The House of Hopes and Dreams

by Trisha Ashley

  There was no funeral feast, and Nat and Willow didn’t hang about, but got straight back into the car and left without a word to anyone.

  But I lingered, talking to the vicar and some of the guests, so it was a little while before I followed them.

  Molly came back with me, to keep me company for a while – or act as a buffer zone between me and the Terrible Two – but we discovered that Nat and Willow had already changed and were stowing their bags in the car ready to make a quick getaway to London.

  Nat got into the driver’s seat without a word to us: I expect he was still seething because I’d dared to put my stamp on Julian’s service. Willow lingered long enough to whisper that I’d made Nat very angry.

  ‘Well, tough titties,’ I said vulgarly, and she looked really shocked, though when you spend your days in an all-male work environment, these turns of phrase tend just to slip out naturally.

  ‘I’ll let you know if the move is definitely fixed for the third of January once I’ve booked the removal company,’ she said coldly. ‘I’m hoping so, because Nat will want to be here when the workshop reopens on the Monday.’

  ‘We’ll be counting the days till you get back,’ Molly said.

  ‘Yes, but we’ll try and struggle on without you until then,’ I added, and Willow gave us both an uncertain look before hauling her skinny frame up into the four-by-four and slamming the door.

  ‘If only this was all a bad dream,’ Molly murmured, as the noise of the engine faded into the distance.

  But as the Queen song says, there’s no escape from reality.

  Ralph Revell seemed to take a keen interest in the making of his windows, for he soon visited the workshop again. He much admired an interior leaded panel that was in progress for another customer, which had a design of tall, swaying red tulips against a background of light-green rippled glass.

  This prompted Father to remember my existence and he introduced me to Mr Revell, informing him that I had not only designed the panel, but also cut the glass, painted it for firing and then leaded it up.

  ‘Is that not unusual in a young lady?’ he asked, looking at me with amusement and a keen interest that, being small and boyish in figure, I rarely invoked in young men.

  ‘Oh, Jessie can carry out all aspects of the business,’ Father said. ‘I’ve never managed to keep her out of the workshop and, indeed, she’s more useful than many of the men.’

  ‘Young ladies do seem much taken up with arts and crafts these days,’ he observed, giving me a very charming smile. ‘I think it is quite admirable – especially when they are as talented as your daughter.’

  I blushed at this compliment, for Father was never fulsome in praise, even when I knew myself to have done a piece of good work. He was called away for a few moments on some matter of business and I soon found myself chatting quite easily to Mr Revell and telling him about the classes in drawing, design and painting I was taking.

  When I said that, unlike my best friend, Lily, I had no skill in the more womanly occupations such as the embroidery and tapestry in which she excelled, he remarked that I was a much rarer creature.

  I think he meant it as a compliment, but it seemed a strange way of putting it.

  9

  Alchemy

  Molly made us sandwiches and tea, before popping home to fetch the supply of cardboard cartons, tape and large marker pens I’d asked her to buy for me when she did her shopping.

  She and Grant were going to spend Christmas with their daughter and her family in Keswick, setting off after the workshop closed at noon next day, but Molly was worrying about leaving me on my own.

  ‘Why don’t you come with us?’ she suggested. ‘I’m sure Rosie wouldn’t mind in the least.’

  ‘Oh yes she would, because I’d be like the spectre at the feast!’ I said. ‘Really, Molly, I don’t even want to think about Christmas. What I really need right now is a few days alone here in the cottage, to come to terms with everything.’

  She looked unconvinced, even when I told her I’d be occupying myself by packing up my belongings and working in the studio, but I was adamant and in the end she had to accept it.

  After she left I suddenly became overtaken by a kind of restless energy and so for the next few hours I went through the cottage like a dose of salts, scrubbing, polishing and generally expunging every last trace of Nat and Willow, so it was as if they’d never been.

  Then I moved my things back into the front bedroom, while the cold late December air whirled in through the open windows and carried off the last lingering whiff of Willow’s obtrusively musky perfume.

  Finally, boneless with exhaustion, I sank into Granny’s old rocking chair. The gentle ticking of Julian’s carriage clocks from the other room was soothing and the old house creaked, as if heaving a sigh of relief that the usurpers were gone.

  In fact, the only evidence that they’d ever been there were fresh copies of the cottage and workshop inventories, with several things I’d marked as mine now highlighted in orange, with crosses next to them.

  That was helpful: I’d make damned sure those were the first things that went into the storage boxes.

  I was in the studio before dawn next day, then when Grant, Ivan and his grandson, Louis, came in, we carried on working till eleven.

  On Christmas Eve we usually closed the workshop at that hour until the New Year and adjourned to the pub for an early turkey-and-trimmings lunch, but this time none of us had the heart for it.

  Instead, Molly brought food in and spread it out on one of the tables in the studio, like a mini version of the funeral feast we didn’t have yesterday.

  The future was an uncertain thing, but we were all agreed in our determination to finish the rose window as soon as possible. To that end, I intended painting, silver-staining and firing the last of the glass for it over the break, which would make a pleasant change from the packing.

