Shattered (21 page)

Far more absorbing of my time and mental energy was his assertion that if I included factor X (Blackmask Four) in all my insoluble sums, I would find them adding up.

Although I arrived at work half an hour before the normal starting time, Hickory was there before me, obstinately trying again to make a perfect sailing boat. He'd made the boat itself much larger and had put in red and blue streaks up the mast and the whole thing looked lighter and more fun.

I congratulated him and got a scornful grunt in return, and I thought how quickly his sunny temperament could blow up a thunderstorm, and hoped for his sake as well as for our competent little team's, that it would blow over just as fast. Meanwhile I tidied the shelves in the stock-room end of the furnace room, where Hickory had currently raised the melted-glass temperature to 2400 degrees Fahrenheit. To give Hickory his due, he handled semi-liquid glass with a good deal of the panache he would need on the way to general recognition. I privately thought, though, that he would get stuck on “pretty good” and never reach “marvelous,” and because he understood deep down where his limit lay, and knew I could do better, his present feeling of mild resentment needed patience and friendly laughter if he were either to stay or to leave on good terms.

Irish and Pamela Jane arrived together, as they often did, and this time were arguing about a film they'd seen that had a bad glassblower in it. They asked Hickory what he thought and embroiled him so intensely in the argument that with a fatally noisy bang Hickory's precious new sailing boat cracked apart into five or six pieces. It had been standing free on the marver table, the outer surfaces cooling more rapidly than the superhot core. The stresses due to unequal rates of contraction had become too great for the fragile glass. The pieces had blown away from each other and lay on the floor.

All three of my helpers looked horrified. Hickory himself glanced at his watch and said bleakly, “Three minutes, that's all it took. I was going to put it in the oven... God damn that
stupid
film.”

No one touched or tried to pick up the fallen pieces. They were still near to their liquid heat and would incinerate one's fingers.

“Never mind,” I said, shrugging and looking at the sad bits, “it happens.” And I didn't need to remind them that practice glass was cheap. It did happen to everyone. It happened to the best.

We worked conscientiously all morning, making swooping birds for mobiles, which always sold fast. Pamela Jane, loving them particularly, was the one who fixed their strings the following morning early and who at noon would carefully pack them in boxes in such a way that they would pull out easily to fly.

Hickory, who could make neat little birds, recovered his good humor by the time Worthington drew up outside in Marigold's Rolls. Marigold herself, in a dramatic black-and-white-striped caftan, issued from her glossy car with mascara-laden eyelashes batting hugely up and down like a giraffe's. She had come, she announced, to take me to lunch in the Wychwood Dragon. She had a favor to ask, she said.

Worthington, always a step behind Marigold when on active bodyguard duty, looked the more richly sun-tanned from the skiing trip. He had spent most of the time on the slopes, he said with satisfaction, while Marigold's wardrobe had swelled by three enormous suitcases. And a good time had clearly been had by both.

Her intense vitality as usual stirred anyone in Marigold's vicinity to giggles and, as on other days, she and Hickory were soon indulging in batting a sexual ball to each other with gleeful freedom.

Marigold in enjoyment stayed for half an hour—a century for her—during which time Worthington drifted me with a gentle tug on the arm into the furnace end of the room, and told me with the unhappiest of expressions that the underground fraternity of bookmakers were forecasting my destruction, if not death.

“Rose is still actively prowling round here, looking for vengeance, because she can't understand why you aren't on your knees to her. They are
laughing
at her because you and Tom and I have walked away from two of her best-planned smasheroos, and there's no way she's going to put up with such a loss of face. So you just look out, because I hear that someone in Broadway has binocs on you now, reporting every twitch you make straight back to Rose.”

“Binocs?”

“Bins. Where have you been all your life? Binoculars. Race glasses. But seriously, Gerard, Tom Pigeon says it's no joke.”

I promised to be careful, but who could live forever in a state of alarm? I said, “I suppose I'd better tell you, then, that Adam Force and Rose did try to do me in yesterday. At least, I think so.”

