Bird Inside Read online

  The artist was now rooting through a box of smaller offcuts; seemed unwilling to relax or take a rest. He held up a diamond-shape just a foot or two away from her, so she could admire the tiny bubbles in its texture. ‘That greeny-blue gives me quite a lift. Strange how colours can affect your mood and spirits, work like music, almost. I always feel at home with blues, whereas most reds make me restless.’

  ‘So you can’t have been too happy doing Adrian’s job?’

  ‘No, but I didn’t have you then.’

  She half-choked on her biscuit. That was the first truly personal thing he had said for a whole week. When he’d returned to the studio last Monday, after their tense aborted sex two days before, he had adopted his professional role, friendly still, but distant; not made a single mention of Adrian’s dinner party, nor its sequel in the bedroom. She’d been horribly on edge herself, fearing everything was spoilt, that he would refuse to let her work there any longer, be embarrassed by the whole affair – or rather non-affair. And, instead, he’d simply blanked it out, as if it hadn’t happened. He was busy, she was busy, and they both worked hard, said little. Yet he was surely all too well aware of the words not said, the things not consummated, and all the week she had been expecting an attack – if not an actual physical encounter, which she feared she would fight off again, then an irritable tirade. Yet it seemed he wasn’t scornful, as she’d feared. ‘I didn’t have you then’, suggested need and intimacy, not anger. He hadn’t followed the remark up, simply left it hanging. All the tiny noises seemed to stampede through the silence, the slap of mug on bench, the tinkle of a spoon.

  ‘I … I like green,’ she said, at last, glancing at her emerald, its jewel-like colour glowing on the light-box.

  ‘So you should,’ he countered, seeming grateful that she’d changed the subject, steered them on to safer ground. ‘It’s the colour of youth and hope. Though it stands for death as well as life, which is why I’ve used it in the window. It’s something of a paradox, is green – formed from blue and yellow, heaven and earth combined.’

  ‘I’m still a bit thrown by all these symbols,’ Jane observed, brushing off what she thought were biscuit crumbs, then wincing when she found that they were glass. ‘It’s like I’ve been half-blind for years, simply unaware of them.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ Christopher replied. ‘You can’t avoid them, really. Symbols are basic to the human mind, arise out of our deepest hopes and fears. Every race and age and culture has produced them. I mean, bread and wine were universal symbols long before the Christian Eucharist. Bread means life and food and sharing – and even union, because of all those separate grains in just one substance. And wine is life, as well – synonymous with blood. And bread and wine together symbolise the union of feminine and masculine, solid and liquid, man and god.’ He propped the sheet of glass against the wall, used his hands to gesture with – urgent restless hands which Jane felt should be tired by now. They had been cutting glass since nine, and were nicked in several places, dirty, grimed with dust, a Band-Aid round one thumb. Yet his hands seemed like the rest of him – determined, energetic, refusing to sit idle. He was pacing up and down now, as if the vigour in his words had spilled over to his body, had to be worked off.

  ‘Even language itself is symbolic in its origin. Take poetry or drama, or even maths – the circle and the triangle are some of the oldest symbols in the world. And what do we do with triangles? Stick them on road signs to warn motorists of danger, when they stand for so much more than that – the Trinity, to start with, and I don’t mean just the Christian one, but every sort of trinity – heaven, earth and man; father, mother, child; body, soul and spirit; love, truth and wisdom.’ He broke off, drained his coffee. ‘Back to work,’ he ordered. ‘If you start me on this subject, we’ll never get our window cut at all.’

  Jane removed the dirty mugs, washed them up immediately, replaced them in the kitchen cupboard, grinning to herself. Her parents would hardly recognise her now. Christopher had taught her in a fortnight what they’d been trying to instil for eighteen years – the importance of order and routine. She paused a moment, thinking of the Shrepton kitchen, with its spotless tidy worktops, the neat labels on each tin and jar, which Amy stencilled in herself, as if spice and tea and sugar were unsure of their identities and needed to be reassured. She had ripped off her own label –‘daughter’ – but still sometimes felt a deep sense of loss and longing; still missed tiny stupid things like her mother’s knitted tea-cosy, or the egg-cups with the legs.

