The Silver Wind

by Nina Allan

  My mother giggled. With her fuzzy hair slightly awry and her open-necked white silk shirt she looked like a recalcitrant schoolgirl. I thanked Henry for the meal. I was relieved it would soon be over, even though I had enjoyed the food.

  “I wanted to give you this,” said Henry. “Just a little something to mark the occasion.” He took a small oblong package wrapped in a dull gold paper from his jacket pocket and pushed it towards me across the tablecloth. I hated to think what was in it, some fancy pair of cufflinks or one of the expensive fountain pens he was so fond of. Henry was always giving me pens. He liked to think of me as a scholar in the making. He, far more than my mother, had been distraught when I failed half my mock O levels. He offered to pay for a private tutor to help get me through the exams but my mother had turned him down flat.

  “There’s no point in you wasting your money,” she said. “Martin’s just lazy, that’s all.”

  She was right of course. I’m sure the only reason I finally managed to scrape into university was because I didn’t want to see the look on Henry’s face if I failed my A levels.

  Dora was different. She passed everything, although much of what she was taught held little of real interest for her.

  I tore off the paper, revealing a flat leather box. I liked the box at once. It had the patina of age, and a wonderful workmanlike quality that reminded me of the plain but elegant decor of Henry’s flat. I opened it quickly, preparing for disappointment at the sight of cufflinks or a tiepin and wanting to put the moment behind me. When I saw the watch the first thing I felt was surprise at being wrong.

  It was the simplest and loveliest of objects: steel case, black strap, white face. The hands had been set to the correct time, and the long, needle-like second hand was sweeping around the dial with a graceful gliding motion that tugged at my heart. I realised I wanted it. I smiled, in amazement at myself.

  “It’s a Longines,” said Henry. He leaned over and pointed at the dial, where the unfamiliar name was printed in black. “Longines were one of the finest Swiss firms in their heyday. Lindberg wore a Longines to fly the Atlantic. This one is a military model. It was made just after the war.”

  “I’m sure it was too expensive,” said my mother. “He’ll only go and lose it, you know.”

  That was unfair of her. We both knew I didn’t lose things. I think she felt uncomfortable sometimes, being dependent on Henry for so much.

  “Henry,” I said. “Thank you.”

  I passed the box to Dora. She held it between her hands and looked down at the watch inside. With her long green dress and dark hair pulled back from her face she looked like a mediaeval astronomer consulting an astrolabe. Henry beamed, the kind of pure, untroubled smile that was rare with him. He could tell how pleased I was and no further words were necessary. We understood each other perfectly. It was a special moment between us.

  Henry paid the bill. We walked with him to the station, where he insisted on calling a taxi to take us home. My mother sat in the front seat beside the driver, Dora and I sat close together in the back. It was still not quite dark. I could see my mother’s face in the rear view mirror. Her hands were folded in her lap and her eyes were closed. She seemed to be asleep but I knew that she was not, that she was pretending because she didn’t want the taxi man to talk to her. She had a dislike of casual conversation. My mother and I were alike in this, as I suppose we were alike in so much.

  Dora stared straight ahead, her face bathed in the orange light from the oncoming traffic. She smelled of nettles, or pine needles, some new shampoo she was using. I wanted to kiss her mouth hard, so our teeth would grind together and perhaps draw blood.

  When we got home we went straight upstairs. We went to my room, where the bed was still unmade from the morning. I pulled the cover up over the duvet and we lay down. I held her for some minutes in silence, relishing her closeness and warmth. She was seventeen then, just eleven months younger than me. That morning she had given me her own present, a recent biography of Brunel and a silver bookmark shaped like a rose.

  Dora’s presents were often bizarre but I always enjoyed them. They led me into territory I might never have explored otherwise. And while I was no scholar in the way Henry would have liked me to be, I had an appetite for books of any kind.

  “You like it a lot, don’t you?” said Dora. “The watch Henry gave you, I mean.” Her voice was muffled against my shoulder but I had no trouble understanding her. I stroked her head, feeling the bumpy fragile contours of her skull.

  “I think it’s beautiful,” I said. “It’s such a perfect thing.”

  “Clocks make me nervous sometimes,” she said. “They remind me of how little time we have left.”

  It was a strange thing for her to say. I had never known Dora to be morbid. She had a steady pragmatic mind and was too absorbed in the life she was living to worry unduly about the future. I put it down to the champagne and forgot all about it. In later years when I remembered her words I always had to push them away.

  “Does it bother you then?” I said. “My having it?”

  “I love you having it. It reminds me of your mind, all ordered and silver and neat.” She giggled and I rolled her on her back. She always saw me as orderly and painstaking, even though I saw myself as obdurate and chaotic. It was strange, how right she was. It was as if she instinctively recognised that in the luminous dial and the intricate mechanism behind it I had found everything I was looking for, an ideal of perfection and constructive order I had been striving towards without even realising it.

  She squirmed away from me and got up from the bed. “I’m tired,” she said. “Goodnight.” She kissed me on the forehead and left the room. A moment later I heard her in the bathroom, the toilet flushing and then the sound of running water. Dora’s baths were so hot they drained the immersion tank. It drove our mother crazy.

