Learning to Swim: And Other Stories

The Watch

TELL ME, WHAT IS MORE magical, more sinister, more malign yet consoling, more expressive of the constancy — and fickleness — of fate than a clock? Think of the clock which is ticking now, behind you, above you, peeping from your cuff. Think of the watches which chirp blithely on the wrists of the newly dead. Think of those clocks which are prayed to so that their hands might never register some moment of doom — but they jerk forward nonetheless; or, conversely, of those clocks which are begged to hasten their movement so that some span of misery might reach its end, but they stubbornly refuse to budge. Think of those clocks, gently chiming on mantelpieces, which soothe one man and attack the nerves of another. And think of that clock, renowned in song, which when its old master died, stopped also, like a faithfull mastiff, never to go again. Is it so remarkable to imagine — as savages once did on first seeing them — that in these whirring, clicking mechanisms there lives a spirit, a power, a demon?

My family is — was — a family of clockmakers. Three generations ago, driven by political turmoils, they fled to England from the Polish city of Lublin, a city famous for its baroque buildings, for its cunning artifacts — for clocks. For two centuries the Krepskis fashioned the clocks of Lublin. But Krepski, it is claimed, is only a corruption of the German Krepf, and, trace back further my family line and you will find connections with the great horologers of Nuremberg and Prague. For my forefathers were no mere craftsmen, no mere technicians. Pale, myopic men they may have been, sitting in dim workshops, counting the money they made by keeping the local gentry punctual; but they were also sorcerers, men of mission. They shared a primitive but unshakeable faith that clocks and watches not only recorded time, but contained it — they spun it with their loom-like motion. That clocks, indeed, were the cause of time. That without their assiduous tick-tocking, present and future would never meet, oblivion would reign, and the world would vanish down its own gullet in some self-annihilating instant.

The man who regards his watch every so often, who thinks of time as something fixed and arranged, like a calendar, and not as a power to which is owed the very beating of his heart, may easily scoff. My family’s faith is not to be communicated by appeals to reason. And yet in our case there is one unique and clinching item of evidence, one undeniable and sacred repository of material proof.

No one can say why, of all my worthy ancestors, my great-grandfather Stanislaw should have been singled out. No one can determine what mysterious conjunction of influences, what gatherings of instinct, knowledge and skill made the moment propitious. But on a September day, in Lublin, in 1809, my great-grandfather made the breakthrough which to the clockmaker is as the elixir to the alchemist. He created a clock which would not only function perpetually without winding, but from which time itself, that invisible yet palpable essence, could actually be gleaned — by contact, by proximity — like some form of magnetic charge. So, at least, it proved. The properties of this clock — or large pocket-watch, to be precise, for its benefits necessitated that it be easily carried — were not immediately observable. My great-grandfather had only an uncanny intuition. In his diary for that September day he writes cryptically: “The new watch — I know, feel it in my blood — it is the one.” Thereafter, at weekly intervals, the same entry: “The new watch — not yet wound.” The weekly interval lapses into a monthly one. Then, on September 3rd, 1810—the exact anniversary of the watch’s birth — the entry: “The Watch — a whole year without winding,” to which is added the mystical statement: “We shall live for ever.”

But this was not all. I write now in the 1970s. In 1809 my great-grandfather was forty-two. Simple arithmetic will indicate that we are dealing here with extraordinary longevity. My great-grandfather died in 1900—a man of one hundred and thirty-three, by this time an established and industrious clockmaker in one of the immigrant quarters of London. He was then, as a faded daguerrotype testifies, a man certainly old in appearance but not decrepit (you would have judged him perhaps a hale seventy), still on his feet and still busy at his trade; and he died not from senility but from being struck by an ill-managed horse-drawn omnibus while attempting one July day to cross Ludgate Hill. From this it will be seen that my great-grandfather’s watch did not confer immortality. It gave to those who had access to it a perhaps indefinite store of years; it was proof against age and against all those processes by which we are able to say that a man’s time runs out, but it was not proof against external accident. Witness the death of Juliusz, my great-grandfather’s first-born, killed by a Russian musket-ball in 1807. And Josef, the second-born, who came to a violent end in the troubles which forced my great-grandfather to flee his country.

To come closer home. In 1900 my grandfather, Feliks (my great-grandfather’s third son), was a mere stripling of ninety-two. Born in 1808, and therefore receiving almost immediate benefit from my great-grandfather’s watch, he was even sounder in limb, relatively speaking, than his father. I can vouch for this because (though, in 1900, I was yet to be conceived) I am now speaking of a man whom I have known intimately for the greater part of my own life and who, indeed, reared me almost from birth.

In every respect my grandfather was the disciple and image of my great-grandfather. He worked long and hard at the workshop in East London where he and Stanislaw, though blessed among mortals, still laboured at the daily business of our family. As he grew older — and still older — he acquired the solemn, vigilant and somewhat miserly looks of my great-grandfather. In 1900 he was the only remaining son and heir — for Stanislaw, by wondrous self-discipline, considering his length of years, had refrained from begetting further children, having foreseen the jealousies and divisions that the watch might arouse in a large family.

Feliks thus became the guardian of the watch which had now ticked away unwound for little short of a century. Its power was undiminished. Feliks lived on to the age of one hundred and sixty-one. He met his death, in brazen and spectacular fashion, but a few years ago, from a bolt of lightning, whilst walking in a violent storm in the Sussex downs. I myself can bear witness to his vigour, both of body and mind, at that more-than-ripe old age. For I myself watched him tramp off defiantly on that August night. I myself pleaded with him to heed the fury of the weather. And, after he failed to return, it was I who discovered his rain-soaked body, at the foot of a split tree, and pulled from his waistcoat pocket, on the end of its gold chain, the Great Watch — still ticking.

• • •

But what of my father? Where was he while my grandfather took me in charge? That is another story — which we shall come to shortly. One of perversity and rebellion, and one, so my grandfather was never slow to remind me, which cast a shadow on our family honour and pride.

You will note that I mave made no mention of the womenfolk of our family. Futhermore, I have said that Stanislaw took what must be considered some pains to limit his progeny. Increase in years, you might suppose, would lead to increase in issue. But this was not so — and Great-grandfather’s feat was, perhaps, not so formidable. Consider the position of a man who has the prospect before him of extraordinary length of years and who looks back at his own past as other men look at history books. The limits of his being, his “place in time,” as the phrase goes, the fact of his perishability begin to fade and he begins not to interest himself in those means by which other men seek to prolong their existence. And of these, what is more universal than the begetting of children, the passing on of one’s own blood?

