The Glass Painter's Daughter (24 page)

‘Yes. Though he’s not older than me and he’s certainly not my brother.’

‘But he feels tied to you in some way. He didn’t save you from drowning or something, did he?’

‘No, but he thinks he saved me from other things. The problem is that I certainly don’t feel tied to him.’

‘But you’re supposed to be friends?’

‘We are. He’s the person who knows me the best in the world. Even more than my parents and sister.’

‘You’re lucky,’ I said wistfully, thinking of my own lack of relations. ‘Not something to treat lightly.’

‘Lightness is not possible with Michael, I assure you.’

The alcohol and the slightly surreal tone of the evening made me bold. ‘And what have you done this time to make him interfere?’

I half-hoped he’d say it was something to do with me. Some perverse part of me rather liked the idea of Ben caring enough to quarrel over me. But after a moment he disappointed me by saying carefully, ‘It’s something to do with Nina. He thinks I have too much influence over her, that I’m letting her get too dependent on me. He means musically, career-wise, though he’s also accused me of all sorts of dreadful things that I’m not remotely guilty of.’

‘How complicated!’ I said. And suddenly I didn’t want to know any more. I was only making a fool of myself. I finished my drink and stood up. ‘I really must get back now.’

When we reached the front door, we seemed suddenly awkward with one another.

‘Making sure I’ve got my scarf this time,’ I said, wrapping it round my neck and standing tense, hands in pockets.

Ben hesitated, then pulled me to him and kissed me quickly on the cheek.

‘Thank you for putting up with me tonight,’ he said softly.

‘That’s all right,’ I said gravely. ‘I understand.’ He opened the door and stood back to let me go.

That’s it, I thought wildly as I crossed the road. I probably won’t see him alone again.

I was vaguely aware of a security alarm squealing across the Square. I turned and waved to Ben, I thought for the last time. Halfway across the garden, I looked back once more, but the door had closed. I felt empty.

The security alarm whooped on and on. Why doesn’t someone blooming well get out of bed and turn it off, I thought irritably, as I continued my walk.

It gradually dawned on me that the alarm was coming from my side of the Square, and when I reached the street I stopped dead. In the window of
Minster Glass
, above Dad’s angel, there was a hole the size of a tea-plate. Shards of glass glittered on the pavement.

A long wail of anguish soared above the sound of the alarm. It took me a moment to realise the cry was mine. As I dashed back across the garden to Ben’s flat, the alarm wailed mockingly on and on.

By the time I returned, with Ben in tow, there were half a dozen people milling around outside
Minster Glass
, all talking at once.

‘I telephoned the police, of course,’ said an elderly man wearing a Paisley dressing-gown and slippers whom I recognised as Mr Broadbent, the antiquarian bookseller. He had called into the shop once to ask about Dad. ‘It seemed the thing to do. Or none of us will get any sleep.’

‘I’m ever so sorry,’ I said faintly, but a woman shivering in a short-sleeved sparkly top immediately admonished him.

‘It’s not
her
fault someone’s tossed a blimming rock through the window.’

Ben took charge, stopping anyone from touching anything, checking round the back for signs of intruders and reporting that there were none. He wrapped a throw round my shoulders, which the woman brought out, for I was shivering from shock as much as cold.

The police arrived a few minutes later–a man and a bored-looking woman in a tiny patrol car. Under their instruction, I was allowed to unlock the shop and turn off the alarm. Then Ben and I waited whilst the policeman assessed the damage and the policewoman interviewed the neighbours. No one had seen anything suspicious. From within the shop the policeman called, ‘Come and look at this.’

Inside, glass crunched under our feet.

‘This is the culprit,’ said the Constable, bending and picking up what looked like a glass ball with a cloth. ‘Hurled with some force, I’d say.’ He placed it in a polythene bag, which he held up for our inspection. The ball was about the size of a grapefruit and looked as though it was filled with a pink and purple mist.

‘A paperweight, isn’t it?’ said Ben.

