The Silver Wind

by Nina Allan

  “Rye’s OK,” Stephen said. “He takes after his granddad, that’s all.” I knew nothing of Levin’s grandfather and for some reason Stephen refused to tell me about him. Levin’s father had been born and raised in London. He was an antiques dealer in Spitalfields. I had only seen him the once, when he had been called into school in the aftermath of the gun incident. Rye Levin had smuggled a gun into school in his duffel bag. The gun wasn’t loaded, and looked about as threatening as a cap gun. It was one of his father’s antiques, with an engraved barrel and a mother-of-pearl handle, what was known in collectors’ circles as a Ladies’ Weapon. The headmaster made Rye stand up in school assembly. He hated what he saw as Rye’s insolence and wanted to make an example of him. He asked Levin what he thought he’d been playing at and Levin said the gun had been a present from his father.

  “You’ll come to a bad end if you’re not careful,” said the headmaster. “Young men like you always do.” He made a violent dismissive gesture and I could see his hands were shaking. Levin was kept in detention for a week. For two hours each day after school he sat alone in the gym filling an exercise book with obscene drawings and chemical equations. I never found out what became of the gun.

  Rye Levin was tall and lanky with dirty brown-blond hair that was always flopping forward into his eyes. Stephen was dark, like me. Levin dropped out of school halfway through the sixth form but I still saw him in the street sometimes. He was always alone. Occasionally he would speak to me. I once ran into him in the local newsagent’s. He was buying cigarettes, Silk Cuts. His clothes were crumpled and smelled stale. The stubble showed on his chin, as if he hadn’t shaved for several days.

  “I’ve not seen your brother around much lately,” he said. “Tell him I said hello.”

  I nodded and mumbled assent. I was thirteen then. I did still see Stephen, but usually it was at a distance, ahead of me in the cinema queue or coming down the opposite escalator at London Bridge Station. Perhaps he thought I no longer needed him, that I was old enough to look after myself. On the rare occasions we were together I tried to ask him about it but he would never answer. Every time I saw him I was afraid it might be the last.

  My first time machine was a Smith, one of the post-war models with a stainless steel Dennison case and a silvered dial. It was given to me for my thirteenth birthday by my aunts, Judith Greening and Myra Dillon. They weren’t my real aunts, just friends of my Uncle Henry, but I had known them all my life and they were like family. Uncle Henry was my mother’s brother, and lived north of the river in West Kensington. The Aunts lived in Brighton, close to the sea. We often went to Brighton to visit them, but I quickly came to realise that my mother didn’t enjoy these trips as much as I did. At first I thought she was uncomfortable with the fact that they were lesbians, but later on I came to believe it was because they had known my father. My mother never talked about my father. She was reluctant to tell me even his name.

  Judith and Myra’s bungalow was one of the asbestos prefabs that had been put up after the war in an effort to cure the housing shortage. Most of them were later demolished and replaced with traditional brick-built houses. There were even grants to help with the cost of doing this but the Aunts refused to apply for one. They saw their home as a part of history and they preferred to keep it exactly the way it was. The outside was painted yellow and trimmed with narrow black beams in a casual approximation of mock Tudor. The bungalow had been built to a strange design, with the kitchen and bedrooms and dining room arranged around the living room like the cells in a honeycomb. The living room itself had no exterior windows. My mother used to say it was the ugliest place she had ever seen but I adored it. I found its very ugliness enticing. I loved also the small glazed veranda that the Aunts called the loggia. In winter when the rains came it felt like the observation turret of a submarine. In summer it smelled of creosote and peeling paint.

  Judith and Myra were both history teachers. Myra was tall and thin with spindly wire-framed glasses. She wore her hair in a long grey plait that fell straight as a bell rope between her jutting shoulder blades. My mother used to call her the Spider. Judith’s hair was curly and still dark. Her eyes were different colours, one a translucent green, the other a light hazel. In certain lights the hazel eye looked almost golden, like a cat’s eye. When we arrived for my birthday visit it was Judith who opened the door.

