Notes from an Exhibition (26 page)

‘No!’ she said more firmly.

‘Keeper!’ someone shouted. ‘Here! Keeper!’ It was a
boy, at that unreadably leggy age between twelve and fifteen. ‘Sorry,’ he told her, gruff with embarrassment. ‘He don’t often meet strangers. Sorry. Keeper!’

He had been walking on a path she hadn’t noticed, off the track and under the trees and now plunged off it towards her, all outsized trainer and overstretched leg. He ducked his head as he fumbled to get a collar and lead fastened on the dog, which had now decided to play and was bouncing its meaty paws in a circle with Morwenna as the tree in the middle.

‘Someone doesn’t want to come,’ she said, relaxing now.

‘Telling me,’ he muttered. ‘Bloody animal. We were meant to be going the other way, weren’t we?’ He had on a baseball cap over a thatch of red-brown hair, and baggy shorts worn low on his hips but his stab at cool was let down by his cruelly skinny arms. As he succeeded in catching the dog at last, she stole a glimpse of his face under the brim of his hat.

It surprised her so much that without thinking she said,

‘Petroc?’

He looked at her properly for a second, long enough for her to see it, then the dog took off in the direction they had come, tugging him in its wake.

‘Wait,’ she said. ‘Please. I just …’

She was unfit, quite unused to running, so couldn’t keep up. And the boy couldn’t stop, although he glanced over his shoulder at her a couple of times. Perhaps it was a routine with the dog to walk so far every morning in return for being allowed to race home afterwards? Perhaps it knew there was food waiting for it? For whatever reason
it all but towed him along the track and through a gap in the trees and then she heard a door slam.

She drew closer to where he and the dog had vanished and found a little outpost of the Bosviggan of her youth. There was an extraordinarily unadorned bungalow, whose once white rendering someone seemed to have been using for target practice, a couple of caravans propped up on breezeblocks and a cluster of cars, none of which looked roadworthy, one of which was missing its windscreen. Someone was chopping logs nearby. She could hear the rhythmic thumping of blade on log. She could hear the dog barking too, frantic with excitement, somewhere in the house and the boy yelling at it, his voice cracking.

It had been a delusion, of course, of a sort to which she had never become sufficiently inured to dismiss them as such as they occurred. She was hungry; her blood sugar was crazily low. He was just another boy and it was purely the strong memories stirred by returning to this place that had made her see something in his face that wasn’t there.

She had come much closer to the bungalow than she had intended. She turned away and was startled to find a man only feet behind her. He had several days of stubble and was dramatically bald so she didn’t recognize him until he spoke.

‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ he demanded and she said nothing, as she struggled to align the hostile man before her with the confident boy she remembered. She stared at his right hand, which held a hatchet, and recognized the little bluebird tattoo above his thumb. She remembered kissing it. He had many other tattoos now. Less kissable ones.

‘I wanted …’ she began. ‘Spencer?’

‘We don’t need you around here no more. You did enough damage, all right?’

‘Is that your boy I saw?’

‘You stay away from him and all. Go on.’ He took a step towards her. ‘Piss off.’

Frightened, she staggered around him and the oiled gleam of the blade and hurried away along the drive, not daring to look back in case he was following her and took her fear as provocation.

Soon the drive spilled out on to the road and she felt safer, away from the brooding trees. But then there was a car engine close behind her and the parping of a horn. She didn’t dare look round in case it was him and turned her face submissively towards the hedge, hoping he would drive past her. But the car paused right beside her, engine still running, and a woman’s voice called her name.

She turned. The driver was a woman, a battered thirty-something, crazily thin with long, dyed black hair and a silver ring in her nose to match Spencer’s gold one. ‘Are you OK? It’s Bettany, remember? Petroc’s friend?’

‘Oh,’ Morwenna said. ‘Yes. Yes of course you are.’ She stared at the henna tattoos on the woman’s wrists.

‘I can give you a lift into town if you like.’

‘Oh. Thanks.’

Dazed, Morwenna let herself in on the passenger side. It was one of the less hopeless cars from the bungalow. A cat had left muddy pawprints all over the windscreen but either Bettany wasn’t bothered by them or the wipers weren’t working.

‘Haven’t seen you for ages,’ she said.

‘No,’ Morwenna admitted. ‘I … I’ve been away.’

