Notes from an Exhibition

by Patrick Gale

  People were embarrassed now, shorn of familiar form, feeling the want of a priest. Garfield stepped forward and accepted the spade instead. He tossed in one load of earth about the tree then another then carried on, heedless of the others, until it was completely planted.

  ‘Sorry,’ he told the woman, sweating now. ‘Didn’t want that digger going again.’

  She looked frightened and took the spade back without a word. He turned away to find Lizzy had come up behind him. She took him in her arms and rocked him saying, ‘There there.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she muttered as they turned to rejoin the rest. ‘About back there.’

  ‘That’s OK,’ he said. ‘You spoke the truth.’

  ‘Yes, but you’re pissed off.’

  ‘Let’s not talk about it now, eh?’ he said. He wanted to prolong her discomfort a little but of course she had apologized so any continuing bad feeling between them was now his fault. Never carrying the blame for long was a skill of hers.

  She drove on the way back into Penzance, leaving him to ride in the back with Antony while Hedley and some carless Quakers were driven by Oliver. His father kept sighing as they drove so that Garfield was worried he was going to start crying. He wished he had some of Hedley’s gift for soothing chat. Lizzy, too, was not one to say anything when she had nothing to say. It was one of their bonds. He could out-sulk her, but only just, and often gave in first only to find that she hadn’t been sulking at all but merely silent.

  When they arrived at the house, he realized Antony’s sighs had been suppressed speech, for the moment Lizzy was out of the driving seat and had shut the door his father seized the moment to say, ‘Let’s have a quick word alone, before you two head back to Falmouth tonight.’

  ‘What, both of us?’

  ‘Just you.’

  Far more people had come back to the house than he could have predicted. Several of the women from the Meeting had taken swift command of the kitchen and tea-brewing, and extra cakes had materialized on alien china and been sliced. Far from feeling like an invasion, it was a relief. For an hour, maybe longer, the house was richly inhabited by people chatting, eating, washing up, gossiping, lapsing into tearfulness, offering comfort. All the things unsaid at the Funeral Meeting were free to bubble up now. Photographs of his mother he had never seen before were passed around. They showed her looking younger or different somehow, presenting her out of familiar context or with people he hadn’t even known she knew. It was pleasant. It postponed silence and grimness, but even so it was too much for Garfield after a while and he seized his moment to commandeer the quieter of the two lavatories and stayed there longer than he needed to, reading an old TLS, a review of a book on the history of Byzantium so remote in its urgent preoccupation from his immediate concerns it was like calamine for the itching soul.

  Jack Trescothick, the family GP as well as Antony’s oldest friend, caught him as he came out.

  ‘My old violin,’ he said. ‘Do you think you could find a buyer for it? It’s a nice instrument. None of your Korean crap. I think it’s French.’

  ‘Sure,’ Garfield said. ‘Drop it off with Dad and I’ll take a look next time I’m over. Maybe one of Lizzy’s pupils is looking for one.’

  ‘Thanks. Fingers getting too arthritic. And Garfield … What Lizzy was saying earlier about getting a child … Do you want tests?’

  ‘We’ve had tests, thanks. The works. Nothing wrong with either of us.’

  ‘Good. Just time, then.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You know, inheritance is by no means certain. You turned out fine. And Hedley.’ He failed to mention the other two.

  ‘Lizzy’s father suffered from depression,’ Garfield explained, quietly because someone was passing them with a muted hello to use the lavatory. ‘I think she worries about a sort of genetic build-up. What with Dad’s mother too. Or I worry. We both do.’

  ‘Nurture not nature, if you ask me. It’ll be fine. You’ll all be fine.’

  Bracing talk was Jack Trescothick’s speciality, as was a kind of pharmaceutical parsimony, and would always be offered first in case it could be accepted in lieu of pills. He boasted he had the fewest hypochondriacs on his books of any practice in West Penwith. ‘If they can’t get their sweeties, they go elsewhere,’ he’d say. ‘Either that or they pull themselves together.’

  It was astonishing that a man apparently so unsympathetic and averse to prescribing should have proved so loyal and effective a doctor to Rachel over the years. And in a tragedy he was never slow to hand out sleeping pills.

