Edge of Glass Read online

  He rose and went into the kitchen as though to end the subject. I followed him. ‘Then you’re not staying here now? You haven’t come back for good?’ The idea of his not being here as long as I was at Meremount was oddly disquieting, as if a refuge had abruptly been withdrawn.

  ‘No ‒ I thought I was gone for good when I went to London. And then I had that daft notion that I could perform one last service to Sheridan Glass and the family. I thought if Blanche Sheridan could be persuaded to come over and see her mother … well, Blanche Sheridan was dead, and there was only you. I didn’t see how you were to be induced to interest yourself in a broken-down old glassworks and an almost equally broken down old lady. So I took the Culloden Cup. I had to make it serious, or you wouldn’t have paid any attention to me. Coming back here was just to deliver it safely ‒ and perhaps to steer you a little if you did decide to come. I felt responsible for you, you see. Now look, will we stop the cackle and do something about food?’

  He had opened the small refrigerator and squatted to survey its contents. ‘There’s the easy stuff ‒ eggs.’

  ‘Not eggs,’ I said quickly.

  ‘Well then ‒ sausages, best Irish pork. There’s sole, fresh off the quay at Cloncath today. And Dublin Bay prawns. You know, the rivers and lakes of Ireland, and the seas around it teem with the best fish you’ve ever put into your mouth, and the Irish won’t eat it except as penance on Fridays. There’s some new potatoes. Cherries ‒ from the Rhone valley, the greengrocer swears. And a bit of Camembert …’

  I smiled down at him. ‘You do yourself well. Do you have any white wine?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Then we’ll have poached sole. And if you’ll peel the prawns, we’ll have those too.’

  ‘Would it be possible you’re a cook, then?’

  ‘I am,’ I answered, dropping into the lilt of his speech, using the affirmative that is a characteristic of the Gaelic tongue.

  ‘And whoever would think it to be looking at you,’ he said, unconsciously echoing the words that Annie had used. ‘Sure it’s a pleasure to turn me kitchen over to you. And it’s not to every female I’d be doing it, either. Sure wasn’t it one of the things I learned when I got out of Ireland that the greatest cooks are men. And when I tasted what could be done with food didn’t it annoy me to think of all the good things we had at home that no one took much notice of except to dish up in the same old way. I was taught to cook spaghetti sauce from an Italian glassblower who had eight kids. There was a restaurant owner in Stockholm who was persuaded to let me hang about the kitchen and watch how they did it in return for a collection of glass animals I blew for him to represent the fish and game and meat he served in the restaurant ‒ triggers, those kind of pieces are called in the trade. He put them on display, and people in Stockholm began to call the place ‘The Glass Menagerie’. As long as I ate in the kitchen, I could get a free meal whenever I wanted it. Well, it taught me that I didn’t have to take indifferent food for granted, or wait for someone else to prepare better for me. I could do it myself. But mind you, I didn’t say a word about this when I came back to Ireland ‒ anyone who heard me talk about cooking like this would seriously doubt I was a man at all.’

  ‘Not if it was a woman who was doing the listening,’ I answered, and then busied myself among the bottles of his small wine stock.

  He did as he promised ‒ he gave the kitchen to me, only doing the things I asked him to do, and the rest of the time leaning against the chimney wall, drink in hand, watching me with a kind of amused satisfaction. He lighted a second fire in the hearth that faced into the kitchen, and we ate at a table placed before it. There was a Rhine wine, and cherries for dessert, and Grand Marnier with the coffee he brewed himself. At the end of the meal he stretched luxuriously and leaned back in the chair, pouring more brandy for himself when I refused the proffered bottle.

  ‘Might as well enjoy it,’ he said. ‘In a few weeks there’s going to be no money for things like Grand Marnier and cherries from the Rhone Valley. No money, and even less time to enjoy such things.’

  ‘Why?’ I was growing drowsy, the warmth of the fire and the liqueur reaching to me. It had been the longest, the strangest day, begun in the rainy dawn with eggs and brandy and another man.

