UNNAMED STUDY (1967?). Wax crayon on paper.

Because of the inferior medium used, this small work is thought to date from one of Kelly’s enforced stays in what was then Cornwall’s only psychiatric hospital, the defunct St Lawrence’s in Bodmin. (Once the size of a small town, now largely demolished or redeveloped as luxury housing, the hospital’s records for their distinguished patient have been lost or destroyed.) There is no date but Kelly is known to have been treated there for nervous breakdowns following the births of three of her four children, in 1962, 1965 and 1967. At least two of these involved suicide attempts and all were almost certainly brought on by her insistence on taking no medication of any kind when she was pregnant. By a cruel irony, she produced some of her greatest work in the periods of almost frenzied activity – and mental instability – in the weeks preceding the birth of each child. Unnamed Study (1967?) gains its putative date from the distinctly Op Art or Rileyesque ways in which the orange-coloured squares are made to vibrate or throb by the subtle application of contrasting greens between them. Another reason it is thought to have been executed in hospital is the lack of any finished, larger work produced from the study.

(Lent by a private collector)

‘Today I am seven,’ Garfield wrote in his diary. ‘I am seven and my sister, Morwenna’s still only three and the baby, who doesn’t have a name yet but’s a boy, is two months old. Our mother is in hospital so this birthday won’t be quite like the others as we’re going miles in the car to visit her. We will see how things turn out!’

He hated the diary. It was a tyranny. It was a lockable one, which he liked because it made it a secret as no one else had the key or knew where he hid it. However it was a five-year diary so it would last until he was twelve, which was ages away. Nobody had managed to give him a satisfactory explanation of what it was for. Holiday diaries were different. Everyone knew about those. You stuck in a postcard or something every day of the holiday or did a drawing in it or a painting and you wrote what you had done. Then you all took them into school on the first day of the Christmas term and there were prizes for the best ones. He complained about having to do holiday diaries but they were easy really, especially if the exercise book wasn’t too big so the postcards used up half a page. And it was only eight weeks or less. Two months. And you put public things in it because people would be reading it.

The five-year lockable diary, though, was like a small, leatherette conscience.

‘Just put your thoughts in it,’ Rachel told him. ‘The things you like and the things you don’t. Don’t just say what you had for meals as that’s boring but you can say what you did and how it made you feel.’

‘What’s it for, though?’

‘When you’re older you’ll be able to read it and see how you used to think when you were little.’

‘But I’ll remember.’

‘You won’t remember everything. You’re forgetting things already.’

He tried, because he was the eldest – especially now he was to have a little brother – and had to set an example. But he felt uncomfortable writing things down unless he knew they were true, like the dates of battles or what Humphry Davy invented or Isambard Kingdom Brunel. But feelings weren’t like facts. And how did you know they were true? Or right?

Some things he had written down then wished he hadn’t. He wanted to tear them out but he didn’t dare. He bought some special ink eraser instead, which you dabbed on from a little brown bottle with a plastic applicator in the lid. It smelled funny but it sort of worked only once it was dry you could still see what you’d written but in very pale yellow instead of blue Quink washable.

It had only recently occurred to him that he could simply leave days blank. Since he held the only key, nobody would know. But he had learnt to take nothing purely as it was presented to him. He was told the diary was private, secret, but that could change. He might suddenly be asked to hand it over, unlocked, or he might fall ill without much warning, like Rachel did, and leave it unlocked, readable by anyone who was passing his room. Nobody could resist reading a book of private things. It was wrong but irresistible, he could see that.

When Morwenna was old enough to keep a diary, he would have to warn her to hide it somewhere without telling him. She was only three but she was already showing a worrying lack of caution. She shared and showed everything. She ate chocolate or ice-cream or biscuits in an unguarded, open way, vulnerable to any passing dog or seagull or unscrupulous child. She shared things with thoughtless generosity she only regretted once it was too late.

‘Garfy?’ Antony called up the stairs. ‘Are you ready?’

‘Coming!’ He locked the diary, which he hid under his mattress and reached up into his bedroom fireplace to tuck the key on to a sort of sooty shelf in the chimney. Then he hurried down to the hall where Antony was buttoning Morwenna’s cardigan for her.

The hospital where Rachel went to have the baby was in Penzance, on the seafront. It wasn’t really a hospital because no one there was ill, just having babies. It was a sort of house, called the Bolitho Home. St Lawrence’s, the hospital she was in now, was miles away in Bodmin, which was nearly in Devon it was so far.

Garfield tried to sit in the front, in Rachel’s seat, but wasn’t surprised when Antony told him to get out and sit in the back because Morwenna was too little and might have opened her window or her door when they were driving fast. Not that they ever went very fast. The car was a Morris 1000 Traveller and cream-coloured, with woody bits. It was very old, nearly antique, and Garfield often heard Antony telling people it would go on for years so long as they treated it carefully and didn’t overtax the engine. It was so old it had indicators that popped out from the sides to flash, rather than just flashing like a normal car’s, which Garfield liked. But the seats got hot and sticky in summer and stuck painfully to his calves if he was in shorts, like today. Also the back seat stank because Rachel had forgotten a pack of Anchor butter once and it had melted into the upholstery leaving just the dried-up paper and a terrible smell that actually smelled like carsickness. It was especially bad on hot days and today was hot because they were having an Indian Summer. Garfield and Morwenna breathed through their mouths to avoid smelling it too much. If they opened their windows instead, Antony would complain they were creating too much drag and making him waste fuel. Which was bad for the planet, like not turning off light switches or having too deep a bath.

