But this is not a story about my father, nor even about clock-making. All these lengthy preliminaries are only a way of explaining how on a certain day, a week ago, in a room on the second floor of a delapidated but (as shall be seen) illustrious Victorian building, I, Adam Krepski, sat, pressing in my hand till the sweat oozed from my palm, the Watch made by my great-grandfather, which for over one hundred and seventy years had neither stopped nor ever been wound. The day, as it happens, was my wedding anniversary. A cause for remembrance; but not for celebration. It is nearly thirty years since my wife left me.
And what was making me clutch so tightly that precious mechanism?
It was the cries. The cries coming up the dismal, echoing staircase; the cries from the room on the landing below, which for several weeks I had heard at sporadic intervals, but which now had reached a new, intense note and came with ever-increasing frequency. The cries of a woman, feline, inarticulate — at least to my ears, for I knew them to be the cries of an Asian woman — an Indian, a Pakistani — expressive first of outrage and grief (they had been mixed in those first days with the shouts of a man), but now of pain, of terror, of — it was this that tightened my grip so fervently on that Watch — of unmistakable urgency.
My wedding anniversary. Now I consider it, time has played more than one trick on me …
And what was I doing in that gloomy and half-derelict building, I, a Krepski clockmaker? That is a long and ravelled tale — one which begins perhaps on that fateful day in July, 1957, when I married.
My grandfather (who in that same year reached one hundred and fifty) was against it from the outset. The eve of my wedding was another of those humbling moments in my life when he invoked the folly of my father. Not that Deborah had any of the questionable credentials of the widow of a music-hall manager. She was a thirty-five-year-old primary school teacher, and I, after all, was forty-three. But — now my grandfather was midway through his second century — the misogynist bent of our family had reached in him a heightened, indiscriminate pitch. On the death of his third wife, in 1948, he had ceased to play the hypocrite and got himself a housekeeper, not a fourth wife. The disadvantage of this decision, so he sometimes complained to me, was that housekeepers had to be paid. His position towards womankind was entrenched. He saw my marriage-to-be as a hopeless backsliding into the mire of vain biological yearnings and the fraudulent permanence of procreation.
He was wrong. I did not marry to beget children (that fact was to be my undoing) nor to sell my soul to Time. I married simply to have another human being to talk to other than my grandfather.
Do not mistake me. I did not wish to abandon him. I had no intention of giving up my place beside him in the Krepski workshop or of forfeiting my share in the Watch. But consider the weight of his hundred and fifty years on my forty-odd. Consider that since the age of three, not having known my father and, barely, my mother, I had been brought up by this prodigy who even at my birth was over a hundred. Might I feel, in watered-down form, the oppressions and frustrations of my father? At twenty-five I had already grown tired of my grandfather’s somehow hollow accounts of the Polish uprisings of 1830, of exiled life in Paris, of the London of the 1850s and ’60s. I had begun to perceive that mixed with his blatant misogyny was a more general, brooding misanthropy — a contempt for the common run of men who lived out their meagre three score and ten. His eyes (one of which was permanently out of true from the constant use of a clockmaker’s eye-piece) had developed a dull, sanctimonious stare. About his person there hung, like some sick-room smell infesting his clothes, an air of stagnancy, ill-humour, isolation, and even, to judge from his frayed jackets and the disrepair of his Highgate home — relative penury.
For what had become of “Krepski and Krepski, Clock and Watchmakers of Repute,” in the course of my lifetime? It was no longer the thriving East End workshop, employing six skilled craftsmen and three apprentices, it had been at the turn of the century. Economic changes had dealt it blows. The mass production of wrist-watches which were now two-a-penny and cheap electrical (electrical!) clocks had squeezed out the small business. On top of this was my grandfather’s ever-increasing suspiciousness of nature. For, even if lack of money had not forced him to do so, he would have gradually dismissed his faithful workmen for fear they might discover the secret of the Watch and betray it to the world. That watch could prolong human life but not the life of commercial enterprise. By the 1950s Krepski and Krepski was no more than one of those grimy, tiny, Dickensian-looking shops one can still see on the fringes of the City, sign-boarded “Watch and Clock Repairers” but looking more like a run-down pawn-broker’s — to which aged customers would, very occasionally, bring the odd ancient mechanism for a “seeing to.”
Grandfather was a hundred and fifty. He looked like a sour-minded but able-bodied man of half that age. Had he retired at the customary time (that is, some time during the 1860s or ’70s) he would have known the satisfaction of passing on a business at the peak of its success and of enjoying a comfortable “old age.” In the 1950s, still a fit man, he had no choice but to continue at the grinding task of scraping a living. Even had he retired and I had managed to support him, he would have returned, surely enough, to the shop on Goswell Road, like a dog to its kennel.
Imagine the companionship of this man — in our poky, draughty place of work which vibrated ceaselessly to the rumblings of the City traffic outside; in the Highgate house with its flaking paintwork, damp walls and cracked crockery, and only the growlings of Mrs. Murdoch, the housekeeper, to break the monotony. Was I to be blamed for flying with relief from this emtombment to the arms of an impulsive, bright-minded, plumply attractive schoolteacher who — at thirty-five — was actually perturbed by the way the years were passing her by?
• • •
Ah, but in that last fact lay the seeds of marital catastrophe. Grandfather was right. A true Krepski, a true guardian of the Watch, should marry, if he is to marry at all, a plain, stupid and barren wife. Deborah was none of these things: She was that volatile phenomenon, a woman at what for women is a dangerous age, suddenly blessed with the prospect of womanhood fulfilled. Shall I describe our union as merely connubial? Shall I offer the picture of myself as the sober, steady, semi-paternal figure (I was eight years her elder) taking under my sheltering wing this slightly delicate, slightly frightened creature? No. Those first months were a whirlwind, a vortex into which I was sucked, gently at first and then with accelerating and uninhibited voracity. The walls of our first floor flat shook to the onslaughts of female passion; they echoed to Deborah’s screams (for at the height of ecstasy Deborah would scream, at an ear-splitting pitch). And I, an, at first, unwitting and passive instrument to all this, a clay figure into which life was rapidly pummeled and breathed, suddenly woke to the fact that for thirty years my life had been measured by clocks; that for people who are not Krepskis, Time is not a servant but an old and pitiless adversary. They have only so long on this earth and they want only to live, to have lived. And when the opportunity comes it is seized with predatory fury.