The Yellow Glass (5 page)

The silence that followed was only broken by the cat,
who started to make the most appalling, rasping noise - like rusty cogs cranking
into gear - which must have been his way of purring.
 
Unnerved, my uncle and I both stared at the
animal, who launched into a lip-smacking washing routine that seemed rather
traitorous to his owner.
 
As if the
identical thought had occurred, Uncle Tristram jumped up and extended a hand to
Magnus.
 
Not surprisingly, Magnus
declined to take it, but got himself up, in a clumsy fashion, rubbing his
wrist.
 
His face had gone bright red.
 
I felt I should say something calming, but
couldn’t think what it might be.

However, “I
like
your friend,” Uncle Tristram remarked, oddly, and then, “I’d be interested to
see more of your magazine, Magnus.”

Magnus snorted in disbelief, “Oh, yeah?”

“No, I really would.
 
It sounds like an intriguing publication.
 
Actually, my mother is involved in your sort
of field.
 
You may have heard of
her.
 
Leonora Thetford?
 
She’s always been to the left side of the
spectrum.”

Magnus’ mouth fell open.

“Wha . .?
 
Leonora Thetford the
politician
?”

Uncle Tristram nodded.

“Bloody hell,” Magnus whistled, as if he just couldn’t
believe that such a thing might be possible.
 
“Leonora Thetford’s my idol, man.
 
She’s my heroine.
 
She’s the
coolest politician on the entire planet.”

“Mmm,” Uncle Tristram agreed.
 
“She’s quite a lot of people’s cup of tea.
 
Speaking of which . .”

The room had warmed up and we were ranged around
Magnus’ paper-strewn table with chipped mugs of steaming tea in hand.
 
The earlier part of the day was beginning to
seem far-fetched in the extreme; fading back to that bizarre dream-world that
just couldn’t be squared with real life.
 
Yes, we were finally warm and cosy and all getting on like a house on
fire (a trip to the pub had even been mooted), when my uncle asked to use
Magnus’ telephone.
 
Magnus indicated the
ancient Bakelite number screwed to his wall.

“Have you got an extension?
 
I’ll use that one if you don’t mind.”

There was one in the other room and Uncle Tristram
went to make his call.
 
I was rather
surprised that he wanted to speak in secret because something in
A Paler Shade of Red
- or in Magnus
himself, or, perhaps, in the efficient use he’d made of his right fist - had
persuaded the boss that he could be trusted with the bare bones of our story.

Magnus, for his part, had lit up with excitement.
 
He was as incandescent as his hair.
 
In fact, the only times that I’d seen Magnus
that enthused, he’d either had a half bottle of Hennessey in his jacket pocket,
or Chet Baker
[7]
had been on the gramophone, or both.

“You, a spy!”
 
He kept repeating, as if it were the oddest concept ever.
 
“You, a spy!”

“And why shouldn’t I be?”
 
I was getting slightly cross.

“You!
 
Quirky
Rosa Stone with her long hair and her bright dresses and her earrings!
 
I can’t believe it!”

This was a fairly accurate description of my usual
clothes, I suppose (which you haven’t seen, of course, since I’d been working
undercover as Miss Dodd), but still puzzling.
 
What did he mean, ‘quirky’?

“What do you mean, ‘quirky’?” I asked.
 
“What kind of word is that when it’s at
home?”

He burst out laughing, “I’m sorry, Rosa, but you
are.
 
Right quirky.
 
For a start, nobody says stuff like that any
more;
 
‘
when it’s at home
’.
 
You make
me laugh, man.”

I could’ve begun a rant about the idiotic way he
called everybody ‘man’, regardless of gender, as if he’d grown up in San
Francisco and not Hull.
 
But I decided
against it.
 
The truth is that lots of
people have thought I was peculiar, for as long as I could remember, because
I’ve never fitted in.
 
It’s just a
fact.
 
I’m a Jewish girl who grew up in
the Kent countryside, for starters.
 
My
uncle’s an Honourable and my mother began life below stairs, in service.
 
Then, one could factor in the many schools I
had to go to because of the war.
 
And my
crazy, extrovert father, the noisiest baker ever.
 
And my abilities, of course.
 