  “Happy birthday, Martin!” She flung her arms around me, hugging me fiercely against her flat chest. I could smell her usual aroma, a dense, dry scent like almonds or marzipan. Of the two Aunts it was Myra who usually talked the most but Judith was the more affectionate. When I was younger she often took me for walks on the beach and I had always enjoyed these times alone with her. She was older than my mother, but had a playful innocence that kept her seeming young. She loved animals. Once when we were down on the sand we came across a fish that had been left stranded when the tide went out. It was trapped in a shallow pool between two low hillocks of sand. It was a flatfish, a bottom feeder, a ray of some kind. Its speckled colouring made it all but invisible.

  “Oh no, the poor thing!” cried Judith. “Wait here.”

  She ran off up the beach, leaving me standing beside the pool. I watched her tiny figure receding, the thin cotton skirt flapping against her shins. She was gone for almost half an hour and I had started to worry about what was going to happen to the fish. It was a hot day. The water in the pool had begun to go down.

  Finally Judith returned, haring towards me across the sand, carrying the red plastic bucket and spade that I had used for building sandcastles when I was small. She went down on her knees in the sand, filled the bucket with water from the pool and used the back of the spade to chase the fish inside.

  “Got him,” she said. “Just in time.” We went to the edge of the sea, to where the rock pools were deep and secure and shaded from the sun. Judith lowered the bucket into the water and sighed as the fish swam free.

  “They’re so beautiful, aren’t they?” she said. She kissed the top of my head and shortly after that we went back to the house.

  My birthday seemed to have got her very excited. “I can’t believe you’re a teenager already,” she whispered. “How does it feel?”

  Myra kissed my mother on the cheek. “Violet, how lovely to see you,” she said. “Is Martin allowed to try a glass of champagne?”

  “I don’t see why not, but I doubt he’ll drink it,” said my mother. “He never likes trying new things.”

  That was not true, and both of us knew it. I knew also it was not me she was trying to get at, but Myra. I sensed again my mother’s resistance, not hostility exactly but a cool dislike. The Aunts were Henry’s friends after all, not hers. Thomas Byrne, the man Henry had lived with for more than a decade, had been at school with Myra’s brother Edwin. Henry and Myra had known one another for years.

  The table was already laid, the white lace tablecloth, the glasses like crystal trumpets on twisted stems. There was something beside my plate, a small oblong package wrapped in a dull gold paper.

  The champagne tasted bitter and yellow. It filled the back of my throat with a strange dry heat.

  Bloody hell, said Stephen. It’s the real McCoy. No cheapskate Tesco’s Cava for the Spider. It was the first time I had seen him for several weeks.

  “Should we eat first, do you think?” said Myra. “Or would Martin like to open his present?”

  “Oh, the present first, of course,” said Judith. “It isn’t fair to make him wait.”

  It was unusual for her to express a preference ahead of Myra. My mother looked up at her sharply. Their eyes met briefly then each of them looked away. I had been feeling curious about the gold package but now I was nervous. It seemed there was a lot riding on it.

  Get a move on then, said Stephen. Best get it over with.

  I knew Stephen hated birthdays. He thought they were a lot of fuss about nothing. For my last birthday the Aunts had given me a pair of cloisonné cufflinks. He had teased
me about them for weeks.

  I tore off the paper, revealing a hinged box covered in brown leather. I liked the box at once. It had a workmanlike feel about it, and a smell of wax polish, and for some reason made me think of the gun Rye Levin had brought into school, the swatch of yellow silk he had used to wrap it in. I opened the box quickly, steeling myself for disappointment at what might be inside. When I saw the watch I was left speechless. It came as such a total surprise.

  “Henry helped us choose it,” said Judith. “He has such immaculate taste.”

  Henry had given me a gift already that morning, Cusk’s Illustrated Guide to Clocks and Watches, an expensive-looking brick-shaped book full of colour plates. I had thought it was another of Henry’s attempts to educate me. Now that I had the watch it all made sense.

