Multiple-choice reading

The shop had been closed for eleven days, and it smelled of it. Wren stood just inside the door with the key still in her hand, letting her eyes adjust to the brown light that came through the blind, and tried to decide whether the smell was oil, or dust, or simply absence. Above the counter, forty-odd clocks went on with their business, not quite in agreement with one another, so that the silence of the room was not silence at all but a soft, dry argument about the time. Her father would have known which of them was right. He would have known, too, which were running slow out of age and which out of temper, and would have spoken of them in exactly those terms, as though they were elderly relatives.

She had not been inside for six years. That was not a fact she had intended; it was more a sum that had added itself up while she was looking elsewhere: a job in Rotterdam, then another in Lisbon, phone calls on Sunday evenings that grew shorter as the line grew clearer. He had never once complained. He had, she realised now, never once asked her to come, either, and she could not decide whether that had been tact or a kind of pride, or whether in him the two had ever been distinguishable.

On the workbench at the back, everything was as he must have left it on the Friday: the eyeglass lying on its side, a movement laid open on a square of chamois leather like a patient on a table, tweezers aligned with the edge of the bench as precisely as cutlery. Beside them, impaled on a nail, was a sheaf of repair tickets. She leafed through them. Mrs Ashworth, carriage clock, ‘strikes eleven at noon – customer fond of this, leave alone if possible’. Mr Fenn, wristwatch, ‘his late wife’s – do NOT polish’. A child’s name she didn’t recognise: ‘Cartoon watch. Hands loose. No charge.’ Each was written in the same small, upright capitals, and on almost every one he had added something that was not strictly necessary for the repair.

Callum arrived at eleven, as he had said he would, in a coat too good for the weather. He had driven up from Leicester that morning and wanted, he said, to ‘get a sense of the scale of things’ before the estate agent came on Thursday. He walked the length of the shop twice, tapping the glass cases, and Wren watched him calculate. It was not that her brother was unfeeling. It was that grief, in Callum, had always taken the form of administration, as if a sufficiently thorough list might hold the worst of it at bay. ‘The stock will have to be valued separately,’ he said. ‘There’s a man in Harrogate. And the unfinished jobs – I suppose we just give them back?’

‘We can’t give them back unfinished.’ She had not meant to sound so sharp. Callum looked at her with the mild, patient surprise of someone who had been expecting exactly this. ‘Wren. Neither of us can mend a watch.’ ‘I know that.’ ‘So what do you suggest?’ She did not have a suggestion. She had only the conviction, unreasonable and complete, that Mrs Ashworth’s clock should go back to her still striking eleven at noon, and that someone ought to telephone Mr Fenn before anything was polished.

It was after Callum had gone out to find sandwiches that she came across her own name. The ticket was at the very bottom of the sheaf, older than the others, its edges softened by handling. ‘W. – blue strap. Glass cracked, winder missing. Waiting on part.’ Underneath, in different ink, was a date from nine years ago, and then, in a later and shakier hand: ‘Part found.’ In the drawer beneath the bench, wrapped in tissue paper, lay the watch she had been given on her tenth birthday and had dropped in the school playground two years later. She had assumed, when it disappeared from her bedroom, that her mother had thrown it away.

She sat for a long time with it in her palm. The new glass was flawless; the strap had been replaced with one of almost exactly the old blue, which could not have been easy to find. He had not finished it. The hands were still loose under the glass, pointing at nothing. When she heard Callum’s key in the door she closed her fingers over the watch and put her hand in her pocket, and when he asked whether she had found anything worth keeping she said, after a moment, that she would need a few more days to go through the bench properly. He looked at her, and then, to her surprise, he nodded and did not ask why.