The Yellow Glass (33 page)

“Christ Almighty . . if you knew
what I’ve to deal with!
 
Will you just
shut up for a moment!”

“It’s not just
you
, Reg,” she said, huffily, “I’ve done
my bit, haven’t I?
 
All that time in the
office and that?”

“Yes, and
now
look what you’ve gone and done; only brought two rogue spies
right to our bloody door.
 
It’s the last
straw!
 
Can’t you see I’ve enough to do
with my glass?
 
It’s near on bankrupting
me.
 
The factory in Finland is working at
full stretch to meet this insane order and I’m shipping it down here to the
scientists as fast as humanly possible.
 
Just one more order and I swear it could ruin me.
 
Tip me over the edge.
  
I can’t be doing with these distractions,
Dil.”

There was a blessed bit of quiet
and then I heard her ask:

“What do they want with all this
glass, Reg?”

I strained to hear more.

“I told you before, Dil, it’s
big and it’s going to set us up for life.
 
That’s all you need to know; I don’t want you bothering your pretty head
about it any further, alright?
 
Now let’s
get inside and have our tea, woman.”

“But Re . . eg,” she began to
whine again, “why can’t we go back to ‘Seaspray’?
 
You know I love it there and . . . Ow!”
 

It sounded horribly like he’d
clouted her one and she began to cry nagging, hopelessly dreary, tears.
 
He must have taken himself off, because I
heard her open the door and climb into the caravan and go and sit up front, by
the driver’s seat, and she was all on her own, still weeping.
 
I waited until her crying jag showed signs of
subsiding and then I called out:

“Are you alright, Aunt Dilys?”

She climbed round the seat and
came over to see me, where I lay on a mattress in the back.
 
She looked that blotchy and down-trodden it
was pitiful to see.
 
She had a rolled
paper tissue in her hand and damp scraps of it had got stuck round her eyes and
nose.
 
A pencil and pad stuck out of the
pocket of her cardigan, as if she’d been writing.

“I couldn’t help overhearing . .
you shouldn’t let him get away with hitting you.
 
It’s not right for a man to do that to a
woman.”

She sat down on the end of my
mattress with her head bowed over her restless hands, which turned her tissue
this way and that, that way and this, in that odd, compulsive way of hers.

“Has he done it before?” I
asked.

She gave a little mewing noise,
and then a shudder; both of which I took to mean the bastard had.

“Well, it’s got to stop.
 
You let him get away with that and who knows
what he’ll do to you next time.
 
Have you
got any friends or family you could go and stay with?”

“Oh, he’s not that bad,
Magnus.
 
I appreciate your concern, but .
. it’s just that he’s got a lot on his plate at present.”

“That makes no difference;
there’s never an acceptable time to hit a woman.”

“And the poor man has such
trouble with his eyes, you know.
 
I
couldn’t possibly leave him to go blind all by himself.”

“Blind?
 
As bad as that, is it?”

“Oh, yes, dear.
 
I’m very much afraid it is.”

“Well, I’m dead sorry to hear
that.
 
I had no idea . . .
 
What set it off in the first place, if you
don’t mind me asking?”

“The glass did him in, it’s as
simple as that, Magnus.
 
He learned his
trade young, when the Yorkshire glass industry was at its peak . . it’s dying now,
of course, like so much else in this country of ours.
 
The New Elizabethan Age, my foot!”
 

She’d begun to pluck at her
skirt, while her voice rose an octave and I wondered what we were in for.
 
Thankfully, she recollected herself.
 

“Your uncle is a
master-craftsman - one of the best there is, they say - he loves his glass and
he can turn his hand to anything.
 
But
his great love gave him cataracts; not that it’s unusual for a glass maker to
suffer from cataracts, but his are so bad nothing can be done.
 
They de-mobbed him early from the war because
of them, but not before he’d worked for some of the best people at the very
highest levels, if you get my meaning.”
 

A light flared in her eyes as
she mouthed the word, “Intelligence” and tapped the side of her nose.
 
A bit of tissue paper was dislodged and
fluttered into the air.

“It was round about that period
that Reginald and I met, actually.”
 
She
sighed.
 
