by Nina Allan
It was like the London I remembered from when I was a boy.
I watched TV for about an hour then went down to the curry house opposite and ordered a meal. I ate it quickly, still feeling conspicuous, though none of the other diners paid me the slightest attention. Once I had finished eating I returned to the hotel. There was a pay telephone in the hallway. I inserted my card and dialled Dora’s number. The phone rang and rang, and was eventually answered by a woman with an Eastern European accent so strong I could barely understand what she was saying. Silently I replaced the receiver.
After a moment’s hesitation I lifted it again, this time dialling Owen Andrews’s number, reading it off the slip of paper in my wallet. The phone clicked twice and then went dead. I climbed the stairs to my room and watched television into the small hours, trying to gather as many facts as I could about my new world. Eventually I turned out the light and went to sleep.
* * *
I had to keep reminding myself that this was not the future. I had jumped forward three months at some point but that was all. The year was the same. The TV channels were more or less the same. Shooter’s Hill Road was still rife with carjackings, only now there was no talk of reinstating the death penalty. The increase in my finances I put down to some lucky quirk, an error in accounting between one version of reality and another.
Once my initial nervousness began to wear off my biggest fear was meeting myself, the kind of nightmare you read about in H. G. Wells. I reminded myself that Owen Andrews had not mentioned it as a possibility and as things turned out it did not happen. I began to wonder if each reality was like Schrödinger’s theoretical box, its contents uncertain until it was actually opened. I thought that perhaps the very act of me entering this world somehow negated any previous existence I had had within it.
Such thoughts were unnerving yet fascinating, the kind of ideas I would have liked to discuss with Owen Andrews. But so far as I could determine, Owen Andrews did not exist here either.
I returned to what I was good at, which was buying and selling. I was still cautious in those early days, afraid I might reveal myself through some stupid mistake, and so instead of applying for a job with an estate agent I decided to set up by myself selling watches and clocks. I enjoyed reading up on the subject and it wasn’t long before I had a lucrative little business. I had learned in my old life that even during the worst times the rich are always with us, all of them eager to spend their money on expensive luxuries. I had never lost sleep over this, preferring to turn the situation to my advantage. I was amused to find that some of my clients were people I knew from my old life, men and women whose houses I had sold for them, or their sons or daughters. None of them recognised me.
The only possession I carried over from before was the photograph of Miranda that I always kept in my wallet, a snapshot of her on Brighton beach soon after we married. Her topaz eyes were lifted towards the camera, her heart-shaped face partially obscured by silvery corkscrewed wisps of her windblown hair. It was like an answered prayer, to have her with me. There were no traces of her death now, no evidence of what had happened. All that remained was my knowledge of my love for her and this final precious image of her face.
* * *
One evening in September I left a probate sale I had been attending in Camden and walked towards the tube station at St John’s Wood. It was growing dusk, and I stopped for a moment to enjoy the view from the top of Primrose Hill. The sky in the west was a fierce red, what I took to be the afterglow of sunset, but later, at home, when I put on the radio I discovered there had been a fire. The report said that underground fuel stores at the old army hospital at Shooter’s Hill had mysteriously ignited, causing them to explode. The resulting conflagration was visible for twenty miles.
The Royal Herbert was a listed building, said the newscaster. It was originally built for the Woolwich Garrison at the end of the eighteen eighties and was most recently in use as a long-stay care facility for victims of war trauma.
The police suspected arson, and a forensics team had already been sent in to investigate. I supposed they would find something eventually, a piece of loose circuitry or faulty shielding, but felt certain that unless they were experienced in tracking a crime from one universe to another they would never discover the truth of what had happened.
What I believed was that the resistance fighters Owen Andrews told me about had finally found a way to destroy the hospital and seal the breach. The blast had been so strong it had ripped through the Time Stasis, wiping the building off the map in all versions of reality simultaneously. I had a vision of the great hotel lobby of time Owen Andrews had spoken of, alarm bells clamouring as a line of porters shepherded the guests out of the building and a fire crew worked to extinguish a minor blaze in one of the bedrooms. The fire was soon put out, the loss adjusters called in to assess the damage. By the end of the evening the guests were back in the bar and it was business as usual.
Some old biddy’s cigarette, apparently, said one as he sipped at his Scotch.
We’re lucky she didn’t roast us in our beds, his companion jabbered excitedly. D’you fancy some peanuts?
I supposed that my old life was now lost to me for good. Perhaps this should have bothered me but it didn’t. The more time passed, the more it was that past life that seemed unreal, a kind of nightmare aberration, a bad photocopy of reality rather than the master version. The world I now inhabited, for all its rough edges, felt more substantial.
I uncorked a bottle of wine – the dreadful Blue Nun that was all you could find in the shops at the time because of the customs embargo – and drank a silent toast to the unknown bombers. I thought of the soldiers in their rec room, their harmless card games and noisy camaraderie, and hoped they had been able to escape before the place went up.
* * *
It was not until some years later that I stumbled upon the photograph of Owen Andrews. It was in a book someone had given me about the London watch trade in the nineteenth century. Andrews stood at his work bench. He was wearing a baggy white workman’s blouse and had his loupe on a leather cord around his neck.
