by Nina Allan
He took my hand in his, then placed the watch in the centre of my palm and closed my fingers securely around it.
“What’s your name?” he said. When I told him he smiled and seemed pleased.
“Martin,” he said. “That means ‘dedicated to Mars.’ Did you know that Mars is the god of war? You must be a fighter.” He laughed out loud. “You’ve certainly been in the wars today.” He pointed at my jeans. I saw that they were torn and stained with red.
“You’d better get going,” he said. “You ought to get that seen to.” He stood up, springing to his feet in a single bound. Before I could say anything he had set off across the sand, walking, almost dancing, in the direction of the West Pier. I started to go after him, but was brought up short by the pain in my injured leg.
“Wait,” I called. He was moving rapidly out of earshot, and I cupped my hands around my mouth to amplify the sound. “I don’t even know your name.”
“Ferenc,” he called back to me. “It means ‘free man.’”
He smiled, but it was not the smile I had seen on him earlier. It was a wide and mischievous grin, almost a leer. He waved, and spun his cane in the air, and suddenly he seemed as dangerous and unpredictable as I had always imagined him to be. I took a step backwards, bumping my heel against the edge of the concrete ramp. I glanced down to check my footing, and when I looked up he was gone.
I felt a deep and unaccountable relief. I began inching my way up the beach. My injured leg made even slow walking painful, especially on the rough shingle, and by the time I reached the promenade I had started to sweat. Normally I could walk for hours and not feel tired, but now I found I had to concentrate all my efforts just to keep going. I was almost all the way back to the bungalow before I realised I was still holding the watch, still clutching it in my palm just as Ferenc had presented it to me. I also realised something else: I could feel the watch ticking, the miniscule rapid vibrations of its secret heart.
I stopped walking at once. The sudden cessation of movement sent a spasm of pain through my bruised knee but I barely registered it. I was listening with my whole body, straining every nerve outwards. I could hear waves falling and sighing on the beach, the distant grumbling of traffic on the coast road. It was impossible that I could hear the watch, so small a sound against that background of noise, but I heard it anyway, the steady, immutable beat that had become the living centre of my life.
Slowly I unfolded my fingers. The second hand was sweeping the dial. I held the watch so I could examine it better, half afraid that what I was seeing was a trick of the light. Sunlight flashed off the unbroken glass. The elegant blued-steel hands showed me four o’clock.
I knew this was impossible, that it had to be later than that. The watch had stopped at twenty past three, and I had spent a half an hour at least talking to Ferenc. Added to that there was the time it had taken to get from the beach to the bungalow. Thirty minutes of my life had disappeared.
I started to tell myself that the Smith had simply stopped for half an hour and then started working again. I could even persuade myself that there was some kind of crazy logic in what Ferenc had done, that it had been the beat of his heart that had set the watch going, as garage mechanics might use jump leads to start a flat car battery.
But none of that felt right to me. The day now seemed different, older. I had the same feeling I had after an afternoon nap: bleary-eyed and slightly confused, with the sense that something important had happened while I had been asleep, that the world had a secret it was determined to keep from me.
What I needed was evidence. I thought suddenly of the old Westclox alarm clock that the Aunts always kept in the kitchen pantry. It was made of tin and its tick was so loud that you could hear it even when the pantry door was closed. I had always thought it rather ugly but Myra seemed inordinately fond of it.
“I had that clock when I was up at Oxford,” she had told me on several occasions. “It has always kept excellent time.”
If the Westclox read five o’clock or later then it would prove that the Smith had simply stopped for half an hour and then started running again. In a sense how that might have happened was immaterial. But if the Smith and the Westclox agreed then that would seem to suggest something else entirely. It occurred to me that Ferenc could have moved the hands himself, that he could have reset the watch to the correct time before giving it back to me, but I had not seen him do it. Besides that I could have sworn he had not been wearing a watch of his own. He would have had to guess the time, and any attempt to reset the hands would have been an estimate at best.
I could think of nothing that would explain the mended glass.
I approached the bungalow from the road. There was another way in, a shortcut, a narrow gravelled path that ran straight from the promenade into a service lane behind the garden, but I didn’t want to use it that day. I knew that everyone would be in the loggia and if I came in through the garden they would see me at once. That was the last thing I wanted. I needed a couple of minutes to myself.
The front door opened directly into the kitchen. I went straight to the pantry, to the Westclox alarm clock, sandwiched in its usual place between the toast rack and the egg timer.
It read twelve minutes past four, the same as the Smith. There was less than a second’s difference between the two.
I put the Westclox back on the shelf and closed the door. I leaned upon it, letting it take my weight. It was hot in the kitchen, hot and buzzing as a beehive. All at once I felt very tired. My bruised knee began to throb.
I stood like that for a couple of minutes, trying to recover myself. The dazed feeling started to recede and I supposed it had been brought on by the heat. I took a glass from the shelf under the window and filled it with water from the tap. The water was tepid, with the sour, slightly sulphurous taste that was always a feature of the water at the Aunts’. The door to the rest of the bungalow was open, and I could hear Henry and Myra in one of their interminable political discussions, this one about the American oil tycoon who had recently announced his intention to stand for president.
