Bird Inside

by Wendy Perriam

  ‘Can’t you use another resin – I mean, stick the pieces back and …?’

  ‘Well, yes, we did discuss that. But it would mean stripping them all off first, and starting again from scratch, and the cost would be enormous. They’re short of cash, as usual, and I simply haven’t the time or inclination to do the job for peanuts. No, we decided we’d remove the thing and just plain-glaze the window, at least for the time being. It’s pretty bloody depressing. I always liked that window, and it was connected with a good time in my life – had sentimental memories.’

  Jane said nothing. More females, she supposed, more nipples and areolas. He’d probably had another young assistant, some sixteen-year-old siren, who’d inspired him and consoled him, modelled for him live. Part of the trouble of sleeping with a man so old was he’d lived too much, known too many women.

  ‘Anyway, I was driving back feeling rather down, when I saw this signpost to Newark, which is actually in Nottinghamshire, and not that far from Belthorpe, where I did another window, donkey’s years ago – a Saint Jerome window, complete with faithful lion. I thought we might drive over there to see it, have some lunch in the local pub, perhaps an amble round the village. It’s such a perfect day. I hope you realise I laid it on specially. Blue sky and puffy clouds don’t turn up on their own in the first week of December, especially when we were deep in snow last night.’

  She laughed, tried to hide a twinge of disappointment. Had he totally forgotten they were meant to be continuing where they’d left off earlier on? She hadn’t dressed on purpose, just had a bath, brushed her hair a hundred times, sprayed her breasts with scent. Now she felt a little spare, lolling naked on the pillows, when he was clearly chafing to get off.

  ‘Come on, Rose. We mustn’t miss this sunshine. Throw a sweater on or something, and we’ll go. The views are quite fantastic, and you can see for miles and miles. If we hang about, it may cloud over.’

  ‘But what about your breakfast?’

  ‘I very rarely eat it. And we can have an early lunch.’

  She checked her watch. It was already past eleven. She couldn’t see him stopping for lunch before two-ish at the earliest. Meals came last – after work and windows. This was work, in one sense, going to see his window. He had planned it as an outing, a treat for her, diversion, but she’d have preferred to have him to herself, without Saint Jerome as a threesome – and to have him wild and naked, as he’d been when they woke up. He wasn’t even looking at her, seemed oblivious of her breasts now, her areolas, her pink nipples.

  ‘I’ll wait for you downstairs, okay? I want a word with Jonathan.’

  ‘Yes, fine,’ she said flatly, slipping out of bed and hunting for her bra. The artist’s clothes were all neatly hung or folded; hers strewn on the floor.

  Fifteen minutes later, she joined him in reception, where he was talking with Jonathan and two other natty men. Four pairs of eyes swivelled to inspect her. She had left her hair loose, was wearing a tight sweater which made the most of what he’d called her firm and high-slung breasts. She could see the men approved; suddenly felt powerful, with a new weapon in her armoury, as if she’d broken through some barrier this morning, which had given her new status in the world.

  She sauntered out to the car, the artist’s arm across her shoulders, the three men strolling after them, waving them goodbye. Once outside, she was grateful for his plan. It was a perfect morning, cold but very clear, the sun deepening all the colours, gilding the grey water; the sky so vast and spacious it looked as if some busy giant had pulled it out and stretched it, laundered the white clouds. The roads seemed dwarfed beneath it, winding toytown roads, with wild and ragged hedgerows; an air of peace and timelessness frosted on a countryside which hadn’t yet been wrenched into the age of jets or juggernauts, and which had banned transistor radios and brazen Kawasakis. The loudest noise was the screeching of a jay, soaring from a copse. They admired the flash of turquoise in its wings, its gleaming chestnut plumage.

