Luke Williams: The Echo Chamber

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. And 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?’