Notes from an Exhibition (7 page)

‘Could I have one of these?’ Antony asked, holding up a tin of fruit-flavoured car sweets.

‘Sure,’ Garfield croaked. ‘Good idea.’

They each took one. They were the old-fashioned kind, bathed in tangy icing sugar, and suddenly seemed the most refreshing thing in the world.

‘I don’t suppose many people are coming back afterwards,’ Hedley said as they pulled out, ‘but I put out cake and tea things and whisky and sherry in case and boiled a couple of kettles so they won’t take too long to boil again.’

This was nervous chat but Garfield could think of nothing reassuring to say back so let it hang between them.

As they followed the hearse down Clarence Street, he saw how Hedley reached out to give their father’s shoulder a little squeeze.

In keeping with her eco-friendly coffin, Rachel had opted not for cremation, as had become the local norm, but for non-denominational burial. A farmer a few miles towards Land’s End had used diversification grants to set up both a pet crematorium and funeral service and a multi-species burial ground so that humans might be buried alongside their pets. His brochure boasted that they had facilities to cremate any animal up to the size of a carthorse and several horses had already been laid to rest there with space reserved alongside them for their erstwhile riders. There were no headstones in the burial ground. Instead each body or casket of ashes was laid to rest beneath one’s sapling of choice with no more permanent marker than a cardboard label tied to its trunk. The idea was to found a new, organically spreading wood instead of the inert space and straight lines of a traditional cemetery. Because so few mourners could bear to settle for a quiet English native as their marker tree however, the result was unlikely ever to seem natural in the Penwith landscape. On their way from the parking area to Rachel’s grave they passed a few beeches and holly
trees but also flame-red acers and ironwoods, magnolias and sad, short monkey puzzles.

As Rachel’s neighbour was to be an Irish Water Spaniel’s swamp cypress, likely to spread with time, they had opted for something deciduous and columnar, a fastigiate English oak. It stood to one side of the waiting pit in the plastic pot which still bore the price tag and care label from the nursery that had raised it. Its long leaves had turned brown but showed no signs of falling yet. Apparently they would hold on, like a beech’s, until the spring and only drop as their replacements came through. Garfield liked this idea and the way they would rustle together in the winter winds. Rachel liked a bit of noise.

Copying something he and Oliver had experienced at some friend’s funeral, Hedley handed out large springs of rosemary or lavender from a basket as everyone arrived. The undertakers lowered the coffin into its hole then stood back as, following Antony’s lead, they tossed their fragrant sprigs in on top of it. It was less brutal than throwing handfuls of earth, Oliver had explained, made nobody muddy and left a nicely evocative scent on the hands for hours afterwards. It still felt as if they were starting the burial process though. And they were scarcely spared because they then had to stand about while a woman on a small mechanical digger pushed a mound of earth back over coffin and herbs with a brutally frank thump, so that the tree could be planted. She manoeuvred the tree out of its pot and into the hole and offered a spade to Antony in case he wanted to lend a symbolic hand but he seemed quite unmanned and merely shook his head with a brief, devastated smile.

People were embarrassed now, shorn of familiar form, feeling the want of a priest. Garfield stepped forward and accepted the spade instead. He tossed in one load of earth about the tree then another then carried on, heedless of the others, until it was completely planted.

‘Sorry,’ he told the woman, sweating now. ‘Didn’t want that digger going again.’

She looked frightened and took the spade back without a word. He turned away to find Lizzy had come up behind him. She took him in her arms and rocked him saying, ‘There there.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she muttered as they turned to rejoin the rest. ‘About back there.’

‘That’s OK,’ he said. ‘You spoke the truth.’

‘Yes, but you’re pissed off.’

‘Let’s not talk about it now, eh?’ he said. He wanted to prolong her discomfort a little but of course she had apologized so any continuing bad feeling between them was now his fault. Never carrying the blame for long was a skill of hers.

She drove on the way back into Penzance, leaving him to ride in the back with Antony while Hedley and some carless Quakers were driven by Oliver. His father kept sighing as they drove so that Garfield was worried he was going to start crying. He wished he had some of Hedley’s gift for soothing chat. Lizzy, too, was not one to say anything when she had nothing to say. It was one of their bonds. He could out-sulk her, but only just, and often gave in first only to find that she hadn’t been sulking at all but merely silent.