Because they were little moved by the breeding instinct my great-grandfather and my grandfather were little moved by women. The wives they had — both of them got through three — followed very much the Oriental pattern where women are little more than the property of their husbands. Chosen neither for their beauty nor fecundity but more for blind docility, they were kept apart from the masculine mysteries of clock-making and were only acquainted with the Great Watch on a sort of concessionary basis. If the only one of them I knew myself — my grandfather’s last wife Eleanor — is anything to go by, they were slavish, silent, timid creatures, living in a kind of bemused remoteness from their husbands (who, after all, might be more than twice their age).

I remember my grandfather once expatiating on the reasons for this subjection and exclusion of women. “Women, you see,” he warned, “have no sense of time, they do not appreciate the urgency of things — that is what puts them in their place”—an explanation which I found unpersuasive then, perhaps because I was a young man and not uninterested in young women. But the years have confirmed the — painful — truth of my grandfather’s judgement. Show me a woman who has the same urgency as a man. Show me a woman who cares as much about the impending deadline, the ticking seconds, the vanishing hours. Ah yes, you will say, this is masculine humbug. Ah yes, I betray all the prejudice and contempt which ruined my brief marriage — which has ruined my life. But look at the matter on a broader plane. In the natural order of things it is women who are the longer lived. Why is this? Is it not precisely because they lack urgency — that urgency which preoccupies men, which drives them to unnatural subterfuges and desperate acts, which exhausts them and ushers them to an early death?

But urgency — despite his words — was not something that showed much in my grandfather’s face. Understandably. For endowed with a theoretically infinite stock of time, what cause did he have for urgency? I have spoken of my elders’ miserly and watchful looks. But this miserliness was not the miserliness of restless and rapacious greed; it was the contented, vacant miserliness of the miser who sits happily on a vast hoard of money which he has no intention of spending. And the watchfulness was not a sentry-like alertness; it was more the smug superciliousness of a man who knows he occupies a unique vantage point. In fact it is true to say, the longer my forefathers lived, the less animated they became. The more they immersed themselves in their obsession with time, the more they sank in their actions into mechanical and unvarying routine, tick-tocking their lives out like the miraculous instrument that enabled them to do so.

They did not want excitement, these Methuselahs, they dreamt no dreams. Nothing characterises more my life with my grandfather than the memory of countless monotonous evenings in the house he had at Highgate — evenings in which my guardian (that man who was born before Waterloo) would sit after dinner, intent, so it would seem, on nothing other than the process of his own digestion, while my grandmother would batten herself down in some inoffensive wifely task — darning socks, sewing buttons — and the silence, the heavy, aching silence (how the memory of certain silences can weigh upon you), would be punctuated only — by the tick of clocks.

Once I dared to break this silence, to challenge this laden oppression of Time. I was a healthy, well-fed boy of thirteen. At such an age — who can deny it? — there is freshness. The moments slip by and you do not stop to count them. It was a summer evening and Highgate had, in those days, a verdant, even pastoral air. My grandfather was expounding (picture a boy of thirteen, a man of a hundred and twenty) upon his only subject when I interrupted him to ask: “But isn’t it best when we forget time?”

I am sure that with these ingenuous words there rose in me — only to hold brief sway — the spirit of my rebellious, and dead, father. I was not aware of the depths of my heresy. My grandfather’s face took on the look of those fathers who are in the habit of removing their belts and applying them to their sons’ hides. He did not remove his belt. Instead, I received the lashings of a terrible diatribe upon the folly of a world — of which my words were a very motto — which dared to believe that Time could take care of itself; followed by an invocation of the toils of my ancestors; followed, inevitably, by a calling down upon my head of the sins of my father. As I cringed before all this I acknowledged the indissoluble, if irrational, link between age and authority. Youth must bow to age. This was the god-like fury of one hundred and twenty years beating down on me and I had no choice but to prostrate myself. And yet, simultaneously — as the fugitive summer twilight still flickered from the garden — I pondered on the awesome loneliness of being my grandfather’s age — the loneliness (can you conceive it?) of having no contemporaries. And I took stock of the fact that seldom, if ever, had I seen my grandfather — this man of guarded and scrupulous mien — roused by such passion. Only once, indeed, did I see him so roused again — that day of his death, when, despite my efforts to dissuade him, he strode out into the gathering storm.

The sins of my father? What was my father’s sin but to seek some other means of outwitting Time than that held out to him? The means of adventure, of hazard and daring, the means of a short life but a full, a memorable one. Was he really impelled by motives so different from those of his own father and his father’s father?

Perhaps every third generation is a misfit. Born in 1895, my father would have become the third beneficiary of the Great Watch. From the earliest age, like every true Krepski male-child, he was reared on the staple diet of clocks and chronometry. But, even as a boy, he showed distinct and sometimes hysterical signs of not wishing to assume the family mantle. Grandfather Feliks has told me that he sometimes feared that little Stefan actually plotted to steal the Watch (which he ought to have regarded as the Gift of Gifts) in order to smash it or hide it or simply hurl it away somewhere. My grandfather consequently kept it always on his person and even wore it about his neck, on a locked chain at night — which cannot have aided his sleep.

These were times of great anguish. Stefan was growing up into one of those psychopathic children who wish to wreak merciless destruction on all that their fathers hold dearest. His revolt, unprecedented in the family annals, may seem inexplicable. But I think I understand it. When Feliks was born, his own father Stanislaw was forty: an unexceptional state of affairs. When Stefan grew out of mindless infancy, his father was approaching his first hundred. Who can say how a ten year old reacts to a centenarian father?

And what was Stefan’s final solution to paternal oppression? It was a well-tried one, even a hackneyed one, but one never attempted before in our family from land-locked Lublin. At the age of fifteen, in 1910, he ran away to sea, to the beckoning embraces of risk, fortune, fame — or oblivion. It was thought that no more would be seen of him. But this intrepid father of mine, not content with his runaway defiance or with braving the rough world he had pitched himself into, returned, after three years, for the pleasure of staring fixedly into my grandfather’s face. He was then a youth of eighteen. But three years’ voyaging — to Shanghai, Yokohama, Valparaiso …—had toughened his skin and packed into his young frame more resourcefulness than my hundred-year-old grandfather had ever known, bent over his cogs and pendula.