  The tea party, wake, whatever it was – half a joint of ham had appeared from somewhere, so perhaps it was supper now – lasted nearly three hours. Drifting from room to crowded room accepting the arsenal of affection from sorrowful looks through handshakes to hugs, all of it buttered with talk, Garfield received an impression of the three of them – he, Hedley and their father – briefly upheld and protected by a loving concern that was ever so slightly stifling. The talk was to save them talking or, worse, weeping but it had something of fear in it. They surely were not scared of his mother; however frightening she might have been on occasion, she was beyond scaring them now. So perhaps it was Morwenna’s continuing absence that frightened them? Or Petroc’s? Petroc’s absence remained so raw and ugly and beyond consolation it had marked the family and left everyone a bit scared of them, even the most tranquil and frank of the Friends.

  He overheard both Oliver and Lizzy being told in a friendly but firm manner to ‘look after’ them as though either partner might now be at risk of running away. At last, demonstrating his knack for nurture, Oliver began to prepare one of the healing, impromptu soups that were his speciality and the discreet scent of frying ginger and onions freed people to start leaving. As the last person left, Hedley thrust a glass of claret into everyone’s hands and, helping Lizzy make toast, began a post-mortem as though it had been an ordinary party; who had said what, who had failed to come, who was wearing badly, who he hadn’t known. Where Lizzy or Oliver didn’t know someone he would fill them in with an anecdotal explanation that dared them not to laugh. And soon there was laughter, and the smell of toast – so sour in his own kitchen the day she died – became cheering. How had he done it? How could one person so improve an atmosphere by force of will?

  Watching them gossip and laugh, leaning against the dresser he knew by touch as well as he knew the small of his own back, Garfield caught Antony’s eye and followed him out and up to the master bedroom.

  Everyone had been flinging their coats and scarves on the bed where Rachel’s body had lain and there was another woman’s scent on the air, something sweet and floral and English. Garfield glanced at Rachel’s bedside table drawer and thought guiltily of drugs and drains.

  Antony was rifling through his sock drawer, carelessly spilling its contents. He produced an envelope, read its address to reassure himself then turned to face him.

  ‘She wrote this for you,’ he said.

  For as long as Garfield could remember, their father had referred to their mother as She. Her personality was so large and pervasive that she was the first woman who sprang to mind at the word. None of them ever thought he meant Morwenna, not even Morwenna.

  He began to hold out the envelope but as Garfield stepped forward to take it he held it back.

  ‘She wrote it years ago,’ he said. ‘Just in case. I didn’t want her to but she teased me about Friends telling the truth and she had a point. Then, when Lizzy said what she said I remembered it and thought you should, well … Here you go.’

  He handed it over watchfully.

  Her handwriting came as a shock. She wrote and read so little she could hardly have been said to have had a life in words. The written word was as little her medium as singing and it was always startling that someone with such a keen eye and such casually worn skills as a draughtsman should have such poor penmanship. Only her signature had confidence, because she had practised it so long and hard for her
paintings it became an icon for her, a sort of pictogram for her personality. To the unfamiliar eye, the words on the envelope – Master Middleton – might have been written by a backward ten-year-old. Master. So she had written this when he was still a boy. Just in case.

  Garfield tore open the envelope, whose glue had all but given out with age, pulled out a one-page letter and turned aside to read it, oppressed by his father’s gaze.

  What he read didn’t make sense at first, partly because Oliver called up, ‘Boys! Supper’s ready!’ when he was halfway down its single, spidery paragraph. He looked at his father for confirmation.

  ‘It’s true?’

  Antony nodded. ‘But I always thought of you as mine.’

  ‘Did you know him?’

  ‘Not to speak to. He was quite a bit older. He may not be alive still. There’s no getting round what you might have inherited from Rachel but at least taking my mother out of the picture might improve the odds. Of course I can’t answer for him and his family.’ He nodded at the letter. There were footsteps on the stairs and Hedley’s nervous cough. The smell of toast was all about them suddenly, driving off the stranger’s scent.