  By twelve, everyone had gone and I locked up and went back to the cottage to email my stepfather, Jim. I’d kept him and Mum updated on what had been happening and Jim was convinced I was being done out of my rights and wanted to engage a good solicitor to fight for part of Julian’s estate. But as I told him, I didn’t care about the money and I was moving on, both literally and figuratively.

  He offered to bankroll me himself next and I gratefully but firmly declined that, too.

  As soon as it was light on Christmas morning I drove to Crosby and walked along the beach, something I’d often done with Granny when I stayed with her during the school holidays. I don’t know what she’d have made of the tall Gormley sculptures of figures gazing out to sea, but I suspected she would have liked them.

  There were a surprising number of other solitary walkers, though most had dogs. Later, I knew, families would appear, intent on walking off their Christmas dinner excesses.

  On my way back to the car, a message pinged into my phone from Carey, wishing me and Julian a happy Christmas. He was, as I expected, out of rehab and staying at Nick’s flat and they were about to go to Nick’s parents for Christmas dinner.

  It was odd to think he knew nothing of what had been happening to me, but then Julian’s passing had made only the local TV news, plus one small obituary piece in the national press that Molly had cut out and kept for me. I longed to talk to him, but he too needed a respite from everything that had been happening to him, so I resisted the urge and instead wished him a happy Christmas back.

  ‘See you in the New Year, Shrimp,’ he returned. It would be time enough to tell him then.

  At home the clocks busily ticked away the remaining hours of my old life as I packed fragments of it into the boxes, a task I continued over the next couple of days. It all took a lot longer than I expected.

  And how odd and bare the cottage looked without my stuff in it, not like my home any longer, though I supposed that would make the moment I finally left much less of a wrench.

  Having completed that task, on the Sunday after Christmas I started o
n the workshop, which I didn’t expect to take very long. But it was surprising how much that was personally mine was stored there and in the end I had to fetch a couple of old empty tea chests from the outhouse to take the overflow.

  Into the boxes went my years of sketchbooks, the rolls of cartoons for private design commissions and competitions, along with a few small experimental leaded panels I’d stored in the loft. Nat had padlocked the cupboard the cartoons were kept in, but since the keys were hung in the office, that had been a pointless exercise.

  My crazy magpie hoard of glass in the outhouse was still packed up – I’d only opened the tops of the tea chests so I could gloat over the contents – so they were good to go.

  I’d finished the roundel with the angel head, giving it a bright flower border and a hanging loop, and that was carefully bubble-wrapped and stowed away.

  Other than that, there was just my current sketchbook, the huge plastic toolbox with tiers of trays in which I kept my art materials, and my own set of tools, which I would need until Julian’s final commission was finished.

  And now, everything else was out of the way, I spent the remaining solitary days absorbed in painting and staining glass.

  Oddly, many people assume we paint the colour on to clear glass – but no, apart from any details added in dark vitreous enamel, the glass is usually coloured in the making of it – pot metal glass.

  But sometimes one deep shade, like red or blue, is thinly flashed over a thicker layer of clear or pale glass. This means you can acid etch some of the top layer away, so you have two colours in one piece. And then you can vary it even more, because if you apply a coat of muddy ochre silver stain to the back of some areas and fire it in the kiln, by a kind of clever alchemy it turns into a clear bright yellow. Or green, if it’s painted over blue, orange if over red …

  Pure magic.

  I’d booked a small storage unit at a nearby depot and, once I’d got everything packed up, I engaged two men with a Transit van to move my stuff into it on the Wednesday after Christmas.

  Luckily, Molly and Grant had come home the previous night and helped with a couple of the really heavy and awkward things, like the dresser and the tea chests of glass.

  It looked a bit dismal in the cottage after that, with all the empty spaces and the memories, so after I got a brief message from Willow saying she and Nat were definitely moving in on Saturday the third of January, I packed my bags and decamped to Molly’s house, leaving my door keys – though not my keys to the workshop – on the kitchen table.

  I’d already started sending out feelers to friends and contacts about a new job but, of course, right after Christmas wasn’t the best time for that.

  Grant generously texted Nat offering to give them a hand with the move, but got a one-liner back saying, ‘No need.’

  Gracious as always.

  I avoided the cottage that day, going early to the workshop by way of the separate drive from the lane. I took out the last of the painted and stained glass that had been cooling in the kiln and stuck it up with blobs of plasticine on a sheet of plate glass over the window, so once the sky grew light enough I could see how well it looked: the last interpretation of Julian’s vision fused into the glass and ready to be leaded up.

  Even though it wasn’t a work day, Grant came in later to see how the last panels were looking, and brought me a hot cheese and onion pasty from Molly.

  He reported that a large removal van was parked by the cottage and in the process of being emptied.

  ‘I’m glad I’ve managed to get the last of the rose window panels ready to lead up,’ I said. ‘I wanted to do it myself and chances are that when the workshop reopens on Monday, Nat will put me in my place by telling me to sweep the floor, or something like that.’

  ‘I suspect you’re right, and though I know you’d prefer to stay long enough to see Julian’s last commission completed, he may make it impossible for you.’

