Notes from an Exhibition (18 page)

Hedley sat back, aware of the sounds of Antony moving about downstairs again but reluctant to tear himself away. He could see how these big, triumphant canvases would look hung in a sequence in a space light and generous
enough to let their colours vibrate off the walls like a line of cathedral windows. It was too soon to go worrying Antony about them but these paintings needed to be seen and not merely sold. Oliver would know how to proceed. Hedley set about carefully sliding them back into storage. His mind was spinning ahead. Were these cupboards entirely dry? Was the household insurance enough? When could he persuade Oliver down to see them?

The thought of Oliver inevitably led back to a mental image of Ankie and all at once Hedley could see why he had been so powerless in the face of the woman. It was because she was so like Rachel. Sensing her foe’s weak points by instinct, she had touched on his boyhood conditioning never to threaten or upset Rachel’s delicate equilibrium however badly she behaved. Like Rachel, Ankie was powerful, dismissive, erratic, a threatening, clamorous, emotionally hungry presence and deep down he wanted to appease and please her. But she was not remotely as talented and therein, just possibly, lay his chance to overcome her.

Not that he had ever overcome or even withstood his mother. He had simply withdrawn from the field. Once the last painting was tidied away he should have gone downstairs and set about making something small but nutritious for Antony’s supper. He got as far as opening the trapdoor and turning out the light but then he sat back in the old, defeated armchair where his mother had spent such tormented hours, defeated himself but drawing thin comfort from the possibility that proximity to the greater predator would protect him from the lesser one.

Morwenna was alone in St Ives with Rachel because it was her tenth birthday and that was the tradition. Considering she was so abnormal in other ways, not always bothering to dress properly or wash her hands or brush her hair, eating pills more often than she sat down to normal meals, considering she was a painter, considering she painted paintings which weren’t actually
of
anything, considering she sometimes cried or laughed for no reason, considering she was mad, Rachel was surprisingly
insistent on traditions. The night before Christmas they could only use candlelight, even in the bath, because it was a tradition. On Midsummer Day they had to have all three of the day’s meals out of doors, preferably on the beach, and always the same beach, even if it was high tide, even if it was raining. Tradition again.

And when it was anyone’s birthday they had to spend the day with Rachel. Not Antony, of course, because he was married to her so that would have been silly. But the rest of them. The idea was it was your day and, within reason, she had to go and do and eat whatever you wanted. Garfield was even more of a traditionalist than she was and always wanted exactly the same thing: crab and chips then ice cream and chocolate sauce in Bailey’s then a film. Being a boy he took real pleasure in commanding Rachel, knowing she had to do stuff, had to eat pudding – which she affected to despise – and watch a film – which would have her twitching with impatience. Hedley was only eight, so was only just starting to take full advantage of his birthdays and would dream about them and plan them in such detail and change his plans so often that the big day, when it came, was bound to disappoint him. Petroc, being really small still, had birthday outings that were actually an excuse for Rachel to go off on her own somewhere and just take him along like a giggly parcel.

Morwenna adored Petroc. The look, the sound, the smell of him filled her with a kind of hunger so that she wanted to possess and control and sort of crush him with love – a feeling neither Garfield nor Hedley ever inspired in her. She was ashamed that when Rachel got into the
car with her that morning and said, ‘Your day. Just us. What’ll we do?’ she really wanted to tell her mother to take everyone else away somewhere and leave her alone with Petroc for a few hours. But she had once been as deeply in love with Rachel as she was with her little brother so it was easy enough to shrug and say, ‘It’s being just us that matters. What do
you
want to do?’

So they had driven to St Ives because there was an exhibition at the Penwith Society Rachel wanted to see. This filled Morwenna with foreboding. She liked St Ives. It had proper beaches, unlike Penzance, and people went there on holiday so, even though it was barely half an hour away, going there tended to feel a little like being on holiday too. It was the mention of art that unsettled her.

Rachel never said as much but it was obvious she thought Morwenna more talented than her brothers. When they brought paintings home from school, she’d dismiss them with a ‘very nice’ or an unconvincing burst of enthusiasm whereas whenever Morwenna did or whenever Morwenna picked up her crayons at home and drew things, Rachel took it as seriously as she might them forming letters correctly or doing maths. She would ask impossible questions like, ‘Why did you use that colour instead of this one?’ or ‘What makes you draw the tree from that angle?’ and if she came across Morwenna in the act of drawing or painting she could never refrain from correcting the way she was applying a colour or demonstrating an effect she could improve by holding her pencil at a different angle. The result was to make Morwenna self-conscious and nervous about art by introducing rights and wrongs
into something that would otherwise have been a kind of play.

