Notes from an Exhibition (12 page)

There was a trembling in his pocket from his mobile. He took it out, apologizing, and saw it was a text message from Lizzy saying simply,
Well? L.x.

An idea occurred to him. He should take a picture to show her and any child they might eventually have. ‘Would you mind if I took your photograph?’ he asked. ‘To show my wife?’

Simeon Shepherd was staring at the television now, confused maybe at the lack of sound. Garfield lined him and the monstrous cat up in his mobile’s viewfinder, moved the standard lamp so that it cast a better light over them, then took the picture.

The mobile’s camera made a tiny noise, the sound of an old-fashioned camera shutter and film winder, as pointlessly nostalgic as the pseudo clockwork tick added to some electric watches. It was a tiny noise, far quieter than the purring of the cat, but apparently it reached the old man and enraged him. Or perhaps he had indeed been asleep with his eyes opened and was always bad-tempered on waking. For whatever reason he was suddenly bolt upright, focused and angry. He shouted senselessly and shook his hands at Garfield. The cat yowled, jumped free and ran hissing from the room.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Garfield said, alarmed. ‘It’s just a tiny camera. I took your photograph to show my wife. Look. You want to see the picture? You don’t? Oh. Well. Shit.’

He took up the remote control and unmuted the television so the room filled again with the sound of surging film score and whichever Californian landscape was doing duty for the Wild West. Then he hurried out, shutting the door behind him.

Niobe Shepherd was deeply involved in her indexing again and evidently inured to outbreaks of noise from upstairs because he stood in the kitchen doorway without her looking up and he ended by clearing his throat and saying a vague, ‘Well, I should be erm …’

She gave one of her ambivalent half-smiles and came to see him out.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘That probably wasn’t quite the cosy reunion you’d pictured.’

He shrugged, feeling desolate now. ‘I don’t know what I’d pictured. But meeting you was … Here. Let me give you my details. Ah, but you’ve got them already. Of course
you have. Falmouth is a lot closer than America.’ He added, ‘You’re always welcome to visit us and, well, let me know how he gets on. And perhaps you would post me the other names? Of the Americans?’

She was giving him no help. He was the third she had watched writhing like this. Perhaps there would be more? She merely kept that look of possibly malicious amusement about her and opened the front door for him. It was seizing up and she discreetly braced herself with a foot against the jamb as she tugged it open.

‘Let’s keep in touch,’ he said.

‘Let’s,’ she said and something in her manner stopped him offering a hand, as Hedley would have done, or even a friendly kiss such as Lizzy would have mustered. He found himself almost ducking out of the door. ‘Bye,’ she added and shut the door behind him with a thump. Pausing, dazed, on the pavement, he heard her lock it and tug a bolt across.

The sense of desolation that had stolen up on him in the hall intensified as he realized he was now a prisoner of ill-laid plans. Lizzy had suggested he come alone. She was going to a concert in Truro with Antony and Hedley, who seemed to have taken root in his old room and had not been home to London and Oliver since the funeral. At her prompting he had taken a room in a hotel for the night. It was possible he would be asked to spend the evening with his new relations, she said, or that they would want him to fit in a second visit on the Sunday.

He glanced at his watch. There was no longer time to catch the train to Reading that would let him pick up the last bearable train home of the evening. There was always
the sleeper, of course, but that didn’t arrive in Reading until well past midnight and there could be no certainty of finding a berth free. His days of making the overnight journey slumped in a seat to save money were long over and besides, such a late journey still obliged him to find some way of filling the evening. He used to know people in Oxford. At least one friend from law school was a legal-aid barrister here somewhere. But he had made no preparatory phone calls, not knowing how things would transpire at the Shepherds’, and had not thought to bring his address book with him.

He began to walk back towards the hotel and thought that of course there was no reason not to ring Lizzy and ask her to look numbers up for him. But then there was always the risk that a reunion with friends with whom he had exchanged no more than Christmas cards since his wedding might prove just as dispiriting as his meeting his natural father.

