The first thing that caught my eye was the terrible restoration job. They’d obviously tried to purge two hundred years worth of soot from parts of the old bridge, and left some of the gold on the statues looking like it had come out of a Christmas cracker. Tourists climbed up onto the wall to have their photographs taken with the various saints and patron saints that lined the bridge. I walked toward the middle and St. Christopher; after all, I was a traveler. I didn’t realize I had been clutching Isla’s medallion until I was standing on the wall, eye-to-eye with the statue. I hung her St. Christopher from the fingertips of the baby Jesus on the saint’s shoulder. I recited a couple of lines from Mácha as a sort of prayer, and clambered back down before anyone could complain about the crazy tourist hanging off their national treasure.
As I turned, I saw a painting that stopped me dead in my tracks. It was of a couple standing outside of a shop window, meeting for the first time. The hope in their eyes was agonizing. I know, because it was the hope in my eyes the painter had captured. I couldn’t see if the same look of love was in Isla’s eyes because her head was tilted just slightly away as she looked into the window. All I could think was “be brave” as I walked up to the artist. He sat beside his easel, eating a meat pie with his hands.
“This painting, how did you see this?” I asked, pointing an accusing finger at the shop on the Westgate Road.
He looked up at me like I was mad.
I was beginning to think I was.
“I mean, this picture, that very minute, that’s the most important minute of my life, what’s it doing in one of your paintings?”
He continued to look at me, and then a slow smile spread across his lips as he recognized me. “It’s you,” he said.
I nodded.
“Oh, my God, it’s you.” He jumped up, dropping his meat pie and grabbing my hand to pump it. “I’m so pleased to meet you! You have no idea!”
I really didn’t.
I felt like a character in some surreal black and white art house movie.
Once was coincidence, but twice, what was that? It certainly wasn’t coincidence.
“I don’t understand what’s happening here.”
“It’s a funny story,” he promised, but I doubted it. “I was away from home, living in this shitty bedsit, when my girlfriend phoned me to tell me she was pregnant … it was the happiest moment of my life,” he said, still grinning. I have to admit it, his grin was infectious. I wanted to share his happiness. “I just went to the window and took a photograph of the world outside. I wanted to remember that exact moment, all of it, exactly how it happened. I always wondered what was happening down there.”
“It was the happiest moment of my life, too,” I said, thinking about it all over again. Thinking about how it felt to swallow my fear and walk across the street and say: hi, I’m Steve, I’m hoping you’ll fall in love with me. “I was finally being brave. I saw this woman, and I just knew I had to walk over there and tell her she was going to be the love of my life.”
“That’s wonderful! What happened? Did she fall in love with you? Tell me she fell in love with you! That would be perfect; two happily ever afters entwined in a single painting. I could call it four hearts. That’s a great name for a painting. Four hearts.”
I nodded. “She did.” I didn’t realize I was crying until he asked me what was wrong. “This was supposed to be our honeymoon,” I said. I didn’t say anything else; I let him read between the lines.
There was a moment in which the silence between our heartbeats was deafening, and then the painter understood the implications of the word supposed, and said, “Oh, shit, I’m sorry. I … what happened? Can I ask?”
“She saved someone’s life,” I said, “but no one saved hers.”
I really was crying now, not just a single tear. The painter sat me down on the tarpaulin he’d laid out on the ground. I told him what I was doing, my pilgrimage, and about the old couple I’d met in Paris a few days ago. I don’t know how long I sat there. I couldn’t take my eyes off the paining. By the time I stopped looking at it, it was past midnight and the tourists had gone home.
“It seems to me this journey of yours is being steered, my friend. Call it fate, call it chance, you were meant to be here, tonight, because you needed to be here. I want you to have this,” he said, taking the painting off the easel.
“I can’t … let me give you something for it.”
He shook his head, “You already did, believe me. Just by being there you gave me part of your life and made it such an important part of mine. Let me give it back to you.”
I couldn’t argue with that.
I held the painting like it was the most precious thing in the world as I walked back to my room in the old Dominican monastery, and hung it on the wall.
I lay in my bed looking up at the painting of when I meet Isla Durovich for the first time. Four hearts.
But there were only three of them now.
At three-fifteen the next morning my watch stopped and I couldn’t get it going again. It was only a small thing, but it felt like the greatest tragedy in the entire world. I cradled it in my hands like a dying child, willing it to tick. It didn’t.
I’d seen a place in the Jewish Quarter called Old Watches. It was a tiny antique place with a watchmaker who looked like a gnome with mad whiskers and madder eyes. I set out at first light. I couldn’t sleep. I needed to get it fixed. I couldn’t bring Isla back, but I could fix this. It’s funny how little things become obsessions. I didn’t care about my train to Vienna, I wasn’t leaving until my moon landing watch was keeping good time.
The morning air was brisk. There was rain in the air. Locals bustled toward the underground station, Staroměstská. It was too early for the shops; they were all boarded up or shuttered. It felt like I was seeing a secret part of the city, like watching a lover in bed, drowsy and not quite ready to face the world. I couldn’t remember exactly where I’d seen the watch shop, somewhere close to the old Jewish cemetery and the synagogues, so I just wandered around for a while drinking in the architecture of dreams and desires that had fired those imaginations oh so long ago, marveling at just how beautiful the buildings were and wondering—not for the first time—what future generations would think of the modern monstrosities we left as our legacy with the ugly but functional lines.
