The Glass Ocean (12 page)

That is who he is looking for. That is who he must find.

He has followed the path of her usual errands, through narrow streets and alleys upon the turnings of which the harbor may be seen, to the market, to the bake house, to the fishmonger’s; but her familiar silhouette, the longed-for figure of his sister, dark hair flying out behind her, eludes him. She is not in the yard; she is not in the streets. From the corner where he stands, he can see, in the window of the bedroom they once shared, the shade drawn firmly down. It is well past her time for rising. Certainly she is not there.

He thinks,
She never answered any of my letters.
All those hours, writing. Hiding from Clotilde. Hiding from his fate.

In his distress he does not know whom to ask,
Where is my sister?
He will not ask anyone at all until one evening, by accident, in the rain, he runs into Jamie Humber in Sandgate Street, neighbor of his childhood but a different Jamie Humber, hunched beneath the weight of jetty’s tools, his eyes older than they used to be; and then without even the preamble of a decent greeting he will blurt it out,
Where is Anna? Hast seen her?
—falling, in his anxiety, into the old, childish way of talking; and Jamie Humber will look at him and want to move on; his face will be streaked with dirt because he has been out on the Scaur all day; he is tired, the rain edged with ice stings both of them as they stand awkwardly together beneath the awning of Edward Corner’s, the butcher’s shop. A half dozen slaughtered piglets and a dead goose, hanging in the window, peer over their shoulders, listening eagerly. Leo, too hasty, impatient:
Hast seen her?
Jamie Humber, soft voiced, gentle as ever—
I ain’t seen nowt, Leo. Nowt.
And then Jamie will do what he wants to do, will shrug and move on, in the dark and rain, into the crowd in Market Square and then up the cliff, toward Henrietta Street, and home.

Nowt. I ain’t seen nowt.

Shrugging indifferently, as if it were not he who, as a boy, once scrambled desperately behind her up the twilit Scaur, calling her name, begging her to wait, longing for her indulgent mercy, mercy received and forgotten.

•   •   •

Yes, my father thinks. Sometimes people come back. Sometimes they don’t.

•   •   •

Outside, in the cold, in the shed, where he is attempting to make himself a studio, he wonders where his sister can be. Beneath his preoccupied gaze the penciled lines of his own drawings come together and fall apart, transform into runes, maps, a palimpsest, which, if only he can read it rightly, will reveal the answer. But the answer is not there. There is only Clotilde at the taffrail, Clotilde in the saloon, Clotilde at the spinet, Clotilde bending over to button her boot; Harry Owen with his cigar; Felix Girard, hat over his face, sleeping in the smallboat; and specimens—endless specimens, drawn in exacting detail. My father, while recognizing the skill with which he has worked, nonetheless regards all these with despair.
Where
, he thinks,
is Anna?
He had hoped for her indulgent mercy himself; and finds himself, now that he is unable to claim that mercy, suddenly bereft. It has been brought home to him that he and Clotilde are utterly alone. With the remains of his stipend as
Narcissus
ship’s artist, with Clotilde’s small inheritance (mostly the last proceeds of
Felix’s Girard’s Ghosts of Bain Dzak
), and by selling the few saleable objects from Bury Place that held neither sentimental value for Clotilde nor sufficient worldly value to interest Petrook, they have rented this five-sided, shuddering house above the river, the Birdcage, for one year. Beyond that: the abyss. Sitting by the fire with his bewildered young wife, feeling the house shiver and shake beneath them, Leopold feels their future, too, shuddering and shaking, ready to sink, to slide, to fall, to drown, to be carried, along with the rest of the offal in the River Esk, out into the cold North Sea.

He must work. He does not know what to do. He will not carve jet again, not ever. He will never step foot inside the Dell’oro Jet Works.

But then what?

