Notes from an Exhibition Read online

  He had stayed in boisterously hetero youth hostels, where he was kept awake by groups of girls singing along to their guitars, walked around so many churches and galleries and museums that his feet bled and only found the courage actually to enter a gay bar rather than merely staring from a café across the street on his last night in the country. Two men had approached him within minutes, who might have been asking for lights or proposing marriage but he had been too scared and too lacking in informal Italian to do more than sort of snarl in response and drive them away.

  He knew he was a man and should start acting and thinking like one and would probably never lose his virginity until he did but he was so lacking in romantic role models that he tended to think of himself as a sort of sulky, Helena Bonham Carter waif, waiting to be swept off her feet, waiting to have her proud reserve shattered with a forthright kiss in a poppy field.

  Now he was back, just as the Italian weather was improving, having failed to find a job out there because of his lack of Italian. And cowardice. He had landed a short-term job in the cinema which was an improvement on pasty-making, at least, but his romantic outlook remained bleak.

  And now, by a keen irony, Antony had taken Rachel to New York for the opening of her first solo exhibition there, a trip about which the two of them had done little but complain since it was first arranged. Apparently it never occurred to them to ask him to come too.

  The parking space near the house had been snatched by someone else so Hedley had to drive back to the seafront and leave the car there before walking up. Passing his driving test back in November had been the high point of his gap year to date. Not that he had a car of his own or anywhere particular he wanted to drive.

  Their bedroom’s curtains were still closed, puffing in and out of the open window in the breeze. Petroc had reached the age where he needed at least twelve hours’ sleep a night in order to function. Judging from the crusty T-shirts under their bunk, Hedley suspected him of launching into short frenzies of masturbation whenever he found himself left alone up there. Maybe this was why he was so tired.

  Morwenna was up, however, and already barricaded in by politics and philosophy revision at the far end of the kitchen table. She was cradling a big mug of tea and staring bleakly at a propped-up file marked Hegel while her Marmite toast went cold.

  ‘They get off OK?’ she asked, not looking up.

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘When are they back?’

  ‘Not until Tuesday.’

  ‘Fanfuckingtastic.’

  ‘We can party every night.’

  ‘Yeah. If you had any friends.’

  The kettle boiled. He slung coffee into two mugs and filled them. Two sugars in Petroc’s.

  ‘Sorry,’ she added. ‘I can’t talk until later. When are you at work?’

  ‘One-thirty till nine,’ he told her.

  ‘Cool. We can do lunch.’

  He stuffed a banana in the back pocket of his jeans and carried the coffees upstairs. Their room smelled like a cow byre. He twitched back one of the curtains, which brought a groan from the lower bunk.

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Coffee. Absorb.’

  Another groan.

  ‘According to the plan on the kitchen noticeboard, you’re doing French verbs this morning and Twelfth Night this afternoon.’

  ‘Oh bugger.’ Unlike the rest of them, Petroc had managed to grow up with a perfect local accent. He sat up just enough to sip the coffee without spilling it. ‘You put sugar in this, Hed?’

  ‘Two.’

  ‘You stir them?’

  ‘Course.’

  ‘Better make it three tomorrow, then.’

  Antony had claimed them an old partners’ desk when the school common room was refitted so they had half each, although Petroc persisted in using his half for carpentry and making model ships and encroached on Hedley’s for homework. No doubt he was readying himself for having the room to himself. His dark secret, so far shared only with Hedley, was that he planned to drop out of school after GCSEs to work for one of the boat-building firms in Falmouth. Carpentry and sailing were the only subjects that had ever stirred his interest.

  There would be fireworks. Or perhaps not. Having seen three of them through school and off to university, Antony and Rachel would perhaps make an easy exception of Petroc. Rachel, certainly, would end by defending his decision against every attack. (When it suited her, she boasted about her lack of higher education.) Petroc, who so rarely did right, could do no wrong in her eyes.