The shop was open.
There must have been ten thousand watches and parts of watches in the window, all of them at least fifty years old, most a lot older, all of the working parts ticking away to different rhythms. I opened the door. A little bell rang. There was no room inside—there was a one-foot square space in front of the watchmaker’s counter and the rest of the shop was taken up by mechanisms. He looked up from the timepiece he had been tinkering with and waggled his bushy eyebrows. There where tiny hairsprings and mainsprings and little coils scattered across the counter, some of them almost microscopic.
“What can I do for you, young man?” He asked, in perfect English. I hadn’t been expecting that. I’d been all primed for five minutes of miming to get my point across.
I took my watch off and put it on the counter between us.
“It stopped last night and I can’t get it going again.”
“Well, let’s have a look at it, shall we?” He studied it, reached into one of the drawers beneath the counter and brought out a little tool to screw the back off it. He put a jeweler’s monocle in his eye. Using a fine pin he teased the mechanism, tutting like a mechanic about to tell me he could fix my car, but it was going to cost a lot because the gear box was shot, the manifold was blown, the gaskets were knackered, and a whole bunch of other technical terms that made no sense whatsoever to me was wrong with it. “I see what the problem is,” he said. I was glad he could, because I couldn’t.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s broken.” He grinned at me. “But don’t worry, I can fix it. I assume you want me to fix it?”
“That’s why I’m here,” I s
aid. “How much will it cost?”
“For you? Nothing, Steve,” he said, taking the monocle out.
“You know my name? How?”
“I know all my customers’ names, Steve. It’s just good business.”
“Yeah, right, sure, but how do you know my name?”
“I make it my business to. We’re all cogs, my friend; we’re all gears in the guts of the world. We tick, we tock, our orbits occasionally draw us close to one and other, though more often than not they take us away.”
“Have we met before?”
He inclined his head. “Maybe. You have one of those faces. Now, let’s see about fixing this, shall we? Been losing a lot of time, has it? The spring’s loose. I should probably replace it, but I’m not sure you want me to do that.”
“Why not? I’m sorry, I don’t really understand, if you need to replace the spring to make the watch work again, why wouldn’t I want you to do that?”
“Because of the time that’s stored up inside it. Change the spring and it’s gone forever.”
I shook my head.
“Gone?”
“Yep, gone, vanished, spent, left behind, lived through, no more, a memory.”
“But that’s what happens. Time passes.”
“Oh you know so much do you? So how come you didn’t notice your watch was saving time?”
“It wasn’t, it was losing time.”
“Losing, saving, you speak like you don’t understand the difference,” the watchmaker said, sniffing. He popped the lid back on and pushed the watch into the middle of the counter between us. “It’s all in there, all of that saved time.”
I looked at it.
It wasn’t ticking.
“You didn’t fix it?”
“Did you see me fix it?”
“No.”
“Then I didn’t fix it. I don’t think you want me to fix it. After all, there are two whole days stored in there. That’s a lot of time to throw away. It’s up to you, but I’d think long and hard about it. Two days. What’s happened to you over the last couple of days, and more importantly, are you ready to give it up?”
What had happened to me? I’d met an old couple who’d reminded me of just how incredible it felt when Isla said yes, and I’d met a painter who had captured the single most important moment of my life. In less than forty-eight hours they’d given me back two of the most precious memories of Isla. There was no way in a million years I’d give that up; but it wasn’t as though I’d just forget them either. They were etched on my soul.
“Forty-eight hours,” he said again. He picked up the watch, and reset the time, rolling the hands back. “Think about it.”
I took the old moon landing watch off him. I could feel the gentle tick of the hands moving. I put it on. “Thank you,” I said, and stepped out of the cramped little shop onto the Parisian street. I felt the padlock in my pocket. I wanted to go to be Les Pont des Arts because of Julio Cortázar’s book Rayuela. Isla and I had joked about fastening a padlock to the bridge like lovers do. I knew what was going to happen. I’d throw the key into the river then walk down to the subway and meet an old couple looking at a photograph of Isla and me, and I’d be as happy and sad as I could remember ever being, both at the same time. Then I’d move on to Prague to scatter another one of her ashes, her St. Christopher.
I looked at the watch Isla’d given me for my birthday. It was losing time. No. It was saving time. There was a difference. It was saving a little bit every hour until it was full. Then it would stop. And when it stopped, I’d go to a little watchmaker’s shop in the Jewish quarter of Prague, and he’d say, “I know all my customers’ names, Steve. It’s just good business.” This time I’d know how he knew my name, because we’d done this dance before.
If he gave me that choice again, fixing it, or using it, I’d keep on using it until I was ready to go on scattering the rest of Isla Durovich’s ashes in Vienna—on a picnic blanket on the green in Bellevue Höhe overlooking the entire city—and Venice—on the Grand Canal—then Rome—taking in the breathtaking view of the Eternal City from Gianicolo Hill—and finally that little lake house in Garda that was just us, our little dream house.
