The Yellow Glass

by Claire Ingrams

  She woke up not long before we got to Charing Cross hospital.

  “Don’t leave me,” she cried, startling me out of a thicket of black thoughts.

  “I won’t. Not if you don’t want me to.”

  “Sorry. You may have some acting to do, Aunt Kathleen. I mean, I wouldn’t want to disturb . .”

  “Acting?” I snorted. “I’m in rather a lull at the moment, darling.”

  “It must be wonderful to be an actress; I know I’d love it,” she seemed to be picking up. “Especially Shakespeare. At the Old Vic, or Stratford. Or on film, you know, like Olivier’s new Richard III[42].”

  “Shakespeare? They’ve never let me loose on Shakespeare, I have to say.”

  “Perhaps you could give me some advice, Aunt Kathleen, on how one becomes an actress?”

  I’d just taken the wrong road off Hammersmith Broadway and was searching for somewhere to turn round, so I blurted out what I really thought, rather than cooking up a pat response to her question (which was one I’d frequently been asked before).

  “Don’t do it,” I said, “that’s my advice. It’s a life of diminishing returns for a woman. What’s more, you’ve got brains; unlike some of us. God alone knows why I landed up in the business! One minute I was singing and the next somebody cast me in a film and that was that . . and it’s not as if I ever wanted to sing in the first place!”

  “Didn’t you?” She sounded fascinated by my boring, old story; the sweetheart. “What did you really want to do, then, Aunt Kathleen?”

  “I wanted to be a mechanic, or an engineer, something like that, Rosa. To race cars and pilot planes around the world. Build a motorbike and whirl off into the sunset.”

  There was a pause, while we both thought about what I’d just said.

  “Well, why don’t you do it now? If you’re in a lull, I mean.”

  Such a simple question. Why had I never asked myself that question? I stopped the car outside the hospital and sat back in my seat. Maybe some questions were so simple that even simpletons like myself failed to ask them.

  They put my niece in solitary confinement again and wouldn’t let me go with her. We hugged before they took her away and there were tears glinting in the corners of her eyes.

  “Don’t listen to me, Rosa. You be an actress if you want to be.”

  She rubbed the tears away with the sleeve of her sackcloth and ashes dress.

  “I don’t know why I’m crying, Aunt Kathleen. I never used to cry.”

  “Then you should have done. Goodbye, darling. I’ll let everyone know where you are and we’ll be here, like a shot, the minute they give us the say so. And you can call me any time you like, just reverse the charges. Promise?”

  I kissed her again and hung about in the hospital lobby, watching her through the glass pane in the first door of a long corridor of other doors with glass panes; watching her walk the length of the corridor with a nurse to either side - like prison escorts - leading her on and on until she was out of sight. I stood there long after she’d gone, lost in thought.

  I was fervently hoping our shiny, new health service could get that muck out of her system before it did any serious damage. ‘Tristram’s uranium’; that’s how I’d come to think of it. Damn the man. I only wished I could remember more of what young Mr Tamang had said about radiation when we’d been in that tunnel (the whole experience having been so odd that it’d been difficult to take it all in). There’d been something about glass being inert and not leaching and some discussion about whether this changed when it was broken . . because Rosa had smashed some glass, that much I did know. And, of course, there’d been the broken glass in that underground shelter, which had sent Mr Tamang into a complete tailspin. Smashed glass, intact glass, uranium-bearing glass. This horror that Tristram had brought to my family, that had taken my brother and poisoned my niece, was all about glass.

  I turned to go . . and then, not before bloody time, I remembered the envelope.

  The minute I got home to Chelsea, I dashed upstairs and dug out the envelope that I’d stolen from Brompton Oratory, and the note from the old, Polish spy. I’d hidden them in my underwear drawer and they smelt of Patou’s Joy. The spy had wanted me to hand them over to the authorities, or to Tristram, but I’d done neither and kept them to myself. I hadn’t opened the envelope, however, and in that sense I had followed Mr Piotrowski’s advice. (Although that part of it hadn’t been difficult, because it had dawned on me that I couldn’t give a fig for what was inside; it was the fact of the thing that I liked, the little part of Tristram’s other life that I owned and he didn’t know about.)

