DESIGNS FOR FABRIC.

Indian ink and watercolour on paper.

From 1965, when Jack Trescothick effected her introduction until the mid-seventies, when she was finally earning enough from her painting not to need the extra income, Kelly produced these and other designs for Cresta Silks. A stylish dresser herself, at least when occasion demanded, Kelly had a good eye for designs that would repeat well in a variety of colour-ways and would not overpower the wearer. Barbara Hepworth, Patrick Heron, Jack Trescothick and Graham Sutherland were among the artists to contribute to Cresta designs over the years though by the time Kelly produced these the company had all but lost its roots in pacifist Tom Heron’s idealistic enterprise in St Ives and been absorbed into the Debenhams’s empire. This display also contains a letter Kelly sent on acceptance of her Shasta design requesting a dress made up in the pink colour-way for her daughter’s tenth birthday in part-payment and a photograph of Morwenna Middleton (second from left) wearing it.

(Materials and designs lent by Debenhams plc)

Morwenna was alone in St Ives with Rachel because it was her tenth birthday and that was the tradition. Considering she was so abnormal in other ways, not always bothering to dress properly or wash her hands or brush her hair, eating pills more often than she sat down to normal meals, considering she was a painter, considering she painted paintings which weren’t actually of anything, considering she sometimes cried or laughed for no reason, considering she was mad, Rachel was surprisingly insistent on traditions. The night before Christmas they could only use candlelight, even in the bath, because it was a tradition. On Midsummer Day they had to have all three of the day’s meals out of doors, preferably on the beach, and always the same beach, even if it was high tide, even if it was raining. Tradition again.

And when it was anyone’s birthday they had to spend the day with Rachel. Not Antony, of course, because he was married to her so that would have been silly. But the rest of them. The idea was it was your day and, within reason, she had to go and do and eat whatever you wanted. Garfield was even more of a traditionalist than she was and always wanted exactly the same thing: crab and chips then ice cream and chocolate sauce in Bailey’s then a film. Being a boy he took real pleasure in commanding Rachel, knowing she had to do stuff, had to eat pudding – which she affected to despise – and watch a film – which would have her twitching with impatience. Hedley was only eight, so was only just starting to take full advantage of his birthdays and would dream about them and plan them in such detail and change his plans so often that the big day, when it came, was bound to disappoint him. Petroc, being really small still, had birthday outings that were actually an excuse for Rachel to go off on her own somewhere and just take him along like a giggly parcel.

Morwenna adored Petroc. The look, the sound, the smell of him filled her with a kind of hunger so that she wanted to possess and control and sort of crush him with love – a feeling neither Garfield nor Hedley ever inspired in her. She was ashamed that when Rachel got into the car with her that morning and said, ‘Your day. Just us. What’ll we do?’ she really wanted to tell her mother to take everyone else away somewhere and leave her alone with Petroc for a few hours. But she had once been as deeply in love with Rachel as she was with her little brother so it was easy enough to shrug and say, ‘It’s being just us that matters. What do you want to do?’

So they had driven to St Ives because there was an exhibition at the Penwith Society Rachel wanted to see. This filled Morwenna with foreboding. She liked St Ives. It had proper beaches, unlike Penzance, and people went there on holiday so, even though it was barely half an hour away, going there tended to feel a little like being on holiday too. It was the mention of art that unsettled her.

Rachel never said as much but it was obvious she thought Morwenna more talented than her brothers. When they brought paintings home from school, she’d dismiss them with a ‘very nice’ or an unconvincing burst of enthusiasm whereas whenever Morwenna did or whenever Morwenna picked up her crayons at home and drew things, Rachel took it as seriously as she might them forming letters correctly or doing maths. She would ask impossible questions like, ‘Why did you use that colour instead of this one?’ or ‘What makes you draw the tree from that angle?’ and if she came across Morwenna in the act of drawing or painting she could never refrain from correcting the way she was applying a colour or demonstrating an effect she could improve by holding her pencil at a different angle. The result was to make Morwenna self-conscious and nervous about art by introducing rights and wrongs into something that would otherwise have been a kind of play.

