The Girl with the Glass Eye

A fable without fairies

 

THE GIRL WITH THE GLASS EYE

 

 

It was the last box to be opened. The little red package sat at the centre of the white marble table which all the other presents had covered a short time ago. Now the floor was strewn with a brilliant rainbow of paper and tissue.  Lady Osgood beamed in anticipation as her husband picked up the present and handed it to their only child.

 

“This comes all the way from Venice,” he told their daughter. “A young Italian doctor I know had it made for me.”

 

Leon Osgood’s gifts were always curious. Lucy’s eyes widened in anticipation. One of them shone a pretty bright blue. The other was blank, sightless since she had fallen from her horse three years before. Twisting her dark red curls away in a knot at the nape of her neck, she carefully undid the ribbon and lifted the lid.

 

Inside she saw a precious stone. At its centre was a dark circle, and around this a ring of delicately veined cerulean that exactly matched the colour of her seeing eye. The stone had no gold or silver setting, and when she picked it up, its smooth form felt cool in the palm of her hand.

 

“It’s a glass eye,” said her father gently. “When it is fitted no one will know that you can only see with one.”

 

********

 

He held her so tight for a minute that Lucy had to crane her neck to search his face for the reason.  Her gaze settled on his. A look of distraction, absent, fluttered above her head. All that summer, from the very day of her seventeenth birthday in June, they had danced together every night. Now, in the soft orange glow of this September evening, she saw a new expression in his eyes.

 

She knew his touch; his kiss; his smell and his favourite music. She knew his mother, the Princess, and his father, the Prince. She had been their guest at the Palace for several weeks. It seemed to her that Renaldo was her future, and she thought it seemed so to everyone else.  Now he was so close, yet such a long way away.

 

“What is it?” she whispered.

 

He looked down into her round blue eyes, so perfectly matched. He held her gaze for a minute, for the satisfaction of seeing her beautiful face look him straight in the eye. Then he turned away slowly, wincing as he observed that only one of her eyes followed his movement.

 

“I’m going away, Lucy. I’m going to study.”

“I know.”

“When I’m gone..”

“I’ll write.”

“I don’t want you to .. wait for me.  I don’t want a girlfriend.  When I marry, it will be for the public. The whole kingdom will watch me.  You know how it is. Any imperfection, however small, will be blown out of all proportion by the press. You’re the most lovely girl I’ve ever known, but public life is so cruel.. ”

 

He turned round to appeal to the sweet sympathetic face he had grown to love that summer and found himself talking to a gentle breeze.

 

 

******

 

Her Spitfire flashed silver in the rays of the dying sun as she drove off the road to where a cliff stuck out over the sea. She scrambled down the rocks to the sea-shore, the hot tears on her face sparkling red in the sunlight. Howling with rage, she flung the beach stones angrily back at the waves that enveloped her shoes. No-one, in the history of the world, had ever felt so hopeless.

 

How could she face people again as the one eyed reject of Prince Renaldo. All her mother’s love, all her father’s money, all his doctor’s energy, had not been enough to make her ‘normal’ again. This precious glass eye fooled no-one. It was expensive, beautiful and useless. The meanest fisherman’s child was twice as good as her, born with two perfect orbs that danced a subtle tango to carry their bearer through the world.

 

Angrily she reached up her hand and squeezed until she held the brilliant piece of glass in her hand. She flung her arm back and hurled the stone with all her strength into the sea. It rose up high, flashed in the sunlight, entered the water, and sank gently down through the swirling sea to the sandy bed below.

 

Lucy sat on the shore for a long time. The sun had long gone. The sea was still now and its quiet motion calmed her.  She watched the lights bobbing up and down on the fishermen’s boats as they set off for the night’s catch. Snatches of their conversation floated over the water.

 

“.. a long way out to throw the nets.”

“…Fish are staying away from the bay…”

“…a better catch tonight or we’ll be in trouble.”

 

The moon lit up the cove behind Lucy with blue and sepia tones like an old photograph. The magic shapes and shadows that it made cheered her as she rose stiffly to her feet and felt her way up the rocks.

 

*********

 

On the sea-bed fishes swarmed around the curious gleaming ball. Unlike any other pebble, the glass eye winked in the low light. By subtle signals beneath the waves the news of this important discovery spread. A shoal formed, darting towards the shallow water near the shore, missing the fishermen’s nets by a reed’s breadth.

 

The fish swam backwards and forwards over the glass eye, turning suddenly from north to south. They were not hunting for food or travelling. They were waiting, listening for signals. The glass eye shimmered, even in the moonlight beneath the waves. The sea-bed trembled. The waves suspended their endless lapping rhythm. The fish hung motionless in the water.

 

Up above the fishermen argued about how far they should take their boats.

“ .. won’t get anything here. Got to get away from the shore.”

“Wait a bit longer. This is where we usually cast.”

“No we’re too close in I tell you.”

“We’ve been travelling for half an hour. I swear that shore is coming closer.”

