Notes from an Exhibition

by Patrick Gale

  There was no fireplace in Morwenna’s room so they’d invade Petroc’s and Hedley’s so as to smoke joints up the chimney. Spencer decided Hedley was cool because of this and got Morwenna to bring him with her to the next party at Bosviggan, which involved horrendously risky lies about visiting perfectly innocent friends who were actually on holiday in Brittany.

  Which was how Hedley got to know Troy, who had actually left the school long before Hedley was old enough to notice him. Spencer’s big brother, an impressive five years older than Hedley, he was thin where Spencer was stocky, and had rusty blonde hair, prominent cheekbones and a mouth like a line. He smiled so rarely that it was rumoured his teeth were as crooked as his hero’s, David Bowie. Despite the Duran Duran hair he was cultivating at the time, he looked like a sexy ferret. With astonishing bravery, possibly born of his Bowie fixation, he had let it be known he was bisexual. There was never any proof of this, nothing with a pulse, but there were no steady girlfriends either so the revelation, or rumour, effectively lent him a tantalizing odour of sophistication that went some way towards counteracting the squalid, borderline poverty in which the Youngs lived.

  You couldn’t say Troy singled him out – he would never have done something so obvious – but Hedley rarely went to Bosviggan without Troy finding a minute or two alone with him, longer if people were drinking and inattentive. In his cool, interested-but-not-really way, he drew Hedley out and found out about him, about how he was different from his brothers but not precisely why. They talked about the pressures of family expectations, of the lack of privacy and of where they’d rather live than Penzance.

  It was Troy who, casually, and saying, ‘Don’t bother to give it back as I won’t read it again,’ passed him a battered copy of Dancer from the Dance, which he claimed a bloke on a train had given him.

  It was gay. Completely, undeniably, lock-it-in-a-drawer gay.

  Hedley would have been hard-pressed to summarize the plot even when the book was fresh in his mind, as it seemed to be nearly all parties and nightclubs, but it conjured up another world, a drug-fuelled, hedonistic subworld of New York where a shifting crowd of men fellin lust and danced and wore wonderful clothes and occasionallyfell deeply in love. It could have been designedto instil a yearning for big city life in provincial closetcasestoo timid even to land a kitchen porter’s job in anItalian hotel. And probably was.

  Because of the terrible holiday on the Gower Peninsula, he didn’t have a chance to talk to Troy about the book for weeks and when he did, Troy was maddeningly vague and unfocused beyond dismissing it with a shrug and saying, ‘Yeah, well, but it was all a bit gay, wasn’t it?’ So that Hedley wondered if perhaps he was astonishingly stupid and had read the book with little understanding and passed it on with even less of the significance the gesture might have had.

  But then, because Morwenna was off sofa-surfing with Spencer somewhere and wasn’t around to see, he accepted some girl’s offer of a toke on her joint one night, found after a few stoned minutes that the girl had wandered off to dance and been replaced by Troy, and it all came splurging out.

  With hindsight this was probably exactly how Troy’s being bisexual had become such an open secret. They had not talked for long, because the police turned up soon afterwards to complain about the noise and Morwenna had insisted they leave but Hedley had said enough to wake worrying that Troy would now tell the world. Or at least Spencer, who would tell Morwenna.

  Nothing was said, however, and when he was next up there he found Troy was now all questions. So what was it like, actually being gay? How did it feel? What was he going to do about it, since he wasn’t, you know, just bisexual like Troy? They were questions that struck to the heart of Hedley’s teenage frustration and insecurity.

  But then, once he was drunk enough to deny all knowledge later, Troy said, ‘You could kiss me. If you like. Just to see how it feels, you know?’ And they had gone out, minutes apart, to the biggest of the empty barns, stumbling on God knows what in the darkness, and kissed and kissed. No talking, no groping – Hedley didn’t dare without encouragement – just kissing. Then some people had come out into the yard from the house and Troy had got nervous and slipped away.

