Читать книгу A Woman of Our Times - Rosie Thomas - Страница 8

The town had long ago been consumed by the city.

In the local train, looking out, Harriet imagined that in her mother’s childhood there might have been a green ribbon of woods and fields separating the last housing estate from the first filling station. Now there was no dividing line, of trees or anything else, and the backdrop of houses and shops and small factories flowed seamlessly past her.

At the station, she bought a local street map from the bookstall and sat on a bench to study it. The other passengers from the train passed her and crowded out through the ticket barrier. When Harriet looked up the train had pulled out and the platform was deserted. At once, she was aware of her isolation in an unfamiliar place. The place names on the train indicator above her head meant nothing to her, and she was ignorant of the streets that led away from the station entrance.

There was no sense of a homecoming. If she had arrived expecting anything of the kind, Harriet reflected, then she was being sentimental. But still she had felt herself irresistibly drawn here, and there had been complicated arrangements to make before she could allow herself the time off from her business. The urban anonymity she had glimpsed from the train was less than welcoming, and she allowed herself the irrationality of a moment’s disappointment. Then she stood up, closing the street map but keeping her finger in place to mark the right page, and briskly walked the length of the platform. Her heels clicked very loudly, as if to announce her arrival.

The ticket collector had abandoned his booth, and so Harriet passed through the barrier without even cursory official acknowledgement of her arrival. There were two dark-red buses waiting beside a graffiti-sprayed shelter, but neither of the destination boards offered the area she was heading for. There was also a taxi at the rank, and the driver eyed her hopefully. Harriet hesitated, and then passed him by. She didn’t want to arrive at the house on the corner by taxi, proclaiming her lack of familiarity to whoever might now live in Simon Archer’s house. If the house was even still there, she reminded herself. Her mother’s home town had changed in thirty years.

Harriet bent her head over the map once more, then hitched her bag over her shoulder and began to walk.

The scale of the map was deceptive. She walked a long way, more than a mile, and her shoes began to rub. It was a long time since she had drunk a cup of coffee on the InterCity train from Euston, and she thought of going into a pub for a drink and a sandwich. But she knew that sitting alone in a bar could only heighten her sense of displacement, and she walked on instead.

The road was busy with a constant stream of heavy traffic that left a pall of grime in the air, and over the houses and shopfronts. The shops that she passed were small, with meagre and faded displays behind the dirty glass, and the houses looked cheerless and hardly inhabited.

Harriet was disconcerted by the anonymity of the streets, and by their barrenness. There was nothing to tell her, You are here, a thin thread links you to us, Sam’s Superette and Madge’s Wool Shop and S. Walsh, Turf Accountants. The disappointment that she had felt on the station swelled, and to counteract it Harriet told herself that she hadn’t come looking for a place, only for the people it had once sheltered. As she plodded on, Kath’s astonishment at her pilgrimage seemed justifiable. Even Harriet found it hard to believe that she would discover her father in this grey, ugly and exhausted place.

To stifle the thought, she resumed her observation. The one place this could not be, she thought, of all defeated urban wildernesseses, was London. Even in its parts that were sadder than this, London had an unmistakeable spiny vitality. There was no liveliness here. Harriet felt a wave of affection for London, like the surprising warmth that had overtaken her on the crowded tube ride to Sunderland Avenue. There was home, after all, and there was everywhere else. Had Kath felt that, once, about these streets? Presumably not, Harriet decided. She had left and never came back.

The responsibility – was it responsibility, or simply need? – had devolved upon herself.

A dark red bus trundled past her, the board on the back bearing the same destination as the one she had rejected outside the station. Harriet quickened her pace, but the stop was in the distance and even as she half-ran it slowed, dropped a single passenger and gathered speed again. She stopped to consult her map for the last time, and saw that her goal was only a handful of streets away. She turned a corner, and then another, away from the main road.

There were houses here instead of shops. This was where Kath had lived, ridden home on her bicycle to save the bus fare. Harriet’s senses were all primed, ready for the impressions to crowd in on her, but now that she was here there was nothing to feel. The rows of houses were neither inviting nor as seedy as the ones that lined the main road. They were simply ordinary and insignificant.