‘Sorry about back there. Spence gets a bit paranoid sometimes. He may not even have known who you were, you know?’

‘Oh I think he knew. But I’m sorry. I wasn’t snooping. I just took a walk and found myself there and then I met … Is it your son?’

‘Rocky. Yeah.’

Her skinny hands on the wheel showed every tendon. She had the kind of skin that would bruise at the slightest pressure. She had so many silver rings on her left hand it made Morwenna feel uncomfortable looking at it. The biggest ring had a skull design with two little moonstones in the eye sockets. Death grinned at her and Morwenna stared at her own hands and out of the window instead. They had passed through Sancreed and were on the main road towards Penzance.

‘So have you and Spencer been together long?’ she asked, still looking out of the window.

‘Since he got out?’ Bettany said. She phrased every sentence as a question.

Morwenna remembered how that had grated on her nerves and how furious Petroc had been when Antony suggested upspeak was a symptom of moral relativism in the young. ‘When was that?’ she ventured, looking round but studiedly casual.

‘Eight years ago?’

The maths was no great challenge, subtracting the years from what she guessed was the age of the boy with the dog. Rocky. Short for Petroc? She couldn’t ask.

‘Are you home for long, then?’ Bettany went on.

‘Maybe,’ Morwenna said, trying the idea on for size. ‘Probably not. But don’t worry. I won’t bother Spencer again.’

The girl was suddenly focused, distraught even. ‘What did you want? What did you hope to get out of seeing him?’

‘I … Nothing. Closure? Isn’t that what it’s called? I had a chance to come home so I took it and then I found I needed to see Bosviggan again.’

‘Yeah, well, it’s all change there, isn’t it?’

‘The holiday cottages. Did Spencer do those?’

‘You must be joking. He and Troy were only ever tenants and they had to move out when… Their dad bought the bungalow before he died so we’d have somewhere.’

‘Where’s Troy now?’

‘Auckland.’

‘God!’

‘Yeah.’ Making a mint with a nightclub? So there’s just Spencer and me. Look I know what you’re thinking. Why’s she been so sly and secretive? Why didn’t she tell us anything? But it wasn’t like that. I was in such a state afterwards and, well, I just needed a fresh start, you know? I was scared your mum and dad would want to take him away or sort of take us over. Shit!’

‘What?’

‘I hadn’t meant to tell you.’

‘That’s OK.’

‘He’s Spencer’s boy, OK? He thinks that. Spencer thinks that. And, well, most of the time now so do I, frankly.’

‘That’s OK.’

‘You won’t tell them?’

‘No.’

‘Why’re you smiling, Morwenna?’

‘I’m an aunt.’

‘Yeah. Well. Not really. Forget it. Best that way. Just forget I told you?’

‘You were sleeping with Spencer back when I was, then?’

‘Search me. Yeah. Sorry. It was only casual back then, though. We were just kids, weren’t we?’

‘Yes,’ Morwenna admitted. ‘I suppose we were. Anywhere on the front’s fine, thanks.’

‘OK.’

They were driving through Newlyn and Bettany pulled over as soon as she could, keen to be rid of her difficult passenger.

‘Bye,’ she called out, inexplicably cheery now. ‘Take care, Morwenna! All right?’

Morwenna stood on the pavement a moment or two, taking stock. Across the road several boys were flying back and forth on the skateboarding ramp, jeans miraculously hooked round their hipbones in the look Rocky had been aiming at. She crossed over to be nearer them without a moment’s thought and was almost hit by a lorry, which blared its horn, then by a car, which swerved to avoid her. The car driver screamed abuse at her through his open window but she walked on.

Someone somewhere was shouting her name.

She watched the boys.

It had always struck her that their shortening of their names in childhood were all puns when you listened to
them. Head. Pet. When. Only Garfy, out on a limb as ever, had two syllables and a name with no meaning.

The boys whizzed noisily back and forth, practising their turns and jumps and appearance of effortless agility. One of them was much too old to be playing with the others, but perhaps this wasn’t play to them but something more important, like sport.

‘When! When?’