“He’s built himself this
wonderful new career as a businessman, but who knows how much longer he can
carry on . . when his sight’s completely gone.
 
When he’s got nothing left but his jazz music.”

“And you and Terry,” I said.

“Oh, yes,” she smiled brightly,
“and Terry and I, of course.”

Then she got up and put on her
pinny to make the tea, humming snatches of a top-twenty tune; the picture of a
contented housewife.

——

“The Channel Islands of the
Pacific are noted for their kelp forests,” said Jay, as we walked along the
beach towards Ness Point, holding hands.
 
“Giant Kelp and Bull Kelp, predominantly.”

I nodded:

“
Macrocystis pyrifera
and
Nereocystis
luetkeana
,” I declared.
 

He laughed, delightedly, and
squeezed my hand.
 
I was a bit taller
than him and felt rather a pang when I remembered my new, high-heeled, green
shoes.

 
“I’ve had occasion to study
these species,” he said, “although not in association with the production of
uranium, I admit.
 
They are quite
remarkable.
 
They grow as profusely as
the rainforests in Brazil.
 
Two feet per
day – can you imagine that, Rosa?
 
Great
ropes of kelp winding through the ocean.
 
What an incredible resource this would be!”

“Mmm.
 
But, that’s not what we’ve got here in Kent,
is it?”
 
I thought of my miniature
Collins GEM, ‘Plants of the
British Isles: Sea & Shore’
.
 
“
Laminaria digitalis
, or
hyperborea
, I rather think.”

“Exactly!
 
And
Laminaria
digitalis
is what I saw on the floor of the chamber in the cliff; a far
greater volume of it than I would expect to see in Southern England.”

We sat down by the low fence
that skirted the Coastguard pub and a herring gull the size of a cat hopped
around us, pretending not to be eyeing us up for sandwich crusts or crisp
crumbs.

“Do you think that it might have
something to do with the nutrients in the water?”
 
I suggested.
 
“I’ve heard that seaweed is on the increase around Dover because all the
activity around the harbour is heating the water up.
 
Just a millionth of a degree will do it,
apparently.
 
The same goes for the
power-stations on the Thames and all the river-weed they have to dredge out by
the gallon because it hinders the boats.
 
Here, too, the fishermen get jolly cross about it.”

“Yes!”
 
He jumped up.
 
“You’ve hit the nail on the head, Rosa!
 
What a wonderfully intelligent girl you are!”

I tried to smile demurely, but
it may have come out as more of a smirk.

“Let’s say that Dover is the
first stage of a gigantic experiment,” Jay pronounced.
 
“The technique is being perfected, so now the
British Government begins to do deals around the world, wherever there are
healthy supplies of kelp:
 
the Pacific
coast of America, sub-Arctic Alaska, from the Bering Strait down the coast of
Eastern Russia to the Bering Sea.
 
They
are mining the oceans of the world to produce uranium for a nuclear future!”

I looked out to sea and thought
about it.
 
The gunmetal-grey shape of a
tanker sat on the horizon and I wondered how many more of those there would be
in the coming years, scouring the seas.
 
Should we be rejoicing that Britain was on the up; that Britannia was
going to be ruling the waves once again?
 
Think how many jobs would be created for her people.
 
How much wealth would pour into her
cities.
 
Truly, it would be the New
Elizabethan Age . . . How could they be expected to care about poor, handsome,
Mr Dexter or my brave Uncle Tristram when their secret was still vulnerable?
 
What were two lives, when such wonders were so
very nearly ready to be performed?
 
Why,
they’d let entire armies burn before they gave the game away.
 
Two lives were nothing.

“Do you think the police will
manage to set him free?”
 
I asked Jay the
question that had loomed in the back of my mind all morning long.

He sat down beside me once more,
hung his head and said nothing.

——

 
She started on our
tea, switching the wireless on to keep me company on my bed of pain.
 
I’d managed to persuade her to tune into the
BBC Home Service so I could catch up with the news, but it only got me
down.
 
Every now and then they’d stick in
some classical music, but they never strayed off the beaten track far enough to
broadcast any jazz.
 
I’d have turned the
damn set off if I could, only I couldn’t, of course, being so completely and
utterly useless.
 
