Notes from an Exhibition

by Patrick Gale

  ‘What about lunch?’ she called out.

  Rachel stopped abruptly and looked down at her in much the way Dame Barbara had looked at herself minutes before, as though she couldn’t quite place her and resented the need to try.

  ‘What?’ she asked.

  ‘The chip shop,’ Morwenna said in a small voice, hoping she wasn’t about to cry. Rachel hated it when any of them cried; it felt like failure. ‘We just passed it.’

  Rachel looked back up the street the way Morwenna was pointing then looked back at her for a second or two, wearing what Garfield called her ticking face, meaning the face she wore when you could hear her brain ticking like a cooling car engine, then she turned on her heel without a word and strode to the shop. Her tone was strenuously cheerful again but not friendly.

  ‘Remind me what you like. Cod or scampi?’

  ‘Scampi’s expensive.’

  ‘It’s your birthday. Scampi and chips, please,’ she told the man.

  ‘Anything for yourself?’ he asked.

  ‘No. Lunch makes me sick.’

  ‘Anything to drink?’

  ‘Anything to drink?’ she relayed to Morwenna.

  ‘No, thank you,’ Morwenna said to the man, although she badly wanted a fizzy drink to help the chips go down.

  Scampi was a terrible decision, of course, because it meant a longer wait. Morwenna spent the time trying to find scampi on the Fish of the World poster and trying to take her mind off the way Rachel was staring at other people who came in.

  The parcel eventually handed down to her was hot and sent vinegary fumes up her nose that made her want to rip it open at once. Eating in the street was bad manners, however; it was a rule. So she clutched her lunch close under one arm as they walked. Instead of striding on muttering to herself, Rachel now strolled, apparently lost in thought, as though she were all alone. It was like a punishment for greed; walk slowly while clutching cooling chips and forbidden to eat them. When they finally reached the car again Rachel remembered it was a special occasion and drove them to the far end of the car park to give them a sea view.

  ‘I almost forgot,’ she said. ‘Your card. It’s in the glove compartment.’

  Morwenna looked in the glove compartment and took out that year’s card. As always it was wrapped in newspaper and done up with string. Rachel never gave them cards from a shop but did them tiny versions of her paintings on stiff, cream-coloured board which she folded in two. This was another of her traditions. Garfield said it dated back to when she was in hospital after Hedley was born and couldn’t buy a present on his birthday so did him a picture instead. Morwenna cherished the five she had been given already – Rachel didn’t waste them on children under four – and had acquired several of Hedley’s and Garfield’s in rash exchanges for Easter eggs or comics. She knew Rachel’s big paintings sold for quite a lot of money and that these tiny ones were also worth something so weren’t really a cheat’s way of not buying a present. She kept them in a drawer and liked to take them out occasionally when she was on her own and spread them around the room pretending it was a grown-up gallery. She liked to place them in order of merit too. They were all abstracts, of course, but they were friendly abstracts, somehow, perhaps because they were so small; pictures for very modern doll’s houses.

  That day’s was a bit of a cheat, even so. It was orange. It looked as though Rachel had simply taken her biggest brush and dragged orange paint from one side of the card to the other. She hadn’t quite covered the card, though, and she had painted in a sort of fringe of yellow. She had signed it with the signature she used on her proper paintings and inside she had written ’For Morwenna on her tenth birthday, love from Rachel’.

  But Morwenna looked at it and knew it had been done last night in a resentful hurry, probably after a reminder from Garfield or Antony, because they were better at remembering birthdays than Rachel was. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘It’s lovely.’ And she leant to kiss Rachel’s cheek.

  ‘I can’t believe you’re ten already. Now. Put it out of harm’s way and eat your chips before they get cold.’

  The chips had become soggy and the scampi were tasteless and gluey and sort of sliding out of their batter coating. The vinegar appeared to have evaporated for all the tang it lent the spoiled feast.

  The desire to cry was becoming stronger and stronger, not because the food was ruined, fish and chips were still a treat even when past their best, but because the day was, in a way Morwenna could not have defined out loud.

