With a series of drawn-out whistles the train sped through York station, the platform filled with people standing to attention. The engine roared; black smoke gushed from the funnel and plumed past the window. Inside, diners, having finished their luncheon, began to smoke. The student indicated that he himself wanted a cigarette, but the stranger was oblivious. The student wiped the palms of his hands against his trouser leg and helped himself to the packet.
‘I must get off this train,’ the stranger said. ‘But first,’ he said, rising from his seat, ‘I will give you the letter.’ He produced a crumpled but otherwise perfectly ordinary-looking envelope.
‘Promise me you’ll see it to its destination.’
‘I promise,’ said the student.
‘I must get off the train! Should anyone ask, we never met.’
The student was alone in the dining car, clutching the letter. It was surprisingly heavy. He smoothed the wrinkles then scanned the address: Evelyn Rafferty, 16 Ingolstadt Place, Oxford. There was the first surprise — a woman! In his mind the addressee had assumed a theatre of forms — madman, accomplice, alibi, or target for the stranger’s murderous imagination — but not a woman. He read the name again: Evelyn. Evie. Eve. (My name, of course, and my mother’s too. But I was not named after her; I acquired my name by accident.) The student turned the letter — how gently the stranger had held it! — and lifted it to the window. He saw lines like tightly scrabbling ants beneath the envelope. He held it up to the sun. And those words, which he could not make out, stirred a desire in him.
Why did the student decide to deliver the letter? Why, when the stranger was unreliable, and his story improbable, was he prepared to embroil himself in an unknown fate? Perhaps because he had made a promise; perhaps for the sense of adventure it foretold; or maybe it was the stranger’s own guarantee — ‘Nothing of what I say will cause you harm or adversely affect you in any way.’ In my opinion, there is a more immediate explanation. The student was simply curious.
3. How My Parents Met
There was silence, next day, as the student approached 16 Ingolstadt Place. Sunlight streamed through sycamores that lined the edge of the pavement. The street was empty, the sky limpid and still; and — why not? — a pair of moths circled a rose bush. Number 16 was a watch shop. Inside, the air was cool. Corridors of dusty light sprang from shuttered windows, and high glass cabinets displayed carriage clocks, nocturnals, music boxes. There was a dynasty of grandfathers, chronometers, mechanical dancing figurines. As the student approached the counter, he saw a thousand faces staring at him. A thousand hands formed the letter ‘L’ as he surveyed the room. There was a clangour of gong-bells and chimes, melodies, a cuckoo’s cry. A thousand pendulums rocked back and forth. A thousand ticks, a thousand tocks. The student spoke (amid the cacophony of three o’clock a young woman, dressed in an accordion-pleated skirt with a cape over her shoulders, had appeared behind the counter): ‘Are you Evelyn? Yes? I have something for you.’ Then, ‘My watch is broken.’ Releasing watch and letter, he stood, eyeing the floor.
‘Where did you get the letter?’ she asked.
‘From a gentleman … he didn’t tell me his name.’
‘I know the handwriting.’
‘I met him on the train to London.’
‘I recognize his handwriting.’
‘Whose?’
‘Father.’ Suddenly she collapsed into a fit of weeping. ‘Your watch will be ready the day after next,’ she said between sobs that shook her whole body.
Many years later, when Rex Steppman was no longer a student, and the stranger, whom I called Grandfather, lived in an institution with other fantasists, my father remembered the encounter. ‘I was as helpless as she was.’ Father, sitting at the edge of our veranda in Lagos; me, six years old, balancing on his knee. ‘I didn’t know what to do. I just stood there with your mother weeping and those clocks staring at me.’ Suddenly changing mood, he looked into my eyes. ‘Never underestimate the power of clockwork, Evie. Once you wind it up, it has a life of its own.’ And I, timidly, ‘But is clockwork truly alive?’ Whereupon Father roared with laughter and reached for the pocket watch. ‘I’ll show you,’ he said, sliding me to my feet. Crouching at the edge of the lawn, I watched as he flipped the body from its case … to reveal a tiny world of movement, a pinioned order such as every artist dreams of, a world of cogs and balances, each moving at different speeds and trajectories, but all, somehow, impossibly, in synchrony. Next he took a letter opener and wrenched the mainspring; it leaped from his hands thrashing and turning like a Catherine wheel; up it went, making a noise like the sharpening of knives, until it hit the roof and fell to the floor; where it continued to spin maliciously, without restraint, in ever-increasing circles, until finally, as I squirmed in fear and excitement, it died on the wood.
The following day, slightly embarrassed, winking at me and trying to turn the whole thing into a joke, Father gathered the parts and took them to the watch repairer. But that night I did not sleep. Father knew how to bring clockwork to life!
He also knew how to destroy it. And frequently, in the years we lived in Lagos, he succumbed to his appetite for stifling clockwork. This life-long struggle with clocks, however, began in the weeks after he delivered the letter. The pocket watch broke apart an extraordinary number of times, and on each occasion my father returned to the shop with the thousand faces and the corridors of dusty light. The watch’s rusty hand was succeeded by a misaligned going-barrel, a broken arbor, an impulse which spun too slowly. My mother mended each disorder willingly and with patience. There was the matter of an over-eager escarpment, which she removed, filed and carefully replaced. The watch suffered from train-wheel convulsion, bevel seizure, a wonky chapter and, of course, the afflicted minute hand, which snapped and was placed in a drawer. Like many objects stored in drawers, however, it went missing, and my mother never got round to finding a replacement.
In between his visits to the shop, my father began his training for the colonial service. He was given a historical account of Empire, instruction in governorship by law, the basics of gunboat diplomacy. He learned that the instinct of sport played a great part in maintaining the British Empire. ‘History,’ he was told by a severe Oxonian in mufti, ‘has demonstrated that the human race advances inexorably.’ And, ‘Strong, healthy and flourishing nations require a continual expansion of their frontiers.’ He took out subscriptions with the Royal Geographical Society, the Zoological Society, the Old Elephant and the Corona Club. He learned that time marches ever forward, and yet he continued — unaware — to rebel against the sentiments of the age. Over the following weeks he proceeded to scratch and snap, to smash and unscrew … in short, to interrupt the otherwise steady progress of the pocket watch. By 1939, the pocket watch was falling sick roughly once a week. And gradually my parents were getting to know one another. Rex had begun to linger while Evelyn mended the watch; and, as she worked, she talked.
‘When I was fourteen,’ she told him, several months after their first meeting, ‘my mother left home in mysterious circumstances. She was a singer and routinely toured. I rarely saw her. When she returned to Oxford in between tours we scarcely spoke. She regarded me with barely concealed boredom. I remember — I was nine years old — asking her, during an awful scene, why she was such a selfish mother. “I have a weak heart,” she said.