Similarly Rachel would ask her opinion of grown-ups’ paintings – as if the opinion of a little girl really mattered to her – then would weigh up Morwenna’s responses in a way that made it clear that it wasn’t enough to be honest and say, ‘I like this’ or ‘I don’t like that.’ There were right and wrong responses. Morwenna loved her mother’s paintings. She liked to sit close to them and stare without blinking until the vibrant colours began to blur and shift. They made her feel things as strongly as music did but whereas you felt quite safe saying, ‘This piece makes me think of snow falling on lily pads,’ or ‘This piece is like a giant marching through the forest breaking trees,’ you couldn’t specify what Rachel’s paintings suggested and it was a grave error of taste to say they reminded you of things like clouds or boats or birds. The only thing more frightening than Rachel’s anger was her disappointment when you said something stupid like, ‘That blob’s the lady and that blob there’s her husband.’ She looked at you and simply turned aside in a way that felt like the sun going behind a cloud, only for ever.

Antony said they all had to be careful not to hurt Rachel’s feelings.

‘She feels things more than we do,’ he explained, ‘so we have to treat her gently.’

Luckily she never asked Morwenna’s opinion of her own pictures but she was sure to ask in the Penwith Society. Morwenna did not understand the details but she knew that to enter this small gallery together was to enter a minefield. There were friends of Rachel’s and Antony’s in the Society, like Uncle Jack, who it would normally be right to like out loud but Rachel was not a member of the Society for some reason. She said she wouldn’t want to be, in a way that implied she wanted to be very much but that the Society had said no.

The drive over started well. The sun was shining and the trees on the edge of town were dazzling in their finery. They stopped in Rachel’s favourite lay-by, high up beyond Badger’s Cross, so they could get out and admire the view of St Michael’s Mount far below and so she could take Morwenna’s birthday photograph. As they drove on, plunging down into Nancledra, Rachel made her giggle by saying it was the kind of place where people married their sisters and as the car laboured and coughed up to Cripplesease and the steady descent towards the back of St Ives, Morwenna saw that for once Penzance and St Ives were sharing the same weather. Perhaps the day would go well after all.

‘Isn’t this great? Just us girls together?’ Rachel called out and Morwenna said yes it was and asked Rachel to tell her about when she was a baby, because this always put her in a good mood.

‘You were the tiniest baby,’ Rachel began. ‘You were so tiny you hardly made a bump so a lot of people just thought I’d been eating too many Jelbert’s ices. And I carried on wearing my normal clothes for ages with no beastly maternity smocks until the very last month. And I was painting as usual. I did some really good work while I was waiting for you to show up. It was a beautiful autumn day, just like today, and I was painting.’

‘Was it a circle or a square?’

This was the only permitted joke on the subject of Rachel’s art and Rachel laughed.

‘It was a square, cheeky. You know it was because I had it hanging in your bedroom for ages.’

‘The purply one with the green line.’

‘That’s the one. So I was working on that, listening to the radio, and suddenly I can feel you starting. So I call out to Antony and say put the suitcase in the car because it’s time. And he went out to get the car started and to turn the heater on, because it was quite chilly and windy even though the sun was shining, and then he realized we needed petrol so he drove to the Co-Op to buy petrol and to drop Garfield off with friends, and by the time he was back …’

‘I was born!’

‘You were born. The only one of you to be born at home. You were so tiny, you’d slipped out of me like a pretty little fish and I’d hardly had to puff and pant at all.’

‘Not like with Hedley.’

Morwenna said this for the pleasure of seeing the little, false thundery expression she knew it would bring to her mother’s face. Sure enough there it was and Morwenna giggled, forgetting she wanted to be at home with just Petroc.

‘Hedley?! Hedley was another matter entirely. Hedley took two whole days to arrive in the Bolitho Home and your father began to say maybe we should just leave him where he was because he sort of liked me the size of a mountain.’

Morwenna loved Rachel again. Rachel was doing what she so rarely did, making you feel you were the thing, the person, whatever, at the front of her mind. Most of the time she was being distracted by all the clamour and demands and bother of family and even under that surface level of irritable chat you knew she wasn’t seeing the room at all but was staring away inside her head at some painting she’d left half-finished or some other painting she hadn’t even begun yet.

It would be a good birthday after all. Sliding into double figures had felt ominous, a first significant pace away from childhood and towards a time when more and more would be expected of her. But laughing with Rachel, daring to admire her now that she was staring straight ahead, she decided all would be well.

‘If we pass three women with wicker baskets before the bottom of the hill,’ she told herself rashly, ‘It’ll be fine.’

