THE GODFATHERS (1972).
Pencil and coloured crayon on paper.
SYMPATHETIC BLUES (1972). Oil on canvas.
Never shown until now, although named and signed as if for exhibition, The Godfathers surfaced among Kelly’s numerous papers and sketches after her death. The setting is the artist/doctor Jack Trescothick’s Newlyn studio where he is shown on a sofa with his fisherman companion, Fred George. The child between them, his face hidden in a cat mask but clearly identifiable from his clothes, is Kelly’s third, her son Hedley. The reason this tender picture, in which Kelly’s affection for the three and their fondness for one another is so evident, is strange is that only Trescothick was Hedley’s godfather. Fred George was drowned when Amazing Grace, the fishing boat he was working on, mysteriously sank on a calm summer night a year before Hedley was born. The informal photograph taken on his fifth birthday (see below) shows how his mother’s drawing simply replaces her and his father on the sofa with Trescothick and George. Executed in the same month, Sympathetic Blues is surely an abstraction of elements in the same image; artist, lover and godson are echoed in three shapes whose shades pick up exactly the shades of blue the three are wearing in The Godfathers and whose arrangement – two larger forms bending protectively around a much smaller third – suggests an emotional intensity from which the figurative work holds off.
(Both works on permanent loan from Antony Middleton)
Hedley had not meant to stay on so long after the funeral. With disastrous timing, long-booked builders had arrived in his and Oliver’s house in London to rip out, extend and re-fit the kitchen and Oliver was too busy at Mendel’s to oversee the work with the necessary attention to detail. Oliver could date a picture frame from only its back view and tell a real Kokoschka from a fake virtually by smell but he was quite incapable of stopping an electrician placing a socket several inches out of place and affected a kind of snow blindness when faced with fabric swatches. By rights Hedley should have driven back to London two or three days after Rachel and her shockingly undecorated cardboard coffin were laid in earth. Nearly a fortnight had passed, however, and he was still in Penzance.
No one but he seemed to realize how much there was to be done. Sorting Rachel’s clothes had taken days, for a start. She had always been a spendthrift clothes shopper and seemed never to throw anything away. As child after child had left home, she had simply extended her storage territory into the wardrobes and drawers they left empty. She never emptied her pockets when she put things away, either, so he kept finding things she would have long since forgotten losing: bracelets, cheques from galleries, house keys. Many of these finds would involve leaving the room to go to her desk or in search of yet another sombre consultaion with Antony. Some of the clothes – old bras, pants and tights and numerous things ruined by paint – could be bundled into bin liners without hesitation. Others were good enough for charity shops but needed washing or dry cleaning first. Others – usually barely worn suits or dresses, purchases made in her high-spending bouts of mania – were grand enough to count as vintage and therefore be sold for charity through a dealer.
This was all time-consuming enough but then there was the way so many clothes were so evocative that Hedley would find himself remembering or weeping or simply sinking into little bouts of unconstructive reverie before stuffing them, no decision made, back into a cupboard.
He was crying a lot still, which was unlike him. He had thought experience had left him thicker-skinned.
He had pictured her death, and even wanted it, often. The reality had proved far easier and less traumatic than anything he had imagined; no hospital, no messy suicide, no drawn-out guilt trips or deathbed speeches. It was the unexpectedly quiet exit of such a histrionic woman that had unmanned him, he decided. He loved her, he had always loved her, but it was a love in which he had grown used to thinking of her as the tireless adversary. For as long as he could recall, their every conversation had been a skirmish, their every affectionate moment freighted with protective irony.
She required his worship and would have hated him to see her reduced by a common or garden heart attack, would have hated him for seeing it. He had long suspected that, for all her bohemian credentials, she thought him less of a man for being gay. She was certainly made insecure by his living with a man who worked at Mendel’s, the gallery that had always represented her to the world. She had asked him to end the relationship and, when that failed, had tried to have Oliver fired. (Oliver’s mourning was purely sympathetic and professional’) That it was made plain that she was now less valuable to Mendel’s than Oliver was had not endeared him to her.
Apart from all the clothes and belongings, there was the loft window to fix. Hedley called a glazier out to replace the broken pane up there. While waiting for him he took a bucket out to the garden below and picked over the flowerbeds, pots and gravel, retrieving all the pieces of shattered glass he could spot. He found one and then another of the six big pebbles she seemed always to have kept to hand there and, not far from them, snagged on a yucca’s needle-sharp leaves, the missing circlet thing she had sometimes worn about her wrist but more often used as a hair clasp when she tugged her hair back out of her face.
He showed the glazier up to the attic then took the hair clasp to Antony. He found him in his usual chair, which caught the sun until noon. Hedley saw at a glance that he had failed to finish even the first of the letters he had set out to write that morning. He had probably not read the paper either but had completed both the day’s sudoku and cryptic crossword instead.
‘Look what I just found,’ Hedley said, as he felt he had been saying for days, as he handed this or that memento or keepsake found in drawer or pocket.
Antony took the thing and turned it over, opening and closing its crude clasp. ‘She always said this was by GBH,’ he said. ‘Though I don’t see how it could be. She never made jewellery, did she?’
‘Not that I know of. Did they even know each other?’
‘Barely. She met her when she did some teaching …’
‘Hard to imagine that!’
‘One of her colleagues was having an affair with some artist nobody remembers now and the three of them used to slope off to rather wild parties, nude swimming and jazz and a lot of the usual boho willy-waving while the girls sat around adoringly.’
‘You never told me this. Where were you?’
‘Oh. Minding Garfield, probably.’ Antony looked back at the hair clip. ‘They got on at first but then Rachel had another bad spell, after Morwenna was born, and lost touch. But GBH was like that; she’d pick people up, having sudden enthusiasms, then drop them as soon as she felt they’d let her down. Morwenna should have it,’ he said, handing the clasp back. ‘Where was it?’
‘In the garden. She seemed to have thrown it out of the window she broke.’
‘She was in a bad way. The noise she was making! She cried out and …’
‘What? Dad?’
‘Nothing. It’s nothing, really.’
‘Dad?’
Antony looked up, his face infinitely kind. ‘She had no record of a weak heart so I keep wondering if she scared herself to death.’
