Notes from an Exhibition

by Patrick Gale

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Where’s she now?’

  ‘Well I thought you’d want to …’ He broke off and gulped and took a breath to control himself. ‘… say goodbye here so I’ve put off the Co-Op until you’re ready. She’s on their bed. Happiness was never her forte but considering the state she must have been in she looks peaceful at least. Come on, Garfy. Come inside.’

  At some point in the late Sixties, when their parents finally installed central heating in place of the solid-fuel Rayburn, they had removed most of the ground floor’s internal walls or reduced them to piers or pillars so as to make a big, welcoming kitchen/dining/living area with a pair of sofas at one end and the kitchen sink below the rear window at the other. The décor had not been touched since so the sofas were still covered in chocolate-brown corduroy and the high ceiling was painted a burnt orange to match the swirly tiles around the cooking area. Bizarrely for such an artistically literate couple, they had acquired a matching toaster/kettle/breadbin set decorated with beige wheatsheaves which, by some miracle of careful use, was still in place.

  Antony was at the kitchen table, hunched over the telephone and a list he was drawing up with the aid of a psychedelic address book even older than the kettle. The only light was coming from the smoked glass push-up-pull-down fitting over his head. As usual it was set too high for comfort and, as usual, Hedley played instinctive art director and tweaked it several inches nearer the tabletop to shed a kinder glow. Hedley had taken to admiring this light fitting as a design classic.

  ‘Hello,’ Garfield said. His father stirred.

  ‘Well look who it isn’t,’ he said with a sad smile. ‘Sorry about the phone muddle. It’s … It’s all a bit much.’

  ‘I said I’d do that,’ Hedley told him, glancing at the list.

  ‘You stay put,’ Garfield said, gently pressing his father back into his chair.

  ‘Tea or something stronger?’ Hedley asked. ‘And there’s food. God knows there’s food. Just look at all this stuff. People are so kind.’

  ‘Tea would be lovely, Hed, but I’ll just go up and see her. Then I suppose we can call the …’

  ‘Yes,’ Hedley said and Garfield realized they had quite suddenly reached the age of talking code over their father’s head as their parents used to do over theirs. ‘If I tell them half an hour?’

  ‘That’ll be plenty. Back in a sec.’

  * * *

  Without thinking he climbed the stairs in darkness, secure as a blind man in his boyhood home. Nothing would have moved. Like many Quakers, his father favoured simplicity so the house had never been cluttered with furniture. Even regarding what was hung on the walls or for how long – his mother’s restless department – stasis had prevailed for a while. Garfield knew the feel of the banisters and every creak and sag of the uncarpeted stairs intimately. He knew he was passing under Rachel’s Porthleven Series Seven and that the fiery bands of her Noon, Porthmeor loomed before him on the landing. He knew their childhood rooms – his, Morwenna’s, Hedley and Petroc’s – remained virtually unaltered. Hedley’s old room still contained the infantilizing bunks he and Petroc had clung to through their teens and which their parents had clung to in their turn so that they had become at once a memorial and a reproach for the absence of grand-children. Even the single beds were designed for children. Garfield knew that if he spent the night he would wake with cold, aching feet from sleeping with them dangling off the edge or neckache from sleeping with his head and shoulders hard against the headboard. At least abandoned childhood books and toys were not hoarded. Even when they were still children they were expected to conduct annual purges to help supply Quaker jumble sales.

  The door to his parents’ room was shut. Garfield reached for the light switch as he let himself in and the sudden glare created a momentary illusion of movement. Rachel lay on the bed, or rather his father and Hedley had laid her there. They had placed her on her side of the mattress, as though there were some chance of Antony wanting to climb in beside her still. Her hands were at her sides, her eyes were shut. She might have been asleep were it not for the slackness of her mouth and the atypical softness this lent her expression.

  He reached for one of her hands but its coldness repelled him. There were bright streaks of paint on her fingers and nails and a dot of it in her ash-grey hair. That was right; she should go to her grave with paint on her since it had been her life and even lifesaver. But something was wrong. She looked wrong. He crouched on the floor beside her, staring. They hadn’t suddenly put makeup on her or powdered her protuberant, shiny nose, so what was making her look so unlike herself; so kind even, and accommodating?

