Notes from an Exhibition

by Patrick Gale

  Encouraged by the others, Jack helped her clear it out and sweep away decades of cobwebs. They spent two days sloshing its walls with whitewash, cleaned the window with vinegar, moved back in the decrepit chaise longue they had been about to put out for the dustmen and suddenly she had a studio almost better than his purpose-built one on the edge of Newlyn.

  She began to paint every day, with no particular view in mind other than perfecting whatever idea had seized her. She walked a lot, although the great bulge of her baby made this tiring and drew disapproving glances from women who thought she should be at home with her feet up. She drew and painted small works in situ, on beaches and in fields.

  She discovered she was not a terribly good housewife as a result, frequently forgetting to do anything about food in the evenings. But Antony was forbearing; happy, presumably, that she seemed healthy again. Michael was a plain but reliable cook, used to fending for himself and feeding Antony, so would often rescue her by cooking them all chops or sardines or sausages.

  When the pregnancy finally defeated her and she was obliged to lie down more and more to rest her aching back and legs, the old man enjoyed fussing around her, although he could hardly hear a thing she said and would often just smile rather than ask her to repeat a remark. Antony would come home from teaching to find her listening to the radio, being fed bloater paste sandwiches by his father and amusing local gossip by Jack. They were all very merry together and she saw no reason to think life should not continue like that.

  The baby started on September the fourth. She was checked on by Jack then driven by Antony the few hundred yards from their front gate to the little lying-in hospital on the seafront towards Newlyn, with Jack pedalling his bicycle alongside them and shouting encouragement.

  Childbirth was at once far more painful and far simpler than she had been led to imagine. Nothing, least of all reading the copies of Truby King and Dr Spock from the lending library, had prepared her for the sensation of her body taking over so entirely from her mind, an effect heightened further by the midwife kindly giving her laughing gas when the pain and the language it was drawing from her, threatened to become too much.

  But the baby, who they agreed to call after Antony’s father, was perfect, to the point where just looking at him made her cry but in a happy way and she could quite see how some women thought the pain was worth the reward and had baby after baby until they were worn out. They gave him the room across from theirs, which she had already painted blue with a frieze of little clouds, and laid him in a cot donated by a Quaker household that had no further use for it.

  But then the shadows came for her.

  First Michael shocked them by announcing he was moving into a nursing home. There was nothing wrong with him apart from his deafness and a touch of angina, but he was adamant, saying he had friends there and preferred to move in while he was still compos mentis. It was clear he felt the house belonged to a young family now and that he would be in the way and a burden. But the reverse was the case, not least because he didn’t mind cooking, and Rachel found she missed him painfully.

  The baby was now not so sweet and cried for hours at a time and Antony seemed to think she could stop it just by being its mother, which was far from the case. So they were short with each other and had their first proper arguments. And Jack was away, taking one of his semidetached holidays with Fred in Tangier, so she could not look to him to tease her into better cheer.

  All this would pass. She knew it would. She knew babies grew up and couples rediscovered harmony. She knew she would have time to paint again in a while and that her breasts would not always hurt so. She knew the weather would not always be so blustery and dark.

  And yet the darkness that stole upon her was like no darkness she had experienced before. It had no real cause and it came upon her with devastating speed, like a storm across bright waters. Quite suddenly, in the space of little more than a day, whatever little gland provided hope or a sense of perspective, ceased its merciful function and she woke from the afternoon nap that Truby King insisted mother and baby take in their separate rooms and Garfield was crying through the bedroom wall and softly, from the drawer where she kept the pills Jack had weaned her off during pregnancy, a second, malign baby was whispering to her.

  She left Garfield to cry, fearing to look on him, and took the pill bottle from the drawer. It felt wrong to die in a house that was so good and where the good baby, the innocent one, was lying so she pulled a fisherman’s smock over her jersey and her thickest coat over that and gathered up the pills and a bottle of sloe gin Fred had made for them and took herself out to the studio. There she swallowed the pills, in several painful fistfuls, washing their gritty bitterness away with great, greedy glugs of the sour-sweet liqueur. Then she lay back on the broken-down chaise longue with a blanket over her and waited for death.

