Ever After by Graham Swift Page B

concern to her that she should not allow the clock to stop, at least—given her frequent trips away—while she was able to attend to it. I wind it now. Ever since that moment of panic, less than two days after her death, when I remembered that the clock had not been wound (but it had not stopped), it has been my resolution never to let the clock wind down. I cannot explain this. This was before Matthew entered my life. When I wind the clock, I hold the key which Ruth once held, and holding the key that Ruth once held, I hold the key once held by Matthew.
    The people go; the patterns remain. Something like that …
    It is a moot point why this little clock which presided not only over Matthew’s marriage but over his scandalous divorce, and seems to have presided since over a good many marred marriages, including my mother’s to my father, should have become such a token of nuptial good will. Elizabeth might so readily have disposed of it. She might—who knows?—have picked it up and sent John Pearce’s loving handiwork smashing to pieces. Yet, when her second marriage had already fallen on hard times (this would have been after she received Matthew’s letter) she gave it to her daughter as a blessing on hers.
    But I think I know why. There is surely no other explanation. She kept the clock, and passed it on, for the same reason that she kept the letter and the Notebooks. For the same reason that the clock has kept its perversely benignstatus (“One day, sweetie, when you get married …”). For the same reason that we keep, in spite of all, in spite of ourselves, certain things it proves impossible not to keep.
    Matthew was a clockmaker’s son, from Launceston in Cornwall, who one day fell in love with the daughter of a vicar from a village in Devon and married her and had children, and it seemed they would all live happily ever after. Then one day Matthew told the vicar that he no longer believed in God. Result: scandal, divorce, Matthew’s unseemly exit from the village, never to show his face there again …
    Thus, my mother’s version (“They took things seriously in those days, darling”), first told to me one day as she wound the clock, when I must have been seven or eight, and never significantly enlarged since.
    The Notebooks; the letter to Elizabeth: my “line of research.” There is no stipulation in the terms of the Ellison Fellowship that prevents the appointee from switching subjects. Complication—resentment—number two. I had no wish—whatever the College planned—to give up my scheduled tutoring of first- and second-year students in the Elizabethans and Jacobeans (always my strong period). But I happened to have drop into my lap what is the dream of every scholar, if granted to few, not even to those proudly inured cases (this place abounds with them) who have toiled for decades, heroically but aridly in their chosen fields, without ever stumbling across the spring of something Original or New. I was the owner of hitherto undiscovered
material
, of fresh
data
, of (I am quoting Potter now, but what the hell?) “an historical document of enormous value—a testimony to the effects on a private life of ideas that shook the world” (he had slipped—anticipatorily, perhaps—into his media style).
    It was therefore my duty—let alone my new-found, galvanizingpurpose—to give full priority to this matter. To see that it was properly presented (a book: editorial preface; introduction; notes) to the world of learning, if not to the public at large. My only mistake was to have spoken when I did to our resident whiz kid (history of Victorian ideas a speciality); to have
shown
him (goddammit!) the manuscripts. To have become, once more,
persona grata
at the Potter dinner table—an enviable privilege, I gather—but no longer for my cachet (though Katherine Potter is another matter) as a refugee from show-business and grief.
    Potter’s argument was, of course, that by the same token that I