Shattered Read online

  “Someone gave this to Martin to give to you,” he shouted, coming back and holding it out for me to take. “Martin asked me to give it back to him when he was leaving to go home, so he could pass it on to you ... but of course ...” He swallowed, his voice breaking. “He’s gone.”

  I asked. “Who gave it to him?”

  The valet didn’t know. He was sure, though, that Martin himself knew, because he had been joking about its being worth a million, and Eddie was clear that the ultimate destination of the parcel had been Gerard Logan, Martin’s friend.

  I took the package and, thanking him, put it into my raincoat pocket, and we spent a mutual moment of sharp sadness for the gap we already felt in our lives. I supposed, as he turned to hurry back to his chores in the changing room, and I continued into the car park, that I might have gone to the races for the last time, that without Martin’s input the fun might have flown.

  Priam’s tears welled up again at the significance of the empty saddle, and Lloyd Baxter shook his head with disapproval. Priam recovered enough, however, to start Martin’s car and drive it to Broadway, where, as he’d intended, he off-loaded both me and Lloyd Baxter outside the Wychwood Dragon and himself departed in speechless gloom towards Bon-Bon and her fatherless brood.

  Lloyd Baxter paid me no attention but strode without pleasure into the hotel. During the journey from the racetrack he’d complained to Priam that his overnight bag was in Priam’s house. He’d gone by hired car from Staverton airfield, intending to spend the evening at Priam’s now canceled New Year’s Eve party, celebrating a win in the Gold Coffee Cup before flying away the following morning to his thousand-acre estate in Northum berland. Priam’s assertion that, after seeing Martin’s family, he would himself ferry the bag to the hotel, left Tallahassee’s owner unmollified. The whole afternoon had been a disaster, he grumbled, and in his voice one could hear undertones of an intention to change to a different trainer.

  My own glass business lay a few yards away from the Wychwood Dragon on the opposite side of the road. If one looked across from outside the hotel, the gallery’s windows seemed to glitter with ultra-bright light, which they did from breakfast to midnight every day of the year.

  I walked across the road wishing that time could be reversed to yesterday: wishing that bright-eyed Martin would march through my door suggesting improbable glass sculptures that in fact, when I made them, won both commissions and kudos. He had become fascinated by the actual composition of glass and never seemed to tire of watching whenever I mixed the basic ingredients myself, instead of always buying it the easy way—off the shelf.

  The ready-made stuff, which came in two-hundred-kilo drums, looked like small opaque marbles, or large gray peas, half the size of the polished clear-glass toys. I used the simple option regularly, as it came pure and clean, and melted without flaws.

  When he first watched me load the tank of the furnace with a week’s supply of the round gray pebbles, he repeated aloud the listed ingredients, “Eighty percent of the mix is white silica sand from the Dead Sea. Ten percent is soda ash. Then add small specific amounts of antimony, barium, calcium and arsenic per fifty pounds of weight. If you want to color the glass blue, use ground lapis lazuli or cobalt. If you want yellow, use cadmium, which changes with heat to orange and red and I don’t believe it.”

  “That’s soda crystal glass.” I nodded, smiling. “I use it all the time as it’s safe in every way for eating or drinking from. Babies can lick it.”

  He gazed at me in surprise. “Isn’t all glass safe to suck?”

  “Well ... no. You have to be exceedingly careful making things with lead. Lead crystal. Lovely stuff. But lead is mega mega poisonous. Lead silicate, that is, that’s used for glass. It’s a rusty red powder and in its raw state you have to keep it strictly separate from everything else and be terribly meticulous about locking it up.”

  “What about cut lead crystal wineglasses?” he asked. “I mean, Bon-Bon’s mother gave us some.”

  “Don’t worry,” I told him with humor. “If they haven’t made you ill yet, they probably won’t.”

  “Thanks a bunch.”

