A Woman of Our Times. Rosie Thomas

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,