  ‘I’m starting a new glassworks with an Englishman I met in Sweden ‒ Tim Henderson’s his name, a real artist in glass ‒ almost,’ he grinned, ‘as good as I am. No Praeger money this time. Just the wee bit of capital we both put in, and a one-furnace glasshouse in an old warehouse his family owns in Bristol, There’ll be just the two of us, and a couple of boys who want to learn. It will never be an assembly line, and we’ll never be rich. In fact, for a few years we’ll probably be bloody poor.’

  ‘Will you live in a garret above the glasshouse?’ I said teasingly.

  ‘You need to learn something about glassmaking, don’t you, allanah? No one lives above a glasshouse, not unless you expect to be roasted in your bed. Warm in winter, but highly dangerous.’

  ‘Why should I learn about glass-making? I’ve managed so far without it,’

  ‘Why, indeed? ‒ and you a Sheridan! The old man must be turning in his grave. Connor will probably take you over the works and it’s something you should see. You should do it for the sake of the men working there too. It could mean quite a lot to some of the older ones to have the most direct descendant of Thomas Sheridan there. Connor will tell you all the technical stuff ‒ how hot the furnace, the proportion of soda, lime and silica. He’ll show you the glassmaker’s tools, and you’ll see several chairs at work ‒ a chair, you’d better know, is the team that works under the master glassblower, who’s called a gaffer. You’ll hear so much your head will spin.’

  ‘It’s spinning now.’

  He ignored the interruption. ‘Connor’s good on all these things. He’s learned it all, and thoroughly. Sheridan Glass is well served, and if he ever got another chance with some money he’d know how to use it. But Connor knows it all with his head, not with his hands or his imagination.’

  ‘Imagination?’ I wondered if I were drunk, or merely tired. His voice fell smooth as silk on my ears, soft, evocative. There was only the firelight in the room, the red heart of it, and the leaping shadows on the walls.

  ‘Think of it,’ he said. ‘Pliny tells a tale of some merchants a few thousand years B.C. who camped on the sands of the River Belus, and how they placed their hot cooking pots on some cakes of natron they were carrying, and in the morning found that the heat of the pots had fused the sand and the soda, forming glass. It’s a nice story, but I’m thinking they must have had a very overcooked dinner for the pots to have been that hot. That’s man-made glass. Then there’s the glass that comes in nature, black obsidian, whole mountains of it. The ancient Mexican tribes shaved themselves with it, and sacrificed their victims to the gods with knives of it. But the Egyptians made the first glass we know of. They had what glass needs ‒ sand, soda and fuel from the acacia groves ‒ and people rich enough to pay for such an expensive item. In the beginning they made their bowls and bottles by forming a liquid fusion of silica and soda about a moulded core of clay and sand that could be poured away when the fusion had cooled to hardness, leaving a hollow shaped vessel of opaque glass. They went on for a long time that way, and then someone discovered that the liquid fusion could be gathered on the end of a hollow iron rod and blown into a bubble, and that it could be blown into moulds so that identical shapes could be made. This was a kind of mass-production, and glass became relatively inexpensive. By reheating the molten bubble every time it began to cool and harden they found that you could keep it in a workable state, and do almost anything you liked with it ‒ stretch it, squeeze it, flatten, cut, tear it. You see …’

  He reached and took up his empty wineglass. ‘If you were making this by the ‘off-hand’ method ‒ that’s entirely by hand ‒ you’d start with heating your batch. That would be silica, soda and lime, or soda and lead, depending on the type o
f glass you wanted. You’d add to the batch any bits and pieces of glass of the same type and colour you had ‒ this is called the cullet and helps speed up the fusion of the raw ingredients. When it’s white hot we go to work ‒ me, the gaffer, and my team. We work around a reheating furnace called a ‘glory-hole’ ‒ in glasshouse humour it’s supposed to be a vision of the future after death. The gatherer starts the whole process by taking up molten glass on the blowing iron, and blows out the first shape. He can elongate this by swinging the blow-rod, but all the time it has to be kept rotating so that it won’t sag out of shape. Now it’s given to the gaffer who’s sitting at his chair with big level arms that let him continue to rotate the blowing-iron with one hand while the other works on shaping the glass with tongs and shears and measuring for size with calipers. The piece goes back into the glory-hole just as many times as it needs to keep it soft and workable. When the stem and foot are shaped the whole thing is transferred to a solid rod called a pontil by pushing the pontil into the base and cracking off the blowing iron. That leaves what’s going to be the drinking edge free. Back it goes into the glory-hole and when it’s workable I rotate it, flare it out and shape it back in, trim it to the height I want it with shears, measure for size, smooth it and trim it, and never stop rotating because gravity will pull it out of shape if I do. The whole art of the glass-blower is judging where and how the glass will fall, and when you first see it, the operation will seem faster than the eye. If it’s to have handles the gatherer will bring me long pulls of glass and they will be curved and stuck on, then the heat of the glory-hole again fuses one to the other. When it’s done it’s held between tongs while I give it a sharp tap to break it free of the pontil at the base ‒ that’s why all hand-blown glasses have that hollow under their foot. Then it goes into the annealing oven so that it cools very slowly, otherwise it will be too brittle ‒ the outside surface will cool more quickly than the inner core. When it’s cool, it’s ground for smoothness and then I can paint, enamel, engrave, cut ‒ do anything my skill and taste allows for decoration. And if I want to be seditious, I add an engraving of Bonnie Prince Charlie. And you have the Culloden Cup.’

