Imagine the companionship of this man—in our poky, draughty place of work which vibrated ceaselessly to the rumblings of the City traffic outside; in the Highgate house with its flaking paintwork, damp walls and cracked crockery, and only the growlings of Mrs. Murdoch, the housekeeper, to break the monotony. Was I to be blamed for flying with relief from this emtombment to the arms of an impulsive, bright-minded, plumply attractive schoolteacher who—at thirty-five—was actually perturbed by the way the years were passing her by?
• • •
Ah, but in that last fact lay the seeds of marital catastrophe. Grandfather was right. A true Krepski, a true guardian of the Watch, should marry, if he is to marry at all, a plain, stupid and barren wife. Deborah was none of these things: She was that volatile phenomenon, a woman at what for women is a dangerous age, suddenly blessed with the prospect of womanhood fulfilled. Shall I describe our union as merely connubial? Shall I offer the picture of myself as the sober, steady, semi-paternal figure (I was eight years her elder) taking under my sheltering wing this slightly delicate, slightly frightened creature? No. Those first months were a whirlwind, a vortex into which I was sucked, gently at first and then with accelerating and uninhibited voracity. The walls of our first floor flat shook to the onslaughts of female passion; they echoed to Deborah’s screams (for at the height of ecstasy Deborah would scream, at an ear-splitting pitch). And I, an, at first, unwitting and passive instrument to all this, a clay figure into which life was rapidly pummeled and breathed, suddenly woke to the fact that for thirty years my life had been measured by clocks; that for people who are not Krepskis, Time is not a servant but an old and pitiless adversary. They have only so long on this earth and they want only to live, to have lived. And when the opportunity comes it is seized with predatory fury.
Deborah, how easy the choice might have been if I had not been a Krepski. Sometimes, in those early days, I would wake up, nestled by my wife’s ever-willing flesh and those years in Goswell Road would seem eclipsed: I was once more a boy—as on that audacious summer evening in Highgate—seduced by the world’s caress. But then, in an instant, I would remember my grandfather, waiting already at his work-bench, the Great Watch ticking in his pocket, the clock-making, time-enslaving blood that flowed in his and my veins.
How easy the choice if passion were boundless and endless. But it is not, that is the rub; it must be preserved before it perishes and put in some permanent form. All men must make their pact with history. The spring-tide of marriage ebbs, we are told, takes on slower, saner, more effectual rhythms; the white-heat cools, diffuses, but is not lost. All this is natural, and has its natural and rightful object. But it was here that Deborah and I came to the dividing of the ways. I watched my wife through the rusting iron railings of the playground of the primary school where sometimes I met her at lunch-time. There was a delicate, wholesome bloom on her cheeks. Who would have guessed where that bloom came from? Who could have imagined what wild abandon could seize this eminently respectable figure behind closed doors and drawn curtains?
Yet that abandon was no longer indulged; it was withheld, denied (I had come to relish it) and would only be offered freely again in exchange for a more lasting gift. And who could mistake what that gift must be, watching her in the playground, her teacher’s whistle round her neck, in the midst of those squealing infants, fully aware that my eyes were on her; patting on the head, as though to make the point unmistakable, now a pugnacious boy with grazed knees, now a Jamaican girl with pigtails?
Had I told her, in all this time, about the Great Watch? Had I told her that I might outlive her by perhaps a century and that our life together—all in all to her—might become (so, alas, it has) a mere oasis in the sands of memory? Had I told her that my grandfather, whom she thought a doughty man of seventy-five, was really twice that age? And had I told her that in us Krepskis the spirit of fatherhood is dead? We do not need children to carry our image into the future, to provide us with that overused bulwark against extinction.
No. I had told her none of these things. I held my tongue in the vain—the wishful?—belief that I might pass in her eyes for an ordinary mortal. If I told her, I assured myself, would she not think I was mad? And, then again, why should I not (was it so great a thing?) flout the scruples which were part of my heritage and give a child to this woman with whom, for a brief period at least, I had explored the timeless realm of passion?
