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?’
Soon Rex no longer needed a broken watch to visit Evelyn. Three times a week, in between his studies, he rode his bike to the shop, leaving it propped against a lamp-post.
But I tell too much. It is not easy, with my failing memory, to relate every detail of my parents’ history. I keep a single picture of them in my mind. A simple scene, composed more of sound than image. They stand in the shop. Father’s left hand cups the pocket watch, his right index finger points to the space where the minute hand ought to be. It is three o’clock in the afternoon. My mother’s mouth is open as if to say something but all I can hear is the clangour of a thousand clock-calls.
…
Today I travelled to Edinburgh to visit my maternal grandfather, Mr Rafferty. He was in bed, surrounded by enormous white pillows. I decided to take him for a walk. He can cause trouble outside the institution, but I needed some information, and he is more receptive to my questions in the open. Mr Rafferty is an important resource for these first stories, my pre-history. He is old and his mind half-cracked; nevertheless, he may provide me with certain details I cannot know. For instance, what happened after he returned to Oxford.
As we began to walk I held tightly to his arm because I feared he might run on to the street. It had been raining, and the pavements of Edinburgh are broken, so we could not take a step without treading in a puddle. I tried as far as possible to cross to the drier sections, but I saw at once that Mr Rafferty loved getting into the water. It took all my strength to force him to walk by my side. Nevertheless, he managed to step on to a section of pavement where one of the slabs had sunk in deeper than the rest. By the time I realized what he was doing he was wet through and covered in dead leaves.
Mr Rafferty is often gloomy and inclined to silence. His gestures are furtive; the tips of his moustache droop, and his eyes sink into the grey rash of his face. In this mood he spends whole days in bed, falling in and out of heavy sleep. At other times he is excited and talkative. Sometimes he gets quietly to his feet and runs to the corner of his room where a sink and shaving mirror stand; there he argues with himself, staring into his reflection. Or else he will sit up suddenly, knock on the side of the bed and answer, ‘Come in,’ in various tones for hours on end.
He was nervous and animated as we walked. His eyes gleamed, and everything that shone caught his attention. I knew that if I could get him to George Square, where we could watch the pigeons and drink hot chocolate, he would answer my questions. We walked to the corner of Warrender Park. As we were passing the windows of the swimming pool, full of green shadows and refracted light, he didn’t want to carry on; he made himself heavier and heavier and, however hard I pulled, I could scarcely move him. Finally I had to stop in front of the last window. For several minutes we watched the bathers moving smoothly between bars of broken light. I grabbed hold of Mr Rafferty and tried to walk naturally. But every step was an effort as in those dreams in which one’s shoes are made of lead. In this way we proceeded down Warrender Park, through the Meadows until, finally, we reached George Square. He didn’t want hot chocolate, so I bought him a packet of crisps and this seemed to make him happy. We sat on the brickwork surrounding the square. The edge of my skirt was damp, and scraps of leaves clung to the lining. I asked him about the days before the war. I asked what my mother was like when she was a child. Was she very beautiful? Did she wear long dresses? He didn’t answer; he only stared up at the sky, placing crisps into his mouth every so often. But I could see that he was enjoying the day, the air which was sweet and unobtrusive.
‘What was Mother’s star sign?’ I asked. He didn’t seem to hear. All at once he turned his head towards me.
‘Who are you?’ he said.
‘Evie Steppman,’ I said.
‘Where were you born?’
‘Children’s Hospital, Lagos.’
‘Age?’
‘Fifty-four.’
‘Eyes?’
‘Green.’
‘Jew or Gentile?’
I didn’t answer but sprung back a question: ‘On what day did you return to Oxford before the war?’
‘It was at night,’ he replied.
‘On what night did you return?’
‘February 15th 1939.’ I started to ask him questions about his return to Oxford, quickly, one after another, in case he lost interest.
Suddenly, he interrupted me.
‘There’s no cure for a broken heart. For a weak one, there is. I have found it. In fact, I am currently in the process of establishing a patent for this cure.’
‘Yes?’
And he proceeded to tell me about the events after his return to Oxford.
