The Clockmaker's Daughter

by Kate Morton

  The label on the videotape said that this performance had taken place at the Royal Albert Hall in 1987 and that the piece of music was Dvořák’s Cello Concerto in B Minor, Op. 104. Elodie jotted a note.

  Her mother was playing unaccompanied now, and the orchestra – a blurred sea of women with straight faces and men with dark-rimmed glasses – sat very still behind her. The heart-stripping cello notes sent a shiver up Elodie’s spine.

  Lauren Adler had believed that a recording was a dead thing. She’d given an interview to The Times in which she’d said so, going on to describe live performance as the precipice on which fear, anticipation and joy met, a unique experience shared between audience and performer, which lost all potency when pressed into permanence. But the recording was all Elodie had. She had no memories of her mother the musician. She’d been taken to see her play once or twice when she was a very small child, and of course she’d heard her practising at home, but Elodie couldn’t actually remember hearing her mother play professionally – not that she could separate her from her experience of other concerts, performed by other musicians.

  She would never have confessed as much to her father, who was wholly invested in the idea that Elodie carried those memories inside her; moreover, that they were an intrinsic part of who she was. ‘Your mother used to play for you when she was pregnant,’ he’d told her more times than she could count. ‘She used to say that the human heartbeat was the first music that a person heard, and that every child was born knowing the rhythm of her mother’s song.’

  He often spoke to Elodie as if she shared his memories. ‘Remember when she played for the Queen and the audience stood in ovation at the end for over three minutes? Remember the night she performed all six Bach cello suites at the Proms?’

  Elodie didn’t remember. She didn’t know her mother at all.

  She closed her eyes. Her father was part of the problem. His grief was just so pervasive. Rather than allowing the chasm left when Lauren Adler died to close – even to help it close – his own sorrow, his refusal to let her go, had kept it wide open.

  One day, in the weeks following the accident, Elodie had been in the garden when she overheard a couple of well-meaning women who’d come to offer consolation and were now returning to their car. ‘A good thing the child’s so young,’ one of them had said to the other as they reached the front gate. ‘She’ll grow up and forget and she’ll never know what she’s missing.’

  They were right, in part: Elodie had forgotten. She simply had too few memories of her own with which to fill the hole made by her mother’s death. But they were wrong, too, for Elodie knew exactly what she was missing. She hadn’t been allowed to forget.

  Now she opened her eyes.

  It was dark outside; night had swept the dusk aside. Inside, the television screen was fizzing with static. Elodie hadn’t noticed when the music stopped.

  She climbed off the window seat and ejected the tape, selecting another to replace it.

  This one was labelled Mozart String Quintet No. 3 in C Major, K. 515, Carnegie Hall, 1985, and Elodie stood watching the preamble for a few minutes. The video had been shot documentary-style, starting with a biographical introduction to the five young string players – three women and two men – coming together in New York to perform together. As the narrator spoke about each one in turn, the footage showed her mother in a rehearsal room, laughing with the others while a violinist with dark curly hair joked around with his bow.

  Elodie recognised him as her mother’s friend, the American violinist who had been driving the car from Bath to London on the day they were both killed. She remembered him vaguely: his family had come to dinner once or twice when they were visiting London from the States. And, of course, she’d seen his photograph in some of the newspaper articles published after the accident. There’d been a couple, too, amongst the boxes of loose photos at home that her father had never got around to sorting.

  She watched him for a moment as the camera followed his movements, trying to decide how she felt about this man who had unwittingly taken her mother from her; who would remain linked to Lauren Adler forever by the circumstances of their deaths. But all she could think was how impossibly young he looked, and how much talent he possessed, and how right Mrs Berry was that life’s only nod to fairness was the blindness with which it dealt unfair blows. After all, he had left a young family behind, too.

  Lauren Adler was onscreen now. It was true what all the newspaper columns said: she had been breathtaking. Elodie watched as the group performed in concert, jotting down notes as she considered whether the piece would be a good choice for the wedding ceremony and, if so, which portions they might decide to use.