When they arrived at the house, he realized Antony’s
sighs had been suppressed speech, for the moment Lizzy was out of the driving seat and had shut the door his father seized the moment to say, ‘Let’s have a quick word alone, before you two head back to Falmouth tonight.’

‘What, both of us?’

‘Just you.’

Far more people had come back to the house than he could have predicted. Several of the women from the Meeting had taken swift command of the kitchen and tea-brewing, and extra cakes had materialized on alien china and been sliced. Far from feeling like an invasion, it was a relief. For an hour, maybe longer, the house was richly inhabited by people chatting, eating, washing up, gossiping, lapsing into tearfulness, offering comfort. All the things unsaid at the Funeral Meeting were free to bubble up now. Photographs of his mother he had never seen before were passed around. They showed her looking younger or different somehow, presenting her out of familiar context or with people he hadn’t even known she knew. It was pleasant. It postponed silence and grimness, but even so it was too much for Garfield after a while and he seized his moment to commandeer the quieter of the two lavatories and stayed there longer than he needed to, reading an old
TLS
, a review of a book on the history of Byzantium so remote in its urgent preoccupation from his immediate concerns it was like calamine for the itching soul.

Jack Trescothick, the family GP as well as Antony’s oldest friend, caught him as he came out.

‘My old violin,’ he said. ‘Do you think you could find a buyer for it? It’s a nice instrument. None of your Korean crap. I think it’s French.’

‘Sure,’ Garfield said. ‘Drop it off with Dad and I’ll take a look next time I’m over. Maybe one of Lizzy’s pupils is looking for one.’

‘Thanks. Fingers getting too arthritic. And Garfield … What Lizzy was saying earlier about getting a child … Do you want tests?’

‘We’ve had tests, thanks. The works. Nothing wrong with either of us.’

‘Good. Just time, then.’

‘Yes.’

‘You know, inheritance is by no means certain. You turned out fine. And Hedley.’ He failed to mention the other two.

‘Lizzy’s father suffered from depression,’ Garfield explained, quietly because someone was passing them with a muted hello to use the lavatory. ‘I think she worries about a sort of genetic build-up. What with Dad’s mother too. Or I worry. We both do.’

‘Nurture not nature, if you ask me. It’ll be fine. You’ll all be fine.’

Bracing talk was Jack Trescothick’s speciality, as was a kind of pharmaceutical parsimony, and would always be offered first in case it could be accepted in lieu of pills. He boasted he had the fewest hypochondriacs on his books of any practice in West Penwith. ‘If they can’t get their sweeties, they go elsewhere,’ he’d say. ‘Either that or they pull themselves together.’

It was astonishing that a man apparently so unsympathetic and averse to prescribing should have proved so loyal and effective a doctor to Rachel over the years. And in a tragedy he was never slow to hand out sleeping pills.

The tea party, wake, whatever it was – half a joint of ham had appeared from somewhere, so perhaps it was supper now – lasted nearly three hours. Drifting from room to crowded room accepting the arsenal of affection from sorrowful looks through handshakes to hugs, all of it buttered with talk, Garfield received an impression of the three of them – he, Hedley and their father – briefly upheld and protected by a loving concern that was ever so slightly stifling. The talk was to save them talking or, worse, weeping but it had something of fear in it. They surely were not scared of his mother; however frightening she might have been on occasion, she was beyond scaring them now. So perhaps it was Morwenna’s continuing absence that frightened them? Or Petroc’s? Petroc’s absence remained so raw and ugly and beyond consolation it had marked the family and left everyone a bit scared of them, even the most tranquil and frank of the Friends.

He overheard both Oliver and Lizzy being told in a friendly but firm manner to ‘look after’ them as though either partner might now be at risk of running away. At last, demonstrating his knack for nurture, Oliver began to prepare one of the healing, impromptu soups that were his speciality and the discreet scent of frying ginger and onions freed people to start leaving. As the last person left, Hedley thrust a glass of claret into everyone’s hands and, helping Lizzy make toast, began a post-mortem as though it had been an ordinary party; who had said what, who had failed to come, who was wearing badly, who he hadn’t known. Where Lizzy or Oliver didn’t know someone he would fill them in with
an anecdotal explanation that dared them not to laugh. And soon there was laughter, and the smell of toast – so sour in his own kitchen the day she died – became cheering. How had he done it? How could one person so improve an atmosphere by force of will?

