The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

by Natasha Pulley

  Grace looked up. ‘Sounds like religion to me.’

  He laughed. ‘You poor pedantic thing. Your science can save a man’s life, but imagination makes it worth living. Take that fellow there, look at him. Clerk written all over him,’ he said, looking past her to the man still speaking to the three aides. ‘The highlight of his day is probably an excursion to the canteen to buy lukewarm vegetable soup, before it’s back to dishing out passport forms for Chinese immigrants. How do you think he carries on? Knowing that the world is statistics and probability, or imagining what it would be like to see impossible things?’

  ‘Statistics and probability are only methods of describing things, they don’t make them less interesting.’

  ‘Think you’ll find most people disagree. Oh, here we are,’ he said suddenly.

  On the roulette wheel, the ball was clicking to a halt.

  One of Grace’s brothers arrived. ‘What are we playing?’ he said. He was already flushed from the wine. Matsumoto gave him the amused look of an experienced dandy meeting his younger self, and flicked a few counters to him.

  ‘Oh, thank you … oh!’ James added, having caught sight of Matsumoto’s black hair and slanted eyes for the first time. He beamed. ‘You must be Gracie’s Japanese beau!’

  ‘I don’t think she has any beaux of any sort. She frightens them off with numbers and sulphur,’ Matsumoto said. She thought there was coldness in his voice, but Matsumoto was bulletproof: anything that was not a compliment pinged off him and hit an innocent bystander.

  The ball crept over one last number.

  ‘Zero!’ announced the banker.

  ‘Oh!’ laughed Grace. She threw up her hands without meaning to, just like Matsumoto and her brother. When she stepped back from the wheel to let Matsumoto collect his winnings, she bumped into someone just behind her. Twisting around, she found the clerk who had been speaking to Matsumoto’s aides.

  ‘Oh – sorry,’ he said, smiling a little. His eyes were an unusual bright grey, like storm light. ‘I didn’t see you.’

  Grace smiled too. He had a completely incongruous northern accent, not strong, but hardly Foreign Office Eton either. ‘No, no. My fault. May I ask where you learned Japanese?’

  ‘Oh … out of a dictionary. And at home. My landlord’s teaching me. I’m not very good.’ He looked her over and didn’t bother to pretend that he hadn’t noticed her hair. ‘Anyway, I’m sorry, ma’am … ’

  ‘Actually, would you stay a minute?’ Grace said, and then felt stupid. ‘It’s … I’m sorry. It’s just that I think my friend might be annoyed with me and I haven’t got anyone else to talk to.’

  His grey eyes went over Matsumoto, and then to her again. He had the quiet unflustered manner that usually came of army service, but she didn’t think he was otherwise military. There was no oil in his hair, and he did not hold his hands behind his back.

  ‘Why don’t we see about the next dance, then?’ he said. ‘I won’t be very good, but it might be better than roulette.’

  ‘Please. I’m Grace, by the way, Carrow.’

  ‘Thaniel. Steepleton.’

  ‘Like Nathaniel?’

  ‘Yes, but my dad was Nat, so … ’ He tipped his head as he trailed off, in a way that suggested he had explained it often already tonight, mainly to people who couldn’t pronounce a ‘th’ anyway.

  ‘No, no, I see.’

  Pleased, she tapped Matsumoto to tell him where she was going. He looked Steepleton up and down once, then turned away without saying anything.

  FOURTEEN

  She was an odd-looking woman. The fashion was for whites and pale blue, but her dress was hummingbird green and her hair was very short. She moved like a faulty bicycle, by turns too fast, and then too slowly. It reminded him of Mori, or, Mori as he would have been if he weren’t so closely tangled with the fires at Scotland Yard. When she spoke, it was with his serious truthfulness.

  ‘So, you’ve got an unusual voice for someone who works at the Foreign Office.’

  ‘You’ve got unusual hair,’ he said. It was a gamble to say anything; he had only just learned to dance and talk at the same time. Fanshaw had been giving lessons at the office all week on the principle that if even the oafs from the Russia desk were competent, he wouldn’t be having any of his fellows embarrass the section.

