The Glass Painter's Daughter (2 page)

Tears, such as angels weep, burst forth.

John Milton,
Paradise Lost

Sometimes, if I wake early on a summer’s morning, I lie in a day dream whilst the rest of the household slumbers, remembering how it all started. I pinpoint that moment, ten years ago now, that precise milli-second when, staring at the closed and empty shop, I recognised that everything had changed, changed irrevocably and for ever.

We talk about going ‘back home’ as though it’s a regression, and that’s what I’d believed, but on this occasion it turned out to be a step forward into a new life. It’s been on my mind a great deal, this story that is my–my ‘angel reach’ story. Now that I’ve brooded about it for so long, seen its consequences, like ripples spreading outwards on a pond after the stone is thrown, the time has come to write it all down. And so each evening, while the light is long in the sky, I climb the stairs to the attic, sit at Dad’s old desk and take up my pen. How quickly I am absorbed in my task.

Home was absolutely the last place I wanted to be, that gloriously balmy autumn of 1993. Given the choice, I’d have picked an old
palazzo
apartment in Venice perhaps, or a neat townhouse
Pension
in Heidelberg, or some glittering high-rise hotel in New York or Tokyo. Somewhere different, exotic, where I could live entirely in the present and forget the past. But sometimes life doesn’t give us a choice. And so I found myself in London again–a desolate homecoming, given the circumstances. Yet, knowing what I do now, I can see that the timing was exactly right.

The day before, when Zac finally tracked me down with the news, I had been in Athens, dozing away a baking afternoon in a hostel in the older part of the city. The caretaker’s son, a wary, tonguetied sixteen year old, had tapped on the door then led me to the phone in a cool tiled recess of the reception lobby.

‘
Fran!
Finally,’ cried the voice down the line.

‘Zac, what’s the matter?’ I’d have known that Scottish burr anywhere. Zac was Dad’s assistant at
Minster Glass
.

‘Why the heck don’t you pick up your messages?’

No ‘How are you?’ or ‘I haven’t seen you for months.’ In fact, he sounded so agitated that I didn’t bother to ask where he’d left messages or how he’d found my number here.

‘I didn’t get any messages, that’s why. Zac, what is it?’ But I knew instinctively what was wrong.

The annoyance went out of Zac’s voice, to be replaced by desperation. ‘You’ve got to come home.
Now
. Your father’s in hospital–and this time it’s not just one of his funny turns. Fran, it’s a stroke, a bad one.’

As I packed that evening, I tried to think straight. There was no one in Athens I needed to contact. The concert tour had finished a few nights ago. The orchestra had dispersed the next morning, everybody air-kissing in the hotel lobby and promising to keep in touch. Nick went too. I had decided some time before to find somewhere cheaper to stay on for a few days’ holiday, and he found me out as I loitered miserably, envying other people’s excitement at going home. He smiled, his expression soft, then kissed me chastely on the cheek and muttered, ‘Goodbye. Watch out for yourself. It’s been…’

‘I always do. Goodbye, Nick,’ I cut in, as coolly as I could, and watched him heft his luggage outside. To torture myself further I peeped between the pot plants in the window, saw him stow his cello in the boot of the taxi and drive off, out of my life.

After everyone had gone I removed myself with my bags and my tuba to the shabby Aphrodite Hostel. My original plan had been to mosey about sightseeing until my diary service told me where I might be required to play next on someone else’s expenses–somewhere glamorous, I hoped, Munich, Rio or Paris–but in the event I was so downcast I couldn’t summon the energy to trudge round the tourist spots. And then Zac rang and everything changed once more.

So here I was outside our old shop in Greycoat Square, my fingers remembering the trick of working the keys.
Minster Glass
, the place where I was born. I don’t mean that literally, of course. That had been thirty years ago in the same hospital where my father lay now, the same hospital probably where my mother had died when I was tiny.

