This was disturbing news.

For several hours, Salvatore Cavalli’s father, Roberto, had not been able to bring himself to pass it onto his son. He found the courage to do so only after he’d drunk several glasses of wine and eaten seventeen chestnuts soaked in brandy at the birthday dinner. Then, Roberto Cavalli wiped his mouth, put an eighteenth chestnut onto his plate, turned to his son, took a breath and said: ‘Salvatore, I heard today that the King has ordered a number of years to be erased permanently from recorded time. What are we to make of that, do you think?’

Salvatore stared at his father. He wondered whether the clockmaker, a man of such precision in all his dealings, was beginning to show some inconsistency in his thinking. ‘Papa,’ said Salvatore, ‘nobody can erase time. It’s not possible. I think you must have misunderstood.’

But Roberto Cavalli had not misunderstood. With his mouth full with the eighteenth chestnut, he explained to Salvatore and to the assembled birthday guests that the King had been so horrified by the revolution in France and had suffered so miserably in his years of exile during the wars with Napoleon that he now preferred to pretend that none of these events had ever happened. His subjects were ordered to collude with this pretence and to purge their memories and their conversations of all reference to the years 1789 to 1815 inclusive. Punishments for disobeying the edict would be severe. Anyone heard uttering the word Bonaparte would be executed on the spot. The concept of egalité was decreed dead and had been officially interred in a dry well in the palace grounds. Worse and more difficult, nothing at all that had occurred during this time – nothing at all – was to be publicly recognised or discussed.

‘So there it is,’ said Roberto. ‘The strangest decree ever to come forth, isn’t it? And on this day of all days, my poor son. But there’s nothing we can do about it. A decree is a decree and all we can hope is that we’ll get used to it.’

That night, Salvatore refused to sleep. He stood at a window, counting stars. All twenty-six years of his life had been officially swept away. He existed only in the future – only from this moment of becoming twenty-seven – and all his past was consigned to a void, to a hole in time. He felt outraged. He came from a family whose profession it was to measure time, a family of rational, clever, mathematically-minded people. He found the King’s decree absurd, adolescent, unhistorical, unscientific and untenable. He refuted it utterly. His father’s cowardly acceptance of it infuriated him. He spoke to the stars, as they paled in the paling of the sky. ‘I shall have to leave home,’ he said, ‘leave home and leave Italy. Leaving is the only honourable solution left to me.’

Salvatore’s proposed departure caused anguish in his family. He was already an accomplished assistant in the clockmaker’s workshop. Roberto reminded him that their ancestors had started out as humble glass blowers but that for four generations they had been master craftsmen, rivalled only by the great watchmakers of France and Switzerland. ‘You may not leave, Salvatore!’ said Roberto. ‘I forbid it. You are not free to abandon the family firm of Cavalli.’

‘I have no other choice,’ said Salvatore.

‘Think of everything that has been done for you,’ said Salvatore’s mother, Magnifica, crying into a piece of Bavarian lace, ‘the start you’ve had in life . . .’

Salvatore felt choked. He tried to stroke his mother’s hair. ‘There was no start, Mamma,’ he said. ‘I have no past. I am a day old.’

‘Don’t be stupid!’ said Roberto, ‘don’t be pedantic.’

‘I’m not being pedantic, I’m following orders. The years 1789 to 1815 have been cancelled.’

‘In public, in public!’ whispered Roberto, as if the King might be standing on the other side of the door, listening to the conversation, ‘only in public! In private, they still exist. And this house is full of proof of their existence and yours, and these things can’t be taken away: your baby curls in a box, your first prayer book, your tutor’s reports, the engraving I gave you of the great Galileo Galilei, the first little clock you helped me make . . .’

‘I can’t live only in private, Papa,’ said Salvatore, ‘and anyway, I want to see something of the world.’

‘Why?’ asked Roberto. ‘What’s wrong with Piedmont?’

‘Everything. A place in which time can be annulled and events denied and history rewritten is not a fit place to be and I pity you and Mamma if you’re unable to see this.’