In the cold, dark, sleeting afternoons he rounds the streets, as if, looking into windows, he will find the solution—will, perhaps, peer into a grocer’s or shoemaker’s or a smithy and see himself looking out, staring back through time from the vantage of some happier and better-ordered future. Round he goes, up Bridge Street past Horne and Richardson, Booksellers, to Grape Lane, skirting the entry of Walker, Hunt, and Simpson, Attnys-at-Law;
he clings
to rough-surfaced, whitewashed walls, guides himself where the lamps have not yet been lit, until he emerges around a corner into Church Street; then up past Jonathan Smallwood’s smithy, Appleton’s brewery, and Jim Watt the chemist’s; past the My Infant Academy, Ann Davis, Proprietress; all the way up to the circle at Tate Hill, where, barely pausing to glance at the purpling line of horizon at the lip of the sea, he skirts the turning to Henrietta Street, makes his way instead down Sandgate Street, past Hugill’s Hairdressers and the Victoria Inn, into the bustle of Market Square, where, pushing through a wooden door heavy at the hinges, he makes his way into the Bird in Hand, settles himself into a dark unnoticed corner, his drawing paper unfolded from within his coat and opened surreptitiously on the bench beside him. The place is filled with fug of smoke, wet steam rising off drying woolens, voices decrying the state of the weather, the state of the state, the state of the neighbors.
What a flirtigiggs she is
, a woman is saying, close to him, by the reeking fire.
She’s browden on un, surely
,
the daft fool.
From farther off, by the counter:
It’s cawd as hell. Better button up them gammashes, Robby.
And then, softly, a whisper almost, carried to him on an eddy in the conversation:
He’ll rue it tomorrow
.
He’ll rue it for sartain.

In his corner my father does what he has always done when he seeks distraction: he draws; with quick absent strokes creates curve of cheek, curl of hair, plump, booted foot, shawl with fringe unraveling across a broad, matronly back. But he is not content; cannot remain absorbed; it itches at him. He cannot get quite right the mole upon the cheek, the angle of the hairpin, the knots in the yarn. This is painful; he turns away. And when he turns away, the twin anguishes from which he has sought momentary escape come rushing back, like brutal jabs—
One! two!
—of the butcher’s knife.

Where is Anna?

What will we do?

Folding up his paper he emerges into the cold, turns left, finally, back to Bridge Street and the acrid stink of the Esk. Leaning above the water, he sees, in the semidark, shadowy objects barely discernable and therefore dreadful, circling, quivering, trembling along the surface, then disappearing into the swift, green-grey rush of the river.

Like us,
he thinks.

What will we do?

•   •   •

All the time, of course, it is right there in front of him, although he does not see it; or rather, perhaps, he sees it without seeing. How many times, walking along Church Street, has he passed, without a second glance, Argument’s Glasswares, with its ambitious glittering window, lighted from below by brilliant, jewel-bright jets of gas? Or, if he happens to be walking on the opposite side of the street, the somewhat darker but no less crammed shop front of Argument’s chief competitor-in-trade, William Cloverdale? Perhaps the translucence of the glass has allowed it to hide itself from him; perhaps that is why, passing these windows, he has not looked inside, at and then
past
the wares—the everyday glasses and plates, the wine goblets, the candy dishes, the deep green and burgundy decanters, the vases and goblets, the figurines, the paperweights, and other, more fanciful creations—to see the glow of the ovens beyond, the flare of the fires, the white-hot, rotating globes and cylinders of glass,
the objects being made.

What, after all, is my father, if not a maker of objects? A creator of things from nothing? Despite the lessons of his cousin, Giorgio Dell’oro, it seems clear that my father still does not, at this time, comprehend his own true nature. He is still searching.

In the end it is my mother who sees, and understands. On one of her few excursions outside the Birdcage, on the rare day cold but clear, strolling down Church Street in her blue shawl and fur muff, averting her eyes from views of the sea, Clotilde pauses, just for a moment, in front of a window, to rest; the window happens to belong to Argument’s Glasswares. The name on the door, Thomas Argument, means nothing to her, although it would to my father, were he to notice it, since Thomas Argument is the son of Argument the knacker, whose yard Leopold walked past many times, as a boy, on his way from Henrietta Street down to the Scaur, and vice versa. The Arguments are an old Whitby family; Thomas is not the first to resent the family trade but he is the first to succeed in leaving it. He fought to leave it, tooth and claw; to remove himself from it and to remove it from himself, to eradicate, from his very being, even the faintest clinging molecule of the knacker’s yard. He is a fiercely competitive man—the brightness of the gas lighting in his window being directly proportional to the nearness, in time, of the reek of rendered livestock, the rattle of disarticulated skeletons, in his past. Can the brightness of the light blind the passersby to the too-close proximity of corpses? Can pure white heat burn away the stink of death? Thomas Argument thinks so. He stakes his livelihood upon it. The gaslight in his window, in the evening, is dazzling white, dazzling hot, and it is reflected, magnified, ferociously, again and again, in a hundred faceted surfaces of glass.

