’s fairy tales that, she said, had been a present from her grandmother when she was a girl. The book was illustrated with ten colour plates, each protected by a sheet of semi-transparent paper to stop their brightness from fading. In the story of the Little Mermaid, Andersen had described how each of the seven mermaid sisters kept her own garden at the bottom of the sea, how each of the gardens was decorated with the treasures the mermaids had gathered from sunken ships: sea chests, anchor chains, the bones of drowned sailors.
The youngest sister had one thing only in her garden, the statue of a young boy carved from white marble. In time she fell in love with the statue, believing it represented the face of her beloved. Owen forgot how the story ended. It was a distant memory, distant and gentle as the memory of his mother herself. He listened to the thump and grind of the coffee machine, the shrieks and laughter of children at another table.
“Is it too noisy here?” he asked Angela, concerned that the sudden onslaught of the city might be too much for her.
“I like it,” Angela said. She reached across the table, caught hold of his hand. “I like being here with you.”
That was when he knew his worries had been ridiculous, that their letters had been real because their feelings were real, that whatever happened next they were in it together. He smiled back at her, momentarily speechless, stupefied with happiness. He realised there had been a part of him that had always believed he would spend his life alone. Not just on account of his club foot, but something deeper, a strangeness that was in his nature and could not be altered. He had believed himself resigned to it – had welcomed it, even.
Now, with Angela before him, the idea of aloneness seemed as distant and as alien as the ocean floor.
They ordered coffee and, suddenly ravenous, two double rounds of sandwiches. As they waited for their food, Angela reached into her satchel and drew out an envelope.
“I need you to look at this,” she said, sounding serious. “I think it might be important.”
Inside the envelope was a black-and-white photograph. It showed a pocket watch, a chronograph with a split-dial setting and elegant Roman numerals. The dial was silver, or possibly platinum, intricately engraved with a pattern of roses.
Owen held the photograph up to the light. It had been taken at close range, making the image slightly blurred. In spite of this he could see at once that the timepiece was of extraordinary quality, not
just in the harmoniousness of its design but in its exemplary finish.
“What a marvellous watch,” he said. “Do you happen to know who it’s by?” The dial, Owen saw, was unsigned. The maker had probably signed the back plate instead.
Angela gave him an odd look. “You don’t recognise it?”
“I’ve never seen a piece quite like it.”
“I found this photograph in my father’s office,” she said. “If I tell you what I think it is, will you believe me?”
“Of course. Why wouldn’t I?”
She stared down at her hands, tapping her fingers against the varnished surface of the table. Then she appeared to come to a decision. “I believe this is a photograph of the watch you are working on now, the watch you are making for my father.”
“You mean this is a design he would like me to copy?”
She shook her head. “No,” she said. “I mean, this is the actual watch, the watch my father is going to buy from you once it is finished.”
Owen frowned. “I don’t understand.”
At that moment the waitress brought their coffee. Owen took a sip, scorching his lips. The burnt sienna aroma was harsh and delicious. “You have to tell me what you mean,” he said at last. He felt confused, afraid, excited, the same feeling he had experienced in Lionel Norman’s drawing room in the moments before Angela had first entered the room and entered his life. As if he was standing on the cusp of something marvellous and new.
What Angela seemed to be suggesting was impossible, and yet he knew it was real. He wondered later how things might have turned out if he had torn the photograph in two and refused to discuss it. He saw himself taking Angela by the hand, leaving the inn and walking with her over London Bridge, into the late August sunshine and another life.
“You don’t like my father, do you?” Angela said.
Owen started, broken out of his reverie, confused by her seeming change of tack. “I wouldn’t say that,” he said. “I’m not entirely sure that I can trust him, I suppose.”
“It’s all right for you to admit it. I’m glad you don’t like him. It shows you have fine instincts. But liking him or not liking him isn’t the point. The point is, my father is dangerous. I don’t mean just to us, although of course if he knew what we were doing he would try to stop us. I mean he’s ruthless and greedy and he’ll risk anything to get what he wants. It’s why my mother left him. I think she was even afraid of him in the end.”
Owen felt a thrill of vindication. He had been right then, to take against Lionel Norman. His aversion was natural, the same fear and disgust experienced by the hare at the sight of the fox.
“Your mother,” he said. “I thought – your father said—”
“Mama isn’t dead, if that’s what you mean. My father likes to pretend she is, because he still can’t stand the fact that she walked out on him. She’s living in France now, in a town called Sommières, near Montpellier. She writes to me care of the post office in Goring, because she doesn’t want my father to find out where she is.”
“She left you alone with him?”
“She knows how badly I want to go to Cambridge. She won’t let anything get in the way of that.” She looked down again at her hands. “17, rue de Durel,” she said suddenly. “That’s where I’ll be. If anything were to go wrong, I mean. Don’t tell anyone.”
She gazed at him earnestly from behind her glasses, her eyes the same greenish gold he remembered from their brief half hour in the Mermaids’ Garden.
“I wouldn’t,” Owen said. “I won’t.” His heart seemed to twist inside his chest. “Please, tell me about the watch.”
For a moment she said nothing. She toyed with the breadcrumbs on her plate. They had eaten their sandwiches almost without realising it. “My father came from a poor family,” Angela said finally. “He left home at sixteen. His parents were Jehovah’s Witnesses. They wanted my father to go into the Faith, but he ran away to London instead. He got a job selling dress and curtain fabric off a market stall in Whitechapel. He turned out to be good at it – not just at persuading people to buy things, but finding the things that people wanted to buy. He was never out of work after that, not even after the Crash. He made most of his money during the war.”