He listened grimly and asked the unanswerable: “Where's Rose now?”

Marigold and Hickory, having enjoyed their flirting as much because of their twenty-year age difference as in spite of it, gave each other a pecking kiss on the cheek in farewell, and Marigold and I made a head-turning entrance into the Wychwood Dragon dining room. The Dragon herself swept in full sail between the tables to fetch up by Marigold's side, two splendid ladies eyeing each other for supremacy.

I counted it a draw for outrageous clothes and an easy win for Marigold in the mascara stakes, and nearly two hours slid by before Marigold, tiring of the underlying contest, told me the reason for her invitation to me for lunch.

She declaimed to start with (unnecessarily), “I am Bon-Bon's mother!”

“Ah,” I said. I knew.

“At Christmas,” Marigold continued, “Martin gave his wife a video camera from the children, and he was going to give her a necklace from himself as well.”

I nodded. “But she preferred warm winter boots.”

“The silly girl has no taste.”

“But she gets cold feet.”

Marigold considered fashion far more important than comfort. “Martin said you had made a spectacular necklace once, and that you could make the same one again. So... for Bon-Bon, will you do it now? As a present from me, of course. And I'd like to see it first.”

She waited an uncharacteristically long time for my answer, gazing hopefully into my face. I didn't know in fact what to say. I couldn't insult her by telling her it would cost more than the woolly boots and the video camera combined, though she would need to know, but the videotape describing how to make it and listing the detailed ingredients in grams was not only missing but might have come into Rose's field of things to die for. When I had said I would make a necklace for Bon-Bon, I hadn't known Rose.

After too long a pause Marigold asked, “What's the problem? Can't you do it?”

When an answer of some sort became essential I said, “Does Bon-Bon give the necklace idea her blessing?”

“She doesn't know about it. I want her to have a lovely surprise to cheer her up. I thought of buying her something in Paris, but then I remembered what Martin wanted you to do, so will you?”

She was so seldom presented with a negative that she couldn't understand my hesitation. I put together my most persuasive smile and begged for a little time. She began to pout, and I remembered Martin, laughing, saying that the Marigold pout meant the knives were out.

Hell, I thought, I wished he were alive. He'd been dead twenty-one days and I'd found each one a quandary without him.

I said to Marigold, “The necklace I made is in a strongbox in the bank down the road here. I do agree that you should see it before we go any further.”

The pout cleared away to a broad smile of understanding, and although we could easily have walked the distance, Marigold grandly summoned Worthington, equally grandly paid for our lunch, and outshone the poor Dragon all the way to the Rolls.

In the bank Marigold had the manager bowing to the floor while minions were sent scurrying to bring my locked box into the private room where contents could be checked. I opened the metal box and laid the flat blue velvet folder containing the copy of the Cretan Sunrise onto the bench-shelf, opening it for her opinion.

I hadn't seen the antique original except lit behind glass, so I couldn't completely compare them, but in the chill light of the bank's viewing room the duplicate I'd made gleamed as if with inner life, and I gave way to such a bout of self-regard as would have caused my uncle Ron to bury his head in his hands in shame.

Marigold exclaimed “Oh!” in astonishment, then drew in a breath and said, “Oh, my dear,” and couldn't decide whether or not she liked it.

The necklace designed three thousand five hundred years ago was a matter of twenty flat pieces, each made of aquamarine-colored and dark blue glass streaked together with melted gold. About two inches, or five centimeters, long, by a thumbnail wide, each flat shining piece bore the imprint of a flower. When worn, the long pieces, strung loosely together around the neck by their short sides, spread out in rays like a sunrise, the imprinted flowers, outermost, lying flat on the skin. In a way barbaric, the whole thing was antiquely magnificent, and definitely heavy. I didn't blame delicate Bon-Bon for not wanting to wear it.

Marigold, regaining her breath, asked if Martin had seen it.

“Yes.” I nodded. “He thought it would suit Bon-Bon, but she wanted the boots more.” I'd lent the necklace to him without conditions, and he'd shown it around in the jockeys' changing room. Dozens of people had seen it.

