by Cecilia Tan
“Oh, goodness, yes, a little bit,” she said.
“Do you know where? I’d like to meet some of the artists.”
“My daughter’s an artist. She might know. Let me ring her. I won’t be but a moment.” She went out to the front counter, which was in the next room over, where they sold tea and accessories, and I heard her pick up the phone.
I still had some tea in my pot and a pile of brochures to look through, so I contented myself with waiting around a little to see if the lead turned up anything.
A short while later, a woman about my age, in jogging shorts and a tank top, her hair in a bandanna, stuck her head into the tearoom. “You the American who wants to see the glassworks?”
“Me? Yes!” I closed the brochure I was reading.
“Mum says you’re keen to go down there. If you give me a minute, I’ll take you.”
“Great! I’m Karina.”
“Helen.” We shook hands. Hers was sweaty. “Back in a mo’.”
I continued with my reading, and a short while later Helen returned to collect me. I paid my check and followed her through the narrow streets, an actual alley that was barely wide enough for a bicycle, and we emerged on a wider thoroughfare. Another two blocks down and we went into a parking garage.
“Is it far?” I asked.
“About ten minutes’ drive,” she said. “That all right? It’s a few miles.” She unlocked the doors and we got into a small car. “I mean, kilometers. No, wait, you Americans use miles, don’t you?”
“We do. Isn’t it metric here, though?”
“Some things are. We British invented the mile, though, so I guess we feel we’ve still got a right to use it, eh? Anyway, we’re headed to an old factory-type building up the river. A bunch of art going on there.”
That sounded promising. “Really?”
“Mostly sculpture. There’s a fellow who welds industrial scrap into things. All manner of crazy good stuff and some glass. York’s always had glassmakers, though not always the arty type, if you see what I mean.”
“I’m not sure I do.”
“I grew up here, so here’s the schoolbook version, all right?” We pulled out of the garage onto a busy street. I had to suck in a breath as my instincts said we were on the wrong side of the road. She didn’t seem to notice my anxiety and barreled us cheerfully onto the road out of town. “All business in York was controlled for hundreds of years by the guilds, the guild of Merchant Adventurers—”
“Adventurers?”
“I know. Sounds like something made up, don’t it? Anyway, they allowed kind of monopolies to various companies. This one for shoes, that one for combs. You had to apprentice in a shop to get anywhere, and the license to run a shop was passed from generation to generation. The early glass companies weren’t making art. They were making medicine bottles for the apothecaries and such. When industry came along, it was industrialized of course, but you didn’t have the kind of horrible mills and factories here that you had in a lot of West Yorkshire. The guilds didn’t allow it. So it stayed small scale. There were three glassworks with a dozen or so employees each. One by one they moved out or outgrew the area. Redfearns left in the sixties and their building got turned into a hotel. So all that was left was little guys again, some hobbyists and artists.”
“I see.”
“What I’m saying is there’s a tradition of glassworks, but what we’re doing now isn’t really part of that.” Helen gestured around with one hand, then put it back on the wheel. “It’s a new thing.”
“Art.”
“Yeah.”
“So what kind of art do you do?”
“I was in painting for a long time, but that world is so hard. So competitive, and you’re being compared not only to every painter working today, but everyone who ever put paint on a canvas. You look at Rembrandt and Titian and van Gogh and you think, why do I even bother? Dalí. Rossetti. It’s all been done. And it’s so restrictive. So I moved into sculpture, where…I can’t say there are no rules, but there are a lot fewer of them.” She hunched over the wheel as we zipped along on a two-lane highway, with a river on one side and fields on the other.
“What medium do you work in?”
“That’s the fun of it. Sculpture can be anything. Metal, wood, glass—your own poo if you’re into that sort of thing.” She cackled. “Don’t worry, I’m not. Lately I’ve been using animal bones, though. And doing things like casting them in metals. Thousands of years from now they’ll dig up the site of where some piece of mine was and wonder why the hell they have a pig skeleton that is partly copper, partly bronze, partly steel. I hope in the future we’re smart enough to say it was art and not some weird pig-worshipping cult.”
That made me smile. “I hadn’t thought of that before.”
“Glass, too, glass lasts forever. There’s a glass artist from America. He makes these globes that look like planets. Think paperweights, only he makes them all sizes, up to huge like this.” She took her hands off the wheel for a second to make a space bigger than a bowling ball, then quickly grabbed control of the car again. “And he marks them with the infinity symbol and hides them all over the world. He wonders what people will think in three thousand years when they’ve found hundreds of these things all over. If his name is forgotten, will they think space aliens put them there, or what?”
“What is his name?” I asked.
“Josh something,” she said. “Super-nice guy, too. Came to visit the glassworks here, gave a talk. Singleton? Simpson? Can’t remember. I’m not good with names. He was really nice and his work was gorgeous and amazing.” She pointed up ahead. “There’s our destination.”
We pulled into a cleared parking area lined with gravel, next to a stone building that made me think of an old firehouse. In each of what would have been a garage for a fire truck, there was a workshop. The bay doors were open, and she showed me one was for melting, smelting, and forging, one was for glass blowing, and the third was for woodworking. There were very solid stone walls between each section. Other parts of the building had some offices and smaller studios.
