The Yellow Glass

by Claire Ingrams

  “Major Dyminge?” I lifted the latch on their back door to call inside.

  Nobody answered, so I walked around the front of the house and held my hand over my eyes to shield them from the surprisingly strong sun, which was descending in the west.

  Two figures were sitting on the Dyminges’ front wall, smoking cigarettes and scanning the sea. They both wore odd, battered-looking hats and one had a newspaper spread open on his lap.

  “Which horse takes your fancy, Uncle Albert?” I cried and they turned their sea-toasted, old faces to watch me pick my way towards them in my green heels, trying not to massacre anything underfoot.

  “Your uncle favours Crimson Star, but I’ve told him Impending Danger is the only sure-fire bet,” Major Dyminge spoke for Uncle Albert - as everybody did - because my mother’s younger brother (and uncle number 3 in this uncle-ridden story) never said anything much at all, having been hurt in the brain when he was a baby.

  “How are you, Rosa?” Major Dyminge got up from the wall and tipped his peculiar hat.

  “Extremely well, dear Major,” I said and gave him a kiss on the cheek.

  Then I went over to my uncle and patted his hand - aware that a kiss would only frighten him away - and comprehension crept into his blank, round face, slowly. He smiled and hung his head. Then he picked up his paper, as if to shield himself with it.

  I turned to Major Dyminge, who took my chin in one calloused hand and squinted at me with his functioning eye, as if I might have changed since we’d last met. He sighed, rather, as if he’d been holding his own breath along with my face, and then he let both go. He tugged his hat further down over his forehead and turned back to the sea.

  “You were worried, weren’t you?” It struck me even as I spoke. “Was that why you didn’t come inside the house?”

  “Poison,” he remarked, his back to me. “Terrible stuff.”

  The Major had been poisoned, you see. Centuries ago, he’d been poisoned by Fascists and it had deformed his face from that day forwards.

  “Come and have some vegetables,” I said. “You too, Uncle Albert. We have enough vegetables to open our very own greengrocers.”

  “Is it a Jewish thing?” Major Dyminge enquired politely, as we walked back to our house.

  “Not particularly . . I think it’s more of a ‘feed Rosa up until she bursts’ thing, actually,” I laughed. And then it slipped out: “If Arko doesn’t kill me, the vegetables will!”

  Major Dyminge stopped, abruptly, on the threshold of Shore House. I stopped, too, and steadied myself, fighting that dizzy feeling; up high on the Big Dipper again, swaying in the empty air. Then voices reached us. The Friday night feast was waiting, so I hurried in.

  The candles had been lit, the wine un-corked and two glossy challah loaves were sitting on the table. My brother was already there, washed and scrubbed, his little yarmulke on top of his tight, black curls. My father never wore one and was still sporting his ridiculous beret, but Sam had asked to be bought his, for some unknown reason. This meal was as Jewish as our family got, actually. I’d once joked that Daddy only celebrated his God with food and he’d looked scandalised.

  “God is not in food?” He’d exclaimed. “If he’s anywhere at all, Rosa, he’s surely in food!”

  Jerzy Stone was in his element, therefore. With great ceremony, he carried an enormous fish on a plate to the table and set it down amid the legions of vegetables.

  “May I sit beside you, Mr Smith?” Mrs Dyminge addressed Uncle Albert. “Doesn’t the table look superb!” She clapped her hands. “Loaves and fishes. How wondrously biblical!”

  “Indeed. For not only is it our Shabbat, but we are celebrating the return of the Prodigal daughter,” boomed my father.

  “Prodigal?” I queried, sitting down beside my brother and within easy reach of the roast potatoes. “I’m not sure I like that word. Don’t you mean prodigious?”

  “No he doesn’t,” said my mother, decidedly. “If anybody’s prodigal, it’s you, Rosa. Turnips anyone?”

  I wondered how she knew that I’d spent the entirety of my six months wages - the money from the secretarial agency and the pittance I’d got from HQ - and then some. Perhaps the green shoes had given me away. My mother had grown up dirt poor and worked like a Trojan all her life (as she constantly reminded me), and knew the cost of everything.

