The Sundial's Chime

I am forty-three years old, I work in a museum in Manchester, and two months ago my girlfriend of four years moved out and told me she needed space, which turned out to mean she needed space with a yoga instructor named Poppy, and I need you to understand that when I booked a flight from Manchester to a village in the Italian Dolomites to meet a woman I had never seen in person, I was not looking for love. I was looking for damage. I wanted a story so good that when Mireille finally answered my texts, she would read it and feel something twist in her chest, and if that sounds petty, well, it is, I never claimed otherwise.

The plan was simple. I had been chatting with a woman online for three weeks, a tour guide from Bolzano who said all the right things and sent photos of herself standing on mountain passes looking windblown and gorgeous, and I booked the trip, told my sister I was going on a walking holiday, and flew out on a Friday in February with a bag full of nice underwear I had bought specifically for the occasion. Then the snow came. Not a dusting, not a scenic little flurry, but an actual wall of snow that shut the mountain road, canceled the transfer, and left me standing in a village square at four in the afternoon with a suitcase, a dead phone battery, and no signal.

That is how I ended up at the convent. There was a light on in an old stone building at the edge of the village, and a wooden sign with faded letters that said something about pilgrims and travelers, and I knocked on a door that had probably been knocked on by people fleeing worse things than a canceled date for about five hundred years. The woman who answered was tall, forty-seven according to what she told me later, with gray coming in at her temples and a wool sweater that had a hole at one elbow, and she looked at me standing there in the falling snow and said, "Oh, you poor thing, come in before you turn into a statue."

Her name was Danni. She was English too, which felt almost impossibly fortunate, and she had been the convent's bell ringer for six years now, after ten years of leading tours around Rome that had worn her voice down to something low and amused. She gave me the guestroom, which had a narrow bed, a Crucifix I chose not to think about too hard, and a window that looked out over the walled garden, and she told me the road would maybe open Monday, maybe Tuesday, depending on the plows, and did I want soup.

* * *

So there I was the next morning, watching snow pile up on the windowsill like the sky was dumping flour on the world, thinking about the nice underwear folded in my suitcase going quietly mad in there, unworn and pointless. I had flown across Europe for nothing. I had told my sister a lie for nothing. Somewhere in Manchester, Mireille was probably drinking an oat flat white and letting Poppy tell her about chakras, and here I was in a convent guestroom with a Crucifix and no signal and the beginnings of a genuine sulk.

I got dressed and went downstairs, and the front door was unlocked, so I let myself into the garden. The snow had stopped for the moment and everything was white and muffled and bright, and in the middle of the garden stood an old stone sundial, green with lichen, its gnomon casting a fat blurry shadow on a face nobody could read under two inches of snow. I brushed the snow off the hour marks with my gloved hand like that would accomplish something, and I was standing there feeling sorry for myself in a historic setting, which frankly is my favorite way to feel sorry for myself, when a voice behind me said, "That hasn't told the correct time since 1911, so don't arrange your day around it."

Danni came across the snow in boots and a big coat, holding two chipped mugs, and handed me one. The coffee inside was terrible, thin and bitter and faintly of the sock it had probably been strained through, and I said so.

"It's awful, isn't it," she said, grinning into her own mug. "One of the sisters left us a tin of something in 2019 and I refuse to let it defeat me. Drink it anyway, it's hot and that's the whole argument for it."

"Is it always this quiet up here?" I asked.

"In winter? This is the loud season. Summer, we get coaches. Forty German tourists at a time, all of them photographing the sundial, which, again, does not work. One of them asked me last year if the shadows were original."

I laughed, properly, the first real laugh in what I realized had been months, and she looked pleased about it, the way people do when they're good at something and they catch themselves being good at it. We stood there drinking terrible coffee and looking at the mountains, and then she asked, casually, the way you ask when you've already decided to ask, "So what's your story? Nobody comes here in February on purpose."

And out it came, all of it, the four years with Mireille, the yoga instructor named Poppy, the space, the three weeks of chatting with the Bolzano woman, the flight, the underwear, the snow. Danni listened with her elbows on the sundial, wincing at the right places and making a small noise of pure disgust at the name Poppy, and when I finished she was quiet for a second, looking at me with what I can only describe as professional interest.

"Let me make sure I have this straight," she said. "You flew across a mountain range to be petty, and the mountain stopped you."

"The mountain stopped me, yes!"

"That's almost biblical. You should ask for your money back from the devil." She sipped her coffee and made a face at it. "So what was the plan, once you got to Bolzano? Just sleep with a stranger and feel better?"

