The Clockmaker's Daughter Read online

  Mrs Mack was kind enough in her way. It was a way that included plenty of beatings for those that got on her wrong side and a tongue so sharp it lashed, but she was fairer than most. In her way. She was good to me; she took me in when I was desperate; I believe she even loved me. I betrayed her in the end, but only when I had to.

  It is different on this side. Human beings are curators. Each polishes his or her own favoured memories, arranging them in order to create a narrative that pleases. Some events are repaired and buffed for display; others are deemed unworthy and cast aside, shelved below ground in the overflowing storeroom of the mind. There, with any luck, they are promptly forgotten. The process is not dishonest: it is the only way that people can live with themselves and the weight of their experiences.

  But it is different over here.

  I remember everything, memories forming different pictures depending on the order in which they fall.

  Time passes differently when I’m alone in the house; I have no way of marking the years. I am aware that the sun continues to rise and set and the moon to take its place, but I no longer feel its passage. Past, present and future are meaningless; I am outside time. Here and there, and there and here, at once.

  My visitor has been with me for five of his days now. I was surprised when he first arrived, with his scuffed suitcase and that brown bag over his shoulder, which makes me think of Edward’s satchel; even more so when the doors were locked on the house that night and he remained. It has been a long while since anyone stayed here overnight. Ever since the Art Historians’ Association opened the house to the public, I have seen only weekend day-trippers with sensible shoes and tour books.

  The people from the Association have put the young man in the rooms of the old malt house, part of the closed area that was once used briefly to accommodate a caretaker, and into which the visiting public are Not Permitted. It wouldn’t do to have him take up residence inside the house, for it is set up like a museum now. Antique furniture, much of it from Edward’s own collection, purchased with the house when he bought it, has been ‘arranged’, taking care to leave room for the tourists to mill about on weekends. Bunches of lavender with velvet bows have been placed on the seats so that no one tries to use them as intended.

  Just before my clock strikes ten each Saturday morning, a group of volunteers arrives, positioning themselves about the house so that there is one per room. They wear tags that read ‘Guide’ around their necks and it is their job to remind people Do Not Touch! They are primed with partially correct historical anecdotes so that when they catch the eye of a half-willing tourist they can ensnare them with their spiel.

  There is one in particular, Mildred Manning, who likes to sit on a Quaker-style chair at the top of the attic staircase, baring her teeth in the grim approximation of a smile. Nothing makes her happier than to catch an unwitting guest in the process of setting down their pamphlet on the table beside her. This infraction grants her the prized opportunity to intone that ‘nothing should be placed upon Edward Radcliffe’s furniture.’

  Edward would have hated her. He couldn’t bear the zealous over-protection of ‘things’. He believed that beautiful objects should be cherished but not revered. And so, with Edward in mind, some days when the year is creeping towards autumn, I spend my afternoons draped around Mildred’s shoulders. No amount of clothing can keep a person warm when I get too close.

  I have taken a preliminary inventory: my visitor’s hair is dirty blond in colour and his skin is sun-browned. His hands are weathered and capable. They are not the fine hands of a painter. They are the hands of a man who knows how to use the tools that he carries with him when he heads out on his daily rounds.

  He has been very busy since he arrived. He wakes early, before sunrise, and although he does not seem pleased about the fact, groaning and then squinting at the phone that he keeps beside his bed to tell the time, he nonetheless elects to rise rather than to remain in bed. He makes a cup of tea, quickly and sloppily, and then showers and dresses, always in the same clothing: a T-shirt and faded blue denim jeans, tossed the night before across the bentwood chair in the corner.

  Whatever it is that he is doing requires him to frown at a map of the manor grounds and a series of handwritten notes. I have taken to standing at a distance behind him as I try to discover what it is that he is up to. But it is no use. The handwriting is too small and faint to read and I dare not go nearer. We have not yet been acquainted long enough for me to know how close I can get. I can be an oppressive companion and I do not wish to scare him off.

  Yet.

  And so I wait.

  I do at least know what it is he keeps in that brown bag of his; he unpacked it last night. It is a camera, a proper camera of the sort that Felix might recognise were he to rematerialise suddenly in the here and now.

  Something that Felix would not recognise, however, is the way my visitor is able to connect the camera to a computer and have the images appear, like magic, upon the screen. No need any more for a darkroom or developing solutions with their acrid smell.

  I watched last night as he scrolled through picture after picture. Photographs of the churchyard; headstones, mainly. No one that I knew, but I was transfixed all the same. It was the first time in many years that I have been able to ‘leave’ this place.

  What do his photographs tell me about his purpose here? I wonder.

  Not nearly enough.

  He is out there somewhere now; he has been gone since breakfast time. But I am patient, far more patient now than before.

  I have been watching from the window in the stairwell, looking beyond the chestnut tree towards my old friend the Thames. I do not expect my young man to return that way: unlike others who came to Birchwood before him, he does not favour the river. He considers it at times, as one might a painting, but only from a distance and not, I think, with pleasure. No boat rides for him thus far.

