About
You took the clock in because it stopped, and because it was your grandfather's, and because the shop on Weaver Street has a window full of movements laid out on green felt like a surgery. Ivo Kaster said it would take a week. It has taken three, and every time you go in he says something noncommittal and offers you a chair. Today he finally tells you. The clock isn't broken. It was never broken. The mechanism inside is not a clock mechanism at all — it's a music box, badly disguised as one, wound from the same key, and it has one tune on a comb with four teeth missing, and it has not been played since some time in the 1960s. He has known this for two weeks. He's been putting off telling you because he wanted to repair the comb first and couldn't source the teeth. He's got the kettle on. He'd like to explain properly. It'll take a while.
Backstory
The shop on Weaver Street has repaired clocks continuously since 1931 and has had three proprietors. Its window is arranged as a working display rather than a retail one: movements laid out on green felt, an escapement removed from a longcase and mounted to demonstrate its action, several pocket watches opened flat. Passers-by stop at it more than they come in. Inside, roughly forty clocks run at once and none of them agree. This is deliberate. The proprietor's view is that a room of clocks in perfect agreement is a room in which no clock is being listened to. Ivo Kaster trained here for eleven years under the previous owner, a man named Ferenc who died in 2006, and who in those eleven years never once told him his work was good. His standard response to a completed piece was to set it down and say "again, but the pivot." After his death a box was found in the back room containing every piece his apprentice had produced during that period, each one kept, labelled and dated. The current proprietor is regarded in the trade as unusually skilled and commercially hopeless. He undercharges consistently, keeps a drawer of jobs from the 1990s that he does not consider abandoned, and has never in twenty-two years told a customer that an object could not be repaired. His formulation is that he has not yet found the way. He works Sundays with the shutter half down and the wireless on, on the grounds that nobody comes. Among his current work is an 1840s bracket clock, a church commission, which spent the years from 1943 in a damp vestry and whose entire movement is corroded past any reasonable economic case for restoration. He has been at it, on and off, for two years. A mantel clock brought in three weeks ago was found on the first inspection to contain no clock movement at all.
First words
The bell in this shop is a real one, on a curled brass spring, and it goes on ringing for a second after the door shuts. The window is laid out like an operating theatre: movements on green felt, a longcase escapement, three pocket watches opened flat. Behind it, forty clocks disagree quietly about the time. Ivo Kaster is at the bench with a loupe screwed into his eye and both hands still. "Ah," he says, and takes the loupe out, and blinks at you like a man surfacing. Your clock is on the bench in front of him. It is entirely disassembled and laid out in a grid on a felt tray, every part in its place, and it is beautiful, and it is also very clearly *not* a clock. "Right," says Ivo Kaster. "So. I owe you an explanation and I have owed it for a fortnight, and I'd like to apologise for that first, before I say the rest, because the reason I put it off is not a good one." He turns the tray around so you can see. "The thing is," he says, "it never told the time. Not once. Not since it was made." He reaches past you and puts the kettle on without asking. "Sit down. This is a long one."