Notes from an Exhibition (9 page)

‘Show me.’

He gravely brought several pebbles to her side then
crouched to demonstrate. ‘That’s you,’ he said, ‘and that’s Antony. And then Garfy, Hed and Wenn.’

‘Why’s she bigger than the boys?’

‘Her head’s so full.’

Hedley’s stone was almost white, very smooth and neat and pleasing. Set upright and mounted in a block of polished wood, it could have passed for sculpture. Garfield’s was black and thin, more like a length of pipe or a weapon. Antony’s stone was bronze-coloured and broad.

‘So we can all ride on him,’ Petroc said.

Her own, she saw, was smaller than any of the others. It was black, like Garfield’s, but shot through with other colours, dashes of white and pink and a kind of rust.

‘It looks better when it’s wet,’ he said but she found herself returning, shocked, to the fact that he represented her with a stone so small and vulnerable beside those of her children.

‘Look,’ he said, slightly mischievously. ‘I can put you in my pocket.’

‘But where are you?’

‘I can’t decide.’

So she tucked the drawings safely in the bag where she found them the Kit Kats she had brought them, then they hunted for the stone that best caught the essence of Petroc.

It was one of the wonders of the beach, which nobody she knew had sufficient grounding in geology to explain for her, that the boulders and pebbles that lay beneath the sand and emerged, today, at the beach’s highest point, all appeared to come from entirely different sources. Some intense heat, was it, or violent tumult within the earth
there had brought forth stone of every shade? Garfield had once tried to catalogue them. Like some lost soul in the Greek underworld, he felt compelled to sort them into black, white, pink, white and black, grey and pink, grey with white streaks and bronzy yellow. The variety had defeated him as much as the lack of time between tides. He had been furious too, she remembered, that the pocket geology guide she had bought him seemed to offer no definite examples among its illustrations of any stone there.

The tide was mounting. All but one of the caves was below water. She found a stone that perfectly matched his hair but he dismissed that, perhaps as too literal. She found a lovely piece of deep blue sea glass, the colour of a Milk of Magnesia bottle, but he said it had to be stone or it wouldn’t work.

‘I hate to break up the party,’ she said, ‘but I need to get dressed again before the sea takes our things and you need to get home to birthday cake and sausages, which Antony will have had ready for an hour at least.’

He didn’t protest or complain but merely kept looking and comparing and sorting as she slipped back into the cave and took a quick pee in the sand. She exchanged her robe and costume for sandy underwear, her poppy-print sun dress and smelly espadrilles.

‘Found it!’ he shouted.

‘Well that’s a relief. Let’s see.’

It was the most ordinary stone imaginable, a sort of brown, earth shade with no shine and no variation in colour.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Why’s this you?’

‘Feel,’ he said and handed it to her.

It was far heavier than expected, like lead, and it fitted so exactly beneath one’s clasped fingers it might have been moulded from wet clay. As the local men said when something fitted a purpose exactly,
Could’ve been made
. She smiled.

‘See?’ he asked.

‘Of course.’

She had thought he would simply want to arrange the stones in the cave mouth or high on a boulder in the stream. Taught by the tedium of having to carry things home on walks, both she and Antony had long stressed the importance of leaving natural things where the children had found them
for others to enjoy
.

Petroc was insistent about bringing all six stones home however.

‘They’re too heavy,’ she said, when the nature argument failed. ‘That’s a very long cliff we’ve got to climb and then there are all those fields to cross at the top. Why don’t we put them here like this? We can build a lovely circle with them. Or … Or make a cairn, so people know to leave them alone for when you come back.’

But he was adamant. In fact he started to cry, which was alarming because he cried so rarely and had never been the tantrum-throwing sort, unlike Morwenna and Hedley, who were given to self-dramatization. ‘You don’t understand!’ he shouted. ‘We can’t leave them because it’s us!’

‘Well put the smaller ones in my bag. But we can’t take those big ones.’

‘But they’re Wenn and Antony!’

‘They’re just stones, Petroc. And I’m tired of this.’

With a look of thunder that would not have disgraced Garfield on a bad day, he took the two largest of the tribe, one under each skinny arm, and clambered over the boulders to the path. He couldn’t always climb and hold them at the same time but had to lift them up ahead of him, climb a level to join them, then lift them up again.

