The Clock Thieves

Elin was holding the edge of the pool with both hands and trying to make it look like a choice.

“I could just swim along here,” she said. “There and back. It’s a perfectly useful distance.”

Jo stood beside her in water up to her shoulders. Beyond the rope, three women were having a conversation in slow breaststroke. They reached the end, turned, and continued the same sentence on the way back. In the teaching pool a father was pretending to be surprised whenever his son jumped into his arms.

“It is,” Jo said. “But you wanted to float.”

“I wanted to learn to swim.”

“This will help.”

Elin looked at the width of water behind her. She had helped raise the money for every metre of it. Jo had heard her explain the new filtration system to forty people while a microphone squealed against her jacket. Here, with nobody to impress and her hair scraped into a small wet knot, she found the idea of putting her ears under water unreasonable.

Jo put a hand beneath her upper back.

“Let your knees bend. Your feet can stay down.”

Elin bent her knees. Then she straightened them again.

“That was a rehearsal.”

“All right. Another one.”

Morning sun lay across the opposite wall, where there used to be a crack large enough to hold a pencil. The old pool had been shut for four years. Children Jo now taught had reached eight without seeing a public swimming pool in their own town. There had been plans, fundraising dinners, revised plans and a long period when everyone involved stopped making predictions. Selling the town clock had paid the last large gap. Now the changing-room hooks held clothes, the cafe sold out of warm rolls, and Jo’s father came twice a week to exercise his knees among women who made him laugh so much he forgot to count.

Jo liked being here before the first lesson, when the water was flat. She liked it almost as much at eleven, full of people. Sometimes, watching them, she wanted a whole hour in it for herself. Today she had got in at seven to find a child’s missing hair clip and had stayed for work.

“Look at that light,” she said. “Keep looking there. I’ll keep my hand where it is.”

Elin lowered herself again. Jo felt her shoulders tighten before the water reached her ears.

“That’s enough,” Elin said, sitting abruptly forward.

“You went further.”

“I heard something.”

“The pool.”

“It sounded as though it was closing.”

Jo waited while Elin wiped her face. She had seen people become angry with their own bodies for failing to accept an explanation. Elin could usually arrange a way through a problem; if one person refused she found another, or changed the date, or worked out who might pay. She had brought that same hopeful ingenuity to the water and found nothing to negotiate with.

“Again?” Jo said.

Elin nodded. This time Jo felt some of the weight leave her hand.

“Jo.”

Her mother stood at the shallow steps, shoes inside blue covers, holding a sheet of paper above the splash line.

“In a minute, Mum.”

“Have you seen this?”

Elin planted her feet. Water ran from her ears.

“Vera, you can’t come in here in outdoor clothes.”

“I asked at the desk. She gave me these.” Vera raised a covered foot. “I haven’t come for a swim.”

“It’s a lesson,” Jo said.

“I can see that.”

Vera lowered the paper, but did not go away. She was wearing the soft green cardigan Jo had given her at Christmas and carrying the large bag in which she brought books, food, and whatever small practical difficulty other people had failed to anticipate. Jo had spent half her childhood accepting things from that bag. Her mother had lent it to her once for an outing and emptied it first, with evident doubt about whether a bag without anything useful in it remained a bag.

Elin looked at the paper.

“Oh,” she said.

Jo recognised that particular oh. She heard it from parents just before they explained why their child was in the wrong class.

“What?”

“We’ll talk when you’re finished,” Elin said.

Vera held the photograph towards Jo. A tall oak cabinet stood in a bright room, its glass so clear that the brass inside looked newly made. In front of it, propped on a workbench, was a polished plate.

THE FELIX RANE CLOCK.

Jo read it twice because she expected another line beneath the name.

“Where’s Latchford?” she said.

“Yes,” said Vera.

Elin pushed damp hair back from her forehead.

“It’s a display name. The history will still be there.”

“Where?”

“In the information about it.”

Vera turned the paper over, as if useful information might be waiting on the back.

“This came from their opening announcement. There’s a whole paragraph about him. He appears to have made the clock in 1909.”

“Nobody is saying that.”

“Mabel Rusk’s name isn’t on it either.”

Jo took the photograph with wet fingers. Vera immediately reached into her bag for a spare copy.