  I went in through my heavy gallery door of beveled glass panes already feeling an emptiness where Martin had been. And it wasn’t as if I had no other friends, I had a pack of beer and wine cronies for whom fizzy water and sauna sweats were on their anathema lists. Two of those, Hickory and Irish, worked for me as assistants and apprentices, though Hickory was approximately my own age and Irish a good deal older. The desire to work with glass quite often struck late in life, as with Irish, who was forty, but sometimes, as with me, the fascination arrived like talking, too early to remember.

  I had an uncle, eminent in the glassblowing trade, who was also a brilliant flameworker. He could heat solid glass rods in the flame of a gas burner until among other things he could twiddle them into a semblance of lace, and make angels and crinolines and steady flat round bases for almost anything needing precision in a science laboratory.

  He was amused at first that an inquisitive kid should shadow him, but was then interested, and finally took it seriously. He taught me whenever I could dodge school, and he died about the time that my inventiveness grew to match his. I was sixteen. In his will he left me plans and instructions for the building of a basic workshop, and also, much more valuably, his priceless notebooks into which he’d detailed years of unique skill. I’d built a locked safelike bookcase to keep them in, and ever since had added my own notes on method and materials needed when I designed anything special. It stood always at the far end of the workshop between the stock shelves and a bank of four tall gray lockers, where my assistants and I kept our personal stuff.

  It was he, my uncle Ron, who named his enterprise Logan Glass, and he who drilled into me an embryonic business sense and an awareness that anything made by one glassblower could in general be copied by another, and that this drastically lowered the asking price. During his last few years he sought and succeeded in making pieces of uncopyable originality, working out of my sight and then challenging me to detect and repeat his methods. Whenever I couldn‘t, he generously showed me how; and he laughed when I grew in ability until I could beat him at his own game.

  On the afternoon of Martin’s death both the gallery and showroom were crowded with people looking for ways of remembering the advent of the historic millennium day. I’d designed and made a whole multitude and variety of small good-looking calendar-bearing dishes in every color combination that I knew from experience attracted the most tourist dollars, and we had sold literally hundreds of them. I’d scratched my signature on the lot. Not yet, I thought, but by the year 2020, if I could achieve it, a signed Gerard Logan calendar dish of December 31, 1999, might be worth collecting.

  The long gallery displayed the larger, unusual, one-of-a-kind and more expensive pieces, each spotlit and available: the showroom was lined by many shelves holding smaller, colorful, attractive and less expensive ornaments, which could reasonably be packed into a tourist suitcase.

  One side wall of the showroom rose only to waist height, so that over it one could see into the workshop beyond, where the furnace burned day and night and the little gray pebbles melted into soda crystal at a raised heat of 2400 degrees Fahrenheit.

  Hickory or Irish, or their colleague Pamela Jane, took turns to work as my assistant in the workshop. One of the other two gave a running commentary of the proceedings to the customers and the third packed parcels and worked the till. Ideally the four of us took the jobs in turn, but experienced glassblowers were scarce, and my three enthusiastic assistants were still at the paperweight and penguin stage.

  Christmas sales had been great but nothing like the New Year 2000. As everything sold in my place was guaranteed handmade (and mostly by me), the day I’d spent at the races had been my first respite away from the furnace for a month. I’d worked sometimes into the night, and always from eight onwards in the morning, with one of my three helpers assisting. T
he resulting exhaustion hadn’t mattered. I was physically fit, and as Martin had said, who needed a sauna with 2400 degrees in one’s face?

  Hickory, twirling color into a glowing paperweight on the end of a slender five-foot-long steel rod called a punty iron, looked extremely relieved at my return from the races. Pamela Jane, smiling, earnest, thin and anxious, lost her place in her commentary and repeated instead, “He’s here. He’s here ...” and Irish stopped packing a cobalt blue dolphin in bright white wrapping paper and sighed, “Thank God,” very heavily. They relied on me too much, I thought.

  I said, “Hi guys,” as usual and, walking around into the workshop and stripping off jacket, tie and shirt, gave the millennium-crazy shoppers a view of a designer-label white string singlet, my working clothes. Hickory finished his paperweight, spinning the punty iron down by his feet to cool the glass, being careful not to scorch his new bright sneakers. I made, as a frivolity, a striped hollow blue-green and purple fish with fins, a geodetic type of ornament that looked impressively difficult and had defeated me altogether at fourteen. Light shone through it in rainbows.

