The Echo Chamber

by Luke Williams

  As he spoke the stranger looked intently at the student. He had become increasingly agitated, taking quick sips of his wine, and glancing around the dining car. The student appeared at once horrified and intrigued. Both had neglected the food, and the dining attendants, in their umber-coloured livery, curved past the tables, unfazed by the motion of the train, clearing the plates, cutlery and glasses and producing the next course. Speaking hurriedly, the stranger continued his tale.

  ‘If one reads the Encyclopaedia Britannica, it will tell you that the word watch derives from the old English wæcce, which suggests a keeping guard or watching. The word, by derivation, means “that which keeps wakeful observation over everything”. This notion became my starting point – for the heart must remain ever watchful over the body. I focused my attention upon creating a mechanism that would connect in subtle ways to Julia’s arteries. By means of research and through a series of terrible experiments I mapped the exact passage of the blood as it flows through the body. The human heart possesses two chambers – ventricles – which propel blood to the organs. I, in turn, made twin pumps, each with a disk-shaped mechanism. The action of my clockwork heart was similar to that of the human heart. There was, however, one difference – the heart is living muscle, while clockwork is nothing more than a series of mechanical components. Julia’s new heart needed some internal source of life. Naturally, I couldn’t see her wound up every so often like a regular clock. I had to find a way to keep her independently ticking, so to speak. It was then I came upon a magnificent invention. In 1780, Breguet invented the first self-winding watch. He called it the perpétuelle. Using two barrels, a carefully balanced weight reacting to the slightest movement and an additional train wheel to provide a going-period of sixty hours, he produced a watch that could be used by someone leading a relatively inactive life. The perpétuelle was capable of running for eight years without being overhauled or going slow. With this technology I felt able to build Julia’s clockwork heart.

  ‘I won’t go into details about the operation to fit the device. Rest assured, it was a messy business. When I’d completed the fitting, having set the clockwork in motion, I rebuilt Julia’s ribcage and stitched her skin. I waited for her to wake from her opium-induced stupor. But she never woke. Inside her otherwise lifeless chest I could hear the clockwork, ticking just as I had hoped. The heart appeared to be functioning perfectly – it even produced tiny tremors on her breast – and yet her chest failed to rise and fall, and I did not feel her breath when I wet my palm and pressed it to her lips.

  ‘And now, through no more than husbandly devotion, I find myself wanted for murder! If uxoriousness is a crime, let me be damned!’

  The stranger slumped in his seat. His limbs and shoulders dropped, and his whole body trembled. The student bent his head. He unwound his tie and placed it across his legs. He picked at the inside seam.

  With a series of drawn-out whistles the train sped through York station, the platform filled with people standing to attention. The engine roared; black smoke gushed from the funnel and plumed past the window. Inside, diners, having finished their luncheon, began to smoke. The student indicated that he himself wanted a cigarette, but the stranger was oblivious. The student wiped the palms of his hands against his trouser leg and helped himself to the packet.

  ‘I must get off this train,’ the stranger said. ‘But first,’ he said, rising from his seat, ‘I will give you the letter.’ He produced a crumpled but otherwise perfectly ordinary-looking envelope.

  ‘Promise me you’ll see it to its destination.’

  ‘I promise,’ said the student.

  ‘I must get off the train! Should anyone ask, we never met.’

  The student was alone in the dining car, clutching the letter. It was surprisingly heavy. He smoothed the wrinkles then scanned the address: Evelyn Rafferty, 16 Ingolstadt Place, Oxford. There was the first surprise – a woman! In his mind the addressee had assumed a theatre of forms – madman, accomplice, alibi, or target for the stranger’s murderous imagination – but not a woman. He read the name again: Evelyn. Evie. Eve. (My name, of course, and my mother’s too. But I was not named after her; I acquired my name by accident.) The student turned the letter – how gently the stranger had held it! – and lifted it to the window. He saw lines like tightly scrabbling ants beneath the envelope. He held it up to the sun. And those words, which he could not make out, stirred a desire in him.

  Why did the student decide to deliver the letter? Why, when the stranger was unreliable, and his story improbable, was he prepared to embroil himself in an unknown fate? Perhaps because he had made a promise; perhaps for the sense of adventure it foretold; or maybe it was the stranger’s own guarantee – ‘Nothing of what I say will cause you harm or adversely affect you in any way.’ In my opinion, there is a more immediate explanation. The student was simply curious.

  3

  How My Parents Met

  There was silence, next day, as the student approached 16 Ingolstadt Place. Sunlight streamed through sycamores that lined the edge of the pavement. The street was empty, the sky limpid and still; and – why not? – a pair of moths circled a rose bush. Number 16 was a watch shop. Inside, the air was cool. Corridors of dusty light sprang from shuttered windows, and high glass cabinets displayed carriage clocks, nocturnals, music boxes. There was a dynasty of grandfathers, chronometers, mechanical dancing figurines. As the student approached the counter, he saw a thousand faces staring at him. A thousand hands formed the letter ‘L’ as he surveyed the room. There was a clangour of gong-bells and chimes, melodies, a cuckoo’s cry. A thousand pendulums rocked back and forth. A thousand ticks, a thousand tocks. The student spoke (amid the cacophony of three o’clock a young woman, dressed in an accordion-pleated skirt with a cape over her shoulders, had appeared behind the counter): ‘Are you Evelyn? Yes? I have something for you.’ Then, ‘My watch is broken.’ Releasing watch and letter, he stood, eyeing the floor.