Some glassblowers were working together making something, and we watched them for a while. A man and a woman seemed to be the two leads, with a few assistants. When they took a break, Helen introduced me to them as Linae and Peter.
We made a little small talk about art and such while Helen went over to check on some of her materials by the forge. I felt I didn’t want to waste a lot of time, so I tried to get right to my main question. “I’m looking for an artist, a glass artist, who has been working around here recently.”
“Oh, what’s his name?” Peter wiped a bit of sweat from his forehead.
“Well, I think he might be under an assumed name, you know?”
“What, is he wanted by the law?” Linae joked. She was blond, her hair tied back in a ponytail, with a smudge of soot on her temple.
“Worse,” I said. “By the Tate.”
That set them laughing, which was good.
“But seriously, my boss at the Tate has been trying to track him down for a while. He’s about six feet tall and blond.”
“Like this?” Peter stood up straight. He had a dark beard, shaved close to his face.
“About that,” I said. “Anyway, blond, or he was last time I saw him.”
“He hasn’t been working here,” Peter said. “Sorry. Can I get you a drink? I’m afraid water’s all we’ve got, though. No beer until we’re done with the dangerous stuff.”
“Oh, that’s all right. I drank a gallon of tea earlier.”
Linae grinned. “You’ll be wanting the ladies’, then. Come on with me.”
I followed her around back to the toilet facilities. Once we were alone she said, “I think I know who you mean.”
“You do?”
She nodded. “He came around more than a month ago, looking to borrow some things. Peter was in London at the time. I was under the impression the fellow was setting up a workshop but
didn’t have everything he needed yet. We helped him out, of course.”
“Oh my goodness, that’s great. Do you know the address of the workshop?”
“I don’t exactly. But I helped him to move some things, so I’ve been there. I could probably figure it out again.”
“That would be fantastic.”
“Here’s the thing. Peter gets ragingly jealous. We can’t let him know I went to this bloke’s workshop by myself while he was gone, and I can’t leave here now. We could go tonight.”
“Tonight would be fine. I’m free.” I gave her my number and the name of the guesthouse, and then we took turns using the facilities.
We hung around a bit more, and then Helen offered to run me back into town. At the guesthouse I got online but Becky wasn’t around. I ended up taking a nap.
My dreams weren’t exactly hard to interpret. I was Snow White, and my prince was put in a charmed sleep under glass. The only thing I had to smash the glass, though, was an apple. I brought it down as hard as I could, cutting my hand on the glass as it shattered, and thumping him hard on the chest with my fist. I woke suddenly, clutching my hand. No glass here.
When Linae came to get me later, after dinner, she pulled up in front of an old university building where there was a driveway, around the corner from the guesthouse. I was surprised to see Helen in the car, too. “Well, hello.”
“I thought I’d come along for the ride,” she said. She was wearing a dress, and so was Linae, who looked much more refined when she wasn’t wearing a heavy leather apron and covered in soot.
“Peter gets much less suspicious of me if I bring a girlfriend along,” Linae added. “He thinks we’re going out drinking.”
I got into the backseat and buckled myself in, glad that I was wearing something relatively nice, too. In case we did find James I didn’t want to look like a slob. As we were headed out of town, the houses dropping away and the countryside taking up both sides of the road, Linae asked, “So, tell us more about this fellow.”
“He’s a recluse,” I said. “Used to work in upstate New York mostly. I’m not sure why he’s in England now.”
“A mystery man! And what’s his art like?”
“Abstract mostly, but with some odd representational pieces. One of them looked a lot like a house, but made of glass. I guess it was a whole ‘glass houses’ concept.”
“Where did you see that?”
“A gallery in New York City. They had a bunch of his smaller works, too. And they installed a piece in the art history department building at my university last semester.”
“Oh, are you at university? I thought you older,” Linae said.
“Graduate school.”
“Ah, that explains it. And now you’re at the Tate.”
“Yes.”
“So what name was he working under when you knew him in the States?”
“J. B. Lester,” I said. I didn’t see how I could get around telling them that.
“Oho, the infamous. Now I know who you mean. But this fellow looks nothing like the photographs of Lester I’ve seen.”
“He uses an actor to play him so that he can hang back and observe the audience at his installations,” I said.
“Ahh, clever, clever lad. So sneaky!”
“Oh, we don’t know any sneaky artists,” Helen said with a snort.
“No, none,” Linae agreed, giggling a little.
They didn’t let me in on the joke, but I took it to mean they had some shared secret.
We drove for a while. The sun was setting, and I didn’t have a sense of how far we had gone. We turned off the road onto another small highway, then another. Linae and Helen debated where we should try if this didn’t turn out to be the right road.
“No, wait, there it is,” Linae said. As we cleared the trees coming down the side of a hill, we could see a lone house on the next hillside. Maybe house wasn’t the right word. It wasn’t big enough to be a mansion, really, but it was pretty grand looking, with another building off to the side that looked to be a barn or carriage house or something. We could see several parked cars in the circular driveway.
