Notes from an Exhibition

by Patrick Gale

  This was fairly new science, apparently, and the reason the drug worked was still not understood. Jack had read up on the subject, she being the only such patient on his books, and the salt of a ground metal had become as much a part of her daily routine as insulin injections for a diabetic. And it was working. Her moods evened out, although the short temper was revealed as temperamental not chemical, she became easier to predict and live with and when she was happy or sad, it tended to be for good reason. No more nights broken by fizzing anxieties she couldn’t name, no more strange fears, no more mania. She was not mad. She had a chemical imbalance that was controllable.

  At first the relief was so great the news seemed all good. She returned to motherhood, painting around its edges when Garfield let her and more, once he started in playgroup. When Michael died, she found herself able to support Antony for a change instead of the other way around. He began to make a little more money. Garfield started primary school. She painted more and, with Jack’s encouragement and introductions, began to put her work into local, semi-professional exhibitions. She sold some. She took a part-time job at West Cornwall Girls’ School in the art department which paid enough to keep her in materials.

  Something had changed, however. Something had fallen away. Now that she had a diagnosis she was less of a victim and she became aware that her marriage had been founded on a vulnerability and an inequality that were no longer there. Antony was too equable and rational to be threatened by this change but she was and began to be oppressed by it and the careful life he had built around her. Worse, she noticed a falling-off in her work and felt she now approached it coolly whereas her old turbulence had brought with it moments where she felt she was accessing a white heat of inspiration, something this new controlled safety had closed off to her.

  She emerged from dressing to find Antony still in his day clothes. He had agreed to wear a silver beard and carry a lightning bolt, both of which she had made him but there he was, hunched apologetically over a heap of marking, pleading exhaustion. His compliments on her appearance didn’t help as they only made her feel silly and overdressed and her mounting excitement as she drove across the moor to the north coast was fired by irritation and an unformulated need to strike back at him.

  Having handed over her coat and accepted a drink she felt exposed without a partner. Happily Jack was there and feeling similarly spare. He never appeared in public with Fred, although everyone knew about them and their adjoining cottages. It was never discussed. She could see Fred’s appeal but their relationship was obviously so entirely about sex she had found herself at a loss for how to make conversation with him.

  Jack was wearing a dinner jacket but had a small tin skillet on the back of his head like a helmet and when she looked blank he explained he had come as Pan.

  ‘Oh lord,’ she said, looking about them.

  It was a measure of how restless Rachel had become and how stifled she had started to feel that, in preparing for a Gods and Goddesses Ball to raise money for the arts in the district, she had so completely forgotten the likely reality of such an event. The St Ives Guildhall was not the Ritz and its main rooms, even when decorated with twined garlands of ivy, laurel and bay, were not a ballroom. Local councillors and librarians still looked local in fancy dress or more so, if possible, exposing flesh untouched by the sun or stripes where it had touched too much.

  There was a band, too small confidently to fill a large acoustic and compete with the chatter of the crowd. Rather than playing standard ballroom stuff, the players were trying to be with it, playing Herb Alpert arrangements like Spanish Flea and Tijuana Taxi with much pofaced maraca shaking. Only a few brave souls were attempting to dance to it.

  ‘Your hair is amazing,’ Jack said.

  ‘Don’t,’ she told him. ‘I think it’s the highest hair in the room. I don’t know what I was thinking of. I feel like Marie Antoinette.’

  He looked up at her hair once more, without saying anything, which didn’t help.

  ‘This is ghastly,’ she said.

  ‘Isn’t it? They wanted to revive the old Arts Ball idea but nobody in the Society could spare the time to organize it and it was left to the council. And the old affairs were pretty ropey, looking back at them. No Antony?’

  ‘He’s being a saint and minding Garfy.’

  Jack caught her eye.

  ‘He had marking to do,’ she admitted. ‘I wasn’t happy.’

  ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘And I think he wants a bigger family.’

  ‘Well. It is a bit tough on Garfy being an only.’

  ‘Yes but …’

  ‘Hmm.’