Almost too quickly, she found herself at the right turning. She checked the street name and looked across at her grandparents’ house. It was the same as all the others, the windows masked with net curtains, a patch of garden separating the front door from the pavement. Harriet turned away from it to look at the house opposite. As Kath had described, it faced in a different direction, presenting a high, blind wall of reddish brick directly to the street.

Very slowly, she crossed the road and walked round in the shelter of the wall. She came to a dusty hedge, too high to see over, enclosing the front garden of the house. When she found the gate she had to push past scratchy branches to reach the path and the front door. As she looked for a bell to press she discovered that she was breathless, almost gasping. There was no bell-push. She pressed the flap of the letterbox and it snapped back on her fingers. The sound generated no answering echo within the house, and the windows remained sightless. Harriet knocked, hard, with bare knuckles.

Then she heard someone coming. She rehearsed her lines. A friendly smile, I’m looking for a man who used to live in this house. A long time ago, I’m afraid. How many years have you …

The door opened.

Harriet’s smile never materialised. She had tried to envisage all the alternatives that might confront her, the Bengali housewife with no English, the surly night-shift worker, the transitory bedsit dweller – absurdly, she had made no provision for facing Simon Archer himself.

The man who opened the door was in his late sixties, stooped but still tall, with strands of thin, colourless hair brushed back from a high forehead.

‘I’m sorry,’ Harriet said. ‘I’m looking for Mr Archer.’

The man regarded her. Harriet felt half deafened by the blood in her ears, pounding like surf. I’m looking for my father. The enormity of what she was doing threatened her, made her wish herself somewhere else.

‘I am Mr Archer.’

‘Did you … were you living here thirty years ago?’

He didn’t like questions, Harriet saw that at once.

‘What relevance can that possibly have? Are you from the Social Services? I don’t want Meals on Wheels, or large-print books.’

‘I’m not from the Social Services, nothing like that. I just want to ask you about something that happened a long time ago.’

‘Department of Oral History at the Polytechnic?’

He did have a cultured voice, clipped and precise. Harriet understood Kath’s comparison with a radio announcer, but an announcer of the old, dinner-jacket days. The recognition drew her closer to the eighteen-year-old with the torn stocking, giving her the determination to press further. Harriet found her smile, although the warmth of it wasn’t reciprocated.

‘Nothing like that, either. I’m Kath Peacock’s daughter. Kath, who used to live across there. She was a friend of yours.’ And more. You must remember.

For a moment Harriet was afraid that Kath was right, and Simon Archer had forgotten her. Then, with an imperceptible movement, he let the door open an inch wider.

‘Kath’s daughter?’ There was a pause. ‘Come inside, then.’

She followed him into a dim hallway. She had an impression of cracked yellow paint, a narrow stairway with bare boards, a curtain with musty folds smelling of damp. At the end of the hallway there was a kitchen, with a small window looking over a garden at the back. In this room, Harriet thought, Kath had sat the first time, with her leg propped on a stool. She wondered what else had happened here.

Simon Archer jerked his chin at the room. There were piles of newspapers on every surface, jars with brushes stuck in them, tools and crockery intermingled, dust and a smell of mildew everywhere.

‘I won’t ask you to forgive the state of things in here. Why should I, and why should you?’

Harriet held her hand out. ‘I’m Harriet Trott.’

Simon took her hand, briefly and formally. His was bony and cold. ‘Harriet Trott,’ he repeated. ‘But you’re a grown woman.’

‘I’m nearly thirty,’ Harriet said gently. ‘It’s almost exactly thirty years since Kath left here.’

He looked at her, still unconvinced by her claim. ‘And you’re her daughter?’

‘Yes.’

Simon shook his head. ‘I forget. Kath can’t be eighteen any longer, can she? No more than I am.’

‘Next year she’ll be fifty.’

‘I suppose so.’ He moved away from her, edging around his kitchen, lifting one or two of the pieces of clutter and putting them down again elsewhere as if to establish his dominion over this much, at least. ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

‘If it’s not too much trouble.’

Harriet watched him lifting and filling the kettle, wiping two dusty cups with a matted cloth. She was studying the shape of his head and his hands, the set of his features, wondering if she might see herself. She could only see an elderly man in a green cardigan and oil-stained trousers, no more. Her neck and jaw muscles ached with the tension of her gaze.

‘Do you know why she called you Harriet?’ The abruptness of the question startled her, so that she only shook her head numbly. ‘Rather than Linda or Judy or something that was fashionable then? No?’