  It was her hair, he realized. She had always worn her hair tied back off her face in a sort of silver ring with a pin jabbed through it. He had terrified Morwenna once by saying it was what held Rachel’s face together and that only Antony was allowed to pull out the pin and see how she looked underneath. But now she lay there with her hair girlishly loose. He had never seen her without the clasp except on the beach so had no idea where she put it when she took it off to sleep. She had no dressing table. She was not that sort of woman. Her bedside table held the usual muddle of old newspapers, a half-empty glass of water and a chocolate biscuit with a neat record of her teeth where she had taken a bite before being distracted and using it as a bookmark. He looked in the small drawer where he remembered looking as a sugar-starved boy in search of cough sweets. There was the ladylike gold watch she never wore for long because she claimed the ticking got on her nerves and, all around it, in such absurd quantities they were almost spilling over the drawer’s edges, were hundreds of pills, almost all the same size and innocent shade of pink.

  For a few years now, ever since her last bad patch, Antony had taken charge of her medication to ensure she neither skipped it nor overdosed. He certainly would not have known about this insane stash and it would have disturbed him. Forgetting about the hair clasp in his anxiety to spare his father further pain, Garfield set the watch aside then took the drawer to the bathroom nearby and shook its contents into the lavatory. There were so many pills that, for a few ghastly moments, the water surged up to the lip of the bowl and began to slop over; then the blockage gave and the water lurched away with a sound like a wet cough, giving Garfield the sudden image of the bright bolus of strong medicine travelling down the soil pipe on the back of the house.

  Back in the bedroom he replaced the watch in the drawer, where he found it looked somehow unconvincing and exposed. So he added a few things picked from around the room at random: a couple of paperbacks, one of her lipsticks, a few tissues. Raised to be incapable of deceit, doing this would have made him nervous even without his mother’s corpse lying on the bed beside him. When he heard the stairs creaking he jumped up from the bedside and busied himself with closing the window so as to give the guilt time to leave his face.

  It was Hedley with the undertakers. They’d brought a kind of zip-up stretcher with them, which they slid on to the bed beside Rachel.

  ‘Her hair’s wrong,’ Garfield said. ‘There was that clasp she always wore.’

  ‘I couldn’t find it,’ Hedley said. ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Maybe it’s in the loft.’

  ‘Anything you want for her – different clothes or shoes or keepsakes, or whatever – one of us can pick up in the next couple of days.’ The undertaker’s face was kind. He had seen this scene many times before; the stalling, the incipient panic, grown men wanting to cling to skirts and cry out but too muffled by dignity to do more than mutter about inconsequential mislaid items.

  Garfield remembered the older undertaker. He had been to this house before. He was waiting respectfully for the brothers to leave the room, his stillness instructing his young assistant to do the same. Taking the hint, Garfield stepped out on to the landing. Hedley followed and, by some joint instinct, they went into their sister’s room. An iron and ironing board were set out in there. An overflowing basket of clean laundry
rested on the bed.

  ‘You could sleep in here,’ Garfield began. ‘I don’t know why you –’

  ‘I’m fine next door. I like it!’ Hedley insisted. He pushed the laundry basket aside. He would probably come in here and sort it later. He was like that. Then he sat on the bed Morwenna hadn’t slept in for years. Garfield drew the curtains then picked restlessly at things on the too-tidy desk – a ruler, a broken Penwith Pirates mug full of pens, a pile of dictionaries – where he remembered her swotting for her A Levels. The walls were hung with the huge charcoal drawings of the Merry Maidens she had made for a school art project. It was typical that she had taken art classes just long enough to prove she was effortlessly able then given them up in search of something that would challenge her.

  ‘How do we let her know?’ he asked.

  ‘I was just going to ask you that. There might be an obituary somewhere. Notice in The Times? She probably doesn’t read the papers but someone might who knows her. Someone might tell her.’

