The Yellow Glass (4 page)

I stooped to pick up the boss’s umbrella, where it lay
beneath my stool on the red and white checked floor.
 
Which was when I saw him.
 

It was the Heaviside office boy, Jim Johnson, hogging
the jukebox with his teen-age crowd.
 
I went
hot and cold and possibly hot again, un-buttoning my coat in what I hoped was a
nonchalant fashion, and then buttoning it up again, slowly, while I put my mind
to this strange coincidence.
 
I supposed
that if one were to run into Jim anywhere at all, the Dissenters would be the
place for it.
 
No doubt, he met up with
his friends after work every evening.
 
Actually,
 
I believed I’d even noticed
him waiting at that bus stop before.
 
That bus stop that my uncle and I had waited at.
 
Of course, that would be it; he must live out
in the suburbs.
   

Jim turned round, as I’d known he would (according to
the laws of serendipity), before we’d reached the door.
 
His freckled face was as empty as ever
underneath his towering quiff, his mouth working at a piece of chewing-gum like
a ruminating cow.
 
He clocked me.

“Why, hello Jim,” Miss Dodd said.
 
“Small world.”

“Evenin’ Miss,” he looked at her and then at the man
with her and then back at her again.

“See you tomorrow, Jim.
 
Bright and early.”

The boy nodded, imperceptibly and returned to the
jukebox, completely uninterested in dull Miss Dodd (which was how it should be
when there was a pretty, little, blonde pony-tailed creature at his elbow).

As soon as we were out of the door and striding down
the street, the boss took my elbow in a pincer-like grip.

“Do you believe that?”

“I do, actually.
 
I think he lives around here.”

“Well I sure as hell don’t!
 
Come!”
 

He hooked his arm through mine and propelled me across
the road, despite the fact that the traffic had a green light.
 
Then he practically threw me down some stone
steps at the bottom of Putney Bridge.

“Stay!”
 
He demanded,
like a cross man to his dog, before disappearing in the direction in which we’d
just come.

Of course I’d no intention of staying and had just
climbed back up the steps when the boss came charging towards me again.

“He went straight to a public phone box.”
 

He pointed down the steps again and scowled at me,

“Back!”

So we clattered down the steps together, to where the
Thames lapped at her dirty shore in the dark.
  
Oily, black wavelets flickered here and there in the light from a
lamppost high on the bridge, breaking against unidentifiable junk and probable
detritus from the war (unexploded bombs were suddenly uppermost in my
mind).
 
I’d thought of Putney as
virtually rural, but the river said otherwise.
 
How close the warehouses and wharves must be: all of the frantic
commerce that bled into the waters (the smell of which were overpoweringly
sulphurous).
 
The boss indicated right
along the water and took my hand.

“This way.
 
Run,
Rosa and don’t stop for
anything
.”

I can’t tell you how exciting it was!
 
We ran along the shoreline
 
- because it was
far
more of a shoreline than a riverbank and we seemed to gallop
along a littered beach at the edge of an eerie, black sea - and my uncle’s hand
was warm and firm in mine and I felt so completely happy, if rather
breathless.
 
To be honest, it was as if
I’d forgotten why we were running.

Then the shots rang out.

“Christ Almighty!”
 
My uncle swore, and then, “Duck!”

So I did, but couldn’t prevent myself glancing behind
us.
 
There seemed to be quite a crowd
behind us.
 
Quite a
gang
of them.
 
Not just Jim,
but all of the other teen-agers, pony-tailed girls included, and several men
for whom Bill Haley and His Comets would not have been their scene.
 
It was an older man wearing a pork pie hat
and a short car-coat who was waving the gun about.
 
He shouted something but, thankfully, we
weren’t quite close enough to hear; had we been, we’d probably have been
riddled with bullets.
 
I imagine he
wished us to stop, but that wasn’t going to happen, not in a month of Sundays;
we weren’t stopping for
anything
.

We had run underneath a railway bridge when it became
clear that we needed a change of plan.
 