Salvatore felt pleased with this quick and pertinent response, but some days later, lying in the cabin of a ship that reeked of tar, hearing the sea boil all around him and knowing that Piedmont was lost to his sight, he heard the true harshness of his words and, for the first time, regretted them. He thought of Roberto and Magnifica alone with his absence, confused and afraid, and for a while he wished that the ship would turn round and take him back. But it sailed on.

His ultimate destination was England. Rumours had reached Piedmont during the wars that Napoleon had devised two alternative plans for the invasion of England: to fly horses and men and arms over in hot-air balloons; to dig a tunnel, like a mine, held up by wooden planks, under the Channel, through which his army would pass. But his engineers had informed him that balloons were too fragile for the English wind and the earth beneath the Channel too crumbly for a mine, and so the schemes were abandoned and England had never become part of the Emperor’s conquered lands.

It was because of this that Salvatore had decided to sail there. He didn’t fear the windy climate. He thought that time, in an unconquered place, would be running normally. He had heard that the English were a finicky people, who did most things by the clock, and so he was confident that his skills would be in demand and that he could make his way in London.

He became quickly acclimatised to sea travel. He let Roberto and Magnifica go from his thoughts. The motion of the ships didn’t make him sick; it filled him with a strange exaltation and sense of freedom.

At Lisbon, he fell into conversation with the ship’s doctor, who spoke four languages and who began to teach him some words of English – earth, soul, city, morning, river, house, heart, bosom, Putney, ironmonger, fog – and proudly recited to him a poem in English about the beauty of London seen from Westminster Bridge which contained all but the last four of these:

‘I was right to leave Piedmont,’ he said to the doctor. ‘With the arrival of this new decree, my family skills will no longer be valued there. This follows logically.’

‘Well,’ said the doctor, ‘I wish you success and I expect you to succeed. From my understanding of the English mind, I would say it has always been curious about contrivances and devices.’

He put up no sign. He had nothing, yet, to sell. And he needed, he believed, to understand the language and to know his way around London before he could start to trade there. He painted his premises green. He hung his precious engraving of Galileo Galilei over the mantel. This was to help him engage his future customers in conversation while they looked at his clocks and watches. He would remind them that it was an Italian, the great Galileo, who, observing very carefully the swinging of a lantern in Pisa Cathedral in the year 1582, had understood that the period of swing of a pendulum is independent of its arc of swing, and so adapted the pendulum to clockmaking via his simple idea of the wheel-cog escapement. He thought this story might be new to them and that it would intrigue and impress them.

Meanwhile, he began on the wheel-work of a range of 15-carat-gold keyless pocket watches, employing the Cavalli pump-winder patented by his grandfather, Domenico, in 1800. It was March and cold in his rooms. The kind of ferocious winds considered too fierce for Napoleon’s hot-air balloons screamed at his door. There was no sign of spring anywhere. The silvery light he’d imagined from the poem on the ship didn’t seem to fall in London except, now and again, just before dusk, just before the lamps were lit, and then it gleamed wetly on the street for half an hour and was gone.

And nor was London a gently sleeping city. Its very air seemed to hold noise within it, so that even while you slept you breathed it in and woke startled and disturbed. More even than the fiery Piedmontese, the men here seemed enraptured by argument and brawl. In Salvatore’s own street, in the grey light that passed for broad daylight, he saw a man pick up a cat from the gutter and hurl this living weapon at the head of another man. The cat’s body struck a railing and fell into a basement. The second man pulled out a pistol and shot the first man in the thigh. All down the street, windows opened and people stood staring. The wounded man lay pale and shrieking on the stones, but nobody went to his aid. After a while, he was put onto a cart of potatoes by some ragged boys and taken away.

That night, Salvatore dreamed that he’d lost not only his home but one of his legs as well. He got up and dressed and touched the great Galileo’s forehead for luck and walked to Westminster Bridge and stood in the middle of it and tried to see the things spoken of in the poem. And, as it happened, the morning was a fine one, the wind less rowdy than of late. Spread out under a clear sky like this, the city did indeed seem beautiful and serene and Salvatore felt tall, as if he were at the centre of a picture. Then, he realised that from this heart of London, if a person turned very slowly in a 360° circle, his eye could come to rest on no less than thirteen public clocks.