‘Where did it come from?’ I wondered. ‘And why didn’t it smash when it fell?’ The answer to the second question was easy to spot–it had met a soft landing in the form of the chair that now lay on its side by the counter, a large dent in its seat.

‘Here’s what you need for your insurer–you are insured, I take it?’ The Constable scrawled his initials on the form and ripped off the top copy for me.

‘I think so,’ I answered.

‘And you’d better be getting a grille for your window for the future. We’ll be in touch if we hear anything.’

‘But…aren’t you going to try and find out who did it?’ I asked, confused.

‘Of course,’ answered the policeman, but he was watching his colleague, who was talking urgently into her radio.

‘We’re off,’ she said, nodding at him. They climbed into the car and were away, siren wailing, before he’d properly closed the door.

The bookseller went off to fetch some cardboard to tape over the hole whilst I found a dustpan and broom. Everybody helped. It wasn’t long before the mess was cleared up and everyone had gone home. Except Ben.

‘Would you come and stay at mine tonight?’ he asked.

‘Oh Ben. I can’t leave the shop like this.’

‘Well, why don’t I come and kip here, then?’ he asked. ‘I’ll sleep on the sofa, promise.’

‘You’d have to fold yourself in half. You’ve seen how tiny it is. Better have the spare bed.’

In the end he fetched a sleeping bag and a few things in a bag and dumped them on the spare-room bed. We huddled together on the too-small sofa and drank tea with no milk, because I’d run out. Ben had to make it, because I was still trembling.

‘It feels like the last straw, after Dad and everything,’ I said shakily. ‘Who would do that?’

‘Some loser. Happens all the time,’ Ben said, putting his arm round me. I snuggled up close to him, to keep warm as much as anything. We were sitting in the dark, though every now and then some car’s headlights would sweep the room.

‘Thank heavens you were nearby. I’d have been terrified otherwise.’

‘That’s curious. You always strike me as being strong and independent. After all, you travel all over the place.’

‘I am fine about most things. Then something like this happens, and it feels as if the floor’s disappeared from under my feet. I’m falling and there’s no one to catch me.’

‘It’s been my absolute pleasure to catch you tonight.’

And after that it was only natural to lean in and kiss him quickly on the cheek. ‘Ben, thank you,’ and I gave a great yawn. ‘Oh, sorry.’

He kissed me back and squeezed my shoulders in a comforting manner. I drifted in and out of sleep, trying to sort out my confused thoughts. Ben had seemed to be so many different people that evening–the molten god standing on his platform, a domineering quarreller, a seducer. Then he’d turned into this lovely, helpful man who had taken charge and looked after me in my hour of need. Which person was he?

All these rolled into one, probably–and anyway, I didn’t care. What happened then, as I lay sleepily in his arms, was that I fell in love. It’s as simple and as complicated as that.

In the end I must have fallen into a deep sleep. I had a vague memory of Ben half-carrying me, and his lips brushing my forehead, and the next moment it was eight o’clock and daylight and I was in my own bed, still fully dressed. No sign of Ben, but when I peeped round the spare-room door I could see his golden curls, just visible under the sleeping bag. I resisted the considerable temptation to put out a hand and run my fingers through them.

My next thought, oddly, was relief that Zac wasn’t due in this morning and therefore wouldn’t know Ben was there.

The thought after that was to go and buy something for breakfast.

Just such disparity

As is ’twixt air’s and angels’ purity,

’Twixt women’s love and men’s will ever be.

John Donne,
Songs and Sonnets

L
AURA’S
S
TORY

At breakfast one morning near the end of June, Mr Brownlow, flicking through the post, a weary look on his face, let out an animated ‘Aha! It’s a letter from Tom,’ he explained cheerfully. He slit open the envelope and began to read.

Then: ‘Dora!’ he whispered, and the light faded from his eyes. Laura and her mother turned rigid, a cup halfway to Laura’s lips.

‘What is it?’ Theodora said in a faint voice. ‘
James?
’

He finished the letter and passed it across to her, his face that of a man struck down.

‘What’s the matter, Papa? Tell us,’ Laura begged.

