The Silver Wind

by Nina Allan

  To the rear of the house was a small paved courtyard, hemmed in on all sides by high red walls. Weeds sprouted from between the flagstones, groundsel and chicory and the miniature yellow sunbursts of a dozen dandelions. The privy was dark and cramped, its mildewed walls permeated by the odours of damp and spent urine. Owen used the toilet quickly and went to find Morton.

  The ground floor was Morton’s showroom, where he saw his clients. The front and back rooms had been knocked into one, creating a large, bright space looking directly on to the street. There was a seating area with armchairs, an oriental rug atop the polished parquet, a sideboard with a crystal decanter and glasses. Further towards the back, a cabinet with brass locks stood in an alcove. The room was spotless, bathed in early morning sunlight, but there was no sign of Morton. Owen knew already from his letters that the old man worked in the basement. He had had the cellar converted exactly to his requirements some decades before.

  The cellar ran the full width of the house, partitioned roughly in two by a wide brick archway. Natural daylight penetrated through the two half-height windows at the front, with Morton’s main work area immediately to the right of the archway. Owen noted two lathes and a circular saw, a set of the new balance-sprung weighing scales, a rack of loupes gradated in order of power. Aside from this newer machinery there was all the usual paraphernalia you would expect to find littering a watchmaker’s studio: soldering iron, anvil, fire tongs, carefully miniaturised replicas of equipment he had seen in use a thousand times in the yard of Pat Gilmour, the blacksmith.

  To the left of the archway, a workspace had been prepared for Owen. A bench and a lathe, an electric lamp on an articulated metal stand. There was also a partitioned wooden box filled with various tools – pliers and bradawls, tweezers and a set of the fiendishly expensive new steel shears specifically designed for cutting sheet metal. The box smelled sweetly of linseed oil. Every piece of equipment looked brand new.

  Owen felt himself flush with emotion. There could be no adequate way of thanking Morton, whose efforts to make him feel welcome – to feel needed – had gone far beyond anything he might have expected. Morton, perhaps sensing his new apprentice’s discomfort, coughed and sniffed. He held up a thin strip of shining metal, offering it to Owen as if it were some important artefact, only recently discovered.

  “Titanium steel,” he said. “One of the most durable alloys known to man.”

  The metal was cool to the touch, with a peculiar greyish sheen. Owen knew that many modern horologists had adopted steel as their material of choice for watch casings – in terms of stability and durability it was preferable to both gold and silver – but he was surprised to find that Morton was familiar with it.

  “What would you like me to do?” Owen said. “Would you like me to cut this for you?”

  “I would like you to show me your watch,” said the old man. “Let’s see what you’re made of, young man.”

  The watch had a silver case and a plain white dial. Owen had constructed it using a barrel and fusée rather than the more modern lever escapement, simply so as to master the finer points of the earlier, more complicated mechanism. The watch kept perfect time, losing less than one second a month. Owen had completed it earlier that spring. It had taken him nine months to make and was the first piece of work that satisfied the standards he had set for himself. His prentice piece. He was inordinately proud of the watch, but this did not mean he was not terrified of showing it to Morton. If Morton were to reject it as not good enough, Owen would feel that it was he, Owen Andrews, who had been rejected. He felt new colour rising in his cheeks as he unbuckled the strap from his wrist and handed it over.

  The old man settled the watch beneath his bench lamp and unfastened the back. It was one of the new-style cases, fitted with a concealed spring. Morton worked it without difficulty, his hands so confident and steady Owen found it hard to reconcile this Morton, so comfortable in his element, with the frail and arthritic figure of the evening before.

  “Nice and clean,” Morton said. “Why did you use a fusée?”

  “To see if I could,” said Owen. Morton laughed, but in a way that suggested pleasure rather than mockery, and Owen felt swept by relief. Perhaps Morton meant to praise him, after all.

