by Nina Allan
He continued to smile. Once again, Amber found herself staring at his hands, those smooth and perfect fingers that might easily have belonged to a pianist, or to a stage magician. Her eyes kept being drawn to the watch he wore, white gold, she thought, or maybe platinum, a Herzog. Its dial was transparent, the purest crystal – she could see the cogs and springs of its mechanism whirring behind. Like the workings of my brain, Amber thought, or some infernal machine. She could not imagine what had brought the word “infernal” so readily to mind, yet it continued to flicker there, nonetheless, like a captive fly.
“Why do all the clocks in your shop show different times?” she asked suddenly. She was anxious to stop talking about the music. It came to her once again, that Anders Tessmond had known beforehand that the song about the dwarf would be on the program, that he had wanted her to hear it.
“Time is an illusion,” Tessmond said. “It is a device invented by humans, to keep themselves sane.” He stared pointedly at the watch on his wrist. “Have you never considered the lies these things tell? That is not their fault of course, it is we who put them up to it. But when you think about it clearly, the only clocks that show us what we choose to call the right time are those on a perfect par with the Royal Meridian. Move even an inch to the right or to the left, and your watch is a liar.”
“But time would still pass, even if there were no clocks.”
“Of course it would, in a sense, but it is only human beings who persist in their delusion of time’s linearity. So far as the universe is concerned, all moments in time are equal and exist simultaneously. Which means that in terms of its own private universe, no clock can be wrong. If people understood this better, they would worry less about time’s passing.”
“I’m not sure if I find that reassuring or not,” Amber said.
“All I am saying is that time is less rigid than most people think.” He raised his hand to touch her cheek, his perfect fingers brushing the corner of her mouth. “The queen was foolish,” he said. “No one could have loved her better than the dwarf.”
“Why do you say that?” Amber said. She found herself unable to move away.
“Because he saw her for what she was,” said Tessmond. “He knew her from the inside out.”
They stood in the foyer, close together, the tide of their fellow spectators flowing around them as they moved towards the exit. “Would you come home with me?” Tessmond said. “Just to sleep,” he added hastily. “There’s a spare room, upstairs. I find it difficult to be alone after listening to music.”
Amber did not see how she could refuse, not easily anyway, not without damaging their budding friendship. Besides, she was curious. Curious about Tessmond, curious about his apartment above the shop. “How can I?” she said. She laughed a soft, low laugh. “I don’t have my night things.” As if the mention of night things did not immediately call to mind the soft glow of naked bodies, his and hers, an image she felt sure he was seeing even as she denied him its reality.
“I have everything you need,” he said. “There’s no need to worry.”
Some steps you take because you don’t know the trajectory of the road ahead, she told herself, and some you take because you do, and still you want to dare yourself. She asked herself which of these extremities lay before her now, and couldn’t decide.
* * *
—
For her birthday, he gave her a pendant of polished amber.
“You must get this all the time,” he said, “but I couldn’t resist.”
The pendant was triangular in shape, an inch across at the base and bound in silver. There was a fly trapped in the amber, not the usual kind of gnat or housefly but a prehistoric monster, its spiky, jointed legs forever thrashing in the tide of the orange sea that had risen to drown it, the limbs of an impossible swimmer, aeons dead and yet still present, irrefutably there.
“My aunt gave me an amber ring for my twenty-first but it’s too small for me,” Amber said. “I could have had it altered, I suppose.” The ring was exquisite, a polished oval of tawny amber in a Georgian setting. Amber knew it must have cost her aunt a great deal of money, yet with her hands the way they were, the gift had seemed tactless, a mockery even. She had never even tried to put it on.
Tessmond lifted her hair aside and fastened the catch. His touch on her skin was so light she barely felt it.
“You look like a queen,” he said.
“You always choose such wonderful things.”
“The maker is still young, but he’ll be famous yet. His work will end up in museums. Won’t you come out with me now and show it off?”
“It’s getting late,” Amber said, although it was not yet ten. She felt as she often felt when she was with him: uncertain of whether she wished to stay or get away.
“What time would you like it to be?” Tessmond said. He slipped the watch from his wrist, the platinum Herzog he had been wearing at the concert, with the skeleton dial. “Try it on,” he said. He caught hold of her wrist, and Amber felt the surge of tension she always experienced when anyone touched or paid attention to her hands. She looked down at her fingers where they lay in his, and trembled. He settled the bracelet into place about her wrist.
“You see,” he said. “It’s not as late as you think.”
The Herzog’s hands were pointing to seven fifteen.
Amber laughed. What harm could there be in going with him to Dyers’ Mews, in enjoying a celebratory cocktail in the wine bar he liked there? When Tessmond opened the door to the street she saw it was still light outside, the radiant, silver twilight that characterized so many September evenings in the city. The birches adjoining the small park across the road linked arms against the sky, their fingers bunched and twisted just like her own.
* * *
—
“So do you live with him, or what?” Jaen asked.