“It’s a blatant case of vested interests,” said Myra. “If his motives weren’t so transparent I might be less furious.”
“Everyone has vested interests if you look closely enough,” said Henry. “It’s what politics is all about.”
Judith appeared in the doorway, carrying a tray. The tray was loaded with empty glasses and a china dish containing the remains of a trifle.
“My God, Martin,” she cried. “What on earth happened to you?”
She dumped the tray on the counter and rushed to my side. She caught me by the shoulders, almost knocking the glass of water out of my hand.
“Did someone do this to you?” she said.
“No,” I said. I tried to back away from her a little. “I fell over, that’s all. It was an accident.”
“You’ll have to get out of those things. Go and run a bath. I’ll see what I can do with those jeans.”
I did as she said, mostly to escape all the fuss. I lay back in the bath, listening to the slow dripping of water from the hot tap. When I put my big toe to the mouth of the tap the dripping stopped. The cut on my leg was puckered at the edges and a deep red at the centre. It looked like a small jagged mouth. Bruises were already forming, a blue-green skein of silk that gradually ate up most of my upper thigh. After I got out of the bath Judith doused my leg with TCP. The pain was fierce and stinging but I hardly cared. The thing that bothered me was Judith. I was all but naked, wrapped only in a bath towel. Her closeness, her touch, made me almost frantic with embarrassment. For some moments afterwards I wondered how I would ever be able to look at her again.
She appeared not to notice how uncomfortable I was. Finally she handed me my jeans.
“I’ve cleaned them off a bit,” she said. “They’ll have to do until you get home.” She screwed the cap back on the bottle of surgical spirit and replaced it in the bathroom cabinet. As soon as she was go
ne I put on my clothes.
I returned to the lounge. Myra was cutting a chocolate cake into large slices. Henry was pouring sherry into glasses, the striped Murano goblets he had found and bought in a junk shop near the Lanes.
“Are you all right?” said my mother. They were the first words I’d heard her speak since I came in. She looked battered and exhausted, like a frightened bird. I wanted somehow to reassure her, but I had no idea what to say.
“I’m fine,” I said. “It was just a stupid accident.” I briefly touched the back of her hand. She jumped as if I had burned her then turned away.
We left just after seven o’clock. We usually walked to the station but because of my leg we took a taxi instead. Henry sat in the front and chatted to the driver. I sat next to my mother in the back. She was very quiet, and I didn’t try to speak to her. It was dusk by then; the sky was full of an ambient, amethyst light.
Henry found us seats on the train and then announced that he was going to the buffet car. My mother sat in silence, her shoulder pressed tight up against the window. Eventually I asked if she was feeling unwell. Her eyes seemed to sparkle with an unnatural brightness and I realised with a shock that she was crying.
“They want you to live with them and go to that school,” she said. “Is that what you want to do?” Her words came out in a rush, as if she had been holding them back against their will.
“No, Mum, it’s not,” I said. “I’m absolutely fine where I am.”
She peered at me balefully, as if trying to catch me out in a lie. I thought as I had often thought how beautiful her eyes were, navy blue, just like Stephen’s. I felt as if there were other things I should say but words failed me. It had been a tiring day.
In the end she seemed satisfied. She rummaged in her handbag and took out a book, a new paperback about doctors in Africa. She leaned back in her seat and started to read. I put my face close to the window and watched the fields roll by. I longed to be home. I wanted to go upstairs to my room and shut the door. Once there I would turn on the bedside lamp and read the introduction to the book on watches that Henry had given me. Then I would slowly begin to go through the pictures.
I felt in my pocket for the Smith. It was there, safe in its neat leather box.
You’re like the mad dwarf in that awful opera, said Stephen. Gloating over his treasure.
Henry had once tried to make us listen to the whole of Wagner’s Ring Cycle but he had never got further than Das Rheingold because Stephen had done something to his record player. I smiled to myself at the memory, but when I turned to look at Stephen he was gone.
It never occurred to me to try and dismiss what had taken place that day. I knew already that miracles could happen, that the important thing was not that they happened but the significance you attached to them. By the time we changed trains at London Bridge I had made a decision: I would become a connoisseur of time, a time-savant. I would collect information and evidence, the way any conventional biographer might build up a file on his subject. I would do my best to tell time’s story. I hoped that by doing this I might eventually understand the story I was trying to tell.
Three months later I received a letter from Rye Levin. I was surprised to get it. I hadn’t known he knew my address. He told me he had decided to join the army and was about to start basic training. He wished me luck with my GCSEs. Tucked into the envelope with his note was a photograph, an old Polaroid.
I found this when I was sorting my stuff, he wrote. I thought you might like to have it. I still miss him.
The photograph was of my brother Stephen. Rye Levin was standing beside him, making a rude gesture with one hand and miming a gun with the other. Stephen was smiling. The colours of the photograph had corrupted slightly, and his blue eyes looked green, like the sea.
They were on Brighton beach, standing beneath the entrance to the West Pier. In a booth just off to one side a man in a boater and blazer was handing out flyers. His skin was very pale, as if he were wearing stage makeup, and I saw at once that it was Ferenc. He was wearing white gloves, like a mime artist. His black cane was tucked under his arm.