My grandfather realised that he faced a man. That weather-beaten stare was a match for his hundred nominal years. The result of this sailor’s return was a reconciliation, a rare balance between father and son — enhanced rather than marred by the fact that only a month or so afterwards Stefan took up with a woman of dubious character — the widow of a music-hall manager (perhaps it is significant that she was twelve years older than my father) — got her with child and married her. Thus I arrived on the scene.

My grandfather showed remarkable forbearance. He even stooped for a while to taste the transitory delights of variety artists and buxom singers. It seemed that he would not object — whether it was fitting or not — to Stefan and his lineage partaking of the Watch. It was even possible that Stefan — the only Krepski not to have done so in the way that fish take to swimming and birds to flight — might come round at last to the trade of clock-making.

But all this was not to be. In 1914—the year of my birth — Stefan once more took to the sea, this time in the service of his country (for he was the first Krepski to be born on British soil). Once more there were heated confrontations, but my grandfather could not prevail. Perhaps he knew that even without the pretext of war Stefan would have sooner or later felt stirred again by the life of daring and adventure. Feliks, at last swallowing his anger and disappointment before the parting warrior, held out the prospect of the Watch as a father to a son, even if he could not hold it out as a master clockmaker to a faithful apprentice. Perhaps Stefan might indeed have returned in 1918, a salty hero, ready to settle down and receive its benison. Perhaps he too might have lived to a ripe one hundred, and another hundred more — were it not for the German shell which sent him and the rest of his gallant ship’s crew to the bottom at the battle of Jutland.

So it was that I, who knew so intimately my grandfather whose own memories stretched back to Napoleonic times, and would doubtless have known — were it not for that fool of an omnibus driver — my great-grandfather, born while America was still a British colony, have no memories of my father at all. For when the great guns were booming at Jutland and my father’s ship was raising its churning propellors to the sky, I was asleep in my cot in Bethnal Green, watched over by my equally unwitting mother. She was to die too, but six months later, of a mixture of grief and influenza. And I passed, at the age of two, into my grandfather’s hands, and so into the ghostly hands of my venerable ancestors. From merest infancy I was destined to be a clockmaker, one of the solemn priesthood of Time, and whenever I erred in my noviceship, as on that beguiling evening in Highgate, to have set before me the warning example of my father — dead (though his name lives in glory — you will see it on the memorial at Chatham, the only Krepski amongst all those Jones and Wilsons) at the laughable age of twenty-one.

But this is not a story about my father, nor even about clock-making. All these lengthy preliminaries are only a way of explaining how on a certain day, a week ago, in a room on the second floor of a delapidated but (as shall be seen) illustrious Victorian building, I, Adam Krepski, sat, pressing in my hand till the sweat oozed from my palm, the Watch made by my great-grandfather, which for over one hundred and seventy years had neither stopped nor ever been wound. The day, as it happens, was my wedding anniversary. A cause for remembrance; but not for celebration. It is nearly thirty years since my wife left me.

And what was making me clutch so tightly that precious mechanism?

It was the cries. The cries coming up the dismal, echoing staircase; the cries from the room on the landing below, which for several weeks I had heard at sporadic intervals, but which now had reached a new, intense note and came with ever-increasing frequency. The cries of a woman, feline, inarticulate — at least to my ears, for I knew them to be the cries of an Asian woman — an Indian, a Pakistani — expressive first of outrage and grief (they had been mixed in those first days with the shouts of a man), but now of pain, of terror, of — it was this that tightened my grip so fervently on that Watch — of unmistakable urgency.

My wedding anniversary. Now I consider it, time has played more than one trick on me …

And what was I doing in that gloomy and half-derelict building, I, a Krepski clockmaker? That is a long and ravelled tale — one which begins perhaps on that fateful day in July, 1957, when I married.

My grandfather (who in that same year reached one hundred and fifty) was against it from the outset. The eve of my wedding was another of those humbling moments in my life when he invoked the folly of my father. Not that Deborah had any of the questionable credentials of the widow of a music-hall manager. She was a thirty-five-year-old primary school teacher, and I, after all, was forty-three. But — now my grandfather was midway through his second century — the misogynist bent of our family had reached in him a heightened, indiscriminate pitch. On the death of his third wife, in 1948, he had ceased to play the hypocrite and got himself a housekeeper, not a fourth wife. The disadvantage of this decision, so he sometimes complained to me, was that housekeepers had to be paid. His position towards womankind was entrenched. He saw my marriage-to-be as a hopeless backsliding into the mire of vain biological yearnings and the fraudulent permanence of procreation.

He was wrong. I did not marry to beget children (that fact was to be my undoing) nor to sell my soul to Time. I married simply to have another human being to talk to other than my grandfather.

Do not mistake me. I did not wish to abandon him. I had no intention of giving up my place beside him in the Krepski workshop or of forfeiting my share in the Watch. But consider the weight of his hundred and fifty years on my forty-odd. Consider that since the age of three, not having known my father and, barely, my mother, I had been brought up by this prodigy who even at my birth was over a hundred. Might I feel, in watered-down form, the oppressions and frustrations of my father? At twenty-five I had already grown tired of my grandfather’s somehow hollow accounts of the Polish uprisings of 1830, of exiled life in Paris, of the London of the 1850s and ’60s. I had begun to perceive that mixed with his blatant misogyny was a more general, brooding misanthropy — a contempt for the common run of men who lived out their meagre three score and ten. His eyes (one of which was permanently out of true from the constant use of a clockmaker’s eye-piece) had developed a dull, sanctimonious stare. About his person there hung, like some sick-room smell infesting his clothes, an air of stagnancy, ill-humour, isolation, and even, to judge from his frayed jackets and the disrepair of his Highgate home — relative penury.

For what had become of “Krepski and Krepski, Clock and Watchmakers of Repute,” in the course of my lifetime? It was no longer the thriving East End workshop, employing six skilled craftsmen and three apprentices, it had been at the turn of the century. Economic changes had dealt it blows. The mass production of wrist-watches which were now two-a-penny and cheap electrical (electrical!) clocks had squeezed out the small business. On top of this was my grandfather’s ever-increasing suspiciousness of nature. For, even if lack of money had not forced him to do so, he would have gradually dismissed his faithful workmen for fear they might discover the secret of the Watch and betray it to the world. That watch could prolong human life but not the life of commercial enterprise. By the 1950s Krepski and Krepski was no more than one of those grimy, tiny, Dickensian-looking shops one can still see on the fringes of the City, sign-boarded “Watch and Clock Repairers” but looking more like a run-down pawn-broker’s — to which aged customers would, very occasionally, bring the odd ancient mechanism for a “seeing to.”

