Notes from an Exhibition

by Patrick Gale

  He signed up for classes and was confirmed six months later. Thereafter, when the rest of the family went to Meeting he usually elected to come to Eucharist on his own, in his school suit and only non-school tie. Garfield and Morwenna teased him at first but desisted when Antony had a sharp word with them about religious tolerance.

  He never entered greatly into the church’s society – he grew into an inhibited teenager – but he took money for the collection, followed the readings in his Bible and took, for a while at least, to reading his scriptures every day and exploring the novel discipline of formal prayer.

  The difference in his sexuality was never discussed – they were not that sort of family – and even with Morwenna, to whom he was closest, the subject was always skirted – but the flamboyant difference in his selected religion provided its convenient metaphor.

  Hedley was not a high-flyer academically but he got by. All that ever really interested him was art so he went to art school in Falmouth where he was quiet but fairly popular and continued to drift in the upper half of the underachievers. He moved to London to share a cheap flat with two quiet girls who were abandoning painting for picture restoration and, thanks to a conversation struck up with an admiring older man after a service at St James’s Piccadilly, landed himself a job in a small gallery several minutes to the cheaper side of Cork Street.

  It was a quiet job. The vast majority of the gallery’s sales – it specialized in discreetly homoerotic works of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – were by catalogue. All Hedley had to do was dress nicely, sit behind a Biedermeier desk all day, sending off catalogues when requested, describing works in detail in answer to telephone enquiries and charming the occasional browser to the point where they felt so guilty at leaving empty-handed they at least bought a handsome catalogue or subscribed to the mailing list.

  Once a week he had the fun of buying and arranging new flowers for the vase on his desk and of choosing a picture to sit in pride of place on the little ebonized easel in the window. Once every two months it fell to him to organize and often host a little Friday soirée to launch the latest show. Since nearly all their artists were dead, there was never a private view as such, so there was no need to court the press or placate painterly egos. He had merely to be sweet and modest and funny and occasionally gravely grateful. He became first an expert bluffer then something of an expert on Tuke, Burra, Vaughan, Minton, Cocteau and friends.

  Oliver came to one of the launches, charmed Hedley before Hedley could charm him, and bought a tiny painting to justify further monopolizing his attention. It was an eight by four Duncan Grant watercolour of a man in a jewel-bright forest clearing. He, too, was an expert bluffer and Hedley had no inkling he didn’t buy such things on impulse all the time and was actually spending several months’ salary. Clients often asked for advice on hanging and because Hedley had a good eye and was wildly inquisitive to see how other people lived, he was happy to offer advice as an aftersales service. Oliver’s address was an awesome one in Kensington and it was disarming to find that he actually lived not in one of the vast cream houses but in an eccentrically converted stables behind it which he only rented for a pittance from a distantly expatriate ex and which had only one room beside the bathroom.

  The spot that was perfect for the little picture just happened to be over the bed, where Hedley proceeded to spend all weekend.

  They were such a perfect fit he worried at first that they should be best friends not lovers. They were both middle sons. They each had a dead sibling. Luckily there were enough differences to pique one another’s interest. Oliver’s family had rejected him, or he them; the story changed according to his audience. He was entirely atheist with the proud rigour only a lapsed Catholic could muster. He played poker. He was only four years older than Hedley but had worldly abilities and an ease around moneyed, straight men that made him feel much older. Crucially he had a past whereas Hedley had enjoyed no significant relationships. This difference became rapidly obvious and Oliver began not to hide his past exactly but to reveal it with tactful caution, piecemeal and only as occasion demanded. Someone would come up to them at an opening and talk to Oliver with slightly too much hunger for recent history while tossing unsettled glances at Hedley and later on that evening Oliver would confirm that they had once been involved with him, but would do it in a way – often with some small, unflattering detail – that gently negated the person as a threat.

  When he discovered who Hedley’s mother was and that he painted too but had begun to neglect it, he encouraged and hectored him and then astonished Hedley by selling his small works to friends and clients for far more than Hedley would have dared demand.

  Oliver had only been marking time in the gallery where he had been working when they met. By the end of a year he had been taken on at Mendel’s. He took out a huge mortgage, bought their mews house off his ex, spent a fortune on taps, lighting, orchids and heritage paint and sold it to an American banker for so much they were able to halve the mortgage and buy a sort of cottage with two bedrooms that was in Holland Park but only if you persisted in the delusion that Shepherd’s Bush Tube station wasn’t five minutes’ nearer. That was twelve years ago.

  ‘If we were straight,’ Oliver joked. ‘We’d have two children in boarding school by now.’

  They had a good life together. They entertained and were entertained, they travelled and the friends they had in common now outnumbered Oliver’s scary exes. Oliver persuaded Hedley to give up his job at the little gallery so he could paint full-time but now Hedley seemed to spend most of his days contentedly shopping and cooking. He was still enough of a Birthright Quaker for their material comfort, or rather the degree to which the material comfort mattered, to trouble him.

