Set Fair

by John Henry Newman, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

The weight had come down in the night, as weights do, with nobody there to hear it; and when Clare Pardoe unlocked the workshop behind the shop on Broad Street on the Thursday morning, she found the longcase clock from Clee Stanton standing where she had left it against the back wall, its hood off and its painted moon looking over her shoulder, and the striking weight lying in the bottom of the trunk with the base board split under it like a biscuit.

She had told Mr Onions it would happen. She had told him in September, when he and his son carried the clock in wrapped in a duvet, that the lines were the original gut or near it, dry as string, and that she would replace both before she let the thing run. She had ordered the gut from the supplier in Leicestershire. The gut had not come. And on Wednesday afternoon, wanting to hear whether the strike was sound before she took the movement down to clean it, she had hung the weight for an hour, and heard the strike, and it was sound; and she had meant to take the weight off again before she locked up, and she had not.

She knelt and lifted the weight out. It was lead in a brass shell, a little under six kilos, and it had come down seven feet on to a board of Georgian oak that had done nothing to deserve it. The line had parted a hand's breadth below the pulley, where it had always been going to part, because that is where a line bends every time a clock is wound, and two hundred years of winding had been bending it there.

"Well," she said to the clock, and went through to put the kettle on.

---

Hannah rang at eleven, which was six in the morning in Toronto, which meant she had not slept.

"It's kicking my liver," Hannah said. "Is that a thing? Can it reach my liver?"

"It can reach anything it likes. What does the midwife say?"

"The midwife says it's a healthy baby with opinions." A pause, and the sound of a kettle four thousand miles off. "Mum, have you booked?"

"I've booked. The twenty-ninth, from Birmingham, back on the nineteenth of November. I sent you the thing."

"I didn't open the thing. What about the shop?"

Clare looked through the doorway at the shop: the two barometers in the window, the carriage clocks on the glass shelves, the ticket drawer, the steel cabinet at the back where the watches in for repair lay in their little envelopes, each with its pink docket. Fourteen of those. Nine clocks promised for Christmas. November was when people remembered that a grandfather's watch would make a present, and brought it in, and wanted it by the twentieth.

"I'll shut it," she said. "I'll put a card in the door."

"For three weeks in November."

"Marion will take in anything urgent."

"Marion sells books, Mum. She's seventy-four. She thinks a watch is a kind of bracelet." Hannah drank something. "Uncle Dom said he'd mind it."

"Did he."

"He said not to tell you he'd said it. He said you'd decide and he didn't want to be in the way of it. So I'm not telling you. I'm just saying it out loud in Toronto."

"You'll wake Kwame."

"Kwame could sleep through the end of the world. Mum. I'm not asking you to. I'm not saying anything. I'm going to go and be sick now, actually."

"Go on, then," Clare said, and Hannah went.

---

Dominic came on the Saturday, as he did on perhaps one Saturday in three, on the train from Leominster where he had a room above a launderette and a job in the back of a bicycle shop; and he came, as he always did now, with something in a paper bag, which this time was two pasties from the baker at the station, still warm, and a bottle of the dandelion and burdock that nobody had drunk since they were children and that he had found, he said, in the Co-op, on a bottom shelf, behind the tonic water.

He was forty. He had their father's forearms and their mother's way of standing with his weight on one foot, as though he might at any moment be asked to leave and did not mean to be caught unprepared. He had had the same haircut for twenty years, and the same jacket for five, and he had lost, somewhere in the last year and a half, the soft look under the eyes that she had not known was a look until it went.

The gut had come on Friday. She showed him the fallen weight, and the split board, and he whistled, and said, "Onions?", and she said yes, and he said, "He'll say it's the board's fault. It'll be the board that did it, in his telling," and was quite right, because it was what Mr Onions had already said on the telephone.

"Hold the weight for me," she said. "I'll tie off above."

He held it. It is not a difficult thing to hold six kilos of lead at the height of your chest for four minutes, but it is not a pleasant one, and there is a moment, while the knot is made and before it is drawn tight, when everything depends on the man holding the weight not getting bored. She threaded the new line through the pulley and back up, and passed it through the hole in the seatboard, and tied the knot her father had taught her, which was a figure of eight with a second tuck, and trimmed the end close with the snips. She did not look at him while she did it. She could hear him breathing through his nose.

"Let it take it," she said. "Slowly."

He let it take it. The line went taut, and creaked the way new gut creaks, and held.

"There," he said, and shook his arms out, and she saw him look, over her shoulder, at the wall above the bench.

There was a stripe on the wallpaper there, a hand's breadth wide and a little over three feet long, paler than the paper round it, where for thirty-one years there had hung a stick barometer in a mahogany case, with a silvered brass scale engraved Josiah Marrow, Shrewsbury, and an ivory vernier, and a thermometer down the side with the old Fahrenheit marks for Blood Heat and Fever Heat. It had been their grandfather's. It had never been for sale. And one weekend seven years ago, when their father was at a fair in Malvern and Clare was in Leeds with Hannah, it had gone to a dealer at the Newark showground for nine hundred pounds in notes, and the nine hundred pounds had gone, over the course of a fortnight, into a telephone.