They were gaining on us, you see - I wasn’t as fit as my uncle and was
bursting with lack of breath - and the man had taken another pot-shot and the
open green space of a park to our right offered scant protection and I couldn’t
see how we’d ever throw them off.
 
My
earlier enthusiasm was certainly ebbing away, although I still felt cushioned
by a sense of dream-like unreality; unable to equate the preposterous idea that
somebody was shooting at me with anything I’d ever known in my previous
nineteen years of existence.
 
When my
uncle came up with a shocker:

“Can you swim, Rosa?”

He had to be stark, staring mad.
 
I was so knocked sideways by the very idea
that I promptly stumbled and dropped my handbag.
 
Yes, I could swim and was, in fact, a pretty
strong swimmer due to my father’s determination that I should master the
perfect crawl (owing to a near-drowning incident that had happened when I was a
child), but nothing would persuade me to go swimming in the filthy waters of
the Thames.

“You must be joking!
 
Haven’t you heard of cholera?”

He shot me one of his swift, stern glances.

“Haven’t you heard of a bullet through the head?”

Then he picked up my beautiful, leather handbag with
the gold clasp and lobbed it into the river.

“Let’s lose this thing, first off.
 
Now, skirt, shoes and coat,” he actually
smiled, the madman.
 
“Last one in’s a
cissy.”

A bullet squealed over our heads and, this time, it
seemed awfully real, somehow.
 
I tore my
clothes off in two seconds flat and made straight for the water.
 

It was hideously cold before I’d even made the plunge,
but I’d less than a heartbeat of sheer revulsion, of shivering on the shore
with the tails of my blouse barely covering my stocking-tops, before he grabbed
my hand and ran with me into the water.
 
Over the slimy, green stones, through the scum of disintegrating,
splintered wood and detergent froth and unknown horrors hardly worthy of the
noble, Latin terms ‘flotsam’ and ‘jetsam’; it was so unpleasant in every single
way that I very nearly turned around and took a bullet.
 
And the water was beyond cold, stinging those
bits of me that it could get at, which were more and more, as my uncle dragged
me in and seemed to fling me at the river, loosing me from all bearings until I
was all alone, trying to remember my perfect crawl.
 
It was horrible . . and then . . it wasn’t.

Because the magic happened, the magic that only water
can conjure.
 
Everything that was
unpleasant and shiver-making transformed into its opposite as I swam.
 
Even my lungs expanded, so that I was able to
breathe properly; it felt like the longest time since I’d taken a proper
breath.
 
The Thames spread out a silver
pattern upon her black surface, a path for me to follow through her immense
treasury of water.
 
There, ahead of me,
was my uncle’s head - his well-oiled black hair making him look like a bobbing
seal - turning to see how I was doing.
 
I
think I actually laughed.
 
All at once
there was so incredibly much space; for the sky seemed to unwrap above the
river as if only here did it have the freedom to show itself.
 
Were there stars over London?
 
I’d never noticed them before.
 
Or were they streaks of sleet snow,
glittering against so much black?

I swam as if it were the easiest thing in the world,
not bothering to look over my shoulder.
 
Bullets may have spattered on the
 
water but, if they did, the Thames gulped them down, silently.
 
Everything was
so
quiet that night.
 
Sometimes a floating spar of wood bumped, gently, against a leg or an
arm, before it went on its way.
 
There
were no river police and surprisingly little river traffic of any kind.
 
Even the tides seemed to have slowed to the
gentle pull of blood through an artery and there was no need to fight the river;
one arm and then the next did their job without me, while I was free to gaze
and gaze.

“Rosa!” Uncle Tristram called, nearer now.
 
“Rosa!
 
Grab the cable.
 
Do you see
it?
 
The cable from the barges.
 
Grab it as soon as you can manage!”

A flotilla of flat, black barges were moored up
together and I stretched out to catch the wire cable.
 
It held me and I waved in the water, like
seaweed.
 
As if from a deep sleep, I came
to, blinking away droplets of river.
 