  Talk of Morwenna always led to talk of someone and perhaps because she had withdrawn her life so far from theirs they knew nothing and had few clues to guide them. Garfield wondered, opening and shutting her school copy of Roget’s Thesaurus. ‘Morwenna Middleton, Regent Square, Penzance, Cornwall, England, The World, The Solar System, Universe 84 (b).’ The hackneyed classroom joke, at once emphasizing and challenging her insignificance in the cosmos now mocked her brothers. They had no address for her, not even an old one, no number they could call. Garfield had long since given up on calling friends since she had severed ties with them as completely as she had with family.

  ‘She’s still alive, though.’

  ‘Oh yes. She sold another of Rachel’s birthday cards a few months ago. I forgot to tell you.’

  ‘Another one?’ Garfield asked, hating the predictability of the anger this roused in him. ‘How many does she have, for God’s sake?’

  There was a cough from on the landing. Hedley jumped up, evading the issue as usual. The undertakers from the Co-Op were ready to leave. ‘I’ll show you out,’ he told them.

  Garfield stood in his sister’s doorway and watched the little procession head down to the hall. Hedley in front, acting as scout in case Antony emerged from the kitchen and saw the man and boy behind with the stretcher thing between them. It had ingenious rigid panels stitched into the black nylon that had folded up to create a kind of lightweight coffin. Presumably a harness kept her in place. He had been expecting and dreading a bodybag effect but between the four straight sides there was not even a telltale bulge to show which end her head was. Surely her head was at the back? Surely bodies always left a house feet first?

  He came forward to keep her in view as Hedley held the front door open and said something to the undertakers about calling in tomorrow then he stepped back into the shadows before Hedley could glance up and shame him into rejoining their shattered father in the kitchen.

  At the top of the loft steps was a finger-stained trap-door, now splintered at its outer edge where Antony had forced it in the night. Above the trapdoor lay a small room, barely ten foot square. The tongue-and-groove wall that followed the line of the roof’s apex was punctured with a series of small doors into ingenious cupboards let into the void beyond. The other three walls were largely taken up with sliding sash windows, out of all proportion to the space, that gave views out across the bay and the promenade.

  Antony’s grandfather had been a tailor but he was also a shipping enthusiast and put in hours up here with his binoculars. Since his death it had become Rachel’s smaller studio. Her winter studio, she called it although she made use of it all year round. She had a larger studio, a proper one with north-facing windows and no distracting views, in a stone lean-to at the bottom of the garden. She loved the brilliance of the loft and its character even though the sunlight up there could be so bright it faded in days any work on paper she forgot to cover or tuck away in a cupboard. It was also a wildly impractical art space because the trapdoor and windows were the only way paintings could come in or out. Any canvas larger than two foot square had to be removed from its stretcher and rolled to come in or out and, once stretched, nothing larger than six by six would have been workable. Once the last of them had left home and there was less risk of noise or interruption she had worked up there more and more, retreating even from Antony’s quiet, unobtrusive presence, locking the trapdoor behind her to paint for hours at a stretch. She always took a full kettle up there with her and, if she were hungry, snacked on biscuits and Cup-n-Soup. If she needed a piss, she used an old china potty which she would then empty through a window into a nearby gutter.

  She had less strength in her arms than in vigorous youth and hated asking for help in stretching canvases. Besides, Antony had arthritic wrists so was not much stronger than she. So she had taken more and more to working on convenient whiteboards rarely larger than a biscuit tin, sometimes as small as a piece of toast. Garfield secretly preferred this smaller, tamer work. He found it more friendly and domestic but he knew it did not sell like the old stuff, or only to her few most loyal collectors.

  Now, when he pushed open the trapdoor, he was startled by a cold draught. He groped for the light switch but the bulb had perished. As his eyes adjusted to the dark and the lights outside came to seem bright, he saw that one of the windows had been smashed, leaving a savage, cartoony star through which wet wind was gusting.

