Notes from an Exhibition

by Patrick Gale

  ‘Sorry,’ she told him. ‘I’ve got to get back. Sorry.’ And she hurried out of the gallery, blinding herself expertly to the start of his quiet protest.

  She took the car. He would enjoy the walk back now the rain had stopped or Jack would give him a lift. She had things to buy and quickly. She drove fast, jumping the lights by the Newlyn Gallery and swerving over the mini-roundabout by the Queen’s Hotel without giving way, so that somebody honked at her and a man with a dog had to jump back on the kerb. She sped left up Queen’s Street, so as to grab a few minutes on the yellow line in Chapel Street while she bought a pile of supplies on account in the art shop there. They knew her. She was a good payer. They liked her. Oh God, they wanted to talk! No time for any of that.

  Then home. Damn! No parking space. She drove the car sharply on to the pavement. Antony could park it for her later. No time now to go all round the houses looking and hoping. And then back to the loft with all her booty, slam down the trapdoor, shoot the bolt!

  And relax. And deep breath. And kettle back on. And another biscuit. And more cadmium yellow. (Nice fat tube.) And start to paint.

  She painted constantly, presumably for what was left of the morning and for most of the afternoon. (Her watch was still in the bathroom.) The dream that had scorched on her mind took shape on her easel and once it was safely down beyond all risk of evaporating, it took on new definition and began to evolve as she had hoped it would. She was talking the language again. Hell, she was singing it!

  Everything else, those irrelevant pretty little daubs that had tried to shame her in the gallery in Newlyn, the sounds of Antony being shouted at by a lorry driver about the badly parked car, the sounds of lunch coming and going, of Garfield and then of Lizzy (Oh Christ! Of all the women he could have married!), and then the need to shower and wash her hair and choose a dress to wear that evening: all of it she found she could push, with an instinctive technique, to the other side of a thick, plate-glass screen where it didn’t matter any more and couldn’t interfere with the crucial business at hand.

  ‘Rachel?’ Garfield’s voice from the landing. ‘Mum? Do you want a cup of tea? Or anything?’

  She ignored him and, used to it, poor sod, he went away.

  She painted on. She snatched the phone up to have the carpenter confirm that yes, he could have those stretchers with her Tuesday. Great! What a star! She painted on.

  She became aware by degrees of who was watching her. If she looked full on, of course, there was nobody there but she could feel her when her back was turned and from the corner of her vision, if she turned her head just slightly, she could see her outline, perched imperiously on the edge of the old armchair as if it were a throne, smoking – Rachel could smell her cigarettes now, could hear the faint sizzle of the tobacco burning whenever she took a drag – and staring at her from under that huge granite brow from those unblinking, judge, mental, Old-Hollywood eyes.

  So you’re back, she told her, only in her head. Christ, but she hoped it was only in her head! Do you like what you see?

  But the old girl wasn’t going to speak; nothing so cheap. She was simply going to sit there, like some terrifying retired ballerina, all black headband and rigid discipline; sit there and invigilate until the job was done and done properly.

  PORT MEADOW (1960/1961). Oil on tea tray. Only recently identified as an early Kelly thanks to a document the new owner found among their late father’s papers, this brooding study of cows on Oxford’s Port Meadow in weather so bad the landscape has all but drowned, dates from Kelly’s unhappy year in the city. Largely self-taught, she attended lectures and life classes at the Ashmolean when she could but was so poor she was often reduced, as here, to painting on any found object with a sufficiently large flat surface. Port Meadow shows unmistakable signs of having been used as a tea tray again after the painting was finished.

