The Silver Wind

by Nina Allan

  * * *

  Owen Andrews was born in a small village a few miles north of Exeter, in Devon. His mother was a teacher, his father a building contractor. From a young age, he showed an aptitude for science and mathematics, and in 1946, at the age of just sixteen, he was awarded a scholarship to study at Oxford. He won several of the major college prizes for mathematics, but left the university before completing his degree. There were rumours that a group of students had mounted a bullying campaign against him, but Angela Norman, Juliet’s grandmother, said Andrews had fallen out with one of his tutors.

  “What about?” asked Martin. The Caseby woman fascinated him. Partly it was because she had a look of Dora about her, but mostly it was her effect upon Miranda, the way Juliet seemed to have brought her out of her shell. He knew it was not just Juliet. Being away from the office had played its part, as had revisiting a place that resonated with childhood memories. But Juliet Caseby had helped, no doubt about it.

  She was dry as a bone, hollowed out, a foreshadowing of what Dora might have become had she lived to grow old. The name Juliet ought not to have suited her, and yet somehow it did. Martin had a sudden and powerful image of her riding pillion on a motorbike, her thin arms hooked possessively about the waist of its rider.

  “I’m not sure what it was about,” she said. “But from the account Gran wrote in her diary I don’t think it was personal. It seems to have been a genuine disagreement about mathematics. I think that’s rather wonderful, don’t you?”

  “I suppose so. How did Owen Andrews end up in Hastings?”

  “Once again, I’m not really sure. I think someone left him some property or something. He lived in one of those large houses up on the Ridge and was pretty much alone in the world. I think he hired Gran for company as much as anything. She was devoted to him, I do know that. She won a place at Oxford herself, you know, but all her plans were ruined because of the war. The work she did for Owen Andrews wasn’t just housework. You’ll think this fanciful, but Mr Andrews was a brilliant scientist. My grandmother helped him with his experiments.”

  “You said in your letter that Owen Andrews was a watchmaker.”

  “And so he was, and a very skilled one, but it was really time itself that interested him. Gran never said as much, but I think she had an idea of turning her diary into a book, some sort of official account of the work he was doing. I hadn’t looked at it in years, not ever really, not properly. But after you made contact with me I’ve been reading it again. There’s a lot of maths in it, things I can’t make head nor tail of, but the descriptions of their day-to-day lives are fascinating. Look,” she said. “There’s something I want to show you.”

  She rose from her chair, staggering slightly in a way that suggested she was suffering from arthritis. Martin watched her as she moved towards the sideboard. He found her story captivating, and yet it was difficult to equate the mathematical genius Juliet’s grandmother spoke of with the man on the beach he remembered from when he was a child.

  It occurred to him that Juliet’s grandmother might still have been alive when he and Dora last stayed with Aunty Violet, that she would not have been much older than Juliet was now.

  He wondered if Juliet’s grandmother and Owen Andrews had ever been lovers.

  Juliet was talking to Miranda, something about Louis Breguet and the tourbillon regulator. He had seen a Breguet watch in the small museum attached to the Greenwich Observatory, three rooms packed with watches and chronometers, a mausoleum of time. The Breguet timepiece, he remembered, contained a mechanism that was said to defy gravity.

  “Breguet’s mind became confused at the end,” Juliet was saying. “He left a stack of notebooks, stuffed with calculations that were supposed to overturn all the contemporary theories about how time worked. They were so obscure that not even his son could understand them, and he had worked as his father’s amanuensis for most of his life. When the notebooks were finally published they caused a furore. Owen Andrews was trying to make sense of them, and Gran was helping.”

  Juliet handed something to Miranda, a picture in a cardboard frame. She studied it for a couple of seconds and then passed it to Martin.

  It was a photograph of a woman. She looked a little like Juliet Caseby, only not as thin. She was wearing spectacles, and her dark hair had been cut short, framing her face in a mass of curls.

