Notes from an Exhibition (4 page)

She was sitting at the end of her bed, dressed and ready, suitcase standing by her feet. She had on a navy-blue duffel coat he had not seen before so that he supposed some friend of hers had called by her lodgings to bring her things she needed. The coat was fastened up to the familiar red scarf at the neck, as though she were waiting at a bus stop in the icy cold, not in a well-heated ward. She looked bloodless, blank and exhausted but she mustered a weak smile when she saw him and stood, wordlessly, bag in hand, eager to be off. The doctor intercepted them on their way out to press a jar of pills on him.

‘See that she has two three times a day,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid it’s not safe to trust her with the whole bottle. Not just yet. Good luck. Your local GP can fix her up with another prescription.’

Once they were down in the car park, Rachel became quite animated. She admired the colour of the Ford. ‘I thought we’d be getting in a taxi,’ she said. ‘I never pictured you with a car.’

As he opened her door for her, he noticed there were brown bloodstains at the cuffs of her coat and realized her landlady must have bundled her into the ambulance with the first clothes that came to hand. Now that she was sitting, he saw they were a wild mismatch, even by bohemian standards.

‘I’ll need to pick up my other things,’ she said. ‘Do you mind?’

‘Of course not. Maybe I can help you pack.’

It transpired that she didn’t live in the little cottage with the faintly hostile couple he had met but in a studio at the end of their tiny garden. It was really a converted garage, basic even by student standards. There was an outside privy and hot water from an Ascot over the tiny, much-chipped sink. Presumably when sponge washing was not enough, she borrowed the landlady’s bathroom. Otherwise there was a bed that doubled up as a sofa, a single rickety dining chair, a card table, a kettle and a toaster.

She saw him taking it in. ‘It was the only place I could afford that had a bit of privacy,’ she explained. ‘Once the door’s shut, they couldn’t see in and I could let friends in at the window.’ She indicated the room’s window, which had been crudely inserted into what would have been the garage door, and he immediately pictured Professor Shepherd taking off his hat and wincing fastidiously as he climbed through it.

She had pulled out a careworn cardboard suitcase from under the bed and was rapidly emptying the chest of drawers into it. He was struck by how few possessions she had. (He was shocked to watch her casually throw her few paperbacks into the wastepaper basket.) The meagre collection of plates, cutlery and dented pans were the landlords’. The only thing of beauty was an incongruous old pewter candlestick which she thrust among her clothes when he began to show an interest in it. Her painting things stood near the window: an old easel, which he dismantled and
bundled up for her, and several shoeboxes stuffed with an assortment of paint tubes, bottles of turpentine, brushes and little palette knives. When he asked her where all her paintings were, she said she had got rid of them, with a kind of flash in her voice that warned him off the subject. She clearly did not mean she had sold them.

She flung the window up and told him to bring his car round so they could load that way rather than trailing stuff through the house. Then she handed things out to him while he loaded. He had assumed she would need to leave through the house so as to settle up with her landlords and say goodbye so was surprised when she ended her labours by climbing through the window and closing it behind her.

‘But they’ll think we’re still in there together,’ he pointed out.

‘Oh probably,’ she said, shivering as she got back in the car. ‘I hate them. They don’t matter any more. Can you drive quite fast now, please?’

He drove as fast as the car and the law allowed, which wasn’t very, but she seemed satisfied and palpably relaxed as they put more and more streets between themselves and the scene of her recent troubles. Then, as they left the city and began the drive towards Swindon, she asked a few questions about where they were going, about Penzance and his grandfather. Just how deaf was he? How big was the house? Were they near the sea? Was there somewhere she could paint? She wasn’t making conversation; she was asking questions so that he would talk so she didn’t have to. And he duly talked and found he wanted to.

As if offering himself up, he told her everything. How his father had gone missing in the War and never returned and his mother effectively pined away with the stress of waiting for him.

‘Nobody pines away,’ she cut in scornfully. ‘Did she kill herself?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said, startled. ‘I was never told.’

He related how his father’s parents raised him, how his grandfather had been the town’s best tailor. Her grasp of English geography seemed hazy – she thought Bristol was near Oxford and that Devon came before Somerset – so he tried to explain about Penzance and West Cornwall’s proud remoteness and how it was wisest not to think of it as part of England at all but as a kind of island nation linked to it by a railway.

Thinking he had talked enough, he tried to encourage her. ‘Tell me about your family,’ he said. ‘I don’t even know where you’re from or how long you’d lived in Oxford or anything.’

