The glasshouse in pieces

An original fictional account of an invented glasshouse relocation.

When I heard that the old glasshouse was being moved, I thought the word was dishonest. I remembered the building as one complete shape: a silver curve holding warmth, wet leaves and the green blur behind its misted panes. A chair could be moved. A glasshouse, I decided, could only remain where it was or be destroyed.

I arrived early on the final day of the work, expecting crashes. Instead, two workers were easing a single pane on to a padded frame. The gap it left was so clean that, from a distance, it looked like another sheet of glass. Their care seemed absurdly slow. I began making notes partly to prove how little was happening.

Closer to the frame, I saw chalk marks beside every joint. One worker wrote C17 on a strip of tape before wrapping a curved pane. Another placed each bolt into a separate compartment of a tray. The marks meant nothing to me, but they belonged to a system. What I had taken for delay began to resemble a kind of reading: the workers appeared to understand a complicated language in the building that I had never noticed.

By midday, most of the glass had gone. The bare iron ribs looked thinner than I remembered, yet their repeated curves were easier to see against the sky. Without the leaves and reflections, the structure appeared both exposed and exact. I could now imagine how its pieces might be fitted together again, although I could not imagine the old warmth returning with them.

Late in the afternoon, the final section was lifted on to a lorry. Six plain crates stood where the entrance had been. A notice on the fence showed a small blue outline labelled as the glasshouse's future home in North Gardens. I followed that outline with my finger, but it seemed much too neat to contain the place I remembered.

As the lorry turned out of the gate, sunlight struck one uncovered pane and briefly threw the familiar curved pattern across the empty ground. For that moment, the glasshouse seemed to occupy two places: missing behind me and waiting somewhere ahead.

The narrator's notebook

How does the writer use the account and the notebook entries to shape the narrator's changing judgement of the work? You should also consider whether the ending presents the move mainly as preservation or loss. Support your answer with references to both parts of the text.