My
God . . we’d reached the other side!
 
My
legs snared on a mooring post and I kicked myself free, only to find that I
could touch the stones on the ground with my toes.

I waded out of the water feeling like a cold-blooded
being arriving in a new, warm world.

He was there to greet me, as if I’d swum alone.

“Well done, Gypsy.
 
I knew you’d make it.”
 

A line from a play I’d seen bubbled up into my
brain.
 
Peggy Ashcroft in ‘Twelfth Night’
[6]
.

“What country, friends, is this?”

 
My uncle thought it might be Hurlingham.

“Quick!” He continued.
 
“They’ll be over Wandsworth Bridge before we know it.
 
Let’s find a taxi.”

I looked down at my sodden white blouse and torn
stockings and acres of streaming hair.

“I don’t know that I can ride in a taxi like this,
Uncle Tristram.”

“Details, Rosa; you have an unfortunate tendency to
get hung up on details.
 
I’ll bribe the
driver.
 
Just get a move on, will
you?
 
We haven’t got all day.”

We found some steps up from the river and began to run
again.
 
We covered the length of
Hurlingham Park, negotiating rafts of daffodils and I waddled after my uncle
like a duck who is infinitely much better at swimming than running.
 
I wish I could say that the park was deserted
and there wasn’t a soul to witness my half-dressed state but, sadly, that
wasn’t the case.
 
Heaven knows what they
thought, (but then I’m never entirely sure what
anybody
thinks).
 
Anyhow,
nobody called a policeman.
 
Perhaps they
thought it was just high spirits.
 
Actually, I didn’t care as much as I probably should have, because I was
turning turquoise blue with cold.
 
Honestly, I felt quite ill with it.

When we’d got to the park gates, the boss stopped for
a breather and took his bearings.

“This isn’t looking promising.”

He was right, it wasn’t the type of area that taxis
regularly frequent.
 
Grim Victorian
terraces, with Watney’s pubs on the corner and housewives gossiping on their
front steps while the tea cooked, that was the kind of territory we were
in.
 
A miasma of thoroughly boiled
laundry and even more thoroughly boiled cabbage floated over the rooftops.
  
Then it dawned on me that I’d been there
before.

“Crumbs,” I exclaimed, “I think I know where we
are.
 
We’re down the wrong end of the
Kings Road.
 
I’ve got a friend who lives
here somewhere.
 
Parsons Green for his
sins.”

I took the lead and set off at a determined walk; it
was pure agony to stand still in my frozen state - especially when a housewife
in curlers and a scarf began to stare at me and make me feel strange -
 
but a brisk walk was my limit.
 

“Get a move on!”
 
I turned and waved my arms at the boss, looking as stern as
possible.
 
“We haven’t got all day, you
know!”

 
Lettice Road, Parsons Green, that was where
Magnus lived.
 
It wasn’t difficult to
remember because the whole address reminded me of salad.
 
It was a shabby house in a shabby London
street and the inside of it was even shabbier, but I liked Magnus and we needed
shelter.
 
There was a strong possibility
that Magnus might be in the pub, of course, but he wouldn’t have gone further
than the establishment at the end of the road.
 
That was partly why I liked him; he wasn’t as hard to read as other
people were.
 
Magnus was a creature of
habit, of smoke-filled rooms and smudged teapots, black turtle-necks and
ink-stained fingers.
 
Of darkness.
 
The only bright thing around Magnus was
Magnus, himself.

The boss tapped me on the shoulder at the beginning of
Lettice Road.

“Can we trust this friend of yours, Rosa?
 
What does he do?”

“Of course we can trust him, Uncle.
 
If we couldn’t then he wouldn’t be any friend
of mine, would he?
 
He was up at
Cambridge with me, in his final year when I was just beginning.
 
I got to know him when I wrote a piece for
Varsity.”

“Varsity?
 
He’s
not a bloody journalist, is he?”

“Um, well, yes, you could say that.
 
