He Turned It Over and Did Not Say Anything for a While

“How long has this been here?” Stephen said.

“Always,” said Aoife. “It was Grandad’s. It came from his mother, I think. It’s been on that mantelpiece my whole life.”

Stephen did not answer.

He lifted it down with both hands, which Aoife noticed, because he had been picking things up one-handed for an hour and a half.

---

It was a mantel clock, about thirty centimetres tall. Ebonised case — black, slightly dull, the sort of finish that looks like it wants a polish and must never have one, as she later learned. A brass dial with a silvered ring around the numbers. Two winding holes. A small brass handle on the top that nobody had ever used.

It had not worked since about 1998. Their father had taken it somewhere once, been told it would cost more than it was worth, and brought it home and put it back.

There was a dent in the bottom left corner of the case from 1991, when Marcus, aged eleven, had been doing something with a football indoors that has been discussed at family gatherings ever since.

---

Stephen turned it over.

He put it on the dining table upside down on a folded tea towel, took a small torch out of his bag and looked at the underside, and then at the back, and then he opened the back door of the case with his thumbnail and looked inside for a long time.

He did not say anything for about ninety seconds.

Aoife, who had spent an hour and a half being told things were worthless, found that she had stopped breathing normally.

“Is it—”

“Hang on,” said Stephen. “Sorry. Hang on.”

---

He took his phone out and photographed the movement — the works, the brass bit inside — from three angles, and then the dial, and then something on the backplate that he had to get very close to.

Then he stood up straight and rubbed the back of his neck.

“Right,” he said. “I’d like to come back, with a colleague.”

“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

“It’s not a bad thing,” said Stephen.

“That’s not an answer.”

“No,” he agreed. “I know. I’m going to be careful with you, because I’ve got this wrong before and I’ve watched what it does to people. But I’d rather come back with somebody who knows more than I do than tell you something now.”

---

“Can you tell me anything?”

Stephen thought about it.

“There’s a name on the backplate,” he said. “And if it’s the name I think it is, and if the movement is original to the case — which is the bit I can’t tell you — then it shouldn’t go in a general sale.”

“Where should it go?”

“A specialist sale,” said Stephen. “In London.”

---

Aoife has been asked since what she felt at that moment, and her answer disappoints people.

She says she felt slightly sick, and that the overwhelming sensation was not excitement but a kind of administrative dread: that something had just become complicated on a day when she had four bags for the tip in the car and a clearance firm booked for Thursday week.

“People think you get this rush,” she says. “I got a sort of oh, no.”

She also says — and this is the part she has been most honest about — that within about a minute a second thought arrived, and that the second thought was: don’t tell them yet.

Not as a plan. Not as anything she was going to act on. Just the thought, arriving on its own, the way thoughts do.

She noticed it, and she remembers noticing it, and she has never once pretended to anybody that it did not happen.

---

Stephen packed his bag.

At the door he said, “Don’t clean it. Don’t polish it, don’t oil it, don’t let anybody wind it. And don’t let the clearance firm in until we’ve been back.”

“Thursday week.”

“Cancel Thursday week,” said Stephen.

---

She stood in the hall after he had gone.

The house was cold and smelled of the inside of cupboards. There were four bin bags by the front door and a pile of curtains on the stairs and, in the front room, on the dining table, upside down on a tea towel, a black clock that had been on a mantelpiece for as long as she had been alive.

She went and stood in the doorway and looked at it.

Then she got her phone out of her coat pocket and rang her brother.