The Yellow Glass (14 page)

“Oh, heavens!”
 
She made a flying leap at the television set and her petticoats took a
minute to subside.
 
“You’re not watching
that rubbish, I can tell you.
 
It’s going
off immediately.
 
So there.”

Sam started to wail, “But it’s Auntie Kathleen!
 
It’s Auntie Kathleen!”

“It’ll be that Doctor film, Mummy
[31]
.
 
With Dirk Bogarde.
 
There’s no harm in it,” I suggested.

“Well, you can never be too sure, Dirk Bogarde or no
Dirk Bogarde.
 
Not with Kathleen’s
films.
 
That St Trinians
[32]
film she was in was ideal family viewing until she popped up as the geography
teacher.
 
They ought to warn you about
her in the Radio Times.”

“Ought to warn you about
who
in the Radio Times?”
 

My father had come into the room wearing his striped
apron and brandishing a pair of tongs.

“Kathleen,” said my mother.

“Why, what’s she done now?
 
I thought it was her husband that you were so
cross with, Millicent.
 
Do you know,
Rosa, your mother has vowed never to speak to him again because he caused her beautiful
daughter to be poisoned?
 
Ha!”
 
He laughed.
 
“And not just food poisoning, but uranium!
 
Uranium!”

“And the rest,” my mother muttered, darkly.

“And what rest?”

She made a face at my brother, one of those
not in front of the children
faces that
immediately alerted Sam to something he’d been paying little attention to
before.
 
His black eyebrows shot up into
points and his ears seemed to prick, visibly, like those of an elf.

“Bath-time,” she grabbed his skinny shoulder and
propelled him out of the room.

“There is more?” My father turned to me.
 
“What else is Tristram responsible for,
Rosa?”

“Oh, you know . . chases, shootings, swims across the
Thames, more chases, more shootings,” I ticked off the list, as if it were just
another of our games.
 
What was the point
of dwelling in darkness when you could live in the light?

“By the way, Daddy, have you made any chocolate buns
recently?”

He had and we both agreed that, even though it was
Friday evening and preparations for the Shabbat meal were in full swing, a plate
of chocolate buns would do me no harm at all.
 
I promised to finish the lot before my mother returned and keep deeply
schtum.
 
A chocolate bun is a halfway
house between a French profiterole, or éclair (with a plain chocolate and crème
patissière filling instead of whipped cream) and the Jewish rugulach, which has
a more elastic dough than choux pastry; often involving cream cheese.
 
It has more heft and chew to it than a
profiterole, in other words.
 
I’ve never
had one anywhere else, so I think my father may have invented it.
 
He watched me out of the corner of one eye,
while he stirred things on the hob.

“What have they been feeding you on in London,
Rosa?
 
Apart from uranium?”

“Um, well, I was doing for myself in my room in
Battersea,” I licked the chocolate out of my second bun, “and I found that
adding things to soup worked quite well.
 
I mean, if you’ve got a few cold potatoes hanging about from supper the
night before, then stirring them into a tin of tomato soup and dribbling in
some Worcestershire Sauce, or chopping up some tinned meat and strewing it over
the top can be . .”

“Vegetables?”
 
He’d gone rather quiet.

“Oh, yes.
 
Heaps.
 
Frozen peas with a
spoonful of Bovril, for example . .”
 
I
tried to think of a few other examples, but there weren’t really any other
examples.

“I expect you eat out every now and again?”

“Oh, yes.
 
All
the time.
 
Lots of milky coffee, you know
and . . beer and . . crisps.
 
Lots and
lots
of crisps.”

He looked considerably more shocked than he had when
I’d brought up the shootings.

“Feh!”
 
He
exclaimed.
 
“I was going to ask you to
choose between carrots and parsnips, but I shall do both.
 
And the swede.
 
And the turnips.”

“Scrumptious.”
 

And it
would
be; everything that my father cooked tasted good, even swede and turnips.

 
“I’ll lay,
shall I?”
 
I pulled open the knife and
fork drawer.
 
“Is it just us?”

“Us and Next Door.”

The long table in the dining-room was draped down to
the floor in a white table-cloth, with a row of silver candlesticks along the
centre.
 
It looked as elegant as could be
in that room that my parents had painted deep, gentian blue.
 
A few years earlier, I’d helped my mother
paint gold stars on the blue ceiling, holding the feet of the ladder steady on
top of the table while my mother strained upwards with her paintbrush, like a
pocket Michelangelo.
 
On clear nights,
when the black velvet curtains were open, their hems tumbled over themselves in
fat folds, the stars outside appeared to swim across the sky to meet ours in a
seamless progression.
 

I’d laid the table and changed out of the red dress
that I’d been wearing for ever and a day, when the old couple who lived next
door in Coast Cottage arrived.
 
She was
bearing an enormous platter of vegetables.

“Not
more
vegetables!”
 
I exclaimed.

“Oh dear, have you too many?
 
I should have asked beforehand.
 
I’ve made a hash of things, haven’t I?”
 
She looked so crestfallen.
 
“I’ll take them away immediately, it will be
no trouble.”

“Don’t you dare!”
 
My father boomed, advancing upon her with a ladle.
 
“Mrs Dyminge, don’t you dare!
 
Your vegetables are like nobody else’s.
 
We
all
love your vegetables.”
 

