The Rendezvous and Other Stories Page 14

  The cylindrical hairspring contracted, swelled, contracted, the pulsation of a metal heart: he could not see the slow, even swing of the balance-wheel, but behind the links of the fusee, taut between the helix and the drum, he caught the recurrent flash of the scape-wheel pinion: the soft gleam of brass in the grey light was like the ever-returning wink of a lighthouse, impersonal, utterly reliable, continuing an indefinite series that drew out towards infinity; and in time the beautiful monotony steadied his mind. Now he could think more evenly of the prospects of the lengthened day.

  They were horrible. But they were not so horrible as thinking of the garden and of all those other things that had once filled his life. Some of them he had cut out deliberately: he had amputated them when each in turn had threatened to grow into an exclusive obsession. Seeing his friends, for example; and his exact system of economy – that had been one of the hardest, but he had succeeded in the end, and now his rows of account books, with every item of expenditure balanced against each incoming penny, had remained unopened these many years. It had been so delightful to calculate the market cost of the garden produce: the bees had had their ledger too: and it had been such a keen triumph to deny himself for the reward of carrying over a surplus from one month to the next. But now he spent as he chose, not even taking a note of it; and in the second drawer of his desk the dividend vouchers piled up, still uncounted; and somewhere there was a clip of uncashed cheques.

  This amputation had been successful, but it had required a dreadful effort: other things had fallen away of themselves. He had deliberately shut his door to callers, but he had never of set purpose opposed himself to books or music. Yet the one was as successful as the other, and it would now mean as much forbidden and indeed impossible effort to open the piano and play as to open the door and engage in conversation with a casual visitor.

  They had shredded away, all these things – all positive action, all doing, had retreated obediently to the other side of what was tolerable. When he got up now, he would slip on his dressing-gown. More than that would be – he wrenched away from the thought.

  What do fleas do when they are not biting? he wondered. Or dogs, when they are not fighting, eating or being taken for a walk – house dogs? They must fall back into the stagnant pool of time. What a universal cruelty, repeated throughout an infinity of members, to be suspended in the fantastically deliberate flow of time, with no possible escape but the even greater horror of the farther limit, where there was no time at all. For very small creatures perhaps it would be worse: a day might be a year for them, by reason of their size.

  Oh the days and the unending hours, he thought, turning his head from side to side. Yet all the time one’s body lived eagerly in the flow: hair and nails – every night his unwanted beard thrust up another hundredth of an inch; and continuously, without a second’s pause, his skin renewed itself, thrust on by innumerable subtle needless combinations of blind vitality.

  Why should the clocks alone have stayed? There seemed to be no reason for their permanence, but in the next room, among the desert of unopened books, there was his workbench, clean, sharp-angled and precise with its rows of tools, broaches, dies and taps, throws, pliers of different shapes and sizes, all ranged so exactly that by now he could pick up each separate tool without taking his eyes from his work. This perfect arrangement called for years and years of use, but then of course he had begun years and years ago. To begin with the old grandfather in the hall could not be made to go: the watchmaker in the village was ill, so he had tinkered with it himself. A common thirty-hour movement, no more, but the simple mechanism, the wonderfully clear train of cause and effect, fascinated him and when he eventually mastered it, when the clock was ticking comfortably, he felt the strangest triumph. He bought books on clocks and even began to collect them in a small way: with the pleasure they brought him came the reproaches of his conscience – it was excessive and disproportionate to spend twelve hours a day for a week in wrestling inexpertly (he was inexpert then) with the escapement of a repeating verge – but in this case, and in this case alone, the reproach died of itself. The proposition that clocks should go was unanswerable. It was of absolute importance that they should go, should measure time exactly, and he concentrated all his powers to the task. He also bought more clocks.

  ‘Well,’ Dr Provis said, almost the last time he ever came to the house, ‘I suppose it is a harmless way of killing time.’ The remark was approving in substance but it was delivered with a kind of sneer: resenting this, he countered with a shrug of his shoulders and a half turn of his body. ‘Ha, ha,’ he replied. ‘I think there is a difference, Provis, between killing time and measuring it.’