  I stared at the wine-glass still in his hand. Before my eyes he had created it ‒ blown, spun, flattened, trimmed and smoothed it. He had added handles, fashioned from thinly wrought pulls of his molten material, he had engraved it and signed it. I saw the Cup as he had held it that day in Blanche’s shop. Then he set it down on the table between us, and it was nothing more than it had ever been ‒ a plain, inexpensive, mass-produced wine-glass.

  ‘Try to imagine,’ he said, ‘the world without glass. No window glass ‒ if you let in light you had to let in the weather. No eye glasses, and genius would have struggled with fading sight. No telescope for Galileo. No test-tubes for Pasteur … No bulbs for Edison. No world as we know it. That’s glass for you.’

  I stared at him, bemused. His voice and the movements of his hands had woven a kind of hypnotic spell for me. ‘That,’ he said, ‘was what we talked about that night in Copenhagen ‒ all kinds of visionary and foolish things. The world of glass. We must have seemed very young that night. It’s no wonder, is it, that I was drunk on the memory for quite a long time after.’

  He helped me on with my raincoat, and we went outside. The night was calm and still. It was not raining, but moisture dripped from the trees, and the sound of the rain-swollen stream seemed louder than when I had sat beside it just yesterday. The sky was beginning to lighten as the clouds broke. I slid into the M.G. and turned on the ignition. Then Brendan’s hand reached across to mine as it rested on the gear stick, and halted me.

  ‘This is where she died ‒ here, at the bridge.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘It was raining.’ He spoke suddenly, quickly, as if there was a compulsion now, having told me the beginning, that night in Copenhagen, to take me through to its ending. ‘It had rained for four days, and the stream was in flood. It’s an old bridge. It must have been weaker than any of us thought, and the pressure of the water was too much for it. It went all of a sudden ‒ just like that. The most terrible crash, and then the roar of water again. I heard it go, and I ran outside to look at it. I did what I could ‒ I closed the gates and parked my car right here where you are, and turned on the headlights so that they shone through the gates and over on to the road ‒ to warn anyone meaning to come to Castle Tyrell ‒ like this‒’ He reached past me and fumbled with the switches on the dash, and cruelly the beam of the headlights cut the darkness, reaching across the stream to the other bank, picking out the jumbled mass of stone in its bed, the ragged edge where the bridge span abruptly ended, the massive wooden barriers on the road. White water swirled about the big slabs of tumbled stone.

  ‘After I had done that I went and rang Meremount and rang Castle Tyrell. But at Meremount I was too late.

  ‘It was raining very hard, and she always drove too fast. She must have seen the lights, but probably they blinded her. I was in the house when I heard the skid and the crash as the car hit what was left of the parapet of the bridge. She drove a white Mercedes sports model ‒ there was no mistaking it down there among the stones. But the water was much higher that night. The car was half under water and turned on its back. I got down there, but the door had burst open and the force of the water had carried her away. It almost took me too …

  ‘We didn’t find her for hours later, further down the stream. Her poor beautiful face was horribly cut ‒ by the glass from the windscreen, and from being banged against the stones and boulders. Of course the water had washed all the blood away. But she wasn’t killed by the first impact. The verdict was death by drowning.’

