Notes from an Exhibition

by Patrick Gale

  ‘I was born!’

  ‘You were born. The only one of you to be born at home. You were so tiny, you’d slipped out of me like a pretty little fish and I’d hardly had to puff and pant at all.’

  ‘Not like with Hedley.’

  Morwenna said this for the pleasure of seeing the little, false thundery expression she knew it would bring to her mother’s face. Sure enough there it was and Morwenna giggled, forgetting she wanted to be at home with just Petroc.

  ‘Hedley?! Hedley was another matter entirely. Hedley took two whole days to arrive in the Bolitho Home and your father began to say maybe we should just leave him where he was because he sort of liked me the size of a mountain.’

  Morwenna loved Rachel again. Rachel was doing what she so rarely did, making you feel you were the thing, the person, whatever, at the front of her mind. Most of the time she was being distracted by all the clamour and demands and bother of family and even under that surface level of irritable chat you knew she wasn’t seeing the room at all but was staring away inside her head at some painting she’d left half-finished or some other painting she hadn’t even begun yet.

  It would be a good birthday after all. Sliding into double figures had felt ominous, a first significant pace away from childhood and towards a time when more and more would be expected of her. But laughing with Rachel, daring to admire her now that she was staring straight ahead, she decided all would be well.

  ‘If we pass three women with wicker baskets before the bottom of the hill,’ she told herself rashly, ‘It’ll be fine.’

  This was cheating slightly because wicker baskets were a far better bet than nuns, or policemen on bicycles and even as she formed the thought, or possibly just before, she counted off her first one; a smart young woman with a wicker basket over one arm chatting to a friend on a doorstep. The second came swiftly after; an older woman pulling a basket on wheels in which a pile of library books was plainly visible. But there was no third. As the bottom of the hill drew ever closer and The Stennack turned into Chapel Street and then Gabriel Street where they had to turn left among the shops, she paid less and less attention to what Rachel was saying in her anxiety to see one. Even a cat basket would do. Or a log basket.

  Please, she thought. Please?

  But there was nothing. Only prams and string bags and one fierce-looking woman with a bag made from Black Watch tartan. And now they had turned the corner and it was too late.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Rachel asked, irritated at being ignored probably. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Morwenna said. ‘I … I thought I saw a girl from school, that’s all.’

  There was no cheating fate. By the time they were parking on the Island, which usually gave Morwenna a small thrill even though she knew it wasn’t really an island but just a promontory with a car park on it, the sky had clouded over and Rachel’s mood was darkening in sympathy.

  ‘So,’ her tone glittered as Morwenna brought her back the ticket for the car park. ‘We’ll just call in at the Penwith Gallery then buy the things Antony asked us to get.’

  ‘Whisky and double cream and lemons.’

  ‘Yes. Then we can get fish and chips and then … Then we’ll see. Just look at that sky!’

  Morwenna glanced up. It was grey, with darker grey clouds around which a threatening hint of pink was showing.

  ‘What colours would you paint that with?’ Rachel asked.

  Morwenna knew a child would say grey and red so she said, ‘Purple and black. Maybe some deep blue. Clouds are hard. They work best if you make the paper wet.’

  ‘But Rachel wasn’t listening. ‘We needn’t go in for long,’ she said. ‘It’s just so I can tell Jack we went. After all, it’s your day, not mine.’

  She was getting nervous, Morwenna knew the signs. She was winding herself up like a spring with razor edges. She had always seemed more attuned to these impending states in her mother than her brothers were, the way a dog could foretell thunderstorms. The mounting tension was infectious and she hated it the way she hated Garfield stretching rubber bands too far or making balloons squeak. At least with a balloon or a straining rubber band you could reach out and make the bad bit happen sooner.

  The gallery wasn’t huge, like a museum – it had just one big sunny room tucked behind a row of houses near Porthmeor Beach – but neither was it like the galleries where pictures were for sale, because they had to pay to go in. Something that made Rachel mutter under her breath.

