The Yellow Glass

by Claire Ingrams

  I handed them their drinks and we all took a good gulp.

  “Aargh!” Kathleen wailed, unnervingly. “We’ve forgotten Rosa! How could we? We must find poor Rosa!”

  I set my glass down on the sideboard. The arrival of the masked men from the Ministry of Defence had put it out of my mind.

  “Oh, I forgot to tell you, Kathleen. I rang round the hospitals and they’ve got a case of mild uranium poisoning at Charing Cross. She’s in solitary confinement and they didn’t want to tell me at first, but I put them in touch with HQ. It turns out that Rosa was with some friends in Hammersmith when she collapsed with lack of breath and they took her straight to the hospital. There’s no cause for concern and you can visit her tomorrow if you . . ”

  I was interrupted by my wife tipping her entire glass of scotch over my head. If that was all I was in for, then I’d got off lightly.

  8. The Fair Lady of Golabki

  This happened weeks before I killed a man, when all I had on my mind was another lousy job and the possible ending of my marriage. Happy days. My agent had sent me off to see a man about a part in a film starring Diana Dors[18], only it turned out it was to play her mother. I’d taken it on the chin and laughed it off - after all, it made a change from zombies and lesbian geography teachers - but brassy barmaids were heading my way, there was no doubt about that. Even if DD’s mum was still a bit of a stretch.

  The temperature was outrageously cold for spring, I remember and I had my camel-hair coat belted tight and was wearing a nut-brown, velvet tam that my sister, Millicent, had made for me. I’m not a fan of hats, but if one really must wear one, then she’s the girl to go to. I admit, I was feeling rather low; not best part of a bottle of Gordon’s low, but blue enough to do something that would have shocked even my closest friends: I slipped into Brompton Oratory to offer up a Stations of the Cross and a candle (and it wasn’t a one-off, either - there’d been a few times those past months when the inside of a church had seen Kathleen Upshott, née Smith).

  Our mother had made sure we’d been brought up good Catholics, but it hadn’t exactly stuck as far as I was concerned. Well, the nuns had hated me (probably with good reason because I’d been a complete tearaway as a kid), and I’d duly hated them back and, I suppose, nuns and God had got all mixed up until I’d come to believe that you couldn’t have one without the other. In fact, I still kept a weather eye out for nuns, as if they might haul me out of church like a drunk from a nightclub.

  Anyway, as I said, I slipped into Brompton Oratory, into that chilly sanctuary all done up with domes and pillars. It was a Monday lunchtime, just before Mass and I had the place to myself; that little tearaway could’ve taken all sorts of daft revenges - run off with a cassock, danced the jitterbug down the aisle - but she didn’t because she was now a sober, middle-aged woman in a camel-hair coat and a modest hat. She walked to the front, sat down and put her head in her hands, trying to empty it of worldly concerns. But it was impossible; it was the same old story. I’d lost the ability to pray. Why couldn’t God let me pray? What did I have to do: go to confession, give alms to the poor, sign on the dotted line? Probably. I got up to leave, prickling with a sense of shame. I was a tourist in that place and I knew enough about the Catholic church to know you couldn’t be a tourist.

  And that’s when I caught him. A man in a black hat and hounds-tooth coat had crept up the aisle while I had my eyes closed and stuffed something behind the nearest pillar. In the cavity between the pillar and the church wall, to be precise. I nearly said something along the lines of, “Excuse me, I think you may have dropped . .” but, then . . I didn’t. I kept my mouth shut and my head well down while I fumbled in my pockets for my kid gloves and he hurried away as if all the nuns in Christendom were after him. I was intrigued, no two ways about it.

  I went up to the altar and I lit my candle and then I sidled left and stuck my hand into the hidey-hole and retrieved whatever it was - a flat envelope with some nonsensical writing on the front was my immediate impression - and I dropped it into my handbag. Then, as I knew Mass was about to begin and that was a step too far in my religious re-awakening, however much I’d enjoyed Deborah Kerr in Black Narcissus, I exited into South Kensington, crossed Exhibition Road and made a beeline for my favourite Polish cafe[19].

