The Clock by Judy Mitchell

 

Sunday evening after tea. Always the same time each week. He would take his watch out of his waistcoat pocket, pause, compare the hour and the minutes then reach for the brass key at my base and start to count the turns under his breath until we were both ready to face another seven days. Then my chime, the voice of my movement, wound until all my wheels danced to a steady beat. The glass was closed, the key replaced and I felt primed, taut.

She never liked my black, slate body with its mock Corinthian columns and its polished dome. I remember hearing her ask him why I had pride of place.

‘Why can’t we have a pretty ormolu timepiece with a gentle ting-tang instead of this monstrosity?’

He thought me a thing of substance, something which seemed to fit his self-image, upright, solid.

He died more than 20 years ago and afterwards, she reluctantly shouldered his weekly routine. At first, I feared she would lift me down, take me to the pawn brokers three doors further down the High Street. But she did not. Sentimentality, I supposed. 

-0-

It was Monday. An unusual stillness in the shop. What had happened? Had she forgotten me? The rhythm of my week was broken and I started to fear a gradual slowing and stillness. Time seeped away from my hands. I wanted to feel the twisting movement of her wrist and the brush of her elegant fingers against my face but she didn’t look in my direction. She slumped into the fireside chair. Her eyes were downcast. She was sobbing softly, her handkerchief held to her blue eyes.

In desperation, I tried to will my fingers to move to ten-to-two to attract her attention but she did not lift her head until, as if on some sudden impulse, she moved quickly to the workroom. I heard the light switch, then the sound of the press, its shrill hiss of steam piercing the silence of the shop. The metallic clang of the jaws of the machine told me she was working despite the late hour. I heard the flick-flack of the coats she still had to finish and smelled the chemical cleaning fluid which leeched into the parlour.

Weeks later, the grate beneath me was cold and empty.

 It had been cleaned and swept but there was no one here to light a fire. A cold draught whispered into the room from under the doors and a white tapestry of ice frosted the window panes. Her chair had been empty since the day she had gone with her niece, its antimacassar clean and pressed and untouched by her soft white hair. There was no ring of the shop door bell, no customers, no deliveries. The presses were still. No muffled footsteps from upstairs. Only the long, low shadows of the winter sun came into the parlour, crossing the windows and then sinking behind the roofs of the adjacent shops.

I guess I had known but clung on to hope. When her niece came to the shop, three weeks later, she was alone. The shop bell seemed to ring a slow, melancholy trill and her gentle footsteps on the lino in the shop and the workroom were tentative, different. I watched the door open slowly and saw her young face, her eyes pale and tearful. She put her hand on the back of the fireside chair and drew her fingers across the cover where her aunt’s head had rested. The tears fell from her eyes as she reached into her coat pocket for her hanky. She went upstairs, her feet stepping only as far as the bed. She paused and then returned downstairs, passing me on the mantelpiece on her way out.

I had stopped weeks ago. Time had run out.