Notes from an Exhibition

by Patrick Gale

  And Morwenna was not there. Garfield had not stopped hoping even now that she might appear, breathless, noisy and welcome. Knowing no friends who still saw her regularly, having no phone numbers or addresses not hopelessly out of date, they had placed announcements of the funeral in the Guardian and The Times adding Please tell Morwenna at the end. He kept up a show of being angry with her because it was easier that way. He had been angry when Hedley first found out about her selling the birthday cards – especially since it wasn’t even her own she was selling – but now, if anyone had thought to challenge him, he would have admitted that he was more upset than angry, unhappy that she should be so desperate as to be reduced to selling something precious when she could have come to any of them for help. What anger he ever felt at her was really with himself for being unable to change the situation.

  He nodded at people he knew. Lizzy was kissing, of course, Hedley and Antony were shaking hands. Then they all sat.

  Penzance Meeting had no purpose-built house and currently met in a disused school from the era when a large room would be subdivided by screens and curtains for smaller classes then thrown open again for meals and assemblies. There was far more space than the Friends needed so they occupied one of the cosier subsections. The windows were placed high to avoid distracting children with views but they let in lots of light and birdsong from the surrounding streets and playground. There were the elements common to Meeting Houses the world over, the posters (for peace, for environmentalism), announcements of talks, concerts, prison and hospital visiting, the shelves of books and pamphlets. He was especially fond of this Meeting Room because of its strong, happy associations with kindergarten and school libraries. For some reason a potent silence was always especially achievable here in a way he did not often find in Falmouth.

  Rachel’s coffin was set upon trestles in the midst of their circle at the point where there was usually a small plain table with a faded Fifties tablecloth and a copy of Quaker Faith and Practice. The table was still there but moved to one side and, because this was a Meeting for Worship as well as a funeral, whoever it was who normally brought something to decorate the table had brought a clipping of a rose bush complete with glossy red hips, and set it on the table in a small glass vase.

  Lizzy reached out for his hand and squeezed it briefly before settling into stillness. He glanced at her then at his father and across at Hedley, who was blowing his nose, no, crying. It struck him they had each sat not with each other but with a comforter. He had Lizzy, his father had Jack Trescothick, his oldest friend in the community, and Hedley had his partner, Oliver. He felt a pang of envy at Hedley’s tears. Hedley had always found his emotions easy to access, a shallow current safely dipped into then shaken off. Perhaps it was the source of his essential easeful blandness. He would rage or weep for a few minutes then move on, refreshed and untroubled. Garfield’s feelings, by contrast, were a deep, forbidding pool, dark and unfathomable, stirred by sudden currents he could not control.

  There were the usual sounds of a group of people settling; creaking of chairs, a squeak of a rubber sole on lino, a cough or two. Then the tick-ticking of the heater became the loudest sound in the room. He sought somewhere to rest his eyes that wasn’t a person and let them come to rest on the cardboard coffin. Now that he looked at it properly it was rather fine in its simplicity and cool, off-white colour.

  Someone, a woman, got to her feet then paused for a moment before speaking. Garfield recognized her but couldn’t recollect her name.

  ‘We are here to say goodbye to our dear Rachel, who was a regular attender since Antony first brought her to Penzance a little over forty years ago. For those of you who have never been to a Friends’ Meeting before, this may not be the kind of funeral you’re used to. The proceedings take the form of a Quaker Meeting for Worship. This is based on silent contemplation. There are two aims in our worship: to give thanks for the life that has been lived and to help those who mourn to feel a deep and comforting sense of divine presence within us. The silence may be broken by anyone, Quaker or not, who feels moved to speak, to pray or offer up a memory of Rachel.’

  There was a pause while she sat and Jack stood, a copy of Quaker Faith and Practice in his hands. He cleared his throat and read, ‘Accepting the fact of death, we are freed to live more fully.’ He allowed a few seconds for that idea to sink in then turned to a place marked with a bookmark and read again. ‘Quakers do have something very special to offer the dying and the bereaved, namely that we are at home in silence. Not only are we thoroughly used to it and unembarrassed by it but we know something about sharing it, encountering others in its depths and, above all, letting ourselves be used in it … You don’t get over sorrow; you work your way right to the centre of it.’

