The Yellow Glass (24 page)

I was sweating from every
pore, spouting gibberish in torrents.
 
I
barely knew
what
I was saying, but I
kept it coming because the minute I stopped an innocent man might be harmed by
that monstrous woman.

“ . . can we not bury the
hatchet and have that cake together; your beautiful cake you so kindly baked
for me.
 
All you’ve done for me, Auntie,
and I go and sound off like that.
 
I’ll
never forgive myself.
 
Please come down
and cut us some cake.
 
Please, please,
please . .”
 
I was practically
sobbing.
 
Practically?
 
I was sobbing my heart out.

Another light tread and then
another and another and there she was, watching me cry like a baby.
 
She reached into her cardigan pocket, got out
a handkerchief and handed it to me.

“Have a mop up,” she said,
as if I was six years old and I’d had a rough time
 
in the playground.
 
“There, there, you’re a good boy, really, I
know you are.
 
Was I a bit too
strict?
 
I know I can be; I can go it a
bit strong with our Terry, I know, although it’s only for his own good.
 
It’s just . .” she sat down on the chair and began
to wring her pale hands again, “ . . your generation, you’re so very . .
different.
 
Even the words you
speak.
 
We don’t know what we should be
doing with you because it’s all moving so terribly fast and it’s leaving us
behind.
 
I don’t want to be left behind,
Magnus.”

I stared at her, amazed by
the transformation.
 
Because this was
another woman from the maniac of half an hour back.
 
This woman was thoughtful and intelligent
enough to understand what was happening to her.
 

“What’s this all about, Aunt
Dilys?”
 
I asked, before I could stop
myself.

“Reginald is such an able
man,” she said.
 
“So
skilled
at what he does.
 
You
should’ve seen the glass he used to make; it was like something out of a
museum.
 
Better
than that, even!
 
But
he had to give that up, so what did he do?
 
He built up a whole new business importing it and he’s made another
success out of all that, too.
 
It’s his
whole life, glass.
  
The only thing he’s
ever really cared about.
 
Oh . . I know
I’ve
got brains, but where’s that got
me?
 
Reg can get things done because he’s
a
man
, you see, and he’s allowed to
achieve things I can only dream about.
 
He
tells me very little, but I know he has big dreams for us and I’m so very
grateful
.
 
If there’s any way I can help him, I will.
 
He’s a wonderful man to be married to,
Magnus.
 
He really is.”
 

“I’m pleased for you both,”
I said.
 
“That’s great news, Auntie.
 
Now, how about a cuppa and a slice of your delicious
cake?”

——

 
It didn’t take
particularly long.
 
The clink of cutlery
on china and then I heard her comment on the taste:

“It’s nice and damp, but it
could do with a tad more sugar; that’s not like me.”

 
I was concerned that she might leave the rest
of her slice uneaten on her plate, but . .

“Eat up your cake,
Magnus.
 
Think of the children in
Africa.”

They, obviously, both
polished it off.

“My, I’m bushed,” she
said.
 
“I can’t think what’s come over
me.”

“Me, too,” he replied,
yawning.
 
“It’s been a long day,
Auntie.
 
We could take a nap.
 
You can have the top bunk if you like.”

She giggled, flirtatiously
and caught his yawn.

“Pardon me.”

Then there was a prolonged
silence.

“You can come out now,”
Magnus’ voice was weighed down with sleep.

I scrambled out in time to watch
his eyelids descend.

“Just . . do . . what’s . .
right,” he managed, before he tumbled into the arms of Morpheus.

Dilys Arkonnen was sitting
on the chair, her head flung back and her mouth wide open, catching flies, as
if she’d been about to protest when sleep had captured her.
 
I tipped her forward, so that she sprawled
over the table and wedged the chair securely to prevent her rolling off.
 
Then I tucked her arms under her head, aiming
to make her position look as natural as possible in case the bargeman came
looking for her.
 
I thought of Tamang’s
remark about knocking her out with the frying-pan and couldn’t help wondering
whether that mightn’t have been the best idea, in the long run.
 
Still, what was done was done.
 
Who knew what state I’d find the man in,
though.
 
I removed my shoes and began to
creep up the ladder, before a noise made me freeze.

Magnus Arkonnen’s marmalade cat
had jumped on top of the table and was sniffing at the cake.

“Shoo, “I whispered,
climbing back down as I did so.

I’m rather fond of animals
and I wasn’t willing to have the cat on my conscience; there being enough
morphine in that Dundee cake to kill the animal outright, despite his
size.
 
“Shoo!”

He shot me a look and jumped
off the table, padding over to wind his great bulk around my legs and nudge my
socks with his astonishingly ugly mug.
 
He was a friendly enough beast and I bent to stroke him, before replacing
the glass lid over the fruitcake.