  ‘That’s a bird which should be seen and not heard,’ Christopher remarked. ‘It’s a pretty handsome fellow, but its voice is a disaster. It’s funny how the really virtuoso singers – the nightingales and skylarks – seem always rather drab, as if God or Mother Nature refused to give them beauty as well as a good voice. By the way, did you hear about that music teacher who used a computer and a tape recorder to slow down the skylark’s song – about sixteen times, I think it was, then transcribed it for the piano, and proved the bird a genius?’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘Well, he discovered that the skylark is creating music as complex and as subtle as that of Bach or Beethoven, and put together as skilfully as if a human mind was in control – actually following sonata form, with an exposition, development, and recapitulation. It almost blows the mind. I mean, larks have been around several million years before man, so they can hardly be following human rules of composition.’ He swerved to avoid a rabbit, already flattened on the road. ‘Apparently, the skylark sings about two hundred and fifty notes a second, which takes some believing, doesn’t it? I know birds live life in the fast lane, but …’ He was driving fast himself now, bare fields flashing by, clumps of naked trees, a tall church steeple glinting, gone; restless shadows rippling on the road. ‘Did you know I sign my windows with a bird?’

  ‘No,’ she said, counting no’s again. Two already, and they hadn’t reached the church yet.

  ‘When I first started, I used just my initials, as I do on all my paintings, but then I met a colleague whose name was Philip Mariner, and he always signed his windows with a tiny little ship. It’s called a rebus – when you use a pun or picture, to stand in for your name. Charles Kempe used a wheatsheaf, and after he teamed up with Walter Tower, they added a small tower to the centre of the sheaf. D’you know their work at all?’

  She shook her head, refused to frame a third no, or to admit she’d never heard of either artist.

  ‘Funnily enough, the first window that I ever signed with my little scarlet bird was the Saint Jerome one we’re on our way to see. Christ! That window cost me, Rose. I must have had more problems with it than any other commission before or since.’

  ‘Why? Was it glass appliqué, too?’

  ‘No. Leaded glass. The problems came before I’d even started, not two decades later. The vicar and the PCC were both a total pain, objected to the way I’d made the figure dissolve into the background, which was the whole point of the design; even objected to the lion, because it wasn’t quite the sort you’d see in London Zoo.’ The artist’s voice was rising as he recalled the whole controversy.

  ‘We had quite a little battle, though fortunately the donor and the architect were both very much on my side, and the donor was a wealthy man and an extremely generous patron of the church, so in the end we licked those stuffy middlebrows, whose whole idea of art was that it should console and be uplifting. My design threw down a challenge to them, suggested conflict and division, instead of easy phoney comfort, or sickly piety. But even when we’d got the thing accepted, the hassles still weren’t over. I had a devil of a job trying to get the glass. I needed a lot of subtle neutral colours, which no one seemed to have in stock, so I was rattling around from one supplier to another, wasting time and petrol.’ He hurtled round a corner, as if in demonstration, hands clenched on the wheel. ‘And to cap it all, I wasn’t that enamoured with Saint Jerome anyway. In fact, it beats me how he made it as a saint. He was fanatical, vindictive, spiteful and self-centred; hated Jews, hated competition, and was so obsessed with fasting and asceticism, he encouraged anorexia in all his female pupils. One of them actually starved herself to death, and there was said to be a scandal at her funeral. And it’s always seemed suspicious that he had so many women flocking round him, when he spent his whole damn life denouncing sex – even sex in marriage.’

  Jane looked up, shading her eyes from the bold stare of the sun. ‘So how did he imagine the race would carry on?’

&
nbsp; ‘I doubt he cared that much. The next life was the important one, which was why he opposed every form of pleasure – food, reading, women, wine – anything which ties us to this transient wicked world. The only thing he could say for sex was that it renewed the supply of virgins, and he apparently assumed that the very few women who ever made it into heaven would be immediately transmuted into men.’

  ‘Gosh! What a pig. I loathe him.’

  The artist laughed, relaxed his hands, let the car slow down, as if all his own annoyance had suddenly evaporated, and he’d remembered it was Saturday, and he was off-duty and at leisure; no longer struggling with misogynist saints, or hostile PCCs. ‘Well, don’t loathe my Saint Jerome. I have to admit I did become quite fond of him, once I’d got stuck in. It’s often the way when you’re working on a job. The subject takes you over, and you begin to see the human side underneath the faults or the façade. I made my Jerome really haunted, pulled between his own strong sensuality and all the fasts and deprivations he inflicted on his body. And the evidence bears me out, you know. The more I read about him, the more I found a man divided. He was apparently a gourmet, and used to visit strip-shows in his youth, yet he had an obvious dread of his own voracious appetites, tried to douse them with hard work. It’s said he studied Hebrew to discipline his mind, stop it recreating images of those topless dancing-girls.’

