by Nina Allan
“I’d like to get some fresh air,” Martin said. “Before it gets dark, I mean. I thought I’d walk up and have a look at my aunt’s old place. Would you like to come with me?”
Miranda shook her head. “You’re going to look for him, aren’t you? The Circus Man?”
Martin gave no reply and she felt no need of one. She knew she was right, that it was something he had to do. It was the only way he could finally say goodbye to Dora.
“I think I’ll stay here,” she said. “I’ve had enough walking. I’ll read for a bit instead.”
“I’ll stay with you if you want me to.”
“You go.” She smiled. “I’ll be fine.”
She watched him put on his shirt, his chinos, a v-neck sweater. The casual clothes suited him, she realised, much better than the suits he wore for the office. They gave her a glimpse of Martin as he must have been once, before his life assumed its current pattern.
No pattern is fixed forever, she thought. There’s still time to change.
She thought that if only he came back, then everything would be all right. Where else would he go? she wondered, and began to laugh.
Martin smiled back at her, and she had no doubt that he thought she was laughing from happiness. But in fact she was laughing from terror, the way she used to do at four years old, when her father made her go on the high slide instead of the baby one.
She had done it to please him, of course. On each shiny, swooping descent Ronnie Coles clapped his hands like a mad thing, and she, Miranda, his daughter, had laughed aloud.
* * *
Violet’s house was at the top of the town. Martin had forgotten how steep Hastings was; also that there were parts of it that stood apart from the rest, lesions of nettle and bramble that overspilled the tightly mapped streets like blots of green ink. The sea lay far below him, colourless, scents of wallflowers and summer bonfires wafted from narrow back gardens. Vast clumps of tangled bindweed garlanded the hedges. As a young child, Dora used to call the convolvulus flowers wedding dresses.
For fairies to wear, she said. They’re so lovely and white.
Now they shone out of the dusk, pale as ghosts.
He could not get over what had just happened. Miranda’s body, light as paper, the flaxen pallor of her underarms and pubis. The way she had strained to meet him at the end, the smell of her transparent as brine.
He felt drained of everything save his awareness of the present moment.
Their mother had not approved of Aunty Violet. She was their father’s sister for one thing, her house a muddle of turpentine-soaked rags and dirty dishes. But she took care of Martin and Dora for two weeks each August and Martin supposed that must have balanced the account. The house that had once been Violet’s now sported shutters on the downstairs windows and a fresh coat of paint. A ceramic plaque to the right of the door read ‘Cressida.’ Martin passed in front of the house then turned at the end of the road and began to walk back again. He had no wish to draw attention to himself, and yet he found he could not bear to leave. His memories had been altered just by coming here. He would never again see the place in his mind the way it was before.
It was as if a door to the past had opened and Dora was about to step through it and away from him. It was his last chance to be with her. His eyes filled with tears.
Don’t go, he whispered.
I was never here, Martin, she said. I’ve been gone for years.
He started backwards, convinced suddenly that he was being watched, and a second later a light came on in one of his aunt’s upstairs windows. It was time to leave. He made his way back down the hill. He went by the quickest route possible, making use of short cuts and twittens he had forgotten existed but that his feet now seemed to find of their own accord. The smoky scent of dusk persisted and deepened, and as he crossed the main road to the Stade and began walking across the shingle between the net shops he had a fleeting image of Dora, jumping from one of the breakwaters and falling headlong on the stones.
Had it been she who cut her leg that time, or he? He found he could not remember any more.
The tide was a long way out, he could tell by the sound. There was someone standing by one of the slip-ramps, a child, he thought at first, or a very old man. As Martin watched the figure turned and began to walk towards him. The shingle scrunched under his feet. A gust of salt-streaked wind blew in off the sea.
It was the Circus Man. He was dressed in a dark-green hooded fleece that reached almost to his knees. He had a little dog with him, a white chihuahua. It galloped across the pebbles like a plump toy pony.
He looks like Father Time, Martin thought. The only thing that’s missing is the scythe in his hand. He shivered in the breeze, and remembered Dora, grumpy with fright, saying she had lost all the feeling in her feet and hands. He’s just an ordinary person, like you and me, Martin had insisted. He had taken off her beach shoes and rubbed her feet, and after a couple of minutes she said she could feel the sensation coming back.
“It’s a fine evening,” the Circus Man said. He had a noble head, Martin saw, handsome features: the dark eyes under heavy brows, the full lips of an aesthete or poet. The dog, mad for the dusk, rolled at his feet.
She did love you, I can see that, Martin thought, thinking of Angela Norman who was also Dora. The idea should have upset him but it did not. He could see now how fitting it was: Juliet Caseby’s grandmother with her brilliant mind, this remarkable man who had somehow learned to stop the clock, or turn it back. Martin was not sure which and found he did not care much either way.
Dora and Owen Andrews belonged together.
He felt terrified but also free. He had watched sky divers on television, mad fools who hurled themselves out of aeroplanes. He wondered if this might be how it felt to do a parachute jump, spinning towards Earth at a thousand miles an hour and praying you would remember to pull the ripcord before you hit the ground.
He laughed.