He put the cups into a clearing on the table, an old brown earthenware teapot beside them, with a clotted milk bottle. ‘Not very elegant. I don’t get many visitors. Well, she called you Harriet after Harriet Vane.’

She had been expecting a revelation, perhaps an admission that would connect the two of them. ‘Who is she?’

Simon laughed, a little dry noise in his chest. ‘You’re like your mother. She wasn’t a big reader either, but she did like detective stories.’

‘Still does. The shelves at home are full of Agatha Christie.’

‘Don’t you?’

‘Not really. I don’t read anything much. I work hard, I manage quite a big shop that sells fitness equipment, dancewear, things like that. In fact I own the franchise, so it’s my own business. I’m at the shop all day, and in the evenings there’s paperwork to do. There isn’t much time for anything else.’ The words came spilling out. She wanted to impress him, Harriet realised. Why else should she need to boast about her responsibilities?

‘How modern,’ Simon said. ‘To answer your question, Harriet Vane is a character in the Lord Peter Wimsey books written by Dorothy L. Sayers. I lent them to your mother, long ago, and she fell in love with Lord Peter. Her favourite was The Nine Tailors, although Harriet doesn’t appear in that one.’ There was a pause. ‘I remember her telling me that you would be either Peter or Harriet.’

Deliberately, Harriet said, ‘I never knew that. I think there are all kinds of things I don’t know about.’

Simon poured the tea. ‘Perhaps that’s for the best?’

She was certain that he was sparring with her. He must know why she had come. She took the cup that he held out and drank some of the tea. It had an oily film on the surface, with whitish flecks caught in it. Tell me, she wanted to say, but Simon headed her off.

‘What about Kath Peacock?’ he asked. ‘I’d like to hear what has happened to her. Who is Mr Trott?’

Harriet relaxed a little, some of the stiffness ebbing from her neck and head. ‘I can tell you all about Mum. She’s well. I think she’s very happy. She didn’t want me to come to look for you.’

‘I don’t know why you’ve come to look for me. Go on about your mother.’

‘She married Ken while I was still quite small. He’s an engineer, a nice man. As a hobby he likes buying houses and putting in new bathroom suites and building retaining walls and then selling the house and starting all over again with a different coloured bathroom.’

Simon raised an eyebrow and looked around him, and then their eyes met and they began to laugh. The laughter was spontaneous and easy, as if between friends. It warmed Harriet and it convinced her that, after all, she had been right to come. Simon took out a handkerchief and blew his nose. ‘That gives me a very vivid picture. Carry on, please.’

In the beginning, Harriet just talked about Sunderland Avenue, Ken’s work, Lisa and her boyfriends and Kath in her kitchen. Simon Archer listened and drank his tea. Then, with more confidence, she went further back, to Lisa’s birth and her own furious jealousy, and beyond that to the arrival of Ken to rescue her mother and herself.

‘Not that we needed rescuing,’ Harriet said. ‘Kath and I were fine. I thought we had everything we needed, just the two of us.’

‘Yes.’

Simon’s responses were never more than a word or two. He watched Harriet closely as she talked, but his own expression didn’t change.

‘I didn’t want to share her with anyone. When Ken came, she wasn’t all mine any more. He had a car, and a house with proper plumbing and a garden and all that, but I’d rather just have had Kath to myself, like before.’

And then she told him about before, about the succession of furnished rooms, the times spent waiting for Kath to come home from work, and her unformulated but clear childish understanding that they must be everything to one another because there was no one else.

Simon’s eyes still held hers, shrewd, without any sign of distress. ‘Kath needed more,’ he said. It was a statement rather than a question, the verdict of someone who knew her well. Harriet nodded, disappointed in him. She had expected more in return for her story.

Simon smiled, sensing as much. ‘Thank you for telling me all this. It’s comforting to rejoin broken ends, or to have them joined for me, since I’m long past involving myself in anything of the kind.’ A small gesture indicated the chaotic kitchen, hinted at the decaying house beyond it, and told her that Simon was indeed past involvement in the common processes of life. She felt both sorry for him and angry at his withdrawal from the world. For the first time since she had arrived she saw him as himself, not illuminated by Kath or herself. As a result her need to know, father or not, released its choking grip on her a little.

She asked, ‘Why are you?’

