Notes from an Exhibition Read Online Free

and said,
    ‘Bet you forgot to put the label back too.’
    By the time he had recovered from his embarrassment she had left the room.
    Several times in the days that followed he hung about the Ashmolean doors in the hope that she was an art student, scanning the clusters of young would-be artists as they came or left, and returned to the museum so often that one of the guards mortified him by winking at him over the postcard woman’s head. He arrived at Sunday’s Meeting like a drunk at opening time, thinking to lose the thought of her in prayerful silence, but the quiet of the Meeting House was no freer of her than the quiet of the various libraries where he tried to lose himself in study.
    At last, a week to the day, half an hour before the next lecture in the Vasari series, he found her sitting on the Ashmolean’s steps sketching something and heedless of the chill that was sending other walkers scurrying forshelter. Instead of the beret she had on a crimson head-scarf. It had the effect of making her huge old mac look glamorous instead of merely bohemian.
    She smiled myopically, as though not quite sure who he was, but he sat down beside her and admitted that he had been searching for her all week in the hope of seeing her again.
    ‘You’re a virgin, aren’t you?’ she said, closing her sketchbook and shivering now that she was returning to the world.
    ‘Yes,’ he admitted.
    She paused, floored by honesty where she had looked for indignation, then laughed, her rough voice startling some pigeons into flight.
    ‘You’re not meant to admit that.’
    ‘Sorry. I can’t lie. Never could.’
    He offered her an arm but she rose unassisted.
    ‘Are you going to the lecture?’ he asked.
    ‘Yeah,’ she said, though she pronounced it somewhere between yur and yah.
    ‘Me too.’
    ‘Really?’
    ‘Yes,’ he said.
    ‘For it’s own sake or for me?’
    ‘For the lecture. It was interesting last week.’
    ‘Hmm.’
    They climbed the steps together as he gathered his courage to blurt, ‘But perhaps you’d let me buy you a drink afterwards or … or go to a film?’
    She stopped just short of the doors and stood aside to let other people pass. ‘Oh you’re sweet,’ she said. ‘But I can’t. I’m … spoken for.’
    ‘Oh.’ The last week seemed to stretch like so much elastic then smack him on the back of the head. ‘Of course you are. I’m so sorry.’
    ‘Don’t. It’s kind of you. I don’t know your name.’
    ‘Tony.’
    ‘I can’t call you that.’
    He laughed. ‘But it’s my name.’
    ‘Not with me. It’s how my mother used to describe places that were high-class or fancy. Tone-y . Makes me think of red plush and cheap candelabra. I’ll call you Antony,’ she smiled. ‘Give you some dignity to makeup for being a virgin still.’
    ‘OK. And what’s your name?’
    She hesitated. ‘Rachel,’ she said. ‘It’s Rachel Kelly.’
    ‘What’s your real name?’ he asked.
    ‘I just told you.’ She flushed, he noticed.
    ‘You hesitated as if you were making it up.’
    ‘Don’t be stupid,’ she said. ‘Why should I do that? Come on. We’ll lose the good seats.’
    Once again she pushed her way into a seat in the front row but there wasn’t room for him too so he slipped in where he could which, because he kept letting others go first, was some six rows behind her.
    That week’s lecture was on Donatello and, because his view of her was blocked and because the lecturer was the kind who seized attention through fear, catching one student’s eye after another’s and holding it, he thought he would listen and make an effort to learn so that they’d have something to talk about afterwards. He listened to a discussion of the relative values of bronze and marble in Florence of the 1530s and retained the outlines of thelecturer’s points about Renaissance attitudes to sculpture from antiquity but then the lights went out so they could look at slide projections and all he could think about