The Silver Wind

by Nina Allan

  “You’re telling me someone sent these photographs to your father from the future?” A burst of laughter escaped him, finally, and for a split second he felt furious with her at the preposterousness of it all. Why was he wasting time here when he could be working? Only children believed in time travel, as only children believed in ghosts and goblins, and however brilliant she might be, Angela Norman was still a child, barely eighteen years old. He should never have let himself become seduced by her.

  “Not just someone,” Angela said. “You sent them, Owen. The writing on the envelope was yours. I recognised it the instant I saw it.”

  Her face was flushed, and there were tears in her eyes. “I thought we trusted each other,” she added. Her hands were curled tightly into fists, and Owen saw she was not so much upset as angry. He had failed her, he realised. Their first serious test of courage, and he had not been equal to it. He grabbed both her hands, tried to uncurl her fingers.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m trying to understand, that’s all.” He touched her hair, which was softer than he had imagined, with the grainy, rippling texture of raw silk.

  “I’ve been trying to understand for days,” she said, relenting. “I haven’t worked it out – yet. All I have is the envelope. And you are working on the tourbillon, aren’t you? You are using Breguet’s calculations?”

  “Yes – but that still doesn’t mean I can build a time machine. You might call the tourbillon a miraculous device, a miraculous invention, but it cannot perform miracles. What Breguet believed at the end – it was just a theory, a flight of fancy, the same as anyone might have, watching a skein of geese crossing the sky and imagining what it might be like to be flying with them. I don’t believe Breguet was senile but I do think he let his imagination run away with him.”

  “In order for a thing to be invented, it must first be imagined,” Angela said. “Breguet imagined it, but he was already old, he died. You may not believe in the Time Stasis, but you have imagined it, you imagine it constantly. You are already further along the pathway than you know.”

  “I’m an apprentice still – I couldn’t possibly achieve the things you say I can.”

  “Not now, maybe, but soon. And my father is waiting. He knows all this already, don’t you see?”

  “Are you telling me – I don’t know, that I should refuse his commission?”

  The idea that he should stop, that he should abandon work on the watch, slammed against his insides like a death knell. He wouldn’t do it – whatever he promised Angela, he felt bound to press onwards. That’s what he’s depending on, Owen thought. Lionel Norman – that’s why he hired you. Because really you are brothers under the skin. Because he knew you would sacrifice anything rather than fail. The dismay must have shown in his face because Angela grabbed his hands and shook her head.

  “That’s not what I mean at all. You have to keep going. I thought at first I would have to beg you to stop, but now I understand that this work is your destiny. It’s what you were born for. I can see you’re laughing at me again, but you know it’s true. We have to keep my father from getting his hands on it, that’s all. At least we know what he’s up to. Some of it, anyway. That should make things easier.”

  We know nothing, Owen thought, but did not say. He imagined a world in which the things Angela said were possible and might really happen – a world in which the motherless son of a builder grew up to become a genius, a genius who made watches that could alter time. A marvellous world, in which diseases were cured, the hungry fed, the impassable gulf between the past and the future reduced to the status of an ancient legend. Or would it be a world of horrors, in which those men who least deserved power seized it for themselves, laying waste to their enemies with terrible weapons, with those who dared resist them expunged from history?

  A flight of fancy, Owen thought. I’m getting as bad as Anthony, with his Martian war machines. He nodded slowly. “All right,” he said, and he found that it was. What he wanted was to carry on working on the tourbillon and writing to Angela. The rest he could simply ignore, at least for now. The idea that he might somehow cheat Lionel Norman of what he desired was also appealing, a way of showing the man that money could not buy everything, whatever he thought.

  He drew Angela closer, kissed her forehead. The gesture felt natural, as if he had done it a hundred times before. And what if you have, or will do? How would you know?

  He felt like laughing again. The sun emerged from behind a cloud, spilled dazzling light across his face and into his eyes. He put up a hand to shade them. “Will you come back with me, to the house?” he asked her. “Morton would love to see you again. I could show you the workshop, you could stay for supper.”

  She shook her head. “That would be wonderful, but I can’t. My father will telephone later – he always does when he’s away. If I’m not there when he calls he’ll want to know why. I’ll never hear the end of it. The last thing we want to do now is to make him suspicious.”

  They walked back to London Bridge Station. The rush hour was just beginning, the streets filling up with commuters hurrying to catch the trains that would take them out of the city, returning them to their homes in the dormitory towns of Surrey and Sussex and Kent.

  “When will I see you again?” Owen said, as Angela’s train was announced. Until they were actually on the platform, the idea that he would soon be parting from her had seemed distant and unreal.

  “I don’t know. I’ll come up again at half-term if I can but that depends on where my father is. It’s not safe for you to be in Sussex.”

  The idea of having to sneak around like a naughty schoolboy riled him, but he supposed Angela was right, it was better that they kept their relationship secret, at least for now. Owen imagined that even under normal circumstances, Lionel Norman would be the type to oppose any friendship of his daughter’s that he had not personally sanctioned. Confronting Norman directly would only make things worse for Angela. Everything would be different once she was at Cambridge.