But it is still early afternoon when Clotilde rests against Argument’s window, so the gas jets aren’t yet lit. All she sees in that vast and flawless pane is an unexpected and therefore unbearable reflection of the sea. It is because of this—to escape the sea—that she opens the door of Argument’s Glasswares and ducks inside. As she does, a tiny bell jingles merrily above her head. Immediately she is absorbed into a world shadowless and clear, sharp and sharply articulated; she must blink several times, so intense is the winter sunlight refracted in shelf upon shelf (the shelves, extending from floor to ceiling, are much taller than my mother is) of Thomas Argument’s pitchers and sugar bowls, his saltcellars, his magnifying glasses, his oil lamps, his hourglasses and pipes, his glazed boxes and dangling chandeliers, his millefiori paperweights and parti-colored perfume bottles, his sherry glasses and wine glasses and brandy snifters . . . and his mirrors.

In Whitby Thomas Argument is known for his mirrors. He makes them himself, casting the glass in his shop, painting the silver foil on the backs of the plates with his own brush. This is part of the competitiveness of Thomas Argument: his mirrors must contain no flaws, no warps, no blurs, no bubbles. His rival across the street, William Cloverdale, makes mirrors, too; once Thomas Argument, who looks very closely into things, found a bubble in one of Cloverdale’s mirrors, and this, for Argument, was a triumph.
A bubble in glass is a great misfortune, sir, a great misfortune, madam,
Argument has been known to tell his customers,
because a bubble, madam, is a flaw; and what is flawed is fragile; and what is fragile can break—never forget it.
Argument has certainly never let Cloverdale forget it, referring, whenever they meet, to the
misfortunate bubble.
Of course it is unpleasant; Thomas Argument is not always a pleasant man. But his mirrors are very good, this even William Cloverdale must concede. Argument makes mirrors that can turn a single, poor room into an endless suite, a dark claustrophobic hallway into a maze. Light, reflected in his mirrors, is more vivid; colors are brighter; shadows more dense; faces more beautiful; images are multiplied, fragmented, reduced, distorted . . . But my mother has not heard about Thomas Argument’s mirrors, and, overwhelmed, she does not notice them, hanging along the back wall of the shop (the better to reflect, to magnify, to multiply Argument’s wares, which are vast enough in any case), until it is too late—until she suddenly finds herself a hundred times reflected (a small woman, blond, pale, astonished), staring over her own shoulder, a hundred times, into the cold, unblinking blue eye of her enemy, the sea.

She gasps; cries out one or two words that she will not remember but that sound (Thomas Argument will tell her later) like
My Papa!
or, perhaps, more puzzlingly, the contradictory
Not my Papa!
Then she faints (her collapse reflected a hundred times in a hundred reflecting surfaces); sags against Argument’s crowded shelves, but so gently that nothing falls, nothing breaks; there is just an ominous shiver, followed by the soft, high-pitched, troubled sighing of glass.

•   •   •

When she returns to herself (this strange expression implying she has lost herself somewhere—and perhaps she has—or perhaps she will) she finds she is no longer in the bright main room of the shop, with its relentless light and its vertiginous shelves of glass, but in another room, darker; the light here filtered through thick, drawn curtains, a vigorous fire burning on the hearth. It is warm—almost too warm. Someone has laid her on a couch thick with pillows and tapestries; someone (the same someone?) has removed from her feet the clever little black boots that her father bought her in France. Her skirts are disarranged, her stockings exposed, but nonetheless, in this close and thickly carpeted space, she feels cosseted, wrapped, strangely protected. She feels (for the first time, perhaps, since the day Felix Girard disappeared from the decks of the
Narcissus
): safe.

Madam,
Thomas Argument says to her,
you frightened me.

Clotilde starts. In the semidarkness she has been unaware of Thomas Argument, except as a mysterious rescuing presence, a cosseter-in-wraps, an unseen remover-of-boots; now, suddenly, she realizes he has been sitting behind her, in a low, leather chair, all along, watching. She does not know how long he has watched her, and the sudden consciousness that it may have been a very long time fills her with shame. She colors, and is briefly confused about everything: who she is, where she is, who Thomas Argument is. She is confused at being addressed as a married woman. In her faint she has momentarily forgotten about Leopold, about her marriage.
Who does he mean? Madam who?
But the ring is there on her finger—evidence, clearly. Clearly Thomas Argument has noticed it. He is a man who misses very little; and so, inevitably, he has noticed Clotilde’s confusion, as brief as it is, as quickly disguised. Indeed, he enjoys her confusion, for he already perceives, better than she, everything that it contains. The only question remaining for Thomas Argument is what, if anything, he wants to do about it.