  She nodded, two short nods, as though her springs were too tightly wound. ‘It used to be long, but I set fire to it once and it seemed better to cut it after that.’

  ‘How?’

  She looked away from him and he heard her teeth click together as she set them, just, over the well-rehearsed strings orchestra at the edge of the room. The colours from there were blurring with the shapes people made dancing, and sometimes he couldn’t tell whether he was seeing the flash from diamond pins in a woman’s hair or from a high violin. The hems of skirts moving over the floor made their own shades and men’s voices were lost sometimes under the red cello. It was the brightest place he had been since Gilbert and Sullivan’s last operetta.

  Then, ‘I read physics at university. There were a few experimental mishaps.’ Without giving him chance to ask anything about it, she said, ‘I take it you’re at the Orient desk?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘You know Francis Fanshaw, then?’

  ‘I work for him. You?’

  ‘We used to go fishing when we were small. It … how is it, interesting?’

  ‘Less interesting than reading physics at university,’ he said, wanting to get back to that before they strayed too far from it.

  ‘Well, that’s all done now,’ she said, and asked him instead about the work, and what sort of a language Japanese was, and whether it was difficult. When the music ended, she ducked an abrupt curtsey. She pushed her fingertips against her thumbnails. ‘Well. Lovely meeting you.’

  From the far end of the hall, a steward announced that Endymion Griszt’s performance would begin in a few moments. Thaniel glanced that way and then down at her. She was watching an older man, her father from his jaw, speaking to Francis Fanshaw. ‘Come and listen to this with me, will you? I don’t want to sit in there by myself.’

  ‘Why would you be?’

  ‘Because the composer’s pretentious and his music is bloody hard to listen to.’

  She laughed. ‘Are you hiding from someone too?’

  ‘No, but I promised to buy the music for my landlord. I want to hear it first, so I know what I’m letting myself in for.’

  ‘All right,’ she said, and looked relieved.

  They skirted the hall toward the grand piano and the rows of tapestry-upholstered seats. In fact there were plenty of other people sitting down already. Probably they weren’t overly familiar with Griszt. The man himself was arranging his music on the stand, pink ribbon around his hat as always. He adjusted it in the reflection of the piano’s black body, where the lacquer had been polished so well that when he dropped his silk gloves on to the top, they slipped straight onto the keys. Grace slouched down in her chair, not much, but enough for the shoulders of her dress to have lifted above her own.

  ‘Do you know about music, then?’

  He shook his head. ‘No. I sit at the back of the Royal Albert sometimes.’

  ‘Only you sound rather as if you know,’ she said, letting her voice fall low.

  ‘Really?’ he said, making an effort to be confusedly flattered. ‘He’s starting.’

  She met the shoulders of her dress again.

  As he had expected, the introduction was a flush of unpleasant colours and clever theory. He knew it was unfair to think Griszt pretentious for that; a good number of people listened to, and wrote, music because they liked to hear the sound of mathematics. But he always wanted to say, if he ever fell into the trap of reading critics’ good reviews of Griszt concerts, that if the method and the mathematics were championed over the real shape of the thing, there would never be another Mozart. Mozarts would come along, but they would all be banished to comic o
peretta and never allowed a symphony orchestra. He listened and felt disproportionately sad, and hoped he could persuade Mori not to play it often. Not that he would have to put up with it for long. He wondered if Williamson was here.

  The music drifted into a familiar, rushing melody that was almost like the rest, but not. He looked up when he realised he could have hummed it. He looked at the ceiling in order to have a blank space on which to see the colours, thinking it was an absent-minded mistake of his own, but the shades and the shapes were the same. It was the piece Mori played in the mornings. In the programme, it had said that the sonata was new for the occasion.

  ‘That’s better,’ Grace offered.

  He nodded, gradually.

  At the end, he excused himself and caught Griszt just as he was about to make his way to the next room, where they were selling sheet music. There was already a queue of girls waiting to see it. Some of them were arguing about the second movement, singing snatches of it to each other as they tried to remember it.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Hm?’ said Griszt. He was powerfully German, which came through even over a small sound. Vienna Conservatoire.

