Bird Inside

by Wendy Perriam

  ‘Er, no, I …’

  ‘You just gotta be an expert, spoutin’ all that stuff.’

  Jane shook back her hair, wondering how she’d ever dared to give her one-man lecture, uninvited. ‘I … I work for a stained-glass artist, in his studio.’

  The group now gathered round her, encircling her and pressing close, as if she were some rare and precious creature unknown in modern times; a unicorn or griffin who had popped up from the Middle Ages and must be caught before it vanished. They invited her to coffee, or to lunch at their hotel – the best in town, they claimed.

  ‘I’m sorry, but I’ve had lunch.’

  ‘Well, listen, how’s about dinner? We’ve found this real neat restaurant, about ten miles out of town. It puts on like medieval banquets – you know, roast wild boar and sucking pig, and this old-fashioned beer called mead.’

  ‘The waitresses are all dressed up like Elizabethan serving-maids. It’s just so cute, you gotta see it.’

  Jane shifted from foot to foot. ‘I’m afraid I’m really pushed for time. I’m only here for …’

  ‘Don’t hassle the kid, Dee-Dee.’ The dark man checked his watch. ‘Hey, you guys, the tour of the crypt starts in seven minutes, and we don’t even have our tickets yet.’

  The other five gathered up their clutter, then all shook her by the hand, left their names – and cards – told her if she was ever in Wisconsin, or Denver, Colorado, she must be sure to look them up.

  She watched them shamble out with a mixture of relief and secret pride. She was now the guide, the expert, the professional stained-glass artist too busy for a banquet. She grinned to herself as she thought of her own supper – a croque monsieur in one of the cheapest of the cafés, or a bread-and-pâté picnic in her dingy hotel room, with herself the only serving-wench.

  She refocused her binoculars, until she’d located the green crucifix, then moved from death and suffering in the centre of the window to resurrection at the top. At last, she found the angel, which was far less overwhelming than the artist’s – just an inconspicuous figure in one of the small roundels. Yet she liked its strange red face and feet, its Persil-gleaming robe; the way it was sitting with its legs apart, looking casual and relaxed, as if about to go off-duty and pour itself a pint. She moved her glasses a fraction to the right, admired the skilful details of the painting: the three white lamps hanging in the tomb, the empty shroud below them. She could appreciate the subtleties now she’d worked with glass herself; the expressive use of colour which could reverberate and jolt, sizzle through your body as if you’d swallowed a live firework.

  She abandoned the binoculars, took a few steps back, so she could scan the three tall windows as a triptych, let them seep into her mind, stain it with their reds and aching blues. Maybe all the tourists brought back a splash of colour with them, with their other souvenirs, so these windows were reseeded in every country of the world. Perhaps they’d come as far to see Christopher’s new window, flocking into Sussex from Denver and Wisconsin, Tokyo and Delhi – and still be coming seven centuries on. She’d be dust and maggots then, like the Druids and the Romans were; a heap of bones like Charlemagne. Yet part of her would still live on – in the Resurrection Angel’s face and features, its long straight streaming hair; and also in the glass she’d cut: the Angel’s bony feet, the landscape they were planted on, a good half of the wings, the streaky startled sky above the halo.

  She wandered down the central aisle, suddenly missing Christopher, his solidity, his seriousness, the way he knew his way about a church, as if he’d grown up in one from childhood, with God a moody, distant (often absent) Father. She stumbled on a rough patch in the pavement, glanced down at the markings underneath her feet – loops and coilings in lighter stone and darker, cut into the floor, until they were swallowed up by rows and rows of chairs. She took a closer look, realised that the pattern was not haphazard, as it first appeared, but enclosed a flower-shape in its centre, with six petals and a stem; recognised it instantly from the pictures in the books. The labyrinth! She’d totally forgotten it, hadn’t even noticed it the first time she’d come in. But then the light was very dim, and the neat concentric circles she’d studied in the photographs were simply not apparent here, but cut off by the chairs, their symmetrical pattern lost.

