‘What on earth did you do?’ I whispered. ‘I’d have gone crazy.’
‘I think I must have done. The next few months are a blur. I missed them so much, Fran–Shona and Olivia. And then I wasn’t earning enough to pay the rent and had trouble with my benefits, and the landlord’s patience ran out.’
‘Why didn’t you go back to Glasgow?’
‘I nearly did, but by now Mam was dead–she died a few weeks before Olivia was born. I knew Dad wouldn’t want me living at home, and anyway, I hadn’t seen him since the funeral. My job in Glasgow would have been filled and it would have been like admitting failure to go back to do nothing.
‘Looking back now, I can see I was grieving–for Mam and for Shona and Olivia, and I couldn’t cope with it all, couldn’t concentrate on anything. I made mistakes on the till in the supermarket, then couldn’t be bothered to turn up at all. Finally, the landlord locked me out of the flat with virtually nothing. That night, I went to the Sally Army hostel in Westminster. The next morning, I decided I’d give London one more week, then I’d ring Dad and ask him to send me the train fare home. It was the day after that when I saw the ad on the door of
Minster Glass
. Your father offered me the job on the spot.’
‘That’s amazing,’ I said quietly. No wonder he was so loyal to Dad.
‘For a while he let me kip in the flat, but I could see he didn’t take to having a lodger. A customer heard I was looking for somewhere. She had a friend in Lambeth who wanted to sublet her flat while she went to live in Spain. I grabbed at it. The area’s a bit rundown but the flat’s been perfect for me.’
‘And you haven’t seen Olivia or Shona since?’
‘No,’ he said quietly. ‘I wrote to tell Shona my new address and after a couple of weeks I had a long letter back saying all the things she should have said to my face. That she was sorry but she knew it wasn’t going to work out and there was no point in us seeing each other any more. Her dad’s latest operation had been successful, but he was still very unwell. They were going to stay in Melbourne and she said again, I shouldn’t come to find her. The only other time I’ve heard from her was when Olivia was one. That’s when Shona sent me the photograph.’
He eased it out of his wallet again and we looked at it together. ‘Shona wrote that Olivia looked like she did at that age. No trace of me, then.’ He sounded bitter.
I stared down at this little lost angel. Of course, Olivia wouldn’t look like this any more–eleven years had passed–and yet the photo of this gorgeous little girl represented something eternal. Loss. The faded nature of the print distanced her further in place and time, like one of those children lost to us on earth who never grow up, but exist in some happy limbo of our imaginations, out of our reach.
As I passed the photo back to Zac his expression was lifeless.
‘Have you never tried to see her?’
‘No. I was broke, though if Shona hadn’t been so definite that I shouldn’t go, I’d have got the money from somewhere. But she didn’t want me to come. I kept having bad dreams about turning up on her doorstep like a mad person and Shona’s family chasing me away. I have my pride.’
‘You shouldn’t allow pride to get in the way of you seeing your daughter, Zac,’ I said stoutly.
He thought for a moment. ‘Maybe not, but it’s hard to go where I’m not wanted. And Shona may be married now. That could be awkward, me turning up and eyeballing another bloke.’
‘Do you still…love her, Zac?’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t know how I’d feel though, if I saw her again. Not that there’s much question of that. I don’t know where they are.’
‘It should be possible to track them down.’ I felt angry on his behalf. I didn’t see why Zac shouldn’t be allowed to see his daughter. ‘Did you never write to Shona and actually demand to see Olivia? Surely you have legal rights.’
‘I don’t think I do. It’s probably easier for everybody, this way.’ He sounded defeated and that made me sad. As he drank the last of his beer, I noted his strong fingers around the bottle were scarred, the nails cut short. And yet I’d seen them handle fragile shards of sparkling glass, paint delicate details of lips and eyes and flower petals, could imagine him holding the hand of a small child.
And he dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth and the top of it reached to heaven; and behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it!
Genesis
XXVIII
. 12.
I slept fitfully that night, haunted by dreams of a lost child. I remember the first drear lightening of the sky and, next, the ringing phone dragging me out of a deep sleep to bright sunlight. I saw with horror that it was ten o’clock.
