Time and the Clock Mice, Etcetera
Page 4
It’s three buses, with a forty-minute wait at Yatterby, but Minnie likes to show she doesn’t depend on anyone. She came over second week of January. Brought me some baps, too.
Soon as we were into the going chamber she stood still, just listening. Then she tapped her way forward. She seemed to know where the bells hung without being told and she worked her way round to them, tapping her stick against the edge of the carousel. There’s ropes and rods and cranks running at floor-level, but she found them all and stepped over.
The carillon bells hang in a line, with the quarter bells beyond, but Old Joe’s right on round the other side, all by himself. It’s because there’s not room for three lots of striking-chain weights over beyond the big carousel weights, so Old Joe’s hangs with the ones belonging to the main going-train.
Minnie worked along the bells, first holding her hands just clear of them as if she was warming her fingers, then flicking them with the middle finger of her left hand, and going on listening long after any sort of sound had gone that I could hear.
“That’s more like it,” she said, when she got to the C sharp. “That’s an honest little bell you’ve got now.”
She tapped on round to Old Joe and did her finger-warming trick.
“Ah,” she said, and struck him with her whole fist.
Now I’ve tried that, and I can’t get a sound out of him. There’s too much mass there to vibrate until he’s hit by something hard and heavy as his own hammer. But when Minnie struck him with her soft-looking little white fist he crooned for her, a soft, deep, quivering note that changed and wandered.
She stood listening and nodding her head.
“That’s why,” she said at last. “There wasn’t much that nasty little bell could do with a bell like this around. I won’t explain to you. You think it’s all nonsense, but I was bothered about you getting home safe that day.”
“I near as toucher didn’t,” I said, and told her about the maniac in the Porsche.
She was tapping her way on round the carousel towards the door when she stopped and stood still as if someone had called her name.
“Who’s there?” she said, sharply.
“It’s only Lady Winter,” I said. “You’re right alongside of her.”
She knew what I was talking about because I’d explained in my tape about the dancers. She turned and held her hands close to the carved wood, the way she’d done with the bells.
“I see,” she said. “Oh, yes, I do see.”
“What was all that about?” I said as I was helping her down the stairs.
She wouldn’t tell me.
“You think it’s all nonsense,” she said. “Only don’t forget we’re first cousins. He was my granddad as well as yours.”
FIRST ESSAY ON SCIENCE
There’s always more than one sort of explanation for things. Anything worth explaining, that is.
I remember Granddad giving me two Swiss rolls and telling me to slice them up, one longways, one crossways. Longways I got straight stripes on the slices, and crossways I got spirals.
“How do you get both on the same slice?” he said.
“You don’t,” I said, after I’d thought about it.
“Right,” he said, and we took the cakes off to the park to feed the ducks with. (They were stale already, I should have said, left over from Cousin Ivy’s wedding which she didn’t turn up at.)
Science is just one way of slicing the cake.
I thought about this sometimes while I was working at the clock, after Cousin Minnie’s visit. The work went well, hardly a hitch, provided I kept at it honestly and didn’t try any short cuts.
That’s the point. Maybe there was something special and strange about the clock, and Old Joe, and Lady Winter—the sort of thing Minnie believed in and I didn’t, and that’s why the clock had kept going all those years when by rights it should have stopped.
That didn’t affect me. The clock had stopped for perfectly good everyday reasons, such as the leading-off rods being let rust up, so it was no good me sitting back and expecting Minnie to hocus-pocus it going again with her bells. The scaffolding came third week in January, and mother, was it cold up there with the north-east wind whipping the snow-flurries off the fells. So it was up to me to get the hands off and ease the leading-off rod back, and cut and fit new bushes and re-true the rod, and the same with all the other dials, while Hiram and Solomon Kapo—nice lads, both—painted the dials fresh.
And the same all through, pulleys and ropes and levers and pinions and the big tapering rollers that carried the carousel by way of bearings. I’d got to get them working by the ordinary laws of classroom science, or all the resonance in the universe wouldn’t make a single tick lead on to its tock.
The same with the mice. Maybe there was something wonderful about them, and Lady Winter, and maybe Old Joe had something to do with it, but I began to think there was a perfectly simple everyday reason why they had to be there, and the clock wouldn’t go without them. I was fiddling with the train for the Halley’s Comet dial—fancy bit of cam-work, that has, to show the orbit—and I needed Solomon on the scaffolding outside to give it a bit of a biff in the right place, so I opened up the grille over one of the slit windows so I could lean out and sign to him what I wanted.
As I was closing up again I noticed the grille had been mended in one corner, with a bit of thin wire woven in. Not by George Baff, or any human, though. It had never been twisted tight with pliers, but it had been, like I say, woven firm, the way a mouse might weave its nest firm.
That set me thinking. A place like the Branton Clock Tower, with the market so close below, what would you expect to find? Rats, mice, pigeons, starlings—starlings are devils for pecking their way into where they fancy nesting—not to mention beetles and bugs. There’d be droppings everywhere, rinds, scraps, bits of old nest, feathers, dead bodies, mostly just lying around harmless, apart from the stink, but every so often a bit of something wrapping itself round a rod, or tumbling into a shaft, or lying against a lever—just the sort of thing to stop a clock that’s anyway on the edge of not going at all.