‘Surely not?’ Hedley sat on a nearby chair.
‘She used to see terrible things, when it was bad.’
‘The baby.’
‘What?’
‘I remember once her going on and on about a baby,’ Hedley told him. ‘She made you stop the car and made us all get out so she could be sure it wasn’t in the car with us.’
‘Don’t remember that.’
‘So what else?’
‘She never told me. She used to say telling me would make them too real.’ Antony’s face closed down again and he looked back at the letter he had started and sighed.
‘I should get on,’ Hedley said.
‘Are you leaving us already?’
‘No, no.’ Hedley noted that unconscious first-person plural. ‘But I’ve got things to get back to. You know.’
Hedley also had to cope with the various tardy obituarists needing facts confirmed and dates checked. Nobody could quite grasp the idea that Rachel’s own family had so little knowledge of her life before she met Antony. They had a birth date and knew she was probably Toronto-born, although people often said she had a Massachusetts accent. There was no copy of the marriage certificate, nobody knew her parents’ names and she had trained them all so early never to ask about her past that it had become a sort of habit to act as though she had none.
Then there was an ever-growing stack of letters to answer, now spread across a couple of breakfast trays. At first Hedley had thought this the ideal quietly therapeutic task for Antony and for a few days after the funeral his father kept busy writing deeply considered replies. But after that he seemed to give up. Days passed, with the piles swelling as acquaintances noticed the obituaries, with only two or three responses written and it became clear Antony was being defeated by the effort. So Hedley sorted them into relatives, close friends and mere acquaintance. The mere acquaintance and relatives, at least, he felt he could write to on the family’s behalf.
Even without all that needed to be done, Hedley didn’t feel he could leave his father yet. Friends called round, especially Jack, and Antony would sit with them for as long as they cared to visit but he was not encouraging. He made no phone calls and, Hedley noticed, had taken to hiding behind the answering machine which still had a message mentioning Rachel. He suggested Antony record a new message and Antony started but then he gave up, defeated by technology, and so they were left with an answering machine that simply beeped at callers, which was still more off-putting than suggesting they might wish to talk to the dead.
When the glazier had gone Hedley slipped up to the shops with the wicker basket Rachel used to carry. He loved all this. The gentle queuing at Tregenza’s for fruit and veg and coffee beans, then at Lavender’s for bread and cheese and ham. He loved the walking down one side of Market Jew Street for the paper and the post office then up the other for the olive stall. People said hello as he passed them. Three others stopped him for news and a chat. All the things that in adolescence made him itch for London, the slowness and charm, the lack of anonymity, the languid measuring out of the day in meals and drinks and little snacks, were dear to him now. The astonishingly parochial gossip – whose niece the nice postman had married and what the less nice postman had done to enrage the man in the lampshade shop’s unmarried sister – came to seem more vital than anything in the national newspaper. The sitting companionably across the room from Antony of an evening doing nothing more exciting than reading, having eaten early because Antony suffered acid reflux if he went to bed on a full stomach, the going to Meeting with him, the chatting with everybody at length afterwards; all these things were suddenly what he wanted, what he felt he needed most. With every undemanding day that passed since the funeral he found it harder to contemplate abandoning them. This was disquieting because it implied that his usual life was lacking whereas he had got into the habit of thinking his life was more or less as perfect as life was going to get.
On his way home down Chapel Street he made a short detour into St Mary’s to light a candle for Rachel then paused on a bench in the graveyard to admire the view of the bay.
Scrupulously good in most ways as a boy, his only major act of rebellion had been to sign up for confirmation classes at eleven to join the C of E. Rachel took the blame. She brought him into St Mary’s the previous year to shelter from the rain once when they were shopping then sat back and watched, hugely amused, as he was seduced by all its high church gewgaws and statues that were such a contrast to the plain severity of the Friends’ Meeting Houses that were all his experience of religion so far. When he pestered everyone with questions for days afterwards Antony ended by insisting Rachel bring him to a service by way of answering them. She had started it, he said, and it was more or less the faith of her youth after all. So she brought him back for a service and he was lost. Hymns, readings, a choir singing mass, bells and incense, lace and ceremonial, the mysterious business of the Eucharistic rite. Compared to the inward contemplation and occasional, formless declaration of British Quakerism, the service presented a drama.
He signed up for classes and was confirmed six months later. Thereafter, when the rest of the family went to Meeting he usually elected to come to Eucharist on his own, in his school suit and only non-school tie. Garfield and Morwenna teased him at first but desisted when Antony had a sharp word with them about religious tolerance.
He never entered greatly into the church’s society – he grew into an inhibited teenager – but he took money for the collection, followed the readings in his Bible and took, for a while at least, to reading his scriptures every day and exploring the novel discipline of formal prayer.
The difference in his sexuality was never discussed – they were not that sort of family – and even with Morwenna, to whom he was closest, the subject was always skirted – but the flamboyant difference in his selected religion provided its convenient metaphor.
Hedley was not a high-flyer academically but he got by. All that ever really interested him was art so he went to art school in Falmouth where he was quiet but fairly popular and continued to drift in the upper half of the underachievers. He moved to London to share a cheap flat with two quiet girls who were abandoning painting for picture restoration and, thanks to a conversation struck up with an admiring older man after a service at St James’s Piccadilly, landed himself a job in a small gallery several minutes to the cheaper side of Cork Street.
It was a quiet job. The vast majority of the gallery’s sales – it specialized in discreetly homoerotic works of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – were by catalogue. All Hedley had to do was dress nicely, sit behind a Biedermeier desk all day, sending off catalogues when requested, describing works in detail in answer to telephone enquiries and charming the occasional browser to the point where they felt so guilty at leaving empty-handed they at least bought a handsome catalogue or subscribed to the mailing list.
Once a week he had the fun of buying and arranging new flowers for the vase on his desk and of choosing a picture to sit in pride of place on the little ebonized easel in the window. Once every two months it fell to him to organize and often host a little Friday soirée to launch the latest show. Since nearly all their artists were dead, there was never a private view as such, so there was no need to court the press or placate painterly egos. He had merely to be sweet and modest and funny and occasionally gravely grateful. He became first an expert bluffer then something of an expert on Tuke, Burra, Vaughan, Minton, Cocteau and friends.