  She had Juliet Caseby’s firm jaw and dark eyebrows, the same features that had reminded him of Dora. The woman in the photograph did not remind him of Dora, though. It was Dora herself.

  He felt his skin turn to ice, a sudden explosion of cold that was like being burned, or having someone douse his chest with a bucket of ice water. His heart jumped in a stuttering dance beneath his ribs. The room and the women receded, spiralling away from him through twisting corridors of corroded time. Perhaps they would be lost forever. He did not care.

  “Where did you get this?” he said. His voice emerged as a breathless croak. Juliet Caseby seemed not to notice.

  “That’s my grandmother, Angela,” she said. “It was taken in 1950, just after she came to Hastings to be near Great-Aunt Joanna.”

  “But it can’t be,” Martin said, before he could stop himself. Logic told him that it could not in fact be Dora in the photograph, but the likeness was so strong it was uncanny. He had heard it said that everyone had a double, somewhere in the world. He had thought the notion fanciful. Now he knew better.

  “Are you all right, Martin?” said Miranda. “You don’t look well.”

  His ears were ringing. He remembered feeling like this before once, when he was a boy, when he tripped over a metal stanchion on the beach and tore his leg open. There was a lot of blood, but Dora said it looked worse than it was.

  Get back in the sea, she said. You need to wash the wound in salt water. It will heal quicker that way.

  He had done as she said. The seawater burned like fire, like he’d been stung by a jellyfish. He hardly dared glance at his leg, though Dora had peered at the cut with interest.

  It’s wrinkled at the edges, like pink lace.

  The wound had healed quickly though, just as Dora had said it would.

  “I feel a bit faint,” Martin said. “Perhaps it’s the fish we had at lunchtime.”

  “I’ll make a fresh pot of tea,” said Juliet. “Tea is always the best medicine for indigestion.” She stooped to pick up the tray and retired to the kitchen.

  “What’s wrong?” Miranda whispered. She rested a hand on his arm. He was glad to feel it there, as he had been glad when she held his hand on the esplanade earlier. Wisps of concern seemed to spiral out from her, like steam.

  “The woman in the photo looks just like my sister,” he said. “I know that sounds ridiculous, but it’s true.”

  He stared down at his hands, waiting for Miranda to express her disbelief. He found he did not care much what she said. Just saying the words aloud made him feel less insane. At first she said nothing, and Martin wondered if his lunacy had shocked her into silence. For the first time he noticed how many clocks there were in the room, a dozen at least. Their massed ticking sounded like the tapping of many hammers on tiny nails.

  It’s a time capsule, he thought. What an eerie place.

  “I think we should go back to the hotel,” Miranda said finally. “We can’t really talk about this here.”

  “You don’t think I’m mad, then?”

  “I don’t think you’re mad at all. But I know you’re upset.”

  When Juliet Caseby returned with the tea Miranda said they were sorry but they had to be going.

  “Martin really isn’t feeling well,” she said. “But we’ll come back and see you again tomorrow if that’s OK.”

  Juliet Caseby nodded, looking anxious. Martin felt bemused by the turn things had taken, the way Miranda seemed to be taking charge. He would never have guessed she had that in her. He realised he had barely known her until now.

  * * *

  “There’s something stra
nge going on here,” Miranda said. “I saw that little man. The watchmaker. The man who was in the photograph with Zoë Clifford.”

  All the time Juliet Caseby was talking Miranda had been feeling increasingly disorientated. Their surroundings were real enough, but there were other things, things that didn’t add up. When Martin told her what he had seen in the photograph it was almost a relief. Either both of them were imagining things, or it confirmed her suspicion that they had stumbled into a mystery. This knowledge should have scared her. Instead it seemed to fill her with new insights.

  “The Circus Man, you mean?” Martin said. “Are you sure?”

  She nodded. “It was while we were in the restaurant. You were paying the bill. I felt sure it was him straight away. Then I saw the picture on Juliet’s mantelpiece and I was certain.”