This was cheating slightly because wicker baskets were a far better bet than nuns, or policemen on bicycles and even as she formed the thought, or possibly just before, she counted off her first one; a smart young woman with a wicker basket over one arm chatting to a friend on a doorstep. The second came swiftly after; an older woman pulling a basket on wheels in which a pile of library books was plainly visible. But there was no third. As the bottom of the hill drew ever closer and The Stennack turned into Chapel Street and then Gabriel Street where they had to turn left among the shops, she paid less and less attention to what Rachel was saying in her anxiety to see one. Even a cat basket would do. Or a log basket.

Please, she thought. Please?

But there was nothing. Only prams and string bags and one fierce-looking woman with a bag made from Black Watch tartan. And now they had turned the corner and it was too late.

‘What’s the matter?’ Rachel asked, irritated at being ignored probably. ‘What is it?’

‘Nothing,’ Morwenna said. ‘I … I thought I saw a girl from school, that’s all.’

There was no cheating fate. By the time they were parking on the Island, which usually gave Morwenna a small thrill even though she knew it wasn’t really an island but just a promontory with a car park on it, the sky had clouded over and Rachel’s mood was darkening in sympathy.

‘So,’ her tone glittered as Morwenna brought her back the ticket for the car park. ‘We’ll just call in at the Penwith Gallery then buy the things Antony asked us to get.’

‘Whisky and double cream and lemons.’

‘Yes. Then we can get fish and chips and then … Then we’ll see. Just look at that sky!’

Morwenna glanced up. It was grey, with darker grey clouds around which a threatening hint of pink was showing.

‘What colours would you paint that with?’ Rachel asked.

Morwenna knew a child would say grey and red so she said, ‘Purple and black. Maybe some deep blue. Clouds are hard. They work best if you make the paper wet.’

‘But Rachel wasn’t listening. ‘We needn’t go in for long,’ she said. ‘It’s just so I can tell Jack we went. After all, it’s your day, not mine.’

She was getting nervous, Morwenna knew the signs. She was winding herself up like a spring with razor edges. She had always seemed more attuned to these impending states in her mother than her brothers were, the way a dog could foretell thunderstorms. The mounting tension was infectious and she hated it the way she hated Garfield stretching rubber bands too far or making balloons squeak. At least with a balloon or a straining rubber band you could reach out and make the bad bit happen sooner.

The gallery wasn’t huge, like a museum – it had just one big sunny room tucked behind a row of houses near Porthmeor Beach – but neither was it like the galleries where pictures were for sale, because they had to pay to go in. Something that made Rachel mutter under her breath.

Rather than walk slowly round the room like her mother, interrogating each picture, Morwenna made directly for the paintings by Uncle Jack. There were only three. She recognized them at once because of the way he always framed his canvases first then painted over the frame as though the picture’s exuberance wouldn’t be contained. In fact exuberance was a word she had learned when Antony and Rachel were discussing him once. There was a bluey-green he used, too, which he must have mixed himself because she never seemed to see it anywhere else. Perhaps he put something in it that wasn’t paint. Soup, maybe, or melted sweets.

She couldn’t have said why she liked his pictures. Perhaps what she liked was the fact of knowing him and liking him so that spotting his pictures in a gallery was like seeing a friend in a crowded room. She felt proud when she saw his pictures on a gallery wall whereas when she saw Rachel’s there was always a stab of worry. Why wasn’t anyone looking at them? Why hadn’t they sold yet?

They were no more of anything than Rachel’s paintings but something about them suggested a narrative, the titles perhaps. These three were called Because You Left Early, Missing George and Witching Hour. There was a happy quality to their use of colour that made them seem to sing where their more rigid neighbours merely spoke or whispered. Perhaps she was confusing the character of the painter with his work, but in this austere setting Uncle Jack’s paintings seemed to be kind.

He wasn’t really her uncle. They just called him that.

She became aware that Rachel was moving round the exhibition towards her. She had thought to keep several steps ahead of her and so avoid the difficulty of a discussion but she was pulled up short by a sculpture.

It was made of some sort of close-grained wood. It was roughly cylindrical only its ends were rounded off, like a gentle, pointless bullet, and it bulged slightly in the middle. It wasn’t solid. There was a kind of split in it, a cleft like the gap in a rock where you might find baby crabs. If you peered closely you saw that the cleft opened out into a sort of cave where the wood had been left rougher, paler and unpolished. The rest, the outer wood and the edges, the lips, of the opening, had been rubbed as smooth as a piece of sea wood and waxed or oiled until it shone and you could see every line and whorl in it.