  Trained by her own self-discipline, Hedley took out a sketchbook from his art drawer and a couple of soft pencils and began to draw a pair of Petroc’s discarded Y-fronts which had landed across a copy of L’Immoraliste, which he was struggling to read in the original. The hard rectangularity of the book made a nice contrast with the soft folds of the intimate fabric. You could read the pants’ Coq Sportif waistband as clearly as the novel’s title.

  Rachel was angry when he had applied to art school. She said it was a complete waste of time, that she had never needed it, and that he could learn all he needed by attending life classes and would be better off apprenticing himself to a framer so as to save money later on. He shut her up by hinting that he found her sort of work old-fashioned and might prefer to learn about working with video or sound and light technologies.

  ‘I could learn how to make installations,’ he said.

  This she pounced on as an even bigger waste of time before predicting that he would probably end up teaching potato printing in primary school. He knew he had to let her snarl, that his ambitions threatened her, but she wounded him. Secretly, of course, he wanted to be just such an ‘old-fashioned’ artist as she was, a painter, and so he did his daily drawings, like a dancer keeping limber, and was impatient and hungry for what his art masters would pass on to him. Robbed of New York, his fantasies were now coalescing around art school, fed by details Morwenna let slip about LSE and the bohemian romance of student life.

  He had been feeling isolated by Rachel’s scorn lately and was happy to have Morwenna home for a few weeks. At twenty-one, about to enter her final term, she remained far closer to him than she was to Garfield, who now lived and worked in London and seemed impossibly adult and distant. He still hadn’t told her he was gay but he suspected he wouldn’t need to; their solidarity ran so deep. It was odd. She loved Petroc more than she loved him but in the unquestioning, often maddened way a mother loved a son. Her closeness to Hedley was something she had chosen. She had long ago elected to ally herself with him rather than with Garfield, for which he was always grateful.

  He loved Pet too, he supposed, but recently, especially since the abortive trip to Italy, he had detected a worrying shift in the balance of power between them. He always used to be protective of his little brother, looking out for him at school, sheltering him from the worst of Rachel’s rages. But now Petroc was no longer so little – seeming inches taller than him on account of his untamed hair – and seemed to be becoming the protective one. Whereas Morwenna and Hedley had passed through school like alien children, cool and difficult and making few friends, Petroc was effortlessly social and always had little gangs of boys or girls calling round to take him shopping or surfing. (To ‘play’, Hedley teased him, covering his own inadequacy with envious mockery.)

  It was curious that Rachel should so have favoured the one of them who was least like her, most like Antony. Antony had coped with marriage to Rachel, Hedley decided, by sustaining so many friendships outside it, through the Quakers and through the school where he taught. Hedley glanced at his father’s busy diary with a kind of awe and could easily picture Petroc turning out the same way, refereeing six-a-side football, teaching carpentry, manning the Quaker peace stall or volunteering as a hospital visitor for patients with no family. These were all activities done for others rather than selfish pleasure and all generated and fostered friendships. Sometimes Hedley thought himself appallingly selfish and immoral – which was why he was cur
rently ploughing his way through the works of Gide and Genet.

  Of all of them, he was the only one to have dropped out of the Society of Friends. Admittedly he did so to get confirmed and start going to St Mary’s – duty of another, even paralled kind – but that had all gone sour when Father Joseph, always so sweet, lectured the church youth group about the dangerous sin of self-abuse and its toxic cousin, homosexuality. For two years now, Hedley’s Sundays had been godless; a rebellion Antony, typically, disarmed with respectful silence. (And guilt at being left blissfully alone for a couple of hours every week had driven Hedley to learn to cook so that he could have lunch ready for them on their return.) Even Morwenna was still a practising Friend, though it would be interesting to see whether she and Petroc still chose to attend Meeting that Sunday without Rachel and Antony there to witness it.

  As he drew on, Petroc noisily gulped the last of his coffee, slouched out of bed and went to pee, fulsomely and unsupported, in the bedroom sink, stretching and yawning as he did so. Hedley could not stop himself glancing at his brother’s naked back view as Pet stooped to scrub his face with Clearasil.

