Free Shattered by Dick Francis Page B

it.”
    â€œHe’s dead.”
    She sat for a while without moving, and then asked, “And you?” in calm return.
    â€œNot yet,” I said.
    Silence could sometimes shout. She listened to what I would probably ask quite soon, and seemed relaxed and content.
    The workshop was warmed as always by the furnace, even though the roaring fire was held in control for nights and Sundays by a large screen of heat-resistant material.
    Looking at Catherine Dodd’s face above the dark close-fitting leather I most clearly now saw her in terms of glass: saw her in fact so vividly that the urge and desire to work at once couldn’t be stifled. I stood and unclipped the fireproof screen and put it to one side, and fixed instead the smaller flap, which opened to allow access to the tankful of molten glass.
    I pressed extra time into the light switch, overriding the midnight cutoff, and with boringly painful movements took off my jacket and shirt, leaving only normal working gear of bare arms and singlet.
    â€œWhat are you doing?” She sounded alarmed but had no need to be..
    â€œA portrait,” I said. “Sit still.” I turned up the heat in the furnace and sorted out the punty blowing irons I would need, and fetched a workable amount of glass manganese powder which would give me black in color eventually.
    â€œBut your bruises... ,” she protested. “Those marks. They’re terrible.”
    â€œI can’t feel them.”
    I felt nothing indeed except the rare sort of excitement that came with revelation. I’d burned myself often enough on liquid glass and not felt it. That Sunday night the concept of one detective darkly achieving insight into the sins of others, and then the possibility that good could rise above sin and fly, these drifting thoughts set up in me in effect a mental anesthesia, so that I could bleed and suffer on one level and feel it only later after the flame of imagination had done its stuff. Sometimes in the disengagement from this sort of thing, the vision had shrunk to disappointment and ash, and when that happened I would leave the no-good piece on the marver table and not handle it carefully into an annealing oven. After a while, its unresolved internal strains would cause it to self-destruct, to come to pieces dramatically with a cracking noise; to splinter, to fragment... to shatter.
    It could be for onlookers an unnerving experience, to see an apparently solid object disintegrate for no visible reason. For me the splitting apart symbolized merely the fading and insufficiency of the original thought. On that particular Sunday I had no doubts or hesitation, and I gathered glass in muscle-straining amounts that even on ordinary days would have taxed my ability.
    That night I made Catherine Dodd in three pieces that later I would join together. I made not a literal lifelike sculpture of her head, but an abstract of her daily occupation. I made it basically as a soaring upward spread of wings, black and shining at the base, rising through a black, white and clear center to a high rising pinion with streaks of gold shining to the top.
    The gold fascinated my subject.
    â€œIs it real gold?”
    â€œIron pyrites. But real gold would melt the same way ... only I used all I had a week ago.”
    I gently held the fragile top wing in layers of heatproof fiber and laid it carefully in one of the six annealing ovens, and only then, with all three sections safely cooling, could I hardly bear the strains in my own limbs and felt too like cracking apart myself.
    Catherine stood up and took a while to speak. Eventually she cleared her throat and asked what I would do with the finished flight of wings and I, coming down to earth from invention, tried prosaically (as on other such occasions) just to say that I would probably make a pedestal for it in the gallery and light it with a spotlight or two to emphasize its shape.
    We both stood looking at each other as if