In every respect my grandfather was the disciple and image of my great-grandfather. He worked long and hard at the workshop in East London where he and Stanislaw, though blessed among mortals, still laboured at the daily business of our family. As he grew older—and still older—he acquired the solemn, vigilant and somewhat miserly looks of my great-grandfather. In 1900 he was the only remaining son and heir—for Stanislaw, by wondrous self-discipline, considering his length of years, had refrained from begetting further children, having foreseen the jealousies and divisions that the watch might arouse in a large family.
Feliks thus became the guardian of the watch which had now ticked away unwound for little short of a century. Its power was undiminished. Feliks lived on to the age of one hundred and sixty-one. He met his death, in brazen and spectacular fashion, but a few years ago, from a bolt of lightning, whilst walking in a violent storm in the Sussex downs. I myself can bear witness to his vigour, both of body and mind, at that more-than-ripe old age. For I myself watched him tramp off defiantly on that August night. I myself pleaded with him to heed the fury of the weather. And, after he failed to return, it was I who discovered his rain-soaked body, at the foot of a split tree, and pulled from his waistcoat pocket, on the end of its gold chain, the Great Watch—still ticking.
• • •
But what of my father? Where was he while my grandfather took me in charge? That is another story—which we shall come to shortly. One of perversity and rebellion, and one, so my grandfather was never slow to remind me, which cast a shadow on our family honour and pride.
You will note that I mave made no mention of the womenfolk of our family. Futhermore, I have said that Stanislaw took what must be considered some pains to limit his progeny. Increase in years, you might suppose, would lead to increase in issue. But this was not so—and Great-grandfather’s feat was, perhaps, not so formidable. Consider the position of a man who has the prospect before him of extraordinary length of years and who looks back at his own past as other men look at history books. The limits of his being, his “place in time,” as the phrase goes, the fact of his perishability begin to fade and he begins not to interest himself in those means by which other men seek to prolong their existence. And of these, what is more universal than the begetting of children, the passing on of one’s own blood?
Because they were little moved by the breeding instinct my great-grandfather and my grandfather were little moved by women. The wives they had—both of them got through three—followed very much the Oriental pattern where women are little more than the property of their husbands. Chosen neither for their beauty nor fecundity but more for blind docility, they were kept apart from the masculine mysteries of clock-making and were only acquainted with the Great Watch on a sort of concessionary basis. If the only one of them I knew myself—my grandfather’s last wife Eleanor—is anything to go by, they were slavish, silent, timid creatures, living in a kind of bemused remoteness from their husbands (who, after all, might be more than twice their age).
I remember my grandfather once expatiating on the reasons for this subjection and exclusion of women. “Women, you see,” he warned, “have no sense of time, they do not appreciate the urgency of things—that is what puts them in their place”—an explanation which I found unpersuasive then, perhaps because I was a young man and not uninterested in young women. But the years have confirmed the—painful—truth of my grandfather’s judgement. Show me a woman who has the same urgency as a man. Show me a woman who cares as much about the impending deadline, the ticking seconds, the vanishing hours. Ah yes, you will say, this is masculine humbug. Ah yes, I betray all the prejudice and contempt which ruined my brief marriage—which has ruined my life. But look at the matter on a broader plane. In the natural order of things it is women who are the longer lived. Why is this? Is it not precisely because they lack urgency—that urgency which preoccupies men, which drives them to unnatural subterfuges and desperate acts, which exhausts them and ushers them to an early death?
But urgency—despite his words—was not something that showed much in my grandfather’s face. Understandably. For endowed with a theoretically infinite stock of time, what cause did he have for urgency? I have spoken of my elders’ miserly and watchful looks. But this miserliness was not the miserliness of restless and rapacious greed; it was the contented, vacant miserliness of the miser who sits happily on a vast hoard of money which he has no intention of spending. And the watchfulness was not a sentry-like alertness; it was more the smug superciliousness of a man who knows he occupies a unique vantage point. In fact it is true to say, the longer my forefathers lived, the less animated they became. The more they immersed themselves in their obsession with time, the more they sank in their actions into mechanical and unvarying routine, tick-tocking their lives out like the miraculous instrument that enabled them to do so.