Oliver came to one of the launches, charmed Hedley before Hedley could charm him, and bought a tiny painting to justify further monopolizing his attention. It was an eight by four Duncan Grant watercolour of a man in a jewel-bright forest clearing. He, too, was an expert bluffer and Hedley had no inkling he didn’t buy such things on impulse all the time and was actually spending several months’ salary. Clients often asked for advice on hanging and because Hedley had a good eye and was wildly inquisitive to see how other people lived, he was happy to offer advice as an aftersales service. Oliver’s address was an awesome one in Kensington and it was disarming to find that he actually lived not in one of the vast cream houses but in an eccentrically converted stables behind it which he only rented for a pittance from a distantly expatriate ex and which had only one room beside the bathroom.
The spot that was perfect for the little picture just happened to be over the bed, where Hedley proceeded to spend all weekend.
They were such a perfect fit he worried at first that they should be best friends not lovers. They were both middle sons. They each had a dead sibling. Luckily there were enough differences to pique one another’s interest. Oliver’s family had rejected him, or he them; the story changed according to his audience. He was entirely atheist with the proud rigour only a lapsed Catholic could muster. He played poker. He was only four years older than Hedley but had worldly abilities and an ease around moneyed, straight men that made him feel much older. Crucially he had a past whereas Hedley had enjoyed no significant relationships. This difference became rapidly obvious and Oliver began not to hide his past exactly but to reveal it with tactful caution, piecemeal and only as occasion demanded. Someone would come up to them at an opening and talk to Oliver with slightly too much hunger for recent history while tossing unsettled glances at Hedley and later on that evening Oliver would confirm that they had once been involved with him, but would do it in a way – often with some small, unflattering detail – that gently negated the person as a threat.
When he discovered who Hedley’s mother was and that he painted too but had begun to neglect it, he encouraged and hectored him and then astonished Hedley by selling his small works to friends and clients for far more than Hedley would have dared demand.
Oliver had only been marking time in the gallery where he had been working when they met. By the end of a year he had been taken on at Mendel’s. He took out a huge mortgage, bought their mews house off his ex, spent a fortune on taps, lighting, orchids and heritage paint and sold it to an American banker for so much they were able to halve the mortgage and buy a sort of cottage with two bedrooms that was in Holland Park but only if you persisted in the delusion that Shepherd’s Bush Tube station wasn’t five minutes’ nearer. That was twelve years ago.
‘If we were straight,’ Oliver joked. ‘We’d have two children in boarding school by now.’
They had a good life together. They entertained and were entertained, they travelled and the friends they had in common now outnumbered Oliver’s scary exes. Oliver persuaded Hedley to give up his job at the little gallery so he could paint full-time but now Hedley seemed to spend most of his days contentedly shopping and cooking. He was still enough of a Birthright Quaker for their material comfort, or rather the degree to which the material comfort mattered, to trouble him.
There were times too when, joking apart, he felt worryingly like a wife. People still bought his little paintings when he found time to do them but they bought them directly from him, not through a respectable gallery, and it tended to be the wives who did the buying. They said things like, ‘I loved your last one, the apple, so much I keep it in the kitchen so I can look at it every day. Could you maybe do me another one of a pear but facing the other way and with the same background?’
Women took him out for lunches to pick his brains about curtain fabrics. Men tended to chat with him but talk to Oliver. He had become lightweight by default.
Hedley’s only strength within the family was Morwenna. From the year she dropped out of university, he had been the only one of them she sought out. Maintain contact was too reassuringly regular a term for her sporadic appearances. She sought him out just twice in his three years at Falmouth. Quite by chance the second time was when he already knew where he was going to share a flat with the two quiet girls. Thereafter he left a scrupulous trail for her, like breadcrumbs in a fairytale wood. A tiny bit of her brain that wasn’t garbled by drugs or madness or whatever it was that had driven her from the paths of normal people, retained his address and phone number the way a sleeping bird clutched its perch.
He never saw her for long though. The last time, a couple of years ago, he had persuaded her to eat supper with him and Oliver and stay the night but she had broken his heart by being gone before either of them woke up. She wasn’t sleeping rough, or not frequently. She often had no or little money. She always had people she was travelling with or volunteering with or about to stay with. She seemed to have become a kind of Buddhist. Or perhaps it was that she was the best Quaker of them all, striving to create the fewest ripples as she moved through life and being a constant service to others, never to herself? He longed to ask her questions – how she lived, what she was trying to achieve in all this restlessness – but instinct warned him off and he forced himself, the way he used to with Rachel in her worst periods, to keep the conversation in a studiously calm present tense. Was she well? Did she need any money? Where was the living? And of course he pressed her with family news in an effort to keep her sewn to the rest of them, however slack the stitches.
The first few times she contacted him he had squeezed an address or a phone number out of her but it seemed the very act of giving out such information made her suddenly itch to move on so it was self-defeating. Instead he had learnt to encourage her to regard him as a poste restante, a safe, still point in her bewilderingly shifting world. If all else failed she could count on him, reverse the charges wherever she was, beg for money, a plane ticket, his company, whatever she needed. He would pay or, rather, Oliver would.
Keenly aware as he was of his material comforts, he was astonished at how she had managed to possess nothing but the clothes on her back and in whatever piece of luggage she was living from at the time. Her only things of value were small pictures of Rachel’s; two startlingly lovely pastels Rachel had given her when she left home for LSE, and birthday cards Rachel had painted over the years. Of these, Morwenna had retained not only all her own but all the ones done for Petroc and several of the others, traded in their foolish youth for urgently needed trifles. (Easter eggs, in Petroc’s case.) This booty she carried with her for the first few years. Then, after he had moved to London, she outraged Rachel by selling one of the cards at auction. It fetched nothing like its real value and he begged Morwenna to entrust the rest to him for secret safekeeping. If she wanted to sell anything more he could do it for her through Oliver and Oliver’s contacts, securing her a better price and sparing Rachel’s feelings.
