Notes from an Exhibition (13 page)

‘He’s a teenager. It’ll pass.’

‘They all are. It’s not that. He’s simply become someone I wouldn’t think of getting to know if we weren’t related.

I’d still die for him but … I don’t
like
him. Did your mother like you? Of course she did. I’m unnatural.’

‘Actually I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘She was ill so often when we were small and her illness could make her pretty scary so when we weren’t looking after her we were being frightened by her. Not much room in that equation for like or love. And now that I know she was pregnant with me when she married, I think she probably resented me when I was a baby. If I hadn’t come along, she’d have been free.’

‘Not every maiden’s prayer back then.’

‘No, but she wasn’t your average … She ended up so hemmed in by marriage and kids and … She was such a wild child. I don’t know why she stayed, when I think about it.’

‘Did she have affairs?’

‘If she did, she was very discreet. Everyone knows everyone else where they lived.’

‘Was she happy?’

‘She was bipolar so happiness didn’t come into it. She was often high, often wildly elated, which could make her fun to be around but I don’t think she was ever steadily content. Especially later on, once we’d left home.’

And prompted by deft questions, he told her a little of the saga of the Middletons, about the crises Rachel suffered after all but one of her births, about the trips into hospital, the painting, about Petroc, about Morwenna. He didn’t go into much detail – he knew of old that people unfamiliar with the story tended to be shocked if told too much so he sketched things in and left a lot out. But he was still surprised to notice tears in her eyes.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘That’s so sad.’

‘I suppose when it’s all you’ve known it seems fairly normal. Well, no. Not normal but … acceptable.’

‘Children are shockingly durable. Mine have had such an easy ride so far that I worry. They need a few shocks to toughen them up and make them less vulnerable. I bet your wife thought she was rescuing you.’ She leant forward, resting her keen, clever face on her hands in a way that made him resent having to talk about Lizzy, which in turn made him spiteful and he found himself telling all about Lizzy and her campaign to get pregnant.

This seemed to embarrass her in a way that the earlier details had not and she sat back and steered the conversation into cooler waters.

Not long afterwards there was a pause during which he stared at her in a way that wasn’t conversational and she stared right back. Then she said, quite simply, ‘Shall we go up?’

They had paid for the meal with a pair of cards, earlier, so they left the table almost at once and headed upstairs. It was only when they were climbing the stairs and he asked what floor she was on that she admitted to having no room of her own yet.

‘Oh,’ was all he could think to say and continued to his room where he let her in and they fell on one another without another word.

Of course it was unlike the sex he normally had because it wasn’t with Lizzy but it was different too in that the woman insisted on total darkness and silence whereas Lizzy liked a light on, however dimly, and tended to talk a lot. She was taller, too, and thinner. The darkness was
strange. It was the utter darkness of a well-curtained hotel room and yet he rapidly found that he was effectively seeing her with his hands.

‘Christ,’ she sighed when it was over. ‘Does she like it like that?’

‘Like what?’

‘Well … You’re pretty rough.’

‘Am I? Sorry.’

‘No. It’s just that … You’ve been married a while and … There are other ways.’

And at the point where he would usually have given Lizzy one last kiss then fallen asleep, she began to kiss and touch him in a way that got them starting all over again. She kept the light off only this time she talked. In fact she proceeded to teach him several explicitly practical lessons.

When he woke thirsty a few hours later and stumbled to the bathroom for a drink, he found his cock and balls were aching from use in a way he had last experienced in the first solitary frenzies of adolescence.

When he woke again, the curtains were half-drawn and she was singing quietly to herself in the bath. He was shy of going in there to join her, although the husky sound of her voice, or the quantities of water he had drunk at the sink earlier, were making him hard again. He pretended to doze as she dried herself and dressed but she wasn’t fooled because she came and sat on the end of the bed eventually and spoke to him as though she knew he was wide awake already.

‘Will you tell her about this?’

