Notes from an Exhibition Read online

  She pulled away, sensing perhaps how much he enjoyed holding her, and walked on. ‘Tell me about you,’ she said. ‘I need a bulletin from the real world.’

  And in trying to honour her request he realized afresh how unreal the world of the university had become to him. They walked on and he told her about Smollett and his fears that he had picked the wrong MPhil topic but would be thought a lightweight if he asked to change it now. He told her about continually feeling an impostor among adults and she was shocked to discover he was only months younger than her. ‘It’s the lack of experience,’ he said, which made her laugh without crying. He told her about the Quakers and being raised by his grandfather and about being Cornish.

  ‘Is there more light there?’ she asked.

  ‘Much. Even when the weather’s bad you can always see lots of sky. And variety in the sky. It feels odd here, having no horizons.’

  ‘It’s like being at the bottom of a weedy pond,’ she snapped. ‘That’s why everyone here does those fucking watercolours.’

  They walked on in silence for five minutes then she said, ‘This is my street,’ and led the way down one of the sad, low terraces that bordered the canal.

  ‘It’s nice,’ he said automatically.

  ‘It’s miserable,’ she corrected him. ‘Though there’s a wild little garden, which is good. When the sun shines. If the sun shines.’

  ‘Are you going to be all right, Rachel?’

  ‘Nope,’ she said and smiled at him wanly. ‘There’s nothing you can do for me, Antony. I can’t be saved.’

  ‘Can I see you again?’

  ‘Same time next week,’ she said. ‘How’s about that? Another Renaissance genius, another walk home in the drizzle. Maybe I can watch you drink a cup of tea beforehand? This is my house.’ She stopped on the side of the street that didn’t back on to the canal, by an especially pinched-looking house. He still wasn’t used to so much brick everywhere.

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘All right. Your bag.’

  He handed her back her shapeless satchel and must have looked especially needy or hangdog because she gave him a rapid hug and said quickly into his ear, ‘I could drag you in and get you drunk on cheap wine and my record collection but it would make me feel like an old hooker and I’d hate you for it.’ She pulled away and felt for her latchkey in her bag. ‘You’re a good, clean Quaker,’ she said. ‘You believe in truth and the little bit of God in all of us but I’m a miserable, hooked-on-sin Presbyterian and I’d be nothing but bad for you. Go back to the light, little boy and I’ll see you for Piero next week.’

  She let herself in and he was alone in the drizzly street except for an enormous cat trying to fish something out from a deep crack in the pavement.

  He should have been wretched. She had rejected him, as much for youth and perceived goodness as for lack of experience. She had belittled him and treated him like a sort of provincial English eunuch who would never catch up with or understand her. But as he pedalled home to the institutional reassurances of dinner in hall and a long, lonely evening in the college library stacks with an article on Georgian pamphleteers, he swung between happiness at being taken into her confidence and the qualified promise of her friendship and excitement at being initiated into a world previously closed to him.

  This euphoria lasted all week. He worked hard, wrote a long, reassuring letter to his grandfather and miraculously found Smollett funny again. The week seemed to fly along and by the evening of the next lecture he was determined to impress her as less immature than she

  thought him. He had read up on Piero della Francesca for a start and had found her secondhand copies of the first two volumes of Dorothy Sayers’ translation of Dante. He had met a few refugees from hard-line religions and had decided that her throwaway references to their faith differences and her slightly over-dramatized sense of her moral waywardness made her the ideal audience for Dante’s mix of harsh religious mythology and humane storytelling.

  He arrived a whole hour before the lecture was due to start, in case her quip about watching him drink tea had been in earnest, and chilled himself waiting for her on the steps until the now half-familiar faces of the other art students began to shuffle in past him. He waited on in the lobby until Professor Shepherd appeared, with a squeak of shoe leather, then slipped in and sat in the rear row of seats, holding a place for her by the aisle in case she arrived late.