Several thousand pounds’ worth had now passed through Oliver’s hands into the art collecting ether. What happened to the money was a mystery. Quite possibly she gave most of it away. She lived with some nuns in Yorkshire for a while as a kind of postulant – unpaid servant, basically – and after that had a year or two in a scrupulously Marxist commune in Cologne, where everything had to be shared. She retained traces of her old, sharp humour, could laugh at nuns and communards, so he did not agree with Garfield that she was mad. It felt more as though she were under some huge obligation, a curse even, that kept her watchful and exhausted, so that her familiar intelligence was blunted and her wit made dim.
The first times she sought him out he was so relieved to see her he couldn’t resist telling the others but once it was clear she was never going home and seemed to have cut off Garfield as much as their parents, Hedley began to keep quiet about seeing her beyond reassuring them from time to time that she still lived. He didn’t want to seem to be saying that she liked him more than them. And quite possibly that wasn’t it. Perhaps she only kept in touch because, as the guardian of her art collection, he was like her banker or trustee; a necessity, not an intimate.
And in a way she had brought him and Oliver together. He was still shaken by a recent, horribly swift and jangled phone call from her to the work number when they met, and found himself forgetting his obligations to his other guests as he told Oliver all about her. Oliver’s dead sister had been schizophrenic and he knew all about relationships that had to be lived in the present tense.
‘Just be grateful it’s still her coming to you,’ he said, ‘and not the police.’
Morwenna dropped out of university in the middle of her finals. Worried friends reported her having behaved erratically before melting into the crowd on Waterloo Bridge and never returning to her hall of residence. Shortly afterwards she sent Rachel and Antony a plain white postcard on which she had written, ‘I’m not dead or anything. Couldn’t cope. Sorry …’ She didn’t write love. She didn’t write her name either but her handwriting was distinctive.
It was when Hedley started at Falmouth that autumn and was living back at home but hardly there that he started to miss her. His life was filling with new experiences and new friends, so he shouldn’t have done. If she were still at university she wouldn’t have been at home anyway but the knowledge that she had cut herself loose and might be anywhere was terrible to him. Obsessive even in childhood, she had taught him the power of pledges with fate when he was quite small. ‘If I do without chocolate until Sunday, the crosscountry run on Monday will be cancelled,’ or ‘If I hold my breath to the end of the road, I’ll get the questions I want in the maths test.’
It had become part of his habitual thinking. Throughout his first term he found himself routinely thinking, If Rachel dies then I can have Morwenna back. But Rachel was making herself especially hateful to him at this period, so perhaps she wouldn’t be a tough enough sacrifice to satisfy the Fates.
* * *
Days later. The house was cleaner, the wardrobes emptier and the piles of letters still largely unanswered. Hedley had still not gone home.
‘Is all well at his end?’ Antony asked after Hedley hung up from Oliver’s daily phone call.
‘Hmm? Yes,’ Hedley told him. ‘Everything’s fine. So have you chosen your password and written it down somewhere?’
Antony had finally decided to admit a computer to the house and Hedley had already spent hours setting it up for him. Rachel had always hated televisions and tarred computers with the same brush so had never allowed one to be bought although both Hedley and Garfield had repeatedly tried.
‘I hate the dead black way their screens look when they’re off,’ she’d say and that was the end of the matter.
Ever since retiring from his teaching post at Humphry Davy, Antony had been involved in adult literacy. His basic technique remained the same while politics and funding changes altered the organization around him but finally his patience had worn through when Jack Trescothick had urged him to call in on the adult learning centre for the first time since Rachel’s death. The equivalent of a headmistress had duly offered condolences and welcomed him back then announced they now needed him to go on maths and computer courses ‘so as to arrive at a fuller understanding of the plight of the adult learner with basic skills challenges’. He had told them he was too old to retrain and given up.
This had depressed Hedley as he thought a sense of duty to his students, many of whom were such hopeless cases they’d been coming to him for years, was the one thing likely to shake his father out of his mourning torpor. But then, after yet another obituarist – this one from some feminist mag in New Zealand – had rung up with queries about Rachel’s origins, the idea took hold that perhaps Antony would start researching the gaps in the family tree.
Antony had spent a frustrating morning in the reference library and an even more frustrating one on the phone to the US and Canadian embassies in London and to various record offices and genealogical societies listed in a book the library had found him. Genealogy had become such a national obsession apparently that official sources had become jealous of wasting phone time on it. Today he had announced that he needed a computer and Internet access if he was to make any progress without packing a bag and leaving Penzance for Toronto.
He claimed he was quite used to computers from the ones at the adult learning centre but Hedley was beginning to suspect he only learned how to use one as a glorified typewriter and then only when a colleague or student had already set the word processing program running for him.
He typed in the password Antony had chosen – the unexpectedly jaunty Quakerman – pressed ‘enter’ and clapped with genuine relief as the modem obediently clicked awake and proceeded to dial. The complications of a broadband connection could wait until the computer had proved itself indispensable.
But Antony was not so easily distracted. ‘So everything’s fine,’ he asked. ‘With you and Oliver, I mean?’
‘I feel bad you staying down here so long. Doesn’t he miss having you around?’
‘He’s probably relieved to have the place to himself for a bit.’
‘Eh?’ Antony cocked a hand to his better ear. He was becoming so deaf it could only have been scrupulous political correctness that had made the literacy place hold on to him so long.
Hedley tapped his father’s glasses back up his nose and Antony took the hint and manoeuvred their built-in hearing aid back into his ear.
‘Everything’s fine,’ Hedley told him finally. ‘Now look. When you dial up, this little icon appears in the bottom right-hand corner. If you can’t see that, you’re not connected. OK?’
‘OK.’
However grim of itself, Rachel’s death had provided a welcome distraction and an excuse. When she made her last insanely jabbering phone call to him, on the attic handset, he had been entering a crisis of his own.