  “It’s beautiful,” I murmured. I could not take my eyes off it.

  “It’s a Smith watch,” said Henry. “Smith made all the watches for the army and the air force during the war. They were a good firm, one of the last of the great English watchmakers.”

  The Smith’s design was elegant but simple, like a child’s drawing. I loved it on sight. You might say I lost my heart to it. I recognised its beauty instinctively, but that wasn’t the point. I loved the fact not just that it was, but that it did something, that it was mechanics in miniature, a perfectly constructed machine. When I held the watch to my ear I heard its robust, reassuring tick as the dynamic throbbing of a mighty engine. I thrilled at the idea of it, so secret and so alive in the palm of my hand. In that instant of recognition I was lost.

  Slowly I came back to the present. To the lunch table with its lace tablecloth and champagne glasses and Viennese dinner rolls. Henry and the Aunts were smiling broad smiles. My mother was staring down at her empty plate. Her expression was grim and closed, reminding me of a spy drama I had seen on television in which a captured female agent was interrogated many times but never confessed.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I love it.”

  “Aren’t you going to wear it?” said Judith. “Aren’t we going to see you try it on?”

  The idea made me nervous. I would have preferred to keep the watch in its box, but I didn’t want to spoil the moment by making a fuss. I unhooked the Smith from its elastic fastening and strapped it on. The leather wristband was soft and pliable, and I could tell from the way the strap holes were stretched that the watch had already been worn a great many times. I felt a strange sense of kinship with the previous owner. I wondered who he was, what had happened to him. I knew he must be dead. It did not seem possible to me that he would have given the Smith away or sold it of his own accord. I made him a silent promise: that I would cherish and look after the watch just as he had.

  I had owned other watches before of course, a black Casio with a digital display that Henry had given me, a cheap plastic Swatch with a cartoon cat on the dial that I had won in a Christmas cracker. Neither watch had meant anything to me; they were just a convenient means of telling the time.

  The Smith made me feel different, powerful. It made me feel as if I owned time, as if my relationship to time had somehow been changed.

  “Look how well it suits you,” said Judith. “I want to get a photograph.”

  She darted off to the bedroom to fetch the camera, an ancient Kodak in a box case that the Aunts had had ever since I’d known them. A moment later I was made to smile and hold out my wrist. Stephen made a face and stuck out his tongue at the camera. That was all right for him, he wouldn’t show up in the picture. The flashgun went several times.

  “Let’s get one of you all together,” said Henry. “I’ll take it.”

  Judith put her arm around my shoulders and squeezed me tightly against her.

  “Say cheese,” she said. I saw my mother try to smile and fail.

  What’s wrong with her? I thought.

  She can’t stand being around Judith, said Stephen. She can’t wait to get home.

  I turned in my seat to face him.

  What do you mean? I said. Why?

  “Oh, Martin,” said Henry. “You moved. I’ll have to take the picture again.”

  Stephen’s father was called Peter Newland. He was a sales rep for one of the first computer software companies and much of his work involved travelling. He died soon after Stephen was born.

  “He had a heart attack,” Henry had told me. “He was in a hotel somewhere on the outskirts of Manchester. Apparently it ran in the family. His father and his brother both died from heart attacks. There was nothing that could have been done.”

  Stephen had the same condition but even worse. He was five years old when he died. The doctors said he was something of a miracle. Most children with his kind of defect died soon after birth.

  My mother didn’t keep any photographs of Peter Newland around the house and until I was sixteen I had no idea what he looked like. It was Myra who showed me his picture, a faded snapshot that showed him wearing shorts and sitting astride a bicycle. Seeing it made me realise how much Stephen resembled my mother. Peter Newland had fair hair and well-muscled legs and a clean-shaven boyish face. He was handsome but in an ordinary way. He could have been anyone.

  “Peter was a nice boy,” said Myra. “But Violet could never forgive him for dying. She saw it as a betrayal.”

