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Page 89.

Chapter 20. Clock Maker at Work and Play

At first, Tim’s new life in San Francisco was governed by pleasant routines.

By day, he worked in the G-2 section, processing intelligence information. It was interesting work, not earth-shaking, but enough to keep his intellect stimulated. Unlike London, he wasn’t shadow boxing or playing dirty spy games. The job was more engineering than intelligence work, though it was intellectually challenging at times and involved both disciplines. Most often each dossier came with a dark pasteboard container resembling a shoebox, both bearing related part numbers and logged in and out by indefatigable young WAVES. At times he had to evaluate huge folders of information on given items of enemy hardware salvaged from sunken ships or downed airplanes. Other materials might be recovered from a dead enemy soldier on some snowy battlefield or from a mummified Luftwaffe corpse at a desert crash site. Sometimes it was a washer or a petcock or a threaded pipe or a detonator. At other times it might be something more personal, like a military issue wristwatch or eyeglasses or a helmet liner or a wool glove. Every item contained some element of information that went into the hopper of a national intelligence network that had until recently been a lackluster imitation of big-mama British intelligence.

All the while, Tim ate his lunches with Teague and Kehoe, washing burgers down with beers and watching the skirts of San Francisco breeze by.

In the evenings, Tim preferred to sit alone in his room and read. He’d discovered a fine USO lending library nearby, and soon a stack of cheap, wartime, paperbound Victory books sat teetering next to empty coffee cups, crumpled napkins, stained cardboard donut boxes, and empty soda cans, all on the morning’s breakfast tray.

Mrs. Auger’s fine facility provided breakfast either a la carte or, more inexpensively, by the week. If there was one thing Tim liked, it was having some predictability, a routine. He was a bit lonely. Sometimes he thought of Anna, but pushed the impossible away. He sometimes wondered: Will I ever make love to another woman? Will I remember how? Will it be anywhere near as good…? He was a practical man, and decided he wanted to live in the present. Leaving London had been just what he needed. Who knew what new adventures might befall him here? He was in no danger of getting shipped out. He could sit out the war here, puttering with his petcocks and machine screws. He’d write cute little engineering reports and leave it all behind him when he went home in the evening.

He loved traveling and he enjoyed faraway cities, along with the kind of insular world of its own that the military offered. You could be in the most distant place on earth but it could attain a certain bizarre imitation of American hominess if you could just get colas and grilled cheese sandwiches, much less listen to the music of Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller thumping from a juke box or let the crooning of Frank Sinatra wrap around a person. Tim enjoyed the pounding of Gene Krupa, the peppy ditties of the Andrews Sisters, and all the hopping stuff from boogie to jitterbug. How could you be young and not groove to such alive and happy noise?

Sometimes he went for walks up and down the long hills, like down to the cable car turnaround at Powell and Market Streets, for a drink at the Pig ‘n Whistle or a sandwich at the Cafeteria with its stainless steel Art Deco sign across the street.

Sometimes he sat at his desk and wrote letters to his family in New England. He never discussed his ordeal in Africa with anyone. In London, he’d made some visits to the chaplain at his BOQ off Buckingham Road to talk about why he was still alive and the others weren’t. The answer of course had been the usual nostrums about God’s will and all that, but Tim had concluded that either there was such a will or there wasn’t, but either way it just played out the way it was meant to be. The only worthwhile thing he’d ever heard on the subject, as far as he was concerned, came during a brief conversation over chips and beer in a Brompton Road pub with an Anglican padre who wore a yellow and blue checkered scarf and had an ugly blue smash on one side of his head from a bit of flying tile some time earlier during a V-2 explosion. The good man, whom Tim had never seen before nor ever saw after, had said: “Life is too short feeling guilty or for that matter becoming cynical. The lads wouldn’t want you to waste your precious time, my boy.” He’d patted Tim on the hand and growled in a low, urgent voice. “Live your life, lad. You have to live it for those poor broken boys out there drowning in the cold water, crying for their mothers. You have to go on, for them, boy. Do you understand? You owe it to them, and to yourself.”

There was another time he’d split up with some friends and taken a cab home early after a few dark, sweet porters. He’d wound up in the same taxi with a tipsy hooker who smelled of gin and cheap perfume, on her way back from shomeplace to shomewheres-elshe, and she’d babbled on and on. Tim had ignored her until she’d segued into the serious part of her conversation about ‘ow ‘er mum and ‘er sistah had perished in the Blitz a few years earlier, and the boy she’d been engaged to marry had been shot down by some ruddy foakin’ Hun and either burned to death or drowned in the Channel. She’d said: “I miss me ‘Enry, I do, every day, but I live me life to the fullest, knowin’ ‘ey's smoilin’ down a’ me. We all go there soon enough, don’ yer think, Sir? Eh?” With that she’d gently wompused Tim on the shoulder with her purse. He’d stared at her, waiting for any more wisdom to pour from her lipstick-streaked mouth, but she’d sat back silent as a stone and watched with unsteady head and watery eyes as the blur of street lights flew by.

Now he sat in his slightly chilly room nine thousand miles and nine time zones away, almost on the other side of the world, and wrote letters or read books and slept alone.

One thing about the war: you always heard some distant swing music, night or day, as if life was being lived too fast, too hard, too desperately because as the woman in the London cab had said, it all ends too quickly.

Things bugged Tim and he couldn’t sleep well some nights. Sometimes it wasn’t the swing music or the boogey-woogie. Sometimes it was remembering the endless rustle of surf on the West African coast, the steady buildup and then dumping of water crashing down in a white foam among the rocks a quarter mile out in the moonlight. Tim realized one day he had yet to visit the beach here. The thunder of surf crashing down reminded him of Africa, of H.M.S. Sturmer, which he wanted to forget. And the lions. He could still see the poor lioness, desperately looking toward her babies in the tower, moments before her death and the capture of her cubs.

Funny part was, Tim wasn’t bothered by the part about mortality too much, now that he understood it was there. He’d wandered in and out of Europe’s cold stone churches more than once, alone of an evening, with their mysterious scent of incense dating back centuries, an oil ground into the stone walls. He’d always felt somewhere in the shadows among fluted pillars or in the ogives of stained glass windows, where it was never either night nor day, there was some spirit, some higher thing, something parental, that did care about a person. He knew he could now be a thin string of bleached bones crumbling away on a beach in the Western Sahel, with the eternal sea breaking in white foam on sand under a pure azure sky, but he wasn’t. He still had precious hours ahead of him, assuming he didn’t get hit by some beer truck or fall into a sausage vat—days, years, even decades and generations—a wealth of time greater than that of any aging millionaire.

Still, there was a gnawing something. Was he doing enough? Was he living those hours usefully enough? The walls creaked now and then as the building adjusted to the cycle of cold and hot from day to night. The floor boards might emit a loud crack. A window might make a popping noise as it resettled itself in its hardened putty. Sometimes the wind would kick up and send a wet leaf to cling to the window. Sometimes a tree branch somewhere outside would bang against the wall, briefly waking Tim before he nodded back to sleep. Faraway cathedral bells tumbled slowly in their rafters, tinkling forth drifty notes.

There was the steady glow of the tiny uranium strips indicating the hours on his travel clock. There was the steady tick, tick, tick of the ratchet wheels, the faint twang of the escapements, the snick of ruby on ruby inside the little clock, and then the magnification of those sounds inside the thick brown and white marble night table top, and the echoes of those sounds bouncing back and forth underneath among hard wooden table legs and on the shelf with its books, as Tim dozed the nights away with one eye sometimes opening a bit, then closing again. Until he met Corinthia, the brunette neighbor, and from there on nothing was ever the same again.