"That was roughly the plan, yes!"

"Solid plan. Flawless execution. Zero stars." She looked up at the bell tower built into the chapel wall, where the bells hung silent and snow-capped, and then she looked back at me, and behind her eyes something turned over, some idea being walked around and inspected. "Right," she said slowly. "Here's my thought. You wanted a story that would sting. Something she'd see and feel in her stomach."

"Go on," I said, though I could already feel where this was going and my heart had picked up.

"You're snowed into a convent. With the bell ringer. Who, and I say this with complete humility, is the only person in this village with hands trained on those ropes." She pointed up with her mug. "Tonight, at midnight, you and I go up that tower, and you ring the bells. Properly, all four of them, the full midnight peal, which the sisters will forgive because I'll tell them it was for a guest's spiritual wellbeing, which technically it is. And you take a photo of yourself up there, bell rope in hand, at exactly midnight, and you send it to her with no explanation at all."

I stood there in the snow with the awful coffee going cold in my hand and thought about Mireille's face. I thought about her seeing that photo, trying to work out what it meant, why I was in a convent in the Dolomites ringing bells at midnight, who took the picture, who was standing next to me just out of frame.

"Danni," I said, "that is the single stupidest plan I have ever heard, and I have never wanted anything more in my life."

She raised her mug. "Midnight, then. Wear gloves, the ropes are cold."

"How do you know how to do this? Actually ring them?"

"Six years of practice, and before that a decade of telling tourists lies about Rome, so I'm comfortable with both bells and nonsense." She drained her coffee and winced again. "Come on, I'll show you the ropes this afternoon. And Cassidy? When she replies, and she will reply, you tell me immediately, because I have been single for years and I need the entertainment."

* * *

The afternoon was going on three when she came to fetch me from the guestroom, and she had brought me a pair of wool gloves the size of oven mitts, which she claimed belonged to the sisters and which I strongly suspected belonged to her.

"These will look absurd," I said, pulling them on anyway.

"They'll look practical. There's a difference, and the difference is frostbite." She held the tower door open for me. "After you. And mind the third step, it's been lying to people since 1974."

The staircase inside the tower was a spiral of stone, narrow enough that we had to go up single file, and it went on longer than I expected, circling and circling with little arrows of window letting in slabs of white light. Danni talked the whole way up, because she was clearly one of those people who narrates her own building, telling me which sister had fallen on which step and how the bells had been recast in the fifties and how the rope had a personality of its own that she'd learned to respect the hard way. I was forty-three years old and getting slightly winded on a staircase, and she was forty-seven and bounding up ahead of me like a goat, and I decided not to take that personally.

Then the stairs ended and we were in the ringing chamber, which was a small square room with a ceiling of old beams and four ropes hanging down through slots in the wood above us, fat ropes with woolly grey sallies halfway up, like enormous caterpillars. The light through the louvres was that pale northern grey that makes everything appear as an old photograph.

"So these are them," Danni said, laying her hand on one rope with genuine affection. "The big one is Aya, she's the deepest, she goes first. Then Anna, then Chiara, and the little screechy one is Benedetta, and we don't talk about what Benedetta did at Easter."

"You've named them."

"Of course I've named them. You spend six years being dragged around a room by something, you end up on friendly terms." She moved behind the rope and patted the floor beside her. "Come here, stand where I'm standing, and take it about there, both hands."

I took my place and gripped the fluffy part of the sally, and she stood close behind me, reaching around to adjust my hands, and I am telling you, reader, that I stopped listening to about a third of what she said, because her chest was against my back and her voice was directly beside my ear and my entire nervous system had gone away on holiday.

"Loose wrists," she was saying, "let the rope do the work, you're not wrestling it, you're asking it politely. Now, when I say pull, you pull down smoothly, all the way, and then let it lift you. Ready?"

"Ready," I said, in a voice I hoped sounded normal.

"Pull."

I pulled, and the bell above us swung, and the note that came down was enormous, it went through the floor and up through my shoes and into my teeth, and the rope hauled me up onto my toes and then dropped me back down, and I laughed out loud, an actual shout of a laugh.

"Oh, that's brilliant," I said. "Why is that brilliant? It's just a bell."

"Everyone says that. It never stops being brilliant. Again, and this time follow through, let it take your arms with it."

We rang Aya a few more times, and then she taught me Anna, and every time she corrected my grip her hands stayed on mine a moment longer than