Shattered (3 page)

One side wall of the showroom rose only to waist height, so that over it one could see into the workshop beyond, where the furnace burned day and night and the little gray pebbles melted into soda crystal at a raised heat of 2400 degrees Fahrenheit.

Hickory or Irish, or their colleague Pamela Jane, took turns to work as my assistant in the workshop. One of the other two gave a running commentary of the proceedings to the customers and the third packed parcels and worked the till. Ideally the four of us took the jobs in turn, but experienced glassblowers were scarce, and my three enthusiastic assistants were still at the paperweight and penguin stage.

Christmas sales had been great but nothing like the New Year 2000. As everything sold in my place was guaranteed handmade (and mostly by me), the day I'd spent at the races had been my first respite away from the furnace for a month. I'd worked sometimes into the night, and always from eight onwards in the morning, with one of my three helpers assisting. The resulting exhaustion hadn't mattered. I was physically fit, and as Martin had said, who needed a sauna with 2400 degrees in one's face?

Hickory, twirling color into a glowing paperweight on the end of a slender five-foot-long steel rod called a punty iron, looked extremely relieved at my return from the races. Pamela Jane, smiling, earnest, thin and anxious, lost her place in her commentary and repeated instead, “He's here. He's here ...” and Irish stopped packing a cobalt blue dolphin in bright white wrapping paper and sighed, “Thank God,” very heavily. They relied on me too much, I thought.

I said, “Hi guys,” as usual and, walking around into the workshop and stripping off jacket, tie and shirt, gave the millennium-crazy shoppers a view of a designer-label white string singlet, my working clothes. Hickory finished his paperweight, spinning the punty iron down by his feet to cool the glass, being careful not to scorch his new bright sneakers. I made, as a frivolity, a striped hollow blue-green and purple fish with fins, a geodetic type of ornament that looked impressively difficult and had defeated me altogether at fourteen. Light shone through it in rainbows.

The customers, though, wanted proof of that day's origin. Staying open much later than usual, I made endless dated bowls, plates and vases to please them, while Pamela Jane explained that they couldn't be collected until the next morning, New Year's Day, as they had to cool slowly overnight. No one seemed deterred. Irish wrote their names and told them jokes. There were hours of good nature and celebration.

Priam Jones called in fleetingly at one point. When he had been at Martin and Bon-Bon's house he'd found my raincoat lying on the backseat in the car. I was most grateful, and thanked him with New Year fervor. He nodded, even smiled. His tears had dried.

When he'd gone I went to hang up my raincoat in my locker. Something hard banged against my knee and I remembered the package given me by Eddie, the valet. I put it on a stock shelf out of the way at the rear of the workshop and went back to satisfy the customers.

Shop-closing time was elastic but I finally locked the door behind the last customer in time for Hickory, Irish and Pamela Jane to go to parties, and for me to realize I hadn't yet opened the parcel that Priam Jones had returned in my raincoat. The parcel that had come from Martin ... he'd sat heavily on my shoulder all evening, a laughing lost spirit, urging me on.

Full of regrets I locked the furnace against vandals and checked the heat of the annealing ovens, which were full of the newly made objects slowly cooling. The furnace, which I'd built to my uncle's design, was constructed of firebricks and fueled by propane gas under pressure from a fan. It burned day and night at never less than 1800 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to melt most metals, let alone burn paper. We were often asked if a memento like a wedding ring could be enclosed in a glass paperweight, but the answer was sorry, no. Liquid glass would melt gold—and human flesh—immediately. Molten glass, in fact, was pretty dangerous stuff.

I slowly tidied the workshop, counted and recounted and then enclosed the day's takings in their canvas bag ready to entrust to the night safe of the bank. Then I put on my discarded clothes and eventually took a closer look at my neglected parcel. The contents proved to be exactly what they felt like, an ordinary-looking videotape, a bit disappointing. The tape was wound fully back to the beginning, and the black casing bore no label of any sort. There was no protective sleeve. I stacked it casually beside the money, but the sight of it reminded me that my videotape player was at my home, that I'd sold my car, and that rising midnight on a thousand years' eve wasn't the best time to phone for a taxi.

