The Glass Painter's Daughter

by Rachel Hore

  ‘Away? What do you mean?’ I was confused.

  ‘It was while I was ill. I had time to think–about Olivia. I need to go and look for her, Fran.’

  I tried to keep up. ‘But you said you wouldn’t ever go…’

  ‘…where I wasn’t wanted. Aye, I did. But it was something Amber said. She’s a wise one, that girl. She asked me if I was at peace about it–not seeing Olivia, that is. And I said no, of course not. It torments me. And she said…she said I should forget my pride, go on the journey, trust and see what happened. That if you love someone, you have to work for them. Although there’s a point where you have to stand back and wait, I needed to try my best first.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, faintly. ‘But where will you look? I thought she’d moved. How long will you be gone?’

  ‘I’m going to start at the last address I had for them. I don’t know how long I’ll be, but I’ve a flight booked this week. Friday, in fact. The prices rise after that, it being the Christmas holidays. I had to decide quickly.’

  ‘Friday,’ I repeated, dully. ‘But Zac, it’s all so sudden.’ So many questions formed in my mind, I didn’t know which one to ask first, and a feeling of panic was rising.

  ‘I need a break, Fran. To get away from everything. And I can’t ask you to hold the job open. It wouldn’t be fair on you. And perhaps I ought to try something new anyway. It’s been a tough time.’

  ‘I couldn’t have got through it without you, Zac.’ Tears were welling up now. I averted my face, not daring to let him see them. ‘I don’t want you to go. It’s awful.’

  ‘It’s not awful, Fran. I’m really happy about it. I’m going to look for Olivia. Of course I won’t turn up on the doorstep unannounced or anything. I’ll find out where she is and then try to speak to Shona, get her to let me meet Olivia.’

  ‘What happens if she won’t let you?’ I said, bravely looking straight at him now. I wouldn’t cry. I wouldn’t.

  He took a slow sip of his wine, staring into the candle flame as though there were pictures in it only he could see. ‘I don’t know,’ he said at last, unhappily. ‘But at least I’ll have tried. Better than sitting on my backside here, pining, isn’t it?’

  ‘When will you come back?’

  ‘I don’t know. The visa’s for three months. I’m keeping up the flat for the moment, but putting my stuff into storage in case. David’s looking after the glass for me. If I found a job out there, got permission to stay…well, maybe I’d do that. I don’t know. I don’t expect it would be that easy. I’ll play it by ear.’

  He would be gone, out of my life. I might never see him again. I hardly knew where I was, couldn’t stop the tears now. I tried to look away, but he reached out his hand and touched my cheek.

  ‘Hey,’ he said really gently. ‘You’re crying. What’s the matter? It’s not the end of the world, you know.’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ I choked. The tears were coming thick and fast now. ‘You can’t go. Not now.’ I grabbed a paper napkin and blew my nose.

  ‘You silly girl. You’ll be all right without me. You’ll have Amber to help in the shop. And it shouldn’t be too difficult finding someone to replace me.’

  ‘It’s not that. It’s that I’ll miss you, Zac.’

  He sat there, taking in my stricken face. I watched him work it out and it was like the glimmer of a light dawning.

  ‘You will miss me? Really? But you’ll have Ben, won’t you?’ The expression in his eyes was unreadable.

  ‘No, Zac, I won’t have Ben. It’s never really been Ben. Well, I thought it was for a bit but then I realised I was wrong.’ Whatever I had felt for him was gone now. I’d been looking through a glass darkly, but now I could see the truth beyond. ‘I didn’t know it till just now, in the church. It’s like…oh, I’m not putting this very well, Zac.’

  He gazed at me across the table, frowning. I tried very hard to smile but my mouth wouldn’t do it properly. Now I’d made a proper fool of myself.

  ‘You don’t want me to go?’ he said quietly. ‘You really don’t?’

  ‘I want you to find Olivia–it would be selfish of me not to. But I don’t want you to go away. Or rather, I want you to come back. Very soon. I need you. I don’t mean at the shop. Well, I do, of course. But it’s for me. I need you.’

  Zac stared at me for some time without speaking, a whole pantomime of emotions playing across his face. Finally he smiled, a crazy lopsided smile that became a laugh. His eyes sparkled, and now I knew that everything was all right. He reached for my hand, and we sat there holding hands, smiling stupidly at one another.