His work on the watches progressed very slowly. He had never been a fast worker. (Would his father remember this and start to find his absence satisfactory?) But now, Salvatore’s hands and his ingenuity felt constrained, as if he were, in fact, afraid to complete the watches. Certainly, he preferred wheel-work to enamel face-work. His numerals never satisfied him, never had the perfection he recognised in the internal machinery or the face pointers. So this, in part, explained why the watches remained unfinished, but not entirely, because he knew that his future was in them: he was nothing and no one, in his empty green shop, until he had begun to trade with the world outside.

It took him two months to understand the cause of his fear. It grew out of his personal predicament after the King of Piedmont’s decree. He’d become uneasy about the validity of his profession. What did all this mathematical monitoring of time signify and what did it serve, if time could be mangled by the edict of a frightened monarch? He was in a country, now, where people seemed to pay proper attention to time, yet nevertheless he felt that, even here, his profession had been dealt some kind of blow from which – in his imagination – it might never recover fully.

It was May. The daylight was brighter, kinder, and Salvatore had made a few acquaintances now and went with them to the taverns and the coffee houses and spoke English and was less alone.

He went to a signmaker and placed an order for an expensive painted sign. It was to show a clock face with its glass casing cracked and its hour hand detached from the centre pinion. Underneath the picture, in black lettering, were to be written the words:

CAVALLI, S. REPAIRER OF TIME

In the window of the shop, Salvatore had placed his unfinished watches and a set of sandglasses made by his ancestor, Vincente Cavalli, mounted in a fine ebony casing. He turned them every so often. He watched passers-by pause and stare at the minuscule movement of the white sand.

He wrote to Roberto and Magnifica: ‘I have decided to specialise in reparation, rather than fabrication. This, I believe, will be better suited to my temperament and I will no longer have to disguise my ineptitude with face-work. My first task was to mend a Viennese table clock showing solar and lunar time by means of an astrolabe and delicate moon pointers. The pointers were jammed at the first phase, yet the moon here is full and overflows into the night mists. I say prayers for your understanding and forgiveness to this big, spilling moon.’

He prayed also that his business would thrive – and it did. ‘A stopped clock,’ said one customer, ‘is a thing no Englishman can endure,’ and it soon became apparent to Salvatore that his sign put Londoners in mind of the unendurable and they hurried to him in considerable numbers with timepieces of extraordinary diversity and differing complexity. People were, on the whole, polite to him. They made emphatic reference to his countryman, Galileo, there on the green wall. They spoke slowly and corrected his faults of syntax with good-natured courtesy. They paid promptly and greeted their mended clocks with affection, as though these might have been convalescent pets. Very occasionally, they returned with gifts of appreciation: an ounce of tobacco, a box of raisins, a lump of quartz.

It began to be clear to Salvatore that his decisions had all been right. He wrote again to his parents, from whom he’d received no word at all: ‘I have begun to prosper a little in my new life.’ At the same time, he felt that the life he had and which he referred to as ‘new’ didn’t yet quite belong to him. It was like a coat he wore, a borrowed garment with holes in it, which let in, not cold exactly, but something mournful, something which sighed and should not have been there.

And then, on a late summer afternoon, a young woman walked into his shop. She was dressed in pale grey and white. There were white roses in her hat. Her hair was black (like the black hair of Piedmontese women in their youth) and her eyes were brown and of startling beauty.

Salvatore got up from his work table and bowed. Since arriving in London, his mind had been on language and on commerce; he’d given women hardly any thought. But now, suddenly in the presence of this person, he remembered how the sight of a particular woman could move him and terrify him at the same time, so that he’d feel exactly as he’d felt as a boy and imagined his life as a grown-up – wanting it and not wanting it, touched by possibilities, excited yet afraid.

In his still-imperfect English, Salvatore asked the woman how he might serve her. He thought that he saw her smile, but it was difficult to be certain, because on this warm day she had brought with her a fan and she held this fan, barely moving it, very close to her mouth.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘well, I’ve come as ambassador – ambassadress would be the correct term, but I think there are no ambassadresses on earth, are there? – for my clock.’