Plans for my own midnight, with a neighborhood dance next door to my house, had disintegrated on Cheltenham racetrack. Maybe the Wychwood Dragon, I thought, not caring much, still had a broom cupboard to rent. I would beg a sandwich and a rug and sleep across the dark night into the new century, and early in the morning I would write an obituary for a jockey.

 

When I was ready to cross to the Wychwood Dragon someone tapped heavily on the glass-paned door, and I went to open it, intending to say it was too late, the year 2000 lay fifteen minutes ahead in Broadway, even if it had been tomorrow for hours in Australia. I unlocked the door and, prompted by inexorable courtesy, faced politely an unexpected and unwanted visitor in Lloyd Baxter, telling him with a half-smothered yawn that I simply hadn't enough energy to discuss the disaster at Cheltenham or anything else to do with horses.

He advanced into the brightest area on the threshold and I saw he was carrying a bottle of Dom Pérignon and two of the Wychwood Dragon's best champagne glasses. The heavily disapproving expression, despite these pipes of peace, was still in place.

“Mr. Logan,” he said formally, “I know no one at all in this place except yourself, and don't say this isn't a time for rejoicing, as I agree with you in many ways ... not only because Martin Stukely is dead but because the next century is likely to be even more bloody than the last and I see no reason to celebrate just a change of date, particularly as there's no doubt the date is incorrect to begin with.” He took a breath. “I therefore decided to spend the evening in my room ...” He stopped abruptly, and I would have finished the tale for him, but instead I merely jerked my head for him to come right in, and closed the heavy door behind him.

“I'll drink to Martin,” I said.

He looked relieved at my acquiescence, even though he thought little of me and was old enough to be my father. Loneliness, though, still propelling him, he set the glasses on the table beside the till, ceremoniously popped the expensive cork and unleashed the bubbles.

“Drink to whatever you like,” he said in depression. “I suppose it was a bad idea, coming here.”

“No,” I said.

“I could hear the music, you see ...”

Music in the distance had forced him out of his lonely room. Music powerfully attracted the gregarious human race. No one welcomed two thousand years in silence.

I looked at my watch. Only nine minutes to ring-the-bells time.

Regardless of cynical withdrawals from organized enjoyments, regardless even of thrusts of raw unprocessed grief, I found there was inescapable excitement after all in the sense of a new chance offered, a fresh beginning possible. One could forgive one's own faults.

New numbers themselves vibrated with promise.

Five minutes to ring-the-bells ... and fireworks. I drank Lloyd Baxter's champagne and still didn't like him.

Tallahassee's owner had changed, thanks to his transferred bag, into formal clothes, complete with black tie. His almost Edwardian type of grooming seemed to intensify rather than lighten his thunderous personality.

Even though I'd been introduced to him at least two years earlier, and had drunk his fizz on happier occasions, I'd never before bothered to read his face feature by feature. Rectifying that, I remembered that he'd earlier had thick strong dark hair, but as his age had advanced from fifty there were gray streaks that to my eyes had multiplied quite fast. His facial bone structure was thick and almost Cro-Magnon, with a powerful-looking brow and a similar no-nonsense jaw.

Perhaps in the past he had been lean-and-hungry, but as the twentieth century rolled away he had thickened around the neck and stomach and taken on the authoritative weight of chairmen. If he looked more like an industrialist than a landowner, it was because he'd sold his majority share in a shipping line to buy his racehorses and his acres.

He disapproved, he'd told me severely, of young men like myself who could take days off work whenever they cared to. I knew he considered me a hanger-on who sponged on Martin, regardless of Martin's insisting it was more likely to be the other way around. It seemed that when Lloyd Baxter formed a set of opinions he was slow to rearrange them.

