The Glass Painter's Daughter

by Rachel Hore

  ‘I’d like to, when I’ve got a moment. It’s something I can do…for Dad.’

  ‘Fine.’ He shrugged. ‘I’ll look up the paperwork now, if you like.’

  ‘Thanks. Oh.’ My eye fell on the brooch I’d left by the unfinished panel. ‘By the way, do you know anything about this? Perhaps Dad dropped it.’

  Zac took the brooch, studied it for a moment then returned it to me with a shake of his head. I turned the brooch over, still puzzled about its significance, then slipped it safely in my pocket.

  He wandered over to the office and started flicking through Dad’s big Day Book on the desk.

  ‘Looks like that panel’s the last part of an order for a new church in South London,’ he said after a minute.

  A church. I suddenly recalled the vicar’s letter.

  ‘That reminds me.’ I went off to fetch the Reverend Quentin’s missive from the shop counter. It wasn’t there, nor on the floor either.

  ‘Have you seen a white envelope?’ I asked, going back into the workshop.

  ‘This what you’re looking for?’ Zac fished the letter out of his overall pocket. ‘You don’t need to worry, I’ve already rung him.’

  ‘You have?’ I knew my annoyance was unreasonable, especially given my previous panic about getting involved, but Zac’s dismissive tone got under my skin. ‘What did he have to say?’

  ‘He didn’t mention anything about the “exciting discovery”. Just asked how your father was. Anita from the café had told him he was ill. I said I’d visit the church myself and report on the state of the windows. I’m going round there Monday at five.’

  ‘Will the light still be good enough to see properly then?’ I said sharply. It might sound ridiculous–but I felt excluded. It was I, after all, who had opened the letter, my father who was a friend of the writer, and if I’d rung the vicar I’m sure I would have got out of him what the mysterious discovery was.

  ‘I expect it’ll be all right.’ We were suddenly circling like a pair of prize-fighters. It was silly. I knew Zac was merely doing his job, but some small stubborn part of me wanted the upper hand.

  ‘I’ll go with you,’ I said, to settle the argument, and walked away into the shop before Zac could object.

  Silence followed, then after a moment came the teeth-jarring sound of tungsten scoring glass. I had been rude and I felt ashamed of myself. But, looking back now, I see that I was too unhappy and worried about Dad to act rationally.

  I tried to make amends by being helpful, opening up the shop and turning on the main lights. There were several new boxes of glass left by our wholesaler, stacked on the floor. I cut open the top one. Today at least, I told myself, it would be business as usual for Minster Glass. I would take my father’s place at the counter.

  From time to time, as I slotted the coloured squares sideways into their compartments on the shelves, so they could be easily flicked through, like old vinyl records, Zac came through to fetch something he needed, and he seemed pleased to see me there.

  I unwrapped a batch of small decorated mirrors and hung them on the back wall, thinking of my tuba upstairs. I had not taken it out of its case for several days now. Nor had I rung Jessica at the diary service that organised my bookings, to tell her what had happened and where I could be contacted. I thought of Dad, lying in his hospital bed, and again that dark tide rose up inside, choking me. I was terrified for Dad, but also for myself. My life was on hold–but for the moment, what could I do about it? Nothing, except wait and occupy myself unpacking glass.

  Zac left at lunchtime, muttering something about calling in on Dad on the way to a business appointment. I watched him walk quickly across the Greycoat Square gardens and was glad to be alone.

  It was a quiet afternoon in the shop. When I’d checked the supplies of the tools we sold, making notes for re-orders, I parked myself at a table just inside the workshop, from where I could see anyone who came in, plugged in a solder iron and tried to mend a lampshade. I hadn’t soldered lead for so long that it took me several practice runs on some pieces of foiled scrap glass before I dared attempt a fine line across the joins on the shade. Contemplating my work, I decided that the result wasn’t too bad. I put the shade to one side, then picked up a mirror with a broken border and started on that. It was absorbing, soothing work.

  There weren’t many customers. A small boy with his father bought one of the little mirrors for his mother’s birthday. A middle-aged woman with faded ginger hair and hoop earrings wanted some glass for an evening-class project. She pulled out every piece in the shop before selecting a perfectly ordinary square of streaky cathedral blue. A young woman in track pants, with straggly black hair and dark eyes, hung about outside, staring at the window display and chewing her nails. When I stepped out to get a cappuccino from the café next door, she returned my smile fearfully before scurrying off. She kept to the shadows, looking behind her from time to time. Like a stray cat, I thought with a rush of pity. Used to being driven away.

  That evening, visited by loneliness, I extracted my address book from my handbag and tried the number of a friend from music college I’d not spoken to for years, only to be told she had moved away, whereabouts unknown. Next I called a fellow brass player in South London, then a woman from the concert promoters I was friendly with, but it was Saturday night and no one, it seemed, was in except me.

  As I leafed through the dog-eared pages, I was struck by the realisation that I had too easily let old friendships lapse. I had hardly anyone left at all.

  I reached ‘P’ and saw my old schoolfriend Jo Pryde’s name. Eleven Rochester Mansions, her parents’ flat, was still the only address given. But then I hadn’t seen Jo in years, so she probably wouldn’t have bothered telling me if she had moved. I thought about ringing the number, but imagined a stilted conversation with one of her parents. Perhaps too much time had passed. I hadn’t contacted her since I left school, dropped her along with everyone else since I began my peripatetic working life. I felt bad about it now, but it had seemed necessary to get away then, to cut my ties and launch out on my own.

  I gave up trying to track down friends and instead went upstairs to pack a bag of Dad’s things to take with me when I visited the hospital tomorrow.

  His bedroom had a sad, abandoned air. I’d placed the gold angel brooch on his bedside table, next to the photograph of me, aged twelve, sitting on a Welsh pony, taken on a rare holiday near Aberystwyth. This photo was the only truly personal item on display. There was one picture on the wall–a framed print of an Alma Tadema painting–unnaturally pale women bathing in a Classical setting, the waters of the pool a storybook blue. Perfectly executed, but I always thought Alma Tadema’s work chilly, devoid of emotion. Perhaps that was why Dad liked it, for he, too, betrayed little of his feelings. And yet I knew that he wasn’t a cold man. It was rather that he had locked his feelings away.

  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:

  To my own darling Edward on his birthday.

  All my love, Angie, 29 March 1963.

  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.

  Chapter 3

  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 unf
ocused 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.