forgotten. She watched him, aware that here, at his bench, was where he spent his time. She shivered in the cold.
‘Put the fire on,’ he told her. She found it in the tangle, a single-bar Fifties model, and dust sparked and smelt as the element began to glow.
‘Here it is.’ Simon held up a tiny nugget of hairsprings and cogwheels. ‘And here’s the case.’ He fitted the mechanism into a silver sleeve engraved with flowers and leaves, then turned it over to show her the glass face, and the web-fine numerals. ‘It belonged to my grandmother. An exquisite piece of fine watchmaking. I used to be able to take it apart, and put it together again, just to admire it. It has a perfect economy of form and function. I couldn’t do it now. Eyesight’s gone.’
Harriet took the watch and examined it, following the leaf-patterns in the silver.
‘What else do you do?’
‘Apart from repairing worthless modern clocks and radios? Yes. I make things. I enjoy that, meeting a challenge. There’s no practical relevance, more an abstract pleasure, like solving a puzzle.’
‘What sort of things?’
Simon looked round his room, then scooped a pair of alarm clocks and a kettle on a bracket from the nearest cardboard box. ‘Why do you want to know about this? Here’s a perfect example. I was without electricity for a while.’ He didn’t explain why, and Harriet could guess. ‘I thought it would be interesting to make myself an early morning tea-machine that worked without it. Here it is. This alarm clock goes off, operates a flint-lighter under the kettle, lights a wick over a spirit reservoir. Heats the water, which takes a measured amount of time. When the kettle is boiling nicely, the second alarm goes off, operates this lever that tilts the kettle over the teapot, and wakes the sleeper at the same time. Hot cup of tea all ready and waiting. It worked perfectly the first time, then I came across an unforeseen snag.’
‘Which was?’
To her surprise, Simon began to laugh. The laughter began as a low rumble, then he put his head back and the sound swelled to a roar. ‘On the second morning, the reservoir holding the spirit cracked. The meths ran down the bedclothes and ignited. I woke up in flames. I didn’t need a cup of tea to get me out of bed.’
Harriet laughed then too, in snorts that stirred the fine dust and made her splutter. It lasted a long time, this second laughter that they had shared, and it dissolved another invisible barrier between them. When it had subsided, and Simon had replenished his whisky glass, Harriet perched on the arm of a wrecked chair and listened as he talked.
‘I’m glad you came back,’ he told her, and she glowed at the compliment.
Much of his talk, a disjointed commentary on the fragments littering his bench and the abandoned schemes littering his workroom, was too technical for Harriet to follow. She was happy to look on and to absorb what she could. An impression formed itself of Simon’s life given over to ideas that shone briefly and then lost their luminosity. The ideas became dead bodies once his enthusiasm had been withdrawn, and then dry skeletons, encroaching from the shadowy corners of the room. Soon, she guessed, the skeletons would fill the whole space and Simon would be swallowed up by them.
He finished the last of the whisky. His voice was beginning to thicken. He held up the empty bottle and tilted it, then seemed to come to a decision. Not quite steadily, he moved to the end of the bench and opened a drawer. He took out a rough wooden board, and propped it at an angle amongst the shavings and discarded tools.
‘This is the only thing I ever did that could have come right,’ he said. ‘If I had only known what to do with it. If I could have made myself look properly at it again, after we were liberated. Set free. That’s a notion, isn’t it?’
Harriet’s first thought was that he had descended without warning into drunkenness. He had been good-humoured and relaxed while he was pottering amongst his skeletons, but now his face had contracted, drawing itself into iron lines.
‘Set free,’ he repeated with bitterness and laughed, nothing like the tea-maker laugh. ‘Here. You’ve seen everything else. Don’t you want to look at this?’
‘What is it?’ Harriet asked, in fear.
‘It’s a game, of course. A wonderful game if you can play it right. Like life, Kath Peacock’s daughter.’
Harriet was frightened by the change in him. He took hold of her wrist and she had to stiffen to stop herself drawing it away from him. Into her open palms, Simon dropped four wooden balls in worn, faded colours, and four plastic counters bright in the same colours, red, blue, yellow and green. He raised their linked hands and let the wooden balls roll into a groove at the top of the board. Harriet saw that it might once have been the end of a packing case. There were marks on it, but she couldn’t decipher them. They looked like pictographs, Chinese or Japanese. Or perhaps they were something else altogether, faded and rubbed beyond recognition.
‘Now. Put the counters here,’ he commanded. ‘Any order you like, together or separate.’ He pointed to the foot of the board, where there were four slots. Harriet dropped the counters in, at random.
‘Watch.’
Simon drew back a spring-loaded tongue of wood to open a gate in the upper groove. The coloured balls fell out and rolled, one after another, down seven inclined struts, glued in a zigzag down the slope of the board. In each of the struts, Harriet saw, there were three more gates, all closed with wooden pegs. As they rolled over the gates and dropped from one strut to the next, the balls made a pleasing, musical sound. They dropped one by one off the end of the lowest strut and formed a column in the last slot. Harriet’s counters lay in different slots, in a different colour sequence. She smiled uncertainly, pleased and oddly soothed by the sound of the rolling balls and by the neat way they had plopped into their resting places, although she had no idea what was supposed to have been achieved.
‘How is your mathematics?’ Simon demanded.
‘Quite good.’ It was true. Harriet enjoyed figures.
‘Then tell me how many different ways the counters could be arranged in those slots.’
Harriet frowned.
‘Four to the power of four,’ he prompted her.
‘Two hundred and fifty six.’
‘Exactly.’ Simon was delighted. Some of the iron lines faded from his face. ‘Do you understand?’
‘I think so,’ Harriet said, who was only beginning to.
‘Go on, then. Your counters are your markers. Make your coloured balls drop into the same slots in the same order.’
‘I think I can do that.’
‘Would you like to make a little bet?’
Harriet grinned, fired by the challenge. She had forgotten to be afraid of Simon’s strange expression. ‘A fiver,’ she offered.
‘Thank you.’
‘Don’t thank me. You haven’t won it yet.’
The key to the game, Harriet saw now, was the little gates in the sloping struts. She touched one, and then saw that it would lift out, leaving a hole in the strut, big enough for a ball to drop through. The gate
