The Glass Painter's Daughter

by Rachel Hore

  He passed it back to me and took up the letter once more.

  ‘“Over the next couple of years, Angie’s career began to take off. She was invited to perform all around the country and this, of course, Fran, was still a time when wives were expected to put their husbands before professional duties. I did my best to be encouraging. When work allowed I would travel with her, but that couldn’t be often. And sometimes she was invited abroad and I didn’t go at all.

  ‘“Two years passed and the strains began to show. She seemed to be away so much. I could have stood her absences; it was her attitude when she came back that hurt me more. I could see that she was changing. She seemed less content with our life together. The criticisms started. The flat was difficult to make nice. Couldn’t we move? she asked. But actually she didn’t put much effort into making it nice. She always said she was bored by housework and cooking. She wanted to go out and eat in restaurants and have fun, which I didn’t enjoy particularly, and couldn’t afford, and then I felt belittled when she said she’d pay. She told me we needed to move somewhere smarter where she could invite people back. I wasn’t comfortable with that idea. Her musical friends could be quite clique-ey and I often felt left out.

  ‘“Of course, in the end I wished that I’d gone along with her desire to move, even if it had meant scrimping and saving, but which of us can see into the future? At the time it seemed as though she wasn’t just criticising the flat but me as well, and so I held out.”’

  ‘Maybe that’s not how she meant it though,’ I couldn’t help interrupting. ‘Perhaps she just wanted him to share the camaraderie of this exciting life she had.’ This letter was, of course, all from Dad’s side and I felt some need to stand up for my mother. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Do go on.’

  ‘“And then”,’ Jeremy read, ‘“Angela found that she was pregnant. We were stunned, having discussed the matter of starting a family and decided to put it off for a few years.

  ‘“Your mother was very anxious all the way through her pregnancy. She was worried about how a baby would affect her work, for she could hardly travel so much once she had you. But it wasn’t just that. She was affected psychologically. She had scares about her health, didn’t sleep well and became convinced that people were breaking into the flat as we lay in our bed. But despite all these anxieties, we obviously hoped that our relationship would be closer when you were born, that you would draw us together again”.

  ‘That’s a great responsibility for a small baby, saving its parents’ marriage,’ Jeremy said with a sigh. He read on.

  ‘“For a while, after your arrival, everything was blissful. You were a quiet baby, who slept through the night almost at once. Her friends used to remark on how easy you were. After a few months, with the help of a part-time nanny, your mother was able to resume her singing in London. And she found she enjoyed looking after a baby. In fact, we were both absolutely besotted with you”.’

  Tears slipped down my face, and when Jeremy looked up and saw them he fell into silence. One of the candles on the altar flickered and died with a breath of smoke. He looked at his watch and slowly folded the letter. ‘Come on,’ he said gently, ‘we’d better go back. Sarah will be sending out search-parties. Shall we read more later? Or tomorrow even?’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ I said. ‘I’m exhausted.’ Then: ‘Thank you,’ I told him, as he locked up. I felt immensely grateful to him for being there with me.

  That night I slept badly, thoughts about Dad’s letter rushing like crazy round my head. In the morning, I got out everything about my mother that I’d rescued from the flat and looked at it with new eyes. Here was her photograph, still tucked into the Burne-Jones book she gave Dad. This must have been how she looked round about the time that they met, her eyes filled with life and hope.

  I took the photograph and the concert programme with me when I went with Zac to see Dad that afternoon. Even if Dad couldn’t see the picture or hear what I had to tell him, it helped me to talk to Zac about my mother in Dad’s presence. Who knew what Dad might absorb from our conversation. Zac didn’t say much, just, ‘She’s very lovely,’ when I showed him the portrait.

  That evening after dinner, Jeremy and I repaired to the lumpy armchairs in his study. He messed about getting the gas fire working, cursing it in a quite unChristian fashion. Finally, satisfied, he retrieved Dad’s letter from his desk drawer and settled down in his chair.

  ‘Are you sure you’re up to this?’ he asked me.