  It had been some years since Dora and I had shared a bed. We had often spent nights together before that, crammed side by side into either my bed or hers, but the older we grew the more difficult and dangerous this became. It was Dora who put a stop to it, although I had the sense that this physical separation was a temporary thing, a measure she had introduced while she, in her pragmatic way, considered the implications of doing otherwise.

  I could stand it, be resigned to it even, so long as there was nobody else.

  I lay back on the bed. It had grown dark while we were talking, but I didn’t turn on the light. I took the leather box from my jacket pocket and laid the watch gently on my pillow. It came to me that time itself had no material presence, that it did not truly exist until it had been taken up by the watch and passed through its mechanism like thread through the eye of a needle. In becoming the owner of the Longines my relationship to time had changed. I felt I had acquired rights over it. The idea had a strange power. With extreme care I raised the crown of the watch and moved the hands backwards by a quarter of an hour. I wished Dora were still with me in the room, as she had been fifteen minutes ago. I waited but she did not come. The watch’s ticking was measured and patient, like the beating of a tiny mechanical heart. I had never considered what made a watch tick before, any more than I really understood how the human heart pumped blood around the body that contained it. On that evening it was enough simply to listen. The sound was infinitely consoling. I moved the watch closer to my ear and felt my breathing become more even, my eyes begin to close.

  A college friend once told me how large parts of his childhood had been shaped by his father’s phobia of clocks. It wasn’t clocks so much, he said, as the sound they made. He could never wear a mechanical watch next to his skin because he could feel its vibrations. If there was a clock in the room he would almost instantly become aware of it to the exclusion of all other things, even much louder sounds such as voices or music.

  “Chiming clocks were the worst,” he said. “We once went on holiday to a small village in the Spanish Pyrenees. It was one of those places you read about, where the caf�
�s stay open past midnight and the old men play boules in the street. We rented a villa near the village centre. It had slate floors and a massive step-down bath made of marble. My mother and sister thought they’d died and gone to heaven. But we were only able to stay there one night.

  “There was a town clock in the square that chimed the hours, and not just the hours but the quarters and the half hours, too. I remember my father’s face when he heard it, when he first realised it was there. He went rigid all over, as if he had been injected with some paralysing drug. He didn’t sleep a wink all night. The next day we returned the keys of the villa to the agency and drove to the nearest big town. We found a good hotel and had a good holiday. But there was always this tension, this wondering if my dad would be all right. You hear about some people having the same thing with aeroplanes, or spiders. My father was never afraid of spiders, though. In fact he quite liked them.”

  When I asked him what his father had been afraid of exactly, the man just shrugged. “Time getting away from him, I think,” he said. “He once told me that lying there in the dark listening to the bells chiming off the hours was like hearing the four horsemen of the apocalypse thundering towards him across the desert.”

  In theory I could understand it but never in fact. I found the ticking of my watch to be the most soothing, the most companionable of sounds. I finally got undressed and into bed. I slipped the watch under my pillow. I went to sleep then quickly, and slept well.

  * * *

  I have no memories of my father. He left us when I was less than a year old and before Dora had even been born. For many years I didn’t even know what he looked like. Later I found a whole cache of photographs. They were in a shoebox in the airing cupboard, wedged in behind an old duvet and the spare blankets. The pictures showed a young man with dark blond, combed-back hair and thin cheeks. Some showed him with my mother, his arm around her shoulders, his hand on her knee. He was good-looking in his way. I knew I was supposed to resemble him but I just couldn’t see it. I don’t know if this was because I didn’t want to see it or if my mother had been mistaken. In any case it seemed not to matter. I had been curious to see the photographs but I wanted nothing to do with my father and was never tempted to seek him out. He, after all, had wanted nothing to do with me.

  His name was Peter Newland. He had been a sales rep for one of the first computer software companies. My mother never talked about him and apart from those bare essentials she made it clear she didn’t want to answer any questions. I once asked Henry why Peter Newland had walked out on her.

  “He claimed he never wanted children,” he said. “When he found out Violet was pregnant with Dora that was it.”

  I thought it was a cowardly action but I didn’t want to dwell on it. I knew nothing of my father, of what factors might have influenced his decisions, and had no wish to know. I did not want to be defined by someone else’s actions, least of all by the actions of someone I had never known. I put the photographs back in the shoebox and stuffed them to the back of my wardrobe. I knew that I would keep them, but I didn’t think I would look at them very often.

  My mother went to school locally in Greenwich, but that was not where she met my father. It was Peter Newland though who put down the deposit on the house in Calvert Road, and perhaps it said something about him that when he left he relinquished all claim to the house and the equity that was in it. I think Henry helped with the mortgage payments at first. Later on, when Dora and I had started going to school, my mother worked part-time as a medical receptionist.

