Notes from an Exhibition

by Patrick Gale

  But Antony said she was sick. Not like when you’d eaten too much lemon mousse but sick in her head so she’d been hearing and seeing things that weren’t there, like having a dream but with her eyes open. She’d also got sad. Very sad. In spite of having the new baby to think about. So she was in the hospital so that she and the baby could be made well and happy again. They weren’t to be worried by what other people said. She wasn’t mad. There were poor people in the hospital who were mad and were probably never coming out because they couldn’t cope on their own. But calling even them mad or loony wasn’t polite or even medically correct. They were ill, like Rachel, but more so.

  Garfield decided the baby had to be with her because of milk.

  ‘Can we catch it?’ he asked. They had been doing coughs and colds at school. Steve Pedney, a rather rough boy whose father was said to be in prison, was told off for blowing his nose by simply blocking one nostril with a finger while emptying the other smartly on to the playground tarmac. They all laughed because it was so disgusting but clever too and Garfield thought it might be nicer than spending the day with a soggy handkerchief in your pocket to surprise you when you put your hand in. But Miss Curnow said that was how tuberculosis was spread. Steve Pedney still did it though. Coughs and sneezes spread diseases. Madness and sadness might be spread too.

  ‘No,’ Antony told him, wrinkling his eyes in the rearview mirror in the way that meant he was smiling. ‘It’s just inside her, like a tummy ache. You can’t catch it by being near her or hugging her. In fact she’d probably like a big hug when you see her. She’ll have been missing you. But she’s on very strong medicine too which might make her seem a bit quieter than usual or a bit sleepy. Don’t worry. Just be yourselves and ask me afterwards if there’s anything you don’t understand.’

  At that point Morwenna started singing one of her aimless, rather tuneless songs so they both stopped talking and listened to her. She picked music up like a sponge – songs from Play School or advertisements (at other people’s houses because they didn’t have television), hymns from kindergarten and Sunday School, even carols from the Salvation Army band – but she sort of melted them down and transformed them so that unless you knew in advance what she thought she was singing it could be hard to guess. Garfield listened closely and decided that today it was the woman on the Shredded Wheat advertisement. He tested his guess by joining in and singing the real version alongside her.

  ‘There are two men in my life.

  To one I am a mother.

  To the other I’m a wife.

  And I give them both the best … with natural Shredded Wheat!’

  It was an odd song because it didn’t go anywhere. It was truncated – like the tail – end of something longer – but oddly haunting. He had only watched the advertisement a few times at a friend’s house and to his knowledge, Morwenna had only seen it once, when they watched it together in an electrical shop while Antony was buying batteries. But her memory was like that. It was almost frightening.

  The other thing that was strange about the advertisement was that you didn’t actually see the woman, just people on a sad-looking beach with the sun going down, but you felt you knew what she was like. You could tell she cared. She gave a lot of thought to how she fed her husband and her son. It was odd that she called her son a man because he obviously wasn’t but perhaps she was a bit shy of him. Perhaps he was strict with her like his father and food was her only way of reaching him. Food instead of hugs. Like some of the women friends from the Quakers who kept coming to visit while Rachel was away in her hospitals, the ones who called her Mummy instead of Rachel and who lied and said she was tired when they obviously knew she wasn’t but that they mustn’t say she was mad. They gave Antony cake and stew. But mainly cake. Garfield looked at the back of his father’s neck and thought of the Interflora poster on the flower-shop door in Market Place that said say it with flowers. Say it with cake.

  Morwenna caught his eye and smiled and sang more in tune so he knew he had guessed right. They kicked their legs in time and sang the jingle together, more confidently now there were two of them. It was funny.

  ‘There are two men in my life.

  To one I am a mother.

  To the other I’m a …’

  ‘That’s enough, now,’ Antony said, quite firmly.

  Garfield shut up at once but Morwenna carried on, louder and faster, giggling, not understanding because she was only three and a half.

  ‘That’s enough, Wenn,’ Garfield told her and tapped her knee so that she looked at him. ‘Ssh,’ he told her.

  ‘Ssh,’ she said back.