It is a strange secret area, this part of Westminster, bounded by the looming gothic Abbey and the ornate Italian-style Catholic Cathedral, tucked away between busy Victoria Street to the north and the River Thames to the south; an area of hidden garden squares like ours, of rows of Victorian terraces cut off from the pavement by black iron palings, the office doorways often studded with polished brass plates advertising the most unlikely sounding organisations–the London Theosophical Society, the Royal Order of Griffins, the
Bookbinders Gazette
. I suppose
Minster Glass
was itself another oddity. I loved it all.

A Victorian stained-glass shop, with bay windows and a tiled porch, though delightfully quaint, wouldn’t be most people’s idea of home. Dad and I had camped–I can’t think of a better word for our haphazard living arrangements–in the flat above the shop. There should have been plenty of space for the two of us, given the living room, large kitchen, three bedrooms and enormous attics. But every spare nook and cranny was crammed with stuff: books, boxes, files and papers, together representing the entire history of
Minster Glass
.

The door leading up to the flat was accessed from the workshop behind the front shop. I remembered how I’d creep down the bare wooden stairs of a gloomy winter’s morning and through the icy workshop, braving its dark corners and sinister acrid smells, terrified of Dad’s temper should I break anything, to meet my friend Jo and walk to school. Jo’s family lived in a mansion block nearby, her father being a hotshot City lawyer.

On my way out to the street I loved to linger in the front shop, for it was beautiful, a fantasy of ever-changing coloured light, especially when the sun slanted through the window, setting the suncatchers turning, pouring dusty pools of ruby, emerald and sapphire upon the wooden floor so it seemed a hallowed place.

It was this peaceful beauty that soothed my troubled feelings now, as I turned the key in the shop door, pushed down the handle and walked in, the bell jangling mournfully overhead. For a moment I stood breathing in the familiar smells, the fustiness of old wood overlaid by a hint of something chemical. And for that moment I could have been a little girl again, dancing in the dusty shafts of coloured light.

Something caught my eye–a stiff white envelope lying on the mat. I picked it up, noticing a crest embossed on the back, but it was addressed to Dad so I dropped it unopened on the counter.

Locking up–the last thing I could cope with right now was some demanding customer–I left my luggage in the shop, opened the door behind the counter and walked into the workshop.

If the front shop always felt like a welcoming church, the workshop was its chilly crypt. I flipped on the ceiling lights, temporarily dazzled by the bright whiteness. Fragments of glass crunched under my feet as I crossed the concrete floor.

Through the rectangle of window I glimpsed the same old scrubby yard and garage, accessed by a drive to the right of the shop. On a worktop next to me, pinned to a wooden board the size of a tea tray, lay a leadwork window, partly soldered. This must have been what Dad had been working on when it happened. Zac said he’d been sitting in the cubbyhole of an office when he’d heard Dad groan, had seen him crumple to the floor, the stool spinning over the concrete.

I perched on this stool now with a feeling of heaviness. With one finger I traced the Celtic knot pattern Dad had made; one of his favourite devices for borders and filling in small spaces, and which he used on occasion as his craftsman’s signature. He liked it, he always said, because he could draw it in a single, continuous line. Under the bench my foot struck something, sending it rolling. I bent down to look. It was the tip of a broken soldering iron. The rest of it was there, too. Zac must have unplugged it, but in the confusion, left it where it lay. I picked up the pieces and examined them, then noticed something else glinting amongst the dustballs under the bench. I reached for it.

It was a small brooch wrought in gold, set with glittering blue stones, shaped in the figure of an angel. Pretty and perhaps valuable. Where it came from I’d no idea–I’d never seen it before. I laid it on the work surface next to the jagged bits of soldering iron and Dad’s stained craft-knife.

A blob of paint on the knife bore Dad’s fingerprint, and suddenly his absence shifted sharply into focus. Covering my face with my hands, I finally allowed myself to remember how I’d seen him a couple of hours before.