 

And so it was. Beneath them the sea-bed shook violently. Deep inside the earth’s huge furnace an explosion of gas sent white fire belching into a fissure between the rocks with such force that the crust of the planet split open like an orange. The very bedrock of the fishermen’s homes parted with a rending yawn to release a torrent of gas and molten rock. For a while the water in the ocean sank soundlessly to the new depths, its glassy surface seeming to tilt away from the shore. Then, with a churning roar, it swept up to the sky and a single mountainous wave approached the shore. Trees, boats, houses, dogs, people and cars were tossed into one boiling stew, thrown inland a mile or so up the river valley, and then abandoned by the ocean like discarded toys.

 

Out at sea, a rusting tanker carrying a load of oil to the big city foundered under giant waves. The captain radioed for help, but there was no response.

 

**********

 

Lucy looked down from the limestone cliff to the blackened remains of the fishing village. Clustered around the bay below were parts of ruined houses, askew like tilted tombstones in a ravaged graveyard. A few desolate children waded the muddy channels that had once been streets. Here and there the post of an old driftwood fence marked the gardens where they would never play again. Lucy’s tears flowed freely from both the seeing and the unseeing eye.

 

The cove where she had run for comfort on that terrible night was black with slicks of oil. Plastic drums and dead fish lay scattered across the beach like the devil’s confetti. A rockfall blocked the old path to this pitchy place. She could no longer reach the sea.

 

The rescue operation was getting under way behind her. Men in hard hats and fluorescent yellow jackets swarmed around white tents that stood out from the black landscape.  Survivors clustered around in knots, no more visible than wormcasts in the sand, their clothes uniformly soiled with mud and oil. It appeared from a distance as if an ant’s nest had been overturned by worker bees.

 

A flash from the ground near her feet caught Lucy’s eye. She bent to pick up its source, a translucent pink stone, clean and cool to the touch, like glass. She could see beneath its surface a cloudy twist, like a wisp of smoke trapped inside. At last, she thought, the earth is showing me her beauty. She put the stone in her pocket, and scanned the ground.  She found another �" a green glass stone, with a greyish streak on one side. Then an orange one with a red heart, a white one enclosing strands of gold and yellow, then a blue and purple stone. Each was a perfect twist of colour, a solid drop of light. Lucy picked up as many as she could and went to join the rescuers.

 

 

***********

 

 

 

Rebuilding the village was long and hard. The villagers were so full of grief at first that it was a surprise when they grew angry with the rescue workers. First they protested that the food from the tents was monotonous and tasteless. Then they complained they had no clean water to wash in, and their toilets were too public. Then they said the clothes they had been sent from the city were for the wrong season.

 

Lucy arranged for winter clothes to come from the north, but the nights grew ever colder and the villagers began to sit around the camp under blankets even when the sun was high in the sky. There was plenty of money to rebuild this village but the will was melting away with the volunteers. A mist of despair hung over the place and infused every effort with defeat.  

 

Lucy devoted herself to improving the food. When this was better the winter clothes arrived, but fights broke out over the best sweaters and jackets. It was difficult to resolve these battles. When everything was a free gift, who should have the best? With no money to purchase a superior life, people used physical force to impose it. In the end the village plumber, who was the largest man there, acquired a pinstripe waistcoat and a scarlet lined tweed jacket. He wore it over tracksuit bottoms with a bowler hat to protect his bald head from the midday sun. He knew that many men coveted his tweed jacket, and slept on it at night.  His wife, who was a very small woman, grew used to wearing a Chanel woollen jacket over a cable-knit sweater that reached to her knees. Everyone was astonished to see how this unfamiliar dress gave her the confidence to reduce even her husband to silence.

 

Meanwhile the houses were still as flat on the ground as the plans to rebuild them.  There were no boats, and nothing to do except forage amongst the oily relics constantly washed in from the sea.  There was a plan to collect the spilt oil from the beach and turn it into tiles for the rooves of the new houses. It was a good plan, and Lucy asked her father’s factory to help, but so far there was nothing to see.

 

***********

The village came back to life at last. The new houses went up slowly because work stopped more than once while the villagers threatened to take each other to court. In the end it was agreed that each house should have the same size and position as before. The architect lamented this retrograde step, but no other agreement could be found. Peace was secured because people who camp life had favoured, like the plumber, were so sure of their new status they felt nothing could take it away. Those who suffered most in the tents, like the banker’s family, were certain that respect would be restored once they returned to what they had before.

 

Lucy moved into the schoolhouse. She did not intend to teach, but she had become so much part of this community that she could not move away just yet.

 

Still the village was not now as it had been. The old port was cleaned up and new boats set out to fish, but the bar was the busiest part of the port. The sound of cards slapping on tables echoed long into the night, and the common currency was murmured grumbling in between the slaps.

 “ Not worth the fuel or the trouble, that’s what I say..”

“..haven’t had a decent haul since the full moon.” 

“..Soon as you go out to fish they take your dole away, so you may as well stay at home and play..”

