The Clock That Lost Time

Part One · A Quarter Turn

Felix had expected the summer at his great-uncle's house to be tranquil, and it was, except for the clocks, which never stopped telling him what time it was, each one disagreeing with all the others. There were eleven of them in the narrow house on Mill Street in Ashcombe, ticking in every room at slightly different tempos, so that the whole place sounded like a committee of people politely drumming their fingers on tables. The largest stood in the hallway, a tall walnut case clock with a glass door, behind which a pale wooden rod swung a brass disc to and fro with tremendous dignity. Great-Uncle Ambrose had repaired clocks for forty-one years before he retired, and his hands still moved like a craftsman's, deliberate and exact, even when he was only buttering toast. On the first morning Felix asked him which of the eleven clocks was accurate. Ambrose said the hallway clock, and that it had been accurate, give or take a few seconds, since before Felix's mother was born.

The clock that was not accurate presided over the square in the middle of town, in a stone tower above the old market hall, with an enamel face on each of its four sides. Everybody in Ashcombe called it the clock that lost time, because every summer it fell behind by several minutes and every winter it galloped ahead. Nobody in living memory had managed to cure it. The town council had asked Ambrose, unofficially, whether he might investigate. His arthritic knee no longer permitted him to climb the tower more than once a week, so Felix accompanied him, carrying the toolbag. Behind the clock faces they found a dusty chamber with an iron frame full of brass gears, a leather logbook in which every clock keeper since 1889 had signed his name, and a long pendulum swinging solemnly through a slot in the floorboards.

The pendulum, Ambrose said, was the heart of the whole mechanism, and it had one peculiar property that Felix should never forget. However heavy the brass bob at its lower end, and whether its swing was a little wider or a little narrower, a pendulum always took virtually the same time to travel from one side to the other. That time depended almost entirely on its length. A longer pendulum swung more slowly and a shorter one more rapidly, and so a clock could be regulated by a large brass nut beneath the bob, which raised or lowered it along the rod. At that moment the tower clock was four minutes slow, in the second week of July. Felix wanted to fix it more than he had wanted anything all year, partly for the town and partly, if he was honest, to discover whether his great-uncle ever said well done to anybody.

Ambrose talked him through it with one hand resting on the iron frame. Felix had to wait until the pendulum paused at the very extremity of its swing, then reach beneath the bob and rotate the nut a quarter turn at a time, so that the bob crept upward and the pendulum became fractionally shorter. Then they halted the hands, advanced them four minutes with a key, and waited, with Ambrose's battered little radio balanced on the windowsill, for the time signal on the hour. Six short pips emerged from the radio, and on the sixth the great bell overhead began to strike eleven, so resoundingly that Felix felt it in his molars. Ambrose recorded the date and the adjustment in the leather logbook, but he did not sign it, and he did not say well done, although he did buy Felix an ice cream on the way home.

For a week the clock was impeccable. Felix checked it every day at noon, standing in the square with his watch synchronized to the radio, and recorded the result in a notebook he carried in his back pocket. Beside each result he also wrote the temperature from the thermometer nailed up in the clock chamber, which he had started consulting because the room was so stifling that he wanted to know precisely how stifling. The days were long and sweltering, and the clock kept time through all of them, to within a second or two. Mrs. Dimitriou, who ran the coffee house on the corner and unlocked her shutters every morning by the tower clock, informed Felix that it was the first July in thirty years that she had not served her first espresso late. Felix walked home feeling approximately seven feet tall.

Part Two · Two Columns

Then, in the last week of August, the weather turned. A storm rolled in off the hills and left behind a week of gray drizzle and raw wind, the kind of week when the whole town retrieved its sweaters and looked faintly betrayed about it, and by Friday the tower clock was three minutes fast. The chaos was spectacular. Mr. Pruitt the baker put out his bread early, so that the street smelled of warm crust before anyone was awake enough to want it. A wedding began while the bride was still in the car park, eating a sandwich. The mayor, who had been told that his speech would start at four o'clock sharp, delivered the whole thing to an empty square and bowed at the end to a pigeon. Felix climbed the tower with Ambrose, turned the nut back down a quarter turn at a time, and reset the hands by the radio. The following week the sun returned, the chamber baked like an oven, and the clock began to lose time once more, as stubbornly as before.

Felix sat on the bench in the clock chamber with his notebook on his knees and understood that he was not repairing anything. He was chasing the weather around the calendar, a quarter turn at a time, and the weather would win, because it always had. Ambrose, massaging his knee, admitted that the keepers before him had performed precisely the same ritual for decades, which was exactly why the logbook was so thick. Felix examined his own handwriting, with the minutes and seconds in one column and the temperatures in the next, and he perceived, as clearly as if somebody had drawn a diagram, that the two columns moved together. Every sweltering day the clock lost a little, and every chilly day it gained. The clock was not broken at all; it was simply measuring the wrong thing.

