The Glass Painter's Daughter (35 page)

‘He’s quietly behaved today,’ Philip whispered, lighting a pipe, which Laura had never seen him do before. ‘Sometimes he won’t settle. I think he’s taken to you.’

‘Oh, do you think so?’ She felt unconscionably pleased.

‘I do. Now, I’ve promised to show him the trains at Victoria Station, then we’re to see the Queen’s horses at the Royal Mews. After that, the girl returns him to his mama in Eaton Square. Will you accompany us?’

Laura readily acceded, thinking how much he had changed since that day in the studio. He seemed solicitous of her now; anxious to please.

They ate cold meat pie while John slept, then, at half-past one, they sallied forth with the boy between them, the girl, Kitty, hurrying behind.

Laura was touched to see how well they were together, father and son, as they watched the trains draw in or leave the station. Philip even found a willing driver with time to take the boy into his cab and show him the controls.

At first, when it was time to move on, John complained, but his nurse insisted, and he held his father’s hand, chattering happily enough, as they walked up Buckingham Palace Road towards the Royal Mews where Queen Victoria’s coaches and horses were kept.

On the other side of the busy street a hackney carriage stopped to let passengers alight. A dandified gentleman with top hat and cane could be seen paying the driver. There was a lady behind him; her face was for the moment hidden as she smoothed the folds of her dress. Then she looked up. Laura drew a sharp breath.

The boy followed the direction of her gaze. ‘Mama!’ he shrieked, and threw off his father’s hand, dashing into the road.

‘John!’ Philip leaped in immediate pursuit.

Another carriage jangled up at a lick, overtaking the first; the snort of the horses like an urgent warning. Too late.

‘John, get back!’ screeched Marie, dodging out in front of the hackney.

Philip grabbed his son from the path of the flailing hooves. Marie tumbled under them. Laura would never forget her scream; long, high-pitched, animal, as the wheels ran over her.

That scream rang through her dreams for weeks, months, so that she woke in the early hours, shaking and sweating. Then she’d lie awake going over and over what had happened, wishing she could have done something. They should have anticipated John’s excitement, known that he was tired and a little anxious about being away from his mother. If only they’d recognised Marie another second before John did. In one tiny, fatal moment of distraction they’d failed this little boy, robbed him of his mother. Philip was forever stripped of hope, Marie’s parents had lost their beautiful daughter. So many people were suffering.

Despair dragged her down. It seemed that all her recent sadnesses, her uncertainties, had been but waiting for this final blow.

She wrote one short broken sentence to Philip–
I feel so wretched for you both. My prayers are all for you
…but heard nothing in return, though she watched the arrival of every post.

The funeral came and went. Harriet read her the account from the newspaper. It had taken place in the fashionable St George’s Hanover Square, where Marie and Philip were married. The list of mourners included many famous names: Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris, John Ruskin, Alma Tadema, even the poet Swinburne winkled out of his lair for the spectacle.

Laura told her parents about the accident. Of course she had to, since she was eventually escorted home, silent and white-faced in a cab by a police officer, to collapse weeping into her mother’s arms. But it was in Harriet that she confided her deepest feelings of guilt, which, as time passed and she had room to think, came to encompass not only her belief that she was somehow responsible for the accident by being there when she shouldn’t–but that her calumny had begun when she’d allowed her friendship with Philip to wander beyond the boundaries of propriety and good sense.

In the journal, Fran read Laura’s outpourings of anguish and found herself weeping with her.
By this scandal, I have deeply hurt everyone whom I love
, Laura had written,
slashed at the tender threads that bind us to one another
.

Although they never chided her, she could tell that her parents were disappointed. At church on Sunday it was apparent that the tragic event had become the latest gossip at firesides and dining-tables around the parish. Few of the women would meet Laura’s eye, and the men glanced at her curiously. No one actually said anything, but as she knelt to pray she felt all eyes on her.

She took no comfort even from the letter that arrived from Miss Badcoe, and which her father had passed round the breakfast-table the day before, confessing to her calumnies and craving mercy.