Marigold, incredibly brought again to speechlessness, said nothing at all while I reenclosed the necklace into darkness and put the velvet folder back in the metal strongbox. There were the other papers there that I checked yet again—will, insurance policy, deeds of the hill house, all the conventional paper trail of living, but of an instructional videotape, still not a sign.

I searched carefully once more through the pile of envelopes.

There was no tape. Nothing. I reflected with irony that even if one followed the instruction tape, it wouldn't be enormously easy to fabricate. I kept it partly because of the difficult hours it had cost me.

The bank minions relocked everything and gave me back my key, and Marigold grandly commanded Worthington to drive us all back to Logan Glass. Apart from her instruction to her chauffeur she remained exceptionally quiet on the very short journey, and also, as I'd noticed in the Wychwood dining room, her gin intake had dropped to scraping zero.

Back at Logan Glass she paraded up and down the brightly lit gallery as if she'd never been in there before, and halted finally in front of Catherine's wings before addressing all of us, Worthington, Irish, Hickory, Pamela Jane and myself, as if we'd been a junior class in prep school. She said we were lucky to be in a studio that stood so high already in the world's estimation. She was going to give us all a huge jump forward in reputation because, “Gerard”—she blew me a kiss—“with the help of all of you, of course, is going to make a marvelous necklace for me, which I'm going to call the Marigold Knight Trophy, and I'm going to present it each year to the winner of a steeplechase run at Cheltenham on every New Year's Eve in memory of my son-in-law, Martin Stukely... and
there”
—she spread her arms wide—“what do you think of
that?”

Whatever we thought, we gazed silently in awe.

“Well, Gerard?” she demanded. “What do you say?”

I didn't say, “Over the top. In fact, out of sight,” but I thought it.

“You see,” Marigold went on triumphantly, “everyone benefits. People will flock to your door, here.”

Apart from terrible trouble with insurance, the one dire probability ahead in her scheme was that someone somewhere would try to exchange the modern for the antique, with Marigold embroiled in legal pincers.

“I think it's a
beautiful
idea,” Pamela Jane told Marigold, and the others, smiling, agreed. Even Worthington raised no security alarms.

Marigold, delighted with the scheme she had thought up within ten minutes, filled in the details rapidly. She would consult the Cheltenham Race Trophy Committee immediately... Gerard could start work at once... the press should be alerted ...

I hardly listened to those plans. Almost anything would be a better trophy than a copy of a jewel worth a million. The obituary for Martin that I hadn't yet fashioned would be more suitable. Glass trophies were common in racing and I would be elated in general to be commissioned to make one.

Irish with enthusiasm clasped Marigold's hand and shook it vigorously, to the lady's surprise. Hickory beamed. The trophy necklace idea swept the polls at Logan Glass, but the Cheltenham committee might not like it.

The Cheltenham committee were given little time more to remain unconsulted. Marigold used my telephone to get through to an influential high-up whom she galvanized into visiting Logan Glass at once.

An hour later, Marigold, irresistible to many a powerful man, greeted the man from Cheltenham, Kenneth Trubshaw, with a familiar kiss and explained her intention even before introducing Irish, Hickory and Pamela Jane.

I got a nod from the smoothly urbane member of the racecourse's upper echelon. He knew me by sight, but we hadn't until then talked. Marigold with arms raised put that right.

“Darling, you know Gerard Logan, of course?”

“Er ... Yes, of course.”

“And it's Gerard who's made the
fabulous
necklace which you
must see,
which is down in the bank here....”

Everyone looked at a watch, or the clock on the showroom wall. The bank had closed its doors five minutes earlier and Marigold looked frustrated. Time had ticked away too quickly.

I suggested diffidently that Mr. Trubshaw, not to have wasted entirely his short journey, might care to see a few other things I'd made and although Marigold protested, “Darling, there's more
gold
in the necklace and it's going to be a Gold Trophy race....”