Grandfather was a hundred and fifty. He looked like a sour-minded but able-bodied man of half that age. Had he retired at the customary time (that is, some time during the 1860s or ’70s) he would have known the satisfaction of passing on a business at the peak of its success and of enjoying a comfortable “old age.” In the 1950s, still a fit man, he had no choice but to continue at the grinding task of scraping a living. Even had he retired and I had managed to support him, he would have returned, surely enough, to the shop on Goswell Road, like a dog to its kennel.

Imagine the companionship of this man — in our poky, draughty place of work which vibrated ceaselessly to the rumblings of the City traffic outside; in the Highgate house with its flaking paintwork, damp walls and cracked crockery, and only the growlings of Mrs. Murdoch, the housekeeper, to break the monotony. Was I to be blamed for flying with relief from this emtombment to the arms of an impulsive, bright-minded, plumply attractive schoolteacher who — at thirty-five — was actually perturbed by the way the years were passing her by?

• • •

Ah, but in that last fact lay the seeds of marital catastrophe. Grandfather was right. A true Krepski, a true guardian of the Watch, should marry, if he is to marry at all, a plain, stupid and barren wife. Deborah was none of these things: She was that volatile phenomenon, a woman at what for women is a dangerous age, suddenly blessed with the prospect of womanhood fulfilled. Shall I describe our union as merely connubial? Shall I offer the picture of myself as the sober, steady, semi-paternal figure (I was eight years her elder) taking under my sheltering wing this slightly delicate, slightly frightened creature? No. Those first months were a whirlwind, a vortex into which I was sucked, gently at first and then with accelerating and uninhibited voracity. The walls of our first floor flat shook to the onslaughts of female passion; they echoed to Deborah’s screams (for at the height of ecstasy Deborah would scream, at an ear-splitting pitch). And I, an, at first, unwitting and passive instrument to all this, a clay figure into which life was rapidly pummeled and breathed, suddenly woke to the fact that for thirty years my life had been measured by clocks; that for people who are not Krepskis, Time is not a servant but an old and pitiless adversary. They have only so long on this earth and they want only to live, to have lived. And when the opportunity comes it is seized with predatory fury.

Deborah, how easy the choice might have been if I had not been a Krepski. Sometimes, in those early days, I would wake up, nestled by my wife’s ever-willing flesh and those years in Goswell Road would seem eclipsed: I was once more a boy — as on that audacious summer evening in Highgate — seduced by the world’s caress. But then, in an instant, I would remember my grandfather, waiting already at his work-bench, the Great Watch ticking in his pocket, the clock-making, time-enslaving blood that flowed in his and my veins.

How easy the choice if passion were boundless and endless. But it is not, that is the rub; it must be preserved before it perishes and put in some permanent form. All men must make their pact with history. The spring-tide of marriage ebbs, we are told, takes on slower, saner, more effectual rhythms; the white-heat cools, diffuses, but is not lost. All this is natural, and has its natural and rightful object. But it was here that Deborah and I came to the dividing of the ways. I watched my wife through the rusting iron railings of the playground of the primary school where sometimes I met her at lunch-time. There was a delicate, wholesome bloom on her cheeks. Who would have guessed where that bloom came from? Who could have imagined what wild abandon could seize this eminently respectable figure behind closed doors and drawn curtains?

Yet that abandon was no longer indulged; it was withheld, denied (I had come to relish it) and would only be offered freely again in exchange for a more lasting gift. And who could mistake what that gift must be, watching her in the playground, her teacher’s whistle round her neck, in the midst of those squealing infants, fully aware that my eyes were on her; patting on the head, as though to make the point unmistakable, now a pugnacious boy with grazed knees, now a Jamaican girl with pigtails?

Had I told her, in all this time, about the Great Watch? Had I told her that I might outlive her by perhaps a century and that our life together — all in all to her — might become (so, alas, it has) a mere oasis in the sands of memory? Had I told her that my grandfather, whom she thought a doughty man of seventy-five, was really twice that age? And had I told her that in us Krepskis the spirit of fatherhood is dead? We do not need children to carry our image into the future, to provide us with that overused bulwark against extinction.

No. I had told her none of these things. I held my tongue in the vain — the wishful? — belief that I might pass in her eyes for an ordinary mortal. If I told her, I assured myself, would she not think I was mad? And, then again, why should I not (was it so great a thing?) flout the scruples which were part of my heritage and give a child to this woman with whom, for a brief period at least, I had explored the timeless realm of passion?

Our marriage entered its fourth year. She approached the ominous age of forty. I was forty-seven, a point at which other men might recognise the signs of age but at which I felt only the protective armour of the Watch tighten around me, the immunity of Krepskihood squeeze me like an iron maiden. Dear Father Stefan, I prayed in hope. But no answering voice came from the cold depths of the Skaggerak or the Heligoland Bight. Instead I imagined a ghostly sigh from far off Poland — and an angry murmuring, perhaps, closer to hand, as Great-grandfather Stanislaw turned in his Highgate grave.

And I looked each day into the tacitly retributive eyes of my grandfather.

Deborah and I waged war. We bickered, we quarrelled, we made threats. And then at last, abandoning all subterfuge, I told her.

She did not think I was mad. Something in my voice, my manner told her that this was not madness. If it had been madness, perhaps, it would have been easier to endure. Her face turned white. In one fell stroke her universe was upturned. Her stock of love, her hungry flesh, her empty womb were mocked and belittled. She looked at me as if I might have been a monster with two heads or a fish’s tail. The next day she fled—“left me” is too mild a term — and, rather than co-exist another hour with my indefinite lease on life, returned to her mother, who — poor soul — was ailing, in need of nursing, and shortly to die.

Tick-tock, tick-tock. The invalid clocks clanked and wheezed on the shelves in Goswell Road. Grandfather showed tact. He did not rub salt in the wound. Our reunion even had, too, its brief honeymoon. The night of Deborah’s departure I sat up with him in the house at Highgate and he recalled, not with the usual dry deliberateness but with tender spontaneity, the lost Poland of his youth. Yet this very tenderness was an ill omen. Men of fantastic age are not given to nostalgia. It is the brevity of life, the rapid passage of finite years, that gives rise to sentiment and regret. During my interlude with Deborah a change had crept over my grandfather. The air of stagnancy, the fixation in the eyes were still there but what was new was that he himself seemed aware of these things as he had not before. Sorrow shadowed his face, and weariness, weariness.

