I went with him sometimes on repair jobs. He called me his helper, but I did not really help. When he was ushered into the library or study, I was invariably taken downstairs by a dutiful serving maid into one of the vast steaming kitchens that fuelled the stately houses of England. Each had a rotund cook labouring away in her engine room, pink of cheek, sweaty of brow, keeping the larders stocked with sweet lumpy jam and fresh loaves of bread.
My father used to tell me that my mother had grown up in such a house. She had been sitting in the grand upstairs window, he said, when he arrived to mend her father’s clock. Their eyes had met, they’d fallen in love, and nothing after that could keep them apart. Her parents had tried, her little sister had pleaded with her to stay, but my mother was headstrong and young and used to being indulged, and so she ran away. Children as a rule are literal creatures, and whenever I heard this story I pictured my mother running, her skirts flying behind her in a satin wake, as she fled from the looming castle, leaving behind her beloved sister and the raging horror of her overbearing parents.
This is what I believed.
My father had to tell me stories, as I did not have the chance myself to know my mother. She was two days shy of twenty-one when she died, and I a child of four. It was consumption that killed her, but my father had the coroner put ‘bronchitis’ on her death certificate as he thought it sounded more refined. He needn’t have bothered: having married my father and left the bosom of her titled family, she was removed to the great mass of ordinary people of whom history takes no account.
There was a single likeness, a small sketch, that he kept inside a gold locket, and which I treasured. Until, that is, we were forced to move into the pair of draughty rooms in the pinched alleyway in a pocket of East London, where the smell of the Thames was always in our noses and the calls of gulls and sailors mingled to form a constant song, and the locket disappeared to the rag-and-bone man. I do not know where the likeness went. It slipped through the cracks of time and went to where the lost things are.
My father called me Birdie; he said I was his little bird. My real name was beautiful, he said, but it was the name of a grown-up lady, the sort of name that wore long skirts and fine silks, but had not the wings to fly.
‘Do I want a name with wings?’
‘Oh, yes, I should think so.’
‘Then why did you give me one without?’
He became earnest then, as he always did when talk grazed the subject of her: ‘You were named for your mother’s father. It was important to her that you should carry something of her family.’
‘Even if they did not wish to know me?’
‘Even if,’ he said with a smile, and then he ruffled my hair, which never failed to make me feel assured: as if no deprivation could matter in the face of his love.
My father’s workshop was a place of wonder. The great tall bench beneath the window was a sea of springs and rivets, scales and wires, bells, pendulums and fine arrow hands. I used to sneak in through the open door to kneel on a wooden stool and explore the bench while he was working, turning over the curious and clever contraptions, gently pressing the tiny, fragile parts beneath my fingertips, holding the different metals in the streaming sun to make them shine. I asked question after question, and he peered over his glasses to answer; but he made me promise not to breathe a word to anyone about the things that I observed, for my father was not merely repairing clocks; he was working on an invention of his own.
His Great Project was the creation of a Mystery Clock, the construction of which involved long sessions at his workbench and frequent surreptitious visits to the Court of Chancery where patents of invention were enrolled and issued. My father said that the Mystery Clock, when he mastered it, would make our fortune – for which man of means would not desire a clock whose pendulum appeared to move without the benefit of a mechanism?
I nodded solemnly when he said such things – the gravity with which he spoke required it – but in truth I was equally impressed by the regular clocks that lined his walls from floor to ceiling, their hearts beating, their pendulums swinging, in constant gentle dissonance. He showed me how to wind them, and I would stand back in the centre of the room afterwards, gazing at their mismatched faces as they tut-tut-tutted me in chorus.
‘But which one shows the right time?’ I would ask.
‘Ah, little bird. The better question is: which one doesn’t?’
There was no such thing as the right time, he explained. Time was an idea: it had no end and no beginning; it could not be seen or heard or smelled. It could be measured, sure enough, but no words had been found to explain precisely what it was. As to the ‘right’ time, it was simply a matter of agreeing to agree. ‘Do you remember the woman on the railway platform?’ he asked.
I told him that I did. I had been playing one morning while my father repaired the large clock at a station west of London, when I’d noticed a smaller version hanging on the wall by the ticket office. I’d stopped what I was doing and was looking between the two disparate faces, when a woman came up beside me. ‘That there’s the real time,’ she’d explained, pointing at the little dial. ‘And that one’ – she frowned at the clock my father had just finished winding – ‘that there’s London time.’
Which is how I learned that while I could not be in two places at once, I could most certainly be in one place at two times.
Soon after, my father suggested that we take a trip to Greenwich, ‘the home of the meridian’.
Greenwich meridian. The new words were like an incantation.
‘A line from which time begins,’ he continued. ‘From the north to the south pole, it splits the earth in two.’
So impressive did this sound, so vivid was my child’s imagination, that I suppose it was inevitable the reality would disappoint.
Our journey took us to the well-tended lawn of a grand stone palace, from which I searched in vain for the great, jagged tear I had envisaged in the earth’s surface.
‘There it is –’ he indicated with a straightened arm – ‘right in front of you, a direct line. Zero degrees longitude.’
‘But I cannot see anything. All I see is … grass.’
He laughed when I said that, and ruffled my hair, and asked whether I would like to take a look through the Royal Observatory telescope instead.
We took the journey along the river to Greenwich a number of times in the months before my mother died, and on the boat back and forth my father taught me how to read – the words in books, the tides in the river, the expressions on the faces of our fellow travellers.
He showed me how to tell the time by the sun. Human beings had ever been captivated by the great burning sphere in the heavens, he said, ‘for not only does it give us warmth, but also light. The foremost craving of our souls.’
Light. I took to watching it on the spring trees, noticing how it turned the delicate new leaves translucent. I observed the way it threw shadows against walls; tossed stardust across the surface of the water; made filigree on the ground where it fell through wrought-iron railings. I wanted to touch it, this marvellous tool. To hold it in my fingertips the way I did the tiny objects on my father’s workbench.
It became my mission to capture light. I found a small hinged tin, emptied of its contents, and drove a nail through the top several times with one of my father’s hammers to make tiny perforations. I took the contraption outside with me, sat it in the sunniest place that I could find, and waited until the top was burning hot. Alas, when I slid the box of wonder open, there was no glittering captive waiting for me. It was just the empty inside of a rusty old tin.
Mrs Mack used to say that when it rained, it poured – which wasn’t a comment on the weather, although it took me a while to work that out, but an observation of the way misfortune seemed to invite further misfortune.
After my mother died, it began to pour for my father and me.