Master James made me work late that night, to make up the time I'd wasted that afternoon. I missed supper.
Carrie took pity on me and brought me some ham and cheese sandwiches. 'It's not like you, Peter, getting in Master's bad books like that! Staying late in the pub, and taking an hour and a half to deliver a package to Jordan!'
I scarcely heard her, and she shook her head and left me standing in the workshop, wiping a lacquer-soaked rag in a lazy circle over the case of the Mayor's clock. My mind was whirring like a loose escapement when the regulator has come detached.
Was I special, after all? Some kind of child prodigy? Did I have amazing powers, which had only now come to light? Probably my mum and dad weren't my real parents at all. I was more likely to be the wrong-side-of-the-blanket offspring of a Lord, or the Dean of Jordan College. Perhaps I would move into Jordan, have rooms next to Professor Belacqua, and spend my time sharpening my skills with the alethiometer. I could see myself already, impressive in mortarboard and gown, strolling down the Broad with my fellow dons, looking down my nose at the townies.
Not good enough for Tring Grammar School, eh?
That night, as I stretched out on my mattress under the shop counter, I noticed something that I had somehow come to forget over the past year or so. The shop ticked. Yes, all the clocks on the walls and in the display cabinets ticked.
Of course they did, I hear you say. What else do you expect to find in a clockmaker's shop, but clocks? And what else do clocks do, but tick? And tock? Assuming they've been wound up, of course.
(Like all mechanisms, clocks should be kept wound up and running. They seize up if they're allowed to run down, and then you have to take them to the clockmaker's to be cleaned and oiled. Wait a minute; why am I telling you this? It's bad for business! You just leave those clocks alone!)
The thing is, I'd got accustomed to the ticking. I'd become part of the place, settled in. I'm sure that if you'd taken my pulse you'd have found that it was ticking too, keeping time with the clocks. The only time I noticed the sound was when I'd been away for a day or two – on a visit home, maybe – and returned late on a quiet Sunday evening.
Jane Phipps, who works at Maison Jeanette next to Sarah (they all hate her there!), told me one hot summer's day, as we sat drinking lemonade on the barrier that prevents the cabbies using Shoe Lane as a short cut to the High, about something similar that happens to her sometimes.
'If I'm working on a piece of material, and it's a really bright colour, like red, and I look up at the wall, which is white, it looks green to me. For a while, anyway.'
'That's because your eyes have got used to seeing red light, and they've adjusted to it. Compensated for it.'
I think Jane quite fancied me at one time, but I started to neglect her as that winter turned to spring. Viola chided me about this, as she did about everything.
I'm getting ahead of myself. What I will say is that the vision of the lovely Sarah with which I used to console myself at bedtime was replaced that night by the face of someone else altogether.
Over the next few days Master James was first puzzled, then increasingly irritated, by what he called my "dozy self". I was making silly, clumsy, mistakes, and not concentrating properly on my work. It would have been better, I know, to have put Professor Belacqua's promise of another try with the alethiometer to the back of my mind and simply get on with the job of learning my trade, but somehow I couldn't do it. I'd be polishing the dome of a carriage clock and drift away, looking up to see Master James staring at me, his usually placid face screwed up with annoyance.
'Peter! Wake up! You'll wear through the glass!'
'Sorry, master.'
The funny thing is that when I tried to remember what Professor Belacqua actually looked like, I couldn't do it. There was just a blurry impression in my mind of a slender figure dressed in severe academic black, a mane of frizzy honey-coloured hair tied back at her neck and a soft voice, pitched low. Her eyes too, of course, clear and pale blue, and the skin around them crinkling when she smiled, which was often.
The worst part was not knowing when she would send for me again. It would be very awkward if it was during my working hours, for Master James had a perfect right to expect me to be in his shop at that time. I couldn't just go wandering off whenever I felt like it.
I had time off during the week, of course. Wednesday was half-day closing, so Mr Cholmondley had that afternoon free. I didn't – it was a full working day in the workshop. To make up for it, I got Saturday afternoons off. Then there was Sunday…
I don't know what it's like where you live, but for me Sundays were absolute torture. I've no idea how sincere Master James' religious beliefs were, but that scarcely mattered. If you wanted to be a successful businessman in Oxford, you had to be seen to be a devout churchgoer. Not just you, but your whole family too. Heaven only knows what it was like, back before I was born, when the Church Police and the Magisterium were in charge of everything. I hear you got excommunicated if you failed to genuflect to the image of the Magdelena by the front of the Oratory, or excruciated if you swore in its neighbourhood.
No, it wasn't that bad, but we still had to attend the Public Oratory three times every Sunday – Mass, Matins and Evensong, each service more than two hours long. And, in between, hardly time to eat, and certainly no chance of going out and enjoying yourself. I don't know when it was worse; winter, when the old building seemed to freeze you up, or summer when you could glimpse the sunshine through a high window and wish with all your heart that you were out there enjoying it.
That Sunday was probably no worse than any other, but it seemed it. As a member of the James family, I was marched into the Oratory and took my usual place in our usual pew, halfway back on the right-hand side of the nave, as befitted our social status. Master sat next to the aisle, then their daughter Emily, fair-haired and chubby, then Carrie, then the mistress, sternly determined that there should be no funny business between Carrie and myself (most unlikely!) and last, me. Our daemons sat, as is usual, on the shelf which was attached to the back of the pew in front of us.
