The Glass Painter's Daughter (18 page)

‘She’d be OK if she stood up for herself,’ said a skinny girl who was searching her hair for split ends. ‘That’s what Lisa hates–that Amber doesn’t fight back.’

Jo and I moved on through to the entrance hall. ‘It doesn’t stop at name-calling, that’s what worries me,’ Jo said in a low voice. ‘Lisa can be vicious and the others are scared of her. They’re not bad girls but they’re cowed by her and will do what she says. Still, we get by.’

I hugged Jo goodbye, and thanked her, then set off to see my father.

Dad wasn’t wearing the oxygen mask today and a nurse explained that his breathing was much better. He lay against a pile of pillows, watching me with anxious eyes. Once he opened his mouth and I thought he was trying to speak, but it turned into a yawn.

‘I’ve told you about Amber, haven’t I?’ I asked him. ‘She’s the girl who’s come to help in the shop. She lives in the church hostel. I went to see it this afternoon. It’s nothing like you’d expect, you know.’ I sat down. ‘Jo was right about employing Amber,’ I went on. ‘She’s got something of a flair for the glasswork. She’s even working on some designs with Zac. He’ll do all the difficult stuff, but she’s helping choose the glass.’

Dad’s eyes gleamed with interest, or was I imagining it? Anyway, it motivated me to go on. ‘It’s making life easier, having Amber. Gives us a bit more flexibility. And the customers like her.’ She was good at small talk about people’s health and the weather, at which neither Dad nor Zac excelled.

I remembered Zac confiding about Olivia. ‘Zac told me how you originally came to employ him,’ I said to Dad. ‘You never said at the time. I think it’s wonderful, the way you helped him.’

I waited, as though I expected him to respond. What would he have said? ‘He was obviously the man for the job.’ Or, ‘It seemed the sensible thing to do.’ Something matter-of-fact, anyway, that allowed no room for emotion.

Ben rang early that evening.

When I picked up the phone I wandered over to the living-room window and peered across the Square, wondering if I would be able to see him. But the evening light dazzled off his windows.

‘Coming to choir tomorrow?’ he asked.

‘The wildest of horses wouldn’t keep me away,’ I quipped.

‘Good. I was ringing to ask your advice as a fellow musician. What do you think about singing exercises?’

‘Singing exercises?’

‘Yes, for the choir. If we spent, say, the first half-hour practising breathing, relaxation, scales, that sort of thing.’

‘Mmm.’ I tried to envisage Jo enjoying this.

‘It could make all the difference to their performance.’

‘Why are you asking me? I’m new. I hardly know anyone.’

‘That’s exactly why–you’ve still got some sort of objectivity about the whole thing. And, as I said, you’re a musician.’

‘Oh, OK. Since you ask, I suppose they wouldn’t mind a few minutes, but any more than that, they might see as hard work and a bit boring. Half an hour would be too much.’

Ben gave a sharp intake of breath and said, ‘That’s what Michael thinks. I suppose you’re both right. OK, I’ll try ten minutes.’ Then he said softly, ‘I’m so sorry about Friday night, by the way.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘It must have been tiresome, listening to stories about people you don’t know. Nina’s used to us now, of course…’

‘No, it was fine, honestly. Though it’s nice of you to say.’ I was touched by his concern.

‘Good,’ he said. There was a brief silence, and I wondered if he had some other motive in ringing, but then he said, ‘Ought to go. PCC meeting in twenty minutes. See you tomorrow. Maybe we can fix up something.’

‘Yes, let’s,’ I said, hoping he’d do so right away. But he’d rung off.

I put the phone down, unsure whether to feel happy or exasperated; whether to believe there was something between us or not. He was attractive, I couldn’t deny that. We had a shared interest in music and, I could be wrong, but I thought there was some spark between us.

Looking back now, I realise that I’d got over Nick very quickly. It hadn’t been a deep thing at all. But it had left me tender. What with that and my anguish about Dad, my guard was down.

I couldn’t settle to anything that evening. I tried playing through some
Gerontius
on the old piano, but it was horribly out of tune. I contemplated my tuba case, squatting in a corner, but didn’t have the will to take the instrument out. The flat looked wretched with its faded furnishings, its sense of absence. Shreds of memories from my childhood rushed in. In the end I trudged gloomily up to the attic. It turned out to be the best possible thing, for I quickly got absorbed in searching the remaining files in the cabinet where I’d found Laura’s journal.