‘I’m
so
sorry about cancelling Wednesday,’ Jo’s voice said, when I picked up the phone. ‘I wondered if you were free today? I thought I’d be busy this weekend, but my arrangements fell through. Then when I rang Mum this morning, thinking I’d go down there for lunch, she said I couldn’t, that they were going out!’
I had to laugh at Jo’s indignant tone. I had vaguely thought of spending my Sunday sorting through more
Minster Glass
papers until it was time to go to the hospital, but now I heard myself say, ‘I haven’t been to the Tate for years. Would you like to do that?’ I had a hankering to see my beloved
King Cophetua
painting once more.
‘That’s a great idea,’ she said. ‘How was Friday, by the way, with Ben?’
‘Interesting,’ I replied, explaining about going back to his flat. ‘There was another couple there. Michael, from the choir, and a violinist called Nina.’
‘But you liked him?’ she pursued.
‘Yes,’ I told her, adding firmly, ‘but he’s just a friend.’
I felt such relief to see that
King Cophetua
was hanging in its usual place. I’d have felt indignant if they’d lent it out to some exhibition. We gazed at Burne-Jones’s lovely beggar maid, regal, untouchable, the King worshipping unheeded at her feet, and I puzzled again why my father hadn’t been able to bear the poster hanging in my room.
Jo was more attracted to
The Golden Stairs
, an enigmatic painting of eighteen lovely women descending a gold staircase. ‘They’re like enchanted spirits in a dream,’ she said with a sigh.
‘Burne-Jones only used one model for the bodies,’ I said. ‘Isn’t that funny? She was an Italian named Antonia Caiva.’ Many of the faces though were of different women Burne-Jones knew. ‘It’s as though he’s raising them to the status of angels, isn’t it? Look, this one at the top is Burne-Jones’s daughter Margaret, whom he adored. Here is Frances Graham, whom he was devoted to at the time, and this is May Morris, William Morris’s daughter, with whom Ruskin and George Bernard Shaw and Stanley Baldwin all fell in love.’
‘How wonderful to be beautiful and to inspire that kind of love,’ Jo sighed as we left. I was about to make some light reply when I saw that she meant it.
‘Jo, you must know that’s nonsense. You’d be in danger of becoming a “thing”, an object of desire instead of a person. I should think May Morris came to find all the worship very irritating. She was said to be a discontented person.’
‘Still, being worshipped sounds all right to me.’
Jo seemed so miserable that I asked her, ‘Is something wrong?’
‘Oh, nothing,’ she said, shrugging. ‘Don’t listen to me. I’m just having an off-day. I don’t even matter to my parents today.’ We both laughed.
I squeezed her arm. ‘You’re nice exactly the way you are,’ I said.
‘Thanks,’ she said, ‘and I suppose I’m…I don’t know, a useful person. But I’d rather be pretty. Like you.’ Her smile was sad.
‘Now you’re making me cross,’ I said. ‘You’re lovely. And I don’t think I’m pretty as you call it, at all.’
She laughed. ‘Will you come and have some lunch?’ she asked me. ‘Effie rang from work after I got off the phone to you. She hasn’t got anyone to help this afternoon so I said I’d go in at three, but…’
‘I ought to see Dad then, anyway,’ I said quickly, ‘but lunch would be great.’ We stopped at a little supermarket to buy a few things.
Jo’s parents’ flat was on the first floor of an immensely solid Edwardian mansion block with a wide, carpeted communal staircase. The flat itself was much the same as I remembered it, opulently decorated with Sanderson-print wallpaper and formal brocade curtains tied back to let in what light could be gleaned from the gloomy street.
We ate in the kitchen, overlooking a communal garden where two women in full Islamic dress sat on a bench, talking animatedly. Three tiny dark-eyed children, the girls in white dresses, played on the grass nearby.
‘It’s funny,’ said Jo, passing me the bowl of green salad, ‘I always planned that by the time I was thirty I’d have children of my own. And there’s not even the remotest possibility on the horizon. Do you ever want kids, Fran?’
I grimaced. ‘The idea terrifies me. Think of my weird upbringing. Suppose I messed up too?’
Jo put down her fork and knotted her fingers together, frowning. ‘Your dad did his best though, Fran. It’s not his fault that your mum died.’
‘I suppose not. But it was his fault that he erased all memory of her, leaving me with…a void.’ I remembered my conversation with Zac yesterday. His girlfriend Shona had done the same thing with their daughter. Deprived her of a father.
