by A. M. Howell
“Helena? Is that you?” her father called from the room opposite.
“Um…yes, Father, there is something I must talk to you…about,” Helena said, forgetting about Mr Westcott and bursting into the room. She paused, something by the open door catching her eye. A chair. A boy sitting on the chair. He wore blue trousers, black shoes with brass hooks for the laces, and a white shirt with ruffles at the cuffs. His blond head of hair was turned towards her father.
Helena’s father was standing on a stool examining a longcase clock with a pagoda-style top. “This mahogany clock is by Moore of Ipswich,” he said. “Isn’t it wonderful!” He placed a hand on it reverently.
Helena stared at Father. Had he not seen the boy?
The boy had swivelled in his chair to give Helena a sidelong glance. His blue eyes were narrowed and his lips set into a hard line.
“See the four dials at each corner of the clock face, Helena?”
Helena turned to her father.
“The clock shows us the day and month, allows us to select whether the mechanism should strike or be silent – and the fourth dial allows a choice of seven tunes. What a fine example this is,” her father said, as proudly as if he’d made the object himself.
“I trust everything is to your satisfaction?” said a voice at the door. Mr Westcott. Helena turned. The chair the boy had been sitting on was empty. He had left the room without making a sound, like a ghost or a shadow. Helena remembered the sensation she had felt of being watched on the landing upstairs the night before. Her scalp tightened like a cap was being pulled onto her head.
Mr Westcott’s eyes flickered to the empty chair then away again. He let out a long sigh. To Helena it sounded like butterflies’ wings caught in a net, unhappy and striving to break free.
“Everything is…perfect, Sir,” her father replied, stepping down from the stool and wiping his hands on his short apron. “This really is the most marvellous clock collection. Have you been collecting them for long?”
Mr Westcott walked slowly into the room. “No, not long,” he said. His voice was fragile, light as a twig.
Between the ticks and tocks of the clocks, the silence in the room stretched until Helena thought it might snap.
“Well, you have made some excellent choices. I think they will increase in value over the coming years,” said Helena’s father.
“I am not interested in their value,” Mr Westcott said, the crevices either side of his mouth deepening. “I merely need them to keep ticking.”
Helena saw her father’s Adam’s apple bob in his throat as he swallowed. “Of course, Sir. And keep them ticking I shall.” Her father threw Mr Westcott a broad smile. It was not returned.
“My sister – Katherine – likes to be present for the clock inspections,” Mr Westcott said in a low voice, walking over to the clock Helena’s father had just been looking at. “Every day,” he added. His left eye twitched. He rubbed it. “I will leave you to your…work. It is Monday and I have a meeting with the board of directors at my printing firm.”
“Of course, of course,” Helena’s father said.
Mr Westcott swivelled and left the room, giving the chair by the door one final glance.
“Who was that boy?” Helena asked as she passed her father the clock hood.
He replaced it with the same tenderness you might lay a baby in a cradle. “Excuse me?” he said.
“The boy…sitting by the door on that chair over there.”
Her father turned and followed Helena’s pointing finger to the empty chair. He pushed his hands into his jacket pockets. “I haven’t the slightest idea what you are talking about.”
Helena bit down hard on her bottom lip. How could her father not have seen him? It was as if this oppressive and strange house was causing her to see things which were not real.
“You do realize how important this position is for us, don’t you, Helena?” her father asked softly.
Helena gave him a small nod.
He picked up a notebook and waved it at her. “I have been up half the night making a list of the clocks and the times we need to wind. We will be very busy, and that’s aside from the conserving work I have to do. I will need your help.”
“But…there’s something I need to talk to you about…”
“Not now, Helena. I have work to do. Please can you check the pocket-watch cabinets upstairs, make a list of the sizes and types of watches and maybe sort out the winding keys?” He turned away, began to remove the hood of another clock.
