The Yellow Glass

by Claire Ingrams

  “Can you explain it all to me now? Please? Please?”

  He lifted a finger to hush me. The conductor had crept up behind us and I hadn’t noticed.

  “Where do you go?” Uncle Tristram asked.

  “Putney Common, Sir.”

  “That’ll do nicely. Two, please. Thank you.”

  The conductor rolled the dial on his ticket machine, handed us the tickets and went back down the stairs.

  After that the boss seemed to relax and stretched his long legs out as far as they could go, which wasn’t far.

  “Oh, I do like buses, don’t you?” He said. “Buses and trains and planes. It’s rather nice to get out of the car. Putney, too; I’m not terribly familiar with it. What will we find, d’you think, Gypsy? Trees and that kind of thing?”

  This was an awful lot of small talk for my uncle who - unlike myself - was inclined to be terse, verging on the abrupt at times.

  “You’re trying to wriggle out of telling me, aren’t you? But I shan’t let you!” I put a pleading note into my voice that I’d found worked well in the past. “Weeks I’ve been in that desperately tedious place with nothing at all going on. I’ve had to wear the most ghastly clothes and go back to that terrible hole after work, with nobody but bed-bugs for company. You’ve got to tell me the full story! You’ve simply got to!”

  “Ha! Battersea? I’m sure it did you good to see how the other half lives.” He gave me his stern look.

  “Yes, well, it’s done me good and now you’ve got to tell me. So there.”

  He leant forward to inspect the small gap under the front window of the bus, which was situated immediately above the driver’s head.

  “I think we should take a short walk on Putney Common. After which, we could stop off at a pub. Or a milk bar, if that’s more your style, Gypsy. Then we might think about taking another bus somewhere else.”

  ——

  They’d said to keep an eye on her, so that’s what I done. I was saving the loot for a pair of pointed alligator casuals. Besides, it weren’t no bad thing to be in their good books. They were hard-faced for oldsters, those two. The old man had come in sozzled and stinking of fags and she’d been narked and he’d given her what for. Then he’d moved on to me, rabbiting on about how there weren’t no teenagers in his day and Ernie Bevin[2] had made it too easy and we hadn’t had to fight in the war. Blah, blah, blah, war, blah, blah, blah, war, blah, blah, blah, war.

  ——

  It was dreadfully cold on Putney Common and deeply dispiriting. I felt like a plucked pheasant with my unusually bare neck and was conscious of my nose growing embarrassingly red. I shivered and pulled the collar of my coat close.

  “Haven’t you got a scarf?” My uncle asked.

  “No.”

  I hadn’t known that I would be out and about in any fresh air, of course. I unpinned my hair, pulling bobby-pin after bobby-pin out of it (all thirteen of them), until the curly mass plummeted, nearly to my waist.

  “Vas-Glass is short for Vaseline glass . .” he began, striding along with his eyes on some personal horizon.

  I had to gallop to keep up with him, since he appeared to be on a mission to circumvent Putney Common in record time. (I should explain, my uncle is relatively young and energetic for somebody’s uncle; he’s probably about thirty. He is actually married to my mother’s sister, my beautiful Aunt Kathleen and . . . Why am I explaining? This was his time to explain.)

  “ . . and Vaseline glass is another name for uranium glass. It’s glass that has been manufactured with a small quantity of uranium in it; nothing new about that, been going on for a couple of centuries, at least. In fact, it’s possible that the Romans mixed a bit into their mosaics, although that might have been the naturally occurring amount that turns up in sand anyhow. However . . .” I was so tremendously interested that I started to say something, but he shot me an especially severe look from under his black brows. “However, production in this country ceased in the war, when the government confiscated all supplies of uranium and that’s still the state of play.”

  We had emerged from trees and scrub onto a road, crossed over and circumnavigated Putney Hospital before arriving at a semi-derelict graveyard that had mislaid its church. My uncle halted by a Victorian stone angel and they stared at one another for a bit. Something rustled nearby: a stray cat, or fox, or somebody’s unquiet ghost. Abruptly, he swung round to face me.