‘Did your parents ever say anything about my mother?’ I wondered suddenly. ‘I mean, Dad must have spoken to other grown-ups about her sometimes. I once heard one of the teachers ask about her.’
Jo, mouth full, shook her head slowly. It had always amazed me as a child how much power grown-ups had in situations where I felt quite helpless. I remembered how swiftly Dad dismissed my first piano teacher when I told him how the wretched woman struck my hand with a ruler if I played a wrong note. I had worried about the matter for weeks, frightened that he would belittle my suffering if I told him. But parents would keep things from you too, as I well knew, and secrets they thought small came to assume giant proportions. Mrs Pryde had intimated she knew exactly why a quiet, studious girl called Kathy hadn’t returned to school after half-term one hot summer–but ‘it wouldn’t be fair to her mother to spread it about, darlings,’ was all she’d say when Jo begged to be told.
‘What about the Kathy Maybury thing?’ I asked Jo, who looked understandably puzzled at the sudden change of subject. ‘Do you remember, we imagined she must be pregnant, or messed up on drugs, or that she had murdered somebody?’
‘Oh, Kathy. It was ridiculous how secretive everyone was. It sounds so normal now. The poor girl had just been working too hard, made herself ill. But everybody thought it was terrible back then, a nervous breakdown. It marked you as a failure. In fact, she just switched schools after the summer holidays. Mum heard she did really well in the end.’
The phrase ‘ill with grief’ floated through my mind. It was from Laura Brownlow’s journal and Laura had been speaking about her mother. ‘Have I told you about this diary I found?’ I asked Jo now. She shook her head, pushing her plate away with half her food uneaten. I explained.
‘Laura’s mother, Theodora, lost two children to disease. Clearly something broke inside her, but no one knew how to deal with that then.’
‘It must have been unimaginably awful,’ said Jo, her eyes huge with concern. ‘Yet people in those days said losing their children must be the will of God.’
‘It does sound callous to us today, doesn’t it? But how else could they deal with it when there was no cure for common childhood diseases? Laura’s parents’ faith was what kept them going. Think of those gravestones referring to children “fallen asleep” or graves with statues of children resting in the arms of angels. It seems sentimental to us now, but it must have helped parents express their grief.’
A cry came up from the little party in the garden below. The tiny boy had fallen and lay weeping. One of the women scooped him up and stood rocking him in her arms as though he were the most precious thing in the world. I glanced at Jo. Her expression was troubled. She looked down at her watch, said, ‘We’ve got another hour,’ then stood up and started clearing away plates with what seemed unnecessary haste.
At her request I made us a pot of tea. ‘Have you practised for choir tomorrow at all?’ I asked. ‘Ben’s sure to notice. He’s grumbling about people sight-reading at rehearsals.’
‘Haven’t had time,’ she said crossly. ‘Anyway, we don’t have a piano like you. I should have ordered one of those tapes Val was offering, but I didn’t realise it was all going to be so serious.’
‘Was the last conductor like this?’ I said.
‘No, much more easygoing. We thought Ben would be, too. He took us for a trial rehearsal back in June and he seemed very relaxed.’
‘But now he seems more serious about it?’
‘Yes, he’s definitely more ambitious than we imagined. The thing is, a lot of people only come because they enjoy singing. Most of us aren’t musicians or anything. We don’t want to spend all our spare time practising. People won’t like the conductor pushing them too hard.’
‘And you think Ben’s doing that?’
‘Possibly. We’ll see how he is tomorrow. But if he carries on like this, I don’t think I’ll enjoy going.’
‘That’s a shame,’ I said. On a wicked impulse I added, ‘Dominic will miss you.’
‘Don’t be silly.’
‘He will. He can’t take his eyes off you.’
‘Rubbish. He’s just friendly. He’s never given the slightest—’
‘Trust me, I notice these things. Not with regard to myself, unfortunately, but with other people.’
She smiled sadly and started to pull at a hang-nail on her thumb. ‘He’s a very nice man. But I think you’re wrong and, anyway, I’m not interested.’
I thought of Dominic, one of those instantly likeable men, who shone with goodness and honesty. He was nice-looking, too. Not classically handsome or, it struck me now, sexy, like Ben. He wasn’t aware of his attractiveness in the way Ben was. He was just someone you warmed to instantly. A lovely person, who’d suit Jo down to the ground.
