Notes from an Exhibition (8 page)

Every time she had written
‘Antony’
, Garfield noted,
she had begun to write ‘
your
’ and crossed it out.
‘Antony’
, not ‘
your father
’ or
‘your daddy’
. Was this, then, why they had always insisted on being Rachel and Antony instead of Mum and Dad, for all that their children complained that it singled them out among their friends? It wasn’t, as they claimed, from a Quakerly preference of Christian names over titles or, as Antony had once suggested, to promote a democratic equality within the family. It was simply to avoid lying to a child.

Garfield thought at first she had broken off the letter with the name and address, making it less a letter than a memorandum. But as he folded it to return it to the envelope he saw she had concluded, briefly, on the paper’s other side.

‘Being currently of sound (ish) mind, your loving mother, Rachel Kelly.’

They didn’t stay late after eating Oliver’s soup. Yawning uncontrollably, Antony was plainly shattered and in need of sleep and Oliver, apologetically, was due back in London to prepare for an opening at his gallery the next day.

Something had made Garfield unwontedly horny, relief at the day’s being done perhaps or even lingering irritation at Lizzy’s speech at the funeral. She took it as therapy perhaps, or a burying of the hatchet, so responded warmly at first. But suddenly she yelped, which made him stop.

‘Sorry,’ she said, pulling away just enough to make him withdraw and the moment die. ‘You were hurting me. Sorry.’

‘Careful!’ Rachel called but Petroc continued ahead of her, scrambling heedlessly down the path that always gave her vertigo if she looked anywhere but at her struggling feet. In winter it became less path than cascade as springs from the fields above found their ways into its narrow channel and scoured it ever deeper. Now, in late summer, it was a cascade of a different kind, its surface an unsteady scree of dust and gravel punctuated by boulders at just the angles to break a fall in the most painful way.

With their lower centres of gravity and skimpier acquaintance with danger and pain, the children tended to skip down it, darting from rock to rock or slithering on their bottoms, as Petroc was doing now, laughing at the way the gradient and beckoning beach tempted them to start running and never stop. Garfield
had
started running once and gashed his knee on a stone so that the day had been ruined by him having to be taken to West Cornwall hospital for a tetanus injection and stitches.

There were other beaches, more accessible, especially with small children, and just as beautiful but this remained her favourite and one she was jealous of sharing.

‘Wait, I said!’ she called out but he laughed at her, actually turned and laughed defiance, the scamp, before hurtling on down to the coast path and on to the stream and last rocky descent. Fighting dizziness, focusing on her inadequate espadrilles, she cursed as she slipped and stubbed a big toe. She paused, made herself look up and out at the glorious view to remind herself why she was doing this then followed him more sedately, picnic bag jouncing at her hip.

On his birthdays up till now she had simply claimed him as an excuse to snatch a day by herself somewhere he might enjoy. This was the first year he had really chosen, thought and chosen. That he had chosen to come here seemed a confirmation of the deep understanding she felt growing up between them.

With every other child there had been a sickening chasm after their birth, a blank of depression, worst with Garfield, from which she had slowly crawled to find a staring baby, ready-made as it were, thoroughly bonded with their father and mildly suspicious of her. It was of her own doing. Her own wild indulgence. Jack had made her brutally aware of the facts by now; that the only way to avoid the depression was to avoid the withdrawal from medication she insisted on during pregnancy. But – and this she had told nobody, not even Jack, the glorious ascent before the fall and the work she could achieve in climbing made it worthwhile. Perhaps.

Yet with Petroc something had been different. Instead
of the sickening plunge there had come merely an intense interiority, a sense of her world narrowing down to a focus no larger than her baby’s dimpled hand. She had barely spoken for weeks and the younger children had been so upset they had to be sent to stay with friends, but it hadn’t been a full-blown, life-denying depression like the others.

He had been easy as a result, she was sure, so easy she had worried he might be slightly simple. He cried as any baby would, but he did not cry for long and was swiftly comforted. He did not fret and grizzle for hours on end as the others had, Hedley being the worst, but was content as soon as held so that she found she could keep him with her in the studio and work with him lying in the crook of her arm when he became restless, or strapped on her back in a papoose improvised from an old curtain and one of Antony’s belts.