  She stooped down to examine the winding coils still showing; felt them rough and gritty underneath her hand, chilly to the touch. Could that uneven stretch of patterned stone really be a model of the universe, contain such complex symbolism, such marvels of geometry, that several well-known scholars had lavished a whole lifetime on its measurements and meaning? A maze to her still meant bulky hedges – yew or beech or holly, standing solid and 3-D – not a flat expanse of worn and dirty pavement.

  She remained squatting on her heels, trying to remember what the various books had said. Most of it she hadn’t understood; had soon got lost and storm-tossed by alchemy and ideograms, solar cycles, Gnostics, but at least she’d grasped the basic concept that it symbolised the path through life, the journey of the soul to heaven or the afterlife.

  ‘I walked that labyrinth in a state of near elation, Rose.’

  She could hear the artist’s rasping voice, husky from his cold; see him standing on this precise spot in the nave, at exactly her own age. His crest of hair was tawny-brown, not grey, but he seemed little different otherwise from how he was today, still moody and impassioned, as he paced around the labyrinth, the flames of eager candles reflected in his eyes. She closed her own eyes, groped up to her feet. She could smell the incense from the service, hear the organ rumbling through the echo-chamber walls, his footsteps growing louder as he circled round and round. Thirteenth-century peasants had danced the maze, he’d told her; their prancing feet beating out the rhythm of the universe. The two images were fusing in her mind – the artist with the peasants, no longer tramping staidly, but whirling through the paths and right on into the centre, while the spinning cosmos orbited in time with them.

  She opened her eyes, dizzy from her fantasy, but itching to walk the maze herself, repeat the artist’s ritual. He’d been lucky – or well-organised – to find himself in Chartres on the one day of the year when the chairs were cleared away. She could hardly shift two hundred single-handed, would only bring some verger rushing out in fury from his spy-hole in the vestry. But at least the entrance to the maze was clear, and also its flower-centre, both marked out on the central aisle between the flanks of chairs. Perhaps she could climb over them, or push her way between. They were only light rush-seated things, not great hulking pews.

  She retraced her steps until she was standing on the narrow path which led into the labyrinth. She had left her bag behind, had no wish to be encumbered, weighed down with trivialities – make-up, mirror, chocolate – or even maps and guidebooks, which were for another sort of journey. She glanced behind her, nervous, relieved the church was so deserted; even the old women gone, just one grubby bundle, doubled on itself, slumped down in the last row at the back. Light was filtering through the West Rose window, which showed Christ as Judge on Judgement Day, and Saint Michael and a black-horned devil, representing good and evil, weighing souls on a pair of scales. She couldn’t make the scenes out, but she knew them from the guidebook; was suddenly reminded of their meaning in her own life – good decisions, bad ones; openness, or lies. The maze might help her choose. Christopher had made her see that it was a path not just to heaven, but to peace, or home, or certainty, or the true centre of one’s self.

  Her neck was aching from the strain of looking up, but she kept gazing at the Rose – a window with her name – aware that, like the maze, it also contained twelve circles – three sets of twelve, in fact – and that if it were hinged down to the floor of the nave, its centre would correspond precisely with the centre of the labyrinth, both circles the same size. When she’d read that in the book, it had seemed a curiosity, a quaint statistic she could usefully forget. Yet now she was actually experiencing the symmetry,
could feel it in her body, as if she were being pulled between the forces which linked stolid stone with iridescent glass.

  She turned back to face the altar, took her first few steps along the maze, stopped, frustrated, as the path branched to the left, then disappeared beneath a mass of blockish chairs. She slipped between the first two, but the four in front were joined together by a wooden bar nailed below their seats, and impossible to move. She clambered swiftly over them, feeling guilty, disrespectful, then squeezed between the next two, then the next, the next, the next. If this was symbolic of the Path of Life, then it was a halting and restrictive path, with no sense of achievement. It was hard to keep on course at all, because the light was even dimmer once she’d moved out from the central aisle, and the grey-blue shadows of the chairs blurred the blue-grey outlines of the maze. She envied Christopher the scope he’d had to walk the path unhindered; even envied those medieval peasants who’d walked it on their knees, seen it as the equivalent of a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. It was a pilgrimage for her, as well, yet she was scrambling over chair-seats, rather than circling round a powerful path charged with mystery and meaning.

