Page 106 of The House of Hopes and Dreams
Next morning, Ivan and I began the task of carefully taking the panels apart, but it was slow work and we hadn’t got far by the time the expert arrived.
She was a middle-aged woman, with curling ash-blonde hair, piercing light blue eyes and a severe and humourless manner. I was sure she knew her stuff, but suspected that the joy of working with coloured light had never touched her soul.
While she was examining the window, I sent Ivan to winkle Carey out of his man cave next door, since any decisions on what to do with it were up to him. He came through, wiping his hands on an oily rag.
‘This is Grace Jakes, an old friend of Julian’s, who’s going to give us some advice,’ I said, introducing them. ‘Carey Revell, who owns Mossby.’
‘I’ve been cleaning up the pikes from the display in the Great Hall, so I’d better not shake hands,’ he said, but after a brief nod, she’d already turned back to the business in hand.
‘You have a very interesting window here, Mr Carey – unusual for its time in that it was designed by a woman and different in style to others of that period,’ she began.
‘Call me Carey,’ he suggested, giving her one of his blinding smiles. She blinked, as if a sudden flash of light had hurt her eyes, but was only briefly deflected from her lecture.
‘It’s therefore an important window and by rights, it should come to us to be properly restored and conserved by experts in the field.’
‘No chance,’ he said. ‘Anyway, I don’t want it restored, or glued together, or whatever else you experts get up to. Angel says there are a couple of cracked pieces, plus the shattered one, which luckily is cleanly broken into three, so she can lead it back together.’
‘That’s the old way, of course, using very narrow calmes, but the lines of the leads are intrusive,’ she said, then turned to look at the broken pieces of the sun, which I’d laid out on the small light-box. ‘However, if edge-to-edge bonding with resin was used instead, then it would look exactly as it was made.’
‘That’s not something I feel competent to do and, anyway, Julian said even the new resins would go yellow eventually,’ I objected. ‘We both actually preferred to see old windows repaired with lead calme – it added to the charm somehow, rather than detracted.’
‘I’m afraid I can’t agree with you there, but on the other hand, if you decided to send the panel for professional restoration at some future point, there would be no problem undoing what you’d done.’
‘Yes, that’s what I thought.’
‘The glass is in surprisingly good condition – almost no pitting or discoloration.’
‘The hillside rises behind that wing, so it’s sheltered. It’s a mystery how a bird managed to fly into it at all, unless it had a death wish,’ Carey said.
‘Unfortunate. Do you intend attempting any kind of cleaning process before you re-lead the glass, Angelique?’
‘Not really, I thought I’d just wash it with distilled water and dry it.’
She briefly closed her eyes, as if in pain. ‘I brought some ionized water in the car, in case you hadn’t got any.’
I shook my head. Not only did I not have any, I had no idea what it was.
She fetched it in just as Carey vanished back into his cave and, though she seemed inclined to follow him in order to make a furtherattempt to persuade him to let her take the window away, I told her it was pointless.
‘Once he’s made his mind up, he’s totally stubborn. And also, you see, he’s a Revell, so I think he reallybelievesthe family would be cursed if you did that.’
‘I don’t hold with superstition,’ she said austerely, then went disapprovingly away.
‘Has she gone?’ Ivan whispered, sticking his silvery head round the door of the back room. ‘I took a scunner to her: she was just like my maths teacher when I was a boy. She tried to beat fractions into me with a ruler.’
‘Grace didn’t attempt any physical violence, but we’ve got to wash the pieces of the window glass in this special water.’
‘Eh, whatever next?’ he said.
We carried on gently taking the panels apart, placing each piece of glass in its right position on the black and white cartoon I’d made and laid out on the other glazing bench.
I continued for an hour or so after Ivan left, reluctant to stop, before locking up and returning to the house. There I found everyone in the kitchen as usual, with an open bottle of wine and the menus of the three local takeaways that delivered.
‘There you are,’ said Carey, looking up and smiling at me, as if my arrival was the only thing needed to make his life perfect, though, actually, that’s pretty much the way he alwaysdoessmile at me.
‘We’re ordering food and then flagellating our artistic souls by watching the last of the Seamus BanyanComplete Cottage Catastrophes,’ he said. ‘Indian, Italian or Chinese?’
Later, we all walked to the pub, where the crew described how Ella had almost caused them to have a mass heart attack earlier in the day, when they’d opened the priest-hole in the Great Hall and found her sitting there.