Our marriage entered its fourth year. She approached the ominous age of forty. I was forty-seven, a point at which other men might recognise the signs of age but at which I felt only the protective armour of the Watch tighten around me, the immunity of Krepskihood squeeze me like an iron maiden. Dear Father Stefan, I prayed in hope. But no answering voice came from the cold depths of the Skaggerak or the Heligoland Bight. Instead I imagined a ghostly sigh from far off Poland—and an angry murmuring, perhaps, closer to hand, as Great-grandfather Stanislaw turned in his Highgate grave.
And I looked each day into the tacitly retributive eyes of my grandfather.
Deborah and I waged war. We bickered, we quarrelled, we made threats. And then at last, abandoning all subterfuge, I told her.
She did not think I was mad. Something in my voice, my manner told her that this was not madness. If it had been madness, perhaps, it would have been easier to endure. Her face turned white. In one fell stroke her universe was upturned. Her stock of love, her hungry flesh, her empty womb were mocked and belittled. She looked at me as if I might have been a monster with two heads or a fish’s tail. The next day she fled—“left me” is too mild a term—and, rather than co-exist another hour with my indefinite lease on life, returned to her mother, who—poor soul—was ailing, in need of nursing, and shortly to die.
Tick-tock, tick-tock. The invalid clocks clanked and wheezed on the shelves in Goswell Road. Grandfather showed tact. He did not rub salt in the wound. Our reunion even had, too, its brief honeymoon. The night of Deborah’s departure I sat up with him in the house at Highgate and he recalled, not with the usual dry deliberateness but with tender spontaneity, the lost Poland of his youth. Yet this very tenderness was an ill omen. Men of fantastic age are not given to nostalgia. It is the brevity of life, the rapid passage of finite years, that gives rise to sentiment and regret. During my interlude with Deborah a change had crept over my grandfather. The air of stagnancy, the fixation in the eyes were still there but what was new was that he himself seemed aware of these things as he had not before. Sorrow shadowed his face, and weariness, weariness.
The shop was on its last legs. Anyone could see there was no future in it; and yet for Grandfather, for me, there was, always, future. We pottered away, in the musty workroom, eking out what scant business came our way. The Great Watch, that symbol of Time conquered ticking remorselessly in Grandfather’s waistcoat, had become, we knew, our master. Sometimes I dreamt wildly of destroying it, of taking a hammer to its invulnerable mechanism. But how could I have committed an act so sacrilegious, and one which, for all I knew, might have reduced my grandfather, in an instant to dust?
We worked on. I remember the hollow mood—neither relief nor reluctance but some empty reflex between the two—with which we shut the shop each night at six and made our journey home. How we would sit, like two creatures sealed in a bubble, as our number 43 trundled up the Holloway Road, watching the fretfulness of the evening rush (how frenzied the activity of others when one’s own pace is slow and interminable) with a cold rep-tilean stare.
Ah, happy restless world, with oblivion waiting to solve its cares.
Ah, lost Deborah, placing gladioli on the grave of her mother.
The sons, and grandsons, of the ordinary world do their duty by their sires. They look after them in their twilight years. But what if twilight never falls?
By the summer of my grandfather’s hundred and sixty-second year I could endure no more. With the last dregs of my feeble savings I rented a cottage in the Sussex downs. My aim was to do what necess
ity urged: to sell up the shop; to find myself a job with a steady income by which I might support Grandfather and myself. Admittedly, I was now fifty-five, but my knowledge of clocks might find me a place with an antique dealer’s or as sub-curator in some obscure museum of horology. In order to attempt all this, Grandfather had first to be lured to a safe distance.
This is not to say that the cottage was merely an—expensive—expedient. One part of me sincerely wished my grandfather to stop peering into the dusty orbs of clocks and to peer out again at the World—even the tame, parochial world of Sussex. Ever lurking in my mind was the notion that age ripens, mellows and brings it own, placid contentments. Why had not his unique length of years afforded my grandfather more opportunity to enjoy, to savour, to contemplate the world? Why should he not enter now an era of meditative tranquillity, of god-like congruence with Nature? Youth should bow to age not only in duty but in veneration. Perhaps I had always been ashamed—perhaps it was a source of secret despair for my own future—that my grandfather’s years had only produced in him the crabbed, cantankerous creature I knew. Perhaps I hoped that extraordinary age might have instilled in him extraordinary sagacity. Perhaps I saw him—wild, impossible vision—turning in his country hermitage into some hallowed figure, a Sussex shaman, a Wise Man of the Downs, an oracle to whom the young and foolish world might flock for succour.
