Notes from an Exhibition

by Patrick Gale

  No one had been up there since the glazier’s visit but it needed doing. In many ways it remained the best room in the house, certainly for someone living alone, and would be wasted as a morbid shrine. Inspired by some fabric he had found, which he liked, although it was quite unsuitable for him and Oliver, he had a vision of the loft tidied up, repainted and carpeted and converted into a delightfully sunny room where Antony could sit and read and doze. It was a room in need of reclamation.

  They would have to do something about the ladder-like steps, naturally, and the silly trapdoor, which were quite unsuitable for an elderly man who would one day be unsteady on his legs. It needed proper stairs, with a banister. It needed a radiator for the cooler months. The incredible accretions of paint, splashed, trodden or smeared on the floor and the one unwindowed wall were too thick merely to paint over and would have to be burnt and scraped and sanded away. The floorboards, he noticed for the first time, were handsomely broad. They were probably old ones reclaimed from some wrecked ship’s timbers when this eccentric lookout was first erected. They could be sanded back to cleanliness and waxed, then he could find a few Turkish or Iranian rugs; modern ones would fade to tastefulness in the sunlight.

  Hedley fetched a large cardboard box from the stash he had gathered in supermarkets for the purpose, some bin liners and a broom. The least spent of her paints and better brushes he put in the box to take to London and add to his own stocks. The rest, the wrecked brushes, the mangled tubes of colour, the spoons and palette knives she had used so brutally they had bent beyond usefulness, he swept into bin liners. He dismantled the easel, which she had in any case broken, perhaps on her last terrible night, and carried it downstairs along with the similarly shattered chair. He emptied the kettle out of the window and tossed it in with the rubbish along with the biscuit tin and paint-streaked teabags and filthy sugar lumps. Sentiment stayed his hand over throwing out the tray as well because it was one Petroc had made for her in carpentry class. Liberal use of paint stripper and beeswax might be enough to salvage it but quite possibly Antony would want it with the paint splashes left on, a memorial to mother as well as son.

  At last the space was clear and fairly clean and he could begin work on the hive of cupboard spaces let into the back wall between the chimney stacks.

  As he had been tidying a sort of mental dialogue took place between him and Rachel. The mess was so her, the impulse to tidy it away so him. He was a very tidy painter. It was a superficial symptom of what would always keep his work at the purely decorative end of the artistic spectrum. But as soon as he started emptying the cupboards, her undeniable voice took over and his kindly fussing one was silenced.

  He emptied the first two smaller cupboards then suddenly, painfully wished Oliver or, better yet, Morwenna were there to help him. There was so much and most of it was of such high quality. At first he found only notebooks and sketchpads. She was an inveterate draughtsman and maintained a lifelong habit of throwing off drawings from the life as a preparatory exercise before beginning her work with paint. Much as a musician might warm up with arpeggios or exercises to feel their way into a given tonality, she drew. She drew used teabags, ruined brushes, paint tubes squeezed and doubled back on themselves. There was a sketchbook meticulously recording and transforming much of what he had just carried out to the dustbins. She drew, too, when she was waiting or ill. Some psychiatrist or occupational therapist long ago must have taught her to use her skill with a 2B pencil and scrap of paper to suspend her mind when it threatened to become too busy or to divert it from irritation whenever circumstances – a traffic jam or delayed appointment – threatened to fill her with pointless anger. She threw many of her sketchbooks away – once filled they were of no more value to her than empty paint tubes – but in the dusty heap of them he had salvaged, he found quick drawings of them as babies or children, of Jack Trescothick’s waiting room and countless ones of views through the car windows. She had always kept a sketchbook in the car. There would still be one in the glove compartment right then if he went out to look. There were drawings without number of her right hand (she was left-handed) and several, only slightly cruder, of her left.

  Done fleetingly, with no view to preservation or selling, these images tumbled across one another, overlapped or undercut. A good one would be ruined by a failure that slewed across it or by her spontaneous mischief in adding some element of caricature or cartoon. But their cumulative effect was to summon up not only her prodigious, careless talent but the maddening truth that art was the one thing that stilled and focused her impossibly restless personality; art won through where her family failed.