Morwenna knew you weren’t allowed to touch but she had never found touching so hard to resist. Or smelling. She wanted to seize the thing in both hands and breathe it in the way she would the skin of a ripe melon or a peach, or Petroc when he had just had his bath and had his hair standing in tufts and was hugsome in pyjamas. It was quite simply the loveliest thing made by a person she had ever encountered. The paintings around it seemed flat and sterile by comparison, even Jack’s, an effect heightened by the sculpture being the only thing of its kind in the gallery. Like a cat in a bookshop, its advantages were all the greater for being unfair.

‘Darling?’ Rachel only called them that when she was impatient or on edge. Morwenna knew better than to linger and ran to join her at the door. ‘What did you think?’ The inevitable question slipped out as they walked up the lane.

‘It was interesting,’ Morwenna told her, using a word that had proved safe in the past even though it encouraged further discussion.

‘Hmm,’ Rachel said. ‘The usual suspects. Did you like Jack’s?’

‘Of course,’ Morwenna said. ‘I saw them as soon as we walked in. You can always tell which are his. Is he very different?’

‘You tell me.’

‘Well … He must be or they wouldn’t be so easy to spot but …’

‘What? It’s OK. You can say whatever you think. You don’t have to like his work just because he’s our friend. That would be facile.’

‘What’s facile?’

‘Like the French for easy only insulting. Too easy. Too simple.’

‘Like Terry Stephens’ boat pictures?’

‘Ssh!’ Rachel giggled. ‘Yes.’

Morwenna hoped this meant they had moved on. Rachel was inspecting a butcher’s shop window. Piles of sausages and lamb’s liver and crouching chickens and skirt for making pasties; the kind of display that made Morwenna feel queasy if she looked too long, mainly because of the nasty plastic grass fringes that had been arranged around each tray of meat. But no. Rachel was relentless.

‘So. About Jack. But what? You said but.’

‘Well … If his paintings are so easy to spot, does that mean he’s just doing the same thing over and over, like Terry Stephens?’ She thought of Because You Left Early and Missing George – even this soon after seeing them they were muddled in her memory and indistinguishable. She compared them in her mind’s eye with the amazing sculpture. ‘They’re all colourful. They’re all cheerful. They’re a bit like sweets, really, aren’t they?’

‘Don’t try to be clever-clever. It does something odd to your face.’

Rachel’s swift reproof, delivered almost casually, seemed to sting more than one place at once and left Morwenna unable to walk and think at the same time. As usual, Rachel seemed unmindful of the strength of her words.

‘Come on,’ she called back cheerfully as she walked on. ‘I just need some things from in here. You said we had to do whatever I would be doing.’

It was a stationer’s, really, selling everything from writing paper and bottles of Quink to cheap paperbacks and packs of cards. Encouraged by local painters and illustrators, however, it had branched out in a small way as an art supply shop. There were racks of oil paint in tubes and watercolours in the little, tempting, paper-wrapped packages that made them look like expensive toffees and strange pencils that weren’t coloured and weren’t HB either. There were artist’s pads, drawers of special papers and a revolving rack of seductive books Rachel loudly despised with titles like How to Paint Seascapes and Drawing Horses is Easy!

Hedley had bought a huge tin of Swiss crayons here with his birthday money from Uncle Jack but seemed so awed by its size and smartness once he got it home that he did little but arrange its contents in different ways or make very neat sort of diagram pictures with each crayon in turn represented by a square coloured in with painful precision.

Morwenna admired some prettily packaged bottles of Indian ink while Rachel made a pile of paint tubes on the counter with her usual decisiveness. ‘We were going to get you one of these for your birthday,’ Rachel called out. She was holding up one of the shop’s little wooden models designed to help artists get people right. Morwenna loved them although secretly she’d have preferred the expensive one like a horse.

‘Yes, please!’ she said.

‘It’s not a toy, though.’

‘I know. It’s to help with proportion.’

‘Well pretend you didn’t see and remember to act surprised when you open it. I just wanted to be sure it was the right thing.’