So you see, I’ve just had to be me and I’d
thought that Magnus was one of the few who could understand that.
 
But I’d got it wrong, as always.

So I didn’t say anything at all.
 
Not that he noticed.

“You, a spy!”
 
He said, again.
 
Then he nodded
his head at the door, “I can believe
he’s
a spy,
he’s
got it written all over
him, once you know.
 
I wouldn’t trust
him
an inch, man.”

“Indeed?”
 
Uncle
Tristram re-appeared.
 
“How very
interesting.”

I let Magnus stew; I felt he deserved it.

“My wife’s meeting us at the pub.
 
She’s bringing the car.
 
The Quiet Dog, did you say it was?”
 
He had borrowed Magnus’ undertaker’s coat and
was shrugging it on.
 
Somehow, he made
even that disreputable garment look rather elegant.
 
“She may be a while, but that shouldn’t
matter, should it?
 
I could do with a
beer.”

I caught up with the boss while Magnus was locking his
front door.
 
He was striding up Lettice
Street towards the subdued glow of lights leaking through the frosted-glass
windows of a mean-looking pub.
 
It looked
like the front parlour of somebody’s house (somebody I didn’t particularly want
to visit).

“I thought you were telephoning HQ, Uncle?”

“Mmm . . what?”
 
He was miles away.
 
“Oh yes, I did
that.”

“What did they say?
 
Do we have new orders?”

“
We
?”
 
He stopped dead in his tracks.
 
“
I
may have orders, Rosa, but
you
do
not.”

I couldn’t believe it; he was going to leave me out of
it.
 
I’d swum the Thames.
 
I’d handled radioactive glass (although, I
was not about to confess to
that
; in
fact, I was trying not to think about it at all).
 
I’d put my life in the service of my country.

“But . .”

Magnus overtook us and stormed through the door of the
public bar (Magnus would no more sit in the saloon than vote for Churchill or
Eden
[8]
),
and Uncle Tristram strode in after him, as if I simply didn’t exist.
 

I went to follow them in and . . hesitated on the
threshold.
 
I just hesitated for a
heartbeat.
 
I took a step backwards and I
closed the door with care, leaving the two men on the inside and me . . on the
outside.
 
Then I began to run.

 
Damn the girl.
 
Damn and blast the girl to kingdom come.
 
You want to know what I thought?
 
Well, that was it.
 
I’d been a complete lunatic to have involved
her in the first place.
 
It wasn’t as if
she didn’t have form.
 
She’d reverted to
type and done a bunk.

“Rosa Stone, a spy!”
 
Her journalist friend commented.
 
“You must have been off your head, man.”

And now I’d also involved some new species of bohemian
from the North of England.

Initially, we thought she was visiting the
Ladies.
 
Well, I did; we didn’t discuss
it, obviously.
 
We ordered our pints and
carried them back to a table.
 
I’d bought
Rosa a small shandy.
 
Time passed while
we debated the Marshall Plan
[9]
and, if I thought about my niece at all, it was to assume that she was doing
something with her queer mop of brown hair, or powdering her nose.

“They got us right where they wanted us,” Magnus was
becoming increasingly het up.
 
“They gave
us money, right enough, but it was all used to buy goods from the U.S. of
A.
 
And we’re supposed to be grateful to
them, man!
 
We
paid for the war in Korea
[10]
,
that’s what people don’t get!
 
And it’ll
go on and on, so that the world becomes more polarised; it’ll all be Us and
Them for evermore and us’ll stand for U.S. more than owt else.”

He was not without brains, that much was obvious, but
what was the alternative?
 
I’d bought a
pack of Player’s and offered him one.

“What about the death of Stalin
[11]
,
Magnus?
 
Bring a tear to the eye, did
it?”

“Hey!”
 
He
raised his palms in an interesting gesture of fake supplication, “You’re at it,
too; if I’m not bowing at the feet of Uncle Sam, then I must be in the pay of
Uncle Joe, that’s how you lot think, isn’t it?”

Yes, I was rather enjoying the conversation, and the
ale, after what had been an unnecessarily wearing day.
 
Until I realised that my niece had gone and
done a bunk.

Of course it crossed my mind that they might have
abducted her.
 
