Edge of Glass Read online

  ‘Easily. You don’t understand how cracked some of these collectors are. And lots of them are very rich. If he’s right about there only ever being three cups made, and they have that kind of historical association, then some of these old boys could go demented about it. Oh, yes, it could fetch a price, all right … What I don’t understand is why Blanche … she knew a good deal more about glass than I’ll ever know. Maura, you were mad not to have told the police. It was exactly the kind of information they were looking for. It has to have been that Irishman! ‒ it all fits. Oh, the gall of the man! ‒ fancy having the nerve to stand there and pay for a letter-opener, and all the time probably having the goblet in one of his raincoat pockets. And I thought how charming he was! He told me he was buying it as a present … Where’s that extension number the Sergeant gave you?’

  I went so far as to lay my hand on the telephone, and then I withdrew it. ‘Mary, I don’t think he meant to steal it.’

  ‘What kind of nonsense is that? Stealing is stealing.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s stolen. I think he means to return it ‒ or tell me where it is … or something,’ I added helplessly.

  ‘You can’t mean to do nothing then? Just sit here and wait for him to make a move. I don’t expect you’ll ever see him again, or the goblet. Stealing is stealing,’ she repeated.

  I twisted the brandy glass nervously in my fingers, trying to find the words to explain something I wasn’t sure of myself.

  ‘But you see, if he’d wanted it so badly, he could have had it for seventy guineas ‒ and made a huge profit on it. He didn’t have to tell me the value of the thing. Why should he? All’s fair between dealers, isn’t it? ‒ and between dealers and customers. You don’t go into a shop or auction room and tell them that something they’ve got is worth a lot more than they’re asking for it. It would have been too easy for him to have taken the Cup from me legitimately, don’t you see?’

  ‘But it wasn’t for sale! That’s why he had to steal it.’

  ‘I put a price on it. He didn’t know till afterwards that it wasn’t for sale.’

  ‘But you wouldn’t have sold it. Not Blanche’s glass!’

  ‘He didn’t know that. And I don’t know it either. One day the shop will have to go, won’t it, Mary? I mean, I can’t keep it on, can I? ‒ and if you don’t … Every antique dealer along the King’s Road must know that the shop won’t last ‒ he could have heard it from any one of them. Why wouldn’t I be just selling off things as the offers are made. Yes, it’s quite possible I would have sold Blanche’s glass.’

  Mary was upset; I could tell from the way she, usually a fastidious and moderate drinker, sloshed another heavy jog of brandy into her glass. Perhaps it was the thought of the shop going that upset her, or the feeling that she had let something rare and valuable that had belonged to Blanche get away from her. The bottle rattled agitatedly against the glass.

  ‘Then you tell me why he did it,’ she said loudly. ‘You tell me why?’

  I took a sip of the brandy, and said carefully, ‘I think he meant me to know it was he who took it. I don’t know why. That will come ‒ very soon now. I think he’ll tell me himself.’

  ‘Well then; he’s a crackpot! Though why any man as good-looking as that would have to do such an extreme thing to make a girl remember him … well! All right ‒ granted that. Now, what do you mean to do about it?’

  ‘Think about it,’ I said. ‘There’s some connection to Blanche … there’s some explanation. I just have to think. It’s odd really, how little I know about Blanche and my father. I just wasn’t very curious. Like Blanche’s collection of glass. Why didn’t we ask her about it, Mary? Why didn’t we?’

  She ignored my question. ‘And if you don’t think of the explanation … what then?’

  ‘On Monday I’ll get back to the police.’

  ‘By Monday you’ll be half way to Spain.’

  ‘So I will.’ I had forgotten that; the journey and even the need for the journey had faded from my mind. ‘Then you’ll get on to the police. Tell them I only just remembered about the man.’

  ‘The Sergeant won’t believe it. They’re not quite fools, you know, in spite of the Great Train Robbery. You could be in trouble for withholding evidence.’

  ‘He can hardly put me in jail when it’s my own goblet that’s been stolen.’