  Rachel had begun to talk again, prattling on about Dame Barbara and some long involved story about Uncle Jack swimming naked, a smelly fur rug and a bracelet made from a tiara. She was talking as though she had a crowd of adults to show off to, not just Morwenna, and the bleakness creeping from Morwenna’s heart caused her throat to constrict and made the stodgy food harder and harder to swallow and she began to wish she had been brave as Garfield would have been and demanded a Coca-Cola in the chip shop as her birthday right.

  At last she could bear it no more and she scrumpled the rest of her lunch into a ball inside the paper. She was crying before she had opened the door but she managed to hold back any proper sobs until she had slipped out and slammed it shut behind her.

  She had not meant to cry. It was pointless with Rachel. It was different with Antony but tears never reached their mother. They seemed to confuse and freeze her. Laughter reached her. And affection. Had Morwenna laughed at her and hugged her she would have caught Rachel’s attention like a finger-click.

  She knew this was not normal. She had observed other children’s tears and seen how, depending on the sort they were, mothers reacted to them with shock or irritation and ultimately with an attempt to comfort. Rachel would simply be staring at her or, more probably talking to herself or looking the other way. Morwenna remembered her discomfort when Garfield, always a crybaby even when too old for it, cried at a hideous children’s party when some boy kicked him over on the gravel. Other mothers had stared when Rachel ignored him but continued to chat and laugh with one of the fathers. She was probably laughing now at Morwenna’s absurdity.

  She tried to control her tears, hiccupping and snorting, fighting to keep hold of her handkerchief and the leftover scampi and chips at the same time. It was spasmodic, out of her control and all surgy, like being sick. The day was ruined. Her special day. It was her fault for trying to be grown-up and clever rather than coming up with a list of things she wanted to do. But it was Rachel’s fault too for not understanding this and not remembering to treat her like a child on her birthday anyway. She was like a stone. A horrid, sharp stone.

  A gust of wind caught her handkerchief and blew it to the grass. Morwenna bent for it, missed then had to dash after it. The effort and ungainliness cured her crying and left her merely angry instead and, having snatched back the handkerchief, she took out her fury on her lunch instead. In a single, savage movement, she shook the newspaper parcel open into the wind. Chips and scampi flew up and away from her and suddenly the air about her was loud and white with swooping gulls seizing the morsels even before they landed on the rocks below the car park. They were forbidden to feed gulls, especially at home where they gathered, if encouraged, and made a noise on Rachel’s studio and attic roofs. But it was as though she had conjured them out of thin air with a single gesture and it felt dramatic and immensely satisfying. Rachel responded to big gestures far more readily than she did to crying and would quite understand one’s jumping out of the car in order to summon a shrieking flock of herring gulls.

  You’re ten now, Morwenna reminded herself. You’re nearly a woman. She dreaded being prised apart from her brothers by femininity the way she had seen it happen to other girls in other families. It would be different, perhaps, if she had a sister, but you couldn’t have a sisterhood of one and Rachel would be no help.

  Summoning a sense of purpose, she folded up the greasy piece of paper and walked to stuff it into an overflowing concrete rubbish bin then turne
d back to the car feeling thundery but recovered and grateful, now that her face must be blotchy and her eyes piggy with weeping, that she could rely on Rachel to pay her little outburst no heed.

  Sure enough, as she drew near the car again she saw Rachel was smoking one of her very occasional cigarettes in the dramatic way she had and concentrating on something she was drawing with the special tortoiseshell fountain pen that lived in her handbag.

  She barely registered Morwenna’s getting back in the passenger seat beyond a low, thoughtful, ‘Hi,’ as she made a few more quick scribbles. Morwenna helped herself to a barley sugar from the glove compartment and thought about the drawing model in the bag at her feet which Antony would be giving her at teatime. He would give it after Hedley’s and Garfield’s presents and whatever they pretended Petroc had got her. She would never use it for drawings. She might try dressing it up or making it hold things in its little arms, then one of the boys would borrow it for some violent game even though war was wrong and it would end up lost and broken or subjected to experimental surgery like her variously maimed dolls.