There was nothing he wanted even slightly to see at the cinema. He scanned the posters but it was half-term and they all seemed to be films aimed at children or at adults who had yet to grow up. Like a fool he had brought nothing to read but Simeon Shepherd’s monograph. He had spotted a tempting secondhand bookshop earlier but all the shops seemed to be closing or already closed for the weekend. He would simply have to break two habits of a lifetime; eat on his own then spend an evening watching television. (They only had a radio at home.) If he caught a train immediately after breakfast he could be home by mid-afternoon, unless there were to be Sunday disruptions on the line.

Just then he spotted a familiar poster and realized the handsome building he was passing on St Giles was Oxford’s Friends’ Meeting House. He doubled back and checked the details, although Meeting for Worship would be at eleven the next day, just as it would be in Falmouth and Penzance. It was not the first time he had wished Meetings happened more often than on Sunday. He felt badly stirred up and quiet contemplation with a group of Friends would have afforded some calmer, clearer thinking. Perhaps his hotel room would be quiet enough for him to turn out the lights, lie on the floor with his head on a pillow and meditate.

He had chosen to stay at the Randolph purely because it was offering a special weekend rate. Loomed over by so much brocade and high Victoriana, he felt underdressed without a tie and wondered if this would give him sufficient excuse to eat in his room rather than suffer the ordeal of a table for one in a restaurant with lighting too romantic to read by.

He wanted a cup of tea and wandered in search of one only to find waitresses wheeling away trolleys of cakes and tea things.

‘Afternoon tea finished half an hour ago,’ one of them explained. ‘But you can get just a cup of tea if you ask in the bar.’

The atmosphere in the bar felt quite wrong for tea and his resolve weakened at the smell of newly chopped lemons and the sound of ice on glass. He ordered a pint of Graduate instead, because he had a raging thirst, and a whisky chaser because his coat was too thin and his aimless walk through the streets had left him chilled.

He found a dark corner table where he could nurse both drinks and think. There had been no revelation. He had felt no sudden imperative of love for his true father, felt nothing for him in fact. But there was no denying he was the old man’s son and he had come away from his wretched household with something he had not possessed before: a kind of permission. He was no longer a Birthright Quaker. He could not pretend that all his upbringing had vanished at a stroke but he now had, it seemed, a different, thornier inheritance with which to balance it.

His father was no longer a pillar of rectitude, a good man on whom, effectively, people had been congratulating him for as long as he could recall. His father now was a man who had shown no loyalty to his wife, sired at least three children with other women to whom he gave no support and had probably made little, if any, provision for the daughter who was inexplicably caring for him in old age. His house had an aridity about it, with no signs of friendship, no suggestions of faith.

He remembered he had not rung Lizzy to make a report and knew, even as it occurred to him, that he wouldn’t. He hardly ever drank. Lizzy was a teetotaller. It was one of those articles of faith, like her vegetarianism, he had absorbed and adjusted to when he met her. Were she somehow able to see him there with spirits as well as beer on the table before him, she would have assumed he was recovering from bad news. It would not have occurred to her that he might be relishing a small step towards independence from principle, even from her. He had just received a small but potent vaccination against goodness,
against his family, against something and the alcohol was a first symptomatic reaction.

Guiltily he took out his mobile and pressed 1 to call her. She was out of range or had hers turned off in anticipation of the concert so he left a quick, calm message inviting no response and saying he’d see her the following afternoon and would ring her from the train. He turned his mobile off and slipped it back in his coat pocket then took a long, good draught of excellent bitter.

When he looked up again, a woman was smiling at him from the next table.

‘Job done?’ she asked.

‘Is that how it looked?’ he said.

She shrugged. ‘Pretty much. I’m getting another. What are you having?’

‘Oh, I …’ He saw to his surprise that the pint was almost gone and surprised himself further by letting her buy him a second whisky. She bought him a double and sat across from him at the table.

‘That’s very kind of you,’ he said.

‘Not at all. You probably haven’t noticed but this bar is a shark pool of predatory males.’

‘I hadn’t. Well I’m safe.’ He flashed his wedding band.

‘Me too,’ she laughed, and flashed hers. ‘No,’ she went on. ‘Don’t introduce yourself. I could tell you were about to. If we get each other’s names we start fishing for connections and thinking of associations and, well, let’s just not.’