  I had meant to be flippant, but she choked on her drink and looked at me strangely. I began quickly to gather up the dishes to take them to the kitchen. She wasn’t in a hurry to follow me. It was the first time, I believe, that she had finally realised that all that had been Blanche’s property was now mine. It was one of the hundred small deaths of Blanche that I had had to witness.

  Presently she came to join me, her face composed, but stiff. She looked as if perhaps she had shed some tears. She took up the towel to dry the dishes. ‘You’re mad, you know,’ she said. ‘You’re as mad as that man is ‒ whoever he is. It’s just wishful thinking to expect him to tell you …’

  ‘I know,’ I cut in. ‘But all I’m asking is one day. Just one day to try to remember anything that Blanche might ever have said … just anything that might give me a clue before we put the police on to him.’

  She shrugged, and polished the glasses fiercely. ‘Maura, why didn’t you tell me about the Cup as soon as you knew? ‒ just assuming this man was right in what he said about it? I wouldn’t have let it out of my sight ‒ it’s probably far more valuable than anything we’ve ever had in the shop.’

  I sighed. ‘What was I to do? ‒ there wasn’t time to have it verified before I left. There’s been so much to see to. To tell you the truth, I really didn’t know whether to believe him or not, but I knew if I told you you’d worry about it. After all, it’s been in the shop ‒ how long? ‒ Years? When did Blanche find it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she answered slowly. ‘I don’t ever remember her saying a word about it. It could have been here before I came. I wonder where she found it … of course she couldn’t have known anything about its history. But still, she was something of an expert on Sheridan glass. I wonder …’

  The same doubts that assailed me had clutched at her. She was unusually silent as we finished the dishes, her practical nature and loyalty to Blanche visibly doing battle with the strange aura, the inexplicable circumstances that surrounded the Culloden Cup. Hers was a nature not given to doubts or to questionings; she was strongly affected by the thought that Blanche might have withheld knowledge of something of this importance right into death. She was preoccupied as we went through the few business details that needed attention, and her eyes questioned me again as she said good-night and wished me a good journey, and success with the filming in Spain. I went downstairs with her to the street entrance of the flat beside the shop. She walked across the road to the bus stop, and I waited there at the door until she was on the bus. It revived the memory of the man running across the road yesterday morning, and swinging up on the back platform. Possibly that, and the glimpse of him in the pub, would be the only times I ever saw or heard of him, and possibly I was as mad as Mary said I was.

  II

  The telephone began ringing as I went back up the stairs; when I lifted the receiver I heard the voice I had been half-expecting to hear.

  ‘Miss D’Arcy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I have the Culloden Cup.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I’m taking it back to Ireland with me.’

  ‘It’s not yours to take anywhere.’

  ‘It belongs with the Sheridan family.’

  ‘It belonged to my mother.’

  ‘Your mother was a Sheridan, Miss D’Arcy.’

  The words hit me and they hurt as if they were physical blows. Like Mary Hughes, I couldn’t quite accept the fact that Blanche could have withheld something of this importance from me, that she could have left it to the whimsy of chance. I had always accepted without question her own statement that there was no family belong
ing either to herself or my father left in Ireland; I remembered, too, that she had said her name, before she married Eugene D’Arcy, had been Findlay.

  So I said to the man on the phone, ‘You’re mistaken ‒ or lying.’

  ‘I promise you there’s no mistake and no lie. But there’s also no reason why you should take my word for it. Why don’t you come and find out for yourself? The Sheridans are there, Miss D’Arcy ‒ all that’s left of them. I can’t say they’re waiting for you, but I do say that they need you, whether they know it or not. And I’d make a guess that possibly you need them ‒ now.’

  And then, unbelievingly, I heard the click of the receiver.

  ‘No! ‒ wait!’ I jangled the button, and the dial tone answered me. Then I let the receiver drop back into its cradle. I was still standing there, staring at it, trying to sort out what he had said, when it rang again, a minute or so later.

  ‘Now wait a minute,’ I said quickly, knowing who it was. ‘What about ‒’

  He cut in. ‘I neglected to tell you that I didn’t steal the Culloden Cup. I took it ‒ yes. But I left a cheque in the drawer of the desk. It’s not as much as the Culloden would have brought at auction, but it’s about as much as my bank account holds. The rest I’ll have to owe you.’