‘Ah,’ said Salvatore.

‘It’s a Dutch bracket clock, made by Huygens. The background to the dial is red velvet, slightly faded. The dial is brass and supported by a winged and naked figure of a man I’ve always taken to be God, or at least a god. It stands above the fireplace in my bedroom and I’m very fond of it indeed. A velvet background is unusual, isn’t it? I couldn’t say why I like it so much, except that it has always been there, ever since I can remember, ever since I could see.’

‘And your clock is broken, Signorina?’ asked Salvatore. He said this with great tenderness. His fear of the young woman had left him and only his longing remained.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘it says twenty-seven minutes past one. It’s paused there. The god still holds up the dial proudly, so it’s possible that either he’s showing me the time of the end of the world or else he hasn’t noticed that his world has stopped. What do you think?’

Salvatore found much of this difficult to understand. He recognised a way of talking somewhat different from that of many young women, a kind of self-mockery in the speech, which he found seductive and he knew that she had asked him a question, but he really hadn’t the least idea how to answer it. She looked at him expectantly for a moment, then smiled and hurried on: ‘Take no notice of me! My mind is like a cloud, my father says, always drifting. And I expect it’s because of my drifting mind that I’ve done what I’ve done. But it has upset me so much.’

‘What have you done?’ asked Salvatore, moving a step nearer to the young woman and snatching at the air with his nostrils to inhale more deeply a sweet perfume, which was either the smell of her body or the smell of the roses in her hat or a mingling of the two. She lowered her eyes. ‘I’ve lost the winder key,’ she said. ‘I’ve ransacked the house for it. I’ve looked inside the grand piano – everywhere . . .’

Salvatore’s eyes now rested on her small gloved hand holding up the fan. He wanted to take the hand and hold it against his face.

‘. . . in every one of my shoes . . . in my father’s pockets . . . under my bed . . .’

‘But it has departed?’

‘I believe it must be there, in the house, but no one can see it. There are certain things, of course, that are there and cannot be seen, but a winder key isn’t usually one of them, is it? You come from Italy, I suppose?’

‘Yes.’

‘Italy is one of countless places that I’ve never seen, despite the fact that they exist and are there. But I have no doubt that Italy is more beautiful than almost anywhere on earth. Is it?’

Salvatore thought: I would like to go up into the sky with her, in a hot-air balloon, and float down on Piedmont, onto my parents’ roof . . .

‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘because I do not know the earth.’

At this moment, a church clock struck the hour of four and the young woman hurried to the door, saying that because her ‘dear Dutch clock’ had stopped she’d lost the race with time and was late for all her social engagements. She said she would come back the following day, with her servant to carry the clock, and Salvatore would manufacture a new key, adding before she left: ‘Then all will be well again.’ And after this, she was gone, adjusting her hat as she moved away down the street.

Salvatore sat down. He wiped his face with a handkerchief. He knew beyond any possible doubt – and indeed this knowledge seemed to be the only thing that was truly his since his arrival in England – that the young woman with the fan was his future. ‘I shall marry her or die,’ he said aloud.

Salvatore had risen early, dressed himself with care, polished the glass of the engraving of Galileo Galilei and waited, but there was no sign of her.

After six days of waiting – during which he went out several times a day and walked up and down the street, searching among the heads of the people for the white roses of her hat – Salvatore told himself that he had misunderstood her. His grasp of English was still shaky, after all. She had not said ‘tomorrow’, she had said ‘this time next week’. And he felt relieved and calmed.

So certain was Salvatore that she would come on this new tomorrow, that again he took extra care with his appearance, dusted the sandglasses and bought lilies from a flower seller to scent the green world of his workshop.

That same morning, he received a letter from his father. ‘My dear son,’ wrote Roberto Cavalli, ‘by leaving the family, you have yourself tampered with time and continuity. Now, your mother and I feel cheated of our rightful futures and to console herself my beloved Magnifica is eating without ceasing and could die of this terrible habit, while I have no appetite for anything at all . . .’