  My favourite Polish café was a fixed point in my life that never seemed to change. It was pickled in aspic. The same wallpaper just got a little browner and the same plant languishing in the window got a little dustier as the years went by. No, the décor may have been nothing to write home about, but . . ooh, that place had seen some sights! During the war, that is, when it seemed as if every Polish soldier in London had homed in on it, with the unerring accuracy of radar. A girl had taken her life in her hands just going past (and, if I hadn’t been here, there and everywhere entertaining the troops, I’d have gone past a lot more often, I can tell you!)

  Well, I had a coffee and a fag while I waited for something wrapped in a cabbage leaf to arrive. It struck me I was feeling a bit less blue. I’d have liked to’ve been able to say that was the effect of a quiet period of religious reflection, but, in all honesty, I think it was more to do with the suspicious envelope burning a hole in my handbag. I began to think about spies. Actually, it wasn’t unusual for me to be thinking about spies since I was ninety-nine per cent certain, at that point in time, that I’d been daft enough to go and marry one. Not that the handsome, young soldier I’d wed ten years before had ever been easy - Tristram had always been a ‘mixed up kid’, as they say nowadays - but . . we’d spoken the same language. He’d let me be the foul-mouthed tearaway I still am underneath the Dior dresses and . . he’d let me laugh at him, too. Which had been good for Tristram, somehow, because what was underneath the stuffed shirt that he’d become, was a shy boy all tied up in knots.

  What laughs we’d had together! I hated to think that was over and done with . . but I couldn’t live much longer with his abominable job. That job had taken the worst of him and allowed him to hide behind it. It was turning him into the type of establishment Englishman who couldn’t say a natural sentence and, personally, I’d preferred him when he was a thief. (Yes, that was what I said and, yes, I’m afraid that was what he’d been.)

  I sighed over my coffee. What a thought! I should go running back to church for a few Hail Mary’s after that thought. But not quite yet. I put my handbag on my lap and opened it under the table. The envelope was roughly six inches by four and I could feel a piece of card inside, to prevent it bending. I was no expert, but the odd letters on the front seemed to me like they might have been the Russian alphabet. I put it on the table to get a better look in the low, rather dingy, light of the café, because this was exciting.

  “May I?”

  A man gestured at the seat opposite and waited for my reply. A quick glance around the café revealed it was filling up for lunch, so I gave him a brief smile.

  “It’s free.”

  He was elderly, but rather dashing, with a beak of a nose, a mane of swept back, silver, wavy hair and a plum-coloured cravat. An old Pole taking lunch at his usual spot.

  “Ty russkiy?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  He pointed to the envelope.

  “I was asking if you were, perhaps, a Russian, Madam,” he said in perfect English, tinged with only the faintest wash of Eastern European.

  “Oh, no. No I’m not.”

  I hastily put the envelope back in my handbag and wondered whether I might give the cabbage leaves a miss, having managed to call attention to myself in the space of a quick coffee. It was obvious that I’d have made the world’s worst spy.

  “You are so fair, you look Russian. Or Polish; we have very many beautiful fair women.”

  I smiled politely - wishing I’d brought a book - but, just then, my lunch arrived.

  “Golabki,” he noted. “An excellent choice, if I may say so. They do them very well here.”

  He unfolded a Polish newspaper and
perched a pair of wire-rimmed specs on top of his impressive, rather aristocratic, nose and I began to relax because he was only a polite old gentleman, after all; far from intrusive and, obviously, not a spy of any kind. I had spies on the brain.

  “Yes, these are delicious,” I remarked, because they were.

  He nodded, seriously, above his newspaper and read for a few minutes, while I ate my meal. I was about halfway through when he finished reading, took his specs off and laid newspaper and glasses on the tablecloth.

  “Tell me, Madam” he asked, “are you a spy?”