‘I don’t want to talk about that,’ she said shortly. ‘I never want to talk about that.’

She said no more and shortly afterwards began to cry.

She didn’t sob or wail. Her grief was horribly discreet but as persistent and almost as silent as bleeding from an unstitched wound. He drove on in silence, glancing across at her, letting her cry. He believed it was healthy to let people cry – friends and onlookers were always far too ready to stifle grief with handkerchiefs and dubious comfort. But he also let her cry because her weeping somehow filled the car with the scent of her and he found it intoxicating. He noted how she didn’t apologize from
time to time, the way weepers usually did, as though their crying were a breach in decorum, like belching or hiccupping. Her flow of tears and occasional sniffs and nose-blowing were so regular, so placid almost, it was as though they were not simply beyond her control but beneath her notice.

After an hour, by which time her grief was threatening to mist up the windows, he stopped in a village on the pretext of buying petrol and bought her some tissues along with some ham sandwiches and two bottles of pale ale. He was prepared for her to wave the offer of food and drink away but he returned to the car to find her quite recovered and, she said, as hungry as a horse.

She ate her share of the sandwiches ravenously, poring over the road map, then suggested it might be a good idea if he gave her the pills the hospital doctor had prescribed. Remembering the doctor’s orders, he shook out two of the pills into his hand and passed them over.

‘I need three,’ she said.

‘But the label says –’

‘I’ve been taking these, or versions of them, since I was a little girl,’ she said drily. ‘I think I know a little more about psychiatric medication than you do. Give me the bottle.’

He held back.

‘Oh it’s OK, Tony,’ she said with a defeated sort of smile that gave him goosebumps. ‘I won’t do anything silly. Not now. Not now you’ve rescued me.’

She took a third pill, washed all three down expertly with a swig of pale ale, made him pause outside the village so she could relieve herself behind a hedge then fell asleep.

It was late at night, nearly one, when they arrived at his grandfather’s house. Tony carried their suitcases into the dark and silent building, where his grandfather would long since have gone to bed, then gently woke her, taking the car blanket off her lap and draping it round her shoulders against the chill before he led her in. Perhaps from sleep, perhaps from pills (of which she had taken three more when they stopped at Exeter for supper) she was as solemn and wordless as a sleepy child. He showed her where the bathroom was then led her to a spare room, his mother’s room, where his grandfather would expect a female guest to be lodged. She gave a little whimper of exhaustion and pleasure on seeing the bed so neatly made in readiness and started to undress so quickly he left her at once.

The idiocy of what he had done struck him only on waking from a deep and dreamless sleep. He had grown used to waking slowly in Oxford to the distant groan and chink of a punctual milk float then the muffled bell of the college clock and finally the alarm clock of the heavily sleeping research fellow in the room beside him. In Penzance the first cackle of seagulls woke him shortly after dawn. He would gladly have rolled over and slept again but nagging worry and a creeping sense of doom kept him awake and staring from his pillows at the too-familiar room, still so full of boyhood that it seemed to mock him for thinking he could become a man so easily.

He had thrown in his future for what? The thin promise of a badly paid teaching post in the town he had thought to escape and the still narrower possibility of a relationship with a pregnant woman in love with someone else?

This was a woman who thought of him, if she did so at all, as a kind of devoted page, less man than spaniel.

Thinking more clearly now than he had for weeks, he made himself sit up, listening to the creaks of the waking house and laying realistic plans. He had done the right thing in bringing her here. It was a healthier place, far away from bad associations and bad love, where she could paint again and meet other painters, like-minded souls rather than corrupt academics. He would find some useful woman, one of the Friends, to look in occasionally and perhaps cook meals. Rachel would mend. She would become the person she was meant to be, unwarped by influences and needs. For himself, however, he saw he had no further role in the happy scenario and that to linger longer than was necessary to settle her would be only to complicate matters and risk hurting both of them. He would stay on with her a week, maybe ten days, no more. He would write to his supervisor, who was far more worldlywise than he, and plead over-hastiness. His romantic folly would go understood.

Then he remembered the nurse’s words about the baby and the doctor’s and landlady’s easy assumption that it was his. The Friends were famously non-judgemental in matters of unmarried couples and welcomed those other congregations branded, but that was only one morning out of seven. For the rest of the week she would be just another unmarried mother with all the trials and expense and disapproval to deal with the although he knew his grandfather would gladly take her in and, in time, her child, he doubted she had the strength to bear the burden of compassion.

