by Rachel Hore
Praise for The Memory Garden
‘With her second novel, Rachel Hore proves she does place and setting as well as romance and relationships. Tiny, hidden Lamorna Cove in Cornwall is the backdrop to two huge tales of illicit passion and thwarted ambition…Clever stuff’
Daily Mirror
‘Rachel Hore knows the tricks of her trade and keeps the pages turning by adding a hint of a past mystery, too. Cleverly done’
Now
‘Rachel’s Hore’s second novel is pitched perfectly for a holiday read’
Guardian
‘An engrossing read!’ Yours
Praise for Rachel Hore’s debut novel The Dream House
‘A beautifully written and magical novel about life, love and family…tender and funny, warm and wise, the story of one woman’s search for the perfect life which isn’t quite where she thought she would find it. I loved it!’
CATHY KELLY
‘What a treat! It’s so very real and utterly unputdownable’
CHRIS MANBY
‘I loved it. It’s brilliantly evocative, wonderfully romantic and it kept me guessing right through to the end’
DAISY WAUGH
‘I found this a totally absorbing, intriguing and romantic read, and the period detail, in particular, was beautifully evoked. A wonderfully atmospheric debut by a writer to watch’
ISABEL WOLFF
‘The Dream House is a book that so many of us will identify with…engrossing, pleasantly surprising and thoroughly readable’
SANTA MONTEFIORE
‘I enjoyed it enormously…a wonderfully evocative and cleverly woven story’
BARBARA ERSKINE
‘Warm, very true to life and totally engrossing’
JENNY COLGAN
Also by Rachel Hore
The Dream House
The Memory Garden
First published in Great Britain by Pocket Books UK, 2009
An imprint of Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
A CBS COMPANY
Copyright © Rachel Hore, 2009
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
® and © 1997 Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.
Pocket Books & Design is a registered trademark of Simon & Schuster Inc.
The right of Rachel Hore to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
1st Floor
222 Gray’s Inn Road
London WC1X 8HB
www.simonsays.co.uk
Simon & Schuster Australia
Sydney
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN-13: 978-1-84739-868-0
ISBN-10: 1-84739-868-5
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, events or locales is purely coincidental.
To Felix, Benjy and Leo–non angeli sed Angli.
(Not angels but Englishmen.)
In old days there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction. We see no white-winged angels now. But yet men are led away from threatening destruction: a hand is put into theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they look no more backward; and the hand may be a little child’s.
George Eliot, Silas Marner
Woman is like the Archangel Michael as he stands upon Saint Angelo at Rome. She has an immense provision of wings, which seem as if they would bear her over earth and heaven, but when she tries to use them, she is petrified into stone, her feet are grown into the earth, chained to the bronze pedestal.
Florence Nightingale, Cassandra
Contents
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Coda
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank all the people who helped me during the research and writing of this novel. Susan Mathews, Curator of the Stained Glass Museum at Ely Cathedral, gave generously of her time and expertise. Ian de Arth taught a lively and interesting evening class in copper foil and lead work. Colin Dowdeswell provided useful tips about playing the tuba. The Reverend Colin Way, Victoria Hook, Juliet Bamber and Dr Hilary Johnson all read the script with an eagle eye. The Eaton Parishes Choir provided an enjoyable experience of choral singing.
Immeasurable thanks are due to my agent Sheila Crowley and her colleagues at A. P. Watt and Curtis Brown. At Simon & Schuster, I am indebted to Suzanne Baboneau and Libby Vernon’s excellent editing, and to the rest of the team there, especially Sue Stephens and Jeff Jamieson.
Lastly, but by no means least, thanks to my family. My mother Phyllis is my number one fan; my children have several times saved my memory stick from the jaws of their puppy; my husband David helps in more ways than he knows.
I consulted a wide number of books and websites. The following were especially helpful: Victorian Stained Glass by Martin Harrison, Stained Glass in England by June Osborne, Edward Burne-Jones by Penelope Fitzgerald, Perceptions of Angels in History by Henry Mayr-Harting, A Treasury of Angels by Jacky Newcomb, Teen Angel by Glennyce S. Eckersley, Westminster and Pimlico Past by Isobel Watson, the Canterbury Cathedral Stained Glass Studio website (www.stained-glass-studio.org.uk) and www.williamsandbyrne.co.uk.
Prologue
London, 3 September 1993
The stained-glass shop had worn its Closed sign for nearly a week, though that hadn’t stopped people from testing the door handle or staring in through the window, hoping for signs of life. Some of the lights were on, after all, and passers-by were startled from their early-morning stupor by the exquisite items on display: the angel glowing centre stage in its arched pane; delicate suncatchers–dragonflies and fairies–quivering in some draught; myriad Tiffany-style lampshades receding across the shop ceiling like lush flowers studding a tropical rainforest canopy.
One very young woman who stopped by every day noticed that sometimes the door at the back of the shop stood open and sometimes it was closed, that sometimes there were two or three cardboard boxes stacked on the counter and sometimes none.
Someone visited the shop several times that week: a middle-aged man with a military bearing, dressed in a tweed jacket and clerical collar. The first morning, he tried the door and found it locked. He stepped back to inspect the words Minster Glass gleaming over the shop-front,
adjusted his spectacles to read the opening times listed beneath the Closed sign, then frowned before setting off back across the public garden of the Square. The next day he pushed a white envelope through the letterbox. On the third occasion, as he scrawled the phone number given on the sign into a small notebook, a woman in a plastic apron and with a fat purse in her hand emerged from the coffee shop next door.
‘You wanting Mr Morrison?’ she asked, looking the man up and down as if to satisfy herself that he wasn’t one of them down-and-outs. ‘He’s not at all well. The ambulance come last week.’ She knew no more. He thanked her anyway as he pocketed the notebook and turned away.
Eventually, mid-afternoon on Friday, a black cab sailed out of the traffic and pulled up outside the shop. A slight, neat woman with shoulder-length dark hair and a pale complexion climbed out and started dragging an assortment of baggage onto the pavement.
Anita in the café, glancing out of the window as she waited for the coffee machine to deliver an espresso, surveyed the scuffed leather holdall and the overflowing rucksack, and wondered what could be in the hard, odd-shaped case. Must be a musical instrument of some sort, she supposed. Either that, or the shape suggested a very small elephant.
The girl dismissed the cab and stood among her belongings gazing wistfully at Minster Glass. In her short tailored coat and striped scarf, and with her brown eyes soulful below her fringe, she looked like a reluctant schoolgirl returning to her institution after a glorious summer break. Anita was new to the café, otherwise she might have guessed the younger woman’s identity, and realised that, as she contemplated her father’s shop, Fran Morrison’s entire life was passing before her eyes.
Chapter 1
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 caug
ht 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.