  ‘You’re taking an awful chance ‒ you could go to gaol.’

  There was a shrug in his tone as he answered. ‘Sure, what’s one more chance? ‒ aren’t I taking a hell of a one right now? I’m going back to Ireland with the Culloden. I swore I’d never set foot in Ireland again, Miss D’Arcy ‒ but you and the Culloden changed that.’

  ‘Why? ‒ why?’

  ‘Good-bye, Miss D’Arcy. I hope to see you again ‒ in Ireland.’ And then once again came the dial tone.

  This time I didn’t stand by the telephone, but went downstairs to the shop. There, right on top of the papers in the narrow first drawer, was the blue cheque slip. I knew the importance, if not the substance, of what the man had been hinting at when I saw the sum it was made out for ‒ fifteen hundred pounds. It took me much longer, sitting there at Blanche’s desk, beneath the little cabinet of Sheridan glass, to decipher the scrawled signature. But at last I had it ‒ Brendan Carroll.

  III

  I made fresh coffee, a large pot of it, and broke into a new packet of cigarettes; then I took them and the hat-box to the sofa in front of the fire. The hat-box was the family safe ‒ I suppose no better and not much worse than the places most people store their papers ‒ Blanche had told me that she didn’t trust safe-deposit vaults since the time she had seen a bank blown to bits during the blitz. In any case, ours was a big Lock & Co. box, and for the first time, as I poured a mug of coffee, I wondered where it had come from. I had been about nine years old when my father had been killed in a jeep crash in Korea; from Blanche’s talk of him, and what I remembered, he hadn’t been a Lock & Co. kind of man. He had had a host of friends who had filled the flat above the shop, most of them journalists, like himself; he had worn rather crumpled tweeds, and so had they. Thinking of that time, I remembered the gift of laughter he had had, the gift of ease and gentleness. I remembered the thick brown-red hair, the freckled skin, and the smile wrinkles about his eyes. I could remember also, seeing it then with a child’s eyes, the desolation in Blanche when he had gone from our lives. He had been a much-loved man, my father. I took the lid off the hat-box gently, feeling glad, somehow, that he hadn’t been a Lock & Co. man.

  The hat-box had had to come down for two reasons. The first and obvious one was that I had to get out my passport for the journey to Spain; but that wouldn’t have needed the pot of coffee and the cigarettes. The more compelling reason now was to find out if the box contained anything that would lend weight to what Brendan Carroll had told me about Blanche.

  I hadn’t been near the hat-box since Blanche had died except to thrust in the death certificate, the simple will she had made, and the small insurance policies of which I had been the beneficiary. In my mind the hat-box still had the association of the horror and shock I had felt on the day when I had come home two hours late from a modelling session and found Blanche unconscious in the easy chair in her room, the hat-box open on the floor beside her. That was the period when the pain had been gaining on her quickly; a nurse was coming three times a day to give her injections, and we both knew that very soon she would have to make the move to a nursing home. We kept putting it off, both of us, and the disease made enormous and uncheckable progress. She had been taken unconscious to the nursing home that night, and there had followed two weeks when she had rare and brief periods of lucidity. If she had meant me to do anything about the papers in the hat-box she had never been able to say so; it had been pushed hurriedly into the cupboard in her room and left there, until now. I put my hand reluctantly on those top papers, knowing that if any evidence existed of Blanche’s family, it would be here.

  It took much longer than I thought, and the coffee grew low in the pot. Business papers were jumbled with personal things ‒ the lease of the shop, an insurance policy my father had taken out before going on his assignment to Korea, and then, heartbreakingly, his letters to Blanche from Korea. I glanced at only a few of them, feeling an intruder into a relationship and a passion that came startlingly to life in my father’s large, impatient script on the faded paper. Of course they had loved ‒ even a child would have known that; what I did not know was how they had loved.

  I thrust the letters back into their package, feeling that they should be destroyed because their special intimacy was a private thing, yet knowing that I would never be the one to snuff out this last and final proof of it.