Or perhaps my motive was simpler than this. Perhaps it was no more than that of those plausible, burdened sons and daughters who, with well-meaning looks and at no small cost, place their parents in Homes, in order to have them out of sight and mind—in order, that is, to have them safely murdered.
My clinching argument was that, though all that would be left of Krepski and Krepski would be the Great Watch, yet that all would be all-in-all. And as a preliminary concession I agreed to spend a first experimental weekend with him at the cottage.
We travelled down on a Friday afternoon. It was one of those close, sullen high-summer days which make the flesh crawl and seem to bring out from nowhere swarms of flying insects. Grandfather sat in his seat in the railway carriage and hid his face behind a newspaper. This, like the weather, was a bad sign. Normally, he regarded papers with disdain. What did the news of 1977 mean to a man born in 1808? Almost by definition, papers were tokens of man’s subjection to time; their business was ephemerality. Yet recently, so I had noticed, he had begun to buy them and to read them almost with avidity; and what his eyes went to first were reports of accidents and disasters, sudden violent deaths …
Now and then, as we passed through the Surrey suburbs, he came out from behind his screen. His face was not the face of a man travelling towards rejuvenating horizons. It was the petrified face of a man whom no novelty can touch.
The Sussex downs, an hour from London, still retain their quiet nooks and folds. Our cottage—one of a pair let by some palm-rubbing local speculator as weekend retreats—stood at one end of the village and at the foot of one of these characteristic, peculiarly female eminences of the Downs, referred to in the Ordnance Survey map as a beacon. In spite of the sticky heat, I proposed this as the object of a walk the day after our arrival. The place was a noted viewpoint. Let us look down, I thought, us immortals, at the world.
Grandfather was less enthusiastic. His reluctance had nothing to do with his strength of limb. The climb was steep, but Grandfather despite his years, was as fit as a man of forty. His unwillingness lay in a scarcely concealed desire to sabotage and deride this enterprise of mine. He had spent the first hours after our arrival shambling around the cottage, not bothering to unpack his things, inspecting the oak timbers, the “traditional fireplace” and the “charming cottage garden” with an air of acid distaste, and finally settling heavily into a chair in just the same hunched manner in which he settled into his habitual chair in Highgate or his work stool at the shop. Long life ought to elicit a capacity for change. But it is the opposite (I know it well). Longevity encourages intransigence, conservatism. It teaches you to revert to type.
The sultry weather had not freshened. Half way up the slope of the beacon we gave up our ascent, both of us in a muck-sweat. Even at this relative height no breezes challenged the leaden atmosphere, and the famous view, northwards to the Weald of Kent, was lost in grey curtains of haze and the shadows of black, greasy clouds. We sat on the tussocked grass, recovering our breath, Grandfather a little to one side and below me, mute as boulders. The silence hanging between us was like an epitaph upon my futile hopes: Give up this doomed exercise.
And yet, not silence. That is, not our silence—but the silence in which we sat. A silence which, as our gasps for breath subsided, became gradually palpable, audible, insistent. We sat, listening, on the warm grass, ears pricked like alert rabbits. We forgot our abortive climb. When had we last heard such silence, used as we were to the throbbing traffic of the Goswell Road? And what a full, what a tumultuous silence. Under the humid pressure of the atmosphere the earth was opening up its pores and the silence was a compound of its numberless exhalations. The downs themselves—those great feminine curves of flesh—were tingling, oozing. And what were all the components of this massive silence—the furious hatching of insects, the sighing of the grass, the trill of larks, the far-off bleat of sheep—but the issue of that swelling pregnancy? What, in turn, was that pregnancy, pressing, even as we sat, into our puny backsides, but the pregnancy of Time?
Old, they say, as the hills. Grandfather sat motionless, his face turned away from me. For a moment, I imagined the tough, chalk-scented grass spreading over him, rising round him to make of him no more than a turf cairn. On the Ordnance Survey maps were the acne-marks of neolithic barrows and Iron Age earthworks.
Silence. And the only noise, the only man-made obtrusion into that overpowering silence was the tick of Great-grandfather’s Watch.
We began to descend. Grandfather’s face wore a look of gloom; of humility, of pride, of remorse, contrition—despair.