  A delicious calm came over her and for a few minutes an extraordinary clarity of vision, so that she could see every detail of the familiar view of the house’s rear, its windows, its drainpipes, the patches of rust, the fern growing from a crack beside the drain, the washing lines. But she could simultaneously see the shapes these elements made purely as shapes, uncluttered by meaning, and the way the sunlight, falling on those shapes without understanding or preference, simply as sunlight, released colours and patterns that only she could see. Even Garfield’s jagged crying, barely audible through his open window, and then only to his mother, had a shape and a colour.

  Part of her saw all this and thought, Wait! Let me see it long enough to get it down! And the other, stronger part spoke with her mother’s voice, soothing but controlling too, tucking the thick, death-blanket about her, and said,

  ‘No, dear. Don’t try to speak. We can just sit here a while and be nice and calm.’

  THE GODFATHERS (1972).

  Pencil and coloured crayon on paper.

  SYMPATHETIC BLUES (1972). Oil on canvas.

  Never shown until now, although named and signed as if for exhibition, The Godfathers surfaced among Kelly’s numerous papers and sketches after her death. The setting is the artist/doctor Jack Trescothick’s Newlyn studio where he is shown on a sofa with his fisherman companion, Fred George. The child between them, his face hidden in a cat mask but clearly identifiable from his clothes, is Kelly’s third, her son Hedley. The reason this tender picture, in which Kelly’s affection for the three and their fondness for one another is so evident, is strange is that only Trescothick was Hedley’s godfather. Fred George was drowned when Amazing Grace, the fishing boat he was working on, mysteriously sank on a calm summer night a year before Hedley was born. The informal photograph taken on his fifth birthday (see below) shows how his mother’s drawing simply replaces her and his father on the sofa with Trescothick and George. Executed in the same month, Sympathetic Blues is surely an abstraction of elements in the same image; artist, lover and godson are echoed in three shapes whose shades pick up exactly the shades of blue the three are wearing in The Godfathers and whose arrangement – two larger forms bending protectively around a much smaller third – suggests an emotional intensity from which the figurative work holds off.

  (Both works on permanent loan from Antony Middleton)

  Hedley had not meant to stay on so long after the funeral. With disastrous timing, long-booked builders had arrived in his and Oliver’s house in London to rip out, extend and re-fit the kitchen and Oliver was too busy at Mendel’s to oversee the work with the necessary attention to detail. Oliver could date a picture frame from only its back view and tell a real Kokoschka from a fake virtually by smell but he was quite incapable of stopping an electrician placing a socket several inches out of place and affected a kind of snow blindness when faced with fabric swatches. By rights Hedley should have driven back to London two or three days after Rachel and her shockingly undecorated cardboard coffin were laid in earth. Nearly a fortnight had passed, however, and he was still in Penzance.

  No one but he seemed to realize how much
there was to be done. Sorting Rachel’s clothes had taken days, for a start. She had always been a spendthrift clothes shopper and seemed never to throw anything away. As child after child had left home, she had simply extended her storage territory into the wardrobes and drawers they left empty. She never emptied her pockets when she put things away, either, so he kept finding things she would have long since forgotten losing: bracelets, cheques from galleries, house keys. Many of these finds would involve leaving the room to go to her desk or in search of yet another sombre consultaion with Antony. Some of the clothes – old bras, pants and tights and numerous things ruined by paint – could be bundled into bin liners without hesitation. Others were good enough for charity shops but needed washing or dry cleaning first. Others – usually barely worn suits or dresses, purchases made in her high-spending bouts of mania – were grand enough to count as vintage and therefore be sold for charity through a dealer.