The shop was on its last legs. Anyone could see there was no future in it; and yet for Grandfather, for me, there was, always, future. We pottered away, in the musty workroom, eking out what scant business came our way. The Great Watch, that symbol of Time conquered ticking remorselessly in Grandfather’s waistcoat, had become, we knew, our master. Sometimes I dreamt wildly of destroying it, of taking a hammer to its invulnerable mechanism. But how could I have committed an act so sacrilegious, and one which, for all I knew, might have reduced my grandfather, in an instant to dust?

We worked on. I remember the hollow mood — neither relief nor reluctance but some empty reflex between the two — with which we shut the shop each night at six and made our journey home. How we would sit, like two creatures sealed in a bubble, as our number 43 trundled up the Holloway Road, watching the fretfulness of the evening rush (how frenzied the activity of others when one’s own pace is slow and interminable) with a cold rep-tilean stare.

Ah, happy restless world, with oblivion waiting to solve its cares.

Ah, lost Deborah, placing gladioli on the grave of her mother.

The sons, and grandsons, of the ordinary world do their duty by their sires. They look after them in their twilight years. But what if twilight never falls?

By the summer of my grandfather’s hundred and sixty-second year I could endure no more. With the last dregs of my feeble savings I rented a cottage in the Sussex downs. My aim was to do what necessity urged: to sell up the shop; to find myself a job with a steady income by which I might support Grandfather and myself. Admittedly, I was now fifty-five, but my knowledge of clocks might find me a place with an antique dealer’s or as sub-curator in some obscure museum of horology. In order to attempt all this, Grandfather had first to be lured to a safe distance.

This is not to say that the cottage was merely an — expensive — expedient. One part of me sincerely wished my grandfather to stop peering into the dusty orbs of clocks and to peer out again at the World — even the tame, parochial world of Sussex. Ever lurking in my mind was the notion that age ripens, mellows and brings it own, placid contentments. Why had not his unique length of years afforded my grandfather more opportunity to enjoy, to savour, to contemplate the world? Why should he not enter now an era of meditative tranquillity, of god-like congruence with Nature? Youth should bow to age not only in duty but in veneration. Perhaps I had always been ashamed — perhaps it was a source of secret despair for my own future — that my grandfather’s years had only produced in him the crabbed, cantankerous creature I knew. Perhaps I hoped that extraordinary age might have instilled in him extraordinary sagacity. Perhaps I saw him — wild, impossible vision — turning in his country hermitage into some hallowed figure, a Sussex shaman, a Wise Man of the Downs, an oracle to whom the young and foolish world might flock for succour.

Or perhaps my motive was simpler than this. Perhaps it was no more than that of those plausible, burdened sons and daughters who, with well-meaning looks and at no small cost, place their parents in Homes, in order to have them out of sight and mind — in order, that is, to have them safely murdered.

My clinching argument was that, though all that would be left of Krepski and Krepski would be the Great Watch, yet that all would be all-in-all. And as a preliminary concession I agreed to spend a first experimental weekend with him at the cottage.

We travelled down on a Friday afternoon. It was one of those close, sullen high-summer days which make the flesh crawl and seem to bring out from nowhere swarms of flying insects. Grandfather sat in his seat in the railway carriage and hid his face behind a newspaper. This, like the weather, was a bad sign. Normally, he regarded papers with disdain. What did the news of 1977 mean to a man born in 1808? Almost by definition, papers were tokens of man’s subjection to time; their business was ephemerality. Yet recently, so I had noticed, he had begun to buy them and to read them almost with avidity; and what his eyes went to first were reports of accidents and disasters, sudden violent deaths …

Now and then, as we passed through the Surrey suburbs, he came out from behind his screen. His face was not the face of a man travelling towards rejuvenating horizons. It was the petrified face of a man whom no novelty can touch.

The Sussex downs, an hour from London, still retain their quiet nooks and folds. Our cottage — one of a pair let by some palm-rubbing local speculator as weekend retreats — stood at one end of the village and at the foot of one of these characteristic, peculiarly female eminences of the Downs, referred to in the Ordnance Survey map as a beacon. In spite of the sticky heat, I proposed this as the object of a walk the day after our arrival. The place was a noted viewpoint. Let us look down, I thought, us immortals, at the world.

Grandfather was less enthusiastic. His reluctance had nothing to do with his strength of limb. The climb was steep, but Grandfather despite his years, was as fit as a man of forty. His unwillingness lay in a scarcely concealed desire to sabotage and deride this enterprise of mine. He had spent the first hours after our arrival shambling around the cottage, not bothering to unpack his things, inspecting the oak timbers, the “traditional fireplace” and the “charming cottage garden” with an air of acid distaste, and finally settling heavily into a chair in just the same hunched manner in which he settled into his habitual chair in Highgate or his work stool at the shop. Long life ought to elicit a capacity for change. But it is the opposite (I know it well). Longevity encourages intransigence, conservatism. It teaches you to revert to type.

The sultry weather had not freshened. Half way up the slope of the beacon we gave up our ascent, both of us in a muck-sweat. Even at this relative height no breezes challenged the leaden atmosphere, and the famous view, northwards to the Weald of Kent, was lost in grey curtains of haze and the shadows of black, greasy clouds. We sat on the tussocked grass, recovering our breath, Grandfather a little to one side and below me, mute as boulders. The silence hanging between us was like an epitaph upon my futile hopes: Give up this doomed exercise.

And yet, not silence. That is, not our silence — but the silence in which we sat. A silence which, as our gasps for breath subsided, became gradually palpable, audible, insistent. We sat, listening, on the warm grass, ears pricked like alert rabbits. We forgot our abortive climb. When had we last heard such silence, used as we were to the throbbing traffic of the Goswell Road? And what a full, what a tumultuous silence. Under the humid pressure of the atmosphere the earth was opening up its pores and the silence was a compound of its numberless exhalations. The downs themselves — those great feminine curves of flesh — were tingling, oozing. And what were all the components of this massive silence — the furious hatching of insects, the sighing of the grass, the trill of larks, the far-off bleat of sheep — but the issue of that swelling pregnancy? What, in turn, was that pregnancy, pressing, even as we sat, into our puny backsides, but the pregnancy of Time?