Similarly Rachel would ask her opinion of grown-ups’ paintings – as if the opinion of a little girl really mattered to her – then would weigh up Morwenna’s responses in a way that made it clear that it wasn’t enough to be honest and say, ‘I like this’ or ‘I don’t like that.’ There were right and wrong responses. Morwenna loved her mother’s paintings. She liked to sit close to them and stare without blinking until the vibrant colours began to blur and shift. They made her feel things as strongly as music did but whereas you felt quite safe saying, ‘This piece makes me think of snow falling on lily pads,’ or ‘This piece is like a giant marching through the forest breaking trees,’ you couldn’t specify what Rachel’s paintings suggested and it was a grave error of taste to say they reminded you of things like clouds or boats or birds. The only thing more frightening than Rachel’s anger was her disappointment when you said something stupid like, ‘That blob’s the lady and that blob there’s her husband.’ She looked at you and simply turned aside in a way that felt like the sun going behind a cloud, only for ever.

Antony said they all had to be careful not to hurt Rachel’s feelings.

‘She feels things more than we do,’ he explained, ‘so we have to treat her gently.’

Luckily she never asked Morwenna’s opinion of her own pictures but she was sure to ask in the Penwith Society. Morwenna did not understand the details but she knew that to enter this small gallery together was to enter a minefield. There were friends of Rachel’s and Antony’s
in the Society, like Uncle Jack, who it would normally be right to like out loud but Rachel was not a member of the Society for some reason. She said she wouldn’t want to be, in a way that implied she wanted to be very much but that the Society had said no.

The drive over started well. The sun was shining and the trees on the edge of town were dazzling in their finery. They stopped in Rachel’s favourite lay-by, high up beyond Badger’s Cross, so they could get out and admire the view of St Michael’s Mount far below and so she could take Morwenna’s birthday photograph. As they drove on, plunging down into Nancledra, Rachel made her giggle by saying it was the kind of place where people married their sisters and as the car laboured and coughed up to Cripplesease and the steady descent towards the back of St Ives, Morwenna saw that for once Penzance and St Ives were sharing the same weather. Perhaps the day would go well after all.

‘Isn’t this great? Just us girls together?’ Rachel called out and Morwenna said yes it was and asked Rachel to tell her about when she was a baby, because this always put her in a good mood.

‘You were the tiniest baby,’ Rachel began. ‘You were so tiny you hardly made a bump so a lot of people just thought I’d been eating too many Jelbert’s ices. And I carried on wearing my normal clothes for ages with no beastly maternity smocks until the very last month. And I was painting as usual. I did some really good work while I was waiting for you to show up. It was a beautiful autumn day, just like today, and I was painting.’

‘Was it a circle or a square?’

This was the only permitted joke on the subject of Rachel’s art and Rachel laughed.

‘It was a square, cheeky. You know it was because I had it hanging in your bedroom for ages.’

‘The purply one with the green line.’

‘That’s the one. So I was working on that, listening to the radio, and suddenly I can feel you starting. So I call out to Antony and say put the suitcase in the car because it’s time. And he went out to get the car started and to turn the heater on, because it was quite chilly and windy even though the sun was shining, and then he realized we needed petrol so he drove to the Co-Op to buy petrol and to drop Garfield off with friends, and by the time he was back …’

‘I was born!’

‘You were born. The only one of you to be born at home. You were so tiny, you’d slipped out of me like a pretty little fish and I’d hardly had to puff and pant at all.’

‘Not like with Hedley.’

Morwenna said this for the pleasure of seeing the little, false thundery expression she knew it would bring to her mother’s face. Sure enough there it was and Morwenna giggled, forgetting she wanted to be at home with just Petroc.

‘Hedley?! Hedley was another matter entirely. Hedley took two whole
days
to arrive in the Bolitho Home and your father began to say maybe we should just leave him where he was because he sort of liked me the size of a mountain.’

Morwenna loved Rachel again. Rachel was doing what
she so rarely did, making you feel you were the thing, the person, whatever, at the front of her mind. Most of the time she was being distracted by all the clamour and demands and bother of family and even under that surface level of irritable chat you knew she wasn’t seeing the room at all but was staring away inside her head at some painting she’d left half-finished or some other painting she hadn’t even begun yet.