Amber shifted in her seat. “He has a spare room,” she said, although actually it was more than that. From a darkened inner hallway behind the shop, steps led up to Tessmond’s private apartment. The living room at the front, overlooking the street, was hung with velvet drapes and lined with bookshelves. The room seemed to contain as many clocks as the shop downstairs. The bathroom and kitchen overlooked the yard, as did Tessmond’s bedroom, though Amber could not have said what that room was like, because the door was always closed.
In the hallway next to the kitchen was another door. Amber had initially mistaken it for a linen closet, although in fact it granted access to the upper floor. The staircase was narrow and very steep, which led Amber to imagine that the space above would be equally cramped. She had regretted accepting Tessmond’s invitation to spend the night there almost immediately.
“I hope you’ll be comfortable,” Tessmond had said. Amber opened her mouth to tell him she had changed her mind, she had decided she would walk home, after all. Why she hadn’t done so she couldn’t remember – the expression in his eyes, so full of hope, the very narrowness of the staircase, which made it impossible to turn around without brushing against him. She climbed gingerly upwards, the uneven, uncarpeted treads creaking alarmingly beneath her feet. She emerged into a room that should have been impossible. Beamed and smelling faintly of sandalwood, the curved ceiling and polished floorboards putting her in mind of the cavernous space beneath an upturned boat.
A wooden bedstead and a bedside cabinet, an intricate Oriental carpet, a tall chest of drawers. A recessed doorway led to a well appointed en-suite bathroom.
Amber thought of her dingy flat, with its grumbling, inefficient radiators, the dripping tap her landlord had promised to fix six months ago but had never got round to.
“How is this here?” she breathed.
“I had it converted after I moved in,” Tessmond said. “The builders were surprised by how much space there was. So was I.”
The thought flew through her mind, that he was lying, that
the room had never existed before that night.
She felt like laughing aloud. Did she believe that Anders Tessmond was some sort of wizard?
There were many at court who credited the dwarf with magical powers.
“It’s incredible,” Amber said. “Are you sure you don’t mind my staying here?”
Tessmond smiled, and inclined his head in the ghost of a bow. “There’s no point in it standing empty,” he said. “A spare room needs a guest.”
At the time she met Jaen, who was apprenticed to the city philosophers and who worked at the Remarque Library to pay their rent, Amber had been living in Anders Tessmond’s attic for most of a year.
“What’s the deal?” Jaen asked, echoing Amber’s own thoughts almost exactly. “Are you – do you have sex with him?”
“Of course not.” She shook her head vehemently. “He’s a friend, that’s all. A kind of – guardian.” Tessmond had never pestered her for favors or for greater intimacy. She came and went as she pleased, though when she had asked Tessmond for a key he had said there was no need, that she would never find the door locked against her and this, so far at least, had proved to be the case. She had given up the lease on her studio flat, telling herself it was goodbye and good riddance, though the very ease of her life with Tessmond continued to bother her.
“Guardian?” Jaen said. “You mean like an angel? A eunuch? I bet he doesn’t see it that way. You should be careful.”
“Careful of what?”
Jaen shrugged. “I don’t know. That he doesn’t get the wrong idea, I suppose.”
“I can always leave. If things don’t work out, I mean.” If things get complicated, she meant. Difficult. She had not told Tessmond about Jaen. When she went to see them, she told Tessmond she was going to the library, which was half the truth at least, it didn’t feel like lying. There was no need for Tessmond to know about Jaen’s quarters, deep in the cellar complex of the great Remarque building, which was where most of the scholars and prentice philosophers kept their lodgings.
Amber had never expected to fall in love. The presence of Jaen in her life still shocked her on a daily basis.
Jaen had been curious about her hands – they had asked questions, examined her joints – and for the first time ever, Amber was able to talk about her disfigurement with complete unconcern. She felt uncomfortable asking similar questions about Jaen’s transition, however. Amber knew that full membership of the philosopher’s guild was open only to women, though Jaen was open about their personal antipathy towards the old law and had aligned themself with a sept that was pledged to repeal it. “Isn’t that risky, I mean for a prentice?” Amber had asked. She hesitated to say more, for fear of trespassing against Jaen’s privacy, but Jaen knew her too well.
“Because I’m ascended, you mean? You think they might demand I do penance on account of my penis?” Jaen laughed. “We are allowed to talk about this, you know.”
“I’m sorry,” Amber said. She gently punched Jaen’s ribs. “Did you always know? I mean—”
“I didn’t transition because I wanted to become a philosopher, if that’s what you mean. Being a philosopher and being who I am are one and the same.” Jaen wrapped both arms around her waist, slid down their hands to rest between her legs. Amber gasped, the air cutting across the plane of her upper lip like a blade of ripe grass. She loved Jaen’s body, the upright, muscular strength of it, the tightness of the flesh beneath the skin. Sometimes, upstairs in her room at Anders Tessmond’s, Amber would bring herself to orgasm, remembering the ecstasy of lovemaking she had experienced with Jaen earlier in the day, Tessmond moving slowly about in the rooms directly below. The knowledge that he was there and maybe listening made her climax, when it came, all the more powerful.
“I think you should tell him,” Jaen said, later.
“About you?”