  Rather than walk slowly round the room like her mother, interrogating each picture, Morwenna made directly for the paintings by Uncle Jack. There were only three. She recognized them at once because of the way he always framed his canvases first then painted over the frame as though the picture’s exuberance wouldn’t be contained. In fact exuberance was a word she had learned when Antony and Rachel were discussing him once. There was a bluey-green he used, too, which he must have mixed himself because she never seemed to see it anywhere else. Perhaps he put something in it that wasn’t paint. Soup, maybe, or melted sweets.

  She couldn’t have said why she liked his pictures. Perhaps what she liked was the fact of knowing him and liking him so that spotting his pictures in a gallery was like seeing a friend in a crowded room. She felt proud when she saw his pictures on a gallery wall whereas when she saw Rachel’s there was always a stab of worry. Why wasn’t anyone looking at them? Why hadn’t they sold yet?

  They were no more of anything than Rachel’s paintings but something about them suggested a narrative, the titles perhaps. These three were called Because You Left Early, Missing George and Witching Hour. There was a happy quality to their use of colour that made them seem to sing where their more rigid neighbours merely spoke or whispered. Perhaps she was confusing the character of the painter with his work, but in this austere setting Uncle Jack’s paintings seemed to be kind.

  He wasn’t really her uncle. They just called him that.

  She became aware that Rachel was moving round the exhibition towards her. She had thought to keep several steps ahead of her and so avoid the difficulty of a discussion but she was pulled up short by a sculpture.

  It was made of some sort of close-grained wood. It was roughly cylindrical only its ends were rounded off, like a gentle, pointless bullet, and it bulged slightly in the middle. It wasn’t solid. There was a kind of split in it, a cleft like the gap in a rock where you might find baby crabs. If you peered closely you saw that the cleft opened out into a sort of cave where the wood had been left rougher, paler and unpolished. The rest, the outer wood and the edges, the lips, of the opening, had been rubbed as smooth as a piece of sea wood and waxed or oiled until it shone and you could see every line and whorl in it.

  Morwenna knew you weren’t allowed to touch but she had never found touching so hard to resist. Or smelling. She wanted to seize the thing in both hands and breathe it in the way she would the skin of a ripe melon or a peach, or Petroc when he had just had his bath and had his hair standing in tufts and was hugsome in pyjamas. It was quite simply the loveliest thing made by a person she had ever encountered. The paintings around it seemed flat and sterile by comparison, even Jack’s, an effect heightened by the sculpture being the only thing of its kind in the gallery. Like a cat in a bookshop, its advantages were all the greater for being unfair.

  ‘Darling?’ Rachel only called them that when she was impatient or on edge. Morwenna knew better than to linger and ran to join her at the door. ‘What did you think?’ The inevitable question slipped out as they walked up the lane.

  ‘It was interesting,’ Morwenna told her, using a word that had proved safe in the past even though it encouraged further discussion.

  ‘Hmm,’ Rachel said. ‘The usual suspects. Did you like Jack’s?’

  ‘Of course,’ Morwenna said. ‘I saw them as soon as we walked in. You can always tell which are his. Is he very different?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘Well … He must be or they wouldn
’t be so easy to spot but …’

  ‘What? It’s OK. You can say whatever you think. You don’t have to like his work just because he’s our friend. That would be facile.’

  ‘What’s facile?’

  ‘Like the French for easy only insulting. Too easy. Too simple.’

  ‘Like Terry Stephens’ boat pictures?’

  ‘Ssh!’ Rachel giggled. ‘Yes.’

  Morwenna hoped this meant they had moved on. Rachel was inspecting a butcher’s shop window. Piles of sausages and lamb’s liver and crouching chickens and skirt for making pasties; the kind of display that made Morwenna feel queasy if she looked too long, mainly because of the nasty plastic grass fringes that had been arranged around each tray of meat. But no. Rachel was relentless.

  ‘So. About Jack. But what? You said but.’