  And then again, the full significance apart, this was an activity in which he could control all the factors: for clocks, rightly adjusted, would go; they had none of the intolerably frustrating imponderables of living things, yet for him they were alive enough. They exactly suited him; and his somewhat inhuman persistence suited them.

  But in the last eighteen months the area of his pleasure had contracted. By now he had a very high degree of skill; he could cut a pair of pallets for any escapement the old clockmakers had ever made, and in case of need he could even produce a new scape wheel. But a new scape wheel was now a few hours’ work: once it had been the toil of weeks, and once he had felt a tingling elation as the new wheel first revolved, ticked, and swung the doubtful pendulum. And by now he had an example of every variant; there was no new principle to be explored, and by the rules of his conscience he could not clutter up his house with clocks that would essentially be no more than duplicates of those he had already. Nor, now that he had the highest degree of manual ability, could he interfere with a clock that was going perfectly. Once, with no more than a half-imagined hint of irregularity, he had felt justified in stripping a clock and searching over every part of it, perfecting as he went; but he could not do so now. It must not be blind activity, doing for the sake of doing: it had to have the dignity of an end in view. That was a discipline which he must never, never break, or the whole thing would fall into an incoherent mockery.

  He could do it all now, verge pallets, deadbeat pallets, ordinary anchor pallets … abruptly he remembered his evening’s work. To make a long night’s sleep more sure he had stayed up to finish the pallets of the small Knibb clock. He had finished the work entirely: he should have kept it for today. Without it the grey hours stretched away in an endless plain without anything at all to break the horrifying blank.

  He lay there with the utter vacancy before him, and if no relief had come he might have screamed at last. But at a few minutes to six the arm lifted from the locking plate of the Graham bracket clock; the detent wheel spun three-quarters of a turn; the hoop wheel moved the distance of two pinion leaves; the clock was ready to strike six. It was immediately followed by the others. His practised ear heard the cocking of the clocks, and a springing hope made his thin heart beat.

  There was no hope from the Knibb clock: that would be going accurately, with no shadow of a doubt. It was perfectly in beat and he had regulated its pendulum to the last hairs-breadth: he knew that clock. But it seemed to him that in his sleep he had heard the Tompion drop a stroke, as if the locking plate were worn: it had given trouble seven years before. Unless it were a dream it would be the Tompion, and it would probably have happened at three – he heard them through his sleep, he knew. And if that were so it would now strike five, not six. Five strokes instead of six: it would be an escape, a reprieve for one more day at least.

  He listened intently, breathing shallow not to make a noise. The hands of the two chronometers crept in perfect unison towards the point of six. In the next room an assembly of long-case clocks, bracket clocks, wall clocks and table clocks stood poised to bell out the time. Only the equation clocks and the big regulator would not say anything: they had no bells. The others, the converted Cromwellian lantern clock, the early Fromanteel, the Tompion, the Graham deadbeat, the Mudge, the Quare,
the Harrison, had all raised their striking trains. They stood there in no order, here and there about the book-lined room: he cared nothing for the beauty of their cases and some rested on rough trial benches, stripped of their hoods and covered from the dust with glass bell jars. Their ticking filled the room with a strange, depressingly urgent confusion of sound as they flicked the present by. Brass and iron insects, horrifying in their nakedness and numbers, perpetually eating time.

  He waited, and as the moment drew nearer and nearer he clenched his fists under the bedclothes.

  The first clock dropped and whirred; the pin gathered the tail of the hammer and bore down upon it. The first stroke rang out pure, but the second was lost in the clangour of the other clocks, whirring, striking faster or slower, all bawling out that it was six, pinning the moment down.