‘Why aren’t you interested?’ I insisted, but found I’d gone too far.
She ripped at the hang-nail and it tore off. Blood welled up. ‘Oh, whoever knows why someone is or isn’t attracted to someone! I can’t explain it.’
‘Sorry,’ I said, but instead of apologising profusely as she usually did if she feared she had caused offence, she merely sucked at her thumb while pouring the tea, a self-absorbed expression on her face.
She plonked a mug in front of me.
‘So how’s Amber getting on?’ she asked, sitting down.
‘Oh, she’s going great guns,’ I replied. ‘Got Zac twisted around her little finger. He’s really impressed with her progress. Do you know, she created designs for two children’s nursery windows, and they’re beautiful.’
‘I’m so glad,’ Jo said, and it was the old, upbeat Jo again, eyes shining. ‘I can see it’s made a real difference to her. I don’t think life at the hostel is much easier for her, but she seems to be taking it better. She was going shopping for some clothes yesterday. I wonder what she’s got for herself.’
‘Not a great deal, on what I can pay her,’ I said. ‘Doesn’t she have to pay the hostel rent if she’s earning?’
‘Only something small,’ Jo said. ‘Tell you what, have you seen the hostel? If you’ve got time now, you could come in with me, before you go to see your dad.’
‘I’d like that,’ I said.
Just as we were leaving the flat the telephone rang. Jo snatched it up, but when she said, ‘Mum,’ a look of exasperation crossed her face. ‘I’m fine, really. Fran’s here but we’re going out now. I’ve got to work.’
She put the phone down. ‘She was ringing from the party they’ve gone to, worried at the idea of me being here on my own. Honestly.’
I remembered Jo’s tone of indignation, that her parents should have their own lives, and forbore to comment.
The modern brick building that was St Martin’s women’s hostel must have replaced the rather grim 1930s offices I remembered, sometime since I left home. For some reason I had a preconception of bare school-like dormitories or an old-fashioned youth hostel with sets of bunks. It was a pleasant surprise to be shown single rooms that were cheerfully decorated and strewn with female possessions, often with en-suite bathrooms. On the ground floor there was a kitchen and a café which was open for snacks at certain hours, and a big living room with the inevitable TV blaring away in one corner.
‘It’s really lovely,’ I told Jo.
‘It is a temporary home,’ she said. ‘Somewhere the girls can live until they’re set up and ready to move on. We can take about thirty at a time, and, as you might imagine, there’s a waiting list. If they break the rules, they’re out though. We can’t put up with illegal drug use or drunkenness or violence, anything like that.’
Being a Sunday afternoon, there were not many people around. Just a small huddle of girls in a corner of the café drinking fizzy drinks from out of the machine. One of them, dressed in a T-shirt and what looked like pyjama bottoms, leaned against the whitewashed wall smoking a cigarette, her black bobbed hair framing a face the colour of whey but for a slash of scarlet lipstick. She had small pretty features, but a hard twist to her mouth and cavernous dark shadows under her eyes. The look she fastened upon Jo and me showed such disdain that it hurt. The other girls lounging, feet up on the chairs around us, glanced up briefly as Jo said hello.
‘This is my friend Fran. I’m showing her round. Lisa, you know you can’t smoke in here. Take it outside, please.’
There was a tense silence that seemed to go on and on. Then, slowly, Lisa took a last long drag on her cigarette and dropped the butt into a Coke can. She walked off in the direction of the stairs, all eyes on her. Nobody spoke.
‘Well,’ said Jo, to no one in particular, and the tension relaxed.
‘You on tonight, Jo?’ asked one of the other girls, a plump, unhappy-looking blonde with a little girl’s voice, wearing caked make-up that failed to disguise bad acne.
‘That’s right, Cassie,’ replied Jo. ‘Anyone know if Amber’s about? Fran here, her dad owns the shop Amber’s working at.’
The girls glanced at me with more interest. After a moment Cassie said, ‘She and Lisa had a row. Amber went out in a strop. Dunno where.’
‘Ah,’ said Jo. ‘What were they fighting about now?’
‘Oh, same as ever. Lisa calls Amber a runt or something and Amber starts whingeing. She’s such a baby.’
‘Oh, Cassie…’ Jo started to say.