For thirty years her mother had gone to the town hall to wind that clock. Even when Jo was away in Merrow, she knew where Vera would be on a Tuesday before lunch. Sometimes there was a message afterwards: the door still catches; the council has borrowed the key again; Mrs Venn’s grandson proposed under it, which seemed a peculiar thing to do at ten in the morning. When the clock was sold, Vera returned the key in a labelled envelope. Jo had thought the envelope unnecessary. She was less certain now.

“We sold it,” Jo said. “We all knew who bought it.”

“I know what sold means.”

“And this is what we did with the money.”

She made a small movement of her arm through the water. Behind Vera, a boy came carefully down the steps with his grandmother, one hand in hers and the other holding a pair of goggles. The grandmother’s swimming cap had flowers moulded into the rubber.

“I haven’t suggested draining it,” Vera said.

Elin gave a short, tired laugh. Jo wished her mother would look pleased at least once when she came in. Tom arrived with a towel and a cheerful account of who was there. Vera came to collect him, or bring something, or point out a missed patch of paint.

The boy reached the water and gasped. His grandmother gasped in answer, though she was still on the step.

Jo handed the paper back.

“We’ve got five minutes left,” she said to Elin. “Do you want them?”

Elin glanced towards Vera.

“Yes.”

Vera went to a chair against the wall. She sat with the photograph on her knees, watching the boy set out on his first great expedition along the handrail.

Elin managed to wet both ears together. She came up quickly, coughing though her mouth had stayed clear.

“I don’t believe Bea does this for fun.”

“She’ll want you to come in with her.”

“That’s why I’m here.” Elin smiled, suddenly less guarded. “There’s a little bay near the place we’ve booked. She keeps sending me photographs. You can see right through the water. I thought that would be encouraging.”

“It might be.”

“You can also see how much of it there is.”

At the end of the lesson Jo stood beside the steps until Elin was out. She put the rope back, rinsed the teaching floats and wrote two brief notes for the instructor taking over. Vera waited until she had finished. That small courtesy made Jo feel worse about the impatience in her own voice.

Upstairs, in the cafe, Elin had ordered tea for three. Vera had found a short video on her phone and was holding it so close that Jo could hear only a thin metallic sound.

“Listen to this bit.”

“I’ve heard it, Mum.”

“You haven’t. It hasn’t done this properly since you were at school.”

Jo sat down with her towel still round her shoulders. On the screen a little brass band emerged from the cabinet and began to circle. The drummer’s arm rose. A cornet gave a sharp, surprising note, followed by a cheerful phrase in which something seemed to arrive half a breath too late. Jo remembered standing beneath the cabinet as a child, waiting for that stumble. It had always sounded deliberate to her, a musician trying to catch his friends.

She laughed.

Vera replayed it.

“That boy’s moving again,” she said. “Look. They used to get him round by pulling on the back of the next one. I wouldn’t let them do it.”

Elin put the teapot down between them.

“We’re invited tomorrow. We can ask him about the name.”

“Tomorrow evening,” Vera said. “In front of his birthday cake?”

“I can ask for a meeting before that.”

“Today.”

“Vera—”

“If he’s got time to put his name on it, he can make time to talk about it.”

Jo watched a swimmer on the other side of the window draw a long straight line down the pool. She had a free afternoon, for once. Leonie had sent a message the previous week: If you come for this thing, stay. I own two guest towels now. We can be respectable.

“I’ll drive,” Jo said.

Both women looked at her.

“I can hire the van we use for outings. The one with the load space. If you’re taking that display board, I’m not having it sticking through the windscreen of my car.”

Vera’s paper bag already contained photographs of the clock in the town hall. Of course it did.

“Are you sure?” she asked.

“I’m going to see Leonie. I’ll bring you home on Saturday. And you’re going to ask a question, Mum. You’re going to let him answer it.”

“That depends on the answer.”

Elin was looking at her phone. “I could get there by half past four. Bea can cover the shop.”

Vera began to call Gideon. Jo knew him as Leonie’s father, a man who could make a sticking window open while telling you there had never been anything wrong with it. He and Vera played word games on their phones and accused one another of using outside assistance. He had been invited too.

“Bring a small bag,” Vera told him. “We’re going this afternoon.”

Jo took her own phone out and told Leonie she would come.

The answer arrived before she had put it down.

Good. Bring the shoes.

Jo smiled into her tea. At the next table two women were sharing a roll and discussing which of them had been responsible for persuading the other to join. Downstairs, Elin’s place beside the rail was occupied by a little girl who had both ears under water and no intention of coming out.