“You asked me that the day after he died,” Priam said impatiently. “The answer is still yes, he said we wouldn’t leave the racetrack until he’d collected some package or other to give to you. And I did give it to you, don’t you remember? I brought it back to Broadway after you’d left it in your raincoat in the car... Well, I’ll see you tomorrow, Gerard. Give my regards to Bon-Bon.”
Also on the evening before Martin’s funeral, Eddie Payne went to his local Catholic church and in the confessional recited his past and present sins, asking for pardon and absolution. He told me this with self-righteousness when I intercepted his condolences to Bon-Bon. He’d tried and tried to get someone else to do his racetrack work, he said, but such was life, he hadn’t succeeded, and he’d have to miss the funeral, and it grieved him sorely as he’d been Martin’s racetrack valet for six or seven years. Eddie, to my disparaging ear, had plucked up half a bottle of dutch courage before stretching out his hand to the phone, and wouldn’t remain long in a state of grace owing to his distance from the fact that he could have more easily got stand-ins to free him to go to that particular funeral than if it had been for his own grandmother.
On the same evening, before Martin’s funeral (though I didn’t learn of it until later), Ed Payne’s daughter, Rose, described to a small group of fascinated and ruthless knaves how to force Gerard Logan to tell them the secret he’d been given at Cheltenham races.
3
On the first Thursday of January, the sixth day of the next thousand years, I, with Priam Jones and four senior jump jockeys, carried Martin into church in his coffin and later delivered him to his grave.
The sun shone on frosty trees. Bon-Bon looked ethereal, Marigold stayed fairly sober, Worthington took off his chauffeur’s cap, baring his bald pate in respect, the four children knocked with their knuckles on the coffin as if they could wake their father inside, Lloyd Baxter read a short but decent eulogy and all the racing world, from the Stewards of the Jockey Club to the men who replaced the divots, everyone crowded into the pews in church and packed the wintry churchyard grass outside, standing on the moss-grown ancient slabs of stone. Martin had been respected, and respects were paid.
The new burial ground lay on a hillside a mile away by hearse and heavy limousines. Among banks of flowers there Bon-Bon cried as the man who’d quarreled with her daily sank into the quiet embracing earth, and I, who’d stage-managed the second farewell party in a month (my mother the other), prosaically checked that the caterers had brought enough hot toddy and that the choristers were paid, along with other mundane greasings of the expensive wheels of death.
After the hundreds who had turned up for Martin had drunk and eaten and had kissed Bon-Bon and left, I sought her out to say my own good-bye. She was standing with Lloyd Baxter, asking about his health. “Do take the pills,” she was saying, and he with embarrassment promised he would. He nodded to me coldly as if he had never brought Dom Pérignon to me for company.
I congratulated Baxter on his eulogy. He received the praise as his due, and stiffly invited me to dine with him in the Wychwood Dragon.
“Don’t go,” Bon-Bon exclaimed to me, alarmed. “Stay here one more night. You and Worthington have tamed the children. Let’s have this one more night of peace.”
Thinking of Martin, I excused myself to Baxter and stayed to help Bon-Bon, and after midnight, when only I was awake, I sat in Martin’s squashy chair in his den and thought intently of him. Thought of his life and of what he’d achieved, and thought eventually about that last day at Cheltenham, and about the videotape and whatever he’d had recorded on it.
I had no minutest idea what he could have known that needed such complex safekeeping. I did see that, much as I thought Bon-Bon a darling and as sweet as her name, she wasn’t the most reticent person on earth. To Bon-Bon a secret would be safe until her next nice chat with her best friend. Many of hers and Martin’s shouting matches had been the result of Bon-Bon repeating publicly what she’d been privately told or overheard about some horse or other’s prospects.
I slouched in Martin’s chair, deep in regret. One had so few close friends in life. None to spare. His personality filled the room to the extent that it seemed that if I turned I would see him standing by his bookcase, looking up some race’s result in the form book. The feeling of his presence was so intense that I actually swiveled his chair around to see, but of course there were only books, row on row, and no Martin.
It was time, I supposed, to make sure the outside doors were locked and to sleep away the last hours in Martin’s house. I’d lent him a couple of books a few weeks earlier on ancient glass-making techniques, and as they were lying on the long table by the sofa, it seemed a good time to pick them up to take home without bothering Bon-Bon too much. One of the things I would most miss was, I thought nostalgically, Martin’s constant interest in historic difficult-to-make goblets and bowls.
In the morning, saying good-bye, I mentioned I was taking the books. “Fine, fine,” Bon-Bon said vaguely. “I wish you weren’t going.”
She was lending me Worthington to drive me in her white runabout to Broadway. “If you weren’t getting your butt out of that house pronto,” Worthington said bluntly as we drove away, “Bon-Bon would catch you like a Venus fly-trap.”
“She’s unhappy,” I protested.
“Sticky, attractive, and once caught, you can’t escape.” Worthington grinned. “Don’t say I haven’t warned you.”
“And Marigold?” I teased him. “How’s the Marigold fly-trap?”
“I can leave her any day I want,” he protested, and drove for miles smiling, as if he believed it.
Stopping to unload me at my gallery door in Broadway, he said more seriously, “I got a low-life investigator to ask about that woman, Rose.” He paused. “He didn’t get much further than you did. Eddie Payne thinks she saw who gave that damned tape to Martin, but I wouldn’t rely on it. Eddie’s afraid of his own daughter, if you ask me.”
I agreed with him on that, and we left it there. My three assistants welcomed me back to a regular workday, and I taught Hickory — as I’d taught Pamela Jane before Christmas — how to collect a third gather of glass, so hot that it was red and semi-liquid, and fell in a heavy teardrop shape that drooped towards the floor (and one’s feet) if one didn’t marver it fast enough on the steel table. He knew how to press its lengthened tip into long heaps of dustlike colors before returning the revolving head into the heat of the furnace to keep the now-heavy chunk of glass at working temperature. I showed him how to gather glass neatly on the end of a blowing iron, before lifting it into the air ready to blow, and how to keep the resulting slightly ballooned shape constant while he continued to develop his ideas towards a final goal.
Hickory watched the continuous process with anxious eyes and said that, like Pamela Jane when she’d tried it, he couldn’t go the whole way.
“Of course not. Practice handling three gathers. You can do two now easily.”
A gather was the amount of molten glass that could be brought out of the tank at one time on the tip of the steel punty rod. A gather could be of any size, according to the skill and strength of the glassblower. Glass in bulk, very heavy, demanded muscle.
Owing to the space limitation of tourist suitcases, few pieces of “Logan Glass” sold in the shop were of more than three gathers. Pamela Jane, to her sorrow, had never quite mastered the swing-upwards-and-blow technique. Irish, in spite of enthusiasm, would never be a top-rated glassblower. Of Hickory, though, I had hopes. He had ease of movement and, most important, a lack of fear.