  ‘Who’s this?’ he asked, picking up her doll. She snatched it off him, as he knew she would, and lost herself in a quick fury of love, correcting the doll’s skirt and hair and squeezing it harder than any mother would. She didn’t really love her dolls, she just possessed and controlled them. She spent ages telling them off in language he couldn’t always understand and sometimes encouraged him to pull their heads off with a sick-making rubbery pop that made them both laugh. She laughed even more if he muddled the heads up when he put them back but then she tended to panic and he had to calm her by changing the heads round the way they should be and fast.

  They drove on towards Bodmin in relative silence. Some of his friends had parents with radios in their cars but all the Morris had were maps and Rachel’s sketchpad and a red tartan picnic blanket that smelled of beaches and seaweed.

  Rachel wasn’t a mummy and she certainly wasn’t like the Shredded Wheat lady. He thought it most unlikely she had been missing him and wanted a hug. Sometimes, especially if she was painting, she hardly knew you were there. And when she got angry it was really frightening. She never smacked them or hit them – Antony said that wasn’t right, which meant it wasn’t Quakerly – but she shouted and she hit things instead.

  It was worth it though for when she was happy. When she was happy she was better than any stupid mummy because she was like someone your age, like a sister but a sister who could put you in the car and say, ‘Let’s escape, let’s not go to school today.’ When she was happy and did things like take Garfield on a train ride or out for a long walk when he was meant to be in school or going to the dentist for a filling, Antony got cross but she just got crosser and then laughed at Antony, which was very shocking because he wasn’t someone you laughed at, being a teacher.

  When he was older Garfield might have to be in Antony’s English class at Humphry Davy, which was something he secretly dreaded as he would not know how to behave and imagined it would make things awkward around the other boys. His father must have a nickname, like Fishface or Wingnut or Dr Death that all the boys used. It would be so terrible he had even wondered about failing the Eleven Plus on purpose so he’d have to go to the other school, the bad one full of boys like Steve Pedney who never used handkerchiefs. Only that would not be Quakerly.

  He had recently stopped always going to Sunday School and started occasionally sitting with the grown-ups in Meeting instead. The power of the silence impressed him and what was Quakerly and what wasn’t was often on his mind. Wanting more pocket money now that he was older wasn’t. Being nice to Steve Pedney, even though other people weren’t, was. We all had a little bit of God or Goodness in us, even Steve Pedney, like a tiny candle you couldn’t blow out however hard you tried and however bad you were and when you sat with the others in silence you had to think of that candle and try to make it shine brighter. Or you had to think of the people who needed it, not just Steve Pedney but children in Africa or Rachel in St Lawrence’s or your new baby brother, Hedley who you weren’t sure you were going to like much and imagine holding them in a kind of warm light made by all the people in the circle. It was quite hard work, a bit like magic, and he enjoyed it. When they had assembly at school and all mumbled the same prayers together and it was all about God and Jesus and everyone saying exactly the same thing, it seemed shockingly noisy and so perfunctory it was hard to see what
the point of it was. Antony said it was up to him what he believed, that he, Antony, believed in God and Jesus and would probably call himself a Christian and that Rachel didn’t entirely but that they both believed in goodness, the little candle inside everybody, even Steve Pedney. Even Steve Pedney’s mother, who Garfield had seen in the Co-Op once, who had arms like roast pork and looked awful.

  St Lawrence’s was big; lots of large old buildings and quite a few smaller ones. It was like a little town behind its own wall. It wasn’t like a hospital because it didn’t have ambulances coming and going and there wasn’t a queue of people with blood coming out of them or taps stuck on their toes and bunches of flowers to give to friends. It seemed very quiet. You only knew it was a hospital because it had those coloured signs with white capital letters that only hospitals had. RECEPTION, the signs said, as if they were shouting. THERAPY UNITS. DRUG DEPENDENCY UNIT. REHABILITATION UNIT.