He asked Ambrose why, and Ambrose looked gratified for the first time all summer, although he attempted to conceal it. Metal expands when it warms, he said, and contracts again when it cools, and the pendulum rod in the tower was steel. On a hot day it grew longer, by less than the thickness of a fingernail, but that was sufficient to make every swing a fraction slower. A tower clock swings tens of thousands of times a day, so the minuscule delays accumulated into minutes. In winter the rod contracted and the clock hurried. There were ingenious pendulums that compensated for it, constructed from several different metals arranged so that their expansions canceled out, but they were extremely expensive, and the council, Ambrose remarked dryly, had never been in the habit of purchasing anything expensive.

Felix walked home slowly, contemplating steel lengthening and shortening in the darkness at the summit of the tower. When he opened the front door, the hallway clock was ticking with its customary dignity, and he halted and stared at it, because something did not make sense. That clock had kept time, give or take a few seconds, since before his mother was born. The hallway was frigid in winter and stuffy in summer, the same as anywhere, and nobody clambered inside it every week to turn a nut. He opened the glass door and scrutinized the pendulum properly for the first time. The rod was not metal at all, but a long straight strip of pale wood, varnished until it gleamed like honey, with a little brass hook at the top and the heavy disc suspended at the bottom.

He located Ambrose in the kitchen and asked whether wood lengthened in the heat the way steel did. Ambrose set down the kettle. Wood, he said slowly, swelled considerably in damp weather, across the grain, but lengthwise, along the grain, it scarcely changed with temperature at all, which was why old clockmakers had frequently used it for pendulums, provided they varnished it thoroughly to keep the moisture out. Felix asked whether the tower could have a wooden rod. For a long moment Ambrose said nothing. Then he confessed that he had walked past that hallway clock perhaps twenty thousand times. He had spent forty-one years mending mantel clocks and pocket watches without once considering the colossal one in that light, he said, and it had taken a twelve-year-old with a notebook to notice what was standing in his own hall.

Part Three · The First Frost

The council agreed, partly because a wooden rod would cost less than repainting the market hall's railings. Felix chose the timber himself at the lumberyard by the river, from a rack of long spruce strips, sighting down each one with one eye closed the way Ambrose demonstrated, searching for a specimen without a single knot or twist. The one he selected was as straight as a ruler and smelled faintly of resin and sawdust, and Ambrose pronounced it satisfactory, which from Ambrose was practically a speech. In Ambrose's workshop they trimmed it to precisely the length of the old steel rod and fitted brass fittings to both ends. Then Felix varnished it, three coats, one each evening, sanding delicately between them, until the wood glowed like the hallway pendulum and water from the tap rolled straight off it in beads.

They installed it on the first Saturday of September, which consumed the entire morning and most of Ambrose's patience. Felix unhooked the steel rod while his great-uncle steadied the bob, then lifted the new rod into position, suspended the bob from it, adjusted the nut, and gave the pendulum a gentle nudge. It swung exactly as before, unhurried, through the slot in the floorboards. For the next two weeks they regulated it by the radio every few days, with smaller and smaller adjustments, until the clock was correct to the second. Then Felix returned to school in the neighboring town and came over on Saturdays instead, and the first thing he did each Saturday was open his notebook in the clock chamber and compare the week's temperatures with the week's time.

September concluded with a heatwave that made the chamber smell of warm dust and hot varnish, and the clock lost a few seconds. October brought rain and blustery wind, and the clock gained a few. Each Saturday Felix wrote the numbers in his notebook, and each Saturday they were trivial, seconds where previously there had been minutes, easily corrected with the smallest nudge of the nut. Mrs. Dimitriou unlocked her shutters by the tower throughout the autumn and reported that her pastries and her customers were now arriving in the correct sequence. Then, on the last Saturday of October, Felix awoke to find the windowpanes white at the corners, the street outside glittering, and his breath smoking in the bedroom, and he understood that the clock was about to confront its first frost.

He was in the square before noon, with his scarf wrapped twice around his neck and his watch synchronized to the radio, and Ambrose came limping after him with a thermos of cocoa. Mrs. Dimitriou had carried her radio out onto the coffee house step, turned up loud, and the three of them waited together while the frost melted off the cobblestones in the pale sunshine. The pips began, six of them. On the fifth, the great bell above the market hall had still not made a sound, and Felix's stomach dropped like a bucket down a well. On the sixth, the first stroke of twelve boomed across the square, precisely together, as if the two had been rehearsing all autumn. Felix exhaled a breath he had not realized he was holding. Ambrose said nothing whatsoever. Then he withdrew the leather logbook from his overcoat, opened it to the newest page, handed Felix his own fountain pen, and told him to sign it.