Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection

by Rosie Thomas

  ‘Perhaps.’

  Outside she took a deep breath. She knew that she was rather drunk, but perhaps that would be a help. Without needing to consult her map, she retraced her steps to Simon’s house.

  It took a long time for him to answer the door. Harriet’s knuckles were bruised with knocking. At last the door creaked open and he loomed in front of her. When it was too late she thought of running away, like the children.

  ‘I’ve come to ask,’ she said, ‘whether I could borrow The Nine Tailors.’

  She thought she saw relief in his face. She didn’t know if it was because she had come back or for the harmless idiocy of her question.

  ‘I told you, that one doesn’t have Harriet in it. You could begin with Busman’s Honeymoon, if you like.’

  ‘If you think that’s a good idea.’

  He stood aside, to allow her to come in again. In the kitchen, Harriet saw that the remains of two boiled eggs had been added to the mess on the table. Simon reached into a cupboard and held up a bottle of whisky, two-thirds empty. She nodded gratefully at it. ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘I haven’t seen those books in years. It might take me a while to find yours in all this.’ The slight, comprehensive gesture again.

  ‘There’s no hurry.’ Harriet laced her fingers round the sticky glass, took a gulp of the whisky. ‘Simon, there’s something I want to ask you.’

  Simon. She had avoided calling him anything, before. The whisky hit her stomach. Now or never.

  ‘I know you don’t like questions, I’m sorry. Is there any possibility that you might be my father?’

  Simon drank, looking at her over the rim of the glass. His face was creased.

  ‘That was really what you came to find out.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There isn’t any possibility at all. I wish I could say something different. I wish I really were your father.’

  As soon as she heard it, she knew that it had been a ridiculous quest. If he had been, even if only perhaps, Kath would have found a way to tell her. Harriet had longed for the idea of him, denying every likelihood, to fill a void. The voice was her own, inside her, nothing to do with Leo because the history of it went back much further than her brief marriage. Simon couldn’t fill it. Nor should she ask him to. Harriet stood up. She moved with exaggerated, half-drunken care, around the table to Simon’s side. She put her arm around his shoulder and rested her cheek against the top of his head. Tears ran out of her eyes and down her cheeks.

  ‘I wish, as well. I hoped, all the time.’

  ‘Come and sit here.’ He took hold of her arm and guided her so that she half-leaned, half-sat on the table, where he could see her face. With his other hand he poured himself another drink.

  ‘I’ve got some catching up to do.’

  Harriet rubbed her face with the palms of her hands, raggedly exhaling like a child recovering from a crying fit, and then smiling woefully. ‘I needed Dutch courage. Didn’t do me much good.’

  ‘Cry if you feel like it, Harriet. I do.’

  ‘Here, by yourself?’ The image pierced her with sadness.

  ‘Where else? Listen, I’ll tell you about Kath and me. I loved her, you guessed that. I would watch her across the street. She used to come and visit me, tell me about her adventures, and I’d look at her sitting there, where you are. I’d have done more, of course, if I could. I only touched her once. Put my hand here.’ Stiffly, watching the hand with its brown blotches and twisted cords as if it belonged to someone else, he touched Harriet’s waist. ‘She was so shiny, her eyes and skin. She was surprised. Not offended, or saucy, just surprised. I took my hand away. That’s all. That doesn’t get you a daughter thirty years later, does it?’

  Harriet shook her head.

  ‘Let’s finish the whisky,’ Simon concluded.

  ‘That isn’t all the story. Kath’s only a tiny bit of it.’ With relief, Harriet forgot her own concerns. It was Simon himself who drew her now, the more sharply because he was free of the miasma of her clumsy hopes and expectations. The neon strip light suspended over his kitchen table cast harsh shadows, focussing them in their postures of almost-intimacy.

  ‘You’re not my father. It doesn’t matter, I never even wanted one until Kath told me about you. But the fact that you aren’t doesn’t take you or me away, does it, now that we’re both here? Perhaps we can be friends.’

  In her own ears, it sounded brash. A facile solution. But he had said, I wish I were your father.