  Straining his head up from his pillow he followed the deep, smooth tone of the Tompion through the competing din. At the fourth stroke his expression changed, and at the fifth his face lost its humanity. Now there was the racing pause between the fifth stroke of that one bell and the sound of the sixth, if it should ever come. The pause lengthened at last beyond the possibility of another stroke – it had missed for sure; but until the last of the clocks had finished, the Graham with its melancholy toll, his face did not change. Only then, when the last sound had died to a humming in the bell, did he allow his strained-up head to move. It sank down, and his eyelids fluttered over his eyes; but in another minute he was up, his fingers twitching with activity. He threw the dressing-gown over his shoulders and shuffled quickly to the door: and as he opened it he lowered his head to conceal the pale smile on his face.

  The Chian Wine

  WHEN FIRST HE CAME TO Saint-Felíu the middle and indeed the dark ages still hung about the streets, while the beach was classical antiquity itself. The village was so heavily fortified, with two castles, five towers and a massive surrounding wall – so heavily fortified against the Spaniards, the Algerine corsairs and the inhuman people from the neighbouring province that there was little room for the three thousand inhabitants. In the course of centuries they had crammed their houses into narrow winding lanes, so close that their roofs, viewed from the nearby hills, resembled a swarm of bees, with never an open place to be seen.

  Hanging from his window over one of these deep lanes in the hope of air – he had been ordered to the Mediterranean for the air – Alphard saw a world he had imagined long past and gone: in those days mules paced by; women with loads poised on their heads – heads that turned slowly, with infinite grace, to watch the town-crier as he beat his drum and announced death or the arrival of goat-cheese in the market-place. Tumblers appeared, a family of dumb acrobats; they spread a dusty mat on the cobbles and tumbled there in the street, turning somersaults and contorting their lithe dusty bodies until it seemed they must come apart, while their dumb, thin-faced children looked up with open hands to the windows, catching the sparse shower of little coins: and at All Hallows a Basque brought his dancing bear – they slept together, by arrangement, in the cellar of Alphard’s house. The life of the village went on in the street. At noon the men lit fires of vine-cuttings outside their doors, and the smell of grilling fish wafted up; family quarrels also came out into the open, and once he saw a stone-faced woman bring a chair and sit outside a door all day and half the night until her husband should come out. Every morning the women carried pots of filth mixed with ashes to the edge of the sea; every morning they and their daughters went to the pump recessed into the opposite house for water; every evening the grandmothers came back from the hills loaded with an immense faggot, held by a band across their foreheads. Every evening the ass that belonged to Alphard’s landlord picked its way through the people, through the innumerable dogs and cats, and walked up the ladder-like stairs, followed some minutes later by its master, a man with a fair-sized vineyard and a market-garden, and one of the few who did not go out with the fishing-boats. The fishermen all had vineyards too in the terraced hills behind; and as peasants they lived by the rhythm of the sun for half the year, rising before dawn and sleeping in the heat of the day; in the due seasons they worked, sprayed, sulphured and pruned their vines, and every autumn, when the grapes came home in narrow carts or in eared tubs slung to the saddles of hump-backed mules – brass-studded, old crimson saddles – the streets ran purple and the smell of fermenting wine hung over the town. But as fishermen they lived by the moon, rising according to its motions and gathering in the darkness at the gate that gave on to the open strand. Sometimes they came back at moon-set, sometimes not until the bell was ringing for high mass, but more usually at dawn; and when, as it often happened, the cock upstairs made sleep impossible, Alphard would go down to watch them.

  It was here on the beach that the ancient world showed purest: with his back to the town he could forget the two or three thousand intervening years. The sea was timeless, of course; and apart from the baroque church on his left the shore-line too was quite unchanged. The long, brilliantly-painted, high-prowed boats with pagan symbols on their bows might have been launched for the siege of Troy: the men who sailed them, rounding the jetty under their archaic lateen sails or sweeping in when the breeze failed them, might have been bringing back the Golden Fleece. In fact they usually brought anchovies; and when the catch was heavy they would heave to there at the edge of the sea, picking the silver fish out of their nets, tossing them into baskets. They would then carry the baskets up the beach – a line of men in red Phrygian caps and washed-blue drawers staggering abreast through the shingle with these gleaming fish between them, while their house-cats came running out, tails erect, each to its own basket. One day, when he was watching, a fisherman handed him a small amphora: after the south-east gales they often came up in the nets, tearing the delicate mesh, and usually the men broke them on the gunwale to make sure they would sink for good; but this was a neat little jar; it had done no harm; and Joseph thought Monsieur Alphard might like to have it, the seal being still intact.