Watching them gossip and laugh, leaning against the dresser he knew by touch as well as he knew the small of his own back, Garfield caught Antony’s eye and followed him out and up to the master bedroom.

Everyone had been flinging their coats and scarves on the bed where Rachel’s body had lain and there was another woman’s scent on the air, something sweet and floral and English. Garfield glanced at Rachel’s bedside table drawer and thought guiltily of drugs and drains.

Antony was rifling through his sock drawer, carelessly spilling its contents. He produced an envelope, read its address to reassure himself then turned to face him.

‘She wrote this for you,’ he said.

For as long as Garfield could remember, their father had referred to their mother as
She
. Her personality was so large and pervasive that she was the first woman who sprang to mind at the word. None of them ever thought he meant Morwenna, not even Morwenna.

He began to hold out the envelope but as Garfield stepped forward to take it he held it back.

‘She wrote it years ago,’ he said. ‘Just in case. I didn’t want her to but she teased me about Friends telling the truth and she had a point. Then, when Lizzy said what she said I remembered it and thought you should, well … Here you go.’

He handed it over watchfully.

Her handwriting came as a shock. She wrote and read so little she could hardly have been said to have had a life in words. The written word was as little her medium as singing and it was always startling that someone with such a keen eye and such casually worn skills as a draughtsman should have such poor penmanship. Only her signature had confidence, because she had practised it so long and hard for her paintings it became an icon for her, a sort of pictogram for her personality. To the unfamiliar eye, the words on the envelope – Master Middleton – might have been written by a backward ten-year-old.
Master
. So she had written this when he was still a boy. Just in case.

Garfield tore open the envelope, whose glue had all but given out with age, pulled out a one-page letter and turned aside to read it, oppressed by his father’s gaze.

What he read didn’t make sense at first, partly because Oliver called up, ‘Boys! Supper’s ready!’ when he was halfway down its single, spidery paragraph. He looked at his father for confirmation.

‘It’s true?’

Antony nodded. ‘But I always thought of you as mine.’

‘Did you know him?’

‘Not to speak to. He was quite a bit older. He may not be alive still. There’s no getting round what you might have inherited from Rachel but at least taking my mother out of the picture might improve the odds. Of course I can’t answer for him and his family.’ He nodded at the letter. There were footsteps on the stairs and Hedley’s nervous cough. The smell of toast was all about them suddenly, driving off the stranger’s scent.

‘I’ll go down,’ Antony said, meaning to herd Hedley back into the kitchen. ‘Let you digest it all.’

‘No. Honestly,’ Garfield began, meaning to say that it couldn’t matter less, that it made no difference but he found Antony had gone and it mattered so much he had to sit in the tight little button-backed bedroom chair no one ever used and read the letter again.

It was dated 1962.

‘My Garfield,’ she had written. ‘My darling, beautifully perfect. You’re still a baby, only a few months old, so it’s hard to imagine you reading this. I wasn’t going to write anything but I’ve been thinking and thinking and, as always, I worry about it making me ill. I was ill for a bit again after you were born so coming back to myself to find you is so special. So I’m putting it on paper then at least it’s down there and all I have to do is decide whether or not to tell Antony I’ve written it and whether or not we’ll ever tell you. I hope I can tell you in person one day but this letter is a just-in-case. Your father, your biological one, isn’t Antony. Before I met Antony I was involved with someone else. He’s handsome and clever and for all I know quite rich but he was never going to marry me, whatever he said, and anyway he’s married to someone else and I didn’t want you born in a little circle of pain and guilt. Because you’re going to be special! But you have a right to know who he is. (Antony’s Quaker truthfulness is rubbing off on me!) So. For the record. His name is Simeon Shepherd (Professor).’ She gave the man’s address, in St John’s Street, Oxford, and a phone number so short it looked antique.