“It is indeed,a fine evening,” he said. “I ought to be getting back, though. My wife will be wondering where I’ve got to.”
“It’s good to see you, Martin. It’s been a long time.”
“I don’t know you,” Martin said. “Everyone I knew here is dead.”
“The last time I saw you we were at Paddington Station. You went to buy us both coffee and I almost missed my train.”
“I’m sorry,” Martin said. “You’ve mistaken me for someone else.”
“Your sister was ill for years before she told you about it. I gave her my watch, though it didn’t help, not in the end. She was living on borrowed time.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I used to enjoy our talks, Martin. You were always so insistent that time streams could not run parallel to each other without leaking through, that on some level our alternate selves would carry an awareness of each other. A trace-awareness, you used to call it. A seepage between universes. I insisted you were wrong, that your theories stemmed from the excess of sentiment typical of the non-scientist. Now I'm beginning to think you might have had something.”
Martin was silent. He listened to the sound of the waves, fractionally closer now, and thought about the concourse of Paddington Station. He had been there many times, though not recently. There was a restaurant there he liked, a French bistro that served baked camembert and steak au poivre. He wondered if it was still there.
The white chihuahua came racing out of the darkness and flung itself into his arms. It yelped with excitement and tried to lick his face. Its smooth coat was slightly damp, and smelled of the sea.
“I miss her very much,” said Owen Andrews. “Sometimes I find it hard to live without her.”
“Dora?” said Martin.
“No,” said Owen Andrews. “I mean Angela.”
Martin handed over the wriggling dog. It nestled itself in the crook of the little man’s arm.
“I really must be going,” he said. “It was nice talking to you.”
“Take care of yourself,” said Owen Andrews. “See you again.”
Martin walked back up the beach towards the esplanade, the shingle shifting heavily beneath his feet. The lights along the promenade shone brightly, and when he looked back once over his shoulder there was nothing but darkness.
* * *
They had to check out of the hotel by ten o’clock, but they decided to take one more tour of the Old Town before returning to London. They had coffee in one of the cafés and looked at the sea. Martin said he had forgotten how much he enjoyed the salt air, that they should take another, longer holiday as soon as possible, perhaps in France.
The night before they had made love again, and at some point during the small hours Martin had asked Miranda if she would move in with him.
“Don’t you think it’s too soon?” she said. “Don’t you think we should wait?”
“We’ve known one another twelve years,” Martin said. “I think we’ve waited long enough already.”
She knew what her mother would say, that you should never make important decisions on the spur of the moment, but it occurred to Miranda that all the most important decisions were made on the spur of the moment, that the time apparently spent deciding was simply the time you needed to inform other people of what you intended.
After their coffee they went round the shops. There was a second-hand bookshop that Martin was anxious to find again. He wanted to see if they had any books on antique watches. The interior of the shop was cramped, and Miranda didn’t feel like going inside. She browsed the curio shops instead, of which there were many. One had a window display of old pocket watches, and she suddenly thought how nice it would be to buy one, as a surprise for Martin.
The watch she liked best was silver, its dial intricately engraved with a pattern of roses. She examined it for several minutes through the window, then went into the shop and asked if she could have a proper look at it.
“Most certainly you can, my love,” said the shop’s proprietor. “But just to warn you I don’t think that one actually works.”
He took a key from beneath the counter and unlocked the casement. The watch felt heavy in her hand, and right, and she knew she must have it. While the shop owner scrabbled around in the back closet looking for a box to put it in, Miranda raised the watch’s crown and gave it a twist.
She saw the second hand begin to move. It was a centre seconds, finely honed and tapering, like a needle. Her fingertips, pressed tight to the glass, felt a faint pulse, as if a tiny mechanical heart were beating away.
For a moment time seemed to hesitate, the minutest of gasps, a silently indrawn breath as if at the sight of something wonderful. Then, all by itself, the world started turning again.
timelines: an afterword
It is five past three in the morning. When Binny opens her eyes the first thing she sees is the black-and-gold Westclox alarm clock that stands on her bedside table. She loves the clock for the sound it makes, its tinny rattling, wheezy as an old man’s breathing. She loves its round convex glass with the gilt frame surrounding it, also its face, which lights up in the dark, that samphire-green, marsh-fire glow. She has always seen the clock’s ability to illuminate itself as a minor miracle. She cannot understand why it does not arouse a similar excitement in other people.
“How does it do that?” she asks.
“It’s luminous,” her mother says, in the same tone of voice she might use to say ‘its face is black’ or ‘it is made of metal.’ Binny knows the word luminous already. She wants to know how it happens, not what it is called.
She had set the alarm for three-fifteen so she could be sure of waking up in time for the holiday but she never oversleeps, she has woken up anyway. She cancels the alarm, turning the clock with its back to face her and sliding across the small brass lever in its crescent-shaped opening. She pulls herself into her clothes and then puts on her wristwatch. It is a Timex Girl’s Wristwatch, with a round white dial and a black leather strap. At night she keeps it on her bedside table, still in its original case, a leatherette box with a hinged lid and a hump of blue velvet inside to keep the watch from sliding around. The watch was given to her as a birthday present by her grandmother, the first grown-up gift she has been given.
