Notes from an Exhibition

by Patrick Gale

  Now tree blossom blew down upon grass untainted by dogshit or hypodermic and well-fed children played in a remarkably clean sandpit. The city was still recognizable but barely tallied with the grim place she had passed through on her way to Europe.

  ‘That’s because you’re considerably richer than you were back then,’ Antony told her, catching their waiter’s eye and scribbling in the air for the bill. ‘God knows where you stayed then and I doubt you did much shopping.’

  The show didn’t open until that night – they had finished the hanging only yesterday – but already a third of the pictures had sold thanks to a catalogue-mailing.

  She wondered for a moment how he would cope at the opening but of course he would cope beautifully because he treated everyone the same. He would confess to being a schoolmaster not an artist in a way that would disarm even the most status-conscious collector and would pay the toyboy handing round canapés the same attention as the banker with a Nicholson over his fireplace. She was far more nervous than he was and it would only get worse as the evening approached. She had beta-blockers to stop her stammering or sloshing her wineglass when Thalia introduced her to yet another intimidating journalist or moneyed stranger.

  Antony’s gift was that he could never be intimidated because he didn’t care, or he cared only about the things that carried moral rather than social weight. Listen as she might to his calm good sense, she could never emulate him and supposed it went back to childhood conditioning; she was the product of her mother’s pathetic self-consciousness while he came from a line of men who accepted everyone as they found them and guilelessly assumed they would return the courtesy.

  He paid the bill and idly fiddled with the scrap of paper. She reached out for his hand and stilled it and, before she knew it, they were holding hands across the tablecloth in a way they’d never have done at home.

  ‘Couple of middle-aged honeymooners,’ she said and he just said yes and smiled to himself, turning his hand round beneath hers to caress and then gently grasp her wrist in a way that made her want to go back to the tiny bachelor pad with him and draw the curtains. Only it was too minimalist to have anything but white roller blinds, which would let in too much light and leave her, at least, frozen with inhibition. So they would probably do no more than lie there and fall asleep then wake all muddled and cross.

  She was still jetlagged but in a pleasant way that simply left her feeling unreal and floaty, as though her actual body were several blocks away leaving this lightweight dream self to drift pleasurably along behind. They had spent the morning walking – because it was too lovely a day to lose to museums and Antony had read that sunshine on the face was a way of helping the pineal glands adjust to a new time zone. They had strolled here and there, stopping for coffees and consulting an amusingly humourless architectural guidebook borrowed from the guest flat. Then they had taken one last look at the hanging and reassured Thalia they were still in the country and would show up in time to meet the people she wanted them to meet. At once egged on and made nervous by hearing about the advance sales, Rachel had gone shopping for a new outfit to lend her courage.

  Everyone they encountered there, male and female, seemed immaculately groomed. Hair, nails, makeup, shoes; nothing was left to chance. The money they could have spent on food they blew on looking as if they earned double what they did. Antony assured her it was good to stand out as the artist and that a less kempt appearance would be a badge of distinction and Englishness but, as the morning wore on, she became more and more conscious of her bashed-up shoes and broken nails and unnurtured, provincial hair. Even the vast women climbing down from an out-of-town tour bus were manicured and coiffed. So she had bought the most expensive dress she had owned in her life, some bargain shoes to match and made an appointment at three to see to her hair and nails.

  ‘But you won’t have talons like Thalia?’ he asked her.

  ‘Fat chance,’ she said, ‘with ruinous stumps like these. But they can sand them down or something and give me some clear lacquer and do something with all the dead-looking bits of old skin around the edges.’

  ‘I’d never noticed those.’

  ‘Neither had I!’

  They had laughed a lot. They were lighter together here, easier, and it wasn’t until they sat down to lunch, exhausted from all the walking and shopping, that she saw it was because they were temporarily childless. Apart from the occasional day trip, they never went anywhere as a couple. She hated travelling and he loved being at home so it never happened. Being on their own at home when Petroc was out with friends didn’t count because the house and its clutter was so insistent a reminder they had a family. Freedom for her had long since come to mean solitude in the attic or out in the studio. It came as a pleasant surprise to find she could feel this pleasant sense of airy detachment with Antony at her side, could actually share it with him.

  ‘I used to worry, you know,’ she told him as they walked back across the square past the children on swings and the young men playing basketball, ‘that it would feel strange when they’d all grown up and left home. I used to think I’d cling on to Petroc for dear life. But now I can’t wait, bless him. I mean I can but …’

  ‘I know,’ he said and gave her arm a little squeeze above the elbow as he steered her over the road.

  He held her to him in the little lift, burying his nose in the front of her hair, and, with only a token mumbling from him about feeling a little tired, they went directly to bed and made love without even pulling the blinds. She mutely encouraged him to take her from behind, which she preferred these days as she felt her back was ageing better than her front, and he readily obliged so perhaps he felt the same about keeping her eyes averted from his sliding perfection. And they fell into a delightful, jetlaggy sleep with his arm still flung about her chest and her toes still pressing the tops of his big feet. She fell asleep smelling the good smells of him and clean bed linen and hearing the bouncing of the ball against the metal mesh of the basketball court and looking at her smart shopping bags lined up neatly on the bedroom armchair full of reassurance, like young but competent maids.

