Notes from an Exhibition (11 page)

She affected to read the Film Society brochure then asked him lightly, ‘So Troy Youngs, right?’

‘Yes?’

‘Is it true he’s AC/DC?’

‘It’s what they used to say,’ Hedley told her. ‘But it’s a pack of lies.’

‘Really?’ She perked up and unconsciously touched her hair. ‘You know that for a fact? Because a friend of mine’s quite interested in him.’

‘He’s gay,’ Hedley told her. ‘Now that is. Totally gay. Kirsty Spiers broke off with him because he wouldn’t, you know, satisfy her.’

‘Oh,’ she said, comically deflated.

‘Still,’ he breezed as the first group arrived for the teatime screening of
Pretty in Pink
, ‘one girl’s loss’ll be some boy’s happy day.’

They had exchanged letters. Garfield wrote to her father initially, attaching a photocopy of Rachel’s letter, explaining that Rachel had recently died and that he desired nothing but to meet.

‘I quite understand how awkward this will be for you,’ he wrote. ‘And that you may wish to have nothing to do with me. I feel sure you are as curious as I am, though. I know you probably have family and will perhaps prefer not to introduce me to them or in any way alert them to my existence.’ As an afterthought he enclosed a fairly recent photograph Lizzy had taken of him when they were out on a friend’s boat. It revealed little about him, of course, other than that he was in his forties, capable of smiling, possessed of good teeth and all his hair, but he hoped it might make the receipt of the letter less alarming, stop it, at least, from seeming the work of a crank.

A card came back almost at once. It was of some porcelain in the Ashmolean.

It seemed to be the only house in St John’s Street that had not been restored and cosseted in recent memory. Garfield had researched Simeon Shepherd on the Internet and found that he was an art historian who had published no articles for twenty years and no books for thirty. He had found a copy of his monograph relating Uccello to an Iranian artist of the same period and had tried to read it on the train but, with baffling assumption of knowledge, it had no illustrations and seemed to be more footnote
than text. What he had learnt led him to expect severity and elegance. This house must once have had both but now looked down-at-heel, even shifty. Its tarnished brass knocker was of an odd, possibly Masonic design, a kind of triangle suspended from an eye. The rust-coloured paint was flaking so badly from the door he could see patches of bare, blackened wood. He knocked too vigorously and a large paint flake fluttered to the ground.

A sharp-nosed, middle-aged woman opened the door, took one look at him and exclaimed, ‘Christ! Sorry. That was a shock even after the photograph. You’d better come in.’

‘Thanks.’ He stepped into the gloomy hall. It smelled of gas and damp and he noticed the woman was wearing two cardigans.

She gave a quick smile that revealed nothing. ‘I’m Niobe Shepherd,’ she said. ‘My father’s upstairs.’

His half-sister. And she said
my father
not
our
or
your
. Garfield’s mind was working so hard at missing nothing he found it hard to speak.

‘I’d keep your coat on,’ she said. ‘The boiler’s packed up again and he’s got the only fire. I’ve just made tea. Do you want a cup?’

‘Yes, please.’

He followed her into the kitchen. It was like an advertisement from 1952 and did not appear to have been redecorated since then. There was a sour, lemon colour on the walls. The torn curtains were decorated with a frenzied ‘kitchen’ pattern of spice jars and bay trees. There was the kind of gas cooker that lit with a wand on a greasy hose and, beside it, slope-fronted cupboards with
striped glass doors that slid in unclearable crumb-clogged grooves. A saucer on the floor held a half-eaten sardine, another, some yellowing milk. An enormous, off-white cat glared from discomitingly yellow eyes on a blanket-covered chair in the corner.

The table was barely visible beneath a thick typescript and an array of open shoeboxes filled with little cards. He picked a stray one off his chair in order to sit down. In a tiny version of her handwriting it read,
Slater
,
Montagu
and gave a list of page numbers.

She took it from him with a muted, ‘I knew I hadn’t lost that,’ and tucked it into one of the boxes then poured him a mug of tea. ‘Is it very tarry?’ she asked.

