Notes from an Exhibition (29 page)

‘Want Mummy,’ she said, Mummy, not Rachel, and she started crying again only differently, quietly, just for him, so he would know it was real.

‘I know,’ he said, doing his best to feel grown up. ‘Me too. I miss her too, Wenn, but she has to be here for a bit as she’s not well. She’s not well in her head.’

‘She
is
well!’

‘No. She’s … She’s depressed and it’s not safe for her at home. Not for a bit.’

But at this she started to cry loudly again, her public cry as he thought of it.

‘Shut up,’ he tried saying because she was making him want to cry too. ‘Shut up! It’s all your fault she ran in like that.’

‘Nooo!’

‘Yes it is, stupid. If you hadn’t gone on and on about look at me she’d have stayed a bit longer. But you made her say fuck.’

‘I didn’t.’ There was another thump on his seat-back and then the crying grew almost painful in such a close confinement so, after a few ineffectual and rather angry
pleases
he got out again and shut the door behind him.

He leaned on the bonnet, enjoying the heat of it through his shorts but taking care not to scald his bare bits. With any luck the heat in the car would send
Morwenna to sleep soon. He watched the other visitors leave.

The miserable couple drove off in a brown Austin Cambridge. They were arguing. He could hear, because their windows were open in the heat and they didn’t seem to care. The grape lady waited at a bus stop just outside the hospital gates. She had the empty grape plate in one hand at her side. The other man just walked away so perhaps he lived in Bodmin.

‘Sorry, Garfy.’ Antony came back to the car. ‘It got a bit much for her. Oh.’ He noticed Morwenna’s crying. ‘And not just her. She didn’t forget, you know. I think she wanted to have some birthday time with just you but then Hedley needed her and then Morwenna and then we ran out of time, didn’t we? But she did this for you.’

He handed something over then opened the back of the car and crouched down to reason quietly with Morwenna.

It was a sort of homemade envelope but she had made it from the thick paper she used for doing watercolours sometimes. She had written on the front in the beautiful calligraphy she did when she could be bothered, when she had to write notices or place-cards or cards for an exhibition. MASTER MIDDLETON. She had explained to him once that he would always be Master Middleton until he was grown up whereas any brother he had would have to be Master Hedley or whatever to show they weren’t the eldest.

He peered inside just enough to see a flash of brilliant colour then decided to save it. Antony disapproved of children getting lots of birthday presents when there were
some in the world who got nothing at all, so Garfield knew his birthday tea would not bring the lavish array of parcels and envelopes, of toys and games, he had watched non-Quaker friends open on their birthdays. He knew in his heart this was right. He had seen, and been faintly disgusted by the greedy heedlessness that came over children with too many presents, the way they tore one after another free of its wrapping without paying it the attention it deserved. But knowing something was right did not make it easier and a small part of him, the bad part presumably, always wanted to ask if that was all. In their family there tended to be two presents only, even at Christmas, one of which was nice-but-useful, like a dictionary or a box of crayons. The useful present was usually officially from Morwenna. His bad part wondered if the arrival of Hedley would mean one more present but not just yet. He knew greed was bad but presents weren’t just about greed. They were about love too.

‘Aren’t you going to open it?’ Antony asked as they set off for Penzance again. ‘It looks pretty special.’

‘I think I’ll save it,’ Garfield said.

‘Ah,’ Antony said in a pleased way that made Garfield think this was the right answer. Good boys saved and Garfield was good at it. He was saving for a Meccano set and had put half of his pocket money into a piggy bank for so long the piggy bank was nearly full. He had noticed too late it was the kind you had to smash to open, which seemed a wicked waste so he was deferring the evil by lining up a second, openable, plastic piggy bank he had found at a jumble sale for tuppence. He saved strawberries until the end. He made an Easter egg
last for a week. He had learned to save good news, and jokes. He had learned that if you saved your anger rather than speaking it, it had a way of evaporating like smoke, leaving just a faint smell where before there had been flames.