  She wrung out the dishcloth, folded it in four, tried to cram her mother back in her own highly-polished jar – a small one with no label, and a tight well-fitting lid. She was better off with Christopher. ‘Our’ window, he had called it – which meant his and hers, not his and Isobel’s. He could hardly be intending it as a tribute to an unknown baby, Angela, when he had told her quite specifically that it was celebrating Rose – no, more than that – making Rose immortal.

  Her stupid grin was spreading as she returned to the cutting-bench, and her last small piece of green, found a triangular-shape on the cutline which it fitted more or less, then laid the glass on top. She ran through her instructions as she prepared to cut again, priming both her hand and brain. Christopher had compared it to a dentist and his drill, requiring a similar combination of pressure and control. She cut the piece as accurately as possible, then stuck it up in place; stood a moment, motionless, delighting in her landscape, her shining furrowed fields. She could hardly see the real November landscape which stretched beyond the window. The glass-screens blocked it off, together with the half-drawn thick black curtains, which the artist used to prevent the light filtering in from each side of the screens. Just two narrow strips were showing, one on either side – sombre wintry farmland in sallow greys and browns, which only served to heighten the brilliance of her greens. She had found the curtains strange at first, especially on a bright and sunny morning, but he’d explained that when he was working on a window for a church, then he liked to try to reproduce roughly the same light-conditions; using heavy curtains or tacked-up strips of card, to create the effect of the stonework round the glass, and so cut out all glare. Now she’d come to like the muted light, which seemed intimate, romantic, lapped them both in their own private snug cocoon.

  The phone shrilled through the privacy, a blatant bossy ring. She cursed beneath her breath. Christopher encouraged her to take the calls, so she could fob off any time-wasters, or deal with practicalities. But sometimes she was greeted by a poncy female voice – some friend or fan or floozy who insisted on speaking to the artist, and she was then forced to listen in while he gushed or even flirted. He had picked it up himself this time, and she couldn’t hear the caller’s voice, though, judging by his seductive tone, it was a woman he knew well. His private life was a mystery, and she felt totally excluded from it when he jabbered on to some anonymous Presence, whom she always pictured instantly as a voluptuous doe-eyed Venus with Shakespeare’s brain and the genius of Picasso. This particular Aphrodite was kind enough to keep her phone-call brief, and after three goodbyes from Christopher, Jane could concentrate again.

  She selected a new sheet of flash-veridian, which varied in both thickness and in colour, from deep and almost chunky at the bottom, to paler and much thinner at the top. She checked her cutline, frowning; wasn’t always certain which particular shade or texture of the glass-sheet the artist wanted where. But he had returned to work himself, and she didn’t like to bother him, when he was cutting the first segment of the Angel’s outstretched wing. She watched in admiration, listening to the gentle squeaky scratching of his cutter, the sudden sharp metallic tap which followed it, then the abrupt but muted snapping of the glass. The noises made a music of their own; a strange discordant music she preferred, in fact, to the angry wailing symphony he’d been playing earlier on, with its thumping drums and strident stabbing brass.

  Despite his concentration, he was aware that she was stumped; laid his
pliers down, and slipped round to her end of the bench, gesturing to her cutline. ‘Where I’ve chalked DG – dark green – use this end of the glass, okay? It’s a fantastic colour, isn’t it? Hell! I’m sorry, Rose, I’m boring you, harping on and on about fantastic bloody colours, when maybe they don’t grab you in quite the same gut way. Colour’s like a drug for me, and I crave my daily fix of it. I’ve always been like that, you know, even as a student. Yet we hardly even touched it for the first two years at art school. We did life-drawing and plant-drawing, and drawing from the cast, but we had to work in line and tone, not colour. Then there was anatomy, perspective, composition – all extremely disciplined and highly academic, but I was dying to slap paint on something, burst into an art-shop and buy every bloody tube and pot they had!’