  (From the collection of Miss Niobe Shepherd)

  It was Antony’s favourite time for taking refuge, just before dusk on a dirty February afternoon. There were no tourists, not even parties of schoolchildren. He was free to wander from room to gloomy room, studying the cases of treasures unobserved and dreamy-minded. He should have been in the Bodleian poring over the old newspapers he had ordered up to his desk that morning but his brain was itchy. It was the first year of his study for an MPhil and he was hardly daring to admit to himself that his choice of the novels of Smollett on the thin basis of having enjoyed Humphry Clinker more than anyone else he knew was a mistake. Since committing to the topic he had dutifully read all or most of Smollett’s other works, to find to his dismay that Humphry Clinker was the only one that appealed to him and even that book was fast losing its attraction under too close an inspection. He was begin ning to feel like a fraud and wondering how long it would be before his supervisor saw through him.

  Security was lax in the museum at that time of day unless a school party was coming round. The few guards who patrolled the galleries seemed loath to return to their posts after the mid-afternoon tea break and would find excuses to loiter in the lobby, chatting to the woman who sold postcards, so he was surprised to find he was no longer alone.

  She was tall and thin, almost gaunt. Her short, dark brown hair was swept behind her ears and tucked under a beret. She wore black slacks and black slippers like ballet shoes and a huge mackintosh surely meant for a man. She reminded him of a feminine actress trying to pass herself off as a boy: Katharine Hepburn in Sylvia Scarlett. She was perhaps his age, perhaps a little older; he had little experience of women and was a poor judge of age.

  She was examining a case of porcelain, one of those whose contents had the irregular even haphazard look of a collection willed to the museum by a well-heeled supporter on condition it be left unedited.

  As he watched, she slid open the glass door of the case, seemingly with no thought for who might be watching, took out a small, blue and white bowl and its label then shut the door again. She didn’t stuff the bowl in her pocket or bag but merely walked with it to the window to look at it more closely. Perhaps she was a member of staff but her mac made that unlikely.

  He could not believe one could commit a crime with such graceful nonchalance. As he drew closer she made no attempt to hide the bowl away but merely met his gaze for an incurious moment before returning to her contemplation.

  ‘You really …’ he began then stopped to clear his throat because his voice had come out wrong. She was looking at him now, her boyishness revealed as a wafer-thin disguise. ‘You can’t simply take things out of the display cases,’ he said.

  ‘Oh but I just did,’ she told him. Her voice was harsh, at odds with her appearance, her accent American or Canadian, dry, oddly theatrical. ‘I had to see this in a better light; those cases are so gloomy. Look. What if …? How did they do that colour? Is that truly blue, do you think, or a kind of green? It’s both really. Maybe they did the colour in layers. And the background’s not really white but a kind of grey-blue.’

  He was sweating. Someone might come in at any moment. He glanced around them. There was laughter from the postcard counter downstairs and a flurry of steps and voices as people arrived for an art-history lecture.

  ‘It’s Ming,’ he said. He came here so often he almost knew some parts of the collection by heart. She glanced quickly at the label and tossed it on the floor.

  ‘Oh I don’t care about that,’ she said. ‘It’s the colour I’m interested in. But even this light’s hopeless! How can we live with all this cloud and drizzle? We should all head south, the whole lot of us. I’ll just have to look at it at home with the Anglepoise.’

  She stuffed the bowl in her pocket and strode away towards the stairs and the voices.

  He hurried after her. ‘You can’t,’ he said. ‘Please. I … Don’t you see I’d have to tell someone?’

  ‘Why?’ She stopped and looked at him inquisitively. ‘What’s it to do with you?’

  ‘Because I saw. If I didn’t say anything I’d be an accessor
y.’

  ‘The case was left unlocked. Nobody saw,’ she said. ‘It’s really not that important.’

  ‘Please,’ he said.

  ‘Oh really,’ she snorted. ‘You put it back, then. I’ve got a lecture to go to,’ and she pushed the bowl into his hands so abruptly he almost dropped it.

  He started to protest but she was stalking downstairs, her slippered feet as quiet on the marble as any cat burglar’s. Frightened to find himself standing on the landing openly clutching a stolen artefact, he hurried back to the gallery they had left and replaced the bowl in what he guessed to be its correct place. Too late he remembered to retrieve its label from the floor and was forced to pocket rather than replace it by the return of one of the absentee guards.