As he drove, Antony told them the baby was going to be called Hedley, after his grandfather, who was Michael Hedley Middleton. Then he told them all about why Rachel was in hospital in Bodmin. He always told them the truth about everything because it was important and what Quakers did. He didn’t always tell them right away, though. Garfield had known she was in a different hospital for days, from listening to conversations, and had been waiting for his father to tell them about it.

Other people, even including other Quakers, were not as truthful as Antony, Garfield had noticed. They dropped their voices, thinking he couldn’t hear them, or spoke to him as if he was about five to say, ‘Mummy’s not gone away for long. She’ll soon be back. She just needs a rest after having the baby.’

But Antony said she was sick. Not like when you’d eaten too much lemon mousse but sick in her head so she’d been hearing and seeing things that weren’t there, like having a dream but with her eyes open. She’d also got sad. Very sad. In spite of having the new baby to think about. So she was in the hospital so that she and the baby could be made well and happy again. They weren’t to be worried by what other people said. She wasn’t mad. There were poor people in the hospital who were mad and were probably never coming out because they couldn’t cope on their own. But calling even them mad or loony wasn’t polite or even medically correct. They were ill, like Rachel, but more so.

Garfield decided the baby had to be with her because of milk.

‘Can we catch it?’ he asked. They had been doing coughs and colds at school. Steve Pedney, a rather rough boy whose father was said to be in prison, was told off for blowing his nose by simply blocking one nostril with a finger while emptying the other smartly on to the playground tarmac. They all laughed because it was so disgusting but clever too and Garfield thought it might be nicer than spending the day with a soggy handkerchief in your pocket to surprise you when you put your hand in. But Miss Curnow said that was how tuberculosis was spread. Steve Pedney still did it though. Coughs and sneezes spread diseases. Madness and sadness might be spread too.

‘No,’ Antony told him, wrinkling his eyes in the rearview mirror in the way that meant he was smiling. ‘It’s just inside her, like a tummy ache. You can’t catch it by being near her or hugging her. In fact she’d probably like a big hug when you see her. She’ll have been missing you. But she’s on very strong medicine too which might make her seem a bit quieter than usual or a bit sleepy. Don’t worry. Just be yourselves and ask me afterwards if there’s anything you don’t understand.’

At that point Morwenna started singing one of her aimless, rather tuneless songs so they both stopped talking and listened to her. She picked music up like a sponge – songs from Play School or advertisements (at other people’s houses because they didn’t have television), hymns from kindergarten and Sunday School, even carols from the Salvation Army band – but she sort of melted them down and transformed them so that unless you knew in advance what she thought she was singing it could be hard to guess. Garfield listened closely and decided that today it was the woman on the Shredded Wheat advertisement. He tested his guess by joining in and singing the real version alongside her.

‘There are two men in my life.

To one I am a mother.

To the other I’m a wife.

And I give them both the best … with natural Shredded Wheat!’

It was an odd song because it didn’t go anywhere. It was truncated – like the tail – end of something longer – but oddly haunting. He had only watched the advertisement a few times at a friend’s house and to his knowledge, Morwenna had only seen it once, when they watched it together in an electrical shop while Antony was buying batteries. But her memory was like that. It was almost frightening.

The other thing that was strange about the advertisement was that you didn’t actually see the woman, just people on a sad-looking beach with the sun going down, but you felt you knew what she was like. You could tell she cared. She gave a lot of thought to how she fed her husband and her son. It was odd that she called her son a man because he obviously wasn’t but perhaps she was a bit shy of him. Perhaps he was strict with her like his father and food was her only way of reaching him. Food instead of hugs. Like some of the women friends from the Quakers who kept coming to visit while Rachel was away in her hospitals, the ones who called her Mummy instead of Rachel and who lied and said she was tired when they obviously knew she wasn’t but that they mustn’t say she was mad. They gave Antony cake and stew. But mainly cake. Garfield looked at the back of his father’s neck and thought of the Interflora poster on the flower-shop door in Market Place that said say it with flowers. Say it with cake.

Morwenna caught his eye and smiled and sang more in tune so he knew he had guessed right. They kicked their legs in time and sang the jingle together, more confidently now there were two of them. It was funny.

‘There are two men in my life.

To one I am a mother.

To the other I’m a …’

‘That’s enough, now,’ Antony said, quite firmly.

Garfield shut up at once but Morwenna carried on, louder and faster, giggling, not understanding because she was only three and a half.

‘That’s enough, Wenn,’ Garfield told her and tapped her knee so that she looked at him. ‘Ssh,’ he told her.

‘Ssh,’ she said back.

‘Who’s this?’ he asked, picking up her doll. She snatched it off him, as he knew she would, and lost herself in a quick fury of love, correcting the doll’s skirt and hair and squeezing it harder than any mother would. She didn’t really love her dolls, she just possessed and controlled them. She spent ages telling them off in language he couldn’t always understand and sometimes encouraged him to pull their heads off with a sick-making rubbery pop that made them both laugh. She laughed even more if he muddled the heads up when he put them back but then she tended to panic and he had to calm her by changing the heads round the way they should be and fast.

They drove on towards Bodmin in relative silence. Some of his friends had parents with radios in their cars but all the Morris had were maps and Rachel’s sketchpad and a red tartan picnic blanket that smelled of beaches and seaweed.

Rachel wasn’t a mummy and she certainly wasn’t like the Shredded Wheat lady. He thought it most unlikely she had been missing him and wanted a hug. Sometimes, especially if she was painting, she hardly knew you were there. And when she got angry it was really frightening. She never smacked them or hit them – Antony said that wasn’t right, which meant it wasn’t Quakerly – but she shouted and she hit things instead.

