Free Notes from an Exhibition by Patrick Gale

silent. He knew that ministry was good, that it was good that anyone could feel moved by the spirit to share a revealed truth with the group but he still preferred the silence and regarded a Meeting where hardly anyone spoke as superior to those where no silence lasted more than five minutes. He knew he wasn’t alone in this. Some of the older members, who never spoke, had let slip mutinous mutterings over coffee about earlier, less assertive times. They tended to blame Oprah.
    He had sat in many different Meetings too so knew that some were far quieter than others. Talk encouraged talk. If no braver soul stood up initially, the timid ones were less likely to follow suit. The urge to minister went in cycles. Talky people would move away and, for a fewblessed months, a Meeting would pull comforting silence back around itself.
    Once he heard Rachel tell Petroc, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll never speak in Meeting. I’m always afraid that if I stood and started speaking I’d never stop.’ Which of course then made him even more afraid that one day she would break the silence and talk on and on about all the wildly disjointed thoughts that were occurring to her, on and on, for minute after excruciating minute, until people started openly to exchange unquakerly looks or even to stare or to nudge him in the ribs and whisper,
    ‘Can’t you do something?’
    By a small miracle nobody spoke until nearly forty minutes of her funeral had passed. He had worried there would be simple-minded praise or pointless reminiscence or even, more disturbing, ministry that had nothing to do with the dead woman in their midst but that made some point by actively ignoring her. His mind was free to circle away from his grief into memories and fears and back to the grief again like a bird asserting its independence of a pool where its flock was drifting and feeding.
    Just as he was starting to focus on the coffin again and the room and the people in the room and to think that perhaps it was sad that no one was speaking because it meant no one had loved or even liked her much, a woman he had never seen before stood up. He knew at once she was not a Quaker. She was not used to any of this but she had decided to speak because she had judged that it was important even though she had been steeling herself to it for forty minutes.
    She was about his father’s age, or maybe younger; latesixties? Her coat and clothes did not fit her or go together. They looked secondhand. Her straight, grey hair was so badly cut he imagined her trimming it herself with random, spasmodic snips of a pair of kitchen scissors. She glanced fitfully about her and Garfield read and recognized the signals and knew, before she spoke, where she and Rachel had met. This was a woman who talked back to empty rooms.
    Having stood and looked about her, she reached awkwardly down for a much-used plastic carrier bag.
    ‘I got to know Rachel a long time ago when we were both in hospital, in St Lawrence’s in fact. On the gridiron. Huh! And it seemed unlikely either of us would reach our forties, never mind our sixties. I think I was more ill than she was. I mean she left before I did. But before she left she gave me this picture and it helped me and it always has and I think it says more about her lovely spirit than I can as I’m not – Huh! A very good talker. So. Erm.’ She pulled off the plastic bag. ‘Perhaps we could pass it round?’
    She sat down abruptly, eyes bright now with mad daring and relief, and passed the small picture to the man on her left.
    Nobody ever passed things around. It broke the silence in the wrong way, creating little currents of sociability and expectation. But Quakers forgive everything and, besides, it was a funeral so the uninitiated were an expected seasoning to the occasion.
    Garfield too was expectant, concentration shot; a painting by his mother he had not seen before was a message from beyond the grave. He made rapid calculations as to the date it