  There were times too when, joking apart, he felt worryingly like a wife. People still bought his little paintings when he found time to do them but they bought them directly from him, not through a respectable gallery, and it tended to be the wives who did the buying. They said things like, ‘I loved your last one, the apple, so much I keep it in the kitchen so I can look at it every day. Could you maybe do me another one of a pear but facing the other way and with the same background?’

  Women took him out for lunches to pick his brains about curtain fabrics. Men tended to chat with him but talk to Oliver. He had become lightweight by default.

  Hedley’s only strength within the family was Morwenna. From the year she dropped out of university, he had been the only one of them she sought out. Maintain contact was too reassuringly regular a term for her sporadic appearances. She sought him out just twice in his three years at Falmouth. Quite by chance the second time was when he already knew where he was going to share a flat with the two quiet girls. Thereafter he left a scrupulous trail for her, like breadcrumbs in a fairytale wood. A tiny bit of her brain that wasn’t garbled by drugs or madness or whatever it was that had driven her from the paths of normal people, retained his address and phone number the way a sleeping bird clutched its perch.

  He never saw her for long though. The last time, a couple of years ago, he had persuaded her to eat supper with him and Oliver and stay the night but she had broken his heart by being gone before either of them woke up. She wasn’t sleeping rough, or not frequently. She often had no or little money. She always had people she was travelling with or volunteering with or about to stay with. She seemed to have become a kind of Buddhist. Or perhaps it was that she was the best Quaker of them all, striving to create the fewest ripples as she moved through life and being a constant service to others, never to herself? He longed to ask her questions – how she lived, what she was trying to achieve in all this restlessness – but instinct warned him off and he forced himself, the way he used to with Rachel in her worst periods, to keep the conversation in a studiously calm present tense. Was she well? Did she need any money? Where was the living? And of course he pressed her with family news in an effort to keep her sewn to the rest of them, however slack
the stitches.

  The first few times she contacted him he had squeezed an address or a phone number out of her but it seemed the very act of giving out such information made her suddenly itch to move on so it was self-defeating. Instead he had learnt to encourage her to regard him as a poste restante, a safe, still point in her bewilderingly shifting world. If all else failed she could count on him, reverse the charges wherever she was, beg for money, a plane ticket, his company, whatever she needed. He would pay or, rather, Oliver would.

  Keenly aware as he was of his material comforts, he was astonished at how she had managed to possess nothing but the clothes on her back and in whatever piece of luggage she was living from at the time. Her only things of value were small pictures of Rachel’s; two startlingly lovely pastels Rachel had given her when she left home for LSE, and birthday cards Rachel had painted over the years. Of these, Morwenna had retained not only all her own but all the ones done for Petroc and several of the others, traded in their foolish youth for urgently needed trifles. (Easter eggs, in Petroc’s case.) This booty she carried with her for the first few years. Then, after he had moved to London, she outraged Rachel by selling one of the cards at auction. It fetched nothing like its real value and he begged Morwenna to entrust the rest to him for secret safekeeping. If she wanted to sell anything more he could do it for her through Oliver and Oliver’s contacts, securing her a better price and sparing Rachel’s feelings.

  Several thousand pounds’ worth had now passed through Oliver’s hands into the art collecting ether. What happened to the money was a mystery. Quite possibly she gave most of it away. She lived with some nuns in Yorkshire for a while as a kind of postulant – unpaid servant, basically – and after that had a year or two in a scrupulously Marxist commune in Cologne, where everything had to be shared. She retained traces of her old, sharp humour, could laugh at nuns and communards, so he did not agree with Garfield that she was mad. It felt more as though she were under some huge obligation, a curse even, that kept her watchful and exhausted, so that her familiar intelligence was blunted and her wit made dim.

  The first times she sought him out he was so relieved to see her he couldn’t resist telling the others but once it was clear she was never going home and seemed to have cut off Garfield as much as their parents, Hedley began to keep quiet about seeing her beyond reassuring them from time to time that she still lived. He didn’t want to seem to be saying that she liked him more than them. And quite possibly that wasn’t it. Perhaps she only kept in touch because, as the guardian of her art collection, he was like her banker or trustee; a necessity, not an intimate.

  And in a way she had brought him and Oliver together. He was still shaken by a recent, horribly swift and jangled phone call from her to the work number when they met, and found himself forgetting his obligations to his other guests as he told Oliver all about her. Oliver’s dead sister had been schizophrenic and he knew all about relationships that had to be lived in the present tense.

  ‘Just be grateful it’s still her coming to you,’ he said, ‘and not the police.’

  Morwenna dropped out of university in the middle of her finals. Worried friends reported her having behaved erratically before melting into the crowd on Waterloo Bridge and never returning to her hall of residence. Shortly afterwards she sent Rachel and Antony a plain white postcard on which she had written, ‘I’m not dead or anything. Couldn’t cope. Sorry …’ She didn’t write love. She didn’t write her name either but her handwriting was distinctive.

  It was when Hedley started at Falmouth that autumn and was living back at home but hardly there that he started to miss her. His life was filling with new experiences and new friends, so he shouldn’t have done. If she were still at university she wouldn’t have been at home anyway but the knowledge that she had cut herself loose and might be anywhere was terrible to him. Obsessive even in childhood, she had taught him the power of pledges with fate when he was quite small. ‘If I do without chocolate until Sunday, the crosscountry run on Monday will be cancelled,’ or ‘If I hold my breath to the end of the road, I’ll get the questions I want in the maths test.’

