Page 32 of The House of Hopes and Dreams
Love at First Sight
The building was not too dissimilar to Julian’s workshop – low, brick built and with long windows to let in as much light as possible. It was partly concealed behind a beech hedge that still bore a few tattered bronze leaves.
‘If we followed that branch of the drive behind the workshop, there’s an extensive range of old stables and outbuildings round a courtyard, but we’ll stop here.’
Once he’d pulled in, I insisted Carey get poor Fang out of his carrier and he must have been desperate for a pee, because he shot off and watered a nearby bush for about five minutes. After that, though, he trotted back to Carey.
‘Won’t he run off if you don’t put him on a lead?’
‘No, he prefers hanging around my feet, trying to trip me up,’ he said, which seemed to be true because Fang followed him as closely as a tiny shadow.
I thought the poor little creature was probably clinging to Carey as the only familiar thing in an uncertain, ever-changing and threatening world, but I didn’t say anything.
I waited impatiently while Carey unlocked the workshop door and led the way into a big, light room full of dust motes and cobwebs.
‘It’s got electricity,’ he said, demonstrating by flicking on and off the series of dim bulbs that hung down the centre of the room in metal cages, ‘andrunning water. It backs on to a stable they turned into a garage with a flat over it for the chauffeur, in the days when they had such things.’
‘Those lights look a bit more recent than the thirties,’ I said, gazing round.
‘My uncle had thoughts of renting it out again at one time, but in the end I think he decided it would cost more to renovate it than he would get back.’
‘It was obviously lit once by gas,’ I said, surprised. ‘See, there are the old brackets on the wall.’
‘Mossby actually had its own private gas-making plant – one of the earliest in the country,’ he told me. ‘My ancestors seem to have been very innovative.’
‘I prefer a gas soldering iron to an electric one,’ I said. ‘But I can always run it off a cylinder.’
‘Or we could have a storage tank outside and pipe it in,’ he suggested, but by then I was exploring.
In addition to the main area, there was a collection of smaller rooms with plenty of space to house everything I needed. The final door I opened even revealed a freezing cold cloakroom, with a white Victorian loo and no washbasin.
‘All mod cons,’ said Carey enticingly, like an overeager estate agent. ‘Just needs a little updating.’
I gave him a look, then returned to examine the main workshop area more carefully. It was all very familiar, for nothing much has changed in the way leaded windows have been made over the centuries. And Jessie Kaye would actually have stood and worked at one of these long, wooden, dust-laden tables! I brushed the furring of ages from the top of the nearest one and revealed the indentations where the horseshoe nails had held the glass pieces together during the leading-up process. One of the tables would be smooth-surfaced, though, for drawing cutlines and cartoons. In the days before light-boxes, glass would always be cut on the table, laid over the cutline, the drawing that marked the position of the leads.
There were deep stone sinks and wooden work surfaces with tall, leather-topped stools. In fact, now I’d had a chance to take it all in, I thought it resembled a time capsule, for there were still crusted jars of pigment, a large pestle and heavy glass grinding tile, a pair of rustedgrozing pliers tossed down on a bench and a tall and deep wooden rack that would once have held the store of coloured sheet glass. There was even an old hand mill for producing lead calme from cast blocks. I couldn’t imagine why the last leaded light maker to rent the place hadn’t sold those off when he retired, though there was no actual lead or glass, so presumably everything of real value had been removed by the last tenant.
‘So, what do you think?’ Carey asked finally, sounding amused. ‘Will it do?’
‘It’s wonderful!’ I sighed. ‘And it’s in a much more workable state than I expected, too.’
‘Great, I knew you’d love it!’
‘I do – but by workable I didn’t mean I could move right in and set up shop. It needs so much doing first – the electricity updated and extended, for a start, and a heavy-duty cable for the kiln installed. And hot water as well as freezing cold would be good.’
‘Minor details,’ he said dismissively.
‘Expensiveminor details,’ I said firmly. ‘And I’d have to have an air filtration system in one of the other rooms.’
‘What for?’
‘The cementing process generates a lot of dust, because you clean the panels off afterwards by brushing powdered whitening over them. You don’t really want to be breathing that in.’
‘I wish I’d got round to learning more about the leaded light process when I used to visit you,’ he said. ‘I always meant to – but then, I had you to help me with the programmes when I needed it.’
‘It’s not exactly something you can do at one end of the garden shed, either,’ I said. ‘Or not on any kind of professional level.’
I shoved my hands in the pockets of my padded coat for warmth, mentally doing a rough calculation of the costs and comparing them with my modest nest egg.