He chose to ignore the question, but disarmed her. Talking almost to himself, he said, ‘Kath was unusual. She was alive, vibrating with life, like nothing else around.’ This time the gesture took in the extinguished town, as it must have been in the post-war years. Then and now, Harriet thought. ‘I used to love to see her, and listen to her. She lit everything up.’

‘I know. For a long time I haven’t bothered to see her as anyone but my mother. In the kitchen, cooking meals. Ordinary. Then all of a sudden I saw a young girl looking out of her face, when she told me about you. It’s one of the reasons why I wanted to meet you. I came from London to find you.’

As soon as the words were out, she knew that they would have been far better left unsaid. That she had come at all was a threat all over again, to have come a long way, with a list of reasons, was too much of an intrusion.

Simon looked at an old kitchen clock, almost obscured on the mantelpiece by sheaves of yellowing bills and papers. Harriet knew that they had been sitting at the table for almost two hours. Stiffly, but deliberately, he stood up.

‘I’m glad you came. I’m pleased to hear that Kath is well, and happy. She deserved that.’ He had asked her in, and she had accepted his hospitality. His courtesy would continue, but it was clear that she couldn’t hope for anything beyond it.

He held out his hand now, and reluctantly she shook it. ‘Perhaps you’ll give her my best wishes,’ Simon added. ‘I don’t think any other greeting would be appropriate, after thirty years.’ If there was a twitch of a smile, it was gone before Harriet could be sure. ‘This way,’ Simon said. ‘I’m sorry the passage is so dark.’

There was the crumbling hallway again, the front door and then the empty street. Simon shook her hand once again, as if she was the well-meaning but unwelcome official he had first taken her for, then closed the door.

The autumn afternoon was already almost over. There were yellow lights showing in two or three of the windows opposite, and in contrast with the cosiness Simon’s house seemed morbidly chilly and dark. Angry with herself, smarting with the rejection, Harriet began to walk away.

A small boy on roller skates rattled over the uneven paving stones, wobbled, and almost fell. He grabbed at her arm to save himself.

‘Be careful,’ Harriet warned, and he gaped up at her, dirty-faced and cheerful.

‘You’ve never been in there, have you?’ He jerked his head at Simon’s gate.

‘Yes, I have. Why not?’

He whistled, pretending admiration. ‘Cos he’s mad. My sister said. You want to watch he doesn’t get you.’ Delighted with his dire warning he launched himself off again.

Harriet watched him almost collide with Kath’s lamp-post. Even in her girlhood, Kath had said, the little children tended to avoid Simon’s house. Now, a solitary old man existing in a nest of newspapers and rubbish, he was a bogeyman to frighten another generation. Sadness for him overcame Harriet’s bitterness and hungry curiosity once more, and made her want to know about him for his own sake. She looked up at the house but it was obstinately dark.

Harriet turned away without any idea where she was heading. She walked the length of her grandparents’ old street, looking through the still-open curtains at the blue eyes of television sets, tea-tables, homework. She rounded a corner, went on without the intention of going anywhere.

At length she came to a park with elaborate railings, and took a tarmac path under some trees. A boy and a girl in school uniforms stood against the peeling bole of a plane tree, arms wrapped around each other, faces pressed together. Harriet passed them, came to a bench next to an overflowing litter bin. She sat down on the bench and dead brown leaves scuttled like insects around her feet.

She sat on the bench for a long time, without moving. She didn’t even think of going back to the station and the conclusion of the London train. The boy and girl drifted by, white faces turning to peer at her in the dusk, frightened of being spied on. Harriet waited until they were out of sight, then stood up and shook herself. She was cold, and swung her arms to warm her fingers as she headed for the sound of traffic on the main road.

In the centre of a parade of shops she came to an Indian restaurant. It was opening as everything else closed up, and Harriet peered past the menu, mounted in an arched wooden frame and set off with plush drapes, into an interior of white cloths and twinkly lights. She was hungry as well as cold.

The restaurant was completely empty. A waiter in a white jacket came forward, beaming at her, and they went through a pantomime of deciding which table would suit her best. She chose one beside a green-lit tank of morose tropical fish, and ordered a bottle of wine to go with her food, because there were no halves.