  Shaken to the brink of anger, he fled downstairs and, seeing her near the front of it, joined the queue that was filling in for a lecture. As an undergraduate he had swiftly become frustrated at the artificial unconnectedness of the various faculties. As a dare to himself he infiltrated a few lectures on subjects officially alien to his own yet obscurely connected to it, on law, on zoology, on ancient history, and once he discovered that the faculties were so mixed, with students from so many different colleges that he was just another stranger among strangers and was never challenged, the dare became a habit.

  This was the first of a series of lectures of Vasari’s Lives and the Renaissance but it might have been on double-column accounting for all the attention he paid the speaker. He was focused entirely on her. She sat in the very middle of the front row, taking careful notes yet seeming barely to glance at what her hand was writing. It could not have been the lecturer who held her attention so – he was at least forty and had a forbidding manner and an etiolated, bony elegance. So perhaps she lived for the Renaissance. He had squeezed into a place in the row behind her but she paid him no heed even when he pointedly coughed and he would have bravely given up on her as a skinny swot who stole things had she not turned to look at him, after they had all stood while the lecturer swept from the room, smiled and said,

  ‘Bet you forgot to put the label back too.’

  By the time he had recovered from his embarrassment she had left the room.

  Several times in the days that followed he hung about the Ashmolean doors in the hope that she was an art student, scanning the clusters of young would-be artists as they came or left, and returned to the museum so often that one of the guards mortified him by winking at him over the postcard woman’s head. He arrived at Sunday’s Meeting like a drunk at opening time, thinking to lose the thought of her in prayerful silence, but the quiet of the Meeting House was no freer of her than the quiet of the various libraries where he tried to lose himself in study.

  At last, a week to the day, half an hour before the next lecture in the Vasari series, he found her sitting on the Ashmolean’s steps sketching something and heedless of the chill that was sending other walkers scurrying for shelter. Instead of the beret she had on a crimson head-scarf. It had the effect of making her huge old mac look glamorous instead of merely bohemian.

  She smiled myopically, as though not quite sure who he was, but he sat down beside her and admitted that he had been searching for her all week in the hope of seeing her again.

  ‘You’re a virgin, aren’t you?’ she said, closing her sketchbook and shivering now that she was returning to the world.

  ‘Yes,’ he admitted.

  She paused, floored by honesty where she had looked for indignation, then laughed, her rough voice startling some pigeons into flight.

  ‘You’re not meant to admit that.’

  ‘Sorry. I can’t lie. Never could.’

  He offered her an arm but she rose unassisted.

  ‘Are you going to the lecture?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, though she pronounced it somewhere between yur and yah.

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘For it’s own sake or for me?’

  ‘For the lecture. It was interesting last week.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  They climbed the steps together as he gathered his courage to blurt, ‘But perhaps you’d let me buy you a drink afterwards or … or go to a film?’

  She stopped just short of the doors and stood aside to let other people pass. ‘Oh you’re sweet,’ she said. ‘But I can’t. I’m … spoken for.’

  ‘Oh.’ The last week seemed to stretch like so much elastic then smack him on the back of the head. ‘Of course you are. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Don’t. It’s kind of you. I don’t know your name.’

  ‘Tony.’

  ‘I can’t call you that.’

  He laughed. ‘But it’s my name.’

  ‘Not with me. It’s how my mother used to describe places that were high-class or fancy. Tone-y. Makes me think of red plush and cheap candelabra. I’ll call you Antony,’ she smiled. ‘Give you some dignity to makeup for being a virgin still.’

  ‘OK. And what’s your name?’

  She hesitated. ‘Rachel,’ she said. ‘It’s Rachel Kelly.’

  ‘What’s your real name?’ he asked.

  ‘I just told you.’ She flushed, he noticed.

  ‘You hesitated as if you were making it up.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ she said. ‘Why should I do that? Come on. We’ll lose the good seats.’