  She could always take the easy course, simply cut across the windings of the circles, instead of following them laboriously, back and forth, back and forth. But then she’d reach the centre in just a few brief paces, instead of a meandering two hundred yards; would attain her goal in seconds, rather than a convoluted lifetime.

  She stood dithering, uncertain, peering down at the faint and fading tracks. She could hardly see at all now. The cathedral was darkening, the windows guttering like burnt-down candles, then finally snuffing out. The weather must have changed, the sky outside be completely overcast – not snow, as she had feared, but torrential winter rain. She strained her ears, but could hear no drenching downpour, hear no sound at all, only the silence of the centuries silted up like sand. The great West Rose looked dead, Christ Himself blanked out, Saint Michael overthrown. The demons in that window, shown hurling the lost souls into the gaping jaws of hell, seemed to have climbed down from the glass and be closing in around her, their breath clammy on her face, their scaly touch erasing her, like another of the damned. She turned from west to east. Those windows, too, were blank, all the exuberance of the glass-makers doused with a black pall.

  She crouched down on all fours, the stone rough beneath her knees, the darkness like the night of the great storm. She could hear the wind again, baiting the frail walls of her cottage on the beach; the sea pounding on the shingle, then sucking, swirling back. She had slept outside a church that night, woken to black cold, then crept inside for sanctuary, groping in the shadows until she was startled by a torch.

  The torch was weak this time, wavering, uncertain, barely showing up the dim outline of the paths. She took two blind steps ahead, towards the centre of the labyrinth, aware that she was cheating, jumping gaps instead of tracing circles, but too panicky to care. She couldn’t see to walk, but a hand was reaching out to her, a steel hand like a magnet, guiding her, restoring her, seeing she got home.

  The torch was brighter now, illuminating six stone petals opening out around her. She was standing in the centre of the maze’s central flower; could feel peace seeping up like heat, as if some hidden vent had been let into the floor, thawing the bleak darkness, quickening the dead windows. The blues were singing out again, a choir of peacock altos resounding through the nave, outshrilling the more timid greens and browns. The gold of crowns and thuribles looked newly shined and polished; the white robes freshly washed. She could see another figure in another shining robe – a figure in her mind – Ariadne with her guiding saving thread, leading Theseus from the labyrinth. She suddenly realised she’d been guided in her turn, led to a decision, as Christopher himself had been, in exactly the same spot. She had to work with glass – she knew that now, instinctively – had to stay with Christopher, despite the complications, and continue learning her new craft; not fritter time and skills away pushing papers in an office, or stuffing poncy aubergines. She would even have a faith – a faith in her own work, like the faith of all these stone-masons and glass-makers who had made themselves eternal with their church.

  She could hear her stomach rumbling, realised she was ravenous – and not just for a sandwich. She needed a whole sucking pig, a whacking ten-course banquet, to give her instant energy to start on Christopher’s windows. If she replanned her stay, she could report to work on Monday, as he’d asked. Today was Friday morning. She would get up at dawn tomorrow and see everything in Chartres – all the other churches, the old medieval town – then travel back on Sunday. But first she’d celebrate – buy up the whole cake-shop, fill her room with tulips, strip the flower-stall bare. She had discovered her true role in life, cut through all the turmoil, so why shouldn’t she splash out?

  She took a last look at the Rose as she sailed towards the doors; the angels in the circles blowing their bright trumpets, the shroud-clad dead struggling from their tombs. She couldn’t see the details, but one scene in particular was blazing in her head: a triumphant green-winged angel pointing out the way, leading the elect towards Paradise Regained.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Jane stood clinging to the rail on the top deck of the ferry, the wind snatching up the long strands of her hair, then letting them whip back against her face. The decks were shining-wet from the hiss and swoosh of spray which was smoking from the breakers, softening their dark green. The horizon stretched ahead of her, lost in hazy mist, blue smudging into grey. A gull dived low towards the deck, then spiralled up again, blown away like a flimsy paper-bag. She envied it its wings, wished she could soar back to France, start her trip again – or travel further, see the world. She hadn’t once been lonely in the past three days in Chartres, was thrilled that she could be alone, no longer had to cling to friends or parents. Even now, she was on her own, all the other passengers cowering down below, sheltering from the cold; a few brave souls huddled on the lower decks. This top one was deserted, hers to share with the hugeness of the sky, with the swooping pilgrim gulls.

