The Yellow Glass

by Claire Ingrams

  “Stop!” I cried. “Whatever the hell you’re doing, just stop it will you?”

  “Keep your nose out, son. This is none of your business.”

  “It bloody is!” I shouted and, without thinking, I fell on top of him, fists flying.

  His head jerked forward and the gun went off, the retort unbelievably loud inside the car. Had he got her? I tried to hold him down and get a look out of his window at the same time, but he kept struggling and he’d got his weight on the accelerator, so the car was out of control. I’d just time for one serious punch, which must have connected somewhere because a great, winded, ‘oomph’ broke out of him, and to scream out:

  “Run, Rosa! Run!”

  Before the car smashed into the side of a wall and all the colours in the world turned to black.

  11. Grounded in Kent

  I was convinced they would follow me. I sneaked into an empty First Class carriage after the ticket inspector had done his rounds, stowed my tapestry bag in the rack and prayed to God that they’d missed me on the platform. (I don’t believe in God but, somehow, that’s never stopped me praying to him.) The first train of the day would have been too obvious, I’d calculated, so I’d taken the second and gone to such elaborate precautions at Charing Cross that my Uncle Tristram would have been proud of me. Even so, I’d learnt to expect the unexpected and I spent the beginning part of the journey - when I wasn’t praying - with my teeth positively chattering with fear. I’d had hours to think about it and I had slotted the pieces together from the hallucinatory fragments of the night before. I was pretty sure that I knew who my enemies were, now: Uncle Reg, who was also Arko the devil incarnate. An extremely fast runner called Terry, who was also Jim Johnson the office boy at Heaviside Import/Exports. And Magnus . . who was just Magnus.

  I felt peculiarly sick when I thought of Magnus; especially when I recalled him jumping into that car to join his wicked uncle. (The feeling reminded me of the sickness I’d felt on the Big Dipper at Battersea Funfair the only time I’d tried it: out of my element, dizzy, stripped of the ability to grasp anything real and make something comprehensible out of it.) Magnus wasn’t actually ‘just Magnus’, you see. He wasn’t who I’d thought he was at all, and that made me feel so sad. Sad and lost. I looked out of the train window and watched London become Kent and the miserly, early morning light expand into gay, spring sunshine and I wondered whether I would ever understand other people. What’s more, I wondered whether I even knew who I was, myself. My name is Rosa, I repeated over the driving bass beat of the train chugging southwards. My name is Rosa. Rosa Stone.

  Yet, astonishingly, as the journey went on and nobody burst into the carriage with a gun, I began to dare to believe that I’d got away with it. As each oasthouse sailed past my window, each strict assembly of hop poles, each orchard of stunted apple trees, just come into leaf, I breathed a little easier. It helped that those signs of spring were all around me; London was still in thrall to the terrible, long winter we’d suffered, but Kent appeared to have thrown it off like that thick jumper you come upon in the summer and cannot believe you ever wore. Speaking of which, I’d had Magnus’ black slacks and jumper rolled up in my tapestry bag and - for purposes of disguise - had taken them out and put them on over my dress, earlier that morning. With the sun streaming through the window, I was starting to feel tremendously hot. By Folkestone I’d thrown caution to the winds and stripped them off. There they sat, on the seat beside me, so hard-wearing, so voluminous, so black . . so Magnus. I hated how I felt when I looked at them. Somewhere before Dover Priory I chucked them off the train.

  Alighting on the platform, I kept a firm grip on my bag; I’d used it as a weapon before and I would again. But there was no need; it was quite miraculous, but I really seemed to have got off scot free. Oh, the relief! I can’t tell you! I swished the satisfyingly full skirts of my scarlet dress and clicked down the platform in the green shoes I’d bought with my last pay-packet, to where I could see my father waiting with the ticket collector. He waved his arms about (as if there was any possibility that I might miss the mountainous mass of him in his blue fisherman’s jumper, red trousers and unfortunate beret), and shouted unnecessarily:

  “Bubeleh! I’m here!”

  I resisted the urge to inform him that I wasn’t blind and allowed him to envelop me in his arms, the tang of coal and steam from the train adding a piquancy to the wafts of cinnamon and cologne that he habitually gave off.

  “You shouldn’t have come, Daddy, not halfway through the working day. I told you on the phone, I was going to get a taxi.”

  “Well, I thought I’d find a poor, little, ailing soul, all shrivelled and yellow in the face.” He set me at arms length. “But what is this? As hale and hearty as ever, Rosa!”

  “It was only a touch of uranium poisoning, Daddy. I didn’t have jaundice, you know.”

  “According to your mother and your aunt, you were at death’s door in that hospital.”

  He took my bag from me and we set off to find the car.

  “Hardly!”

  They’d come dashing up to Charing Cross hospital and tried to lure me back to Kent with my baker father’s chocolate buns, only, since I’d been poisoned, I’d gone off my food for the first time in my life, so it hadn’t worked. Except . . here I was. When you are nineteen, however much you love your childhood home - and I did, I really did - any trip back without a job or a place of your own to return to, well, it feels a bit abject. I couldn’t help it; at nineteen one only wants to fly and I felt grounded.

  I got into the old Crossley while my father put my bag in the boot. When he got in next to me the car sagged and gave a resigned, little sigh, but it started first time, which wasn’t usually the case. We drove out of Dover, taking the route past the harbour and up the hill towards home.

