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By Root 259 0

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 t-shirts, no skater clothes. Their courtship was accelerated by similar feeling on Stephen's side - here was a beautiful, freethinking, artistic girl dressed in a slightly funky fashion, charming him with a world he knew nothing of.

When Nora brought Stephen home to Islington Elinor sighed inwardly. She liked Stephen - with his old-world manners and Cambridge education - but could see what was happening. In her women' group her friends agreed. Nora was seeking out her father, but what could Elinor do?

Elinor gave her daughter the glass heart that Bruno had given her. She told Nora what she knew of her father's family, of the famous Corradino Manin, in an attempt to give her daughter a sense of paternal identity. But at that time Nora was no more than momentarily interested - her heart was full