  “Tell me, Rosa, what did you notice? What was your assessment of the situation?”

  I smiled, took a deep breath and then something clicked in my brain. Images tumbled over each other, vying to be first out.

  “Fifty-seven boxes and nineteen crates in my office alone, all stamped and labelled DA FINLANDIA HANDLE WITH CARE. White labels, black ink, letterpress printed. Most recent delivery 10th April 1955, ten boxes stamped and labelled as per, however, not letterpress but phototypeset employing individual glyphs on film strip. Also, anomaly with string . .”

  “Bravo,” he broke in, “those were ours . .”

  “Blue and white cotton twist on thirty-five boxes not matched by the mid-grey and white of the . .”

  “Move on . .”

  “Saunders, Loretta, secretary at Heaviside Import/Export engaged in wild affair with fiancée of best friend Higgs, Florence. Johnson, James, office boy, hours of work not commensurate with those stated in the work sheet provided and . .”

  ——

  Jim Johnson seemed like a good enough name to me.

  “Dig this,” I’d told Gloria and Little Frank and the rest, “we’ve got the keys to one of my dad’s motors and a few bob for the tube if it’s not free. Coffees on me and all.”

  “Cappuccinos?” Gloria asked. “Iced coffees? That cassata ice cream with the coloured stripes?”

  “Half an avocado pear up Mayfair, if that’s what you really dig,” I’d said, carried away.

  She ruffled my hair and pouted; the prettiest little chick in London by a mile.

  “D’I ever mention, Tel, you look just like Johnny Ray?”

  ——

  “Enough!” My uncle had put his hands upon my shoulders and shook me, gently. “Enough, Rosa. Too much information.”

  I swayed on my sensible shoes.

  “Sorry. Was it too much again? I can’t edit it, you know . .”

  “Never mind. There will be a complete debriefing later, HQ will see to that. You’ve done your best, Gypsy,” he actually smiled at me for a brief, magical second. “I knew you’d come up trumps.”

  I shivered, suddenly so tired that I could barely string two words together.

  “Now. P . . p . . please,” I stuttered. “Tell me the story.”

  2. The First Uncle

  The Dissenters coffee bar, on the corner of Putney High Street and the Lower Richmond Road, had brick wallpaper plastered over one wall and egg yolk-yellow paint on another, with a black ceiling and a red and white checked lino floor. The horseshoe shaped bar was fringed with high stools, and lushly-leaved rubber-plants in pots punctuated the Formica counter at regular intervals. I loved it and I dragged the boss off the pavement and through the door before he had a chance to protest much.

  “Must we?”

  “Yes we must. And the coffee will be good; it’s got one of those Gaggia machines. I don’t want to go to an old man’s pub, Uncle. Besides, the rain’s actually turning to sleet, look and it’ll be as dark as death in a minute. I’ve had enough walking for one day.”

  He looked askance at the rubber-plants, but shook out his umbrella and sat down on a stool, nonetheless, rather out of place in his debonair pin-striped suit and shiny shoes. The Dissenters was empty and I calculated we’d have a good half an hour of privacy before the end of the working day brought any further influx of customers.

  “I’ll get them,” I offered, going up to order from the man behind the Gaggia.

  I waited at the counter watching the man pull the great levers and the machine belch steam into the bar, but he studi
ously ignored me, while a waitress in a dirndl skirt nipped over to my uncle behind my back and took the order, smiling unnecessarily. I went over to admire a glorious monster of a jukebox - a Seeburg with bright yellow chrome tubes - before I plonked myself down on the stool next to my handsome uncle.

  The glass cups of frothy coffee had arrived on a melamine tray and Dizzy Gillespie[3] was blowing some brain-expanding, intricate riffs on his trumpet before Uncle Tristram got down to business. He bent his dark head towards mine and spoke just loudly enough for me to hear and nobody else.

