The Glass Painter's Daughter (7 page)

‘So how come you let Jo drag you along to the choir?’ he enquired, and I explained about recently coming home and that I’d only bumped into her by accident.

‘Dad owns the stained-glass shop in Greycoat Square,’ I concluded. ‘I came to look at the windows in the church this afternoon.’

‘Ah, so you’ll have met Jeremy Quentin,’ he said. ‘What d’you make of him?’

‘He seems…nice. Is he?’

‘He’s all right.’

He didn’t sound enthusiastic, and I wondered if there was something else there behind his words. At that point we reached the pub.

He held the door open for me and his arm accidentally brushed mine as I went through. Then we were swallowed up in a warm and welcoming crowd of choir members.

I hardly saw Ben again that evening, though once I noticed him standing with two or three other men by the bar, a tall graceful figure deep in animated conversation.

Somebody in the group round a big table moved up to allow me to squash into a corner next to Jo. Dominic got up to fetch me a glass of white wine.

So there I was, in the middle of a throng of people again, friendly people, but all except Jo strangers who would no doubt forget my existence as soon as the evening ended. So many new people, all talking at once, asking me the same questions about how I knew Jo and what I thought of the choir. It was exhausting, bewildering. The wine tasted acidic and I felt panicky, wanting to be alone. Perhaps I’d been wrong to come in the first place. Maybe the choir wasn’t for me.

I stood up to leave as soon as was polite, echoing everyone’s goodbyes, kissing Jo and arranging that I would ring her during the week. When I reached the door, someone touched my arm. It was Ben. I was surprised to see him and asked him if he was leaving too, but no, he had come over specially to say goodbye.

‘We’ll see you next week, won’t we?’ Again, that soul-searching look.

‘Of course,’ I managed to say. All my previous doubts about the choir mysteriously vanished. ‘You told us not to miss any rehearsals.’

‘Wonderful,’ he said warmly. ‘It’s lovely to have you. Take care now.’

The few minutes’ walk home calmed me. Back in the safety of
Minster Glass
, I rejoiced in my own company. But the flat, as ever, was full of echoes. I lay on my bed thinking of Dad, probably asleep, an old man surrounded by other old men in the shiny white hospital sterility. I thought about the windows of St Martin’s Church, about seeing Jo again, about the noisy camaraderie I had briefly been a part of this evening. I’d done nothing–yet a new life was assembling itself around me. I was being swept along by it all. I wasn’t sure how I felt about it.

When I finally fell asleep I dreamed I was cradled in the arms of a great angel flying high over the city, with the flashing jewels of lights, the dark glistening snake of the river, the silver towers of churches, the glint of glass from high-rise offices, all laid out beneath me. So high were we that the only sound I could hear was the rhythmic beating of wings.

Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.

Hebrews XIII. 2.

During school holidays in my late teens, when I wasn’t practising my music or helping Dad in the shop, I used to walk down to the Tate Gallery–now known as Tate Britain–only a few streets south towards the river. My favourite rooms were where the pre-Raphaelite and late-nineteenth-century paintings hung, and the painting I loved above all others was, of course, a Burne-Jones,
King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid
. In it the beggar maid sits in a wooden boudoir staring out at the observer, her bearing, despite her rags, that of a Queen. Below her on the step, the handsome King, his crown doffed in his lap, gazes up at her adoringly. But she will not even look at him. Instead she holds a bunch of anemones, telling him through the flowers that she rejects his love.

This dramatisation of unrequited passion stirred up such deep feelings in me that I read up all about the picture in the book on Burne-Jones that hid the photo of my mother.

It was based on an old legend of a King who found his love for a beautiful beggar maid was greater than all his power and wealth. Burne-Jones probably learned of the legend by reading Tennyson’s poem, ‘The Beggar Maid’, and he cast it in a setting inspired by fifteenth-century Italian painting. He apparently created the picture after a time of considerable strain in his marriage, and some say the artist is the King and the beggar maid Georgiana, his wife, whom he betrayed by his affair with the stormy beauty Mary Zambaco. But others hold that the maid must be Frances Graham, a girl with whom Burne-Jones went on to conduct an intense romantic friendship and who, to his distress, got married in 1883, while he was working on the picture. Did the painting become an expression of his feelings about the loss of Frances?

I bought a poster of
Cophetua
and hung it on my bedroom wall. By then my father, in respect for my womanhood, rarely entered my room, but once he did to give me a magazine that had arrived in the morning post. He stared at my poster with a stunned look on his face. When I asked him what the matter was, he snapped, ‘Nothing,’ and, as ever, the shutters came down.

The next day, when I came home from school, the poster had disappeared and, although this might seem strange, I didn’t even question the matter. I was angry, yes, disturbed certainly, but I had just enough compassion in my selfish teenage soul to realise that my poster had touched some terrible sadness in him. So I bit my lip and let the matter go.

The day after our visit to St Martin’s, Zac arrived at the shop at nine, but didn’t bother to remove his jacket.