  “What do you hope to learn from me?” Morton said. “You already possess more skill than any apprentice I have worked with. You would probably benefit more by going abroad.”

  Owen was startled by the old man’s honesty. He remembered one of his father’s best carpenters, a craftsman of such technical skill and inventive power he could make the meanest piece of pine look like seasoned maple wood. Owen had once seen him use leftover strips of walnut to construct a card case so beautifully jointed it slid open and closed as if upon oiled runners. The man had made it during his lunch hours. Owen had asked if he could purchase it from him but the man had refused. He was a difficult character. He did not like it when his father hired other joiners, even to work beneath him, and much preferred working alone. It was as if he feared other people stealing his ideas.

  Morton seemed the very opposite, so little concerned with his own talent as to eliminate it from the equation. What interested him was the craft itself, the pure and abstract art of the measurement of time.

  “You are mistaken, sir,” Owen said. He tried to choose his words carefully, full of gratitude for Morton’s candour. “I still have much to learn, and you inspire me simply by being here, by existing. I want to know how to build a tourbillon. I know you have done it. I know you can teach me how.”

  Morton raised his eyebrows. The gesture, full of irony and humour, made him look twenty years younger. “The tourbillon is redundant, don’t you know? An indulgence, a foible, as anachronistic as the bicycle in the age of the aeroplane.” He paused, as if waiting for his words to take effect. “I read it the other day in Scientific American.”

  “But that is a nonsense, and you know it,” Owen shot back at him. “Like saying that books should be done away with, now we have film.”

  “Well,” said Morton, laughing. “Shouldn’t they?”

  Owen frowned, then laughed also, delighted that the easy familiarity that had built up between them during the years of their correspondence seemed so easily restored. They spent the remainder of the morning in the workshop, Morton explaining the workings of the new machines. Though Owen was familiar with them from books and periodicals, this was the first time he had seen many of them in action. At one o’clock they walked up to Long Lane and had their luncheon at The Almoners, a public house that Morton referred to as his local.

  “The family who run the place came here from Poland,” Morton told him. “Their food is the finest in Southwark.”

  They ate bowls of spiced goulash, served with a dark rye bread baked at a continental bakery just three streets away. Owen felt elated by the sound of foreign voices, the fresh tastes. He found it hard to believe he had been in the city less than twenty-four hours. When the young woman serving behind the bar smiled at him, he found himself smiling back. Owen noticed that Morton was grinning and blushed furiously. Nonetheless, he felt blessed, illustrious. Could it be possible that here in the city he was simply a man among other men, busy in his chosen profession, his disability as unremarkable and unremarked upon as the nose on his face? It scarcely seemed possible, yet here he was, living a life he had believed existed only in dreams.

  He could not help wondering what Dora might think of him, were she to see him now, the apprentice of a renowned watchmaker, relaxed in the company of other workingmen as he took his lunch in the saloon of a busy London pub, whether it would make a difference.

  Dream on, little brother. The voice of his brother Charles. A cripple is still a cripple, wherever he drinks. Women like us to think they don’t care about such things, but they do. Dora Newland would no more look at you than at the man who cleans and oils her father’s motor car.

  Charles and Stephen had been against Owen coming to London at all. They di
d not see the point of it, not when there was a post ready and waiting for him as business accountant to their father’s building firm. His two older brothers, who both worked as site overseers, had tried to pressurise their father into making him stay, though Ted Andrews had seemed indifferent to his leaving, some might say relieved. Owen always had the feeling he made his father uncomfortable, not so much because he was crippled as because he reminded Ted too much of Owen’s mother Evelyn.

  His younger brother Anthony was now in line for the accountant’s job. Well, he must make his own decisions. Of all his brothers, Anthony was the only one who had seemed sorry to see him go. There had been tears in his eyes, even though Anthony was a hard nut, obstinate as their father and wild-spirited as their mother. Whatever he chose to do, he would fare well enough without the scant protection Owen could afford him.

