‘Why did the watch stop?’ I asked.
I turned the cold gold in my hand. Elgin was the one word on the white face. The delicate hands were of blue steel. All through my childhood it had shone.
‘Can there be two reasons why it stopped?’ His anger veered towards me now. ‘It stopped because it got broke.’
‘Why can’t it be fixed?’ I ignored the anger.
‘Poor Taylor in the town doesn’t take in watches any more,’ Rose answered. ‘And the last time it stopped we sent it to Sligo. Sligo even sent it to Dublin but it was sent back. A part that holds the balance wheel is broke. What they told us is that they’ve stopped making parts for those watches. They have to be specially handmade. They said that the quality of the gold wasn’t high enough to justify that expense. That it was only gold plated. I don’t suppose it’ll ever go again. I put it in with the sheets to have it out of the way. I was running into it everywhere.’
‘Well, if it wasn’t fixed before, you must certainly have fixed it for good and for ever this time.’ My father would not let go.
His hand trembled on the arm of the rocking chair, the same hand that drew out the gold watch long ago as the first strokes of the Angelus came to us over the heather and pale wheaten sedge of Gloria Bog: ‘Twenty minutes late, no more than usual … One of these years Jimmy Lynch will startle himself and the whole countryside by ringing the Angelus at exactly twelve … Only in Ireland is there right time and wrong time. In other countries there is just time.’ We’d stand and stretch our backs, aching from scattering the turf, and wait for him to lift his straw hat.
Waiting with him under the yew, suitcases round our feet, for the bus that took us each year to the sea at Strandhill after the hay was in and the turf home; and to quiet us he’d take the watch out and let it lie in his open palm, where we’d follow the small second hand low down on the face endlessly circling until the bus came into sight at the top of Doherty’s Hill. How clearly everything sang now set free by the distance of the years, with what heaviness the actual scenes and days had weighed.
‘If the watch isn’t going to be fixed, then, I might as well have it.’ I was amazed at the calm sound of my own words. The watch had come to him from his father. Through all the long years of childhood I had assumed that one day he would pass it on to me. Then all weakness would be gone. I would possess its power. Once in a generous fit he even promised it to me, but he did not keep that promise. Unfairly, perhaps, I expected him to give it to me when I graduated, when I passed into the civil service, when I won my first promotion, but he did not. I had forgotten about it until it had spilled out of the folded sheets on to the floor.
I saw a look pass between my father and stepmother before he said, ‘What good would it be to you?’
‘No good. Just a keepsake. I’ll get you a good new watch in its place. I often see watches in the duty-free airports.’ My work often took me outside the country.
‘I don’t need a watch,’ he said, and pulled himself up from his chair.
Rose cast me a furtive look, much the same look that had passed a few moments before between her and my father. ‘Maybe your father wants to keep the watch,’ it pleaded, but I ignored it.
‘Didn’t the watch once belong to your father?’ I asked as he shuffled towards his room, but the only answer he made was to turn and yawn back before continuing the slow, exaggerated shuffle towards his room.
When the train pulled into Amiens Street Station, to my delight I saw her outside the ticket barrier, in the same tweed suit she’d worn the Saturday morning we met in Grafton Street. I could tell that she’d been to the hairdresser, but there were specks of white paint on her hands.
‘Did you tell them that we’re to be married?’ she asked as we left the station.
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘It never came up. And you, did you write home?’
‘No. In fact, I drove down last weekend and told them.’
‘How did they take it?’
‘They seemed glad. You seemed to have made a good impression.’ She smiled. ‘As I guessed, Mother is quite annoyed that it’s not going to be a big do.’
‘You won’t change our plans because of that.’
‘Of course not. She’s not much given to change herself, except to changing other people so that they fit in with her ideas.’
‘This fell my way at last,’ I said and showed her the silent watch. ‘I’ve always wanted it. If we believed in signs it would seem life is falling into our hands at last.’
‘And not before our time, I think I can risk adding.’
We were married that October by a Franciscan in their church on the quay, with two vergers as witnesses, and we drank far too much wine at lunch afterwards in a new restaurant that had opened in Lincoln Court. Staggering home in the late afternoon, I saw some people in the street smile at my attempt to lift her across the step. We did not even hear the bells closing the Green.
It was dark when we woke, and she said, ‘I have something for you,’ taking a small, wrapped package from the bedside table.
‘You know we promised not to give presents,’ I said.
‘I know but this is different. Open it. Anyhow, you said you didn’t believe in signs.’
It was the gold watch. I held it to my ear. It was running perfectly. The small second hand was circling endlessly low down on the face. The blue hands pointed to past midnight.
‘Did it cost much?’
‘No. Very little, but that’s not your business.’
‘I thought the parts had to be specially made.’
‘That wasn’t true. They probably never even asked.’
‘You shouldn’t have bothered.’
‘Now I’m hoping to see you wear it,’ she laughed.
I did not wear it. I left it on the mantel. The gold and white face and delicate blue hands looked very beautiful to me on the white marble. It gave me a curious pleasure mixed with guilt to wind it and watch it run; and the following spring, coming from a conference in Ottawa, I bought an expensive modern watch in the duty-free shop of Montreal Airport. It was guaranteed for five years, and was shockproof, dustproof, waterproof.
‘What do you think of it?’ I asked her when I returned to Dublin. ‘I bought it for my father.’
‘Well, it’s no beauty, but my mother would certainly approve of it. It’s what she’d describe as serviceable.’
‘It was expensive enough.’
‘It looks expensive. You’ll bring it when you go down for the hay?’
‘It’ll probably be my last summer with them at the hay,’ I said apologetically. ‘Won’t you change your mind and come down with me?’
She shook her head. ‘He’d probably say I look fifty now.’ She was as strong-willed as the schoolteacher mother she disliked, and I did not press. She was with child and looked calm and lovely.
‘What’ll they do about the hay when they no longer have you to help them?’ she said.
‘What does anybody do? Do without me. Stop. Get it done by contract. They have plenty of money. It’ll just be the end of something that has gone on for a very long time.’
‘That it certainly has.’
I came by train at the same time in July as I’d come every summer, the excitement tainted with melancholy that it’d probably be the last summer I would come. I had not even a wish to see it to its natural end any more. I had come because it seemed less violent to come than to stay away, and I had the good new modern watch to hand over in place of the old gold. The night before, at dinner, we had talked about buying a house with a garden out near the strand in Sandymount. Any melancholy I was feeling lasted only until I came in sight of the house.