The Yellow Glass (9 page)

“Excellent idea,” I said.
 
“I love a switch.”

I did as he said and, by the simple process of
sticking my hand out of the window, found the thing and yanked at it.
 
There was a violent jolt, at which the floor
began to rise; the contraption squeaking to high heaven like it needed a can of
oil applied to it’s joints.
 
It wasn’t
the fastest of lifts, but it did its job and we ascended from what had, at
times, felt like the bowels of hell itself, to a pill-box shaped,
concrete-walled building just behind Borough High Street.
 
Setting aside the knowledge that we were
thoroughly irradiated for one moment
 
(and
that severe levels of radiation were wafting about beneath the streets of
London), it was bloody good to be above ground.

Nobody much was about at that hour, so we drove over
London Bridge and followed the river past bridge after bridge - Southwark and
Blackfriars, Waterloo, Westminster, Lambeth, Vauxhall and Chelsea - until we reached
Tite Street, and Tamang and I vowed to keep our eyes closed while Kathleen went
to open the front door with the key from her handbag (my front door key having
been lost countless pages back in the saga of that evening).

 
They came at break of day.
 
We’d all soaped and scrubbed ourselves red
raw and put on fresh clothes and I’d just rung round the hospitals and was
wondering whether to wash the car, when the doorbell rang.
 
I left Kathleen and Tamang at the kitchen
table eating toast and marmalade and went up the basement steps to answer the
door.
 
There must have been six or seven
of them - a fearsome sight in their masks - barging into the hall and pushing
past me to run down the stairs and catch my wife and colleague.
 
They corralled us into the drawing-room,
surrounding us in a circle, leaving us nowhere to escape.
 
The main man pointed his instrument at me and
I knew that I was for it.
 
But . . .

“There’s no radiation here, sir,” he said, tapping at
his Geiger counter, or whatever it was that he held.

“What?”
 
Tamang
and I exchanged glances.
 
“There must
be.”

The man traced the line of each of our bodies with his
meter, measuring us from top to toe, and then studied it again.
 
He shook his head and the elephantine tube
that extended from his mouth and nose jiggled about.
 
Then he went over to the window and peered at
the thing in the early morning light.
 
He
removed his mask apparatus and peeled down his radiation suit until it flapped,
like a deflated balloon, around his waist, revealing a well-pressed, white
shirt and a conservative tie.

“What made you think there might be, sir?”

“The hat,” I replied.

“The hat, sir?”
 
The man obviously thought I was a complete lunatic.

I looked at Tamang again, for guidance, but he was
giving nothing away.
 
All of his
inventions came under the aegis of the Official Secrets Act, of course.
 

I waited until the men had left before I bearded
him.
 
At least he had the decency to look
upset.

“I cannot think what happened.
 
Why my hat should not have worked.
 
I mean, my ideas
always
work . . . unless . .”

“Unless, what?”

“Unless it got wet.”

I recalled that underground citadel running with
water.
 
Yes, I thought we could safely
say that it had got wet.

“The calibrations must have been destroyed by the
moisture,” he appeared genuinely mortified.
 
“I cannot tell you how sorry I am, Mr Upshott.
 
Mrs Upshott.”

“Please don’t give it another thought,” I said.
 
One had to laugh, in all honesty.
 
“Would you say seven in the morning is too
early for a whisky and soda?”
 
I didn’t
wait for a reply, but made a beeline for the bar in the corner of our
drawing-room.
 
“No.
 
Me neither.”
 

I handed them their drinks and we all took a good
gulp.

“Aargh!”
 
Kathleen wailed, unnervingly.
 
“We’ve forgotten Rosa!
 
How could we?
 
We must find poor Rosa!”

I set my glass down on the sideboard.
 
The arrival of the masked men from the
Ministry of Defence had put it out of my mind.

“Oh, I forgot to tell you, Kathleen.
 
I rang round the hospitals and they’ve got a
case of mild uranium poisoning at Charing Cross.
 
She’s in solitary confinement and they didn’t
want to tell me at first, but I put them in touch with HQ.
 
It turns out that Rosa was with some friends
in Hammersmith when she collapsed with lack of breath and they took her
straight to the hospital.
 
There’s no
cause for concern and you can visit her tomorrow if you . . ”
 

I was interrupted by my wife tipping her entire glass
of scotch over my head.
 
If that was all
I was in for, then I’d got off lightly.

 
This happened weeks before I killed a man,
when all I had on my mind was another lousy job and the possible ending of my
marriage.
 
Happy days.
 
My agent had sent me off to see a man about a
part in a film starring Diana Dors
[18]
,
only it turned out it was to play her mother.
 
I’d taken it on the chin and laughed it off - after all, it made a
change from zombies and lesbian geography teachers - but brassy barmaids were
heading my way, there was no doubt about that.
 
Even if DD’s mum was still a
bit
of a stretch.

The temperature was outrageously cold for spring, I
remember and I had my camel-hair coat belted tight and was wearing a nut-brown,
velvet tam that my sister, Millicent, had made for me.
 