  They embraced briefly, and then Angela got onto the train. Owen stood on the platform, gazing through the window into the compartment: the brass trim, the blue seat covers, the red flash of Angela’s dress as she sat down. There were others in the compartment with her, an elderly vicar reading a newspaper and a young black woman with a baby in her arms. Angela pressed her fingers to the glass. Her lips were moving but Owen could not make out what she was trying to say. He found he had to resist the urge to leap aboard, to hold her hands one more time before they parted. When the train pulled out of the station he was almost glad.

  Owen crossed the taxi rank, dodging between the bus lanes and emerging on to Borough High Street. Cars and lorries thundered past him over London Bridge. At the junction of Long Lane and Great Dover Street he crossed over on to Marshalsea Road, losing himself in the tangle of side streets and alleyways tucked into the right angle between Bridge Road and Great Suffolk Street. He had no reason to be there but it was a part of town he liked, crammed with corner newsagents and Turkish restaurants, dingy junk shops stuffed with pre-war bric-a-brac and mildewed books.

  Most of these shops had already closed for the day. Their dusty window displays glowed blue or rose under neon lighting. Owen paused in front of one of them, a nameless, peeling premises that advertised itself as a specialist in modern electrical goods, though many of the objects on show in the window looked as if they would have been out of date even before the war.

  Most of the window space was taken up by a large aquarium in which silvery, triangular fish glided up and down as if suspended on invisible strings. Owen gazed at them, momentarily mesmerised, wondering if they were for sale or just for show. He remembered his old Latin teacher, Stanley Simpson, who had kept tropical fish as a hobby. Mr Simpson had insisted his fish were not insentient as most people imagined them to be, but could recognise the person who fed them and could even be trained to rise to the surface of the water and take food from your hand.


  As a boy, Owen had been spooked by the idea. He wondered if it was true. It was beginning to grow dusk he realised; time for him to return to Trinity Street. Shadows massed in the alleys and doorways, seeming to block his path. Owen felt confused, realising he could not remember the exact direction he had approached from, or how he should find his way back to the main road. He walked to the end of the street, casting about in both directions for a familiar landmark, but the lanes that led off into the shadows seemed completely alien. He doubled back, passing the shop again and then emerging into a narrow courtyard he thought he recognised. There was a burst of coarse laughter, the sound of running feet, and then suddenly he was in Marshalsea Road again, with the brighter lights of Borough High Street clearly before him.

  He made for home as quickly as he could, cutting across the High Street then into Great Dover and Trinity. A figure loomed up at him out of the twilight, a middle-aged man carrying a briefcase. Owen’s heart began to race, convinced for a second that this was Lionel Norman, though when he looked again he saw he was nothing like him.

  The basement of Trinity Street was dark, the windows shuttered. Owen stood on the pavement outside, wondering where the time had gone. In some small yet infinitely distressing way, the house seemed different, and Owen realised he was afraid to enter. He thought about calling out, just to see if Morton would come to the window, inwardly chastising himself for his own foolishness.

  You’d scare him half out of his wits. You’re as mad as Louis Breguet, after all.

  He thought of retracing his steps to the station, taking a room at the Tooley Hotel, but it had grown so late he doubted they would let him in. Aside from that, his foot was aching badly. He would not be able to walk much further, even if he wanted to.

  Finally he was left no choice but to go inside.

  The hallway was dark as he expected it to be, but faint traces of light were visible on the upper landing, a sure sign that Morton was still awake, reading in his armchair or listening to the radio. Owen hurried upstairs, eager to reach the safety of his attic. He fumbled his way into the room then lit the lamp, turning everything a grainy yellow. The bed was neatly made, the books and papers on his desk untouched. All at once, his fears seemed groundless, the kind of half-awake, nameless anxieties experienced in the small hours, in the wake of a nightmare. As he crossed to the window to draw the curtains, he noticed something lying on the bed. When he stooped to pick it up, he saw it was the photograph of the watch that Angela had given him.

  How it had arrived in the room before him he had no idea. Was it even the same photograph? He wondered if it might not be Morton’s – an image the old man had found, and wanted him to see. The question seemed suddenly wearying, less important than the watch itself, which was a gem. Owen gazed for a long time at the elegant lines of the hands, the silvered dial with its pattern of roses. As he slipped out of his clothes and into bed it occurred to him that he could indeed copy it, that he could make the design his own.

  He fell asleep quickly, and slept a full eight hours. He awoke thinking about Lionel Norman, about how satisfying it would feel to fool him into believing the watch he, Owen, had made him was the watch in the photograph.

  * * *

  He was now working twelve hours a day. Often he was so immersed in what he was doing that he was aware of Morton only as a hazy, beneficent figure on the periphery of his existence. Occasionally he would go to Morton with questions – minor technical problems that needed solving, queries regarding the melting points of various alloys. Morton seemed happy to share his experience, and never offered advice unless Owen specifically asked for it.