The caption named him as ‘the marvellous Mr Andrews’, the ‘miracle dwarf ’ who had successfully perfected a number of new advancements in the science of mechanics. I studied the picture for a long time, wondering what Andrews would make of being called a miracle dwarf. I supposed he would have a good laugh.
The text that went with the picture said that Andrews had held a position in the Physical Sciences Department of Oxford University but had resigned the post as the result of a disagreement with his superiors. He had come to London soon afterwards, setting up his workshop in Southwark.
Sometimes, on those light summer evenings when I had finished all my appointments and had nothing better to do, I made my way to Paddington and ate a leisurely supper in one of the bars or cafes on the station concourse. I watched the great steam locomotives as they came and went from the platforms, arriving and departing for towns in the north and west. A train came in from Oxford every half hour.
I knew it was futile to wait but I waited anyway. Andrews had said we would meet again and I somehow believed him. I sipped my drink and scanned the faces in the crowd, hoping that one of them one day would be the face of my friend.
REWIND
“Tourbillon is French for whirlwind,” said Juliet Caseby. “It is also the name of a mechanical invention, something watchmakers refer to as a complication. Owen Andrews told my grandmother Angela that the tourbillon was the most exacting horological complication ever.”
“Was he right, do you think?” Miranda asked.
“I’m sure he was. Even today, with microelectronics and computer circuitry and so on, the basic principles of the tourbillon are still in use. The man who invented it was a genius. His name was Louis Breguet, and he learned and honed his craft at the court of Versailles. Marie Antoinette was one of his clients, and it was partly because of her that he ended up having to flee
Paris. It was only with the help of Marat that he escaped the guillotine. Owen Andrews used to say that Breguet was the first human being to defy the laws of gravity.”
Marat, Miranda thought. Wasn’t he the one who was murdered in his bath? She remembered seeing an article about the tourbillon in the Greenwich Gazette. The whole of Greenwich seemed obsessed with time. As the home of the Greenwich Meridian it went with the territory. Miranda had read the article because it included a photograph of a pocket watch with an image of a fox enamelled on the inside of the case and she had always had a fondness for urban foxes. The article described the tourbillon as a time-cage, and encouraged its readers to think of it as a tornado in miniature.
Wind itself has no physical substance, the article read. But it generates enormous power. The tourbillon spins the watch mechanism about its own axis like storm debris caught in a hurricane. Like flicking a switch on gravity and turning it off.
Miranda thought about the recent television footage of the damage caused by a tornado in the Midwestern United States, the vistas of flattened houses, the cars and lorries and beef cattle flung hundreds of feet into the air then released to smash on the ground like plastic toys.
Later in their hotel room she went online and searched for images of the tourbillon. There were diagrams with pointers and arrows showing how the watch mechanism could be made to fit inside a metal cage that would then spin it around itself, like a sidecar on a fairground ride.
The cage itself reminded her of the gyroscope she had owned as a child, a beautiful and shining thing that her brother Stephen referred to as one of the minor miracles of engineering. He had taught her how to tightrope-walk it across a piece of string stretched between her bedroom windowsill and the door handle. Stephen had a genius for tricks like that.
“But what was it actually used for?” Miranda said. “I can see how it made a watch more complex, but what was the point of it?”
“It helped a watch keep accurate time,” said Juliet. “The trouble with the old pocket watches was that they couldn’t stand being bumped about. A pocket watch stayed in your pocket and liked it there. Taking it out to look at the time played havoc with the mechanism and even the finest watches in the world could lose as much as twenty minutes in as many hours. A tourbillon freed the mechanism from the pull of external gravity. Breguet’s watches were accurate to an eighth of a second.”
“Are tourbillon watches expensive?”
Juliet smiled. “You could say that. They take hundreds of hours to make, and cost many thousands of pounds to buy.”
Miranda thought of a fairground at night, the big wheel turning majestically against a backcloth of stars. She had once accompanied her mother to a pre-auction viewing at Christie’s for a sale of timepieces. The others who had attended were mostly men, though she did see two women, both wearing designer business suits and an air of confidence that made it clear they were used to being looked at. Self-assurance wafted from them like the cool green ground-notes of the expensive scents they wore. Women of this kind used to intimidate Miranda until she came to realise she was invisible to them. Her gaucherie scared them. They shied away from her as if she had a physical deformity.
The men were different. It was as if they saw in the gleaming watch glasses not just a reflection of their own status but the encapsulation of dreams they had once cherished but had since let die. In spite of the Italian shoes and the onyx signet rings she could see her father in each and every one of them.
There was a picture of her father, photographed on the veranda of his childhood home in Cape Town, the house Miranda had never seen but where Stephen now lived. Her father was twelve years old and surrounded by the glinting innards of a war-vintage Bakelite wireless set. There was a second photograph, taken later the same day, that showed the radio restored to working order.
Her father had mended the wireless all by himself.
“Your granddad was a coffee grower,” he told Miranda. “He could fix a pick-up truck no problem, but not a radio set.”