‘What has the boy done?’ he cried, and pressed his hands to his face.

‘Papa!’ Laura pushed back her chair and rushed to help him.

Across the table, Mrs Brownlow read the letter and gasped out, ‘Oh, Tommy!’

It was Laura’s turn to take the sheet of cheap white paper. She read it with growing horror. Her brother had given up all plans for the priesthood. Not only that, he had left Oxford.
By the time you read this, I will be in Liverpool, my plan to take ship for New York. Please don’t come after me. I need to plot a different course in the world. In Oxford I could hardly breathe, was forcing myself along a path I could not, nay, must not go. I know for sure that the Church is not my calling. Better to change now before all is too late. I know this will cause you great pain, after all you’ve done and hoped for me. Oh, the guilt tears me apart, but the alternative, I assure you, would in the end have been much worse for everyone. A priest without faith can only damage his flock
.

The Rector left for the station without finishing his breakfast and caught a train to Liverpool, hoping, God willing, that he would reach the docks in time to prevent Tom’s folly.

He hoped in vain. A salty old mariner from the shipping office pointed out the smokestacks of the SS
Alexandria
on the distant horizon. James Brownlow watched until the ship disappeared over the edge of the world.

For a long while he was unable to move or speak. Finally the mariner came and tapped him on the shoulder and took him to sit in the office, practically forcing brandy down the Rector’s throat.

On the way home, exhausted and despairing, Brownlow stopped to lodge at Oxford and met with his son’s tutor, hoping for some explanation of the calamity. The man, however, though highly embarrassed at his own failure, was at a loss to understand the sudden defection of his bright and previously dutiful pupil.

As Mr Brownlow left the fellow’s rooms he almost collided with a young man he recognised at once as one of Tom’s friends. He spoke pleadingly to him of his trouble. The boy took pity and led Mr Brownlow to a shabby sitting room, plied him with tea and stale cake and explained in the most tactful terms what he thought had been going through his friend’s mind to make him take this dreadful step.

Tom had fallen in with a sophisticated crowd: a band of rationalists who admired the work of Charles Darwin and who brought Tom to question everything the young man believed in.

‘He came to doubt not only his calling, but the very bedrock of his faith in God,’ the spotty young man said miserably, knowing that each word was like a physical blow to Tom’s father.

After that there was nothing to do but return home in the morning and wait for another letter from Tom. The weeks passed and there was nothing.

If Mr Brownlow had seemed vague and oppressed before, this latest news crushed him. The family’s investment in Tom–not just a financial one, though it was undeniable that much scrimping had been necessary to see him through college, but all their hopes for the future, too–had been flung back in their faces.

Tossing and turning in her bed, Laura asked herself why he couldn’t have stayed and explained everything to his parents? Was he, too, afflicted by the darkness that seemed to weigh down on their family?

Mr Brownlow now seemed unwilling even to hear Tom’s name, for reasons of grief rather than anger. More and more he wrapped himself up in his
History of the Church
and in his God.

He hardly had the strength to deal with the continuing rumblings of discontent in his parish.

More anonymous letters had been arriving, complaining about matters such as incense and statues of the Virgin, which the writer, who had an educated hand, condemned as
the scarlet rags of Papists; sacrilegious, unEnglish
.

Then one evening Mr Perkins, the verger, fetched up on the Brownlows’ doorstep in a terrible dither. ‘They’ve thrown earth at un, they’ve thrown earth!’ was all the Brownlows could get out of him. They sat him in the kitchen with a glass of Mrs Jorkins’s Best Medicinal until he calmed down, then Mr Brownlow accompanied him to the church where he was shocked to find that someone had indeed scattered dirt from the street all over the high altar. Worse was to come. When they visited the Lady Chapel, they found the statue of the Blessed Virgin knocked to the floor, her head rolled into a corner amidst the mouse droppings.

Enquiries were made. The old flowerseller who sat in the street outside most days, but swore as though it were a virtue that she had never crossed the threshold of a church in her life, told a Constable she’d seen three drunks lolling in the porch the day before, but even she couldn’t actually confirm that they’d entered the church.