And when I was ready, I’d go on to the third battered paperback in my bag, but not yet, and I couldn’t go back four years, six months, four days, thirteen hours, and fifteen minutes to the moment I’d had Tom of Finland tattoo “be brave” over my heart, and live it all again, because forty-eight hours was forty-eight hours. The watch couldn’t save any more time. Not in the year I’d had it.
But I didn’t need to go back. As tempting as it was to wish I could save the child myself, or go back to that day we first met and be brave all over again, I couldn’t change things. This was the way it had to be.
All I needed to do was to let him rewind the watch on all of its saved time, and step out of his shop onto the moonlit Parisian streets. There would always be an old couple waiting for me on the platform with their Kodak moments, and a painter on a bridge tomorrow desperate to share the happiest moment of his life with me.
That was Isla’s last gift to me, seconds saved here and there from our last year together that all added up to time to remember her.
***
The Hollow Earth
The woman might have been beautiful, once. It was impossible to tell because the flickering blue blush of the gaslight cast a pall of sickness across her face. The harsh light picked out the shadows of her pocked skin, flaunting her imperfections. Whatever she might have been, she was not beautiful now.
She carried a basket of wilting flowers. The wet stems nestled against the pearly ruffles of her blouse leaving a grimy circle of damp beneath the swell of her left breast.
The man who called himself Nathaniel Seth smiled at her pantomime of propriety as she adjusted the lie of her bustle on her generous hips and teased the set of her porter’s knot. It was all a show, an elaborate charade to mask the fact that she was loitering on the corner of Bedford Square.
A flower girl.
A prostitute by any other name.
Where other girls made for the warmth of the palatial Alhambra down in Leicester Square or the dancing rooms of the East End where the music of desire filled the snuggeries and lust parted the amorous from their shillings, this one waited out the night on a dimly lit corner, clinging to the dark places she knew well.
She listened hungrily to the sounds of the night, the clatter of horses’ hooves sparking on distant cobbles, the cries of the street hawkers and below them, the soft feet of the young cadgers running back to their nests to share whatever spoils their light fingers had plucked.
He cursed his luck, willing her silently to move on, find another perch or slip into a Hansom Cab and disappear into the cloying smog.
He could smell her perfumes, wantonly applied to douse the reek of those other wanton fragrances that clung to her ample flesh. It was cloyingly sweet.
At that moment the world had such small horizons: it spanned from the mouth of the Square to the shadowy steps of the British Museum. He opened his hand, stretching the stiffness out of his fingers. His pocket-watch ticked against his breastbone. He counted the movements, inhaling and exhaling shallowly with every third one, twenty breaths in a full minute of watching the woman.
She showed no sign of leaving.
She was, he thought, looking for someone. An expected rendezvous, perhaps? A pre-arranged tryst? Or business? He listened intently for another set of footsteps, the slow measured confidence of a tallyman come to collect her bawd’s cut of the night’s take.
He cracked his knuckles one at a time and stepped out of the sheltering obscurity of the hanging gardens, pushing back the tears of a weeping willow. The melancholy leaves fell across his face, leaving smears of pollen on his lapel like poisonous kisses. The metal tip of his cane marked each step precisely as he crossed the cobbles toward the waiting woman, the harsh sound hanging in the air.
Halfway across the square he h
eard the first chime of midnight from St. Giles’ church. It was taken up a moment later by the great bells of St. Pancras and St. Luke’s, and before the first chime had stopped resonating, by The Holy Trinity out by Lincoln’s Fields. The chimes were like a ripple of sound spreading out across the city. He paused for a moment, to listen to them. They were not an unpleasant last thing to hear …
He smiled warmly, imagining himself in her eyes: tall, debonair, a dashing city gent both educated and cultured and a long way from his element, walking a lonely road at night, a fool in other words, waiting to be parted from his money. The tails of his Churchill topcoat swirled around his ankles like a clutch of yapping terriers. The cut of his suit was expensive, the threads exquisite, imported from the Far East. Seeing her half-turn, half-smile, he inclined his head and tapped the silver wolf’s head of his cane to the brim of his silk plush Waverley and returned her smile.
He decided then that he would be merciful. It was curious how a simple thing like her smile could buy even that small relief from him. On another night, he knew, that same smile could just as easily have been reason enough for him to choke the life out of her with her own sex-stinking garter. But tonight it saved her pain.
She made to offer one of the rather dejected looking blooms from her basket but a wry smile and a slight shake of the head stayed her hand.
The light was indeed deceptive. Up close, stripped of the mask of shadows and the blush of youth betrayed itself. She could not have been more than eighteen or nineteen but already the curse of old London town had stripped away so much of her life. He could not give back her youth but he could bring an end to the relentless slide into decay her flesh was on. He had heard it said that eight years was the best a flower girl could hope to last on the streets. That was a sorry state of affairs. As the looks began to slide so the coin would dry up. Desperation would see to the rest. It was a devil’s deal if ever there were one.
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