  He cut her sheet in half for her, to make it easier to handle, blunted both cut edges. ‘I suppose that’s why I was attracted to stained glass. It uses light and colour so directly, and all the colours shift and change continually, according to the time of day, and what the clouds and sky are doing.’

  He handed Jane her half-sheet, replaced the remainder in the rack, pausing for a moment to inspect another offcut of flash-green. ‘The first time I ever went to Chartres, as a student of eighteen, I stayed in the cathedral for hours, just watching how the windows reacted to the light. It was one of those spring days when the sun keeps going in and out, so the colours changed dramatically. And different windows came to life as the sun moved round the sky – first the east end, after sunrise; then the south side, by midday; and those amazing, almost hurting blues above the west-end portal started really shouting out by latish afternoon. And then, as the sky began to redden into sunset, all the warmer colours like the rubies seemed to blaze out like a fire; then, finally, everything died down, and once the sun had set, the whole cathedral was plunged into a sort of murky twilight gloom. It was really quite a spectacle. No wonder people call stained glass the most ancient form of kinetic art there is.’

  ‘What’s kinetic art?’ Jane asked, longing for his way with words, so she could make some more appropriate response to his energetic monologue.

  ‘Art that moves – you know, mobiles or mechanical sculptures with moving parts or motors. It’s from the same Greek word as cinema. Right, start with the dark green, Rose – this area I’ve marked. I suggest you use that end of the sheet for these oblong-shapes down here.’ He returned to his own cutline, studied it a moment before picking up his own glass, positioning it on top. ‘Actually, talking of the cinema, I’ve always thought medieval stained glass was something like a picture-show, a sort of magic panorama, or a Cecil B. De Mille extravaganza.’

  ‘But you told Felice it was spiritual.’

  ‘It was – a supernatural drama played out in the windows, with the faithful sitting in the gloom, transported to another world. It was several things at once, in fact – a teaching-aid for an illiterate population – what they called the Poor Man’s Bible, with vivid coloured pictures instead of miles of text; a mystical experience using light and colour as a hot-line up to God, and sheer undiluted sensual thrill.’ He tossed a piece of scrap glass into the cullet-box, its ringing chink sounding almost celebratory. ‘Of course, the cathedrals were quite different then from how they are today. All the walls were painted, and half the sculptures too, so the whole interior was a riot of bright colour. And just think of the grand scale – vaulting soaring up a hundred and fifty feet and more, when most buildings at that time were cramped and primitive. The thirteenth-century equivalent of the man on the Clapham omnibus must have felt he’d reached the Pearly Gates already.’

  He paused to light another of his Marlboros, his entire attention focused on the process, as if it were more important momentarily than any vast cathedral. He inhaled luxuriously, then blew out smoke and words. ‘Those stuffy academics who write about medieval art don’t always stress the sensuous side enough. It irritates me sometimes, the way they try to defuse its charge, refuse to get excited, or react with any personal involvement. But then that’s true of art in general – music, poetry, paintings, are all so potent, Rose, people try to tame them by shrouding them in worthy words, or inventing names or labels to pin them safely down. I suspect they’re sometimes scared of art, or their own responses to it. It can arouse such extremes of feeling, set off a sort of anarchy or wildness, even a vulnerability, which can be very threatening, undermine their certainties, their settled rational view of things, make them insecure.

  ‘Damn!’ he muttered, sucking a cut finger, and whipping out his handkerchief to prevent the blood from oozing down his cutline. He went to fetch the Band-Aid, still talking as he cut a strip to size. ‘I mean, look at Samuel Beckett, or Francis Bacon, or Kafka. Their view of life is terrible and painful, doesn’t hide the cruelties or pointlessness, which the rest of polite society tries its hardest to deny. I suppose there’s always a majority who want art to be safe – consoling and uplifting, rather than challenging, subversive, or simply very bleak. Of course, there’s obviously a difference between private art and public art, but even when the work is done to order – for a patron or an institution, the Church, or state, or some such – there’s still an individual voice or vision which can challenge accepted conventions and beliefs, and may well be subversive. That’s why art’s destroyed, Rose – one of the reasons, anyway – Puritans smashing centuries’-worth of treasures, Muslims burning books, tyrants flinging poets into jail. They may trot out high-flown arguments to justify themselves – spout reasons of security, or moral codes and creeds, but underneath there’s an element of fear – fear of that whole side of man which is naked or explosive.’