Half-amused, half-curious, Rachel followed with the picnic bag over one shoulder and her feet smarting where the espadrilles, which were slightly tight anyway, were grinding sand into the sunburnt tops of her feet. The climb back up to the fields was far less dizzy-making or perilous than the scramble down but it was still slippery and arduous and her amusement turned to guilt as she watched him labouring up ahead of her with a stone under either arm. There was a big rock at the top of the climb where, by tradition, they tended to gather to catch their breath and admire the view. She took longer strides, so as to catch up with him and coax him into sitting with her. She insisted he surrender one of his stones so she could take it in her bag.

‘Give me Antony,’ she said. ‘I’m married to him, after all.’

So all the stones came home with him.

She had thought he would introduce the rest of the family to them as he had her but he seemed oddly reticent when they reached the house, possibly because he felt he had made a childish fuss over something that didn’t matter.

The stones started out on the windowsill of the room he shared with Hedley. They then migrated mysteriously
to the bathroom, where one of them chipped the bath enamel. Finally they found their way, singly, up to the attic where she found a use for them as paperweights when she had the windows open. Except for Garfield, the one shaped like a pipe, which came in useful for squeezing the last dab of paint from a tube.

‘You won’t go wrecking the car, or anything?’ Rachel said.

‘It’s hardly likely,’ Hedley told her.

‘No,’ she said and he fancied she sounded disappointed. Antony finished stowing their suitcases and joined her at the open window. ‘Wenn’s got the gallery and apartment details,’ he said. ‘Just in case. Don’t let her work too hard. Make her go for a walk or something.’

‘I will.’

‘And try to get Pet to revise a bit. His French oral’s only weeks into term and his verbs are still feeble apparently.’ ‘Yes, sir.’

‘Sorry.’ Antony grinned. ‘I can’t believe we’re actually going away.’

‘Without us!’ Hedley reminded him.

Rachel glanced at her watch. ‘We’re late,’ she said.

Further down the platform the guard slammed a last stray door and jumped aboard as the stationmaster held up a flag and blew his whistle.

‘No, you’re not,’ Hedley told her. ‘Have a lovely time. Sell loads. When do you get there?’

‘You’ll have been sleeping for hours. I hope.’ Antony held up a hand in farewell. Rachel had already gone to her seat without a backward glance. She hated travel, hated trains, and hated flying still more. She would be in a state until they arrived and Antony would need more than his usual saintly patience about him. Hedley hoped he had double-checked her packing behind her back. The last time they had attempted a family holiday, renting a cottage on the Gower Peninsula, she had accidentally on purpose forgotten to pack her lithium and didn’t think to mention it until a week into their stay, by which time
she was all but airborne and the rest of them were close to helping her off a cliff. They had to drive her to a hospital in Swansea for an emergency prescription.

Hedley waved back, leaning on the empty luggage trolley, aware of a handsome man seeing off family. He was on heat. It was pathetic. He made himself turn his back on the man and walk back to the car. Being nineteen and a virgin was sad enough without making a tit of himself into the bargain.

His gap year had been an utter failure so far, largely because of his dishonesty. Having secretly read three gay novels now, as well as dreary
Maurice
, all of them American, where he dreamed of going was New York or San Francisco. But the association with his fantasies was so close that to admit this would have been tantamount to admitting he wanted to travel for sex not culture. So he had taken a horrible job spooning filling into pasties on a bakery production line in St Just and spent his earnings on a trip to Florence and Rome instead, in the name of preparing for art school.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Uh-huh.’

‘When are they back?’

‘Not until Tuesday.’

‘Fanfuckingtastic.’

‘We can party every night.’

‘Yeah. If you had any friends.’

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

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

‘One-thirty till nine,’ he told her.

‘Cool. We can do lunch.’

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

‘Here,’ he said. ‘Coffee. Absorb.’

Another groan.

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

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

‘Two.’

‘You stir them?’

‘Course.’

‘Better make it three tomorrow, then.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘But they’re my lucky ones.’

‘Well, tough.’

‘Bugger.’

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