  Stepping towards it he struck his foot on a table lamp that had been toppled to the floor. He stooped to turn it on and was shocked afresh at the squalor in which she liked to work. Floorboards, chair and table were lurid and lumpy with splashed or trodden-in paint. The not quite empty potty nestled against the kettle and an open packet of chocolate digestives. The lines had repeatedly blurred between what was for food, for artistic or personal use. A spoon brought up there for the eating of a yoghurt had lingered, unwashed, and been used to stir paint. The mouldy yoghurt pot now held a toothbrush clogged with dried-up Marvin medium. A comb, still carrying a few of his mother’s hairs, had been used to spread one acrylic colour in furrows across another then been left to dry and serve whichever medium called it next – hair, paint or lifting out a teabag from scalding tea. She sat or crouched to work. When she sat it was in an old kitchen chair but there was an armchair too for occasional sprawling in, which she kept below the windows, facing her easel not the view. Two big pebbles lay on the armchair at the moment and two more on the floor behind it. There was a mark in the tongue-and-groove panelling where one had been hurled so it was not hard to deduce how the window above had been shattered.

  He was moved to see she had been looking at an unfinished piece of her earlier work he had never seen, a big, near-perfect circle in a dazzling blue against which she had been experimenting with shades of grey when the work was abandoned. He wondered when she had done the piece. Certainly before Petroc. Since Petroc there had been nothing like this, nothing so energetically abstract.

  He reached, shivering, behind the easel for a piece of hardboard that would cover the hole in the window. Sifting through the tangle of string, corks, picture wire and old felt tips in a Mint Choc Chip ice-cream carton from his boyhood, he found gaffer tape and scissors and set about making a temporary repair to keep the wind and rain out.

  They were lucky with the weather. It was cold but sunny and dry. It was surprise enough that Rachel had bothered to make a will, more surprising yet that she had gone to such trouble to spell out how she wished them to dispose of her.

  To the consternation of the undertakers she had insisted on a simple, biodegradable coffin made of recycled cardboard.

  Lizzy was enthusiastic about this but Garfield could only worry about it turning prematurely pulpy in bad weather. Lizzy said she had once been to a funeral where the cardboard coffin had been lovingly painted and doodled on by the family the night before. Sure enough there was a second pained phone call from the undertakers to say the cardboard coffin looked well enough an
d was quite sturdy but that the instructions that came with it suggested asking the bereaved if they wished to decorate its plain surfaces to add a personal touch.

  ‘You don’t want to decorate it, do you, sir?’

  ‘Erm. No,’ Garfield said, alarmed. ‘Certainly not.’ And he took a unilateral decision not to offer the choice to the others.

  Now that the coffin was being borne into the Friends’ Meeting House however, he felt it looked woefully unadorned. Not even the Autumn Sheaf (assorted asters, maple leaves, some decorative seed heads) stopped the coffin looking like an outsized shoebox.

  She never gave the environment a second thought. The only reason she had chosen this option was to have them express themselves all over her coffin. He was ashamed of his inhibitions and having connived with the undertaker’s conservatism. Now what should have been grounds for exuberance merely looked like loveless economy.

  Hedley could paint, of course, but he hated to fall short of perfection so took few risks. If Morwenna were there she would have understood exactly what was expected. She would have thrown a coffin-painting wake and had everyone leave their mark, however colourful or rude. She would have brought out glue and sequins and pots of coloured spangly dust. In the Hollywood version of this funeral he would find the courage to raid the box of crayons and paints in the Sunday School cupboard and hand them out right now, have everyone decorate the coffin as part of the ceremony. In the play of this funeral he would find the courage at least to stand up and speak of his shame and of how he would have painted the cardboard had he the nerve.

  But Garfield had never spoken in Meeting in his life. He had often felt the prompting. Sitting in the silent circle he would find the urge to speak of joy or sorrow or of simple sudden understanding welling up in him and would even get as far as shifting his feet so they were planted firmly and evenly so he would stand with confidence. The same niggling inner voice that checked his hand above the paint box always sapped his resolve, however, by reminding him he must only speak if what he felt were true ministry and not merely a desire to hear his own voice or take issue with what an earlier speaker had said.