  “You must understand, Rosa, that the more you know about this operation, the more dangerous it might be for you. That’s why I hesitate, do you see? As it is, I wonder whether I should have involved you at all,” he took a sip of his coffee and his eyes collided with mine, briefly, over the rim of his cup, “despite your abilities.”

  “But why?” I barged in. “Why should I be in danger? Why couldn’t I have stayed at the office? Why are we running away like this?”

  He raised a warning finger, “That’s enough. Or I won’t tell you anything.”

  I subsided into silence. I knew from past experience that pestering my uncle would get me nowhere.

  “You were to be our eyes and ears; that was our agreement, yes? You have frankly remarkable powers of observation, Rosa. As you well know. And they were the reason we signed you up. I have absolutely no doubt that your debriefing will uncover a wealth of useful information; stuff that you have no idea that you possess. However, at no time did I ask you to do anything that might put you in any danger, now did I?”

  “No, but . .”

  “Mr Orchard’s secretary was offered a free holiday, paid - unbeknownst to her - by the British taxpayer. At which we slotted you in with the secretarial agency and gave you some glowing testimonials, correct? The rest was up to you. You were to go in as a temporary secretary, fulfil your duties quietly and efficiently and then leave. And that is precisely what would have happened, if not for today’s piece of rotten luck. Or, to put it another way . .” he shook his head and sighed, “right royal cock-up.”

  And then he added, as if to himself,

  “It’s not the fact that we didn’t flee the scene with them that makes me uneasy - I mean the solicitor and the secretary simply wouldn’t have because the solicitor and the secretary were, supposedly, oblivious. It’s that we witnessed their reactions. Especially Arko’s reaction. Yes, whether the glassware were lethal, or not, that’s the bit they won’t like, where we are concerned.”

  I had no idea what he meant. Would he tell me the full story, or not? It seemed a jolly long time coming. I’m a girl who just cannot bear not to know everything immediately. It’s like a kind of curse, actually.

  “Uncle Tristram, if you don’t tell me the whole story this very minute, I shall . .”

  I looked about me, desperate for something that I could threaten him with, when inspiration struck.

  “I shall change the record on the jukebox,” I said, and I found a couple of pennies in my handbag and got up to do just that.

  ‘One, two, three o’clock, four o’clock rock . .’

  The opening strains of Bill Haley’s ‘Rock Around the Clock’[4] came crashing into the coffee bar and the boss’s face twisted in disgust.

  “You don’t like this rot, do you? I must say I find it pretty unbearable.”

  “Like it?” I said. “I love it. I love it so much that, if you don’t tell me what on earth has been going on, I shall grab the first boy to come in here and dance with him. And if no boys do come in, then I shall grab you and force you to dance with me. How about that!”

  The best thing about this spontaneous plan was that my uncle knew me too well to dismiss it out of hand.

  “Oh, Rosa,” he sighed, again, “will you please try not to make a spectacle of yourself?”

  “I will do it. You know I will.”

  “For heavens sake, we’re supposed to be working undercover . . . Honest to God . .” He shifted on his stool and looked as uncomfortable as I’ve ever seen him. I felt quite pleased with myself; that I’d worked out how he might feel.

  “Look. Rosa. Positively no dancing – and I mean that, not even a suggestion of a hand-jive, or whatever they call it. Let me finish my coffee, please.”

  ——

  We were out for kicks, that was all. Then the ground floor window got smashed and everything changed. The girl had only just left with the toff when the phone rang.

  “It’s for you, Jim,” the office manager went, narked at me getting a call in office hours, when I should’ve been sweeping up broken glass.

  “Is she still there?”

  “No. Upped and gone this minute.”

  “After her and let me know where she goes. Forget the job. Get the others. Keep me informed all along the line, right? I’ll send some back-up.”

  “What if I can’t get to a phone box?”

  “You will if you know what’s best for you.”

  ——

  The boss drained his cup and then clicked his fingers at the waitress for another one in a grand manner that I hadn’t seen anybody use in a coffee bar before, but which seemed to do the trick because it came super fast. Then he leant towards me once more.