Their father had never hung anything else in the place. He said the paper would not match. It would not have.

"I saw one like it at Newark in the spring," Dominic said. "Not ours. Ours had the little chip on the cistern cover. This one was a Bate. Four and a half, they wanted."

"You went to Newark?"

"With Graham. He likes the militaria." He was still looking at the stripe. "I didn't buy anything. I didn't have anything to buy anything with." And then, not to her particularly, in the easy voice people use for a thing they have said often enough that it has worn smooth: "Dad said he'd leave it with God, in the end. So."

Clare drew the knot at the seatboard another quarter-inch tighter, though it did not need it.

"Pasty's getting cold," she said.

---

She did not sleep much that night, and at half past one she gave it up and came down to the kitchen behind the shop, and took a docket book from the drawer, a pink one, Pardoe & Son, Clocks & Barometers, est. 1961, with the carbons, because it was what came to hand; and she folded back the carbon so as not to make a copy, and sat down under the one light.

It was her father's way, and she had not used it since he died. He had used it at auctions, on the backs of catalogues, when he was minded to bid for something more than he could afford. Every reason, Clary, he would say, however thin. Thin ones too. Then go through and strike out any two that are really one. Then count. He had bought the Clee Hill regulator that way in 1994, and he had not bought, that way, a great many things she had wanted him to buy, and he had been right about all but one of them.

She wrote:

1. Forty-one payments of £60. Never missed.

That was two thousand four hundred and sixty pounds. She had not asked for it. It came into the shop account on alternate Fridays with the reference MARROW, which she had thought, the first time, was either an apology or a joke, and had since decided was simply the only word he could think of that the bank would take. She looked at the line for a while, and then wrote after it, smaller: (a standing order. set up once.)

2. GamStop. Five years. Can't undo it.

3. The bank block. Two days to take it off.

She looked at those. He had done both of them on the same afternoon, in the same room over the Baptist church in Leominster, with Graham sitting beside him at a laptop; she knew it because he had told her, and she knew it because Graham had told her, at the one meeting she had gone to, in the spring of last year, and sat at the back of, and left early. It had been one afternoon. It had been one decision, made once, by one man, in one mood, with one friend watching. She drew a bracket round 2 and 3 and wrote beside the bracket: same Tuesday.

4. Graham says he's doing well.

5. He says he's doing well.

She held the pen above the paper. Graham was a retired postman from Kington with eleven years clean and a voice like gravel, and she liked him. But Graham knew what Dominic told Graham. He had no other window on to it, any more than she had. She struck out 4 and wrote = 5 beside it. Then she looked at 5, which was as thin a thing as could be written on a docket, and very nearly struck that out too; and did not, because her father had said thin ones too.

6. He rang Hannah on her birthday.

He had rung Hannah on her birthday every year of her life. He had rung her on her birthday the year of the barometer, in March, two months before; he had sent her twenty pounds in a card, and Clare did not now like to think where the twenty pounds had come from. Whatever it was in Dominic that remembered birthdays, it had been in him before and it had been in him during and it was in him now. It did not tell her which of those he was in. She struck out 6.

7. His hands.

She did not know why she had written that. His hands had been steady on the weight. They had always been steady. He had been the better of the two of them at the bench when they were young; their father said so, and it had been a grief to their father, later, that the hands had gone to a telephone. But the steadiest hands she had ever seen belonged to a man who sat in the betting shop on Corve Street from opening to closing in the years when there was a betting shop on Corve Street, and whose hands, lighting a cigarette, never shook at all. She struck out 7.

8. Nineteen months.

9. Hasn't asked for anything. Until this.

And it was not asking, even this. He had told Hannah not to say.

10. Has never once told me he's changed.

She looked at that one for a long time. The last time, in 2017, after the two hundred pounds from the till, he had told her he had changed at great length, in this kitchen, crying, with his arms round her; and she had believed him, and she had been right to believe him, because he had meant it, and he had been wrong. This time he had said nothing of the kind. He came on the train on one Saturday in three with pasties, and held weights, and went home.

She counted what was left without striking through. Six. Five, if the standing order was worth less than a line.

Then, because her father had also said, at auctions, now do it the other way, and see if it comes out as long, she turned the docket over, and on the back, where the customer signs to say the work has been collected, she wrote:

1. He was sorry last time too.

2. He paid back last time too. (£200 by the October.)

3. Nineteen months is nothing. The longest before was eleven.

4. "Dad said he'd leave it with God."

5. Three weeks alone with the cabinet. Fourteen watches. The Dent carriage clock.

6. He wants it.

She stopped. It had come out as long. It had come out, if anything, longer, and more easily, because every one of these had happened, and she had been in the room.

She wrote:

7. I want it.

And sat, with the pen in her hand, in the kitchen behind the shop at a quarter past two in the morning, and could not for the life of her have said which side of the paper that one belonged on.

After a while she tore the docket out along the perforation, and folded it in four, and put it in the drawer where the spare keys were kept; and went up to bed; and slept, as it turned out, until the bells of St Laurence's rang for the eight o'clock.