Antony made an effort, even though he was a man. They had a birthday tea, that was actually high tea, with all Garfield’s favourite food: sausage rolls and Welsh rarebit and the cake he and Rachel had invented last year which was shop-bought ginger cake with a bar of Bournville melted with some butter and spread over the top. He had seven candles and he made a wish before blowing them out:
Bring Rachel and Hedley home soon
,
please
. And he opened his cards first, then his presents.

He treated the thing from Rachel as a present and opened that last. The special present was a little model engine, a real Mamod one, where you used meths on cotton wool to boil water in a tank which drove a metal wheel or even sounded a whistle, if you wanted. Antony said they could use it to drive a Meccano windmill or roundabout once he’d saved up the money.

Garfield had slightly been hoping the special present would be Meccano anyway and felt a bit tight-throated in his effort not to let his disappointment show. The engine was very good – they would fire it up later once Morwenna had gone to bed – but it was just not what he had been hoping for so it would take a while for his hopes to rearrange themselves. The nice-but-useful present was a real leather satchel for school. This too was rather a disappointment. He had wanted one really badly a year ago, when several of his friends had them and all he had was
a duffel bag which scrunched all his things in a heap inside. Now he would have preferred a briefcase like the ones the older boys carried.

Antony made him put the satchel on and walk up and down and look pleased with it once they’d adjusted the straps a little but even Morwenna stared at it with something like disdain. It
was
real leather – Antony encouraged him to smell it – and had his name and address on a little card like the ones on the hospital doors and a place for his pens and even a little compartment for house keys but its brown was too red and too childish and it was not a briefcase.

He washed his hands before opening Rachel’s homemade envelope because he had chocolate icing on them.

She had made him a card by making a picture with wax crayons on half the paper then folding the rest behind and writing in it. It was a bit like the pictures she did with paint – an abstract, he had to learn to call them – only, being concentrated on to such a small space made it more intense. It was a series of orange blocks floating on a greeny blue background but she had made the orange bits all slightly different shades, some brighter, some darker, some with deeper orange around their edges, some sort of wispy and less defined, as if there was a fog in front of them.

‘Let me see,’ Morwenna was whining. She didn’t like it when it wasn’t her birthday, which was only to be expected. He showed her, which silenced her more effectively than Antony’s shushing, but he wouldn’t let her touch.

He looked some more. Because they weren’t all quite
the same shade, the orange bits seemed to move forwards and backwards out of the paper as you stared. The one you focused on would hold still but then immediately one of the brighter ones came forwards a bit and your eye felt it had to flick sideways.

‘You’re honoured,’ Antony said at last.

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well she’s never done a picture for me.’

‘She must have.’

‘No.’ He shook his head, mock-rueful, and smiled.

Garfield looked inside.

‘For my darling Garfield,’ she had written, ‘On his seventh birthday with love from Rachel. Sorry I can’t be with you. Blame young Hedley! This time next year the bearer of this card is to have me all to himself for a whole day to do whatever he likes … Don’t forget!’

She had drawn three Xs. Then, perhaps as an afterthought because he was only seven and the picture was a bit serious and not at all like the other cards he had from his godparents and school friends, with their cars and footballers, she had drawn a cartoon. The Xs were on a sort of sledge and she was pulling them up to a signpost which said Penzance 46 miles. She had drawn herself like a mad lady, with sticky-out hair and bare feet with big toes but you knew it was her because she was in her painting clothes and she had her nose. Beads of sweat were pinging off her in her effort to deliver the kisses and the reason the sledge was so hard to pull was that Baby Hedley and his pram were tied on to the back of it and the road was a bit uphill.

It felt odd getting something from her but not having
her there to thank. Antony was looking at him as if he expected something more so Garfield put it back in its special envelope and said he would clear the table while Antony took Morwenna off for her bath. She had reached the point where she was so tired she would probably grizzle herself to sleep.