  ‘I need to know,’ I replied.

  He began to read again.

  ‘“When you were one year old, your mother left you behind in order to travel to Germany for a series of concerts. Her own mother came to stay to help out as I had to work and, anyway, I didn’t feel confident about the care of a baby. These days, young chaps change nappies at the drop of a hat. I’d never changed a nappy in my life.

  ‘“She returned a week later and it was instantly clear that something about her was different. Some door was closed against me. She still looked after you tenderly, but with me she seemed distracted. I knew, with a sense of panic, that we were growing further and further apart, but I had no idea what to do about it. My resentment grew and festered.

  ‘“Every time she went on tour she would leave you with me, no longer encouraging me to accompany her. In fact, she told me it was bad for you to be carted around like a bag of shopping and that, although she missed you, it was better that you stayed at home with me. When your grandmother couldn’t come I depended on the nanny but, more and more, I would find myself in sole charge and was surprised to find that I enjoyed looking after you.

  ‘“This went on until after your second birthday and then came June the twenty-third, that awful night in 1965. I’ve been over and over it so many times it’s difficult to remember exactly what happened, but I’ll do my best. Angela arrived home in the early hours of the morning, and woke me in terrible distress. She wouldn’t tell me what was wrong and we quarrelled. Eventually, it all came out. She had been having an affair with another musician–a young English tenor whom she’d met on the Berlin tour. She was deeply in love with him, she told me. She looked white and exhausted, but I had no interest in her pain. I was incandescent with rage, but determined not to show it. I told her to go. She came out with some story that the affair was over, that she had come back, wanted to mend things. But I wouldn’t hear her. I was too angry, didn’t want to know. She had spoiled everything for ever. I had adored her, had given her all of myself, but she had thrown it all away. I couldn’t bear to look at her”.’

  I cried out then, and Jeremy stopped reading. ‘That’s so like Dad,’ I whispered. I remembered the few times I had seen my father really angry with me, how cold his anger could be, how he would withdraw from me for days until I was frantic with grief, and then he’d suddenly relent. Perhaps that’s how he ended up with so few friends. If he gave his loyalty he expected loyalty and obedience in return. Like King Cophetua, whose image he had ripped from my wall, he had adored his beggar maid, and she had spurned him. She was given no second chance.

  ‘Go on,’ I told Jeremy gently. He found his place on the page.

  ‘“I left the room, returning a moment or two later with you in my arms. I wanted to hurt Angela, show her what she was losing. I told her to say goodbye to you and leave. I said I would sue for divorce and for custody of you. And, since she had spent so much time away from home, I felt in justice it would be granted to me.

  ‘“Angela gave a great cry of despair and tried to take you from me, but I pushed her off. She cried that she had nowhere to go, so I told her roughly to go to her lover. It was then she impressed upon me that this option was no longer open to her. ‘Go home to your parents then,’ I said wildly, and pulling her suitcase from the top of the wardrobe I threw it to her. I watched her pack a few clothes, then pick up her handbag and her vanity case. She cried goodbye to you–an anguished goodbye that I still hear in my dreams–and went downstairs.

  �
��“It is useless to speculate how the situation might have been redeemed, had what happened next not taken place. Don’t think I haven’t been tortured by such speculations for the rest of my life. Maybe, once we’d both calmed down, we would have found some way forward. But alas, we were never given the chance.

  ‘“I walked with you over to the window. The scene that unfolded there is forever imprinted on my memory. I saw her step out into the road and turn to look up at the window, with an expression of desolation that haunts me still. Desolation turned to terror as a car, full of partygoers, accelerated round the corner and knocked her down. We rushed down to the street but there was nothing I could do. She died in hospital later that night”.’

  Jeremy stopped. I stared at the opposite wall, playing it all out in my mind. I had been there–I had heard them quarrel–but the memory of it was, thankfully, lost to me. I had been with my father when he ran down to the street, when the ambulance came, when they’d taken her away, my mother. I imagined myself crying, screaming for her, understanding that something had gone terribly wrong but not knowing what. But I couldn’t remember a thing about that night. I could only remember the way she used to hold me close; the pattern of a dress–the scent of her.

