Dick Francis - Shattered

“Don’t worry,” I told him with humor. “If they haven’t made you ill yet, they probably won’t.”

“Thanks a bunch.”

I went in through my heavy gallery door of beveled glass panes already feeling an emptiness where Martin had been. And it wasn’t as if I had no other friends, I had a pack of beer and wine cronies for whom fizzy water and sauna sweats were on their anathema lists. Two of those, Hickory and Irish, worked for me as assistants and apprentices, though Hickory was approximately my own age and Irish a good deal older. The desire to work with glass quite often struck late in life, as with Irish, who was forty, but sometimes, as with me, the fascination arrived like talking, too early to remember.

I had an uncle, eminent in the glassblowing trade, who was also a brilliant flameworker. He could heat solid glass rods in the flame of a gas burner until among other things he could twiddle them into a semblance of lace, and make angels and crinolines and steady flat round bases for almost anything needing precision in a science laboratory.

He was amused at first that an inquisitive kid should shadow him, but was then interested, and finally took it seriously. He taught me whenever I could dodge school, and he died about the time that my inventiveness grew to match his. I was sixteen. In his will he left me plans and instructions for the building of a basic workshop, and also, much more valuably, his priceless notebooks into which he’d detailed years of unique skill. I’d built a locked safelike bookcase to keep them in, and ever since had added my own notes on method and materials needed when I designed anything special. It stood always at the far end of the workshop between the stock shelves and a bank of four tall gray lockers, where my assistants and I kept our personal stuff.

It was he, my uncle Ron, who named his enterprise Logan Glass, and he who drilled into me an embryonic business sense and an awareness that anything made by one glassblower could in general be copied by another, and that this drastically lowered the asking price. During his last few years he sought and succeeded in making pieces of uncopyable originality, working out of my sight and then challenging me to detect and repeat his methods. Whenever I couldn’t, he generously showed me how; and he laughed when I grew in ability until I could beat him at his own game.

On the afternoon of Martin’s death both the gallery and showroom were crowded with people looking for ways of remembering the advent of the historic millennium day. I’d designed and made a whole multitude and variety of small good-looking calendar-bearing dishes in every color combination that I knew from experience attracted the most tourist dollars, and we had sold literally hundreds of them. I’d scratched my signature on the lot. Not yet, I thought, but by the year 2020, if I could achieve it, a signed Gerard Logan calendar dish of December 31, 1999, might be worth collecting.

The long gallery displayed the larger, unusual, one-of-a-kind and more expensive pieces, each spotlit and available: the showroom was lined by many shelves holding smaller, colorful, attractive and less expensive ornaments, which could reasonably be packed into a tourist suitcase.

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.