  It happened three times more, again in the barn, now with no more preamble from Troy than a muttered, ‘You … you know?’ and a minute inclination of his sexy ferret face towards the back door.

  Hedley would go home, walking as often as not, cheeks on fire from Troy’s stubble, more worried that he reeked of Troy’s Blue Stratos than that anyone might smell dope or beer on him, but exhilarated in a way that had nothing to do with the man he had been kissing and everything to do with the possibilities of a future that seemed a little bit nearer.

  Then Morwenna had gone up to LSE and Antony, in a hideously embarrassing little exchange on the stairs, said, ‘I don’t want you spending time up at Bosviggan any more without Wenn to keep an eye on you.’

  And a few days later, Petroc let slip as they walked to school that Kirsty Spiers, the big sister of one of his mates, had got engaged to Troy Youngs and how her family were dead against it as they had hopes for her but it was going to happen anyway. And then Morwenna had decided she was in love with someone in London and had hardly come home at all for a while.

  The audience from the one o’clock screening came out, bringing with it a great gust of pent-up sugar and excitement and stale air scented with artificial fruit. Hedley smiled blandly in case anyone looked his way while Candy sat on, legs twined tightly around her stool as though it was rats not children surging past her. She then smacked on a single rubber glove and slipped off to walk around the studio just emptied and throw the worst of the litter into a bin liner. Hedley followed the last of the children out and propped the doors open to draw in some fresh air off the street then retreated behind his counter. Candy came back to the foyer, slung her half-full bin liner into a cavity behind the freezer then stood just outside the doors where she smoked a cigarette, watching the late shoppers with alternating expressions of scorn and blank incuriosity that showed exactly how she must have looked at Petroc’s age, three children and three fathers ago. She squished the butt with a neat swivel of a toe then resumed her station on her stool.

  She affected to read the Film Society brochure then asked him lightly, ‘So Troy Youngs, right?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Is it true he’s AC/DC?’

  ‘It’s what they used to say,’ Hedley told her. ‘But it’s a pack of lies.’

  ‘Really?’ She perked up and unconsciously touched her hair. ‘You know that for a fact? Because a friend of mine’s quite interested in him.’

  ‘He’s gay,’ Hedley told her. ‘Now that is. Totally gay. Kirsty Spiers broke off with him because he wouldn’t, you know, satisfy her.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, comically deflated.

  ‘Still,’ he breezed as the first group arrived for the teatime screening of Pretty in Pink, ‘one girl’s loss’ll be some boy’s happy day.’

  MING FROG BOWL (1961). Oil on board.

  Dating from the early years of Kelly’s marriage, when economy forced her to recycle her materials, this tiny painting is worked on the back of a larger work (artist unknown) which she sawed into pieces. Bowl with Greengages (1961) and Milk Bottle with Corn Cockles (1961) were painted on other fragments of the same work. It shows the interior of an Early Wanli dish, dating from around 1580, showing a toad – not a frog – sitting amidst plants and on a cloud of what may be toad spawn. Such porcelain dishes were made in the late Ming era for export to the Japanese market. Utterly unlike her later work, it displays a precocious academic flair. Careful examination of the light reflections on her bowl’s surface reveals the distorted representation of a couple standing between the bowl and a nearby sash window. Perhaps Ming Frog Bowl represents a tentative step towards painting of obvious commercial and decorative appeal. Kelly certainly retained a sneaking admiration for the exquisite still lives of William Nicholson at a period
when they were quite out of fashion compared to the abstracts of his son, Ben and this work could be read as a homage to his. Kelly is not known ever to have possessed or had access to such a valuable ceramic so it is assumed she worked either from a postcard or from memory. A remarkably similar bowl formed part of Oxford’s Ashmolean collections until it was accidentally broken in 1970.

  (Lent by the Warden and Fellows of Christchurch College, Oxford)

  They had exchanged letters. Garfield wrote to her father initially, attaching a photocopy of Rachel’s letter, explaining that Rachel had recently died and that he desired nothing but to meet.