Later, we walked without incident back to the institution, where we parted: he to his bed, I to Gullane. Now I am seated at my desk. Twilight is spreading through the attic, creeping into the corners, mouse holes and dusty spaces under the floor. Outside, leaves shiver in the gutter. The sea lets out a sigh, and at once everything turns sombre, lonely and late. In the relative quiet I will attempt to finish this third chapter, using what my grandfather told me earlier today, together with the stories I heard from Father in my childhood.
…
It was late evening on 15 February 1939 when Mr Rafferty returned to Oxford. Across Europe nations were building giant monsters of war. Engineers were dreaming dreams of destruction which those monsters could excrete and simultaneously raising defence lines against them. On my grandfather’s return he and my mother began a different kind of blockade adumbrated by the build-up of arms. They sealed the upstairs entrance to the workshop, spread a rug over the trapdoor. They hung heavy curtains across the basement window, scattered sawdust on the rough boards. Blankets, books, towel and tea-set each found a place there, in that nocturnal bunker where Mr Rafferty installed himself.
Whether or not my mother believed the predicament in which my grandfather claimed to be embroiled, whether she understood how deeply and inexorably he had retreated from practical affairs, she must have felt that he was in danger, because she made a great effort to hide him from the outside world. No one, she understood, was to know of his presence – not even Rex. In the waking hours Mr Rafferty was to remain silent, emerging from his hiding place at dusk for an hour or two, after which he would descend once again to the workshop, in whose dank light a strange, complicated and unnatural affair was taking shape.
It began with the reading of scientific treatises. Mr Rafferty concentrated on the writings of Jacques de Vaucanson, who in 1737 constructed a mechanism in the shape of a fawn, which could play the flute. Over the following weeks he consumed innumerable books and manuscripts. He noted particular sections on loose sheafs then pinned these fragments, to which he added illustrative diagrams, on to the walls. His reading matter became increasingly technical, including manuals on anatomy, alchemy and mechanics, the writings of the Italian Futurists and Pavlovian reflex theory. He ate infrequently, slept only for a few hours in the afternoon. His complexion acquired the tarnished hue of an old euphonium.
It was at this time that Mr Rafferty began to receive visitors (so he told me this afternoon in Edinburgh). Men wearing dark suits made their way to Ingolstadt Place, then vanished into the back entrance of the workshop. There they would remain throughout the night, drinking cocoa, conversing in hushed tones, observing demonstrations, remonstrating with one another, conducting their business with complicated handshakes. Later, when Mr Rafferty had ceased to appear above ground altogether, other darkly clad figures came to that fusty vault, human shadows conveying stiff and weighty packages.
And slowly, during the course of this midnight activity, this sinful undertaking brought to my grandfather the subtle, strange-smelling vapour of death; slowly – Evelyn did not notice the change – 16 Ingolstadt Place became enveloped in a blue haze. This strange mist originated from the small hearth Mr Rafferty had set into the wall and from which he drew brightly gleaming substances. By April, when Rex was nearing the end of his civil service training, the mist had started to creep up into the shop. Rex told Evelyn that he was to travel to Nigeria, his first posting abroad, but she hardly took in the news. She had too much to think about, keeping the shop by day, tending to her hideaway at all other times. What is more, she was harbouring a pair of secrets in the shape of my father and grandfather.
Secrets are like shadows; they transform the one who bears them, they flit and flicker behind the eyes, grow longer and more difficult to command by evening-time and disperse at night, only to appear with renewed authority during the day. Perhaps it was for this reason – the incorrigibility of secrets and shadows – that one afternoon my mother closed the shop early and invited Rex to supper. Perhaps it was good fortune that Mr Rafferty was working at the hearth. Maybe Evelyn really did feel faint and go to bed, telling Rex to show himself out. Whatever the truth, chance (chance yielding to my mother’s will) led Rex towards the trapdoor. A great heat was emanating from beneath his feet as he stepped on to the rug. There was a sulphurous smell whose pungency grew stronger as he raised the rug, prised open the trapdoor and walked down the basement stairs.