  Myra took the photograph out of my hand and put it away in a drawer. She was a senior lecturer by then, and held an important position in the History Department of Sussex University. My own father had been a friend of hers, another history lecturer who was visiting from Düsseldorf. So far as I knew he had no idea I existed.

  My mother had been beautiful once. There was a photograph in Henry’s flat that showed her in her last year of school, the same year she met Peter Newland. Her hair was fuzzy and dark, and stood out in a soft corona around her head. Her bare shoulders were narrow and pale, like the wings of a dove. Henry told me she had been keen on studying medicine at one point but had never followed it up.

  “Everything happened so quickly,” he said. “She and Peter met and married in less than three months.”

  He told me that she had been very depressed after Stephen’s death and that had made her stop caring about her appearance. She wore shapeless, frowsy clothes that made her look pallid and spinsterish, years older than she was. Her one remaining vanity was her shoes. On the day of my thirteenth birthday she was wearing a pair of sleek brown sandals with four-inch stiletto heels. The narrow straps criss-crossed her ankles like the bridle on a Lipizzaner horse.

  “Have some more bread, Violet,” said Myra. “It’s awfully good.” She held out the basket of rolls. My mother took one and immediately laid it aside on the edge of her plate.

  “He’s wonderful, our baker,” said Judith. “Everything’s organic, and made by hand.” She selected a roll and appeared to study it, turning it in her hands as if it were some small but highly significant work of art. “His son Lindsay obviously takes after him. He loves making things. He does these amazing model aircraft, all to scale.”

  “He’s about Martin’s age actually,” said Myra. “Perhaps we should introduce them one of these days.”

  “He goes to school just round the corner,” said Judith. “It’s a wonderful place, one of the new technology colleges. The headmaster there is marvellous. He gets the most outstanding results. His Ofsted report this year was one of the best in the country.”

  “It would do Martin the world of good to go to a place like that,” said Myra. “The emphasis is very much on individual attention for every child.”

  “Martin’s fine where he is, thank you,” said my mother. “And he has plenty of friends of his own.”

  She darted me a frightened glance and then looked down again at her plate. I had the oddest feeling, as if I had stumbled on the edge of something, a piece of rusted metal half-buried in sand.

  I knew it, said Stephen. Time to boogie.

  What’s going on? I said. What are they talking about?

  “You shou
ldn’t dismiss it out of hand, you know, Violet,” said Henry. “That school he’s at is hardly a centre of excellence.”

  “I don’t believe this,” said my mother. “You’re on their side.”

  “I’m not on anyone’s side. I just think you could do with a break.”

  “A break?” said my mother. “From my own son?”

  There was a sudden crushing silence around the table. I stared at my mother’s hands, her slim, still graceful fingers laced rigidly together in her lap. There was an opal ring on the middle finger of her right hand, a beautiful thing, a large oval stone in a gold claw setting that she had worn for as long as I could remember. When I was a small child she had occasionally let me play with it. I loved the way its colours seemed to run together beneath the surface, making the whole stone pulse with a rainbow light.

  “The best opals come from Australia,” she told me. “The Aborigines believe they hold magical powers.”

  She had a friend in Australia called Leonie Sutton, someone she had known since her schooldays. Leonie Sutton had married an Australian medical student and gone to live with him in Melbourne. She was always asking my mother to visit but she never had. She said she couldn’t afford it, even though Henry would have been glad to pay her airfare. She collected books on Australia and knew a lot about its history. Whenever she heard the place mentioned a fierce opalescent light came into her eyes.

  “You should go and have a look at the beach, Martin,” said Henry. “It’s a shame to be cooped up inside on a day like this.”

  Sounds ideal, said Stephen. Let’s get out of here.

  I knew it was pointless to stay. Whatever was going on I could tell from their stony faces that they had no intention of talking about it while I was there. I set off towards the promenade, smelling the familiar odours of seaweed and brine. Stephen ambled beside me, kicking a stone.