The Yellow Glass (2 page)

“One million pieces.
 
Stop.”

Somebody passes me a new pencil, not the American, who
is actually beginning to tickle the back of my neck, but the third man.

“Six noughts, I think you’ll find,” he remarks, drily.

“Thank you so much,” I reply and swat lightly at my
neck, as if at a fly.
 

The American chuckles quietly and extends a couple of
fingers down the back of my crisp, white blouse.
 
I really don’t like this.

“Signatories, Orchard, don’t you think?
 
Mmm?
 
Then we can get this show on the road,” says the third man.

“Signatories, Miss Dodd.
 
Mr G. Orchard, Financial Director,
Heaviside
etc., stop. Space for
signature.
 
New line,” the American’s
fingers are tickling me atrociously and I cross my legs and slide forward to
get away from him, so that I’m barely sitting on the chair at all.
 
“Mr A. Arkonnen, Managing Director,
Dilko Arkonnen Vas-Glass & Ceramics
Finland
, stop.
 
As before,” it’s becoming
just about unbearable and I slap my notepad down on Mr Orchard’s desk and lean
my head and shoulders over it, as if over a decidedly tricky piece of
work.
 
“Mr B Dexter,
Sambaware Enterprises, Cape Prince of Wales, Seward Peninsula,
Territory of Alaska, USA
, stop.
 
Witness to the above signatories, Mr T. Clarendon, Legal representative
for
Trelawney & Mole Solicitors,
Bayswater, Lon . .
”

My notepad slips out from under me and skids clear
across the desk as if propelled by some wicked power of its own, knocking over
a hefty yellow vase, which promptly knocks over two yellow goblets,
precipitating all three off the edge of the desk and onto the hard linoleum
floor.

“I’m so . .” I make an automatic move to catch them
before they smash to smithereens, but my arms scrabble in thin air.

“No!”
 
The
American leaps away from me, like a man possessed.

“Really, I didn’t mean to . .”

“Christ!”
 
Mr
Orchard positively
screams
.
 

I suspect that I look at him rather blankly because
I’m actually so taken aback at the violence of the general reaction to my
unfortunate accident.
 
I cannot help
noticing that Mr O. has grabbed his checked hankie and clamped it over his
mouth and nose.

Then it is that the Finn at the window turns around
for the first time and I have the opportunity to see his face, quite
distinctly, in the strip of light between the curtains.
 
He’s a bluff, pleasant-looking man in his mid
forties under his grey, felt hat.
 
Strawberry-blond sideburns and rounded cheeks, full, bloody-coloured
lips.
 
Yes, the effect is pleasant enough
. . until the light catches his eyes.
 
There is something very odd about his eyes.
 
They are tremendously pale, like a pint of
milk, so that his pupils stand out like tiny beetles that have fallen in and
are trying not to drown.
 
His mouth opens
in shock.
 
Is he about to say something
Finnish?
 
No, he isn’t.

The Finn flings out one arm and punches it in a great
arc through the window behind him.
 
He
repeats this once and then twice and then he launches himself through the hole
that he has made.
 
Crumbs, it’s lucky
that we’re on the ground floor.
 
I may
have turned to the other three men and begun to gabble something to that
effect, but nobody hears me because they are so intent on escaping, themselves:
first Mr Orchard and then the American rush to the window and positively vault
after the Finn.
 
I stare through the
broken glass as if they might suddenly re-appear, jumping in bottoms’ first,
like a film that’s spooling backwards.
 

The third man looks at me and sighs.

“Oh Rosa,” he sighs, “what have you done?”

“I don’t know, Uncle Tristram,” I say.
 
“Perhaps you could tell me?”

“I can tell you what you
haven’t
done, Rosa,” he says, unfolding his handkerchief and
kneeling down to pick up a shard of yellow glass.
 
“You haven’t condemned the whole of London to
uranium poisoning and slow death by radiation.”
 
He turns the fragment of glass until it winks, prettily.
 
Then he smiles his crooked smile.
 
“So that’s something.”

My uncle - and my boss - Tristram Upshott, and I left
Heaviside Import/Exports via the front door and went to wait for a bus at the
stop outside the Lots Road Power Station.
 
Fulham was looking at it’s most abject.
 
Fog had turned to rain and it was still so very cold after the freezing,
interminable winter we’d just endured.
 
The boss unfurled his black umbrella so that we could both take shelter
while we waited.

“Where’s your car, Uncle?”
 

I’d never imagined that he would take buses, not in my
wildest dreams.

“I parked it up by World’s End.
 
I daresay they’ll be watching it.
 
It may be a goner.
 
Now, tell me, Gypsy (his pet name for me),
that room you took in Battersea; anything you’re particularly attached to in
it?”

“What, like peeling wallpaper, or the stained
mattress, d’you mean?”

“Please don’t be more than usually precocious.
 
Any personal things you care about?
 
Or, more to the point, things that could be
used to trace you?”

“No.”
 
I thought
about it.
 
“No, nothing at all.
 
Miss Dodd’s clothes are in the wardrobe.
 
And some books . .”

“Notebooks?”
 
He
broke in.
 
“Were you scribbling
there?
 
You had strict instructions
not
to scribble, remember.
 
