Notes from an Exhibition (14 page)

Hedley had not meant to stay on so long after the funeral. With disastrous timing, long-booked builders had arrived in his and Oliver’s house in London to rip out, extend
and re-fit the kitchen and Oliver was too busy at Mendel’s to oversee the work with the necessary attention to detail. Oliver could date a picture frame from only its back view and tell a real Kokoschka from a fake virtually by smell but he was quite incapable of stopping an electrician placing a socket several inches out of place and affected a kind of snow blindness when faced with fabric swatches. By rights Hedley should have driven back to London two or three days after Rachel and her shockingly undecorated cardboard coffin were laid in earth. Nearly a fortnight had passed, however, and he was still in Penzance.

No one but he seemed to realize how much there was to be done. Sorting Rachel’s clothes had taken days, for a start. She had always been a spendthrift clothes shopper and seemed never to throw anything away. As child after child had left home, she had simply extended her storage territory into the wardrobes and drawers they left empty. She never emptied her pockets when she put things away, either, so he kept finding things she would have long since forgotten losing: bracelets, cheques from galleries, house keys. Many of these finds would involve leaving the room to go to her desk or in search of yet another sombre consultaion with Antony. Some of the clothes – old bras, pants and tights and numerous things ruined by paint – could be bundled into bin liners without hesitation. Others were good enough for charity shops but needed washing or dry cleaning first. Others – usually barely worn suits or dresses, purchases made in her high-spending bouts of mania – were grand enough to count as vintage and therefore be sold for charity through a dealer.

This was all time-consuming enough but then there
was the way so many clothes were so evocative that Hedley would find himself remembering or weeping or simply sinking into little bouts of unconstructive reverie before stuffing them, no decision made, back into a cupboard.

He was crying a lot still, which was unlike him. He had thought experience had left him thicker-skinned.

He had pictured her death, and even wanted it, often. The reality had proved far easier and less traumatic than anything he had imagined; no hospital, no messy suicide, no drawn-out guilt trips or deathbed speeches. It was the unexpectedly quiet exit of such a histrionic woman that had unmanned him, he decided. He loved her, he had always loved her, but it was a love in which he had grown used to thinking of her as the tireless adversary. For as long as he could recall, their every conversation had been a skirmish, their every affectionate moment freighted with protective irony.

She required his worship and would have hated him to see her reduced by a common or garden heart attack, would have hated him for seeing it. He had long suspected that, for all her bohemian credentials, she thought him less of a man for being gay. She was certainly made insecure by his living with a man who worked at Mendel’s, the gallery that had always represented her to the world. She had asked him to end the relationship and, when that failed, had tried to have Oliver fired. (Oliver’s mourning was purely sympathetic and professional’) That it was made plain that she was now less valuable to Mendel’s than Oliver was had not endeared him to her.

Apart from all the clothes and belongings, there was the loft window to fix. Hedley called a glazier out to replace
the broken pane up there. While waiting for him he took a bucket out to the garden below and picked over the flowerbeds, pots and gravel, retrieving all the pieces of shattered glass he could spot. He found one and then another of the six big pebbles she seemed always to have kept to hand there and, not far from them, snagged on a yucca’s needle-sharp leaves, the missing circlet thing she had sometimes worn about her wrist but more often used as a hair clasp when she tugged her hair back out of her face.

He showed the glazier up to the attic then took the hair clasp to Antony. He found him in his usual chair, which caught the sun until noon. Hedley saw at a glance that he had failed to finish even the first of the letters he had set out to write that morning. He had probably not read the paper either but had completed both the day’s sudoku and cryptic crossword instead.

‘Look what I just found,’ Hedley said, as he felt he had been saying for days, as he handed this or that memento or keepsake found in drawer or pocket.

Antony took the thing and turned it over, opening and closing its crude clasp. ‘She always said this was by GBH,’ he said. ‘Though I don’t see how it could be. She never made jewellery, did she?’

‘Not that I know of. Did they even know each other?’

‘Barely. She met her when she did some teaching …’

‘Hard to imagine that!’

‘One of her colleagues was having an affair with some artist nobody remembers now and the three of them used to slope off to rather wild parties, nude swimming and jazz and a lot of the usual boho willy-waving while the girls sat around adoringly.’

‘You never told me this. Where were you?’

‘Oh. Minding Garfield, probably.’ Antony looked back at the hair clip. ‘They got on at first but then Rachel had another bad spell, after Morwenna was born, and lost touch. But GBH was like that; she’d pick people up, having sudden enthusiasms, then drop them as soon as she felt they’d let her down. Morwenna should have it,’ he said, handing the clasp back. ‘Where was it?’

‘In the garden. She seemed to have thrown it out of the window she broke.’

‘She was in a bad way. The noise she was making! She cried out and …’

‘What? Dad?’

‘Nothing. It’s nothing, really.’

‘Dad?’

Antony looked up, his face infinitely kind. ‘She had no record of a weak heart so I keep wondering if she scared herself to death.’

‘Surely not?’ Hedley sat on a nearby chair.

‘She used to see terrible things, when it was bad.’

‘The baby.’

‘What?’

‘I remember once her going on and on about a baby,’ Hedley told him. ‘She made you stop the car and made us all get out so she could be sure it wasn’t in the car with us.’

‘Don’t remember that.’

‘So what else?’