He edits a small magazine called
A Paler Shade of Red
.
 
He puts the whole thing out, in fact:
writing, subbing, funny little cartoon, everything.
 
I think the whole magazine actually
is
Magnus.”

“Whoa . . stop right there.
 
A Paler
Shade of
what?
 
Is this a home
decoration magazine, flogging paint?
 
Or
am I right in thinking that your friend Magnus is a bit of a Commie?”

“Possibly,” I pretended to think about it (knowing
full well that Magnus was an out and out Lefty, if not your actual,
full-throated Commie).
 
“I’d say he leans
to the left.
 
But he wouldn’t agree with
smuggling uranium anywhere, you can bet your bottom dollar on that, because
he’s a ban the bomb man.
 
He’s completely
against all nuclear power, and all fighting, for that matter.
 
If he’d been old enough to fight in the war,
he wouldn’t have.”
 

Uncle Tristram looked exasperated and hesitated, as if
to hike all the way back up the Kings Road to the land where taxis plied their
trade and people fought wars when they were told to.

So, I marched up to the front door of Magnus’ two-room
flat and knocked, hard, on it.
 
Magnus
opened up immediately, as if he’d been skulking behind the door.
 
He looked like a man who’d been to a funeral
and forgotten to tell his hair: layers of black wool and dusty black corduroy,
trousers tucked into black socks, hands even swathed in horrible, possibly
home-made, black fingerless mittens, and his pink complexion and luminous,
strawberry- blond hair perched on top of all that bulk.
 
I looked a bit closer.

“You’ve grown a goatee, Magnus,” I said.

He peered at me and his face got pinker.

“You’ve got no shoes on, Rosa.”

Before I could reply to this polite observation, my
uncle made himself known behind me.

“Good evening,” he said, sticking out his hand, “I’m
Rosa’s uncle.
 
We’ve taken a tumble in the
river and we wondered if we might warm up a bit in front of your fire.”

Magnus hesitated to shake his hand and I could tell
that he had my stocking-tops in his head and was striving, manfully, to make
sense of them.
 

“He
is
,
Magnus.
 
My uncle.
 
He’s married to my aunt and all that.”

He clasped Uncle Tristram’s hand, briefly and stepped
away from the door.

“You’d best come in then,” he said.

There’s something I’ve neglected to tell you.
 
It shouldn’t make any difference but, life
being life and Britain being the class-ridden snake-pit that it patently is, it
struck me - as I put on a pair of Magnus’ enormous black slacks and a scratchy,
black turtle-neck - that it probably would.
 
You see, Uncle Tristram Upshott is, actually, the Honourable Tristram
Upshott because his father is an honest to goodness Lord.
 
And Magnus is from Hull.
 
Of course, Cambridge was over-run with
Honourable types but, if I remember correctly (and I always do), Magnus hated
all of them.
 
Without exception.
 
I know this might seem a ridiculous
consideration, when one
 
has just been
faced with international smugglers and gun-toting teen-age gangs, but it was on
my mind when I went back into Magnus’ other room.

The place really was a hovel.
 
There were galleys and proofs lying upon every
conceivable surface, floor included.
 
On
top of the paperwork stood an assortment of chipped mugs, some encrusted with
ancient tea-leaves, others swimming with stubbed out cigarette butts.
 
It wasn’t much warmer than outside, either,
because Magnus had his gas fire turned down to the merest flicker.
 
A shallow bowl of water stood in front of it,
from which a huge marmalade tomcat was drinking thirstily, spraying water from
foot-long whiskers.
 
Things were
certainly pretty bad if Magnus couldn’t even run to a bowl of milk for his cat
(a truly
enormous
specimen; I’d often
wondered whether he had some Scottish wildcat in him).
 
Magnus followed my gaze.

“He’s not supposed to be drinking that,” he said,
“it’s to stop the gas drying up the air.”
 

“I don’t think you’ll find that makes any difference,
actually,” commented Uncle Tristram, but Magnus ignored him, ominously.