The preacher droned on and on; we stood up to sing the dreary hymns, or sat while he harangued us with threats of hell if we didn't behave ourselves, or knelt down to pray, and all the time it seemed even more pointless than ever. Look, no offence. If Observance is meaningful to you, then fine. It's just never been that way for me, and that Sunday was worse than it had ever been before.
When we returned to Shoe Lane after Matins there was something waiting for me. A formal note from the College porter, on Jordan College headed paper, requesting my presence in Professor Belacqua's rooms that afternoon. I asked Master James if I might be excused attending Evensong.
'No, certainly not.'
'But Master!'
'No, Peter. Even if your conduct this week had been exemplary, I could not permit you to miss a Divine Service. You have not performed your duty to me; should I also allow you to default in doing your duty to God?'
I stared blankly. There was nothing I could do about it. My Master's word was, quite literally, law. I was completely in his power. As I've said, I liked my Master and enjoyed working for him and learning from him, and so I swallowed my disappointment, looked down to my feet and said, 'No Master.'
He was a good man and right, by his own lights. What else could I do? Running away would get me nowhere. Viola comforted me, sitting on my shoulder and whispering in my ear.
'There'll be another time. Another chance.' It was kind of her, but I doubted it.
That night, for the first time since I arrived in Oxford, I cried myself to sleep.
And that night, I had the strangest dream. It was as if I had been sleeping deeply and been awakened by someone nibbling my ear. I sat up, wondering if something had disturbed Viola, but she was in her usual place, curled up by my right side. Have you ever had one of those dreams, where you dream that you've woken up?
Anyway, I looked around and saw possibly the last thing I expected. The Professor's daemon, the pine-marten with the funny name, was sitting on the floor next to my mattress, looking up at me with an annoyed expression, if a pine-marten's face can be said to have an expression at all. But you know how it is with daemons; you can catch what they're thinking, whatever their form. There was no sign of the Professor, so I knew this was a dream, (even though I was dreaming) although I wasn't sure whether it wasn't going to turn into a nightmare. A daemon without her human, indeed! (I'm sorry if you find this part of my story upsetting. If I'd been awake, I'd have been horrified and upset too. But it was only a dream, you see.)
The dream-daemon spoke: 'Why didn't you come?'
'Come?'
'Come to see us.'
'Master wouldn't let me.' Better play along with the dream.
'Why not?'
'I had to go to Evensong.'
'Oh,' the dream-daemon shook his head sadly, 'you poor thing. Couldn't you get out of it?'
'Only if I wanted my master to cancel my indentures and send me home in disgrace!'
'Hmmm.' The daemon paused to think about this. I looked about myself, in my dream. The ticking darkness of the shop was unchanged. I'm sure that if the Professor had been there I'd have known it.
'When can you come and see us?'
'Not until Saturday afternoon. That's the first chance I'll get.'
'Saturday afternoon… We'll have to postpone a tutorial… Yes, all right, if that's the only day you can make it. We'll see you on Saturday.'
He looked at me closely. 'You will come, won't you? Lyra would be very disappointed if you didn't come to see her.'
'Yes. I'll come. I promise.'
'See that you do.'
And he winked at me, leapt over the counter, ran up the wall, and disappeared.
The dream ended as suddenly as it had begun, and I slipped back into normal sleep.
When I woke, cold and hungry, on Monday morning, I found that the dream had stuck in my mind, as they sometimes do. One word in particular had lodged itself in my memory. Lyra. Why had the dream-daemon called her Lyra? Why that name? Where, from which part of the depths of my imagination, had that name come from? The label on the parcel I had taken to her had read simply Professor Belacqua, Jordan College. There had been no initial and certainly no first name written there.
So it hit me with all the greater force when, at lunchtime, Elias "Mr" Cholmondley summoned me into the shop at the front.
'Lady come in,' he said.
'Oh yes? One of yours, eh?'
'No. Called for you, she did. Bit old for me.'
I bit my lip. What was going on?
'Left a note, she did. Not sure I should give it to you; a note from an older woman. Might be something sinful. You got an assignation planned?'
'Don't be daft. Give it here!'
He held the note up, smirking. 'Jump for it, then.'
'Sod you!' I kicked his ankle, hard, and he howled and doubled over, rubbing at the bruise with his free hand. I grabbed the note from him and exited, fast, into the back of the shop.
I broke the seal and unfolded the note with shaking hands. It read:
|
Dear Peter, So glad you can come and see me again this Saturday. Would two o'clock in my rooms suit you? Best wishes, Lyra Belacqua |
I told you back there that I'd let my fancies run away with me the week before about seeing the Professor, for so I still thought of her even though she'd told me her name. Now that I was certain I would be able to visit her again, and the awful doubt was removed, my mind was more at peace and I could pay proper attention to my work. Master James was pleased, I know. He probably thought I'd been mooning over Jane, or fallen out with Carrie.
So the week passed more quickly than I could have possibly imagined it would, and the following Saturday, after a hastily bolted lunch and free of my obligations to my master until that night's twelve o'clock curfew, I set out, on a blustery day with the clouds racing overhead, for Jordan College.
I am sure that, that time at least, I was not followed.