“Is it his?” I asked.
“I don’t think so. I was under the impression he was merely staying there,” Linae said. “He set up the workshop in the carriage house and mentioned some wealthy couple from Romania or somewhere. I think they own the place, but they weren’t there at the time.”
“Looks like they’re having a party,” Helen mentioned.
“So it does. Think we should come back later, Karina?”
“No. Let’s go in and see.” Maybe if it was a party we could have a look around. “Let’s act like we belong, eh? If anyone asks, we’re neighbors, right?”
“Sounds good,” Linae said. “After all, we did help that fellow out.”
We parked at the end of the line of cars and then walked up the rest of the drive.
Where the driveway met the walkway to the front door, a butler stood in full livery, despite the summer warmth. He had a red silk cravat tied around his throat, black tails, and very shiny shoes. The only thing that looked modern about him was the piercing in his ear. As we approached, he looked at us somewhat curiously. “Good evening, ladies?” he asked cautiously, as if not wanting to offend us by challenging our presence there, but not sure if we were invited.
I was about to go into the “neighbor” explanation when I realized his earring wasn’t just a hoop. It was a flattened silver loop with a smaller loop hanging from it, like a miniature slave collar. If I hadn’t seen people wearing collars of that type before, I wouldn’t have made the connection. Was this one of those kinds of parties? “Good evening. We seem to have…lost our gloves,” I said.
“Oh, indeed?” His smile grew wide. “I might have seen them.”
“If they matched your tie, then I’m sure you did,” I said coyly. I had the urge to wink but thought that might be overdoing it.
“They indeed did,” he said, and bowed. “Please proceed inside and have a lovely evening.”
The other two hurried after me as I went up the walkway between towering hedge trees. When we were out of sight of the butler I whispered to them, “Okay, gals, you want to know what that was all about?”
“You bet I do,” Helen said.
“This party, it’s not like a regular hoity-toity garden party,” I said, trying to think of how to explain it. “It’s kind of like an orgy.”
“Oh my goodness!” Linae’s eyes lit up. She looked far from distressed by this news. “Karina, you are full of surprises.”
“Well, keep your cool, okay? I’m still trying to find this guy.”
They nodded in agreement.
“And don’t do anything. You know. These people are very big on rules. So if you say don’t touch, they won’t touch you.”
“All right,” Helen said.
“That doesn’t sound like any fun.” Linae wrinkled her nose. “But all right. We’ll try not to get in trouble.”
Another butler opened the front door for us but didn’t challenge us in the slightest. My heart began to hammer as we went into the parlor, where a buffet was laid out, as if I might run into James at any moment. But no one was in there except a pair of servants, one of whom offered us crystalline glasses of fruity punch. We took the glasses and then followed the sound of voices through the back of the house and into the garden.
There was a sudden cheer as we appeared, and it took me a moment to be sure it had nothing to do with us, but as I looked around it became apparent what the commotion was. They were running races, human pony races. The riders were all done up in these sort of fox-hunty outfits, and the ponies were people—mostly naked, with leather tack on them like for horses, except clearly made for humans. They raced by pulling their rider in a kind of buggy or rickshaw. Racing lanes had been mowed into the grass between the patio and the ornamental hedges.
With everyone watching the racing, no one paid us much attention, and I got a good look
at everyone there.
None of them were James. I wondered if he could be in the house, or down at the workshop building. I told Linae and Helen that I was going to sneak down there. They stayed put.
There was a stone walkway from the house down to the other building. The sun was down now, and the staff was lighting lanterns and torches for the pony racing, but I made my way in the dim twilight.
The door was not locked. It opened easily. The entryway was dark. I felt for a light and managed to hit one. British light switches tended to be large and easily hit with the hand. I was in a sort of mudroom, with hooks for coats and shelves for shoes. I passed through from there into a large central room. The scent of turpentine and burned wax filled the air.
It took a bit longer to find the switch for the lights in there, but when I did, I found myself looking at a studio full of art. The worktable was covered with sketches, some of them technical, some of them figure studies. My breath caught as I realized one had to be me, in rope bondage, a pose he had tied me into at the party. Once I had seen that, I saw another, this one the way I had been tied that time at the hotel, the time with the string of pearls. The pearls were even in the picture, the suggestion of them anyway, a series of shaded curves off to one side. I still had that necklace. I’d nearly sold it to get the plane fare for this trip, but I was glad I hadn’t.
Under a drop cloth stood a canvas with a painting in progress. It was reminiscent to me of Degas’s ballerinas, except this was a woman in a blue ball gown and a glass tiara. Bits of glass had been affixed to the canvas, yet it remained unfinished.
In the center of the room I saw what James had photographed and sent. The glass slippers. They were mounted on a platform over which loomed a much larger glass sculpture. It looked like Hokusai’s breaking wave, except instead of blue and white, this was white and deep red, and the spiky forms of glass towering overhead resembled a giant mouth of teeth about to eat the shoes. Parts of the sculpture were suspended by near-invisible wires to look as if splashes were ricocheting away from the negative space. One “splash” rose up from the center of the breaking wave like a tongue.