  ‘Where did you get the letter?’ she asked.

  ‘From a gentleman … he didn’t tell me his name.’

  ‘I know the handwriting.’

  ‘I met him on the train to London.’

  ‘I recognize his handwriting.’

  ‘Whose?’

  ‘Father.’ Suddenly she collapsed into a fit of weeping. ‘Your watch will be ready the day after next,’ she said between sobs that shook her whole body.

  Many years later, when Rex Steppman was no longer a student, and the stranger, whom I called Grandfather, lived in an institution with other fantasists, my father remembered the encounter. ‘I was as helpless as she was.’ Father, sitting at the edge of our veranda in Lagos; me, six years old, balancing on his knee. ‘I didn’t know what to do. I just stood there with your mother weeping and those clocks staring at me.’ Suddenly changing mood, he looked into my eyes. ‘Never underestimate the power of clockwork, Evie. Once you wind it up, it has a life of its own.’ And I, timidly, ‘But is clockwork truly alive?’ Whereupon Father roared with laughter and reached for the pocket watch. ‘I’ll show you,’ he said, sliding me to my feet. Crouching at the edge of the lawn, I watched as he flipped the body from its case … to reveal a tiny world of movement, a pinioned order such as every artist dreams of, a world of cogs and balances, each moving at different speeds and trajectories, but all, somehow, impossibly, in synchrony. Next he took a letter opener and wrenched the mainspring; it leaped from his hands thrashing and turning like a Catherine wheel; up it went, making a noise like the sharpening of knives, until it hit the roof and fell to the floor; where it continued to spin maliciously, without restraint, in ever-increasing circles, until finally, as I squirmed in fear and excitement, it died on the wood.

  The following day, slightly embarrassed, winking at me and trying to turn the whole thing into a joke, Father gathered the parts and took them to the watch repairer. But that night I did not sleep. Father knew how to bring clockwork to life!

  He also knew how to destroy it. An
d frequently, in the years we lived in Lagos, he succumbed to his appetite for stifling clockwork. This life-long struggle with clocks, however, began in the weeks after he delivered the letter. The pocket watch broke apart an extraordinary number of times, and on each occasion my father returned to the shop with the thousand faces and the corridors of dusty light. The watch’s rusty hand was succeeded by a misaligned going-barrel, a broken arbor, an impulse which spun too slowly. My mother mended each disorder willingly and with patience. There was the matter of an over-eager escarpment, which she removed, filed and carefully replaced. The watch suffered from train-wheel convulsion, bevel seizure, a wonky chapter and, of course, the afflicted minute hand, which snapped and was placed in a drawer. Like many objects stored in drawers, however, it went missing, and my mother never got round to finding a replacement.

  In between his visits to the shop, my father began his training for the colonial service. He was given a historical account of Empire, instruction in governorship by law, the basics of gunboat diplomacy. He learned that the instinct of sport played a great part in maintaining the British Empire. ‘History,’ he was told by a severe Oxonian in mufti, ‘has demonstrated that the human race advances inexorably.’ And, ‘Strong, healthy and flourishing nations require a continual expansion of their frontiers.’ He took out subscriptions with the Royal Geographical Society, the Zoological Society, the Old Elephant and the Corona Club. He learned that time marches ever forward, and yet he continued – unaware – to rebel against the sentiments of the age. Over the following weeks he proceeded to scratch and snap, to smash and unscrew … in short, to interrupt the otherwise steady progress of the pocket watch. By 1939, the pocket watch was falling sick roughly once a week. And gradually my parents were getting to know one another. Rex had begun to linger while Evelyn mended the watch; and, as she worked, she talked.

  ‘When I was fourteen,’ she told him, several months after their first meeting, ‘my mother left home in mysterious circumstances. She was a singer and routinely toured. I rarely saw her. When she returned to Oxford in between tours we scarcely spoke. She regarded me with barely concealed boredom. I remember – I was nine years old – asking her, during an awful scene, why she was such a selfish mother. “I have a weak heart,” she said.

  ‘Father was devoted to my mother. Despite her ambivalence towards us, I cannot recall his saying a hurtful word about her. He tolerated her long absences from Oxford for many years, her distractedness at home, and even the infidelities; these last betrayals hurt him deeply, but it made him only more determined to keep us all together. When she left home shortly after my fourteenth birthday, however, departing with no explanation and taking half her wardrobe, Father knew that she wouldn’t return. He made inquiries and discovered she was living with a cellist from the Berlin Philharmonic. It was then he began to spend long hours in his workshop, a little room at the bottom of the house, just below where we are standing. I don’t know what obsession captured him in those months, because both he and his workshop were closed to me; he shut himself away for weeks at a stretch.