Soon there was the usual splashing and wailing from the bathroom – she hated having her hair washed, especially by Antony who tended to get soap in her eyes and didn’t understand that she meant it when she said her hair hurt. Garfield took the satchel and the picture to his room. He tried filling the satchel with books and pens and things, which made it look less new at least. He took the picture out and propped it up in the middle of his short mantelpiece where it glowed beautifully against the white paintwork. But it worried him. It was too vulnerable and too precious. He left it there to inspire him while he wrote her a thank-you letter telling her all the news he had been unable to tell her while he had been showing off on the swing and she had been preoccupied with Hedley and Morwenna and Antony.

As he wrote, he pictured her as a huge gingerbread woman and the rest of them as little dogs nibbling bits off her. No wonder she was ill. They must learn not to eat her all at once. They must learn to save her.

Making out a fair copy took a while because the letter was quite long in the end. He tucked the picture back in its envelope and hid it in his desk for safekeeping. When she came home again, when she was well, he would ask her if she could let him have a proper frame for it. He would pick his moment carefully.

The young porter glanced at the coins she had dropped in his hand. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thanks very much,’ and left, leaving Winnie to fret that she had either tipped him too much or insufficiently.

She shrugged off the worry; she was a foreigner so was allowed to get things wrong. The only thing she couldn’t abide was being constantly mistaken for an American here, something an American would never do.

She unzipped her case and fancied she heard her clothes give a little sigh at the release of pressure. The case was her biggest, the one Josh had always used on their holidays together but where she had always borrowed over
flow space. She was a lousy packer and had little idea how long she was there for.

She took in the room and saw it was as shabby-genteel as the hotel’s reception area. The curtains were sun-faded, there were stains on the ceiling and there was one of those silly little kettles and a bowl of tea and coffee sachets where she would have welcomed a minibar. If she needed a drink she would have to enjoy it in public, in one of those big downstairs rooms dotted with people who looked so ancient and so rooted that she suspected they were permanent residents parked there by their families. She had heard the English did that.

The bed did not look promising – after a lifetime of sleeping with a much bigger man, her back was rarely in the right alignment – but at least the linen would be clean. She tugged aside the pointless net curtains – she was on the fourth floor and quite unoverlooked – to reveal the view of the bay and distant boats and felt immediately better. It was for the view and anonymity she had chosen a big old place like this over one of the boutique B&Bs Petey had researched for her. She was a city girl and did not relish interrogations over breakfast, especially in chichi surroundings, especially on this trip.

She unpacked her things, picked out the slacks and blouse she would wear and hooked them above one end of the bath before leaving the shower running on its hottest at the other in the hope of their wrinkles dropping out in the steam. Then she kicked off her shoes and lay on the bed, thinking to doze a little. The overnight flight from Toronto and then the little shuttle from Gatwick and then the hour’s taxi ride from Newquay had left her
physically shattered. She was too keyed-up to sleep, however, and her mind was spinning.

Close your eyes, at least, she
told herself.
Listen to the
sea out there. This is the sea She must have listened to.
And swum in. And stared over
.

His e-mails hadn’t exactly been chatty – he wasn’t like some of the guys she’d bumped into online who barely had your name before they were giving you way too much information – so she decided he was simply one of those men who only spoke when they deemed it necessary. A Quaker. Her brother-in-law.

She got shivery when she thought back to it. All those years, through her mourning for Joanie, through her marriage to Josh, through her mother’s quick last illness and her father’s long decline, Ray Kelly had remained her private demon. Whenever another schizophrenic stabbed a complete stranger, whenever she heard colleagues spooking themselves with tales of blank-eyed psychos pacing empty hotels or driving deserted late-night buses, it was Ray Kelly’s face that sprang to mind. If Josh was away on business, it was Ray Kelly she thought of as she remembered too late to draw the curtains or bolt the back door. She could not believe a person could have that traumatic an effect on four lives then disappear so entirely. Had she read about her killing someone else or being arrested finally or knocked down by a tram somewhere it might have lessened her bogeywoman potency and maybe made her banal or even pitiable.

Then, when Winnie had been idly searching for old school friends, to see her name there so starkly on the new genealogy postings with the note ‘born Toronto
1940s, lived Gerrard Street East, died this year,’ had taken her breath away.