  My first memories are of the house: the long downstairs hallway with its black and white tiles, the sour and brackish odour of the small galley kitchen, the fake William Morris wallpaper on the upstairs landing. There was a concrete yard out the back and a scrappy lawn where my mother had the rotary clothes dryer. On one side lived an old man who wore a tweed cap and bred budgerigars. On the other there was a smartly dressed young woman of a similar age to my mother, although as far as I knew the two never exchanged a word. On the wall of my bedroom was a large coloured map of the world, an early and beloved present from Henry. I learned most of it by heart and would often send myself to sleep by mentally reciting the names of all the countries in Africa or the capital cities of South America. For some reason none of this ever did me much good in my geography classes. It was a private thing, and had no connection with schoolwork.

  I remember my mother’s hands, long and slightly rough, the opal ring on the middle finger of her right. I remember how she talked on the telephone, sometimes for hours, after I had gone to bed at night.

  I have no memories of Dorothy from before the age of four but from that moment on my memories are continuous, conscious, what you might call adult.

  It is true to say I loved her at first sight, though I had no understanding of her as a sister. From the first days of my awareness of her I was thrilled by her otherness, her identity as a separate person. Until then I had lived a child’s solipsistic view of the world. If I thought about other people at all it was mostly to calculate how their actions might impact upon me. With Dora I was struck almost mute by the idea that she could be herself and yet love me, that she could ally her will with mine and yet remain intact, inviolable, gloriously private.

  Perhaps it was because we were so close in age. Perhaps it was because our mother was distant, lost in her world of troubles, and we fell back on one another. I believe none of these things. They explain closeness and sympathy but they do not explain Dora and me.

  She was a sturdy, unsmiling child who would sometimes think for a long time before speaking. Some might have said she was prone to moods. She had my mother’s coarse dark hair, Henry’s bottle-green eyes. When she was very young she would come into my arms whenever I came near her, laying her face against my chest and locking her small square hands behind my back. As she grew older she became physically less demonstrative but even so we were never apart for long.

  I never experienced a moment’s guilt over what we felt for one another and so long as there had been no question of children we might easily have flouted the law. Our mother saw what went on and ignored it. Her experience with Peter Newland had left her with little time for social conventions and she preferred to keep herself to herself.

  As a family we were peculiar. As three people sharing a house we got along surprisingly well.

  * * *

  I loved Dora so completely that the feeling was inseparable from being alive, but I was envious of her too. What I envied was her sense of herself, her pragmatism, her ability to concentrate her mind on something and succeed at it. She was interested in so many things and was good at all of them. She could have taken her life in any one of a dozen directions.

  Compared with her I felt like a fraud, a dilettante, someone kicking around on the sidelines while the game went on.

  I think Henry might have realised how I felt and he did everything he could to encourage me in my interests, but the fault wasn’t in my family or teachers, it was in me. My mind was a closed room from which I looked out at the world with a sense of incredulity that was almost entirely passive. I watched, but I took no action. Nothing affected me strongly enough to make me want to grab it and not let go.

  Henry had an old-fashioned slide-viewer, an oblong plastic box with a slit in the top. When you put in a slide a light came on, projecting the transparency against a white background. The photographs showed groups of people: at the seaside or on board an aeroplane, seated around a table in paper hats. They seemed frozen in time. I had no idea who any of them were but that didn’t matter to me. Their world seemed magical, softly lit and private, poised somehow between our own world and the past.

  I used to imagine that in a world like that anything would become possible. I would lie on my back in the middle of Henry’s living room floor, one eye pressed to the viewfinder of the slide projector and wondering how I could arrange to be transported inside it. I wanted to be like those strangers, moving through
the half-light at one remove.

  When I told Dora this she was angry. “That’s horrible,” she said. “What if you got in and then couldn’t get out?”

  She was seven years old then. I imagined her snatching up the plastic box and staring through the viewfinder, searching the unknown faces in the old photographs, desperately looking for the one she recognised.

  When Henry gave me the Longines everything changed. It was like a light going on inside me. Everything in the world seemed to gather focus, to become a function of this new passion, and finally I began to make sense of my life. I discovered in the Longines’s mechanics all the perfection and idiosyncrasy of a world in miniature. In apprehending that world I also became a part of it. I had discovered what I wanted to do: I wanted to become a connoisseur of time.

  * * *

  Dorothy and my mother didn’t get on. My mother thought Dora was cold. Dora thought my mother had let her life drown in indecision. They never fought or argued but they were uneasy in each other’s company. They sometimes went several days without speaking, though this was never the result of any particular grievance.

  When Dora became ill my mother had no idea how to cope with it. The practical things she left to Henry, and when it was all over she made her escape as quickly as she could. She had a friend, Leonie Sutton, someone she had known since school. Leonie Sutton had married an Australian, a medical student, and had gone to join him in Melbourne as soon as she graduated from college. She and my mother had kept in touch though. Their friendship was remarkable in that Leonie remained my mother’s only real friend and the only person apart from Henry that had known her before she married my father. When Dora and I were children we always saw the arrival of Leonie’s Christmas card as the signal for the start of the holiday. The cards themselves were always of the same type: small and highly-coloured on a stiff, slightly waxy white paper. Sometimes they contained a photograph of Leonie, by herself or with her husband and three children. There was always a letter, too, but those we were forbidden to look at.