But the mice didn’t allow anyone in to make that kind of mess, and they cleaned up their leavings almost well enough to please my Cousin Elsie, who feather-dusts her ornaments three times a day. It was just as if they were proud of their clock, took an interest in it. If there’d been a Branton Town Hall Clock Preservation Society they’d have been founder members.
Tracy took more than an interest. Most of the mice, as I say, I didn’t see a lot of, but Tracy was different. I don’t know what the rest of them felt about the clock being stopped. It didn’t affect them much, though it had finally stuck during the three-quarter strike, but George Baff had had the sense (I’ll give him that) to crank the carousel round and bring Lady Autumn and her lot (and the Docks too, if he’d known) in out of the weather. So they went about their business much as before. A bit more restfully, I dare say, without their homes facing a new way each time the carousel moved and Old Joe juddering them out of their nests whenever he boomed the hours.
But Tracy wanted to know what I was up to. She was really interested. She’d perch on the bench close as she could get (mice are short-sighted, by our standards) and follow every detail. If I had a chocolate biscuit to keep me going through to the next meal I’d give her a corner and she’d eat it, but she didn’t come nosing into my pockets looking for more the way a pet mouse would have, and as soon as I started work again there she was, studying and thinking, so close sometimes that if I was straightening a rod I could actually smell the scorch of her fur from the red-hot metal. She wasn’t scared of the roar of the blowlamp. I had to get a spare set of goggles so she could sit behind one of the eye-pieces and watch me welding.
And, like I say, she thought. She’d be puzzled, and she’d put her head on one side, and she’d go nosing along a crank
Maybe this is the sort of thing she’d have been thinking, supposing I could have seen into her mind.
But even without that I could tell she’d got it.
She hadn’t been born when the clock stopped. She was a naked pink slug at her mother’s teat, remember, when I’d first opened the hatch in Lady Summer’s back, October some time. Maybe some of the older ones had told her about how in the old days the carousel used to go round and round and the bells would tinkle and clang and boom—the way we talk about the old days when there wasn’t any television and people made their own amusements—so maybe she’d some idea what all that machinery was for. But she’d never seen it going.
She worked it out though, bit by bit.
Though we couldn’t say a word to each other, I came to have a real fellow-feeling for Tracy. When I’d come to Branton there was only me in the whole world who knew how the Branton Town Hall Clock was supposed to work.
Now there were two of us.
THIRD ESSAY ON PEOPLE
People are clever, but they don’t like thinking. Not for themselves. Ready-made thoughts are what they like.
My Cousin Duncan makes a living out of this fact. He cuts mottos on pin-heads and sells them, everyday true sayings like There’s no place like home and Mother knows best and It is Father’s fault. I can’t think why anyone should buy them. You need a powerful magnifying glass to read the message, and then it turns out to be something you knew already. Pin-heads appeal to pin-heads, I told him once, and he wasn’t pleased, but next time I see him I’ll tell him I’m sorry and ask him to carve one for me, special.
There’s no fool like an old fool.
It was the champagne did it. That, and the bright, admiring eyes with their long curling lashes, and the pretty little red, red mouth.
And being too pleased with myself.
I’d reason to be pleased, mind you, because everything had gone so well, better than I could ever have dreamed. The business with the carousel bearings just topped it all off.
I’d been bothered about them all along. Very first time I’d looked at the clock I’d cranked the carousel round a notch and found it took all my strength to move it, while it groaned like far-off thunder. No wonder George Baff had been hanging anvils on its weights. The bearings were gone.
I’d borrowed a few jacks from the bus-depot and got them under and jacked the whole thing up and found what I’d been afraid of. The bearings were tapered rollers, twelve of them, half a meter long, ten centimeters wide at the fat end and six the other, running in a nest-shaped track, with the whole carousel balanced on them and steadied by wheels out at the edges.
They were box-wood.
Where do you get ten-centimeter section box, six meters of it, true, knotless, in this day and age? I asked around pretty well every specialist timber merchant in the country. Not a hope. So in the end I had a set turned for me out of some kind of foreign hardwood. They looked all right, but they didn’t feel all right. It was the best I could do, but I wasn’t happy. It wasn’t what Granddad had used.
Then a week before I was going to start putting the whole thing back together I saw my Cousin Cyrus on TV. We’d not been on speaking terms most of our lives, due to a disagreement about home-made marmalade when we were both young and hot-headed, but we’d made it up a couple of years back while we were letting off the fireworks at Cousin Dennis’s funeral. (That was a party!) Not that he’d been right about the marmalade, but there comes a time when you can let bygones be bygones.
Cyrus was always crazy about trees, but they take him seriously these days, outside the family at least. He’s become a world expert on rainforests, so he’s not often in the country, but there he was on TV so I rang him up to say welcome home. In the course of telling him what I’d been up to I mentioned my dealings with the timber merchants, because I thought he’d be interested.