  “Now, what are your plans for the future, Rosa dear?” Asked Mrs Dyminge. “Is Cambridge quite passé?”

  “Cambridge just wasn’t me, Mrs Dyminge. It’s not that I’m not intellectual, of course, but it was just so passive; listening to other people tell me things . .” I helped myself to some delectable-looking caramelised parsnips.

  “No, that’s never been your strong point,” my mother agreed.

  “ . . I think I’m a more active type of person, actually. I’m hoping to prove to my uncle Tristram that I’m a safe pair of hands, because I’ve got so much more to offer in his area of expertise.”

  “And what area would that be, exactly?” Asked Mrs Dyminge.

  There was a sudden hush around the table and a number of forks paused a fraction away from a number of mouths.

  “Import/Exports,” I said, rather fast. “It’s frightfully interesting. Honestly.”

  “I’m sure it is,” said Mrs Dyminge, “but . . uranium, dear? I do hope Tristram’s not an arms dealer of any description.”

  It was impossible to miss how, well, stunned, everybody around the table looked (except my little brother, who was busy trying to toast a chunk of challah in the flame of a candle).

  “Oh.” She was flustered. “Have I spoken out of turn? You mustn’t mind me; I’m the world’s nosiest parker.”

  “Yes you are, Frances,” Major Dyminge spoke up for the first time. “It’s quite obvious what Tristram is; what he’s been for years. Tristram Upshott is a spy.”

  Sam dropped his bread on the table and a brief flame flared.

  “A spy!” His mouth fell open. “Gawrsh!” He gave it his best Goofy voice.

  “Samuel!” My mother grabbed her glass of water and chucked it at the tablecloth.

  And I suppose that was when I should have been quoting the Official Secrets Act of 1939 to them and swearing them all to silence. But I didn’t. Because my eye had chanced to fall on Mrs Dyminge’s platter of vegetables, where it sat beside the hole that my brother had burned in the tablecloth. Mrs Dyminge’s white platter decorated with a stick lady wearing a big hat and picking flowers, in an unmistakeably Finnish design, was not Mrs Dyminge’s at all. It was Arko’s.

  12. A Platter of Vegetables

  My first thought was that it might be contaminated. I closed my eyes and played over the conversation I’d had with Uncle Tristram in that coffee bar in Putney, from:

  “They’re smuggling uranium, and huge quantities of it at that . .” to “Arko Arkonnen is the devil incarnate”.

  I had every word off pat, of course, but nowhere in our conversation had my uncle specified whether it was only the yellow glass that was contaminated with uranium, or whether all of the deliveries from Finland were carrying the stuff. Whatever the case, it simply wasn’t worth hanging about. I grabbed the platter and streaked out of the room.

  “Goodness, she does like her vegetables, doesn’t she?” Mrs Dyminge’s voice followed me all the way into the drawing-room.

  I stood there for a bit, holding the platter at arm’s length, humming and hawing over what on earth to do with it. Initially, I scooped a rug up from the polished floorboards and bundled the thing up and then I tried to stuff it behind a cushion on the sofa, but that didn’t feel like an adequate enough precaution. In the end, I opened a window and leant through to drop the bundle onto the stones outside, shutting the window firmly after it. Then I did what I should have done the minute I’d got off the train and come home. I rummaged through the address book for Uncle Tristram’s phone number and dialled it.

  “FLAxman 4390,” he answered, promptly.

  “Unc
le Tristram, it’s me, Rosa.”

  “Hullo, Gypsy. I was wondering when I might hear from you. How are you? Alright?”

  “Oh, yes, yes, fine and all that. At home in Kent, actually . .”

  “Nice weather?”

  “Good grief, yes . .”

  “You sound a little het up, Gypsy. Are you het up?”

  “Well I am. Yes. If you’ll just let me finish, Uncle, I’ve got some tremendously vital stuff to say.”

  “Vital? I’m all ears.”

  “Rosa?” My mother stuck her head around the sitting-room door. “Your dad says we’ve got plenty more vegetables in the kitchen and he’s putting some more out on the table for you as we speak, only it’s a bit rude to our guests, wouldn’t you say, dashing off like that and . . . Who are you talking to in the middle of dinner, Rosa?”

