Notes from an Exhibition (24 page)

Silence settled on the room, as familiar and comforting to her as certain hymns to other worshippers. Morwenna glanced around her before yielding to it. It was a large, first-floor room with meticulously maintained 1890s decoration. There was a small jungle of tall potted palms and dracaenas in the deep, rounded bay window that marked the building’s corner. Because of the height, the view was a soothing one of trees in the square’s central garden: chestnut, plane and lime.

She would never get used to the ceaseless novelty there. Brussels’ hybrid culture and constant stream of passers-through was reflected in its Quaker Meeting, which was polyglot, well-dressed and rootless. Ministry was often made in heavily accented English in a room where she
sometimes suspected she was the only native English speaker. There were the unchanging elements of Friends’ Meeting Houses the world over – the table, the flowers, the books, the noticeboard and the sense of a heterogeneous group united by a hunger for something more than mere life, the stuff of things, could offer. There was that slightly séancey atmosphere and the dim anticipation of weak coffee and biscuits. (Only the coffee here was real – if Fair Trade – and instead of biscuits, there were often warm, sugared waffles or sweet and bendy stroopwafels if someone had been to Holland that week.) But the handsomeness of the art nouveau building – owned by the Quaker Council for European Affairs, who paid for its upkeep by renting out rooms for meetings and parties – and the muted elegance of the Flemish regulars and the quantity of new faces every week made it strange. No doubt a Quaker growing up with weekly exposure to the arrangements at the Square Ambiorix would find the relative poverty and quiet sameness of a Cornish Meeting extreme by comparison. She had heard that Meetings in Africa or Central America were different again, some of them involving exuberant music, some of them more overtly Christian, some of them so profoundly meditative and unstructured that they lasted all day, not just for an hour between breakfast and lunch.

Roxana caught her eye and smiled. Oh God. She knew. She should smile back but feared it would come out as a sort of simper or, worse, a sneer so she dropped her eyes to her lap, opting for demure over honest because she was a coward.

Roxana had fallen in love with her months ago, that
much had been obvious, but had only made things awkward by declaring herself the previous night, which meant Morwenna would have to move on for fear of hurting her gratuitously.

People fell in love with Morwenna all the time, both men and women. It was not a thing she could have predicted and certainly not a thing she deserved. She looked pretty odd much of the time, she knew, so it wasn’t primarily a physical attraction. It was because they could not believe the simplicity of her – the lack of home, or job, or possessions, the routine lack of money – and projected mysteries and secrets on to her. And it was these that ensnared their hearts. Had she invented a persona to match other people’s, given them the usual litany of career, expectations, relationship history – crucially those expectations – the banality of it all would have put people off and simplified her life. But that would have involved lying, which was something she wouldn’t do. She had taught herself to withhold information but never to falsify it.

Garfield thought she was mad. A lot of people did. Largely this was because their idea of sanity was so enmeshed with property, economic and social stability with its mental equivalent. She was bipolar. She was intelligent and well-educated and had diagnosed herself and read widely in the subject long before any doctor pronounced the diagnosis over her. It was a kind of curse, the obvious inheritance from her mother backed up by the gloomy genetic parcel from her father, whose mother had proved herself suicidal but had possibly been mildly unhinged as well. She had tried medication and rejected it. For personal reasons which her coolest, most rational
moments showed her to be justified, she had chosen to surrender to her illness as she was surrendering now to the silence of the circle of men and women beside her. It drove her this way and that and was steadily wearing her out. She was like a plant rooted in too windy a spot. It would kill her sooner rather than later but death held no fears for her and suggested only the blank bliss of sleep. Were she not a Quaker, she would have killed herself years ago. Insofar as she deserved to die, though, living was a fit punishment for her.

She had only tried to kill herself once and her depressions had rarely been as deep since. They were terrible and seemed to go on for months but after surviving one, she knew she would survive more. She didn’t always know she would survive at the time, of course, since depression of its very nature made such knowledge hard to believe, but she had learnt to manage herself. When she was entering a high but was not yet in a dangerous, hypomanic state, she stored up messages for herself to help pull her through the dark times. She wrote stories, poetry or simply long letters to herself, e-mailing copies of them to an address maintained for her by a convent which had once taken her in, which she only accessed in times of great need.

Through this process, much of it self-exploratory, she had become a writer. Nobody knew it yet, she certainly hadn’t reached the stage of describing herself as a writer on forms, but she had sold a few of her stories to magazines and websites and one of her earlier poems, written when she was living in Potsdam with a rock musician, had achieved a kind of immortality as the lyrics to a song.
The musician had stolen the poem after parking her in a Berlin A&E department, changed its
he’s
to
she’s
and passed it off as his own so she received no royalties from it. But she heard it being played in shops or bars sometimes, especially in Brussels – where its lines about belonging to a mongrel race had struck a chord – and, like her letters to herself, it was cheering.

She was writing a series of long letters to Petroc as well, unposted naturally, which, provided she only looked at them from the corner of her eye, seemed to be coalescing into a kind of novel. But the novel’s ending was so inescapably death that she only wrote the letters when she was feeling especially brave or strong. Not that death frightened her. It was just that she felt more ready for it on some days than on others. She liked to repeat to herself a Stoical exchange from the teachings of Epictetus in which the worried pupil asks, ‘Shall I, then, exist no more?’ and his master replies, ‘Thou shalt exist, but as something else.’ For a long while she had cherished a bookmark, now lost, on which one of her nun friends had penned her a quotation from
Religio Medici:
‘We are in the power of no calamity while death is in our own.’ (They were Anglican nuns, so relatively openminded about suicide.)