There’d been no one at Heathrow Airport to meet me, but then I hadn’t even told Zac the time of my flight. I’d travelled straight to the hospital, where a nurse led me down a small ward to a bed at the far end.

It took me a moment to adjust to the fact that the figure in the bed was Dad, my dad, helpless as I’d never seen him before. His eyes were closed. Tubes, running from cannulas on the back of his hand, were looped above his bed, reminding me for all the world of the long strips of lead solder draped over hooks in his workshop. A monitor beside him pulsing steady red zigzags was the only clear sign of life.

I sat down on a chair beside the bed and studied the pale sleeping face. ‘Dad, Daddy,’ I whispered, with a flutter of unease. There was no indication that he had heard. I touched his cheek. It was cool against the back of my hand.

In some ways he was the same, I thought, trying to calm myself. His sparse greying hair was combed back in its usual neat style; the long skull with its high cheekbones and hawkish nose still conveyed an air of dignity. But his pallid skin, the thread of saliva between greyish lips, a twitching eyelid, all these made me fear that some dreadful, strange being now lurked beneath his skin. I asked myself, not for the first time in my life, what was he really like, this man, my father?

They say you can never truly know anyone, and there were great swathes of Edward Morrison’s inner life that he had never allowed even me, his only child, to penetrate. He was not a cruel man, but often distant, lacking in tenderness and easily irritated. Anything could annoy him–someone ringing up while we were eating, a neighbouring shopkeeper piling rubbish on the pavement when it wasn’t collection day. This worsened as he got older, and I wondered how Zac put up with it.

Dad was peaceful enough now. I sat waiting for a rush of emotion, a release of tears. Instead, there was only numbness.

‘We think he will come round before long.’ Mr Bashir, the consultant, who arrived a moment later, was a calm, portly, middle-aged Pakistani. ‘There are signs that his coma is lightening, but the scans indicate that the stroke was a serious one. We do not know how he will be when he wakes.’

‘He’s only sixty-one,’ I managed to blurt out. ‘Isn’t that still young for something like this?’

‘I am afraid it is not so unusual. Especially with your father having type one diabetes. His high blood pressure was a contributory factor.’ Diabetes was something Dad had suffered from since his teens. I remembered the bad spells on the rare occasions when he was late with his insulin injections. This stroke, however, was uncharted territory.

After Mr Bashir had gone I stared out of the window at the great expanse of clear sky. At least when Dad woke–and he would wake, I told myself fiercely–he would be able to see the changing light he loved, watch birds and clouds crossing the heavens, twilight fading into darkness, the lights of planes winking against the stars.

And as I whispered goodbye, stroking his hand, dry and callused, this thought comforted me.

It wasn’t until late afternoon that I remembered the formal-looking letter I’d left on the shop counter. I’d inspected the flat, finding it tidy though not very clean, made up the bed in my old room, unpacked, then gone to buy some supplies from the express supermarket around the corner. It was when I returned with my carrier bags that I noticed the letter again. With that crest it might be something important. I tore open the envelope.

The single page inside was headed
The Rectory, Parish of St Martin’s Westminster
, the letter obviously typed by the rector himself for it paid no heed to layout or margins.

St Martin’s was the sandstone Victorian-gothic church in Vincent Street, which skimmed the opposite corner of Greycoat Square, running roughly parallel to Victoria Street. I don’t remember ever going inside the church–it always appeared locked up when I passed–but I’d noticed coloured glass behind several of the metal grilles that shielded the windows and had wondered vaguely what scenes they depicted. I had a faint memory, come to think of it, of Dad telling me
Minster Glass
had been responsible for their creation back in Victorian times.

I’d also been christened in the church as a baby, he told me, yet on the odd Sunday we attended a service when I was growing up, we always went to Westminster Abbey. We both loved the music and Dad found the sermons suitably intellectual. It was also easy to creep out after the service without anybody engaging him in intrusive conversation. In matters spiritual, as in everything else in life, he liked to keep himself private. It intrigued me how he’d become so friendly with the Reverend Quentin.