This had a face and a name. She was called Ankie Witt. She was a Dutch painter who had moved back to Europe after a spell in South Africa where she had dropped art in favour of politics and worked for the ANC. She produced the sort of work Hedley loathed that seemed to be all about ideas and very little about paint: close-ups of parts of her body variously wired to car batteries or Bibles, wilfully childlike images of her being abused by her father, huge squares of canvas on which she had painted, with stencilled letters, rambling accounts of same abuse unpunctuated by insight, wit or punctuation. She wasn’t especially young, perhaps thirty-eight – but she retained a young woman’s confidence and a child’s self-belief. She wasn’t especially attractive – she had disconcertingly large, square teeth and a bovine brow – but she had a room-stilling sexiness that had something to do with a sense she conveyed in seconds of being unafraid and unshameable. She was a talented self-publicist and a hot new thing and, even when being bored or offensive, assured journalists of good copy.
It was a coup for Oliver to have brought her to the gallery; the painters with whom Mendel’s had made its name in the Sixties and Seventies were now so Establishment that it was in danger of becoming a dinosaur park. Oliver’s brief was to bring in artists people could actually afford for a year or two, whose work sold for thousands not tens of thousands.
He effectively represented several younger artists, not just painters, and was in regular, supportive contact with most of them but his role with them had professional distance. Apart from mounting their shows he acted as a kind of agent and matchmaker, introducing them to collectors who were likely to favour them, brokering occasional commissions for site-specific work. But unlike some gallery men who collected artists like big-game trophies, he preferred not to become too close. He claimed it made it easier on both sides for money to be discussed if the relationship remained professional.
Ankie was different. Overnight, seemingly, she was his new best friend. Had she simply come to three dinner parties in a row, Hedley would not have cared, but she started dropping round without warning – only ever when Oliver was home – or turning up at Mendel’s when he was about to leave so that he drove her home with him or, worse, changed his plans to fit in with her wishes. Hedley would already be cooking when Oliver would ring to say, ‘Ankie’s dragged me to this amazing bar she’s found. Do you want to join us?’ or ‘Ankie says I’ve got to see this Korean film at the Curzon. Come too and we can go somewhere afterwards.’
So assertive with others, Oliver seemed to be incapable of saying no to her. He always tried to include Hedley at least. Ankie never did. Hedley might not have felt so threatened by her had she at least had the subtlety to go after him on a charm offensive. From their first meeting, when she let her eyes slide off his while saying, ‘Oh, hello,’ when Oliver introduced her, she had barely acknowledged his existence.
The few times she rang and he answered she said only, ‘Is Oliver there?’ She bypassed that problem entirely once she had Oliver’s mobile number. She ate the food he cooked, without comment, looked in on his studio without comment. If she found herself sitting by anyone who wasn’t Oliver or famous, she ignored them to talk to Oliver across the table. She was not above simply taking his neighbour’s seat when they left the room for a minute and laughing off any objections.
Ankie laughed a lot and made people laugh. Had her voice not had a buzz-saw edge to it one could have found her swiftly in a crowd by the telltale sign of a circle of people laughing and not saying much. She could be very funny, as monsters so often could, always at the expense of others, usually at the expense of others within hearing range. Just as there were people who did not feel a night out was complete without someone passing out or throwing up, so Ankie did not seem to feel socially fulfilled unless someone, usually a woman, had left the room in tears or, better yet, attacked her with words or a wineglass. Then her eyes would shine and a kind of moist satisfaction stole over her. If she was ever sweet or kind it would be in the hour after some such scene, as though some hunger in her had been answered and she could finally spare some attention for others.
Hedley tried. Of course he did. Because he loved Oliver and would have walked over broken glass to please him. He always liked Oliver’s friends, at first simply because they liked Oliver and then in their own right. Many of his best friends now were friends they had in common. But Ankie defeated him. He tried but even when he laughed at her jokes her laughter would dim slightly and she would turn aside as from a bad smell.
So he tried objecting. He told Oliver she was offensive, but that was like pointing out that rain was wet and Oliver merely shrugged and said what could he do, she was his highest-earning artist and so on. So he tried pointing out that she had no boundaries, that she clearly fancied Oliver and wanted him for herself.
‘Well sure she’s insecure. But who wouldn’t be after what she’s been through?’ Oliver said. ‘She knows I’m not available.’
‘Has she said so?’
‘She’s been here. She’s met you. Look, what is this, Babe? Are you jealous?’
Raising the subject at least meant that Oliver realized Hedley didn’t like her but then he merely stopped bringing her back to the house or involving Hedley in what were now effectively their dates.
Rounds one and two to Ankie.
Alone too often, frustrated and feeling he had mishandled the situation, Hedley attempted retaliation and began to see something of a handsome and flirtatious ex of Oliver’s who had begun to hover like the proverbial chicken hawk. This made matters worse in that the ex became extremely keen, scenting encouragement and when Hedley, tempted, put him off, he threatened to tell Oliver they were already sleeping together to help him make his mind up.
Hedley finally cracked at the end of that rare thing, a quiet night in with just the two of them. It was their anniversary and Oliver was very attentive and full of rather sweet nostalgia and, best of all, managed not to mention Ankie once all evening. They resisted the lazy, anaphrodisiac of slumping comfortably in front of the television and, with one accord went to bed early and were making love of a kind that quite put the flirtatious ex out of Hedley’s thoughts when the phones rang, first Oliver’s mobile, muffled in a distant jacket, and then the land line, just inches from the mattress.
They both manfully ignored it, Oliver even smothering it with a pillow before returning to the matter in hand, but then the answerphone clicked on in the study. Soon the unmistakable tones of Ankie were burbling through the open doors to where they lay.
‘Oliver? Ollie! I know you’re there. Listen, you handsome fucker, pick up the phone. Pick it up now!’ And so on.
Unfortunately the machine was set up for taking long, involved messages from fretful artists so had no time limit fixed. She hung up eventually but not before the mood in the bedroom had cooled to the point where she might as well have been there between them.
Hedley lost his temper so rarely it was like a violent fit coming upon him.
‘Why don’t you sleep with the silly cow just to shut her up?’
‘Not this again.’
‘It’s what she wants! Isn’t it?’
‘No. She’s …’
‘It’s harassment, Oliver. Plain and simple. Can’t you see that? She’s coming between us and I’m not strong enough on my own, not with you off schmoozing her.’
‘She’s a friend, Hed.’
‘Isn’t that a bit unprofessional?’
‘Fuck off.’ Oliver had never said this to him, not in anger. They both fell silent, possibly equally shocked. Then the phone started to ring again.