  And just as her unfinished, unappetizing lunch had become the focus of her angry disappointment so the gift-wrapped wooden mannequin came to stand for all the sorrow and discomfort of becoming another year older, the enforced attention of a birthday and its equally brutal removal with the opening of the last present. At least at Christmas the fever and disappointment were shared.

  ‘There,’ Rachel said, screwing the cap back on her pen. ‘I added a little something extra.’

  She passed over the birthday card. It looked much the same. Still abstract. Still orange. Perhaps Rachel had not been drawing but writing. Perhaps she had written an extra message after the love, Rachel about tears and disappointment. Perhaps she had written an apology? Morwenna looked inside.

  The writing was unchanged but on the left, on the reverse of the orange picture, she had drawn something.

  Rachel could draw just like Rolf Harris. It was one of her dark secrets. She could do grown-up drawings and filled notebook after notebook with the exquisitely shaded pencil or ink images she usually threw off to warm up before she started painting or when she was merely struck by something she’d stumbled on. But it was her cartoons the children loved. They were well drawn but immensely funny somehow, the more so for the seriousness of most of Rachel’s work and the demonic speed with which she threw them off.

  She had done a cartoon of the little supermarket they had just been in. There was the narrow aisle, its sides stacked high with everything from biscuit tins to bleach, only she had added in funny things like a crocodile and a coffin. There were the whisky bottles, by which she had added a dangling sign which said HOOCH! And there was Morwenna, wearing exactly the tartan skirt and best white shirt and black shoes she had on today and there was Rachel, beaming so crazily there was a star glinting off her teeth. And there, in pride of place, was Dame Barbara, complete with high, deeply scored forehead and pushed-back headscarf. She was pointing at the whisky bottle in Morwenna’s basket and apparently offering a small sculpture in return. There was a caption underneath. A BRUSH WITH GREATNESS, it said.

  It was very funny and Rachel’s self-portrait was better than any apology. What did she have to apologize for anyway? She had given up a working day to Morwenna. They had seen an exhibition, met a famous sculptor, had fish and chips by the sea. They even had a funny story to carry back to the others. In some ways it was a vintage year.

  ‘Thank you,’ Morwenna told her. ‘It’s brilliant.’ She closed and opened the card again to appreciate it afresh.

  Rachel tugged her over and kissed the top of her head. ‘My only girl,’ she said and started the car to drive them home.

  They talked all the way back or, rather, Rachel asked questions and made Morwenna tell her things. She asked her about school and who her friends were and what her favourite and least favourite subjects were and what she wanted to do when she grew up. (To which Morwenna had to say, ‘I don’t know!’ as if the question was silly, otherwise she’d have had to say I want to be just like you, which was something she had never said aloud and which was an impossible thing to admit.) It was odd. Rachel asked the questions as though they didn’t see each other every day, as though she were a visiting godmother or something.

  As they pulled back over the hill above Nancledra and paused again to say ooh at the view from Cornwall’s Best Lay-by, Morwenna realized it was because the day must be a kind of treat for Rachel as well as her, a chance for once to avoid having to share or be shared and the thought filled her with a kind of sticky, homesick feeling, like the smell of tears behind your face when you’d finished crying.

  They wound down around the hillside, past the first few houses, past the sign to Polkinghorne that always made Rachel laugh and intone the name in a deep, slow voice, past the succession of backyard washing lines where Garfield and Hedley always played a competition as to who won out of pants or bras, and up to the junction with the seafront. There was nothing coming. Morwenna was trained, as they all were, to look left at junctions and say clear left, clear left for as long as it was safe to pull out. But Rachel left the car where it was and asked, ‘You don’t often cry like that, for no particular reason, do you?’

  Morwenna was too embarrassed to turn round. She just kept on watching for traffic from the left and when she said no it came out all squeaky. ‘Just checking,’ Rachel said and drove on.

  HAIR CLASP (1964?).

  Silver, tungsten florist wire and steel.

