Dazzle Patterns Read online

  DAZZLE

  PATTERNS

  ALISON WATT

  A NOVEL

  © Alison Watt 2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical — including photocopying, recording, taping, or through the use of information storage and retrieval systems — without prior written permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright), One Yonge Street, Suite 800, Toronto, ON, Canada, M5E 1E5.

  Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Alberta Media Fund.

  Freehand Books

  515 – 815 1st Street sw Calgary, Alberta T2P 1N3

  www.freehand-books.com

  Book orders: LitDistCo

  8300 Lawson Road Milton, Ontario L9T 0A4

  Telephone: 1-800-591-6250 Fax: 1-800-591-6251

  [email protected] www.litdistco.ca

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Watt, Alison, 1957–, author

  Dazzle patterns / Alison Watt.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-988298-18-4 (softcover).

  ISBN 978-1-988298-19-1 (epub).

  ISBN 978-1-988298-20-7 (pdf)

  I. Title.

  PS8645.A875D39 2017 C813’.6 C2017-903722-6 C2017-903723-4

  Edited by Rosemary Nixon

  Book design by Natalie Olsen, Kisscut Design

  Author photo by Kim Waterman

  Printed on FSC® recycled paper and bound in Canada by Friesens

  To Roxy’s great-granddaughters, Sophie, Heather, Alison, Danielle, Leah, Ashley, Stefani, Sasha, and Lana.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  A Note From the Author

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  1

  FRED STARED INTO THE ORANGE GLOW, turning the blowpipe, waiting for the precise moment to pull it from the molten crucible. The glass was sluggish this morning. The fire not hot as it should be. The Halifax factory hadn’t had good coal since the war started. Fred turned the pipe again, drawing more glass into the gather.

  His father had taught him that glass depended on the coal that fed the kilns as much as on its sand. Both had to reach just the right purity and density. An eddy of worry. Maybe the sluggishness wasn’t the fire. Maybe it was him.

  Fred had been eight years old when, after a year of begging, he was finally allowed to spend the hours after school at the glass workshops in Lauscha with his father, rather than in his mother’s kitchen. His mother had been kneading Schwarzbrot the first day he ran out the door and across the snowy fields to the factory. She’d hugged him hard and kissed him, smelling of yeast and butter and sadness, leaving floured handprints on his cheeks. He was her only child.

  Little Freidrich found his father seated at his bench, the faded cloth of his dark blue work pants stretched over his knees as he pulled an apple wood block from the bucket of water beside him. “It’s not just the raw materials, Freidrich.” Steam rose from the block as his father shaped the white-hot glass in its cup. At the time, Fred had thought of his father as old. He had been only two years older than Fred was now.

  “Yah,” his father addressed the emerging bowl, rolling, rolling, dipping the block again in the water. “It’s the man.”

  Freidrich, sitting on the bench, knees bumping his father’s as he kicked his skinny legs, wasn’t interested in men. He was a little German boy, only interested in trying glass-blowing himself, entering the mystery of creating beauty from grains of sand.

  “These ones,” his father waved the block at the factory around him, “who think they can be masters overnight … they will never be good glass-makers.” He returned the block to the pail. “Do you know why, Freidrich?”

  Freidrich had moved to the furnace, warming himself. He was hoping that if he looked like he was listening, his father would let him blow in the pipe. “Because they think they are in charge. Eingebildet, bigheads.” His father rose, still turning the pipe, “The glass tells you what it needs. You have to listen.”

  His father would leave Lauscha, leave Germany, seven years later because men of lesser skills, from more influential families in town, would be given master status over him.

  Before he could stop himself, Freidrich stepped towards his father, reaching, just to touch the glass below where his father’s left hand held the magical blowpipe. Heat seared his fingers.

  “Nein!” His father threw his pipe on his workbench, the glass dropping onto the sand floor. He grabbed Freidrich’s hand and plunged it in the pail, wetting his sleeve to the elbow, while Freidrich’s tears tracked his floury cheeks. He had cried not only from the pain, but because he felt that his father had already considered him hopelessly eingebildet.

  How young his father had been in those years, just before arriving in a new country with his family. How filled with ambition and optimism he must have been to teach small Freidrich that the nature of a glass-blower was as vital as sand and coal. And now, years later, despite his father’s disappointments, those words rang true.

  The gather was cooling. Fred took it to the glory hole furnace where he would reheat it, return it to the perfect state between liquid and solid. A small dark man pushed past him. “Kraut,” the man said under his breath as he angled his pipe into the furnace, the orange light reflecting off his smeary glasses.

  Fred’s blood rose. His back tensed as he turned to his bench. He fell into concentrated focus, the motions he knew by heart, by hand, by smell and touch, and his anger fell away. He read the glass, watched without thinking, how it moved on the end of his pipe, the minute draining of red heat; he felt its urgency, the precious seconds ticking like the quickening of a new pulse. The glass was ready — Fred could feel up the length of the pipe its eagerness to take form. A small breath to open the belly of the flask … he lifted the pipe to his lips, an eye on the light playing the glass as it thinned.