Harriet couldn’t remember ever having sat down alone to dinner in a restaurant. It seemed appropriate that she should do it here, where she had felt her isolation so strongly. Her awareness of it was just as strong, but it seemed to matter less now. She thought about Leo, and the hundreds of dinners they had shared. Her memories were affectionate, but Leo himself seemed a long way off. She didn’t wish that he was here with her, or that she would be going back to him.

The smiling waiter brought her lamb pasanda, paratha and saag ghosht, and poured out the wine for her.

‘You are living near here?’ He had a very dark face, and a gipsyish gap between his top teeth. Harriet smiled back.

‘No. I’ve come from London.’

‘Nice place,’ he told her. She wasn’t sure whether he meant here or there, but it didn’t matter. She suddenly felt comfortable, wedged between the fishtank and the tablecloth that looked purple and green under the multicoloured lights.

She ate everything, and drank most of the wine because she was thirsty and because the food was so spicy it made it seem innocuous. Afterwards, while she was drinking a cup of watery coffee, some other customers filtered in. A young couple stared covertly at her, and two businessmen talked in loud voices. The feeling of being at home vanished at once. She called for the bill and hurriedly paid it. Her waiter shook her hand as she left. ‘Come back again.’

‘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 fitted 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 triumph.

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.

‘So when did you make it? Where, and why?’

‘So many questions,’ Simon said.

Ever since he had let her in, her history and her questions had probed his defences. Kath would never have asked such questions. Kath had been absorbed in herself. Not unhealthily, but with the normal, sharp appetite of youth. Even thirty years ago she had made him feel old, because she was so fresh and full of juice. He had loved that. With Kath’s different, surprising daughter – who had come too close, in so short a time – beside him, he wondered whether he had loved the real Kath, or even known her. He felt angry with this girl because she threatened to distort a happy memory, a cherished one because so many other memories were not happy.

Simon didn’t want to look at the game now because it reawakened those other memories. He didn’t know what impulse had made him bring it out. He studied Kath’s daughter instead, as her fingers explored the old wood from Shamshuipo camp.

She didn’t look like her mother, even. Kath had been all curls and satiny curves. She had full, soft lips and a ready smile. This girl was lean and flat, and her close-cut hair made her look even more like a boy. As well as asking questions, she listened to the answers as if trying to memorise them. And her eyes moved quickly, taking in everything. Unlike her mother, she didn’t smile very often. She did laugh, in startling bursts, but it was a fierce kind of laughter, more like a man’s.

Simon didn’t think Harriet Trott was happy, but he did not attribute much significance to that. Happiness was not an expectation of his own, either.

‘Is this lettering? Chinese lettering?’

Questions.

‘It’s Japanese,’ Simon told her.

The dam burst with the words. Sights and sounds, smells that choked him, all flooded up. The stinking tide swept him away from his workbench, from his redoubt, to another place. He became another man.

Lieutenant Archer, Royal Artillery. Shamshuipo Prisoner of War Camp, Hong Kong, in the spring of 1942.

Simon stared into the gloom of his kitchen, not seeing the girl, blind to everything but the horror of the camp. He was back there in an instant, and he knew as always that nothing he had done or ever could do would obliterate what he had known in that place.

The smells were the worst.

Forty years later Simon Archer could try to close his eyes and muffle his ears, but the smells still crept inside his head to rot the bones of his skull.

There were dying men all around him. The dysentery buckets overflowed on to the concrete floors of the prison, and the sick men lay in their mess too weak to move.

The scents of putrefaction and death were part of the air itself, the principal flavours of the meagre portions of grey rice.

The smell had become a fifth limb that Lieutenant Archer dragged with him everywhere, even outside the camp to the working parties at Kai Tak airport, to the munitions dumps, wherever their Japanese captors herded them. The pains of hunger and sickness, perversely, seemed to be part of another man’s body, so that he could observe them without emotion. Sometimes he could hear other men moaning or screaming, but he made no sound himself. He could turn away from the sights, pitiful or nauseating, until quite soon he had no need to do even that much because they grew familiar through repetition, and he became as indifferent to them as were the rats that ran over them all where they lay.

It was only in the later years that the sights came back to torture him. Starvation, maltreatment and disease. In Shamshuipo Simon knew that was all that lay ahead for him and the five thousand other men in the camp. He began to regard the men who were dying, and those who were already dead, as the lucky ones.