It would be a good birthday after all. Sliding into double figures had felt ominous, a first significant pace away from childhood and towards a time when more and more would be expected of her. But laughing with Rachel, daring to admire her now that she was staring straight ahead, she decided all would be well.

‘If we pass three women with wicker baskets before the bottom of the hill,’ she told herself rashly, ‘It’ll be fine.’

This was cheating slightly because wicker baskets were a far better bet than nuns, or policemen on bicycles and even as she formed the thought, or possibly just before, she counted off her first one; a smart young woman with a wicker basket over one arm chatting to a friend on a doorstep. The second came swiftly after; an older woman pulling a basket on wheels in which a pile of library books was plainly visible. But there was no third. As the bottom of the hill drew ever closer and The Stennack turned into Chapel Street and then Gabriel Street where they had to turn left among the shops, she paid less and less attention to what Rachel was saying in her anxiety to see one. Even a cat basket would do. Or a log basket.

Please
, she thought.
Please?

But there was nothing. Only prams and string bags and one fierce-looking woman with a bag made from Black Watch tartan. And now they had turned the corner and it was too late.

‘What’s the matter?’ Rachel asked, irritated at being ignored probably. ‘What is it?’

‘Nothing,’ Morwenna said. ‘I … I thought I saw a girl from school, that’s all.’

There was no cheating fate. By the time they were parking on the Island, which usually gave Morwenna a small thrill even though she knew it wasn’t really an island but just a promontory with a car park on it, the sky had clouded over and Rachel’s mood was darkening in sympathy.

‘So,’ her tone glittered as Morwenna brought her back the ticket for the car park. ‘We’ll just call in at the Penwith Gallery then buy the things Antony asked us to get.’

‘Whisky and double cream and lemons.’

‘Yes. Then we can get fish and chips and then … Then we’ll see. Just look at that sky!’

Morwenna glanced up. It was grey, with darker grey clouds around which a threatening hint of pink was showing.

‘What colours would you paint that with?’ Rachel asked.

Morwenna knew a child would say grey and red so she said, ‘Purple and black. Maybe some deep blue. Clouds are hard. They work best if you make the paper wet.’

‘But Rachel wasn’t listening. ‘We needn’t go in for long,’ she said. ‘It’s just so I can tell Jack we went. After all, it’s your day, not mine.’

She was getting nervous, Morwenna knew the signs. She was winding herself up like a spring with razor edges. She had always seemed more attuned to these impending states in her mother than her brothers were, the way a dog could foretell thunderstorms. The mounting tension was infectious and she hated it the way she hated Garfield stretching rubber bands too far or making balloons squeak. At least with a balloon or a straining rubber band you could reach out and make the bad bit happen sooner.

The gallery wasn’t huge, like a museum – it had just one big sunny room tucked behind a row of houses near Porthmeor Beach – but neither was it like the galleries where pictures were for sale, because they had to pay to go in. Something that made Rachel mutter under her breath.

Rather than walk slowly round the room like her mother, interrogating each picture, Morwenna made directly for the paintings by Uncle Jack. There were only three. She recognized them at once because of the way he always framed his canvases first then painted over the frame as though the picture’s exuberance wouldn’t be contained. In fact exuberance was a word she had learned when Antony and Rachel were discussing him once. There was a bluey-green he used, too, which he must have mixed himself because she never seemed to see it anywhere else. Perhaps he put something in it that wasn’t paint. Soup, maybe, or melted sweets.

She couldn’t have said why she liked his pictures. Perhaps what she liked was the fact of knowing him and liking him so that spotting his pictures in a gallery was like seeing a friend in a crowded room. She felt proud
when she saw his pictures on a gallery wall whereas when she saw Rachel’s there was always a stab of worry.
Why
wasn’t anyone looking at them? Why hadn’t they sold
yet?

They were no more of anything than Rachel’s paintings but something about them suggested a narrative, the titles perhaps. These three were called Because You Left Early, Missing George and Witching Hour. There was a happy quality to their use of colour that made them seem to sing where their more rigid neighbours merely spoke or whispered. Perhaps she was confusing the character of the painter with his work, but in this austere setting Uncle Jack’s paintings seemed to be kind.