  It had been raining intermittently all day and the fug of wet overcoats and Harris tweed was stifling but he found himself drawn in by Professor Shepherd. He had thought a good deal during the week about what she had told him and had decided it was a fantasy. She had met the professor on the liner, as she had said, but they were probably both with their respective families and nothing significant was said. It was a crush. One of those inexplicable crushes to which even clever girls were prone. She needed a father-figure. Perhaps her own father was weak or foolish and an eminent lecturer in her own field was safely symbolic. When he had rebuffed her so publicly, she reversed the situation in her mind to save her fragile self-esteem. After Tony’s foolishly admitting his virginity she delighted in seizing the opportunity to deceive and shock him. But at bottom she had done so because he interested her and she had given him reason to hope.

  Faced afresh with Professor Shepherd he was not so sure. He was younger than he had thought at first – in his late thirties, perhaps – but with the manner and dress of his elders. And even in the things that aged him there were touches of the dandy: the black shoes were polished to a mirror shine, the three-piece suit was sharply cut, the white shirt that matched the silvered gloss of his hair, brilliantly clean and creaseless, and his tie was iridescent petrol-blue. His voice, too, was at once commanding and silky. Even as it pronounced on Piero’s mastery of space and precocious suggestion of frozen time, Antony could imagine it saying, ‘Take off your dress and stand where I can see you.’ This was not the voice of a man who loved in helplessness but that of a predator who captivated by withholding affection. So why was his latest slave not here?

  Anxiety began to take hold of him until he could sit there no longer. Under cover of darkness, while Professor Shepherd was having difficulty with his slide projector, he slipped out, unlocked his bicycle and rode to Jericho through a fresh downpour that blinded him. Her little house was lit up, looking cosier than it had the week before, but when he knocked at the door an old woman answered, in a housecoat and clutching a bath sponge gritty with Ajax.

  ‘So it’s you,’ she said, not letting him in, when he asked for Rachel.

  ‘I’m sorry. We haven’t met.’

  ‘No, but it’s obvious who you are. You’re too late. Ambulance took her to the Radcliffe an hour ago. The state of our bathroom! You’ve a nerve showing up here now.’

  Her husband shuffled into view in the narrow corridor behind her asking, ‘Is that him?’ but Tony was already back on his bike and riding up the street towards the back entrance of the hospital.

  There was an oddly similar scene on the ward where he finally tracked her down. He had bought flowers from the hospital stall on his way up, which was perhaps a mistake on top of the Dante. The nurse he approached took them as all the explanation she needed and was cold towards him.

  ‘You’re lucky,’ she said. ‘Not sure I can say the same for her. She’s in the last bed on the left. You can have five minutes then she’ll need rest.’

  There was little more colour in Rachel’s face than in her pillow. She was all sore-looking angles beneath her borrowed nightdress. Without beret or scarf her hair hung, lank and greasy, behind ears which he now saw were small but slightly protuberant. She stirred sleepily, then, seeing who was visiting her, tried to sit up, which was when he saw that both her wrists were thickly bandaged.

  ‘Antony’ she slurred.

  ‘Don’t,’ he said, pulling up a chair. ‘Don’t try to speak.’

  ‘Not drunk,’ she said. ‘It’s pills. Oh amazing pills. When I shut my eyes I don’t dream,
I just switch off like a light and the darkness is so soft and pillowy.’

  She shut her eyes for several slow seconds during which he distinctly heard another woman on the ward murmuring the Lord’s Prayer. She opened them again, took him in afresh and said, ‘You brought me flowers.’

  ‘Yes. Sorry. They’re not very …’

  ‘They’re hideous. You’re so sweet. Sweet Antony.’

  ‘And this.’ He put the brown paper parcel from the bookseller on her blanket. ‘But maybe it’s a bit heavy going for here.’ He had a growing sense of being surrounded by female patients who were all in a more or less similar state of wretchedness. She looked unimaginably lovely to him. ‘What can I do?’ he asked, trying not to weep but feeling tears welling up. It was as though he could feel her damaged spirit fluttering between his hands. ‘Who can I tell for you? Your parents?’

  ‘Christ, no.’

  ‘A tutor?’

  ‘I’m not a student.’

  ‘Professor Shepherd, then.’