It has taken the intervention of your daughter to make me see how I might have been mistaken in my complaints. I respectfully ask for your understanding and your forgiveness. I deserve no more, except, I beg you, for your discretion
. Even now, the stiff old lady was too proud to ask for practical help, so Laura explained on Miss Badcoe’s behalf. Mr Brownlow merely nodded, walked slowly away to his study without a word and shut the door.

His wife expressed her feelings more strongly. ‘I cannot believe that a lady would know, let alone employ such language as she has done.’

‘She’s elderly and lonely…and perhaps a little mad, Mama,’ Laura said gently. ‘She deserves our pity.’

‘Indeed.’ Her mother sighed and capitulated as Laura knew she would. ‘But I shall never be able to consider her in the same way again. And does this explain all the damage? No, it doesn’t. Whatever shall become of us all?’

They didn’t have to wait long for the rest of the mystery to be solved. Three nights later, on the Festival of St Michael and All Angels, one Alfred Cooper was apprehended, drunk and insensible, in the porch of the church. Two more windows had been broken, said the policeman who visited the rectory the following morning, and the man’s pockets were found to be full of stones. He’d confessed, giving the names of other villains he’d ensnared.

Later that morning, a carriage and pair, briskly driven, rolled up outside the house and Harriet climbed out. There was no sign of baby Arthur. Instead, she was dragging a clearly reluctant Ida by the arm.

‘Ida, tell my parents what you told me, you wretched girl,’ she ordered, pulling off her gloves and settling back in her chair. Mr and Mrs Brownlow exchanged glances. Laura stood quietly by the window.

‘What is it, Ida?’ said Mr Brownlow, more gently, and gradually the white-faced maid stumbled out her story.

‘I’ve done nothing wrong, sir. I was pulled all ways. I didn’t know what was right.’

‘It’s that man they’ve arrested,’ Harriet said. ‘Her father. Ida, go on, tell them properly. I caught you last evening, didn’t I? Giving him food. Which she’d stolen from my kitchen.’

‘I’m sorry, madam, I’ve told you I’m sorry,’ squeaked Ida. Humped up in misery, she was close to tears.

‘Now now, my dear, you’re with friends here,’ said Mrs Brownlow. ‘There’s nothing you can’t tell us.’

Little by little, they extracted from her the whole story.

‘He threatened me. Told me I must save my brothers and sisters from the orphanage and get the family together again or I’d burn in hell.’ Alfred Cooper resented the Brownlows, that much was obvious.

A police officer was called to speak to Ida.

At luncheon, Mr Brownlow told his wife and Laura, ‘The police say that Cooper ranted about how Mrs Brownlow killed Molly and the baby and took his children away.’

‘What rubbish!’ cried Mrs Brownlow, spreading her napkin on her lap. ‘The man’s too dissolute and intemperate to provide for his wife and children, and then he blames other people for the family’s misfortune. Nay, blames the whole parish, it seems. Well, now the man will be transported no doubt and it’ll be an end to the matter.’

Laura picked at a thread on the tablecloth and remembered that foul hovel where the Coopers had lived. Just as she understood Miss Badcoe, now she wondered whether Mr Cooper had a story of his own. Yes, it could not be denied, he had failed his family. He had been threatening and violent, and that could not be excused. But what kind of upbringing had Alfred Cooper endured? What had made him the man he was?

‘What’s going to happen to Ida?’ she asked as she spooned her soup.

‘Harriet’s very angry about the theft of the food,’ said her father. ‘George wants her to dismiss the girl. Such a crime cannot be seen to be condoned. However, I have written urging him to reconsider the matter. Is a young girl with a soft heart to be condemned for obeying her father? Surely not. I’ve suggested that they give her some other punishment, but not throw her out on the streets without a reference. I hope George will see the way of mercy.’

‘I hope so, too,’ said Laura, sighing. ‘Some good should come of all this misery.’ What good could ever come out of her own terribly calumny, she could not for the moment conceive.

And it was while she pondered this that, for the third time, Anthony Bond proposed marriage. Mindful of her family’s happiness and won over by his persistence, she promised him an answer at Christmas.

In mid-October, as the leaves on the trees in the Square began to fall, a letter arrived from Philip.