But that was
unlikely.
 
It was
possible
- all things are possible in my trade - but, as I say, not
likely.
 
The man Magnus (who, like most
of his tribe, was a crass romantic at heart), came up with a crackpot theory,
whereby a Dickensian network of street urchins had been bribed to keep a lookout
and report our whereabouts to a criminal mastermind; Rosa having fallen into
their net upon the threshold of the Quiet Dog public house.
 
It was an amusing idea (for the Artful Dodger
substitute a spotty teen-ager who bought his clothes from Woolworths), but that
was all it was.
 
Besides . . I knew my
niece.

We made a desultory effort to look for her in the
local streets, but she’d have been miles away by then.
 
Magnus seemed prepared to spend the entire
night searching for her, if need be, and was distinctly unhappy when we turned
back to the Quiet Dog.
 
He wanted to
carry on charging about in the most ineffectual manner (as amateurs usually do),
but it made
far
more sense to wait
for my wife to arrive with the car and then conduct a comprehensive sweep of
the area.
 
Of course, the journalist was
pretty far gone on her - that much was plain to see (and, in retrospect, I
suppose that must have been the reason I’d let him in on the game).
  

Anyway, eventually I managed to drag him back to the
pub and we waited a bit.

“Why don’t you go home and put your paper to bed,
Magnus?”
 
I tried to get rid of him.
 
“If you give me your telephone number, I’ll
let you know how she is in the next few days.”

“How could you
do
this?”
 
The ants were still in his
pants.
 
“Put her in danger like this,
man?
 
You’re supposed to be her bloody
uncle!”

He had a point, although he didn’t need to know it.
 
I was a lot more rattled than I was letting
on.
 
We were in a hole, one way or
another.
 
In fact, we were in an entire
rabbit warren’s worth of holes, several of which had been dug by my missing
niece: dropping Arko’s glass, taking us straight to the haunt of Arko’s young
mole.
 
But being rattled doesn’t do in my
business.
 
I tried another tack.

“What do you know of her other friends, Magnus?
 
Are there any others living round here that
you know of?”

He stopped maundering on for a minute and gave it some
thought.

“I don’t know.
 
I mean, she’s got friends, man, but I’m not sure where they live.
 
Rosa kind of dips in and out of her friend’s
lives.”

I could imagine; she sounded just like a spy.
 
How close were they, I wondered - my unusual
niece and this clumsy northerner?
 
How
well did he really know her?
 

“She’s always been something of an escape-artist,” I
let drop.
 
“Were you aware of that,
Magnus?”

He looked surprised and then, thoughtful.
 
I daresay his heart had known, even if his
brain hadn’t.

“You’ll remember the Cambridge fiasco, of course, but
that was only the latest in a long line of bunks.
 
She was particularly active during the war
years, apparently; never stopped running away from kindly people she was
evacuated to, or boarding-schools, or what have you.
 
She once stowed away on a ship and nearly
drowned when it got wrecked!
 
She’s an
interesting girl, in many ways.
 
I’ve
only known her for the last ten years - since I married her aunt, Kathleen -
but she’s been a source of considerable interest to me.”
 
I grinned, “A source of considerable
anguish
to her poor parents, of course,
but there you go . . aren’t we all?”

I couldn’t think why I was talking so much; unless it
was to conceal how rattled I actually was.
 
Thank God Kathleen arrived promptly, or who knew what sad and sorry
tales the beer - and the kickback one gets from a botched operation - might
have encouraged me to dredge up from my own childhood.
 

“Ah,” she’d tooted the horn, “that sounds like my
lift.”
 

I stood up and removed his coat.
 

“Please, take this back.
 
Many thanks.
 
Just give me your telephone number will you?
 
There’s no need to write it down, I’ve a head
for them.”

I could tell he was reluctant to abandon the chase and
- if he was any kind of journalist - he’d be even
more
reluctant when he cast eyes upon my rather well-known wife, so
I tried to make a clean exit.
 
Even so, I
thought I’d better give him my number, too, in the remote chance that Rosa made
contact with him first.

“You can reach me at FLAxman 4390.
 
Now get back to work.
 
A Paler
Shade of Red
needs you, Magnus.”
 
I
stopped at the pub door.
 