Old, they say, as the hills. Grandfather sat motionless, his face turned away from me. For a moment, I imagined the tough, chalk-scented grass spreading over him, rising round him to make of him no more than a turf cairn. On the Ordnance Survey maps were the acne-marks of neolithic barrows and Iron Age earthworks.

Silence. And the only noise, the only man-made obtrusion into that overpowering silence was the tick of Great-grandfather’s Watch.

We began to descend. Grandfather’s face wore a look of gloom; of humility, of pride, of remorse, contrition — despair.

The night was quick in coming, hastened by the louring clouds. And it brought the appropriate conditions — a drop in temperature, a clash of air currents — to release the pent up explosion. As the electricity in the atmosphere accumulated, so Grandfather grew increasingly restless. He began to pace about the cottage, face twitching, darting black scowls in my direction. Twice, he got out the Watch, looked at it as if on the verge of some dreadful decision, then with an agonised expression returned it to his pocket. I was afraid of him. Thunder clattered and lightning flashed in the distance. And then, as if an invisible giant had taken a vast stride, a wind tore at the elm trees in the lane, half a dozen unfamiliar doors and windows banged in the cottage, and the bolts from heaven seemed suddenly aimed at a point over our heads. Grandfather’s agitation intensified accordingly. His lips worked at themselves. I expected them to froth. Another whirlwind outside. I went upstairs to fasten one of the banging windows. When I returned he was standing by the front door, buttoning his raincoat.

“Don’t try to stop me!”

But I could not have stopped him if I had dared. His mania cast an uncrossable barrier around him. I watched him pass out into the frenzied air. Barely half a minute after his exit the skies opened and rain lashed down.

I was not so obtuse as to imagine that my grandfather had gone for a mere stroll. But something kept me from pursuing him. I sat in a rocking chair by the “traditional fireplace,” waiting and (discern my motive if you will) even smiling, fixedly, while the thunder volleyed outside. Something about the drama of the moment, something about this invasion of the elements into our lives I could not help but find (like the man who grins idiotically at his executioner) gratifying.

And then I acted. The beacon: that was the best place for storm watching. For defying — or inviting — the wrath of the skies. I reached for my own waterproof and walking shoes and strode out into the tumult.

During a thunder-storm, in Thuringia, so the story goes, Martin Luther broke down, fell to his knees, begged the Almighty for forgiveness and swore to become a monk. I am not a religious man — had I not been brought up to regard a certain timepiece as the only object of worship? — but that night I feared for my soul; that night I believe a God was at work, directing my steps to the scene of divine revenge. The thunder beat its drum. By the intermittent flashes of lightning I found my way to the slopes of the beacon; but, once there, it seemed I did not need a guide to point my course — I did not need to reach the top and stand there like some demented weathercock. The downs are bald, bold formations and in the magnesium-glare of lightning any features could be picked out. Clinging to the incline was a solitary clump of trees, of the kind which, on the downs, are said to have a druidical significance. I needed to go no further. One of the trees had been split and felled by a scimitar of lightning. Grandfather lay lifeless beside its twisted wreckage, an anguished grimace frozen on his face. And in his waistcoat pocket, beneath his sodden coat and jacket, the Great Watch, its tiny, perfect, mechanical brain ignorant of storms, of drama, of human catastrophe, still ticked indifferently.

Help me, powers that be! Help me, Father Time! I stood in the crematorium, the last of the Krepskis, the Great Watch ticking in my pocket. Flames completed on Grandfather the work of the lightning, and reduced, in a matter of seconds, his one-hundred-and-sixty-year-old body to cinders. That day, a day so different — a tranquil, golden August day — from that night of death, I could have walked away and become a new man. I could have traced my steps — only a short distance — to the school playground where Deborah still stood among her frolicking brood, and asked to be reconciled. Her mother; my grandfather. The chastening bonds of bereavement.

I could have flung the Watch away. Indeed, I considered having it incinerated with Grandfather’s corpse — but the rules of crematoria are strict on such matters. And did I not, that same afternoon, having attended the perfunctory reading of a barren will at a solicitor’s in Chancery Lane, walk on the Thames Embankment, under the plane trees, holding the Watch in my sweating hand and daring myself to throw it? Twice I drew back my arm and twice let it fall. From the glinting river the waterborne voice of my father said, Why not? Why not? But I thought of Grandfather’s ashes, still warm and active in their urn (surely when one lives the best part of two centuries one does not die so quickly?). I thought of Great-grandfather Stanislaw, and of his forebears, whose names I knew like a litany — Stanislaw senior, Kasimierz, Ignacy, Tadeusz. In the curving reaches of the Thames I saw what I had never seen: the baroque spires of Lublin; the outstretched plains of Poland.

It is true what the psychologists say: Our ancestors are our first and only gods. It is from them we get our guilt, our duty, our sin — our destiny. A few claps of thunder had awed me, a few celestial firecrackers had given me a passing scare. I gripped the Watch. I did not go back to the infants’ school that afternoon, nor even, at first, to the house in Highgate. I went — all the way on foot, like a devout pilgram — to the street in Whitechapel where my great-grandfather, a flourishing clockmaker in his hundred and twelfth year had set up a home in the 1870s. In the 1870s there were fine houses as well as slums in Whitechapel. The street was still there. And so was the old home — its crumbling stucco, its cracked and boarded-up windows, its litter-strewn front steps a mockery of the former building which had once boasted two maids and a cook. I stared at it. By some prompting of fate, by some inevitable reflex on my part, I knocked on the door. The face of an Asian woman; timid, soulful. Someone had told me there was a room to let in this house. Yes, it was true — on the second floor.

So I did not throw away the Watch: I found a shrine in which to place it. And I did not return — save to dispose of its meagre contents and arrange its sale — to the house in Highgate. I refashioned my world, on a hermit’s terms, out of an ancestral room in Whitechapel. Time, as even the ignorant will tell you and every clock-face will demonstrate, is circular. The longer you live, the more you long to go back, to go back. I closed my eyes on that old charlatan, the future. And Deborah remained for ever in her playground, whistling at her children, like someone vainly whistling for a runaway dog which already lies dead at the side of a road.

Thus I came to be sitting, a week ago, in that same room in Whitechapel, clutching, as I had that day by the Thames, the Watch in my itching palm. And still they came, the cries, desolate and unappeasable, from the floor below.