“Stick to chicken livers,
old boy.”

I consulted my watch and
found it was approaching half past six in the evening.
 
I could’ve wished it had been later and
darker, but there was nothing for it; I had to risk going above board if I was
to find out what she’d done with Jay Tamang.
 
I prodded the cat with one toe to break his ardent attachment to my
socks, pulled up the dark grey lapels of my suit jacket in order to conceal the
white shirt that I wore underneath, and set off up the ladder once more.

The minute I slid the hatch
and poked my head above the hold, I felt a welcome sense of release from
captivity.
 
Fresh air - less brackish-smelling,
with a definite tang of the marine, now - hit me.
 
Then, the realisation that we weren’t alone,
that the river was a crowded highway lined with docks and thronging with
lighters and tugs, motorships, coasters and colliers: all the momentum of a
busy river widening into her estuary, pulling towards the sea.
 
I was struck by the thrum of the engine, not
having noticed it in the metal-lined berth below.
 
I crawled out and onto the deck, staying low
to the ground, aware that Severs would be up in the small wheelhouse to the
stern.
 
I just had to trust that his eyes
were on the great river ahead and not the expanse of deck, which lay bare,
darkening under long, evening shadows.
 
But,
where was Tamang?
 
I crawled towards the
bows and then I saw him.

She’d lashed him to the mainmast
(of course she had), wrapped him up with the rope and secured it around a
cleat.
 
I could see the silhouette of his
head against the evening sky, his chin resting upon his chest.
 
There was a rusty smudge of blood at the collar
of his coat, but I couldn’t make out any more damage than that.
 
Perhaps that had been enough.
 

I kept low and ran
over.
 
Just before I reached him,
however, I stumbled upon something lying on the deck.
 
Three slim, short lengths of rope had been
tied together and knotted at their ends; a makeshift cat-o’nine tails -
cat-o’three tails, if you must - with which to whip the brave Tamang.
 
My gorge rose at the sight of the foul thing
and I was sorely tempted to toss it into the river in disgust . . but sentiment
only leads to stupidity.
 
I picked up the
little horror and stuck it under my jacket, looping the loose ends around the
belt of my trousers.
 
No point in looking
any gift horses in their muzzles.

“Tamang!” I whispered.
 
“Tamang!
 
Are you still with us, Jay?”

He stirred and lifted his
head, blinking in the dusk.

“Mr Upshott?
 
Is it you?”

I breathed a deep sigh of
relief and got on with the job.

——

 
“Straight to hospital!”
 
Aunt Kathleen exclaimed, frogmarching me
across the beach and back to the house.
 
“I’ll
drive you, but you’ll have to tell me where to go.”

We drove to Buckland
Hospital in Dover, but, when we got there, they turned me away the instant I
mentioned the word ‘uranium’.

“Straight to the isolation
hospital,” the woman at reception ordered.
 
“Noah’s Ark Road.”

“The isolation
hospital?”
 
Aunt Kathleen queried, once
we were back in the car.
 
“Isn’t that for
the unlucky kids who’ve caught polio
[41]
?
 
I can’t possibly take you
there
, Rosa.
 
Millicent would never forgive me.
 
No, there’s only one thing for it,” she
checked her petrol gauge.
 
“I’ll have to
drive you back to London.”

“To London?
 
Whatever for?”
 
I was beginning to feel tired and rather
disorientated.

“They know you in Charing Cross;
they’ll be up to speed on how to deal with another poisoning.”

“Fine.”

“Just lie back and take a
nap, darling,” she said, whipping the car onto the London road.
 
“I’ll have you there in two shakes.”

I closed my eyes and sank
into the welcoming arms of Morpheus.

 
Rosa was all done in
and little wonder.
 
She rattled about in
the passenger seat, sliding to the right and left as we bumped over the many
potholes the appalling winter had gouged into the old London Road, but nothing
could wake her.
 
I hoped that her dreams
were sweet ones but, glancing at her as she slept
 
- her face thinner, now, than I’d ever seen
it and sallow, too, against the brown sack of a dress that she’d chosen to wear
- I doubted whether they were.
 
My niece
looked like adulthood had caught up with her and ripped her from her childhood
overnight.
 
It had to happen, I
supposed.
 
After all, it happens to every
one of us.
 
(Although, in my own case, I wasn’t
so sure there’d
ever
been anything
soft and childish in me; whether that hadn’t been one more luxury that we hadn’t
been able to afford in my family.)
 
Yet
the magic dust of childhood had certainly lingered over Rosa and I hated to
think that it had gone.

She woke up not long before we
got to Charing Cross hospital.

“Don’t leave me,” she cried,
startling me out of a thicket of black thoughts.

“I won’t.
 
Not if you don’t want me to.”

“Sorry.
 
You may have some acting to do, Aunt
Kathleen.
 