  His inattention to Morton sometimes made Owen feel guilty, though never guilty enough for him to change his behaviour. He felt the old man’s presence as a steadying influence. There were times, late at night, when Owen felt tempted to go to Morton and tell him about Angela, just for the relief of finally having a reason to speak her name aloud. He wondered what the old man would say if he were to tell him what Angela had said about her father, if he were to ask him if he could identify the maker of the watch in the photograph Angela had stolen from Norman’s desk. He burned to confide in his master, yet something held him back. He told himself it was because he didn’t want to worry the old man, though he knew there was more to it, that his hesitation had more to do with his own anxiety over what might happen than concern for Morton.

  He was worried that Morton might tell him to stop, that he might forbid him from entering the workshop until they were able to establish for certain what was going on. The prospect of that was unbearable, and so he said nothing.

  He asked him about Breguet instead.

  “Was he mad at the end, do you think?”

  “The man was a genius,” Morton said. “There’s a fine line between the two.”

  One morning Morton came down to breakfast holding a tattered copy of Georges-Louis’s edition of Breguet’s diaries.

  “Keep it,” he said to Owen. “I think my days of fretting over insoluble puzzles are almost done.”

  Owen had laid eyes on Breguet’s diaries only once before, in a heavily abridged edition he had managed to obtain via the inter-library loan scheme in Exeter. He had made little sense of them at the time, though then as now he had been enthralled by Breguet’s drawings. Owen himself had never been a good draughtsman. Even his most careful efforts showed little discernible improvement from the lopsided, inarticulate doodles that had once littered the pages of his school exercise books. Breguet drew with the accuracy of an architect, the impassioned fluency of the fine artist. The drawings he made detailing the design and mechanism of his watches had a finesse and a flair, above all an energy that reminded Owen of the sketchbooks of Leonardo da Vinci.

  Breguet’s earlier diaries consisted mainly of such drawings, accompanied by sparse notes about materials he needed to buy, clients he was appointed to see, monies he had received from commissions fulfilled. Latterly they became more confusing, a disorderly hotchpotch of horological history, scientific methodology and what appeared to be some sort of fictitious narrative, complete with named characters and snatches of fully articulated dialogue.

  In the midst of all this there were conventional diary entries: sarcastic comments about the weather or diatribes on contemporary politics.

  Owen hardly knew what to make of it. He purchased a stack of sketching paper from a stationer’s on Borough High Street and spent a part of each day attempting to make copies of Breguet’s more elaborate drawings, striving for accuracy insofar as his limited ability would allow him. When enlarged in scale, the components of Breguet’s watches appeared to take on a life of their own, an individualistic, almost organic quality, like some of the nameless objects he had observed in Cubist paintings by Miró and Gris.

  He sent some of his drawings to Angela, who pronounced them beautiful. Their letters continued as before, and as before he would spend the final hour before sleep in recounting anecdotes from The Almoners, or other incidents from his day he thought would interest or amuse her. The weeks passed, and then the months, and as his second Christmas in London approached, Owen found himself wondering if this would be his life from now on, a never-ending pursuit of the impossible, indifferent to the weather, undifferentiated by high days or holidays. He thought of his New Year’s sojourn in Devon with detached nostalgia, his pain over Dora Newland a dusty jewel in a hoard of useless mementoes he had forgotten existed. The snows came again, and Owen thought about how the past itself seemed to have become smaller, a self-contained and isolated region that had no bearing on the present. He could visit it through memories and photographs if he really wanted to, but what would be the point?

  He remembered a snow dome that used to stand on his mother’s dressing table, a miniature city behind curved glass that had entranced him so much he had begged and pleaded to be allowed to keep it in his room.

  “You’ll only break it,” his mother said. “Then there’ll be tears.”

  A
fter she died it disappeared. Owen had no idea where it went.

  As work on the watch gathered pace, Owen began a series of new experiments, making enlarged templates of the mechanism’s most complicated components from the same steel and brass alloy Breguet would have used before finally recreating them in Invar, a newly invented alloy of iron and nickel. Less susceptible to corrosion or heat expansion, although it was more expensive than brass and steel, most of the top horologists considered Invar to be superior in every way.

  Owen planned to construct the tourbillon cage itself from Nivarox, an alloy containing beryllium that was more durable even than Invar. The plates and case of the final article would be constructed from gold. For the prototype he contented himself with silver and stainless steel. He assembled the enlarged components into a travelling clock, with a glass panel inserted into the back plate, making it possible to view the mechanism in action. He engraved the dial with roses, copying the pattern in the photograph Angela had stolen from her father’s desk. Seeing the design brought fully to life gave him a strange sensation of déjà vu, a feeling he brushed aside as predictable and irrelevant. Of course the pattern seemed familiar, because it was – if he had examined the photograph once, he had examined it a hundred times. There was nothing uncanny in this. He had seen the pattern and liked it. That was all.

  When Owen showed the clock to Morton, he immediately removed the back plate and began examining the mechanism through his loupe.