He shaved and pissed at his bedroom sink and dressed hurriedly. She was not in her room and his grandfather was not in his. He heard his grandfather’s scratchy laugh from overhead but was distracted by the smell of burning and raced down to the kitchen in time to tweak a tray of flaming toast from under the grill and tip it into the sink under a running tap. He opened windows to clear the billowing smoke then climbed the stairs, following voices.

Like several houses in the neighbourhood of Morrab Gardens, it had an extra room, a kind of lookout built out of the attic. Long since retired from tailoring, half-gratefully defeated by the arrival of John Collier’s and racks of off-the-peg suits in Simpson’s, his grandfather had retreated to his first love: seafaring. He spent hours in his eyrie, telescope or binoculars trained on the water, or down at the harbourmaster’s office gossiping, and received a regular fee for a weekly half-column in
The
Cornishman
called ‘About The Bay’ in which he gave details or stories of any vessels of note currently at anchor or being repaired in the dry dock.

They were laughing again as he climbed the narrow wooden steps and he thought how long it must be since the dapper and lightly flirtatious old man had entertained an attractive woman in the house.

They had all the windows flung up and his grandfather was showing her how to use the binoculars. They turned as he came up.

‘Well here’s the man!’ his grandfather exclaimed and she hurried over, laughing and enthusing about how beautiful it all was and how the light was so strong even in
winter and how she wanted to live there for ever and ever.

And before he had even climbed up off the steps into the tiny, dazzling room, Rachel had stooped and was kissing him on the lips with an eagerness that made his grandfather laugh again and clap his hands.

Lizzy was talking to his father and Garfield knew straight away that it was bad news. Lizzy had a voice she only used with his parents and would become bright and twinkly as soon as she said hello, as though endeavouring to charm a child. Only this time she suddenly slumped against the fridge door saying,

‘Oh no. When? I’ll fetch Garfield … Well. Oh dear. Well of course I can. Yes.’

She had hung up before he left his chair. The air in the kitchen was thick with burnt toast fumes and the steam from drying laundry and the angry words she had been speaking when the telephone interrupted her. He made to open a window to ease the atmosphere but she was holding him now, pressing her face into his chest.

‘I’m sorry I was horrible,’ she mumbled to his shirt buttons.

‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘Has she finally done it?’

‘No,’ she said, pulling back with a faint snort of laughter. ‘After all that, she ended up having a heart attack like a normal person.’

She had never liked his mother, sensing Rachel found her too earthbound and honest. Sincere to a fault, Lizzy could not hide her excitement that Rachel had died and that she still lived, the only viable woman left in the family. She had won.

‘When did it happen?’ he asked, refusing to soften for her.

‘This morning. He wanted to tell you but he got upset. I’ve never heard your dad cry before.’

‘He doesn’t cry easily,’ he said, wondering if he could ever remember his father weeping. ‘Why did he only call now?’

‘I don’t know. Too upset to do it before.’

‘I’ll go over.’

‘Let me drive.’

‘No. I’d … I think I’d rather go on my own.’

‘Oh. OK.’ And he could tell he had hurt her. ‘Don’t be like this,’ she added.

‘Like what? How am I supposed to be? My mother’s just died and my father takes all day to tell me. Sorry. I didn’t mean to shout. Don’t wait up, OK? I might have to stay over. There’s nothing on tomorrow, is there?’

She glanced with him at the calendar.

‘Nothing I can’t cancel for you.’

He kissed her hair then, briefly, her lips. He was still
at a loss for how she could irritate him so much one minute then squeeze his heart the next.

‘Later,’ he said and grabbed his coat and keys.

In high tourist season the drive from their terrace in Falmouth to his parents’ house in Penzance could take an hour and a half. But even outside the holiday seasons, when he could reach them in half the time, he saw less of them than when he had lived in London.

‘Cuts both ways,’ Lizzy would say. ‘They see less of you too.’

But as the son, the onus to visit was surely on him. The burden of dutiful care and worry passed from parent to child a few years after that child left home. When Lizzy’s father fell ill, it took little persuasion to convince Garfield they should move to Falmouth and first prop up then take on his violin repair workshop. Garfield was a skilled carpenter and enjoyed learning from his father-in-law. He and Lizzy shared moral qualms about Garfield’s work as a solicitor. But his covert reason for complying so readily with her suggestion was to be closer to the house he still thought of as home and to the couple he found himself worrying about during every meeting.