It was worth it though for when she was happy. When she was happy she was better than any stupid mummy because she was like someone your age, like a sister but a sister who could put you in the car and say, ‘Let’s escape, let’s not go to school today.’ When she was happy and did things like take Garfield on a train ride or out for a long walk when he was meant to be in school or going to the dentist for a filling, Antony got cross but she just got crosser and then laughed at Antony, which was very shocking because he wasn’t someone you laughed at, being a teacher.

When he was older Garfield might have to be in Antony’s English class at Humphry Davy, which was something he secretly dreaded as he would not know how to behave and imagined it would make things awkward around the other boys. His father must have a nickname, like Fishface or Wingnut or Dr Death that all the boys used. It would be so terrible he had even wondered about failing the Eleven Plus on purpose so he’d have to go to the other school, the bad one full of boys like Steve Pedney who never used handkerchiefs. Only that would not be Quakerly.

He had recently stopped always going to Sunday School and started occasionally sitting with the grown-ups in Meeting instead. The power of the silence impressed him and what was Quakerly and what wasn’t was often on his mind. Wanting more pocket money now that he was older wasn’t. Being nice to Steve Pedney, even though other people weren’t, was. We all had a little bit of God or Goodness in us, even Steve Pedney, like a tiny candle you couldn’t blow out however hard you tried and however bad you were and when you sat with the others in silence you had to think of that candle and try to make it shine brighter. Or you had to think of the people who needed it, not just Steve Pedney but children in Africa or Rachel in St Lawrence’s or your new baby brother, Hedley who you weren’t sure you were going to like much and imagine holding them in a kind of warm light made by all the people in the circle. It was quite hard work, a bit like magic, and he enjoyed it. When they had assembly at school and all mumbled the same prayers together and it was all about God and Jesus and everyone saying exactly the same thing, it seemed shockingly noisy and so perfunctory it was hard to see what the point of it was. Antony said it was up to him what he believed, that he, Antony, believed in God and Jesus and would probably call himself a Christian and that Rachel didn’t entirely but that they both believed in goodness, the little candle inside everybody, even Steve Pedney. Even Steve Pedney’s mother, who Garfield had seen in the Co-Op once, who had arms like roast pork and looked awful.

St Lawrence’s was big; lots of large old buildings and quite a few smaller ones. It was like a little town behind its own wall. It wasn’t like a hospital because it didn’t have ambulances coming and going and there wasn’t a queue of people with blood coming out of them or taps stuck on their toes and bunches of flowers to give to friends. It seemed very quiet. You only knew it was a hospital because it had those coloured signs with white capital letters that only hospitals had. RECEPTION, the signs said, as if they were shouting. THERAPY UNITS. DRUG DEPENDENCY UNIT. REHABILITATION UNIT.

They were a little early. Visitors were only admitted from two until four so they had to wait in the reception area and sit quietly looking at magazines until it was time. There were a few other visitors waiting too: a man with some books in a basket, an old woman with a bunch of grapes already arranged on a plate, a man and woman who murmured together in a corner and looked really worried as though they’d come in secret and hadn’t expected anyone else to be there. The murmuring woman started to cry and Garfield had to whisper to Morwenna not to stare. Morwenna was still too little to know what tactful meant so he was surprised she didn’t loudly ask why, the way she usually did. She fell to drawing on ladies’ faces in a copy of Woman’s Realm. Garfield pretended to read a copy of Motor Sport, which was a man’s magazine, but he was really watching Antony.

Antony was normally very serious and calm. You didn’t really notice his moods because he didn’t have any. He was always the same, the unchanging pavement under Rachel’s weather. But today he was different, even nervous. He kept looking at his watch, as though he didn’t trust the clock on the wall above the nurse’s head, and turning his wedding ring round and round as though he wanted to unscrew his finger.

He had seen the baby before. They hadn’t. Not really. Children weren’t allowed to visit the Bolitho Home in case they gave the babies germs or tuberculosis so Garfield had been made to wait on the pavement outside, holding Morwenna’s hand although she was wriggling like a fish and her hand was all sweaty and she kept asking why. Then Antony had appeared in a window, as he said he would, and held up the baby.

‘Look,’ Garfield told Morwenna. ‘Up there. See? That’s the baby. That’s our brother. See?’ But she had just started crying Anty Anty which was how she said Antony. She hadn’t been interested in the baby at all. Which wasn’t surprising because at that distance it looked as if Antony was just holding up a bundle of white blanket with a lamb chop inside it. When Garfield asked him what Hedley was like, he said it was impossible to tell because new babies were so wrinkled and red and cross and either cried or slept. So perhaps he was worried Hedley would have changed in a bad way. Or perhaps he was worried about the sickness in Rachel’s head. Garfield had looked up depression in his dictionary but it had only confused him by talking about weather fronts and dips in the landscape along with uncontrollable or clinical sorrow.

The nurse’s clock was electric, like the ones in school, so it didn’t tick. Its secondhand swept round so smoothly you couldn’t really use it to count the seconds and it conveyed the impression that time was passing more swiftly. Something Garfield had learnt to resent in maths tests. Only the minute hand clicked. While Morwenna fidgeted beside him and Antony composed himself into stillness the way he did in Meetings, he watched the clock click from five to two to a maddening two minutes past before the nurse lifted the little upside-down watch on her starched apron front and announced, ‘You can go in, now. Just present yourself to the nurse on duty in the ward you want to visit.’

‘Which ward do we need?’ Garfield asked as they approached a big sign listing all of them with arrows in all directions.

‘Williams,’ Antony said and led them up a big flight of boomy steps with no carpet on them.

‘It smells,’ Morwenna complained. ‘I don’t really like it.’

‘Ssh,’ Antony told her. They had to pass a man who was staring and not talking and she took Garfield’s hand. She only did this when she was scared, which helped in a way because it meant he couldn’t be scared too.