By the time I surfaced my watch said eleven o’clock, but I’d found nothing. I’d hauled files dated 1880, 1881 and even 1882 out of the drawers, trawling through them not once but several times, turning over every letter and receipt, unfurling endless drawings in my search for a cartoon for the angel window.

I’d found sketches for saints and disciples, crucifixions, Holy Families; for creations and apocalypses, and for angels, yes, dozens of angels. The Angel of the Lord–believed to be the personification of God Himself–saving Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego from their Babylonian furnace, messenger angels visiting Virgins and shepherds; whole choirs of angels praising God in Heaven–but not my angel.

I carefully refolded a torn sketch for a roundel of cherubs and returned it to its place, filed under
June 1882
. Apart from that letter from the Reverend Brownlow, Laura’s angel seemed to have vanished from official record. Every reference to its construction had disappeared.
Why?

Where else could I look? There must be a picture in an old book somewhere. Or maybe…I suddenly remembered the Museum of Stained Glass at Ely in Cambridgeshire. Perhaps they could help me.

Telling myself that I’d ring them the next day, I went downstairs to read a page or two of Laura’s journal.

Four angels to my bed,

Four angels round my head,

One to watch and one to pray,

And two to bear my soul away.

Thomas Ady,
Candle in the Dark

L
AURA’S
S
TORY

The first letter from Mr Russell arrived at the end of April and was brought by Polly to the breakfast-table. Laura recognised the curious spindly handwriting on the envelope instantly and some tension eased inside her. It was as though some deep part of her mind had been waiting. Murmuring some excuse to her mother, she took the missive up to her room, where she opened it carefully and gasped with pleasure. The margins of the thick cream paper were dotted with humorous little sketches of angels and animals.

I pray you will forgive my corresponding with you, Miss Brownlow
, Mr Russell had written,
but I badly need your advice. It is the age-old problem of trying to please two masters, and since you know both parties in the case, perhaps you might graciously agree to be Solomon
.

It regards my design for the
Mother and Child
window. I sent it to the benefactress’s nephew, Mr Jefferies, and am pained to learn today
that it does not find favour. If it is to be the
Virgin and Child in Glory,
his letter informs me, he wishes to see more of the
Glory.
Harps, cherubs and pink clouds, and all manner of sentimental pish were his late aunt’s taste, it seems, but this I will not do. Your father saw my design last week and approved it, so now I am caught on the horns of a dilemma. How should I proceed?

Laura reread the letter with surprise. Mr Russell valued her advice! She’d seen the design in question, an early colour sketch which the Rector passed to Laura and her mother. They’d admired its simplicity, its naturalness. She felt confident of her answer. Sitting at her escritoire, she took up her pen.

Sir
, she wrote,
your Mary is already bedecked in rich blue and gold as befits her royal status. Perhaps a simple crown to indicate her position as Queen of Heaven would satisfy Mr Jefferies without compromising your artistic sensibilities? Two cherubs, such as the pretty ones you drew at the bottom of your letter, might hold the crown above her head. Nothing else need alter a jot
.

But Russell wasn’t so easily soothed.
On my life, cherubs and crowns speak of the worst excesses of the Baroque
, came his reply that afternoon.
Perhaps we should meet to see how the matter might be settled. If the weather is clement, we might walk in the park. Will tomorrow at two o’clock suit?

With the faintest feeling that she was being underhand, she wrote back naming a time the next day when she knew her father would be out and her mother at some meeting. Laura couldn’t say why, but she wanted to see Philip Russell by himself.

The next day he arrived promptly at two and she took him into her father’s study. Remarkably, his irritation about the window had vanished like the morning’s last puffs of grey cloud. He’d even brought a new sketch that incorporated Laura’s suggestions, though in a different way to how she’d imagined, the angels like androgynous youths rather than small children. ‘Leave it for my father to see,’ she suggested, and Russell readily agreed.

‘Now, shall we walk?’ he said. ‘It’s breezy, but quite pleasant out.’ She fetched her bonnet and a Paisley shawl and they set off.

As they wandered through St James’s Park, watching children playing tag on the grass and a giggling group of young women throwing a ball, Laura thought she’d never felt so happy.