  He had never thought of him in a sexual light and still didn’t but he admired his easy grace and the loose-limbed body that was emerging from his teenage chrysalis. He suspected that his romantic ideal would have something of Petroc’s manly confidence and casual athleticism, suspected further that these were qualities rarely found in gay men and that he was thus doomed to loneliness.

  He shot out a protective hand as Petroc made to snatch up the pants he was drawing. ‘Get a clean pair,’ he said.

  ‘But they’re my lucky ones.’

  ‘Well, tough.’

  ‘Bugger.’

  Petroc mumbled in search of fresh underwear. It was a house law that Rachel did no laundry for anyone but herself but he had yet to master the art as Hedley tended both to clean their room and to harvest his brother’s dirty clothes along with his own. Hence his acquaintance with the crusty T-shirts.

  The doorbell rang. Morwenna answered it and called up, ‘Petroc?’ before returning to the kitchen. There was laughter on the stairs and a gang of three girls and a boy burst into the room just as Petroc was tugging on some jeans with nothing underneath.

  ‘Rise and shine,’ one of the girls said with a leer. She was Bettany Sampson, older than Petroc, whom Hedley remembered from school as a notorious slut. But then these reputations tended to be built on wounded male pride. She seemed nice enough and very keen on Petroc at the moment. She flopped on the lower bunk with one friend while the other girl climbed on the top one and the boy started flicking through their CD collection. Hedley shut his sketchbook quickly in his drawer, which he kept locked as it held his American novels, and retreated to the kitchen to plague Morwenna in turn.

  The cinema prided itself on being one of the oldest purpose-built ones in continuous use in the country. Sadly it had been obliged to woo dwindling audiences by subdividing its original auditorium into three and so had lost much of its architectural charm.

  Whoever was placed on the afternoon shift had to hoover the foyer and, superficially, all three studios. This was Hedley’s least favourite part of the job. With the house lights on to pick up the dirt patches and ice-cream wrappers, the rooms were particularly unlovely, their glamorous drapes revealed as cheap, their velvet seats as timeworn. There was a dreadful smell in the smallest studio that no amount of hoovering or fresh-air spray would remove, as though a dead animal had been tacked behind the stapled ruched fabric that masked the soundproofing or someone had died during a screening and not been discovered until their bodily juices had soaked into one of the seats. The perk of the job – the chance to watch each new film for nothing – quickly palled and he doubted the place would retain any magic for him if he returned as a paying customer.

  To his surprise, however, he discovered that he enjoyed the part of the job that involved dealing with the public. He had always thought himself shy and awkward, a typical schoolmaster’s son, too well-spoken and obedient ever to fit in. Having a reason to speak to people, even if only to say, ‘Enjoy the film,’ or ‘Small, medium or jumbo?’ lent him confidence. People came there to be happy or to escape, which was infectious, and he found he wasn’t trying to roughen his accent, the way he usually did, but presented himself as a sort of genial host or cheerful young priest. He had a role – a reason to speak – and saw that people responded if he was mildly flirtatious, perhaps because having the ticket counter between him and them cut him off at the waist and desexed him as effectively as a silly uniform would have done.

  When there was a children’s film on he enjoyed catching the eyes of exhausted mothers and teasing a smile out of them. The men were harder, unless they were on their own when they could be surprisingly talkative. If they were handsome, he liked being extra helpful, warning them to sit near the back if the film was very loud or reminding them there was a licensed bar upstairs if it was very long and had no interval. There was a wistfulness to his encounters with the handsome ones because it was in the nature of cinemas, unlike pubs and bakeries, that few customers could be described as regular and – pensioners aside – none was likely to return within a week or so.