  ‘Well … If his paintings are so easy to spot, does that mean he’s just doing the same thing over and over, like Terry Stephens?’ She thought of Because You Left Early and Missing George – even this soon after seeing them they were muddled in her memory and indistinguishable. She compared them in her mind’s eye with the amazing sculpture. ‘They’re all colourful. They’re all cheerful. They’re a bit like sweets, really, aren’t they?’

  ‘Don’t try to be clever-clever. It does something odd to your face.’

  Rachel’s swift reproof, delivered almost casually, seemed to sting more than one place at once and left Morwenna unable to walk and think at the same time. As usual, Rachel seemed unmindful of the strength of her words.

  ‘Come on,’ she called back cheerfully as she walked on. ‘I just need some things from in here. You said we had to do whatever I would be doing.’

  It was a stationer’s, really, selling everything from writing paper and bottles of Quink to cheap paperbacks and packs of cards. Encouraged by local painters and illustrators, however, it had branched out in a small way as an art supply shop. There were racks of oil paint in tubes and watercolours in the little, tempting, paper-wrapped packages that made them look like expensive toffees and strange pencils that weren’t coloured and weren’t HB either. There were artist’s pads, drawers of special papers and a revolving rack of seductive books Rachel loudly despised with titles like How to Paint Seascapes and Drawing Horses is Easy!

  Hedley had bought a huge tin of Swiss crayons here with his birthday money from Uncle Jack but seemed so awed by its size and smartness once he got it home that he did little but arrange its contents in different ways or make very neat sort of diagram pictures with each crayon in turn represented by a square coloured in with painful precision.

  Morwenna admired some prettily packaged bottles of Indian ink while Rachel made a pile of paint tubes on the counter with her usual decisiveness. ‘We were going to get you one of these for your birthday,’ Rachel called out. She was holding up one of the shop’s little wooden models designed to help artists get people right. Morwenna loved them although secretly she’d have preferred the expensive one like a horse.

  ‘Yes, please!’ she said.

  ‘It’s not a toy, though.’

  ‘I know. It’s to help with proportion.’

  ‘Well pretend you didn’t see and remember to act surprised when you open it. I just wanted to be sure it was the right thing.’

  The threatened rain arrived when they were still two streets from the chip shop and they had both dressed equally foolishly, lulled by a sunny morning. They sheltered in a little supermarket where Rachel suddenly remembered she had promised to buy things but not what they were. Morwenna reminded her and held the art bag while Rachel put several other things besides cream, butter, whisky and cornflakes in her basket. She was like a magpie in food shops, drawn to glitter and colour and quite capable of buying something they didn’t need and would never eat, because she liked its packaging. Antony had trained Morwenna and her brothers to be firm when they were with her.

  ‘Admire things with her,’ he said, ‘but then put them back. She won’t mind. Not if you do it kindly.’

  Rachel was admiring some packets of saffron when a terrifying old woman came up to them. At least her face looked old, as craggy as cliffs and as furrowed as a field, but she had a good figure and a big gash of amazingly red lipstick, so perhaps she wasn’t that old but just very battered. She was just the way Morwenna imagined Hansel and Gretel’s witch would look. Her hands looked as spread and strong as a road-mender’s. Morwenna could picture her tucking Petroc into a casserole with carrots and onions and a bottle of wine then thumping a lid on him so heavy he couldn’t escape as she slid him into the oven.

  The woman was peering up at the shelf where Rachel’s whisky had come from. ‘What? Up here?’ She shouted to the lady behind the counter. ‘No, there’s nothing here but Bells and Famous Grouse. I ordered it. I always do. You had no business to … Oh.’ She had spotted the bottle in Rachel’s basket and came close. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, not shouting any more but still not very politely. ‘But you’ve got my bottle there. I buy it on account and it’s normally put aside for me with the other things but the new girl didn’t know. Do you mind?’ And she reached into the basket and took the bottle.

  ‘Barbara?’ Rachel said, letting her take it.

