Notes from an Exhibition Page 20

  The tidiness was as much to do with Hedley’s contribution as with the absence of Rachel’s. Having him on this extended visit had become something like having a wife again but of the 1950s school. He made beds and aired rooms. He dusted and hoovered. He set good meals on the table at regular hours and provided charming conversation with them. His presence was a delight but Antony could tell that, in the name of being a good son, he was actually deferring for both of them a time of necessary recognition, perhaps even the time of full mourning.

  When his nerve cracked at last, an hour after all the shouting and banging gave way to silence, when he broke into the loft and found her cold, it seemed that all his feelings would be released in a merciful rush. Alone with her body he cried and raged and brooded. He kissed her and shouted at her and held her, free to do as he liked because she had not died in a hospital with all the family around her. But then, once she was buried, a kind of numbness stole over him, abetted by Hedley’s housekeeping, and he found he was missing the honesty of sorrow and unsettled by the ambiguous feelings that insinuated themselves in its place.

  Was the absence of her not like the calm after days of violent weather? Did life not feel easier now he no longer shared it with such a difficult woman?

  Jack gave him Prozac in the first flush of crisis to help him cope. Antony had come off it now, not liking the way it kept his feelings so muffled and hoped this would bring them flooding back, but it hadn’t. In his shrewd way Jack had been more help than anyone, Jack whose life had been so shaped by the loss of a loved one. Jack had been without Fred for far more of his life than he had been with him but had never loved again – or not publicly – and, notoriously, had abandoned painting in the throes of grief and barely resumed it in the decades since. He maintained the gentlemanly pretence that medicine had been his vocation, art a mere hobby. He had work in the Tate – a small painting of his was regularly hung in their St Ives gallery and was one of their bestselling postcards there – but time had made the pretence a fact.

  Jack called in every day for a few minutes, checking on his patient on his walk home from the Morrab Road practice he now shared with several much younger partners who did almost all the work. Grief was a kind of illness, he maintained, and ran a course as predictable as measles or the common cold. Its fever always abated, given time and management, leaving the luckier among them with scars where love had been. He had been just as supportive after Petroc and even that grief, shockingly, had receded in time.

  When Antony hinted that Hedley’s continuing presence was threatening to turn him into an emotional invalid, Jack gently reminded him that Hedley was mourning too and pointed out what Antony had missed. ‘That boy’s always been the family glue, stopping you going to pieces, keeping the peace. With Rachel gone he’s out of a job. He needs time to adjust. That’s assuming all’s well with him and Oliver. I can’t think why else he’d end up spending all these weeks in a single bed.’

  Even as he dismissed this and said that things with Oliver were fine, Antony realized that perhaps they weren’t. Hedley had always presented his home life so smoothly that it virtually compelled an equally smooth acceptance and certainly didn’t invite discussion. Worried now, Antony waited until Hedley was out grocery shopping then rang Oliver at the gallery. Possibly he had been tactless because there being a problem between them seemed to have no more occurred to Oliver than it had to him. Backing off from meddling further and embarrassing them both, Antony turned the conversation to whatever paintings Rachel had left behind and the possibility of a show and it transpired that a (fairly junior) Tate curator had already been making discreet enquiries. On safer ground, Oliver agreed to come down to look at them at the first opportunity and take photographs. A friend of his was rather keen to see Cornwall, he added disconcertingly just before they ended.

  When various obituarists had rung with queries about the details of Rachel’s life, Hedley had dealt with them. They had agreed on the formula: Hinting at some unhappiness in her family background, she preferred to keep all details beyond her date of birth and Canadian origins a mystery. It had been Hedley’s suggestion that, now that she was dead, there could be no harm in a little investigation.

  Antony had accepted long ago that it was not something she wished to discuss.

  ‘If I’d told you I was adopted,’ she liked to say, ‘you’d have left it at that. Just pretend I was adopted. Pretend I was a foundling. It’s really very dull.’

  Had she suffered from conventional depression, there was no doubt she would sooner or later have taken a talking cure and been encouraged by a therapist to dig over her life before coming to England. As it was, with Jack and the other doctors so certain her problem was purely chemical, her only therapy was chemical-based, which always worked in the end. Perhaps, too, because he had been denuded of family when they met, he had not been led to wonder much about hers.

  When the funeral was announced and the obituaries began to appear, he began to wonder idly if some relative of hers, or someone claiming kinship, might not emerge from the shadows but they had heard from no one. It was not unlikely that her relatives were all dead. End of story. But it began to irritate him. He began to feel stupid telling people that he didn’t know. It almost suggested, it struck him, that he didn’t care.

  And so, encouraged by Jack, he tried researching in the town’s libraries and when that failed he gave into pressure from Hedley and admitted a computer to the house.

  Once connected to the Internet, he actually knew far more about surfing genealogy sites than Hedley did. Literacy students not referred by an employment agency often denied they had a problem and would make their first overtures to the centre as a request to learn about the Internet. Their failure to form sentences in an e-mail or their heavy reliance on the computer’s spellchecker could gently be used to convince them that perhaps there was something beyond computing they needed to learn. In the hope of luring them into writing some extended prose that could be used for a detailed analysis of where their literary problems lay, Antony’s ploy with some of these was to suggest they therefore use the centre’s computers to research their families. He knew all the generalogy sites, as well as the ones for tracing people students had been to school with or known through work.