  He meant me to ask it; he meant me to know it all. He leaned against the door, quite close to me, waiting for the question.

  ‘Why did you phone Meremount? Did you know she was going to Castle Tyrell?’

  ‘She wasn’t going to Tyrell ‒ I was expecting her here. She was coming here ‒ to me.’

  ‘Here …’ I felt a kind of sickness within me. I knew better now the despairing rage of Connor’s grief; the end of him and Lotti had brought the knowledge of unfaithfulness as well as death.

  ‘I was making a trip to Copenhagen to try to sign up some experienced glassblowers for Sheridan. Lotti simply told me she would go too ‒ a kind of jaunt for her, I suppose it was. A few days in Copenhagen, a few days in London, and she would tell Connor she had spent all the time in London. We were going to fly together that night. It wasn’t the way I wanted it with Lotti ‒ I wanted all of her, not the crumbs from the table. But that’s what was offered, and ‒ like most men would have ‒ I took it.

  ‘After the phone call to Meremount they knew ‒ Connor and Praeger ‒ that I was expecting her here. And they knew why. But at the inquest we all lied ‒ Connor and Otto Praeger and I. Connor and Praeger both said she had been going to Tyrell ‒ that she was going to visit her father before catching a plane later that evening to London. Past this lodge is the shortest route from Meremount to Tyrell. And I ‒ I said I just had time to warn them at Castle Tyrell. I said nothing about phoning Meremount. And Annie ‒ she just said nothing at all. No one asked her, and she just said nothing. There was no one to prove anything different, and no one around here would want to. But Connor and Praeger and I ‒ we’re bound together by the lies we told to protect her and the Sheridans and Praeger from scandal. It would have served no purpose at all for everyone to know the truth.’

  ‘But you told me …’

  ‘I had to. I seem to have made you some kind of scapegoat, someone to bear the consequences of what I helped to happen. When I said I owed a debt, that was what I meant. I thought perhaps I could give them back something through you. But I’ve dragged you back here and perhaps made things worse than they were before ‒ and you’re caught in the mess too. So you had to know.’ He added, ‘I’m sorry.’

  VI

  Only one light showed in the windows of Meremount
as the M.G. emerged from the avenue on to the weedy sweep of gravel before the house ‒ the room next to the hall where Connor had his office. I took the flash-light from the car, but the front door was opened before I began to mount the steps. Connor stood there as if he had waited for some time.

  ‘The front door of every country house in Ireland will be securely bolted at night, and every kitchen door will be on the latch,’ he said as I came close. ‘I thought I’d spare you the trouble of finding out.’

  ‘I’m sorry if I’ve kept you up.’ I moved past him into the crowded, darkened hall. The only light came from the open door to the office. I tried to move on, towards the staircase, but his hand was there at my elbow, urging me towards the office.

  ‘You haven’t kept me up,’ he said. ‘You’re just in time. I’m finishing the brandy.’

  I halted. I could see the desk, the brandy bottle, two glasses, the sofa drawn up before the brightly leaping fire. But the image of Brendan was strong with me, the words he had said still repeated themselves. I couldn’t face Connor, not face him now and still hide what I knew. I couldn’t face the recollection of the brandy we had shared that morning when we had talked without restraint.

  ‘I don’t think so, thanks.’

  The pressure on my arm tightened. ‘Not very sociable tonight, are you?’

  ‘It’s late, Connor. I’m tired. The day began very early ‒ remember?’

  ‘Our day,’ he corrected.

  Now the urging was a definite push. In the doorway of the office he swung me to face him. ‘Our day, Maura. It began as badly as you can imagine anything beginning ‒ with the Old Lady having the attack. But after that there were some of the best hours I’ve ever spent in this house. We ate and we talked and I enjoyed myself. It was a sane, normal thing to do, wasn’t it? ‒ to enjoy being with a beautiful girl. Is it so strange to want more of it? But I suppose time moves quickly for girls like you, doesn’t it, Maura? I haven’t been here all afternoon, so you hurry on to the next man available. Now you’re tired, which means I’m to have no more of your company. Brendan has used up all the energy, has he?’