  ‘Yes?’ The woman didn’t seem pleased to be talked back to, especially not by her Christian name. She had her bottle and now she wanted to leave. Now she was closer, Morwenna discovered she smelled like an ashtray. Neither of her parents smoked, or not at home, but Morwenna had sniffed ashtrays and cigarettes out of curiosity at other people’s houses. Jack smoked a pipe but he used peppermints afterwards, which didn’t make it not smell but made the smell a bit better.

  Rachel was putting on her party voice. ‘Of course you won’t remember me after all this time. Rachel Kelly. We met at the Artists’ Ball ages ago. And then I went swimming with Jack Trescothick and the gang and you –’

  ‘Oh yes,’ the witch said to shut her up but Morwenna could see she either couldn’t remember or hadn’t cared to be reminded. She was glancing over Rachel’s shoulder for an escape route and Morwenna half-thought to step aside and hiss, ‘This way!’

  ‘We were in the Penwith Gallery just now.’ It was one of those times when Morwenna wished Rachel had a normal accent or rather no accent at all. Her curious mixture of American drawl and la-di-dah English had a way of becoming grotesquely exaggerated when she was nervous. She could tell she was nervous now from how busy her fingers had become. They were fretting with her buttons, with the handle on her wire basket and the paint-splashed leather of her watchstrap. ‘Morwenna’s been admiring one of your lovely vulvas.’

  Morwenna wasn’t quite sure what a vulva was but she suspected it was rude because the Witch blanched and another woman who was passing them with, too late, a wicker shopping basket gave a sort of indignant cough and hurried away knocking a can of beans off a display.

  The Witch stared at Rachel for a moment then said, ‘Oh yes. You’ve been ill, haven’t you?’ Then she crouched down to Morwenna’s height. It was frightening. She had an even stranger face close too, with a huge brow like Queen Elizabeth the First’s and the deepest wrinkles Morwenna had ever seen and she was rather furry and smelled so strongly of cigarettes and something else not very nice that it was a bit like being too close to a clever, dangerous monkey, the sort that bit if you made the mistake of pushing food through their bars when they asked for it.

  But Morwenna was fascinated too, because the sculpture had been so beautiful, and wished Rachel wasn’t there being embarrassing.

  ‘So what did you think?’ the Witch asked, only of course she wasn’t a witch, Morwenna realized now, but Dame Barbara Hepworth.

  Morwenna thought of Hansel and Gretel again and of how Gretel stands up to the witch by being a bit rude and witchlike herself to match her. ‘I liked it,’ she said. ‘I liked the way it was smooth and rough at the same time. It made me think of secrets.’

  ‘Secrets? Good! Show me your hands? Are you strong?’

>   She set down her whisky bottle and Morwenna gingerly offered her hands, which weren’t very clean actually. Dame Barbara took them firmly in hers and spread out the fingers then turned them over to look at the palms. Whatever she found there she kept to herself. Her own hands were quite worn and rough, not a lady’s hands at all but maybe dames were different. With a new gentleness she folded Morwenna’s fingers over on themselves, as though she had passed her a secret note and was tucking it away, then she sort of handed her hands back to her. ‘I’ll tell you something, Morwenna,’ she said. ‘Life can be bloody sometimes but then suddenly it’s bloody marvellous.’ She took her whisky, stood upright again and only glanced at Rachel in passing before walking away.

  Nobody was ever rude to Rachel. They tended either to be too scared or too concerned. Certainly nobody ever mentioned her ‘illness’ so openly and in public. Morwenna was torn between a deeply instilled urge to protect her and a worrying, entirely new temptation to cheer.

  Somehow Rachel appeared not to mind having been first insulted then ignored. She took down a different brand of whisky from the shelf, carried her basket to the counter and paid calmly enough. Once they were back on the street, however, she walked through the puddles so swiftly Morwenna almost broke into a run to keep up. Worse, she started muttering to herself. Morwenna only caught snatches that made any sense, like ‘Stuck-up old huckster’ and ‘Who does she think she is’ and ‘So drunk she could hardly stand’. Passers-by were staring and even stepping off the pavement to avoid them.

  Suddenly Morwenna noticed they had passed the fish and chip shop and interrupted her without thinking, because she was hungry.