‘Fitting some windows this morning,’ he said. ‘Give me a hand getting them in the van?’

‘Oh. Yes, of course.’ This meant that I’d be stuck looking after the shop, but I bit back my complaint and went out to help him polish and pack up two panels representing a pair of gorgeous peacocks, which had been drying in the garage in our yard, then to carry out the sunrise, which he’d finished the day before, and Dad’s Celtic knot to take their place. He backed the van out of the drive at a lick. Locking the garage door, I went through to open the shop.

It was a glorious morning, the kind of morning when I used to shirk my music practice, but today I forced myself to sit in the shop and make suncatchers. We had sold a dragonfly and a fairy yesterday from the line-up in the window and they were easy to replace using Dad’s old pattern-book for inspiration. Cutting out simple glass shapes, edging them with copperfoil and soldering them together to make fairies, birds or butterflies, adding a copper loop to hang them by, came so naturally to me it was almost a meditative task.

The bright sunshine made everything look dirty, so after I’d arranged my suncatchers in the window I found a brush and a soft cloth and set about cleaning the shop, stopping only to sweettalk an indecisive customer into buying a pair of poppy-patterned lampshades as a wedding present for her niece.

The shop obviously hadn’t had a thorough clean for ages, for I was soon coughing at the dust I stirred up with my broom. I wedged the door open to clear the air, then one by one unhooked the items in the window to wipe them over carefully. It was while I was removing our lovely angel from the chains by which she hung that I looked through the window to meet a pair of dark eyes. It was the stray-cat girl I’d seen a few days ago; then she’d seemed wary, now she was agitated. Even before I’d laid the angel on the counter she had moved into the open doorway.

‘Hello,’ I said, trying to sound friendly. ‘Can I help?’

‘You’re not, like, sellin’ it, are you? Oh, please don’t let someone else have it.’ Her voice was shaking and her black-lashed eyes great pools of pleading.

‘I’m only cleaning it,’ I said gently.

‘Oh, I thought…That’s OK then.’ She smiled and it was impossible not to smile back, there was something so sweet and fragile about her. If I’d had to guess her age, I’d have said seventeen or eighteen, but it was hard to tell. Aware of her watching, I laid the angel on the counter and began to work away at the layer of greasy grime.

Now she was in the shop the girl seemed unsure whether to stay or go. I said, ‘You like her, do you? Well, she certainly is lovely. My dad made her. Come and have a proper look.’

Shy again, she stepped inside, glancing about at the mirrors and the lampshades and the shelves of glass like Alice entering Wonderland, her mouth slightly open in amazement. Then she tiptoed, as much as one can tiptoe in trainers, over to the counter. I carefully raised the arched window, tilting it until the light brought it to life, and we studied the angel together.

Clothed in white and pink and gold, the tips of her wings pink also, she stood in a field of flowers, her caramel hair blowing around her heart-shaped face. Dad had made her shortly before I left home, from a design of his own that had a kind of 1970s style, something about the way the hair waved across the face.

‘Do you know anything about how stained-glass windows are made?’ I asked the girl.

She shook her head. ‘No. I…I just like angels. And the glass–it’s so pretty. I really wish I could buy her. Is she a lot of money?’

‘She’s not for sale, I’m afraid,’ I said, and watched disappointment and relief struggle in her countenance. Eventually relief won.

‘At least I can always come and look at her, then.’

‘That’s right. She’ll be here.’

‘You see, she’s my angel.’

Now it was my turn to be confused.

‘Everybody has a guardian angel, didn’t you know? And she’s mine.’

‘I’m sure we could all do with a little extra help in life,’ I said, wanting neither to encourage this unusual line nor to upset the girl.

‘That’s right.’ Her smile transformed her face. All her wariness was gone now. ‘Our angels watch over us wherever we go. So we’re not hurt, see. Or…’ she paused and looked away. ‘They help us if we are hurt.’

She seemed so unhappy suddenly, that I knew she was talking about herself. Oh heck, now she would come out with some terrible story that I wouldn’t know whether to believe and then I wouldn’t know what to do about it.

‘What’s your name?’ I asked, and told her mine.

‘Amber,’ she answered. ‘I live at St Martin’s–you know, the hostel?’

I nodded slowly. ‘My friend works there. Do you know Jo Pryde?’

‘Oh yes, she’s nice.’ This response didn’t surprise me one bit. I couldn’t imagine anyone not liking Jo. ‘I’m just there till I get myself sorted out. Find a job and that.’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Well, Amber, I ought to get on. It’s lovely meeting you.’

‘Thanks for showing me the angel.’ And she was gone, slipping out in a little sparkling cloud of dust. A trick of the light, of course.

I considered the question of guardian angels as I finished cleaning this one, which I must now think of as Amber’s. It was a sentimental idea, something out of a Victorian children’s book. Yet what about all those children who fell in the fire, or under horses’ hooves, or who died of scarlet fever? Were their angels looking the other way at the time? Dad used to talk about angels as a source of inspiration. Sometimes when he’d had a good idea for a design he would say, ‘An angel must have passed overhead.’