So why did he see so little of them? The ill-concealed antipathy between Rachel and Lizzy was small excuse since he could always call over on his own and brave her mockery or disapproval later. In fact what he tended to do was drop by their house whenever work took him to St Ives or Penzance, so that he could honestly say he just happened to be passing, so that any emphasis on or expectations of the visit were diminished. No special meal had
to be shopped for, as when Hedley drove down from town, no beds made up or rooms cleaned.

‘I’m local now,’ he told himself. ‘I don’t visit, I drop by.’ But of course what he was doing was excusing his parents’ lack of interest. They were always perfectly pleased to see him, at least Antony was. If it happened to be his father who opened the door he would always exclaim,

‘Well look who it isn’t!’

Garfield knew he meant nothing by this – it was just one of his habitual expressions, like asking ‘What have we here?’ when a plate of unfamiliar food was set before him – but the grudging older son in him couldn’t help interpreting it as a implicit complaint that he had opened the door to find merely Garfield again and not one of his siblings.

The house lay in a Regency row of ice-cream-coloured houses one block back from the Penzance seafront. Sheltered and fertile, its long front garden was a lush, sculpture-dotted plantation of echiums, banana trees, furcraea, pseudopanax. Antony had replaced its old stone path with deep pea gravel because he liked visitors to make plenty of noise on approaching so as not to surprise him. Low-level lights, another innovation, clicked on as Garfield crunched his way to the door.

Surely it was odd, these days, for people to live in the same house all their lives? Yet this was where Antony had grown up, where he had brought Rachel when they were students and where Garfield and his siblings had been born. Garfield wondered, in a flush of guilt, if Antony would now expect them to move in and care for him the
way he had for his grandfather. It was unimaginable for him and Lizzy, Hedley was entirely too urban and as for Morwenna …

He found he could not dismiss the thought of his sister with his usual, hard-won mental shrug. Tonight the worry of her was more than usually persistent and he ran through a quick prayer that she was safe, that she was warm, that some uncharacteristic impulse might drive her to pick up a telephone or board a homeward bus.

The recent winds had tugged a rose branch free from its arch across the path. It snagged on Garfield’s jersey, compelling him to take a step away to ease it free before twining it back to where it couldn’t catch his father in the face.

The house looked small tonight, perhaps because Rachel hadn’t left all the lights blazing. Garfield had been pulled up short by the realization that his mother would never again leave every light blazing, when the door opened.

‘Oh I’m so glad it’s you.’

Hedley was a sunbaked but still pretty version of their sister.

‘Who else should it be?’ Garfield asked, surprised to see him there so soon and thinking,
Morwenna. Wenn!

‘Oh God,’ Hedley sighed. ‘You know. Another of his adoring women with a bag of vegetable pasties or a thermos of nettle soup. The kitchen’s heaving already. Can’t think why I stopped to shop on the way down. You can buy everything in Penzance now anyway, even udon noodles, and Tregenza’s have better tomatoes than we get in Holland Park and for half the price. I’m wittering.’

Ankle-deep in damp gravel, they hugged – another innovation – rubbing one another’s backs. They had never been a family that touched. Something that at once amazed and appalled Lizzy, who insisted on kissing everyone she liked and quite a few people she didn’t.

‘He thought he’d rung you much earlier,’ Hedley said, ‘but then he said he’d left a message with a man and I pointed out your answering machine had Lizzy’s voice on it. Which means he told some complete and untraceable stranger their mother’s just died.’ He was infallible at guessing and soothing the anxieties of others. In another life he might have made the perfect valet.

‘How come he rang you?’ Garfield couldn’t keep the childish resentment from his voice, which made Hedley smile.

‘He didn’t. She did.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘She rang us last night. Really late – which she never does. Did. You know their nine-thirty rule. And she was ranting. Stuff about stones and beaches and Petroc and the “importance of the group”. Then really paranoid, weirdo stuff about GBH and how she exerted a baleful influence on anyone who was trying to paint down here and how Wenn was cursed and … Oh God. I dunno. Mad stuff. I tried to ring Dad once she’d done but she hadn’t hung up properly or she’d pulled the phone out of the wall or something. And of course he refuses to buy a mobile like any normal person and I couldn’t sleep because she’d got me worrying.’

‘You could have rung us.’

‘I know. And I should. But I was due for a visit anyway
and, well, I drove through the night. She was dead when I got here.’

‘Had he found her?’