  ‘I’ll go down,’ Antony said, meaning to herd Hedley back into the kitchen. ‘Let you digest it all.’

  ‘No. Honestly,’ Garfield began, meaning to say that it couldn’t matter less, that it made no difference but he found Antony had gone and it mattered so much he had to sit in the tight little button-backed bedroom chair no one ever used and read the letter again.

  It was dated 1962.

  ‘My Garfield,’ she had written. ‘My darling, beautifully perfect. You’re still a baby, only a few months old, so it’s hard to imagine you reading this. I wasn’t going to write anything but I’ve been thinking and thinking and, as always, I worry about it making me ill. I was ill for a bit again after you were born so coming back to myself to find you is so special. So I’m putting it on paper then at least it’s down there and all I have to do is decide whether or not to tell Antony I’ve written it and whether or not we’ll ever tell you. I hope I can tell you in person one day but this letter is a just-in-case. Your father, your biological one, isn’t Antony. Before I met Antony I was involved with someone else. He’s handsome and clever and for all I know quite rich but he was never going to marry me, whatever he said, and anyway he’s married to someone else and I didn’t want you born in a little circle of pain and guilt. Because you’re going to be special! But you have a right to know who he is. (Antony’s Quaker truthfulness is rubbing off on me!) So. For the record. His name is Simeon Shepherd (Professor).’ She gave the man’s address, in St John’s Street, Oxford, and a phone number so short it looked antique.

  Every time she had written ‘Antony’, Garfield noted, she had begun to write ‘your’ and crossed it out. ‘Antony’, not ‘your father’ or ‘your daddy’. Was this, then, why they had always insisted on being Rachel and Antony instead of Mum and Dad, for all that their children complained that it singled them out among their friends? It wasn’t, as they claimed, from a Quakerly preference of Christian names over titles or, as Antony had once suggested, to promote a democratic equality within the family. It was simply to avoid lying to a child.

  Garfield thought at first she had broken off the letter with the name and address, making it less a letter than a memorandum. But as he folded it to return it to the envelope he saw she had concluded, briefly, on the paper’s other side.

  ‘Being currently of sound (ish) mind, your loving mother, Rachel Kelly.’

  They didn’t stay late after eating Oliver’s soup. Yawning uncontrollably, Antony was plainly shattered and in need of sleep and Oliver, apologetically, was due back in London to prepare for an opening at his gallery the next day.

  Something had made Garfield unwontedly horny, relief at the day’s being done perhaps or even lingering irritation at Lizzy’s speech at the funeral. She took it as therapy perhaps, or a burying of the hatchet, so responded warmly at first. But suddenly she yelped, which made him stop.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, pulling away just enough to make him withdraw and the moment die. ‘You were hurting me. Sorry.’

  SWIMMING COSTUME (1972?).

  Cotton, nylon and wire.

  The manufacturer of this entirely plain but flattering garment with under-wiring in the bodice is unknown as the label stitching has rotted. Kelly wears it in the iconic Janet Bown portrait of her from the Sunday Times in 1973 (photograph 25) but also in the much later family photographs exhibited in the same case so it either lasted well or she found an exact replacement. This turquoise colour, unusual in Kelly’s palette, is precisely reproduced in Nanjizal 78 (Exhibit 125) and Pedne 1980 (not in exhibition).

  ‘Careful!’ Rachel called but Petroc continued ahead of her, scrambling heedlessly down the path that always gave her vertigo if she looked anywhere but at her struggling feet. In winter it became less path than cascade as springs from the fields above found their ways into its narrow channel and scoured it ever deeper. Now, in late summer, it was a cascade of a different kind, its surface an unsteady scree of dust and gravel punctuated by boulders at just the angles to break a fall in the most painful way.

  With their lower centres of gravity and skimpier acquaintance with danger and pain, the children tended to skip down it, darting from rock to rock or slithering on their bottoms, as Petroc was doing now, laughing at the way the gradient and beckoning beach tempted them to start running and never stop. Garfield had started running once and gashed his knee on a stone so that the day had been ruined by him having to be taken to West Cornwall hospital for a tetanus injection and stitches.