  It being the Easter holidays, there were two children’s matinees showing the previous year’s Disney cartoon, The Black Cauldron at one-thirty and Young Sherlock Holmes at two. Children always bought masses of sweets, drinks and ice-creams – the cinema’s chief source of income he was sure – so the displays and fridges all had to be restocked after each intake. Then he had nothing to do until the teatime screenings but sit behind his counter selling an occasional advance ticket and watching shoppers on Causewayhead pass the window. He was meant to sell ice-creams out of this window, which could slide back, but the management offered nothing that couldn’t be found more cheaply in the Co-Op and it wasn’t yet warm enough for ice-creams to appeal to anyone but a filmgoer. Besides, Hedley did little to encourage custom as he had encountered enough mannerless, sticky-coined brats for one afternoon. Because the window was small, people were too distracted by the film posters farther along the building to pay it much attention. No one thought to look in and he could stare with impunity.

  A young man with a whippet on a rope appeared out of the crowd. He had on a suede sports jacket of a kind Hedley coveted and short hair, which was why it took him a second or two to recognize him as Troy Youngs. The last time he’d seen him, Troy still had big, New Romantic hair because he was emulating Simon le Bon on a tight budget. The new look was a great improvement. He tapped on the glass and Hedley slid the window back.

  ‘All right?’

  ‘Troy! How are you? Good jacket.’ Hedley was in work mode and forgot to blunt his enthusiasm and Troy was a bit startled.

  ‘What? Oh. Thanks. Yeah, well, Wenn said you’d be here.’

  Morwenna had a longstanding thing going with Troy’s even dodgier younger brother, Spencer. Never quite a relationship, never allowed utterly to peter out, it had its roots in her late teenage rebellion. He regarded her as posh arm-candy, something to set off his latest motor, she regarded him as a source of uncomplicated fun. She claimed he liked it that she had no romantic expectations but Hedley suspected the truth was that Spencer thought she was easy.

  ‘So how’s Kirsty? How’s grown-up married life?’

  ‘Didn’t work out,’ Troy said. ‘Didn’t happen, did it?’

  ‘Oh. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Yeah. Well. Women, Hed. What can you do? We’re having a bit of a party tomorrow night.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘D’you fancy coming? Spencer asked Wenn and she said you were still around so …’

  ‘Yeah. Sure.’ Hedley remembered to be cool and not to ask what time and should he bring a bottle.

  ‘Cool.’ Troy didn’t smile. He never smiled. Not smiling was his thing. ‘See you then.’

  ‘Yeah. See you.’

  Hedley shut the window. The cartoon, adverts and trailers we
re done for the two o’clock screening and the feature had started so Candy, the usherette, had returned to the foyer where she liked to perch on a stool, watch the passers-by and smoke, if the owner wasn’t around to see her.

  ‘Who was that?’ she asked. She hardly ever bothered speaking to him, having decided he was too stuck-up or too young or too gay to be worth noticing.

  ‘Troy Youngs,’ he said.

  ‘What? Spencer’s brother?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘You known him long?’

  ‘Since we were kids. We were at school together. They give good parties.’ He felt himself rise a notch or two in Candy’s estimation and set about polishing the chrome ticket dispenser, enjoying giving her no more information and ignoring her for once. She had a mean little mouth like a rat trap and a prim way of stubbing out her cigarettes that implied she felt smoking Lambert & Butlers made her more interesting. Petroc, who was a mine of lowlife gossip because he had friends on the Treneere estate, said she had three children by three different men and was a notorious slapper in both senses.

  Hedley wished he could ring Morwenna to gossip but he knew he couldn’t without being more honest than he felt ready to be. Besides, the phone was set up for incoming calls only, which went straight through to an answering machine that enthused at tedious length through the week’s programmes. Then he remembered that Morwenna had set Troy up to ask him in person, when she could simply have passed on the invitation herself. Perhaps this was confirmation that she knew more than she was letting on.

  She had started hanging around – she scorned to call it going out – with Spencer Youngs in her idle months before going up to LSE, when she was eighteen to Hedley’s sixteen. Usually he had picked her up in his car and taken her back to his father’s rundown farm but occasionally he had come into the house, every inch the unwelcome bad boy, and spent an hour or two in Morwenna’s room, where they played their music so loud Rachel would start thumping on the attic floor or would storm out to the studio or to visit Jack, raging that if Morwenna got pregnant and ended up on the Treneere estate instead of going to LSE, that was her affair.