Notes from an Exhibition (17 page)

Antony was pleased about this but not, Hedley could see, as pleased as Garfield could wish. Garfield always wanted more than either parent could give and had not spent enough time with Antony lately to have learned how subdued all his reactions had become since Rachel’s death. Hedley knew he ought to resent the speed with which Garfield had backed away and left all the sorting out of Rachel’s things to him but actually he had been glad of it. Garfield had a sentimental way of relating everything back to his own emotional history that would
have made sorting out even a box of her old shoes an interminable process.

This represented a complete volte-face on Lizzy’s part – she who had always been so set on saving Garfield from Law and London, and who had seemed to seize on the maintenance of her father’s ailing business as a kind of sacred trust. He glanced across at her and received a sharp look back that told him to wait until later.

He liked Lizzy, against all the odds. He had enjoyed a swift understanding with her from the day Garfield first brought her to visit them in Penzance and did not need to look at her to know, when the others talked about going for a walk up to Pendennis Castle after lunch to enjoy the perfect weather, that she wanted him to stay back with her.

She was an archetypal good girl, the sort who kept a towelling band in the bathroom so she could keep her hair up while giving her forehead and neck a thorough scrub. She reminded him of Laura and Midge, the clean-living picture restoration students whose flat he used to share. Nice girls like that, girls who assumed the best of people and thus made one strive not to disappoint them, had become rare in his life.

The house had a pretty first-floor sitting room. As soon as Garfield and Antony were walking down the garden path for their digestive stroll, Lizzy took him up there with coffee and the chocolates Hedley had brought knowing she would have no chocolate in the house because she found it irresistible.

‘I think it’s wonderful what you’ve been doing for your dad,’ she said at once. ‘Garfield really appreciates it, I
know. You’re much stronger than he is. Emotionally, I mean. How is he, do you think?’

‘Better. Definitely. He’s started researching the family tree a bit, which is fantastic because it’s given him a goal.’

‘Doesn’t he know it all already?’

‘His side, yes, but hers is a mystery. I had all the obituarists after me and I think that’s what got him out of his armchair finally. He’s logging into all these New England and New York websites now in search of her. But with Kelly not exactly being unusual among Irish immigrants, he’ll have his work cut out.’ He took a chocolate then remembered to offer her one, which she waved aside.

‘So. When do you head back?’ she asked.

‘Oh … you know. Soon, I suppose. Though it’s sort of fun just bumbling along with him. I used to look around at all these sad men who end up living with their mothers and think how did
that
happen and suddenly I can see.’

They laughed.

‘Oliver must miss you, though,’ she said.

‘Hmm.’

He planned on easing into the subject but Lizzy’s face was so pure and sympathetic he couldn’t resist shocking her a little.

‘Actually I think he’s having an affair and he’s glad to have me out of the way.’

‘No. Hedley, are you serious?’

‘Oh it’s probably nothing. I want to hear about you two. What’s with Garfy going back into law?’ He patted the little sofa beside him. All the furniture there was slightly doll-sized because it was one of those houses where the rooms looked perfectly big enough until you furnished
them or opened a door. Hedley thought guiltily of the twelve-foot, bed-depth monster he had recently ordered for their sitting room in town then found himself picturing Ankie Witt sprawled on it. Lizzy had joined him and he was all set to start telling her then saw a difference in her expression and a sly hint of a smile.

‘What?’ he asked.

‘You won’t believe this,’ she said. ‘But at long bloody last you’re going to be an uncle.’

‘No! Oh Lizzy, that’s fantastic news!’ He hugged her. ‘When did you find out?’

‘A few days ago, actually longer than that. But we were only certain yesterday. Garfield rang to ask you both over as soon as we heard.’ She laughed. Her happiness was uncontainable and transformed her. He marvelled at her control at keeping it tamped down all morning and all through lunch.

‘Do you think he’s telling Antony now?’

‘Of course. You know Garfield.
Look what I did
,
Daddy
.’ Her quick assessment of Garfield’s nature was no less devastating for being delivered in a loving tone. ‘We had half a mind to keep quiet a while longer. I didn’t want it upsetting Antony, coming so soon after Rachel.’