  There were other beaches, more accessible, especially with small children, and just as beautiful but this remained her favourite and one she was jealous of sharing.

  ‘Wait, I said!’ she called out but he laughed at her, actually turned and laughed defiance, the scamp, before hurtling on down to the coast path and on to the stream and last rocky descent. Fighting dizziness, focusing on her inadequate espadrilles, she cursed as she slipped and stubbed a big toe. She paused, made herself look up and out at the glorious view to remind herself why she was doing this then followed him more sedately, picnic bag jouncing at her hip.

  On his birthdays up till now she had simply claimed him as an excuse to snatch a day by herself somewhere he might enjoy. This was the first year he had really chosen, thought and chosen. That he had chosen to come here seemed a confirmation of the deep understanding she felt growing up between them.

  With every other child there had been a sickening chasm after their birth, a blank of depression, worst with Garfield, from which she had slowly crawled to find a staring baby, ready-made as it were, thoroughly bonded with their father and mildly suspicious of her. It was of her own doing. Her own wild indulgence. Jack had made her brutally aware of the facts by now; that the only way to avoid the depression was to avoid the withdrawal from medication she insisted on during pregnancy. But – and this she had told nobody, not even Jack, the glorious ascent before the fall and the work she could achieve in climbing made it worthwhile. Perhaps.

  Yet with Petroc something had been different. Instead of the sickening plunge there had come merely an intense interiority, a sense of her world narrowing down to a focus no larger than her baby’s dimpled hand. She had barely spoken for weeks and the younger children had been so upset they had to be sent to stay with friends, but it hadn’t been a full-blown, life-denying depression like the others.

  He had been easy as a result, she was sure, so easy she had worried he might be slightly simple. He cried as any baby would, but he did not cry for long and was swiftly comforted. He did not fret and grizzle for hours on end as the others had, Hedley being the worst, but was content as soon as held so that she found she could keep him with her in the studio and work with him lying in the crook of her arm when he became restless, or strapped on her back in a papoose improvised from an old curtain and one of Antony’s belts.


  Her ability to use tide tables was erratic at best and this beach was far too insignificant in tourism or sailing terms to be detailed on them specifically so she had to extrapolate or, frankly, guess at a low-tide time somewhere between the ones given for Marazion and Sennen Cove. Today they were in luck. The tide was out so far there were three caves laid bare for Petroc to explore and the sand was banked up in a smooth ramp from the surf.

  By the time she began to clamber down over the boulders to reach the beach, steadying herself on the old tarry rope some kind soul had lashed to a metal ring there, Petroc was already racing far ahead, delighting in the patterns his feet were making on the virgin sand. The only other sign of life was the track where a seal had lolloped its way back into the water in the last hour or two.

  Petroc was not a chatterbox like Hedley or Morwenna or strong and silent (for which read sulky) like Garfield. He talked if he felt like it but more often he was too self-contained to bother. In this he strongly resembled Antony, so that loving him was tied up in loving his father. Secretly he reminded her of the best kind of dog; amusing himself while always keeping half an eye on his owner. While he raced about at the water’s edge she kicked off her espadrilles, which had never been the same since she mistakenly stood in a puddle at the fishmonger’s in them. She crossed the beach to the first cave, where she changed swiftly into her bathing costume, and left the picnic in the shade to keep it cool. There was a stream which splashed down from the valley above even at this dry time of year. She slipped their bottle of apple juice into one of the pools it made, hoping to chill it.

  One of the reasons this beach was special was the violent changes wrought on it from day to day and season to season. Sometimes the sand was heaped to one side, sometimes to the other. Sometimes the stream created a deep, winding gorge through the sand down which dogs and children delighted in slithering. Sometimes it carved a stealthy path feet beneath the beach surface and was undetectable until the point where it spilled out into the surf. Sometimes she would find the sand clean and pure, as she had today. At other times it would be laden with fascinating junk washed from passing ships – rubber shoe soles, plastic bottles, wrecked packing cases and once, to Garfield’s and Hedley’s delight, some yachtsman’s ingenious heads cobbled together from a mahogany lavatory seat and an old dining chair.