The threatened rain arrived when they were still two streets from the chip shop and they had both dressed equally foolishly, lulled by a sunny morning. They sheltered in a little supermarket where Rachel suddenly remembered she had promised to buy things but not what they were. Morwenna reminded her and held the art bag while Rachel put several other things besides cream, butter, whisky and cornflakes in her basket. She was like a magpie in food shops, drawn to glitter and colour and quite capable of buying something they didn’t need and would never eat, because she liked its packaging. Antony had trained Morwenna and her brothers to be firm when they were with her.

‘Admire things with her,’ he said, ‘but then put them back. She won’t mind. Not if you do it kindly.’

Rachel was admiring some packets of saffron when a terrifying old woman came up to them. At least her face looked old, as craggy as cliffs and as furrowed as a field, but she had a good figure and a big gash of amazingly red lipstick, so perhaps she wasn’t that old but just very battered. She was just the way Morwenna imagined Hansel and Gretel’s witch would look. Her hands looked as spread and strong as a road-mender’s. Morwenna could picture her tucking Petroc into a casserole with carrots and onions and a bottle of wine then thumping a lid on him so heavy he couldn’t escape as she slid him into the oven.

The woman was peering up at the shelf where Rachel’s whisky had come from. ‘What? Up here?’ She shouted to the lady behind the counter. ‘No, there’s nothing here but Bells and Famous Grouse. I ordered it. I always do. You had no business to … Oh.’ She had spotted the bottle in Rachel’s basket and came close. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, not shouting any more but still not very politely. ‘But you’ve got my bottle there. I buy it on account and it’s normally put aside for me with the other things but the new girl didn’t know. Do you mind?’ And she reached into the basket and took the bottle.

‘Barbara?’ Rachel said, letting her take it.

‘Yes?’ The woman didn’t seem pleased to be talked back to, especially not by her Christian name. She had her bottle and now she wanted to leave. Now she was closer, Morwenna discovered she smelled like an ashtray. Neither of her parents smoked, or not at home, but Morwenna had sniffed ashtrays and cigarettes out of curiosity at other people’s houses. Jack smoked a pipe but he used peppermints afterwards, which didn’t make it not smell but made the smell a bit better.

Rachel was putting on her party voice. ‘Of course you won’t remember me after all this time. Rachel Kelly. We met at the Artists’ Ball ages ago. And then I went swimming with Jack Trescothick and the gang and you –’

‘Oh yes,’ the witch said to shut her up but Morwenna could see she either couldn’t remember or hadn’t cared to be reminded. She was glancing over Rachel’s shoulder for an escape route and Morwenna half-thought to step aside and hiss, ‘This way!’

‘We were in the Penwith Gallery just now.’ It was one of those times when Morwenna wished Rachel had a normal accent or rather no accent at all. Her curious mixture of American drawl and la-di-dah English had a way of becoming grotesquely exaggerated when she was nervous. She could tell she was nervous now from how busy her fingers had become. They were fretting with her buttons, with the handle on her wire basket and the paint-splashed leather of her watchstrap. ‘Morwenna’s been admiring one of your lovely vulvas.’

Morwenna wasn’t quite sure what a vulva was but she suspected it was rude because the Witch blanched and another woman who was passing them with, too late, a wicker shopping basket gave a sort of indignant cough and hurried away knocking a can of beans off a display.

The Witch stared at Rachel for a moment then said, ‘Oh yes. You’ve been ill, haven’t you?’ Then she crouched down to Morwenna’s height. It was frightening. She had an even stranger face close too, with a huge brow like Queen Elizabeth the First’s and the deepest wrinkles Morwenna had ever seen and she was rather furry and smelled so strongly of cigarettes and something else not very nice that it was a bit like being too close to a clever, dangerous monkey, the sort that bit if you made the mistake of pushing food through their bars when they asked for it.

But Morwenna was fascinated too, because the sculpture had been so beautiful, and wished Rachel wasn’t there being embarrassing.

‘So what did you think?’ the Witch asked, only of course she wasn’t a witch, Morwenna realized now, but Dame Barbara Hepworth.

Morwenna thought of Hansel and Gretel again and of how Gretel stands up to the witch by being a bit rude and witchlike herself to match her. ‘I liked it,’ she said. ‘I liked the way it was smooth and rough at the same time. It made me think of secrets.’

‘Secrets? Good! Show me your hands? Are you strong?’