I mean, I wouldn’t want to
disturb . .”

“Acting?”
 
I snorted.
 
“I’m in rather a lull at the moment, darling.”

“It must be wonderful to be an
actress; I know I’d
love
it,” she
seemed to be picking up.
 
“Especially
Shakespeare.
 
At the Old Vic, or
Stratford.
 
Or on film, you know, like
Olivier’s new Richard III
[42]
.”

“Shakespeare?
 
They’ve never let me loose on Shakespeare, I
have to say.”

“Perhaps you could give me some
advice, Aunt Kathleen, on how one becomes an actress?”

I’d just taken the wrong road
off Hammersmith Broadway and was searching for somewhere to turn round, so I
blurted out what I really thought, rather than cooking up a pat response to her
question (which was one I’d frequently been asked before).

“Don’t do it,” I said, “that’s
my advice.
 
It’s a life of diminishing
returns for a woman.
 
What’s more, you’ve
got brains; unlike some of us.
 
God alone
knows why
I
landed up in the
business!
 
One minute I was singing and
the next somebody cast me in a film and that was that . . and it’s not as if I
ever wanted to sing in the first place!”

“Didn’t you?”
 
She sounded fascinated by my boring, old
story; the sweetheart.
 
“What did you
really
want to do, then, Aunt Kathleen?”

“I wanted to be a mechanic, or
an engineer, something like that, Rosa.
 
To race cars and pilot planes around the world.
 
Build a motorbike and whirl off into the
sunset.”

There was a pause, while we both
thought about what I’d just said.

“Well, why don’t you do it now?
 
If you’re in a lull, I mean.”

Such a simple question.
 
Why had I never asked myself that
question?
 
I stopped the car outside the
hospital and sat back in my seat.
 
Maybe
some questions were so simple that even simpletons like myself failed to ask
them.

 
They put my niece in
solitary confinement again and wouldn’t let me go with her.
 
We hugged before they took her away and there
were tears glinting in the corners of her eyes.

“Don’t listen to me, Rosa.
 
You
be
an actress if you want to be.”

She rubbed the tears away with
the sleeve of her sackcloth and ashes dress.

“I don’t know why I’m crying,
Aunt Kathleen.
 
I never used to cry.”

“Then you should have done.
 
Goodbye, darling.
 
I’ll let everyone know where you are and
we’ll be here, like a shot, the minute they give us the say so.
 
And you can call me
 
any time you like,
 
just reverse the charges.
 
Promise?”

I kissed her again and hung
about in the hospital lobby, watching her through the glass pane in the first
door of a long corridor of other doors with glass panes; watching her walk the
length of the corridor with a nurse to either side - like prison escorts -
leading her on and on until she was out of sight.
 
I stood there long after she’d gone, lost in
thought.
 

I was fervently hoping our
shiny, new health service could get that muck out of her system before it did
any serious damage.
 
‘Tristram’s uranium’;
that’s how I’d come to think of it.
 
Damn
the man.
 
I only wished I could remember
more
of what young Mr Tamang had said
about radiation when we’d been in that tunnel (the whole experience having been
so odd that it’d been difficult to take it all in).
 
There’d been something about glass being
inert and not leaching and some discussion about whether this changed when it
was broken . . because Rosa had smashed some glass, that much I
did
know.
 
And, of course, there’d been the broken glass
in that underground shelter, which had sent Mr Tamang into a complete
tailspin.
 
Smashed glass, intact glass,
uranium-bearing glass.
 
This horror that
Tristram had brought to my family, that had taken my brother and poisoned my
niece, was all about
glass
.
 

I turned to go . . and then, not
before bloody time, I remembered the envelope.

 
The minute I got
home to Chelsea, I dashed upstairs and dug out the envelope
that I’d stolen from
Brompton Oratory, and the note from the old, Polish spy.
 
I’d hidden them in my underwear drawer and
they smelt of Patou’s Joy.
 
The spy had
wanted me to hand them over to the authorities, or to Tristram, but I’d done
neither and kept them to myself.
 
I
hadn’t opened the envelope, however, and in that sense I
had
followed Mr Piotrowski’s advice.
  
(Although that part of it hadn’t been
difficult, because it had dawned on me that I couldn’t give a
fig
for what was inside; it was the fact
of the thing that I liked, the little part of Tristram’s other life that I
owned and he didn’t know about.)

I turned the envelope over in my hands and studied the
random Russian letters that, apparently, made up the dull as ditchwater
sentence ‘BID FOR GLASS’.
 
It might mean
something, then again it might be entirely unconnected to Tristram’s case, but
one thing I did know and that was that the time for pathetic, marital games was
over.
 
In
every
respect, it was over.
 

I caught sight of my face in the hall mirror; there
were faint lines in it that hadn’t been there weeks before.
 