  The subject of brothers would not leave him alone that day, it seemed. Back at the workshop on Trinity Street, Morton set Owen to work cutting and hammering back plates for a pair of wristwatches he had been commissioned to make for two regular clients, identical twins.

  “They’re a strange pair,” Morton explained. “They work as a cabaret act, the Gemini Twins. I’ve made pieces for them before and they have been most appreciative. The only thing you should be aware of is that these watches must be identical in every detail. I don’t just mean that they should look the same from the outside. They must be exactly alike, even down to the smallest component of the mechanism. Any discrepancy is liable to make them physically ill.”

  Owen watched his face carefully, wanting to be sure he was not joking, but his features remained impassive and Owen was bound to take him at his word. The subtext, that Morton would never have trusted such intricate work to Owen unless he felt him capable, was both daunting and thrilling. Owen worked steadily for several hours, measuring and cutting the silver, then stretching the plates. The method for this was called bouging, and involved striking the metal with his hammer in a series of repeated spiral motions that both thinned it evenly and stretched it into shape. The work was routine, some might say mind-numbing, though Owen had always found it almost hypnotically satisfying. It did not demand the pitch-point accuracy required to build a mechanism but the constant rhythm of the hammer, the minute movements of his fingers as he steadied and turned the silver calmed and reassured him in a way the company of people never had.

  His thoughts were free to wander, and he found himself remembering his last Guy Fawkes Night in Ottery St Mary, when he had tried to explain the wonder of the tourbillon to Anthony. They had just come down off the Hurricane, the huge spinning wheel that had been brought all the way from the goose fair in Tavistock and had proved so popular there were queues around the fairground most of the night.

  Anthony was laughing, his head flung back, his arms outstretched as he struggled to regain his balance on the too-solid ground.

  “You felt weightless up there, didn’t you?” Owen said. “Well, for all the time you were in the capsule you were weightless, or as good as. That’s what the tourbillon does to the watch mechanism. It suspends it from gravity. There’s effectively no friction, nothing to stop the watch from keeping perfect time.”

  “You’re not telling me your tourbillon is better than a quartz watch,” his brother said, snapping back to reality. “My friend Giles Wellesley from school has a quartz watch his father brought back from America. He says that in ten years’ time everyone will have them, that you’ll never have to wind a watch again. Wellesley reckons quartz watches will be so cheap to make there’ll be no point in having them repaired, that if your watch stops working you’ll throw it away, and get a new one instead.”

  Anthony folded his arms, seeming to challenge him, and all Owen could think was that he had not explained the thing well enough. The tourbillon was a technical marvel, but for Owen it was more than that: a miraculous alignment of art and science that compelled attention and awe, as perfect and inviolable as the arrangement of the planets around the sun.

  He had never yet seen a quartz watch, but he knew already that such a thing had no majesty, that it was a dead thing, a reanimation at best, a Frankenstein’s monster of a watch that worked by trepanning a crystal shard with a microscopic lightning bolt. A quartz watch did not tick, and for Owen there was something monstrous in that, in and of itself.

  The inventor of the tourbillon, Louis Breguet, had been eighty-nine when he died, a Methuselah of his time and still in the midst of his researches. In his final years he had come to believe that the tourbillon could be improved still further, that the gravitational stasis it induced could be extended to control the fabric of time itself. There were many who insisted he was confused at the end, unable to distinguish fantasy from reality. His youngest son Georges-Louis swore his mind was clear as a bell, as impervious to time’s passing as the miraculous watches he had set in motion. Some years after his death, Georges-Louis published his father’s diaries in the hope that some future genius might one day make sense of them.

  So far, none had.

  * * *

  The days soon fell into a rhythm. Owen would rise at eight o’clock, have breakfast and work until one, when he would go along to The Almoners for something to eat. Morton would sometimes accompany him, though more often than not he preferred to take lunch in his rooms. He would return to the workshop at two, working on through the afternoon until Morton ordered him to down tools, always insisting that Owen break off before he became too tired.