  ‘Are you all right, my dear?’ Jeremy asked quietly.

  I nodded mechanically. Then after a moment I said, ‘He killed her–that’s what he thought, didn’t he? That he killed her.’

  ‘“That is the burden that I have carried all these years”,’ Jeremy read on. ‘“That my anger and callousness contributed to her death. I robbed you of your mother, Fran, and I can never forgive myself. I have always been afraid to tell you about her, not only because it’s so painful for me, but because I feared to lose you, too. I thought you would hate me if you learned that I caused her death. If you grew up in innocence of her, I believed that you wouldn’t miss her; that you would be happy. Lately I’ve come to see that I was wrong. I regret the deep silence between us, the gulf I long to cross. I pray for the courage to cross it before it is too late. I remain, despite everything, Your loving father, Edward”.’

  Jeremy’s voice ceased. We both sat for a long while without speaking.

  My father had caused the death of Angela, his beautiful angel. I remembered the angel in the shop window, now a mess of smashed glass and twisted lead. It had been made in memory of her, my mother. I suddenly knew this for sure. Each man kills the thing he loves. That was Oscar Wilde, wasn’t it? My thoughts were rambling now.

  ‘Did you know everything he’d written, Jeremy?’ I asked.

  ‘He told me most of it, yes,’ Jeremy replied.

  ‘Do you believe his version of events? That he was guilty?’

  ‘The important thing is that he still considered himself guilty, years after the event. Of course, the coroner would have looked at the matter more objectively. A woman walked into the road without looking and was knocked down by a car, driven by a drunk, which was undoubtedly going too fast. Put like that, your father deserves no blame. The driver of the car apparently spent a year of his three-year sentence in prison. Your father spent a lifetime in hell. It destroyed his relationship with your mother’s family. He couldn’t bear to see their suffering, so in the end it was easiest not to see them at all.’

  I’d lost them, too. I remembered my argument with Dad over my grandmother’s legacy–that when she died he hadn’t even told me. I had no memory of my mother’s parents at all.

  I ran my fingers along the faded chintz of the chair’s arm and pulled at a loose thread.

  ‘What did you say to him?’ I asked. I didn’t know what to feel. Was I angry with my father, or sorry for him? The course of my life was decided by the events of that night so long ago, and yet I felt emotionally detached from the whole business. My father had taken the blame. He’d done his time. Now he was an old man lying in a coma. Ready for release.

  ‘I asked him many questions about his version of events,’ Jeremy continued. ‘It was important that he work it all out for himself–I always feel that with people. He seemed relieved that he had told someone. It’s an old cliché, isn’t it, to “get something off one’s chest”? But that’s what it can feel like, that something heavy has been weighing down on one, like the dead albatross around the Ancient Mariner’s neck, and then–one hack of the knife, so to speak, and it’s gone, you’re free.

  ‘He gradually came to see that the situation was more complex than he had allowed it to be; that your mother had to share something of the guilt. It didn’t help that soon after her death he had a letter from Angela’s lover, a man who grieved but who clearly wished to shift any blame onto your father. He explained how the end of their relationship had come about: that he had requested she leave her husband and child and come to him and she had refused. This man implied that Angela had been too frightened of your father to leave him. In his letter he twisted everything, making Edward appear a kind of ogre. And Edward, I’m afraid, allowed himself to be swayed by this impression, believing that by taking all these accusations upon himself he was enduring the punishment he deserved.’

  ‘But he wasn’t an ogre, was he? From what you say it doesn’t sound as if he deserved any of this.’

  ‘Look into your heart, Fran,’ Jeremy said quietly. ‘What kind of man do you believe your father to be?’

  It didn’t take long to decide my answer. ‘Like most of the rest of us. Basically a good person.’ Dad was never an easy man. Sometimes he was moody. He was someone who found it hard to forgive and who feared he could not be forgiven in return. I remembered his gentleness with me; yet he could on occasions be irritable, strict–even fierce. But an ogre? I was never frightened of him. He was never violent.