  This was all time-consuming enough but then there was the way so many clothes were so evocative that Hedley would find himself remembering or weeping or simply sinking into little bouts of unconstructive reverie before stuffing them, no decision made, back into a cupboard.

  He was crying a lot still, which was unlike him. He had thought experience had left him thicker-skinned.

  He had pictured her death, and even wanted it, often. The reality had proved far easier and less traumatic than anything he had imagined; no hospital, no messy suicide, no drawn-out guilt trips or deathbed speeches. It was the unexpectedly quiet exit of such a histrionic woman that had unmanned him, he decided. He loved her, he had always loved her, but it was a love in which he had grown used to thinking of her as the tireless adversary. For as long as he could recall, their every conversation had been a skirmish, their every affectionate moment freighted with protective irony.

  She required his worship and would have hated him to see her reduced by a common or garden heart attack, would have hated him for seeing it. He had long suspected that, for all her bohemian credentials, she thought him less of a man for being gay. She was certainly made insecure by his living with a man who worked at Mendel’s, the gallery that had always represented her to the world. She had asked him to end the relationship and, when that failed, had tried to have Oliver fired. (Oliver’s mourning was purely sympathetic and professional’) That it was made plain that she was now less valuable to Mendel’s than Oliver was had not endeared him to her.

  Apart from all the clothes and belongings, there was the loft window to fix. Hedley called a glazier out to replace the broken pane up there. While waiting for him he took a bucket out to the garden below and picked over the flowerbeds, pots and gravel, retrieving all the pieces of shattered glass he could spot. He found one and then another of the six big pebbles she seemed always to have kept to hand there and, not far from them, snagged on a yucca’s needle-sharp leaves, the missing circlet thing she had sometimes worn about her wrist but more often used as a hair clasp when she tugged her hair back out of her face.

  He showed the glazier up to the attic then took the hair clasp to Antony. He found him in his usual chair, which caught the sun until noon. Hedley saw at a glance that he had failed to finish even the first of the letters he had set out to write that morning. He had probably not read the paper either but had completed both the day’s sudoku and cryptic crossword instead.

  ‘Look what I just found,’ Hedley said, as he felt he had been saying for days, as he handed this or that memento or keepsake found in drawer or pocket.

  Antony took the thing and turned it over, opening and closing its crude clasp. ‘She always said this was by GBH,’ he said. ‘Though I don’t see how it could be. She never made jewellery, did she?’

  ‘Not that I know of. Did they even know each other?’

  ‘Barely. She met her when she did some teaching …’

  ‘Hard to imagine that!’

  ‘One of her colleagues was having an affair with some artist nobody remembers now and the three of them used to slope off to rather wild parties, nude swimming and jazz and a lot of the usual boho willy-waving while the girls sat around adoringly.’

  ‘You never told me this. Where were you?’

  ‘Oh. Minding Garfield, probably.’ Antony looked back at the hair clip. ‘They got on at first but then Rachel had another bad spell, after Morwenna was born, and lost touch. But GBH was like that; she’d pick people up, having sudden enthusiasms, then drop them as soon as she felt they’d let her down. Morwenna should have it,’ he said, handing the clasp back. ‘Where was it?’

  ‘In the garden. She seemed to have thrown it out of the window she broke.’

  ‘She was in a bad way. The noise she was making! She cried out and …’

  ‘What? Dad?’

  ‘Nothing. It’s nothing, really.’

  ‘Dad?’

  Antony looked up, his face infinitely kind. ‘She had no record of a weak heart so I keep wondering if she scared herself to death.’

  ‘Surely not?’ Hedley sat on a nearby chair.

  ‘She used to see terrible things, when it was bad.’

  ‘The baby.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I remember once her going on and on about a baby,’ Hedley told him. ‘She made you stop the car and made us all get out so she could be sure it wasn’t in the car with us.’

  ‘Don’t remember that.’

  ‘So what else?’

