The Silver Wind

by Nina Allan

  “It’s my name they’re expecting to see,” he said. “And they’re used to getting everything they expect.”

  Owen tried not to feel disheartened. He knew it was common practice for an apprentice to have his work signed by his master, that he owed the old man a great debt. He reminded himself that these might be among the last projects Morton would see to fruition. His own callousness surprised him, but he accepted it as part of his new self, his London self, as he had accepted the humiliation of having his first society commission effectively stolen from beneath his nose.

  He felt a thrill of righteous satisfaction when Morton informed the Gemini Twins that their watches had mostly been the work of his apprentice.

  “Owen Andrews is one of the most gifted horologists I have ever encountered,” he said. “You’ll be hearing his name again.”

  “Magnificent,” the twins said, simultaneously. The brothers were an unusual spectacle. Before meeting Arthur and Simeon Bentall, Owen had known only one set of identical twins, the Sisley brothers, who had gone to substantial lengths to assert their individuality by adopting different hairstyles, different professions and manners of dress. The Bentall brothers, by contrast, seemed not only content with their sameness but fixated upon it. They did not speak much, and when they did speak they held a kind of silent conference beforehand, with one brother delivering the verdict at a nod from the other. They were scrupulously polite, but restrained in their manner to an almost unnatural degree, refraining from any overt displays of emotion as if they believed that to expose themselves in such a way would be as unseemly as removing their clothes.

  They gazed at the watches on their velvet cushions, tipping their heads from side to side, exchanging nods and smiles and covert glances, their pale eyes shielded by their long eyelashes. When they expressed themselves satisfied, Morton served China tea, which they appeared to relish. At the end of exactly half an hour they rose to leave. As they headed for the door, one of the brothers reached into his jacket pocket and produced a cardboard wallet.

  “For you,” said the other. He nodded then offered the wallet to Owen. “We trust that you and your young lady will enjoy the show.”

  The wallet contained two tickets to the Gemini Twins’ stage show at the London Palladium. Owen bowed his head, stammered his thanks. He glanced briefly at Morton, wanting to gauge his reaction, but the old man was shaking hands with the other twin and refused to meet his eye. It was only once the brothers had departed that Morton congratulated him on his decorum.

  “They’re not the easiest of clients,” he said. “But you did well, they liked you.”

  He said nothing about the tickets. Nor did he express any curiosity about the ‘young lady’. Morton cleared away the tea things and then they returned to work.

  Once the Bentall commission was complete, Morton put Owen on repairs, routine work that nonetheless required a high degree of accuracy and offered Owen the opportunity to familiarise himself with the work of some of the greatest watchmakers in the world. Morton’s regular client list included two headmasters, half a dozen consultants from Guy’s, a number of prominent local businessmen, a high court judge and several members of parliament, each of them owning at least one timepiece of above average quality. Owen’s workload soon encompassed watches he had thus far only seen in periodicals or museums.

  Christmas came and went. Owen had planned on returning to Devon for the holiday, but the weather had turned suddenly colder and on December 18th a prolonged and heavy snowfall closed the railway line west of Reading. By Christmas Eve, workmen had succeeded in making one of the tracks passable but there were few trains and major delays to those that did run. Owen worried about further snowfalls, his return to London postponed by days or even weeks. In the end, he decided it would be better to remain in town. He telegraphed his father, promising to come at New Year if the weather improved. He spent Christmas with Morton, the two of them enjoying a turkey dinner at The Almoners. The dark-haired girl who served behind the bar had just become engaged to the pub’s chef and many toasts were drunk. Owen enjoyed himself more than at any Christmas he could remember since his mother died. He barely thought of Dora Newland, and felt pleased with the way things had turned out.

  On December 27th the thaw set in. He travelled down to Exeter on the 29th. Anthony collected him from the station in Eric Butts’s motor car. On the drive back to the village, his brother regaled him with news and items of gossip from the past six months. Benny Dixon had been brought before the magistrate, charged with affray, Old Dan Blakeley had died of a heart attack during harvest festival, Julie Wetherall who ran the post office was married again, to a sailor she met on the dockside in Plymouth.