“You’d much better stick to box,” he said.
“I can’t get box, I told you,” I said.
“I’ll look in the back of my shed,” he said.
“I tell you I need six meters of true, knotless, seasoned, ten-centimeter finish box,” I said. “You won’t find that in the back of your shed.”
“What’ll you bet?” he said.
“I’ll eat a pot of your rotten sweet marmalade.”
“It’s a deal.”
“And I’ve got to have them Tuesday, latest.”
“Just give me the exact measurements.”
And next Tuesday, sure enough, I was looking at twelve box-wood rollers, turned, waxed and polished, and a pot of marmalade I’d once sworn I wouldn’t eat to save my life on a desert island. It was a three kilogram pot, too.
The carousel settled on to the rollers as if it had known them all its life, and turned with barely a whisper. The whole job had gone smoothly which was why it was finished three weeks ahead of schedule. I’d call to be pleased.
But I shouldn’t have been pleased with myself.
You could put that on one of Cousin Duncan’s pin-heads. Be pleased, but not with yourself.
It was just luck, things going so sweetly, and once you start taking credit for your luck you’re in for trouble. Fact.
I told the Town Clerk, and maybe he didn’t believe me, so he insisted on coming along early one Sunday morning before anyone was up, to see the clock going. At five to six I lifted the bob of the pendulum sideways along the wall of the weight room and let it swing. Above our heads the two-second heartbeat began, sweet, steady, even, as if it had never been stopped.
We went down and out into the March dawn to watch the hour strike. We heard the click and burr of the warning. The minute hand moved on. The Town Clerk had got me to muffle the bells, because he didn’t want to disturb people, he said, but I guessed he had other reasons. We could faintly hear the carillon. The door on the right swung open and out came the foxes, twiddling on their hind legs. Out came the first dancing woodman and the first fox, then Lady Winter, and then the other woodman and fox, and last of all Lady Winter’s grim mate with his drum.
They stopped in the centre and did their dance while the muffled quarters chimed. We waited for the man to beat the drum.
I don’t know how I’d expected to muffle Old Joe—I should have disconnected his hammer, but maybe even a little thing like that would have mucked up the balance of the clock—it had got to be all working or none of it would work. Be that as it may, he didn’t appreciate having his hammer muffled. I could feel his note resonate along my thigh-bones, a deep, surly boom it seemed without its clank of metal striking on metal.
It won’t have been only my thigh-bones that resonated. All round the square the windowpanes, the frames of the beds, the mugs on the trays set out for morning tea, the dentures in the tooth-glasses by the beds, the silver photo-frames round snaps of grandchildren, the very tiles and timbers of the buildings, all of them must have stirred and answered according to their fashion, rattling or groaning or twanging or quivering. The sleepers too, they stirred, woke, listened, understood, ran to the windows …
We heard the sashes fly up, and as the last boom of six died away and Time came swinging out to chase the dancers into their cavern, we heard the cheering.
“That’s torn it,” said the Town Clerk. “Now they’ll want a party.”
(There’s never been a Town Clerk at Branton who enjoyed spending money.)
They made it into a publicity party to tell the world that Branton Town Hall Clock was running again. They had the papers along, and the radio and TV and all, and what are called “personalities,” and almost anyone they could think of to tickle the interest of tourists. The square was lit and decorated like Christmas twice over, and there was free wine and free beer (while it lasted) and a barb
ecue and ices and a band to dance to, and jugglers and clowns and morris men and a pageant of the history of Branton, of which there isn’t any. I set the pendulum swinging at 11.55 and everyone got their glass of wine and they counted the noon strike through, all together, and everyone cheered and threw streamers and the band played and the dancing began, while the nobs and notables went into the Assembly Room for a sit-down dinner. With champagne.
They included me in, which was nice of them. In fact, they did me proud for having got their clock started, and put me on the top table, and they’d even asked me who I’d fancy sitting beside.
“Someone young and pretty,” I said. “I don’t get enough of that, my age.”
(No, there’s no fool like an old fool.)
Oh, if I’d met her fifty years before!
Her name was Lilith. She was the Town Clerk’s daughter, though you’d never have guessed it to look at them. She was twenty. Pretty isn’t in it. Gingery hair in shining waves, and big green eyes flecked brown with an almost-squint (very fetching, I find that), high cheekbones, neat red mouth, a skin you wanted to touch to see if it was real … oh, I had excuses for my folly!
She was in the end chair on the top table, with no-one on the other side, so she’d only me to talk to. She didn’t seem to mind. She laughed, and listened, and asked questions—the right questions, showing she’d understood. And she was interested in everything, the clock, Granddad, my cats, Cousin Minnie and her bells and the resonances of the universe, Cousin Angel and her cats, Cousin Cyrus and the rainforests and the marmalade—even my old dad and his airships which I’d never taken much heed of …
I told her all that.
She didn’t care for champagne, either, so I got her whack on top of mine.
I told her about the mice.
Those big green eyes opened wider still, and shone.