‘Could one be that rogue Cooper?’ Mr Bond asked the officer, but investigations revealed Ida the nursemaid’s father to be in the penitentiary, sent down for breaching the peace.

On Mr Bond’s orders, Mr Perkins hammered a notice to the door:
This church will be locked when unattended due to vandalism
. Overnight the notice was defaced.

The following Sunday Laura’s father delivered a fiery sermon denouncing iconoclasm as ‘blasphemous and anarchic’. He instructed any in the congregation who knew the identity of those involved to give him or Mr Bond the names. The sermon proved a mistake. Some of the rougher elements of the congregation took umbrage, believing they were under suspicion. The wealthier members, who had heard about the anonymous letters, were upset that one of their number might be responsible. Everyone began to suspect everyone else, despite the Rector insisting that the vandalism was very likely the work of outsiders.

Everyone was briefly united again the following Sunday, when morning worship was interrupted by a cacophony of clanging and shouting outside.

Mr Bond and Mr Perkins hurried out to find a gaggle of small boys banging saucepans and cans by the gate. ‘Run, ye beggars,’ shouted the ringleader, and they scarpered, all except one, whom Mr Bond collared.

‘They paid us sixpence,’ squeaked the miscreant, but as to who had ordered the children to make a noise, he couldn’t or wouldn’t say. In the end Mr Bond took pity on the half-starved urchin and let him go.

‘Some of the poor resent us,’ a gloomy Brownlow said at luncheon that day, ‘when they should be grateful. Now they mock the glory of God. Instead of joining our worship they drag everything down to their own godless level and destroy.’

‘We have to remember it’s only a few people who are responsible, James,’ his wife replied. ‘Most are appreciative of our efforts.’

‘Then we must defend ourselves against the troublemakers,’ said James, sighing. ‘We must stand firm.’

Another anonymous letter arrived. The vicar left it open on his desk and Laura couldn’t help reading it.

Disciples of the Scarlet Whore will burn in hell
. The capital S of Scarlet was shaped like a small, ornate harp.
Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image
. Had it been written by the same hand that threw earth and broke glass? Laura agreed with her father that it seemed unlikely. The writer betrayed at least some reverence for plain worship. The vandals didn’t value anything.

‘Papa has been summoned to see the Bishop,’ Laura remarked breathlessly to Mr Russell one day, when she visited him in one of the workshops at
Minster Glass
.

She had been to the shop once or twice before, and was introduced to Mr Reuben Ashe, the thin-faced, bespectacled owner of the firm, himself a skilled glass-painter. On their second visit, Polly the maid so clearly expressed her dislike of the dirt and the chemical smells that this time Laura came alone.

Today, black curtains were drawn across the windows; daylight was only permitted to shine through the middle, where Russell had propped up a large sheet of clear glass on an easel. Stuck to this with beeswax were the pieces of coloured glass that were to make up the
Virgin and Child
window. Last week Laura had watched him cut out the shapes and neaten the edges with pliers. Today he showed her how he had painted the reverse of the clear sheet with lamp black to mark the lines where the lead would come. Now, with the light shining through the sheet from behind, he stood painting detail on the coloured shapes, the original drawing by his side as guide.

Laura sat in the half-darkness and watched him, talking about anything that came into her head. Sometimes her father heard confessions from behind a screen at the back of his church; another Papist fashion that scandalised the letter-writer. Laura had never taken advantage of this herself. There were things now that she wouldn’t want to tell her father; but here, sitting in the half-darkness with Philip, concentrating on his work, no more than a silhouette against the light, she could imagine what it might be like. It was easy to say too much. Words, once said, could not be taken back.

‘The Bishop might blame Papa; might order him to make changes,’ she confided. ‘Papa fears the shame of it.’