  “Dora Newland got engaged,” he added, seemingly as an afterthought.

  Owen, who had just seconds before been laughing merrily over the widow Wetherall’s apparently inexhaustible appetite for men in uniform, felt his heart skip a beat, the tips of his fingers suddenly stiff with cold.

  “Who to?” he said. He tried to make the question seem casual, as offhand as Anthony’s original remark. He had no idea whether he succeeded, what, if anything, Anthony might notice about the change in his demeanour. Owen doubted his brother even remembered Dora was special to him – he could not recall Anthony ever having taken even the most cursory interest in a woman, and when Charles and Stephen fell into boasting about their conquests he usually made a point of leaving the room.

  He prefers his machines, and chess games, Owen thought. And maybe Billy Deuce, who had been at school with Anthony until he won a paid scholarship to the Cathedral School, in Exeter. Yes, it was obvious, though were it not for his Soho nights, the revelation would probably not have come upon him.

  Should he speak to his brother, try and reassure him, or no? His musing upon the subject almost cut through the pain of what he was hearing. Almost but not quite.

  “Tommy Stowells, of course. The big hero.”

  Tommy Stowells was the son of a stonemason, a skilled bricklayer who had been one of his father’s regular crew until he went and joined the army. The whole village had cheered him off, him and the others who went, and now as Anthony said, Stowells was a hero; Victoria Cross, Veterans’ Pension and not a mark on his handsome face to show he’d ever left the county.

  The lads who had joined up with him had not been so lucky.

  It all made sense. Owen sighed. At least it was over. He kept his eyes on the road. As they turned off the main thoroughfare and on to the narrow, winding lane that led to the village, Anthony pointed out their father’s latest construction site, where work had just begun on a house for a retired opera singer.

  “He’s from Milan,” Anthony said, excitedly. The subject of Tommy Stowells seemed to be closed.

  * * *

  Owen spent a week in Devon altogether, mainly working on the site with his father and brothers. His father was short-handed because of the holiday, and Owen found himself mixing mortar and cutting bricks, relishing the cleansing sting of the December air. He found himself enjoying the work, as familiar to him as an old suit of clothes and a welcome distraction from thoughts of Dora, though he dreaded to think what Morton would say if he knew how his gifted apprentice was risking his hands.

  He caught sight of Dora Newland only once, at a distance, riding out across the frosted fields on her father’s hunter Brewster. She was wearing trews, a luxurious ermine-trimmed cloak about her shoulders, and the combination of the plain workingmen’s garment with the almost fantastical elegance of the cloak stabbed Owen to the heart with rapture and hopeless longing. The look, the daring, unconventional beauty of it, was so very Dora. At least she was alone, and not with Tommy Stowells. Owen didn’t think he could bear the sight of Tommy right now, although Tommy had always been kind to him when he was a boy, never mocking his crippled leg the way many of the men on the sites had done, at least when Owen’s father was nowhere near.

  Yes, it was over. For a long time afterwards, Owen would look ba
ck at that moment – that gorgeous image of Dora on horseback, her face turned away, one elbow jutting as she adjusted her hood – as the final severance from his old life, the true beginning of the new.

  On January 4th, Owen went back to London.

  * * *

  The snows returned at the end of January. With much of the transport network suspended or only partially operational, the city seemed static, eerily gridlocked. Certain foods were in short supply, and there were whispers of a serious outbreak of influenza in the slums of Canning Town. Then as suddenly as it had descended, the freeze lifted. Crocuses bloomed in the squares, the street markets reopened, burgeoning with newly imported goods. Spring arrived early. They received the commission from Lionel Norman in the last week of March.

  Owen came down to breakfast to find Morton reading a letter, hand-written in blue ink, a tightly elongated script that sprawled haphazardly across the page. The sender, who Morton insisted was not a regular client, described himself as a businessman who collected watches as a pastime. He wanted Morton to create a timepiece for him, specifying that it should incorporate a tourbillon regulator. He invited Morton to lunch at his home in Worthing, West Sussex.