‘If you’re not man enough to tell her when to back off,’ Hedley said.
‘No!’ Oliver tried to get to the phone first but Hedley pulled him aside so furiously he struck his skull on the headboard.
Well good, he thought. Serves you right. He tossed aside the pillow and snatched up the phone. ‘Listen, you talentless bitch …’
‘What?’
‘Petroc?’
‘Sorry I … It’s Hedley, Mum. Petroc’s dead. Why are you whispering?’
‘She mustn’t hear me,’ Rachel hissed. ‘She’s under the table there and. Oh, fuck. Hedley, are you still there?’
‘Yes,’ Hedley sighed.
‘The stones. How many should there be for it to be perfect?’
‘Which stones, Mum? Where’s Antony? Have you had your pills?’
And so began the last forty-minute phone call of Rachel’s life.
By the end of it Oliver had draped the duvet over Hedley’s shoulders, pulled on a dressing gown and gone to watch television. Hedley looked in on him once he had tossed a few things into a bag. ‘I’m sorry about your head,’ he began.
Oliver said nothing.
‘She’s really bad again. I’d better drive down. I don’t understand it. Maybe the valproate isn’t working as well as the lithium did or she’s changed back or …’ He realized Oliver wasn’t looking at him so he left.
He seethed most of the way down, speeding like a madman on both motorways. He turned on his mobile when he stopped for petrol or coffee in the hope that Oliver had left a message, only to seethe afresh when he saw that he hadn’t.
Finding Rachel dead blasted all those thoughts aside apart from a momentary, low, childish voice that said, Well he’ll have to be nice to me now.
Oliver was scrupulous. He bought crazily beautiful flowers as soon as he heard the news and had them sent to Antony and they were from him, not the gallery. The Mendel’s ones were considerably less special but then she had made them no significant money in years and hadn’t had a solo show there since the mid-Eighties. He came down for the funeral, bringing Hedley a choice of suits and a shirt and black tie bought for the occasion. He stayed one unbelievably weird night below him in Petroc’s old bunk then drove back early with the parting instruction, put with warm sincerity, that Hedley was to take as long as it took.
Since then he rang every day and even sent a few postcards. Together they sustained an illusory continuity of their normal life together, exchanging dull bits of information about what they had done or who they had spoken to. He loved Hedley and missed him, he said. He couldn’t wait for him to come home. Oh and which fabric should they use on the old kitchen sofa, the soft pink stripes or the pinky brown weave or the taupe stuff that felt like suede? And if he posted Hedley a bundle of catalogues, could Hedley choose the light fittings for the new bookcase?
And then, that morning, with lethal quietness, like the scene in the horror film where the audience suddenly spots the killer crossing a doorway behind the heroine’s back, Oliver let slip a we.
‘I think,’ he said, ‘we’re going to see another Gong Li film tonight.’
Hedley kept his responses light and neutral and hung up soon afterwards but when Antony started asking him if everything was all right between them he had to leave the house for a while. We might have referred to several people, but Oliver only saw Korean films with Ankie. Then there was the little matter of that another, which began to suggest they had been taking in a whole season of the things in Hedley’s absence.
He needed to speak about it with someone. Morwenna. If only. Even in her adult strangeness, she remained a good listener and would take his side with the reliability of magnetic north.
Antony wouldn’t begin to understand. If Hedley could not fathom Ankie’s motives, how could he expect his father to? Spite was not in his vocabulary. Besides, contemporary London life having lain so far outside his sphere of reference for so long it would have been like explaining house music to William Penn.
Garfield was no better, but for different reasons. He was too much the older brother, always so high-minded, so fixated on pleasing Rachel and Antony it was a wonder he had focused on any girl long enough to convince her to marry him. And ever since he had thrown in law for this Joseph the Carpenter act, the fog of inhibition that came between the brothers had been thicker than ever. Oliver’s theory was that, for all that Garfield meant well, he found the idea of having a gay brother deeply distasteful so got around it by treating Hedley as though he had never grown up. The insulting implication of this being, of course, that he thought gayness just a stage out of which Hedley would eventually mature.
The solution came in a phone call Antony took while Hedley was out; Garfield had invited them over for Sunday lunch. Hedley would talk to his sister-in-law.
Hedley drove Antony over to Falmouth for Meeting, then they went back to Garfield and Lizzy’s house for the rest of the day. Spring was in the air. The trees were greening up and, in the daffodil fields, the unpicked flowers were nearly all spent and browning. As if to chime with the clamorous birdsong outside, the Meeting seemed extraordinarily talkative.
Garfield seemed happier and less brooding than they had seen him for weeks and he announced over lunch that he was going back into law. The man he had introduced them to after Meeting worked for one of the numerous firms in Truro based around the county courts and thought he could find an opening for him on a six-month trial basis. He would wind up the instrument repair business and start there in a month. The understanding was that, as a sop to his conscience about making money from other people’s trouble, he would only work on pro bono, legal-aid cases.
Antony was pleased about this but not, Hedley could see, as pleased as Garfield could wish. Garfield always wanted more than either parent could give and had not spent enough time with Antony lately to have learned how subdued all his reactions had become since Rachel’s death. Hedley knew he ought to resent the speed with which Garfield had backed away and left all the sorting out of Rachel’s things to him but actually he had been glad of it. Garfield had a sentimental way of relating everything back to his own emotional history that would have made sorting out even a box of her old shoes an interminable process.
This represented a complete volte-face on Lizzy’s part – she who had always been so set on saving Garfield from Law and London, and who had seemed to seize on the maintenance of her father’s ailing business as a kind of sacred trust. He glanced across at her and received a sharp look back that told him to wait until later.
He liked Lizzy, against all the odds. He had enjoyed a swift understanding with her from the day Garfield first brought her to visit them in Penzance and did not need to look at her to know, when the others talked about going for a walk up to Pendennis Castle after lunch to enjoy the perfect weather, that she wanted him to stay back with her.
She was an archetypal good girl, the sort who kept a towelling band in the bathroom so she could keep her hair up while giving her forehead and neck a thorough scrub. She reminded him of Laura and Midge, the clean-living picture restoration students whose flat he used to share. Nice girls like that, girls who assumed the best of people and thus made one strive not to disappoint them, had become rare in his life.