Mr Russell didn’t answer so she rose from the uncomfortable wooden chair and moved over to look more closely at what he was doing. He was working on the faces, which until now had been only rough circles of white-tinted glass. With the thinnest of brushes he outlined the iris of the Madonna’s eye, then, picking a fatter brush from the jar, he dipped it into the paintpot and sketched an eyebrow like a bird’s wing. As Laura watched, the whole face came into being under his hand. But it was unfinished, without depth or texture; just features floating.

‘This brown paint has to dry first,’ he explained, wiping his brush on a cloth hanging out of his overall pocket. He selected the fine one once more, with a quick movement of his long fingers, like a heron they’d once seen dipping for fish in the park, Laura thought. ‘When I’ve finished the faces I’ll start work on the lines of drapery. The borders will be done after that. Tomorrow, I can mat the lightest of washes on the skin. When that’s dry I’ll stipple it with a brush to bring out the moulding of the flesh.’

‘And the hair?’

‘Silver nitrate. It turns gold when fired. That stage is last of all.’

‘All that will take days. Can’t you ask someone else to help–I don’t know, paint the borders for you?’

‘I could,’ he said calmly, as he outlined the infant’s rosebud mouth with the fine brush. ‘But that’s not how I like to work.’

She sighed impatiently. He was so absorbed in his work now that he hardly looked at her. She wandered back to her chair, careful to lift her skirts clear of the paint-splashed tins and dusty bags lining the skirting boards and worktops.

‘This must bore you,’ he said after a while.

‘Not at all,’ she said sharply. ‘But I must leave. I promised Mama I’d accompany her to the orphanage.’ They were taking Ida Cooper to visit her brothers and sisters.

‘Mmm,’ was all he replied. He was contemplating the baby’s face, looking from the drawing to the glass, frowning.

She stood up, shook out her shawl and pulled it round her. When she said goodbye, he finally put down his brush and turned to face her, smiling, wiping his fingers on the dirty cloth. He looked like a common workman today, she thought, and was irritated that he didn’t notice her mood.

Walking briskly across the Square she regretted her scorn, berated herself for viewing him as through her parents’ eyes; in dirty overalls, at home in an industrial workshop. She had only thought like this because she was annoyed, that’s all. And yet she couldn’t explain her annoyance.

She still enjoyed their meetings, but she was aware that, all the while they talked, his thoughts were not really on her.

What was wrong with that? He was married. She had no claim on him. Anything more than friendship was simply not possible. She was tired of hearing about his wife, Marie, that was all. She didn’t want to be reminded of how Marie still filled his dreams, even though she’d betrayed him. One day, maybe, Marie would return to him. Laura knew it to be her noble duty to pray for such a day, without any consideration for how it might affect her friendship with him. If only–if only the light glinting on his red-gold hair didn’t make her heart beat so fast she would have been able to bear it all.

One balmy July afternoon, they took a walk up past the Royal Aquarium to Westminster Abbey. She was wearing her gold dress, which always made her feel more attractive.

‘I came to a wedding here once with Marie,’ he told her, as they stood looking up at the dizzying heights of the west front. ‘It was the first time I realised what a lovely singing voice she had. Yet she rarely sang, you know, except lullabies. It was a shame.’ His eyes were sad.

Laura felt a bolt of anger shoot through her; she picked up her skirts and ran for the steps. This so startled a great flock of pigeons that they wheeled up suddenly, and she had to put up her arms to shield her face.

I don’t want to hear about Marie any more
, was what she was telling him. He merely grabbed her, pulled her back.

‘What did you do that for?’ he asked angrily.

‘Oh, I felt like it,’ she replied, as gaily as she could, but she meekly allowed him to take her arm once more.

‘You might have been hurt,’ he said, gently now, as though he were correcting a child. ‘And now I must tell you some news.’ His eyes were sparkling. Not more Marie, she briefly prayed, but it was something else entirely. ‘I showed those stories of yours to my friend at Millner’s. And he rates them, my dear. Can’t publish them himself, he says; not his sort of thing. But he advises you to send one or two to Alfred Loseley at
Ladies’ World
. Thinks they’re right up his street, especially the one with the dead flowers and the destitute wife.’