  When the tape ended, she started another.

  She was halfway through her mother’s 1982 performance of the Elgar Cello Concerto Op. 85, with the London Symphony Orchestra, when her phone rang. Elodie glanced at the time. It was late, and her first instinct was to worry that something had happened to her dad, but it was only Pippa.

  Elodie remembered the book launch at the publishing house in King’s Cross; her friend was probably on her way home now, wanting conversation on the walk.

  Her thumb hesitated above the answer button, but the call rang out.

  Elodie considered ringing back and then silenced the phone and tossed it onto the sofa.

  A peal of laughter carried up from the street below and Elodie sighed.

  Some of the disquiet from her meeting with Pippa earlier that day lingered. Elodie had felt possessive about the photo of the Victorian woman in the white dress, but it had been more than that. Now, sitting in a room filled with the melancholy strains of her mother’s cello lines, she knew that it was the way Pippa had asked about the recordings.

  They’d already talked about the subject, back when Penelope had first suggested using clips of Lauren Adler in the wedding ceremony. Pippa had wondered then whether Elodie’s dad might not have reservations, given that he could barely talk about Elodie’s mother without welling up. Frankly, Elodie had held the same concerns, but it turned out he’d been quietly pleased, echoing Penelope’s sentiment that it was the next best thing to having her there.

  Today, though, when Elodie had said as much, rather than dropping the subject and moving on, Pippa had pushed further, asking whether Elodie agreed.

  Now, watching Lauren Adler as she brought the Elgar to its aching conclusion, Elodie wondered whether perhaps Pippa had her own reasons. Within their friendship Pippa had always occupied the more dynamic space, inviting attention where Elodie, naturally shy, preferred to play the support act; maybe in this one instance, when Elodie could lay claim to an extraordinary parent, Pippa resented the intrusion?

  Even as the thought occurred to her, Elodie was ashamed of it. Pippa was a good friend who was even now busy designing and making Elodie’s wedding dress. She had never done anything to suggest that she begrudged Elodie her parentage. In fact, she was one of the few people who’d never seemed particularly interested in Lauren Adler. Elodie was used to people, when they learned of the connection, tripping over themselves to ask questions, almost as if from Elodie they could absorb some of the talent and tragedy that had surrounded Lauren Adler. But not Pippa. Although over the years she’d asked plenty about Elodie’s mother – whether Elodie missed her, whether she remembered much from before her mother died – her interest had been limited to Lauren Adler’s maternal role. It was as if the music and fame, though interesting enough, were inconsequential in all the ways that mattered.

  The Elgar recording ended and Elodie switched off the TV.

  Without Alastair there to insist on a ‘proper weekend lie-in’, she planned to get up early and take a long walk east along the river. She wanted to get to her great-uncle Tip before his shop opened.

  She showered and climbed into bed, closing her eyes and willing herself to sleep.

  The night was still warm and she was restless. Free-floating anxiety circled in the air above her li
ke a mosquito looking to land a sting.

  Elodie turned and tossed and then turned again.

  She thought of Mrs Berry and her husband, Tomas, and wondered if it was true that the love of one person – and such a tiny person as Mrs Berry, five feet tall on a good day and as wiry as they come – was comfort enough to alleviate another person’s fears.

  Elodie was frightened of so many things. Did it take time, she wondered, for the certainty of another person’s love to accumulate such power? Would she discover, somewhere down the track, that the knowledge of Alastair’s love had made her fearless?

  Did he love her that way? How was she to know?

  Her father had certainly loved her mother that way, but rather than make him brave, the loss of her had made him timid. Edward Radcliffe, too, had loved with a depth that made him vulnerable. I love her, I love her, I love her, and if I cannot have her I will surely go mad, for when I am not with her I fear—

  Her. The woman in the photograph came to Elodie’s mind. But, no, that was her own obsession. There was nothing to link the woman in the white dress to Radcliffe; it had turned up in his satchel, certainly, but the photo was in a frame that had belonged to James Stratton. No, Radcliffe had been writing about Frances Brown, the fiancée whose death, it was well known, had driven him to his own demise.

