I’m called in after a death – not immediately but when the funeral’s over and the task of sorting out the house and belongings has to be faced. People up and down this valley know I’m a bloke who’s interested. Local, see. They know where I live, so I won’t be off with the family silver. Not that there’s much of that about. It’s not what people here ever put their money into. Way more than a century ago, back when Coal was King in Wales, as they say, families in the boom times might splash out on a nice walnut bureau or a cabinet to show off the best china and these pieces hang on, here and there, among the old folk.
Sometimes I spot something the family hasn’t valued much and I can tell them it’s worth a bit. They appreciate that – most of them. I’m good at small repairs too. I get asked to see what I can do to mend this or that. I charge hardly anything but when I do see something I fancy I make a fair offer and mostly people are glad to be spared the hassle of putting it on the market. I’ve been at this now since long before I retired. Always been interested in old things, old houses. How do you know where you are unless you know where you’ve come from? Right?
Nine times out of ten these houses have seen a series of deaths and, like as not, those of a married couple. There’s a kind of sameness about these houses, the houses of the dead – that’s how I think of them. Ownership not yet transferred, if you like. Pending. There are lots of these houses. And I’ve got so I can read them.
This house, now, this particular house in Briwnant Street (eighteen-eighties terraced, back extension nineteen-sixty – a DIY-job, corrugated PVC roof and all) the husband here was buried last week. This little house has an airless feel to it. Everything in it’s ownerless, like. You’ll get what I mean. The quilt on the bed in the big front room above? Nylon, thin, like something that’s had the air let out – its cheap fibre filling showing through in patches – and it’s flounced in an orangey pink that is, frankly, unlikely. His late wife, I bet, chose it when it seemed cheery and modern. She died ages ago so it looks, well, just too feminine – grotesque, even – given that everything else is… well, you can tell there’s only been a man living here. The sheets beneath the quilt – lemon. A queasy mix. Life in this house shrank to one crucial room downstairs and now it has evaporated. Nothing of value here. So-so furniture. Everything used up to the point of exhaustion: painfully flattened toothpaste tube; lidless jar of half-burned candles. The people who lived here said to one another, ‘Mustn’t grumble’ and they didn’t. They ‘got by’. For the sake of what? Myself, I get a strange sense of the predominance of cardboard.
In a wardrobe upstairs, front box room, I found some photographs in frames, no names, and the memories that could provide them – long gone. This frame here – I brought it down – let me measure it – it’s so ornate that you know straight away what’s in it is important and that is… a glass plate portrait of a very young child in petticoats. Now, this is a really early photograph. Got to the Valleys quickly, photography. Yes, studios everywhere as people poured in to the mines. Plenty of work to be had, and money to spend. Imagine it. The thrill. Seeing yourself in a photograph – for people who’d only ever had a mirror or a pail of water. You could even give yourself to your friends. You know, with a copy. On a carte de visite, they called them; the size of visiting cards the Quality used.
And you could capture change. This figure, now, in this photograph, is – well, like it was made of shadows. Insubstantial. And valuable. Quite an outlay to capture that fleeting stage, very early childhood. There he stands in his curls and petticoats. Within six months this little boy would’ve looked very different; a few years and a few more, and the photograph would be the only evidence of his short time in the world of women. But here’s a strange thing: though the glass in the frame is intact, the thick photographic plate inside has been dealt a blow somehow. From a central point, it’s cracked with this big starburst of fractures. The thin wooden board at the back’s not in its original fixings. Someone, a long time ago, has tried to repair this, after some explosive bit of violence.
They were going to put it out with the rubbish here but I wouldn’t let it go. I’m taking it home.
Which reminds me…. You do pick up the strangest things. You see what the family doesn’t see.