‘Come on,’ he told her. ‘We’re going to see Hedley!’ But he flinched a bit when they passed a door where a woman was crying very loudly, like Morwenna did when she didn’t get her way.

He made himself look into wards as they passed. In some, people were dressed and walking about or just sitting in chairs. In some they were all in bed. There always seemed to be either men or women. There was a room where everyone was really old and a children’s ward with pictures on the wall, which he hadn’t expected. He decided to start breathing as shallowly as possible so as not to draw the madness in.

‘Williams Ward,’ said Antony. ‘Here we are. Williams Ward.’

The nurse there was young and really friendly. She crouched down so her head was the same height as Morwenna’s nearly and said, ‘And who’ve we got here?’

‘I’m Garfield and this is Morwenna,’ he told her.

There was a really strong smell of lavatories but not from the nurse, who smelled of fabric conditioner.

‘Is that a fact?’ she said. She had huge breasts, he noticed, so that she could probably read her upside-down watch without needing to lift it. ‘Have you come to see baby Hedley?’ she asked Morwenna. Morwenna nodded.

‘And our mother,’ Garfield said. ‘Please.’

‘Mum’s a bit sleepy,’ she said. ‘So she might not chat much but she’s been looking forward to seeing you both. I know she has. You’re better for her than any pills. Soon cheer her up.’

She smiled at Antony as she stood and Garfield saw she had a great curvy bottom to match. He was surprised to wonder how it might feel to push his face into it quite hard or to take shelter under her bosom as under a great, soft-stacked cloud. She might have read his mind because she briefly laid one of her hands on the back of his head and let it slide down on to his nape in a way that gave him goosebumps and made him blush.

‘You’ll find her in the room on the end,’ she told Antony softly. ‘Down the ward and turn right. I’ll go and fetch young Hedley from his cot.’

There was a Bob Hope film playing on the television and several women were watching it or pretending to. Their faces faced the screen but Garfield was sure their eyes were slyly turned on him as he passed. He hated Bob Hope films. They were full of jokes he didn’t understand because everyone talked too fast and he associated them with nausea as they only ever seemed to be on when he was held home from school with a stomach bug. (He had heard it said that he had a sensitive stomach and was deeply ashamed of it.)

Morwenna was holding Antony’s hand now, which must mean she was really scared and Garfield was briefly envious of the soft girlishness that would let her take such favours as her right until well past the age at which he had been told to be a big boy and stop crying and stop wanting to be held. Like Morwenna, he suspected, he really wanted to be carried high on Antony’s shoulders, which was where he used to feel safest, but Antony had a bad back and wasn’t supposed to do that any more.

A woman in a yellow dressing gown with a head that was much too big came up to them and said, ‘You give me sweeties,’ in a voice that was all wrong.

‘I’m sorry,’ Antony told her, ‘we don’t have any,’ and passed on with Morwenna.

But Garfield had bought a mixture of Black Jacks and Rhubarb and Custards with some of his pocket money that morning. He had one Black Jack left and knew the woman knew it was in his shorts pocket because she wasn’t moving away but was staring down at him. ‘All right,’ he told her. ‘It’s my last one, though.’

She took it from him and tore off the wrapper in seconds and threw it in her huge mouth. Like a frog’s, her lips seemed to divide her head clean in two when they parted.

She gulped.

‘You’re supposed to make it last,’ he told her.

She was holding out a fleshy hand again. ‘You give me sweeties,’ she repeated and a dribble of liquorice spit fell on to her chin.

‘It was my last one,’ he said. ‘I told you.’

He ran to escape her terrible stare and caught up with Antony and Morwenna as they were turning right at the far end of the ward. He glanced back to see if she was following. She had stayed where she was but she was staring and when she saw him look she twitched up her nightdress and he looked away fast but not quite fast enough.

There was a row of individual bedrooms off a corridor. They had brass numbers on the door and, when a room was occupied, little cards slotted into brass holders, with people’s names on them. They made Garfield think of the jar labels in the larder at home, only instead of saying Dark Muscovado Sugar or Macaroni they announced their contents as Julie Dawson, Maggie Treloar or, in the case of room seven, Rachel Middleton (& Hedley).

It was funny seeing her called that because when she painted everyone called her Rachel Kelly.

‘Why do all the doors have windows in them?’ he asked.

‘So the nurses and doctors can always see in,’ his father said and gave the little cough that showed he was unhappy. ‘So nobody can hurt themselves without someone seeing,’ he added. ‘Ready?’

Garfield nodded.

‘Mummy!’ Morwenna shouted and Garfield shushed her.

Antony peered through the window in Rachel’s door, knocked twice, gave a little smile then opened the door and gently pushed Garfield and Morwenna in before him. ‘Look who it isn’t,’ he said. He used a funny tone of voice, slightly wheedling, as though Rachel had stopped being a grown-up.

She was sitting in the room’s only armchair, beside the oddly high-up window. ‘Look,’ she said sleepily. ‘I have to sit on all these so I can see out.’ She shifted slightly to reveal a great heap of telephone directories she had used to raise the chair’s cushion by nearly a foot.

Garfield was shy of hugging her so, while Morwenna ran to jump on her lap, he jumped a few times instead to see what she was seeing, and caught a few glimpses of a lawn and trees and rosebuds. He was glad to see she looked fairly normal. She was wearing daytime clothes – a dark-blue dress covered in white spots – but she looked pale and somehow uncooked without her lipstick and there was something different about her eyes and she needed to wash her hair.

‘What’s wrong with your eyes?’ he asked her.

‘My eyes?’ she asked slowly then understood. ‘Oh. No mascara. Do they look terrible?’

He stopped jumping and dared to look at her full on. The directories made her so high she and Morwenna might have been on a throne. ‘Not really,’ he admitted. ‘Just sort of pale. And weak.’