  She did not hear the phone ring. She woke on her own to the sound of the bedroom door shutting and the realization that Antony was talking next door.

  ‘No!’ she heard him say, and the complaint of a kitchen chair being roughly sat on. ‘Where?’ and then, ‘What time was this?’ and then ‘Where are the others?’

  She pulled a borrowed dressing gown about her before opening the door to join him, robbed of abandon by a completely unfamiliar edge to his voice. He sounded frightened. Raw.

  Hearing her open the door, he turned. His expression made her dizzy. Suddenly the floor seemed unwalkably slippery and she slumped on to the nearest chair, just as he had, as he said, ‘Tell them we’ll be on the first flight we can, Jack.’

  As he hung up, there was nothing for her to ask but, ‘Who?’

  JUBILEE POOL (1965).

  Charcoal and blue chalk on paper.

  The Jubilee Pool, a lido on Penzance’s seafront, was designed by Captain F. Latham, the borough engineer, and opened thirty years before Kelly threw off this quick but charming record of it for a friend’s Christmas present. In the 1960s this unusually practical Art Deco structure was still used by the town’s schools and all Kelly’s children learned to swim in its unheated sea water before being allowed in the wilder surf she favoured. Neglect and the advent of more stringent safety regulations rendered the pool inaccessible to an affectionate public for some years but the Friends of the Jubilee Pool have now seen it both listed and restored for future generations to enjoy.

  (From the collection of Jack Trescothick)

  Silence settled on the room, as familiar and comforting to her as certain hymns to other worshippers. Morwenna glanced around her before yielding to it. It was a large, first-floor room with meticulously maintained 1890s decoration. There was a small jungle of tall potted palms and dracaenas in the deep, rounded bay window
that marked the building’s corner. Because of the height, the view was a soothing one of trees in the square’s central garden: chestnut, plane and lime.

  She would never get used to the ceaseless novelty there. Brussels’ hybrid culture and constant stream of passers-through was reflected in its Quaker Meeting, which was polyglot, well-dressed and rootless. Ministry was often made in heavily accented English in a room where she sometimes suspected she was the only native English speaker. There were the unchanging elements of Friends’ Meeting Houses the world over – the table, the flowers, the books, the noticeboard and the sense of a heterogeneous group united by a hunger for something more than mere life, the stuff of things, could offer. There was that slightly séancey atmosphere and the dim anticipation of weak coffee and biscuits. (Only the coffee here was real – if Fair Trade – and instead of biscuits, there were often warm, sugared waffles or sweet and bendy stroopwafels if someone had been to Holland that week.) But the handsomeness of the art nouveau building – owned by the Quaker Council for European Affairs, who paid for its upkeep by renting out rooms for meetings and parties – and the muted elegance of the Flemish regulars and the quantity of new faces every week made it strange. No doubt a Quaker growing up with weekly exposure to the arrangements at the Square Ambiorix would find the relative poverty and quiet sameness of a Cornish Meeting extreme by comparison. She had heard that Meetings in Africa or Central America were different again, some of them involving exuberant music, some of them more overtly Christian, some of them so profoundly meditative and unstructured that they lasted all day, not just for an hour between breakfast and lunch.

  Roxana caught her eye and smiled. Oh God. She knew. She should smile back but feared it would come out as a sort of simper or, worse, a sneer so she dropped her eyes to her lap, opting for demure over honest because she was a coward.

  Roxana had fallen in love with her months ago, that much had been obvious, but had only made things awkward by declaring herself the previous night, which meant Morwenna would have to move on for fear of hurting her gratuitously.

  People fell in love with Morwenna all the time, both men and women. It was not a thing she could have predicted and certainly not a thing she deserved. She looked pretty odd much of the time, she knew, so it wasn’t primarily a physical attraction. It was because they could not believe the simplicity of her – the lack of home, or job, or possessions, the routine lack of money – and projected mysteries and secrets on to her. And it was these that ensnared their hearts. Had she invented a persona to match other people’s, given them the usual litany of career, expectations, relationship history – crucially those expectations – the banality of it all would have put people off and simplified her life. But that would have involved lying, which was something she wouldn’t do. She had taught herself to withhold information but never to falsify it.

  Garfield thought she was mad. A lot of people did. Largely this was because their idea of sanity was so enmeshed with property, economic and social stability with its mental equivalent. She was bipolar. She was intelligent and well-educated and had diagnosed herself and read widely in the subject long before any doctor pronounced the diagnosis over her. It was a kind of curse, the obvious inheritance from her mother backed up by the gloomy genetic parcel from her father, whose mother had proved herself suicidal but had possibly been mildly unhinged as well. She had tried medication and rejected it. For personal reasons which her coolest, most rational moments showed her to be justified, she had chosen to surrender to her illness as she was surrendering now to the silence of the circle of men and women beside her. It drove her this way and that and was steadily wearing her out. She was like a plant rooted in too windy a spot. It would kill her sooner rather than later but death held no fears for her and suggested only the blank bliss of sleep. Were she not a Quaker, she would have killed herself years ago. Insofar as she deserved to die, though, living was a fit punishment for her.

