Notes from an Exhibition (21 page)

‘Well that’s always her speciality. She tried to bully me into being one of her assistants once. Can you imagine? Let me take that off you. It’ll never stay up like that.’ He removed the crumpled crown, folded it further and dropped it with a smile on a passing waiter’s tray.

The evening unfolded in a way it never would have done had Antony not stayed home with his marking. Dame Barbara left soon after making her circuit. The younger members of her entourage, sweeping Jack and Rachel and the colleague
en travesti
with them, abandoned the ball shortly afterwards. They went to a noisy pub then for a moonlit swim on Porthmeor Beach.

The sea was surprisingly warm. Or perhaps that was just the effect of drinking. Rachel’s expensive hair collapsed, which was a sort of relief. The little cushion thing floated away into the darkness. The sudden nakedness of them all didn’t feel sexual, possibly because they were in a group, but when she stood shivering beside Jack as they both attempted to dry themselves on the one handkerchief they had between them, she felt they had passed for ever beyond some transitional stage and that he was now as deeply in the weave of her life as Antony. Maybe even deeper.

Dressed again, she was battling with her hair when he suggested she use the Hepworth armlet to hold it back and helped her do it, pipe clamped in his chattering teeth for the suggestion of warmth.

‘Jack?’ she asked as he fiddled to fasten the thing behind her.

‘Hmm?’

‘If I did have another baby, would you be its godfather?’

‘Of course,’ he told her. ‘Honoured. But only if it’s a boy.’

Apparently by prior agreement, they all then went up the hill to Trewyn Studio to thaw out and keep Dame Barbara company. It was a simple, two-storey building with a garden and workshops beside it where Jack said she had worked for years but to which she had retreated full-time since the end of her marriage nearly fifteen years earlier.

Everyone knew everybody else, even her colleague, who turned out to be having an affair with one of the married artists, which would have scandalized their strictly Methodist employers at the school. Rachel was shivering still and Dame Barbara draped her in some kind of animal fur which reeked. The booze – neat spirits – flowed freely. Two of the artists produced bottles from their coat pockets and the multiple conversations became rowdier and more opinionated but Dame Barbara’s pronouncements cut through everyone else’s. Rachel’s own opinion was rarely consulted.

She was fascinated to see this other side to Jack, which was entirely in abeyance in his doctoring life, among these artists for whom he was a painter who pursued medicine as a sort of eccentric sideline, not the other way around. But more, she was fascinated by their host. At least thirty years older than the rest of them sprawled on her floor, she had dropped the queenly air she wore around the town councillors and was arguing and gossiping as if
among friends and matching them drink for drink with fewer ill effects. Rachel found herself drunkenly fixing on the extremities of the Hepworth accent so that she caught single phrases but no sense from what was being said.
The Enyetomy of Myenne. The Gawgeousniss of the way
we re-ect
.

And then Dame Barbara was suddenly on her feet, dismissing them with a yawn.

‘Help me clear up, could you,’ she told Rachel and Rachel found herself alone in the studio with Britain’s Great Living Female Artist as the others stumbled out into the night.

The overhead lights were back on – they had been drinking by candlelight – and their harshness was probably as cruel to her as it was to Dame Barbara. In the end there was no
help
involved; it was she who walked around the place collecting glasses and bottles on a tray and she who washed up at a rather dirty sink while Dame Barbara perched on a stool watching her, scowling and smoking. And interrogating.

‘So you paint?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ Rachel told her.

‘Do you sell?’

‘I’m starting to.’

‘Where?’

‘The Newlyn Gallery. Jack’s introduced me to –’

‘Oh it’s no good being like Jack – a gentleman amateur. Women have to work harder at this game. Are you married?’

‘Yes.’

‘Children?’

‘One.’

‘Only one. Well that helps. If you’re serious, don’t have any more. Don’t let anything get in the way, not children, not your husband. Nothing. What did you do with the bracelet I lent you?’ she asked abruptly.

‘Oh I, er …’ Rachel glanced down at her arm, forgetting Jack had put the thing in her hair.

‘Doesn’t matter. It’s probably here somewhere. It’s silver, mainly. Do you know Jensen’s work?’

