The Serpentine Cave

by Jill Paton Walsh

  The admiration while it lasted choked up her words, and further complicated her life with her mother. Had Stella noticed it? Marian doubted that she had.

  There was a day she remembered, a bright summer day of the glassy light in which Brighton specialized, when Stella had driven the car up Ditchling Beacon, with a picnic in a basket along with all her gear. Marian had brought a book. She had spread out the rug, and lain on her stomach, chin propped in hands, book open on the grass in front of her, looking out over the view. The South Downs had seemed like a solid sea, made of green swelling waves, advancing like a great tide and stopped by some sudden ancient enchantment. Stella called her, and she lumbered up from the rug. There Stella stood, with two easels set up, two plain sized boards propped ready. Stella was wearing a white floppy hat, and a pale brown overall over her red dress. She held out to her daughter a brush, and a pallet.

  ‘Wouldn’t you like, just once, to try?’ she had asked.

  Marian had looked at the huge prospect, the stilled movement of the crests and troughs of land, the heat haze just faintly now beginning to soften outlines, the light silken movement of wind running on the bowing grass under a sky like translucent bright shadows … She remembered the hours of labour, the misery, the striving, the painting over, the abandoned canvases, the subjects tackled again and again which characterized her mother’s life. She felt herself to be a tiny, incompetent pigmy, beside une femme peintre; and both of them cast away helplessly on the flood of the beauty of the world.

  ‘No, thanks, Mother,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry, I’ve brought a book.’

  It was later again that shame returned to her. She brought a boy home from college to stay a few days; he wanted to see Brighton. He seemed glamorous and sophisticated to Marian. He had played Hamlet in the college production, and affected an Olivier mode of dress – black polo-necks, and black jeans, and an expression of anguished abstraction. Entering the house, and having penetrated only the front room, he had said, ‘God, Marian, whatever are all these daubs? You don’t mean to say your mother paid good money for these?’

  Marian had not briefed him; had no right to expect him to bite his tongue. His unfeigned contempt opened to her the horrible possibility that in the eyes of the cognoscenti her mother was not good – was terrible, even. The young man, on getting further into the house, and perceiving the confusion, the plethora of paintings and the smell of turps, cottoned on, and said not another word about it. He fell over himself to be courteous to Stella, who barely noticed whether he was or not, being as usual deeply engrossed. But taking his leave, three days later, he said to Marian, ‘I had no idea. It must be very hard on you.’ From then on, of course, it was.

  For it is one thing to have been sacrificed in pursuit of the achievements of a genius; quite another to have been neglected and bundled around from place to place, to have had a fragmented education, and endlessly been put second to a duff artist. Marian could forgive her mother her childhood if her mother was brilliant; to have lived through all that for the sake of an obsessional hobby, for the sake of badly executed daubs, filled Marian with shame. And rage followed swiftly after.

  Rage fuelled escape. Marian went to college, and seldom came home. If this now seemed ungracious to her, sitting watching her mother helpless, and probably dying, she remembered in her own defence how little difference her presence or absence made to Stella. Stella went on working absolutely regardless of who might be in the house, or what they might need for comfort – food, towels, a word of welcome. Late at night she would talk, over a shared whisky, but only about her painting. About Marian’s studies she never asked, her palpable incomprehension of her daughter’s choice of subject left unspoken.

  But then, it occurred to Marian now, perhaps her mother had taken her studies as a silent reproach, as a move in the endless struggle between them. Marian studied pharmaceutical chemistry, a subject requiring neatness, orderly methodology, objectivity and calm. A subject she had thought of as indubitably useful – as far as could be from the hateful uncertainty of art, where a painting could seem valuable beyond all price to one person, and a worthless daub to another person. A drug had a proven and uncontroversial use. Its correct administration helped people. The possibility of iatrogenic illness had not then occurred to her. Only now, her mind drifting across occluded stretches of the past, now misty, now clear, did she remember seeing somewhere a lovely pharmacy window full of gorgeously swelling glass jars, containing a rainbow array of coloured liquids. Had she after all been following an inherited passion for colour and form?

  At first Marian and the children were only camped in Stella’s house. It was a graceless modern house, much extended, set back from the village green, crouched behind a thick screen of holly hedge, dwarfed by a huge willow tree that spring was turning the colour of tarnished brass. Later it would drift gossamer wispy seeds all over the place like a split eiderdown. Stella had bought the place because it had been built in front of an old barn, a black, clapboard structure which the previous owners had converted into a games room, weather-proofing and insulating the walls, replacing the huge wagon-doors in the sides with enormous windows, and extending the house to meet it, so that there was an indoor way through to it, down a few stairs to the barn level. Here Stella had worked. It was on the stairs into the barn that Marian had found her lying stricken when she came for the weekend.