But in answer there always came the thought of Rosemary, his wife, and the baby son he had never even seen, at home in England. Even though he knew in abstract what war meant at home, Simon always imagined his family with a soft glow around them, as if of firelight, and then he would painfully remember the sweetness of love and domesticity. The will to live returned, burning more brightly.

Lieutenant Archer, naked except for a loincloth knotted between his legs, crawling with vermin and exhausted from malnutrition and hard labour on building the Kai Tak runway, sat on a concrete floor and played with the broken end of a packing case. He turned the wooden strut in his hands and numbers ravelled in his head. In the filthy labyrinth their unassailable logic helped him to stay deaf and blind to everything around him.

Slowly, tenaciously, Simon began to devise a kind of numbers game. He needed markers, and so he collected buttons from decayed battledress. Out on a working party, he watched the ground for round, smooth pebbles and when he found them he held them in his mouth until the return to Shamshuipo.

While some of the men screamed out their misery and others gnawed silently on it, Simon tilted his packing case at an angle and let the round pebbles run down the slope. He thought of choices and options, all the fruitful possibilities of freedom that had been closed off to him, and he built them into his game instead. He tried to carve wishbone shapes from twigs, although he was past wishing, but he had no knife blade or other sharp instrument. He began to collect spent matches instead. The Japanese guards all smoked, and they dropped the matches like largesse. Even the men were able to smoke sometimes. They collected flies that swarmed through the camp and plagued their captors as indiscriminately as themselves. They sold them to the guards, one hundred dead flies per cigarette.

So Simon shuffled between sprawled bodies and picked up the burnt matches. He made a kind of glue from hoarded grains of wet, cooked rice, kneading them into a fine, grey paste. He stuck the matches together to make wishbones. The balls rolled, and dropped through the wishbone-gates when Simon opened them. He could open or close the gates, and so he had created minuscule choices for himself. With increased concentration he added the numbers, challenging himself with new and harder combinations, scratching the columns of figures with a white stone on to the concrete floor.

He hunched over his packing-case board as if it offered him freedom.

In time, the game attracted the attention of the other men, those who were still able to take notice of anything around them. Simon showed one or two of the men how to position the button markers, and to set the pebbles rolling to meet them along matchstick paths. None of them had energy or ingenuity to spare, and interest in Simon’s contraption soon flagged. He was able to keep it to himself, refining the apparatus and allowing the numbers to replicate cleanly inside his head.

The guards saw no reason to bother themselves with a contraption of sticks and stones, but still Simon generally kept it hidden under his scrap of blanket whenever one of them was near.

Then came a day when he was absorbed in watching the pebbles following the paths he had decreed for them, and so he didn’t see a guard they called the Fat Man making his way between recumbent prisoners. The Fat Man was stopping every few yards to point at a man, who was then jerked to his feet and hustled away. The Fat Man was choosing those men who still had some strength left. There was clearly some task waiting to be done by the few who still might be fit enough.

It was too late when Simon looked up. His eyes met the corpulent guard’s, who responded by pointing straight at him. With an automatic, belated movement Simon tried to cover up the packing case with his blanket. As the Fat Man’s fellows pulled him to his feet, Simon saw the guard’s eyes flicker inquisitively to his game. The pointing finger moved to it, and beckoned.

The game was pulled out for the Japanese to inspect.

Simon waited. There was nothing for him to do but watch. He saw the Fat Man’s big, shiny round face bend to the game, the rolls of flesh distending his filthy tunic, and the broad, black half-moons spreading under his armpits. As he stood there Simon caught his richly oily and fishy scent in symphonic contrast to the common stench of Shamshuipo.

The guard glanced at him, curiosity making sharp points of light in his flat black eyes.

‘What?’ the man asked Simon.

The Fat Man was hated for his knowledge of a few words of English as much as for his appearance and behaviour. Simon masked fear and disgust with a polite smile. He looked like a grinning skull.

He answered, ‘It’s a game. A game of skill and numerical calculation, involving the setting of two-way gates in various combinations to permit balls to reach pre-positioned markers via a kind of maze, or labyrinth. Each of the gates is awarded a numerical value, and the points scored are totalled when the balls reach their markers. Lowest score wins.’

The guard was staring at him, his face a suspicious mask. Simon knew that he couldn’t have understood more than two words of his mannerly explanation. He broadened his smile, and scooped up the tunic buttons to reposition them.