I’m not a fan of hats, but if one really
must
wear one, then she’s the girl to go
to.
 
I admit, I was feeling rather low;
not best part of a bottle of Gordon’s low, but blue enough to do something that
would have shocked even my closest friends: I slipped into Brompton Oratory to
offer up a Stations of the Cross and a candle (and it wasn’t a one-off, either -
there’d been a few times those past months when the inside of a church had seen
Kathleen Upshott, née Smith).
 

Our mother had made sure we’d been brought up good Catholics,
but it hadn’t exactly
stuck
as far as
I was concerned.
 
Well, the nuns had
hated me (probably with good reason because I’d been a complete tearaway as a
kid), and I’d duly hated them back and, I suppose, nuns and God had got all mixed
up until I’d come to believe that you couldn’t have one without the other.
 
In fact, I still kept a weather eye out for nuns,
as if they might haul me out of church like a drunk from a nightclub.
 

Anyway, as I said, I slipped into Brompton Oratory, into
that chilly sanctuary all done up with domes and pillars.
 
It was a Monday lunchtime, just before Mass
and I had the place to myself; that little tearaway could’ve taken all sorts of
daft revenges - run off with a cassock, danced the jitterbug down the aisle -
but she didn’t because she was now a sober, middle-aged woman in a camel-hair
coat and a modest hat.
 
She walked to the
front, sat down and put her head in her hands, trying to empty it of worldly
concerns.
 
But it was impossible;
 
it was the same old story.
 
I’d lost the ability to pray.
 
Why couldn’t God let me pray?
 
What did I have to do: go to confession, give
alms to the poor, sign on the dotted line?
 
Probably.
 
I got up to leave,
prickling with a sense of shame.
 
I was a
tourist in that place and I knew enough about the Catholic church to know you
couldn’t be a tourist.

And that’s when I caught him.
 
A man in a black hat and hounds-tooth coat
had crept up the aisle while I had my eyes closed and stuffed something behind
the nearest pillar.
 
In the cavity
between the pillar and the church wall, to be precise.
 
I nearly said something along the lines of,
“Excuse me, I think you may have dropped . .” but, then . . I didn’t.
 
I kept my mouth shut and my head well down
while I fumbled in my pockets for my kid gloves and he hurried away as if all
the nuns in Christendom were after him.
 
I was intrigued, no two ways about it.
 

I went up to the altar and I lit my candle and then I
sidled left and stuck my hand into the hidey-hole and retrieved whatever it was
- a flat envelope with some nonsensical writing on the front was my immediate
impression -
 
and I dropped it into my
handbag.
 
Then, as I knew Mass was about
to begin and that was a step too far in my religious re-awakening,
 
however
much I’d enjoyed Deborah Kerr in
Black
Narcissus
, I exited into South Kensington, crossed Exhibition Road and made
a beeline for my favourite Polish cafe
[19]
.

My favourite Polish café was a fixed point in my life
that never seemed to change.
 
It was
pickled in aspic.
 
The same wallpaper just
got a little browner and the same plant languishing in the window got a little
dustier as the years went by.
 
No, the
décor may have been nothing to write home about, but . . ooh, that place had
seen some sights!
 
During the war, that
is, when it seemed as if every Polish soldier in London had homed in on it,
with the unerring accuracy of radar.
 
A
girl had taken her life in her hands just going past (and, if I hadn’t been
here, there and everywhere entertaining the troops, I’d have gone past a lot
more often, I can tell you!)
 

Well, I had a coffee and a fag while I waited for
something wrapped in a cabbage leaf to arrive.
 
It struck me I was feeling a bit less blue.
 
I’d have liked to’ve been able to say that
was the effect of a quiet period of religious reflection, but, in all honesty,
I think it was more to do with the suspicious envelope burning a hole in my
handbag.
 
I began to think about
spies.
 
Actually, it wasn’t unusual for
me to be thinking about spies since I was ninety-nine per cent certain, at that
point in time, that I’d been daft enough to go and marry one.
 
Not that the handsome, young soldier I’d wed
ten years before had
ever
been easy -
Tristram had always been a ‘mixed up kid’, as they say nowadays - but . . we’d
spoken the same language.
 
He’d let me be
the foul-mouthed tearaway I still am underneath the Dior dresses and . . he’d
let me laugh at him, too.
 
Which had been
good for Tristram, somehow, because what was underneath the stuffed shirt that
he’d become, was a shy boy all tied up in knots.
 

What laughs we’d had together!
 
I hated to think that was over and done with
. . but I couldn’t live much longer with his abominable job.
 
That job had taken the worst of him and
allowed him to hide behind it.
 
It was
turning him into the type of establishment Englishman who couldn’t say a
natural sentence and, personally, I’d preferred him when he was a thief.
 
(Yes, that
was
what I said and, yes, I’m afraid that
was
what he’d been.)
 

I sighed over my coffee.
 
What a thought!
 