---

On Monday morning she telephoned him at the bicycle shop, and he came on Tuesday, his day off, on the nine o'clock train, in the same jacket.

She showed him everything. She showed him the ticket drawer, and how the dockets were numbered and in what order they were filed, and the book in which every piece that came in was written up in her father's system, which was a system nobody else in the world could have understood and which she had never changed. She showed him the alarm and the fob and the code, and the lock on the back door that stuck in wet weather, and where the torch was for a power cut. She showed him the till, and how much was in the float, and how the card machine had to be restarted every morning or it sulked. She showed him the telephone numbers on the inside of the workshop door: Marion; the insurers; the locksmith in Tenbury; Mr Onions, with DO NOT ARGUE written beside it in her father's hand.

She showed him the steel cabinet at the back, and she opened it, and let him see the envelopes.

"Anything comes in," she said, "you write it up, you give them a docket, you tell them after the twentieth of November and you don't promise a day. Anything goes out, they sign the back of the docket, they pay, you give them the envelope. If they haven't got the docket, you don't give them anything, I don't care if it's the Bishop of Hereford."

"Right."

"And the carriage clock on the top shelf in there is the Dent. It's a customer's. It's in for a new mainspring, which I've done, and it goes back to Mrs Hickman on the fifteenth. She'll collect. She's had it valued at six thousand, and she'll tell you so."

"Right," he said.

Then she took the ring of keys off the hook by the door and held it out to him: the front door, and the back door, and the little brass key to the window display, and the alarm fob, and the long key for the steel cabinet.

He took the ring. He weighed it in his hand, the way you weigh a thing to see if it is what you expected, and he stood for a moment, looking down at it; and then he worked the long key round the split ring with his thumbnail, patiently, the whole awkward circuit of it, until it came free. He held it out to her.

"Give that one to Marion," he said.

"Marion's seventy-four. She'll have to come round every time someone wants their watch."

"Yes."

"Some days that'll be three times."

"Yes," he said. "I'll ring her. She can come round and open it, and stand there while they sign. I'll make her a cup of tea." He still held the key out, and she had not taken it. "Clare. You know what Dad said. The whole of it."

She did know. She had been in the back, in this workshop, in the May, with a Comtoise movement in pieces on the bench in front of her, when her father came in from the shop with Dominic behind him, and neither of them saw her, or neither of them cared; and her father, who had shouted a good deal in his life and did not shout then, said, quite quietly, I'll leave it with God, Dominic, since I can't leave it with you.

"I've been telling it short," Dominic said. "To people. To Graham. To Hannah, once. I tell the first half." He looked at the key in his own hand. "It sounds better the short way."

She took the key.

She put it in her cardigan pocket, and then, because a cardigan pocket was no place for it, she took it out again and went next door there and then and gave it to Marion, who was pricing a box of Penguins at the counter and who said, "Oh, am I the bank now?", and put it on a ribbon round her neck with her reading glasses, and was, for three weeks, extremely pleased with herself.

---

The taxi for Birmingham was booked for half past eight on the twenty-ninth, and Dominic came in on the first train from Leominster and was standing outside the shop at ten to eight with his hands in his jacket pockets, looking at the window, when she came down.

It had rained in the night, and stopped, and Broad Street was the colour of wet slate all the way down to the Broad Gate, and the gutters were running. She let him in, and turned off the alarm, and showed him again where the torch was, which he knew. She had her suitcase at the foot of the stairs and a bag of presents for the baby, most of which were knitted by Marion, and a list for him on the counter in handwriting that grew smaller towards the bottom, where she had run out of card.

On her way to the door she stopped at the window, as she did every morning and as her father had done every morning of his working life, and tapped the glass of the banjo barometer that hung there, the shop's own, the one that was not for sale. Under her finger the long blued hand, which had been standing at Change, gave a little start and slid an eighth of an inch towards Rain, further from Set Fair than it had been all month.

"It'll clear by dinner," Dominic said. "Look at the sky over Whitcliffe."

"It's gone down."

"It went down in the night. That's only it catching up." He said it in their father's voice, not meaning to, the way they both did with some of their father's sentences, having heard them so often at this counter that they came out whole. "Tapping it doesn't do anything to the weather."

"I know what tapping it does," she said.

The taxi came up the hill with its wipers going. He carried the suitcase out for her and put it in the boot, and stood on the step while she got in with the bag of knitting on her knee; and she did not wave, because they were not a family that waved, and he did not either.

The driver pulled away. At the top of the street, where the road turns by the Buttercross, she looked back through the rear window, and saw him go in, and turn the sign on the door, and then stand for a moment in the window of the shop with his hand lifted towards the glass of the barometer, not yet touching it, as though he were waiting to see what it would say.

✾ ❦ ✾ ❦ ✾ ✾ ❦ ✾ ❦ ✾ ✾ ❦ ✾ ❦ ✾

Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem quīntum Kalendās Octōbrēs (27 September 2026), ab Iōanne Henrīcō Newmannō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

John Henry Newman, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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