The Clocks in This House All Tell Different Times by Xan Brooks

Author:Xan Brooks
Language: eng, eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Salt Publishing Limited
Published: 2017-01-27T09:12:33+00:00

19

They named sodden trenches after grand London streets and mapped the city upon the farmland of France. But somehow the layout had been shaken in transit, so that Piccadilly sat on the firing line to the east, with Regent Street running parallel close behind and the Mall conspiring to connect the two. And linking all three was a narrow, shallow scar, lined with splintering duckboards and butt ends, which had no name at all. Mr Pritchett told her that he started calling it Ermine Street and that this label caught on. Mr Pritchett joked that his French Ermine Street was only a degree or two worse than the real Ermine Street.

On returning from the front, Mr Pritchett had taken up his old job at the furniture warehouse and celebrated each payday with tankards at the Griffin, his clothes pungent with linseed oil. So far as she can tell, he has been able to darn himself back into his previous life so completely that one would have to look very closely to see that he had once been torn out. And she is aware that Pritchett is not alone. All around, in shops and offices and on factory floors, thousands of men have cast off their adventures and rejoined the throng and you would never guess where they’d been just a few years before. They might feel different inside but this makes no odds because the change doesn’t show.

But not everyone is like Mr Pritchett. Some are not so robust, or else they had suffered in ways Mr Pritchett had not and their adventures have bent them out of shape. She has seen them out in Edmonton: the halt and the blind and the overwrought; the servicemen who appear to have only half made it home. They can’t return to their old jobs because the work is beyond them, so they get by on war pensions or sell trinkets and matches. Some of these men are outright abject while others are at pains to maintain a front of good cheer. Either way, she has the sense the world has passed them by. They would prefer to be elsewhere. They would prefer to be in different bodies than the ones they are trapped in today.

Like Mr Pritchett, Lucy Marsh has survived her adventures and taken up her old duties. Like the men on the street, however, she would rather be somewhere else. Having previously disliked school and avoided it when she could, she is faintly surprised to find that she misses the place. School at least provided a framework that she could either rely upon or kick against. Now her days at the Griffin stretch out endlessly, unvaryingly, with nothing to look forward to except her birthday or Christmas – both of which she will in all likelihood spend working. To make matters worse, she has lost her appetite for reading. It is all she can do to pick up a book – the stories are too rich and too thrilling. The

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