  It had become part of his habitual thinking. Throughout his first term he found himself routinely thinking, If Rachel dies then I can have Morwenna back. But Rachel was making herself especially hateful to him at this period, so perhaps she wouldn’t be a tough enough sacrifice to satisfy the Fates.

  * * *

  Days later. The house was cleaner, the wardrobes emptier and the piles of letters still largely unanswered. Hedley had still not gone home.

  ‘Is all well at his end?’ Antony asked after Hedley hung up from Oliver’s daily phone call.

  ‘Hmm? Yes,’ Hedley told him. ‘Everything’s fine. So have you chosen your password and written it down somewhere?’

  Antony had finally decided to admit a computer to the house and Hedley had already spent hours setting it up for him. Rachel had always hated televisions and tarred computers with the same brush so had never allowed one to be bought although both Hedley and Garfield had repeatedly tried.

  ‘I hate the dead black way their screens look when they’re off,’ she’d say and that was the end of the matter.

  Ever since retiring from his teaching post at Humphry Davy, Antony had been involved in adult literacy. His basic technique remained the same while politics and funding changes altered the organization around him but finally his patience had worn through when Jack Trescothick had urged him to call in on the adult learning centre for the first time since Rachel’s death. The equivalent of a headmistress had duly offered condolences and welcomed him back then announced they now needed him to go on maths and computer courses ‘so as to arrive at a fuller understanding of the plight of the adult learner with basic skills challenges’. He had told them he was too old to retrain and given up.

  This had depressed Hedley as he thought a sense of duty to his students, many of whom were such hopeless cases they’d been coming to him for years, was the one thing likely to shake his father out of his mourning torpor. But then, after yet another obituarist – this one from some feminist mag in New Zealand – had rung up with queries about Rachel’s origins, the idea took hold that perhaps Antony would start researching the gaps in the family tree.

  Antony had spent a frustrating morning in the reference library and an even more frustrating one on the phone to the US and Canadian embassies in London and to various record offices and genealogical societies listed in a book the library had found him. Genealogy had become such a national obsession apparently that official sources had become jealous of wasting phone time on it. Today he had announced that he needed a computer and Internet access if he was to make any progress without packing a bag and leaving Penzance for Toronto.

  He claimed he was quite used to computers from the ones at the adult learning centre but Hedley was beginning to suspect he only learned how to use one as a glorified typewriter and then only when a colleague or student had already set the word processing program running for him.

  He typed in the password Antony had chosen – the unexpectedly jaunty Quakerman – pressed ‘enter’ and clapped with genuine relief as the modem obediently clicked awake and proceeded to dial. The complications of a broadband connection could wait until the computer had proved itself indispensable.

  But Antony was not so easily distracted. ‘So everything’s fine,’ he asked. ‘With you and Oliver, I mean?’

  ‘It’s fine, Dad. Honestly.’

  ‘I feel bad you staying down here so long. Doesn’t he miss having you around?’

  ‘He’s probably relieved to have the place to himself for a bit.’

  ‘Eh?’ Antony cocked a hand to his better ear. He was becoming so deaf it could only have been scrupulous political correctness that had made the literacy place hold on to him so long.

  Hedley tapped his father’s glasses back up his nose and Antony took the hint and manoeuvred their built-in hearing aid back into his ear.


  ‘Everything’s fine,’ Hedley told him finally. ‘Now look. When you dial up, this little icon appears in the bottom right-hand corner. If you can’t see that, you’re not connected. OK?’

  ‘OK.’

  However grim of itself, Rachel’s death had provided a welcome distraction and an excuse. When she made her last insanely jabbering phone call to him, on the attic handset, he had been entering a crisis of his own.

  This had a face and a name. She was called Ankie Witt. She was a Dutch painter who had moved back to Europe after a spell in South Africa where she had dropped art in favour of politics and worked for the ANC. She produced the sort of work Hedley loathed that seemed to be all about ideas and very little about paint: close-ups of parts of her body variously wired to car batteries or Bibles, wilfully childlike images of her being abused by her father, huge squares of canvas on which she had painted, with stencilled letters, rambling accounts of same abuse unpunctuated by insight, wit or punctuation. She wasn’t especially young, perhaps thirty-eight – but she retained a young woman’s confidence and a child’s self-belief. She wasn’t especially attractive – she had disconcertingly large, square teeth and a bovine brow – but she had a room-stilling sexiness that had something to do with a sense she conveyed in seconds of being unafraid and unshameable. She was a talented self-publicist and a hot new thing and, even when being bored or offensive, assured journalists of good copy.

  It was a coup for Oliver to have brought her to the gallery; the painters with whom Mendel’s had made its name in the Sixties and Seventies were now so Establishment that it was in danger of becoming a dinosaur park. Oliver’s brief was to bring in artists people could actually afford for a year or two, whose work sold for thousands not tens of thousands.