‘Hello, darling,’ Antony said and kissed her on the lips then sat on the end of her bed.

She had slowed down completely. Garfield was used to her being sharp and crackly and rather frightening because you had to think quite carefully what you said because she never missed anything and might pull you up short at any moment. But now she was so slow and placid she was frightening in a different way, as though her mechanism was winding down and no one else had noticed or thought to turn the key. For a whole minute they just sat in silence, Antony sad and watchful on the bed, she on the chair and Morwenna blissful and unquestioning on her lap. Like a ravenous cat given milk, Morwenna always became entirely focused on a pleasurable moment.

The room had no other furniture but a little chest of drawers with a vase on it and a heap of drawings Rachel had been doing with wax crayon.

‘Can I see?’ Garfield asked. You never looked at her pictures without asking, in case you had sticky fingers.

She stared at him and he could almost hear the glutinous plop as her mind closed over his question and drew it in. She nodded at last with a smile and he went to look.

Instead of doing the obvious view out of the window she had done the window itself, the panes of old, uneven glass, the flaking paint creamy with age, the damp stained roller blind for blocking out the sun, and the arrangement of gutter, brickwork and drainpipes a little to one side. Then she had done her bed, over and over, with the rumples in different places and the sunlight in different places but the brutal black bedstead exactly the same each time, like a cage about something shifty and fluid. It was so unfair, he thought, that when he did pictures with wax crayon they looked like every other boy’s wax crayon pictures but when she did them it didn’t look like wax crayon any more. There were no pictures of the baby.

‘I asked for pastels,’ she said.

He was proud to know better than to think she meant sweets.

‘But they said they were too messy,’ she went on.

‘Maybe I could bring you an old tablecloth and sheet to protect the floor,’ Antony said but then the door opened and the nurse with the curvy bits came in with a pram.

‘Who wants to meet their baby brother?’ she asked and Morwenna slid off Rachel’s lap to see.

Garfield was less obviously eager because men didn’t show the same interest in babies as ladies did but actually he was quite excited.

‘He’s off in the Land of Nod,’ the nurse said, ‘but you can wake him at three if he’s still asleep and give him his bottle. I’ve tucked it in there, behind his pillow. I thought you might all like a stroll in the sunshine,’ she told Antony. ‘You can take the service lift just outside here and get out to the garden that way. How are you feeling, my lovely?’ she asked Rachel. ‘Up to a walk?’

Rachel only did a sort of wincing smile by way of an answer but the nurse didn’t seem that interested in a response and bustled off to see someone shouting nurse nurse from the room next door.

‘Careful or you’ll wake him,’ Antony told Morwenna, crouching down beside her. Garfield drew near to look too. It was a big navy-blue pram almost like a boat with a fringed blue hood and a white inside. Hedley seemed tiny in it. Only his face and hands showed. He had dark hair that grew in a whorl and he had the smallest ears and fingernails Garfield had ever seen. He felt he had never looked properly at a baby until now. He turned round to look at Rachel but she was staring out of the window again.

‘Can I touch him?’ he asked Antony.

‘Of course. Don’t wake him, though. He looks so comfortable.’

Garfield reached out a forefinger and just grazed Hedley’s cheek with his knuckle. The skin was warm and softer even than Morwenna’s. Maybe because it was so new. He touched the back of his tiny fingers.

‘Me,’ Morwenna said. ‘I do.’ But she was too small to reach in unassisted so Antony lifted her almost inside the pram so she could touch too.

‘What does he eat?’ Garfield asked, smiling because he knew really.

‘Milk,’ Rachel said, focusing back on them.

‘From you,’ he asked, amazed at his boldness.

‘It should be,’ she slurred. ‘But it’s not safe. Too many pills in me now so he’d be drinking them too.’

‘He has special baby milk,’ Antony said. ‘In a bottle. Shall we all go outside for a bit? Push him around the garden? Do you feel up to it, darling?’

Rachel said of course she did.

They went down in the service lift, which was fun as it left your tummy behind and had big metal doors that let you see the floors slipping by. Garfield would quite happily have gone up and down in it a few more times but didn’t like to ask, although as it was his birthday Antony might have said yes.

The garden had gravel paths and very neat rose beds with very neat roses in them.

‘I asked the gardener how he avoids black spot,’ Rachel managed, ‘and he said Jeyes Fluid. In solution. All over the soil in January.’ She pushed the pram with Antony on one side of her and Morwenna on the other. ‘You lead the way,’ she told Garfield, though in fact there was little choice about where to walk and small chance of getting lost.

He followed the path, tuning in and out of his parents’ horrible conversation. In fact it was all one-sided. Antony kept saying things like, ‘Sarah and Bill asked after you on Sunday. They send their love,’ which Rachel would answer with a sigh or a barely perceptible murmur. She wasn’t fierce or rude, just sad and discouraging, as though each offering of news or good wishes merely caused her physical pain she was unable to describe. He wished Antony would give up. It was bad enough hearing Rachel sound so listless and miserable without him sounding all pathetic. She had not wished him a happy birthday, something so shocking he had to try not to think about it or he would cry.

Escape presented itself in the shape of a small playground area with a swing and a slide. Encouraging Morwenna to follow him, he ran ahead and used both in quick succession. The slide was babyishly low and short but the swing, tied to the bough of a big tree, had such long chains that he was soon able to make it fly so high that the chains went momentarily slack at the top of each arc and frightened him into swinging not quite so fiercely.

The others had caught up and sat on a bench nearby with the big pram beside them. He couldn’t look at them too closely or he’d be car sick. Swing sick. But he snatched glances as he flew up towards the tree canopy and down again. He saw the baby had woken up. Antony lifted it from the pram with a knitted blanket all round it so that you couldn’t see its legs. It shook its arms though and cried a bit so Antony gave it a drink from the bottle to shut it up.