  ‘Fuck!’ she said loudly, startling him. She giggled and shook her head. ‘Nobody,’ she sighed. ‘Just you’s nice,’ and shut her eyes again.

  The nurse was approaching so he stood to forestall her. She took the flowers from him with a hint of disdain. ‘I’ll put these in a vase for her,’ she said. ‘Time to go now.’

  ‘When can I come back?’

  ‘Tomorrow. Visiting hours are two until four. You left your parcel on the bed.’

  ‘Oh. No. That’s for her.’

  ‘Ah.’ She shut the books, still bagged, in the locker by Rachel’s bed.

  When he visited the next day, bringing fruit this time, a smuggled bar of chocolate and a Georgette Heyer romance from the bookstall because it looked more comforting than Dante, he was waylaid by a woman doctor about the same age as Professor Shepherd and as severe as a nun, with a stethoscope where her crucifix should have hung. She was kinder than the nurse, however.

  ‘Are you the father?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘You’re Miss Kelly’s friend?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Perhaps she didn’t tell you. She’s two months pregnant.’

  ‘Oh.’

  He sat, unwittingly confirming her assumption.

  ‘You’re not engaged or …’

  ‘No but …’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘I can look after her.’

  ‘Can you take her out of Oxford?’ she asked. ‘A complete change of scene would be best.’

  ‘I live in Penzance.’

  ‘Perfect. She’s held on to the baby despite the overdose and losing all that blood. She’s a toughie. They both are.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, reeling. ‘Good. When could she leave?’

  ‘End of the week? She hurt herself quite badly and I want to be sure she’s strong enough. The antidepressants will keep her pretty woozy. Presumably you have a doctor at home she could see?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, having no idea because he was never ill and neither was his grandfather. He thought of his best friend, Jack, who had recently qualified and returned home but seemed uncertain whether to set up as a GP or be a painter.

  And that was it. At no point was Rachel consulted. She was simply told. She was asleep that day so he just sat and held her hand for an hour until people started to stare at him but when he came the next day she was sitting up, waiting for him. She said, with the woozy slur he was beginning to find worryingly attractive, ‘They tell me you’re taking me home with you.’

  ‘Well … They assumed all sorts of things and I just … I could just take you back to your digs if you like. The doctor needn’t know.’

  But that upset her and she shook her head and started to cry.

  So it was settled. He called on his supervisor and managed to break the news in a way that wasn’t a lie but sounded more of a moral imperative than it perhaps was. ‘Someone very close to me, a young woman, is extremely ill and needs me to look after her,’ he said. ‘As she has no one else. I know this means dropping out and I’ve thought very hard but I can’t see any other way.’

  His supervisor had evidently sensed his waning enthusiasm for Smollett and research and was immensely understanding.

  ‘If you can come back next term, let me know and we’ll see what we can do but …’

  ‘I think I’m probably going to have to get a job,’ Antony said, which was only just dawning on him. Half the reason he had opted for research when his first degree came through was because the only other future he could imagine with an English degree was as a teacher.

  ‘I suppose you could always teach,’ his supervisor said, echoing what everyone at home had said when it was announced he was to study English rather than something useful, like law or engineering. And he offered to write Tony a reference should a suitable opening suggest itself.

  He had a car, a Ford Popular badly rusted from living so near the sea at home. He could barely afford to keep it on the road, still less run it, and used his bicycle whenever he could, but it represented adult possibilities, however laughable, to set against the suspicion that his staying on to pursue an MPhil was somehow immature.

  He settled his buttery bill and packed his suitcase and few possessions into the boot and lashed his bicycle to the roof. There was no one he felt he must see before he left. He hadn’t acquired the knack of making friends. At home and at Oxford the Quakers were so sustaining they left him as lazy socially as any man dependent on a wife. Growing up with only a deaf old relative for company had left him shy of novelty and the challenges of his peers. His grandfather was so deaf now that even if he was close enough to hear the phone ring and answer it he could hardly hear what one was saying so that making phone calls to him about delicate matters was unbearable. So, rather than risk yelling at him from a kiosk an arrangement he could hardly explain to himself, he had settled for a calming, matter-of-fact letter presenting the two salient points as independent bits of news rather than a cause and effect.