What was the meaning of these cries? I knew (I who had renounced such things to live in perpetual marriage with the Watch) they were the cries that come from the interminglings of men and women, the cries of heart-break and vain desire. I knew they were the cries of that same Asian woman who had opened the door for me that day of Grandfather’s cremation. A Mrs. — or Miss? — Matharu. The husband (lover?) had come and gone at varying times. A shift-worker of some sort. Sometimes I met him on the stairs. An exchange of nods; a word. But I did not seek more. I burrowed in my ancestral lair. And even when the shouting began — his ferocious, rapid, hers like some ruffled, clucking bird — I did not intervene. Thunder-storms pass. Clocks tick on. The shouts were followed by screams, blows, the noise of slamming doors — sobs. Still I sat tight. Then one day the door slammed with the unmistakable tone of finality (ah, Deborah); and the sobs that followed were not the sobs that still beg and plead, but solitary sobs, whimpering and dirge-like — the sobs of the lonely lingering out the empty hours.

Did I go down the stairs. Did I give a gentle knock to the door and ask softly, “Can I help?” No. The world is full of snares.

Time heals. Soon these whimperings would cease. And so they did. Or, rather, faded into almost-silence — only to build up again into new crescendos of anguish.

I gripped my ticking talisman, as the sick and dying cling, in their hour of need, to pitiful trinkets. Do not imagine that these female cries merely assailed my peace and did not bring to me, as to their utterer, real suffering. I recognised that they emanated from a region ungoverned by time — and thus were as poisonous, as lethal to us Krepskis as fresh air to a fish.

We were alone in the building, this wailing woman and I. The house — the whole street — lay under the ultimatum of a compulsory purchase. The notices had been issued. Already the other rooms were vacated. And already, beyond my windows, walls were tumbling, bulldozers were sending clouds of dust into the air. The house of Krepski must fall soon; as had fallen already the one-time houses of Jewish tailors, Dutch goldsmiths, Russian furriers — a whole neighborhood of immigrant tradesmen, stepping off the ships at London docks and bringing with them the strands of their far-flung pasts. How could it be that all this history had been reduced, before my eyes, to a few heaps of flattened rubble and a few grey demarcations of corrugated fencing?

Another rending cry, like the tearing of flesh itself. I stood up: I clutched my forehead; sat down; stood up again. I descended the stairs. But I did not loosen my grip on the Watch.

She lay — beneath a tangled heap of bedclothes, on a mattress in the large, draughty room which I imagined had once been my great-grandfather’s drawing-room, but which now served as living-room, kitchen and bedroom combined — in the obvious grip not so much of grief as of illness. Clearly, she had been unable to answer my knock at the door, which was unlocked, and perhaps had been for weeks. Sweat beaded her face. Her eyes burned. And even as I stood over her she drew a constricted gasp of pain and her body shuddered beneath the heaped bedclothes which I suspected had been pulled rapidly about her as I entered.

Circumstances conspire. This woman, as I knew from the dozen words we had exchanged in little more than a year, spoke scarcely any English. She could not describe her plight; I could not inquire. No language was needed to tell me I should fetch a doctor, but as I bent over her, with the caution with which any Krepski bends over a woman, she suddenly gripped my arm, no less fiercely than my free hand gripped the Watch. When I signalled my intention, mouthing the word “doctor” several times, she gripped it tightly still, and an extra dimension of torment seemed to enter her face. It struck me that had I been a younger man (I was sixty-three, but little did she know that in Krepski terms I was still callow) her grip on my arm might have been less ready. Even so, fear as much as importunacy knotted her face. More than one layer of shame seemed present in her eyes as she let out another uncontrollable moan and her body strained beneath the bedclothes.

“What’s wrong? What’s wrong?”

You will doubtless think me foolish and colossally ignorant for not recognising before this point the symptoms of child-birth. For such they were. I, a Krepski who held in my hand the power to live so long and whose forefathers had lived so long before him, did not recognise the beginnings of life, and did not know what a woman in labour is like. But, once the knowledge dawned, I understood not only the fact but its implications and the reasons for this woman’s mingled terror and entreaty. The child was the child of a fugitive father. Daddy was far away, ignorant perhaps of this fruit of his dalliance, just as my father Stefan, far away on the North Sea, was ignorant of my mother stooping over my cot. Daddy, perhaps, was no Daddy by law; and who could say whether by law either Daddy or Mummy were rightful immigrants? That might explain the hand gripping me so tightly as I turned for professional help. Add to all this that I was an Englishman and I bent over this woman — whose mother had perhaps worn a veil in some village by the Ganges — as she suffered the most intimate female distress … You will see the position was vexed.

And I had no choice but to be the witness — the midwife — to this hopeless issue.

I understood that the moment was near. Her black-olive eyes fixed me from above the tangled sheets, in which, as if obeying some ancient instinct, she tried to hide her mouth. The point must soon come when she must abandon all modesty — and I all squeamishness — and I could see her weighing this terrible candour against the fact that I was her only help.

But as we stared at each other a strange thing happened. In the little half-oval of face which she showed me I seemed to see, as if her eyes were equipped with some extraordinary ultra-optical lens, the huge hinterlands of her native Asia and the endless nut-brown faces of her ancestors. At the same time, marshalled within myself, assembling from the distant margins of Poland, were the ranks of my Krepski sires. What a strange thing that our lives should collide, here where neither had its origins. How strange that they should collide at all. What a strange and extraordinary thing that I should be born a Krepski, she a Matharu. What an impossible concatenation of chances goes to the making of any birth.

I must have smiled at these thoughts — or at least lent to my face some expression which infected hers. For her look suddenly softened — her black irises melted — then immediately hardened again. She screwed her eyes shut, let out a scream, and with a gesture of submission — as she might have submitted to that brute of a husband — pulled back the bedclothes from the lower part of her body, drew up her legs, and, clutching at the bed-head, with her hands, began to strain mightily.