Pablo, who was sitting
on the end of the mattress, making a serious job of washing himself, stopped,
with one leg cocked in the air, to assess me.
 
Yes, I could tell he thought I was useless, too.

For the thousandth time, I
wondered what they’d done with the spies.
 
Or had they managed to escape?
 
Aunt Dilys refused to discuss it and Uncle Reg steered as well clear of
me as he possibly could in a caravan.
 
To
tell the truth, it was a mystery to me what was going through his nasty
mind.
 
He knew that I could blow the
whistle on him, no problem.
 
He knew that
I knew what he’d attempted to do to Rosa.
 
So what was the old devil up to?
 
Was Aunt Dilys keeping me safe from him, or was he waiting until I’d
recovered to make his move?
 
Surely he
wasn’t banking on my silence because we were ‘so-called’ family?
 
That would have been preposterous!
 
If I’d had the use of my arms and legs, I’d
have called the police the minute I hit dry land, you bet I would.

It was mystifying; everything
that’d happened since Rosa Stone knocked on my door with no skirt on had been
mystifying.
 
Take that story Rosa’s uncle
had told me about glass and uranium: that could’ve done with a journalist’s
analytical eye, and no mistake!
 
It
sounded like the biggest load of crap I’d heard in a long while.
 
Or . . a conspiracy theory.
 
If I didn’t already have a G (for Gunpowder
Plot) in my series on how
governments manipulate conspiracy theories to their own advantage, I
could have slotted Glass in there like a dream.

 
Mr Piotrowski
fetched a magnifying glass and peered through the clear jacket at the little
squares of flat film.”

“What is it?”
 
I asked.

“It’s a microfiche, Kathleen,”
he replied.
 
“Ninety-eight documents on
one fiche.
 
I don’t have the optimum
magnification system, but this may do for the moment.”

“Yes, but what
is
it?”

“All in good time, my dear.
 
All in good time.”

It was after midnight and his
flat had grown cold.
 
Twenty minutes had
passed since we’d opened the envelope and, if I was going to stay much longer,
I’d have to wrap up a sight warmer.
  
A
car drove down the road and the lights streaked across a wall and then up and
over the ceiling.
 
My throat hurt from
all the cigarettes I’d smoked and I suddenly wanted to lie in my own bed
so
much more than I wanted to know about
the microfiche.
 
I got up to fetch my
coat. Only then did I realise how much of me ached.
 
I ached all down one side and it wasn’t just
the effect of hours spent on the old spy’s uncomfortable sofa; there would be
bruises where I’d fallen against that parquet floor.
 
Bath and bed and, perhaps, a cry, if I could
remember how.

“Must you go?
 
This is really rather interesting, you know.”

Mr Piotrowski had got his second
wind.

“I’m afraid I don’t have the
stamina for ninety-eight documents.
 
Not
tonight.”

“No?”
 
He seemed rather surprised.

“I’m dying on my feet.
 
I must go home to bed.”

He nodded, scarcely hearing
because he was so engrossed in what he had under his magnifying glass.

“I’ll ring you tomorrow,” I
promised, “if you’ll give me your number.”

“Ah,” I’d got his attention, “my
telephone is - temporarily - out of order, Kathleen.”
 

In other words, they’d cut him
off.

“Let’s rendezvous at the Queen’s
Elm,” he suggested.
 
“Opening time do
you?
 
Shall we say Thursday because there
is so much de-coding to do?”

Thursday was three days away,
but I took his point.
 
After all, it had
taken me long enough to open the envelope, what were a few more days?

“Opening time in the morning, or
evening?”
 
I asked.

“Oh, I never drink in the day,
my dear.
 
Not all of us have
your
head for strong drink!”

I laughed and he stood up and
performed an elegant, little bow over my hand.

“Are you sure you will be
alright, Kathleen?”
 
He asked.

“Thank you, yes,” I picked up my
handbag.
 
“Thank you so much for . .
everything
.”

“Nonsense.
 
It is you I should thank.
 
This business shows promise . .” he was
returning to the microfiche before I’d got as far as the door.
 
“Yes . .” I heard him mutter, “
considerable
promise.”

 
Nothing much
happened on the Tuesday . . well, nothing much that anybody would want to know
about.
 