  2

  CLARE HURRIED DOWN the wide hall of the glass factory lined with open workshops. Her stop at the Red Cross, her talk with Mrs. Beddow, had made her late. It also now made the factory seem a dingy, grey set. A stir of excitement — as if she was breathing fresh air and not the factory fumes of ash, oil, and hot metal. Soon she would be leaving it all behind.

  Men barely looked up as she passed, but the boy
s stared, some shyly, some cockily. Most of them were small. They were not supposed to be younger than fourteen but the ones with soft faces, thin arms, and bony shoulders under their cotton shirts had probably lied, especially if their fathers were dead or overseas.

  Clare turned to the nearest team: Wilf, a young man, pale skin pitted with acne scars; Percy, a wiry older man who had worked there for years; and a red-nosed boy she didn’t recognize, perched on a wooden crate, his lips drawn thin with concentration, small ears pressed close to his newly shaven head. When Percy stepped towards him and pushed the knot of glass on his pipe into the hinged mould, the boy snapped it shut. Percy blew air down the pipe then broke it away and the boy opened the mould, pulled out the bottle with tongs, set it on a low bench, and returned to his crate. Then it was Wilf’s turn to load the boy’s mould with fresh glass. Rumour had it that Wilf had been an apprentice glass-maker before the war. When he came home, he went into the bottle shop and never left. It was said around the factory that his hands weren’t steady enough for glass-blowing, though the only hint of his injuries was the stiff right leg that slowed his movement from the furnace to the boy. The three worked silently as if in a trance, a fluid circular choreography from which a new tonic bottle emerged every minute.

  Jack Bell strode towards Clare. “Did you sleep in this morning?” His eyes peered at Clare out of a narrow face, made longer by the fact that his hair had retreated to a small grey tuft, threaded with a few red strands on the top of his skull.

  “I’m sorry, I missed the trolley. I’ll stay later today.”

  Jack grunted. For a moment Clare worried that he might reprimand her, or worse, ask more questions.

  “I’ll just get on then,” she said.

  “I’ll walk with you. I’m going to shop eight.” Jack fell in step beside her, his gruffness sliding away. “How’s that lad of yours, Leo is it?”

  “I got a letter yesterday. But it was written a month ago.”

  “I hope they’re better at delivering bullets than mail,” Jack said.

  “And Ross, any news?”

  Jack Bell smiled, showing the gaps in his molars. “My nephew? He made it to a gun emplacement, got a grenade in. Killed five of the blonde brutes at once. He’s been recommended for a gold bar. Wish his mother was alive to see it.”

  “She would have been proud,” Clare said. Ross’s mother was Jack’s sister. When she died of a strange wasting disease, Jack and his wife had taken in her boy.

  Ross had grown into a clumsy young man with a large nose and milk-blue eyes. Jack had insisted he start in the glassworks last year. Clare could see, when she passed the workshop, how he had struggled to keep up with the younger boys. He’d seemed bored and was accident prone, constantly dropping pieces.

  One day, passing his workshop, Clare heard a mighty crash. She glanced in the doorway to see Ross, ankle-deep in broken bottles. A tall shelf lay face down on the floor.

  Jack, who had been checking inventory in the workshop, whirled on the boy. “For Christ’s sake, Ross!” Jack pushed the boy backwards to the door of the workshop. “Clumsy lout.”

  Ross had stood inert, his arms dangling at his sides. “I’ll clean up.”

  “Get out,” Jack hissed, “you’d probably break the bloody broom.”

  The boy caught Clare’s eye, his big doughy face miserable. The next week he’d enlisted.

  JACK STOPPED AT A SHOP DOOR. This was the only shop where men still made hand-blown glass. He motioned for Clare to pause. She felt a stab of irritation. Each time he wandered from his office, bored with paperwork, she’d noticed he searched for an audience.

  Four gaffers worked between furnaces in silence, shaping the glass on benches, returning to glory hole furnaces to reheat the glass; blowing, reshaping. The heat that made the men’s foreheads bead left circles of sweat under the arms of their shirts. It warmed Clare’s face.

  As Jack watched the men, Clare sensed how much he missed the work. She glanced down at his hands, which were twitching as if anxious to hold the blowpipe. She had noticed his hands when she came to ask for a job at the glassworks the year before. He’d caught her staring at the scars, old burns.

  “I didn’t always work in the office,” he’d said, splaying his trembling fingers. “Don’t have the steadiness anymore.”

  Clare’s attention was caught by a tall, fair-haired man, moving with wary tenderness between the furnace and his bench. He moved gracefully, as if he were part of the tear-shaped flask he created.

  It was improbable to her, this breathing of molten liquid into solid form, the smallest gestures shaping the glass into something you could fill, drink from, hold in your hand.

  “Do you know what most people don’t realize?” Jack said.

