Notes from an Exhibition Read Online Free PDF Page A

audience for Dante’s mix of harsh religious mythology and humane storytelling.
    He arrived a whole hour before the lecture was due to start, in case her quip about watching him drink tea had been in earnest, and chilled himself waiting for her on the steps until the now half-familiar faces of the other art students began to shuffle in past him. He waited on in the lobby until Professor Shepherd appeared, with a squeak of shoe leather, then slipped in and sat in the rear row of seats, holding a place for her by the aisle in case she arrived late.
    It had been raining intermittently all day and the fug of wet overcoats and Harris tweed was stifling but he found himself drawn in by Professor Shepherd. He had thought a good deal during the week about what she had told him and had decided it was a fantasy. She had met the professor on the liner, as she had said, but they were probably both with their respective families and nothing significant was said. It was a crush. One of those inexplicable crushes to which even clever girls were prone. She needed a father-figure. Perhaps her own father was weak or foolish and an eminent lecturer in her own field was safely symbolic. When he had rebuffed her so publicly, she reversed the situation in her mind to save her fragileself-esteem. After Tony’s foolishly admitting his virginity she delighted in seizing the opportunity to deceive and shock him. But at bottom she had done so because he interested her and she had given him reason to hope.
    Faced afresh with Professor Shepherd he was not so sure. He was younger than he had thought at first – in his late thirties, perhaps – but with the manner and dress of his elders. And even in the things that aged him there were touches of the dandy: the black shoes were polished to a mirror shine, the three-piece suit was sharply cut, the white shirt that matched the silvered gloss of his hair, brilliantly clean and creaseless, and his tie was iridescent petrol-blue. His voice, too, was at once commanding and silky. Even as it pronounced on Piero’s mastery of space and precocious suggestion of frozen time, Antony could imagine it saying, ‘Take off your dress and stand where I can see you.’ This was not the voice of a man who loved in helplessness but that of a predator who captivated by withholding affection. So why was his latest slave not here?
    Anxiety began to take hold of him until he could sit there no longer. Under cover of darkness, while Professor Shepherd was having difficulty with his slide projector, he slipped out, unlocked his bicycle and rode to Jericho through a fresh downpour that blinded him. Her little house was lit up, looking cosier than it had the week before, but when he knocked at the door an old woman answered, in a housecoat and clutching a bath sponge gritty with Ajax.
    ‘So it’s you,’ she said, not letting him in, when he asked for Rachel.
    ‘I’m sorry. We haven’t met.’
    ‘No, but it’s obvious who you are. You’re too late. Ambulance took her to the Radcliffe an hour ago. The state of our bathroom! You’ve a nerve showing up here now.’
    Her husband shuffled into view in the narrow corridor behind her asking, ‘Is that him?’ but Tony was already back on his bike and riding up the street towards the back entrance of the hospital.
    There was an oddly similar scene on the ward where he finally tracked her down. He had bought flowers from the hospital stall on his way up, which was perhaps a mistake on top of the Dante. The nurse he approached took them as all the explanation she needed and was cold towards him.
    ‘You’re lucky,’ she said. ‘Not sure I can say the same for her. She’s in the last bed on the left. You can have five minutes then she’ll need rest.’
    There was little more colour in Rachel’s face than in her pillow. She was all sore-looking angles beneath her borrowed nightdress. Without beret or scarf her hair hung, lank and greasy, behind ears which he now saw were