  ‘That’s what I think, too,’ said Jeremy. ‘I’m sure of it, in fact. And I’m certain that he was coming to realise it. But he was only at the beginning of a long spiritual journey when he was struck down. Now we must trust that God in His great mercy will help him complete that journey.’

  I longed to be where I might weep for that two-year-old girl who, long ago, lost her beautiful mother, and whose father was cast into a prison of his own making.

  But there was one question to which I had as yet no answer. I told Jeremy about my dream on the night of the fire; the woman’s lovely singing and the urgent voice that woke me.

  ‘Do you believe it could have been more than a dream?’

  ‘There are many instances in the Bible where angels spoke to people in dreams. Why shouldn’t this still happen today?’

  I experienced a rush of relief that Jeremy believed me.

  ‘I’d like to think of that as the explanation,’ I told him. ‘Nothing else makes sense.’

  Chapter 35

  If some people really see angels where others see only empty space, let them paint the angels: only let not anybody else think they can paint an angel, too.

  John Ruskin

  LAURA’S STORY

  It was September and the windows had been finished two months before, but in the general atmosphere of unrest, Mr Bond was uncertain about whether to continue with their installation. Mrs Brownlow was beside herself with distress. The benefactress’s nephew was pragmatic. Mr Brownlow was pulled all ways.

  ‘It’s not as though the windows won’t be installed at some point.’ Pulling on her hat and gloves in the hall, Laura heard her father’s voice drift from the morning room. ‘Bond suggests we delay, given the effect they might have on certain members of the parish.’

  ‘But I thought you said we shouldn’t give in to these people.’ She had to strain to hear her mother’s gentle tones.

  ‘Not give in, dearest, no. But remember what the Bishop advised: we should continue to assist the police to find the culprits, but not go out of our way to provoke further discontent.’

  ‘But James, we’ve paid for the angel window ourselves and the other is decreed by a Will. It’s not as though these people can argue that we’ve used church money to take bread out of others’ m
ouths. All can use the church and have the benefit of these beautiful windows.’

  ‘I agree with you heartily, Dora. However, these persons don’t see the matter in such terms. There is a risk that they might seek to destroy the stained glass, and what then? All our efforts will have been wasted. I am the last person to want to hide our light under a bushel, but I’m bound to listen to the Bishop’s advice–which is also Mr Bond’s.’

  Laura had to move aside hastily as her father emerged from the drawing room. He muttered an apology to her and retreated to his study. That, she knew, would be the last they saw of him until luncheon. She peeped around the door of the morning room to see her mother bent over her writing desk.

  ‘Mama, do you need Polly this morning?’

  Her mother looked up. ‘Ah, Laura, I thought you’d gone for your walk. I’m glad you’re still here, dear, there’s a message come from…’ she consulted a sheet of thin, yellow paper ‘…a Mr Murray–a neighbour of our Miss Badcoe. It seems Miss Badcoe has taken to her bed “with her chest”, the man says, and is asking for me. Since I’ve a meeting with the Missionary Committee this morning I wondered if you’d go. By all means, take Polly. Ask Cook to pack you a basket.’

  Laura had meant to walk across Vauxhall Bridge Road to Pimlico, to Mr Russell’s address in Lupus Street; she was most put out by her mother’s request. But she could hardly refuse, not least because she’d have to reveal the true nature of her outing.

  She cheered up on reading the address that her mother passed her, realising that it wasn’t too far out of her way. Very well, she would call on the elderly lady first, then continue on to Philip’s. His invitation said there was someone he wanted her to meet. She hoped she wouldn’t miss whoever it was.

  Goose Lane was a mews running off Greycoat Street on the other side of the church, in the direction of Westminster Abbey. Laura had often noticed its name, painted in wobbly capitals on the wall of the corner building, but she’d never been down it before. It was muddy, gloomy and silent, the tall terraced houses blocking out sunlight.