  I turned the envelope over in my hands and studied the random Russian letters that, apparently, made up the dull as ditchwater sentence ‘BID FOR GLASS’. It might mean something, then again it might be entirely unconnected to Tristram’s case, but one thing I did know and that was that the time for pathetic, marital games was over. In every respect, it was over.

  I caught sight of my face in the hall mirror; there were faint lines in it that hadn’t been there weeks before. Bert’s death had been so terrible, of course, so unexpected and appalling in every way . . but those lines stretched back even further than that. I traced one with a fingertip, from temple to temple. It was then that the plan came to me. I had to stop treating my life as if I were acting in it and I couldn’t begin to do that until I’d done what was right. So, I made a start. After I’d rung Millicent and told her Rosa was back in Charing Cross, I put the envelope into my handbag, grabbed a light coat and picked up my car keys. Then I drove over to South Kensington before I lost my nerve.

  I found a parking space in Thurloe Place and walked back to the café, checking my watch. It was still only lunchtime (although it felt a whole lot later), and it was even another Monday and I reckoned Apoloniusz Z Piotrowski was a creature of habit; if he wasn’t to be found reading his newspaper over Polish dumplings, then I planned to sneak into Brompton Oratory and ambush him while he was on his knees. But he was there, alright.

  “Good afternoon, Mr Piotrowski,” I said.

  The debonair, retired spy looked up at me and his eyes widened very slightly behind the thick lenses of his wire-rimmed spectacles, that was all.

  “Good afternoon, Madam. How pleasant to see you again.”

  “Is this seat taken?”

  “Please be my guest.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “Oh, and I’m Kathleen by the way. Kathleen Upshott, but you can call me Kathleen.”

  “To what do I owe this honour, Kathleen?”

  He’d put down his newspaper and removed his specs and was smiling, benignly, at me over his plate of half-eaten dumplings. The waiter appeared and I ordered a strong black coffee before I answered his question.

  “Well, Mr Piotrowski, to put it bluntly, I need some information and I was rather hoping you could help me.”

  “Information? What information could an old fellow like me possibly have to give you? I’m always happy to help a beautiful woman, but I fear you may have come to the wrong quarter, Kathleen.”

  “Trust nobody, eh?” I smiled back at him. “That’s right and proper, of course, but I’m completely harmless, you know. Nobody is more harmless than myself, if you want the honest truth . .”

  “I think you do yourself an injustice . .”

  “Oh, don’t!”

  “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t flirt with me, Mr Piotrowski. Just eat your dumplings and listen to what I have to say, will you?”

  “How delightful it is to see you again,” he laughed. “But you’ve put me off my lunch . . in the nicest possible way.” He reached for a thin, black cigarette. “Please continue.”

  I leant towards him and lowered my voice.

  “You remember the envelope?”

  He frowned and nodded.

  “Well, I still have it . . I know, I know . .” (He’d made to interrupt and, no doubt, give me a good telling off.) “ . . I should’ve handed it over to the
proper people straight away - and thank you for the note, by the way; you shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble. But I didn’t and that’s all there is to it. I didn’t show it to anybody, but I also didn’t open it, as you can see for yourself, if you want to, because I have it right here in my handbag.”

  I went to open the clasp, but he stuck a hand out to stop me.

  “Not here, if you please. Did I teach you nothing, Kathleen?”

  “Sorry. I’m very difficult to teach; practically impossible they used to say at school. Anyway, it’s here and it hasn’t been opened and you’ll just have to take that on . .” ( I’d been about to say ‘trust’, but, of course, that word wasn’t in his vocabulary.)

  “So what are you going to do with the item?” He asked, after a considerable pause.

  “I want to take it to HQ, as I believe they call it. I was hoping you had the address. I want to take it in person, you see.”