‘Yes. She’d spent the night in the loft. She’s been working obsessively since the last show. She’d locked herself in but he broke in and found her and somehow …’ Hedley broke off for a moment as impending tears distorted his voice. ‘Sorry,’ he squeaked and blew his nose. ‘Sorry.’ He took a deep breath then continued with a brave show of airiness. ‘Yes, so somehow he’d managed to haul her down the loft stairs. I found him curled up with her on the landing.’

‘Oh, Hed.’

‘I know.’

‘Where’s she now?’

‘Well I thought you’d want to …’ He broke off and gulped and took a breath to control himself. ‘… say goodbye here so I’ve put off the Co-Op until you’re ready. She’s on their bed. Happiness was never her forte but considering the state she must have been in she looks peaceful at least. Come on, Garfy. Come inside.’

At some point in the late Sixties, when their parents finally installed central heating in place of the solid-fuel Rayburn, they had removed most of the ground floor’s internal walls or reduced them to piers or pillars so as to make a big, welcoming kitchen/dining/living area with a pair of sofas at one end and the kitchen sink below the rear window at the other. The décor had not been touched since so the sofas were still covered in chocolate-brown corduroy and the high ceiling was painted a burnt orange to match the swirly tiles around the cooking area. Bizarrely
for such an artistically literate couple, they had acquired a matching toaster/kettle/breadbin set decorated with beige wheatsheaves which, by some miracle of careful use, was still in place.

Antony was at the kitchen table, hunched over the telephone and a list he was drawing up with the aid of a psychedelic address book even older than the kettle. The only light was coming from the smoked glass push-up-pull-down fitting over his head. As usual it was set too high for comfort and, as usual, Hedley played instinctive art director and tweaked it several inches nearer the tabletop to shed a kinder glow. Hedley had taken to admiring this light fitting as a design classic.

‘Hello,’ Garfield said. His father stirred.

‘Well look who it isn’t,’ he said with a sad smile. ‘Sorry about the phone muddle. It’s … It’s all a bit much.’

‘I said I’d do that,’ Hedley told him, glancing at the list.

‘You stay put,’ Garfield said, gently pressing his father back into his chair.

‘Tea or something stronger?’ Hedley asked. ‘And there’s food. God knows there’s food. Just look at all this stuff. People are so kind.’

‘Tea would be lovely, Hed, but I’ll just go up and see her. Then I suppose we can call the …’

‘Yes,’ Hedley said and Garfield realized they had quite suddenly reached the age of talking code over their father’s head as their parents used to do over theirs. ‘If I tell them half an hour?’

‘That’ll be plenty. Back in a sec.’

* * *

Without thinking he climbed the stairs in darkness, secure as a blind man in his boyhood home. Nothing would have moved. Like many Quakers, his father favoured simplicity so the house had never been cluttered with furniture. Even regarding what was hung on the walls or for how long – his mother’s restless department – stasis had prevailed for a while. Garfield knew the feel of the banisters and every creak and sag of the uncarpeted stairs intimately. He knew he was passing under Rachel’s Porthleven Series Seven and that the fiery bands of her Noon, Porthmeor loomed before him on the landing. He knew their childhood rooms – his, Morwenna’s, Hedley and Petroc’s – remained virtually unaltered. Hedley’s old room still contained the infantilizing bunks he and Petroc had clung to through their teens and which their parents had clung to in their turn so that they had become at once a memorial and a reproach for the absence of grand-children. Even the single beds were designed for children. Garfield knew that if he spent the night he would wake with cold, aching feet from sleeping with them dangling off the edge or neckache from sleeping with his head and shoulders hard against the headboard. At least abandoned childhood books and toys were not hoarded. Even when they were still children they were expected to conduct annual purges to help supply Quaker jumble sales.

The door to his parents’ room was shut. Garfield reached for the light switch as he let himself in and the sudden glare created a momentary illusion of movement. Rachel lay on the bed, or rather his father and Hedley had laid her there. They had placed her on her side of the mattress, as though there were some chance of Antony
wanting to climb in beside her still. Her hands were at her sides, her eyes were shut. She might have been asleep were it not for the slackness of her mouth and the atypical softness this lent her expression.

He reached for one of her hands but its coldness repelled him. There were bright streaks of paint on her fingers and nails and a dot of it in her ash-grey hair. That was right; she should go to her grave with paint on her since it had been her life and even lifesaver. But something was wrong. She looked wrong. He crouched on the floor beside her, staring. They hadn’t suddenly put makeup on her or powdered her protuberant, shiny nose, so what was making her look so unlike herself; so kind even, and accommodating?