They did not want excitement, these Methuselahs, they dreamt no dreams. Nothing characterises more my life with my grandfather than the memory of countless monotonous evenings in the house he had at Highgate—evenings in which my guardian (that man who was born before Waterloo) would sit after dinner, intent, so it would seem, on nothing other than the process of his own digestion, while my grandmother would batten herself down in some inoffensive wifely task—darning socks, sewing buttons—and the silence, the heavy, aching silence (how the memory of certain silences can weigh upon you), would be punctuated only—by the tick of clocks.
Once I dared to break this silence, to challenge this laden oppression of Time. I was a healthy, well-fed boy of thirteen. At such an age—who can deny it?—there is freshness. The moments slip by and you do not stop to count them. It was a summer evening and Highgate had, in those days, a verdant, even pastoral air. My grandfather was expounding (picture a boy of thirteen, a man of a hundred and twenty) upon his only subject when I interrupted him to ask: “But isn’t it best when we forget time?”
I am sure that with these ingenuous words there rose in me—only to hold brief sway—the spirit of my rebellious, and dead, father. I was not aware of the depths of my heresy. My grandfather’s face took on the look of those fathers who are in the habit of removing their belts and applying them to their sons’ hides. He did not remove his belt. Instead, I received the lashings of a terrible diatribe upon the folly of a world—of which my words were a very motto—which dared to believe that Time could take care of itself; followed by an invocation of the toils of my ancestors; followed, inevitably, by a calling down upon my head of the sins of my father. As I cringed before all this I acknowledged the indissoluble, if irrational, link between age and authority. Youth must bow to age. This was the god-like fury of one hundred and twenty years beating down on me and I had no choice but to prostrate myself. And yet, simultaneously—as the fugitive summer twilight still flickered from the garden—I pondered on the awesome loneliness of being my grandfather’s age—the loneliness (can you conceive it?) of having no contemporaries. And I took stock of the fact that seldom, if ever, had I seen my grandfather—this man of guarded and scrupulous mien—roused by such passion. Only once, indeed, did I see him so roused again—that day of his death, when, despite my efforts to dissuade him, he strode out into the gathering storm.
The sins of my father? What was my father’s sin but to seek some other means of outwitting Time than that held out to him? The means of adventure, of hazard and daring, the means of a short life but a full, a memorable one. Was he really impelled by motives so different from those of his own father and his father’s father?
Perhaps every third generation is a misfit. Born in 1895, my father would have become the third beneficiary of the Great Watch. From the earliest age, like every true Krepski male-child, he was reared on the staple diet of clocks and chronometry. But, even as a boy, he showed distinct and sometimes hysterical signs of not wishing to assume the family mantle. Grandfather Feliks has told me that he sometimes feared that little Stefan actually plotted to steal the Watch (which he ought to h
ave regarded as the Gift of Gifts) in order to smash it or hide it or simply hurl it away somewhere. My grandfather consequently kept it always on his person and even wore it about his neck, on a locked chain at night—which cannot have aided his sleep.
These were times of great anguish. Stefan was growing up into one of those psychopathic children who wish to wreak merciless destruction on all that their fathers hold dearest. His revolt, unprecedented in the family annals, may seem inexplicable. But I think I understand it. When Feliks was born, his own father Stanislaw was forty: an unexceptional state of affairs. When Stefan grew out of mindless infancy, his father was approaching his first hundred. Who can say how a ten year old reacts to a centenarian father?