She could so easily have loved Roxana in return. The temptation to shout down the voices telling her to move on was terrific. Roxana was the only woman she had been involved with in this way – allowing it to progress as far as bed rather than tearful conversations. Blonde and sturdy, what Henry James called
vaccine
in looks and manner, she was not obviously attractive. However she had that Flemish sexiness that was partly to do with her
smokily slurred accent when she spoke English, partly with her cool acceptance of absolutely everything that caused no suffering. She was politically a radical, who had only left the radicals because they refused to reject violence and she wanted to be with people who got things done. She had carved a living in Brussels as a lobbyist. She was a natural Quaker – a refugee from her parents’ post-Lutheran atheism – and had taken Morwenna under her wing a year ago when Morwenna stumbled into her first Meeting at 50 Square Ambiorix, nearly catatonic with sleep deprivation and evidently, grubbily, homeless. She had an attractive apartment – a sublet of a sublet – in an unrestored 1880s building between the Oude Graanmarkt and the canal and a fridge as bottomless as her heart was warm.

That they had stayed together longer than Morwenna had lasted with any man was less to do with unacknowledged lesbianism than with the fact that Roxana had never raped her, drugged her or stolen her clothes or poetry or abandoned her, penniless and gibbering, in a public place. Morwenna didn’t think she was a lesbian but then she didn’t think she was anything at all. Sex with anybody tended to leave her feeling panicky and stifled but at least with men one was required to give nothing back. Roxana, bless her heart, needed feedback, reassurance, more than merely a companionable heartbeat and a body’s simple warmth.

She had not made the mistake of trying to make Morwenna see a doctor – she liked her beer so knew all about self-medication and respected her choices – but, through one of her useful network of Low Country exes,
she found her a job that would suit her, stimulating and wonderfully solitary, in an archive of botanical art. It would mean regular money, security, taxes, having somehow to track down what Morwenna called her notional insurance number.

‘And hey,’ Roxana said, with her characteristic downturn of the mouth, ‘archivists are hardly normal but it would be a kinda passport to the world of normal people, yes?’

There was no pressure; she had a whole fortnight in which to decide. It was more than Morwenna deserved. Since dropping out of university her CV had consisted of nothing but waitress and chambermaid jobs and, once, folding shirts in a laundry.

She glanced up again. Again Roxana sensed she was looking at her and looked right back and blessed her with a private, no teeth, smile. Morwenna held her gaze this time, gave her a kind of smile back then wrenched her gaze away towards the open window and the view of trees. At the stop near the front door a bus’s doors closed with a hiss and a rubbery thump. She felt the too-familiar churning in her belly that had been nagging her for days like a thing waiting to be born.

She made a quick mental tour of Roxana’s flat. There was nothing crucial she could not abandon there. Having no identity card, she always carried her passport. She had the scant remains of her birthday card money in her wallet. She had on the stouter of her two pairs of shoes and her warm suede coat because the morning had been chilly. There wasn’t enough cash for a train any great distance but there was plenty to stand breakfast to any lorry driver who gave her a lift.

Twelve o’clock came and she slipped away the cruellest way, with not even a veiled explanation or goodbye, under cover of going to the lavatory while Roxana was helping brew coffee with the boys who ran a bookshop. She would write to her, she decided, once she knew she wasn’t coming back. She had tried to leave once before – using the cover of feigned shock when they had first slept together – but hunger, lack of impetus and a disarming curiosity had driven her back after a day or two.

She jumped on the first bus that came and rode it along Rue d’Archimède to the European Commission, then caught the Metro to De Brouckere, which felt horribly close to home. She then jumped on another bus, an 87, which took her way out to beyond Berchem-ste-Agathe and a particularly horrible shopping mall near the ring road. There she had to wait on the windswept fringes of the lorry park for nearly two hours before someone pulled over who didn’t want a prostitute. Sundays were quiet and she suspected there was a bylaw limiting goods vehicle access to the city.

It was a rule of hers to trust in fate when hitching, especially when all that mattered was to leave a place. Italy. Germany. Holland. She took care to have no preference in her mind when he wound down his window but swiftly racked her mental dictionary for a shrugging Flemish ‘wherever?’ in case he was one of the rare, cussed ones who wouldn’t speak French.
Ik ben gemakkelijk?
Or was that sexual?
Ik geef niet?

He was Scottish, headed to Dunkirk for the boat crossing to Ramsgate then on up to Dundee. His lorry announced a firm specializing in logistics, which left her
none the wiser as to its load. She had heard that lorry drivers engaged in smuggling, especially the smuggling of people, were always happy to have a properly passported woman passenger join them in the cab as women were thought to convey an air of the wholesome.

So England it was, then. For the first time since she had fled Hedley’s and Oliver’s house two years ago.

The driver was fifty-something, a recent ex-smoker – that she was a non-smoker too was a condition of his giving her a lift – huge and pasty-skinned with sandy hair cut convict-short. With well-trained eyes she took in the wife and child snaps tucked into a vent in the dashboard and the little fire extinguisher she could use to cosh him if they were no more than a cover. He talked incessantly, showing no curiosity, which was a blessing, largely about people in his home village. He talked well, even amusingly, and she was beginning to think that, since she had never been north of Edinburgh, now might be the time, when he abruptly started saying how his wife had allowed him no sex for nearly a year, despite his long absences, and how he was wondering if she had turned lesbian and, if she had, did Morwenna think it would be within his human rights to ask at least to be allowed to watch.

So she deflected his enquiry amiably enough until they were safely through passport control and on to the boat, then she bought him a pie and a pint and locked herself in the ladies and read a discarded magazine until drivers were summoned back to the vehicle decks.