Garfield quite wanted to feed it too but he felt being happy on the swing had become his job for the moment so he kept swinging.

Morwenna didn’t join him, although normally she liked going down slides if the steps up weren’t too high and there weren’t bigger children hurrying her from behind or kicking her on the bottom. She seemed transfixed by Hedley and was throwing him looks that mixed curiosity with black resentment. As Garfield swung on she climbed on to Rachel’s lap, although Rachel was paying hardly any attention to the baby. She wriggled and fidgeted until Rachel held her as firmly as Antony was holding Hedley, then she lay back in a kind of triumph, though still throwing penetrating glances at her little brother.

Looking at the four of them it struck Garfield that he somehow existed apart from them. They were a family, a tidy family – woman, girl, man and baby boy – and he was something else, something outside their tidy unit. By pushing himself into their notice, by running ahead to show off on the swing, he had accidentally excluded himself. Where he ought to be was on the bench, snugly in the midst of them, too old as oldest son to need a lap but still belonging at the centre as of right. He tried not to think about it in case he cried. He tried looking around the garden instead as he swung.

There were other people out here. He spotted the people from the waiting room, the man with the books, the woman with the grapes, the haunted couple who had looked so ashamed and unhappy. They each had someone with them now. The woman with the grapes had a man even older than she was. He was eating the grapes off the plate while she pushed him very slowly in a wheelchair. The man with the books had left the books inside and was sitting on a bench with another man who was in stripy pyjamas and a tweed jacket. They were smoking and the book man was laughing as he told a story. The miserable couple had a boy with them; a big boy, a teenager, but still a boy. He had jeans and a T-shirt on and you wouldn’t have guessed he was ill in his head at all. But then he looked straight over at Garfield on the swing, or seemed to, and his eyes looked totally blank, like two little chips of coal, and somehow you knew that if you could hear his thoughts they’d just be a sound like the washing machine made on a spin cycle and Garfield knew he mustn’t meet his eye or he’d become the same.

To escape the boy’s eyes and prove he didn’t belong here, he showed off his new trick which was swinging standing up. It was quite scary but he knew he could do it. The trick was to keep a really firm grasp of the chains. That way you wouldn’t fall even if your feet lost their grip on the seat. Rachel saw what he was doing but it was Antony who said, ‘Garfield,’ in a weary tone. He ignored them both by just smiling like a man on a circus trapeze. His sandals skidded on the plastic a little and the swing faltered slightly but then he was up, gloriously up, standing and swinging and proud. And because he was standing not sitting, it suddenly felt as though the swing was moving much faster and higher. He remembered what the older boys in the playground had taught him, that you had to bend your knees slightly then straighten them over and over to maintain momentum. And soon it felt as though he was almost reaching the horizontal, facing up into the tree one moment then facing down at the balding grass the next.

The sick took him by surprise. For a few minutes he was fine then suddenly he felt all hot behind the eyes and churny in his stomach and then he knew there was no time to slow down and get off. And then there was sick, arcing out and away from his mouth one moment, splashing all down his front the next.

Rachel actually cried out and Morwenna laughed. By the time he’d managed to stop the swing, he’d stopped being sick but he still felt as if he was going to be sick some more and it was all hot where it had spilled beyond his shorts and splashed down his leg. His head was filled with the sound of his own helpless gulping and his nose with the bitterness and stink of it.

Antony was there beside him helping him off the swing and leading him to the grass. ‘Poor chap,’ he said. ‘Poor old soldier. Come on. Sit down. That’s it. You need to keep very very still till it passes. That’s it. Head between your knees and just breathe. That’s it. In and out. Nice and slow. In and out. Look how still the ground is now. Poor chap. You overdid it a bit, didn’t you?’

He held a big hand across Garfield’s forehead, the way he always did if Garfield was sick on a car journey or in bed, and he wiped him clean with one of his big spotty handkerchiefs that smelled of peppermints and pockets and bunches of keys.

Gulping less often now, his insides settling, his nose full of the frank reek of himself, Garfield continued to sit with his head obediently resting on his knees, listening to the voices as Morwenna took her turn on the slide, repeatedly demanding first that Antony help her up the steps then that Rachel watch her as she slid down the slide. He made himself focus on the ants moving through the miniature landscape of grass and twigs beneath his legs.

If a blade of grass was a tree to an ant, what must a tree be or a whole lawn? Perhaps, he thought, they simply blanked out such vastnesses and, having no conception of their own insignificance, could thus cope with life and even be happy? Perhaps the trick was to aspire backwards, to the blessed narrowness of a baby’s pram-bound outlook and the more you saw, the less happy you could hope to be? Perhaps Rachel was an ant who saw trees, who couldn’t help knowing how high it was to the top or how far to the edge?

‘Look at me!’ Morwenna shouted again.

Garfield dared to raised his head and found the world new-made. The midsummer colours of grass and sky and rosebush and his mother’s spotty dress seemed brighter than before and the sounds, like the sights, seemed sharper. He had experienced something like it when he was feverish with first measles and then chickenpox, so hoped the being sick was just from dizziness and not a sign of something more sinister, like tuberculosis.

‘Look at me!’ Morwenna was perched yet again at the top of the slide, stout little legs stuck out ahead of her, preparing to push off but Rachel wasn’t looking at her. She was tucking Hedley back into his pram. Morwenna’s voice acquired the shrieky edge she still used occasionally to bring a shocked silence to shops or bank queues. ‘Look at me!’

Rachel stood abruptly, still not looking, and said, ‘Oh for fuck’s sake,’ and turned away towards the hospital. They all watched her go at first, startled as much by her departure as by her words.

