The Glass Painter's Daughter (4 page)

There were no photographs of my mother, a lack I had brooded upon since I was very young. I simply didn’t remember her, and Dad made sure there was nothing around the flat to remind me. He hardly ever mentioned her and would deflect any questions about her. Once, at suppertime, I mentioned a friend at primary school who had a birthday on Christmas Day. ‘It’s so mean,’ I said. ‘Some people still only give her one present.’ I was horrified to see anguish cross his face.

‘That’s what your mother complained about,’ he mumbled, putting down his knife and fork. ‘Christmas Day was her birthday, too. She was upset when I did that once. Gave her one present, I mean.’ He stared at the food I’d cooked for him, lost in misery. Then, as though I wasn’t there, he got up slowly, scraped the food into the bin and left the room. Sitting alone at the table I let the unseen tears drip down my face, knowing I’d said the wrong thing but not sure why I should bear the blame.

I only learned something of how she’d died by listening at doors. When I was in my first year of senior school we had a visitor at home, a rare event in itself. It was Mrs Webb, my form teacher, who came to see Dad after he refused to sign the form allowing me to go on a week’s field trip in the Peak District. He seemed worried about letting me go away for so long. ‘She’s all I’ve got,’ I overheard him tell Mrs Webb from my hiding-place outside the living-room door, and I glowed with pleasure at what I took to be evidence of his love. I wouldn’t have minded not going on the trip if it was because he couldn’t stand to be without me. But what they discussed next was unsettling.

Mrs Webb asked what had happened to my mother. ‘An accident when Frances was small.’ Dad’s voice drifted to me, almost inaudibly. ‘She died in hospital. I haven’t talked about it to my daughter; it would only upset her.’

Where, how and when the accident had happened Dad didn’t volunteer, but Mrs Webb persuaded him to sign the form and was sensitive enough not to ask any more questions.

My mother. I yearned to know more, but was not sure how to find out. Out of respect for Dad I hadn’t liked to try.

Though I couldn’t remember her, I always felt her absence keenly. ‘Make a card for Mother’s Day,’ some teacher would say, before noticing my confused expression and stuttering with embarrassment, ‘Er, how about for a g-grandmother, Frances?’ while the other children stared at me curiously.

Sometimes as a child I’d lie on the borders of sleep and try to remember something–anything–about her, but I couldn’t. Occasionally, I’d be caught unawares by the pattern on a dress or a whiff of a particular perfume…but I could never catch the coat-tails of the memory before it was gone.

Once, when I was about ten, I dredged up the courage to ask Dad what my mother had looked like and he said, ‘Like you,’ which pleased me. But he couldn’t look at pictures of her, he added. It made him too sad. At the time I accepted this. It didn’t occur to me that I had any rights in the matter. By my mid-teens, however, I became angry, mutinous, told myself I hated him–for clearly, any sadness
I
might have didn’t count!

Not long afterwards I discovered a photograph album full of pictures of me, first as a baby, then as a fat laughing toddler. There were blanks in the album where, here and there, photos had been torn out. Photos of my mother, I supposed. I had to content myself with learning about her in parts–her arms cradling me, a graceful pair of legs visible where she stood behind me as I staggered my early steps, wavy dark hair, a pair of lips curving above my baby curls.

Then, one day, a few months later, I struck gold. I was becoming interested in Dad’s work, was teaching myself art history out of the many books he kept in the flat. I lifted an outsize volume on Edward Burne-Jones down from a high shelf and opened it. On the title page was inscribed:

I turned the pages wonderingly, feeling the precious weight of this evidence of my parents’ love for one another, until I reached a series of angel paintings. There, sandwiched between one named
Faith
and another called
Hope
, lay a small black and white photograph of a woman’s face. I’d know those smiling lips anywhere, that cascade of hair.

I replaced the photo between the pages and slid the book under my bed, taking pleasure in the fact that I slept with it there every night. When I left on tour for the first time I had moved the book for safety to a shelf in my wardrobe. After I’d packed Dad’s hospital bag I went to check. The book was still there. I sat on the bed to study the photograph.

It was a studio shot taken at a three-quarter angle, the light falling softly on her upturned face. I suspected some touching up, since her skin was so flawless, though no one could deny that she was lovely, the long dark hair cut into a heavy fringe at the front, as was the fashion in 1963. It was the style of photo you see in concert or theatre programmes, and it occurred to me that I’d never properly considered what she did before she became my mother. To me she’d always first and foremost been my mother, never a person in her own right, with her own story.