She began to walk swiftly as she pondered, only dimly aware of people having to dodge out of her way. The revelation that Petroc had fathered a son, that she was an aunt, had been followed so swiftly by the harsh ban on further contact that all she was left with was death. Death had been following her all morning, she realized. Longer than that. Death was the belly-churning she had been mistaking for the return of her old friend, mania. Death was the skittering, chattering questions and if-only’s at her back. And death had whispered her away from Roxana. It had been waiting patiently beside her as she slept in the lane. It had walked beside her as she made her way to Bosviggan. It had been there in the thudding of the axe and the barking of the dog and the boy’s startled thinness and his mother’s terrible rings. And now it was impatient and chasing her, running to catch up. And she was ready at last, ready to greet it like a lover.

‘Wenn! Wait!’

There was a firm touch on her shoulder. She started with a gasp then found it was Hedley. Little Head! Even as she asked him why he was there and not in London where he belonged, tears sprang to his eyes and she knew that Death was using him to reach her.

‘Come on,’ he said, after trying to explain. ‘We can run you a nice hot bath and find you some clean clothes – something of mine might fit you. Then we can get you something to eat.’

She let him lead her back across the road and up to their parents’ terrace. She held back, frightened at the sudden sight of the house in daylight but he pulled her along with him, as a child might have done, and she realized that death was as much outside the place as in it and that she might as well surrender control.

We are in the power of no calamity
, she recalled.

‘I’m so tired,’ she told him. ‘I might not talk much.’

‘That’s OK. Antony’s over in Falmouth with the others so we can be as quiet as you like. Oh, Wenn. I’m so glad.’

He took her hand then. He wasn’t the boy she always remembered when she thought of him but a man, almost middle-aged. She wondered if she seemed equally old and unfamiliar to him.

They were halfway up the path to the front door and he hugged her suddenly, almost violently. She found she couldn’t hug him back. Her arms were like lead, like arms in a dream. So she told him, ‘You’re an uncle, you know. Pet had a baby.’

‘Ssh,’ he said. ‘Don’t. We can talk later. Once you’re rested. So much to tell you …’

So perhaps she wasn’t making much sense. That happened sometimes, when she was at a low ebb; her words came out fine in her head but outside they just made people stare or look away.

‘Today I am seven,’ Garfield wrote in his diary. ‘I am seven and my sister, Morwenna’s still only three and the baby, who doesn’t have a name yet but’s a boy, is two months old. Our mother is in hospital so this birthday won’t be quite like the others as we’re going miles in the car to visit her. We will see how things turn out!’

He hated the diary. It was a tyranny. It was a lockable
one, which he liked because it made it a secret as no one else had the key or knew where he hid it. However it was a five-year diary so it would last until he was twelve, which was ages away. Nobody had managed to give him a satisfactory explanation of what it was for. Holiday diaries were different. Everyone knew about those. You stuck in a postcard or something every day of the holiday or did a drawing in it or a painting and you wrote what you had done. Then you all took them into school on the first day of the Christmas term and there were prizes for the best ones. He complained about having to do holiday diaries but they were easy really, especially if the exercise book wasn’t too big so the postcards used up half a page. And it was only eight weeks or less. Two months. And you put public things in it because people would be reading it.

The five-year lockable diary, though, was like a small, leatherette conscience.

‘Just put your thoughts in it,’ Rachel told him. ‘The things you like and the things you don’t. Don’t just say what you had for meals as that’s boring but you can say what you did and how it made you feel.’

‘What’s it for, though?’

‘When you’re older you’ll be able to read it and see how you used to think when you were little.’

‘But I’ll remember.’

‘You won’t remember everything. You’re forgetting things already.’

He tried, because he was the eldest – especially now he was to have a little brother – and had to set an example. But he felt uncomfortable writing things down unless he knew they were true, like the dates of battles or what
Humphry Davy invented or Isambard Kingdom Brunel. But feelings weren’t like facts. And how did you know they were true? Or right?

Some things he had written down then wished he hadn’t. He wanted to tear them out but he didn’t dare. He bought some special ink eraser instead, which you dabbed on from a little brown bottle with a plastic applicator in the lid. It smelled funny but it sort of worked only once it was dry you could still see what you’d written but in very pale yellow instead of blue Quink washable.

It had only recently occurred to him that he could simply leave days blank. Since he held the only key, nobody would know. But he had learnt to take nothing purely as it was presented to him. He was told the diary was private, secret, but that could change. He might suddenly be asked to hand it over, unlocked, or he might fall ill without much warning, like Rachel did, and leave it unlocked, readable by anyone who was passing his room. Nobody could resist reading a book of private things. It was wrong but irresistible, he could see that.