I’ll give you an instance. Here we are now in Briwnant Street but picture another house, not a million miles from here. A well-appointed Valleys house, eighteen-nineties, end-of-terrace, that bit bigger than its neighbours; the name BRYN ARIAN carved into its stone lintel. In Welsh that’s ‘Hill of Silver’ – or ‘of Money’, depending. Its first owner was – I’d say – a poet. Or a miser.
This was back just before the Millennium that I was there. Winter. Probably November. Time was everywhere then. Count-down, run-up, apocalypse. End of the decade, of the century, of a decade of centuries. Bloody Robbie Williams wailing on about it on the radio: mill-enny-UM, Da-daddy-da-da. No escape.
Anyway. There I was, standing on my own in the back sitting-room of Bryn Arian: a nice high marble mantelpiece (not your common slate) and a mahogany sideboard facing it across the room. I won’t have to tell you (because these houses are all of a type) that as I stood with my back to the mantelpiece I saw – over to the left, out through the open door – the banisters and panelling of stairs coming down into a hallway, and a bit of the black-and-white-tiled floor going up to a big, heavy front door with leaded lights. The furniture around me was extra respectable good stuff, and knew it. To my right was a solid square dining table covered in a thick chenille cloth that was weighed down all around with a heavy fringe. The table was almost as wide as the window it stood beneath. A cold light, I remember thinking, about that window. Cold.
I wasn’t in Bryn Arian, mind you, because someone had died there. The son of the family had asked me to take a look at one particular thing: a hefty grandfather clock, before they got “you know – a valuer in”. A proper expert, he meant. I said to him, “So it’s your grandfather’s clock, then.” You know, little joke, little pun, like. But he just said, “That’s right.”
The clock stood to the left of the window. A lovely piece. Taller than a man. Bit of a giant grandfather. Locally made. Country scenes nicely painted in the four corners around the clock-face. All its weights and pendulum in good nick, hanging there behind the walnut door panel with the original crank key for winding it. In pencil on the inside of the door was a log of all the maintenance visits from the eighteen-seventies to nineteen-twelve. Done by a father and son, I’d say. D. Abrahams in a fancy hand and then, from nineteen-oh-one, the son’s, neater: Jacob. Jewish immigrants, very likely. There was a faded business card – Howells Jewellers – from the nineteen-fifties pinned there with a tack. It’s a firm that was in Ponty till about nineteen-eighty. All that time going by. All that careful attention.
And it was down inside the clock case, at the back, that I found the photograph. I nearly didn’t, because there was just the tiniest corner visible, a crumb of white, peeping up from underneath the base plate. Tricky to get out. It was very late Victorian, not long before the First World War, and what they call a cabinet portrait. They’re mounted on stiff card, a bit bigger than a postcard. It was a studio portrait of a young couple. Over-exposed. Fainter than it should have been. She’s standing, he’s sitting, surrounded by the photographer’s props: little fake staircase, potted fern, fur rug, ‘garden’ backdrop. She’s corseted and tense. There’s something pleading in his expression.
So there I was, trying to work out if the two or three little rips and scores in it could be repaired. I put the photograph face-down on the table. The chenille was awkward, yielding and lumpy at the same time. And it trapped crumbs. In fact, I was surprised that, in such a self-assured household, this table-cloth hadn’t been shaken out in ages. The crumbs and dust got in my way. Without something firm to lean on I couldn’t get a purchase on the card and just as I was thinking it’d be tough to make anything stick, even if I’d had the right glue to hand, an elderly woman came in. Her white hair was pinned up in some way, elegant and efficient. She was about to go out by the look of her. A man her age – her husband, I supposed – drifted past in the background, down the hallway to the front door. She was the boss, she was. I picked that up straight away. It didn’t suit her that I was there. When you work in other people’s houses you get to know how they feel about you being in their space.
