The Glassblower of Murano Read Free Page A

in the seventies with a
small daughter, and a promise from Bruno to write and
visit. Baby Leonora spent her first months with her grandparents or at the University creche. When Bruno did not
write Elinor was hurt but not surprised. Her pride stopped
her from getting in touch with him. She made a gesture
of retaliation by anglicizing her daughter's name to Nora.
She began to appreciate feminist ideas and spent a great
deal of time at single mother's groups rubbishing Bruno
and men in general. At the Christmas of Nora's first year,
Elinor received a Christmas card from an Italian friend
from Ca' Foscari. Dottore Padovani had been a colleague
in her department, a middle-aged man of intelligence and biting humour, not one given to patronage or sympathy.
But Elinor detected a note of sympathy in his Christmas
greetings. She rang as soon as the Christmas vacation was
over to demand why he thought that just because a woman
was a single parent she deserved to be pitied. He told her
gently that Bruno had died of a heart attack not long after
she had left - he assumed that she had heard. Bruno had
died at work, and Elinor pictured him as she had first seen
him, but now clutching his chest and pitching forward
into the canal, the city claiming its own. The fire was out.
For Elinor her love affair with Venice was over. She continued in her studies but moved her sphere of interest
south to Florence, and in the Botticellis and Giottos felt
safe that she would not keep seeing Bruno's face.

    Nora grew up amongst women. Her mother and grandmother, the women of Elinor's discussion groups; they were
her family. She grew up to be taught to develop her own
mind and her creativity. She was perpetually warned of
the ways of men. Nora was sent to an all-girl school in
Islington and showed an aptitude for arts. She was encouraged in her sculpture by Elinor who had dreams of her
daughter following in the footsteps of Michelangelo. But
Elinor had reckoned without the workings of fate and the
call of Nora's ancestors.
    For whilst studying sculpture and ceramics at Wimbledon
School of Art Nora met a visiting tutor who had her own
glass foundry in Snowdonia. Gaenor Davis was in her sixties and made glass objets to sell in London, and she
encouraged Nora's interest in glass, and the blower's art.
Nora's fascination for the medium grew with the amberrose bubbles of glass that she blew and her expertise developed during a summer month spent at Gaenor's foundry.
With the fanciful, pretentious nature of the naive student
she saw her own self in the glass. This strange material was
at once liquid and solid, and had moods and a finite nature,
a narrow window in which she would allow herself to be
malleable before her nature cooled and her designs were
set, until the heat freed her again. Elinor, watching her
daughter's specialism become apparent, began to have the
uneasy feeling that that continuity, that enduring genome
that she had identified in Venice, would not be so easily
dismissed and was rising to the surface in her daughter.

    But Nora had distractions - she was discovering men.
Having been largely ignorant of the male sex for the whole
of her childhood and adolescence, she found that she adored
them. None of her mother's bitterness had passed to her
- she surrounded herself with male friends and cheerfully
slept with most of them. After three years of sex and sculpture Nora embarked on a Masters degree in ceramics and
glass at Central St Martin's and there began to tire of
artistic men.They seemed to her without direction, without
conviction, without responsibility. She was ripe for a man
like Stephen Carey, and when they met in a Charing Cross
bar, her attraction was immediate.
    He came from not the arts but the sciences - he was doctor. He wore a suit. He had a high-powered, well paid
job at Charing Cross Hospital. He was handsome, but in
a clean-shaven way - no stubble, no ironic seventies