  No, I watch the river for myself. The Thames flowed through my life just as surely as blood flows through a body. I can only go as far now as the wall of the field barn in the north, the Hafodsted Brook to the west, the orchard to the east and the Japanese maple in the south. I have tried to travel further over the years, but alas, to no avail. The sensation, if I dare, is like an anchor being pulled. I do not understand the physics; I only know that it is so.

  My visitor is not as young as I first thought. He is muscular and able, with the pulsing physicality of an animal made to come inside against his will, but there is something that weighs on him. Hardships tell upon a man: my father aged by a decade during the months after my mother’s death, when the landlord began to knock on our door and the two of them engaged in tense discussions that became more and more heated over time, until at last, on a bleak wintry day, the landlord shouted that he’d been as patient as a saint, that he wasn’t a charity and it was high time my father found himself a new situation.

  My visitor’s hardship is of a different nature. He keeps a printed photograph inside a scuffed leather wallet. I have seen him take it out late at night and pore over it. The image is of two small children, little more than babies. One of them grins with juicy happiness at the camera; the other is more circumspect.

  The way he frowns at that photograph – the way he rubs his thumb across its surface, as if by doing so he might enlarge it and permit himself a closer view – makes me certain that they are his.

  And then, last night, he made a call on his mobile telephone to someone he called Sarah. He has a warm voice and was polite, but I could see by the way he clenched his pen and clawed his hand in his hair that he was struggling.

  He said, ‘But that was a long time ago,’ and, ‘You’ll see, I’ve changed,’ and, ‘Surely I deserve a second chance?’

  As all the while he stared at that photograph, worrying at its top left corner with his fingertips.

  It was that conversation which put me in mind of my own father. Because before Mrs Mack and the Captain there was my father, alwa
ys looking for his second chance. He was a clockmaker by trade, a master craftsman, his skills unsurpassed and his expertise sought by those with the most elaborate timepieces to repair. ‘Each clock is unique,’ he used to tell me. ‘And just like a person, its face, whether plain or pretty, is but a mask for the intricate mechanism it conceals.’

  I went with him sometimes on repair jobs. He called me his helper, but I did not really help. When he was ushered into the library or study, I was invariably taken downstairs by a dutiful serving maid into one of the vast steaming kitchens that fuelled the stately houses of England. Each had a rotund cook labouring away in her engine room, pink of cheek, sweaty of brow, keeping the larders stocked with sweet lumpy jam and fresh loaves of bread.

  My father used to tell me that my mother had grown up in such a house. She had been sitting in the grand upstairs window, he said, when he arrived to mend her father’s clock. Their eyes had met, they’d fallen in love, and nothing after that could keep them apart. Her parents had tried, her little sister had pleaded with her to stay, but my mother was headstrong and young and used to being indulged, and so she ran away. Children as a rule are literal creatures, and whenever I heard this story I pictured my mother running, her skirts flying behind her in a satin wake, as she fled from the looming castle, leaving behind her beloved sister and the raging horror of her overbearing parents.

  This is what I believed.

  My father had to tell me stories, as I did not have the chance myself to know my mother. She was two days shy of twenty-one when she died, and I a child of four. It was consumption that killed her, but my father had the coroner put ‘bronchitis’ on her death certificate as he thought it sounded more refined. He needn’t have bothered: having married my father and left the bosom of her titled family, she was removed to the great mass of ordinary people of whom history takes no account.

  There was a single likeness, a small sketch, that he kept inside a gold locket, and which I treasured. Until, that is, we were forced to move into the pair of draughty rooms in the pinched alleyway in a pocket of East London, where the smell of the Thames was always in our noses and the calls of gulls and sailors mingled to form a constant song, and the locket disappeared to the rag-and-bone man. I do not know where the likeness went. It slipped through the cracks of time and went to where the lost things are.

  My father called me Birdie; he said I was his little bird. My real name was beautiful, he said, but it was the name of a grown-up lady, the sort of name that wore long skirts and fine silks, but had not the wings to fly.

  ‘Do I want a name with wings?’

  ‘Oh, yes, I should think so.’

  ‘Then why did you give me one without?’

  He became earnest then, as he always did when talk grazed the subject of her: ‘You were named for your mother’s father. It was important to her that you should carry something of her family.’

  ‘Even if they did not wish to know me?’

  ‘Even if,’ he said with a smile, and then he ruffled my hair, which never failed to make me feel assured: as if no deprivation could matter in the face of his love.

  My father’s workshop was a place of wonder. The great tall bench beneath the window was a sea of springs and rivets, scales and wires, bells, pendulums and fine arrow hands. I used to sneak in through the open door to kneel on a wooden stool and explore the bench while he was working, turning over the curious and clever contraptions, gently pressing the tiny, fragile parts beneath my fingertips, holding the different metals in the streaming sun to make them shine. I asked question after question, and he peered over his glasses to answer; but he made me promise not to breathe a word to anyone about the things that I observed, for my father was not merely repairing clocks; he was working on an invention of his own.

  His Great Project was the creation of a Mystery Clock, the construction of which involved long sessions at his workbench and frequent surreptitious visits to the Court of Chancery where patents of invention were enrolled and issued. My father said that the Mystery Clock, when he mastered it, would make our fortune – for which man of means would not desire a clock whose pendulum appeared to move without the benefit of a mechanism?