Not to scribble and not to touch any
deliveries,” he peered down at me under the umbrella and a thick lock of
blue-black hair broke free from the bondage of hair-oil and fell over his
unreadable eyes.
 

I was saved by the bus.
 
We climbed up to the top deck and found we
had it all to ourselves.

“Do let’s sit at the front,” I exclaimed.

“Very well,” he slid in first, but remained standing
and seemed to be winding open the top bit of window, which was odd considering
that it such an exceedingly nippy afternoon for April.
 
“One moment.”
 
He took off his black bowler hat and promptly dropped it out of the
window.
 
“That’s better.
 
Trelawney
& Mole Solicitors
have rather bitten the dust, I should think.”

“Can you explain it all to me now?
 
Please?
 
Please?”

He lifted a finger to hush me.
 
The conductor had crept up behind us and I
hadn’t noticed.

“Where do you go?”
 
Uncle Tristram asked.

“Putney Common, Sir.”

“That’ll do nicely.
 
Two, please.
 
Thank you.”

The conductor rolled the dial on his ticket machine,
handed us the tickets and went back down the stairs.

After that the boss seemed to relax and stretched his
long legs out as far as they could go, which wasn’t far.
 

“Oh, I do like buses, don’t you?”
 
He said.
 
“Buses and trains and planes.
 
It’s rather nice to get out of the car.
 
Putney, too; I’m not terribly familiar with it.
 
What will we find, d’you think, Gypsy?
 
Trees and that kind of thing?”

This was an awful lot of small talk for my uncle who -
unlike myself - was inclined to be terse, verging on the abrupt at times.
 

“You’re trying to wriggle out of telling me, aren’t
you?
 
But I shan’t let you!”
 
I put a pleading note into my voice that I’d
found worked well in the past.
 
“Weeks
I’ve been in that desperately tedious place with nothing at all going on.
 
I’ve had to wear the most ghastly clothes and
go back to that terrible hole after work, with nobody but bed-bugs for
company.
 
You’ve got to tell me the full
story!
 
You’ve simply got to!”

“Ha!
 
Battersea?
 
I’m sure it did you
good to see how the other half lives.”
 
He gave me his stern look.

“Yes, well, it’s done me good and now you’ve got to
tell me.
 
So there.”

He leant forward to inspect the small gap under the
front window of the bus, which was situated immediately above the driver’s
head.

“I think we should take a short walk on Putney
Common.
 
After which, we could stop off
at a pub.
 
Or a milk bar, if that’s more
your style, Gypsy.
 
Then we might think
about taking another bus somewhere else.”

——

 
They’d said to keep an eye on her, so that’s what I
done.
 
I was saving the loot for a pair
of pointed alligator casuals.
 
Besides,
it weren’t no bad thing to be in their good books.
 
They were hard-faced for oldsters, those
two.
 
The old man had come in sozzled and
stinking of fags and she’d been narked and he’d given her what for.
 
Then he’d moved on to me, rabbiting on about
how there weren’t no teenagers in his day and Ernie Bevin
[2]
had made it too easy and we hadn’t had to fight in the war.
 
Blah, blah, blah, war, blah, blah, blah, war,
blah, blah, blah, war.

——

 
It was dreadfully cold on Putney Common and
deeply dispiriting.
 
I felt like a
plucked pheasant with my unusually bare neck and was conscious of my nose
growing embarrassingly red.
 
I shivered
and pulled the collar of my coat close.
 

“Haven’t you got a scarf?”
 
My uncle asked.

 
“No.”

I hadn’t known that I would be out and about in any
fresh air, of course.
 
I unpinned my
hair, pulling bobby-pin after bobby-pin out of it (all thirteen of them), until
the curly mass plummeted, nearly to my waist.

 
“
Vas-Glass
is short for Vaseline glass .
.” he began, striding along with his eyes on some personal horizon.
 

I had to gallop to keep up with him, since he appeared
to be on a mission to circumvent Putney Common in record time.
 
(I should explain, my uncle is relatively
young and energetic for somebody’s uncle; he’s probably about thirty.
 
He is actually married to my mother’s sister,
my beautiful Aunt Kathleen and . . . Why am
I
explaining?
 
This was
his
time to explain.)

“ . . and Vaseline glass is another name for
uranium
glass.
 
It’s glass that has been manufactured with a
small quantity of uranium in it; nothing new about that, been going on for a
couple of centuries, at least.
 
In fact,
it’s possible that the Romans mixed a bit into their mosaics, although that
might have been the naturally occurring amount that turns up in sand
anyhow.
 
However . . .”
 
I was so tremendously interested that I
started to say something, but he shot me an especially severe look from under
his black brows.
 
“However, production in
this country ceased in the war, when the government confiscated all supplies of
uranium and that’s still the state of play.”
 

We had emerged from trees and scrub onto a road,
crossed over and circumnavigated Putney Hospital before arriving at a
semi-derelict graveyard that had mislaid its church.
 
My uncle halted by a Victorian stone angel
and they stared at one another for a bit.
  
Something rustled nearby: a stray cat, or fox, or somebody’s unquiet
ghost.
 
Abruptly, he swung round to face
me.

“Tell me, Rosa, what did
you
notice?
 
What was
your
assessment of the situation?”

I smiled, took a deep breath and then something
clicked in my brain.
 
Images tumbled over
each other, vying to be first out.