He saw nothing at first, or nothing tangible, since the room was filled with smoke. As it dispersed, Rex made out a figure bent over a large wooden table, a broad, round-faced semblance of a man with unkempt hair and black shiny eyes under-arched with greying bags, eyes which, as they turned towards the stairs, Rex knew immediately. Basements, unlike attics, rarely accentuate sound; rather everything that stirs is muted, dampened by the inevitable moisture in the air, so that as Rex stood staring into the eyes of the stranger Mr Rafferty he felt strangely calm. Despite the muted though frankly appalling scene – a woman, or rather the likeness of a female form, white, bloodless, prostrate on the table, parts of her covered with a sheet, others simply missing – Rex spoke.
‘Good evening,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think we’d …’
‘We have never formally introduced ourselves,’ said Mr Rafferty.
‘You already know my name. I know several of yours.’
‘My name,’ said Mr Rafferty, ‘is Mr Rafferty.’
He held out his hand. Rex stepped back and lowered himself into the armchair, averting his eyes from the hideous form over which Mr Rafferty now drew a sheet. He spent a few minutes poking the fire, with his back to Rex, then joined him in a neighbouring armchair, and, settling, declared, ‘Before you say anything more, please allow me to explain. Much has happened since that day on the train to London. If you recall, I was in a keen state of anticipation. I had conceived a plan that would enable me to return to Oxford, where, as you will hear, I could restore my former happiness.’
Mr Rafferty paused and gazed out into the distance. After some time he said, ‘In the weeks following Julia’s death, you see, I had been unable to forget one thing. The fact that my clockwork heart had functioned perfectly. I had managed to manufacture a human heart, one of the most complicated anatomical structures – why should I not repeat the feat for each of the vital organs? After all, what is a lung if not a sanguine bellow? And the eye – how faithfully it corresponds to a scientific instrument! Might I not forge each of the vital organs and clothe them in the likeness of my wife!
‘I faced a major difficulty. I needed a base from which to begin my work, yet I was on the run. I had to get back to Oxford. For several months I considered this problem. It was not until, several days before our meeting on the train, I came across an article in The Times, that I saw my opportunity. In 1935, said the article, a group of scientists and engineers had developed a method for detecting flying objects by shooting invisible waves towards the sky. And the government had supported this absurd idea! They also, it was said, offered £1,000 to anyone who could demonstrate a ray that would kill a sheep at a range of 100 yards. How far the government errs! What desk-ridden imbecile supported this mad imagination? Still, I thought, I could use this governmental madness to my advantage. Such is the fear of conflict in Europe, so inadequate is our readiness for war, that Whitehall is willing to assist anyone who volunteers to help. So I contacted the Chiefs of Staff. After explaining my state of affairs, that is my enforced itinerancy, I proceeded to describe my skills as a maker of clockwork and automata. I put to their dreaming minds the image of a battalion of soldiers, each like the next, a defence force to which fear was as alien as hunger, an army of expendable automata whose glassy eyes would strike fear into the enemies of our little island. I arranged for the reply to be covertly announced in The Times. The reply came. I returned to Oxford and into the arms of my daughter.
‘Of course, I concealed my true motive: to realize the plan to which, ever since Julia fell sick, I have dedicated my life. So, I first set about making each of the components necessary for life, all of which I have either built from clockwork or plucked from the corpses of criminals, which the War Office have brought me. You see, I cannot hope to forge every part of Julia from metal. There are certain structures, such as the organs of reproduction, not to mention the hair and skin that, through a strange alchemy, I plan to integrate with the manufactured articles. I do not expect Julia, upon waking, to function as before. I imagine her to be like one who enters into life for the first time. And just as the new-born learns to call his creator Mother, so Julia, with the right instruction, will learn to call me Husband. But there is more! I will not simply replicate Julia – that’s the easy part – but improve on her! Just as our missionaries bring the torch of culture and progress to the dark people of the earth, so I, a Stanley in my own right, will mould Julia in my own image. Soon I will have a perfect simulacrum of my wife, the true likeness of myself in female form, Julia, my love!’