It was tepid. ‘It’s fine,’ he assured her. ‘It’ll wake me up.’

She sat across from him and ferreted out a packet of gingernuts from under the pages of typescript she had already turned. ‘Indexing,’ she explained. ‘It means I can work from home and save paying someone else to be here.’

‘Oh. I see. Interesting.’

‘Not very. Dull books are easier on the whole. If they send one that threatens to be interesting I have to read it backwards to avoid getting too drawn in to do the job properly.’ She stared at him again and laughed shortly. ‘You do look amazingly like him.’

‘Really? Don’t you?’

‘Not at all. I take after my mother.’

‘Is she …?’

She shook her head and dunked a biscuit. ‘She died years ago. You’re, what, forty?’

‘Forty-one,’ he said.

‘So she died when you were a baby.’

‘When you were a child?’

‘I’m quite a bit older than you.’ She coughed nervously. ‘He was always very independent, luckily. Until fairly recently.’

‘Ah.’

They both drank their nasty tea.

‘You probably want to see him now,’ she said abruptly just as he burst out with, ‘My letter must have been a shock.’

They each apologized and made
no, after you
gestures then she said, ‘Not greatly. You’re not the first.’

‘Really?’

‘He seems to have been both extraordinarily fertile,’ she said, ‘and careless.’

Was this his voice in her? This cool, drily amused superiority?

‘We have three half-brothers,’ she added. ‘That I know about, that is. The other two are both younger than you. Both American. He did several lecture series there after my mother died. I was boarding and it paid handsomely compared to what he made here. They don’t look like him like you do. But there’s an interesting pattern emerging. Your mothers all kept a secret until they died and you’ve all said you don’t want anything. Which is lucky, given that there’s so little to be had. This is rented.’ Her economical gesture took in the house about them. ‘In case you were wondering.’

‘I wasn’t.’

‘We have it on a long and intractable lease. His atten
dance allowance and disability benefit help and the council and university do their bits.’

‘What’s wrong with him?’

She sighed, stacking index cards into neat piles and as she bent her head forward, he noticed a bald patch on her scalp, perhaps four inches across. She had attempted to disguise it by growing the rest of her hair long and pinning it across in an artful disarray but as she fretted and rubbed at it, the habitual gesture she made now, the artifice was steadily pulled aside.

‘He had a stroke,’ she said. ‘At first that was all and he lost most of his speech. Then he had another one and lost the use of his right leg. Now I think it’s just advanced crumble and multi-infarct thingy. I used to be able to understand what he was saying but most of the time now it doesn’t make sense. And he’s stopped reading or writing, which is a bad sign.’

‘Did he meet the others?’

‘Oh yes. He had quite long talks with both of them and was signally unimpressed. You’ll have a much easier time of it. Shall we go up?’

Was there some mischievous pleasure for her in all this? Some grim amusement to be had at this futile hunger in her male half-relatives for a meaningful connection to an absent and faithless father? The cat jumped off its chair with a malevolent growl and led the way upstairs. As they climbed past dim etchings Garfield could barely decipher in the half-light, the sounds of a television drew closer.

Simeon Shepherd’s room was stifling after the tomb-like chill downstairs. An oscillating fan heater was
competing with a Western. The old man in the wheelchair was asleep, his head to one side. He had thick, white hair and sharper versions of Garfield’s features. Now it was Garfield’s turn to swear under his breath.

Niobe looked from one to the other. ‘Sinister, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Like the last scene of that stupid Kubrick film. He’ll turn into an embryo next. Pa? Pa!’ She gave her father a vigorous shake. ‘Bit deaf too,’ she explained to Garfield. ‘Sit. Please.’ She muted the volume on the television.

Her father, their father, was looking around him and blinking as deliberately as an owl.

‘This is Garfield Middleton, Pa. His late mother was another of your girlfriends.’

Simeon Shepherd seemed to focus on Garfield a moment or two then murmured something indistinct.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘I’ve forgotten your mother’s name.’

‘Rachel Kelly,’ Garfield said.

‘The painter?’

‘Yes. I thought I’d told you.’