‘God,’ he said, sitting up. ‘Morning. Probably.’

‘Why?’

‘I never lie to her.’

‘Ah yes. Congenitally incapable. But why?’

‘I owe it to her.’

‘So that she can be upset? It’s your problem surely, not hers, if you feel guilty. Why spread it around?’

‘So you won’t tell your husband?’

She chuckled. ‘Of course not. He’d be terribly upset and so should I. I think it’s a peculiarly male syndrome, this need to tell. When you still love your wives, that is. It’s totally illogical, when you stop to analyse it. Anyway.’ She held one of his feet that was sticking out from the bedding and gave it a gentle shake. ‘You’re man enough to carry the burden on your own. I’m going in search of breakfast. Thanks for a lovely, unexpected evening.’ She bent over to kiss his big toe. ‘I’ve left cash for my share of the room.’

‘But …’

‘I insist. It’s a dignity thing. Bye.’

She gave his foot another squeeze and left.

He climbed out of bed soon afterwards and was shocked to see it was already ten o’clock. He had missed the first train that connected through to Penzance and, unless he wanted a long wait in Reading, there was no point walking down to the station until past noon. He bathed, breakfasted on the room’s ration of instant coffee and shortbread fingers and checked out, causing some confusion by his insistence on paying part of the bill with the notes the woman had left behind.

He thought about dropping by the Shepherds’ house once more to say a second goodbye to the waspish Niobe
then realized there was no point. Old instinct diverted him instead into the Friends’ Meeting House. It was about two minutes before eleven so he just had time to slip into the Meeting room and take a seat in the circle before the door was closed. It was far better subscribed than Penzance Meeting. There were perhaps thirty people in the room. Including her.

He saw her almost at once, probably because she had seen him coming in and was still looking at him as he automatically ran his eyes around the room on taking his seat. She smiled at him then looked down at her hands which she held loosely clasped in her lap. He felt a jolt of panic at first, but as he breathed deeply and began to listen to the room growing quiet about them he saw there was nothing to fear. Nobody here knew him and it was quite as possible that she was a stranger here too. And even if they were known, there was nothing to connect them. They were among Friends.

He couldn’t resist looking at her again, less obviously. She was not beautiful, he saw, but she had a sort of clean clarity to her. If one were casting actors to play Quakers in a film, hers was the kind of face one would look for. She was not a voluptuous seductress nor was she a hypocrite. If asked, she would have admitted that she spent last night with a man who wasn’t her husband because it felt good and (perhaps) she liked him but insisted that this had no bearing on her love for her husband or the truthfulness with which she aspired to lead her life.

It crossed his mind that she was so matter-of-fact about their casual adultery she was capable of standing now
and sharing with the Meeting her deep sense that the pleasures of sex were God-given.

But of course she didn’t. In fact no one spoke. It was one of those rare, lovely hours he cherished and when he finally reached home that night he would tell Lizzy about it. About the serene pleasure of sitting in a roomful of thoughtful people for a whole hour without a word being said. A roomful of strangers.

When the hour finished and suddenly people were shaking hands around the circle, Garfield found his mind had become completely disengaged from the room and had been thinking intensely about Rachel and what her life must have been like before his father found her in this cold, landlocked city. He readjusted to his surroundings slowly with the almost sickened feeling of someone abruptly woken from deep sleep, and was one of the last to stand and be sociable.

Trained by Antony’s example, it was normally a rule of his to accept a cup of coffee and make the effort to talk to at least one stranger before leaving. But he was anxious about his train. He was about to slip away when the man who had been sitting beside him and who shook his hand at the end caught him gently by the elbow and said, ‘Now do you two know each other?’ and brought him face to face with the woman.

‘Oh yes,’ she said with a kind smile. ‘We’re old friends.’

‘How are you?’ Garfield asked her as she shook his hand.

‘I’m very well,’ she said. ‘Thank you. And you?’