  ‘I quite understand how awkward this will be for you,’ he wrote. ‘And that you may wish to have nothing to do with me. I feel sure you are as curious as I am, though. I know you probably have family and will perhaps prefer not to introduce me to them or in any way alert them to my existence.’ As an afterthought he enclosed a fairly recent photograph Lizzy had taken of him when they were out on a friend’s boat. It revealed little about him, of course, other than that he was in his forties, capable of smiling, possessed of good teeth and all his hair, but he hoped it might make the receipt of the letter less alarming, stop it, at least, from seeming the work of a crank.

  A card came back almost at once. It was of some porcelain in the Ashmolean.

  My father is beyond correspondence these days. And is probably too confused to understand who you are. You are welcome to come and look at him whenever you like. We never leave home but the late afternoons are best, between four and six o’clock. Yours sincerely, Niobe Shepherd.

  It seemed to be the only house in St John’s Street that had not been restored and cosseted in recent memory. Garfield had researched Simeon Shepherd on the Internet and found that he was an art historian who had published no articles for twenty years and no books for thirty. He had found a copy of his monograph relating Uccello to an Iranian artist of the same period and had tried to read it on the train but, with baffling assumption of knowledge, it had no illustrations and seemed to be more footnote than text. What he had learnt led him to expect severity and elegance. This house must once have had both but now looked down-at-heel, even shifty. Its tarnished brass knocker was of an odd, possibly Masonic design, a kind of triangle suspended from an eye. The rust-coloured paint was flaking so badly from the door he could see patches of bare, blackened wood. He knocked too vigorously and a large paint flake fluttered to the ground.

  A sharp-nosed, middle-aged woman opened the door, took one look at him and exclaimed, ‘Christ! Sorry. That was a shock even after the photograph. You’d better come in.’

  ‘Thanks.’ He stepped into the gloomy hall. It smelled of gas and damp and he noticed the woman was wearing two cardigans.

  She gave a quick smile that revealed nothing. ‘I’m Niobe Shepherd,’ she said. ‘My father’s upstairs.’

  His half-sister. And she said my father not our or your. Garfield’s mind was working so hard at missing nothing he found it hard to speak.

  ‘I’d keep your coat on,’ she said. ‘The boiler’s packed up again and he’s got the only fire. I’ve just made tea. Do you want a cup?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  He followed her into the kitchen. It was like an advertisement from 1952 and did not appear to have been redecorated since then. There was a sour, lemon colour on the walls. The torn curtains were decorated with a frenzied ‘kitchen’ pattern of spice jars and bay trees. There was the kind of gas cooker that lit with a wand on a greasy hose and, beside it, slope-fronted cupboards with striped glass doors that slid in unclearable crumb-clogged grooves. A saucer on the floor held a half-eaten sardine, another, some yellowing milk. An enormous, off-white cat glared from discomitingly yellow eyes on a blanket-covered chair in the corner.

  The table was barely visible beneath a thick typescript and an array of open shoeboxes filled with little cards. He picked a stray one off his chair in order to sit down. In a tiny version of her handwriting it read, Slater, Montagu and gave a list of page numbers.

  She took it from him with a muted, ‘I knew I hadn’t lost that,’ and tucked it into one of the boxes then poured him a mug of tea. ‘Is it very tarry?’ she asked.

  It was tepid. ‘It’s fine,’ he assured her. ‘It’ll wake me up.’

  She sat across from him and ferreted out a packet of gingernuts from under the pages of typescript she had already turned. ‘Indexing,’ she explained. ‘It means I can work from home and save paying someone else to be here.’

  ‘Oh. I see. Interesting.’

  ‘Not very. Dull books are easier on the whole. If they send one that threatens to be interesting I have to read it backwards to avoid getting too drawn in to do the job properly.’ She stared at him again and laughed shortly. ‘You do look amazingly like him.’

  ‘Really? Don’t you?’

  ‘Not at all. I take after my mother.’

  ‘Is she …?’

  She shook her head and dunked a biscuit. ‘She died years ago. You’re, what, forty?’