  “Uncle Tristram.”

  “Tristram?” She scowled. “Well you can just tell Tristram Upshott from me that . .”

  “What’s that?” My uncle went, down the line.

  “It’s Mummy. She sends her love and . .”

  “I most certainly do not send my love!”

  “I heard that,” he said.

  “And he sends his love, Mummy.”

  “Well, he can keep it and I don’t care if he hears that, too!”

  Her head disappeared from the side of the door.

  “Three way conversations are not ideal for vital information,” Uncle Tristram observed. And then, in a louder voice, “Two lumps, please and plenty of gin in it. Now, where were we?”

  I cut to the chase and whispered down the receiver, in case anybody else was lurking nearby.

  “The contaminated glass, Uncle, was it just the yellow glass, or all of it? I mean all of the deliveries: the mustard-coloured pottery and the white platters with stick ladies wearing hats and picking flowers, were they carrying tremendous amounts of uranium, too?”

  “I can’t say I know anything about stick ladies wearing hats, Rosa, but, as far as I’m aware, the uranium gives the glass - and probably the pottery, too - it’s concentrated, yellow colour. So I think we can rule out the white platters. Why?”

  “Oh, phew!” The relief was overwhelming. “Only we’ve got a stick lady here, if you know what I mean, and we’ve all eaten heaps of vegetables out of her.”

  “Plenty of gin,” he said, loudly, “because I think I’m going to need it.”

  “Mrs Dyminge brought her and I’ve wrapped her up in a carpet and put her outside.”

  There was a distinct pause, while he thought through my new information.

  “Let me get this straight. Your neighbour owns a similar white platter to those found among the deliveries from Arko. Which you’ve spotted because you deliberately chose to ignore my orders not to unpack those boxes.”

  Crumbs, he wasn’t going to go harking on about all that, was he? This was precisely why I’d been giving him a wide berth.

  “Marvellous!” He exclaimed, rather unexpectedly. “This is the first damn break-through we’ve had in weeks. Bring the stick lady in, would you, Rosa? And take a good look at her bottom.”

  “Righto! I’m just putting the receiver down. Don’t go anywhere.”

  I ran to the window, my heart beating like crazy in my breast. I mean to say; this was more like it! The break-through had come from me, Rosa Stone (spy in Her Majesty’s Secret Service).

  I unwrapped the platter by the window and couldn’t help noticing that a number of greasy patches had appeared on my mother’s Chinese rug. However, there was work to do. I took a swift look at the bottom of the dish on my way back to the telephone.

  “It says ‘R’co & Son Glassware, Dover and there’s a little blue cross underneath that, which is lying on its side.”

  “Ah, the Siniristilippu,” he said. “It’s the flag of Finland, so we’re on the right lines. And the company is simply called ‘Arko’, you say?”

  “Yes, but it’s a capital ‘R’ for Uncle Reg and then co for company.”

  “What do you mean, ‘R’ for Uncle Reg’? Who’s Uncle Reg when he’s at home?”

  “Well, I’m glad you asked that, Uncle, because that was the next part of my vital information.”

  I sat down on the sofa and told him exactly what had happened after I ran into Magnus at HQ, missing nothing out because who could tell what was important and what wasn’t?

  “Richard Burton?” Came his voice down the line and then, louder in my ear, “Just a splash more gin this time, darling.”

  “ ‘. . Into the car, or I shoot you!’ And then Magnus jumped right into the black sedan with him and I was so galvanized with horror that I just took my life in my hands and I broke free, not looking back, but running and running and running some more, all the way to Charing Cross station.”

  It had gone very quiet at his end.

  “Are you still there, Uncle?”

  “Damn,” he said, sounding rather subdued. “Are you alright, Rosa?”

  “Yes, yes, of course I am. You asked me that before and I said I was.” We were going round in circles.

  “I should have detained that Commie traitor while I had the chance. Christ only knows why I let him stroll out of HQ like that.”

  “Did you already have your eye on Magnus, then?”

  I was highly surprised to learn this.

  “Mmm. He let slip he was an Arkonnen . . . I have to say, I’m completely bemused about Arko operating in Dover and being an Uncle Reg. We’ve got a file a yard wide on Arko Arkonnen and none of this begins to tally.”