Her ability to use tide tables was erratic at best and this beach was far too insignificant in tourism or sailing terms to be detailed on them specifically so she had to extrapolate or, frankly, guess at a low-tide time somewhere between the ones given for Marazion and Sennen Cove. Today they were in luck. The tide was out so far there were three caves laid bare for Petroc to explore and the sand was banked up in a smooth ramp from the surf.

By the time she began to clamber down over the boulders to reach the beach, steadying herself on the old tarry rope some kind soul had lashed to a metal ring there, Petroc was already racing far ahead, delighting in the patterns his feet were making on the virgin sand. The only other sign of life was the track where a seal had
lolloped its way back into the water in the last hour or two.

Petroc was not a chatterbox like Hedley or Morwenna or strong and silent (for which read sulky) like Garfield. He talked if he felt like it but more often he was too self-contained to bother. In this he strongly resembled Antony, so that loving him was tied up in loving his father. Secretly he reminded her of the best kind of dog; amusing himself while always keeping half an eye on his owner. While he raced about at the water’s edge she kicked off her espadrilles, which had never been the same since she mistakenly stood in a puddle at the fishmonger’s in them. She crossed the beach to the first cave, where she changed swiftly into her bathing costume, and left the picnic in the shade to keep it cool. There was a stream which splashed down from the valley above even at this dry time of year. She slipped their bottle of apple juice into one of the pools it made, hoping to chill it.

One of the reasons this beach was special was the violent changes wrought on it from day to day and season to season. Sometimes the sand was heaped to one side, sometimes to the other. Sometimes the stream created a deep, winding gorge through the sand down which dogs and children delighted in slithering. Sometimes it carved a stealthy path feet beneath the beach surface and was undetectable until the point where it spilled out into the surf. Sometimes she would find the sand clean and pure, as she had today. At other times it would be laden with fascinating junk washed from passing ships – rubber shoe soles, plastic bottles, wrecked packing cases and once, to Garfield’s and Hedley’s delight, some yachtsman’s ingen
ious heads cobbled together from a mahogany lavatory seat and an old dining chair.

For weeks on end the sand could all but disappear, visible only from the clifftop as a bank formed in the bay’s broad mouth. This would expose instead the beach’s rocky foundations, a mesmerizing, ankle-twisting layer of rounded boulders over a sloping granite shelf. When the sand went it was harder and less comfortable to go swimming but it had the advantage of putting off casual visitors and children. Provided one could find a broad enough boulder and had a thick enough towel to act as a cushion, it could still be a good place to muse and doze, the heat coming off the salty rocks, the stream gurgling somewhere beneath them.

‘Are you coming in with me?’ she asked Petroc. ‘Birthday swim with your old mum?’ She had persuaded him to wear his trunks instead of shorts because he could be prudish about changing in public, even in a cave. But he was content with what he was doing, attempting to divert or dam the stream by the insertion of rocks and weed bundles and merely shook his head with a fleeting smile.

She knew she should slap some sun cream on him – he had the vulnerably pale skin that went with his deep-red hair – but he hated her fussing and the sun wasn’t hot yet. Besides, she had a shameful hankering to see him freckled. So she left him in peace and made herself stride into the waves, fighting the urge to cry out or flinch at the cold. She made herself dive, to get past the point where she might be tempted to run back out, and swam several strokes under water. When she emerged, gasping,
she found herself in one of those mysteriously warmer patches created by the tides. She waved to Petroc, who was watching her anxiously, and he waved back. Then she lay on her back and kicked out for several more yards but the memory of swimming instruction at high school was too strong and soon she merely floated, staring up at the cliffs and sky and then out at a little plane towing a flag to advertise some attraction they would never see. Then she rolled on to her front and saw a seal watching her from only five yards away, close enough for her to hear the faint indignant snorts of its breath. She kept still, treading water, willing it to come closer although she suspected seals were not as benign as they looked. Suddenly there was another, much smaller one beside it, also watching her; a pup, perhaps, or simply a female? She glanced over her shoulder to the shore in the hope she might catch Petroc’s attention without startling the seals but he was lost to his dam-building so she looked back and enjoyed a full minute’s solitary communion with them before they slipped from view.

