The Glass Painter's Daughter (12 page)

‘Is it happening? Shall I send for Mama?’ asked Laura, helping her sister to sit up more comfortably as Nurse Stephens bustled in tut-tutting.

The little boy was born as first light touched the morning sky. After the doctor left, Laura and Mama were admitted to the room to find Harriet lying exhausted but demanding bread-and-milk. Portly George hovered anxiously, staring into the cradle, hands in pockets. Laura gazed at tiny Arthur (named for George’s dead father), sweetly swaddled, asleep, and felt her world turn on its axis. In one stroke her sister had become a mother, her mother a grandmother, she herself an aunt. The Brownlow family had taken a step into the future.

‘Five minutes, that’s all,’ snapped Nurse Stephens, standing sentinel by the bed. ‘Mother needs to rest.’

I read Laura’s journal until the neat italics began to swim before my eyes. It was rich material, anyway; I was glad to stop and contemplate everything I’d read. I could still hear her voice in my head, almost feel her presence in the gloomy room.

How lonely Laura must have been, shut up in a house with two grieving parents, her daily task to assist in their work. Perhaps the only activity through which she could escape was her writing.

She had a natural writer’s style, Laura, an ability to make a scene come alive with emotive observations and touches of humour. All this, and yet her account was imbued with deep sadness; hers was a family in mourning, divided not only by death but by other natural processes of life–the surviving children leaving home, marrying, pursuing careers–and by silence. And Laura had been left behind, perhaps destined to look after her parents–though it seemed she had had at least one chance at marriage.

As I laid the journal on the desk, by the Day Books, I wondered again what it was doing here in
Minster Glass
. And whether Dad knew about it; that was an important question. Its position in the drawer suggested no, as did his scribbled note
Who was Laura Brownlow?
Yet all the files in the cabinet had been neatly labelled in his black script, making it difficult to believe that he hadn’t come across it. Perhaps he had, but didn’t realise its significance to his account.

‘Every time you hear a bell ring, it means that some angel’s just got his wings.’

It’s a Wonderful Life

On Friday morning I was exasperated to find I was to be left alone in the shop again for most of the day. At eight-thirty Zac arrived, only to go straight out again in the van to take some sketches he’d done over to a house in Clapham. Later, he said, he would head further south to install Dad’s Celtic window. Jo’s idea of employing Amber was beginning to seem more and more attractive.

My mind still on Laura’s extraordinary journal, I found the letter Jeremy Quentin had sent Dad and rang the vicarage number. There was only an answerphone message delivered in a gentle female voice. As I left my name and number, I noticed the address at the top of the letter. It was 44 Vincent Street. How puzzling. I was sure Laura had described the Victorian rectory as being in Greycoat Square.

It was a busy morning. I longed for a moment to fetch the diary from upstairs and read some more, but evening classes must have been starting in earnest because hobbyists kept arriving in a steady trickle with printed lists, wanting tools and glass and advice. It was while I was serving that our wholesaler left a large order that, when I found a moment to check it, proved to be wrong.

I was sitting in an unflattering position, legs splayed on the shop floor, surrounded by open boxes and polystyrene packaging, and talking on the phone, when a shadow fell across the window. I looked up to see Ben. I clambered to my feet and motioned to him to come in, while still trying to explain to the idiot of a boy at the other end of the telephone line that they’d given us the wrong opalescent glass, and that a Tiffany-style wisteria lampshade was not by any stretch of the imagination the same as a poppy one.

Ben walked around the shop, looking at everything before pulling up an old wooden chair and sitting astride it, watching me with a slight smile playing on his lips. I found it hard to concentrate on what I was saying.

‘So I’ll see you back here first thing Tuesday without fail,’ I said sternly down the receiver, and ended the call.

‘Wouldn’t want to get the wrong side of you on a bad day,’ Ben said with a grin.

‘They’re usually very good.’ I shrugged, starting to pack up the boxes. ‘Seems there’s someone new getting it all wrong. Lovely to see you. Have you come for a reason or is this a social call?’

‘Half and half,’ Ben said, his gaze sliding to the workshop door. ‘I wondered if I could see the famous exploding window.’

‘Didn’t the vicar show you?’ I said.

‘Only the box it was in. The whole thing looked a mess, frankly.’

‘It still is,’ I said bleakly.

The bits of angel were carefully laid out on the lining paper where we’d left them. Ben regarded them critically, one finger hooking his cord jacket over his shoulder. He was wearing a linen shirt today of a soft pale blue. I kept glancing out of the corner of my eye to see the effect of it against his hair. Like ripe corn against a summer sky.

‘Correct me if I’m wrong,’ he said, bringing me back to earth, ‘but it does look like a lost cause. I mean, it’s not just a matter of sticking all the bits together, is it? For a start, how do you know where everything goes and what’s missing?’

‘I know it seems like that,’ I explained, defensive. ‘But if we can get hold of a photograph or find the original drawing, we could have a good try…’

‘And there’s a perfectly decent stained-glass scene already in the window. Has anyone thought of what would happen to that?’