  Jack sat down and Garfield tried again to lose himself in contemplation of the coffin, and the fact that his mother was in it and that he would never see her again. Or hear her voice. He realized it was her distinctive, crackly voice with its strange, sporadically transatlantic accent he would miss most keenly. It was a voice that had often mocked him, that left nowhere to hide but which, by the same token, was utterly candid. Quakerly candid. A voice for letting you know there was no worse to come. A voice for spine-stiffening, for the be-a-man breaking of bad news, but also for the seductive invitation to break rules and say the unsayable.

  When he was first old enough to join the adult Meetings and to sit in silence rather than be parked in Sunday School, she had quickly divined his horror that one or other of his parents might suddenly feel moved to speak. Once or twice she tormented him by clearing her throat and shifting in her chair as though about to stand then smiled wickedly as his eyes widened in horror. Antony was not amused. Usually, though, she was too involved for such teasing. She did not come every Sunday and elected to stay a lifelong attender rather than committing to membership. She always shied away from serious discussion of such matters yet something in Quakerism spoke to her: the lack of authoritative voices, perhaps, or the democracy. Most probably, given her unquiet soul, it was its ideal of stillness.

  When he married Lizzy and Rachel was still disposed to like her, she said that she thought it a good faith in which to raise children. ‘I like the way it manages to be mystical and no-nonsense at the same time – meditation in plain surroundings. It offers you the divine but it keeps it in a plain pine cupboard alongside the kettle and cookies and Band-Aids.’

  He suspected that Quakers fell into two groups; the talkers and the silent. He knew that ministry was good, that it was good that anyone could feel moved by the spirit to share a revealed truth with the group but he still preferred the silence and regarded a Meeting where hardly anyone spoke as superior to those where no silence lasted more than five minutes. He knew he wasn’t alone in this. Some of the older members, who never spoke, had let slip mutinous mutterings over coffee about earlier, less assertive times. They tended to blame Oprah.

  He had sat in many different Meetings too so knew that some were far quieter than others. Talk encouraged talk. If no braver soul stood up initially, the timid ones were less likely to follow suit. The urge to minister went in cycles. Talky people would move away and, for a few blessed months, a Meeting would pull comforting silence back around itself.

  Once he heard Rachel tell Petroc, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll never speak in Meeting. I’m always afraid that if I stood and started speaking I’d never stop.’ Which of course then made him even more afraid that one day she would break the silence and talk on and on about all the wildly disjointed thoughts that were occurring to her, on and on, for minute after excruciating minute, until people started openly to exchange unquakerly looks or even to stare or to nudge him in the ribs and whisper,

  ‘Can’t you do something?’

  By a small miracle nobody spoke until nearly forty minutes of her funeral had passed. He had worried there would be simple-minded praise or pointless reminiscence or even, more disturbing, ministry that had nothing to do with the dea
d woman in their midst but that made some point by actively ignoring her. His mind was free to circle away from his grief into memories and fears and back to the grief again like a bird asserting its independence of a pool where its flock was drifting and feeding.

  Just as he was starting to focus on the coffin again and the room and the people in the room and to think that perhaps it was sad that no one was speaking because it meant no one had loved or even liked her much, a woman he had never seen before stood up. He knew at once she was not a Quaker. She was not used to any of this but she had decided to speak because she had judged that it was important even though she had been steeling herself to it for forty minutes.

  She was about his father’s age, or maybe younger; late sixties? Her coat and clothes did not fit her or go together. They looked secondhand. Her straight, grey hair was so badly cut he imagined her trimming it herself with random, spasmodic snips of a pair of kitchen scissors. She glanced fitfully about her and Garfield read and recognized the signals and knew, before she spoke, where she and Rachel had met. This was a woman who talked back to empty rooms.