Bert’s death had been so terrible, of course,
so unexpected and appalling in every way . . but those lines stretched back even
further than that.
 
I traced one with a fingertip,
from temple to temple.
 
It was then that
the plan came to me.
 
I had to stop
treating my life as if I were acting in it and I couldn’t begin to do that
until I’d done what was
right
.
 
So, I made a start.
 
After I’d rung Millicent and told her Rosa
was back in Charing Cross, I put the envelope into my handbag, grabbed a light
coat and picked up my car keys.
 
Then I
drove over to South Kensington before I lost my nerve.

I found a parking space in Thurloe Place and walked
back to the café, checking my watch.
 
It
was still only lunchtime (although it felt a whole lot later), and it was even
another Monday and I reckoned Apoloniusz Z Piotrowski was a creature of habit;
if he wasn’t to be found reading his newspaper over Polish dumplings, then I
planned to sneak into Brompton Oratory and ambush him while he was on his
knees.
 
But he was there, alright.

“Good afternoon, Mr Piotrowski,” I said.

The debonair, retired spy looked up at me and his eyes
widened very slightly behind the thick lenses of his wire-rimmed spectacles,
that was all.

“Good afternoon, Madam.
 
How pleasant to see you again.”

“Is this seat taken?”

“Please be my guest.”

“Thank you,” I said.
 
“Oh, and I’m Kathleen by the way.
 
Kathleen Upshott, but you can call me Kathleen.”

“To what do I owe this honour, Kathleen?”

He’d put down his newspaper and removed his specs and
was smiling, benignly, at me over his plate of half-eaten dumplings.
 
The waiter appeared and I ordered a strong
black coffee before I answered his question.

“Well, Mr Piotrowski, to put it bluntly, I need some
information and I was rather hoping you could help me.”

“Information?
 
What information could an old fellow like me possibly have to give
you?
 
I’m always happy to help a
beautiful woman, but I fear you may have come to the wrong quarter, Kathleen.”

“Trust nobody, eh?”
 
I smiled back at him.
 
“That’s
right and proper, of course, but I’m completely harmless, you know.
 
Nobody
is more harmless than myself, if you want the honest truth . .”

“I think you do yourself an injustice . .”

“Oh, don’t!”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t flirt with me, Mr Piotrowski.
 
Just eat your dumplings and listen to what I
have to say, will you?”

“How
delightful
it is to see you again,” he laughed.
 
“But you’ve put me off my lunch . . in the nicest possible way.”
 
He reached for a thin, black cigarette.
 
“Please continue.”

I leant towards him and lowered my voice.

“You remember the envelope?”

He frowned and nodded.

“Well, I still have it . . I know, I know . .”
 
(He’d made to interrupt and, no doubt, give
me a good telling off.)
 
“ . . I should’ve
handed it over to the proper people straight away - and thank you for the note,
by the way; you shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble.
 
But I
didn’t
and that’s all there is to it.
 
I didn’t
show it to anybody, but I also didn’t open it, as you can see for yourself, if
you want to, because I have it right here in my handbag.”
 

I went to open the clasp, but he stuck a hand out to
stop me.

“
Not
here
, if you please.
 
Did I teach you nothing, Kathleen?”

“Sorry.
 
I’m
very difficult to teach; practically impossible they used to say at
school.
 
Anyway, it’s here and it hasn’t
been opened and you’ll just have to take that on . .” ( I’d been about to say
‘trust’, but, of course, that word wasn’t in his vocabulary.)

“So what are you going to do with the item?”
 
He asked, after a considerable pause.

“I want to take it to HQ, as I believe they call
it.
 
I was hoping you had the
address.
 
I want to take it in person,
you see.”

He took a long drag of his cigarette and sighed.

“I must say, you continue to mystify me, Kathleen.
 
Why not give the item to your husband to
deliver?
 
Or, if you are still so
determined to thrust yourself into matters that do not concern you, pump your
husband for the relevant information;
 
I’m sure that would not be beyond your capabilities.”

I took a sip of my coffee, found it a bitter brew and
unwrapped a sugar cube, thoughtfully.

“It’s complicated, Mr Piotrowski.
 
Too complicated to go into at this point.”

He stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray and
fluttered the tips of his fingers in an elegant, if disdainful, little gesture
of dismissal at the very idea of my marital complications.

“Is that so?
 
Well, then,” he said, “in that case, we had better go.”

“What?”
 
I was
taken aback.
 
“But . .
you’re
not coming with me, you know.”

“I may have mentioned that I have plenty of time on my
hands.
 
A visit to the old firm might be
. . diverting.”
 
He got up and threw some
coins on the table.
 
“Your coffee is
taken care of.
 
Do you have a car,
Kathleen, or shall I hail a taxi?”