‘Good lord. He should have married her and made some money that way. Silly fool. Rachel Kelly, Pa! The abstract painter! You know? Cornwall! Patrick Heron!’

He made another gargling sound and looked quite definitely at Garfield now.

‘Ah,’ she said.
‘That
got through. He hates abstract art with a passion. I’ll leave you two to get acquainted.’

‘Oh, but …’ Garfield thought to ask her to stay and interpret but she was too brisk. ‘You can’t stay long,’ she said. ‘He has the concentra
tion span of a gnat and he’ll probably fall asleep again in a bit. I’ll be back in the kitchen.’

She left them alone with the cat, which leapt on to the old man’s lap where it seemed to double in size as it reached almost to his chin. Garfield had been wondering how such a thin, bookish-looking woman found the strength to haul her father in and out of bed and bath but he saw now the man was even slighter than she was, a human husk. There was a kind of winch contraption over the bed and, presumably, similar machinery in the bathroom.

The old man was still staring at him, stroking the cat as a reflex.

‘Hello,’ Garfield said. ‘My mother died a couple of months ago. She’d written me a letter that explained you were my father, otherwise I’d never have known …’ He heard this explanation tail off foolishly. Abashed, he looked about the room.

The paintwork and carpet were as threadbare as elsewhere but there were things of beauty in here; a small Flemish painting of a young woman hung over the fireplace and there was a gilt-framed landscape behind the sofa of an avenue of poplars that looked French. They went badly together but perhaps represented the only things of worth father and daughter had not yet been obliged to sell. He hoped at least one of them would survive for Niobe. In their brief, strange interview he had begun to feel affection for her. He glanced at the television.

‘
The Searchers
, isn’t it?’ he asked. ‘I like Westerns too. Ford’s almost like a painter, isn’t he, the way he gets his
cameraman to draw the beauty out of those landscapes? He composes them and makes you look.’

Still the stare.

‘I wonder if you ever saw any of my mother’s paintings? Rachel Kelly? Was she painting yet when you … knew her? They were amazing. She lost her way a bit after my … The earlier ones, the ones from the Seventies, I think they’ll stand up for themselves for a while yet. I live in Falmouth,’ he added. ‘With my wife Elizabeth. Lizzy. She’s a violin teacher and I mend violins. Well any stringed instrument. I had to rebuild a double bass last year after someone put a foot through one. That was a challenge! I didn’t always do this. I was working as a solicitor. In London. But so many of the clients were crooks and … My wife … It wasn’t right somehow and then I helped out in her father’s violin workshop and he taught me before he died and it sort of happened. I read your last book. Well, I did my best. Not really my field.’

He stopped talking. This was pointless. Simeon Shepherd’s expression had altered so little Garfield wondered if he were actually asleep again but with his eyes open. He thought of how Antony would behave in such circumstances and made an effort to sit in companionable silence instead. There was a waist-height, glass-fronted bookcase against one wall and on it, a cluster of silver-framed photographs. Even at this distance, by the indirect light from the standard lamp a few feet away, he could distinguish the stereotypical formats of a wedding photograph and a studio portrait of a mother and baby. There was also a portrait of a man in uniform.

‘Can I see?’ he said after a second’s hesitation and went
to pick it up. ‘Was this you?’ Of course it was. It might have been a younger version of himself in fancy dress with a particularly cheap and savage haircut. The young man was smiling. Was this, Garfield wondered, the smile that had seduced Rachel? Or had she seduced him?

It was impossible to imagine. She had always been so wild and exuberant and risky. And so mad. Yet everything in this house, in the book he had tried to read, in the bleakly dutiful daughter downstairs, spoke of sanity, reserve and withdrawal; the antitheses of a passionate life. The young man in the photograph was handsome enough but it was hard to see him as a serial seducer. Perhaps he had simply been the passive-manipulative sort, adept at projecting a veneer of helplessness so that women couldn’t help responding to him. He thought instinctively of Lizzy and her insistent baby hunger. Perhaps Rachel and the others had been decades ahead of their time in coolly appraising Simeon Shepherd as the ideal oblivious donor, his cheekbones almost as high as his IQ.