Her eyes were shut; I think they remained shut throughout the whole ensuing procedure. But mine opened, wider and wider, at what perhaps no Krepski had seen, or at least viewed with such privileged and terrified intentness. The mother — for this is what she was now indubitably becoming — arched her spine, heaved her monstrous belly, seemed to offer her whole body to be cleaved from between the legs upwards, and those expanding eyes of mine saw a glistening, wet, purple-mottled object, like some wrinkled marble pebble, appear where the split began. This pebble grew — and grew — growing impossibly large for the narrow opening in which it seemed intent on jamming itself. For a whole minute, indeed, it stuck there, as if this were its final resting place, while the mother screamed. And then suddenly it ceased to be a pebble. It was a lump of clenched, unformed flesh, suffused with blood, aware that its position was critical. The mother gasped; it became a head, a gnarled, battered, Punch-and-Judy head. The mother gasped again, this time with an audible relief and exultation; and it was no longer a head, but a whole creature, with arms and legs and little groping hands; and it was no longer caught in that awesome constriction but suddenly spilling out with slippery ease, like something poured from a pickle jar, a slithery brine accompanying it. But this was not all. As if it were not remarkable enough that so large a thing should emerge from so small a hole, there followed it, rapidly, an indescribable mass of multicoloured effluents, the texture and hue of liquid coral, gelatine, stewed blackberries …

From what a ragout is a human life concocted.

What was I doing throughout this spectacular performance? My eyes were popping, my knees were giving. I was clutching the Great Watch, fit to crush it, in my right hand. But now, with the little being writhing in slow motion on the gory sheets and the mother’s moans of relief beginning to mingle with a new anguish, I knew that I had my own unavoidable part to play in this drama. Once, on Grandfather’s television at Highgate, I had watched (disgusted but fascinated) a programme about child-delivery. I knew that much pertained to the fleshy tube which even now snaked and coiled between mother and baby. The mother understood it too; for with her last reserves of energy she was gesturing to a chest of drawers on the fair side of the room. In one of the drawers I found a pair of kitchen scissors …

With the instant of birth begins the possibility of manslaughter. My untutored hands did what they could while my stomach fought down surging tides — not just of nausea but of strange, welling fear. Like the TV surgeon, I held up the slippery creature and, with an irresolute hand, slapped it. It grimaced feebly and made the sound — a sound of choking pain — which they say means life has taken hold. But it looked wretched and sick to me. I put it down on the mattress close to the mother’s side, as if some maternal fluence could do the trick I could not. We looked at each other, she and I, with the imploring looks of actual lovers, actual cogenitors who have pooled their flesh in a single hope.

Deborah … with your playground whistle.

I had heard the expression “life hangs in the balance.” I knew that it applied to tense moments in operating theatres and in condemned cells when a reprieve may still come, but I never knew — used to life as an ambling affair that might span centuries — what it meant. And only now do I know what enormous concentrations of time, what huge counter-forces of piled-up years, decades, centuries, go into those moments when the balance might swing, one way or the other.

We looked at the pitiful child. Its blind face was creased; its fingers worked. Its breaths were clearly numbered. The mother began to blubber, adding yet more drops to her other, nameless outpourings; and I felt my ticking, clockmaker’s heart swell inside me. A silent, involuntary prayer escaped me.

And suddenly they were there again. Stanislaw and Feliks and Stefan; winging towards me by some uncanny process, bringing with them the mysterious essence of the elements that had received them and decomposed them. Great-grandfather from his Highgate grave, Grandfather from his urn, Father (was he the first to arrive?) from the grey depths where the fishes had nibbled him and the currents long since corroded and dispersed him. Earth, fire, water. They flocked out of the bowels of Nature. And with them came Stanislaw senior, Kasimierz, Tadeusz; and all the others whose names I forget; and even the mythical Krepfs of Nuremberg and Prague.

My hand was on the magic, genie-summoning Watch. In that moment I knew that Time is not something that exists, like territory to be annexed, outside us. What are we all but the distillation of all time? What is each one of us but the sum of all the time before him?

The little baby chest was trembling feebly; the hands still groped; the wrinkled face was turning blue. I held out the Great Watch of Stanislaw. I let it swing gently on its gold chain over the miniscule fingers of this new-born child. They say the first instinct a baby has is to grasp. It touched the ticking masterpiece fashioned in Lublin in the days of the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. A tiny forefinger and thumb clasped with the force of feathers the delicately chased gold casing and the thick, yellowed glass. A second — an eternity passed. And then — the almost motionless chest began to heave vigorously. The face knotted itself up to emit a harsh, stuttering wail, in the timbre of which there seemed the rudiments of a chuckle. The mother’s tearful eyes brightened. At the same time I felt inside me a renewed flutter of fear. No, not of fear exactly: a draining away of something; a stripping away of some imposture, as if I had no right to be where I was.

The diminutive fingers still gripped the Watch. Through the gold chain I felt the faintest hint of a baby tug. And a miraculous thing — as miraculous as this infant’s resurgence of life — happened. I set it down now as a fact worthy to be engraved in record. At six-thirty P.M. on a July day scarcely a week ago, the hand of a baby (what titanic power must have been in those fingers, what pent-up equivalent of years and years of accumulated time?) stopped my great-grandfather’s Watch, which had ticked, without requiring the hand of man to wind it, since September, 1809.

The fear — the sensation of being assailed from within — clutched me more intently. This room, in the house of my great-grandfather — in which my ancestors themselves had invisibly mustered (had they fled already, exorcised ghosts?) — was no longer my sanctuary but the centre of a desert. Weighing upon me with a force to equal that which had kept this child alive, was the desolation of my future, growing older and older, but never old enough, and growing every day, more puny, more shrivelled, more insectile.

I released my grip on the chain. I pressed the Great Watch into the hands of an infant. I got up from my position squatting by the mattress. I looked at the mother. How could I have explained, even if I had her language? The baby was breathing; it would live. The mother would pull through. I knew this better than any doctor. I turned to the door and made my exit. Things grew indistinct around me. I stumbled down the flight of stairs to the street door.

Outside, I found a phone-box and, giving the barest particulars, called an ambulance to the mother and child. Then I blundered on. No, not if you are thinking this, in the direction of Deborah. Nor in the direction of the Thames, to hurl, not the Watch, but myself into the murky stream and join my sea-changed father.

Not in any direction. No direction was necessary. For in the historic streets of Whitechapel, minutes later, I was struck, not by an omnibus, not by an arrow of lighting, nor by a shell from one of the Kaiser’s iron-clads, but by an internal blow, mysterious and devasting, a blow by which not physical trees but family trees are toppled and torn up by their roots.

Another ambulance wailed down Stepney Way, not for a mother and child, but for me.

And now I lie beneath fevered bedclothes. And now I can tell — from the disinterested if baffled faces of doctors (who no doubt have a different way of gauging time from clockmakers), from the looks of buxom nurses (ah — Deborah) who bend over my bed, lift my limp wrist and eye their regulation-issue watches — that my own breaths are numbered.