Distantly, out in the cold night, bells in England pealed the passing of the all-important moment, celebrating the artificial date change and affirming that hu mankind could impose its own mathematics on the unresponsive planet. Lloyd Baxter raised his glass to drink to some private goal, and I, following his gesture, hoped merely that I would see January 2001 in safety. I added in fact, with banal courtesy, that I would drink to his health outside, if he'd forgive me my absence.

“Of course,” he said, his voice in a mumble.

Pulling open the gallery door, I walked out into the street still holding my golden drink, and found that dozens of people had felt impelled in the same way. A host, myself included, had been moved by an almost supernatural instinct to breathe free new air under the stars.

The man who sold antique books in the shop next to my gallery shook my hand vigorously, and with uncomplicated goodwill wished me a happy new year. I smiled and thanked him. Smiling was easy. The village, a fairly friendly place at any time, greeted the new year and the neighbors with uncomplicated affection. Feuds could wait.

Up the hill a large group of people had linked arms and were swaying across the road singing “Auld Lang Syne” with half the words missing, and a few cars crept along slowly, headlights full on, horns blaring, with enthusiastic youths yelling from open windows. Up and down High Street local sophistication found its own level, but everywhere with a benign slant of mind.

Perhaps because of that, it was longer than I'd intended before I reluctantly decided I should return to my shop, my ready-for-the-bank takings and my unwelcome visitor, whose temper wouldn't have been improved by my absence.

Declining with regret a tot of single malt from the bookseller, I ambled along to Logan Glass feeling the first twitch of resignation for the lack of Martin. He had known always that his job might kill him, but he hadn't expected it. Falls were inevitable but they would happen “some other time.” Injuries had been counted a nuisance that interfered with winning. He would “hang up his boots,” he'd told me lightheartedly, the minute he was afraid to put them on.

It was the
thought
of fear that bothered him, he'd once said.

I pushed open the heavy door preparing my apologies and found that an entirely different sort of action was essential.

Lloyd Baxter lay facedown, unmoving and unconscious, on my showroom floor.

Dumping my empty glass rapidly on the table that held the till I knelt anxiously beside him and felt for a pulse in his neck. Even though his lips were bluish he hadn't somehow the look of someone dead, and there was to my great relief a slow perceptible
thud-thud
under my fingers. A stroke, perhaps? A heart attack? I knew very little medicine.

What an appallingly awkward night, I thought, sitting back on my heels, for anyone to need to call out the medics. I stood up and took a few paces to the table which held the till and all the business machines, including the telephone. I dialed the come-at-once number without much expectation, but even on such a New Year's Eve, it seemed, the emergency services would respond, and it wasn't until I'd put down the receiver on their promise of an instant stretcher that I noticed the absence beside the till of the ready-for-the-bank canvas bag. It had gone. I searched for it everywhere, but in my heart I knew where I'd left it.

I swore. I'd worked hard for every cent. I'd sweated. My arms still ached. I was depressed at that point as well as furious. I began to wonder if Lloyd Baxter had done his best, if he'd been knocked out trying to defend my property against a thief.

The black unidentified videotape had gone as well. The wave of outrage common to anyone robbed of even minor objects shook me into a deeper anger. The tape's loss was a severe aggravation, even if not on the same level as the money.

I telephoned the police without exciting them in the least. They were psyched up for bombs, not paltry theft. They said they would send a detective constable in the morning.

Lloyd Baxter stirred, moaned and lay still again. I knelt beside him, removed his tie, unfastened his belt and in general rolled him slightly onto his side so that he wasn't in danger of choking. There were flecks of blood, though, around his mouth.

The chill of the deep night seeped into my own body, let alone Baxter's. The flames of the furnace roared captive behind the trapdoor that rose and fell to make the heat available, and finally, uncomfortably cold, I went and stood on the treadle that raised the trap, and let the heat flood into the workshop to reach the showroom beyond.

Normally, even in icy winter, the furnace in constant use gave warmth enough, supplemented by an electric convection heater in the gallery, but by the time help arrived for Baxter I had wrapped him in my jacket and everything else handy, and he was still growing cold to the touch.