  “But how can that be? That would make him over eighty years old. More like ninety.”

  “I know. But he wasn’t. He looked the same as he did in the photograph. Should we try to find him, do you think?”

  “I honestly don’t know. What would we say?” He sat down on the edge of the bed. “I thought this whole thing was just me, you know? That I was seeing what I wanted to see. Do you think the old witch knows what’s going on?”

  Miranda giggled. “Juliet, you mean? She’s not a witch.”

  “No, but she’s strange, and that house is strange. What was she talking to you about?”

  “Her grandmother’s diary, mostly. Apparently Angela was going to write a book about Owen Andrews, about the time experiments he was doing. Juliet said she was thinking about carrying on the project herself, now that we’d got her interested. I told her she should.”

  “You liked her, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, I did. She seemed more real than most people. She wasn’t trying to pretend about anything. She said what she thought.”

  “Does that mean you think I’m pretending?”

  “No, of course not.” She went to sit beside him on the bed. His face was stricken, clouded with tension. She wanted badly to ease it, if she could. She wanted to tell him that whatever he was feeling it was all right, that it was better to feel even things that seemed crazy than nothing at all. “You miss your sister, that’s part of it. That must really hurt.”

  “You don’t understand,” said Martin. “What it was like between us. That’s something I can never tell you because it was wrong. We led a secret life. Secrets are exciting at first because they make you feel special. But in the end they keep you from knowing what is real. You can’t measure your life against other people’s, because you can’t reveal yourself to anyone. You have each other of course and perhaps while you’re both in the world you can make that enough. But if the other person leaves you’re left with nothing. You can’t even grieve the way you want to. You wouldn’t want people to think you were overdoing it.”

  He pressed a hand to his face, as if he were trying to hold back his emotions with physical force. Miranda remembered the time she had gone out to the garden to call her father inside for supper and found him crying down by the railway line. He was wedged in behind the old wooden summer house that Nimmie had thought would act as a buffer against the sound of the trains. In winter it was damp and full of snails but in summer the boards roasted and cracked and smelled wonderfully of creosote and dry grass. You could take a blanket in there, and a book, and every twenty minutes a train would dash past like a windstorm. The spindly rafters wobbled like strips of Meccano.

  Her father’s jeans were filthy with mud.

  What’s wrong, Dad? she said.

  Oh God, he said. Oh God, Miranda, I’ve made such a mess of my life. He grabbed her around the waist and pressed his head against her stomach, his tears soaking into her shirt.

  Come inside, Dad. Have something to eat. You’ll feel better.

  Less than three months later he was dead. Miranda felt she should have tried harder to get through to him, though her mother insisted it wouldn’t have made any difference.

  Do you think I didn’t try? Nimmie said to her after the funeral. Her voice rang out like a hammer blow, like a mallet on steel. I wasted half a lifetime trying. But your father was always so damned selfish.

  “Do you mean that you loved Dora?” Miranda said to Martin.

  Martin took his hands away from his face and stared back at her. His eyes were glazed with tears. She could see now he was not just upset; he was also afraid.

  “Yes,” he said. “Of course I did. We loved each other. Only – far more than we should have done.”

  Miranda sat very still. She knew what Martin was trying to tell her, that there had been some kind of sexual relationship between himself and his sister. She felt shocked, she realised, but her distress was more for Martin than for herself. Dora was dead now, after all. Whatever had happened between them was at an end.

  It was difficult in any case, she realised, to know how much of her shock was real and how much was programmed, an outrage she felt because the world she happened to live in expected it of her. No doubt she would have felt some of the same confusion and disbelief if she had grown up being told it was wrong to kiss another person in public or go outside without your shoes on.

  Martin and Dora hadn’t hurt anyone. Now Dora was dead and Martin was asking if Miranda would, if she could, accept what had happened. If there was any hope for them beyond this point.

  She leaned forward and kissed him on the mouth. For a moment his lips remained taut and unresponsive. Then he was kissing her back. His saliva tasted faintly salty from the fish and chips they had eaten earlier. His face was so close, so present suddenly. She could feel his fingers pressing the back of her head.