  Dear Grandpa, my research hasn’t worked out so I’ve decided to cut my losses, come home and see if I can find a job, probably as a teacher.

  I’ll be bringing Rachel with me, a painter friend who has been ill and needs a change of scene.

  She was sitting at the end of her bed, dressed and ready, suitcase standing by her feet. She had on a navy-blue duffel coat he had not seen before so that he supposed some friend of hers had called by her lodgings to bring her things she needed. The coat was fastened up to the familiar red scarf at the neck, as though she were waiting at a bus stop in the icy cold, not in a well-heated ward. She looked bloodless, blank and exhausted but she mustered a weak smile when she saw him and stood, wordlessly, bag in hand, eager to be off. The doctor intercepted them on their way out to press a jar of pills on him.

  ‘See that she has two three times a day,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid it’s not safe to trust her with the whole bottle. Not just yet. Good luck. Your local GP can fix her up with another prescription.’

  Once they were down in the car park, Rachel became quite animated. She admired the colour of the Ford. ‘I thought we’d be getting in a taxi,’ she said. ‘I never pictured you with a car.’

  As he opened her door for her, he noticed there were brown bloodstains at the cuffs of her coat and realized her landlady must have bundled her into the ambulance with the first clothes that came to hand. Now that she was sitting, he saw they were a wild mismatch, even by bohemian standards.

  ‘I’ll need to pick up my other things,’ she said. ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘Of course not. Maybe I can help you pack.’

  It transpired that she didn’t live in the little cottage with the faintly hostile couple he had met but in a studio at the end of their tiny garden. It was really a converted garage, basic even by student standards. There was an outside privy and hot water from an Ascot over the tiny, much-chipped sink. Presumably when sponge washing was not enough, she borrowed the landlady’s bath
room. Otherwise there was a bed that doubled up as a sofa, a single rickety dining chair, a card table, a kettle and a toaster.

  She saw him taking it in. ‘It was the only place I could afford that had a bit of privacy,’ she explained. ‘Once the door’s shut, they couldn’t see in and I could let friends in at the window.’ She indicated the room’s window, which had been crudely inserted into what would have been the garage door, and he immediately pictured Professor Shepherd taking off his hat and wincing fastidiously as he climbed through it.

  She had pulled out a careworn cardboard suitcase from under the bed and was rapidly emptying the chest of drawers into it. He was struck by how few possessions she had. (He was shocked to watch her casually throw her few paperbacks into the wastepaper basket.) The meagre collection of plates, cutlery and dented pans were the landlords’. The only thing of beauty was an incongruous old pewter candlestick which she thrust among her clothes when he began to show an interest in it. Her painting things stood near the window: an old easel, which he dismantled and bundled up for her, and several shoeboxes stuffed with an assortment of paint tubes, bottles of turpentine, brushes and little palette knives. When he asked her where all her paintings were, she said she had got rid of them, with a kind of flash in her voice that warned him off the subject. She clearly did not mean she had sold them.

  She flung the window up and told him to bring his car round so they could load that way rather than trailing stuff through the house. Then she handed things out to him while he loaded. He had assumed she would need to leave through the house so as to settle up with her landlords and say goodbye so was surprised when she ended her labours by climbing through the window and closing it behind her.

  ‘But they’ll think we’re still in there together,’ he pointed out.

  ‘Oh probably,’ she said, shivering as she got back in the car. ‘I hate them. They don’t matter any more. Can you drive quite fast now, please?’

  He drove as fast as the car and the law allowed, which wasn’t very, but she seemed satisfied and palpably relaxed as they put more and more streets between themselves and the scene of her recent troubles. Then, as they left the city and began the drive towards Swindon, she asked a few questions about where they were going, about Penzance and his grandfather. Just how deaf was he? How big was the house? Were they near the sea? Was there somewhere she could paint? She wasn’t making conversation; she was asking questions so that he would talk so she didn’t have to. And he duly talked and found he wanted to.