Notes from an Exhibition Read online

  For weeks on end the sand could all but disappear, visible only from the clifftop as a bank formed in the bay’s broad mouth. This would expose instead the beach’s rocky foundations, a mesmerizing, ankle-twisting layer of rounded boulders over a sloping granite shelf. When the sand went it was harder and less comfortable to go swimming but it had the advantage of putting off casual visitors and children. Provided one could find a broad enough boulder and had a thick enough towel to act as a cushion, it could still be a good place to muse and doze, the heat coming off the salty rocks, the stream gurgling somewhere beneath them.

  ‘Are you coming in with me?’ she asked Petroc. ‘Birthday swim with your old mum?’ She had persuaded him to wear his trunks instead of shorts because he could be prudish about changing in public, even in a cave. But he was content with what he was doing, attempting to divert or dam the stream by the insertion of rocks and weed bundles and merely shook his head with a fleeting smile.

  She knew she should slap some sun cream on him – he had the vulnerably pale skin that went with his deep-red hair – but he hated her fussing and the sun wasn’t hot yet. Besides, she had a shameful hankering to see him freckled. So she left him in peace and made herself stride into the waves, fighting the urge to cry out or flinch at the cold. She made herself dive, to get past the point where she might be tempted to run back out, and swam several strokes under water. When she emerged, gasping, she found herself in one of those mysteriously warmer patches created by the tides. She waved to Petroc, who was watching her anxiously, and he waved back. Then she lay on her back and kicked out for several more yards but the memory of swimming instruction at high school was too strong and soon she merely floated, staring up at the cliffs and sky and then out at a little plane towing a flag to advertise some attraction they would never see. Then she rolled on to her front and saw a seal watching her from only five yards away, close enough for her to hear the faint indignant snorts of its breath. She kept still, treading water, willing it to come closer although she suspected seals were not as benign as they looked. Suddenly there was another, much smaller one beside it, also watching her; a pup, perhaps, or simply a female? She glanced over her shoulder to the shore in the hope she might catch Petroc’s attention without startling the seals but he was lost to his dam-building so she looked back and enjoyed a full minute’s solitary communion with them before they slipped from view.

  Numb from cold now, she swam back to shore and hurried up the beach to her towel. She had recently acquired a sort of beach robe, a blue towelling dressing gown with a voluminous hood. She couldn’t bear to upgrade to a more matronly cut of swimming costume but the birth of four children had left her self-conscious of her increasingly pear-shaped figure and the veins on her thighs. She liked the garment, sensed it would improve as it became bleached and battered with age. She had offered to buy Petroc one as it would protect his skin and he would look adorable in it but he said no because it would look like a dress. He was probably right. She worried that boys could be turned homo with too much of the wrong kind of love but Jack had assured her it lay entirely beyond a mother’s control.

  She settled herself comfortably in the sand with her back against an especially flat bit of cliff. This was the risky side of the beach to lie because there were great rocks high above, barely contained in the turf and shale around them, but it caught the sun and gave the best view. She tugged her sketchpad and a pencil case out of the picnic bag and began drawing the archway the sea had hollowed out from the cliff on the beach’s shady side.

  It was an interesting shape but a challenge to capture with only a pencil and a few coloured crayons as it presented such extremes of light and shade but then working on the planes of water, the utterly still, dark pool in the sand beneath the arch and the dazzlingly white-shot blue of the open sea glimpsed beyond gave her an idea for a painting or a series of paintings. Layers of finely gradated colour could be built up in bands, like a stack of Pyrex saucers that had once held her fascinated in a hospital canteen. She abandoned the sketch then filled page after page with studies, leaning on her drawn-up knees.

  She was faintly aware of time passing as she worked. Some people came to the beach with a dog and explored the caves, talking loudly about a bird they thought was roosting there, and passed on. Petroc padded around her and helped himself to sandwiches and a pork pie and tomatoes and some apple juice. At one point, when she had fallen back to staring at the arch in the cliff – seeing it yet not seeing it as the pictures formed and rearranged themselves on the canvas in her mind – a man walked into her vision and distracted her. He was impossibly tall, thin and old, perhaps seventy, like a Mervyn Peake illustration. She watched as he half-stripped until he had nothing on but his khaki trousers then darted like a wading bird in and out of the shallow surf, stamping his feet and stooping to catch the foam in his hands before anointing his face and neck and, strangest of all, the small of his back. She saw that Petroc, far up the beach among the high tide of pebbles, was watching too and she grinned at him. Then they watched the man stamp his feet dry on his jersey, dress and leave again, clambering back up the boulders and clay with surprising agility. His little visit had taken all of six or seven minutes, like a speeded-up re-enactment of childhood joy amid the mature pleasures of a long clifftop walk.

  She began to draw a quick cartoony drawing of the man stamping in the surf but was distracted afresh by the light on the water and the entirely unwatery shapes she could see in it if she stared long enough, a kind of network of dish shapes and bending discs. Then she remembered that several of the crayons she was using were water soluble so she experimented with a corner of a handkerchief dipped in apple juice and rubbed selectively across what she had drawn. She was playing and she was working and she was entirely absorbed and happy.

  Finally she broke off, when her inability to take the ideas further without paint and brushes was becoming a kind of pain, and remembered with a spasm of guilt that it was Petroc’s birthday and that was why they were there together with no one else.

  But he was fine, gathering and sorting stones into a collection a few feet from where she sat. He looked up, aware she was watching him.

  ‘You’re back,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Do you want a pork pie?’

  ‘Yes please!’ She was ravenous, she realized, and thirsty. She drank the apple juice in her beaker, which had acquired the unmistakable sweet-wood taint of pencil and thanked him for the pork pie and tomato he brought her.

  ‘You’ve done lots,’ he said, looking at her pad while, unable to control herself, she briefly stroked his amazing-coloured hair.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. The sketches looked hopelessly scrappy but, with the cooler eye that followed inspiration, she could see there were enough details in them for her to recapture her ideas when she was back in the studio.

  ‘Did you draw me a card?’ he asked.

  She paused. ‘No,’ she admitted because she couldn’t lie to him. ‘But you can have …’

  ‘Can I have this one?’ he asked eagerly. With unerring instinct he had singled out the most interesting of the ones she had blurred with apple juice.

  ‘Of course,’ she said, pleased. ‘You have an eye, Petroc Middleton.’

  ‘I have two,’ he pointed out. ‘You can write me something on it later.’

  ‘Oh. All right. What are you doing there?’

  ‘Sorting stones. I need six.’

  ‘Show me.’

  He gravely brought several pebbles to her side then crouched to demonstrate. ‘That’s you,’ he said, ‘and that’s Antony. And then Garfy, Hed and Wenn.’

  ‘Why’s she bigger than the boys?’

  ‘Her head’s so full.’

  Hedley’s stone was almost white, very smooth and neat and pleasing. Set upright and mounted in a block of polished wood, it could have passed for sculpture. Garfield’s was black and thin, more like a length of pipe or a weapon. Antony’s stone
was bronze-coloured and broad.

  ‘So we can all ride on him,’ Petroc said.

  Her own, she saw, was smaller than any of the others. It was black, like Garfield’s, but shot through with other colours, dashes of white and pink and a kind of rust.

  ‘It looks better when it’s wet,’ he said but she found herself returning, shocked, to the fact that he represented her with a stone so small and vulnerable beside those of her children.

  ‘Look,’ he said, slightly mischievously. ‘I can put you in my pocket.’

  ‘But where are you?’

  ‘I can’t decide.’

  So she tucked the drawings safely in the bag where she found them the Kit Kats she had brought them, then they hunted for the stone that best caught the essence of Petroc.

  It was one of the wonders of the beach, which nobody she knew had sufficient grounding in geology to explain for her, that the boulders and pebbles that lay beneath the sand and emerged, today, at the beach’s highest point, all appeared to come from entirely different sources. Some intense heat, was it, or violent tumult within the earth there had brought forth stone of every shade? Garfield had once tried to catalogue them. Like some lost soul in the Greek underworld, he felt compelled to sort them into black, white, pink, white and black, grey and pink, grey with white streaks and bronzy yellow. The variety had defeated him as much as the lack of time between tides. He had been furious too, she remembered, that the pocket geology guide she had bought him seemed to offer no definite examples among its illustrations of any stone there.

  The tide was mounting. All but one of the caves was below water. She found a stone that perfectly matched his hair but he dismissed that, perhaps as too literal. She found a lovely piece of deep blue sea glass, the colour of a Milk of Magnesia bottle, but he said it had to be stone or it wouldn’t work.

  ‘I hate to break up the party,’ she said, ‘but I need to get dressed again before the sea takes our things and you need to get home to birthday cake and sausages, which Antony will have had ready for an hour at least.’

  He didn’t protest or complain but merely kept looking and comparing and sorting as she slipped back into the cave and took a quick pee in the sand. She exchanged her robe and costume for sandy underwear, her poppy-print sun dress and smelly espadrilles.

  ‘Found it!’ he shouted.

  ‘Well that’s a relief. Let’s see.’

  It was the most ordinary stone imaginable, a sort of brown, earth shade with no shine and no variation in colour.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Why’s this you?’

  ‘Feel,’ he said and handed it to her.

  It was far heavier than expected, like lead, and it fitted so exactly beneath one’s clasped fingers it might have been moulded from wet clay. As the local men said when something fitted a purpose exactly, Could’ve been made. She smiled.

  ‘See?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course.’

  She had thought he would simply want to arrange the stones in the cave mouth or high on a boulder in the stream. Taught by the tedium of having to carry things home on walks, both she and Antony had long stressed the importance of leaving natural things where the children had found them for others to enjoy.

  Petroc was insistent about bringing all six stones home however.

  ‘They’re too heavy,’ she said, when the nature argument failed. ‘That’s a very long cliff we’ve got to climb and then there are all those fields to cross at the top. Why don’t we put them here like this? We can build a lovely circle with them. Or … Or make a cairn, so people know to leave them alone for when you come back.’

  But he was adamant. In fact he started to cry, which was alarming because he cried so rarely and had never been the tantrum-throwing sort, unlike Morwenna and Hedley, who were given to self-dramatization. ‘You don’t understand!’ he shouted. ‘We can’t leave them because it’s us!’

  ‘Well put the smaller ones in my bag. But we can’t take those big ones.’

  ‘But they’re Wenn and Antony!’

  ‘They’re just stones, Petroc. And I’m tired of this.’

  With a look of thunder that would not have disgraced Garfield on a bad day, he took the two largest of the tribe, one under each skinny arm, and clambered over the boulders to the path. He couldn’t always climb and hold them at the same time but had to lift them up ahead of him, climb a level to join them, then lift them up again.

  Half-amused, half-curious, Rachel followed with the picnic bag over one shoulder and her feet smarting where the espadrilles, which were slightly tight anyway, were grinding sand into the sunburnt tops of her feet. The climb back up to the fields was far less dizzy-making or perilous than the scramble down but it was still slippery and arduous and her amusement turned to guilt as she watched him labouring up ahead of her with a stone under either arm. There was a big rock at the top of the climb where, by tradition, they tended to gather to catch their breath and admire the view. She took longer strides, so as to catch up with him and coax him into sitting with her. She insisted he surrender one of his stones so she could take it in her bag.

  ‘Give me Antony,’ she said. ‘I’m married to him, after all.’

  So all the stones came home with him.

  She had thought he would introduce the rest of the family to them as he had her but he seemed oddly reticent when they reached the house, possibly because he felt he had made a childish fuss over something that didn’t matter.

  The stones started out on the windowsill of the room he shared with Hedley. They then migrated mysteriously to the bathroom, where one of them chipped the bath enamel. Finally they found their way, singly, up to the attic where she found a use for them as paperweights when she had the windows open. Except for Garfield, the one shaped like a pipe, which came in useful for squeezing the last dab of paint from a tube.

  JUMBO JET STUDIES (1986). Ink on paper.

  Kelly completed these obsessive studies of the view from the left side of a British Airways Boeing 747 during the only transatlantic crossing she ever made by air. This was for the one-woman show held for her in New York at Easter 1986 so triumphantly and yet, tragically, to so little purpose. Kelly hated even European flights. They frightened her and she found herself incapable of sleep in transit because, she claimed, she had convinced herself that the plane would fall from the sky if she let herself lose consciousness. Faced with the relatively long flight to New York, she occupied her mind by repeatedly making these highly finished ink drawings, complete with cross hatching worthy of Hogarth, of whatever she could see from the window beside her. The result is a modernist take on the experiments carried out by Monet at Rouen Cathedral; the essential architecture of window frame, wing and engines is unchanging from picture to picture yet the qualities of light, shadow and cloud pattern are the same in no two images. It was Kelly’s idea to have the studies framed en masse like this, to suggest a stained-glass window. Interestingly nobody had noticed until the curating of this retrospective that one can tell, by comparing the nightfall and starlight pictures of the sequence with what is known of her travel arrangements, that she worked on the flight home as well as on the flight out. The assumption had always been that she was too heavily sedated on the flight home to speak, let alone to draw so beautifully.

  (On loan from the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart)

  ‘You won’t go wrecking the car, or anything?’ Rachel said.

  ‘It’s hardly likely,’ Hedley told her.

  ‘No,’ she said and he fancied she sounded disappointed. Antony finished stowing their suitcases and joined her at the open window. ‘Wenn’s got the gallery and apartment details,’ he said. ‘Just in case. Don’t let her work too hard. Make her go for a walk or something.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘And try to get Pet to revise a bit. His French oral’s only weeks into term and his verbs are still feeble apparently.’ ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Sorry.’ Antony grinned. ‘I can’t believe we’re actually going away.’
/>   ‘Without us!’ Hedley reminded him.

  Rachel glanced at her watch. ‘We’re late,’ she said.

  Further down the platform the guard slammed a last stray door and jumped aboard as the stationmaster held up a flag and blew his whistle.

  ‘No, you’re not,’ Hedley told her. ‘Have a lovely time. Sell loads. When do you get there?’

  ‘You’ll have been sleeping for hours. I hope.’ Antony held up a hand in farewell. Rachel had already gone to her seat without a backward glance. She hated travel, hated trains, and hated flying still more. She would be in a state until they arrived and Antony would need more than his usual saintly patience about him. Hedley hoped he had double-checked her packing behind her back. The last time they had attempted a family holiday, renting a cottage on the Gower Peninsula, she had accidentally on purpose forgotten to pack her lithium and didn’t think to mention it until a week into their stay, by which time she was all but airborne and the rest of them were close to helping her off a cliff. They had to drive her to a hospital in Swansea for an emergency prescription.

  Hedley waved back, leaning on the empty luggage trolley, aware of a handsome man seeing off family. He was on heat. It was pathetic. He made himself turn his back on the man and walk back to the car. Being nineteen and a virgin was sad enough without making a tit of himself into the bargain.

  His gap year had been an utter failure so far, largely because of his dishonesty. Having secretly read three gay novels now, as well as dreary Maurice, all of them American, where he dreamed of going was New York or San Francisco. But the association with his fantasies was so close that to admit this would have been tantamount to admitting he wanted to travel for sex not culture. So he had taken a horrible job spooning filling into pasties on a bakery production line in St Just and spent his earnings on a trip to Florence and Rome instead, in the name of preparing for art school.