  ‘She never told me. She used to say telling me would make them too real.’ Antony’s face closed down again and he looked back at the letter he had started and sighed.

  ‘I should get on,’ Hedley said.

  ‘Are you leaving us already?’

  ‘No, no.’ Hedley noted that unconscious first-person plural. ‘But I’ve got things to get back to. You know.’

  Hedley also had to cope with the various tardy obituarists needing facts confirmed and dates checked. Nobody could quite grasp the idea that Rachel’s own family had so little knowledge of her life before she met Antony. They had a birth date and knew she was probably Toronto-born, although people often said she had a Massachusetts accent. There was no copy of the marriage certificate, nobody knew her parents’ names and she had trained them all so early never to ask about her past that it had become a sort of habit to act as though she had none.

  Then there was an ever-growing stack of letters to answer, now spread across a couple of breakfast trays. At first Hedley had thought this the ideal quietly therapeutic task for Antony and for a few days after the funeral his father kept busy writing deeply considered replies. But after that he seemed to give up. Days passed, with the piles swelling as acquaintances noticed the obituaries, with only two or three responses written and it became clear Antony was being defeated by the effort. So Hedley sorted them into relatives, close friends and mere acquaintance. The mere acquaintance and relatives, at least, he felt he could write to on the family’s behalf.

  Even without all that needed to be done, Hedley didn’t feel he could leave his father yet. Friends called round, especially Jack, and Antony would sit with them for as long as they cared to visit but he was not encouraging. He made no phone calls and, Hedley noticed, had taken to hiding behind the answering machine which still had a message mentioning Rachel. He suggested Antony record a new message and Antony started but then he gave up, defeated by technology, and so they were left with an answering machine that simply beeped at callers, which was still more off-putting than suggesting they might wish to talk to the dead.

  When the glazier had gone Hedley slipped up to the shops with the wicker basket Rachel used to carry. He loved all this. The gentle queuing at Tregenza’s for fruit and veg and coffee beans, then at Lavender’s for bread and cheese and ham. He loved the walking down one side of Market Jew Street for the paper and the post office then up the other for the olive stall. People said hello as he passed them. Three others stopped him for news and a chat. All the things that in adolescence made him itch for London, the slowness and char
m, the lack of anonymity, the languid measuring out of the day in meals and drinks and little snacks, were dear to him now. The astonishingly parochial gossip – whose niece the nice postman had married and what the less nice postman had done to enrage the man in the lampshade shop’s unmarried sister – came to seem more vital than anything in the national newspaper. The sitting companionably across the room from Antony of an evening doing nothing more exciting than reading, having eaten early because Antony suffered acid reflux if he went to bed on a full stomach, the going to Meeting with him, the chatting with everybody at length afterwards; all these things were suddenly what he wanted, what he felt he needed most. With every undemanding day that passed since the funeral he found it harder to contemplate abandoning them. This was disquieting because it implied that his usual life was lacking whereas he had got into the habit of thinking his life was more or less as perfect as life was going to get.

  On his way home down Chapel Street he made a short detour into St Mary’s to light a candle for Rachel then paused on a bench in the graveyard to admire the view of the bay.

  Scrupulously good in most ways as a boy, his only major act of rebellion had been to sign up for confirmation classes at eleven to join the C of E. Rachel took the blame. She brought him into St Mary’s the previous year to shelter from the rain once when they were shopping then sat back and watched, hugely amused, as he was seduced by all its high church gewgaws and statues that were such a contrast to the plain severity of the Friends’ Meeting Houses that were all his experience of religion so far. When he pestered everyone with questions for days afterwards Antony ended by insisting Rachel bring him to a service by way of answering them. She had started it, he said, and it was more or less the faith of her youth after all. So she brought him back for a service and he was lost. Hymns, readings, a choir singing mass, bells and incense, lace and ceremonial, the mysterious business of the Eucharistic rite. Compared to the inward contemplation and occasional, formless declaration of British Quakerism, the service presented a drama.