The diminutive fingers still gripped the Watch. Through the gold chain I felt the faintest hint of a baby tug. And a miraculous thing — as miraculous as this infant’s resurgence of life — happened. I set it down now as a fact worthy to be engraved in record. At six-thirty P.M. on a July day scarcely a week ago, the hand of a baby (what titanic power must have been in those fingers, what pent-up equivalent of years and years of accumulated time?) stopped my great-grandfather’s Watch, which had ticked, without requiring the hand of man to wind it, since September, 1809.
The fear — the sensation of being assailed from within — clutched me more intently. This room, in the house of my great-grandfather — in which my ancestors themselves had invisibly mustered (had they fled already, exorcised ghosts?) — was no longer my sanctuary but the centre of a desert. Weighing upon me with a force to equal that which had kept this child alive, was the desolation of my future, growing older and older, but never old enough, and growing every day, more puny, more shrivelled, more insectile.
I released my grip on the chain. I pressed the Great Watch into the hands of an infant. I got up from my position squatting by the mattress. I looked at the mother. How could I have explained, even if I had her language? The baby was breathing; it would live. The mother would pull through. I knew this better than any doctor. I turned to the door and made my exit. Things grew indistinct around me. I stumbled down the flight of stairs to the street door.
Outside, I found a phone-box and, giving the barest particulars, called an ambulance to the mother and child. Then I blundered on. No, not if you are thinking this, in the direction of Deborah. Nor in the direction of the Thames, to hurl, not the Watch, but myself into the murky stream and join my sea-changed father.
Not in any direction. No direction was necessary. For in the historic streets of Whitechapel, minutes later, I was struck, not by an omnibus, not by an arrow of lighting, nor by a shell from one of the Kaiser’s iron-clads, but by an internal blow, mysterious and devasting, a blow by which not physical trees but family trees are toppled and torn up by their roots.
Another ambulance wailed down Stepney Way, not for a mother and child, but for me.
And now I lie beneath fevered bedclothes. And now I can tell — from the disinterested if baffled faces of doctors (who no doubt have a different way of gauging time from clockmakers), from the looks of buxom nurses (ah — Deborah) who bend over my bed, lift my limp wrist and eye their regulation-issue watches — that my own breaths are numbered.
A Note about the Author
GRAHAM SWIFT was born in 1949 in London, where he still lives and works. He is the author of eight previous novels: The Sweet-Shop Owner; Shuttlecock, which received the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; Waterland, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize and won the Guardian Fiction Award, the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, and the Italian Premio Grinzane Cavour; Out of This World; Ever After, which won the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger; Last Orders, which was awarded the Booker Prize; The Light of Day; and, most recently, Tomorrow. He is also the author of Learning to Swim, a collection of short stories, and Making an Elephant, a book of essays, portraits, poetry, and reflections on his life in writing. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages.