Notes from an Exhibition Read Online Free PDF Page B

supervisor and managed to break the news in a way that wasn’t a lie but sounded more of a moral imperative than it perhaps was. ‘Someone very close to me, a young woman, is extremely ill and needs me to look after her,’ he said. ‘As she has no one else. I know this means dropping out and I’ve thought very hard but I can’t see any other way.’
    His supervisor had evidently sensed his waning enthusiasm for Smollett and research and was immensely understanding.
    ‘If you can come back next term, let me know and we’ll see what we can do but …’
    ‘I think I’m probably going to have to get a job,’ Antony said, which was only just dawning on him. Half the reason he had opted for research when his first degree came through was because the only other future he could imagine with an English degree was as a teacher.
    ‘I suppose you could always teach,’ his supervisor said, echoing what everyone at home had said when it was announced he was to study English rather than something useful, like law or engineering. And he offered to write Tony a reference should a suitable opening suggest itself.
    He had a car, a Ford Popular badly rusted from living so near the sea at home. He could barely afford to keep it on the road, still less run it, and used his bicycle whenever he could, but it represented adult possibilities, however laughable, to set against the suspicion that his staying on to pursue an MPhil was somehow immature.
    He settled his buttery bill and packed his suitcase and few possessions into the boot and lashed his bicycle to the roof. There was no one he felt he must see before he left. He hadn’t acquired the knack of making friends. At home and at Oxford the Quakers were so sustaining they left him as lazy socially as any man dependent on a wife. Growing up with only a deaf old relative for company had left him shy of novelty and the challenges of his peers. His grandfather was so deaf now that even if he was close enough to hear the phone ring and answer it he could hardly hear what one was saying so that making phone calls to him about delicate matters was unbearable. So, rather than risk yelling at him from a kiosk an arrangement he could hardly explain to himself, he had settled for a calming, matter-of-fact letter presenting the two salient points as independent bits of news rather than a cause and effect.

    Dear Grandpa, my research hasn’t worked out so I’ve decided to cut my losses, come home and see if I can find a job, probably as a teacher.
    I’ll be bringing Rachel with me, a painter friend who has been ill and needs a change of scene.
    She was sitting at the end of her bed, dressed and ready, suitcase standing by her feet. She had on a navy-blue duffel coat he had not seen before so that he supposed some friend of hers had called by her lodgings to bring her things she needed. The coat was fastened up to the familiar red scarf at the neck, as though she were waiting at a bus stop in the icy cold, not in a well-heated ward. She looked bloodless, blank and exhausted but she mustered a weak smile when she saw him and stood, wordlessly, bag in hand, eager to be off. The doctor intercepted them on their way out to press a jar of pills on him.
    ‘See that she has two three times a day,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid it’s not safe to trust her with the whole bottle. Not just yet. Good luck. Your local GP can fix her up with another prescription.’
    Once they were down in the car park, Rachel became quite animated. She admired the colour of the Ford. ‘I thought we’d be getting in a taxi,’ she said. ‘I never pictured you with a car.’
    As he opened her door for her, he noticed there were brown bloodstains at the cuffs of her coat and realized her landlady must have bundled her into the ambulance with the first clothes that came to hand. Now that she was sitting, he saw they were a wild mismatch, even by bohemian standards.
    ‘I’ll need to pick up my other things,’ she said.