‘Me too,’ he said and found he was grinning. ‘I have a train to catch,’ he added, as much to the man beside them as to her.

‘Of course you do,’ she said. ‘Now you’re not to worry so. Everything will be fine. You’ll see.’

‘Will it?’

‘I’m a bit of a witch,’ she said. ‘Trust me. Go well.’

He had a powerful sense of her blessing as he left the building. It was as though she had tucked something warm into his breast pocket and its benign heat suffused him as he walked and induced a mild euphoria. When his mobile vibrated and it was Lizzy to say she had just left Falmouth Meeting and was missing him he said, ‘Me too,’ and found he meant it.

They chatted on the phone about this and that as he walked past Worcester and through the abruptly less charming, traffic-clogged area around the station. When she asked him about meeting his real father and he told her she said, ‘A bit of an anticlimax, then.’

He said, ‘Yes and no. It’s changed things a bit. I think I want to go back into law. Do legal-aid work around Falmouth and Truro. Would you mind?’

She laughed. ‘Of course I wouldn’t.’

‘But your dad’s business …’

‘Was his, not yours. And it was failing anyway when you took it over from him. You must do what you’re best at.’

‘You’re sure? You’re not just saying that?’

‘Course not. It was London and all those fat-cat clients that didn’t suit you, I think. Not law.’

‘Everything’s going to be fine,’ he said.

‘What? You’re cracking up a bit.’

‘It’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘You’ll see.’

The months leading to Garfield’s birth were the happiest Rachel had ever known.

The weather was glorious – she had no idea anywhere in England could be so sunny and even hot – and she found herself seduced on several fronts. She fell in love with West Cornwall, not just Penzance and St Ives but the coastline and coves, and the strange, haunted villages inland. She fell in love with the house, which managed
to be at once older than anywhere she had ever lived and yet entirely innocent of bad atmosphere. It was as though the sunlight washed it through every day, rinsing away any particles of regret or sorrow that might have gathered in the corners. This was partly thanks to its layout, which seemed designed to attract the sun and minimize the sense so many buildings gave her of smothering you as you came in and closed the door but it was partly to do with her third seduction, by Quakerism. Antony’s faith, which he had only slowly revealed to her, passed on from Michael, his dear grandfather, and his great grandparents before that, was not a covert, Sunday thing, detached from his weekday life, but a part of the fabric of the place, like its chopping board or window seats. Antony’s and Michael’s openness, their way of giving everything and everyone their due weight, of avoiding sanctimony but abhorring glibness too, was embedded in the fabric of the house because the buying of a mug or looking glass would be approached with the same self-questioning care as the question of whether or not to support a certain cause or what to take someone in hospital. Schooled in her parents’ unthinking hypocrisy, scorched by Simeon’s cynicism, she was beguiled.

When they took her to her first Meeting for Worship and she witnessed the potent combination of quiet contemplation with the lack of Christian paraphernalia she had long dismissed as nonsense, she found herself marvelling that Quakerism had not become the dominant world faith. It seemed so accessible, sane and adaptable.

Their wedding day was unlike anything she had imagined. Yes they made their vows before witnesses, and
signed a register, but there was no white dress for her or penguin suit for him, no paternalist piffle about being given away, no sense that she was losing her identity. (Arguably she had done that already …) Instead there was a group of Freinds silently focusing on them and their hopes, perhaps, but also holding a Meeting for Worship as they would on any Sunday.

‘You don’t have to come to Meeting with us, you know,’ Antony told her. ‘Plenty of wives have husbands who don’t belong and vice versa.’

But she continued to go and wanted to, even though she suspected she would never formally become a member of Penzance Meeting. She went because she found the weekly experience recharged her and improved her mental focus.

She and Antony didn’t share a bed at once. She made her way to his room when she couldn’t sleep one night because of a thunderstorm, about two weeks into their marriage. She found him very attractive but sex was not a great success at first because he was inexperienced, which in turn inhibited her. But it felt right and, as their joint technique improved, began to feel good in a way that spilled over into their daylight hours.