My uncle had rubbed himself down with a small, greying
towel and was standing beside the cat in hopes of a bit of secondary heat.
 

“I don’t suppose I could trouble you for a
cigarette?”
 

Again, Magnus said nothing at all.
 
Eventually - in his own sweet time - he loped
over to a funereal coat, which was slung over the back of a chair, retrieved
some papers and tobacco and threw them at Uncle Tristram, who, looking rather
surprised, caught them, miraculously, with one hand.
 
It was as if war had been declared.

“How’s the mag. going, Magnus?”
 
I asked, delving into a slew of papers that
concealed a battered, Olivetti typewriter.

He scratched his glowing head, “Not so well, man.
 
I’m snowed under just now.
 
It’s going to press tomorrow and I’ve that
much to do . .”

“A paler shade of red would, surely, be pink?”
 
My uncle broke in, sticking a twist of a
cigarette between his lips and looking quizzical.

“It would.
 
But
that’s
not the title of the magazine,
man,” Magnus replied, extremely slowly, as if to a kindergarten class.

“ ‘
Pinkos
’!”
 
Uncle Tristram exclaimed, as if it had just
come to him that minute and he thought he was being frightfully helpful.
 
“Now
that
would be a considerably better title, in my view.
 
That
would say what it did on the tin.”

I laughed, nervously.

“We mustn’t keep you, Magnus, not when you’re so
busy.
 
It’s terribly kind of you to lend
me these clothes; I’ll see they get back to you.”

“Send a servant to deliver them, will you?”

“Hey! That’s not fair!”

He bent his broad, black shoulders over his work.
 
From where I was standing, he looked like a
buffalo.

“You and your boyfriend’d best be off, Rosa.”

“I told you!
 
He’s my uncle!”
 
I felt peculiarly
hot.

“Pull the other one.
 
He’s hardly older than we are.”

“That’s just . .” I tried to explain, but he
interrupted me.
 

“I’m not interested in what you’ve been getting up to
this evening, but, if you don’t mind, can you go and get up to it somewhere
else and not in my office?”

“That is just so unfair, Magnus!”
 
Now we were face to face and I may have been
shouting.
 
“It’s not true, but even if it
was
, it’s so square, it’s
laughable.
 
I thought you were cool, but
you’re not, you’re a complete wet rag . .”
 

I had
so
much more to say, but my uncle had begun to laugh and cut me off, just when I
was getting into my stride.

“Ha, ha, ha!
 
Wet rag.
 
I like that. The only
wet rag around here is
me
,
actually.
 
Sopping wet.
 
Would you turn your damned fire up a bit,
man, for pity’s sake?
 
And Rosa, stop
shouting please.
 
We’ve heard more than
enough out of you.
 
He’s absolutely right
to regard this scenario with suspicion; your friend obviously has your best
interests at heart.
 
For all he knows,
I’ve torn your clothes off you and been chasing you through deepest, darkest
Fulham for hours on end.”

I blushed to the roots of my damp hair, overwhelmed
with embarrassment to hear my uncle say those words out loud.
 
However, nobody paid me the slightest
attention because Magnus had shuffled over to where Uncle Tristram was
standing, by the cat, and had curled his big hands into tight fists, like
dumbbells at the end of his stiff, black arms.

“And have you?”
 
Asked Magnus.

My uncle’s eyes gleamed, “What if I have?”
 

Magnus drew back his elbow and aimed a punch at my
uncle’s right cheekbone.
 
It was a smart,
staccato kind of a movement, straight from the boxing ring, that would have
taken most of us by surprise.
 
However, Uncle
Tristram had fought in the war and, no doubt, been trained in all kinds of
deviant ways by the Secret Service and he deflected the blow just as it was
about to connect with skin and bone; he swung Magnus’ arm right round his back,
rather as if he were jiving with him, and then tripped him up in one, fluid
movement, so that Magnus was face down on the floor before he knew what was
what, with the boss sitting comfortably on top of his pinioned arm.