I like to remind students that if you write a story that is built around a defining central image – a clock, say, you only get one chance, so make the most of it. No one is going to want to read another story of yours about a clock, and if you keep writing stories about clocks, you’ll become pigeonholed as the person who writes about clocks. (This doesn’t apply to themes, which can recur again and again in your stories, but usually in different guises, using different and contrasting images and points of focus.) I can’t help thinking that Bowen might have had such a thought in mind when she wrote this story – I’m not going to write another story about a clock, so I’m going to do everything you can do with a clock in one story. In the Inherited clock two cousins are dealing with this particular timepiece – a domed skeleton clock – and in the course of the story everything is done with the clock that can be done – one character puts their finger in the mechanism and is “bitten”, another puts the dome over their head and so “wears” it, and so on. At times the clock seems like another character, a protagonist, and in a narrative sense, at least, could be described as alive. But that’s just one aspect of the story – as with all Bowen’s writing there are layers and layers of history, characterization and meaning contained in beautifully structured prose.
First published in The Demon Lover and Other Stories, Jonathan Cape, 1945. Bowen’s collected stories are published by Vintage, 1999
A Personal Anthology 