As the baby swelled within her, she started painting and drawing again. On the tiny income Antony was earning as an English teacher in the boys’ grammar school they were too poor for her to indulge her hankering for large canvases but she economized with ingenuity, blowing the last of her savings on paint, paper and pencils and working on everything from old pieces of marine ply she found discarded to overpainting old pictures and even
Woolworths’ canvas-look reproductions she picked up for almost nothing in junk shops.

Antony was out at work all day and Michael spent most mornings strolling around the harbour and town, passing time with friends or researching his shipping column so she was left a good deal to her own devices, which suited her.

She was befriended by Jack Trescothick, a boyhood friend of Antony’s who was now one of the town’s doctors. His real love was painting and his abstract work, which secretly she found a bit dry and scratchy, had won him the respect of the Hepworth circle in St Ives and a place in the Penwith Society of Artists. Jack puzzled her, though. He kept a symbolic distance on his exalted friends by choosing to base himself in Newlyn rather than St Ives and he kept a distance on art by continuing to practise as a GP. She teased him that it was the Quaker in him, unable to give himself over to something self-indulgent when he could use his training to help others but she suspected he did it because he was scared of failure. By using that old English stand-by of posing as a gifted amateur, he sought to spare himself from judgement. He was distanced in other ways too. By degrees she discovered that the Fred he fleetingly referred to at times, was his lover, stoutly independent, a fisherman and even less openly homosexual than Jack was. Jack was so very discreet, in fact, that she had at first been tempted to flirt with him.

Knowing his grandfather was out most mornings and dozing off a beer lunch most afternoons, Antony must have asked his friend to keep an eye on her, to check she
wasn’t going to pieces again. She didn’t mind because she so quickly warmed to Jack, who was a little like the brother she had never had, but it was hard to say whether Jack kept more of an eye on her in his guise as doctor or as artist. As doctor he calmly monitored her pregnancy, testing her blood pressure and making sure she remembered to eat properly. He also gave her the courage to reduce then stop entirely her intake of antidepressants, for the sake of the baby.

As artist, he helped her carve out a studio from the junk-laden outbuilding at the back of the house. Set across a little yard, where she used to hang the washing, this had once been a laundry. It retained a copper, where Antony’s grandfather remembered his wife and mother cooking puddings as well as boiling linen, and a system of pulleys in the high roof to lift poles on which sheets were dried. Antony’s mother had briefly tried using it as a greenhouse during the war. When she was widowed, Michael had put in the larger window for her in the hope that an interest in raising seedlings might save her from morbid introspection. Since her death it had been the one blighted part of the property and become a dumping ground for things potentially useful but unwanted. An old pram, whose fabric had rotted in the sun, a bicycle with a bent wheel, quantities of bamboo canes from when the garden had been given over to vegetables and so on.

Encouraged by the others, Jack helped her clear it out and sweep away decades of cobwebs. They spent two days sloshing its walls with whitewash, cleaned the window with vinegar, moved back in the decrepit chaise longue they had been about to put out for the dustmen
and suddenly she had a studio almost better than his purpose-built one on the edge of Newlyn.

She began to paint every day, with no particular view in mind other than perfecting whatever idea had seized her. She walked a lot, although the great bulge of her baby made this tiring and drew disapproving glances from women who thought she should be at home with her feet up. She drew and painted small works in situ, on beaches and in fields.

She discovered she was not a terribly good housewife as a result, frequently forgetting to do anything about food in the evenings. But Antony was forbearing; happy, presumably, that she seemed healthy again. Michael was a plain but reliable cook, used to fending for himself and feeding Antony, so would often rescue her by cooking them all chops or sardines or sausages.