  Having stood and looked about her, she reached awkwardly down for a much-used plastic carrier bag.

  ‘I got to know Rachel a long time ago when we were both in hospital, in St Lawrence’s in fact. On the gridiron. Huh! And it seemed unlikely either of us would reach our forties, never mind our sixties. I think I was more ill than she was. I mean she left before I did. But before she left she gave me this picture and it helped me and it always has and I think it says more about her lovely spirit than I can as I’m not – Huh! A very good talker. So. Erm.’ She pulled off the plastic bag. ‘Perhaps we could pass it round?’

  She sat down abruptly, eyes bright now with mad daring and relief, and passed the small picture to the man on her left.

  Nobody ever passed things around. It broke the silence in the wrong way, creating little currents of sociability and expectation. But Quakers forgive everything and, besides, it was a funeral so the uninitiated were an expected seasoning to the occasion.

  Garfield too was expectant, concentration shot; a painting by his mother he had not seen before was a message from beyond the grave. He made rapid calculations as to the date it might have been done and what style she was working in then. He stared impatiently at the small, complacent smiles with which people were looking at it, then it arrived in Lizzy’s hands and she placed it in his so they could look at it together.

  It was small, perhaps eight inches by five, oil on board, and was almost entirely canary yellow except for a thin, uneven orange line that seemed to burn a horizon across its middle. The uninitiated might think it a painting she could have done in minutes with three or four large strokes of a paint-laden brush but he knew that it was made of layer upon layer of tiny strokes like the scales of a butterfly’s iridescence and that the positioning and precise shade of the orange would have caused her agonies of indecision.

  He had half-expected a daub of a kitten or a sunflower – a madhouse offering not even by her – but though unsigned, this was as recognizably hers as her own scarred wrists or thin, vulnerable neck, and it brought such a burning to his throat and eyes and a sense of loss to his heart that he could hardly bear to give it up; Lizzy had gently to prise it from his hands and pass it on for him.

  He saw Oliver, who worked for her old Cork Street gallery, turning pale with desire as it approached him and made himself look up at the ceiling because he did not want to think about Hedley and Oliver or of money just now but of his mother.

  And then, before the picture had quite completed its circle, Lizzy stood up, in that neat way she had, with her knees together, that made her seem to uncurl. Garfield didn’t know where to look. Not at his father and brother certainly, but not at strangers either, for fear of watching their reactions. He was at once proud – ‘This is my beautiful wife speaking!’ – and aghast – ‘This is my beautiful wife speaking!’ much as parents must often feel when obliged to watch their children perform in public.

  Lizzy was a Birthright Quaker like him and yet she claimed never to have spoken in Meeting. It was one of the things they first found they had in common. ‘I think of it,’ she said, ‘but then the moment passes and it no longer seems right.’ One of the jokes she had cracked a little too often for it to be funny any more was that there should be a neat phrase for the Quaker equivalent of esprit de l’escalier, for the ministry one thought of making but never quite made.

  He decided to look, very hard, at his hands.

  ‘Garfield and I have been trying to have a child for some time now,’ she said and he clenched his fingers together in his lap. ‘And I’ve been wondering whether one of the reasons it’s taking us so long is fear that a child of ours might have the same mental health challenges as its grandmother. But – this sounds awful probably – but if a child of ours did have those challenges but could produce a painting like that, we’d have nothing to fear. We’d be blessed.’

  She sat, less elegantly than she had stood because the chair had moved and she had to fumble for it. She laid a cool hand on Garfield’s and smiled across at the woman who was now returning her precious painting to its carrier bag. ‘Thank you for bringing us that,’ she murmured.

  The silent minutes that followed passed slowly. Garfield continued to stare at his hands, aware of the clicking of the stove and the ticking of the clock and of every sigh and breath around him. At last the woman who had started the Meeting glanced at the clock then shook her neighbour’s hand and the ripple of greeting that ran round the room signalled the Meeting’s end.