She could still hear the pride in his voice. Ronnie Coles was never a vain man but he had always experienced a profound joy in making things work.
Stephen was the same, of course. It was a pity he had been unable to mend their father.
* * *
Lewis Usher lived alone in one of the fine detached villas at the top end of Crooms Hill. He had let the place go a bit, Martin thought, but for the right price it would be snapped up in no time. Houses on the Hill always were.
Usher said he wanted a quick sale.
“It’s time to move on,” he said. “That’s a moment you only recognise when it comes.” Usher coughed and dabbed at his eyes and Martin found himself wondering if the house sale was being forced on him by interfering relatives. It had been the same for him when Dora died. His friend Ray Levin especially kept insisting he should make a fresh start. There were mouse droppings in Usher’s larder though, and the rooms on the second floor were festooned with cobwebs. All in all, Martin thought, Usher probably would be better off with something smaller.
He moved from room to room, taking measurements and making notes of the fixtures and fittings. It was work he enjoyed, especially when the house, like this one, was full of curious angles and surprises.
The picture of the two girls brought him up short. It stood on top of a chest of drawers on the upper landing, just one of a collection of objects gathering dust. The girls were both smiling broadly for the camera and standing either side of a dwarf in a panama hat.
The little man was smiling also. He held a dog on a leash, a white chihuahua. There was a seaside pier in the background, posters advertising pleasure boat rides.
The scene was so familiar it made Martin feel faint.
“That’s my wife, with her best friend Juliet,” Usher said. He touched the top edge of the photo frame and then quickly withdrew his hand. “This was taken long before I met her, of course. They were only sixteen.”
Usher’s wife had died of cancer at the age of sixty. Martin had the vague idea she had been an actress. Lewis Usher was clearly still in mourning for her.
“It’s a lovely picture,” he said. “Where was it taken?”
“Hastings, Folkestone, one of those places. That’s where she was from.”
“Your wife, you mean?”
“Zoë was born in Shoreditch. I’m talking about Juliet. She went to the same school as Zoë and Zoë often used to go down and stay with her during the holidays. I have her address somewhere. Zoë used to write to her every Christmas. I’ll go and have a look if you don’t mind waiting.”
He shuffled off into one of the bedrooms, panting a little with the exertion. He returned after a minute or so, clutching a small leather-bound address book. Its covers bulged with the many additional scraps of paper that had been stuffed between them.
“This was Zoë’s,” Usher said. “Zoë was the one with all the friends.” He leafed clumsily through the pages, grabbing at the loose sheets and markers that kept threatening to fall to the floor. “Here it is,” he said finally. He pointed to one of the entries, Juliet Caseby, with the surname in brackets, 24 Silcox Square, Hastings. The postcode began with TN, which Martin knew was for the main sorting office in Tonbridge.
The entry was scrawled in blue biro. Zoë’s large, flamboyant handwriting overflowed the lines on the page as if it resented being cooped up in such a confined space.
Most likely the photo was nothing, just a coincidence.
“Do you mind if I take a note of the address?” Martin said. “I’d like to make contact with this lady. My sister and I used to go for holidays in Hastings. I’d be interested in hearing what she remembers about the old days.”
“I don’t mind at all,” Usher said. “I’ll leave you to it. Just put the book back on the tallboy when you’ve finished.” For a moment he remained where he was, and Martin sensed he had more to say, but in the end he turned his back and retreated downstairs. After a minute or so Martin he
ard the radio come on in the kitchen. Martin copied Juliet Caseby’s address into the back of his diary and placed the address book carefully down on the chest of drawers.
When he tried to find Lewis Usher to tell him he was leaving, the old man was nowhere in sight.
Leave him be, Dora said to him inside his head. You must have noticed how upset he was. This house was his life.
Martin returned to the office, parking his car at the back and entering the building through the side door.
Miranda Coles was in her cubby hole, typing up a batch of new instructions.
“If I download the photos for Crooms Hill would you sort them out for me?” Martin said to her.
Miranda nodded and smiled then returned to her work. She seemed the same as always, calm and pragmatic, but for some reason the sight of her unsettled him.
Their trip to the cinema the week before had been a disaster.
Your fault, Dora said. You hardly spoke a word to the woman all evening.
Dora was right of course, but the truth was he had not known how. He had known Miranda for twelve years but had barely exchanged a word with her outside the office. That was something he wanted to change but as to how to go about it he was in the dark.
He put his briefcase down on his desk and switched on his computer. He wondered briefly about asking Miranda to go to lunch with him but decided he wasn’t feeling up to it.
He knew from her CV that she was now thirty-eight, though he would have found it difficult to tell her age otherwise. The drab, old-fashioned clothes she wore made her seem middle aged, and yet her skinny arms and pageboy haircut gave her the appearance almost of an adolescent.
She worked hard and was clearly intelligent, though she never made Martin party to her opinions and occasionally he wondered if she even had any. The other women in the office, Jenny Lomax and Janet Carlson, who was head of Land Sales, called her the Mouse. Her meekness seemed to irritate them for some reason, though this never boiled over into open hostility.