When Morwenna was old enough to keep a diary, he would have to warn her to hide it somewhere without telling him. She was only three but she was already showing a worrying lack of caution. She shared and showed everything. She ate chocolate or ice-cream or biscuits in an unguarded, open way, vulnerable to any passing dog or seagull or unscrupulous child. She shared things with thoughtless generosity she only regretted once it was too late.

‘Garfy?’ Antony called up the stairs. ‘Are you ready?’

‘Coming!’ He locked the diary, which he hid under his
mattress and reached up into his bedroom fireplace to tuck the key on to a sort of sooty shelf in the chimney. Then he hurried down to the hall where Antony was buttoning Morwenna’s cardigan for her.

The hospital where Rachel went to have the baby was in Penzance, on the seafront. It wasn’t really a hospital because no one there was ill, just having babies. It was a sort of house, called the Bolitho Home. St Lawrence’s, the hospital she was in now, was miles away in Bodmin, which was nearly in Devon it was so far.

Garfield tried to sit in the front, in Rachel’s seat, but wasn’t surprised when Antony told him to get out and sit in the back because Morwenna was too little and might have opened her window or her door when they were driving fast. Not that they ever went very fast. The car was a Morris 1000 Traveller and cream-coloured, with woody bits. It was very old, nearly antique, and Garfield often heard Antony telling people it would go on for years so long as they treated it carefully and didn’t overtax the engine. It was so old it had indicators that popped out from the sides to flash, rather than just flashing like a normal car’s, which Garfield liked. But the seats got hot and sticky in summer and stuck painfully to his calves if he was in shorts, like today. Also the back seat stank because Rachel had forgotten a pack of Anchor butter once and it had melted into the upholstery leaving just the dried-up paper and a terrible smell that actually smelled like carsickness. It was especially bad on hot days and today was hot because they were having an Indian Summer. Garfield and Morwenna breathed through their mouths to avoid smelling it too much. If they opened their windows instead, Antony would complain they were creating too much drag
and making him waste fuel. Which was bad for the planet, like not turning off light switches or having too deep a bath.

As he drove, Antony told them the baby was going to be called Hedley, after his grandfather, who was Michael Hedley Middleton. Then he told them all about why Rachel was in hospital in Bodmin. He always told them the truth about everything because it was important and what Quakers did. He didn’t always tell them right away, though. Garfield had known she was in a different hospital for days, from listening to conversations, and had been waiting for his father to tell them about it.

Other people, even including other Quakers, were not as truthful as Antony, Garfield had noticed. They dropped their voices, thinking he couldn’t hear them, or spoke to him as if he was about five to say, ‘Mummy’s not gone away for long. She’ll soon be back. She just needs a rest after having the baby.’

But Antony said she was sick. Not like when you’d eaten too much lemon mousse but sick in her head so she’d been hearing and seeing things that weren’t there, like having a dream but with her eyes open. She’d also got sad. Very sad. In spite of having the new baby to think about. So she was in the hospital so that she and the baby could be made well and happy again. They weren’t to be worried by what other people said. She wasn’t mad. There were poor people in the hospital who were mad and were probably never coming out because they couldn’t cope on their own. But calling even them mad or loony wasn’t polite or even medically correct. They were ill, like Rachel, but more so.

Garfield decided the baby had to be with her because of milk.

‘Can we catch it?’ he asked. They had been doing coughs and colds at school. Steve Pedney, a rather rough boy whose father was said to be in prison, was told off for blowing his nose by simply blocking one nostril with a finger while emptying the other smartly on to the playground tarmac. They all laughed because it was so disgusting but clever too and Garfield thought it might be nicer than spending the day with a soggy handkerchief in your pocket to surprise you when you put your hand in. But Miss Curnow said that was how tuberculosis was spread. Steve Pedney still did it though.
Coughs and sneezes
spread diseases
. Madness and sadness might be spread too.

‘No,’ Antony told him, wrinkling his eyes in the rearview mirror in the way that meant he was smiling. ‘It’s just inside her, like a tummy ache. You can’t catch it by being near her or hugging her. In fact she’d probably like a big hug when you see her. She’ll have been missing you. But she’s on very strong medicine too which might make her seem a bit quieter than usual or a bit sleepy. Don’t worry. Just be yourselves and ask me afterwards if there’s anything you don’t understand.’