‘Who?’

‘Oh never mind. Shut the door firmly when you go, would you?’

She had walked back up to bed, cigarette in hand. She was old enough to be a grandmother, maybe even was one, and yet she was living in squalor like a kind of student. Charming at first, with its curious combination of lush potted plants, bashed-up antique furniture and the maquettes for sculptures, the place became desolate when you reminded yourself she actually lived there and wasn’t eventually going home to somewhere more comfortable. Tipping the contents of an ashtray into the rubbish bin, Rachel imagined her peeing in the gaunt little bathroom then climbing into bed with only a last splash of Scotch to warm her and lying there, staring up at the high ceiling from those judgemental, Bette Davis eyes. She was probably thinking,
Christ what a pointless evening!
Or, no, probably clearing her head at last of meaningless chat and thinking about the work that would have been occupying a part of her mind all evening, tugging on the skirts of her concentration as she would have never let children do.

Rachel had drunk far less than the rest of them and had made herself a strong and nasty instant coffee in the studio. The startling strangeness of the evening’s end had sobered her up still further. As she went in search of her car she found Jack sitting on a garden wall, smoking his pipe. Far too drunk to drive. She led him back to the Morris and drove home with him snoring lightly against the passenger door.

The house was silent, of course, when she finally let herself in. She looked in on Garfield, gently tugging the bedding back over his shoulders, then slid into bed beside Antony.

‘God you’re cold,’ he mumbled as her feet woke him.

‘Sorry.’

‘And you’re sandy! Where on earth have
you
been?’

‘Swimming. With Jack and his friends. Sorry. Too tired to wash it off.’

She pressed against him then, when she rolled over, was glad to have him roll over too and press himself against her.

‘Jack introduced me to GBH,’ she said.

‘Who?’

She giggled, remembering Jack as she led him back to his front door and fished his keys out of his pocket for him. ‘It stands for
God! Barbara Hepworth!
’

His arm came around her as he settled back to sleep and she held it close, wide awake now but wrapped in warm relief.

There were intervals, usually in daylight hours or at times when she would have taken herself off to paint, when Antony could almost forget she was dead. They had lived
such independent lives within their marriage, even after his retirement, that he had been deeply conditioned to spending days on end with her only nominally present. She kept such erratic hours, often being seized by a sudden need to work or read or go for a walk late at night or in the hours after dawn, that he was even used to waking to find himself alone in bed. What kept betraying her absence was the unaccustomed tidiness everywhere. And the calm.

The tidiness was as much to do with Hedley’s contribution as with the absence of Rachel’s. Having him on this extended visit had become something like having a wife again but of the 1950s school. He made beds and aired rooms. He dusted and hoovered. He set good meals on the table at regular hours and provided charming conversation with them. His presence was a delight but Antony could tell that, in the name of being a good son, he was actually deferring for both of them a time of necessary recognition, perhaps even the time of full mourning.

When his nerve cracked at last, an hour after all the shouting and banging gave way to silence, when he broke into the loft and found her cold, it seemed that all his feelings would be released in a merciful rush. Alone with her body he cried and raged and brooded. He kissed her and shouted at her and held her, free to do as he liked because she had not died in a hospital with all the family around her. But then, once she was buried, a kind of numbness stole over him, abetted by Hedley’s housekeeping, and he found he was missing the honesty of sorrow and unsettled by the ambiguous feelings that insinuated themselves in its place.

Was the absence of her not like the calm after days of violent weather? Did life not feel easier now he no longer shared it with such a difficult woman?

Jack gave him Prozac in the first flush of crisis to help him cope. Antony had come off it now, not liking the way it kept his feelings so muffled and hoped this would bring them flooding back, but it hadn’t. In his shrewd way Jack had been more help than anyone, Jack whose life had been so shaped by the loss of a loved one. Jack had been without Fred for far more of his life than he had been with him but had never loved again – or not publicly – and, notoriously, had abandoned painting in the throes of grief and barely resumed it in the decades since. He maintained the gentlemanly pretence that medicine had been his vocation, art a mere hobby. He had work in the Tate – a small painting of his was regularly hung in their St Ives gallery and was one of their bestselling postcards there – but time had made the pretence a fact.