  And then the waiter arrived with platters of food and merry small talk and we ate without speaking much, but still with plenty of looking at each other. Once he reached across and stroked my face. I grabbed his hand and put it to my lips, gave his finger the tenderest of little bites, which made him narrow his eyes. I held his big cool hand against my hot cheek and closed my eyes. I felt safe, protected.

  ‘Dessert? Café?’ asked the waiter when he withdrew the empty platters. Despite everything, we’d been ravenous.

  Zac raised his eyebrows in question. ‘No,’ I said hastily. ‘Thank you.’

  I let Zac pay the bill and help me on with my coat and then once again we were out on the street. But this time, Zac’s arm was round me, keeping me warm and safe. I wasn’t alone any more.

  Round the corner, out of sight of any passers-by, he drew me into the dark porch of some office block and we kissed. They were long, desperate kisses that left me dizzy and hungry for more. I knew the feel of his hair now, thick and springy, the roughness of his jaw, the gleam of his eyes, his skin ghostly pale in the darkness. I’ve no idea how much time passed. We didn’t want to stop. When we came up, gasping for air, he wrapped me tightly inside his coat and I felt warm against the cold. Even so, I shivered.

  ‘What shall we do now?’ he whispered. ‘No good going back to mine, it’s all packed up. I’m sleeping on my own sofa.’

  It was nearly midnight–too late to take him back to the vicarage. But we didn’t want to say goodbye, not yet.

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  The flat above Minster Glass was as cold inside as it was outside, the electricity being off, but we were providing our own warmth. It seemed right somehow making it a place of love again, snuggled up together in some blankets on the sofa, trying to ignore the smell of damp and smoke.

  I felt so safe in his arms, as though I’d come home, really home, and I couldn’t help but weep a little with happiness, as well as the thought that he was going away.

  ‘Don’t cry,’ he whispered, kissing me again. After a moment he muttered in my ear, ‘I love you.’

  ‘I love you, too,’ I replied wonderingly, and sat back to look at his face, strange and slightly sinister in the light from the street. I stroked his bristly cheek.

  ‘I’ve loved you such a long time, Fran.’

  ‘How long?’ I asked, though I knew now. So many things were starting to make sense. Zac’s surliness. His deep misery. I’d put everything down to Dad or Olivia, but it hadn’t just been them.

  ‘Oh, only since you walked back through that door in September,’ he said. ‘Sad, eh?’

  ‘Oh, Zac.’

  ‘Yes, but you didn’t notice me, did you? Not really.’

  Why had I not seen it? Why do we never see these things? Because we’re looking somewhere else, for something else, that’s why. When what matters is right there in front of us.

  ‘I didn’t know for sure then,’ he went on. ‘Frankly, you got on my wick. I wanted you. I wasn’t sure I liked you though. You seemed selfish.’

  Selfish. Three months ago I’d have resented that. Now, it still hurt, but I saw why he might have got that impression of me. I had been closed up inside, like an unripe nut. ‘You’re a dark horse, Zac McDuff,’ I told him. ‘And you’re horrible. Not liking me indeed.’

  He threw back his head and laughed then, his eyes flashing in the golden light.
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  ‘But all that time I was with Ben…’ I remembered. That must have hurt so much.

  ‘I couldn’t believe you didn’t see through the guy,’ Zac said savagely. ‘He’s got “flake” written all over him.’

  I thought about that. Poor old Ben. Yes, he was ‘poor old Ben’ because, for all the ways in which he used people, he couldn’t see himself clearly. He was blinded by the flame of ambition that fascinated him and, in the end, burned him. Still, it must have been hard for Zac to watch me with him, feeling unable to say or do anything. Certainly, I’d have put him in his place if he’d tried.

  Amazingly, despite the cold, we fell asleep together until the sun rose next morning and hunger for food drove us out. We parted, promising to meet that evening. I sneaked back to the vicarage, let myself in and crept straight up the stairs, though I could hear Sarah clattering about in the kitchen. Only Lucifer, sitting by the radiator, saw me. He paused in his washing, with one leg in the air, his eyes gleaming accusingly. He was used to me now, but I couldn’t say he approved of me. Jeremy and Sarah said nothing about my absence. But then perhaps they didn’t know I hadn’t been to bed.

