If for nothing else, today’s feuilleton will be remarkable for recording the smallest thing ever to go wrong with a house in its owners’ absence. Indeed, so confident am I of this claim that if any reader writes to me with a smaller, he will receive, by return of post, a magnum of the finest Toblerone.
I spent the Bank Holiday weekend in Edinburgh, where it I turned out not to be a Bank Holiday at all; so that I came home feeling oddly deprived. It was not for some time that I discovered the yet odder depths to which deprivation may plummet.
It was four hours, to be precise; which is precisely what I can be. I know that my key turned in the lock at 3 p.m., because I heard the cuckoo clock in the kitchen observe this; just as I know that it was 7 p.m. when I discovered what I discovered, because I was in the kitchen itself at the time, slicing the lemon for the yard-arm gin, and when the clock cuckooed, I looked up.
Owners of clocks of the order cuculidae will not need an explanation for this, but the rest of you might be thunderstruck to learn that that is what you do if you are in a room with one at any time after five o’clock. Up until five o’clock, the number of cries registers in the head, but after that time you have no idea how many it is, and you have to look up at the clock to see what hour it is.
I looked up just in time to see the little door shutting. And, in the nanosecond before it did, to note that what it was shutting on was not the cuckoo.
I walked across to the clock, prised open the door with my forefinger, and peered into the cuckoo’s premises. It was not there. It had flown its tiny coop. To make doubly sure, I forefingered the minute-hand around to eight o’clock: the door burst open, the voice cried eight times, but what leapt out on each of these eight occasions was nought but a wobbling spring. The cuckoo was not on the end of it.
Where had it gone? And why? Had it, perhaps, in ecstasy at finding it had the house to itself, hurtled so joyously from its cavity that it had detached itself from its tiny umbilicus? Or heard, maybe, the rumour of a sparrow-clock somewhere, and gone off to lay an egg in it?
Unlikely. It is, in truth, only half a cuckoo. It is little more than a head on a spring. I cannot speak for more expensive clocks, it may well be that the Swiss houses of parliament sport a giant example which hourly lurches from its penthouse atop Big Bird intact in every particular, but mine, sadly, does not have the wherewithal to parturiate. It does not even have legs. It could not have gone far. I searched the kitchen floor. Nothing.
Had a clockwork cat got in?
I wondered if the head might have fallen off not forwards at all, but backwards. It could be lying on the floor of the works, struggling ventriloquially every time the spring sprang out. It dawned upon me that Wordsworth must have suffered similar horological shock; nothing else could explain so awful a line as ‘O Cuckoo! Shall I call thee bird, or but a wandering voice?’ It is exactly what the old fool would have cried upon walking into Dove Cottage to find himself confronted with a headless chime.
I took the clock from the wall, and removed the back, appropriately enough, with my Swiss Army knife. Exactly, I’m sure, what the Swiss Army would have done in the circumstances. The head was not inside.
Three days have now passed, and some 50 phone calls. Can you believe that there is not a spare cuckoo head to be found anywhere in these islands? I tried this morning to fashion one from Plasticine, with a little matchstick beak, but it was too heavy, it lumbered out on the first cry, hung dangling over the clockface, and refused to go back until manhandled.
I do not know what to do. I may have to junk the clock. The kitchen is below my bedroom, I hear the cry in the small hours, and I would swear a derisory note has crept into it. They do change their tune, you know.