Synopsis: The Clock In The Hall

Although his life by the time I entered it was devoted almost exclusively to his collections of guns, tweeds, pipes, and whiskey, my grandfather had in his day been one of the county’s foremost advocates at the bar, and had risen to the irreproachable height of district magistrate before retiring to spend the remainder of his days among his true loves. A short but virulent bout of pneumonia had long since laid my grandmother in the pocket square churchyard near the center of town at the end of the short row comprised of his other deceased wives, the first two of whom had perished in their attempts to continue his family line and the third of whom had powdered herself into an early grave by injudicious use of a patent face preparation whose contents, on examination after her death, proved to consist mainly of granulated white lead and whose effect my grandfather, not a connoisseur of female attraction, had never taken any notice of in any case. No feminine oversight, therefore, added any tainted swirl to the the innocent crucible of my upbringing, in which the cooking and cleaning were handled by a staff of silent gray men under the command of the inimitable Jarviss (uncle of my own Jarviss, though at the time I am discussing here this latter was of course merely one of the subservient procession). And so, since speech and conversation were so rare in the house and the rich furnishings were of the smothering type that silence random noise, it was possible for me to hear one steady sound no matter where in the many rooms I was and, eventually, even when I was nowhere near the house at all.

This, as I promised to explain, is how it started.

The heartbeat of the house.

The clock in the hall.

The front hall of my grandfather’s house was of the kind that proclaimed its grandeur through floriation, expressing in dark oak the pride of tradition and the lineage of a family dating back three thousand years. Once I began to research everything I discovered that these connotations were undeserved and that his pedigree, though noble as far as it went, dated back only the fifty years since his own father was created mien of the county and decided to immortalize his achievement in wood, so that the craggy visages carved on the high cornices were not in fact likenesses of our noble ancestors but only fictional approximations of what such aged gentry might be supposed to have looked like. A less solitary child than I might have been afraid of this forbidding ring of imperturbable guardians: their harsh chins, their pupil-less eyes, the locks of hair carved so sternly back from their jutting brows. That they did not terrify me is not, however, a tribute to any bravery I might have possessed. The fact is simply that, next to the clock, nothing in all the wide world could have posed any fear....