  This ornament is said to have been made by Dame Barbara Hepworth as a bracelet for a fancy dress party. It was part of Kelly’s strong signature ‘look’ when worn as a hair clasp to keep her hair out of her eyes as she worked. The story of its origins seems unlikely. Hepworth was not known as a jeweller even of occasional pieces and there is no documentary evidence of her having known Kelly, let alone liked her well enough to make her gifts. If the story is true then it seems Hepworth made (or acquired) the piece as part of her costume for the St Ives Borough’s Artists’ Ball of 1964. A fundraising event, this set out to ape the more genuinely bohemian Arts Balls organized a decade earlier by Hepworth and colleagues to raise funds for the Penwith Society of Arts they had formed in 1949 as a modernist rival to the traditionalist St Ives Society of Artists. The two semicircular plates are made of silver (not hallmarked) bound together with what appears to be the thicker grade of florist’s wire. On closer examination, the hoop-ended steel pin which then fixes the two halves together around hair or wrist, is a kitchen skewer of a type then commonly available, with its pointed end sawn off.

  (From the collection of Morwenna Middleton)

  Rachel had never worn her hair so high. The style was not a beehive but it had required a little cushion to be pinned in and her hair piled up and lacquered over it by the girl in the salon. She had hoped to look a little like Julie Christie but it felt artificial, like a dead animal arranged up there, and she disliked the smell of lacquer so had tried spraying on scent to cover it.

  She had bathed with extreme care, terrified the creation would collapse into absurdity, then dried herself, dusted herself with talc and dressed as though a bowl of water were balanced on her head. It probably wasn’t half as fragile a structure as she feared but she was unused to such things. They never went to grown-up parties. In fact they never went to parties. Supper or lunch at people’s houses was as festive as they tended to be and she sometimes felt she had moved from her late teens to her early thirties without a frivolous stage in between.

  The theme was Gods and Goddesses so she had found a pure white, backless dress that was perfect. It had a loosely gathered bodice held up by a chunky, mock-silver chain that went around the neck. It fell in folds that were romantic, if not strictly Grecian, and she paired it with silver sandals that were so cheap it didn’t matter if they fell apart.

  She had spent all morning making herself a diadem out of stiff cardboard wrapped in aluminium foil and stuck
with small silver Christmas tree decorations. She gave it a quick shake to check the glue was holding and all seemed well so she lifted it up and tucked it over her head. She looked at herself critically, front and back, in the house’s only full-length mirror, teased down a couple of long strands of hair and decided the effect was rather good. If not quite Julie Christie.

  Giving her little pupils at West Cornwall Girls their weekly art class that afternoon – she had them drawing dandelion clocks – she had been giddy and let things get a little out of hand so that Miss Binns, the young history teacher across the corridor, had looked in to ask if something was amiss. Then she had spoiled Garfield when she picked him up from school because he looked so sweet in his uniform. She bought him an ice-cream sundae in The Buttery and listened happily to his earnest talk of school and hadn’t become impatient with him the way she sometimes did when he went on and became tedious. And all this sprang from a real happiness, not a sick one, because finally she had the right pills.

  When she had her last breakdown and a neighbour had spotted her, passed out in the studio, and called Jack in time to save her life, Jack had pulled strings to have her seen by a specialist. Vernon Wax took into account the patterns of her behaviour when she was apparently well rather than merely treating the effects of her breakdown. He diagnosed manic depression. It was chemical, he said, not causative, despite the contributory factors in her history, and needed a permanent chemical treatment with lithium carbonate. Dosage varied from patient to patient, metabolism to metabolism and it would take regular blood tests to ensure the dosage was then maintained at a level that would even out her moods without damaging her kidneys. The only immediate side-effect was a metallic taste in her mouth but that would come and go and she would adjust to it because everybody did. She had to cut out or at least cut back the caffeine and salt in her diet and she had to be wary of doing anything that would make her sweat so much the sodium level in her body dropped below the lithium one. The antidepressants she had been prescribed before were, Wax said, the worst possible thing for her as they would have increased her chances of a rapid descent into suicidal behaviour, which was precisely what had happened, abetted by her natural tendency to post-partum blues.