Her fluffy white head disappeared altogether in an
enormous bear hug.
 
My father was just
so
embarrassing.

When she came up for air, her cheeks were flushed with
pink.

“Golly, I haven’t
grown
them, Jerzy dear.
 
Just bought them from
the greengrocers in St Margaret at Cliffe, you know.”

“No matter; they will be splendid, I am sure.”
 
He took the platter from her.
 
“What have you done with the old man,
Frances?”

She glanced around the kitchen.

“Oh.
 
He was
here a minute ago.
 
I seem to have lost
him on the way.”

I went to look for him, going out of our kitchen door
and stepping over the low wall that separated Shore House and Coast Cottage,
trying not to put my big feet on the cushions of plants that Mrs Dyminge had
cultivated in her garden that was, essentially, a gentle slope of shingle.
 
She had sea asters and sea kale, thymes and
irises, minute tulips sprouting among pads of thrift, golden gorse and - in the
summer - thickets of blue vipers bugloss.
 
I could give you the Latin if you’d like.
 
No?
 
It
was Mrs Dyminge who’d taught me the names of flowers, of course.
 
(I take full credit for remembering them, but
even somebody with my abilities needs to be alerted to interesting things to
begin with.)

“Major Dyminge?”
 
I lifted the latch on their back door to call inside.

Nobody answered, so I walked around the front of the
house and held my hand over my eyes to shield them from the surprisingly strong
sun, which was descending in the west.

Two figures were sitting on the Dyminges’ front wall,
smoking cigarettes and scanning the sea.
 
They both wore odd, battered-looking hats and one had a newspaper spread
open on his lap.

“Which horse takes your fancy, Uncle Albert?”
 
I cried and they turned their sea-toasted,
old faces to watch me pick my way towards them in my green heels, trying not to
massacre anything underfoot.

“Your uncle favours
Crimson Star
, but I’ve told him
Impending
Danger
is the only sure-fire bet,” Major Dyminge spoke for Uncle Albert -
as everybody did - because my mother’s younger brother (and uncle number 3 in
this uncle-ridden story) never said anything much at all, having been hurt in
the brain when he was a baby.

“How are you, Rosa?”
 
Major Dyminge got up from the wall and tipped his peculiar hat.

“Extremely well, dear Major,” I said and gave him a
kiss on the cheek.

Then I went over to my uncle and patted his hand - aware
that a kiss would only frighten him away - and comprehension crept into his
blank, round face, slowly.
 
He smiled and
hung his head.
 
Then he picked up his
paper, as if to shield himself with it.
 

I turned to Major Dyminge, who took my chin in one calloused
hand and squinted at me with his functioning eye, as if I might have changed
since we’d last met.
 
He sighed, rather,
as if he’d been holding his own breath along with my face, and then he let both
go.
 
He tugged his hat further down over
his forehead and turned back to the sea.

“You were worried, weren’t you?”
 
It struck me even as I spoke.
 
“Was that why you didn’t come inside the
house?”

“Poison,” he remarked, his back to me.
 
“Terrible stuff.”

The Major had been poisoned, you see.
 
Centuries ago, he’d been poisoned by Fascists
and it had deformed his face from that day forwards.

“Come and have some vegetables,” I said.
 
“You too, Uncle Albert.
 
We have enough vegetables to open our very
own greengrocers.”

“Is it a Jewish thing?”
 
Major Dyminge enquired politely, as we walked
back to our house.

“Not particularly . .
 
I think it’s more of a ‘feed Rosa up until she bursts’ thing, actually,”
I laughed.
 
And then it slipped out: “If
Arko doesn’t kill me, the vegetables will!”

Major Dyminge stopped, abruptly, on the threshold of
Shore House.
 
I stopped, too, and
steadied myself, fighting that dizzy feeling; up high on the Big Dipper again,
swaying in the empty air.
 
Then voices
reached us.
 
The Friday night feast was
waiting, so I hurried in.

The candles had been lit, the wine un-corked and two
glossy challah loaves were sitting on the table.
 
My brother was already there, washed and
scrubbed, his little yarmulke on top of his tight, black curls.
 
My father never wore one and was still
sporting his ridiculous beret, but Sam had asked to be bought his, for some
unknown reason.
 
This meal was as Jewish
as our family got, actually.
 
I’d once
joked that Daddy only celebrated his God with food and he’d looked
scandalised.
 

“God is not in food?”
 
He’d exclaimed.
 
“If he’s anywhere
at all, Rosa, he’s surely in food!”

Jerzy Stone was in his element, therefore.
 
With great ceremony, he carried an enormous
fish on a plate to the table and set it down amid the legions of vegetables.

“May I sit beside you, Mr Smith?”
 
Mrs Dyminge addressed Uncle Albert.
 
“Doesn’t the table look superb!”
 
She clapped her hands.
 
“Loaves and fishes.
 
How wondrously biblical!”

“Indeed.
 
For
not only is it our Shabbat, but we are celebrating the return of the Prodigal
daughter,” boomed my father.

“Prodigal?” I queried, sitting down beside my brother
and within easy reach of the roast potatoes.
 
“I’m not sure I like that word.
 
Don’t you mean prodigious?”

“No he doesn’t,” said my mother, decidedly.
 
“If anybody’s prodigal, it’s you, Rosa.
 
Turnips anyone?”