  “They’re smuggling uranium, and huge quantities of it at that, most probably to the Soviets, but we can’t be sure. You’re aware of how desperate the world is for uranium? It’s application to nuclear power? There was the Manhattan Project[5], of course - a Pandora’s box that will never be shut again - and the amazing things it does to steels, in terms of durability and elasticity. The Russians opened the world’s first commercial scale nuclear power station in Obninsk only last year and the Americans have used nuclear power to propel a submarine. It’s the future, whether we like it or not.”

  “And they’re smuggling it in glass?” I was breathless with excitement.

  “They’re smuggling it in a number of ways, but, yes, glass in this instance,” his voice had dropped to a whisper, even though nobody could possibly overhear our conversation above the racket that Bill Haley and His Comets were making. “Somebody is extracting substantial amounts from an unknown source and we believe - and our experience this afternoon rather backs up our theory - that they’ve found a way for the fabric of the glass to carry increasing amounts of uranium; dangerous amounts that may not be perfectly stable. In fact, as we saw, it seems that they, themselves, don’t know how stable or otherwise the uranium is. When you broke those glasses they panicked in the sincere belief that radiation poisoning was on the cards.”

  “But it wasn’t?” I asked.

  “No. We’ve been introducing dummy crates of Vaseline glass for quite some little while. Had they been as smart as you when it came to letterpress labels and string and so forth, they’d have smelt a rat. Luckily they weren’t.”

  We were almost bumping noses now, because a group of teen-agers had come in and made a beeline for the jukebox. ‘Rock Around the Clock’ had been swiftly followed by ‘Shake, Rattle & Roll’ and the joint was beginning to jump.

  “We’d had word that the big man was coming today,” he continued, “and I put in an appearance as the tame solicitor. We were checking samples prior to despatching some extremely large orders (‘though I’d made damned sure that they weren’t the real McCoy, not being terribly keen to get on close terms with their baby). The curtains were drawn and we had a black cloth on the desk owing to a rather interesting phenomenon; uranium glass glows bright green in the dark when ultraviolet light is shone on it. Fluorescence is the technical term. The more uranium, the more green it glows. Well, that’s what we were up to when you came into the room . . and we know what that led to.”

  “But . .” it struck me, “if the glass samples you were looking at weren’t the real thing, then how did you get them to glow?”

  “Good point, Rosa. Our technical man put plenty of manganese in them and that will produce a similar kind of effect, I’m told.”
/>
  He pulled his pocket handkerchief out and unwrapped the fragment of yellow glass so that it lay between us on the counter and we both stared at it, as if to confirm for ourselves:

  “Nope, no uranium in this one”.

  “Which was the big man, Uncle? The American or the Finn?”

  “Oh, that’s a bad Yank, but he’s not the biggest fish. Arko is the big man.”

  He folded up the piece of glass and stowed it away in his trouser pocket. Then he retrieved a few coins and left them on the Formica counter by our empty cups. He stood up to go.

  “Arko Arkonnen is the devil incarnate.”

  I admit it, I squealed with pure excitement.

  “Now forget I ever told you anything, Gypsy. If your Aunt Kathleen ever hears of this, there’ll be merry hell to pay.”

  I jumped off my stool and began to button up my coat, my fingers trembling with the thrill of it all.

  Glancing outside, I noted that darkness had fallen upon Putney High Street. Car headlights came and went on the road, but I could still discern the sleet, streaking in diagonal lines, through the ochre glow from the Dissenters’ neon sign. I felt such a sense of unreality; half there and half a long way away, as one feels when emerging from a theatre onto cold London pavements, or turning the final page in a book one’s read deep into the early hours of the morning. Might the devil incarnate really be on our tail? Would my Uncle Tristram and I take another bus and then perhaps another and another, ad infinitum? I did hope so; if I had to be on the run, there was nobody else in the whole, wide world I’d rather run with.

  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.