  “Do you fancy a trip to the coast, then?” Morton said. There was a mischievous light in his eyes. He had not looked so lively since Christmas.

  * * *

  They travelled from London Bridge to East Croydon, where they changed on to the Littlehampton train, which ran down to Worthing via Haywards Heath and Portslade. The war zone, some people still called it. Owen had been nine years old when the war broke out. He remembered vividly Tommy Stowells coming home on his first leave, resplendent in uniform. He remembered the foreign coin Tommy had given him – he thought he might still have it somewhere – Tommy claiming he had taken it from the body of a German soldier. Owen had cherished the coin for years as a lucky charm, even when he found out it was a Belgian franc and not a German coin at all.

  He would never forget the day the telegram came, announcing that Tommy’s comrade Warren Baxter was missing in action. Becky Baxter running down the High Street still in her dressing gown, clutching the piece of paper and screaming no, not her son, it couldn’t be true, falling to her knees outside the Fox and Hounds, Martha Wellesley opening the doors and taking her inside. Owen’s mother Evelyn, scrubbing away her tears with the edge of a tea towel before sitting down at her desk in the corner of the living room and dashing off another letter of protest to The Times.

  “What a ridiculous waste of life,” she had stormed, when she saw the newspaper photographs of the ruins of the armaments research station at Herstmonceux. More than two hundred civilians had been killed in the bombing, and worse was to come. Evelyn Andrews had not lived to see the long, drawn-out, deadly endgame that laid waste to the Romney Marshes and the ports of Dover and Newhaven. Owen had never been in Sussex. He had no clue what he might see, how widespread the destruction. He had an idea the bombing had not extended as far west as Worthing and Angmering but wasn’t sure. He did not want to ask Morton, for fear of seeming ignorant.

  There had been talk at the time that the terms of the Armistice had been too harsh, that there was a danger of revolution in Germany, possibly a new war. So far it hadn’t happened, and Owen had not paid the talk much heed. The whole idea of war sickened him, and he had other things to think about, now more than ever.

  The land immediately to the south of London formed a series of waste lots, a mixture of scrub and cleared underbrush, scrapyards and gravel pits and closed-down factories, the ordinary detritus of urban expansion. South of Horley seemed somewhat less squalid, and by the time they reached Haywards Heath they were passing through large tracts of open countryside, less extreme in terms of colour and contour than the county of Devonshire but with a delicacy and subtlety of ambience that lent it a beauty of its own. From time to time, Owen noticed odd sections of railway track branching off from the main line but clearly going nowhere, the rails and sleepers sunk in thickets of nettle and brambles.

  “What are they?” Owen asked Morton, unable to help himself.

  “The lines that used to serve the garrisons,” Morton replied. “There’s no use for them now.”

  The journey took almost two hours. They alighted at West Worthing. Lionel Norman was there to meet them at the station, his car, a gleaming green Austin, parked outside. Norman shook first Morton and then Owen jovially by the hand.

  “So glad you could make it,” he said. “It’s quite a hike from London.”

  A stoop-shouldered, sinewy man, he was not in the least as Owen had expected. His face, with its high cheekbones and clear grey eyes, was good-looking but in a tired, dissolute sort of way. With his thinning hair and gold tiepin he reminded Owen of the upper-class drug dealers that congregated around certain pubs in Soho. As he opened the back door of the car for him to get in, Owen noticed he was wearing a Rihm, a watch of almost grotesque ostentation, the horological equivalent of one of the more outlandish castles of mad King Ludwig of Bavaria. Personally, Owen found Rihm watches to be ridiculous, yet one could not doubt their pedigree, equal to Breitling and Lange in terms of quality and rarer than the both of them put together.

  None of Morton’s clients owned a Rihm, so far as he knew, and Owen had never seen one outside of the magazines. If Norman had dressed to impress, he had surely succeeded.