They talked easily, she and Russell, of pictures and books they loved. Tentatively, she told him about her own endeavours. ‘I don’t know if what I write has any merit,’ she confessed. ‘I sent one of my tales to a magazine once, but it came back with a letter to say that they had no room for it.’

‘I’ll read your stories, if you’d permit me,’ he said. ‘I read occasionally for a publisher friend of mine so I know the form.’

‘That’s very kind of you,’ she said, ‘if you’re sure it’s no trouble.’ She felt such a sympathy with him and instinctively trusted that he’d treat her writing seriously. Their milieux were so different, he moving amongst artists and writers, encountering wealthy patrons like his wife Marie’s family, and yet there was much they had in common. They shared their experiences of being the children of church ministers.

‘We moved around more frequently than you,’ he said. ‘My father was a travelling minister and rarely at home. Every two or three years he’d be directed to a different region and my poor mother would be beside herself with worry, altering curtains and measuring up the furniture for the next house, complaining about the aspect of the rooms or the run-down nature of the neighbourhood and the difficulty of finding a new cook. When I turned eight, I was sent away to school and so avoided the turbulence of these moves, but ever after it seemed that nowhere was home.’ He, too, was from a family of five children, but the only son. ‘My parents are most dismayed at my choice of profession, never mind my choice of wife.’

‘What is the nature of their objection to her?’

‘To them she seems strange, exotic, beyond their narrow experience. Her mother is Italian and although Marie was brought up in the Church of England, you’d have thought she was the Pope himself for the way my father speaks of her.’

Laura felt his anger then, his bitterness. He still spoke of his wife with deep loyalty, despite the wound she had inflicted on him. Marie’s father was a wealthy shipping magnate, he told Laura, and she’d inherited her mother’s passionate, unstable nature.

‘Sometimes I think she can’t help herself,’ he said sadly. ‘There’s something about her that draws men to her.’

After their meeting Laura looked for another letter from him. It came the next day, once again inviting her to show him her stories. She parcelled up her notebook and dispatched it to him with a little whispered prayer that he’d like them. He did, and several days later, wrote back, asking if he could show them to his friend the publisher. ‘It might take some time,’ he warned. ‘My friend is often inundated with work.’ She was satisfied to wait and even more satisfied with his postscript suggestion to meet for another walk in two days’ time.

On this next occasion, they encountered in the street two women from the church, who greeted Laura and looked at Mr Russell most curiously, so that for the entire outing Laura was anxious that they were being watched. In Greycoat Square, as they said goodbye, she was sure she glimpsed Mr Bond cross the road behind them and she hurried indoors to avoid meeting him.

Not that she was doing anything wrong in walking with Mr Russell, she assured herself, as she slipped upstairs to change her dress, which was splashed with mud. Discoursing in a public place with a married man of forty, who was a friend known to the family, hardly constituted a scandal. But something made her unsure that her parents would regard the matter in the same way. Yes, he was a friend and only a friend. She accepted that, but she was aware of a growing warmth between them, a closeness that both comforted and disturbed her.

As she tidied her hair, she told herself that by listening to his outpourings of grief about Marie, offering words of consolation, she was helping him. In return she found herself opening up to him, confiding her own grief about the loss of Caroline, something her parents rarely discussed. Mr Russell listened tenderly, and this made her realise how much she missed good friends, especially now that Harriet was absorbed in motherhood. As she stared at her flushed face in the mirror she had to acknowledge that she already longed to see him again.

After Mr Russell redrew the
Mother and Child
sketch, the work on the windows stalled. Mr Brownlow approved the changes, but Mr Jefferies disappeared abroad on business before seeing them. By the time he returned, it was Mr Russell’s turn to go away. He and Laura had arranged to meet again one afternoon, but during the morning before she received a hastily written note from him.

I have bad news from home
, it ran,
and I’m afraid I must break our appointment. My father is dangerously ill and I’m leaving for Manchester at once
.

Laura felt disappointed and had to remind herself to pray for Russell Senior.

The tone of his next missive, five days later, was irate.
My journey was to little purpose. My father, thank God, has fashioned a remarkable recovery from his seizure. That his strength returns is evident in his constant tirades against me. He blames me
, me,
for Marie’s
desertion, saying I should never have made the marriage. I can take no more of this and shall be returning to London as soon as filial duty permits
.

Please tell your father
, he finished,
that I’m determined to resume work on the windows immediately
.