  She had only tried to kill herself once and her depressions had rarely been as deep since. They were terrible and seemed to go on for months but after surviving one, she knew she would survive more. She didn’t always know she would survive at the time, of course, since depression of its very nature made such knowledge hard to believe, but she had learnt to manage herself. When she was entering a high but was not yet in a dangerous, hypomanic state, she stored up messages for herself to help pull her through the dark times. She wrote stories, poetry or simply long letters to herself, e-mailing copies of them to an address maintained for her by a convent which had once taken her in, which she only accessed in times of great need.

  Through this process, much of it self-exploratory, she had become a writer. Nobody knew it yet, she certainly hadn’t reached the stage of describing herself as a writer on forms, but she had sold a few of her stories to magazines and websites and one of her earlier poems, written when she was living in Potsdam with a rock musician, had achieved a kind of immortality as the lyrics to a song. The musician had stolen the poem after parking her in a Berlin A&E department, changed its he’s to she’s and passed it off as his own so she received no royalties from it. But she heard it being played in shops or bars sometimes, especially in Brussels – where its lines about belonging to a mongrel race had struck a chord – and, like her letters to herself, it was cheering.

  She was writing a series of long letters to Petroc as well, unposted naturally, which, provided she only looked at them from the corner of her eye, seemed to be coalescing into a kind of novel. But the novel’s ending was so inescapably death that she only wrote the letters when she was feeling especially brave or strong. Not that death frightened her. It was just that she felt more ready for it on some days than on others. She liked to repeat to herself a Stoical exchange from the teachings of Epictetus in which the worried pupil asks, ‘Shall I, then, exist no more?’ and his master replies, ‘Thou shalt exist, but as something else.’ For a long while she had cherished a bookmark, now lost, on which one of her nun friends had penned her a quotation from Religio Medici: ‘We are in the power of no calamity while death is in our own.’ (They were Anglican nuns, so relatively openminded about suicide.)

  She could so easily have loved Roxana in return. The temptation to shout down the voices telling her to move on was terrific. Roxana was the only woman she had been involved with in this way – allowing it to progress as far as bed rather than tearful conversations. Blonde and sturdy, what Henry James called vaccine in looks and manner, she was not obviously attractive. However she had that Flemish sexiness that was partly to do with her smokily slurred accent when she spoke English, partly with her cool acceptance of absolutely everything that caused no suffering. She was politically a radical, who had only left the radicals because they refused to reject violence and she wanted to be with people who got things done. She had carved a living in Brussels as a lobbyist. She was a natural Quaker – a refugee from her parents’ post-Lutheran atheism – and had taken Morwenna under her wing a year ago when Morwenna stumbled into her first Meeting at 50 Square Ambiorix, nearly catatonic with sleep deprivation and evidently, grubbily, homeless. She had an attractive apartment – a sublet of a sublet – in an unrestored 1880s building between the Oude Graanmarkt and the canal and a fridge as bottomless as her heart was warm.

  That they had stayed together longer than Morwenna had lasted with any man was less to do with unacknowledged lesbianism than with the fact that Roxana had never raped her, drugged her or stolen her clothes or poetry or abandoned her, penniless and gibbering, in a public place. Morwenna didn’t think she was a lesbian but then she didn’t think she was anything at all. Sex with anybody tended to leave her feeling panicky and stifled but at least with men one was required to give nothing back. Roxana, bless her heart, needed feedback, reassurance, more than merely a companionable heartbeat and a body’s simple warmth.

  She had not made the mistake of trying to make Morwenna see a doctor – she liked her beer so knew all about self-medication and respected her
choices – but, through one of her useful network of Low Country exes, she found her a job that would suit her, stimulating and wonderfully solitary, in an archive of botanical art. It would mean regular money, security, taxes, having somehow to track down what Morwenna called her notional insurance number.

  ‘And hey,’ Roxana said, with her characteristic downturn of the mouth, ‘archivists are hardly normal but it would be a kinda passport to the world of normal people, yes?’

  There was no pressure; she had a whole fortnight in which to decide. It was more than Morwenna deserved. Since dropping out of university her CV had consisted of nothing but waitress and chambermaid jobs and, once, folding shirts in a laundry.

  She glanced up again. Again Roxana sensed she was looking at her and looked right back and blessed her with a private, no teeth, smile. Morwenna held her gaze this time, gave her a kind of smile back then wrenched her gaze away towards the open window and the view of trees. At the stop near the front door a bus’s doors closed with a hiss and a rubbery thump. She felt the too-familiar churning in her belly that had been nagging her for days like a thing waiting to be born.

  She made a quick mental tour of Roxana’s flat. There was nothing crucial she could not abandon there. Having no identity card, she always carried her passport. She had the scant remains of her birthday card money in her wallet. She had on the stouter of her two pairs of shoes and her warm suede coat because the morning had been chilly. There wasn’t enough cash for a train any great distance but there was plenty to stand breakfast to any lorry driver who gave her a lift.