  Jane glanced up at the artist – the lean ascetic face and troubled eyes. Weren’t there certain parallels between him and harrowed Jerome? He called himself a gourmet, like the saint, but was always missing meals, hadn’t eaten since last night, and then left half his food. He, too, had females fluttering around him, was fanatical and self-centred, and though clearly very sensual, still rationed all his pleasures, always put work first.

  ‘Actually, I’m keen for you to see him, Rose. I’d like your view on the window as a whole. I’ve never been too sure about the lion. Because I knew the story was apocryphal, and there probably hadn’t been a lion at all, let alone a new-style softie Jerome pulling out a thorn from its paw, I tried to make the creature very minimal, more the general feeling of a lion, the sense of strength and claw, rather than every hair and whisker painted in. But perhaps I went too far, played it down a shade too much. It’ll be interesting to see it now, after all these years.’

  Jane started as a flock of geese suddenly honked across the sky, the nearest they had got yet to a jet plane. She was both pleased and apprehensive that he wanted her opinion on the window: flattered that he thought her views worth hearing; scared she’d disappoint him by saying something crass. She was always short of words, didn’t have his skill in clothing basic thoughts in velvet or shot-silk. And suppose she didn’t like it? Should she lie, pretend, force empty smiles and phrases; or simply tell him it was ‘interesting’ or ‘haunted’ – terms he’d used himself?

  She glanced through the car window at the stretch of tangled woodland, the murky stagnant stream. Despite the wreckage from the storm, the wreckage of the season – crippled hedgerows, beaten bracken, dead or fallen trees – there were also signs of spring: swollen buds on beeches, a pewter sheen on willows, glossy heart-shaped ivy-leaves garlanding dead elms. All life and vegetation seemed turned low, like a barely flickering flame, but both heat and light were there still, ready to burst forth again, once winter was defeated.

  ‘Look, there’s the signpost – Belthorpe.’ Christopher swung right, following its white arm. ‘I’d like to tell you it’s an idyllic country village, but it’s actually quite ordinary, and spoilt by modern housing.’

  Jane could see nothing modern as they drove into the village, just a street of old stone houses, a timbered pub shaded by two ancient oaks, and a group of old age pensioners gossiping by the village store, which had yellowed windows and a mangy cat dozing on the sill.

  Christopher scorched up the street, all the grey heads turning to goggle at his car; an overweight labrador suddenly trotting right in front of it, so that he was forced to swerve and slow. ‘The church is further up, Rose. It’s rather nicely sited on its own, with trees all around it, so you feel you’re in the wilds.’

  ‘We are,’ said Jane. ‘I’ve never seen such space and sort of emptiness. I mean, driving here, we hardly passed a soul.’

  ‘Well, Lincolnshire especially is rather secretive. I suppose it’s not en route to anywhere, so it keeps itself to itself. And even parts of Notts are pretty lonely. Right, here we are.’ He pulled up outside the churchyard, which stood higher than the village, with a screen of naked beeches standing guard around it, their labyrinthine roots exposed, like gnarled arthritic fingers. She could glimpse the grey stone church through the frieze of dappled branches; a dour but solid building, with a squarish tower one end. Christopher was already at the door, impatient as she hovered by the gravestones.

  ‘Some of these are really old. I can hardly read the inscriptions.’ She peered closer at a moss-furred block of granite.

  ‘I’m not surprised. The church is thirteenth-century – parts of it, at least. It’s suffered horribly, lost half its nave and chancel, and all its early glass.’ He plunged across to join her, pacing swiftly round the tombstones, the anger in his voice spilling to his feet. ‘When I think about the destruction of stained glass, I get so hopping mad I’d like to line up those crass Puritans and shoot them in cold blood, like they shot their lethal musket-balls through precious jewels of windows, or smashed them into fragments with iron bars. D’you realise, Rose, they called them works of the devil, those fantastic works of art, said they were invented by Satan, who was the patron of pomp and pride. You ought to read their records, their almost gloating relish when they battered down another hundred windows, or demolished priceless statues, and then recorded their barbarities as ‘‘godly reformations’’.’