  If I cannot have her … Elodie rolled over onto her back. It was an odd thing to write about a woman to whom he was engaged. Surely the very act of engagement meant the opposite? She was already his.

  Unless he wrote the message after Frances’s death, when he was facing the same abyss of absence that had confronted her own father. Is that when Radcliffe had drawn the house, too? Was it a real house? Had he stayed there after his fiancée’s death – to recuperate, perhaps?

  Elodie’s thoughts swarmed, dark feathered birds circling closer and closer.

  Her father, her mother, the wedding, the woman in the photo, the house in the sketch, Edward Radcliffe and his fiancée, Mrs Berry and her husband, the little German boy alone on the doorstep; life, fear, the inevitability of death …

  Elodie caught herself entering the dreaded night-time thought-loop and stopped.

  She pushed back her sheet and slid out of bed. She’d been down this road enough times to know that she was as far away from sleep as one could be. She might as well do something useful.

  The windows were still open and the sounds of the nocturnal city were a familiar comfort. Across the road, all was in darkness.

  Elodie turned on a lamp and made a cup of tea.

  She loaded another tape into the video player, this one labelled Bach Suite No. 1 in G Major, Queen Elizabeth Hall, 1984, and then she sat cross-legged on the old velvet armchair.

  As the clock ticked over past midnight and the new day slid into position, Elodie pressed play and watched as a beautiful young woman with the world at her feet walked out onto the stage, lifted her hand to acknowledge the applauding audience, and then, taking up her cello, began her magic.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Elodie’s great-uncle lived in a garden flat at the end of Columbia Road. He was eccentric and something of a recluse, but had used to come to lunch at the weekends when her mother was alive. As a child, Elodie had found him somewhat startling; even then he’d seemed old, and she’d been vitally aware of his great tufting eyebrows and runner-bean fingers, and the way he would start to fidget when the lunch conversation turned to topics that didn’t interest him. But where Elodie might have been told off for sticking her fingertips in the warm wax of the lunch-table candle and peeling the prints off once they’d cooled, nobody said a word to great-uncle Tip, who would quietly amass a considerable pile, arranging them in elaborate patterns on the linen cloth, before losing interest and brushing them aside.

  Elodie’s mother had been very fond of her uncle. She was an only child and had become close to him when he moved into her family home for a year when she was young. ‘She used to say that he was different from other adults,’ Elodie could remember her father telling her. ‘She said your great-uncle Tip was like Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up.’

  Elodie had glimpsed this for herself in the aftermath of her mother’s death. Amidst all the adult well-wishers, there’d been Tip and his pottery charm box, its surface covered with a wondrous array of shells and pebbles, broken tiles and shiny pieces of glass – all the things that children noticed but grownups walked right by.

  ‘What’s a charm box?’ Elodie had asked him.

  ‘A little bit of magic,’ he’d replied, with no hint of the indulgent smile adults usually adopted when speaking on such themes. ‘And this one’s just for you. Do you have any treasures?’

  Elodie had nodded, thinking of the little gold signet ring her mother had given her for Christmas.

  ‘Well, now you have a place to keep them safe.’

  It had been kind of Tip to make an effort, to seek her out when everyone else was focused on their own grief. They hadn’t had a lot to do with one another since, but Elodie had never forgotten the kindness and hoped that he would come to the wedding.

  It was a bright morning and, as she walked along the river path, Elodie was glad to be out in it. She had fallen asleep eventually on the brown velvet chair, and the night had passed in a series of fractured dreams and stirrings until she woke with the dawn birds. Now, as she neared Hammersmith Bridge, she realised that she still hadn’t shaken it off: she had a stiff neck and a haunting cello line stuck in her mind.