Jack called in every day for a few minutes, checking on his patient on his walk home from the Morrab Road practice he now shared with several much younger partners who did almost all the work. Grief was a kind of illness, he maintained, and ran a course as predictable as measles or the common cold. Its fever always abated, given time and management, leaving the luckier among them with scars where love had been. He had been just as supportive after Petroc and even that grief, shockingly, had receded in time.

When Antony hinted that Hedley’s continuing presence was threatening to turn him into an emotional invalid,
Jack gently reminded him that Hedley was mourning too and pointed out what Antony had missed. ‘That boy’s always been the family glue, stopping you going to pieces, keeping the peace. With Rachel gone he’s out of a job. He needs time to adjust. That’s assuming all’s well with him and Oliver. I can’t think why else he’d end up spending all these weeks in a single bed.’

Even as he dismissed this and said that things with Oliver were fine, Antony realized that perhaps they weren’t. Hedley had always presented his home life so smoothly that it virtually compelled an equally smooth acceptance and certainly didn’t invite discussion. Worried now, Antony waited until Hedley was out grocery shopping then rang Oliver at the gallery. Possibly he had been tactless because there being a problem between them seemed to have no more occurred to Oliver than it had to him. Backing off from meddling further and embarrassing them both, Antony turned the conversation to whatever paintings Rachel had left behind and the possibility of a show and it transpired that a (fairly junior) Tate curator had already been making discreet enquiries. On safer ground, Oliver agreed to come down to look at them at the first opportunity and take photographs. A friend of his was rather keen to see Cornwall, he added disconcertingly just before they ended.

When various obituarists had rung with queries about the details of Rachel’s life, Hedley had dealt with them. They had agreed on the formula:
Hinting at some unhappiness
in her family background, she preferred to keep all
details beyond her date of birth and Canadian origins a
mystery
. It had been Hedley’s suggestion that, now that
she was dead, there could be no harm in a little investigation.

Antony had accepted long ago that it was not something she wished to discuss.

‘If I’d told you I was adopted,’ she liked to say, ‘you’d have left it at that. Just pretend I was adopted. Pretend I was a foundling. It’s really very dull.’

Had she suffered from conventional depression, there was no doubt she would sooner or later have taken a talking cure and been encouraged by a therapist to dig over her life before coming to England. As it was, with Jack and the other doctors so certain her problem was purely chemical, her only therapy was chemical-based, which always worked in the end. Perhaps, too, because he had been denuded of family when they met, he had not been led to wonder much about hers.

When the funeral was announced and the obituaries began to appear, he began to wonder idly if some relative of hers, or someone claiming kinship, might not emerge from the shadows but they had heard from no one. It was not unlikely that her relatives were all dead. End of story. But it began to irritate him. He began to feel stupid telling people that he didn’t know. It almost suggested, it struck him, that he didn’t care.

And so, encouraged by Jack, he tried researching in the town’s libraries and when that failed he gave into pressure from Hedley and admitted a computer to the house.

Once connected to the Internet, he actually knew far more about surfing genealogy sites than Hedley did. Literacy students not referred by an employment agency
often denied they had a problem and would make their first overtures to the centre as a request to learn about the Internet. Their failure to form sentences in an e-mail or their heavy reliance on the computer’s spellchecker could gently be used to convince them that perhaps there was something beyond computing they needed to learn. In the hope of luring them into writing some extended prose that could be used for a detailed analysis of where their literary problems lay, Antony’s ploy with some of these was to suggest they therefore use the centre’s computers to research their families. He knew all the generalogy sites, as well as the ones for tracing people students had been to school with or known through work.

With no great expectations and largely to satisfy Hedley, he pursued the usual channels. He listed Rachel as his wife and the mother of the four children on a couple of family tree sites, specifying that she had come to England from New York in 1960 and been born in Canada. Nobody contacted him apart from a slew of American Kellys who hadn’t read the bit about Canada. Then, hunting through their bedroom bookcase in search of a copy of J. T. Blight’s
A Week at the Land’s End
, he was shamed by finding several out-of-date National Trust member’s handbooks to fetch a box and, Hedley-fashion, do a little weeding out.

