Dick Francis - Shattered

I pressed extra time into the light switch, overriding the midnight cutoff, and with boringly painful movements took off my jacket and shirt, leaving only normal working gear of bare arms and singlet.

“What are you doing?” She sounded alarmed but had no need to be..

“A portrait,” I said. “Sit still.” I turned up the heat in the furnace and sorted out the punty blowing irons I would need, and fetched a workable amount of glass manganese powder which would give me black in color eventually.

“But your bruises...,” she protested. “Those marks. They’re terrible.”

“I can’t feel them.”

I felt nothing indeed except the rare sort of excitement that came with revelation. I’d burned myself often enough on liquid glass and not felt it. That Sunday night the concept of one detective darkly achieving insight into the sins of others, and then the possibility that good could rise above sin and fly, these drifting thoughts set up in me in effect a mental anesthesia, so that I could bleed and suffer on one level and feel it only later after the flame of imagination had done its stuff. Sometimes in the disengagement from this sort of thing, the vision had shrunk to disappointment and ash, and when that happened I would leave the no-good piece on the marver table and not handle it carefully into an annealing oven. After a while, its unresolved internal strains would cause it to self-destruct, to come to pieces dramatically with a cracking noise; to splinter, to fragment... to shatter.

It could be for onlookers an unnerving experience, to see an apparently solid object disintegrate for no visible reason. For me the splitting apart symbolized merely the fading and insufficiency of the original thought. On that particular Sunday I had no doubts or hesitation, and I gathered glass in muscle-straining amounts that even on ordinary days would have taxed my ability.

That night I made Catherine Dodd in three pieces that later I would join together. I made not a literal lifelike sculpture of her head, but an abstract of her daily occupation. I made it basically as a soaring upward spread of wings, black and shining at the base, rising through a black, white and clear center to a high rising pinion with streaks of gold shining to the top.

The gold fascinated my subject.

“Is it real gold?”

“Iron pyrites. But real gold would melt the same way... only I used all I had a week ago.”

I gently held the fragile top wing in layers of heatproof fiber and laid it carefully in one of the six annealing ovens, and only then, with all three sections safely cooling, could I hardly bear the strains in my own limbs and felt too like cracking apart myself.

Catherine stood up and took a while to speak. Eventually she cleared her throat and asked what I would do with the finished flight of wings and I, coming down to earth from invention, tried prosaically (as on other such occasions) just to say that I would probably make a pedestal for it in the gallery and light it with a spotlight or two to emphasize its shape.

We both stood looking at each other as if not knowing what else to say. I leaned forward and kissed her cheek, which with mutual small movements became mouth to mouth, with passion in there somewhere, acknowledged but not yet overflowing.

Arms around motorcycle leathers had practical drawbacks. My own physical aches put winces where they weren’t wanted, and with rueful humor she disengaged herself and said, “Maybe another time.”

“Delete the maybe,” I said.

All three of my assistants could let themselves in through the gallery with a personal key, and it was Pamela Jane alone whom I saw first with a slit of eyesight when I returned unwillingly to consciousness at about eight o’clock on Monday morning. I’d spent the first hour after Catherine had gone considering the comfort of a Wychwood Dragon bed (without the Dragon herself) but in the end from lack of energy had simply flopped back into the big chair in the workshop and closed my eyes on a shuddering and protesting nervous system.

Catherine herself, real and abstract, had kept me warm and mobile through the darkest hours of night, but she’d left long before dawn, and afterwards sleep, which practically never knitted up any raveled sleave of care, had made things slightly worse.

Pamela Jane said, horrified, “Honestly, you look as if you’d been hit by a steamroller. Have you been here all night?”

The answer must have been obvious. I was unshaven, for a start, and any movement set up quite awful and stiffened reactions. One could almost hear the joints creak. Never again, I promised myself.

I hadn’t considered how I was going to explain things to my little team. When I spoke to Pamela Jane, even my voice felt rough.

“Can you...” I paused, cleared my throat and tried again. “Pam... jug of tea?”

She put her coat in her locker and scurried helpfully around, making the tea and unbolting the side door, which we were obliged to use as a fire escape if necessary. By the advent of Irish I was ignoring the worst, and Hickory, arriving last, found me lifting the three wing sections of the night’s work out of the ovens and carefully fitting them together before fusing them into place. All three of my helpers wished they’d seen the separate pieces made. One day, I agreed with them, I would make duplicates to show them.

They couldn’t help but notice that I found too much movement a bad idea, but I could have done without Hickory’s cheerful assumption it was the aftermath of booze.

The first customer came. Life more or less returned to normal. Irish began building a plinth in the gallery to hold the wings. If I concentrated on blowing glass, I could forget four black jersey-wool masks with eyeholes.

Later in the morning Marigold’s Rolls drew up outside and occupied two of the parking spaces, with Worthington at the wheel looking formal in his badge-of-office cap.

Marigold herself, he reported through his wound-down window, had gone shopping with Bon-Bon in Bon-Bon’s car. Both ladies had given him the day off and the use of the Rolls, and he appreciated their generosity, he said solemnly, as he was going to take me to the races.

I looked back at him in indecision.

“I’ m not going,” I said. “And where am I not going?”

“Leicester. Jump racing. Eddie Payne will be there. Rose will be there. Norman Osprey will be there with his book. I thought you wanted to find out who gave the videotape to Martin. Do you want to know what was on it, or who stole it, and do you want to know who gassed me with the kids and the ladies, or do you want to stay here quietly and make nice little pink vases to sell to the tourists?”

I didn’t answer at once and he said judiciously, making allowances, “Mind you, I don’t suppose you want another beating like you got last night, so stay here if you like and I’ll mooch around by myself.”

“Who told you about last night?”

He took off his cap and wiped his bald crown with a white handkerchief.

“A little bird told me. A not so little bird.”

“Not... a pigeon?”

“Quick, aren’t you.” He grinned. “Yeah, a Pigeon. It seems he thinks quite a bit of you. He phoned me specially at Bon-Bon’s. He says to put it around that in future any hands laid on you are laid on him.”

I felt both grateful and surprised. I asked, “How well do you know him?”

He answered obliquely. “You know that gardener of Martin’s that was dying? That you lost your license for, speeding to get him there in time?”

“Well, yes, I remember.”

“That gardener was Tom Pigeon’s dad.”

“He didn’t die, though. Not then, anyway.”

“It didn’t matter. Are you coming to Leicester?”