She presses the watch against her ear to check that it is still ticking. The watch’s mechanism fascinates her. She pictures the cogs and wheels turning inside, like the moving parts inside the Westclox alarm clock only smaller. Sometimes she likes to imagine that the watch has a secret inhabitant, a tiny driver, smoky-voiced and grubby-cheeked, like the engine-stoker she saw once in a television documentary about old steam trains. She thinks of him tapping the pins securing the mainspring with a neat gold hammer, checking the flow of seconds on his time-gauge, shaking his head.
We have an early start this morning. It won’t do to take any chances.
She sees no reason why her miniature engineer should not exist. She has been introduced to the world of the microscope through her science lessons. She knows there are plenty of lifeforms that are invisible to the human eye.
She goes out into the hall. The door of her parents’ bedroom is open and as she stands there in the orange glow of the overhead ceiling light her mother emerges.
“Have you washed?” Her mother speaks in a whisper because her brother is still asleep, a cramped insistent bundle of bright blond hair and blue pyjamas. Nothing short of a bomb going off would persuade him to wake at this hour. She resents the way her mother never makes Charlie get up until the last minute.
Binny nods. The nod is a lie, but one she knows she will get away with, at least today. From inside her parents’ bedroom she can hear the voice of her father talking on the telephone.
“It’s up there now, just look out the window. Don’t tell me you can’t see it?”
There is a short silence then he laughs and says something about a light in the sky. Binny doesn’t understand what he’s talking about. She asks him about it later, when they’re all up and dressed and in the car.
“What was it?” she says.
“A you-foe,” says her father. “Unidentified Flying Object. A flying saucer.” The engine coughs once and then starts.
She doesn’t believe him. He has never been very good at telling stories. She wonders who he was calling at three in the morning, too early to be telephoning anyone except in an emergency. Her father made the you-foe sound like an emergency, but she senses it was just an excuse to make the call.
She thinks about this for a while then lets it go. It is interesting but not important. The important thing is that they are going to France, that in a little over three hours they will be on the ferry. Outside it is dark and silent, a fugitive world of curtained windows and grey front gardens. The main road is eerily empty, a polished black band of tarmac, and soon they are on the dual carriageway heading for Newhaven. Her eyes catch at the road signs: Give Way and To the Ferry and Exit Ahead. In the dawn light they read like messages meant especially for her, some private code for freedom or escape. She has begun to learn that words are magical tools, that she can use them not only to describe the world but also to bring things into it. The little watch engineer is like this – one moment he is just a thought, a squirming at the back of her brain like a maggot inside an apple, but the more she thinks of words to describe him the more he becomes alive. She clothes him with words, laying on his oil-stained boiler suit and scruffy black cap as she used to lay the flat cut-outs of dresses and jackets on the paper dolls in the girls’ fashion books she had once enjoyed but was now outgrowing. She knows he will always exist now, whether anyone can see him or not.
Her brother is still mostly asleep. She lays her forehead against the window glass, staring out at the goods lorries, the cat's eyes, the low humped buildings of the ferry terminal. The inside of the car smells of tarmac and new morning and its own worn leather upholstery.
* * *
Her grandmother kept the watch in a pillowcase be
hind the wardrobe as a precaution against burglars. It was a silver half-hunter, and had belonged to her father, Binny’s great-grandfather Raymond. It was the only thing of Raymond’s Granny had left.
“It doesn’t work,” said her grandmother. “I took it to the clock man once. He had a shop down by Goring Station. He told me it wasn’t valuable enough to be worth mending and that I would be wasting my money. The shop’s gone now, it got turned into a butcher’s, I think. I haven’t been up there for years.”
The watch was about two inches across, and contained in a round silver case. The silver tarnished easily. When Binny first saw it, it was the same dull brown as the beach pebbles her grandmother used to decorate her garden.
“Can I clean it?” asked Binny. She was eight years old.
“Are you sure it’ll be worth the trouble? You’ll get black stuff all over your hands.”
When Binny insisted her grandmother gave her an apron to protect her clothing then sat her at the kitchen table with a tin of Silvo metal polish. She showed Binny how to apply the polish by smearing it in a thin layer over the surface of the watch case and then removing it by rubbing with a cotton rag.
“Let it rest for a minute first,” she said. “Give it a bit of time to get to work.”
Binny read the side of the tin and learned that the Silvo worked by dissolving the metallic salts that formed when the silver came into contact with the air. She was captivated by the process, by the newspaper spread out on the table, by the pungent smell of the Silvo, which Granny said contained a substance called ammonia. Once she acquired the knack of it she found she enjoyed cleaning not only the silver half-hunter but her grandmother’s silver butter dish and biscuit barrel, as well as the brass candlesticks and ashtrays that had come from her grandmother’s childhood home in Croydon. The brass was an unkind metal, and even the most dedicated scrubbing produced only the faintest of lustres. But Binny found the work soothing in its repetitiveness. She was happy to sit at it for hours, while the kitchen radio played quiz programmes and her grandmother chopped the vegetables for supper.