The night was quick in coming, hastened by the louring clouds. And it brought the appropriate conditions—a drop in temperature, a clash of air currents—to release the pent up explosion. As the electricity in the atmosphere accumulated, so Grandfather grew increasingly restless. He began to pace about the cottage, face twitching, darting black scowls in my direction. Twice, he got out the Watch, looked at it as if on the verge of some dreadful decision, then with an agonised expression returned it to his pocket. I was afraid of him. Thunder clattered and lightning flashed in the distance. And then, as if an invisible giant had taken a vast stride, a wind tore at the elm trees in the lane, half a dozen unfamiliar doors and windows banged in the cottage, and the bolts from heaven seemed suddenly aimed at a point over our heads. Grandfather’s agitation intensified accordingly. His lips worked at themselves. I expected them to froth. Another whirlwind outside. I went upstairs to fasten one of the banging windows. When I returned he was standing by the front door, buttoning his raincoat.
“Don’t try to stop me!”
But I could not have stopped him if I had dared. His mania cast an uncrossable barrier around him. I watched him pass out into the frenzied air. Barely half a minute after his exit the skies opened and rain lashed down.
I was not so obtuse as to imagine that my grandfather had gone for a mere stroll. But something kept me from pursuing him. I sat in a rocking chair by the “traditional fireplace,” waiting and (discern my motive if you will) even smiling, fixedly, while the thunder volleyed outside. Something about the drama of the moment, something about this invasion of the elements into our lives I could not help but find (like the man who grins idiotically at his executioner) gratifying.
And then I acted. The beacon: that was the best place for storm watching. For defying—or inviting—the wrath of the skies. I reached for my own waterproof and walking shoes and strode out into the tumult.
During a thunder-storm, in Thuringia, so the story goes, Martin Luther broke down, fell to his knees, begged the Almighty for forgi
veness and swore to become a monk. I am not a religious man—had I not been brought up to regard a certain timepiece as the only object of worship?—but that night I feared for my soul; that night I believe a God was at work, directing my steps to the scene of divine revenge. The thunder beat its drum. By the intermittent flashes of lightning I found my way to the slopes of the beacon; but, once there, it seemed I did not need a guide to point my course—I did not need to reach the top and stand there like some demented weathercock. The downs are bald, bold formations and in the magnesium-glare of lightning any features could be picked out. Clinging to the incline was a solitary clump of trees, of the kind which, on the downs, are said to have a druidical significance. I needed to go no further. One of the trees had been split and felled by a scimitar of lightning. Grandfather lay lifeless beside its twisted wreckage, an anguished grimace frozen on his face. And in his waistcoat pocket, beneath his sodden coat and jacket, the Great Watch, its tiny, perfect, mechanical brain ignorant of storms, of drama, of human catastrophe, still ticked indifferently.
Help me, powers that be! Help me, Father Time! I stood in the crematorium, the last of the Krepskis, the Great Watch ticking in my pocket. Flames completed on Grandfather the work of the lightning, and reduced, in a matter of seconds, his one-hundred-and-sixty-year-old body to cinders. That day, a day so different—a tranquil, golden August day—from that night of death, I could have walked away and become a new man. I could have traced my steps—only a short distance—to the school playground where Deborah still stood among her frolicking brood, and asked to be reconciled. Her mother; my grandfather. The chastening bonds of bereavement.
I could have flung the Watch away. Indeed, I considered having it incinerated with Grandfather’s corpse—but the rules of crematoria are strict on such matters. And did I not, that same afternoon, having attended the perfunctory reading of a barren will at a solicitor’s in Chancery Lane, walk on the Thames Embankment, under the plane trees, holding the Watch in my sweating hand and daring myself to throw it? Twice I drew back my arm and twice let it fall. From the glinting river the waterborne voice of my father said, Why not? Why not? But I thought of Grandfather’s ashes, still warm and active in their urn (surely when one lives the best part of two centuries one does not die so quickly?). I thought of Great-grandfather Stanislaw, and of his forebears, whose names I knew like a litany—Stanislaw senior, Kasimierz, Ignacy, Tadeusz. In the curving reaches of the Thames I saw what I had never seen: the baroque spires of Lublin; the outstretched plains of Poland.