  ‘I don’t have any excuse for asking. Except that I’ve drunk a bottle of wine and a double scotch. Why do you cry, Simon?’

  ‘Why not?’ The evasiveness, she was discovering, was characteristic. She felt suddenly tired, and Simon perceived it.

  ‘What are the responsibilities of friendship? You’ll have to remind me.’

  Harriet considered. ‘To talk. And to listen. Very important, that.’

  ‘I can listen. Most competently.’

  ‘I’d rather you talked. I have, far too much. Go on.’ Harriet picked up the bottle, pushed it towards him. ‘Talk to me.’

  ‘What a very odd girl you are. Nothing like your mother. What do you want to know?’

  She smiled at him, then. ‘I want to know what sort of father you might have been, if you had turned out to be him.’

  ‘A disappointing one, I imagine. This is what I do, look. I repair things.’ He held up a small brown rectangle, nibbled with cut-outs and coloured wires and brightened with drops of silver. From amongst the dirty plates and greasy papers he picked up an instrument that looked like a tiny poker at the end of a flex. A curl of silvery wire lay next to it. ‘Resin-core solder,’ he told her. An acrid smell momentarily overpowered the kitchen’s other odours and a tiny silver tear fell on to the circuit board. ‘This is part of a transistor radio. Hardly worth repairing. It would be cheaper to go and buy another. The Japs overtook me long ago.’ He picked up another small, disassembled mechanism. ‘Quartz alarm clock. Same thing, but I like clocks.’

  ‘The one in the hall?’ Harriet had noticed it in the dim light. It was a grandfather clock with a handsome moon-face, incongruous in the dingy surroundings.

  Simon’s expression changed. ‘Come and look at it.’

  She followed him into the narrow space. Simon stroked the smoothly patinated case, then opened the door so that she could look inside. She gazed at the cylindrical weights on their chains. The ticking sounded thunderous in the silent hall.

  ‘I rebuilt the mechanism,’ Simon said. Harriet thought about the springs and coiled wires behind the painted face. ‘If you’re interested,’ he added abruptly, ‘you can come in here.’

  He opened a door to the front room of the house. The kitchen was neatly ordered by comparison. In here was what seemed to be the forlorn detritus of many years. Harriet blinked at the skeletons of chairs, their legs and arms tangled with coiled wire, a bicycle frame, a standard lamp with the scorched shade hanging broken-necked. Cardboard boxes were piled high, sagging and spilling over between broken picture frames, rusty tins, a roll of carpet, a backless television set. Against the far wall, with a tin bath propped against it, stood a lathe with its ankles immersed in a small sea of silvery metal curls. There was a smell of oil, and damp, and persistent cold.

  In the middle of the room, in a clearing, was a rough wooden workbench. It was scattered with tools, drills and files and screwdrivers curled with woodshavings, reels of solder, and used tobacco tins containing screws and drill-bits and coloured capacitors. A modern desk lamp was screwed to one side, and Simon clicked it on. He began to hunt amongst his tools, Harriet seemingly forgotten. She watched him, aware that here, at his bench, was where he spent his time. She shivered in the cold.

  ‘Put the fire on,’ he told her. She found it in the tangle, a single-bar Fifties model, and dust sparked and smelt as the element began to glow.

  ‘Here it is.’ Simon held up a tiny nugget of hairsprings and cogwheels. ‘And here’s the case.’ He f
itted the mechanism into a silver sleeve engraved with flowers and leaves, then turned it over to show her the glass face, and the web-fine numerals. ‘It belonged to my grandmother. An exquisite piece of fine watchmaking. I used to be able to take it apart, and put it together again, just to admire it. It has a perfect economy of form and function. I couldn’t do it now. Eyesight’s gone.’

  Harriet took the watch and examined it, following the leaf-patterns in the silver.

  ‘What else do you do?’

  ‘Apart from repairing worthless modern clocks and radios? Yes. I make things. I enjoy that, meeting a challenge. There’s no practical relevance, more an abstract pleasure, like solving a puzzle.’

  ‘What sort of things?’