How can I describe the isolation of my childhood? My father loved me, I knew that in the way he looked after my every physical need, his protectiveness. Later he showed it in the thorough training he gave me in the workshop, gradually giving me more responsibility, letting me serve in the shop, create my own design commissions, which he would soberly carry out, giving me the credit with the customers when he might have kept it for himself.

On the one hand, I trusted him, looked up to him, but as for what was going on in his mind those days when he seemed dragged down in depression or snapped at me irritably, I could never discover. I learned not to ask questions. It might have been different if I’d had a brother or sister with whom to share this burden of loneliness, even another grown-up who might take an interest, but Dad had been an only child himself, his parents both dead before I was born, and if my mother still had any living relations, well, we had lost touch. I knew no grandmother to make a Mothering Sunday card for. I used to make one for Dad instead.

I remembered him as proud, dignified, always well turned out. Under his work overalls he’d always wear a shirt and tie, and his leather shoes were kept polished. Even at sixty, it was obvious why women might be attracted to him. His deepset eyes had a faraway, unreadable look, his low, well-spoken voice hinted at untapped passion. With his physical presence–he was over six feet tall–and his obvious standoffishness he was someone people took notice of–and treated with wariness.

I believe he never looked at another woman after my mother. He threw himself into the design and creation of beautiful stained glass with complete and utter absorption, always aiming for the highest standards. It was with his craft that he and I came to have something in common. We could talk about the whereabouts of obscure church stained-glass windows for hours; his memory was phenomenal. His other great interest was classical music, and it was he who insisted that I learn first the piano and then an orchestral instrument of my choice. He seemed faintly surprised when I decided on brass, but he paid for the lessons and came to every concert I was in at school, though he would spare me no criticism afterwards until I would almost wish he hadn’t come. On any more personal or emotional aspect of my upbringing, he said little or nothing. I never remember him saying he loved me.

Dad was plainly jealous of boyfriends. I was sixteen when a fellow horn player in the local schools’ orchestra plucked up courage to ask me out. I was so astonished that anyone had breached my shyness that I said yes. We went to the cinema once or twice, and to a concert, but the relationship faltered after Dad insisted on Alan picking me up from the house so he could meet him. Dad was surly and Alan meek and over-awed, so the poor boy seemed diminished in my eyes and I finished the relationship soon after. Still, wary of Dad, I declined to bring anyone home after that and so began my habit of conducting my affairs deliciously in secret.

I mustn’t exaggerate the difficulties. Much of the time Dad and I got along well enough. So what was it that finally caused me to seal myself off and seek a separate life from him? The patterns laid down in childhood, the ebbs and flows of relationships, are not always easy to put into words, but I’ll try.

I suppose I became more aware of the spreading pool of silence and deception between us. As I grew up and sought new experiences, I had to conceal so much from him–as he had always concealed things from me. I resented his unhappiness about me growing up, his own obstinate refusal to embrace change. So even if we hadn’t quarrelled so badly when I was eighteen, I think leaving would have been inevitable. Going away was what I had to do then, just as now I’d had to come back.

What angel nightly tracks that waste of frozen snow.

Emily Brontë,
The Visionary

The next morning I woke as I had every Sunday throughout my childhood to the sound of church bells rippling from near and far across the city. During my walk to the hospital to visit Dad, the single clear bell of St Martin’s tolled an insistent summons to worship.

I found my father propped up on pillows, staring out of the window with a sad unfocused gaze. It was appalling to see how one side of his face sagged. At least he was awake, and when I caught his attention, it surely wasn’t my imagination that his eyes seemed to brighten.

I brought out his washing kit, clean pyjamas, a dressing-gown. I’d even put in an adventure novel by an author he loved, thinking I could read to him when he was up to it. How long might that be? I placed it on the bedside cabinet next to the jar of freesias.

At the bottom of the bag, my hand closed over a wad of tissue paper. I hesitated, then unwrapped the blue and gold brooch and held it out.

‘Is this yours?’ I asked him.

His eyes told me
yes
–the anxiety clear in them.

‘Is it special?’

An anguished sound in his throat was his answer.

‘Don’t try to talk,’ I said swiftly. ‘I won’t leave it here, it might get stolen. I’ll keep it safe at home.’

I cast around for another topic of conversation. The man in the next bed cried out suddenly in his sleep, like a child having a bad dream.