  Jane tried to keep her mind on cutting glass, but it kept sneaking off, reflecting on his words. Had Christopher been talking only about art, or also referring indirectly to her own fears – her fear of wildness, letting go, losing all control? She stared down at her shirt – his shirt – which had pressed against his naked skin, absorbed its heat and sweat. She could see him in her bed again – the bare brown chest and back, the coarse dark hair running down and down, until it was cut off by his belt; the sudden glimpse of other hair, as the belt unsnapped and he seemed to change from cultured artist to aggressive rutting stranger. She did feel fear – fear of anarchy and wildness, cruelty, vulnerability – all the words he’d mentioned.

  ‘Actually, I’ve often felt a conflict in my own work between public art and private. I can be subjective and expressive in my paintings, but when I’m working on stained glass, especially for a church, then I’m often saddled with a theme which may constrain me, or which I find hard to reconcile with my own personal beliefs. Though I never compromise. Why the hell should I, Rose, when there are ways of getting round it? I mean, if I’m asked to depict the sacraments, or the Trinity, or grace, they can always be interpreted in a more general and symbolical way, rather than conventionally and slavishly, following some narrow creed.’

  Jane found it hard to listen to his views on artistic conflict when she was fighting her own battle between resistance and surrender, wondering which she’d choose if he removed not just her clothes but her scruples, inhibitions. She glanced at the dark bloodstains on his cutline; felt drained and almost dizzy, as if she were losing blood herself; her hand feeble on the cutter now, not pressing with its usual power and force. She was aware of him observing her, the note of irritation in his voice.

  ‘If you find that glass too thick to cut, then start the other end– do the pieces on the cutline I’ve marked as medium green. No, turn it over, Rose. Don’t forget, you always cut flash glass on the non-flash side, okay? You’ve really got to concentrate. It’s my fault, probably. I’m distracting you with all this talk. Right, back to work for both of us.’

  ‘Back to work’ continued until tea-time, with just one short break for lunch – though Jane couldn’t help reflecting that the word ‘lunch’ seemed inappropriate for two Kit-Kats, one cold sausage and a pot of instant noodles. By four o’clock, when th
e fading light forced them both to stop, she collapsed back in a chair, all her muscles aching, her right hand sore and stiff.

  ‘I’m dead!’ she said, examining the reddened weal between her first and second fingers, inflamed now from the pressure of the cutter.

  ‘Well, we’d better resurrect you, or Isobel will sue me. She’s right, you know – I do work you too hard.’

  ‘I don’t mind.’

  ‘Don’t you, Rose?’

  She met his eyes a moment, and they seemed to strip her naked – mind as well as body, so she imagined he could see her flesh, the ferment in her head. She turned away, confused; tried to hide her awkwardness by studying the glass-screens, checking on how much they’d done since nine o’clock that morning. The artist had completed the Angel’s head and shoulders, the top part of its hair, and almost one whole wing. She herself had finished off her landscape, and started on the Angel’s foot. The glass they’d cut looked radiant and rich, with the subdued light filtering through it; far more sensuous and solid than the colours on the sketch. Despite her painful hand, she felt a real elation in seeing a small-scale paper sketch translated into glass. And the glass itself had changed, seemed alive now, and vibrating, as it floated in the window. All the hard slog of the day, the cumbersome procedures, cut fingers, dust and mess, had transmuted into something other-worldly – disembodied colour hovering in space.

  She glanced from head and halo, on the upper right-hand light, to her landscape on the lower left; the Angel’s pointed foot poised above the bars of green, as if ready to take off. The foot was not quite finished, but, even so, she’d still cut almost half as much as the artist had himself. And considering she was less than a third his age, and had absolutely none of his experience, that seemed pretty good – no, more than pretty good – it was astonishing, phenomenal.