‘He’ll be over the moon. Of course he will.’

‘Oh good.’

She laughed again and gave him a glimpse of how full and satisfied motherhood would make her. He ate another chocolate but still she waved them away, already controlling what the child would eat, poor thing.

‘But what about you?’ she asked. ‘I want to hear all about everything. You weren’t serious about Oliver?’

‘No no. And there’s nothing to tell,’ he said. ‘Everything’s lovely, the extension’s going to be lovely, Oliver’s lovely, I’m lovely.’

She accepted it and poured him another cup of coffee.

When Garfield and Antony came back Antony was almost as happy as the mother-to-be and Garfield was impossibly pious in his effort not to appear smug. And Hedley smiled on them all and made his face a mirror to give them each the version of himself that would least unsettle them. It was a trick he had learnt in boyhood; in a family of committed truth-tellers, someone had to tell a few kind lies to keep the whole thing together.

That night he settled Antony by the computer with a great box of Rachel’s papers he thought might hold some clues for his family research then took himself quietly off to her loft.

No one had been up there since the glazier’s visit but it needed doing. In many ways it remained the best room in the house, certainly for someone living alone, and would be wasted as a morbid shrine. Inspired by some fabric he had found, which he liked, although it was quite unsuitable for him and Oliver, he had a vision of the loft tidied up, repainted and carpeted and converted into a delightfully sunny room where Antony could sit and read and doze. It was a room in need of reclamation.

They would have to do something about the ladder-like steps, naturally, and the silly trapdoor, which were quite unsuitable for an elderly man who would one day be unsteady on his legs. It needed proper stairs, with a banister. It needed a radiator for the cooler months. The incredible accretions of paint, splashed, trodden or
smeared on the floor and the one unwindowed wall were too thick merely to paint over and would have to be burnt and scraped and sanded away. The floorboards, he noticed for the first time, were handsomely broad. They were probably old ones reclaimed from some wrecked ship’s timbers when this eccentric lookout was first erected. They could be sanded back to cleanliness and waxed, then he could find a few Turkish or Iranian rugs; modern ones would fade to tastefulness in the sunlight.

Hedley fetched a large cardboard box from the stash he had gathered in supermarkets for the purpose, some bin liners and a broom. The least spent of her paints and better brushes he put in the box to take to London and add to his own stocks. The rest, the wrecked brushes, the mangled tubes of colour, the spoons and palette knives she had used so brutally they had bent beyond usefulness, he swept into bin liners. He dismantled the easel, which she had in any case broken, perhaps on her last terrible night, and carried it downstairs along with the similarly shattered chair. He emptied the kettle out of the window and tossed it in with the rubbish along with the biscuit tin and paint-streaked teabags and filthy sugar lumps. Sentiment stayed his hand over throwing out the tray as well because it was one Petroc had made for her in carpentry class. Liberal use of paint stripper and beeswax might be enough to salvage it but quite possibly Antony would want it with the paint splashes left on, a memorial to mother as well as son.

At last the space was clear and fairly clean and he could begin work on the hive of cupboard spaces let into the back wall between the chimney stacks.

As he had been tidying a sort of mental dialogue took place between him and Rachel. The mess was so her, the impulse to tidy it away so him. He was a very tidy painter. It was a superficial symptom of what would always keep his work at the purely decorative end of the artistic spectrum. But as soon as he started emptying the cupboards, her undeniable voice took over and his kindly fussing one was silenced.