THE SILVER WIND
Shooter’s Hill had a rough reputation. The reforestation policy had returned the place to its original state, and the tract of woodland between Blackheath and Woolwich was now as dense and extensive as it had once been in the years and centuries before the first industrial revolution. The woods were rife with carjackers and highwaymen, and scarcely a week went by without reports of some new atrocity. The situation had become so serious that there were moves in parliament to reinstate the death penalty for highway robbery as it had already been reinstated for high treason. During the course of certain conversations I noticed that local people had taken to calling Oxleas Wood by its old name, the Hanging Wood, although no hangings had occurred there as yet. At least not officially.
* * *
There was still a regular bus service out to Shooter’s Hill, although I heard rumours that the drivers rostered on to it had to be paid danger money. I made up my mind to call on Owen Andrews in the afternoon. The evening curfew was strictly enforced in that part of London.
“How on earth do you manage, living alone out here?” I asked him. “Don’t you get nervous?”
He laughed. “I’ve lived here for most of my life,” he said. “Why should I leave?”
Owen Andrews was an achondroplasic dwarf, and as such he was subject to all the usual restrictions. He could not marry, he could not register children, and I wondered if this question was now academic, if he had been sterilised or even castrated in one of the holding camps. Everyone had heard of such cases, and to knowingly pass on defective genes had been a custodial offence ever since Clive Billings’s British Nationalists came to power.
There was a photograph on the mantelpiece in Andrews’s living room, a picture of Owen Andrews when he was young. The photograph showed him seated at a table playing cards with a young woman. The woman was smiling, her fingers pressed to her parted lips. Andrews’s face was grave, his head bent in concentration over his cards. He had a handsome profile, and the camera had been angled in such a way as to conceal the most obvious aspects of his disability. There was something about the picture that disturbed me, that hinted at some private tragedy, and I turned away from it quickly. I asked him again about the Shooter’s Hill Road and about the carjackers, but he insisted the whole thing had been exaggerated by the media.
“This place has always had a history to it, and history has a habit of repeating itself. If you don’t believe me read Samuel Pepys. People feared the Hill in his day too. You’ll find Mr Pepys particularly eloquent on the subject of what they used to do to the highwaymen.” He paused. “Those of them they caught up with, that is.”
I first learned about Owen Andrews through one of my clients. Lewis Usher had once been a rich man, but when the Americans abandoned Europe for China he lost everything more or less overnight. His wife was Zoë Clifford, the film actress. She died giving birth to their daughter, or from complications after the birth, I’m not sure which. The child was taken away by relatives of Zoë’s and Lewis Usher was left alone in an enormous rambling house at the top end of Crooms Hill, less than half a mile from the centre of Greenwich. The place would have been worth a fortune in the old days, but it was far too big for him, and after the crash he could no longer afford to maintain it. In spite of its poor condition it was the kind of property my agency specialised in and I was able to negotiate a very good price with an independent pharmaceuticals company. They were attracted by the council tax rates, which were still much lower on the south side of the Thames. The firm’s representative, a Hugo Greenlove, said they were planning to turn the house into a research facility. He rattled on excitedly, making exaggerated arm gestures to demonstrate how rooms might be divided and walls torn down, and although I thought it was tactless of Greenlove to talk that way in front of the property’s current owner, Lewis Usher seemed completely unmoved. Once Gre
enlove had left, he told me to get rid of the lot, not just the house itself but everything in it. He didn’t say as much but I had the impression he was planning to use the proceeds of the sale to get him to America. I imagined he had contacts there already.
“You really want to sell everything?” I said. In spite of my sympathy for Usher I was excited by the prospect. The house was stuffed with things I could move on for a handy profit, paintings and small bronzes and so on, and my files back at the office were stuffed with the names of people who would be happy to buy them.
“There are some things of Zoë’s I want, but that’s about it,” he said. There were framed photographs of his wife everywhere about the place, detailing the course of her career from stage to screen. She had been a tall, angular woman with a crooked mouth and a wide forehead but the pictures hinted at a deep sensuality and a striking screen presence. Usher was still very much in mourning for her, and I think it was the fact that I was also a widower that made him trust me. He said I could have first refusal on anything I wanted from the house, and when I tentatively mentioned a few of the things that caught my fancy he named a price so low I felt filthy with guilt even as I agreed to it. Usher must have seen some of this in my expression because he thumped me hard on the shoulder and began to laugh.
“You’ll be doing me a favour,” he said. “It’s surprising how little you need, when you come right down to it.”
He laughed again, the laugh quickly turning into a painful-sounding cough that made me wonder if there was something more than grief that was consuming him. This could certainly account for his indifference to his material possessions. Yet when a couple of moments later I pointed to a small brass travelling clock and asked him how much he wanted for it his whole demeanour changed. An excited light came into his eyes and he looked ten years younger.
“That’s an Owen Andrews clock,” he said. “Or at least it’s supposed to be. I’ve never had it authenticated. I accepted it in lieu of a debt. I’ve had it for years.”