“About us.”
“I will, I promise. I need to pick the right moment, that’s all. He’s been so good to me.”
* * *
—
When Amber mentioned to Tessmond that the studio on Renfrew Street she’d had her eye on had been snapped up by someone else, Tessmond said he would investigate. Three hours later he returned to the shop with the contract, and the keys in his hand. Amber insisted on paying the rent herself. The studio was just one room above a butcher’s shop, and now that she was no longer paying the lease on her old apartment she could easily afford it.
“What did you do?” Amber asked him nervously. “The people at the rental agency told me there was no way their client would change his mind. He’d already paid his deposit.”
“He would have paid it, perhaps,” Tessmond said. “But I have an idea that when he went to the agency yesterday to sign the lease, he discovered that somebody else had beaten him to it. He’ll find another studio, I’m sure.”
Tessmond winked, then smiled. He had a lovely smile, open and warm. Amber found herself wondering, as she often did, how old he was.
“You turned back time,” she said, dreamily. She didn’t believe it, of course. The photographer who’d paid the six-month deposit must have gone back on the deal after all, for some reason. But it was a nice idea, a sweet and harmless game they played together, just the two of them.
Truly, she loved Jaen. She knew her life here above the clock shop would have to end. There was something dishonest about it, dangerous even – Jaen was right about that. But still, it was difficult. More difficult than Jaen could properly understand.
“Is it him you love, or his power?” Jaen asked.
“His power?”
“You’re afraid to let go, because you feel safe with him. He keeps the world at bay. Why don’t you just fuck him and be done with it, if that’s what you want?”
For the first time in their relationship, Amber imagined she heard an edge of contempt in Jaen’s voice, a twitch of irritation. Her insides ran cold.
“Of course I don’t. And I’ll tell him. I’ll tell him soon. I just need to find another flat first. You do understand?”
Jaen nodded. Philosopher prentices were not permitted to take an official companion until their five-year anniversary. Cohabitation was precluded until that time, although the guild’s attitude to sexual relationships had become a great deal more relaxed in recent times.
Amber had recently secured a part-time post as factotum in the city archives. She had not told Tessmond about the job. One hint that she was short of money and Amber knew he would try and insist she accepted a stipend – it would not be the first time he had broached the subject. Instead, she let him believe she was spending more time at the studio.
The night following her argument with Jaen, she awoke with a start, convinced there was someone in the room with her. Her heart thumped in terror, but as her eyes gradually adjusted to the darkness she saw there was no one, that the room was just as always. Light from the streetlamp below filtered through the half-open shutters, unspooling in milky rivulets in the folds and creases in the discarded clothing on her bedside chair. She got up to use the toilet. The normalness of the action steadied her nerves a little, though she could not rid herself of the conviction that she was being watched.
What if he has always been watching? Amber thought. What if there are hidden cameras, secret apertures? She remembered the many times the idea of Tessmond’s proximity had been a turn-on for her. For the second time in twelve hours she felt chilled to the bone.
She wrapped herself in her robe – an antique silk kimono that Tessmond had given her some months before, though what the occasion had been she could no longer remember – and tiptoed in her bare feet down the narrow staircase. Her heart leaped up with each creak, raucous as gunshots in the silence. Was Tessmond a heavy sleeper or an insomniac? Amber belatedly realized she had no idea.
The lower landing lay in darkness. The scent of tobacco was always strongest at night,
for some reason – perhaps the stillness drew it out of the woodwork, like a living sap. She saw that the door to Tessmond’s bedroom stood partly open, a sight that startled her as it had always been closed before. There was no light on, just a wedge of darker gray between the plane of the door and the angle of the frame, a neat, taut segment, like a hole into nowhere. Amber felt herself drawn towards it, as if the blackness were magnetic, and her upright, frozen body were made of iron. Just as she had imagined a presence looming over her in her bed upstairs, now she felt traumatized by the idea that she was, in fact, alone, that the house was empty and ruined, that the person of Anders Tessmond was and always had been a figment of her imagination.
“Anders,” she called softly. Her voice emerged as a creaky whisper, the hesitant, toneless mumbling of a senile old woman. She felt that she had stumbled, by mistake, into an alien world. It was impossible to believe that Jaen lay asleep less than two miles from where she now stood, their chin tucked into their elbow in that way they had, their lips curled sweetly around a phrase in the ancient language as they moved through some dream. Amber remembered how as a child it had been possible to feel safe from demons simply by leaping into bed and pulling up the covers. She made for the stairs and hurried back to her room, caring less about the sounds she made than about fleeing from the murky hallway and whatever it hid.
She sprang into bed, giggling now with the thrill of it, the horror. She no longer knew if she had really been frightened, or if her terror had simply been a manifestation of her guilt.
I can’t leave, she thought. We belong together. She banished the thought, pushing it from her like a physical entity. Little by little her breathing steadied, and at last she slept.
* * *
—
“You look pale,” said Tessmond at breakfast the following morning.
“I was awake in the night,” she said. “I don’t know why.”
“Let me take you out for the day. The fresh air will do you good.”