The house had a pretty first-floor sitting room. As soon as Garfield and Antony were walking down the garden path for their digestive stroll, Lizzy took him up there with coffee and the chocolates Hedley had brought knowing she would have no chocolate in the house because she found it irresistible.
‘I think it’s wonderful what you’ve been doing for your dad,’ she said at once. ‘Garfield really appreciates it, I know. You’re much stronger than he is. Emotionally, I mean. How is he, do you think?’
‘Better. Definitely. He’s started researching the family tree a bit, which is fantastic because it’s given him a goal.’
‘Doesn’t he know it all already?’
‘His side, yes, but hers is a mystery. I had all the obituarists after me and I think that’s what got him out of his armchair finally. He’s logging into all these New England and New York websites now in search of her. But with Kelly not exactly being unusual among Irish immigrants, he’ll have his work cut out.’ He took a chocolate then remembered to offer her one, which she waved aside.
‘So. When do you head back?’ she asked.
‘Oh … you know. Soon, I suppose. Though it’s sort of fun just bumbling along with him. I used to look around at all these sad men who end up living with their mothers and think how did that happen and suddenly I can see.’
They laughed.
‘Oliver must miss you, though,’ she said.
‘Hmm.’
He planned on easing into the subject but Lizzy’s face was so pure and sympathetic he couldn’t resist shocking her a little.
‘Actually I think he’s having an affair and he’s glad to have me out of the way.’
‘No. Hedley, are you serious?’
‘Oh it’s probably nothing. I want to hear about you two. What’s with Garfy going back into law?’ He patted the little sofa beside him. All the furniture there was slightly doll-sized because it was one of those houses where the rooms looked perfectly big enough until you furnished them or opened a door. Hedley thought guiltily of the twelve-foot, bed-depth monster he had recently ordered for their sitting room in town then found himself picturing Ankie Witt sprawled on it. Lizzy had joined him and he was all set to start telling her then saw a difference in her expression and a sly hint of a smile.
‘What?’ he asked.
‘You won’t believe this,’ she said. ‘But at long bloody last you’re going to be an uncle.’
‘No! Oh Lizzy, that’s fantastic news!’ He hugged her. ‘When did you find out?’
‘A few days ago, actually longer than that. But we were only certain yesterday. Garfield rang to ask you both over as soon as we heard.’ She laughed. Her happiness was uncontainable and transformed her. He marvelled at her control at keeping it tamped down all morning and all through lunch.
‘Do you think he’s telling Antony now?’
‘Of course. You know Garfield. Look what I did, Daddy.’ Her quick assessment of Garfield’s nature was no less devastating for being delivered in a loving tone. ‘We had half a mind to keep quiet a while longer. I didn’t want it upsetting Antony, coming so soon after Rachel.’
‘He’ll be over the moon. Of course he will.’
‘Oh good.’
She laughed again and gave him a glimpse of how full and satisfied motherhood would make her. He ate another chocolate but still she waved them away, already controlling what the child would eat, poor thing.
‘But what about you?’ she asked. ‘I want to hear all about everything. You weren’t serious about Oliver?’
‘No no. And there’s nothing to tell,’ he said. ‘Everything’s lovely, the extension’s going to be lovely, Oliver’s lovely, I’m lovely.’
She accepted it and poured him another cup of coffee.
When Garfield and Antony came back Antony was almost as happy as the mother-to-be and Garfield was impossibly pious in his effort not to appear smug. And Hedley smiled on them all and made his face a mirror to give them each the version of himself that would least unsettle them. It was a trick he had learnt in boyhood; in a family of committed truth-tellers, someone had to tell a few kind lies to keep the whole thing together.
That night he settled Antony by the computer with a great box of Rachel’s papers he thought might hold some clues for his family research then took himself quietly off to her loft.
No one had been up there since the glazier’s visit but it needed doing. In many ways it remained the best room in the house, certainly for someone living alone, and would be wasted as a morbid shrine. Inspired by some fabric he had found, which he liked, although it was quite unsuitable for him and Oliver, he had a vision of the loft tidied up, repainted and carpeted and converted into a delightfully sunny room where Antony could sit and read and doze. It was a room in need of reclamation.
They would have to do something about the ladder-like steps, naturally, and the silly trapdoor, which were quite unsuitable for an elderly man who would one day be unsteady on his legs. It needed proper stairs, with a banister. It needed a radiator for the cooler months. The incredible accretions of paint, splashed, trodden or smeared on the floor and the one unwindowed wall were too thick merely to paint over and would have to be burnt and scraped and sanded away. The floorboards, he noticed for the first time, were handsomely broad. They were probably old ones reclaimed from some wrecked ship’s timbers when this eccentric lookout was first erected. They could be sanded back to cleanliness and waxed, then he could find a few Turkish or Iranian rugs; modern ones would fade to tastefulness in the sunlight.
Hedley fetched a large cardboard box from the stash he had gathered in supermarkets for the purpose, some bin liners and a broom. The least spent of her paints and better brushes he put in the box to take to London and add to his own stocks. The rest, the wrecked brushes, the mangled tubes of colour, the spoons and palette knives she had used so brutally they had bent beyond usefulness, he swept into bin liners. He dismantled the easel, which she had in any case broken, perhaps on her last terrible night, and carried it downstairs along with the similarly shattered chair. He emptied the kettle out of the window and tossed it in with the rubbish along with the biscuit tin and paint-streaked teabags and filthy sugar lumps. Sentiment stayed his hand over throwing out the tray as well because it was one Petroc had made for her in carpentry class. Liberal use of paint stripper and beeswax might be enough to salvage it but quite possibly Antony would want it with the paint splashes left on, a memorial to mother as well as son.
At last the space was clear and fairly clean and he could begin work on the hive of cupboard spaces let into the back wall between the chimney stacks.
As he had been tidying a sort of mental dialogue took place between him and Rachel. The mess was so her, the impulse to tidy it away so him. He was a very tidy painter. It was a superficial symptom of what would always keep his work at the purely decorative end of the artistic spectrum. But as soon as he started emptying the cupboards, her undeniable voice took over and his kindly fussing one was silenced.