  ‘Even if by some miracle he’s stopped being childishly vindictive, I really couldn’t work with him now,’ I said. ‘Though for Julian’s sake I’ll hang on till he’s found someone to replace me. Perhaps I’ll have had some response to my emails about a new job after the weekend when everywhere reopens.’

  Stained-glass work was very specialized, but now I’d put the word out that I was looking for a move, I was sure something would turn up.

  ‘I saw Nat briefly and said you’d finished painting and staining the glass for the chapel and I was popping in to see if you needed help unloading the kiln, and he said he wasn’t paying either of us overtime,’ said Grant.

  ‘Nice. Not that I’ve ever been paid overtime, but Julian always gave you extra if you came in to see to the kiln, or we were working flat out all hours, didn’t he? Still, at least Nat didn’t come straight down and tell me to clear off!’

  ‘I’ve a horrible suspicion that’s what he’s going to say to Ivan on Monday,’ Grant said gloomily.

  ‘But Ivan’s really handy! Besides, the few quid Julian used to slip him to supplement his pension would hardly break the bank.’

  ‘He’s opinionated, though, is old Ivan,’ Grant pointed out.

  ‘Well, so are you sometimes, Grant, and I don’t want you to lose your job, defending me or Ivan.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about me,’ he said. ‘I’ve decided I’ll look for another job, though it will have to be near enough to drive to, because Molly and I don’t want to move. Or then again, I might just set up on my own to do leaded light repairs. There’s always a big call for that and I’m not arty like you and Julian, so I don’t care much what I’m leading up, as long as I get paid for it.’

  ‘Yes, that’s an option,’ I agreed. Julian hadn’t been interested in repairs, only in creating new works of art, but if Grant, one of the best craftsmen in the business, chose that more mundane use for his skills, then it was a sad loss.

  ‘I’d not take on the restoration or conservation of old glass – that’s a matter for experts,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘But goodness knows, there are enough damaged front-door panels and broken chapel windows in that pink, yellow, blue and white machine-rolled glass that reminds me of Molly’s Battenburg cake. If there’s enough business, Ivan can come and be my right-hand man.’

  On Sunday I furtively skirted the cottage and popped into the workshop, because I’d left my sketchbook behind and didn’t want it lying around with Julian’s drawing of the angel’s head tucked into it.

  As soon as I opened the door I could tell that someone – presumably Nat – had been in there. It was in the air, rather than in anything different, though one or two objects had been slightly displaced. I think he’d been checking on what I’d taken.

  My sketchbook was still in my desk drawer, though, with the drawing safely tucked inside.

  I wasn’t looking forward to tomorrow, when the workshop reopened under the new regime. But nothing mattered now: the cutting, painting and staining – the interpretation of Julian’s genius – was completed and whoever leaded up and cemented the remaining panels of the rose window couldn’t change that.

  When Father returned, Mr Revell looked again at the window panel I’d made and said that he thought something similar would look very well in the inner hall at Mossby, to replace the plain opaque half-glazing.

  ‘It would be extra expense,’ Father pointed out, but Mr Revell simply shrugged.

  ‘Also, it would make the hallway darker,’ Father added, ‘though since you told me you’d had most of the interior painted white since I visited, that should not be a great issue.’

  ‘Perhaps later Miss Revell might also design something for the window on the landing above the main staircase too,’ Mr Revell suggested.

  ‘I … should be very glad to,’ I stammered, dazzled by those strangely beautiful purple-blue eyes. Lavender, I thought confusedly. Yes, that’s the colour. Fresh lavender flowers …

  ‘Good!’ He gave me a beguilingly boyish smile, then turned to Father. ‘Mr Kaye, perhap
s you could revisit Mossby to discuss the new changes – bringing Miss Kaye, too, of course, since she will wish to see the setting for her design.’

  ‘Well … I suppose that could be arranged,’ began Father, as taken aback by this unprecedented suggestion as I was myself. He was quite used to paying such visits by way of business, but Mr Revell being very much the gentleman, the social niceties of taking me with him were somewhat complicated.

  ‘Excellent: you must spend a weekend with us! My sister, Honoria, will be delighted to welcome you,’ he said, which made all clear.

  And that was that: we were soon to travel north to Lancashire and I would see Mossby for myself!

  10

  Designs

  Next morning the workshop officially reopened and I’d meant to turn up with Grant at half past eight, his usual time and now, presumably, also mine. But the previous night Nat sent me a terse message (did he ever send any other kind?) telling me to take the morning off in lieu of overtime and go in after lunch.

  My first impulse was to ignore it – I mean, what would I do with myself if I wasn’t working, except grieve and worry? – but Grant persuaded me not to.

  ‘Let the dust clear a bit first. He’ll see the huge amount of work you’ve done over Christmas and realize just how important you are to the business. Then he might change his tune a bit.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ I said, though perhaps he had a point, and now Nat had gained possession of both the cottage and workshop, maybe he’d mellow a bit and be slightly more magnanimous in victory. But if I turned up anyway, he might take it as a sign I was still trying to assert my authority.

  So instead I spent the morning watching Molly prepare a batch of Lancashire hotpots and vegetarian curry puffs for her freezer-filling service.