And what was Stefan’s final solution to paternal oppression? It was a well-tried one, even a hackneyed one, but one never attempted before in our family from land-locked Lublin. At the age of fifteen, in 1910, he ran away to sea, to the beckoning embraces of risk, fortune, fame—or oblivion. It was thought that no more would be seen of him. But this intrepid father of mine, not content with his runaway defiance or with braving the rough world he had pitched himself into, returned, after three years, for the pleasure of staring fixedly into my grandfather’s face. He was then a youth of eighteen. But three years’ voyaging—to Shanghai, Yokohama, Valparaiso …—had toughened his skin and packed into his young frame more resourcefulness than my hundred-year-old grandfather had ever known, bent over his cogs and pendula.
My grandfather realised that he faced a man. That weather-beaten stare was a match for his hundred nominal years. The result of this sailor’s return was a reconciliation, a rare balance between father and son—enhanced rather than marred by the fact that only a month or so afterwards Stefan took up with a woman of dubious character—the widow of a music-hall manager (perhaps it is significant that she was twelve years older than my father)—got her with child and married her. Thus I arrived on the scene.
My grandfather showed remarkable forbearance. He even stooped for a while to taste the transitory delights of variety artists and buxom singers. It seemed that he would not object—whether it was fitting or not—to Stefan and his lineage partaking of the Watch. It was even possible that Stefan—the only Krepski not to have done so in the way that fish take to swimming and birds to flight—might come round at last to the trade of clock-making.
But all this was not to be. In 1914—the year of my birth—Stefan once more took to the sea, this time in the service of his country (for he was the first Krepski to be born on British soil). Once more there were heated confrontations, but my grandfather could not prevail. Perhaps he knew that even without the pretext of war Stefan would have sooner or later felt stirred again by the life of daring and adventure. Feliks, at last swallowing his anger and disappointment before the parting warrior, held out the prospect of the Watch as a father to a son, even if he could not hold it out as a master clockmaker to a faithful apprentice. Perhaps Stefan might indeed have returned in 1918, a salty hero, ready to settle down and receive its benison. Perhaps he too might have lived to a ripe one hundred, and another hundred more—were it not for the German shell which sent him and the rest of his gallant ship’s crew to the bottom at the battle of Jutland.
So it was that I, who knew so intimately my grandfather whose own memories stretched back to Napoleonic times, and would doubtless have known—were it not for that fool of an omnibus driver—my great-grandfather, born while America was still a British colony, have no memories of my father at all. For when the great guns were booming at Jutland and my father’s ship was raising its churning propellors to the sky, I was asleep in my cot in Bethnal Green, watched over by my equally unwitting mother. She was to die too, but six months later, of a mixture of grief and influenza. And I passed, at the age of two, into my grandfather’s hands, and so into the ghostly hands of my venerable ancestors. From merest infancy I was destined to be a clockmaker, one of the solemn priesthood of Time, and whenever I erred in my noviceship, as on that beguiling evening in Highgate, to have set before me the warning example of my father—dead (though his name lives in glory—you will see it on the memorial at Chatham, the only Krepski amongst all those Jones and Wilsons) at the laughable age of twenty-one.
But this is not a story about my father, nor even about clock-making. All these lengthy preliminaries are only a way of explaining how on a certain day, a week ago, in a room on the second floor of a delapidated but (as shall be seen) illustrious Victorian building, I, Adam Krepski, sat, pressing in my hand till the sweat oozed from my palm, the Watch made by my great-grandfather, which for over one hundred and seventy years had neither stopped nor ever been wound. The day, as it happens, was my wedding anniversary. A cause for remembrance; but not for celebration. It is nearly thirty years since my wife left me.
And what was making me clutch so tightly that precious mechanism?
It was the cries. The cries coming up the dismal, echoing staircase; the cries from the room on the landing below, which for several weeks I had heard at sporadic intervals, but which now had reached a new, intense note and came with ever-increasing frequency. The cries of a woman, feline, inarticulate—at least to my ears, for I knew them to be the cries of an Asian woman—an Indian, a Pakistani—expressive first of outrage and grief (they had been mixed in those first days with the shouts of a man), but now of pain, of terror, of—it was this that tightened my grip so fervently on that Watch—of unmistakable urgency.