Salvatore wanted to write back at once to say that, when his future arrived, when – through his new idea of a marriage – he was fully able to inhabit his new life, then he would return to Piedmont, defying the King’s edict by becoming responsible for the repairing of time, a skill for which he had now discovered himself well suited. But he didn’t write. He sat at his workbench, waiting.

‘Today, she will come,’ he told himself, as the hours succeeded one another faster and faster. ‘Today, she will come.’

Night came, that was all. And then another tomorrow and another.

Salvatore told himself: ‘You are so stupid! Why didn’t you ask for her name? Then you could find her. You could pay a respectful call, informing her that you’d come to collect the Huygens clock, to save her and her servant the trouble of the expedition. It would be perfectly proper. And then the key that you would make for her! What a key! Just to put it into the heart of the mechanism would be to experience a deep frisson of pleasure. And then to turn it! To set the escapement in motion! To know that time was beginning again . . .’ Salvatore knew that his thoughts were carrying him away, but he also believed that if he could only have the clock in his possession he could win the heart of the woman he now thought of as his future beloved.

He began work on designs for keys. Their heads had different emblems: a lyre, a rose, a pair of folded wings. He neglected other work to perfect them. And then, in the middle of the rose design, a realisation arrived in his mind like a canker in the flower: she has found the original key!

It was so simple, so obvious. She had opened the mahogany drawer where she kept her fans and there it lay. And so she had rewound the clock, set the pointers at the right time and given the matter no further thought. She would never come into his shop again. She was lost.

Salvatore put away his designs. He felt sick and sweat began to creep over his head. He remembered his father’s letter and its terrible last sentence: ‘I have no appetite for anything at all . . .’

On the shop door, he put up a sign: Repair suspended owing to illness. From his bedroom window he watched the London summer glare at him and depart. He heard men rioting in the street below. They were shouting about the price of bread. Salvatore felt indifferent towards the price of anything.

In his more optimistic moments, he decided his extreme weakness was due only to exhaustion, to the difficulties he had had to endure since his arrival in London and his struggles with language. On other days, he felt certain that this new disappointment had dealt him a fatal blow. He noticed that his hair was starting to fall out. At twenty-seven, he hadn’t expected this, just as he hadn’t predicted that time could be wiped from the calendar. The capriciousness of the world was too much for the individual. However hard he fought to order his life, the random and the unforeseen lay in wait for him always.

He remained in his bed and didn’t move. He ate nothing. He began to be prey to visions. He saw his lost beloved come into his room, naked except for her fan, which she held in front of her private parts. Then he woke one morning to the sound of someone eating. He saw his mother, sitting at his night table, spooning veal stew into a mouth that was much more fleshy than it had been, and he saw that all her flesh had magnified itself so grossly that her body almost filled the small room. He wanted to ask her why she had let this happen to her, but before he could frame the question, she said with her mouth full: ‘It’s my name. Magnifica. Why aren’t you quicker to understand things?’

Salvatore tried to get out of bed. He wanted to lay his head in her enormous lap and ask her to forgive him. As he struggled towards her, he fainted and woke up lying on his floor, quite alone.

After this, he tried to eat. He nibbled at biscuits, felt deafened by the sound of them being broken against his teeth.

He put some pomade on his thinning hair. His scalp felt frozen, but he found that, under this ice, new thoughts were beginning to surface in his exhausted mind. The successful man, he decided, the man capable of a happy life, defies the random by his ability to foresee what is going to happen. He doesn’t – as I have tried to do – feebly repair the past; his mind is attuned to what will become necessary. He acts in advance to prevent (as far as is humanly possible) the random from occurring. Such a man would have foreseen the possibility of the rediscovery of his beloved’s winder key and asked discreetly for her name and address long before that possibility became a fact. Such a man, aware of the vanity of princes, would have predicted that the King of Piedmont was likely to attempt some wanton comedy with time and schooled himself as to how best to come to terms with it, so that he didn’t have to feel as if his life had been cancelled. The random will still, of course, occur, but the damage caused to a life by the unforeseen will be less severe.