  He took a long drag of his cigarette and sighed.

  “I must say, you continue to mystify me, Kathleen. Why not give the item to your husband to deliver? Or, if you are still so determined to thrust yourself into matters that do not concern you, pump your husband for the relevant information; I’m sure that would not be beyond your capabilities.”

  I took a sip of my coffee, found it a bitter brew and unwrapped a sugar cube, thoughtfully.

  “It’s complicated, Mr Piotrowski. Too complicated to go into at this point.”

  He stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray and fluttered the tips of his fingers in an elegant, if disdainful, little gesture of dismissal at the very idea of my marital complications.

  “Is that so? Well, then,” he said, “in that case, we had better go.”

  “What?” I was taken aback. “But . . you’re not coming with me, you know.”

  “I may have mentioned that I have plenty of time on my hands. A visit to the old firm might be . . diverting.” He got up and threw some coins on the table. “Your coffee is taken care of. Do you have a car, Kathleen, or shall I hail a taxi?”

  As I drove to HQ, I found myself explaining to my passenger that I had, in fact, visited it before, although I had no idea where it actually was.

  “I mean, I never intended to go there. They scooped me up with my husband just past Vauxhall Bridge and I don’t think they actually knew they had me until my husband’s boss opened the van door. Hutch. Was he there in your day?”

  “Oh, yes. I know Hutchcraft.” His noble profile gave nothing away.

  “Well, my meeting with him was over in the blink of an eye; I spent most of my visit in the garage, actually, and then we left from there. We went down the slide.”

  “Indeed?”

  “Did you ever . .?”

  “All of it,” he interrupted, “I have seen and done all of it.”

  It was obvious that subject was closed, so I shut up and we drove to the address in Waterloo that he’d given me, each lost in our own thoughts.

  “Are you sure we’ve come to the right place?”

  I remembered a square courtyard, like a university college, and four imposing walls. Also, a pattern of herring-bone bricks underfoot that had caused me to stumble in my heels. I’d been disorientated - in shock, perhaps - but, even so, the building in front of us looked quite wrong. This was a narrow place, with a soot-stained façade like an old pawnbrokers without the balls. Unwashed windows and yellow nets suggested a building that had been left untenanted for years, where the landlord was sitting tight and waiting for better things to come.

  “I am perfectly sure. The front is a front, if I make myself clear. The genuine entrance is at the back, where the horses used to go to be stabled in happier times,” Mr Piotrowski said.

  I followed the old spy around the corner and noticed that, although his back was ram-rod straight, he walked with a pronounced limp in his left leg. Out in broad daylight and away from the dingy glow of the Polish café, I saw that the back of his long, black coat was shabby and unpleasantly stained and worn to greasiness at the elbows. His shoes were so beyond down at heel that no heel remained. Like the façade that hid HQ from the world’s gaze, Mr Piotrowski had seen better days. He might give the appearance of Polish aristocracy, but, from the back, you’d have taken him for a tramp, in all honesty. I liked the old gentleman and suddenly felt rather sorry for him. Did he really want his former colleagues to see him like that?

  I grabbed his arm just before we turned in to HQ.

  “Are you sure you want to come in, Mr Piotrowski?”

  He swung round and I realised what a fool I’d been, because one look at that magnificent face and he could have been wearing the emperor’s new clothes, for all it mattered. Never mind a Count, he looked like a King returning to his kingdom; all the time we’d been driving across London he’d been steeling himself for this moment, I could see that. It struck me that Mr Piotrowski was no spent force.

  “Are you sure you want to come in, Mrs Upshott?” He retorted.

  I was quaking in my boots; my plan seemed utterly ridiculous in that moment, and going into that building was the last thing I wanted to do.

  “No,” I said, “but don’t try and stop me.”

  And we went inside.

  A uniformed man sprang out of a cubby-hole and tried to prise my envelope from me before I’d said any of what I’d come to say.