Helena pressed her lips together, lowered her head and walked to the chair the boy had been sitting on. She laid a palm on the wooden seat. It was still warm. Which meant that the boy was not a ghost or a shadow at all, but someone else living in this house of one hundred clocks.
For the rest of that day, Helena followed her father around the house from room to room, carrying Orbit in his cage and writing out French verbs on the slate her school insisted she borrow so she wouldn’t get behind. She assisted her father when he asked for help (Pass me the small pocket-watch pliers, Helena. No, no, no, not those ones, the ones with the walnut handle. I need some pig’s gut for the pendulum weights – measure it out, please) and Helena’s head swam with his instructions and orders, a constant reminder of the contract her father had signed. Ferocious bolts of anger would jolt her stomach like the strike of a match, her whole body burning at the thought of what their fate might be if they did not keep the clocks ticking. But Father was seemingly unconcerned, so fully absorbed in his work it was as if he had left their world entirely and entered another.
The mysterious boy would stealthily appear on the chair by the door of each clock room they entered, as if a magician had performed a clever trick. Helena tried catching his eye, but the boy always looked away.
When Helena and her father moved to the wisteria-wallpapered room of longcase clocks on the second floor, the boy followed, his footsteps as light as smoke. Helena remembered Katherine’s instructions when they’d arrived, that they were not to speak about the things that they saw in the house, but her throat was itching with the urge to find out more about this boy. She knew that her father had seen him too, for his eyes had flitted to the boy and away again a few times throughout the day, but he had made no attempt to talk to him, Katherine’s instructions clearly at the forefront of his own mind. While her father had been kneeling on the floor examining the bracketed feet of one of the clocks, Helena had kneeled beside him, asked quietly who he thought the boy was. Did he think he was perhaps Mr Westcott’s son?
“Please don’t ask such questions,” Father had whispered with a ferocity that clenched Helena’s jaw. But how could she not speak of this? Anyone feeling the eyes of another person on their back had a right to know who that person was and why they were staring so.
Helena tried broaching the subject of the boy and his parentage with Stanley after a lunch of anchovies on toast, and fresh lemonade so sour and lacking in sugar her tongue tingled. She asked him why Mr Westcott had failed to mention a boy lived in the house and if his presence was the reason Stanley had been employed as a tutor.
“Miss Westcott asked me not to speak about the happenings in this house,” Stanley said glumly. He opened his mouth as if he wanted to expand on this statement, then closed it. He shook his head slightly, his dark hair ruffling.
Helena sat back in her chair. So Stanley had also been instructed not to speak about anything he saw in the house. Her curiosity expanded like hot metal.
Just before six o’clock that evening, the doorbell to the house jangled. The boy had left the room half an hour before, his feet trudging up the stairs towards the top of the house. Helena and her father were still on the second floor in the room of longcase clocks, her father painstakingly removing the clock hoods, checking the brass dials, metal hands and weights. There came the sound of a distant door banging shut. Feet running down the stairs. Voices.
“Ding-dong-hickory-dickory-dock-clock-tick-tock,” chattere
d Orbit.
The scent of sunshine, clear blue skies and rosy blooms swept into the room with Katherine, her long cream skirts whispering over the wooden floors like doves’ wings. But she was not alone. A girl of about Helena’s age was holding her gloved hand. Her leaf-green, chiffon dress caused a spark of envy to ignite inside Helena. The girl adjusted her hair clip with her free hand. Her blonde hair was short, emphasizing her petite nose and blue eyes.
Mr Westcott stood the other side of his sister, the skin under his eyes as dark as bruises, as he quickly glanced across at the girl, then away. His eyes were regretful, his lips trembling as if words were balancing on the tip of his tongue. The thought sprang into Helena’s head like one of Mr Westcott’s fizzing electric lights. Could this girl be his daughter? And if the girl was his daughter – surely the strange boy who sat in the clock rooms was indeed his son?
“Have you been keeping up with your studies?” Katherine whispered to the girl, as she straightened the long white ostrich feathers on her own large and elaborate felt hat.