  We spent every hour we could together over the next few days, though what with rehearsals for a concert I was to play in at the Wigmore Hall during Christmas week and Zac needing to sort out final arrangements for his trip, the hours didn’t add up to much.

  ‘I’ll be gone for just as long as it takes,’ he said, stroking my hair. It was the Tuesday afternoon and we were sitting on a bench in St James’s Park, the same bench where I’d seen Michael all those weeks ago. ‘Then I’ll be back. I promise.’

  I opened my mouth to complain, then saw his face. He was holding back deep emotion and I knew I must say nothing. Although this was difficult for me, it was far more difficult for him. He was going alone on a journey into the unknown, and I needed to support him. I hugged him without speaking, and he held onto me so hard it hurt.

  On his last night, Zac came to supper at the vicarage. Jo came too, with Dominic in tow. Although nothing was actually said, it had become obvious to me that my new surrogate parents had grown fond of Zac during the previous few months. When I explained somewhat shyly about the shift in our relationship, Sarah, with great tact, immediately took him under her wing as well, offering the address of some friends of theirs who lived in Melbourne, who might offer him hospitality. She also mended a tear in his elderly jacket, a task that was utterly beyond me, let alone Zac.

  Both Jo and Dominic had, in their different ways, changed. Jo seemed happier. In fact, she was almost back to the Jo I’d known at school, though there was something, a slight wariness, there now. Dominic seemed less anxious. He was back at work and life was less stressful now that his mother was in a home. Jo, being in between jobs, was to spend some time down in Horsham helping his sister Maggie clear out the family home as Maggie tired easily at this stage in her pregnancy.

  ‘What are we doing at choir next term?’ I asked Dominic at one point.

  ‘The Messiah,’ he replied. ‘It always brings in the crowds and the music’s easy to get hold of. I’ve been looking through everybody’s questionnaires, by the way.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Mixed bag,’ he said. ‘Ben will feel on the one hand encouraged–everyone appreciates his talent as a conductor–and on the other hand disappointed. Most want to aim for high standards. There are some who definitely share his vision, wanting to expand. But there are far more, I’m afraid, who think we should keep things pretty much as they are. Several grumble that the subscriptions are already too high.’

  ‘Rather what I expected,’ said the vicar, who had been steadily making his way through his roast lamb. ‘I just hope Ben won’t be demotivated. He’s an excellent organist. We’re damn lucky to have him.’

  ‘Will you go to choir next term?’ Zac asked me in a quiet moment, after Jo and Dominic had gone.

  I considered the question. I wanted to. I’d enjoyed the singing and the camaraderie. ‘Would you mind?’ I asked Zac.

  I watched the emotions struggle in his face. It wasn’t easy for him to think of me seeing Ben, even in the distance up on his plinth. ‘You’d do what you want to anyway,’ he said finally, smiling. ‘But for what it’s worth, no, I don’t mind.’ He was saying, I trust you. I loved him for that.

  ‘I might not have time, anyway, what with orchestral commitments and dealing with the shop. I’ll try to though. I love the Messiah.’ I knew it backwards. Maybe it wouldn’t matter if I only went to some of the rehearsals.

  The next morning, though the vicar had offered to drive us, Zac and I took a taxi through the early-morning darkness to the airport. It was the hardest thing in the world to watch him reach the front of the queue at the security gate, turn and wave one last time, and walk away into the crowds of the departure lounge.

  Christmas was a tough time. No Dad, no Zac, no home. It was hard for the Quentins, too. They’d hoped for both their daughters to visit, but on Christmas Eve, shortly before Fenella and her fiancé arrived, a telephone call came from Miranda. She wasn’t coming. Jeremy and I sat at the kitchen table, he with his head in his hands, listening as Sarah begged and pleaded with her, offered for Jeremy to go to Bristol to fetch her, but she refused. Perhaps they could come and see her at New Year, Miranda said, but we all felt she was fobbing them off. After the call ended, Sarah cried and Jeremy comforted her. I glanced at the photograph of Miranda on the dresser, a happy, engaging child in school uniform; no hint there of the anxieties of anorexia to come.