  ‘One day,’ Evelyn told Rex, ‘some months after my mother’s disappearance, Father emerged from his workshop. He told me he was going to Germany to reconcile the marriage. I didn’t hear from him for several weeks. And then I received a telephone call; the reception was bad, but I understood that he was still searching for my mother. She had discovered that he was coming after her and was evading him, doing everything she could, laying false trails, decoys and simulations, dropping misleading clues and appearing on stage under various aliases. Father told me that he wouldn’t rest until he found her and cured her weak heart.

  ‘After that telephone call,’ continued Evelyn, ‘I heard nothing more. I told no one of Father’s departure. My life was unusual for a child in her teenage years. I went to school. I cooked for myself, bought items of clothing when I needed them. When I was seventeen I left school and reopened the shop. I have since lived on the money from watch repairs, which, until now, has been meagre.’

  ‘Will you see your father again?’

  ‘In his letter he said that he is planning to return to Oxford sometime in the New Year … But tell me again. How was he when you met him? Did he look happy? What was he wearing?’

  Soon Rex no longer needed a broken watch to visit Evelyn. Three times a week, in between his studies, he rode his bike to the shop, leaving it propped against a lamp-post.

  But I tell too much. It is not easy, with my failing memory, to relate every detail of my parents’ history. I keep a single picture of them in my mind. A simple scene, composed more of sound than image. They stand in the shop. Father’s left hand cups the pocket watch, his right index finger points to the space where the minute hand ought to be. It is three o’clock in the afternoon. My mother’s mouth is open as if to say something but all I can hear is the clangour of a thousand clock-calls.

  …

  Today I travelled to Edinburgh to visit my maternal grandfather, Mr Rafferty. He was in bed, surrounded by enormous white pillows. I decided to take him for a walk. He can cause trouble outside the institution, but I needed some information, and he is more receptive to my questions in the open. Mr Rafferty is an important resource for these first stories, my pre-history. He is old and his mind half-cracked; nevertheless, he may provide me with certain details I cannot know. For instance, what happened after he returned to Oxford.

  As we began to walk I held tightly to his arm because I feared he might run on to the street. It had been raining, and the pavements of Edinburgh are broken, so we could not take a step without treading in a puddle. I tried as far as possible to cross to the drier sections, but I saw at once that Mr Rafferty loved getting into the water. It took all my strength to force him to walk by my side. Nevertheless, he managed to step on to a section of pavement where one of the slabs had sunk in deeper than the rest. By the time I realized what he was doing he was wet through and covered in dead leaves.

  Mr Rafferty is often gloomy and inclined to silence. His gestures are furtive; the tips of his moustache droop, and his eyes sink into the grey rash of his face. In this mood he spends whole days in bed, falling in and out of heavy sleep. At other times he is excited and talkative. Sometimes he gets quietly to his feet and runs to the corner of his room where a sink and shaving mirror stand; there he argues with himself, staring into his reflection. Or else he will sit up suddenly, knock on the side of the bed and answer, ‘Come in,’ in various tones for hours on end.

  He was nervous and animated as we walked. His eyes gleamed, and everything that shone caught his attention. I knew that if I could get him to George Square, where we could watch the pigeons and drink hot chocolate, he would answer my questions. We walked to the corner of Warrender Park. As we were passing the windows of the swimming pool, full of green shadows and refracted light, he didn’t want to carry on; he made himself heavier and heavier and, however hard I pulled, I could scarcely move him. Finally I had to stop in front of the last window. For several minutes we watched the bathers moving smoothly between bars of broken light. I grabbed hold of Mr Rafferty and tried to walk naturally. But every step was an effort as in those dreams in which one’s shoes are made of lead. In this way we proceeded down Warrender Park, through the Meadows until, finally, we reached George Square. He didn’t want hot chocolate, so I bought him a packet of crisps and this seemed to make him happy. We sat on the brickwork surrounding the square. The edge of my skirt was damp, and scraps of leaves clung to the lining. I asked him about the days before the war. I asked what my mother was like when she was a child. Was she very beautiful? Did she wear long dresses? He didn’t answer; he only stared up at the sky, placing crisps into his mouth every so often. But I could see that he was enjoying the day, the air which was sweet and unobtrusive.

  ‘What was Mother’s star sign?’ I asked. He didn’t seem to hear. All at once he turned his head towards me.

  ‘Who are you?’ he said.

  ‘Evie Stepp
man,’ I said.

  ‘Where were you born?’

  ‘Children’s Hospital, Lagos.’

  ‘Age?’

  ‘Fifty-four.’

  ‘Eyes?’

  ‘Green.’

  ‘Jew or Gentile?’

  I didn’t answer but sprung back a question: ‘On what day did you return to Oxford before the war?’

  ‘It was at night,’ he replied.

  ‘On what night did you return?’

  ‘February 15th 1939.’ I started to ask him questions about his return to Oxford, quickly, one after another, in case he lost interest.

  Suddenly, he interrupted me.

  ‘There’s no cure for a broken heart. For a weak one, there is. I have found it. In fact, I am currently in the process of establishing a patent for this cure.’