Then Antony broke away after her, leaving Morwenna unadmired and still on the top of the slide. ‘Bring your sister, will you, Garfield?’ he said and headed after Rachel, pushing the pram, which looked a bit funny because he was a man and the pram went all bouncy because he was moving a bit too fast for it on the gravel.

Hedley began to cry, bounced awake after his feed. Morwenna started to cry too and slid slowly down the slide to where Garfield was waiting for her. Ahead of them Rachel broke into a run, as if to escape them all.

Garfield watched her go, watched her pass a white-uniformed nurse who had just come out, and he realized he hated her. It was his birthday, something she had not even noticed, and because of her they were spending it in the worst way imaginable. Even being stuck in school would have been better. At least then he’d have had his friends around him. He didn’t quite know how to describe it to himself but her illness and her running off like that seemed as blatant a bid for attention as the baby’s wailing or Morwenna’s shrill demands from the slide.

‘There’s no point,’ he told Morwenna. ‘They can’t hear you and I don’t care.’ But Morwenna only cried the harder, grinding her fists in her eyes so hard it made him feel sore just watching her. ‘Come on,’ he said and pulled her gently upright before steering her before him by the shoulder.

The nurse was exchanging words with Antony who then hurried into the building after Rachel, still pushing the pram. The nurse rang a handbell briefly. All over the garden visitors started across the lawn towards her. She didn’t bend down and say, ‘Ah, what’s the matter, then?’ or anything like that as they drew close. It was sad but when she cried, Morwenna had the opposite effect on people of the one she wanted. She cried too hard or something. It put people off, even hardened their faces against her. Old ladies, who were quick to admire her pretty hair or pinch her apple cheeks when she was happy, grew shifty and looked about them for assistance, as though Morwenna’s grief were a bad smell that somebody might think was theirs.

The nurse’s face grew stiff and wary and she avoided looking at Morwenna at all. ‘Your father said he won’t be long,’ she told Garfield. ‘You’re to wait in the car.’

‘But I want to see Rachel,’ Morwenna almost shouted because the crying was making her breath come in little rushes.

‘Visiting time just ended,’ the nurse said. ‘You can see Mummy another day.’

Morwenna stood and stared at the door, as though will power alone might sweep the horrid nurse aside and open it for her.

Garfield gave a little pull on one of the shoulder straps of her dress. ‘Come on, Wenn,’ he told her. ‘He’ll soon be out.’

The car was never locked. The locks hadn’t worked for ages and Antony probably didn’t think locked doors were Quakerly. Morwenna ran ahead and climbed in. She liked going in the car and he hoped the prospect of a ride would distract her but he had no sooner climbed on board in front of her than she kicked out at the back of the seat.

‘Want Mummy,’ she said, Mummy, not Rachel, and she started crying again only differently, quietly, just for him, so he would know it was real.

‘I know,’ he said, doing his best to feel grown up. ‘Me too. I miss her too, Wenn, but she has to be here for a bit as she’s not well. She’s not well in her head.’

‘She is well!’

‘No. She’s … She’s depressed and it’s not safe for her at home. Not for a bit.’

But at this she started to cry loudly again, her public cry as he thought of it.

‘Shut up,’ he tried saying because she was making him want to cry too. ‘Shut up! It’s all your fault she ran in like that.’

‘Nooo!’

‘Yes it is, stupid. If you hadn’t gone on and on about look at me she’d have stayed a bit longer. But you made her say fuck.’

‘I didn’t.’ There was another thump on his seat-back and then the crying grew almost painful in such a close confinement so, after a few ineffectual and rather angry pleases he got out again and shut the door behind him.

He leaned on the bonnet, enjoying the heat of it through his shorts but taking care not to scald his bare bits. With any luck the heat in the car would send Morwenna to sleep soon. He watched the other visitors leave.

The miserable couple drove off in a brown Austin Cambridge. They were arguing. He could hear, because their windows were open in the heat and they didn’t seem to care. The grape lady waited at a bus stop just outside the hospital gates. She had the empty grape plate in one hand at her side. The other man just walked away so perhaps he lived in Bodmin.

‘Sorry, Garfy.’ Antony came back to the car. ‘It got a bit much for her. Oh.’ He noticed Morwenna’s crying. ‘And not just her. She didn’t forget, you know. I think she wanted to have some birthday time with just you but then Hedley needed her and then Morwenna and then we ran out of time, didn’t we? But she did this for you.’

He handed something over then opened the back of the car and crouched down to reason quietly with Morwenna.

It was a sort of homemade envelope but she had made it from the thick paper she used for doing watercolours sometimes. She had written on the front in the beautiful calligraphy she did when she could be bothered, when she had to write notices or place-cards or cards for an exhibition. MASTER MIDDLETON. She had explained to him once that he would always be Master Middleton until he was grown up whereas any brother he had would have to be Master Hedley or whatever to show they weren’t the eldest.

He peered inside just enough to see a flash of brilliant colour then decided to save it. Antony disapproved of children getting lots of birthday presents when there were some in the world who got nothing at all, so Garfield knew his birthday tea would not bring the lavish array of parcels and envelopes, of toys and games, he had watched non-Quaker friends open on their birthdays. He knew in his heart this was right. He had seen, and been faintly disgusted by the greedy heedlessness that came over children with too many presents, the way they tore one after another free of its wrapping without paying it the attention it deserved. But knowing something was right did not make it easier and a small part of him, the bad part presumably, always wanted to ask if that was all. In their family there tended to be two presents only, even at Christmas, one of which was nice-but-useful, like a dictionary or a box of crayons. The useful present was usually officially from Morwenna. His bad part wondered if the arrival of Hedley would mean one more present but not just yet. He knew greed was bad but presents weren’t just about greed. They were about love too.