Yes
, she thought.
Yes! The mad bitch is dead at last!

As for when she had clicked on the attachment tab and come face to face, not with blank-eyed Ray, that image so sickeningly familiar from the press coverage, but with darling Joanie, no longer rebellious and maddening but suddenly just young and vulnerable-looking… Winnie had doubted her own sanity for a minute or two then had to call in Petey, who ran the shop with her, and ask him to compare the photograph with the one she kept in a cherrywood frame on her desk and tell her, please, if he thought it really was the same girl on the screen.

Suppressing the urge to splurge there and then, to send Antony a great stream of wheres and whys and hows had been one of the hardest things but she found she was too choked by anger and hurt to be more than curtly careful in her initial response. Restraining Petey was harder yet; he had a tendency to wild overexcitement, which was why she hired him in the first place. And then to get those other photographs and suffer the twin convulsions of having Joanie age decades and raise a family in minutes then having her die all over again! It was small surprise if Winnie had been drinking by daylight for the first time since Josh’s death.

Small surprise, either, if her memory had been working so hard dredging up things she had no wish to recall that she was having trouble remembering her own address and twice this week had called herself Joanie when talking to strangers on the phone.

Her mother’s illness had been short and merciful and
whatever terrible secrets she had nurtured went to her grave alongside her, buttoned up in her mock croc purse. Her father had taken far longer to die so had suffered more time for recriminations and longing glances over his arthritic shoulder at the paths not taken.

As his end approached, once he was being kept alive by machinery and the cancer was finally chewing at the parts that no ingenuity or donor could replace, he began to talk. Trapped in her dutiful vigil at his bedside, his only surviving kin, she had been obliged to listen. Years too late, years after it could do anyone any good, he began to talk about poor little Joanie and how bad he had always felt. Winnie loved him dearly, truly she did, but she could have finished him with a pillow right there.

Joanie had been raped, he said. That night when he and Mom had found Winnie with the drawings and Mom had raced her to safety, Joanie had been raped, repeatedly, by a whole gang of boys.

‘Did anyone see?’ she asked him softly, feeling a chasm open beneath her sweaty hospital chair.

‘They didn’t have to,’ he said. ‘One of the boys brought her home, saying he’d found her lying drunk on a bench on the street. But from the state of her it was obvious something had happened. She was bleeding and …’ He broke off, overcome by weakness as much as emotion.

She gave him a sip of water from his beaker, hoping he would shut up now.

‘I told her to get in a bath,’ he went on, ‘and clean herself up. And go to bed. When your mother came back she went into her and Joanie told her and … And your mother told her not to be so disgusting. She said she was
depraved, that those boys came of good families, families she’d be proud to have come to our house. Our shitty little house in Etobicoke.’

He took another sip of water and looked at Winnie as though he were already being pawed by other lost souls.

‘Shush there,’ she said. ‘Shush now. It doesn’t matter any more.’

But he had to speak. ‘Your mother told me the same thing and I did what I always did with her and said
yes
dear
and knuckled under. Joanie cut her wrists the next day, while we were in church. She was in the Clarke by lunchtime. And then she …’

Winnie soothed him as best she could but had to break off from her vigil to visit a hotel bar just along the street from his hospital because his nasty little revelation had made her admit what she had always known: the things her older self had been telling her younger self for years.

He lost consciousness that night and died when she encouraged them to turn his machines off the following week but he had one more story saved up for her when she came back from the bar, frantically chewing a mint.

‘Your mother,’ he kept saying.

‘Yes?’ she would prompt him repeatedly.

They made that little exchange about eight times and just when she thought that’s all there was going to be to it, that he was maybe trying to say her mother had been good or that he’d always loved her or that she was waiting for him on the other side, he had a coughing fit then began the sentence another way.

‘There’s one thing I could never forgive her.’

‘Yes, Dad?’

‘She had another baby.’

‘She did?’