‘I don’t know. That’s for your council to decide, isn’t it?’ I imagined that he was annoyed because of wanting the organ repaired, but I wished he wouldn’t take it out on me.

‘The PCC? I suppose.’

I watched him wander round the workshop, pulling open the doors of the kiln to look inside, prodding little tins of paint and bags of cement, asking what things were. I held one of Zac’s kaleidoscopes up to the light and he muttered his amazement as he squinted through it, turning the marble.

A man came into the shop to pick up a screen I’d mended for his wife, and when I returned to the workshop, Ben was studying a row of beautiful little lozenges of multicoloured glass Zac had left on a shelf. This fusing glass was very popular with people who made their own jewellery, and it was fun to make up pieces and to fire them in a little microwave kiln, though tricky to get the temperatures and firing times exactly right.

Ben was particularly taken with a piece that glinted blue-green, as iridescent as a butterfly’s wing, and, on an impulse, I gave it to him.

‘Are you sure?’ he said. ‘Thanks ever so much.’ He tucked it safely in his jacket and turned on one of his soul-searching looks. I was getting used to these by now.

I followed him out to the door, half-expecting him to mention dinner again. Instead he merely said, ‘Thank you,’ adding, ‘see you at choir.’ And he was gone. I was puzzled as to why he’d really come.

I watched him cross the road, but when he reached the path across the garden he turned to see me still watching and gave me a little wave.

When Zac returned, mid-afternoon, I showed him Laura Brownlow’s journal and told him about the artist being Philip Russell.

‘I haven’t heard of him,’ he said, frowning. He took the book from me and tried to make sense of the handwriting, but soon gave up and passed it back.

‘You must tell me anything else you discover about the windows,’ he said.

‘I will, and I really must let the vicar look at it.’ I rang the vicarage again, but this time the line was engaged. Since someone was in, perhaps I’d call round. After all, I’d been cooped up here all day. Zac agreed to keep an eye on the shop while I walked over to the vicarage, carrying the journal in a bag. Number 44 Vincent Street turned out to be a smallish Edwardian-style terraced house in red brick. Definitely not Laura’s father’s rectory then.

Jeremy was out, but Sarah Quentin invited me in, assuring me she was expecting him back any moment.

‘He was using the photocopier in the parish office,’ she said. She was a small round woman in her fifties who had a kind of stillness about her.

The moment stretched to twenty minutes. I drank tea at the big table in her messy kitchen and when I commented on a pile of paperwork she was sorting, she told me about the parish appeal for expanding facilities for the homeless.

‘We’re waiting for a decision about our government grant application,’ she said. ‘The paperwork is endless. Jeremy’s at meetings about it the whole time.’

Her eyes occasionally rested on me curiously. Suddenly she said something that almost made me choke on my tea.

‘You know, you are very like your mother.’

‘My mother!’ I cried. ‘You knew my…?’

‘No,’ she said hastily. ‘I never met her. But your father showed us a photograph of her once.’

‘A photograph?’ I repeated. Of course, my father might have photographs somewhere that he’d never shown me. But he had shown these…strangers.

Mrs Quentin saw immediately that she’d upset me and said gently, ‘Perhaps you didn’t know that Jeremy and your father have become quite close. I’ve no idea what they talked about, of course, because Jeremy rarely shares anything very confidential, even with me. But one day when your father came, he brought a picture of your mother, and I saw it on the desk when I took the men tea. I noticed it immediately, because she looked so striking–dark hair and eyes like yours, very lovely and vital. You are like her, you know. The shape of your face–and there’s something about your expression. Oh, I don’t know. I’ve always admired beauty. I’ve never been much to look at myself. And now, well, nothing to lose, growing old.’ She laughed as she touched her creased, unmade-up face. No, she wasn’t beautiful in the classical sense, but she had an inner beauty, a soft humility that would draw people to her more surely than looks.

‘Beauty can be a curse as well, can’t it?’ I murmured, still wrestling with the idea that my father had probably confided in a stranger things that I, his daughter, needed to know. Especially about my mother. It comforted me that I looked like her and I remembered that my father once said that, too. Yet, despite this, I couldn’t claim to have the startling beauty Sarah talked of. My hair might be dark but it was fine and flyaway, and I hated my mouth, though full lips were great for playing the tuba.

‘And some they call beautiful are hard and empty,’ Sarah agreed. ‘Some of those Supermodels you read about–I don’t know why the men go for them when there are such lovely girls around like your friend Jo.’

She’d know Jo from the hostel, of course. I smiled to myself. Mrs Quentin obviously shared Jo’s mother’s anxiety to see a nice girl happily married off.

There came the sound of the front door opening, then a voice urged, ‘Well, are you going in or not? I haven’t got all day.’ A large white cat slipped into the kitchen. It regarded me with wide green eyes full of dismay and shot off through the cat flap.