  There were no drawings from her depressions, only fleeting records of the periods of descent or recovery. She must have destroyed most of her hospital work before leaving hospital each time. She joked once that she never picked up a pencil when she was depressed because some thin, surviving bit of her healthy brain retained what she had been taught about depression and sharp objects not mixing.

  And then he found finished pictures. Several perfectly sellable ones from her extended, figurative, post-Petroc phase which, for some reason, she had held back from framing. The pictures Mendel’s had never wanted. Here were the familiar, meticulous studies of shells and fruit and Cornish hedges and a sequence of ominous black birds – rooks? ravens? – he had never seen. Even discarding a third of these there was enough for a good-sized posthumous show in the Newlyn gallery that had remained loyal to her later phase. But then he opened other, bigger cupboards, which he noticed for the first time resembled funerary vaults, and found fascinating near-duplicates of familiar works that had long since found homes in various collections, works that, hung alongside their better known ‘finished’ counterparts, would reveal how meticulously plotted were her apparently spontaneous creative processes.

  The night she died Garfield had mentioned spotting an old abstract work of hers from the Sixties and Hedley was impatient to see it for himself. Garfield had mentioned a big disc in shades of blue and grey. It was half off or half on its stretcher and had been shoved so violently into the cupboard the stretcher had actually broken in one corner. Perhaps she had started to stretch it afresh, thinking to finish it, or, in a fit of economy, to scrape it down and paint over it.

  He spread it out, astonished at its freshness, and saw at once this wasn’t an old work at all. It was a new stretcher, of a construction she had only been using for ten years or so. The colours were those on the palette he had just thrown out. He saw them afresh, slightly smeared where, as usual, she had laid cling film across the palette to stop them drying out overnight.

  It was big compared to the work she had been doing since Petroc, the sort of thing she used to do when she still favoured the studio at the back and wasn’t constrained by what could be fitted through trapdoor or window or what was small enough to be economically priced for tourists.

  He wished Oliver were there to marvel with him, to help and advise. It was staggering. Entirely undomestic. Only a metre square perhaps but still a big, grand statement for a museum or a rich man’s house. Excited, he went back to the cupboards and found eight more, this time with undamaged stretchers. These were finished and roughly dated on the back as well as signed on the front. She had been working like someone possessed for she had completed these in just a month before she died.

  He spread them out about him like so many exotic rugs. They were a sequence of sorts, in that they were all variations on the idea of a disc. There was a fiery one, a sun in effect to the first picture’s moon, and one the precise shade of her newest medication. The other six were less perfectly round, more organic. He stared at them for ten minutes or more before he recognized her precious pebbles she seemed to have had about the loft for ever and which he had just tidied away to the bathroom.

  She had painted them in such close detail and so much larger than lifesize that they had become abstracted. Or perhaps she had merely revealed the abstract art that nature had worked on
them? Stone which a glance showed as merely brownish, seen closer to revealed swirls of pink, blue and deepest purple. And yet they weren’t just the pebbles. She had added something or revealed something.

  Hedley sat back, aware of the sounds of Antony moving about downstairs again but reluctant to tear himself away. He could see how these big, triumphant canvases would look hung in a sequence in a space light and generous enough to let their colours vibrate off the walls like a line of cathedral windows. It was too soon to go worrying Antony about them but these paintings needed to be seen and not merely sold. Oliver would know how to proceed. Hedley set about carefully sliding them back into storage. His mind was spinning ahead. Were these cupboards entirely dry? Was the household insurance enough? When could he persuade Oliver down to see them?

  The thought of Oliver inevitably led back to a mental image of Ankie and all at once Hedley could see why he had been so powerless in the face of the woman. It was because she was so like Rachel. Sensing her foe’s weak points by instinct, she had touched on his boyhood conditioning never to threaten or upset Rachel’s delicate equilibrium however badly she behaved. Like Rachel, Ankie was powerful, dismissive, erratic, a threatening, clamorous, emotionally hungry presence and deep down he wanted to appease and please her. But she was not remotely as talented and therein, just possibly, lay his chance to overcome her.