The girl looked up at Katherine solemnly. “Yes, Aunt Katherine,” she whispered. The girl’s eyes flicked to Mr Westcott, who sighed, straightened his shoulders a little and walked to the clock with the moon-faced pendulum bob. He laid his right palm on the clock door, his lips thinning as he watched the bob swinging back and forth. The cherubic moon-face swung in and out of view with a regularity that seemed to loosen some of the tightness in his shoulders.
“That is a very fine eight-day walnut clock by Vulliamy of London,” her father said, walking over to the clock. “You are very lucky to have it in your collection. Vulliamy was clockmaker to the royal family in the eighteenth century.”
“Yes, I am aware of that,” said Mr Westcott coolly. He turned to face Helena’s father. “You say I am lucky.” He said it as a statement, rather than a question, as if the word needed to be peeled back like orange skin to reveal something else altogether.
“Oh…your lovely parrot,” said Katherine, letting go of the girl’s hand and swishing over to the cage, which Helena had placed on her father’s footstool.
“Hickory-dickory-dock. The mouse ran up the…squawk, squawk, squawk, hickory.” Orbit jumped from his perch to the bottom of his cage and began to screech in alarm, his crown ruffling.
Helena froze. Why was he making that terrible noise?
Katherine clapped her hands together, a smile lighting up her face. “Oh, this bird is quite something. Don’t you think so, Edgar?” she said above Orbit’s cries.
“Screech-screech-squawk.”
Helena saw the girl was chewing on her bottom lip, her eyes widening.
“Take him out of the room, Helena,” her father said, rushing to the cage, his voice raised. “I am so sorry, Mr Westcott. He does not normally make such a fuss. It must be new people…new surroundings…”
Mr Westcott’s cheeks were puce as he glared at Orbit bobbing about in his cage.
“Squawk, squawk, squawk,” cried Orbit, beating his wings against the metal bars.
“Shush, shush, pretty bird,” said Helena, picking up the cage and walking swiftly to the door.
The girl’s forehead furrowed in a sympathetic frown as Helena walked past her.
Helena’s cheeks burned with embarrassment and her father threw her a disappointed glance as he turned back to Mr Westcott and the clocks. Why had Orbit behaved so terribly, just when she had needed him to be on his best behaviour?
At the door, Helena turned and looked back. Katherine was staring after her, a hand to her neck, fiddling with the buttons of her blouse. She gave Helena a quick and bright smile and turned away, the feathers on her hat wafting and waving, as if they had come alive and taken flight.
Later that evening, long after dinner, Helena unpinned another drawing of a flying machine from the wall outside the longcase-clock room. Who was leaving them? She was certain now that the girl and boy were brother and sister and Mr Westcott’s children. But which one of them was leaving the drawings and why? Katherine said Mr Westcott’s wife had gone away eight months earlier. Gone away where? Were the boy and girl motherless too, like Helena? Except Helena wasn’t quite motherless – not while she still had Orbit’s voice to remind her of what she had lost.
Up on the third floor, Helena darted a quick glance back towards her room, where Orbit was now settled and sleeping. It was time to actively seek answers to some of her questions. She walked across the landing to the corridor of rooms where Stanley said Mr Westcott slept. The girl and boy must sleep up here too. There were two doors along each side of the corridor, and another at the very end. All of them were shut. It was so strange to think of Mr Westcott with all of his furniture and possessions here instead of downstairs. What had made him replace all of his things with clocks? Helena paused and tilted her head. The sound of voices drifted from behind the door at the end. Tiptoeing further along the corridor she suddenly stopped, scrunched up her toes in her stockings. It was one thing to overhear a conversation, but another to deliberately eavesdrop. But it was as if she couldn’t stop herself. Perhaps if she didn’t actually put her ear to the door, but instead smoothed the curled carpet runner with the toe of her stocking, she could linger long enough to hear something worth hearing.
