Peacetime (15 page)

‘If you say so.' Mathias climbed onto his chair, rested his arms on the surface of the wall and looked out over the expanse of land ahead of him.

‘You can see why they wanted to cover it with airfields,' Mercer said.

‘Were you ever bombed?' Mathias asked him.

‘Once, in Forlì, south of Bologna.'

‘They came day after day in France,' Mathias said. ‘The same planes, the same times. Some of us were even convinced that their bombs fell in exactly the same places. There was little to oppose them. I knew then that, whatever else happened, however long it might take, the war was lost.'

‘Did you think you might be killed?'

‘Never. What man does?'

Me, I did
, thought Mercer, but said nothing.

Later, the two men left the shelter and walked back to where the others awaited them.

The appearance of Mathias signalled to them all that they might now return to their barracks. By then, Roland was drunk and asleep, and it took several of them to rouse him. He woke slowly, reluctantly, uncertain, at first, of where he was or what he was doing there, and then it all returned to him and he swore at the men who had woken him.

Jacob sat beside the glowing forge. Bail stood nearby, working the bellows. A powder of ash and sparks blew up from the mounded coke. Jacob showed Mercer the kiln he had constructed at one side of the forge. He held in his hands a small amber-coloured bowl, broken at its rim, and with a crack which threatened to break it in half.

Mercer had come on the day of the firing by arrangement with Jacob, uncertain what arcane or private ritual he might have been invading. He was intrigued by what Jacob was still able to achieve there amid such unlikely surroundings and with such crude and makeshift equipment.

Bail had come out to investigate the barking of his dogs, and had called Mercer into the forge, where Jacob awaited him. Bail himself was engaged in the repair of a piece of machinery Mercer did not recognize. It was beyond him to suggest to either of them that the forge had been fired up under this pretence, and that Bail's sole purpose in doing so was to allow
Jacob to continue with his glass-making. Neither man spoke to him for several minutes after his arrival, their attention focused instead on the changing colour of the coals.

Despite the heat of the day and the room itself, Jacob again stood in his tightly fastened jacket and with cloths wrapped around both hands. Bail, however, was naked from the waist up. His injured hand remained gloved and rigid, though this did not appear to hinder him in his work. His chest and stomach were slick with sweat. Ash from the forge stuck to him and darkened.

‘Are you about to make something?' Mercer indicated the kiln.

‘This.' Jacob held out the broken bowl and Mercer took it from him. ‘Hopefully, this time with success.'

‘What happened?' Even chipped and cracked, the bowl was a beautiful thing.

Jacob shrugged. ‘That's the nature of glass. Perfect one second, shattered the next. Perhaps it cooled too quickly. Unlike our Vulcan here, who can douse his lumps of molten metal in drums of water, glass needs to be treated more sensitively. I occasionally wish it were otherwise, but …'

Beside them, Bail took up an iron rod and settled it into the coals, raking them over it as he continued to work the bellows.

Jacob took back the damaged bowl. ‘I made this one last week. It was perfect for a day, and then, within minutes, the piece at the rim broke off and the crack appeared.' He showed Mercer the crucible of broken glass he intended melting. ‘When the kiln is up to temperature, I shall set the glass in it to melt, and when it is sufficiently liquid, I shall attempt once more to shape it.'

‘Do you use a mould of some sort?'

‘Some might. I prefer to blow it and then to shape it in my hands. It was the first thing my father taught me to do. He told me it would teach me respect for the glass.'

‘Because it would burn you?'

‘Because it burned me, yes. It was a simple enough lesson to learn.' He indicated the leather pads on the bench beside him.

Bail withdrew the glowing bar from the forge and started to shape it on his anvil. The bar curled and lost its colour, and he measured it against the piece it was intended to replace. It seemed a simple enough task, dependent more on the man's strength in shaping the metal than any precise measurement or craftsmanship. Jacob, too, watched Bail at work, his eyes rising and falling with Bail's arm and hammer.

After a minute of this, Bail returned the rod to the fire and stood back from the forge.