  In the house Toby and Alice settled into the rooms they traditionally had on visits to Stella. Stella’s own room was left to Marian. For days they didn’t move anything. Apart from the clean kitchen, and the well-stocked fridge, everything was as found; they felt like guests, free to sit, but not to move the chairs. Toby and Alice in turn went down to London, and fetched their books and clothes. But it was a long way home for Marian; she went into Cambridge and bought herself two changes of ordinary clothes to make do. They began to take visiting Stella turn and turn about. And after a fortnight they did move chairs into the sitting room – they put an armchair to each side of the fire, and dragged the sofa across the room, so that they could all three sit comfortably.

  Comfortably up to a point, that is. Stella’s furniture had come from her parents’ house, and had been in its day solid and respectable. It had probably come from the best department store in the city in which Stella’s father had been a shipping agent, and her mother had become the first lady mayoress. It had seen better days. The sofa had long since collapsed, ruptured by escaping coil springs, and broken webbing, and was covered with piles of cushions to build up the sag. The room satisfied the minimum requirements – there was a fire, there was something to sit on, but everything in it had been used almost to destruction. Also it was spectacularly untidy. There was a bookcase, in which the books were mostly in sets; Victorian novels with the names of Stella’s parents on the flyleaves. There was a piano, left open, and with piles of newspapers and art magazines stacked on the dusty keys. An unpleasant smell proved to be a liquefying cauliflower in a plastic supermarket bag full of groceries, put down behind the door and forgotten. The only normal-looking object in the room was a photograph of Toby and Alice taken five years ago, standing on the mantelpiece in a heavily tarnished silver frame. A rather good antique mirror with iridescence creeping across the mercury behind the glass hung over the mantel. No pictures. Oddly, no pictures.

  The whole thing had that awful poignancy of a room not lived in. Apart from the cauliflower, which must have been fairly recent, it had been abandoned for years – it belonged to someone who had no time for sitting rooms. And yet they could not clear it up. Anyone can tidy anyone’s kitchen; but tidying all these scattered possessions without obvious rightful places was beyond them. And although it was Stella’s absence that the room spoke of; her total indifference to the things most people cared about, her life that went from bed to kitchen to studio, and never came in here; yet to tidy it would have been in some odd sense to obliterate her presence.

  Meanwhile, they had to have something to do. Toby re
nted a television set with a video player, and rented videos from the village shop. They found a local walk along the ridge of a modest rise in the land – the last wrinkle of the chalk crests descending from the uplands to the fen.

  ‘It’s a good enough place, I suppose,’ said Marian to the children, over supper one night. ‘But I can’t quite think why it should be here, particularly, that your grandmother settled after so much wandering.’

  ‘To be near someone?’ asked Toby.

  ‘Or something,’ suggested Alice. ‘There were some pictures in Cambridge she liked to look at now and then, I think.’

  ‘There are good pictures in the Fitzwilliam,’ offered Toby.

  ‘She had a lot of space here,’ said Alice. ‘More than she could have afforded in a town.’

  The hospital moved Stella into a side room, and then into another wing. She had fallen utterly silent – not a whisper, not a groan came from her sagging mouth. Toby thought he had set up a system. ‘She’s still there,’ he said. ‘If you ask her to squeeze your hand once for yes, and twice for no, she can answer questions.’ But either he was imagining things, or Stella didn’t want to answer Marian; and in any case neither Where were those beaches? nor Who was my father? could be answered yes or no.

  On one occasion Marian’s visit was interrupted by that of a consultant. He picked up and read the medical notes hanging from the foot of the bed, felt for a pulse, pulled down an eyelid, and said to Marian, ‘Do you see any change in her?’

  ‘Only that she is quieter. She seems to have stopped trying to talk.’

  ‘I think she is slipping away from us,’ the consultant said. ‘Hard to be sure.’

  ‘Is there any hope for her at all?’ Marian asked him. ‘Any chance at all that she could go home, take up some sort of life again?’

  ‘Realistically, I should say no, I’m afraid. The longer it goes without sign of recovery, the bleaker the prospect.’

  ‘Then how long can this go on?’ Marian asked.

  ‘How long can what go on?’

  ‘This terrible state, neither living nor dying.’

  ‘I would tell you if I knew,’ he said. ‘I suppose – she didn’t leave instructions, did she?’

  ‘What sort of instructions?’ asked Marian.

  ‘A living will. Her wishes in case just this situation should arise. Or perhaps you can tell us what she would have wanted?’