  They were a little early. Visitors were only admitted from two until four so they had to wait in the reception area and sit quietly looking at magazines until it was time. There were a few other visitors waiting too: a man with some books in a basket, an old woman with a bunch of grapes already arranged on a plate, a man and woman who murmured together in a corner and looked really worried as though they’d come in secret and hadn’t expected anyone else to be there. The murmuring woman started to cry and Garfield had to whisper to Morwenna not to stare. Morwenna was still too little to know what tactful meant so he was surprised she didn’t loudly ask why, the way she usually did. She fell to drawing on ladies’ faces in a copy of Woman’s Realm. Garfield pretended to read a copy of Motor Sport, which was a man’s magazine, but he was really watching Antony.

  Antony was normally very serious and calm. You didn’t really notice his moods because he didn’t have any. He was always the same, the unchanging pavement under Rachel’s weather. But today he was different, even nervous. He kept looking at his watch, as though he didn’t trust the clock on the wall above the nurse’s head, and turning his wedding ring round and round as though he wanted to unscrew his finger.

  He had seen the baby before. They hadn’t. Not really. Children weren’t allowed to visit the Bolitho Home in case they gave the babies germs or tuberculosis so Garfield had been made to wait on the pavement outside, holding Morwenna’s hand although she was wriggling like a fish and her hand was all sweaty and she kept asking why. Then Antony had appeared in a window, as he said he would, and held up the baby.

  ‘Look,’ Garfield told Morwenna. ‘Up there. See? That’s the baby. That’s our brother. See?’ But she had just started crying Anty Anty which was how she said Antony. She hadn’t been interested in the baby at all. Which wasn’t surprising because at that distance it looked as if Antony was just holding up a bundle of white blanket with a lamb chop inside it. When Garfield asked him what Hedley was like, he said it was impossible to tell because new babies were so wrinkled and red and cross and either cried or slept. So perhaps he was worried Hedley would have changed in a bad way. Or perhaps he was worried about the sickness in Rachel’s head. Garfield had looked up depression in his dictionary but it had only confused him by talking about weather fronts and dips in the landscape along with uncontrollable or clinical sorrow.

  The nurse’s clock was electric, like the ones in school, so it didn’t tick. Its secondhand swept round so smoothly you couldn’t really use it to count the seconds and it conveyed the impression that time was passing more swiftly. Something Garfield had learnt to resent in maths tests. Only the minute hand clicked. While Morwenna fidgeted beside him and Antony composed himself into stillness the way he did in Meetings, he watched the clock click from five to two to a maddening two minutes past before the nurse lifted the little upside-down watch on her starched apron front and announced, ‘You can go in, now. Just present yourself to the nurse on duty in the ward you want to visit.’

  ‘Which ward do we need?’ Garfield asked as they approached a big sign listing all of them with arrows in all directions.

  ‘Williams,’ Antony said and led them up a big flight of boomy steps with no carpet on them.

  ‘It smells,’ Morwenna complained. ‘I don’t really like it.’

  ‘Ssh,’ Antony told her. They had to pass a man who was staring and not talking and she took Garfield’s hand. She only did this when she was scared, which helped in a way because it meant he couldn’t be scared too.

  ‘Come on,’ he told her. ‘We’re going to see Hedley!’ But he flinched a bit when they passed a door where a woman was crying very loudly, like Morwenna did when she didn’t get her way.

  He made himself look into wards as they passed. In some, people were dressed and walking about or just sitting in chairs. In some they were all in bed. There always seemed to be either men or women. There was a room where everyone was really old and a children’s ward with pictures on the wall, which he hadn’t expected. He decided to start breathing as shallowly as possible so as not to draw the madness in.

  ‘Williams Ward,’ said Antony. ‘Here we are. Williams Ward.’

  The nurse there was young and really friendly. She crouched down so her head was the same height as Morwenna’s nearly and said, ‘And who’ve we got here?’

  ‘I’m Garfield and this is Morwenna,’ he told her.

  There was a really strong smell of lavatories but not from the nurse, who smelled of fabric conditioner.

  ‘Is that a fact?’ she said. She had huge breasts, he noticed, so that she could probably read her upside-down watch without needing to lift it. ‘Have you come to see baby Hedley?’ she asked Morwenna. Morwenna nodded.