‘Oh, Lucifer!’ Sarah scolded. ‘He’s wary of strangers, I’m afraid.’

Jeremy came in with a brisk, ‘Hello, hello,’ dropping a large brown envelope on the table. ‘Wretched animal doesn’t like anybody,’ he remarked.

‘I thought a Lucifer would be black.’

‘Not at all. “Oh, Lucifer, bright Morningstar”,’ he intoned, then added sadly, ‘No one knows their Old Testament any more. In the Book of Isaiah, the devil is portrayed as a rebellious angel, Fran, and his name means light-bearer. Our little feline Lucifer is certainly rebellious. Comes and goes as he pleases. Any tea left in the pot, dearest? Sorry I’ve been so long. Mrs Taylor wanted to pass the time of day.’ He sat down at the table and started sorting through his post while Sarah fetched a cup. ‘Anyway, Fran, it’s good to see you.’

‘I won’t take up much of your time,’ I said. ‘You’re obviously busy. I came to show you the journal I told you about.’ I pulled out the leather-covered book and passed it to him.

‘I found it in a filing cabinet,’ I went on. ‘Laura must be the Reverend Brownlow’s daughter, and she’s written the journal to her dead sister Caroline, you see, and she’s the one the angel was meant to remember. So the whole story behind the window might be here, though I haven’t read all of it yet.’

Jeremy turned the pages, stopping to read bits from time to time. Finally he closed the book and handed it back. ‘It looks really interesting,’ he said, ‘and I’d love to look at it properly when you’ve finished. I’ve read a bit about Brownlow. He was vicar here in the 1870s and 1880s.’

‘Do you mean actually here?’ I said doubtfully. ‘This house is more recent than that, isn’t it?’

‘You’re right, of course. The old place in Greycoat Square came to be considered too big. It’s divided into maisonettes now. One’s kept for the curate, but we don’t have one at the moment, so our organist lives there.’

‘Ben, you mean?’

‘Ben’s been there since he joined us in June. But yes, the Brownlow family lived there at one time. He was rather a troubled man, from what I’ve heard. Deeply concerned with his mission to the poor, but things went badly wrong.’

‘Oh? What sort of things?’

‘St Martin’s has always been High Church. Emphasising the mystery of God, the importance of the Sacraments–the mystical side, really.’

I nodded. ‘Yes, I see.’

‘Well, Brownlow took all this very seriously, as you’d hope, but he was also attracted to the idea of church tradition and doctrine. I once found a rather dry book he’d written on church history. Although he was Anglican, there was much about the Roman Catholic Church that appealed to him and he read extensively the writings of figures from the High Church Victorian Oxford Movement, especially John Newman who, as you probably know, eventually became a Catholic Cardinal. Later in his ministry, Brownlow felt led to do things in St Martin’s that some of his parishioners thought were beyond the pale, setting up statues of Mary and the saints, employing what some of them saw as excessive ritual. “Idol worship”, certain less sophisticated members of the congregation called it. Brownlow saw it all as being to the glory of God.’ Jeremy paused. ‘There was confrontation, I believe.’

‘Didn’t they care about all the good things he’d done?’ Having read Laura’s viewpoint, I immediately took her father’s side.

‘I think they forgot these in the upset, unfortunately. It’s always important for clergy to remember that they are serving their congregation. If a priest starts acting off his own bat and fails to take his parishioners with him, he’s asking for trouble.’

Poor Mr Brownlow. I looked down at his daughter’s journal, wondering how it had all turned out. Slowly I said, ‘One of the puzzles is, of course, how on earth did this book end up at
Minster Glass
?’

‘I simply can’t guess,’ said Jeremy Quentin. ‘Perhaps it’s something to do with the making of the window.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘I must tell you, while I remember. I had a little chat with one of my ladies in the almshouse,’ he said. ‘Mrs Muriel Trask, her name is. She’s lived in the parish all her life, so I always go to her if I need any local background. She’s especially useful when I’m giving funeral orations, I can tell you. Memory like the proverbial elephant. Anyway, she remembers the angel window blowing in. A bomb destroyed one of the houses behind the church in 1940 and our angel got caught in the blast.’

‘That’s amazing. Did you ask her what the window looked like?’

‘Yes, of course, but she was a bit vague. She tends to remember details about people–you know, who quarrelled with whom, whose son stepped out with whose daughter in 1957, that sort of thing. But she did say that it was very lovely, all gold and white and glowing. Made her feel very peaceful and loved. And something about being a child and believing that it was a real angel, not just a picture. Apparently she wept when it got broken.’

I knew the vicar must be busy, so I stood up to go. But there was something I was still bursting to ask, and as I looked from Jeremy to his wife, Sarah Quentin discerned that I wished to speak to him alone.

‘Will you excuse me?’ she said graciously. ‘It’s lovely to see you, but I must bring in the washing.’ She unbolted the back door and we both watched her through the window, walking across the tiny garden, calm and graceful in her movements, despite her round figure.