  Once again she pushed her way into a seat in the front row but there wasn’t room for him too so he slipped in where he could which, because he kept letting others go first, was some six rows behind her.

  That week’s lecture was on Donatello and, because his view of her was blocked and because the lecturer was the kind who seized attention through fear, catching one student’s eye after another’s and holding it, he thought he would listen and make an effort to learn so that they’d have something to talk about afterwards. He listened to a discussion of the relative values of bronze and marble in Florence of the 1530s and retained the outlines of the lecturer’s points about Renaissance attitudes to sculpture from antiquity but then the lights went out so they could look at slide projections and all he could think about was her face and that voice of hers that raised goosebumps like a fingernail on his skin. That the words she had spoken to him were mocking and teasingly made it clear she already had a boyfriend, mattered less than that she had appeared to take an interest and had seemed to offer him friendship at least. She had given him a new name and he suspected he liked the version of himself it offered back to him.

  When the lecture finished and the lecturer began to stride from the room, she pushed past people to be first out of her row and amazed Tony by running to catch up with the man. Her face was alight with enthusiasm.

  ‘Professor Shepherd?’ she called out. ‘I wonder if I could just …’ She drew level with him at the end of Tony’s slowly emptying row.

  The lecturer’s face was mild enough as he stopped and turned but when he saw who was calling him it froze into a look of unmistakable contempt. ‘Not now, Miss er …’ he said and passed on.

  Strangely she retained her expression of exhilaration, as though a public smack to her face could not have been more welcome than this dismissal. Other people had witnessed the little scene and they averted their eyes from her as they left, as though the mortification that should have been hers had become their own. By the time Tony had reached her, however, her eyes were misted and reddening with tears and she let him steer her by the elbow like an old friend.

  ‘Let me buy you a cup of tea,’ he urged. ‘Please.’

  ‘No.’ She shook her head, taking the handkerchief he offered. ‘It makes my heart spin. Anyway if I sat I’d be scared I’d never get up again. Could we just walk?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You could walk me home, then.’

  ‘Of course I could.’

  He put her heavy book bag in his bicycle basket, glad he was not in his car so the journey could last longer. She struck out toward
s Jericho.

  ‘My hovel’s this way,’ she said. Then she laughed weepily and added, ‘He’s in love with me. Crazily in love. He can’t show it, naturally, because of his position and family. But all that’s going to change very soon.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Oh yes. He’d got my letter, I could tell. He’ll probably call round this evening, once he can get away. The wife’s a cow. Are you shocked?’

  He thought a moment and found that he was merely elated.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Men can be so judgemental. They know so little about compromise.’

  ‘Have you known Professor Shepherd long?’

  ‘Several months now. He’s the reason I came to Oxford. We met on the boat that brought me to England.’

  ‘From Canada?’

  ‘Why’d you say that?’ Her tone was sharp suddenly.

  ‘No reason. There are a lot of Canadian students here, that’s all.’

  ‘Well I’m not a student and the boat was from New York. He’d been on a lecture tour in New England and he gave a talk during the crossing. On Rembrandt’s self-portraits.’

  ‘It’s hard to imagine him not lecturing,’ he dared. ‘Does he ever relax?’

  ‘Oh he’s a volcano in bed.’

  Tony barked his shin on a pedal and she apologized.

  ‘It’s because he’s so tense, I think,’ she said. ‘And he suffers from post-coital loathing because he hates you for seeing him with his guard down. And in nothing but socks.’ She tried to laugh at this but started to cry instead with hiccupping sobs that sounded as though they must hurt.

  Tony dropped the bike against some railings with a clatter and held her, which he would never have had the courage to do were she not crying. She was only slightly shorter than him and her grasp was strong and immediate. Beneath the bulky coat she was far bonier than he had imagined, like a starving person. She smelled of shampoo and soap and he guessed she had taken a bath and washed her hair especially for Professor Shepherd’s lecture and picked this red headscarf – at once passionate and demure – with a view to pleasing him.