  Jane stepped back, as if he were threatening her personally. She almost envied him his anger; the way he cared so passionately. She knew he would have risked his life if he’d been around in Cromwell’s time, and if that life could save the glass. She had read about the Puritan devastation, but it had all seemed two-dimensional – long ago and far away, just something in her history book, taught by chilblained Miss McKay, who cared more about the heating in the classroom than about the loss of England’s heritage.

  The artist was still fretting round the churchyard, appeared to have forgotten what they’d come for, his mind now in the south. ‘Every time I go to Canterbury Cathedral, I feel a sense of outrage. There’s that splendid nave with all its windows just plain-glazed, when they were probably once as rich as the famous ones in Chartres. I’d like to believe in hell, Rose, so that bloody butcher Cromwell could burn down there for ever. He used the nave as a barracks, would you believe, let his troops run wild and tear the place to pieces. And Henry VIII was every bit as bad – filched twenty-six cartloads of treasure from Canterbury alone, then wrecked every other Becket shrine throughout the length and breadth of England.’

  He suddenly swooped down, ripped out a piece of groundsel sprouting on a grave, flung it to one side. ‘And what makes it even worse was that both men were well aware of the relish for destruction, which lurks beneath the surface of so-called civilised society, and both deliberately harnessed it, whipped up public fury against the cathedrals and the monasteries. Whole communities joined in, every thick-skulled clod and ruffian working off his personal frustration on the fabric of the church.’

  Jane glanced up at his face, troubled by his bitter voice, the rancour in his eyes. Even the first day she had met him, he’d been berating human nature, its appetite for violence; denouncing violence violently. Was he angry just with vandals who’d lived four hundred years ago, or with people in his own life, here and now?

  He wiped his hands, which were muddy from the groundsel, then tramped back to the entrance of the church, beckoning her to join him. ‘Come and see these windows, Rose – monstrosities, the lot of them, nineteenth-century trash, in place of thirteenth-century masterpieces.’

 
; She stepped inside; the cold but bracing winter air giving place to a dark and gloomy clamminess as she closed the door behind her. The windows he was rubbishing looked okay to her – the sort of thing she’d seen in all the books – worthy saints standing under canopies, haloes round their heads, Gothic scrolls twining round their feet.

  ‘Look at this abortion! Absolutely lifeless, and made by some philistine who thought rich colours meant crude ones. It was probably churned out by a soulless firm, working on the cheap and rehashing old designs.’

  ‘But where’s yours?’ she asked, glancing round the nave from pious face to pious face; one saint pointing to a book, another with a pilgrim’s staff, two with lavish lilies. No lion, as yet, no stern but sensual Jerome dissolving into space.

  ‘It’s right up near the altar, in a side-chapel. Thank God! It would have been impossible, stylistically, to put a modern window in this nave, especially my Saint Jerome. You can’t just stick a new work in and ignore the scale and colour of all the other windows, or discount the shapes and rhythms of the architecture. You have to consider the building as a whole. My muted low-key colour scheme would be completely overwhelmed here. I chose sober colours deliberately, to suit a sober saint, and because I …’ He broke off in mid-sentence, stopping to examine a brass plaque on the wall, which seemed to claim his whole attention.

  She turned back to the pilgrim-saint, wondering who he was. Christopher had taught her a lot about the saints, how real they were in medieval times, and how absolutely crucial – patron saints and local saints, saints for every day and cause; helping you and guiding you, like family and friends. She hoped Saint Rose would do her bit when they returned to the hotel, make the sex so special that the artist would remember it for years and years to come, maybe all his life. Though, judging by what she’d learnt about her name-saint, it didn’t seem too likely. Saint Rose had been a virgin, and also a recluse, who had retired to a crumbling garden-shed and practised highly masochistic forms of penance. She’d hardly approve of dirty weekends with someone else’s husband, let alone of Sybarites knocking back champagne.