At that point Morwenna started singing one of her aimless, rather tuneless songs so they both stopped talking and listened to her. She picked music up like a sponge – songs from
Play School
or advertisements (at other people’s houses because they didn’t have television), hymns from kindergarten and Sunday School, even carols from the Salvation Army band – but she sort of melted them down and transformed them so that unless you knew in advance what she thought she was singing it could be hard to guess. Garfield listened closely and decided that
today it was the woman on the Shredded Wheat advertisement. He tested his guess by joining in and singing the real version alongside her.

‘There are two men in my life.

To one I am a mother.

To the other I’m a wife.

And I give them both the best … with natural Shredded Wheat!’

It was an odd song because it didn’t go anywhere. It was truncated – like the tail – end of something longer – but oddly haunting. He had only watched the advertisement a few times at a friend’s house and to his knowledge, Morwenna had only seen it once, when they watched it together in an electrical shop while Antony was buying batteries. But her memory was like that. It was almost frightening.

The other thing that was strange about the advertisement was that you didn’t actually see the woman, just people on a sad-looking beach with the sun going down, but you felt you knew what she was like. You could tell she cared. She gave a lot of thought to how she fed her husband and her son. It was odd that she called her son a man because he obviously wasn’t but perhaps she was a bit shy of him. Perhaps he was strict with her like his father and food was her only way of reaching him. Food instead of hugs. Like some of the women friends from the Quakers who kept coming to visit while Rachel was away in her hospitals, the ones who called her Mummy instead of Rachel and who lied and said she was tired when they obviously knew she wasn’t but that they mustn’t say she was mad. They gave Antony cake and stew. But
mainly cake. Garfield looked at the back of his father’s neck and thought of the Interflora poster on the flower-shop door in Market Place that said say it with flowers. Say it with cake.

Morwenna caught his eye and smiled and sang more in tune so he knew he had guessed right. They kicked their legs in time and sang the jingle together, more confidently now there were two of them. It was funny.

‘There are two men in my life.

To one I am a mother.

To the other I’m a …’

‘That’s enough, now,’ Antony said, quite firmly.

Garfield shut up at once but Morwenna carried on, louder and faster, giggling, not understanding because she was only three and a half.

‘That’s enough, Wenn,’ Garfield told her and tapped her knee so that she looked at him. ‘Ssh,’ he told her.

‘Ssh,’ she said back.

‘Who’s this?’ he asked, picking up her doll. She snatched it off him, as he knew she would, and lost herself in a quick fury of love, correcting the doll’s skirt and hair and squeezing it harder than any mother would. She didn’t really love her dolls, she just possessed and controlled them. She spent ages telling them off in language he couldn’t always understand and sometimes encouraged him to pull their heads off with a sick-making rubbery pop that made them both laugh. She laughed even more if he muddled the heads up when he put them back but then she tended to panic and he had to calm her by changing the heads round the way they should be and fast.

They drove on towards Bodmin in relative silence. Some
of his friends had parents with radios in their cars but all the Morris had were maps and Rachel’s sketchpad and a red tartan picnic blanket that smelled of beaches and seaweed.

Rachel wasn’t a mummy and she certainly wasn’t like the Shredded Wheat lady. He thought it most unlikely she had been missing him and wanted a hug. Sometimes, especially if she was painting, she hardly knew you were there. And when she got angry it was really frightening. She never smacked them or hit them – Antony said that wasn’t right, which meant it wasn’t Quakerly – but she shouted and she hit things instead.

It was worth it though for when she was happy. When she was happy she was better than any stupid mummy because she was like someone your age, like a sister but a sister who could put you in the car and say, ‘Let’s escape, let’s not go to school today.’ When she was happy and did things like take Garfield on a train ride or out for a long walk when he was meant to be in school or going to the dentist for a filling, Antony got cross but she just got crosser and then laughed at Antony, which was very shocking because he wasn’t someone you laughed at, being a teacher.

When he was older Garfield might have to be in Antony’s English class at Humphry Davy, which was something he secretly dreaded as he would not know how to behave and imagined it would make things awkward around the other boys. His father must have a nickname, like Fishface or Wingnut or Dr Death that all the boys used. It would be so terrible he had even wondered about failing the Eleven Plus on purpose so he’d have to go to the other school, the bad one full of boys like Steve Pedney
who never used handkerchiefs. Only that would not be Quakerly.