‘No, it’s not that. There’s a bit of a family legend…’ His words trailed away.
Alice decided to be more like Cary and stay silent, letting him decide if he wanted to say more. She deeply hoped he would, even if it only meant she could listen to his lovely voice for just a little longer.
‘Granny married twice,’ Cary began. ‘Her first husband stayed on in Barbados. He was going to follow her later. When she emigrated, she left with her sister. They both ended up working their whole lives at an infirmary in Glasgow.’
‘Incredible.’ Alice thought of all the nurses she’d met, and the caring and dedication they gave. The love. They didn’t do it for the money, that was for sure.
‘“You called and we came,”’ Cary said. ‘That’s what she always said about her decision.’ A damp glaze came over his eyes, a quiet pride.
Alice gave him time. She turned the key to open the clock case and the door creaked open.
‘We need to work on that too,’ he said. ‘It’s creaky.’
‘So would you be if you were… how old?’
‘Grandad built the case in nineteen seventy. See?’ He pointed to the date engraved on the inside lip of the door casing.
‘Your gran’s second husband?’
Cary nodded. Alice didn’t ask the question aloud, only hoping he could intuit her interest, which, of course, he did. He had a way of reading her that was both alarming and reassuring.
‘What happened to her first husband, right?’
‘Right,’ she said softly.
Cary tapped at the brassy pendulum inside the case and it swung, knocking the chains and ropes, weights and other things Alice didn’t know how to interpret.
‘They’d only been married for a few months. Never had time to have kids. She emigrated first, he was meant to follow a few months later; he was just waiting for paperwork while Gran had a nursing position all ready. When she arrived here, she and her sister got straight to work and… she never heard from Trevor again.’
‘What? No!’
Cary nodded that it was true. ‘This clock dial and its mechanism arrived at her door in a crate one day, along with some of their wedding gifts, and there was a note from his mother. He’d passed away shortly after she left.’
Alice felt her heart sink for the woman. ‘She must have been devastated. Widowed and in a totally new country.’
Cary let her feel it. She liked that about him. He didn’t crowd her feelings out with his. He gave her space and he stayed contained in his space too.
‘What were their names again?’ she asked.
‘Gloria and Trevor,’ he said. ‘Then she married Grandad Dennis. Glo Glo didn’t want us kids to know what had happened. She didn’t want us feeling sorry for her, I guess, or she hated the idea of us being sad about Trevor, like she was. So she made up a story…’
Alice had her eyes fixed upon him now. She loved the sound of Gloria, or Glo Glo. She wondered if that had been baby Cary’s name for her. Little could she know that pet name had been amongst the first sounds he’d made when he’d begun to find his way to speaking out loud as a seven-year-old.
‘She told us kids that she came through the clock,’ Cary said.
Alice started in surprise. ‘What?’
‘She’d have us all crowded around her, me and my little cousins, and she’d tell us how one minute she was in the Barbados sunshine, the next she’d jumped through the clock and appeared in the Scottish rain.’
‘Hah!’
‘Yeah. And the clock came with her. This was before we understood anything about Grandad Dennis making the case or how tough things had been.’
‘You thought your granny was magic!’
‘No. We thoughtthe clockwas magic.’ He laughed. ‘We just thought Glo Glo was lovely. Anyway, she told us that Grandpa Trevor, who we’d never met, had tried to get here inside the clock too, but it hadn’t worked and he’d gone somewhere else, somewhere warm, with turquoise water and lots of colourful fishes.’ He wasn’t laughing now. He was lost in the memories. ‘All so we didn’t have to know about things like death, so we could enjoy the magic of being kids for a little longer. That’s just what she was like.’
Alice watched him tapping the pendulum, making it rock. ‘I wish I could hear this old thing’s heartbeat. It would be like having some of the magic back. My childhood with Glo Glo and Grandad Dennis, and my mum.’