Numb from cold now, she swam back to shore and hurried up the beach to her towel. She had recently acquired a sort of beach robe, a blue towelling dressing gown with a voluminous hood. She couldn’t bear to upgrade to a more matronly cut of swimming costume but the birth of four children had left her self-conscious of her increasingly pear-shaped figure and the veins on her thighs. She liked the garment, sensed it would improve as it became bleached and battered with age. She had offered to buy Petroc one as it would protect his skin and he would look adorable in it but he said no because it
would look like a dress. He was probably right. She worried that boys could be turned homo with too much of the wrong kind of love but Jack had assured her it lay entirely beyond a mother’s control.

She settled herself comfortably in the sand with her back against an especially flat bit of cliff. This was the risky side of the beach to lie because there were great rocks high above, barely contained in the turf and shale around them, but it caught the sun and gave the best view. She tugged her sketchpad and a pencil case out of the picnic bag and began drawing the archway the sea had hollowed out from the cliff on the beach’s shady side.

It was an interesting shape but a challenge to capture with only a pencil and a few coloured crayons as it presented such extremes of light and shade but then working on the planes of water, the utterly still, dark pool in the sand beneath the arch and the dazzlingly white-shot blue of the open sea glimpsed beyond gave her an idea for a painting or a series of paintings. Layers of finely gradated colour could be built up in bands, like a stack of Pyrex saucers that had once held her fascinated in a hospital canteen. She abandoned the sketch then filled page after page with studies, leaning on her drawn-up knees.

She was faintly aware of time passing as she worked. Some people came to the beach with a dog and explored the caves, talking loudly about a bird they thought was roosting there, and passed on. Petroc padded around her and helped himself to sandwiches and a pork pie and tomatoes and some apple juice. At one point, when she had fallen back to staring at the arch in the cliff – seeing it yet not seeing it as the pictures formed and rearranged
themselves on the canvas in her mind – a man walked into her vision and distracted her. He was impossibly tall, thin and old, perhaps seventy, like a Mervyn Peake illustration. She watched as he half-stripped until he had nothing on but his khaki trousers then darted like a wading bird in and out of the shallow surf, stamping his feet and stooping to catch the foam in his hands before anointing his face and neck and, strangest of all, the small of his back. She saw that Petroc, far up the beach among the high tide of pebbles, was watching too and she grinned at him. Then they watched the man stamp his feet dry on his jersey, dress and leave again, clambering back up the boulders and clay with surprising agility. His little visit had taken all of six or seven minutes, like a speeded-up re-enactment of childhood joy amid the mature pleasures of a long clifftop walk.

She began to draw a quick cartoony drawing of the man stamping in the surf but was distracted afresh by the light on the water and the entirely unwatery shapes she could see in it if she stared long enough, a kind of network of dish shapes and bending discs. Then she remembered that several of the crayons she was using were water soluble so she experimented with a corner of a handkerchief dipped in apple juice and rubbed selectively across what she had drawn. She was playing and she was working and she was entirely absorbed and happy.

Finally she broke off, when her inability to take the ideas further without paint and brushes was becoming a kind of pain, and remembered with a spasm of guilt that it was Petroc’s birthday and that was why they were there together with no one else.

But he was fine, gathering and sorting stones into a collection a few feet from where she sat. He looked up, aware she was watching him.

‘You’re back,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Sorry.’

‘Do you want a pork pie?’

‘Yes please!’ She was ravenous, she realized, and thirsty. She drank the apple juice in her beaker, which had acquired the unmistakable sweet-wood taint of pencil and thanked him for the pork pie and tomato he brought her.

‘You’ve done lots,’ he said, looking at her pad while, unable to control herself, she briefly stroked his amazing-coloured hair.

‘Yes,’ she said. The sketches looked hopelessly scrappy but, with the cooler eye that followed inspiration, she could see there were enough details in them for her to recapture her ideas when she was back in the studio.

‘Did you draw me a card?’ he asked.

She paused. ‘No,’ she admitted because she couldn’t lie to him. ‘But you can have …’

‘Can I have this one?’ he asked eagerly. With unerring instinct he had singled out the most interesting of the ones she had blurred with apple juice.

‘Of course,’ she said, pleased. ‘You have an eye, Petroc Middleton.’

‘I have two,’ he pointed out. ‘You can write me something on it later.’

‘Oh. All right. What are you doing there?’

‘Sorting stones. I need six.’