‘We’re getting on beautifully at the shop,’ I ventured, trying to moderate my false brightness. ‘I’m finishing that window for you.’ That was to be my task that afternoon. ‘And Zac’s working on a beautiful sunset. I sold some glass yesterday.’ I rushed on now, telling him anything that came to mind. About the ginger-haired woman who had browsed so long, the lampshade I’d mended, that Anita who ran the café had asked after him.

His eyes eventually fluttered shut. I waited a few minutes, but he had sunk into a deep sleep. Putting the brooch safely away again in my handbag, I bent to press my lips against his cheek. How many years was it since I had last done that? He smelled strongly of hospital soap.

I wanted to ask about his progress, but there was no sign of a doctor. On my way out I consulted the staff at the nurses’ station and was told to ring in the morning when Mr Bashir would be on duty.

Only as I left the hospital did I remember that I hadn’t told Dad about the Reverend Quentin’s mysterious discovery or our proposed visit to St Martin’s.

After a snack lunch, I examined the paperwork for the Celtic window, checking the exact dimensions required. Then I measured the panel Dad had assembled and made some slight adjustments before soldering everything together and cementing it. I was quite pleased with the result. I didn’t seem to have lost my touch at all. Whether this would happen with my tuba was a different matter. I went upstairs that very minute to take it out of its case, and spent a pleasant hour taking it apart, cleaning it thoroughly, oiling the valves and playing a few exercises.

Late in the afternoon, I went out for a walk, up past the Home Office and on to Parliament Square. Dad and I often used to go this way, and sometimes he’d explain what the area used to look like. ‘Where we live was once orchards,’ he’d say. Or, ‘In Victorian times the Royal Aquarium stood on the site of that hotel.’

On the way back today I passed St Martin’s Church, where evening service was clearly underway. I studied its exterior with new interest. A stone over the porch proclaimed its foundation in 1851. When exactly might
Minster Glass
have made the windows? Who was the artist, I wondered, as I made my lonely way home. I ought to find out.

Dad had always been meticulous about researching such jobs, and I knew it would be important at some point for us to find the original paperwork in order to establish the materials and processes we would need to use in any properly conducted restoration. There were strict rules in place about these matters now. Conservation–stopping further deterioration–was the watchword. Restoration processes had to be documented, non-intrusive and reversible.

Minster Glass
had been in business since 1865. I had known that since my early teens, that far-off time when I’d been content, homework permitting, to help Dad in the shop, learning the techniques of glass-cutting, painting, leadwork and using copper foil, and hearing anecdotes about the shop’s history. It wasn’t long before I recognised with ease the different kinds of potmetal glass and could calculate the amount of lead required to complete even a complicated design. I knew my grandfather lent his services during the glazing of the new Coventry Cathedral after the war. That, going further back, his grandmother ran
Minster Glass
after my great-great-grandfather died falling from scaffolding.

The books, papers and files that filled our flat to overflowing represented most of the paperwork documenting the firm’s history–though only Dad knew where everything was. Somehow it had survived damp and the Blitz, the transition from father, or mother, to son to grandson. Dad had converted the huge attic into extra office space after Grandad died, several years before I was born. There, along with much else, he kept the original cartoon drawings and handwritten Day Books that listed every job the firm had ever undertaken.

A year ago, Zac persuaded him to install a computer in the office downstairs. However, Dad still liked to keep up his Day Books, recording the nature of each job in a flourish of loopy black letters. ‘Much quicker than waiting for this booting up nonsense,’ he grumbled when I spoke to him a couple of months ago from Paris after one of his dizzy spells.

When I returned from my walk I climbed the wrought-iron spiral staircase and pushed open the fire door into the attic. It opened with a little sigh.

Through the skylight the setting sun bathed the boxes and filing cabinets, filling the huge room from boarded floor to sloping ceiling in an orangey glow. I switched on the single light bulb and the long black line of Day Books on their deep wall shelves loomed into focus.

Where the two earliest volumes should have been there was a gap. After a moment I spotted them on Dad’s mahogany desk, amongst the books, papers and cardboard folders arranged in piles across the leather top.

One Day Book lay open. When I pulled it towards me, another cloth-covered book was revealed underneath, the pages, relieved from the weight, fanning up suddenly. They were filled with Dad’s distinctive black handwriting.