‘She never told me. She used to say telling me would make them too real.’ Antony’s face closed down again and he looked back at the letter he had started and sighed.

‘I should get on,’ Hedley said.

‘Are you leaving us already?’

‘No, no.’ Hedley noted that unconscious first-person plural. ‘But I’ve got things to get back to. You know.’

Hedley also had to cope with the various tardy obituarists needing facts confirmed and dates checked. Nobody could quite grasp the idea that Rachel’s own family had so little knowledge of her life before she met Antony. They had a birth date and knew she was probably Toronto-born, although people often said she had a Massachusetts accent. There was no copy of the marriage certificate, nobody knew her parents’ names and she had trained them all so early never to ask about her past that it had become a sort of habit to act as though she had none.

Then there was an ever-growing stack of letters to answer, now spread across a couple of breakfast trays. At first Hedley had thought this the ideal quietly therapeutic task for Antony and for a few days after the funeral his father kept busy writing deeply considered replies. But after that he seemed to give up. Days passed, with the piles swelling as acquaintances noticed the obituaries, with only two or three responses written and it became clear Antony was being defeated by the effort. So Hedley sorted them into relatives, close friends and mere acquaintance. The mere acquaintance and relatives, at least, he felt he could write to on the family’s behalf.

Even without all that needed to be done, Hedley didn’t feel he could leave his father yet. Friends called round, especially Jack, and Antony would sit with them for as long as they cared to visit but he was not encouraging. He made no phone calls and, Hedley noticed, had taken
to hiding behind the answering machine which still had a message mentioning Rachel. He suggested Antony record a new message and Antony started but then he gave up, defeated by technology, and so they were left with an answering machine that simply beeped at callers, which was still more off-putting than suggesting they might wish to talk to the dead.

When the glazier had gone Hedley slipped up to the shops with the wicker basket Rachel used to carry. He loved all this. The gentle queuing at Tregenza’s for fruit and veg and coffee beans, then at Lavender’s for bread and cheese and ham. He loved the walking down one side of Market Jew Street for the paper and the post office then up the other for the olive stall. People said hello as he passed them. Three others stopped him for news and a chat. All the things that in adolescence made him itch for London, the slowness and charm, the lack of anonymity, the languid measuring out of the day in meals and drinks and little snacks, were dear to him now. The astonishingly parochial gossip – whose niece the nice postman had married and what the less nice postman had done to enrage the man in the lampshade shop’s unmarried sister – came to seem more vital than anything in the national newspaper. The sitting companionably across the room from Antony of an evening doing nothing more exciting than reading, having eaten early because Antony suffered acid reflux if he went to bed on a full stomach, the going to Meeting with him, the chatting with everybody at length afterwards; all these things were suddenly what he wanted, what he felt he needed most. With every undemanding day that passed since the funeral he found
it harder to contemplate abandoning them. This was disquieting because it implied that his usual life was lacking whereas he had got into the habit of thinking his life was more or less as perfect as life was going to get.

On his way home down Chapel Street he made a short detour into St Mary’s to light a candle for Rachel then paused on a bench in the graveyard to admire the view of the bay.

Scrupulously good in most ways as a boy, his only major act of rebellion had been to sign up for confirmation classes at eleven to join the C of E. Rachel took the blame. She brought him into St Mary’s the previous year to shelter from the rain once when they were shopping then sat back and watched, hugely amused, as he was seduced by all its high church gewgaws and statues that were such a contrast to the plain severity of the Friends’ Meeting Houses that were all his experience of religion so far. When he pestered everyone with questions for days afterwards Antony ended by insisting Rachel bring him to a service by way of answering them. She had started it, he said, and it was more or less the faith of her youth after all. So she brought him back for a service and he was lost. Hymns, readings, a choir singing mass, bells and incense, lace and ceremonial, the mysterious business of the Eucharistic rite. Compared to the inward contemplation and occasional, formless declaration of British Quakerism, the service presented a drama.

He signed up for classes and was confirmed six months later. Thereafter, when the rest of the family went to Meeting he usually elected to come to Eucharist on his own, in his school suit and only non-school tie. Garfield
and Morwenna teased him at first but desisted when Antony had a sharp word with them about religious tolerance.

He never entered greatly into the church’s society – he grew into an inhibited teenager – but he took money for the collection, followed the readings in his Bible and took, for a while at least, to reading his scriptures every day and exploring the novel discipline of formal prayer.

The difference in his sexuality was never discussed – they were not that sort of family – and even with Morwenna, to whom he was closest, the subject was always skirted – but the flamboyant difference in his selected religion provided its convenient metaphor.

Hedley was not a high-flyer academically but he got by. All that ever really interested him was art so he went to art school in Falmouth where he was quiet but fairly popular and continued to drift in the upper half of the underachievers. He moved to London to share a cheap flat with two quiet girls who were abandoning painting for picture restoration and, thanks to a conversation struck up with an admiring older man after a service at St James’s Piccadilly, landed himself a job in a small gallery several minutes to the cheaper side of Cork Street.

It was a quiet job. The vast majority of the gallery’s sales – it specialized in discreetly homoerotic works of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – were by catalogue. All Hedley had to do was dress nicely, sit behind a Biedermeier desk all day, sending off catalogues when requested, describing works in detail in answer to telephone enquiries and charming the occasional browser
to the point where they felt so guilty at leaving empty-handed they at least bought a handsome catalogue or subscribed to the mailing list.