  A clutch of gulls wheeled above a nearby patch of water and by the distant boathouses, rowers were making the most of the fine weather to get out early. Elodie stopped at one of the bridge’s grey-green pillars and leaned against the railing to watch the swirling Thames below. This was the spot from which Lieutenant Charles Wood had leapt in 1919 to rescue a woman who was drowning. Elodie thought of him every time she crossed the bridge. The woman had survived, but Wood had died from tetanus due to injuries sustained in the rescue. It seemed a particularly cruel fate to survive service with the RAF in the First World War, only to die after an act of bravery in peace time.

  By the time she reached the Chelsea Embankment, London was waking up. Elodie walked as far as the Charing Cross railway bridge and then caught the number 26 bus from outside the Royal Courts of Justice. She managed to get a front seat on the top level: it was a childhood pleasure that gladdened her still. The bus route followed Fleet Street all the way into the City of London, past the Old Bailey and St Paul’s, along Threadneedle Street, before turning towards the north at Bishopsgate. Elodie pictured, as she always did, the streets as they must have looked in the nineteenth century, back when London had belonged to James Stratton.

  Elodie hopped off at Shoreditch High Street. Beneath the railway bridge a group of kids were having a hip-hop dance lesson while their parents stood around cradling cups of takeaway coffee. She crossed the road and then cut through the back streets, turning the corner into Columbia Road, where the shops were just starting to open.

  Columbia Road was one of those vibrant, hidden streets in which London specialised: a run of short brick terraces with colourful shopfronts of turquoise, yellow, red, green and black, in which vintage clothing, artisan jewellery, handcrafted treasures and tastefully distressed miscellanea could be bought. On Sundays, when the flower market took over and fragrance filled the air, it was difficult to move for the abundance of bright blooms and bustle; but today, at this time, the street was almost empty.

  There was an iron gate on the side of Tip’s building, behind which a path overgrown with violets led to the back garden. Black letters and a pointed finger had been stencilled on the white brick pillar out front, indicating that the ‘Garden Flat’ was accessed that way. The gate was unlatched and Elodie let herself through. At the end of the path, in the back corner of the garden, was a shed with a carved sign above the door which read, ‘The Studio’.

  The studio door was ajar. Elodie pushed it open and was met, as ever, by an incredi
ble collection of intriguing objects. A blue racing bicycle was propped against a Victorian printing press, and a series of wooden work desks braced the walls. Their surfaces were covered with old-fashioned contraptions: lamps and clocks, radios and typewriters, jostling for space with metal trays of vintage typeset letters. The cabinets beneath overflowed with oddly shaped spare parts and mysterious tools, and the walls were hung with an array of oil paints and ink pens that would have put any art shop to shame. ‘Hello?’ she called, as she stepped inside. She spotted her great-uncle at his tall desk at the back of the studio. ‘Tip, hello.’

  He glanced over the tops of his glasses but otherwise registered no sign of surprise at the arrival of his great-niece on his doorstep. ‘Good timing. Could you pass me the smallest pfeil tool?’

  Elodie fetched it from the wall where he was pointing and handed it across the workbench.

  ‘That’s better,’ he said, making a fine cut. ‘So … what’s new in your world?’ As if Elodie had just stepped out an hour ago to fetch groceries.

  ‘I’m getting married.’

  ‘Married? Aren’t you ten years old?’

  ‘A little older than that now. I was hoping you could come. I sent you an invitation.’

  ‘Did you? Did I receive it?’ He gestured towards a pile of papers on the end of the bench nearest the door. Amongst a stack of energy bills and estate agents’ flyers Elodie spotted the cream cotton-thread envelope selected and addressed by Penelope. It had not been opened. ‘Shall I?’ she said, holding it aloft.

  ‘You’re here now. You might as well give me the highlights in person.’

  Elodie sat at the bench, opposite Tip. ‘It’s next month, Saturday the twenty-sixth. Nothing to do but turn up. Dad said he’d be happy to drive you there and back.’