  “No you don’t! I’m afraid I’m not parting from this until I see . .”

  “Sir Godfrey Hutchcraft, please,” Mr Piotrowski interjected.

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  “No, but we have met,” I tried, “and . . ”

  “Then I’m sorry, but Sir Godfrey can’t see you. He’s far too busy.”

  “Tell him his old friend, Apoloniusz, has come,” Mr Piotrowski said.

  “Apple on what?”

  “Apoloniusz. But you can say ‘A’, if you prefer.”

  The uniformed man picked up his receiver and dialled, not taking his eyes from us.

  “I have ‘A’ here to see you, sir,” he announced. “And . . Mrs Upshott.”

  It wasn’t possible to hear the reaction to this, but it must have gone done fairly well because the man informed us that Sir Godfrey was on his way down, adding, “In person,” as if he usually sent a stand-in.

  I clutched my handbag, tight, and we waited for the arrival of the chief. We waited and we waited in that small, airless lobby, and, several times, we had to make way for official types rushing about on, presumably, top-secret business. It all seemed remarkably cramped for an intelligence service bent on safe-guarding the secrets of the nation . . or finding out the secrets of other nations . . or whatever it was that they got up to in a dull building in the worst part of Waterloo. However, we hadn’t too much longer to wait before a lift descended, a shiny, brass gate was pulled to one side and there was Hutch; a rather droopy category of man in a creased, grey suit. He was small-ish and old-ish and when they’d handed out shoulders he’d been at the back of the queue. I couldn’t think why I’d been so nervous.

  “Mrs Upshott. How lovely to see you again,” he murmured, taking my hand in his and hanging on. “I expect you have concerns about your husband?”

  Of course I had many concerns about my husband, but they certainly weren’t for public consumption and had nothing, whatsoever, to do with why I was there.

  “Let me reassure you that we are doing everything in our power to find him, Mrs Upshott.”

  He didn’t sound terribly reassuring, but then, luckily, I wasn’t particularly in need of reassurance.

  “I’m so glad,” I replied, “but I expect Tristram can fend for himself.”

  “Mmm. That’s the spirit.” He glanced, vaguely, about the lobby, but didn’t seem to register Mr Piotrowski at all. “I say . . can I tempt you to a small glass of sherry in my office? Now that you’ve come all this way. The view of the Thames is quite something from up top.”

  I had no desire to drink sherry with Hutch, but very much want
ed to get out of the lobby and proceed with my plan.

  “Thank you . . Hutch. May I call you Hutch?”

  “I’d be honoured. Step this way.”

  He laid a feather-light, yet strangely intimate, arm around my waist and directed me into the ornate, little lift.

  “Oh, Hutch,” I said, stepping as far away from his arm as the tiny dimensions of the lift allowed, “you remember Mr Piotrowski, don’t you?”

  He looked straight through the old spy, as if he were looking through glass. Mr Piotrowski narrowed his eyes but said nothing.

  “Sorry, old boy,” said Hutch, pulling the brass gate to as he spoke, “only room for two.”

  I was slightly startled by the offhand way he’d dismissed the old spy and fell silent as we ascended in the lift, playing the scene over in my head; it being difficult to work out just how rude Hutch was being when he habitually spoke in such a low-key, inexpressive fashion (as if he were reading lines and hadn’t made up his mind how to play them).

  There was nothing low-key about his office, however, for he’d feathered his nest in some style. It was the epitome of luxury after what had gone before; all gleaming parquet and the lingering tang of lavender furniture polish. The view of the river certainly did take the eye and the dirty old Thames scrubbed up nicely from that height. Hungerford railway bridge was transformed - I had to step closer to the window to prove it was Hungerford - because it spanned the river like a bracelet on a delicate lady’s arm, quite unlike the heap of blackened ironmongery with which Londoners were familiar.

  “This will buck you up.”

  He handed me a glass of sherry - chestnut brown and syrup-sweet, by the look of it - and I slid my handbag up my arm to take it from him.