‘Not ready yet?' he asked Jacob, indicating the kiln, the inner bricks of which now glowed white-hot.

Jacob shook his head.

‘He's a perfectionist,' Bail said to Mercer. There was respect and envy in his voice. He took a half-smoked cigar from his pocket and lit it with a glowing coal lifted from the forge with his pliers.

‘Churchill,' Jacob said.

Bail pretended to make a speech, but stopped abruptly as the dogs outside resumed their barking, and he went to investigate.

‘He worries that the bailiffs are coming,' Jacob said as Bail passed him.

‘Let them try,' Bail said. He picked up another of his hammers as he went.

‘Are you feeling well?' Mercer asked Jacob when they were alone.

‘I'm never truly well. You have surely grasped that much by now. But, yes, relatively speaking, I am well. Well enough to do what I have to do.' He motioned to the kiln. ‘It gives me some small purpose.'

It gives you
all
your purpose
, Mercer thought. He took a handful of broken glass from the cold crucible and rolled it in his palms. Its edges had been ground and it did not cut him. The powder settled into the creases of his hand.

‘Alchemy,' Jacob said unexpectedly.

‘“Alchemy”?'

‘Turning that into this.' He held up the broken bowl. ‘True alchemy. To insist that this concerns only the conversion of base metals into gold is to miss the point.'

‘I know nothing of it,' Mercer said, alerted and encouraged by Jacob's sudden enthusiasm.

‘No? The alchemical tradition tended towards the heretical rather than towards the established church. It was a way of exploring the connections between the terrestrial and the celestial, between the four lower elements of earth, wind, fire and water, and the fifth element.'

‘Which was what?'

‘The quintessence, Mr Mercer. Pure spirituality.'

‘I always imagined it to be something more prosaic, something to do with—'

‘Greed?'

‘Perhaps.' It was not what Mercer had been about to say.

‘I imagine that is what most people think. After all, we live in an age that only recently thought nothing of plundering gold from the mouths of men, women and children.'

The remark shocked Mercer, and there was nothing he could say in reply to it.

Jacob saw this. ‘I've offended you,' he said. ‘It was not my intention. According to the few true alchemists, every object, every substance in the natural world signifies – has as its counterpart – something metaphysical, something beyond understanding on the basis of natural or scientific laws alone. According to those men, the world is not simply the naturalistic thing the vast majority of mankind considers it to be, but is filled with spirits, with soul and with intelligence – an
anima mundi
– where every object has its own unique and special properties. Do you understand?'

‘I think so. And all this is represented for you in your glass-making?'

‘Something of it, yes. I do not deceive myself that it is a perfect or all-encompassing explanation, or that it even provides the justification for what I do, but I see in it, in my understanding of it, something untouched by others, by those greedy enough to want only that gold, by those men who possess no wonder, no awe, and who are impressed only by their own worldly achievements and power.'

Mercer understood then how much more he was being told, and how well this imperfect explanation suited Jacob's purpose.

‘And is it what your father also believed?' he said.

‘It is. And he had the sense to instil the belief in me. Everything else might be stripped away and lost or destroyed, but belief, true belief, belief founded solely on understanding can never –
never
– be taken away from a man.'

‘And is that belief sufficient and potent enough to keep a man alive?'

‘Of course. More than enough.'

‘And your bowls are some kind of justification – a manifestation, almost – of your belief.'

‘You surprise me, Mr Mercer. That is precisely my point, though, again, I concede that it is not a perfect understanding, and certainly not one that I would wish to have to explain in any greater detail.'

And is it all that remains to you, this belief? Like a tightrope, and one now so high above the ground that you can no longer see that ground beneath you. And one so long that you cannot see for certain how far into that same black distance it stretches ahead of you.

Jacob held out the crucible so that Mercer might brush the last of the powder from his palms back into it.

‘Is the kiln ready?'

‘Possibly,' Jacob said.

‘Do you have no way of testing it?'