“Very good, very good. Yes, that’s exactly what I was saying.” (Stanley)
“But would that adjustment keep it in the air for longer?” (It was the girl!)
“That’s right, ask questions! It’s the only way you can be sure you’re learning the right things. Your aunt said those exact words to me herself.” (Stanley)
“We have sent the letter, but will they read it?” (The girl)
There was a cough, the sound of feet moving over floorboards.
Helena quickly bowed her head and walked back down the corridor. It sounded like Stanley had been giving the girl a school lesson? But at this time of night?
After she had pulled on her nightdress and buttoned up the sleeves, Helena unfolded the most recent drawing she had found pinned to the wall downstairs. The girl had talked about “keeping it in the air for longer”. Perhaps these were her drawings. If they were, she had a talent. Helena often wished she had a talent for something. She was quite hopeless at drawing, and the music lessons her mother had encouraged had been disastrous. The face of her music teacher, Miss Cartwright, contorted into pained expressions whenever Helena’s fingers touched the piano keys.
But who were the drawings intended for? Was there a secret message hidden somewhere within the lines and angles? Maybe Stanley had helped her draw them.
Helena turned the picture over, traced a finger over the ridges the pencil had left in the paper. But there were no coded messages to be found. Helena heard the creak of bed springs in her father’s room next door – he was so preoccupied he had gone to bed without coming to say goodnight.
With a sigh she re-folded the paper, pushed it under her pillow and was about to climb into bed herself when she heard the distant slam of the front door below her window, the sound of footsteps clicking on stone. It was late, a little after ten in the evening and ordinarily she would be asleep. Turning down the portable oil lamp (for she still distrusted the electric light on the wall), she pushed back the curtains and peered into the gloom. Mr Westcott…in a hat and coat was waiting at the kerbside. A hansom cab drew up, the horse snorting and bowing its head. The driver leaped down, and waited as Mr Westcott climbed in. The cab pulled away, the horse’s hooves clattering down the street into the dark. Where was he going at this late hour?
“The last clockmaker has left the winding keys for the pocket watches in rather a muddle,” Helena said to her father the following afternoon. She sat on the floor beside Orbit’s cage, laying out the keys in front of her in order of size. Some were as small as a thumbnail – so tiny they could easily slip down between the floorboards. This thought had caused her to lay a green baize cloth over the boards – just in case. Imagine if they lost the only key to a watch and as a
result it could not be wound! As much as she was angry at her father, and as much as she found working with clocks tiresome, she had to help make sure they returned home with all of their belongings.
“Once you have the keys in order, please can you wind the watches, Helena? This is our third day here and some have not been wound since the last clock winder left – they must be done today. I am going to the room next door to replace the pig’s gut attached to some of the clock weights.” He said this in a quick and distracted manner. Once again he had retreated into his “other” world of mechanical objects, somewhere she was not permitted or indeed welcome.
Helena sighed but nodded, glancing at the boy sitting on the chair by the door, as her father left the room with his box of tools. She chewed on the inside of her cheek. Was now the time to ask the boy about why he sat in the clock rooms day after day not saying a word?
Helena stood up and walked to the wooden pocket-watch cabinet and pulled open one of the drawers. The largest of the watches sat at the back of the drawer, the smaller ones at the front. Some were made of silver with fine engravings, some were gold with enamel-painted covers showing country scenes or delicate wild flowers. Helena picked up a gold watch emitting a fast tick-tick-tick-tick and carefully unscrewed the back. She selected a key which looked like it might fit, inserted it into the winding slot and gave it a few turns. Was that enough to keep the watch ticking? She didn’t want to think about the consequences if it stopped. She replaced the back, gave it a quick polish and returned it to the cabinet. As much as she loathed to admit it, there was something rather hypnotic and lovely about these watches, their light and delicate ticks, the enamelled dials and engraved backs. What stories could these watches tell if they could talk? she thought. She wondered whose pockets they had lain in; what appointments they had helped people keep.