English 30-1

For forty years Edwin Sale had kept the shop on Rusholme Street, and in all that time the clocks

had never once agreed. He preferred it so. A room in which a hundred clocks struck the same hour

at the same instant would be, he thought, a kind of tyranny. What he liked was the loose and

overlapping democracy of their voices — the way the hour arrived not as a verdict but as a

rumour, carried first by the tall case in the window, taken up by the carriage clocks along the

shelf, and conceded at last by the cheap tin travellers that always ran a little fast, as though

impatient to have done with time altogether. He was winding the regulator when the bell above

the door went. A young woman came in out of the rain, shaking it from a coat too thin for the

season, and stood blinking in the brown light as people did, adjusting to the shop's particular

weather. Sale did not look up at once. He had learned that a customer left to ripen for a moment

would state her business more plainly, having rehearsed it in the silence. "They told me," she

said, "that you were the last one who still does this." "This," he repeated, not a question. She

set a watch on the counter, on the baize square he kept there for the purpose, and withdrew her

hand quickly, as if the thing might be taken from her by force. It was a man's pocket watch,

gold-filled, the case worn through at the edge to the base metal beneath, so that it wore a thin

grey rim like the tonsure of a monk. Sale knew the make before he had the loupe to his eye: a

railwayman's watch, made by the hundred thousand, accurate enough in its day to keep a man from

being killed at a junction, and worth now, on the open market, rather less than the lunch she

had presumably skipped to come here. "It was my grandfather's," she said. "They always are," he

said, and regretted it, though her face did not change. He opened the case. Inside, the movement

was a ruin — a mainspring snapped and rusted, the balance staff bent, a wheel robbed of two

teeth where someone, years ago, had gone at it with the wrong tool and the right confidence.

Somebody had loved it badly. He turned it under the light and felt the old contempt rise in him

— the contempt of the man who does a thing properly for the great mass of men who do not — and

then, unaccountably, the contempt thinned and left something colder beneath it. "Can you fix

it?" she said. He might have said a great many true things: that the parts were no longer made;

that to cut them new would cost ten times the watch's worth; that the thing had not, in any

sense that mattered to a horologist, kept time in thirty years, and would not keep it again. He

had said such things to many people, and watched the small collapse in their faces, and told

himself each time that a clean truth was kinder than a slow lie, and had believed it. "Leave it

with me," he said. When she had gone he sat a long while with the watch open before him, not

working. The rain had stopped. Around him the shop went on with its disagreement, the hour

breaking over him in its slow untidy wave, and he understood, with the particular clarity that

comes too late to be of use, that she had not asked whether the watch could keep time. No one

ever had. They asked whether it could be made to go — which was a different question, and one he

had spent forty years pretending not to hear.