‘Like I said, it is not a precise science. I daresay if it were to become one, then it would lose its appeal for me.'

They were joined by Bail, who said that the dogs had been barking at nothing, but whose poorly disguised concern was evident to them both.

‘Ready?' Bail said to Jacob, who nodded.

Bail took the crucible in a pair of tongs and slid it into the kiln, closely watched by Jacob, who told him to push it further into the small structure. Bail did this and then returned to the bellows.

Jacob indicated for Mercer to follow him outside.

‘What will you do with it – the bowl?' Mercer said.

‘Who knows? If it breaks again, I shall destroy it completely, just as I have destroyed its imperfect predecessors; but if by some miracle it emerges intact and perfect, then I shall either keep it and look upon it as some sort of justification for all my belief and hard
work, or I may sell it. My existence here is not so spiritual as I might sometimes wish to believe.'

‘Or as you would want others to believe.'

Jacob smiled at this. ‘Precisely.'

‘You sold a bowl to Elizabeth Lynch,' Mercer said.

‘Before the others chased me away, yes.'

They walked between the mounds of useless and abandoned machinery towards the drain.

‘Can I return with you and watch you shape the bowl?' Mercer said.

Jacob shook his head. ‘I'm afraid not. For that, I prefer to be completely alone.'

‘For what reason?'

‘For no reason other than that I have spent the past few years of my life surrounded by tens of thousands of others without a single moment of true privacy.'

‘I understand,' Mercer said.

‘I doubt that, but then I would doubt anyone who said the same. Whatever else has happened, you still live in a world where you can choose to believe or not to believe in a great deal. For me, that choice no longer exists. I'm not saying this because I expect your sympathy, or even that I expect you to believe me, but merely to make clear to you the distance between us, you and me. And I say it, too, because I know you will not be offended by the remark, and because I appreciate being able to say it without also having to frame my apology for it. As you might have guessed, I am through with all those old niceties and platitudes.'

They reached the drain and stood looking over it.

‘Did you lose everything?' Mercer asked him.

‘Everything and everyone. You may believe you can imagine how that feels, but you cannot.'

‘My brother was killed at Anzio,' Mercer said. ‘He was wounded and died six days later.'

‘I'm sorry. Were you close?'

Mercer nodded.

‘And your parents?'

‘My father died when I was a boy. My mother died ten months after my brother was killed.'

‘Then it was no coincidence,' Jacob said.

‘No.'

‘Look,' Jacob said, and he pointed to where a solitary swan drifted seaward on the drain.

‘How long will your glass stay in the kiln?'

‘Not too much longer. The temperature rises and falls, unfortunately, but no real harm will come to it once it has become molten. In Utrecht, Anna and I used to take turns at sitting up through the night with our father while he waited for the fire and the heat to build. Even for him, a master craftsman with thirty years' experience, there was still a great deal of uncertainty involved. And perhaps that was what appealed to him, too. He possessed industrial thermometers, of course, but he insisted he could tell more simply by spitting on different parts of the kiln wall than by what they told him. He taught Anna and myself how to do it.'

‘Perhaps he just liked spitting,' Mercer said.

‘Perhaps. We cooked our meals against those kilns. He owned four, one for each kind of work. In the largest, he could produce sufficient ordinary, clear glass to glaze a hundred windows. And in the smallest, he would make bowls like mine. Anna, too, was taught everything I was taught. It was expected of me that I would follow him in the trade, but she also expressed the same desire. Our mother was angry at hearing this, and she berated him for having put the idea into his daughter's head. She insisted that he dissuade her. He promised her he would try, but then
when he was alone with the two of us, he told Anna to do whatever she pleased. She was only nine when the war started, thirteen when we were forced to leave our home and the glassworks.' He paused to watch the swan pass them by.

‘What happened?'

‘We were driven from our home, and what we left behind, others simply took for themselves. I imagine the kilns were not yet cold from their last firing before their new owner stood before them, rubbing his hands at the thought of all those new and lucrative Army contracts about to arrive.'