  ‘The second movement. Have you played it somewhere before?’

  ‘No,’ said Griszt, looking wary, ‘never. The sheet music was printed only this morning.’

  ‘Steepleton!’ Fanshaw’s voice.

  ‘Steepleton?’ Griszt said. ‘Didn’t you used to … ’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Thaniel. Fanshaw smiled briefly at Griszt before claiming his arm and steering him away.

  ‘You seem to have made friends with Miss Carrow.’

  ‘Oh. It wasn’t anything improper—’

  ‘I didn’t think it was. But you didn’t go to Eton and you’re fortunate enough not to be the second son of an earl, so you can get away with bad manners, no, wait for the end of the sentence; would you mind continuing to make friends with her in a socially clunky but determined way for which I will be eternally grateful while I in my gentlemanly meekness fail to get a word in edgeways?’

  Thaniel moved his hand gently, but Fanshaw held his fingertips instead and squeezed them by way of showing his urgency. ‘Why?’

  ‘Lord Carrow wants to marry her off, and I, alas, am the second son of an earl. You’ve met her. Would you want to marry her? We’ve known each other since we were children, and don’t get me wrong, she’s very interesting, but she has always been the madwoman in the attic full of explosives. For God’s sake, Steepleton, before I have to go and start an embroidery pattern at the buffet table.’

  ‘I like her,’ he said, beginning to laugh.

  ‘Splendid! Good man.’

  He took a deep breath as Fanshaw disappeared among cavalry officers, and went to insist on another dance. Grace looked confused.

  ‘Did Fanshaw ask you to keep me occupied?’

  ‘Yes. I’m not just an inept idiot.’

  She laughed. But he saw her look toward Fanshaw where he was chatting with the officers. There was strain around her eyes and in her back.

  ‘Do you want to marry Fanshaw?’ he said.

  ‘I have to marry someone, if I want somewhere I can work properly. My aunt left a house,’ she said, shaking her head, and didn’t go into it. Then, without preamble, ‘Anyway, I shall be at the Westminster Hotel restaurant tomorrow and I should like to buy you some tea, if you don’t work on Sundays. Half past ten?’

  ‘Yes, please. What for?’

  ‘Because you’ve been awfully kind, and there’s no reason for you to be. Have you got a scientific sister?’

  ‘No, but I’ve got a friend who’s … in the same chemical group, I think.’

  She laughed and so did he, until he realised that he had called Mori a friend, despite having spent two weeks taking care not to.

  Grace inclined her head to catch his eye. ‘Everything all right? Your eyes went rather dark just then.’

  He told a vague lie he couldn’t remember later.

  The ball did not finish until after midnight, and it was nearer one o’clock by the time he turned on to Filigree Street. It was ghostly in the empty lamplight, but not in the way it had been when he had first come after the bombing. Without the rain, he could hear the houses settling as the old timbers cooled, and see which had bachelor tenants from which windows were still lit. The water in the drains below the cobbles muttered. When he passed the bakery, the model Ferris wheel was still turning and glinting, and casting a moving reflection in the glossy surfaces of the cakes, colours all lost with the display lamps turned out. A sugar swan sailed over one of them.

  The lights were still on downstairs at number twenty-seven. Odd strains of piano music stopped and started in the parlour. He banged his forehead against the wall. Yes. Music. He had forgotten it. He pushed the door open with his knuckle.

  Mori was sitting with one leg curled under him, playing the same section again and again, but he was slipping – he never made it past a difficult octave leap. There was no light except a candle on the empty music stand.

  ‘I’m sorry, I forgot it,’ Thaniel said, annoyed with himself.

  ‘Never mind.’ He let his hands drop, flexing his fingers until they cracked. ‘How was—’

  ‘But it was what you were playing just now,’ said Thaniel. ‘I asked Griszt about it and he said that it was new for today, but he must have been lying. Play it again. I’m sure it’s the same.’

  ‘I can’t, I’ve forgotten it.’

  ‘You don’t forget something overnight.’