  ‘Forty-one,’ he said.

  ‘So she died when you were a baby.’

  ‘When you were a child?’

  ‘I’m quite a bit older than you.’ She coughed nervously. ‘He was always very independent, luckily. Until fairly recently.’

  ‘Ah.’

  They both drank their nasty tea.

  ‘You probably want to see him now,’ she said abruptly just as he burst out with, ‘My letter must have been a shock.’

  They each apologized and made no, after you gestures then she said, ‘Not greatly. You’re not the first.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘He seems to have been both extraordinarily fertile,’ she said, ‘and careless.’

  Was this his voice in her? This cool, drily amused superiority?

  ‘We have three half-brothers,’ she added. ‘That I know about, that is. The other two are both younger than you. Both American. He did several lecture series there after my mother died. I was boarding and it paid handsomely compared to what he made here. They don’t look like him like you do. But there’s an interesting pattern emerging. Your mothers all kept a secret until they died and you’ve all said you don’t want anything. Which is lucky, given that there’s so little to be had. This is rented.’ Her economical gesture took in the house about them. ‘In case you were wondering.’

  ‘I wasn’t.’

  ‘We have it on a long and intractable lease. His attendance allowance and disability benefit help and the council and university do their bits.’

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’

  She sighed, stacking index cards into neat piles and as she bent her head forward, he noticed a bald patch on her scalp, perhaps four inches across. She had attempted to disguise it by growing the rest of her hair long and pinning it across in an artful disarray but as she fretted and rubbed at it, the habitual gesture she made now, the artifice was steadily pulled aside.

  ‘He had a stroke,’ she said. ‘At first that was all and he lost most of his speech. Then he had another one and lost the use of his right leg. Now I think it’s just advanced crumble and multi-infarct thingy. I used to be able to understand what he was saying but most of the time now it doesn’t make sense. And he’s stopped reading or writing, which is a bad sign.’

  ‘Did he meet the others?’

  ‘Oh yes. He had quite long talks with both of them and was signally unimpressed. You’ll have a much easier time of it. Shall we go up?’

  Was there some mischievous pleasure for her in all this? Some grim amusement to be had at this futile hunger in her male half-relatives for a meaningful connection to an absent and faithless father? The cat jumped off its chair with a malevolent growl and led the way upstairs. As they climbed past dim etchings Garfield could barely decipher in the half-light, the sounds of a television drew closer.

  Simeon Shepherd’s room was stifling after the tomb-like chill downstairs. An oscillating fan heater was competing with a Western
. The old man in the wheelchair was asleep, his head to one side. He had thick, white hair and sharper versions of Garfield’s features. Now it was Garfield’s turn to swear under his breath.

  Niobe looked from one to the other. ‘Sinister, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Like the last scene of that stupid Kubrick film. He’ll turn into an embryo next. Pa? Pa!’ She gave her father a vigorous shake. ‘Bit deaf too,’ she explained to Garfield. ‘Sit. Please.’ She muted the volume on the television.

  Her father, their father, was looking around him and blinking as deliberately as an owl.

  ‘This is Garfield Middleton, Pa. His late mother was another of your girlfriends.’

  Simeon Shepherd seemed to focus on Garfield a moment or two then murmured something indistinct.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘I’ve forgotten your mother’s name.’

  ‘Rachel Kelly,’ Garfield said.

  ‘The painter?’

  ‘Yes. I thought I’d told you.’

  ‘Good lord. He should have married her and made some money that way. Silly fool. Rachel Kelly, Pa! The abstract painter! You know? Cornwall! Patrick Heron!’

  He made another gargling sound and looked quite definitely at Garfield now.

  ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘That got through. He hates abstract art with a passion. I’ll leave you two to get acquainted.’

  ‘Oh, but …’ Garfield thought to ask her to stay and interpret but she was too brisk. ‘You can’t stay long,’ she said. ‘He has the concentra tion span of a gnat and he’ll probably fall asleep again in a bit. I’ll be back in the kitchen.’