  Simon looked round his room, then scooped a pair of alarm clocks and a kettle on a bracket from the nearest cardboard box. ‘Why do you want to know about this? Here’s a perfect example. I was without electricity for a while.’ He didn’t explain why, and Harriet could guess. ‘I thought it would be interesting to make myself an early morning tea-machine that worked without it. Here it is. This alarm clock goes off, operates a flint-lighter under the kettle, lights a wick over a spirit reservoir. Heats the water, which takes a measured amount of time. When the kettle is boiling nicely, the second alarm goes off, operates this lever that tilts the kettle over the teapot, and wakes the sleeper at the same time. Hot cup of tea all ready and waiting. It worked perfectly the first time, then I came across an unforeseen snag.’

  ‘Which was?’

  To her surprise, Simon began to laugh. The laughter began as a low rumble, then he put his head back and the sound swelled to a roar. ‘On the second morning, the reservoir holding the spirit cracked. The meths ran down the bedclothes and ignited. I woke up in flames. I didn’t need a cup of tea to get me out of bed.’

  Harriet laughed then too, in snorts that stirred the fine dust and made her splutter. It lasted a long time, this second laughter that they had shared, and it dissolved another invisible barrier between them. When it had subsided, and Simon had replenished his whisky glass, Harriet perched on the arm of a wrecked chair and listened as he talked.

  ‘I’m glad you came back,’ he told her, and she glowed at the compliment.

  Much of his talk, a disjointed commentary on the fragments littering his bench and the abandoned schemes littering his workroom, was too technical for Harriet to follow. She was happy to look on and to absorb what she could. An impression formed itself of Simon’s life given over to ideas that shone briefly and then lost their luminosity. The ideas became dead bodies once his enthusiasm had been withdrawn, and then dry skeletons, encroaching from the shadowy corners of the room. Soon, she guessed, the skeletons would fill the whole space and Simon would be swallowed up by them.

  He finished the last of the whisky. His voice was beginning to thicken. He held up the empty bottle and tilted it, then seemed to come to a decision. Not quite steadily, he moved to the end of the bench and opened a drawer. He took out a rough wooden board, and propped it at an angle amongst the shavings and discarded tools.

  ‘This is the only thing I ever did that could have come right,’ he said. ‘If I had only known what to do with it. If I could have made myself look properly at it again, after we were liberated. Set free. That’s a notion, isn’t it?’

  Harriet’s first thought was that he had descended without warning into drunkenness. He had been good-humoured and relaxed while he was pottering amongst his skeletons, but now his face had contracted, drawing itself into iron lines.

  ‘Set free,’ he repeated with bitterness and laughed, nothing like the tea-maker laugh. ‘Here. You’ve seen everything else. Don’t you want to look at this?’

  ‘What is it?’ Harriet asked, in fear.

  ‘It’s a game, of course. A wonderful game if you can play it right. Like life, Kath Peacock’s daughter.’

  Harriet was frightened by the change in him. He took hold of her wrist and she had to stiffen to stop herself drawing it away from him. Into her open palms, Simon dropped four wooden balls in worn, faded colours, and four plastic counters bright in the same colours, red, blue, yellow and green. He raised their linked hands and let the wooden balls roll into a groove at the top of the board. Harriet saw that it might once have been the end of a packing case. There were marks on it, but she couldn’t decipher them. They looked like pictographs, Chinese or Japanese. Or perhaps they were something else altogether, faded and rubbed beyond recognition.

  ‘Now. Put the counters here,’ he commanded. ‘Any order you like, together or separate.’ He pointed to the foot of the board, where there were four slots. Harriet dropped the counters in, at random.

  ‘Watch.’

  Simon drew back a spring-loaded tongue of wood to open a gate in the upper groove. The coloured balls fell out and rolled, one after another, down seven inclined struts, glued in a zigzag down the slope of the board. In each of the struts, Harriet saw, there were three more gates, all closed with wooden pegs. As they rolled over the gates and dropped from one strut to the next, the balls made a pleasing, musical sound. They dropped one by one off the end of the lowest strut and formed a column in the last slot. Harriet’s counters lay in different slots, in a different colour sequence. She smiled uncertainly, pleased and oddly soothed by the sound of the rolling balls and by the neat way they had plopped into their resting places, although she had no idea what was supposed to have been achieved.