I think I slept in a bit and then
I had a cup of tea and a bowl of porridge with a puddle of golden syrup in the
middle, while I stood at the sink looking up through the bars on the window to
the feet going past on the pavement above – the kitchen being in the basement
of our house in Tite Street.
 
I think I
wondered, vaguely, what had become of my husband.
 
I had left him - had cleared out and gone to
stay with Peter and Gabe in Norfolk - so why did I feel as though he had left
me?
 
It was, frankly, annoying to be
trounced at the leaving game like that; to be wondering about Tristram’s
whereabouts, when he should have been wondering about mine.

I’d played it all wrong, I
thought, going upstairs to use the sitting-room telephone and harass my
agent.
 
Tristram’s things were everywhere
I looked - not surprisingly, it being his house - but I’d tipped most of
my
stuff into those bags you get from
the laundry when they return the sheets, stuffed the lot into the car and
carted it off to Norfolk, so now I appeared to be living in somebody else’s
house.
 
Any other woman would have sat
tight and shown
him
the door,
possession being nine-tenths of the law, etc.
 
I was prepared to bet the Duchess of Argyll sat tight.
 
Zsa Zsa, too.
   

I sat down at the telephone
table and put a hand on the phone.
 
The
trouble was, I reflected - taking in the tasteful blue and cream curtains from
Harrods, the quiet, yet quality, watercolours that Tristram had brought to the
marriage and the naff old cocktail cabinet full of bits of shiny rubbish that’d
come along for the ride with me - that I didn’t really
care
as much as one was supposed to care.
 
For the stuff, I mean: all the stuff one
doesn’t care about that one works at jobs one doesn’t care about to buy and put
in one’s house that one doesn’t care about.
 
My hand remained on the phone while I gazed into thin air, summoning up
pictures of things that I possibly
might
care about.
 
The motorbike, or the car,
or the airplane that I was going to pilot into the deep, blue yonder.
 
And then, rather unexpectedly, Tristram
Upshott . . .
 
Don’t say I didn’t warn
you about Tuesday.

 
Wednesday morning
saw me standing at the sink again with my bowl of porridge.
 
But this time my mind was on shoes.
 
An impeccably polished, handmade pair of
gentlemen’s shoes, to be precise.
 
By the
clock on the kitchen wall, I’d established that these shoes strolled across the
front of the kitchen window every ten minutes.
 
Not nine, not eleven, but every ten minutes, on the dot.
 
Hutch was having the house watched - I was
convinced of it - and I could not, for the life of me, think
why
.
 
It certainly put the willies up, though, and I had to go and have a
steadying cigarette in the patch of garden out the back; as far away as I could
possibly get from those shoes, short of leaping over the wall.

I sat on the back step next to
the fishing gnome I’d bought to annoy my husband - it hadn’t worked, he’d only
laughed - flicking ash into a pot full of dead chrysanths, while all sorts of
wild scenarios played out in my head.
 
From the abduction scenario, where Hutch was so deranged with lust that
he’d commanded his men to bring me to him, to the idea that this had nothing to
do with me at all, but was all about my errant husband.
 
Had Tristram been up to something dreadful
that had put his bosses’ backs up and set them watching the house for his
return?
 
That seemed a distinct
possibility, although I said so myself.
 
Abduction was just too straight out of ‘Ivanhoe’ for the modern day and
age and Hutch struck me as more of an opportunist than a man consumed with
desire.
 
However, the notion that
Tristram had returned to his old, light-fingered ways was not so absurd.
 
(Not that my husband had been the type of
thief who stole anything of particular value, but perhaps he’d picked something
important up
inadvertently
, which was
why he’d been forced to disappear.)
 
I
had visions of him spending the rest of his life fleeing from the authorities;
of him yearning after me from dark doorways and us having snatched meetings on
the tops of Ferris wheels.
 
For the first
time that week, I began to worry about him.

My anxiety was only compounded
when I telephoned my sister, Millicent, that evening.
 
She told me that Rosa had been discharged
from hospital and was back home, apparently suffering from a nasty bout of hay
fever, which I was pleased - if a touch puzzled - to hear.
 
We discussed this and that, and then (this is
the anxiety-making bit) we said goodbye and she replaced the phone at her end
and there was a distinct ‘click’ on the line after she did so.
 