  With no great expectations and largely to satisfy Hedley, he pursued the usual channels. He listed Rachel as his wife and the mother of the four children on a couple of family tree sites, specifying that she had come to England from New York in 1960 and been born in Canada. Nobody contacted him apart from a slew of American Kellys who hadn’t read the bit about Canada. Then, hunting through their bedroom bookcase in search of a copy of J. T. Blight’s A Week at the Land’s End, he was shamed by finding several out-of-date National Trust member’s handbooks to fetch a box and, Hedley-fashion, do a little weeding out.

  The box was half-full when he came across a small Bible. It had slid behind the other books and, to judge from its thick coating of dust, had lain unconsulted for years. There was a Collins School Bible in the kitchen bookshelf, abandoned by one of the children there and used as the house reference copy for crosswords ever since. This one was inferior even to that. It was a cheap, Gideon Bible stolen from some hotel drawer. He was shocked to see how Rachel had scrawled illegibly over page after page of text, in different coloured inks that soaked through and with cheap biros that often punctured the paper. It was like coming across a cruel snapshot of her at one of her lowest ebbs and his immediate impulse was to toss it into the box.

  But it fell open at the front page. In a small box of clean white paper, which Rachel seemed to have protected from her own insane scrawls by outlining it when the Bible first came into her possession a childish hand had written, Ray Kelly, 268 Gerrard Street East, Cabbagetown, Toronto. Please return on pain of death!

  She had never called herself Ray, even when they first met. It certainly wouldn’t have suited her and must have been one of those phases so many children went through of trying
on different names as they experimented with signatures or ways of answering the phone.

  He threw the book away, seeing it was both distressing and unusable but next time he was at the computer he thought to add the shortened name as a nickname on the entries for her, in case it would make her more familiar to someone who had known her in childhood. With Hedley’s help, he also had the earliest photograph he had of her scanned on to a disk at the copy shop in town. It was taken by his grandfather and showed the two of them side by side on the doorstep. She had hated it at the time, saying it made her look old because she was wrinkling her forehead but he had kept it in the back of his sock drawer, along with a few precious early postcards written by the children, and now he felt it made them both look pathetically untested and young. He had thought her so sophisticated and urbane at the time, a woman of experience, but to look at her now she seemed little more than twenty or twenty-one. Some four years younger than she actually was.

  When he brought the disk home, Hedley used the computer to enlarge and enhance the picture then, at Antony’s insistence, cropped him out of it. They then attached it to the various genealogy sites. Especially seeing it enhanced like that, Antony felt it was unmistakably how she had looked at that age but he still felt he was lowering a small and untempting piece of bait into a very deep lake.

  A response came in just two days. Encouraged by Lizzy, who was full of talk of just think what fun it would be when his grandchild was old enough to e-mail him, he was getting into the habit of checking and replying to e-mails once a day. He did it after taking in the real mail and before reading the paper. He logged on, thinking to find nothing but the usual nonsense about enlarging his penis or acquiring a degree by simply writing a cheque, and there was a real message for him from winnie@simplegifts.com.

  I was at school with your Ray in Toronto and knew her from when she was small. I didn’t know her by that name though. Then we lost touch, which saddened me. I’m so happy to hear she had a family and was happy. Here are some pictures for you. Could I see some more of yours?

  He double-clicked to open the attached file without preparing himself and suddenly there was a picture of a black-haired toddler in a snow suit and another of Rachel, unmistakably Rachel, in school uniform at about twelve, looking furious but striking, recognizably herself as it were. He zoomed in on the pictures until their details broke up into little cubes. He stared until his eyes ached.

  Hedley had gone to tidy Jack’s overgrown garden for him. Some Quaker friends were driving Antony to a Peace Lunch way over in Come-to-Good. From there he was going to be collected and taken to Falmouth by Lizzy and then Garfield was driving him home after they’d given him supper. It was going to be one of those days when the kind wishes of others made him feel like an elderly parcel and he felt a need to take some action and achieve a little for himself by way of compensation. So he marched into town, to the place where Hedley had helped him buy a computer, and bought himself a scanner. It proved light to carry and ludicrously easy to use and within an hour of getting home he was scanning and attaching pictures of his own.

  He sent Winnie a favourite picture of his, one he kept on his bedroom chest of drawers, of Rachel and the older children helping Petroc blow out the candles on his fifth birthday cake and a much more recent picture of her taken for an article in The Cornishman for her last Newlyn exhibition showing her leaning on the promenade railings and looking a bit ferocious because the photographer had taken too long. He filled in a bit of detail for Winnie, who he guessed could not be an art lover; how Rachel had settled in Penzance with him and become a successful painter and loving mother despite living with the burden of bipolar disorder. For good measure he scanned in a copy of the most readable, if least accurate, obituary that had appeared to date. The Quaker friends were collecting him at eleven so at ten-fifty he checked his e-mail one more time. She had responded.

