Dick Francis - Shattered

Irish and Pamela Jane arrived together, as they often did, and this time were arguing about a film they’d seen that had a bad glassblower in it. They asked Hickory what he thought and embroiled him so intensely in the argument that with a fatally noisy bang Hickory’s precious new sailing boat cracked apart into five or six pieces. It had been standing free on the marver table, the outer surfaces cooling more rapidly than the super-hot core. The stresses due to unequal rates of contraction had become too great for the fragile glass. The pieces had blown away from each other and lay on the floor.

All three of my helpers looked horrified. Hickory himself glanced at his watch and said bleakly, “Three minutes, that’s all it took. I was going to put it in the oven... God damn that stupid film.”

No one touched or tried to pick up the fallen pieces. They were still near to their liquid heat and would incinerate one’s fingers.

“Never mind,” I said, shrugging and looking at the sad bits, “it happens.” And I didn’t need to remind them that practice glass was cheap. It did happen to everyone. It happened to the best.

We worked conscientiously all morning, making swooping birds for mobiles, which always sold fast. Pamela Jane, loving them particularly, was the one who fixed their strings the following morning early and who at noon would carefully pack them in boxes in such a way that they would pull out easily to fly.

Hickory, who could make neat little birds, recovered his good humor by the time Worthington drew up outside in Marigold’s Rolls. Marigold herself, in a dramatic black-and-white-striped caftan, issued from her glossy car with mascara-laden eyelashes batting hugely up and down like a giraffe’s. She had come, she announced, to take me to lunch in the Wychwood Dragon. She had a favor to ask, she said.

Worthington, always a step behind Marigold when on active bodyguard duty, looked the more richly sun-tanned from the skiing trip. He had spent most of the time on the slopes, he said with satisfaction, while Marigold’s wardrobe had swelled by three enormous suitcases. And a good time had clearly been had by both.

Her intense vitality as usual stirred anyone in Marigold’s vicinity to giggles and, as on other days, she and Hickory were soon indulging in batting a sexual ball to each other with gleeful freedom.

Marigold in enjoyment stayed for half an hour — a century for her — during which time Worthington drifted me with a gentle tug on the arm into the furnace end of the room, and told me with the unhappiest of expressions that the underground fraternity of bookmakers were forecasting my destruction, if not death.

“Rose is still actively prowling round here, looking for vengeance, because she can’t understand why you aren’t on your knees to her. They are laughing at her because you and Tom and I have walked away from two of her best-planned smasheroos, and there’s no way she’s going to put up with such a loss of face. So you just look out, because I hear that someone in Broadway has binocs on you now, reporting every twitch you make straight back to Rose.”

“Binocs?”

“Bins. Where have you been all your life? Binoculars. Race glasses. But seriously, Gerard, Tom Pigeon says it’s no joke.”

I promised to be careful, but who could live forever in a state of alarm? I said, “I suppose I’d better tell you, then, that Adam Force and Rose did try to do me in yesterday. At least, I think so.”

He listened grimly and asked the unanswerable: “Where’s Rose now?”

Marigold and Hickory, having enjoyed their flirting as much because of their twenty-year age difference as in spite of it, gave each other a pecking kiss on the cheek in farewell, and Marigold and I made a head-turning entrance into the Wychwood Dragon dining room. The Dragon herself swept in full sail between the tables to fetch up by Marigold’s side, two splendid ladies eyeing each other for supremacy.

I counted it a draw for outrageous clothes and an easy win for Marigold in the mascara stakes, and nearly two hours slid by before Marigold, tiring of the underlying contest, told me the reason for her invitation to me for lunch.

She declaimed to start with (unnecessarily), “I am Bon-Bon’s mother!”

“Ah,” I said. I knew.

“At Christmas,” Marigold continued, “Martin gave his wife a video camera from the children, and he was going to give her a necklace from himself as well.”

I nodded. “But she preferred warm winter boots.”

“The silly girl has no taste.”

“But she gets cold feet.”

Marigold considered fashion far more important than comfort. “Martin said you had made a spectacular necklace once, and that you could make the same one again. So... for Bon-Bon, will you do it now? As a present from me, of course. And I’d like to see it first.”

She waited an uncharacteristically long time for my answer, gazing hopefully into my face. I didn’t know in fact what to say. I couldn’t insult her by telling her it would cost more than the woolly boots and the video camera combined, though she would need to know, but the videotape describing how to make it and listing the detailed ingredients in grams was not only missing but might have come into Rose’s field of things to die for. When I had said I would make a necklace for Bon-Bon, I hadn’t known Rose.

After too long a pause Marigold asked, “What’s the problem? Can’t you do it?”

When an answer of some sort became essential I said, “Does Bon-Bon give the necklace idea her blessing?”

“She doesn’t know about it. I want her to have a lovely surprise to cheer her up. I thought of buying her something in Paris, but then I remembered what Martin wanted you to do, so will you?”

She was so seldom presented with a negative that she couldn’t understand my hesitation. I put together my most persuasive smile and begged for a little time. She began to pout, and I remembered Martin, laughing, saying that the Marigold pout meant the knives were out.

Hell, I thought, I wished he were alive. He’d been dead twenty-one days and I’d found each one a quandary without him.

I said to Marigold, “The necklace I made is in a strongbox in the bank down the road here. I do agree that you should see it before we go any further.”

The pout cleared away to a broad smile of understanding, and although we could easily have walked the distance, Marigold grandly summoned Worthington, equally grandly paid for our lunch, and outshone the poor Dragon all the way to the Rolls.

In the bank Marigold had the manager bowing to the floor while minions were sent scurrying to bring my locked box into the private room where contents could be checked. I opened the metal box and laid the flat blue velvet folder containing the copy of the Cretan Sunrise onto the bench-shelf, opening it for her opinion.

I hadn’t seen the antique original except lit behind glass, so I couldn’t completely compare them, but in the chill light of the bank’s viewing room the duplicate I’d made gleamed as if with inner life, and I gave way to such a bout of self-regard as would have caused my uncle Ron to bury his head in his hands in shame.

Marigold exclaimed “Oh!” in astonishment, then drew in a breath and said, “Oh, my dear,” and couldn’t decide whether or not she liked it.

The necklace designed three thousand five hundred years ago was a matter of twenty flat pieces, each made of aquamarine-colored and dark blue glass streaked together with melted gold. About two inches, or five centimeters, long, by a thumbnail wide, each flat shining piece bore the imprint of a flower. When worn, the long pieces, strung loosely together around the neck by their short sides, spread out in rays like a sunrise, the imprinted flowers, outermost, lying flat on the skin. In a way barbaric, the whole thing was antiquely magnificent, and definitely heavy. I didn’t blame delicate Bon-Bon for not wanting to wear it.