  Everyone watched in silence as the undertakers carried the coffin out; then Antony followed them and Hedley and Garfield fell in behind as a pair, each spontaneously dropping their partner to walk together. Garfield felt he should apologize for Lizzy but found himself so clogged with unshed tears that he couldn’t speak.

  ‘I know,’ Hedley said softly, his eyes as pink and small as a white rat’s. ‘I know.’

  ‘You take your dad and Hedley,’ Oliver said as they neared the cars. ‘Lizzy can come with me.’

  ‘Do you know the way?’ Hedley asked him, blowing his nose.

  ‘I do,’ Lizzy said.

  Garfield couldn’t bear to look at her so stepped forward to hold open the passenger door for his father. Antony seemed to have shrunk and Garfield found himself instinctively reaching out in that policeman’s gesture to prevent his father thumping his head on the door opening as he lowered himself in. He walked around, sat in the driver’s seat and waited until Hedley had slipped into the rear.

  ‘Could I have one of these?’ Antony asked, holding up a tin of fruit-flavoured car sweets.

  ‘Sure,’ Garfield croaked. ‘Good idea.’

  They each took one. They were the old-fashioned kind, bathed in tangy icing sugar, and suddenly seemed the most refreshing thing in the world.

  ‘I don’t suppose many people are coming back afterwards,’ Hedley said as they pulled out, ‘but I put out cake and tea things and whisky and sherry in case and boiled a couple of kettles so they won’t take too long to boil again.’

  This was nervous chat but Garfield could think of nothing reassuring to say back so let it hang between them.

  As they followed the hearse down Clarence Street, he saw how Hedley reached out to give their father’s shoulder a little squeeze.

  In keeping with her eco-friendly coffin, Rachel had opted not for cremation, as had become the local norm, but for non-denominational burial. A farmer a few miles towards Land’s End had used diversification grants to set up both a pet crematorium and funeral service and a multi-species burial ground so that humans might be buried alongside their pets. His brochure boasted that they had facilities to cremate any animal up to the size of a carthorse and several horses had already been laid to rest there with space reserved alongside them for their erstwhile riders. There were no headstones in the burial ground. Instead each body or casket of ashes was laid to rest benea
th one’s sapling of choice with no more permanent marker than a cardboard label tied to its trunk. The idea was to found a new, organically spreading wood instead of the inert space and straight lines of a traditional cemetery. Because so few mourners could bear to settle for a quiet English native as their marker tree however, the result was unlikely ever to seem natural in the Penwith landscape. On their way from the parking area to Rachel’s grave they passed a few beeches and holly trees but also flame-red acers and ironwoods, magnolias and sad, short monkey puzzles.

  As Rachel’s neighbour was to be an Irish Water Spaniel’s swamp cypress, likely to spread with time, they had opted for something deciduous and columnar, a fastigiate English oak. It stood to one side of the waiting pit in the plastic pot which still bore the price tag and care label from the nursery that had raised it. Its long leaves had turned brown but showed no signs of falling yet. Apparently they would hold on, like a beech’s, until the spring and only drop as their replacements came through. Garfield liked this idea and the way they would rustle together in the winter winds. Rachel liked a bit of noise.

  Copying something he and Oliver had experienced at some friend’s funeral, Hedley handed out large springs of rosemary or lavender from a basket as everyone arrived. The undertakers lowered the coffin into its hole then stood back as, following Antony’s lead, they tossed their fragrant sprigs in on top of it. It was less brutal than throwing handfuls of earth, Oliver had explained, made nobody muddy and left a nicely evocative scent on the hands for hours afterwards. It still felt as if they were starting the burial process though. And they were scarcely spared because they then had to stand about while a woman on a small mechanical digger pushed a mound of earth back over coffin and herbs with a brutally frank thump, so that the tree could be planted. She manoeuvred the tree out of its pot and into the hole and offered a spade to Antony in case he wanted to lend a symbolic hand but he seemed quite unmanned and merely shook his head with a brief, devastated smile.