I should go running back to church for a few
Hail Mary’s after that thought.
 
But not
quite yet.
 
I put my handbag on my lap
and opened it under the table.
 
The
envelope was roughly six inches by four and I could feel a piece of card
inside, to prevent it bending.
 
I was no
expert, but the odd letters on the front seemed to me like they might have been
the Russian alphabet.
 
I put it on the
table to get a better look in the low, rather dingy, light of the café, because
this was exciting.

“May I?”

A man gestured at the seat opposite and waited for my
reply.
 
A quick glance around the café
revealed it was filling up for lunch, so I gave him a brief smile.

“It’s free.”

He was elderly, but rather dashing, with a beak of a
nose, a mane of swept back, silver, wavy hair and a plum-coloured cravat.
 
An old Pole taking lunch at his usual spot.

“Ty russkiy?”

“I beg your pardon?”

He pointed to the envelope.

“I was asking if you were, perhaps, a Russian, Madam,”
he said in perfect English, tinged with only the faintest wash of Eastern
European.

“Oh, no.
 
No I’m
not.”

I hastily put the envelope back in my handbag and
wondered whether I might give the cabbage leaves a miss, having managed to call
attention to myself in the space of a quick coffee.
 
It was obvious that I’d have made the world’s
worst spy.

“You are so fair, you look Russian.
 
Or Polish; we have very many beautiful fair
women.”

I smiled politely - wishing I’d brought a book - but,
just then, my lunch arrived.

“Golabki,” he noted.
 
“An excellent choice, if I may say so.
 
They do them very well here.”
 

He unfolded a Polish newspaper and perched a pair of
wire-rimmed specs on top of his impressive, rather aristocratic, nose and I
began to relax because he was only a polite old gentleman, after all; far from
intrusive and, obviously, not a spy of any kind.
 
I had spies on the brain.

“Yes, these are delicious,” I remarked, because they
were.

He nodded, seriously, above his newspaper and read for
a few minutes, while I ate my meal.
 
I
was about halfway through when he finished reading, took his specs off and laid
newspaper and glasses on the tablecloth.

“Tell me, Madam” he asked, “are you a spy?”

I choked on my lunch and had to make signs at the
waiter for a glass of water and pound on my chest and mop at my eyes, choking
all the while.
 
He waited until this
display looked like it was coming to an end before he said anything more.

“Forgive me.
 
I’m an old man with too much time on his hands.
 
I was going to go to Mass until I saw you in
the church.
 
Old habits die hard, I’m
afraid.”

“Praying?” I spluttered.

“Oh no,” he replied.
 
“Spying.”

I pushed back my chair and sprang to my feet, flailing
about for my coat.

“Your lunch, Madam!
 
Please!
 
You must not leave your
good lunch because of my rudeness,” he looked utterly crestfallen and I hovered
over the table, unsure what to do, while other diners swivelled their necks to
get an eyeful.
 

“Please sit down,” he began to roll up his newspaper
and then reached for his hat.
 
“I will
go, Madam.
 
I must learn not to stick my
big nose into other people’s business.
 
My very big nose.”
  

There was a glint of a smile, before he stood up and
tipped his hat at me.
 
I felt so
ridiculous that I sat back down again.

“Don’t go,” I said and I’ll never know why I said that
. . only . . I suppose I rather liked him.

He looked surprised, but promptly sat back down and
removed his hat.
 
A plate of little
dumplings arrived for him and he got down to work in silence, eating like a
trencherman, so that he caught up with me and we both finished our lunches
together.

I reached for my cigarettes and he lit a thin, black
cigar, before he spoke.

“An old agent - long retired and out of the game, but
not so soft in the head that he’s forgotten how it works, altogether - knows a
dead drop when he sees one.
 
It’s a
favourite place, there, for the Russians, being so near the Embassy.
 
But
you
,
Madam . . well, you interest me.
 
You are
a little conspicuous, if I may say so.
 
Your beauty.
 
The envelope placed
on the table, for all the world to see.
 
I hope you don’t mind my saying this, but I do not believe that you are
a spy at all.”

“You’re right there,” I half-laughed.

“So why take the delivery?”
 
He asked, not unreasonably.

“I don’t know.
 
Revenge, maybe.”

“Revenge?
 
On
whom, may I ask?”

“My husband.”

There, I’d said it.
 
I didn’t know this man from Adam, so he was the only person that I
could
say it to.
 
Yes, that was exactly why I’d taken it.
 
How paltry.
 
How sad.
 
What a pathetic little
woman I’d become, snatching at other people’s secrets.
 
Tristram’s life was one long secret that had
me left out in the cold and all I’d wanted was a secret to call my own.
 

“Is your husband the spy?”
 
The old Pole cottoned on fast.

He was relaxed in his seat, with the arm that held his
cigar draped over the back of the chair, nonchalance itself.
 
He was giving nothing away, like they all
learn to do.
 
And yet, some instinct in
me still rather liked him.
 
Was I right
to do so?