“Are you trying to tell me your father was smuggling arms?”
The possibility had not occurred to him before, yet Owen found now that it had, it made perfect sense.
Angela smiled, a wan, resigned smile that suggested she had rehearsed the facts so many times in her head she could no longer doubt them. “To be an arms trader you need money and you need influence. When the war broke out, my father had neither – not enough, anyway. What he did have was an eye for opportunity and a talent for doing business. He broke the trade embargo with Germany, both during the war and immediately afterwards. That makes him guilty of treason. My father knew that if he was caught he could face the death penalty, but that was the kind of risk he was willing to take.”
“You mean he was a German spy?”
Angela laughed. “Daddy was never a spy. He doesn’t care about politics, he’s a natural mercenary. He shipped German goods to anyone who wanted to buy them, which turned out to be a lot of people. The Germans had scientific resources – radar technology, navigational equipment, new kinds of weapons – that were more advanced than any developed in Britain. If you were to argue with him about it, he would say it was his way of helping the war effort, by evening things up. It’s a sound argument, in one sense, but my mother never forgave him and what he wants to do now is even more dangerous.”
“What does he want to do?”
“He wants to import technology from the future. He believes your watch – your tourbillon – will give him a way to do it.”
Owen stared at her in consternation. Then he laughed. “What you’re suggesting is impossible,” he said. “I make watches, not time machines.” Hearing his own words spoken aloud made him want to laugh still harder, a wild, shrill laughter tinged with the sound of madness. For what is a watch but a time machine? he thought. If this is madness I am half in love with it already.
“You do know about Breguet’s diaries?” Angela said.
“Of course.” He felt momentarily surprised that Angela should speak so casually of the great Swiss watchmaker, that she would have heard of him even, the man who had invented the tourbillon, who had created some of the greatest timepieces in the world, almost losing his head to the guillotine in the process. But then, why should she not have done? Angela’s hero was the mathematician Sophie Germain. Mathematics was her lifeblood, and Abram-Louis Breguet was one of the greatest engineers who ever lived. “They’re a nonsense though, an old man’s fantasy. There’s no such thing as the Time Stasis. There never could be.”
“There was no such thing as the motor car or the aeroplane until someone invented them.”
“Not me,” Owen said. “I still count on my fingers, especially when I’m tired. I’m a mechanic, not a physicist.”
“You don’t know what you are,” she said. “Not yet.”
He felt suddenly dizzy, seized by claustrophobia. His surroundings grew indistinct, an unfocussed, noisy jumble of colour and sound. “Let’s go outside,” he said. “It’s difficult to think straight in here.”
He fumbled in his pocket for coins, and as he walked up to the bar to pay the bill he found his hands were shaking. He glanced back at Angela, suddenly anxious that she would be gone, the past hour a kind of fugue state, a fantasy. He wondered if this was how people began to lose their minds – not in a catastrophic meltdown, but in a slow and insidious seeping away of what was real.
Angela was still there, looking out of the window at the people passing by, her arms folded on the table in front of her. If anything, she seemed more real than those around her, the drinkers and diners at the other tables, whose appearance and costume and manner of speech meant as little to him as if they were stage dressing, a company of extras paid by the hour who would disperse amids
t merry chatter once this scene was over.
Could there be even an iota of reason in what Angela was suggesting? Time travel? Smuggling weapons that could avert or more likely cause a new world war? The kind of ideas that would appeal to Mr Wells, perhaps – Owen had read The Time Machine and enjoyed it well enough but for all its gorgeous invention it was still just a story.
Why then did he feel so afraid? For it was fear he felt, he realised, the kind that seizes the heart when you sense a lurking presence in a darkened hallway yet refuse to make a light.
They crossed the road and went down the steps into Potters Fields. The park was busy with lunchtime strollers, office clerks and shop girls, children playing tricks on their au pairs. They walked companionably side by side, sunshine dappling the pathway in front of them, and Owen thought how happy he would be to make light of what Angela had told him, or better still, to forget it entirely. What he wanted was simply to be with her, to feel again the nervous excitement that had overcome him when he first saw her at the station, as if everything around him were gifted with a peculiar brightness.
He tried pointing things out to her – a trio of nuns, a Dalmatian dog, two schoolboys trying to get a kite down from a tree. The kite was red, like a sail, like that kite of Anthony’s that had dived into the sea that day at Dawlish. Owen hoped these sights would capture Angela’s attention, help to draw her out of herself, yet still there was a tension between them, that odd sense of hiatus that always descends in the wake of an unfinished conversation. Angela smiled distractedly, hugging her satchel to her chest. Her desire to return to the subject they had been discussing was obvious, insinuating itself between them like a third person. In the end he had no choice but to give in to it.
“Where did your father come by the photograph?” he said at last. “The photograph of the watch, I mean.”
“That’s the strange part.” She spoke without missing a beat, as if their twenty minutes of awkward, inconsequential small talk had never happened. “He’s been travelling a lot recently – Amsterdam, Brussels, Berlin. Sometimes he comes back filled with energy, at other times he’s so exhausted he sleeps for days. I don’t know which scares me more. I stole the photograph out of his desk last week, while he was in Manchester. There were several copies, half a dozen at least, so I’m hoping he won’t notice that one has gone missing. The photographs were in an envelope – a stamped, addressed envelope sent to our house in Worthing. I know you’re going to find this difficult to believe, which is why I needed to tell you in person. The date on the postmark was – well, it was twenty years from now, or almost. June 1943.”