  Mori tacked his shoulders back like a bird deciding whether or not to fly away. ‘You might not, but you’ve got middle age to look forward to. Was Miss Carrow on form?’

  His smile was paralysed halfway to fading. ‘How did you know that?’

  Mori frowned. ‘You just … told me.’

  ‘Oh. I’m more drunk than I think. Or middle age is closer than I think. She was interesting, anyway. I’m about to make some tea, do you want some?’

  ‘No, I think I’d better take my cold to bed. I didn’t mean to stay up so late. Night,’ he said on his way up the stairs.

  While he waited for the kettle to boil, Thaniel looked through the cupboards for some honey. Lemons they had: Mori kept a bowl of them on the kitchen windowsill because the juice was acidic enough to clean oil from mechanical parts. Some searching yielded a small jar with a piece of honeycomb suspended inside. He spooned some into a cup and squeezed out half a lemon too, then stirred in the hot water. He thought, as he was making it, that he should not have been making it. He ought not to have cared whether or not Mori had a cold. Dolly Williamson would have murmured something, if he could have seen. The old warning bells were sounding tired now, though. He took it up with his own tea and tapped on Mori’s door with his elbow.

  ‘Let me in, I’ve got something for you.’

  Silence, then the click of the lock. ‘What sort of something?’ said Mori. He sounded hoarse now. ‘Oh. Thank you.’

  Thaniel stopped.

  Mori pushed his hand over his red eyes. ‘Is this lemon?’

  ‘And honey. Try it, it helps with … ’ Thaniel hesitated. ‘Is there something else?’

  ‘No. Go to bed and stop fussing. You’re going to need to sleep if you’re to make it to the hotel for ten tomorrow.’

  He stopped with his own cup almost against his lip. He managed only to turn it into a pause and forced himself to continue and drink, but it was hard to swallow. So Mori, or somebody, had been following him. His hand stiffened slowly around the cup as he tried to gauge how long for. If it had been since the start, they knew he was working for Williamson. He had never made any effort to hide his long visits to the Home Office cellar. But if they knew that, he would have been dragged into a warehouse already and asked what he knew by somebody with a pair of sturdy pliers. It was more recent. Down the back of his neck, like the breath of a man standing just behind him, came the prickling awareness that his life might depend on chatting a little, fini
shing his tea, and leaving before dawn.

  ‘I don’t need that much sleep, if you want some looking after.’

  But he had paused for too long. Mori’s shoulders lifted as he realised what he had said, and the two small lines between his brows, where he always frowned anyway, deepened. Thaniel lurched toward the stairs but Mori was fast and in front of him before he reached the top. He looked down at Mori’s hand on his chest, and then made an X of their arms as he did the same.

  ‘I will push you down these stairs if you don’t get out of my way now,’ he said softly.

  ‘Don’t. I wasn’t following you, it’s not what you think – please.’ His voice had cracks in it and Thaniel could feel his heart through his waistcoat. ‘I wasn’t following you. I thought that you had told me. You were about to tell me. I’m tired, I get things confused when – you’ve heard me do it before. I answer the wrong question, I answer the one that you were going to ask, and not the one that you did.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘I’m – I remember what’s possible, and then forget what becomes impossible,’ he said without moving. ‘You’ve just watched me do it. You forgot to buy the music, so I’ve forgotten how to play it. You were about to tell me about the hotel,’ he repeated. ‘You must have been.’

  Thaniel didn’t let his hand drop. ‘What do you mean, remember?’

  ‘I mean not seeing or knowing or deducing.’

  ‘What’s possible.’

  Mori’s shoulder twitched and though he didn’t look back, it was plain that he could not forget the steep stairs behind him. Thaniel didn’t let him move. ‘Past,’ Mori said, tracing a line in the air with his fingertip, ‘what has been and is. Future.’ He opened his hand to show many lines. ‘What’s possible.’

  ‘Keep going.’

  ‘Likely things are very clear, like recent past, which is … why I get them confused so often. Unlikely things are patchy, like things that happened a long time ago, because there are hours or years of more likely ones stacked up before them.’