I picked up this curious new find and turned to the front page. There was a title there in printed capitals, carefully underlined. Reading it, I was amazed. Dad hadn’t told me that he was engaged in writing a history of
Minster Glass
. I flipped open a page at random and a familiar name caught my eye:

During January 1870, Mr Ashe was requested by the patron, Lady Faulkham, to create three windows for the North Chancel of St Barnabas’s Church in Wandsworth, the theme to be
The Last Supper.
He immediately wrote to Edward Burne-Jones asking him to submit designs. The artist supplied some within two weeks but a letter from Lady Faulkham reveals that she took exception to the faces
…

The firm had actually tried to commission Edward Burne-Jones, my favourite artist! I hadn’t known that before.

I pulled out a thin torn cardboard folder from a stack on the desk and looked inside. It contained drawings for a triptych of saints. In the file underneath I found bills and letters all fastened together in a yellowing age-curled wodge. Dad had clearly been doing his homework. I flicked through his notebook once more and scanned the opening page.

The first date mentioned was May 1865 when one Reuben Ashe set up the firm. But Dad had gone further back in time, tracking Ashe’s career up to this point. It was some pages before he returned to the progress of the new business in Greycoat Square. I jumped to the place in the book where he had last laid down his pen.

Although the thick notebook was half-filled he had only reached…no, it couldn’t be. A moment passed before I appreciated the coincidence. I looked again. Dad had reached 1880 and the last paragraph he had written concerned the very building Zac and I were going to see, St Martin’s Church. Then I remembered Jeremy Quentin’s letter, the reference to discussions they’d had, and saw that it wasn’t so surprising after all.

I read on.

The subscription to build St Martin’s Westminster had been raised by a benefactress keen to minister to those thousands of the godless poor who huddled in their rookeries in the shadows of Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament, under the disdainful noses of the rich and powerful.

Its great East Window, a powerful
Crucifixion
scene, was designed for
Minster Glass
by Charles Kempe in 1870, replacing a pattern-book
Nativity
that by this date was considered workaday and old-fashioned. Then, in 1880, the rector, a Mr James Brownlow, had the opportunity to order new windows for the Lady Chapel
…

Frustratingly, the account ended here, though Dad had pencilled a couple of queries in one margin.
Check when Burne-Jones worked for Morris & Co.
was one.
Who was Laura Brownlow?
was another.

I pulled the Day Book over, intending to cross-reference some of the entries. The East Window, it turned out, had been commissioned by a Reverend Truelove in 1870. It took me a while longer to find the others. Here they were in April 1880:
Two leaded lights for St Martin’s Westminster, ordered by Mr Jas. Brownlow, subjects to be discussed.
But that was all.

I regarded the piles on the desk thoughtfully. Somewhere in these mounds of paper would be useful information. I began to sort through the dusty files, taking care not to disturb the order they were in. Nothing of obvious relevance rose to the surface and since I wasn’t sure what I was looking for anyway, I soon gave up.

Turning off the light I took Dad’s notebook down to the living room, where I curled up in the chair by the window and began to read.

Reuben Ashe, I learned, had started the firm in a modest way at a time when coloured glass was all the rage again. A rash of church-building had fuelled a newfound Victorian obsession with the medieval. Dad described small restoration projects, modest commissions for public halls, then a church window or two over the river in Vauxhall, several for the chapel of a large country house in Essex, a triptych for a City guildhall.

The firm grew quickly in size and reputation until it occupied the adjoining building–where the café was now. By mid-1870, Dad wrote, Ashe employed ten men on and off, and many larger jobs were being requested–leadwork for the new suburban churches and public buildings being relentlessly rolled out across the green fields beyond London. They bought their glass from manufacturers like James Powell in the East End.

Dad described many of these commissions in meticulous detail. Too meticulous, I thought fondly as I turned the pages, remembering his favourite aphorism: the devil is in the detail. Any reader unacquainted with the trade would quickly weary of the lists of materials, the quoted letters from architects. I thought of him sitting up in his attic alone for hour upon hour, like Mr Casaubon in
Middlemarch
, filling the lonely hours with endless research into the dusty past. Perhaps I was wrong about him being lonely, but even so the thought made me feel even more guilty that I had seen so little of him over the last eleven or twelve years.

The paragraphs about the
Crucifixion
window were interesting.
Minster Glass
had been paid to use the best antique glass, no expense spared, and the splendid result had led to many more church commissions. I wondered what designs the Victorian Reverend Brownlow had requested. Well, I’d find out tomorrow. I was surprised to realise how much I was looking forward to the visit.