My interest in the photograph annoyed her – it wasn’t what I was there for – but I was surprised she didn’t ask me where I’d got it. I was going to put the obvious questions about who was in it and so on but she stopped me in my tracks by what she did come out with: if I’d be wanting ‘more money for that’. No, no, I tell her, no need. Once she realised that me fiddling with the photograph wouldn’t cost her anything she was mollified. And now she could dismiss it. It was my own time I was wasting. Still and all, as she left, I could tell she was irked that I’d noticed her reluctance to pay for anything she didn’t have to.
So, I’m looking at the couple in the photo and then it strikes me: their clothes don’t match. I mean, she’s in her best black bodice and skirt, with a long string of jet beads and a gold watch chain on show but his suit’s a working man’s – far from a labourer’s but the clothes of a man at work, not leisure.
I’m wondering why on earth it was in the clock – a thing like that doesn’t get there by accident – somebody put it there; hid it there? – when the son comes in. He has an overcoat on. He’s got these big, dark-brown eyes. Anxious. He sees I’m doing something with the photograph, looks puzzled for a moment but asks me, politely enough, not, as I’d expected, about where the photo came from but what my credentials are for ‘that kind of work’. I tell him I have no credentials, just my interest and careful attention and, I add (so he gets the point), my reputation.
I just get to tell him about finding the photo when this tall young woman comes along, his wife, and she wants him somewhere else, that’s obvious. She’s dressed to go out too. She does no more than barely note me (and the old photo) but the way she speaks to him – as though I’m not there at all, you know – puts me in my place as not-one-of-them, more than if she’d told me bluntly that she’s completely indifferent to me and anything I’m doing. Her coat falls open and I see that she’s wearing a clerical collar and she is very, very pregnant. He hands me a brown envelope. Paper money inside. I say I’ll leave a report. As they go out, he looks back at me, apologetic, like. He believes he has no choice.
And then he does turn back. I see him look for a second at the photograph I’m holding and he says that there were two of them. Two photographs, I say. No, he shakes his head, two clocks; identical almost, he’d heard. But his grandfather chopped one up.
Chopped…! I turn instinctively, protectively, to the clock. The surviving clock. The clock he could have touched if he’d reached out. Why, I ask, dead certain there must be an astonishing, an amazing, reason.
For firewood, he tells me.
I imagine the axe smashing into the polished wood. The clanging mangling of the chains. The glass shattering in the case. The wooden finials flying. The crumpling forward. For firewood! What sort of man…?
Surely if you were short of firewood, then sell the clock and buy as much as you wanted. No one destroys something so impressive and expensive without a good – or a powerful – reason.
While I’m gawping at the clock, he’s gone. The front door shuts and I’m on my own. I got to admit I actually went up and stroked the clock, thinking of its twin – its companion? I even wondered what the clock felt to see one of its own – murdered.
I stand by that. I do. You see, a clock has a presence – is a presence – in a house. It’s a living thing. It’s got to be looked after, wound up, kept going.
Who cleared up afterwards – the shards of glass, the splinters? And when people noticed the clock was missing, how did they react to being told it had gone for firewood? Who decided that was a plausible reason for doing something so bizarre? Someone with a weak grip on normality, I’d say. But a strong grip. A strong grip on the family if they couldn’t tell him how out of order he was.
He wouldn’t even have had to say it himself. Someone else will have told the story. I imagine it being mentioned for the first time, in chapel, or in a shop. “The clock? Oh, firewood. It went for firewood.” And the irrational is smoothed over, covered up. And so you’re made to – how can I say it? – un-live what you lived. It didn’t happen the way you experienced it. No, no. It went for firewood. You’re made to live a lie and to hand it down into the future.
I stare at the photograph, at the clock. The photograph in the clock. The clock hiding it. Hiding it to protect it. From him. From the man with the axe, the householder, not the wistful young man in the photograph.
The clocks were older than the house. So they were brought here from somewhere else. One from the husband’s family, one from the wife’s? Was he attacking a person by means of a clock? Was he looking for something? Was he looking for the photograph and chose the wrong clock to break apart?
