She Rang Them Before She Knew What It Was Worth

She rang Marcus first because his was the number at the top of the recent list, which is the only reason, and which she has had to explain more than once.

“The valuer’s been,” she said. “There might be something with the clock.”

“What clock?”

“Grandad’s clock. Off the mantelpiece.”

“The broken one?”

“Yes.”

“Something as in what?”

“I don’t know,” said Aoife. “He wouldn’t say. He’s coming back with somebody else. He said it might need to go to a specialist sale in London.”

There was a pause.

“How much are we talking?”

“Marcus, I genuinely don’t know. He wouldn’t tell me. I’m ringing you because I know as much as I know.”

---

Then she rang Jen, who was in the car, and who pulled over.

That is the whole of it. Two phone calls, eleven minutes apart, on a Wednesday afternoon in September, before anybody knew anything.

---

This is the decision the entire thing turns on, and Aoife made it in about four seconds standing in a hallway, and she has never been remotely tempted to take credit for it, because it did not feel like a decision at the time.

She says: “People keep telling me it was a big moral moment and I can’t make it into one. I put the phone to my ear because that’s what you do. If it had been hard I’d tell you it was hard.”

---

It would have been extremely easy not to.

She has thought about this since, in an abstract way, the way you think about a road you did not take, and the mechanics are genuinely uncomfortable.

She had the key. She was the executor. The clearance was hers to arrange and hers to describe afterwards.

The clock had already been written into the working inventory, in Stephen’s own handwriting, at the point where he first walked the room, as: mantel clock, non-working, nominal.

Nobody was coming to look. Marcus had been in that house twice in three years. Jen had been over for the funeral and for four days in 2019.

Nobody would ever have known. And both her siblings would have received exactly the sum they were already expecting, and would have gone on thinking that their father’s estate came to twenty-six thousand pounds, and neither of them would have felt short-changed for one minute of their lives, because you cannot miss a number you have never heard.

---

The colleague came on the Thursday of the following week.

She was younger than Stephen and very brisk and spent forty minutes with the clock and a loupe and said almost nothing to Aoife at all, which Aoife found much harder than Stephen’s carefulness.

Then the two of them went and stood in the garden for ten minutes.

When they came back in, the colleague did the talking, in careful and heavily qualified language that Aoife has since seen used by every professional she has dealt with since.

That the movement appeared to be by a maker of some significance. That the signature on the backplate was consistent with that attribution. That the case appeared to be original to the movement, which was the important thing, and which was not certain. That the dent was unfortunate but not fatal. That the non-working condition was, in this instance, close to irrelevant, and might even be preferable to a bad repair.

And that if it was what they thought it was, it should go to a specialist horological sale rather than a general one.

“What’s the number?” said Aoife.

They looked at each other.

“Twelve to eighteen,” said the colleague.

“Twelve to eighteen what?”

“Thousand,” said Stephen.

---

Aoife rang Marcus from the garden. She remembers being unable to find a flat bit of the lawn to stand on.

“Twelve to eighteen thousand,” she said.

There was a silence of about five seconds.

“Say that again.”

“Twelve to eighteen thousand pounds. It’s an estimate. They said estimates are just estimates.”

“For the clock.”

“For the clock.”

“Aoife,” said Marcus, and then stopped, and then said: “Does Jen know?”

“You’re first. I’ll ring her now.”

---

It went into the November sale.

Aoife did not go. She has been asked why and says she had a shift, which was true, and that she could not have sat in a room and watched it, which was also true.

Stephen rang her at about twenty past two.

There had been competitive bidding from two telephone buyers, one of whom had been at eleven thousand before the room had properly woken up.

It sold for thirty-one thousand five hundred pounds.