‘It goes like this. The numbers form a labyrinth of their own, a wonderfully logical structure that is colourless, odourless, beautiful and safe. Unlike this terrible place.’ The guard blinked. Simon let the pebbles drop along the matchstick gullies. Everyone watched them as they went.

The Fat Man’s face split like a pulpy fruit into a wide smile, to match Simon’s.

‘Crever,’ he said, and held out a huge hand for the buttons.

Simon let him play for himself. He could smell the man too strongly now, and he realised that his proximity was making him shiver with fear. The Fat Man was engrossed, but his companions called roughly to him. Reluctantly he lifted his head, and then thrust the packing case end back at Simon. He jerked a banana thumb to indicate that it should be stowed away again beneath the blanket. Simon did as he was ordered.

There was a moment then when the Fat Man considered him. Simon shrank, but there was nowhere to hide himself. And then, miraculously, the Fat Man shook his head. Simon understood that, whatever ordeal was being prepared for the few strong men, he was not going to be made part of it. The Fat Man lumbered on down the lines. Simon sat down in his place. He had no choice but to sit, because his legs gave way beneath him. His terror was the final weakness. None of the men who had been picked out ever came back. Simon never knew where or why they had been taken, but he supposed that in some way his game had saved his life. Afterwards, the Fat Man ignored him.

Simon kept the game hidden from that day on. It became a kind of lucky talisman. He believed that if he could keep it, he would survive.

When at last the Shamshuipo prisoners were moved from Hong Kong to Japan, Lieutenant Archer managed to smuggle his piece of packing case with him. It stayed with him in the new camp, thrust under his tatami mat. He sat on it and slept on it for two years. The years were terrible, but they were better than the ones that had passed in Hong Kong. Simon survived because he was set to work on the docks, and he could steal enough food to stay alive.

On 15 August, 1945, he heard a formal, measured voice speaking ornate phrases out of a Japanese foreman’s wireless. Soldiers and civilians were running, or standing frozen into stillness, some of them weeping. At the end of the Emperor’s speech, an interpreter scrambled up on to a platform of oil drums.

‘You are free, gentlemen. The war is over.’

A lorry-load of US paratroopers came to liberate the camp. They brought bread, and fruit, and tinned ham, candy and the unthinkable luxury of American beer. Simon took his packing-case game from under his mat and walked out of captivity with it wrapped in his arms. It was his only possession. Simon Archer reached England after four years spent as a prisoner of the Japanese. It was not, however, a return home. His wife and the baby son he had never seen had died in the bombing of Coventry, and he was not looking for a home without them.

This was what Simon told Harriet as she sat on his bench in the cold, cluttered room. She listened in silence, with only her eyes moving from the game to his face and away again, over the room’s shadows.

At the end, she touched the rough wood once more. Simon saw that he had told her enough. Her questions, at least for the time, had been answered. His body ached and his eyes burned. The assault of memories had left him feeling weak and helpless.

‘I’m tired,’ he told her. ‘It’s too late for you to go anywhere now. You’ll have to stay the night here.’

In silence, Harriet followed him upstairs. The room at the back of the house was chilly and dusty, but otherwise clean. He gave her yellowing sheets from a chest of drawers. They said good-night soberly, each of them stripped of the warm, temporary blanket of drink.

‘You won your five pounds,’ Simon said.

‘No, I didn’t. I prefer to take the direct route.’

‘Of course.’ There was perfectionism in her, as well as persistence. It didn’t surprise him that she was unhappy. But he didn’t pursue the thought. He wished that he had left the game in its hiding place. He was exhausted, and if he slept he was afraid that he would dream of Shamshuipo.

Harriet lay down wearing most of her clothes. The day seemed to have lasted for a very long time, or to have been taken up by a complicated journey. She was glad to have arrived at a destination, to bed in this unfamiliar room, where she could examine her impressions. They fitted together, after Simon’s story. The withdrawal and denial that had puzzled her became bare and understandable fact. She felt ashamed of her probing, now, and more ashamed because it had been motivated by her own self-centred hunger.

Harriet knew that she couldn’t offer Simon any comfort. Her own resources were meagre, and she doubted that even the most generous warmth could touch him now. But he had said that he was glad when she came back, with the courage of her curry and cheap white wine. And he had told her that he wished she was his daughter. There had been that, and the spurt of laughter, between them.