‘Joanie had a twin. It happens. Her twin died during the birth. Caught up in Joanie’s cord. Not a thing that would happen now. And Joanie was a beautiful child. A cute baby. Perfect. And your mother told her. When she was, what, five or six could she have been? Could she?’

‘Maybe Dad. What did she tell her?’

‘She’d been a bit bad and your mother told her, and told her the wrong one had died. That was evil of her.’

Evil. The word so rarely on his lips. The word that even in church only got said once a sitting, during the Lord’s Prayer. It buzzed in the room between them like a meat-fattened fly.

Which was just where Winnie’d left it. She couldn’t take stories like those back to Josh to see his kind face wrinkle in the effort to understand. And now, twenty years on, that fly was out and bothering her again.

She and Josh had not been blessed with children. They had tried. They had tests. They had discussed and rejected adoption. Leastways, she had discussed and he had rejected it. He was funny about wanting his own and wouldn’t go for the idea; she had to respect that.

There were advantages. She kept her figure. He kept his hair. They never had to go without interesting adult holidays and she’d had the freedom to build her own career after all and to put in three hours a week as a volunteer counsellor at the Clarke, helping distraught relatives work through their feelings at having a loved one join the wavering ranks of the mentally ill.

Josh’s sisters had three apiece but their husbands took
them to Los Angeles and Chicago respectively, so they were never close. The time she had really missed motherhood, of course, was during Josh’s bypass surgery and its failure. When there was no one to prop her up or cosset her.

In a curious way her little business had become her child and her employees, her family. Simple Gifts sold wooden furniture and household items and a small range of clothes and linens, all produced by Amish or Shaker communities. Housed in an old warehouse in Cabbagetown, the old Irish district whose fortunes had greatly improved, it had doubled in size since she first opened it with a single assistant and now had an Internet-based mail order side that had greatly increased its turnover. She was not quite a millionaire but what had begun as an indulgence, a venture in which Josh humoured her, had bought her a security. She was well past retirement age and had handed the running of the business over to her junior partner Petey, a sweet man who had come in as her first sales assistant straight out of high school. But she retained a desk in the office and came in almost every day because being home alone was lonely and boring. Something in the eagerness with which Petey had packed her off on this adventure told her it was time to cut everyone a little slack and try to be a merrier widow. Take cruises and stuff.

She sat up. She couldn’t sleep, not with all those seagulls screaming outside, and she wasn’t going to doze.

She reached for the phone and her diary, took a deep breath and rang him.

‘Hello?’ He didn’t sound so old.

‘Antony? It’s Winnie MacArthur.’

‘What?’

‘Hello!’

‘Sorry. Let me turn up the volume on this thing.’ There was a deafening clunk as if he had dropped the receiver on a table then he came back on. ‘Who is this?’

‘It’s Winnie MacArthur, Antony. From LongLost.com. Joanie’s sister? Rachel’s sister, if you like.’

‘Oh. Oh yes. Hello. How are you?’

‘Excited. Tired.’

‘Ah. Sorry if I sounded a little distracted. We’ve rather a full house at the moment. My son Hedley’s here, still, and my daughter, Morwenna, who isn’t very …’

‘Oh. Antony, you must say if it’s not a good time to visit.’

‘Why? Where are you?’

‘The Queen’s Hotel,’ she told him. ‘Just around the corner from you, according to my map.’

‘The Queen’s. I see. I thought you were calling from Toronto. Come. Of course you must come.’

‘What. Now?’

‘Why not? Just … Hang on a second.’ She heard that clunk again. Evidently his phone wasn’t cordless. And then there was the sound of a closing door. He picked up again. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m a bit deaf and I worry about shouting without realizing it and hurting people’s feelings. Morwenna isn’t very well, that’s all. If she strikes you as a bit … Oh dear.’ He sighed. ‘Sorry. Life has been rather interesting.’

‘It’s a bad time. I knew I should have waited to hear back from you.’

‘What?’

‘I’ll leave you in peace. We can meet another day.’

‘No. Please come. I insist. I’ll be looking out for you. But I… I haven’t had a chance to explain who you are, that’s all.’