  It was uncanny sometimes how Jack, who smoked a pipe and played cricket for his village team, could occasionally think like a woman and let her leave things unsaid because he instinctively understood what she was getting at. They paused in their walking around to watch some particularly brave dancers, the tallest of whom seemed to have misread the invitation and had come in a rabbit costume. The band had launched on a Beatles medley, though still to a Latin beat.

  ‘Of course,’ Jack went on thoughtfully, ‘and speaking as your GP, if you did decide to have another, you’d probably have to come off the lithium while you were pregnant.’

  ‘Wouldn’t that be risky?’

  ‘Of course, but people do it. A calculated risk. There’s so little research on the effects of lithium on unborn children. There’s little enough on its toxicity in adults. I’d keep an eye on you. It may even affect your fertility.’

  The thought this planted was still in Rachel’s mind as they collected fresh drinks from a passing waitress and continued their slow circuit of the room. Jack discreetly tucked his pan behind a flower arrangement and tidied his hair. He had padded the pan’s inside for comfort but said it was cramping his style.

  They said hello to a colleague of hers from West Cornwall Girls, a young English teacher who had dressed, rather vampishly, in a man’s suit to which she had pinned a sort of gallery of men cut from knitting patterns and postcards of Old Masters.

  ‘Hims Ancient and Modern,’ she explained. ‘Love the crown. Who are you?’

  ‘Juno,’ Rachel said. ‘And this is Jack,’ leaving the colleague confused.

  ‘You’d better think of someone else to be,’ he muttered, as the colleague left them to greet someone. ‘GBH has come as Juno too.’

  ‘Who’s GBH?’ she asked but he was nodding and raising his eyebrows indicating she should turn around.

  Barbara Hepworth – Dame Barbara Hepworth as she had become in the last few years – was in black, not white, which matched the severity of her style. She had made herself a tinfoil coronet remarkably like Rachel’s, only without the Christmas tree baubles. She had what could only be called an entourage, all male, some of whom Rachel recognized as better-known members of the Penwith Society. They were walking in a cluster a few steps behind her, which enhanced the queenly air of her progress. She greeted Jack with a quick, affectionate expression and they kissed then she turned her attention quizzically on Rachel.

  ‘Well this isn’t Fred,’ she said.

  ‘Barbara, this is my old friend, Antony Middleton’s wife, Rachel Kelly. Rachel, Dame Barbara.’

  Rachel took Barbara Hepworth’s extended hand and briefly felt the strength in it.

  ‘Why aren’t you Rachel Middleton?’ Dame Barbara asked.

  Rachel longed to retort Why aren’t you Barbara Nicholson but instead she explained, ‘It’s my maiden name, the one I paint under,’ and only just fought the impulse to drop a curtsy.

  In photographs Dame Barbara always looked like Bette Davis playing a Yorkshirewoman but in the flesh she was smaller and livelier than the pictures suggested. Her voice sounded like a woman on the BBC; she pronounced Jack as Jyeck. However there was an unexpectedly sexy edge to it from cigarettes and stone dust, presumably and, rumour had it, drink.

  She took in Rachel’s white dress and crown. ‘I know Jack came as Pan,’ she said,
‘but what are you?’

  Jack nudged her too late as Rachel said, ‘Oh, I’m Juno.’

  ‘Oh, but I’m the Queen of Heaven,’ Dame Barbara said. ‘There can’t be two of us. Tell you what, let me just rearrange this a little.’ And she tweaked off Rachel’s crown, folded it smartly in two, creased it down the middle into a sort of tiara, shedding a couple of baubles in the process, and set it back on Rachel’s head. ‘There,’ she said. ‘You can be Diana the Huntress and wear a half-moon.’

  Rachel’s face must have fallen because Dame Barbara looked back at her and stopped performing for her entourage.

  ‘God I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Did it take ages to make? I know mine did. Here.’ She swiftly unfastened a sort of silver buckle she wore around one forearm and fixed it to Rachel’s instead, conveying an unexpected kindness in the gentle way she took her hand to do it. ‘Now you’re complete. I made this yesterday but it looks much better on someone young and pretty.’ And she passed on.