When the pregnancy finally defeated her and she was obliged to lie down more and more to rest her aching back and legs, the old man enjoyed fussing around her, although he could hardly hear a thing she said and would often just smile rather than ask her to repeat a remark. Antony would come home from teaching to find her listening to the radio, being fed bloater paste sandwiches by his father and amusing local gossip by Jack. They were all very merry together and she saw no reason to think life should not continue like that.

The baby started on September the fourth. She was checked on by Jack then driven by Antony the few hundred yards from their front gate to the little lying-in hospital on the seafront towards Newlyn, with Jack pedalling his bicycle alongside them and shouting encouragement.

Childbirth was at once far more painful and far simpler than she had been led to imagine. Nothing, least of all reading the copies of Truby King and Dr Spock from the lending library, had prepared her for the sensation of her body taking over so entirely from her mind, an effect heightened further by the midwife kindly giving her laughing gas when the pain and the language it was drawing from her, threatened to become too much.

But the baby, who they agreed to call after Antony’s father, was perfect, to the point where just looking at him made her cry but in a happy way and she could quite see how some women thought the pain was worth the reward and had baby after baby until they were worn out. They gave him the room across from theirs, which she had already painted blue with a frieze of little clouds, and laid him in a cot donated by a Quaker household that had no further use for it.

But then the shadows came for her.

First Michael shocked them by announcing he was moving into a nursing home. There was nothing wrong with him apart from his deafness and a touch of angina, but he was adamant, saying he had friends there and preferred to move in while he was still compos mentis. It was clear he felt the house belonged to a young family now and that he would be in the way and a burden. But the reverse was the case, not least because he didn’t mind cooking, and Rachel found she missed him painfully.

The baby was now not so sweet and cried for hours at a time and Antony seemed to think she could stop it just by being its mother, which was far from the case. So they were short with each other and had their first proper
arguments. And Jack was away, taking one of his semidetached holidays with Fred in Tangier, so she could not look to him to tease her into better cheer.

All this would pass. She knew it would. She knew babies grew up and couples rediscovered harmony. She knew she would have time to paint again in a while and that her breasts would not always hurt so. She knew the weather would not always be so blustery and dark.

And yet the darkness that stole upon her was like no darkness she had experienced before. It had no real cause and it came upon her with devastating speed, like a storm across bright waters. Quite suddenly, in the space of little more than a day, whatever little gland provided hope or a sense of perspective, ceased its merciful function and she woke from the afternoon nap that Truby King insisted mother and baby take in their separate rooms and Garfield was crying through the bedroom wall and softly, from the drawer where she kept the pills Jack had weaned her off during pregnancy, a second, malign baby was whispering to her.

She left Garfield to cry, fearing to look on him, and took the pill bottle from the drawer. It felt wrong to die in a house that was so good and where the good baby, the innocent one, was lying so she pulled a fisherman’s smock over her jersey and her thickest coat over that and gathered up the pills and a bottle of sloe gin Fred had made for them and took herself out to the studio. There she swallowed the pills, in several painful fistfuls, washing their gritty bitterness away with great, greedy glugs of the sour-sweet liqueur. Then she lay back on the broken-down chaise longue with a blanket over her and waited for death.

A delicious calm came over her and for a few minutes an extraordinary clarity of vision, so that she could see every detail of the familiar view of the house’s rear, its windows, its drainpipes, the patches of rust, the fern growing from a crack beside the drain, the washing lines. But she could simultaneously see the shapes these elements made purely as shapes, uncluttered by meaning, and the way the sunlight, falling on those shapes without understanding or preference, simply as sunlight, released colours and patterns that only she could see. Even Garfield’s jagged crying, barely audible through his open window, and then only to his mother, had a shape and a colour.

Part of her saw all this and thought,
Wait! Let me see
it long enough to get it down!
And the other, stronger part spoke with her mother’s voice, soothing but controlling too, tucking the thick, death-blanket about her, and said,

‘No, dear. Don’t try to speak. We can just sit here a while and be nice and calm.’