  “Now,” he announced, “prove to me that you are well. Tell me what you see, Rosa. Tell me everything.”

  This was an old game (possibly as old as my parents themselves, which was, of course, as old as Methuselah). I gave a low growl of irritation to let him know how very antediluvian he was, while leaning forward in my seat because I simply adore being tested. I opened my mouth to begin as we sped past the castle, those ancient walls which slanted, so proprietorial, over the town and the sea.

  “Not the castle!” He said (we’d done the castle too many times to count).

  Beyond the castle, then, to where the road opened up to the sea and the chalk downlands. I focussed on the wildflowers that had sprung up in the verges since I’d last been there, and felt the reassuring click in my brain.

  “Speedwell, buttercup, stinging nettle,” I cried, “chalk milkwort, vetch, heartsease, oxeye daisy . .”

  “Oy,” he interrupted, “you don’t get points for oxeye! They’re not out yet. Only what you can see, remember.

  “I saw the leaves! Knapweed, hoary plantain, cowslip, birds foot trefoil . .”

  “Bravo! Now the Latin!”

  I won’t bore you with all of that. Just to say that I’d got to ‘ranunculus vulgaris’ when I saw the rabbit. It’s eyes were gummed shut with myxomatosis[29] and it crouched on the verge as a rabbit should never do, as if it had run out of hops. I shivered. Somehow, Arko had followed me home. Arko with his milk-white eyes. Arko who was Magnus’ Uncle Reg. Arko who circled round and round, pointing his gun. It struck home - for the very first time, really - that one day Arko might kill me. I burst into tears.

  They put me to bed in my old room and I slept a deep, dreamless sleep. I tend to forget about sleep, but - though it pained me to admit it - they were right and I’d been exhausted. When I woke up, I was momentarily disorientated by a shaft of the brightest yellow sunlight entering through a gap in the curtains, where the everlasting wind set them flapping. I thought I heard voices raised in alarm, but it was only my mother shushing my brother Sam. I may have smiled into my pillow before sleep dragged me back under.

  Next time I awoke, the shaft of light had travel
led and the familiar angles of my room had softened. I could have sworn that I heard voices once more; many voices whispering to one another:

  “She’s brought us a story,” they whispered. “She’s brought us another story.”

  But it may have been the conversation of the sea, gossiping around our wall in the fervour of high tide.

  I shook myself awake, got up and flung the curtains wide.

  The house was on the beach. Actually, there were two houses - Shore House and Coast Cottage - two white-washed, 1930’s houses, like beached ocean liners staring out at the sweep of St Margaret’s Bay[30]; such an apparent panorama of blue ocean and, yet, the closest point on our islands to France. In the winter the wind screamed and the salt spray whipped red stripes on one’s cheeks for daring to venture out. It could be wild, but it was never dispiriting because even the depths of winter brought surprising new palettes of light to wash over the sky, boosting morale. Yet in the first, swooning, days of spring there was almost too much light and it hurt my eyes after months of London. April by the sea on a sunny afternoon - I looked at my old clock and could barely credit that it was going on for six - it must, surely, be time for a chocolate bun.

  My little brother, Sam, was lying on his stomach on the sitting-room carpet, transfixed by something on the television.

  “Hey,” he said, “did you know we’re getting ITV?”

  “Everybody’s getting ITV, stupid.”

  “Are they?” He looked doubtful. “Bill Hawking isn’t.”

  My mother came into the room with two cups of tea.

  “That’s because the Hawkings don’t have a set, Samuel,” she said, handing me a cup. “How are you feeling, sweetheart?”

  “Fine, thanks.”

  I gave her an awkward kind of a hug over the teacups because I’d been a bit surly when I’d arrived at the house and she’d ordered me to bed as if I were eight years old, like Sam. As always, I’d forgotten how tiny she was, how petite in every way; the complete antithesis of me. I felt like a great, galumphing elephant next to my mother. Her brown hair was cut quite short and curled softly around her face, with a wide streak of silver flaring from the centre of her head, as if going grey was a rather glamorous decision that her hair had decided to make. She was wearing a perfect, simple white shirt and a wide, boldly patterned skirt of green and yellow and red, cinched tight at her waist. The skirt rustled and dipped as she moved, there was so much fabric in it. Possibly net petticoats under it, too. Talk about New Look! (We’d both been intoxicated when clothing restrictions and the meagre amounts of fabric allowed during the war were dropped.)

  “You look beautiful, Mummy,” I said.

  She looked surprised. Actually, we were both rather surprised I’d said it.

  “Thank you, Rosa. You look lovely, too. Isn’t that dress a glorious shade of red!” She put down her cup and picked up the hem, fingering the warp and woof, casting her milliner’s eye over it. “Too much blue for strawberry and too much orange for raspberry.”

  “Tomato?” I suggested.

  “Squashed tomatoes and stew!” Sam sang out.

  “That’s enough out of you,” my mother straightened up.

  “You look like a monkey and you smell like one, too!”

  “There’s only one person round here smells like that and he’s having a bath the instant his programme’s over,” she peered at the set, blind as a bat without her glasses. “What’s that you’re watching, Samuel?”

  “Auntie Kathleen. She’s gone to the doctor’s and he’s got his steth-thingy out.”

  “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.)