  The customers, though, wanted proof of that day’s origin. Staying open much later than usual, I made endless dated bowls, plates and vases to please them, while Pamela Jane explained that they couldn’t be collected until the next morning, New Year’s Day, as they had to cool slowly overnight. No one seemed deterred. Irish wrote their names and told them jokes. There were hours of good nature and celebration.

  Priam Jones called in fleetingly at one point. When he had been at Martin and Bon-Bon’s house he’d found my raincoat lying on the backseat in the car. I was most grateful, and thanked him with New Year fervor. He nodded, even smiled. His tears had dried.

  When he’d gone I went to hang up my raincoat in my locker. Something hard banged against my knee and I remembered the package given me by Eddie, the valet. I put it on a stock shelf out of the way at the rear of the workshop and went back to satisfy the customers.

  Shop-closing time was elastic but I finally locked the door behind the last customer in time for Hickory, Irish and Pamela Jane to go to parties, and for me to realize I hadn’t yet opened the parcel that Priam Jones had returned in my raincoat. The parcel that had come from Martin ... he’d sat heavily on my shoulder all evening, a laughing lost spirit, urging me on.

  Full of regrets I locked the furnace against vandals and checked the heat of the annealing ovens, which were full of the newly made objects slowly cooling. The furnace, which I’d built to my uncle’s design, was constructed of firebricks and fueled by propane gas under pressure from a fan. It burned day and night at never less than 1800 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to melt most metals, let alone burn paper. We were often asked if a memento like a wedding ring could be enclosed in a glass paperweight, but the answer was sorry, no. Liquid glass would melt gold—and human flesh—immediately. Molten glass, in fact, was pretty dangerous stuff.

  I slowly tidied the workshop, counted and recounted and then enclosed the day’s takings in their canvas bag ready to entrust to the night safe of the bank. Then I put on my discarded clothes and eventually took a closer look at my neglected parcel. The contents proved to be exactly what they felt like, an ordinary-looking videotape, a bit disappointing. The tape was wound fully back to the beginning, and the black casing bore no label of any sort. There was no protective sleeve. I stacked it casually beside the money, but the sight of it reminded me that my videotape player was at my home, that I’d sold my car, and that rising midnight on a thousand years’ eve wasn’t the best time to phone for a taxi.

  Plans for my own midnight, with a neighborhood dance next door to my house, had disintegrated on Cheltenham racetrack. Maybe the Wychwood Dragon, I thought, not caring much, still had a broom cupboard to rent. I would beg a sandwich and a rug and sleep across the dark night into the new century, and early in the morning I would write an obituary for a jockey.

  When I was ready to cross to the Wychwood Dragon someone tapped heavily on the glass-paned door, and I went to open it, intending to say it was too late, the year 2000 lay fifteen minutes ahead in Broadway, even if it had been tomorrow for hours in Australia. I unlocked the door and, prompted by inexorable courtesy, faced politely an unexpected and unwanted visitor in Lloyd Baxter, telling him with a half-smothered yawn that I simply hadn’t enough energy to discuss the disaster at Cheltenham or anything else to do with horses.

  He advanced into the brightest area on the threshold and I saw he was carrying a bottle of Dom Pérignon and two of the Wychwood Dragon’s best champagne glasses. The heavily disapproving expression, despite these pipes of peace, was still in place.

  “Mr. Logan,” he said formally, “I know no one at all in this place except yourself, and don’t say this isn’t a time for rejoicing, as I agree with you in many ways ... not only because Martin Stukely is dead but because the next century is likely to be even more bloody than the last and I see no reason to celebrate just a change of date, particularly as there’s no doubt the date is incorrect to begin with.” He took a breath. “I therefore decided to spend the evening in my room ...” He stopped abruptly, and I would have finished the tale for him, but instead I merely jerked my head for him to come right in, and closed the heavy door behind him.

  “I’ll drink to Martin,” I said.

