Bliss, trying to work out the meaning of Marcia’s note, hurries along the promenade, upstream against a tide of outstretched hands balancing little pots, and finds a semicircle of admirers around the maker. The women remain transfixed as Bliss pushes his way deeper into the crowd — seeking what? He has no idea. “Watch the potter,” the note says, and he watches as the strong hands, caked with creamy clay, cup around the brownish red mound as it rises under the pressure of his fingers. The electric wheel, spinning fast, shoots off droplets of water as the potter teases the rising lump, and Bliss turns his attention to the women in the crowd as they are drawn closer.
What’s going on here? he wonders, studying the fascinated faces of the women, as the mound of clay rises like a swelling phallus in the potter’s soft, moist hands, his penetrating blue eyes holding the gaze of each woman in turn — just for a second — just long enough to send a message.
Bliss is looking around the mesmerized crowd of women, wondering how many of them will be rinsing out their underpants when they get back to their hotels, when, almost magically, a perfectly proportioned candle holder complete with crenulated drip tray seems to form itself from the ductile material. Seemingly without taking his eyes off the crowd, the potter lifts the work onto a cardboard disk and stands — teasingly.
“Me, me, me,” call the younger girls who’ve elbowed their way to the front — but he is seeking a bigger catch, and locks eyes with a dark-haired teenager hanging onto her mesmerized mother. With the faintest of nods, he signals that she is the chosen one. Blushing fiercely, she forges a path through the crowd and beams with the bashful joy of a supplicant dragged out of the congregation in St. Peter’s to kiss the Pope’s hem.
For a second the crowd deflates and a few disappointed souls trail away. Others take their place and gravitate towards the wheel as it starts to spin once more.
Over and over the spinning wheel draws the crowd in, until they are glued by the potter’s eyes and hands. Two pots a minute spin off his wheel — vases, mugs, candle holders, egg cups, ashtrays — each as perfect and elaborate as the next, each one warming the heart of the recipient. There’s going to be a lot of blocked toilets tomorrow, Bliss is thinking, when Marcia catches his eye — she is hovering outside the circle and immediately turns her back as he moves to extricate himself from the throng.
“Do you see the way the women watch him?” she hisses, grabbing his arm and steering him away, marching staunchly from the brightly lit quayside towards the moonlit beach. “Doesn’t it make you sick,” she spits, “the way they grovel? He gives them a lump of clay that’ll dry and crack in a few hours, and they treat him like some sort of god.”
“He is giving them more than a pot,” starts Bliss defensively. “He is giving them expectation — that they will be the chosen one. He gives them hope.”
“Huh! And I know what they’re hoping for,” she counters angrily.
“What’s your problem?” he asks, pulling her up sharply. “You don’t own a hotel, do you?”
“Oh, I know all about the hoteliers and their toilets.” She laughs dryly. “No, no hotel.”
“So why do you care?”
“He’s my husband.”
chapter three
Away from the boisterous promenade and the rapt throng surrounding her husband, Marcia drags her feet on the beach. Every attempt on Bliss’s part to get her talking is rebuffed as, head down, she scuffs along the edge of the gently fizzing surf away from the lights of the town.
Be patient, he tells himself as he drags behind, knowing only too well the vexations of dealing with informants, remembering the hours he’s spent doing a dance of a thousand veils with smelly stool pigeons in smoke-filled back rooms of seedy bars, as he pried off each shroud with promises, threats, and rewards. Many proved to be time-wasters, with nothing of substance to offer, holding onto useless snippets with the desperation of a superspy, while others were nothing more than publicity-seeking nutcases. Then there were the altruists, divulging information out of a sense of public duty, throwing off veil after veil with the enthusiasm of a nymphomaniac playing strip poker.
But he also knows, only too well, of the blind alleys, false leads, unwarranted conjecture, and score settling that might turn any informant into a slippery eel, one who could end up writhing around and giving its handler a nasty nip. So it isn’t just the information he seeks — it is the motive behind its disclosure. And there is always a motive. Without a clear knowledge of the motive the information is useless.
Marcia, whatever her information and motive, strings him along until he finally digs in his heals.
“Where are we going?” he demands eventually, and she stops and sits decisively.
“Here.”
She tests his patience for nearly an hour as they sit on the shadowy beach — using the darkness as another veil, making it impossible for him to read her as she dances back and forth between disclosure and concealment. Eventually, stumbling through tears — pain or fear? he wonders, knowing that almost every informant has fear: the fear of exposure and retribution — she twists a rambling trail out of broken promises and wrecked dreams.
Through her tears, Bliss pieces an image of a charismatic young artist barely out of art college, with his young wife and newborn daughter, fêted by the community and the bank, setting up a pottery in a quaint Cotswold backwater — but the idyllic lifestyle they envisioned gradually soured over the years as the bills repeatedly outweighed the receipts.
Working harder, faster, and longer each day, Greg, her potter husband, tried to outrun a tide of cheap imports and domestic oversupply. Slaving sixteen hours or more a day he turned out pots that, together, they painted, glazed, and fired, but he barely kept their heads above water.
“Ooh! Isn’t that lovely,” visitors to the studio would coo, watching with fascination as he threw another masterpiece out of a dull mound of clay, but in the showroom their enthusiasm would quickly wane as they pored over the price tag.
Marcia breaks down completely as she reveals the torture of disenchantment with life — the years of struggling to make ends meet.
“Your husband is so clever. I love his work,” potential clients would enthuse.
“Why don’t you buy it then?” she’d scream inside, knowing that was unfair, knowing her husband’s work was so much more valuable than the mass-market products stamped “Hand painted” by some barefoot kid in a sub-Saharan mud hut.
Marcia’s snivelling continues as she explains how the stack of bills grew over the years, and the banks, initially so enthusiastic in support of such potential, gradually lost confidence and closed in. The cost of heating a kiln, expensive paints and glazes, rent, taxes, gas, advertising, and the expense of driving around the country with an old Volkswagen van full of pots visiting stores, craft markets, and fairs swallowed everything they ever made. There was never enough, until finally she hit on an answer — a way out of the hole they’d slowly sunk into.
The promenade at St-Juan-sur-Mer. No studio to rent, no light and heat to pay for, none of the expensive materials — only clay, costing little more than the price of digging it out of the ground, and each tiny pot used only a few ounces. No breakages in the kiln — no kiln. No shelves of unsold stock in the showroom — no showroom, and no sticker shock at the exorbitant prices, for there were no prices. “It’s absolutely free,” he would declare with a sly smile, yet everyone paid.
However, there is obviously something amiss in nirvana. Marcia’s attitude towards her husband tells Bliss that the apparently flawless resolution of their problems somehow backfired. Is she jealous? he wonders, his mind on the fawning horde of females wilting under her husband’s spell on the promenade. Isn’t jealousy so often the spur that finally forces an informant’s hand? But if that’s the case, what is she trying to tell him? What information can she have that would interest the upholders