She set down her whisky bottle and Morwenna gingerly offered her hands, which weren’t very clean actually. Dame Barbara took them firmly in hers and spread out the fingers then turned them over to look at the palms. Whatever she found there she kept to herself. Her own hands were quite worn and rough, not a lady’s hands at all but maybe dames were different. With a new gentleness she folded Morwenna’s fingers over on themselves, as though she had passed her a secret note and was tucking it away, then she sort of handed her hands back to her. ‘I’ll tell you something, Morwenna,’ she said. ‘Life can be bloody sometimes but then suddenly it’s bloody marvellous.’ She took her whisky, stood upright again and only glanced at Rachel in passing before walking away.

Nobody was ever rude to Rachel. They tended either to be too scared or too concerned. Certainly nobody ever mentioned her ‘illness’ so openly and in public. Morwenna was torn between a deeply instilled urge to protect her and a worrying, entirely new temptation to cheer.

Somehow Rachel appeared not to mind having been first insulted then ignored. She took down a different brand of whisky from the shelf, carried her basket to the counter and paid calmly enough. Once they were back on the street, however, she walked through the puddles so swiftly Morwenna almost broke into a run to keep up. Worse, she started muttering to herself. Morwenna only caught snatches that made any sense, like ‘Stuck-up old huckster’ and ‘Who does she think she is’ and ‘So drunk she could hardly stand’. Passers-by were staring and even stepping off the pavement to avoid them.

Suddenly Morwenna noticed they had passed the fish and chip shop and interrupted her without thinking, because she was hungry.

‘What about lunch?’ she called out.

Rachel stopped abruptly and looked down at her in much the way Dame Barbara had looked at herself minutes before, as though she couldn’t quite place her and resented the need to try.

‘What?’ she asked.

‘The chip shop,’ Morwenna said in a small voice, hoping she wasn’t about to cry. Rachel hated it when any of them cried; it felt like failure. ‘We just passed it.’

Rachel looked back up the street the way Morwenna was pointing then looked back at her for a second or two, wearing what Garfield called her ticking face, meaning the face she wore when you could hear her brain ticking like a cooling car engine, then she turned on her heel without a word and strode to the shop. Her tone was strenuously cheerful again but not friendly.

‘Remind me what you like. Cod or scampi?’

‘Scampi’s expensive.’

‘It’s your birthday. Scampi and chips, please,’ she told the man.

‘Anything for yourself?’ he asked.

‘No. Lunch makes me sick.’

‘Anything to drink?’

‘Anything to drink?’ she relayed to Morwenna.

‘No, thank you,’ Morwenna said to the man, although she badly wanted a fizzy drink to help the chips go down.

Scampi was a terrible decision, of course, because it meant a longer wait. Morwenna spent the time trying to find scampi on the Fish of the World poster and trying to take her mind off the way Rachel was staring at other people who came in.

The parcel eventually handed down to her was hot and sent vinegary fumes up her nose that made her want to rip it open at once. Eating in the street was bad manners, however; it was a rule. So she clutched her lunch close under one arm as they walked. Instead of striding on muttering to herself, Rachel now strolled, apparently lost in thought, as though she were all alone. It was like a punishment for greed; walk slowly while clutching cooling chips and forbidden to eat them. When they finally reached the car again Rachel remembered it was a special occasion and drove them to the far end of the car park to give them a sea view.

‘I almost forgot,’ she said. ‘Your card. It’s in the glove compartment.’

Morwenna looked in the glove compartment and took out that year’s card. As always it was wrapped in newspaper and done up with string. Rachel never gave them cards from a shop but did them tiny versions of her paintings on stiff, cream-coloured board which she folded in two. This was another of her traditions. Garfield said it dated back to when she was in hospital after Hedley was born and couldn’t buy a present on his birthday so did him a picture instead. Morwenna cherished the five she had been given already – Rachel didn’t waste them on children under four – and had acquired several of Hedley’s and Garfield’s in rash exchanges for Easter eggs or comics. She knew Rachel’s big paintings sold for quite a lot of money and that these tiny ones were also worth something so weren’t really a cheat’s way of not buying a present. She kept them in a drawer and liked to take them out occasionally when she was on her own and spread them around the room pretending it was a grown-up gallery. She liked to place them in order of merit too. They were all abstracts, of course, but they were friendly abstracts, somehow, perhaps because they were so small; pictures for very modern doll’s houses.