The box was half-full when he came across a small Bible. It had slid behind the other books and, to judge from its thick coating of dust, had lain unconsulted for years. There was a Collins School Bible in the kitchen bookshelf, abandoned by one of the children there and used as the house reference copy for crosswords ever since.
This one was inferior even to that. It was a cheap, Gideon Bible stolen from some hotel drawer. He was shocked to see how Rachel had scrawled illegibly over page after page of text, in different coloured inks that soaked through and with cheap biros that often punctured the paper. It was like coming across a cruel snapshot of her at one of her lowest ebbs and his immediate impulse was to toss it into the box.

But it fell open at the front page. In a small box of clean white paper, which Rachel seemed to have protected from her own insane scrawls by outlining it when the Bible first came into her possession a childish hand had written, Ray Kelly, 268 Gerrard Street East, Cabbagetown, Toronto. Please return on pain of death!

She had never called herself Ray, even when they first met. It certainly wouldn’t have suited her and must have been one of those phases so many children went through of trying on different names as they experimented with signatures or ways of answering the phone.

He threw the book away, seeing it was both distressing and unusable but next time he was at the computer he thought to add the shortened name as a nickname on the entries for her, in case it would make her more familiar to someone who had known her in childhood. With Hedley’s help, he also had the earliest photograph he had of her scanned on to a disk at the copy shop in town. It was taken by his grandfather and showed the two of them side by side on the doorstep. She had hated it at the time, saying it made her look old because she was wrinkling her forehead but he had kept it in the back of his sock drawer, along with a few precious early postcards written
by the children, and now he felt it made them both look pathetically untested and young. He had thought her so sophisticated and urbane at the time, a woman of experience, but to look at her now she seemed little more than twenty or twenty-one. Some four years younger than she actually was.

When he brought the disk home, Hedley used the computer to enlarge and enhance the picture then, at Antony’s insistence, cropped him out of it. They then attached it to the various genealogy sites. Especially seeing it enhanced like that, Antony felt it was unmistakably how she had looked at that age but he still felt he was lowering a small and untempting piece of bait into a very deep lake.

A response came in just two days. Encouraged by Lizzy, who was full of talk of just think what fun it would be when his grandchild was old enough to e-mail him, he was getting into the habit of checking and replying to e-mails once a day. He did it after taking in the real mail and before reading the paper. He logged on, thinking to find nothing but the usual nonsense about enlarging his penis or acquiring a degree by simply writing a cheque, and there was a real message for him from [email protected].

He double-clicked to open the attached file without preparing himself and suddenly there was a picture of a black-haired toddler in a snow suit and another of Rachel, unmistakably Rachel, in school uniform at about twelve, looking furious but striking, recognizably herself as it were. He zoomed in on the pictures until their details broke up into little cubes. He stared until his eyes ached.

Hedley had gone to tidy Jack’s overgrown garden for him. Some Quaker friends were driving Antony to a Peace Lunch way over in Come-to-Good. From there he was going to be collected and taken to Falmouth by Lizzy and then Garfield was driving him home after they’d given him supper. It was going to be one of those days when the kind wishes of others made him feel like an elderly parcel and he felt a need to take some action and achieve a little for himself by way of compensation. So he marched into town, to the place where Hedley had helped him buy a computer, and bought himself a scanner. It proved light to carry and ludicrously easy to use and within an hour of getting home he was scanning and attaching pictures of his own.

He sent Winnie a favourite picture of his, one he kept on his bedroom chest of drawers, of Rachel and the older children helping Petroc blow out the candles on his fifth birthday cake and a much more recent picture of her taken for an article in
The Cornishman
for her last Newlyn exhibition showing her leaning on the promenade railings and looking a bit ferocious because the photographer had taken too long. He filled in a bit of detail for Winnie, who he guessed could not be an art lover; how Rachel had settled in Penzance with him and become a
successful painter and loving mother despite living with the burden of bipolar disorder. For good measure he scanned in a copy of the most readable, if least accurate, obituary that had appeared to date. The Quaker friends were collecting him at eleven so at ten-fifty he checked his e-mail one more time. She had responded.