  ‘Your face!’ Jack laughed, once she was out of earshot.

  ‘I don’t know whether to be pleased or furious.’

  ‘Well that’s always her speciality. She tried to bully me into being one of her assistants once. Can you imagine? Let me take that off you. It’ll never stay up like that.’ He removed the crumpled crown, folded it further and dropped it with a smile on a passing waiter’s tray.

  The evening unfolded in a way it never would have done had Antony not stayed home with his marking. Dame Barbara left soon after making her circuit. The younger members of her entourage, sweeping Jack and Rachel and the colleague en travesti with them, abandoned the ball shortly afterwards. They went to a noisy pub then for a moonlit swim on Porthmeor Beach.

  The sea was surprisingly warm. Or perhaps that was just the effect of drinking. Rachel’s expensive hair collapsed, which was a sort of relief. The little cushion thing floated away into the darkness. The sudden nakedness of them all didn’t feel sexual, possibly because they were in a group, but when she stood shivering beside Jack as they both attempted to dry themselves on the one handkerchief they had between them, she felt they had passed for ever beyond some transitional stage and that he was now as deeply in the weave of her life as Antony. Maybe even deeper.

  Dressed again, she was battling with her hair when he suggested she use the Hepworth armlet to hold it back and helped her do it, pipe clamped in his chattering teeth for the suggestion of warmth.

  ‘Jack?’ she asked as he fiddled to fasten the thing behind her.

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘If I did have another baby, would you be its godfather?’

  ‘Of course,’ he told her. ‘Honoured. But only if it’s a boy.’

  Apparently by prior agreement, they all then went up the hill to Trewyn Studio to thaw out and keep Dame Barbara company. It was a simple, two-storey building with a garden and workshops beside it where Jack said she had worked for years but to which she had retreated full-time since the end of her marriage nearly fifteen years earlier.

  Everyone knew everybody else, even her colleague, who turned out to be having an affair with one of the married artists, which would have scandalized their strictly Methodist employers at the school. Rachel was shivering still and Dame Barbara draped her in some kind of animal fur which reeked. The booze – neat spirits – flowed freely. Two of the artists produced bottles from their coat pockets and the multiple conversations became rowdier and more opinionated but Dame Barbara’s pronouncements cut through everyone else’s. Rachel’s own opinion was rarely consulted.

  She was fascinated to see this other side to Jack, which was entirely in abeyance in his doctoring life, among these artists for whom he was a painter who pursued medicine as a sort of eccentric sideline, not the other way around. But more, she was fascinated by their host. At least thirty years older than the rest of them sprawled on her floor, she had dropped the queenly air she wore around the town councillors and was arguing and gossiping as if among friends and matching them drink for drink with fewer ill effects. Rachel found herself drunkenly fixing on the extremities of the Hepworth accent so that she caught single phrases but no sense from what was being said. The Enyetomy of Myenne. The Gawgeousniss of the way we re-ect.

  And then Dame Barbara was suddenly on her feet, dismissing them with a yawn.

  ‘Help me clear up, could you,’ she told Rachel and Rachel found herself alone in the studio with Britain’s Great Living Female Artist as the others stumbled out into the night.

  The overhead lights were back on – they had been drinking by candlelight – and their harshness was probably as cruel to her as it was to Dame Barbara. In the end there was no help involved; it was she who walked around the place collecting glasses and bottles on a tray and she who washed up at a rather dirty sink while Dame Barbara perched on a stool watching her, scowling and smoking. And interrogating.

  ‘So you paint?’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ Rachel told her.

  ‘Do you sell?’

  ‘I’m starting to.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The Newlyn Gallery. Jack’s introduced me to –’

  ‘Oh it’s no good being like Jack – a gentleman amateur. Women have to work harder at this game. Are you married?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Children?’

  ‘One.’

  ‘Only one. Well that helps. If you’re serious, don’t have any more. Don’t let anything get in the way, not children, not your husband. Nothing. What did you do with the bracelet I lent you?’ she asked abruptly.