And the people in it: brother and sister? Husband and wife. Even, I find myself thinking, wife and young Jewish clock-maker? Yes, jewellers, clock-makers, often took to photography. Was it done in his studio, illicitly, hastily taken with someone’s connivance, hence the under-exposure? While she, in her best clothes, waited for her husband to arrive for their joint portrait?
But I stop myself. Carried away. This family isn’t asking, and it’s their puzzle not mine. Yet I’m bent over that table troubling to repair their past! They don’t care.
I leave the photograph where it is. I could tell them that I’ve seen the crumbs and the dust. Things are on the slide. I smell staleness and I feel how unsteady the air is here, disturbed by the flurry of their flight from things-as-they-are. To the people of this house it’s even more urgent to escape the past, through hurrying on, hurrying out. What can have been so bad that it must be always run away from, turned away from, with all this hurrying into a future that recedes as fast as it’s chased?
I could have told them that I hear what the photograph whispers: As I am so will you be. There’s a message for you, now. A message they don’t want to hear. No more than they can bear to think of all the un-lived life among the lives of those who’ve gone before them. I think about that. You can be made to deny stuff that actually happened, so how can you ever tell what’s really going on? That’s confusing. Big time. You never know where you are, so you just keep going. These people, this family in Bryn Arian, they have cars to start and sermons to give and so they believe they’re going somewhere else – and not where the people in the photograph went. They believe themselves to be alive.
But Death, now. People like these refuse to let Death take root in their lives. You might say, but the young pregnant wife was a priest. She must have been dealing with Death more than most; taking funerals, burying the dead. But I got her number. Just because you can slot Death in at the crem. doesn’t mean you’re controlling him, but it might encourage you to think you were. Am I right? Bossing Death about, like a relative nobody likes. The awkward uncle you keep shunting around the family. That’s just one way of trying to keep him from settling in. Other people simply refuse to see him. They talk across him or they treat him like any other burden, a dull companion on the sofa, to be borne with but never really attended to. But I know different, see. I know Death prefers to make an entrance early, to season each year with a particular tang, to grow as we grow, to get us used to loss and letting go.
Death’s our friend. He is. Really. He strains and expands our tight little dreams till they burst like… seedpods. Pfff! He takes us to a vantage-point – the end of the year, an illness, a crisis – and there he whispers, hot and close in the ear, “Enough for you, is it, what you see back there behind you? Is that all there’s going to be?”
And Death, our enemy, yeah, he goads us, wants us to put up a fight, to turn and face him and learn from our defeats – those times we let Death get the upper hand, when we didn’t keep hold of Life. Death wants a worthy opponent, not someone who’s half his from the start, like the man who tolerated that hideous, bilious quilt upstairs here in Briwnant Street.
But at least here there’s only a sense of defeat. Back there in Bryn Arian what got to me was a wilful refusal to acknowledge the fight. Death doesn’t like that. After all, he’s the great expert in Time and he likes the stakes to be high. He wants us to look back, to fear the waste of Time. He doesn’t want to be cheated of our regret, our remorse, our real mucked-up life. He doesn’t want only to be directed to the nice stuff.
Death, by the way, does like clocks. They allow him a moment of drama. Death, the great clock-stopper. Ta-da! Anyone who murders a clock, that wouldn’t go down well with Death because when there’s no Time to stop, Death is redundant, upstaged.
Well, I took a last look at that grandfather clock, then I left a note and I left the money too. I despised them all. I put the note on the table beside that photograph. ‘Irreparable’, the note said.
But, before I turned away from Bryn Arian, a pang of pity halted me and also, you know, fair play, I thought. I should try to be accurate and fair – professional, like. The son – the grandson – did tell me about the second clock and he did give me the crazy justification about the firewood. Was that his bid for freedom? A hope that at long last someone else’s outrage will break the spell?
So, I thought, where there’s life, there’s time. Maybe.
I added to the note the words, ‘by me’.
‘Irreparable by me.’