Brian Aldiss - The Squire Quartet

As he spoke, he was following the last of the costumed actors to the steps of the house. There, on the upper step, lay a dozen wrist watches, awaiting revelation like hen’s eggs in straw.

‘Here’s an interesting question concerning present-day style. There has never been such a variety of watches cheaply available as there is today. For all we know, there may never be again – the notion of the future as a period of multiplied diversity is another of the cheering illusions of youth.’

He began to pick up the watches, holding them where the sun – reinforced by a conveniently placed spot – glittered on their cases.

‘Watches are beautiful objects. Perhaps that is why we are all slaves to them. A watch is really a piece of costume jewellery, one of the few pieces of jewellery society approves of the male wearing, since throughout an average day we can estimate the time to within five minutes; or else we are within reach of a clock or someone else’s watch; or else we have escaped routine and do not wish to know the time at all. But for work-oriented cultures, the watch is an essential, like the camera we take on holiday. Both impress us with the precision with which we live: “We were precisely here at precisely such-and-such a time.” Living with precision is a modern style.’

Squire began sorting the timepieces, one by one.

‘This watch is a Quartz LED, LED standing for Light-Emitting Diode. It presents a blank face to the world until you press this button, when the time comes up on a digital display. For me, LEDs are mean and hostile watches, not unlike those sunglasses people used to wear which looked opaque and reflected back the onlooker’s world, so that one could not see the eyes of the wearer. But quartz LEDs are accurate to a degree unknown a generation ago. Armed with such precision, Hitler’s generals could have overthrown him before he ruined Europe.

‘Do you rate your watches for accuracy, or appearance, or reliability, or sheer razzmatazz? Would you like a Mickey Mouse watch, like this one, or a “Star Wars” watch, like this one?’

The dreaded Darth Vader moved a gauntleted arm to twelve noon.

‘This watch is a Quartz LCD, LCD standing for Liquid Crystal Display. It announces clearly that it belongs to the nineteen-eighties. It has forsworn the watch’s traditional association with gold and gold-casing in favour of a heavy dull metal, the sort of thing we imagine Starship hulls will be made of, three centuries from now.

‘It is uncompromising. It does not even call itself a watch any more. It is a Seiko Multi-Mode LC Digital Quartz World Timer, and can give you the time in the world’s twenty-nine time zones. It’s somewhat specialist, being designed for globe-trotters, or those who fancy themselves as globe-trotters. It can give a twenty-four-hour read-out system, with hours, minutes, seconds, day, and date. It also features a perpetual calendar, so that you can find out whether Easter 1991 falls on a Thursday or a Friday, and is programmed until the year 2009 AD. It is water-resistant, and features, as they say by analogy with the movie industry, built-in illumination, so that you can check the time in Rangoon on even the darkest of nights.’

He set the LCD watch down on the step, but it immediately took flight, circled a pampas clump and was lost to view. Squire selected another watch, a more traditional-looking instrument with a leather strap.

‘Whatever it may look like, this is not your old clockwork wind-up watch. Nor is it a clockwork automatic. That old phrase about things “going like clockwork” is now long out-of-date, a fossil of language. Clockwork is no longer the most accurate motion, as it was for centuries. The accuracy of a quartz crystal is measured in seconds per century rather than minutes per week.

‘This is a quartz watch. Not a quartz digital but what we have learnt to call a quartz analogue. It caters for a public who respect accuracy, but who wish to combine living with precision with living with tradition. You notice that the numerals are Roman, just like the numerals on the grandfather clock in the hall of this house. In spite of its twentieth-century interior, this watch aspires to a Georgian exterior, reminding us each time we look at it of a more gracious, less time-devoured age.

‘If you think that makes this watch an example of bad taste, then you are merely being old-fashioned and a little conventional. Good and bad taste are of the past; all that is left us now is multivalent tastes.

‘Even the Seiko Multi-Mode LC Digital Quartz World Timer, last seen heading for Rangoon, subscribes to a twenty-four-hour clock system, with sixty minutes in each hour, passed down to us by Babylonian astronomers and refined by Sumerian mathematics some thousand years before Christ.

‘The facade of this Georgian house represents a triumph of order and symmetry, but order and symmetry are always under threat. We are a species in evolution and not in equipoise. Consequently, we remain uncertain about numbers. Perhaps that is why we find watches so talismanic; watches appear to have numbers if not time well under control. But numbers continue to give us trouble, not least in matters involving currency. Half the people on the globe cannot understand why sufficient money cannot be printed for everyone. Indeed, the world’s present monetary systems have been outgrown, though we struggle on with them, just as previous monetary systems – whether barter or mercantile or purely commercial – have had to be abandoned for more sophisticated infrastructures.

‘A Frenchman’s word for eighty is “quatre-vingts”, or “four twenties”, which betrays the spoor of an ancient numerical system, possibly Celtic, based on twenty, such as Mayan and Aztec cultures once used. Our LCD watch uses “Arabic” numerals. Like almost the whole of modern arithmetic, and the decimal system itself, Europe owes its numerals to the Arabs and Indians. The mathematical systems on which our civilization continues to function were not even possible to visualize until we had got rid of the Roman system of numeration.

‘The Roman letter-numeral system is now used in few places – at the start of books and films, for example, to remind us rightly that we are confronting something which owes little to originality and much to tradition.’

Squire pushed open the door of the house to enter. He used his right hand, so that his shirt and jacket sleeve fell back to reveal an LCD watch on his wrist. It showed the time in Roman numerals, seconds, minutes, hour, and date. The dial stretched right round his wrist.

‘Perhaps one day Seiko will produce a watch like this for those specialists who still study the first lingua franca of Europe, Latin. Taste may please itself; it is judgement which is answerable to others.’

The door swung wide. As the focus zoomed in on the hall, a grandfather clock standing there began to strike twelve in stately tones.

The girls and the dog, all strangely excited, were installed in her mother’s small town house.

She had used the pretext of going down to the shops for groceries to walk on her own. The sun shone. The pavements were hot and dusty. Tourists stood about in appropriate clothes, some of them licking ice-cream cones. She wore no coat, and felt absurd carrying her mother’s stiff shopping-basket. A boy ran up and asked her what the time was. She felt out-of-character, exposed to the world, and could scarcely answer the lad.

Although her open-work shoes were unsuited to walking, she walked. She chose the meaner streets. No one would recognize her, although her father had been a town councillor. The desperation of her thoughts drove her on, an endless disquisition tormented her forward. Someone she passed, staring curiously into her face, reminded her that her lips were moving, in protest, explanation, or accusation.