Really, I told myself as I hung our angel back in the window, they were beautiful, but the world had moved on. Angels belonged to pictures and stories–and dreams–but surely that was all.

It wasn’t until late afternoon that I heard Zac’s van in the yard. I opened the back door to see him edging a box out of the boot, and ran out to help. I’d forgotten he had collected the bombed-out window. The box bulged dangerously and I grabbed one splitting side. Together we brought it in and rested it on a table.

We stood and looked at it for a moment, then Zac opened the flaps, pushed aside the newspaper and drew out the long twisted section from the top. A piece of glass immediately started to fall away, so he hastily laid the whole thing back into the box.

‘Haven’t got time to look at it now anyway,’ he said, reaching for Dad’s Day Book, but he couldn’t stop himself glancing back at the box with a look of longing.

I shut up shop at five, intending to go straight away to see Dad. When I went to say goodbye to Zac though, I found him lifting strips of glass and lead out of the box and laying them out on a length of creamy lining paper that he’d taped onto the table.

Why couldn’t he have waited? I put down my bag, deciding to see Dad later.

‘Shall I help?’ I asked tentatively and was pleased when Zac smiled.

‘Good at puzzles, are you?’ he said, moving pieces around on the paper with his long strong fingers.

In silence we contemplated the elements he’d assembled. There were a number of gold fragments clearly representing drapery. One cluster of white and red was recognisable as a hand curled round a stick. A tinted white piece painted with wavy gold lines must be hair. Zac shifted these around into likely places on the paper, then we tried to build on them using smaller pieces.

‘This drapery’s like doing bits of sky in a jigsaw,’ I moaned. ‘There’s a bit with an eye here, look, and this must be the nose. Can you hunt for more face?’

Zac lifted out all the larger sections from the box and started carefully sifting through pieces at the bottom.

Eventually we assembled a large part of the face, but this area of the window had suffered the greatest damage. Although it must once have been a single piece of glass, half the features had fragmented. It was like viewing a face beneath a heavily patterned lace veil, impossible to grasp it as a whole. We stared at it glumly for a while. Then Zac unfolded the soft lead around a large section of painted gold that so obviously represented feathers that we both grinned at one another and said together, ‘An angel.’

Angels, it seemed, were gathering all around me.

We worked on for another half hour, until there came a point where we ran out of pieces and the picture was only three-quarters complete. Some of the large areas of patterned background and the robes we hadn’t made much sense of, and we couldn’t tell exactly where hands and feet or head should be, though Zac clipped back some of the worst-twisted lead to enable us to try.

‘Most of the glass is not in bad condition, really,’ he noted. ‘I reckon the window must have caved in from the force of a nearby explosion rather than receiving a direct hit. What do you think? There’s no blackening, is there?’

‘Whatever, we can only go so far without an illustration,’ I said with a sigh.

Zac looked utterly fed up. ‘Let’s hope the vicar finds an old guidebook then or we’ll have to start searching libraries. Is there anything upstairs here? Didn’t you say your dad had got out all the papers?’

‘The original cartoon, you mean? There might be. I’ll look when I get back later. Not now though. I must go to the hospital.’

When I returned from seeing Dad, it was nearly nine and the phone was ringing in the flat. I snatched up the receiver, anxious that it might be about Dad. But it was Jo.

‘It was so lovely to see you last night,’ she said. ‘I’ve got the evening off tomorrow. Would you like to meet up?’

‘That would be great,’ I said happily.

After I’d put the phone down, I tried some scales and arpeggios on my tuba for a while. Tonight the sound was overwhelming in this limited space. Goodness knows what anyone next door must think. I returned the instrument to its case.

Remembering the broken angel, I climbed up to the attic, sat down at Dad’s desk and, with a sense of foreboding at the immensity of the task, began sorting through the stacks of ancient files there. Some were dated in a faded copperplate, others bore Dad’s pencilled scribbles–
mostly bills
or
St Ethelberga’s
or just a date. Some were merely fragments of paper tied together with rotting ribbon. There were scrolls of all sizes jumbled on the floor by the desk, some of which I unrolled. Designs for windows, none of which I was looking for. In a huge cupboard at the far end of the attic I knew there were hundreds of others like these. And big pattern-books. The phrase ‘needle in a haystack’ was certainly apt in this case.

What information did I have so far? The entry in the Day Book indicated that the Lady Chapel windows of St Martin’s were made during 1880 and that there had been two of them. There were no further details given, so I picked up several files that bore 1880 dates and started to go through them methodically.

As I feared, it wasn’t a straightforward job.
Minster Glass
had, it seemed, conserved every scrap of paper relating to its commissions. Much of the material was uninviting–accounts from suppliers, estimates–I had only to cast my eye over it and move on, but then came something more interesting: a letter from the then vicar of St Martin’s, the Reverend Brownlow previously mentioned in Dad’s history. It was dated April 1880.