  Another ferry was passing, almost identical with theirs. She spelt out its name – St Anselm – knew the saint from one of Christopher’s windows, a tall lancet in a Catholic church in Canterbury, which he had made ten years ago. She even knew his emblem: a gold ship with silver sails, and flying three white pennants with red crosses. She had learnt so much already, and if she continued working in the studio for eighteen months or more, she’d be as familiar with the saints as any thirteenth-century abbess. She must live as nun herself, though, and refuse to sleep with Christopher, serve him as assistant, not as mistress. She had been struggling with the problem since she’d decided to stay on with him; torn between the memories of their last explosive love-making, and her distaste at being just another casual conquest, a way of spicing up his marriage, providing some variety. She had finally decided to put her interests first, develop her own talents, not join the list of his discarded other women.

  She glanced down at the sea again, the green like reamy glass – the same flowing rippled movements through its colour, the same glints and restless shimmer. Strange they seemed so far from land, breakers swirling on all sides, their lace-topped crests repeated in the spumy clouds above her. An hour had passed already, so they should be close to Dover, yet she could see nothing but unbroken sea and sky. Perhaps she’d go inside, grab a snack before they docked, now that her stomach had recovered from the coach trip.

  She passed from one world to another as she stepped inside the fuggy crowded restaurant, breathing in fried onions instead of clean salt air. The lights were glaring, garish; frowsty whey-faced passengers guzzling buns and sausages, a howling child drowning out the muzak. She joined the long queue at the counter, trying not to look at breadcrumbed haddock oozing yellow fat, or mounds of greasy chips; picked out a plain bread roll instead, and two red shiny apples. She paid with English money, loath to use her last French francs, which she’d keep
for luck, or as a spur to visit France again, perhaps return to Chartres in spring.

  Every seat was taken, so she squeezed out to the passage, where groups of people were squatting on the floor, some swilling cans of beer, one or two sprawled out on their backs, drunk, or maybe seasick. She wove her way between them, lurching with the ship. The sea seemed rougher now, and though she tried to eat her roll, it was difficult to swallow, stuck in her gullet, as if refusing to risk the indignity of being vomited up again. She threw it in the bin, jolted on to the duty-free shop, determined to distract herself from food. She’d buy some scent for Trish, an arty scarf for Isobel. She manoeuvred round a shrill of schoolgirls giggling by the fruit machines, dodged an old man in a duffel coat who tried to paw her hair. The shop felt claustrophobic – low-ceilinged, overheated, and full of jostling bodies. A sleek red-taloned salesgirl was promoting a new perfume, squirting it on wrists, each generous squirt accompanied by a dazzling Colgate smile. The scent was cloying, sickly, curdled in Jane’s head with the smell of chips and onions. She moved over to the scarves, asked the girl behind the counter if she had any more exciting ones. Her voice was interrupted by an announcement on the tannoy – the captain speaking, reporting a delay – what he called ‘an industrial dispute’ at Dover, which would prevent them berthing for an hour, or maybe more.

  An instant brouhaha broke out, people groaning and complaining about wildcat strikes and bloody commie layabouts; two teenage boys even booing at full volume. The captain was still talking, giving information about boat-trains and connections, but his voice was all but swamped. Jane leant against the counter. The ‘hour or maybe more’ might extend itself indefinitely, depended on the whim of a bunch of bolshie dockers. She’d miss the last coach back to London, when it was vitally important that she turned up in the studio first thing Monday morning. She could almost hear the artist’s querulous voice, asking where the hell she’d been. And if she told the truth, then more trouble. He’d be annoyed and even hurt that she’d gone haring off to Chartres without so much as mentioning the fact; hadn’t shared the trip with him, at least in planning and anticipation.