The shop is narrow and warm, and you step from the front door past a glass case of wristwatches into a deeper quiet where the wall of clocks begins. They tick slightly out of phase, a soft uneven rain of small sounds. At the back counter, under the cone of a brass desk lamp, the watchmaker sits in a green eyeshade, a loupe screwed into his right eye, his hands moving with the slowness of someone pouring something that must not spill. He does not look up. You take the stool by the side counter, where he has set out a saucer of tea gone the color of varnish, and you settle in to wait.
The lamp throws its light down in a circle the size of a dinner plate, and inside that circle the work happens. A movement lies open on a square of green baize, its mainspring coiled, its wheels lifted out and laid in order on a strip of white card. The brass is the soft yellow of old honey. The steel parts catch the bulb's light in fine sharp glints, and the jewels, set in their gold chatons, show as small wet drops of red. Beyond the circle of the lamp the counter falls into a brown dimness where tweezers and screwdrivers stand in a wooden block, their handles worn pale by use, their tips pointing up like the spines of a small soft creature.
The radio sits on a shelf behind him, between a tin of oil and a tea caddy with a Chinese landscape on the lid. A violin sonata is playing, low enough that the clocks come through it and over it. The piano line walks under the violin in even measured steps. The clocks layer above. A long-case clock by the door gives the deepest beat, slow and wooden, you can almost feel it through the floorboards. A carriage clock on the counter behind you ticks faster and brighter, a small bright stitch over the long one. Somewhere on the wall a regulator clock with a brass pendulum keeps a steady middle pulse. None of them agree, and none of them try to. The room breathes through all of them at once.
The watchmaker selects a pair of tweezers and lifts a wheel no bigger than a lentil from the strip of card. He lowers it into the movement, turns it with the patience of someone threading a needle in failing light, sets it on its pivot. He breathes out. He picks up a fine brush, dabs it against a square of chamois, brushes the wheel once, twice. The brush is a sable of perhaps six hairs. You watch his fingers, which are blunt and clean, the nails cut short, a faint ring of oil around the cuticle of the thumb. The skin of his hands is the skin of someone who has held cold metal for fifty winters and warm metal for fifty summers. He sets the brush down exactly where it was. He picks up the tweezers again.
You let your eyes travel along the counter. There is a small lathe at the far end, its bed darkened with age, a coil of brass swarf curled against its tailstock like a shaving of butter. There is a cigar box with the lid open, full of crowns and stems sorted by size. There is a jar of watch hands, hundreds of them, blued steel and gilt and black-painted brass, lying in a tangle that looks like dried grass. There is a loupe on a leather lanyard, hung from a nail. The smell here is brass and clock oil, and under that the dry papery smell of old cardboard boxes, and under that the faint mineral smell of the stone floor, which has been swept this morning and is still slightly damp at the edges.
A clock on the wall behind the watchmaker prepares to strike. You hear it first as a small shift in the ticking, a gathering. Then the strike train releases and the hammer falls, once, on a coiled gong, and the note opens out into the room and travels along the shelves and into the corners and slowly dies. A moment later, a smaller clock further down the wall strikes its own hour, four delicate notes on a bell no larger than a thimble. Then the long-case by the door, late by perhaps fifteen seconds, gives its low brassy strokes, deeper than the others, and you feel the floorboards take them up. The watchmaker has not paused. His hands continue their slow conversation with the movement. The strikes pass over him and through him and leave him where he was.
Outside, on the street, a delivery van goes by, and the sound is muffled by the front room and the glass and the inner door, so that it arrives at the back counter as something the building has half-absorbed. The shop window faces east, and a band of pale Saturday light lies across the front display, picking out the polished bezels and the printed cards and the velvet trays. Here at the back, the daylight is only a suggestion at the edge of the lamp's circle, a thinner, cooler shade of brown. The lamp does the real work. Its bulb is old, the filament showing through, and the light it gives is warm and steady and slightly yellow, the kind of light that makes brass look like a substance you could eat.
He fits the balance wheel. This is the part you have been waiting for without knowing you were waiting. He lowers it in with the tweezers, sets the hairspring, adjusts something with a screwdriver whose blade is the width of a hair, and the wheel begins to oscillate. It swings one way, then the other, then back, finding its rhythm in three or four beats and then holding it. The ticking of this new small watch joins the room. It is faster than any of the wall clocks, a quick fine whisper, almost a purr. He sits back an inch on his stool and watches it. He puts a finger to his lower lip. He listens. The whole back of the shop listens. The radio plays a slow figure in the cello, the violin laid over it like a long thread. The watch ticks on inside its open case, and outside its case the larger ticks of the wall continue at their various speeds, and the violin draws its bow, and somewhere up in the rafters a fly walks along a beam and stops and walks again.
You let your eyes go soft. The lamp's circle blurs at its edges. The watchmaker reaches for the case back, a small brushed disc of steel, and lays it ready on the baize. He is not in a hurry. He will not be in a hurry for the rest of the morning. He takes a sip from a cup beside him without looking at it. He sets the cup back in the exact ring of damp it left on the wood. He picks up the loupe again and screws it into his eye.
Out in the front window the light shifts as a cloud crosses the sun, and the brass dims by a degree, and then the cloud passes and the brass warms again. The clocks go on ticking through the change, none of them faster, none of them slower. The carriage clock behind you, the regulator on the wall, the long-case at the door, the new small watch on the baize — they fold their different times together into one slow weather, and you are sitting inside it. The smell of oil deepens slightly as the lamp warms the air above the movement. The violin sonata moves into a quieter passage and then into a quieter one still. The watchmaker turns a screw a quarter turn and stops. The hammer of some clock begins to gather itself for another hour, somewhere off to your left, and the gathering is so slow that it feels like the room itself drawing a long breath, and the light on the counter is the color of honey, and the wheels turn, and the wheels