  The thought of intimate contact with Edmund Wiley had always sickened her. It was not just the fear that he would find her flat chest and bony body unattractive. What she feared was the penetration of her body by another, the idea that she might not be able to stand such dreadful proximity, that she might make some awful faux pas. Now she found that sex was easy. Those parts of male flesh that had aroused such concern in her turned out to be just more body parts, prosaic in their reality as so many human arms and mouths and armpits. She wondered if Martin had been with anyone else since Dora had died. She found the thought exciting, and the flash of guilt she felt on realising that excited her further.

  She strained upwards and against him, a stream of bright dots dancing across the backs of her eyelids. She recognised the feeling for what it was, the start of the queasy unspooling of pleasure that for her was like a slow and gliding fall down a long flight of stairs. Martin was already spent, slumped across her like a heap of damp rags. She stroked his hair, marvelling at the way what had just happened had granted her access to him. She could touch him anywhere now, and that would be normal. She adjusted her position so she could breathe more easily.

  “Are you all right?” he said at last. “I know you’ll think I planned this, but I really didn’t.”

  “I don’t think that,” she said. “But I’m glad it’s happened.”

  Her own voice sounded strange in her ears, the way it had done when Stephen had once secretly recorded it and played it back to her on their father’s ancient reel-to-reel tape machine. She realised she was hungry again, but before she could mention this to Martin she had drifted over the border into sleep. She was woken by him asking her if it was true that she had once been kidnapped.

  “It was something Jenny Lomax said, that’s all. I’m sure it’s nonsense.”

  She opened her eyes. Bars of shadow and light criss-crossed the room and she realised it was getting on towards evening. It made her uncomfortable to think of Martin discussing her with Jenny Lomax, but she knew what Jen was like, how she had tried to draw her into conversation about Dora. No doubt she had cornered Martin in a similar fashion.

  “It’s true in a way,” she said. “Only it wasn’t a real kidnapping. Not like Jen thinks, anyway.”

  “I didn’t ask her about it, in case you�
��re wondering. I would never do that.”

  “I know you wouldn’t. In any case, it doesn’t matter now.” She turned on her side, facing towards him. “When I was eight years old my mother and father separated for a while. It didn’t last long. They were back together within three months. But Dad was very upset. He went a bit mad, I think. One day he drove up to the house while I was playing in the front garden and told me to get in the car. I did as he said, of course – it was just my dad. He drove to the Isle of Sheppey, where a friend of his had a caravan he used for fishing holidays. We had a great time. We collected razor shells and spotted gannets and roasted potatoes over an open fire. Dad kept saying my brother Stephen would be joining us and I thought everything was getting back to normal. I didn’t realise Dad had taken me without permission, that my mother had no idea where I was. She was out of her mind with worry and in the end she called the police. I don’t suppose she thought she had much choice. She didn’t press charges though, not once I was back at home. She told the police it had all been a silly misunderstanding and six weeks later Dad came back to live with us. Perhaps he shouldn’t have.”

  She was crying, she realised, not in the self-conscious, nose-blowing way she occasionally did at films, but in a way that tightened her chest and produced too few tears. Stephen would never talk about their father. Perhaps this was why.

  “My father killed himself,” she said. “When I was sixteen. I missed a whole term at school because of it, because of Mum, because of everything, really. My teachers said I could start the year again from the beginning, but it didn’t seem worth it by then. Too much had gone wrong.”

  She had never spoken of these things before, not to anyone and certainly not to Edmund Wiley. In telling Martin she had the sense of redressing the balance. He had entrusted her with the secret of himself and Dora. Now she had shared with him the reasons why, until then, her life had been a broken thing, a half-life. It was as if in some curious way they were now even.

  She wondered what would happen when they returned to London, whether everything would simply revert to the way it was before. She did not see how it could. She would not let it.