  I wondered how Zac was getting on, finding Olivia. At first we communicated regularly. Phone calls from Melbourne came, sometimes at odd hours of the night, when he sounded miserable and alone. Once, after he’d spent the evening with the Quentins’ friends, he sounded more cheerful.

  It took a week for him to locate Shona and Olivia, and another week to be allowed to speak to Shona. It turned out that she hadn’t lived at her parents’ address, where he’d been sending his cards, for many years. The elderly neighbour who told him this didn’t know where she had gone, but informed him that she was married. Shona’s father had, he said, died two years before, and the widow had moved the previous Christmas to a smaller house on the other side of the city. Too soon for her address to appear in phone books, Zac discovered when he went looking for E. Donaldsons. So he tried phoning other Donaldsons on the list and finally, just before Christmas, he’d tracked down Shona’s uncle, given him his number at the little hotel where he was staying, and waited.

  Down the phone late on Christmas Eve, Zac veered between sounding nervous and glum. He was to spend the following day with the Quentins’ friends, I was relieved to hear. But I thought about him all of Christmas Day.

  A week passed while the Donaldson clan consulted one another, then Zac returned to his lodgings one evening to find that Shona had called.

  Zac rang me at the vicarage just after Christmas with the news that he’d seen Olivia. I couldn’t make much sense of him, he was so overwhelmed, but I gathered some facts. Shona was married to a man who already had children of his own. It had been sensible to explain to Olivia as she grew up that she had a father in Britain, but that her mother wasn’t able to see him any more.

  ‘She didn’t try, Fran, that’s what’s so hurtful,’ he said. ‘She could have been in touch but decided not to. It was tidier that way.’

  ‘But she let you see your daughter today.’

  ‘Her mother persuaded her that it would be best for Olivia. That, otherwise, Olivia might one day find out how much I had wanted to see her and would never be able to forgive her mother. Shona didn’t want me to go to the house so the three of us met at a café for lunch. It was strange, so strange, seeing my daughter for the first time. Since she was a tiny baby, I mean. She’s still very like Shona, but the way she moves–you’ll laugh, but it reminds me of my mam. And yet they never met. How do our genes do that?’

  ‘No idea.’ I laughed. ‘What’s she like?
As a person, I mean.’

  ‘Quite poised and serious. She listens to you very carefully. I felt like…I don’t know, a stranger she was being polite to. But I think she was pleased to see me. Shona’s very protective of her, but I’m allowed to see her again in a couple of days. I didn’t know where you take a child, but Shona’s suggested roller-skating. Let’s hope I can remember how to do it.’

  I laughed at the thought of Zac stumbling around on skates. ‘Don’t kill yourself,’ I said, ‘for heaven’s sake. I need you back in one piece.’

  ‘You’ll get me back,’ he replied softly. ‘But I think my heart will be in two pieces, one half here with my daughter.’

  I’d thought long and hard about that. Some women might have minded, but I knew what it was like to grow up without one parent. I was proud of Zac and what he was doing, and would support him every inch of the way.

  I just wanted him to come home.

  Jeremy and Sarah did go down to stay with their younger daughter at New Year, leaving me alone in the house. It proved a useful time. The builders were due to start work on Minster Glass on the first Monday of the New Year, and I still had things to sort out.

  It was strange going upstairs into Dad’s attic after so long. Everything was just as I’d left it–the manuscript for his history on the desk, heaps of files and rolls of paper strewn around. I knew I had to tidy up.

  The surprise came when I pulled open the desk drawers in a search for new elastic bands; the ones on some of the rolls kept breaking because they’d dried out. One drawer was stacked full of little engagement diaries, from the 1920s and 1930s, I saw. No time to look at those now. In another was a cache of picture postcards depicting stained-glass windows from around the world. Now which of my family had ‘Jim’ been, the person who’d sent them?

  There was a ball of elastic bands in the bottom drawer, and there, too, I found a cardboard tube with a roll of paper inside. It was a family tree, meticulously written out in Dad’s distinctive handwriting. I opened it out flat on the desk, and there we all were, Ashes and Russells and Morrisons staggering down through 130 years of history. And it was as I had hoped. Laura, married to Philip, was my great-great-great-grandmother. Her son Samuel, born in 1882, had married Reuben Ashe’s granddaughter, so Reuben was my ancestor, too.