  ‘Oh I, er …’ Rachel glanced down at her arm, forgetting Jack had put the thing in her hair.

  ‘Doesn’t matter. It’s probably here somewhere. It’s silver, mainly. Do you know Jensen’s work?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Oh never mind. Shut the door firmly when you go, would you?’

  She had walked back up to bed, cigarette in hand. She was old enough to be a grandmother, maybe even was one, and yet she was living in squalor like a kind of student. Charming at first, with its curious combination of lush potted plants, bashed-up antique furniture and the maquettes for sculptures, the place became desolate when you reminded yourself she actually lived there and wasn’t eventually going home to somewhere more comfortable. Tipping the contents of an ashtray into the rubbish bin, Rachel imagined her peeing in the gaunt little bathroom then climbing into bed with only a last splash of Scotch to warm her and lying there, staring up at the high ceiling from those judgemental, Bette Davis eyes. She was probably thinking, Christ what a pointless evening! Or, no, probably clearing her head at last of meaningless chat and thinking about the work that would have been occupying a part of her mind all evening, tugging on the skirts of her concentration as she would have never let children do.

  Rachel had drunk far less than the rest of them and had made herself a strong and nasty instant coffee in the studio. The startling strangeness of the evening’s end had sobered her up still further. As she went in search of her car she found Jack sitting on a garden wall, smoking his pipe. Far too drunk to drive. She led him back to the Morris and drove home with him snoring lightly against the passenger door.

  The house was silent, of course, when she finally let herself in. She looked in on Garfield, gently tugging the bedding back over his shoulders, then slid into bed beside Antony.

  ‘God you’re cold,’ he mumbled as her feet woke him.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘And you’re sandy! Where on earth have you been?’

  ‘Swimming. With Jack and his friends. Sorry. Too tired to wash it off.’

  She pressed against him then, when she rolled over, was glad to have him roll over too and press himself against her.

  ‘Jack introduced me to GBH,’ she said.

  ‘Who?’

  She giggled, remembering Jack as she led him back to his front door and fished his keys out of his pocket for him. ‘It stands for God! Barbara Hepworth!’

  His arm came around he
r as he settled back to sleep and she held it close, wide awake now but wrapped in warm relief.

  NORMAN MORRISON (1965). Oil on canvas.

  In November 1965 a Quaker called Norman Morrison doused himself in gasoline outside the Pentagon and burned himself to death in protest at America’s continuing involvement in Vietnam. The strength of his pacifist demonstration was rendered ambiguous however by the fact that he was clutching his infant daughter at the time whose life was only spared because he was persuaded to throw her clear of the flames engulfing him. The news and equally shocking photograph soon reached Penzance, where Kelly was then succumbing to the second of her post-partum breakdowns. This painting, with its searing use of scarlet and vermilion tones within a block-like structure of greys and blacks has often been taken as a literal translation of newsprint into oil paint. However Sir Vernon Wax, her consultant at St Lawrence’s, Bodmin where she had herself admitted within hours of finishing the painting, recalled in his memories: ‘What had engulfed her was not the fact of the suicide but the danger in which it had placed Morrison’s child. In a lucid moment, she likened his flames to her own insanity licking about her own baby daughter.’ After her recovery she presented the painting to the hospital and, on the occasion of its hanging there, told Wax it wasn’t about Morrison at all but about heroic love. ‘“See that little grey square that seems to be holding the whole thing up?” she told me. “Don’t tell him, but that’s my husband.”’

  (Lent by Cornwall NHS Health Trust)

  There were intervals, usually in daylight hours or at times when she would have taken herself off to paint, when Antony could almost forget she was dead. They had lived such independent lives within their marriage, even after his retirement, that he had been deeply conditioned to spending days on end with her only nominally present. She kept such erratic hours, often being seized by a sudden need to work or read or go for a walk late at night or in the hours after dawn, that he was even used to waking to find himself alone in bed. What kept betraying her absence was the unaccustomed tidiness everywhere. And the calm.