That day’s was a bit of a cheat, even so. It was orange. It looked as though Rachel had simply taken her biggest brush and dragged orange paint from one side of the card to the other. She hadn’t quite covered the card, though, and she had painted in a sort of fringe of yellow. She had signed it with the signature she used on her proper paintings and inside she had written ’For Morwenna on her tenth birthday, love from Rachel’.

But Morwenna looked at it and knew it had been done last night in a resentful hurry, probably after a reminder from Garfield or Antony, because they were better at remembering birthdays than Rachel was. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘It’s lovely.’ And she leant to kiss Rachel’s cheek.

‘I can’t believe you’re ten already. Now. Put it out of harm’s way and eat your chips before they get cold.’

The chips had become soggy and the scampi were tasteless and gluey and sort of sliding out of their batter coating. The vinegar appeared to have evaporated for all the tang it lent the spoiled feast.

The desire to cry was becoming stronger and stronger, not because the food was ruined, fish and chips were still a treat even when past their best, but because the day was, in a way Morwenna could not have defined out loud.

Rachel had begun to talk again, prattling on about Dame Barbara and some long involved story about Uncle Jack swimming naked, a smelly fur rug and a bracelet made from a tiara. She was talking as though she had a crowd of adults to show off to, not just Morwenna, and the bleakness creeping from Morwenna’s heart caused her throat to constrict and made the stodgy food harder and harder to swallow and she began to wish she had been brave as Garfield would have been and demanded a Coca-Cola in the chip shop as her birthday right.

At last she could bear it no more and she scrumpled the rest of her lunch into a ball inside the paper. She was crying before she had opened the door but she managed to hold back any proper sobs until she had slipped out and slammed it shut behind her.

She had not meant to cry. It was pointless with Rachel. It was different with Antony but tears never reached their mother. They seemed to confuse and freeze her. Laughter reached her. And affection. Had Morwenna laughed at her and hugged her she would have caught Rachel’s attention like a finger-click.

She knew this was not normal. She had observed other children’s tears and seen how, depending on the sort they were, mothers reacted to them with shock or irritation and ultimately with an attempt to comfort. Rachel would simply be staring at her or, more probably talking to herself or looking the other way. Morwenna remembered her discomfort when Garfield, always a crybaby even when too old for it, cried at a hideous children’s party when some boy kicked him over on the gravel. Other mothers had stared when Rachel ignored him but continued to chat and laugh with one of the fathers. She was probably laughing now at Morwenna’s absurdity.

She tried to control her tears, hiccupping and snorting, fighting to keep hold of her handkerchief and the leftover scampi and chips at the same time. It was spasmodic, out of her control and all surgy, like being sick. The day was ruined. Her special day. It was her fault for trying to be grown-up and clever rather than coming up with a list of things she wanted to do. But it was Rachel’s fault too for not understanding this and not remembering to treat her like a child on her birthday anyway. She was like a stone. A horrid, sharp stone.

A gust of wind caught her handkerchief and blew it to the grass. Morwenna bent for it, missed then had to dash after it. The effort and ungainliness cured her crying and left her merely angry instead and, having snatched back the handkerchief, she took out her fury on her lunch instead. In a single, savage movement, she shook the newspaper parcel open into the wind. Chips and scampi flew up and away from her and suddenly the air about her was loud and white with swooping gulls seizing the morsels even before they landed on the rocks below the car park. They were forbidden to feed gulls, especially at home where they gathered, if encouraged, and made a noise on Rachel’s studio and attic roofs. But it was as though she had conjured them out of thin air with a single gesture and it felt dramatic and immensely satisfying. Rachel responded to big gestures far more readily than she did to crying and would quite understand one’s jumping out of the car in order to summon a shrieking flock of herring gulls.

You’re ten now, Morwenna reminded herself. You’re nearly a woman. She dreaded being prised apart from her brothers by femininity the way she had seen it happen to other girls in other families. It would be different, perhaps, if she had a sister, but you couldn’t have a sisterhood of one and Rachel would be no help.

Summoning a sense of purpose, she folded up the greasy piece of paper and walked to stuff it into an overflowing concrete rubbish bin then turned back to the car feeling thundery but recovered and grateful, now that her face must be blotchy and her eyes piggy with weeping, that she could rely on Rachel to pay her little outburst no heed.

Sure enough, as she drew near the car again she saw Rachel was smoking one of her very occasional cigarettes in the dramatic way she had and concentrating on something she was drawing with the special tortoiseshell fountain pen that lived in her handbag.