‘All right,’ he said. ‘So you’re here on your own?’

‘Yes. Twice a year I escape my life with the perfectly good excuse of seeing my dentist. I’ve always come to one here. She’s good and causes me no pain and, since
it’s only twice a year, I could see no pressing need to change when we moved away. And it’s far enough from home that I can come for a night and enjoy a little break.’

‘Your husband never wants to come too?’

‘I’ve never suggested it. But no. He’s too busy and my going away makes him busier still. Sometimes I coincide with a touring opera company but this time I planned badly so I’ve got a quiet night in ahead of me. You?’

‘Oh. Yes. Quiet night for me too.’

‘I meant why Oxford?’

‘Sorry. Family research. I came to meet the man I’ve just discovered is my biological father.’

‘God! Was it strange?’

‘Very.’

‘Will you see him again?’

‘Probably not. He’s pretty sick and frail anyway. I live a long way away and my life is very different.’

‘So what do you do? Remember this is your chance to lie and impress me.’

‘I can’t lie,’ he admitted. ‘I’m congenitally incapable.’

‘You never lie to your wife?’

‘No.’ He smiled into his glass. ‘I don’t think I’d do it very convincingly.’

She laughed quietly and he saw just how attractive she was. She was slight and almost oriental-looking, with very straight, dark hair that swung forward across her face whenever she looked down. She had shrugged off her suede coat to reveal a neat, subfusc outfit like a woman barrister’s on television. Her silk blouse was undone one button further than she probably realized so that one cup of her bra kept moving in and out of view. She wore a
double rope of plump pearls; her husband was busy to some purpose. Garfield was a bad judge of age but placed her on the kinder side of fifty but the other side of motherhood.

‘Do you make a practice of talking to strange men in hotel bars?’ he asked.

‘As I say,’ she said, ‘only twice a year. Are you going to eat? My anaesthetic’s finally worn off and I could eat this beer mat. Can we eat together?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good.’

‘Why not?’ There was no harm in eating and the company of a good-looking woman was preferable to room service and the cultural wasteland he gathered constituted Saturday night television.

He could not, after the event, have said how exactly she ended up in his room. He did remember her cheekily admitting she had not yet got around to checking in when she spotted him in the bar. Perhaps it was the way the waiters treated them, with that sly, suggestive deference they never showed people dining alone? Perhaps it was the grisliness of their fellow-diners that made them feel subtle and attractive by comparison?

Or perhaps it was the name thing? He had heard often enough how prostitutes held back from allowing clients to kiss them. It was always presented as something disappointing and impersonal, as in, ‘Of course, they never let you kiss them.’ As though this somehow made the sex they offered fake. It seemed to Garfield that evening that, by withholding kisses, prostitutes were cannily playing on the sexiness of noncommitment. It was precisely
because they didn’t kiss the clients that the clients could depersonalize them to the point of asking for anything. Withholding names was akin to withholding kisses; with no exchange of names, however casual, however fake, there was not even the pretence that these were the early hours of a relationship. Not even a purely friendly one.

By instinct they ordered generic hotel food, rich but safe: a crab thing, steak with béarnaise sauce and sauté potatoes, more wine instead of pudding. And they talked. With a judicious lack of geography or specifics, she told him about her life. Her husband was a consultant urologist but had based her and the family in deep countryside. They had three children, all away at boarding school. She taught the oboe to a handful of children, usually in their schools, sometimes at her house.

‘Do you love them?’ he asked. ‘Your husband and children?’

‘I’d die for them,’ she said. ‘Is that love? I wouldn’t even have to think about it. If it was a matter of taking a bullet or swallowing poison or walking into a burning room or whatever. If they could live, I’d do it. Although I’m scared of pain. I’d probably crack under torture and betray them.’

‘You’ve thought about it.’

‘Over and over,’ she said. ‘But,’ and her smile fell. ‘One of my children, one of my sons, I find I don’t love as much. In fact, as he grows up and becomes more and more his own person, I find I love him less and less.’