  Norman’s house, on the western outskirts of the town and close to the sea, was a detached modern villa with a glazed veranda running along the front and a gated service entrance to the side. A nice-looking house, built from flint and brick and to a pleasingly simple design. Owen was surprised. He had been expecting something grandiose and elaborate, like Norman’s wristwatch. The interior was similarly understated, almost modest – mellow pine, with just a scattering of more valuable-looking antique pieces – and Owen found it difficult to believe that Norman had chosen the furnishings himself. Norman’s wife, Owen supposed, although the house bore no immediately discernible signs of a spouse or children.

  Lionel Norman showed them where to put their coats and then offered them drinks. Owen asked for a Scotch. He had developed a taste for malt whisky since coming to London. Morton opted for the Amontillado he always preferred. With a drink in his hand, Morton immediately became more animated, almost garrulous. Owen had seen him like this before, and it saddened him a little. Morton claimed to enjoy alcohol for its blood-thinning qualities, though Owen suspected he drank mostly in order to gain a respite from his arthritis.

  “You should be talking to my apprentice, not to me,” Morton said, once all the necessary pleasantries had been exchanged. “When it comes to the tourbillon regulator, Owen is something of an expert.”

  Lionel Norman turned to look at him. His eyes had a peculiar cold radiance, like chips of mica in granite. When Morton mentioned the tourbillon they had seemed to flare with a sudden light, like flames doused with paraffin.

  “You seem very young,” Norman said, disdainfully. “Have you actually constructed a tourbillon before?”

  Owen flushed. “I’ve been conducting experiments,” he said. “I have been reading about a new kind of tourbillon, a mechanism that will change the way we think about time. It is complicated work, very intense. Mr Morton has been generous enough to act as my sponsor.”

  Owen was amazed by his own capacity for invention. He stole a glance at Morton, but the old man seemed entirely unperturbed, and Owen realised the truth of the matter: that Morton had planned it this way, that from the moment he received Norman’s commission he had always intended that it would be Owen who would complete it. Another test, like the one he had pulled with the Bentall brothers, only infinitely greater. Owen felt excitement, gratitude and terror in equal parts. For the moment at least it did not matter that the closest he had come to making a tourbillon was a series of tentative drawings at the back of his work log. He had read everything about the apparatus he could lay his hands on. In a discussion with a layman like Norman he had the advant
age.

  “I’m lucky to have him,” Morton added. “It’s like being given a new pair of hands.” He seemed about to say something else, then found himself interrupted by the sound of a door slamming.

  “At last,” Norman said. “Her Highness returns. I thought we were going to have to start our lunch without her.”

  He ducked out into the hall and began talking to someone, a woman. Owen wondered if this was Norman’s wife at last. He felt excited suddenly, as if something important was about to happen. He heard footsteps going upstairs, then Lionel Norman came back into the room.

  “My daughter,” he said. “She’ll be down in a minute. She’s been up in the woods all morning.” He went over to the sideboard and refreshed his drink from the decanter. Like Owen, he was drinking whisky. The tumblers were exquisite, a greenish crystal, the bases embedded with tiny metallic spheres. “You know what it’s like with children,” he said. “You don’t always see eye to eye, but then I have to make allowances with Angela. It hasn’t been easy for her, losing her mother.” He told them his daughter had just been awarded a place at Cambridge University, to read mathematics, and was due to take up her scholarship in the autumn of the following year. Once again Owen found himself swept with a peculiar sense of anticipation. This girl – Angela – had lost her mother, just as he had. She enjoyed exploring the outdoors. She was a gifted mathematician.

  Might it be possible that they would become friends, he and this Angela? Even on such short acquaintance, Owen was beginning to realise he disliked Lionel Norman intensely, even as he relished the idea of Norman’s commission, Norman’s approval, Norman’s money. The thought of having an ally against him – a spy in the midst – was disconcertingly attractive.

  “Shall we take our drinks through?” Norman said. “Angela won’t be long.”