  ‘And our mother,’ Garfield said. ‘Please.’

  ‘Mum’s a bit sleepy,’ she said. ‘So she might not chat much but she’s been looking forward to seeing you both. I know she has. You’re better for her than any pills. Soon cheer her up.’

  She smiled at Antony as she stood and Garfield saw she had a great curvy bottom to match. He was surprised to wonder how it might feel to push his face into it quite hard or to take shelter under her bosom as under a great, soft-stacked cloud. She might have read his mind because she briefly laid one of her hands on the back of his head and let it slide down on to his nape in a way that gave him goosebumps and made him blush.

  ‘You’ll find her in the room on the end,’ she told Antony softly. ‘Down the ward and turn right. I’ll go and fetch young Hedley from his cot.’

  There was a Bob Hope film playing on the television and several women were watching it or pretending to. Their faces faced the screen but Garfield was sure their eyes were slyly turned on him as he passed. He hated Bob Hope films. They were full of jokes he didn’t understand because everyone talked too fast and he associated them with nausea as they only ever seemed to be on when he was held home from school with a stomach bug. (He had heard it said that he had a sensitive stomach and was deeply ashamed of it.)

  Morwenna was holding Antony’s hand now, which must mean she was really scared and Garfield was briefly envious of the soft girlishness that would let her take such favours as her right until well past the age at which he had been told to be a big boy and stop crying and stop wanting to be held. Like Morwenna, he suspected, he really wanted to be carried high on Antony’s shoulders, which was where he used to feel safest, but Antony had a bad back and wasn’t supposed to do that any more.

  A woman in a yellow dressing gown with a head that was much too big came up to them and said, ‘You give me sweeties,’ in a voice that was all wrong.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Antony told her, ‘we don’t have any,’ and passed on with Morwenna.

  But Garfield had bought a mixture of Black Jacks and Rhubarb and Custards with some of his pocket money that morning. He had one Black Jack left and knew the woman knew it was in his shorts pocket because she wasn’t moving away but was staring down at him. ‘All right,’ he told her. ‘It’s my last one, though.’

  She took it from him and tore off the wrapper in seconds a
nd threw it in her huge mouth. Like a frog’s, her lips seemed to divide her head clean in two when they parted.

  She gulped.

  ‘You’re supposed to make it last,’ he told her.

  She was holding out a fleshy hand again. ‘You give me sweeties,’ she repeated and a dribble of liquorice spit fell on to her chin.

  ‘It was my last one,’ he said. ‘I told you.’

  He ran to escape her terrible stare and caught up with Antony and Morwenna as they were turning right at the far end of the ward. He glanced back to see if she was following. She had stayed where she was but she was staring and when she saw him look she twitched up her nightdress and he looked away fast but not quite fast enough.

  There was a row of individual bedrooms off a corridor. They had brass numbers on the door and, when a room was occupied, little cards slotted into brass holders, with people’s names on them. They made Garfield think of the jar labels in the larder at home, only instead of saying Dark Muscovado Sugar or Macaroni they announced their contents as Julie Dawson, Maggie Treloar or, in the case of room seven, Rachel Middleton (& Hedley).

  It was funny seeing her called that because when she painted everyone called her Rachel Kelly.

  ‘Why do all the doors have windows in them?’ he asked.

  ‘So the nurses and doctors can always see in,’ his father said and gave the little cough that showed he was unhappy. ‘So nobody can hurt themselves without someone seeing,’ he added. ‘Ready?’

  Garfield nodded.

  ‘Mummy!’ Morwenna shouted and Garfield shushed her.

  Antony peered through the window in Rachel’s door, knocked twice, gave a little smile then opened the door and gently pushed Garfield and Morwenna in before him. ‘Look who it isn’t,’ he said. He used a funny tone of voice, slightly wheedling, as though Rachel had stopped being a grown-up.

  She was sitting in the room’s only armchair, beside the oddly high-up window. ‘Look,’ she said sleepily. ‘I have to sit on all these so I can see out.’ She shifted slightly to reveal a great heap of telephone directories she had used to raise the chair’s cushion by nearly a foot.