  I choked on my lunch and had to make signs at the waiter for a glass of water and pound on my chest and mop at my eyes, choking all the while. He waited until this display looked like it was coming to an end before he said anything more.

  “Forgive me. I’m an old man with too much time on his hands. I was going to go to Mass until I saw you in the church. Old habits die hard, I’m afraid.”

  “Praying?” I spluttered.

  “Oh no,” he replied. “Spying.”

  I pushed back my chair and sprang to my feet, flailing about for my coat.

  “Your lunch, Madam! Please! You must not leave your good lunch because of my rudeness,” he looked utterly crestfallen and I hovered over the table, unsure what to do, while other diners swivelled their necks to get an eyeful.

  “Please sit down,” he began to roll up his newspaper and then reached for his hat. “I will go, Madam. I must learn not to stick my big nose into other people’s business. My very big nose.”

  There was a glint of a smile, before he stood up and tipped his hat at me. I felt so ridiculous that I sat back down again.

  “Don’t go,” I said and I’ll never know why I said that . . only . . I suppose I rather liked him.

  He looked surprised, but promptly sat back down and removed his hat. A plate of little dumplings arrived for him and he got down to work in silence, eating like a trencherman, so that he caught up with me and we both finished our lunches together.

  I reached for my cigarettes and he lit a thin, black cigar, before he spoke.

  “An old agent - long retired and out of the game, but not so soft in the head that he’s forgotten how it works, altogether - knows a dead drop when he sees one. It’s a favourite place, there, for the Russians, being so near the Embassy. But you, Madam . . well, you interest me. You are a little conspicuous, if I may say so. Your beauty. The envelope placed on the table, for all the world to see. I hope you don’t mind my saying this, but I do not believe that you are a spy at all.”

  “You’re right there,” I half-laughed.

  “So why take the delivery?” He asked, not unreasonably.

  “I don’t know. Revenge, maybe.”

  “Revenge? On whom, may I ask?”

  “My husband.”

  There, I’d said it. I didn’t know this man from Adam, so he was the only person that I could say it to. Yes, that was exactly why I’d taken it. How paltry. How sad. What a pathetic little woman I’d become, snatching at other people’s secrets. Tristram’s life was one long secret that had me left out in the cold and all I’d wanted was a secret to call my own.

  “Is your husband the spy?” The old Pole cottoned on fast.

  He was relaxed in his seat, with the arm that held his cigar draped over the back of the chair, nonchalance itself. He was giving nothing away, like they all learn to do. And yet, some instinct in me still rather liked him. Was I right to do so?

  “Who did you spy for?” I asked.

  “I spied for us!” He exclaimed, greatly amused. “For the Allies and the liberators of the modern world. For my Poland and for America and for the British Empire, God Bless the King!”

  “Don’t you mean Queen?”

  “Certainly, I would have spied for her, too, but I’d been put out to grass long before she came to the throne.”

  “Hmm. But you speak Russian.”

  “Indeed, and very useful it was, too. Not as useful as it would be now, of course, but they have discarded me like an old sock,” he said, with a theatrical shrug.

  I smiled, “An old sock? I’d say there was plenty of life in you, yet.”

  He laughed and shot me an unmistakeable look that I might have taken seriously if he’d been twenty years younger and things had been different.

  “You flatter me, Madam.” He leant over the table to stub out his cigar in the ashtray and whispered into my ear as he did so, “I am not happy about you being in this place with that document about your person. It isn’t safe.”

  “What are you going to do,” I whispered back, “take it from me, by any chance?”

  “Ha! You don’t trust me; that is good. Trust no-one, do you hear me? Ever.”

  “Isn’t that a bit bleak?” I said, thinking of Tristram as I said it.

  “Very. But nobody asked you to take the delivery and you should not have done it. I tell you so and I am sure your husband would say the same.”

  “Well, what do you want me to do with it? Put it back where I found it so that you can steal it when I’m gone?”

  “Bravo! Your distrust is admirable; we will make a spy out of you, yet!”

  “Oh, for goodness sake” I said, beginning to get exasperated. “I can’t sit here whispering all day long. I’ve got things to do.”