I stared at my receiver, like bad actors do
when they’ve received surprising news in a play involving French windows.
 
It was clear to me that we had not been alone
on the line and that the powers that be now knew all about my niece’s hay
fever.

 
Thursday evening
couldn’t come too soon for me.
 
Yes, I
wanted to find out about the microfiche, but - more than that - I was desperate
to learn Mr Piotrowski’s professional opinion on the watchers and listeners; to
be reassured that I wasn’t simply going stark, staring, off my rocker.
 
However, before that, there was plenty to be
done.
 
For I’d drawn up a schedule.

First on my list had been the quick
call to my cleaner in the morning, to enquire whether she could possibly do the
house later that afternoon, because I was giving an impromptu cocktail party
that very evening.

“I’m awfully sorry to muck you
about like this, Joan,” I said.
 
“I know
Friday is your day, but the house is in
such
a state I daren’t let company over the threshold.
 
Please,
please
say you will, darling.
 
Double wages for
your trouble?”

It turned out to be no trouble
at all, and Joan would be delighted to pop round at half past four to do me.

“Marvellous!
 
You’re an absolute saint to do it.
 
I’ve got the window-cleaner coming too, thank
heaven, so that’s perfect timing!
 
See you
later, Joan.”

I waited for the click before I
replaced the receiver, then I went upstairs to sort out some clothes and lay
them on the bed.

When the allotted time arrived,
Joan was wonderfully punctual (which was just as well, because I was hovering
about on the doorstep pretending to water a dead plant and giving the street an
eyeful of my dress).
 
She tripped in,
fluffing up her blond hair and taking her apron out of her bag.

“Oh, don’t worry about all
that,” I said, having shut the door behind her, firmly and pushed her down the
hall.
 
“The house can look after
itself.
 
Let’s have a cup of tea together
while I tell you my plan.
 
Come on,”
 
I beckoned her towards the basement stairs.

“
Plan
, Mrs Upshott?”

“Mmm,” I replied.
 
“You know how you once admired this dress,
darling?
 
Well . .”

 
Joan looked charming
in my frock, as she did in the blue hat with the broad brim that I’d once worn
to Ladies Day at Ascot.
 
With twice her
usual wage stashed away in an old handbag of mine (and the money to see Cary
Grant and Grace Kelly in ‘To Catch a Thief’
[48]
at The Chelsea Classic),
and
the promise that she could keep the
dress, it was little wonder that she positively glowed when she left the house
at five.
 
Would they take the bait?
 
In all honesty, it didn’t matter too much if
they didn’t because I had the rest of my schedule to complete.

If I said I didn’t enjoy the
next bit, I’d be lying.
 
I was in my
element and had to stop myself reaching for the bashed, tin box of greasepaint
that I’d used during the war.
 
I’d taken
the collar off one of Tristram’s shirts and shortened a pair of braces.
 
The trousers were on the baggy side, but not
too long, since I’m tall, and I made sure to stuff plenty of cash into the
pockets, so as to be ready for all contingencies.
 
The jacket didn’t work, though - being far
too broad in the shoulders, so that I looked like one of those old music hall
girls who dressed up as a chap and kept twirling the ends of their moustaches -
so I ripped the arms off a grey jumper that’d suffered from the moths and put
that on, instead.
 
It really wasn’t bad
at all and, when I’d washed my face and stuck my hair under a cloth cap that
Tristram wore in the country, I was quite delighted with the effect, swaggering
back and forth in front of the wardrobe mirror.
 
Next off, it was down to the kitchen to collect a bucket of water and a
dishcloth.
 

I left the house through the
back garden, went round the side and out through the front gate,
whistling.
 
Then I strolled down the
Fulham Road, dumped the bucket and cloth outside the Queen’s Elm pub and went
in to find Mr Piotrowski.

He was sitting in the corner of
the empty saloon nursing a pint of bitter.

“Evenin’ Guv’nor,” I said.
 
“ ‘Ow’s tricks?”

He gazed up at me, as dead pan
as any straight man in a comedy turn.

“Take that chair,” he pointed to
the chair with its back to the bar, “and I’d better get you a pint.”