  I nodded solemnly when he said such things – the gravity with which he spoke required it – but in truth I was equally impressed by the regular clocks that lined his walls from floor to ceiling, their hearts beating, their pendulums swinging, in constant gentle dissonance. He showed me how to wind them, and I would stand back in the centre of the room afterwards, gazing at their mismatched faces as they tut-tut-tutted me in chorus.

  ‘But which one shows the right time?’ I would ask.

  ‘Ah, little bird. The better question is: which one doesn’t?’

  There was no such thing as the right time, he explained. Time was an idea: it had no end and no beginning; it could not be seen or heard or smelled. It could be measured, sure enough, but no words had been found to explain precisely what it was. As to the ‘right’ time, it was simply a matter of agreeing to agree. ‘Do you remember the woman on the railway platform?’ he asked.

  I told him that I did. I had been playing one morning while my father repaired the large clock at a station west of London, when I’d noticed a smaller version hanging on the wall by the ticket office. I’d stopped what I was doing and was looking between the two disparate faces, when a woman came up beside me. ‘That there’s the real time,’ she’d explained, pointing at the little dial. ‘And that one’ – she frowned at the clock my father had just finished winding – ‘that there’s London time.’

  Which is how I learned that while I could not be in two places at once, I could most certainly be in one place at two times.

  Soon after, my father suggested that we take a trip to Greenwich, ‘the home of the meridian’.

  Greenwich meridian. The new words were like an incantation.

  ‘A line from which time begins,’ he continued. ‘From the north to the south pole, it splits the earth in two.’

  So impressive did this sound, so vivid was my child’s imagination, that I suppose it was inevitable the reality would disappoint.

  Our journey took us to the well-tended lawn of a grand stone palace, from which I searched in vain for the great, jagged tear I had envisaged in the earth’s surface.

  ‘There it is –’ he indicated with a straightened arm – ‘right in front of you, a direct line. Zero degrees longitude.’

  ‘But I cannot see anything. All I see is … grass.’

  He laughed when I said that, and ruffled my hair, and asked whether I would like to take a look through the Royal Observatory telescope instead.

  We took the journey along the river to Greenwich a number of times in the months before my mother died, and on the boat back and forth my father taught me how to read – the words in books, the tides in the river, the expressions on the faces of our fellow travellers.

  He showed me how to tell the time by the sun. Human beings had ever been captivated by the great burning sphere in the heavens, he said, ‘for not only does it give us warmth, but also light. The foremost craving of our souls.’

  Light. I took to watching it on the spring trees, noticing how it turned the delicate new leaves translucent. I observed the way it threw shadows against walls; tossed stardust across the surface of the water; made filigree on the ground where it fell through wrought-iron railings. I wanted to touch it, this marvellous tool. To hold it in my fingertips the way I did the tiny objects on my father’s workbench.

  It became my mission to capture light. I found a small hinged tin, emptied of its contents, and drove a nail through the top several times with one of my father’s hammers to make tiny perforations. I took the contraption outside with me, sat it in the sunniest place that I could find, and waited until the top was burning hot. Alas, when I slid the box of wonder open, there was no glittering captive waiting for me. It was just the empty inside of a rusty old tin.

  Mrs Mack used to say that when it rained,
it poured – which wasn’t a comment on the weather, although it took me a while to work that out, but an observation of the way misfortune seemed to invite further misfortune.

  After my mother died, it began to pour for my father and me.

  For one thing, it was the end of our trips to Greenwich.

  For another, we saw a lot more of Jeremiah. He was my father’s friend, of sorts, the two of them having grown up in the same village. He had visited occasionally when my mother was alive, for my father had taken him along sometimes as an apprentice on large railway clock repair jobs; but I was aware, in the vague, instinctive manner of small children, that Jeremiah was a source of tension between them. I can remember my father offering placatory assurances like, ‘He does the best with what God gave him’ or ‘He means well’ and reminding her that although Jeremiah had been blessed with few of life’s gifts, he was ‘a good fellow, really, and certainly very enterprising’.

  The latter was undeniably true: Jeremiah turned his hand to whatever opportunity came his way. He was by turns a rag-and-bone man, a tanner, and at one time became convinced his fortune lay in the door-to-door distribution of Steel’s Aromatic Lozenges, the professed benefits of which included ‘magnificent male stamina’.

  After my mother’s death, when my father began his tumble into the dark crevasse of grief, Jeremiah started taking him out for long stretches in the afternoon, the pair of them stumbling back after dark, my father half-asleep and slumped across his friend’s shoulder. Jeremiah would then bed down for the night on the sofa in our drawing room, all the better to ‘help’ us out the following day.

  And my father had longer days to fill by then. His hands had started to shake and he had lost the ability to concentrate. He received fewer offers of work, which in turn made him bitter. Jeremiah, though, was always there to prop him up. He convinced my father that he’d been wasting his time on repairs anyway; that his future lay in perfecting his Mystery Clock; that with Jeremiah as his agent they couldn’t help but make a fortune.