She barely registered Morwenna’s getting back in the passenger seat beyond a low, thoughtful, ‘Hi,’ as she made a few more quick scribbles. Morwenna helped herself to a barley sugar from the glove compartment and thought about the drawing model in the bag at her feet which Antony would be giving her at teatime. He would give it after Hedley’s and Garfield’s presents and whatever they pretended Petroc had got her. She would never use it for drawings. She might try dressing it up or making it hold things in its little arms, then one of the boys would borrow it for some violent game even though war was wrong and it would end up lost and broken or subjected to experimental surgery like her variously maimed dolls.

And just as her unfinished, unappetizing lunch had become the focus of her angry disappointment so the gift-wrapped wooden mannequin came to stand for all the sorrow and discomfort of becoming another year older, the enforced attention of a birthday and its equally brutal removal with the opening of the last present. At least at Christmas the fever and disappointment were shared.

‘There,’ Rachel said, screwing the cap back on her pen. ‘I added a little something extra.’

She passed over the birthday card. It looked much the same. Still abstract. Still orange. Perhaps Rachel had not been drawing but writing. Perhaps she had written an extra message after the love, Rachel about tears and disappointment. Perhaps she had written an apology? Morwenna looked inside.

The writing was unchanged but on the left, on the reverse of the orange picture, she had drawn something.

Rachel could draw just like Rolf Harris. It was one of her dark secrets. She could do grown-up drawings and filled notebook after notebook with the exquisitely shaded pencil or ink images she usually threw off to warm up before she started painting or when she was merely struck by something she’d stumbled on. But it was her cartoons the children loved. They were well drawn but immensely funny somehow, the more so for the seriousness of most of Rachel’s work and the demonic speed with which she threw them off.

She had done a cartoon of the little supermarket they had just been in. There was the narrow aisle, its sides stacked high with everything from biscuit tins to bleach, only she had added in funny things like a crocodile and a coffin. There were the whisky bottles, by which she had added a dangling sign which said HOOCH! And there was Morwenna, wearing exactly the tartan skirt and best white shirt and black shoes she had on today and there was Rachel, beaming so crazily there was a star glinting off her teeth. And there, in pride of place, was Dame Barbara, complete with high, deeply scored forehead and pushed-back headscarf. She was pointing at the whisky bottle in Morwenna’s basket and apparently offering a small sculpture in return. There was a caption underneath. A BRUSH WITH GREATNESS, it said.

It was very funny and Rachel’s self-portrait was better than any apology. What did she have to apologize for anyway? She had given up a working day to Morwenna. They had seen an exhibition, met a famous sculptor, had fish and chips by the sea. They even had a funny story to carry back to the others. In some ways it was a vintage year.

‘Thank you,’ Morwenna told her. ‘It’s brilliant.’ She closed and opened the card again to appreciate it afresh.

Rachel tugged her over and kissed the top of her head. ‘My only girl,’ she said and started the car to drive them home.

They talked all the way back or, rather, Rachel asked questions and made Morwenna tell her things. She asked her about school and who her friends were and what her favourite and least favourite subjects were and what she wanted to do when she grew up. (To which Morwenna had to say, ‘I don’t know!’ as if the question was silly, otherwise she’d have had to say I want to be just like you, which was something she had never said aloud and which was an impossible thing to admit.) It was odd. Rachel asked the questions as though they didn’t see each other every day, as though she were a visiting godmother or something.

As they pulled back over the hill above Nancledra and paused again to say ooh at the view from Cornwall’s Best Lay-by, Morwenna realized it was because the day must be a kind of treat for Rachel as well as her, a chance for once to avoid having to share or be shared and the thought filled her with a kind of sticky, homesick feeling, like the smell of tears behind your face when you’d finished crying.

They wound down around the hillside, past the first few houses, past the sign to Polkinghorne that always made Rachel laugh and intone the name in a deep, slow voice, past the succession of backyard washing lines where Garfield and Hedley always played a competition as to who won out of pants or bras, and up to the junction with the seafront. There was nothing coming. Morwenna was trained, as they all were, to look left at junctions and say clear left, clear left for as long as it was safe to pull out. But Rachel left the car where it was and asked, ‘You don’t often cry like that, for no particular reason, do you?’

Morwenna was too embarrassed to turn round. She just kept on watching for traffic from the left and when she said no it came out all squeaky. ‘Just checking,’ Rachel said and drove on.