  Here it comes, Clare thought impatiently. What was it about her that drew people into soliloquys? You’re a good listener, Leo had said, his hand travelling from the small of her back up her spine, to linger lightly on the back of her neck. She felt the tingle even as she stood there. She supposed what he said was true. She had never been encouraged to talk much about herself. That wasn’t what her people did.

  “We’d all still be living in caves if it weren’t for glass.” Jack said, without taking his eyes from the furnaces. It wasn’t that she minded Jack’s lectures. But the cold walk from the trolley stop had chilled her and she wanted to get to the packing room, the radiator under her bench, the light flooding in from the long windows. The warm chatter of the girls.

  On her first day Jack had taken her to the yard at the back of the glassworks, where the sand, shipped from Boston, was piled. He’d plunged his hand into it. “Quartz crystals. Nothing else will make perfectly clear glass.” The white sand ran like sugar between his fingers, polished facets shimmering.

  He had led her to the packing room then, where the girls checked the glass for flaws and packed it in straw-filled crates. He’d held up a sapphire-blue glass pitcher. “Here,” he pointed at the seam, “is where you check, to make sure the seam is fused properly.”

  The other girls in the shop had continued their work. Geraldine, an Irish girl from Truro, who lived in Clare’s rooming house and had suggested she apply for a job at the glassworks, smiled, sharing a quick glance with the other girls.

  Any of the other girls could have shown her how to find the fine cracks, the almost invisible bubble that would expand over time, until suddenly, when someone picked up a glass or set a vase on the table, it would shatter.

  THE TALL FAIR GLASS-MAKER sat at the bench, rapped the pipe, and cradled the flask in a pad of wet newsprint in his other hand, as it broke free of the pipe.

  Jack ran his fingers over his head as if searching for the thick red hair which must have grown there once. “Windows, reading glasses, lenses, telescopes, microscopes. We wouldn’t be able to see the planets, the cell.” He hitched up the pants sliding down his thin frame. “From the simplest ingredients.” He swept his arm around the factory. “None of this, our technology, our society, would be here without it.” He set his jaw grimly. “We can’t let it fall into the hands of barbarians.”

  “Barbarians?” Clare was still watching the tall glass-maker, who had set down his flask and risen to gather new glass on his pipe. Despite his long limbs he moved efficiently, almost elegantly about his work, avoiding eye contact with the other men.

  “The Huns,” Jack snapped. His gaze settled on the man Clare watched. Jack nodded towards him, tense-faced. “New man, Baker. He’s making scientific glassware for us. I’ve asked him to come to the packing room. He’s to bring all his work for checking before it’s packed.”

  Clare gave Jack a puzzled look. Normally they didn’t check the hand-blown work.

  “Don’t trust him,” Jack pushed his fists into his pockets. “He’s on probation.”

  CLARE HURRIED ON to the packing room, still thinking of her early morning talk with Mrs. Beddow. It was Clare’s second meeting at the Red Cross office. During the first one she’d had to convin
ce them that she was sure she wanted to go to England. This time she had to convince them that she did indeed have the money for her passage, which she had saved up over a year at the glassworks. She would travel cheaply on a supply ship. But she’d be closer to Leo.

  THE GIRLS IN THE PACKING ROOM clucked in mock disapproval when she appeared at the door.

  “Did you have an assignation?” Jenny gave her a wink and an elbow as she reached into a barrel beside Clare and lifted high an amber goblet. More glass — clear, pale, green, red, blue — lined open shelves above the bench. “Maybe a quick cuddle with that handsome cadet who asked you to dance last weekend?”

  The pale mid-winter faces of the other five girls seated at their benches turned to her avidly. Only Geraldine carried on primly with her work.

  “Yes, in fact. But up close, in the morning light, I could see that he was covered in spots,” Clare said. Jenny giggled. Clare leaned forward and paused for effect, “And when he tried to kiss me, he stuck his tongue almost down my throat.”

  “Eeeww, go away out of that!” Geraldine said.

  The sun rising through the windows at the far end of the long room cascaded over bottles and butter dishes. Coloured shadows spilled onto the bench and stained Geraldine’s face as she turned a jug, searching for flaws.

  Clare could have told them the truth. That she was planning on leaving Halifax, joining the Red Cross efforts in England. She would work in the rest homes, doing whatever she needed to do to be closer to Leo, to be there in case anything happened to him. She was strong, she had assured Mrs. Beddow. She could work in the kitchen, or in the gardens. She could even drive. She drove the carts and sleighs at home on the farm. How different could driving a car be?

  “How do you feel about emptying bedpans?” Mrs. Beddow had asked her.

  The girls would feel betrayed by her taking it into her head to make such a dramatic exit. Already Geraldine was suspicious she was up to something, with her mysterious meetings, and had been badgering her. Well, she’d tell her later today, when they were on their way home on the trolley.

  “There’s a new gaffer,” Clare said, “Fred someone.”