  “Perhaps your file is wrong. After all, not many people can achieve one hundred per cent accuracy when relating information.” He didn’t reply, so I hammered it home, “Like I can.”

  “Point taken, Gypsy. You’ve done well.”

  I was thrilled, I really was. If the boss said you’d done well, then, by anybody else’s estimation, you had in fact done a fabulous, if not brilliant, job.

  “So I’m back on the payroll?”

  “You most certainly are not!”

  “What?!”

  “You are not to involve yourself further in any aspect of this operation, understand?”

  “What?!”

  My mother appeared at the door again. “Why are you shouting, Rosa? We can hear you all the way from the dining-room. Oh my goodness, you’re not still talking to Tristram, are you?” She marched up to me and held her hand out. “Give me the phone this instant, Rosa. Go on; I won’t ask twice.”

  I gave her the phone.

  “Tristram Upshott, this is Millicent Stone here, and I have one thing to say and one thing only. You are not to involve my daughter in your unsavoury business dealings, do you hear me? I don’t care if the whole future of Great Britain is at stake. I won’t have it. No I won’t. You just keep your unsavoury dealings to yourself . . talking of which, may I have a word with my sister, please. Thank you.”

  I kicked the Chinese rug under an occasional table while she had her back turned and sidled out of the room with Mrs Dyminge’s dish. I carried it into the kitchen and left it in the sink because they would surely be on lemon syllabub by that time.

  “There you are, Rosa,” said my father when I re-appeared in the dining-room. “I think you owe our guests an apology, don’t you?

  “I’m so sorry, Mrs Dyminge. Major Dyminge.” I sat back down behind my plate, which was jam-packed with vegetables. “I love your dish so much Mrs Dyminge; I just wanted to get a better look at it. The light’s better in the drawing-room. Wherever did you get it?”

  “My Scandinavian platter? It was a present, dear. From one of my pupils. Let me think which class,” she put down her dessert spoon and crinkled her brow. “I think it might have been ‘Mystery, Murder and Mayhem: the alternative face of humdrum’.

  Mrs Dyminge wrote rather odd detective stories. I’d never been able to finish one, but she had her fans, who were also rather odd. Every now and again one of them would make a pilgrimage to see her and knock on the do
or of Shore House by mistake, so I had some experience of their oddness: they tended to be dressed in brown, with hats straight out of the 1930s - sinister bits of bird wing and netting - and, often, galoshes on their feet. One - a woman, because they were always women - had even been wearing a monocle. Sam and I had spent a wonderful afternoon spying on her and Mrs Dyminge through the Dyminge’s side window, while they drank pots of tea and ate biscuits and chatted about murder.

  Anyhow, Mrs Dyminge also taught evening classes at the ‘Stute in Dover, which is where she must have been given Arko’s dish. I ate a parsnip while I considered what to say next.

  “Well, I must say, I do love it. I don’t suppose you could ask your pupil where they got it from, Mrs Dyminge? I mean, I’d love to have one of my own.”

  Mrs Dyminge looked delighted.

  “For your flat in town, dear Rosa? Gosh, please take mine. No, I insist. Call it a flat warming present. I’d be so pleased if you would.”

  This wasn’t going to plan.

  “Oh, no! I couldn’t possibly deprive you of yours,” I said, vehemently. “Not in a million years!”

  “Oh you must!” She exclaimed. “You simply must!”

  “Let the girl have her own dish, Frances,” Major Dyminge intervened. “If she wants it so much.”

  Mrs Dyminge subsided and picked up her pudding spoon again.

  “Well, I shall just have to put my thinking cap on and remember who the dickens gave it to me . . . Oh, what a sublime pudding this is, Jerzy! Nectar for the gods!”

  I tried a more general approach and threw a question at the table:

  “Is there a glass factory in Dover, does anybody know? Glass and other ceramics? Only the dish is made in Dover, by the stamp on its bottom. It says ‘R’co & Son Glassware, Dover.”

  “Bottom!” My little brother shouted. “Rosa said ‘bottom’!”

  “Stop it Sam, I’m asking a serious question.”