The Yellow Glass Read Online Free PDF Page B

It was a shabby house in a shabby London
street and the inside of it was even shabbier, but I liked Magnus and we needed
shelter.   There was a strong possibility
that Magnus might be in the pub, of course, but he wouldn’t have gone further
than the establishment at the end of the road.   That was partly why I liked him; he wasn’t as hard to read as other
people were.   Magnus was a creature of
habit, of smoke-filled rooms and smudged teapots, black turtle-necks and
ink-stained fingers.   Of darkness.   The only bright thing around Magnus was
Magnus, himself.
    The boss tapped me on the shoulder at the beginning of
Lettice Road.
    “Can we trust this friend of yours, Rosa?   What does he do?”
    “Of course we can trust him, Uncle.   If we couldn’t then he wouldn’t be any friend
of mine, would he?   He was up at
Cambridge with me, in his final year when I was just beginning.   I got to know him when I wrote a piece for
Varsity.”
    “Varsity?   He’s
not a bloody journalist, is he?”
    “Um, well, yes, you could say that.   He edits a small magazine called A Paler Shade of Red .   He puts the whole thing out, in fact:
writing, subbing, funny little cartoon, everything.   I think the whole magazine actually is Magnus.”
    “Whoa . . stop right there.   A Paler
Shade of what?   Is this a home
decoration magazine, flogging paint?   Or
am I right in thinking that your friend Magnus is a bit of a Commie?”
    “Possibly,” I pretended to think about it (knowing
full well that Magnus was an out and out Lefty, if not your actual,
full-throated Commie).   “I’d say he leans
to the left.   But he wouldn’t agree with
smuggling uranium anywhere, you can bet your bottom dollar on that, because
he’s a ban the bomb man.   He’s completely
against all nuclear power, and all fighting, for that matter.   If he’d been old enough to fight in the war,
he wouldn’t have.”  
    Uncle Tristram looked exasperated and hesitated, as if
to hike all the way back up the Kings Road to the land where taxis plied their
trade and people fought wars when they were told to.
    So, I marched up to the front door of Magnus’ two-room
flat and knocked, hard, on it.   Magnus
opened up immediately, as if he’d been skulking behind the door.   He looked like a man who’d been to a funeral
and forgotten to tell his hair: layers of black wool and dusty black corduroy,
trousers tucked into black socks, hands even swathed in horrible, possibly
home-made, black fingerless mittens, and his pink complexion and luminous,
strawberry- blond hair perched on top of all that bulk.   I looked a bit closer.
    “You’ve grown a goatee, Magnus,” I said.
    He peered at me and his face got pinker.
    “You’ve got no shoes on, Rosa.”
    Before I could reply to this polite observation, my
uncle made himself known behind me.
    “Good evening,” he said, sticking out his hand, “I’m
Rosa’s uncle.   We’ve taken a tumble in the
river and we wondered if we might warm up a bit in front of your fire.”
    Magnus hesitated to shake his hand and I could tell
that he had my stocking-tops in his head and was striving, manfully, to make
sense of them.  
    “He is ,
Magnus.   My uncle.   He’s married to my aunt and all that.”
    He clasped Uncle Tristram’s hand, briefly and stepped
away from the door.
    “You’d best come in then,” he said.

 
    There’s something I’ve neglected to tell you.   It shouldn’t make any difference but, life
being life and Britain being the class-ridden snake-pit that it patently is, it
struck me - as I put on a pair of Magnus’ enormous black slacks and a scratchy,
black turtle-neck - that it probably would.   You see, Uncle Tristram Upshott is, actually, the Honourable Tristram
Upshott because his father is an honest to goodness Lord.   And Magnus is from Hull.   Of course, Cambridge was over-run with
Honourable types but, if I remember correctly (and I always do), Magnus hated
all of them.