  I woke up at dawn and couldn’t sleep (yet again!), she wrote. I’ll be in the UK next week and I think we should meet up. I attach my picture, so you can see I’m not some psycho. Best. Winnie MacArthur.

  He guessed she was a little younger than him, though having that North American knack for self-preservation, she could have passed for late-fifties. Yet to have been at school with Rachel, she must have been in her mid-sixties. Her hair must once have been blonde and now was dyed but she had allowed enough silver through for her hair to match her finely lined skin. She was dressed with quiet elegance and was laughing in the picture because a large dog – a Newfoundland? – had jumped up to greet her. She appeared to be standing in the doorway of some kind of furniture shop.

  She was also, without question, Rachel’s sister.

  ‘PS’, she had added under the picture. ‘Her name was Joanie, back then. Joanie Ransome.’

  SNOW SCENE (1955). Oil on canvas.

  An unsigned teenage work, completed for a Toronto schools competition, the eerie Snow Scene shows the clear influence of Magritte in the smooth application of colour and the way it suggests darker meanings beneath a surface of somnambulistic calm. The scene is deserted, the snow in the garden and on the paths from front door and garage still untouched. The neighbouring houses show signs of life – Christmas decorations, a snowman, the grey light of televisions, even a dog. This family is away, perhaps. And yet, if we look closely at the window of one of the upper bedrooms – said to be the painter’s own – we can see the first flickerings of a fire that has broken out in there.

  (From the collection of Mrs Josh MacArthur)

  For as long as Winnie Ransome could remember, she had dreamed of an extra sibling. Brother or sister, either would have done. She simply needed one to spread the pressure a little and mop up some of the attention. With just her and her older sister, Joanie, the situation was intolerable. Among friends, groups of four were held to be good, unlike groups of three, because they could split into pairs. But four in a family meant your parents had only the two of you to weigh in the scales of justice so invariably one would always be down when the other was up.

  Joanie came first. She was almost exactly a year older and was so tough and strong-natured she’d probably have withstood being an only child. But as soon as Winnie arrived and there was a point of comparison, their parents decided that Winnie was the good one, the little angel, no trouble at all and Joanie was the miniature hellcat, the hothead, the problem child. It was almost as though Mom needed this one of each thing to make her life complete. Like having a nest of tables. And if you took a girl and told people, in her hearing, that she was good, that was who she felt she had to be. Always. Or perhaps Winnie’s problem was that she was a born conformist? Maybe if she’d found the courage to break the mould earlier on she wouldn’t have felt so constrained now that she was within a year of leaving school and finding the avenues open to her so few.

  Joanie was dark and bony – skinny Mom called it – and striking despite her big nose. Her eyes were green, true green not just pond-coloured, and she was quick-witted and funny, though their mother called it sharp. Winnie, by contrast, took after their mother and was a Dutch blonde, curvy and blue-eyed and invariably standing two steps behind and staring at her feet while Joanie shot her mouth off. Winnie was undeniably pretty, china doll pretty, with a little tiptilted nose and tiny hands and tidy little ears and a neat, if rather too rosebuddy mouth.

  But it was a prettiness that seemed to require inactivity. As a little girl, much admired by relatives, her reward was to be buttoned into dresses she must not tear or get dirty, so she had to sit still indoors while Joanie ran wild climbing trees with boys. Now she was a teenager she had more say in what she wore and since Dad had been promoted and they had moved to the new house in Etobicoke she actually had a clothing allowance. Boys had taken to calling her a doll, which was a compliment but again seemed to require a kind of waxen passivity.

  Joanie was talented and clever. She scored well in class, when she could be bothered, and maddened the Havergal staff by her habit of answe
ring back questions in a way that made the whole class laugh and the teacher feel stupid. She loved Katharine Hepburn and sat through The Philadelphia Story over and over until she could imitate her funny accent and angular way of talking and drove their mother crazy pretending that was now the only way she could talk. And Joanie was an artist. She had been winning art prizes and illustrating the school magazine since she was fourteen or so and it didn’t matter if she was so rude and wild that no boy would marry her because she had a future. Admittedly Mom thought being an artist was an unladylike ambition and there was an ongoing battle because Joanie wanted to go to Ontario College of Art and draw people with no clothes on whereas Mom wanted her to be a commercial artist, and get a job painting glamorous gowns and pots of makeup for one of the better magazines or working for an advertising agency, like Lauren Bacall in Written on the Wind, only not so vampy.

  Winnie, by contrast, had no talents beyond gymnastics, which had got her into the cheerleading squad but would never prove a ticket to the wider world. If she could be any film star it would have been someone sweeter than Katharine Hepburn; she favoured the ones that sang without showing too much body – Kathryn Grayson or Debbie Reynolds. She had a sweet, true singing voice in church but was too terrified of singing solo ever to do anything with it. She was invariably placed in the lower third of her class and would be lucky if she even made it to secretarial school. (She had glanced at a shorthand manual and thought it looked impossibly strange and difficult.) She had recently decided that her only realistic option was marriage and motherhood.