“Do you have a
surname, by the way?”
 

“Arkonnen,” he said.
 
“With a k.
 
It’s Finnish, man.”

 
I’m not often surprised these days, but
that
did the trick.
 
HQ hadn’t mentioned any relations living in
London and I was prepared to swear that they would have done, had they known of
any.
 
I’d been handed a file a yard wide
on Arko Arkonnen’s background and nothing of the kind had cropped up.
 

More to the point, had Rosa known that her friend was
an Arkonnen?
 
The issue was
problematic.
 
I’d observed that Rosa
didn’t always know
what
she
knew.
 
I mean, I’m no psychologist, but
I’d often noticed that she seemed to have two sections to her brain and the
conscious section seemed to lag behind the other, hidden, part, so that, in a
queer way, the girl was capable of knowing everything and nothing at all.
  
This being the case, Rosa might
well
have connected Arkonnen with
Arkonnen and yet have known damn all about it.
 
That remarkable brain of hers simply contrived to deliver us straight
from the frying-pan into the fire.
 

As you will have guessed by now, my niece is a
savant.
 
They’d identified her at
Cambridge, despite her flying visit.
 
The
grapevine had twitched.
 
I hope I don’t
sound too self-justifying when I say that I sincerely believed that they might
run her, with, or without, me.
 
So,
wouldn’t it be better to use her in one of my operations - in a strictly
clerical position - where I could keep an eye out for her?
 
Well, that was my thinking at the time.
 
Incredibly, dropping her into Heaviside
hadn’t seemed like the act of pure lunacy it turned out to be.
 

 
My wife (a woman of instinct rather than
fact), instantly intuited that something was up.
 
She leant across to open the passenger door
of her white Austin Princess.

“Isn’t it a trifle cold for shirtsleeves?”
 
She commented.
 
Then, “Where’s Rosa, Tristram?
 
I thought Rosa was with you?”

“She’s done a bunk, darling.
 
I think we’d better have a good look for
her.”

Her wide-set, navy blue eyes registered alarm.
 
Had I overplayed it?

“She introduced me to a man friend of hers and, to cut
a long story short, they had words and she ran off into the night in a bit of
state.”

“Really?
 
That
doesn’t sound like Rosa.”

“Running away?
 
You can’t mean that, Kathleen!”

“No, not the running away; that sounds
just
like her.
 
I mean the state.”

“Young love, I suppose.
 
May have jogged something.
 
Touched a nerve.”
 

Dear God, I sounded such a fraud.
 
I never could talk about feelings.

Kathleen adjusted the silk scarf which had slipped a
fraction from her smooth, blond hair and the diamonds on her hand flashed (but
not as much as her eyes).
 
In the old days,
she would have come out with some fabulous expression involving tripe, or ham,
or hogwash.
 
She didn’t do that any more
and I rather missed it.
 
Instead, she
revved the engine and began to drive.

The sleet had ceased to fall and the pavements
glistened where it had become rain.
 
It
was as dark as it ever gets in town, which is to say, not that dark.
 
Kathleen drove as expertly as ever, gliding
that great bucket of a car at a serene speed, just slow enough to take a good
look around, but not too slow to hold up the traffic or excite attention.
 
Up and down the grids of terraces we went,
spreading outwards from Magnus Arkonnen’s flat like concentric circles from a
stone dropped in a pond.
 
Men came home
from work, children ventured out to play in the streets and we slid past them
all, looking for Rosa.
 
We drove down the
New Kings Road until it became the Kings Road, passed the theatre crowd in
Sloane Square and patrolled all the way around Harrods.
 
Then we doubled back by Eaton Square and made
for the Fulham Road, from the borders of South Ken to North End Road market and
looped back towards the Embankment: to the river and the power station and the
rubbish dump and the mundane streets where Heaviside Import/Export Limited
traded deadly glass.
 
It was all
singularly meaningless.

“Oh well,” Kathleen said, “she’s a grown girl, after
all.
 
I expect she’s got some money on
her.”

She glanced at me and then into her front mirror.

“And, anyway, she’s not too far from her flat in
Battersea, is she?
 
What’s the betting
she’s walked back there?
 
We’ll pop
round, shall we?”