  Not that he had ever overcome or even withstood his mother. He had simply withdrawn from the field. Once the last painting was tidied away he should have gone downstairs and set about making something small but nutritious for Antony’s supper. He got as far as opening the trapdoor and turning out the light but then he sat back in the old, defeated armchair where his mother had spent such tormented hours, defeated himself but drawing thin comfort from the possibility that proximity to the greater predator would protect him from the lesser one.

  DESIGNS FOR FABRIC.

  Indian ink and watercolour on paper.

  From 1965, when Jack Trescothick effected her introduction until the mid-seventies, when she was finally earning enough from her painting not to need the extra income, Kelly produced these and other designs for Cresta Silks. A stylish dresser herself, at least when occasion demanded, Kelly had a good eye for designs that would repeat well in a variety of colour-ways and would not overpower the wearer. Barbara Hepworth, Patrick Heron, Jack Trescothick and Graham Sutherland were among the artists to contribute to Cresta designs over the years though by the time Kelly produced these the company had all but lost its roots in pacifist Tom Heron’s idealistic enterprise in St Ives and been absorbed into the Debenhams’s empire. This display also contains a letter Kelly sent on acceptance of her Shasta design requesting a dress made up in the pink colour-way for her daughter’s tenth birthday in part-payment and a photograph of Morwenna Middleton (second from left) wearing it.

  (Materials and designs lent by Debenhams plc)

  Morwenna was alone in St Ives with Rachel because it was her tenth birthday and that was the tradition. Considering she was so abnormal in other ways, not always bothering to dress properly or wash her hands or brush her hair, eating pills more often than she sat down to normal meals, considering she was a painter, considering she painted paintings which weren’t actually of anything, considering she sometimes cried or laughed for no reason, considering she was mad, Rachel was surprisingly insistent on traditions. The night before Christmas they could only use candlelight, even in the bath, because it was a tradition. On Midsummer Day they had to have all three of the day’s meals out of doors, preferably on the beach, and always the same beach, even if it was high tide, even if it was raining. Tradition again.

  And when it was anyone’s birthday they had to spend the day with Rachel. Not Antony, of course, because he was married to her so that would have been silly. But the rest of them. The idea was it was your day and, within reason, she had to go and do and eat whatever you wanted. Garfield was even more of a traditionalist than she was and always wanted exactly the same thing: crab and chips then ice cream and chocolate sauce in Bailey’s then a film. Being a boy he took real pleasure in commanding Rachel, knowing she had to do stuff, had to eat pudding – which she affected to despise – and watch a film – which would have her twitching with impatience. Hedley was only eight, so was only just starting to take full advantage of his birthdays and would dream about them and plan them in such detail and change his plans so often that the big day, when it came, was bound to disappoint him. Petroc, being really small still, had birthday outings that were actually an excuse for Rachel to go off on her own somewhere and just take him along like a giggly parcel.

  Morwenna adored Petroc. The look, the sound, the smell of him filled her with a kind of hunger so that she wanted to possess and control and sort of crush him with love – a feeling neither Garfield nor Hedley ever inspired in her. She was ashamed that when Rachel got into the car with her that morning and said, ‘Your day. Just us. What’ll we do?’ she really wanted to tell her mother to take everyone else away somewhere and leave her alone with Petroc for a few hours. But she had once been as deeply in love with Rachel as she was with her little brother so it was easy enough to shrug and say, ‘It’s being just us that matters. What do you want to do?’

  So they had driven to St Ives because there was an exhibition at the Penwith Society Rachel wanted to see. This filled Morwenna with foreboding. She liked St Ives. It had proper beaches, unlike Penzance, and people went there on holiday so, even though it was barely half an hour away, going there tended to feel a little like being on holiday too. It was the mention of art that unsettled her.