  “Rest is a part of the work, don’t forget that,” he said. “Push yourself too hard and you’ll make mistakes.”

  After supper, Owen would sometimes return to The Almoners to down a pint or two, or play a hand of rummy with Sergius and Andrzej, two medical students from the nearby Guy’s Hospital who were friendly with the proprietor’s son. When he tired of the pub, he would take the tube up to Charing Cross and spend the evening in one of the drinking clubs in Soho. He never consumed much alcohol – Morton never made enquiries as to where he spent his evenings but Owen knew that if his work began to be affected he would think less of him – but he liked to sit and listen, the gruff voices of merchant seamen mixing with the raucous laughter of doctors, lawyers, artisans, bank clerks off the leash. He had been horribly nervous the first time he had dared to enter one of these places, the smoky upstairs rooms with their red plush and chandeliers, their mirrored alcoves and mahogany bars, though he soon discovered that so long as he could pay his way he was welcome anywhere, no questions asked. No one cared who he was or what he did. No one passed comment on his uneven gait, or poked fun at his cane, and indeed the drinking clubs were full of misfits, dwarfs, transvestites, homosexuals, gamblers. Criminals too, Owen suspected, and their associates. A year ago, he would have been shocked at the idea that he would feel fellowship with such people. Now, he frequently found himself nodding to one or other of them as they passed each other on the stairs.

  The light of London’s night life entranced him, the unearthly mixture of sunset and street lighting as it glanced off the proud facades, translucent washes of saffron and rose, and then the deeper dark, the night light that was so different from moonlight, so different from the dark of the country, mostly because it never became truly dark in London at all. Often he would not return to Trinity Street until well after midnight. Morton usually retired to bed at around ten o’clock, but whenever Owen rose in the night to use the privy he would invariably see light seeping in a soft yellow band from beneath Morton’s door. The old man must suffer from insomnia, no doubt exacerbated by the pain of his arthritis.

  Owen wondered how the old man got through these lonely night hours, whether he liked to read or simply sat in his armchair and stared out of the window. The streets of Southwark fell strangely silent after the pubs closed. Owen had never been afraid of the dark but he found the hours between one and four curiously unsettling. Time seemed to pass more slowly then, bent out of shape and beyond its natural limits, stretched to brittleness and
fatigue like a badly worked piece of silver. He sometimes had the sense that if he were to go downstairs and open the front door he would find himself stepping over the threshold into some other universe, a world that looked the same but wasn’t, a world in which you might look into the eyes of your brother and find a stranger staring back.

  He would lie awake in the slippery half-light of four o’clock, the silence so deep he could hear the milk carts beginning their rounds in Stepney and Whitechapel, and wonder if Morton was also lying awake in the room below. He wondered if Morton was afraid of death or simply resigned to it. Owen could not imagine how anyone might think of death – how they might fully open their mind to its hideous possibilities – and still face it with equanimity.

  Often in these grey hours he would take solace in thoughts of Dora, tormenting himself with her image until the darkness receded and urgency overtook him. The relief was a double blessing, a rejoining of himself with the world as well as a simple slaking of his lust. In spite of the inevitable guilt, he usually found he could sleep afterwards, right through until the morning and with no dreams.

  * * *

  Owen spent his first four months at Trinity Street working on the watches for the Gemini Twins, whose real name was Bentall. What the brothers wanted, Morton told him, was not so much novelty as elegance, pieces whose quality was obvious yet would still be unobtrusive when worn on stage. A gentleman’s dress watch, in other words, with few complications. For Owen the work was satisfying but straightforward, and he quickly realised that Morton had given him the commission mostly as an opportunity to observe how he worked.

  Morton’s sole contribution was to engrave his own name on the twin dials. He apologised to Owen for claiming the work as his own, explaining that it was easier that way, and less likely to upset the Bentall brothers.