More than that. Harriet took the last of her impressions and fitted it into the picture. He had drawn the old packing case out of its hiding-place and shown it to her. She lay still, hearing the musical descent of the wooden balls as they followed their separate paths. It was simpler and more elegant than life, she thought. The only common factor was the will to win that they both engendered.

She hadn’t expected to sleep. But she did doze, and then fell into a series of disturbed dreams. When she woke it was in the dirty light of very early morning and the house was silent. She slid out of bed and put the top layer of her clothes on again, then crept downstairs to the kitchen. She had been intending to make herself a cup of tea because the drink of the night before had left her parched, but the chaos of the kitchen was uninviting. She used the kettle of boiling water for washing up instead, and worked her way through the piles of dirty plates and pans.

When that was done she cleared and wiped the table and the other surfaces, removing the most obvious rubbish and taking care to put the tools and clock pieces back exactly as she found them. She found herself humming as she worked, enjoying making order out of the mess. In the cupboard under the stairs, amongst more of Simon’s abandoned skeleton projects, she found a long-handled broom and ancient mop and bucket. She swept and washed the floor, and then peered into the shadowy larder that led off the kitchen. There was nothing in it. Simon must have produced yesterday’s tea-bag and eggs from some other hiding-place.

It was nine o’clock. Harriet picked up her bag and let herself out into the street, leaving Simon’s front door on the latch. She didn’t think that anyone would try to get in while she was away. She walked briskly to the Pakistani-owned corner shop that she had noticed two streets away.

‘Do you know Mr Archer?’ Harriet asked the woman in a sari who helped her to pack two bulging plastic carriers. She described him and the street.

The woman shook her head regretfully. ‘I do not. And we know most of the people here.’

Harriet was unpacking the shopping, arranging her purchases in the larder, when she heard Simon behind her. She swung round, almost guiltily. He looked at the packets and tins.

‘You should have accepted your winnings. That must have cost more than five pounds.’

‘The money isn’t important. I just wanted to get you some supplies.’

Simon regarded her and she blushed. He didn’t say anything, except, ‘I’ll make some tea.’

They sat in the same positions as the day before, and Harriet drank her tea gratefully and ate slices of bread and marmalade.

‘When is your train?’ Simon asked. He didn’t try to soften the implication. He wanted her to go and leave him alone again, in peace. Yesterday’s precarious intimacy had disappeared with his dreams of Japan. He didn’t want this girl interfering with his possessions, clumsily imposing a sort of order that only reminded him of how a different, parallel life might have been lived. He didn’t want her food, either. The bright packets belonged to the other, fertile life.

Harriet’s eyes dropped to her plate. ‘There are plenty of trains. I’ll catch one this morning. I should get back to work,’ she offered, making a necessity of departure.

Simon said, ‘Yes.’

When they had finished breakfast she washed the plates, put away the remainders. When that was done she surveyed the room, glad that she had been able to do something, however small, out of her impotence.

‘Thank you,’ Simon said kindly. He put out his hand and they shook, formally, as they had done at the beginning. He escorted her past the grandfather clock, back to the front door.

‘Wait a minute,’ he said. She watched him return to the kitchen, and come out with one of the empty bags from the corner shop. Then he went into his front room. Harriet saw the corner of one of the dismembered armchairs, and heard a drawer pulled open. When he came out again he was carrying the plastic bag, made square and heavy by the packing case end from Shamshuipo. He held it out to her.

Harriet looked at him in wonder.

‘Take it. It’s yours.’

‘You can’t mean that.’

‘I do. Do whatever you want with it.’

He was suddenly eager to have both of them out of the house. They had become entwined, in the dreams fuelled by unaccustomed whisky. He wanted them both gone, although he didn’t expect that the memories would vanish with them.

Harriet reached out, stiff-fingered, and took the bag from him.

‘Thank you,’ she said awkwardly. ‘I’ll take great care of it.’

‘Do whatever you want with it,’ he repeated. His voice was harsh.

He didn’t echo her final goodbye, but he stood with the door open until she had turned the corner.

Harriet walked back towards the station. This time she didn’t see the shops, or the people, or the relentless traffic. The carrier bag bumped rhythmically and aggressively against her legs. With each step she took, she heard the faint click of the wooden balls rolling together. It was as if the game had a life of its own.