  There were some pictures of my father, ones that Blanche had shown me years before. I was struck again by my own resemblance to him. There was the picture of them both on the steps at Caxton Hall, he in R.A.F. uniform; Blanche had told me they had been married there, but I had never seen this photo. There was the picture Gene D’Arcy had taken of Blanche outside the shop on the day it had opened, with the big sign above her and only one small writing-table to display in the window. That would have been in 1946. What struck me as odd now was that their personal history seemed all to have begun abruptly in this period of the forties. There were no papers, no photographs from childhood, no photographs of parents, or young people who might have been brothers or sisters. Blanche had told me there was no family belonging to either of them left in Ireland; my father had cousins in Boston whom he had never met, she said. Before this, the fact of their both being so barren in family connections hadn’t appeared strange to me; there had always been so many friends, I hadn’t missed a family.

  Finally, there was the large manilla envelope marked, in Blanche’s hand, Lawrence. I broke the seal without any thought of violating privacy; it was time to know. I flicked through its contents and found there the reason why Blanche and Eugene D’Arcy’s history had seemed to begin from nothing in the early forties; it was clear, and, I suppose unless it happens to be one’s own story, fairly commonplace. There was the registry certificate of the marriage of Blanche Sheridan to Lawrence Findlay in 1939 at Fermoyle, County Tyrell, Ireland; Blanche would have been barely nineteen at that time. Then a record of army allotment payments to Blanche in London. These ended with a letter from a firm of Dublin solicitors informing Blanche that Major Findlay had now designated his mother as his next-of-kin, and future payments would be made to her. The last document relating to Lawrence Findlay was a telegram from Ireland: LAWRENCE HAS BEEN KILLED IN ACTION. It was signed, GERALDINE FINDLAY.

  Strangely, here in this envelope, as if the two events were forever linked in Blanche’s consciousness, was the certificate of her marriage to Eugene D’Arcy. It had taken place about a month after the arrival of the telegram from Geraldine Findlay.

  On it, Blanche’s name was given as Findlay, née Sheridan, and her marital status as ‘widow’.

  I had never seen the certificate before, and I knew why.

  The date of the marriage w
as about a year after I had been born.

  I sat there with the papers spread about me, and wondered if Blanche had ever intended me to see them. It would never be possible to know now if, on the day she slipped into the final coma, the day I had found her with the open hat-box, she had intended to show them to me, or to destroy them. Of course the proof existed in other places ‒ at Caxton Hall and at Somerset House; but would I ever have been likely to check those files unless something like Brendan Carroll’s telephone call had not prompted it? She had waited ‒ how many years? ‒ to tell me. Too long. I wondered why she could seriously have doubted that I would be glad to be my father’s daughter, rather than the legal and perhaps routine child of someone I had never known. All that mattered was to have been loved; perhaps the fact of legitimacy by date mattered more to Blanche’s generation than mine, or mattered in particular family circumstances. I guessed that I found some of the reason for her silence in a letter written about a month after I was born. It bore the heading of another firm of solicitors in Dublin, Swift and O’Neil. It was addressed to Mrs. Lawrence Findlay.

  Dear Madam, Our client, Lady Maude Sheridan, has instructed us to inform you that she is in receipt of your communication regarding the birth of a child to you and Eugene D’Arcy. She further wishes you informed that any other communication received from you will be returned unread.

  The coffee pot was drained, the cigarettes were all smoked, and I was aware, for the first time since the telephone call from Brendan Carroll, of Blanche’s little clock chiming on the mantel. It was three o’clock, and in a few hours it would be time to go. So I returned the papers to the hat-box. I didn’t need any of them with me; everything they contained was now burned upon my memory. I put the Lock & Co. box back in Blanche’s cupboard, and then I went to pack. But I left hanging the things I had prepared to take to Spain, the gay, bright-coloured things to wear in places where the sun always shone; instead I put in my bags the clothes I would need for a rainy spring in Ireland; and when I got into the car I didn’t head south for Lydd and the air-ferry to France, but north to Liverpool and the steamer to Dublin.