He emptied the first two smaller cupboards then suddenly, painfully wished Oliver or, better yet, Morwenna were there to help him. There was so much and most of it was of such high quality. At first he found only notebooks and sketchpads. She was an inveterate draughtsman and maintained a lifelong habit of throwing off drawings from the life as a preparatory exercise before beginning her work with paint. Much as a musician might warm up with arpeggios or exercises to feel their way into a given tonality, she drew. She drew used teabags, ruined brushes, paint tubes squeezed and doubled back on themselves. There was a sketchbook meticulously recording and transforming much of what he had just carried out to the dustbins. She drew, too, when she was waiting or ill. Some psychiatrist or occupational therapist long ago must have taught her to use her skill with a 2B pencil and scrap of paper to suspend her mind when it threatened to become too busy or to divert it from irritation whenever circumstances – a traffic jam or delayed appointment – threatened to fill her with pointless anger. She threw many of her sketchbooks away – once filled they were of no more value to her than empty paint tubes – but in the dusty heap of
them he had salvaged, he found quick drawings of them as babies or children, of Jack Trescothick’s waiting room and countless ones of views through the car windows. She had always kept a sketchbook in the car. There would still be one in the glove compartment right then if he went out to look. There were drawings without number of her right hand (she was left-handed) and several, only slightly cruder, of her left.

Done fleetingly, with no view to preservation or selling, these images tumbled across one another, overlapped or undercut. A good one would be ruined by a failure that slewed across it or by her spontaneous mischief in adding some element of caricature or cartoon. But their cumulative effect was to summon up not only her prodigious, careless talent but the maddening truth that art was the one thing that stilled and focused her impossibly restless personality; art won through where her family failed.

There were no drawings from her depressions, only fleeting records of the periods of descent or recovery. She must have destroyed most of her hospital work before leaving hospital each time. She joked once that she never picked up a pencil when she was depressed because some thin, surviving bit of her healthy brain retained what she had been taught about depression and sharp objects not mixing.

And then he found finished pictures. Several perfectly sellable ones from her extended, figurative, post-Petroc phase which, for some reason, she had held back from framing. The pictures Mendel’s had never wanted. Here were the familiar, meticulous studies of shells and fruit and Cornish hedges and a sequence of ominous black
birds – rooks? ravens? – he had never seen. Even discarding a third of these there was enough for a good-sized posthumous show in the Newlyn gallery that had remained loyal to her later phase. But then he opened other, bigger cupboards, which he noticed for the first time resembled funerary vaults, and found fascinating near-duplicates of familiar works that had long since found homes in various collections, works that, hung alongside their better known ‘finished’ counterparts, would reveal how meticulously plotted were her apparently spontaneous creative processes.

The night she died Garfield had mentioned spotting an old abstract work of hers from the Sixties and Hedley was impatient to see it for himself. Garfield had mentioned a big disc in shades of blue and grey. It was half off or half on its stretcher and had been shoved so violently into the cupboard the stretcher had actually broken in one corner. Perhaps she had started to stretch it afresh, thinking to finish it, or, in a fit of economy, to scrape it down and paint over it.

He spread it out, astonished at its freshness, and saw at once this wasn’t an old work at all. It was a new stretcher, of a construction she had only been using for ten years or so. The colours were those on the palette he had just thrown out. He saw them afresh, slightly smeared where, as usual, she had laid cling film across the palette to stop them drying out overnight.

It was big compared to the work she had been doing since Petroc, the sort of thing she used to do when she still favoured the studio at the back and wasn’t constrained by what could be fitted through trapdoor or window or
what was small enough to be economically priced for tourists.

He wished Oliver were there to marvel with him, to help and advise. It was staggering. Entirely undomestic. Only a metre square perhaps but still a big, grand statement for a museum or a rich man’s house. Excited, he went back to the cupboards and found eight more, this time with undamaged stretchers. These were finished and roughly dated on the back as well as signed on the front. She had been working like someone possessed for she had completed these in just a month before she died.

He spread them out about him like so many exotic rugs. They were a sequence of sorts, in that they were all variations on the idea of a disc. There was a fiery one, a sun in effect to the first picture’s moon, and one the precise shade of her newest medication. The other six were less perfectly round, more organic. He stared at them for ten minutes or more before he recognized her precious pebbles she seemed to have had about the loft for ever and which he had just tidied away to the bathroom.

She had painted them in such close detail and so much larger than lifesize that they had become abstracted. Or perhaps she had merely revealed the abstract art that nature had worked on them? Stone which a glance showed as merely brownish, seen closer to revealed swirls of pink, blue and deepest purple. And yet they weren’t just the pebbles. She had added something or revealed something.