My wedding anniversary. Now I consider it, time has played more than one trick on me …
And what was I doing in that gloomy and half-derelict building, I, a Krepski clockmaker? That is a long and ravelled tale—one which begins perhaps on that fateful day in July, 1957, when I married.
My grandfather (who in that same year reached one hundred and fifty) was against it from the outset. The eve of my wedding was another of those humbling moments in my life when he invoked the folly of my father. Not that Deborah had any of the questionable credentials of the widow of a music-hall manager. She was a thirty-five-year-old primary school teacher, and I, after all, was forty-three. But—now my grandfather was midway through his second century—the misogynist bent of our family had reached in him a heightened, indiscriminate pitch. On the death of his third wife, in 1948, he had ceased to play the hypocrite and got himself a housekeeper, not a fourth wife. The disadvantage of this decision, so he sometimes complained to me, was that housekeepers had to be paid. His position towards womankind was entrenched. He saw my marriage-to-be as a hopeless backsliding into the mire of vain biological yearnings and the fraudulent permanence of procreation.
He was wrong. I did not marry to beget children (that fact was to be my undoing) nor to sell my soul to Time. I married simply to have another human being to talk to other than my grandfather.
Do not mistake me. I did not wish to abandon him. I had no intention of giving up my place beside him in the Krepski workshop or of forfeiting my share in the Watch. But consider the weight of his hundred and fifty years on my forty-odd. Consider that since the age of three, not having known my father and, barely, my mother, I had been brought up by this prodigy who even at my birth was over a hundred. Might I feel, in watered-down form, the oppressions and frustrations of my father? At twenty-five I had already grown tired of my grandfather’s somehow hollow accounts of the Polish uprisings of 1830, of exiled life in Paris, of the London of the 1850s and ’60s. I had begun to perceive that mixed with his blatant misogyny was a more general, brooding misanthropy—a contempt for the common run of men who lived out their meagre three score and ten. His eyes (one of which was permanently out of true from the constant use of a clockmaker’s eye-piece) had developed a dull, sanctimonious stare. About his person there hung, like some sick-room smell infesting his clothes, an air of stagnancy, ill-humour, isolation, and even, to judge from his frayed jackets and the disrepair of his Highgate home—relative penury.
For what had become of “Krepski and Krepski, Clock and
Watchmakers of Repute,” in the course of my lifetime? It was no longer the thriving East End workshop, employing six skilled craftsmen and three apprentices, it had been at the turn of the century. Economic changes had dealt it blows. The mass production of wrist-watches which were now two-a-penny and cheap electrical (electrical!) clocks had squeezed out the small business. On top of this was my grandfather’s ever-increasing suspiciousness of nature. For, even if lack of money had not forced him to do so, he would have gradually dismissed his faithful workmen for fear they might discover the secret of the Watch and betray it to the world. That watch could prolong human life but not the life of commercial enterprise. By the 1950s Krepski and Krepski was no more than one of those grimy, tiny, Dickensian-looking shops one can still see on the fringes of the City, sign-boarded “Watch and Clock Repairers” but looking more like a run-down pawn-broker’s—to which aged customers would, very occasionally, bring the odd ancient mechanism for a “seeing to.”
Grandfather was a hundred and fifty. He looked like a sour-minded but able-bodied man of half that age. Had he retired at the customary time (that is, some time during the 1860s or ’70s) he would have known the satisfaction of passing on a business at the peak of its success and of enjoying a comfortable “old age.” In the 1950s, still a fit man, he had no choice but to continue at the grinding task of scraping a living. Even had he retired and I had managed to support him, he would have returned, surely enough, to the shop on Goswell Road, like a dog to its kennel.