  I summoned the waiter and paid my bill and I noticed that he did the same. I put my coat on and he put his hat on. I picked up my handbag and he picked up his newspaper. Then we both went outside and I rounded on him once we were out of earshot.

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “I am following you, Madam.”

  “I can see that. Stop it and go away, or I shall call a policeman.”

  “Please do so, that is a very good idea indeed. Ask the policeman to take you home immediately.”

  “Why?” I didn’t really want to call a policeman, of course. Not at all.

  “To keep you out of danger. If you do not do this, then I shall accompany you home myself, Madam.”

  “If you think you’re coming home with me, then you have another think coming.”

  He sighed, obviously unhappy about the situation.

  “Very well, I shall say no more,” he lifted his hat. “Good afternoon Madam.”

  “Good afternoon to you,” I said and promptly turned on my heels and went into the nearest shop, so that I could hang about and make sure that he really had taken himself off.

  I looked at a lot of superior stationary - it being a stationers - and eventually bought a postcard of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens[20] because I’d been there so long I could sense the shop assistant getting frosty. I’d been peeking out of the shop window every now and again, while I browsed envelopes, and couldn’t see anything of the retired spy, yet I still had an uneasy feeling that he was lurking about somewhere nearby. He was an old pro, after all; look how he’d witnessed the whole business in the church, when I could have sworn blind that I’d been on my own. I decided to take a circuitous route home, involving my hairdresser’s in Sydney Street and the little woman who ran up the odd frock for me in Dovehouse Street and that should do it.

  Antoine was surprised at my appearance in his salon, but happy to fit a regular like me in without an appointment. We had our usual conversation about what I’d been up to and I told him about Diana Dors’ mother, which gave him a laugh – although not quite such a big laugh as I’d expected (another couple of years, maybe less, and I predicted I’d be grateful for the work). I had him sit me under the drier next to the window but wasn’t able to see much beyond a towering display of artificial flowers and a swagged curtain arrangement. By the time I’d let him pin my hair up in a chignon and gas me with hairspray, I was pretty confident that the coast was clear.

  But, when I went up to the girl to pay, she handed me a white envelope, with a confidential air. Had Antoine not been in the vicinity, I shouldn’t have been surprised to get a wink. I glanced at the envelope and frowned. It was addr
essed in a flowing hand with copperplate flourishes, To the Fair Lady of Golabki.

  “Are you sure this is for me?”

  “He pointed you out, Madame.”

  “Who pointed me out?”

  “The gentleman, Madame. Distinguished-looking. Said he knew you, Madame.”

  I wasn’t too happy about the way she said ‘knew’ (it was dawning on me that when a woman reached her late thirties there was no rôle - and no man - too old for her). I thought on my feet.

  “These film producers,” I said, “will they never leave me alone? Now, how much do I owe you?”

  I hurried out with the envelope unopened, but there was nobody on the pavement and, scanning Sydney Street in both directions, I failed to see the old spy once more. Short of summoning up that police escort, I had to assume that he was somewhere nearby keeping an eye on me and lump it. I forgot about my little woman in Dovehouse Street and walked straight home.

  I opened the letter before I’d taken my coat off, standing in the hall with my kid gloves on the floor where I’d dropped them in my haste to get at the envelope.

  Dear Madam, (it said)

  The unintelligible Russian words written on the front of your document are not intended to be read by any Russian, but by an Englishman with a simple knowledge of the layout of the keys of a Russian typewriter.

  Please remove the document from your handbag and read what it says. You will find that there are three words, and the first of the words is Ишв. If the corresponding letters are sought on an English typewriter, (for example И is five keys along from the right on the third, and bottom, row of keys, which corresponds with the letter B on an English typewriter), the message will become clear:

  BID FOR GLASS

  I humbly offer the suggestion that the contents of the document reveal what the Soviets are prepared to offer in this transaction. If I were in your position, I would leave the envelope sealed, for you what you do not know cannot harm you.