It is a month since our terrible loss and only now have I returned to my senses. I must see you, Laura
.

But she was resolved now. She wrote to him saying that it was best for both of them if they didn’t meet.

It is not uncommon for angels to appear when people are on the edge of death.

Gary Kinnaman,
Angels Dark and Light

After reading my father’s letter, I started visiting the hospital every day. Now that I knew Dad’s story and understood how he had always felt about me, I wanted to spend as much time with him as possible, in an effort somehow to bridge that gulf of silence between us of which he spoke. I told him how Jeremy had shown me the letter, that I wished that he hadn’t hidden so much from me, that I was glad I knew it all now.

My feelings were, in truth, confused. Part of me was very angry with him, and the more I dwelled on it, the more I resented the way he’d ruled my whole life, blighting my childhood with his secrets and his guilt. But he was a vulnerable old man now, long in the dying, and it seemed inappropriate to burden him with my anger. I became quickly frustrated, too, that here we were with the truth finally naked between us, but unable to communicate to one another all our thoughts and feelings about it. We’d lost the opportunity to mend the wounds of the past, to fill the silences. In the end I could only whisper broken words of reassurance to him as he lay unconscious, telling him that I loved him and forgave him everything. Jeremy said that it was all that was required and I took him at his word. What else could I do?

Zac sometimes came with me. I showed him Dad’s letter a couple of days after Jeremy gave it to me. We sat in the Quentins’ kitchen as he read it, under the baleful gaze of Lucifer the cat. When he passed it back, his face was troubled. ‘I never suspected any of that,’ he said. ‘Your father gave nothing away about himself.’

‘I’m so glad he found Jeremy to talk to,’ I replied, realising that Dad had almost left it too late.

We were with Dad when he died, Zac and I. A Sister from the hospice called me at the vicarage one Friday morning in the second week of November to say that he was fading. I rang Zac to tell him I was on my way to Dulwich.

We were there all day, and in that terrible time of waiting, phrases from
The Dream of Gerontius
flowed through my mind continuously. Dad probably wouldn’t be conscious that he was dying. But then, who really knew? Perhaps that important part of him, his spirit, was aware of moving forward into light and freedom. Perhaps he could feel our presence or perhaps he had already left us, was in the arms of a great angel who would bear him forth into eternity.

As dusk fell outside, a flock of geese rose above the trees with a great whir of wings, crying mournfully to one another, off on their journey south. When I turned to look at Dad once more, I saw that he, too, had gone.

Sitting next to me, Zac reached out and covered my hand with his. I leaned into him and wept.

On Monday at choir we had sung the section about the moment of Gerontius’ death, when the priest and his assistants cry, ‘Go forth upon thy journey…Go in the name of Angels and Archangels.’ I could hear the chorus running through my mind now as I looked at Dad’s still face. We speak of the dead being ‘at peace’. But what if Dad was, like Gerontius, on a great dramatic journey beyond death? Maybe he wasn’t ready for peace yet, but I prayed that he would get there.

Later, I spoke to Jeremy about this. He seemed to think the same as me. ‘Do you think he’ll see my mother again?’ I asked him.

‘Oh yes, I believe he will.’

‘They’ll have a lot to talk about.’

‘Yes, indeed.’

‘I imagine they’ll be quite cross with each other at first.’

Jeremy smiled. ‘Yes, but this time I expect they’ll hang on in there and work it out.’

There was only a handful of us at the crematorium the following Wednesday: me, Zac, Sarah, Anita, Mr Broadbent the bookseller and a clerk from Dad’s solicitor’s office. Jo couldn’t come and the organist wasn’t Ben, who had a heavy teaching schedule that day. Yet, despite our small party and the anonymous surroundings, Jeremy managed to make the service special and his sincere sorrow at the loss of a friend warmed us all.

‘Go on thy course, and may thy place today be found in peace,’ he said, as the curtains closed around the coffin.

Afterwards, we gathered outside shivering in the cold and stared at our stiff flower arrangements lying on the grass. There was only one that was unexpected. It was a simple bunch of chrysanthemums from Amber. When I read her tender note, my eyes swam with tears. It said,
May your angel carry you safely home
.