  It was indeed: beneath the incrustations of the sea the wax stated that Aristolochus of Chios had made this wine; and beneath the seal the wine, or at least a liquid of some sort, could be heard and felt. ‘I shall try it some day,’ said Alphard, setting it on a tripod from the hearth. ‘Wine of the nth Olympiad! I shall try it one day, when I have good news.’

  Now ten and twenty years had passed, a generation and more, and the wine still stood among the books, its seal unbroken. Alphard himself looked much the same, though his hair was greyer still, his sight was dim, his taste for music and for reading had almost gone, and even his longing for salvation; and his long solitary walks had shrunk to an occasional stroll along the jetty: his heart was quite shrivelled with habitual woe and its consequent selfishness; but he still cared for his everlasting bird and for the mice that came for its seed. He still looked with automatic eagerness for a letter in the morning, although by now he would not have known what to do with it if it had come; he still divided his morning, after early mass and the post, between Le Monde and the Gazette de Lausanne, lunched at home with his bird on a piece of cheese, dined at the Café du Commerce, and then sat for an hour or two over his coffee on the terrace, watching the passers-by and the sea beyond. He had become inured to the tragedy of growing old; his jets of rebellion had faded, and he knew that presently he too must die – he could hear the crier’s voice announcing it before the goat’s cheese and the eels. Yet still for the children of the village Monsieur Alphard in his dark and shabby suit was as unchanging and as little noticed as the clock-tower.

  But Saint-Felíu had changed, changed almost out of recognition. Pert white houses had sprung up outside the walls, with red-brick well-heads over nothing, gnomes, plastic storks; drains carried the filth into the viscid sea, now spoilt at last; water ran in every house; bottled gas or electricity had replaced the faggot-bearers; the braying of the conch was no longer heard, announcing a haul of mackerel, to be given to anyone who chose to bring a dish; wh
at was left of the fishing-fleet ran on diesel-oil, distributed by a scarlet pump in the sea-gate itself; and the well-clothed younger generation no longer spoke the ancient tongue. At the autumn fair of the patron saint raucous microphones had replaced the human voice; the bear, the magpie that picked your fortune from the cards, the sword-swallower, the performing fleas, the fire-eater, were no longer to be seen, nor the pig-faced woman; and the hand-cranked roundabout had given way to an enormous whirling mass of supersonic planes. Hotels abounded – the Café du Commerce was now the fifty-roomed Commanderie du Soleil – and in high summer the villagers wandered like strangers among the tourist hordes: out of an obscure sense of shame the men had laid aside their red caps and broad sashes and the women their white lace coiffes. The ass and the poultry had long since vanished from Alphard’s house. After a marriage the sheets no longer hung from the window: no ribald voice called up ‘How much for a pint of pigeon’s blood?’

  ‘Yet still,’ he said to Halevy as they sat there after dinner, ‘the spirit of the place is quite unaltered. This is not the Spanish coast, whose soul has gone, quite gone. Whatever you may say, these people have kept their integrity: this is a true, an eternal microcosm …’

  ‘When I used to come here as a boy,’ said Halévy, ‘Louise made the best fish soup known to man – pounded lobster-claws, a sea-devil’s liver, the garlicked bread singing from the pan. Now she has hired a fellow with a tall white cap, and the soup comes out of a packet: I detected the criminal industrial crumbs, uncooked, this very evening. And this is not even the tourist-season. There is no excuse. No: it breaks my heart to contradict you, but these people have lost their sense of beauty. The doctored wine alone, and what they buy from me, must convince you of that. Here too the past has died: two thousand years of tradition have died! There is no bridge between the jet-age and the past.’