‘Aren’t you going to open it?’ Antony asked as they set off for Penzance again. ‘It looks pretty special.’

‘I think I’ll save it,’ Garfield said.

‘Ah,’ Antony said in a pleased way that made Garfield think this was the right answer. Good boys saved and Garfield was good at it. He was saving for a Meccano set and had put half of his pocket money into a piggy bank for so long the piggy bank was nearly full. He had noticed too late it was the kind you had to smash to open, which seemed a wicked waste so he was deferring the evil by lining up a second, openable, plastic piggy bank he had found at a jumble sale for tuppence. He saved strawberries until the end. He made an Easter egg last for a week. He had learned to save good news, and jokes. He had learned that if you saved your anger rather than speaking it, it had a way of evaporating like smoke, leaving just a faint smell where before there had been flames.

Antony made an effort, even though he was a man. They had a birthday tea, that was actually high tea, with all Garfield’s favourite food: sausage rolls and Welsh rarebit and the cake he and Rachel had invented last year which was shop-bought ginger cake with a bar of Bournville melted with some butter and spread over the top. He had seven candles and he made a wish before blowing them out: Bring Rachel and Hedley home soon, please. And he opened his cards first, then his presents.

He treated the thing from Rachel as a present and opened that last. The special present was a little model engine, a real Mamod one, where you used meths on cotton wool to boil water in a tank which drove a metal wheel or even sounded a whistle, if you wanted. Antony said they could use it to drive a Meccano windmill or roundabout once he’d saved up the money.

Garfield had slightly been hoping the special present would be Meccano anyway and felt a bit tight-throated in his effort not to let his disappointment show. The engine was very good – they would fire it up later once Morwenna had gone to bed – but it was just not what he had been hoping for so it would take a while for his hopes to rearrange themselves. The nice-but-useful present was a real leather satchel for school. This too was rather a disappointment. He had wanted one really badly a year ago, when several of his friends had them and all he had was a duffel bag which scrunched all his things in a heap inside. Now he would have preferred a briefcase like the ones the older boys carried.

Antony made him put the satchel on and walk up and down and look pleased with it once they’d adjusted the straps a little but even Morwenna stared at it with something like disdain. It was real leather – Antony encouraged him to smell it – and had his name and address on a little card like the ones on the hospital doors and a place for his pens and even a little compartment for house keys but its brown was too red and too childish and it was not a briefcase.

He washed his hands before opening Rachel’s homemade envelope because he had chocolate icing on them.

She had made him a card by making a picture with wax crayons on half the paper then folding the rest behind and writing in it. It was a bit like the pictures she did with paint – an abstract, he had to learn to call them – only, being concentrated on to such a small space made it more intense. It was a series of orange blocks floating on a greeny blue background but she had made the orange bits all slightly different shades, some brighter, some darker, some with deeper orange around their edges, some sort of wispy and less defined, as if there was a fog in front of them.

‘Let me see,’ Morwenna was whining. She didn’t like it when it wasn’t her birthday, which was only to be expected. He showed her, which silenced her more effectively than Antony’s shushing, but he wouldn’t let her touch.

He looked some more. Because they weren’t all quite the same shade, the orange bits seemed to move forwards and backwards out of the paper as you stared. The one you focused on would hold still but then immediately one of the brighter ones came forwards a bit and your eye felt it had to flick sideways.

‘You’re honoured,’ Antony said at last.

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well she’s never done a picture for me.’

‘She must have.’

‘No.’ He shook his head, mock-rueful, and smiled.

Garfield looked inside.

‘For my darling Garfield,’ she had written, ‘On his seventh birthday with love from Rachel. Sorry I can’t be with you. Blame young Hedley! This time next year the bearer of this card is to have me all to himself for a whole day to do whatever he likes … Don’t forget!’

She had drawn three Xs. Then, perhaps as an afterthought because he was only seven and the picture was a bit serious and not at all like the other cards he had from his godparents and school friends, with their cars and footballers, she had drawn a cartoon. The Xs were on a sort of sledge and she was pulling them up to a signpost which said Penzance 46 miles. She had drawn herself like a mad lady, with sticky-out hair and bare feet with big toes but you knew it was her because she was in her painting clothes and she had her nose. Beads of sweat were pinging off her in her effort to deliver the kisses and the reason the sledge was so hard to pull was that Baby Hedley and his pram were tied on to the back of it and the road was a bit uphill.

It felt odd getting something from her but not having her there to thank. Antony was looking at him as if he expected something more so Garfield put it back in its special envelope and said he would clear the table while Antony took Morwenna off for her bath. She had reached the point where she was so tired she would probably grizzle herself to sleep.

Soon there was the usual splashing and wailing from the bathroom – she hated having her hair washed, especially by Antony who tended to get soap in her eyes and didn’t understand that she meant it when she said her hair hurt. Garfield took the satchel and the picture to his room. He tried filling the satchel with books and pens and things, which made it look less new at least. He took the picture out and propped it up in the middle of his short mantelpiece where it glowed beautifully against the white paintwork. But it worried him. It was too vulnerable and too precious. He left it there to inspire him while he wrote her a thank-you letter telling her all the news he had been unable to tell her while he had been showing off on the swing and she had been preoccupied with Hedley and Morwenna and Antony.

As he wrote, he pictured her as a huge gingerbread woman and the rest of them as little dogs nibbling bits off her. No wonder she was ill. They must learn not to eat her all at once. They must learn to save her.

Making out a fair copy took a while because the letter was quite long in the end. He tucked the picture back in its envelope and hid it in his desk for safekeeping. When she came home again, when she was well, he would ask her if she could let him have a proper frame for it. He would pick his moment carefully.