  Rachel never said as much but it was obvious she thought Morwenna more talented than her brothers. When they brought paintings home from school, she’d dismiss them with a ‘very nice’ or an unconvincing burst of enthusiasm whereas whenever Morwenna did or whenever Morwenna picked up her crayons at home and drew things, Rachel took it as seriously as she might them forming letters correctly or doing maths. She would ask impossible questions like, ‘Why did you use that colour instead of this one?’ or ‘What makes you draw the tree from that angle?’ and if she came across Morwenna in the act of drawing or painting she could never refrain from correcting the way she was applying a colour or demonstrating an effect she could improve by holding her pencil at a different angle. The result was to make Morwenna self-conscious and nervous about art by introducing rights and wrongs into something that would otherwise have been a kind of play.

  Similarly Rachel would ask her opinion of grown-ups’ paintings – as if the opinion of a little girl really mattered to her – then would weigh up Morwenna’s responses in a way that made it clear that it wasn’t enough to be honest and say, ‘I like this’ or ‘I don’t like that.’ There were right and wrong responses. Morwenna loved her mother’s paintings. She liked to sit close to them and stare without blinking until the vibrant colours began to blur and shift. They made her feel things as strongly as music did but whereas you felt quite safe saying, ‘This piece makes me think of snow falling on lily pads,’ or ‘This piece is like a giant marching through the forest breaking trees,’ you couldn’t specify what Rachel’s paintings suggested and it was a grave error of taste to say they reminded you of things like clouds or boats or birds. The only thing more frightening than Rachel’s anger was her disappointment when you said something stupid like, ‘That blob’s the lady and that blob there’s her husband.’ She looked at you and simply turned aside in a way that felt like the sun going behind a cloud, only for ever.

  Antony said they all had to be careful not to hurt Rachel’s feelings.

  ‘She feels things more than we do,’ he explained, ‘so we have to treat her gently.’

  Luckily she never asked Morwenna’s opinion of her own pictures but she was sure to ask in the Penwith Society. Morwenna did not understand the details but she knew that to enter this small gallery together was to enter a minefield. There were friends of Rachel’s and Antony’s in the Society, like Uncle Jac
k, who it would normally be right to like out loud but Rachel was not a member of the Society for some reason. She said she wouldn’t want to be, in a way that implied she wanted to be very much but that the Society had said no.

  The drive over started well. The sun was shining and the trees on the edge of town were dazzling in their finery. They stopped in Rachel’s favourite lay-by, high up beyond Badger’s Cross, so they could get out and admire the view of St Michael’s Mount far below and so she could take Morwenna’s birthday photograph. As they drove on, plunging down into Nancledra, Rachel made her giggle by saying it was the kind of place where people married their sisters and as the car laboured and coughed up to Cripplesease and the steady descent towards the back of St Ives, Morwenna saw that for once Penzance and St Ives were sharing the same weather. Perhaps the day would go well after all.

  ‘Isn’t this great? Just us girls together?’ Rachel called out and Morwenna said yes it was and asked Rachel to tell her about when she was a baby, because this always put her in a good mood.

  ‘You were the tiniest baby,’ Rachel began. ‘You were so tiny you hardly made a bump so a lot of people just thought I’d been eating too many Jelbert’s ices. And I carried on wearing my normal clothes for ages with no beastly maternity smocks until the very last month. And I was painting as usual. I did some really good work while I was waiting for you to show up. It was a beautiful autumn day, just like today, and I was painting.’

  ‘Was it a circle or a square?’

  This was the only permitted joke on the subject of Rachel’s art and Rachel laughed.

  ‘It was a square, cheeky. You know it was because I had it hanging in your bedroom for ages.’

  ‘The purply one with the green line.’

  ‘That’s the one. So I was working on that, listening to the radio, and suddenly I can feel you starting. So I call out to Antony and say put the suitcase in the car because it’s time. And he went out to get the car started and to turn the heater on, because it was quite chilly and windy even though the sun was shining, and then he realized we needed petrol so he drove to the Co-Op to buy petrol and to drop Garfield off with friends, and by the time he was back …’