The people had grown used to living on the money sent to rescue them. There seemed to be no work in the village, except for the women. They looked after their new houses, and their old men and brought their children to Lucy at the school. She looked in the children’s eyes and saw emptiness. Elder brothers and sisters began to drift away from the village.

 

One day Lucy locked the school and took all the children to her cove. They searched all day for the beautiful glass pebbles she knew they would find there, filled their pockets with them, and brought them back to the school.

 

*************

 

When the stones were dry some of their glorious sheen was lost. The children’s interest in their treasure faded. But Lucy sent for a stone polisher. For three weeks, while she conveyed the rudiments of geography, mathematics and physics to her class, the rhythmic crash of the drum turning droned constantly at the back of the room.

 

At last they stopped the noisy old machine and gathered round while Lucy opened it. The stones tumbled out of the sandy mess inside like fireworks bursting out of the night. The children gasped as they reached for the smooth round pebbles, rushing to hold colour after colour up to the light, so they could clearly see the smoky forms inside.

 

They begged to be able to take them home, so Lucy gave each child a favourite stone. She remembered the miracle of the glass eye her father had given her at their age. A plan was forming in her head, that promised the excitement she had seen in the children’s faces when they pulled their stones out of the sand.  She glimpsed the future as clearly as they saw the cloudy twists of smoke inside their precious pebbles.

 

She worked alone at first, taking a coloured stone and gradually twisting a frame of wire around it so that it caught the light when it was worn around the neck. Then she showed the children how to use the wire to turn the stones into bracelets and brooches. They took their handiwork home and some mothers came the next day and asked to make more. Soon they had enough pretty trinkets to take to the town and sell.  Lucy remembered well how all the girls at court had crooned over unusual jewels. What else were jewels but coloured stones from the earth? Now she would offer these treasures that seemed to have been given to the village as a gift from the volcano.

 

 

***********

 

It wasn’t easy to sell them. The wire frames were crude and the working was not fine enough. She took them to a jeweller in town who gasped at the unusual beauty of the glass forms the wire encased, but he told her there were imperfections in the polish that would never pass an expert.  He could not name the material. He had never seen it before. He looked up the pebbles in all the books and toyed with several possibilities: jasper, amethyst, amazonite, arcazite, and quartzite, but none of them seemed quite right.

 

Still the jeweller was intrigued and charmed by Lucy’s story. He offered to give the stones to a professional polisher, who produced a deep lustre in them that took Lucy’s breath away. The jeweller showed Lucy how to use fine gold wire to twist around the pebbles so it enhanced their beauty. Now it was a different story when she tried to sell her necklaces and bracelets.  They created a storm of interest in the fashionable circles in town, so that Lucy was besieged with requests for more. She bought gold wire and tools from her new friend, the jeweller, who agreed to come out to the village with his friend the geologist and see if they could identify the stones at source.

 

The women and their children were waiting eagerly when Lucy arrived with her news. They glowed with pleasure when they heard how eagerly their treasure had been received in town. They listened patiently when the jeweller explained why their first work had been rejected and watched carefully when he taught them how to set the stones off to their best advantage. The most gifted workers applied themselves to the task.  Soon they could knit a fabric of such glittering beauty from the stones and gold wire that even the jeweller was inspired. He sat down to create some new designs, which he hoped would sell like wildfire in his shop.

 

 

********

 

It wasn’t long before they built a factory next to the school. The village became known far and wide for these strange pebbles and the gold wire jewellery that took its name. Curious geologists who came there were unable to identify the material for certain. Some said that the volcanic fire had cast sand into new stones, others that they came from salt, oil and chalk fused at white heat. There was even a theory that the stones were a cargo of marbles that had melted in the blast of lava and cooled into these beautiful forms cast on the shore.

 

The village needed no explanation to thrive on its new treasure. Independence and enthusiasm glowed again at the heart of village life. New opportunities appeared for those who seemed to have none. Both the plumber and the banker’s wives turned out to be remarkably good at this work. They formed an agreeable alliance to supervise production in the burgeoning factory. 

 

Lucy had no desire to leave the village now. It had become the centre of her world. Every day she bent over the polished stones marvelling at the various ways in which they reflected the light back into her face. She began to notice that she could perceive their colour with both her seeing and her sightless eye. Each day the glass reflected the sunlight up at her. Each day she found she could see more.

  

The village treasure began to attract curious visitors.  The bar owner now ran a bed and breakfast. The plumber built a grand new hotel with a fine view of the port. To great excitement one day, Prince Renaldo came to visit the factory. Of course Lucy presented him with a gift. He took a fine yellow and white stone from her, set into knitted gold in the form of a star.  He looked at the stone on its red velvet cloth and thought he had never seen anything more beautiful. He looked up at the girl who had given it and realised he was wrong. Lucy’s blue eyes now danced with life.  This was a woman he would gladly marry. But her husband, a jeweller, was standing by her side. 

Reviews

[Ronnie Treitler]

A wonderful fairy tale for adults. Perfectly charming.