He emptied the first two smaller cupboards then suddenly, painfully wished Oliver or, better yet, Morwenna were there to help him. There was so much and most of it was of such high quality. At first he found only notebooks and sketchpads. She was an inveterate draughtsman and maintained a lifelong habit of throwing off drawings from the life as a preparatory exercise before beginning her work with paint. Much as a musician might warm up with arpeggios or exercises to feel their way into a given tonality, she drew. She drew used teabags, ruined brushes, paint tubes squeezed and doubled back on themselves. There was a sketchbook meticulously recording and transforming much of what he had just carried out to the dustbins. She drew, too, when she was waiting or ill. Some psychiatrist or occupational therapist long ago must have taught her to use her skill with a 2B pencil and scrap of paper to suspend her mind when it threatened to become too busy or to divert it from irritation whenever circumstances – a traffic jam or delayed appointment – threatened to fill her with pointless anger. She threw many of her sketchbooks away – once filled they were of no more value to her than empty paint tubes – but in the dusty heap of them he had salvaged, he found quick drawings of them as babies or children, of Jack Trescothick’s waiting room and countless ones of views through the car windows. She had always kept a sketchbook in the car. There would still be one in the glove compartment right then if he went out to look. There were drawings without number of her right hand (she was left-handed) and several, only slightly cruder, of her left.
Done fleetingly, with no view to preservation or selling, these images tumbled across one another, overlapped or undercut. A good one would be ruined by a failure that slewed across it or by her spontaneous mischief in adding some element of caricature or cartoon. But their cumulative effect was to summon up not only her prodigious, careless talent but the maddening truth that art was the one thing that stilled and focused her impossibly restless personality; art won through where her family failed.
There were no drawings from her depressions, only fleeting records of the periods of descent or recovery. She must have destroyed most of her hospital work before leaving hospital each time. She joked once that she never picked up a pencil when she was depressed because some thin, surviving bit of her healthy brain retained what she had been taught about depression and sharp objects not mixing.
And then he found finished pictures. Several perfectly sellable ones from her extended, figurative, post-Petroc phase which, for some reason, she had held back from framing. The pictures Mendel’s had never wanted. Here were the familiar, meticulous studies of shells and fruit and Cornish hedges and a sequence of ominous black birds – rooks? ravens? – he had never seen. Even discarding a third of these there was enough for a good-sized posthumous show in the Newlyn gallery that had remained loyal to her later phase. But then he opened other, bigger cupboards, which he noticed for the first time resembled funerary vaults, and found fascinating near-duplicates of familiar works that had long since found homes in various collections, works that, hung alongside their better known ‘finished’ counterparts, would reveal how meticulously plotted were her apparently spontaneous creative processes.
The night she died Garfield had mentioned spotting an old abstract work of hers from the Sixties and Hedley was impatient to see it for himself. Garfield had mentioned a big disc in shades of blue and grey. It was half off or half on its stretcher and had been shoved so violently into the cupboard the stretcher had actually broken in one corner. Perhaps she had started to stretch it afresh, thinking to finish it, or, in a fit of economy, to scrape it down and paint over it.
He spread it out, astonished at its freshness, and saw at once this wasn’t an old work at all. It was a new stretcher, of a construction she had only been using for ten years or so. The colours were those on the palette he had just thrown out. He saw them afresh, slightly smeared where, as usual, she had laid cling film across the palette to stop them drying out overnight.
It was big compared to the work she had been doing since Petroc, the sort of thing she used to do when she still favoured the studio at the back and wasn’t constrained by what could be fitted through trapdoor or window or what was small enough to be economically priced for tourists.
He wished Oliver were there to marvel with him, to help and advise. It was staggering. Entirely undomestic. Only a metre square perhaps but still a big, grand statement for a museum or a rich man’s house. Excited, he went back to the cupboards and found eight more, this time with undamaged stretchers. These were finished and roughly dated on the back as well as signed on the front. She had been working like someone possessed for she had completed these in just a month before she died.
He spread them out about him like so many exotic rugs. They were a sequence of sorts, in that they were all variations on the idea of a disc. There was a fiery one, a sun in effect to the first picture’s moon, and one the precise shade of her newest medication. The other six were less perfectly round, more organic. He stared at them for ten minutes or more before he recognized her precious pebbles she seemed to have had about the loft for ever and which he had just tidied away to the bathroom.
She had painted them in such close detail and so much larger than lifesize that they had become abstracted. Or perhaps she had merely revealed the abstract art that nature had worked on them? Stone which a glance showed as merely brownish, seen closer to revealed swirls of pink, blue and deepest purple. And yet they weren’t just the pebbles. She had added something or revealed something.
Hedley sat back, aware of the sounds of Antony moving about downstairs again but reluctant to tear himself away. He could see how these big, triumphant canvases would look hung in a sequence in a space light and generous enough to let their colours vibrate off the walls like a line of cathedral windows. It was too soon to go worrying Antony about them but these paintings needed to be seen and not merely sold. Oliver would know how to proceed. Hedley set about carefully sliding them back into storage. His mind was spinning ahead. Were these cupboards entirely dry? Was the household insurance enough? When could he persuade Oliver down to see them?
The thought of Oliver inevitably led back to a mental image of Ankie and all at once Hedley could see why he had been so powerless in the face of the woman. It was because she was so like Rachel. Sensing her foe’s weak points by instinct, she had touched on his boyhood conditioning never to threaten or upset Rachel’s delicate equilibrium however badly she behaved. Like Rachel, Ankie was powerful, dismissive, erratic, a threatening, clamorous, emotionally hungry presence and deep down he wanted to appease and please her. But she was not remotely as talented and therein, just possibly, lay his chance to overcome her.
Not that he had ever overcome or even withstood his mother. He had simply withdrawn from the field. Once the last painting was tidied away he should have gone downstairs and set about making something small but nutritious for Antony’s supper. He got as far as opening the trapdoor and turning out the light but then he sat back in the old, defeated armchair where his mother had spent such tormented hours, defeated himself but drawing thin comfort from the possibility that proximity to the greater predator would protect him from the lesser one.