  He looked relieved at my acquiescence, even though he thought little of me and was old enough to be my father. Loneliness, though, still propelling him, he set the glasses on the table beside the till, ceremoniously popped the expensive cork and unleashed the bubbles.

  “Drink to whatever you like,” he said in depression. “I suppose it was a bad idea, coming here.”

  “No,” I said.

  “I could hear the music, you see ...”

  Music in the distance had forced him out of his lonely room. Music powerfully attracted the gregarious human race. No one welcomed two thousand years in silence.

  I looked at my watch. Only nine minutes to ring-the-bells time.

  Regardless of cynical withdrawals from organized enjoyments, regardless even of thrusts of raw unprocessed grief, I found there was inescapable excitement after all in the sense of a new chance offered, a fresh beginning possible. One could forgive one’s own faults.

  New numbers themselves vibrated with promise.

  Five minutes to ring-the-bells ... and fireworks. I drank Lloyd Baxter’s champagne and still didn’t like him.

  Tallahassee’s owner had changed, thanks to his transferred bag, into formal clothes, complete with black tie. His almost Edwardian type of grooming seemed to intensify rather than lighten his thunderous personality.

  Even though I’d been introduced to him at least two years earlier, and had drunk his fizz on happier occasions, I’d never before bothered to read his face feature by feature. Rectifying that, I remembered that he’d earlier had thick strong dark hair, but as his age had advanced from fifty there were gray streaks that to my eyes had multiplied quite fast. His facial bone structure was thick and almost Cro-Magnon, with a powerful-looking brow and a similar no-nonsense jaw.

  Perhaps in the past he had been lean-and-hungry, but as the twentieth century rolled away he had thickened around the neck and stomach and taken on the authoritative weight of chairmen. If he looked more like an industrialist than a landowner, it was because he’d sold his majority share in a shipping line to buy his racehorses and his acres.

  He disapproved, he’d told me severely, of young men like myself who could take days off work whenever they cared to. I knew he considered me a hanger-on who sponged on Martin, regardless of Martin’s insisting it was more likely to be the other way around. It seemed that when Lloyd Baxter formed a set of opinions he was slow to rearrange them.

  Distantly, out in the cold night, bells in England pealed the passing of the all-important moment, celebrating the artificial date change and affirming that hu mankind could impose its own mathematics on the unresponsive planet. Lloyd Baxter raised his gl
ass to drink to some private goal, and I, following his gesture, hoped merely that I would see January 2001 in safety. I added in fact, with banal courtesy, that I would drink to his health outside, if he’d forgive me my absence.

  “Of course,” he said, his voice in a mumble.

  Pulling open the gallery door, I walked out into the street still holding my golden drink, and found that dozens of people had felt impelled in the same way. A host, myself included, had been moved by an almost supernatural instinct to breathe free new air under the stars.

  The man who sold antique books in the shop next to my gallery shook my hand vigorously, and with uncomplicated goodwill wished me a happy new year. I smiled and thanked him. Smiling was easy. The village, a fairly friendly place at any time, greeted the new year and the neighbors with uncomplicated affection. Feuds could wait.

  Up the hill a large group of people had linked arms and were swaying across the road singing “Auld Lang Syne” with half the words missing, and a few cars crept along slowly, headlights full on, horns blaring, with enthusiastic youths yelling from open windows. Up and down High Street local sophistication found its own level, but everywhere with a benign slant of mind.

  Perhaps because of that, it was longer than I’d intended before I reluctantly decided I should return to my shop, my ready-for-the-bank takings and my unwelcome visitor, whose temper wouldn’t have been improved by my absence.

  Declining with regret a tot of single malt from the bookseller, I ambled along to Logan Glass feeling the first twitch of resignation for the lack of Martin. He had known always that his job might kill him, but he hadn’t expected it. Falls were inevitable but they would happen “some other time.” Injuries had been counted a nuisance that interfered with winning. He would “hang up his boots,” he’d told me lightheartedly, the minute he was afraid to put them on.

  It was the thought of fear that bothered him, he’d once said.

  I pushed open the heavy door preparing my apologies and found that an entirely different sort of action was essential.