  ‘How is your mathematics?’ Simon demanded.

  ‘Quite good.’ It was true. Harriet enjoyed figures.

  ‘Then tell me how many different ways the counters could be arranged in those slots.’

  Harriet frowned.

  ‘Four to the power of four,’ he prompted her.

  ‘Two hundred and fifty six.’

  ‘Exactly.’ Simon was delighted. Some of the iron lines faded from his face. ‘Do you understand?’

  ‘I think so,’ Harriet said, who was only beginning to.

  ‘Go on, then. Your counters are your markers. Make your coloured balls drop into the same slots in the same order.’

  ‘I think I can do that.’

  ‘Would you like to make a little bet?’

  Harriet grinned, fired by the challenge. She had forgotten to be afraid of Simon’s strange expression. ‘A fiver,’ she offered.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Don’t thank me. You haven’t won it yet.’

  The key to the game, Harriet saw now, was the little gates in the sloping struts. She touched one, and then saw that it would lift out, leaving a hole in the strut, big enough for a ball to drop through. The gate was made in the shape of a Y, and when she examined it she saw that it was made from matchsticks, painstakingly glued together. She studied it for a long moment, wondering, and then slipped it back into its place. It fitted, but at a different angle. She tried it one way and then another, and discovered that there were three possible positions for it. The gate could be locked open or locked shut, that was simple enough. But in the third position, the gate stood open to let a ball through. Only then, as it passed, the weight of the ball closed and locked the gate behind it.

  Harriet took a deep, determined breath, sensing Simon watching her. Her head was still fuddled with food and wine, and the day’s jumbled impressions.

  She saw that the green ball would roll first, but that she must coax it into the next-to-last slot. The red ball would drop last but must occupy the first slot. Without giving herself too much time to think and change her mind, she flipped the gates, trying to visualise the path the balls would take as they rolled and dropped.

  After two minutes she was satisfied.

  She brushed Simon’s hand away, flicked the spring-loaded tongue, and the balls merrily rattled. She held her breath as they trickled and dropped, making the same musical sound. As if drawn by magnets, they completed their course and fell, colour by colour and slot by slot, on top of the right, bright counters.

  Harriet shouted in tr
iumph.

  Simon only nodded. ‘Good for a first try.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Look.’

  He pointed to the little gates. A number was pencilled on the strut beside each one, high numbers at the top, lower all down the length of the zigzag path. Harriet’s gates stood open, breaking the smoothness of the route. Counting aloud, Simon added the numbers to make a total. ‘Seventy-nine,’ he said. ‘Now, watch again.’ With a flick, he obliterated Harriet’s solution and substituted his own. She saw that fewer gates stood open, all lower down the board. Then he scooped out the balls and rolled them again. They dropped inexorably to the same resting places, but Simon’s score was only twenty-seven.

  ‘You see? The same conclusion, but achieved by a more or less circuitous route.’

  ‘I see, like life,’ Harriet murmured.

  Simon unfolded a piece of paper. In neat, spidery writing he had plotted the lowest scores for each of the two hundred and fifty-six possible permutations. Harriet glanced at it, then rearranged the counters at random. She drew her lower lip between her teeth, frowning in concentration as her fingers danced over the gates. But now, when the balls were released, the yellow and the green fell into the wrong slots.

  Simon moved to show her, but she stopped him. ‘No. Let me try again.’

  This time she was right, but there was no triumphant shout. She was staring at the board, hypnotised by it. The power of the game, she saw, lay in its simplicity. It was made from a packing case and spent matches, but its brilliance shone out of it. It drew her fingers, tempting another try.

  ‘It’s very clever,’ she said. She felt the fine hairs at the nape of her neck, down the length of her spine, stir and prickle. She shivered, but not from cold now. ‘Very, very clever.’

  Harriet felt a moment of pure, clear excitement. It was like her waking dream back in her childhood bed. It possessed her completely, making everything she contemplated seem fine, and simple, and infinitely inviting. And then, just as quickly, it was gone again, leaving her wondering just what had happened to her. She touched the splintered wood and the faded markings, puzzled by them.