  ‘I didn’t know her well enough for that,’ said Marian bleakly.

  ‘People often tell us that,’ he said. She was suddenly aware of how gentle his tone was. He was being kind, standing in the corridor on his way to some other calamity, lingering, talking to her. ‘You might like to think about it. Talk to other relatives. Go through her papers.’

  Marian’s expression must have been eloquent.

  ‘It is quite certain she will never look at them again herself,’ he said. ‘Someone will have to sort things for her.’

  ‘I’ll ask the children,’ Marian said.

  They confabulated sitting round the kitchen table.

  ‘I don’t entirely grasp what they want,’ said Marian.

  ‘They want permission – written if possible – to stop treating her. Not to resuscitate her if she has a heart attack, not to treat her if she gets pneumonia,’ said Toby.

  ‘But surely, they wouldn’t … ?’ Alice said. ‘Would they bring her back for that?’

  ‘They’ll protect themselves. In case we sue for neglect,’ Toby said. ‘Believe me.’

  ‘You mean we might have to get her out of there, to let her die?’ said Alice, incredulous.

  ‘Did she ever express any opinion about this to either of you?’ asked Marian. ‘She never did to me.’

  Her children looked at her in silence. ‘Be merciful, Mum, and forge something,’ said Alice.

  ‘Well, let’s look first,’ said Toby. ‘It might be already there.’

  ‘I find,’ said Marian slowly, ‘it’s very difficult. It feels like an intolerable thing to do … spying … like reading someone’s diary by stealth. She would hate it so!’

  ‘You do her an injustice, Ma,’ said Toby. ‘She was – she is – quite a sensible person.’

  ‘Sensible?’ said Marian. ‘That’s the last word—’

  ‘She didn’t want the things most people want,’ he said. ‘But she was perfectly hard-headed at getting what she did want. I think.’

  ‘Mum, don’t worry, though,’ said Alice. ‘If you don’t fancy ransacking the inner sanctums, Toby and I will do it.’

  So Marian was sent out into the garden with a book, while her children began, in a sombre mood, to search the house, setting it into some kind of order as they went.

  It was that day of the year when suddenly there is a softness in the air, and one needs to be out of doors. Marian pulled a mildewed deck-chair out of the leaking summer-house, and set it up in deep grass under the apple tree, in the drift of falling petals. The creak of protest it emitted as she sat in it gave way to a deep silence defined by the audibility of bees in the flowering wilderness around her. A gawky overgrown cotoneaster with tiny tight pink blooms was loud with them, over by the sagging fence. A too bright, shifting dapple of leaves and light skittered over the page of her book and made her blink un-comprehendingly at the print. She never had been good at reading out of doors. Besides, she was weighed down with weariness. All the emotion, all the upheaval, the appalling sight of une femme peintre laid low like a fallen tree weighed her down, like that other silence at the bedside, defined by the bleeping monitor, or the discreet tap of flat-heeled shoes, approaching, retreating.

  And was it fair, to be out here, mooning about, leaving the real task to the children? Grown children, to be sure – but she was aware of needing them, leaning on them, as she could never remember her mother leaning on her. And what were they doing here? How was it they were free to come, and even odder, free to stay? If she did feel it was unfair, she did not feel it enough to get herself out of the deck-chair. She lay still, and closed her eyes. A bird alighting in the leafy mezzanine above her began to sing in melodic bursts of fluent meaningless beauty.

  And while reproaching herself for doing nothing, she found she had made decisions. No mother of mine, she had decided, will be shunted off into a nursing home. Of course, she may still be in charge of herself; we may find that living will. But if it is up to me, I shall bring her back here. I will make a bed in the barn, where she can have her working mess around her. I will see her through it – see her out. Whatever a perfect daughter would do, I will do it. She can call in her debts now, and I will make amends. Because of course it is only when I was callow and angry that I thought what lay between us was that she was a bad mother. To her I was a bad daughter. Whatever it was she lived by, I would not see it. What I chose instead she found worthless. It takes two people to make such a discord; if we couldn’t do anything else together, we will do her dying together.

  This felt more to her like something she had discovered to be true than like a decision in the usual sense, where one feels one might have decided otherwise. It was not negotiable now it was known. The bird above her head sang an elaborate obbligato into her thoughts. It occurred to her that if her husband had needed her, if he had not left her, if he were not far away, and otherwise occupied, she could not have reached so simple a conclusion. Or, perhaps, the conclusion once reached would have been less simple. But Donald lived his own life. As to her job in Hull, she would give notice. There was nothing unique about being a dispensing chemist, they could replace her. And there were dispensaries everywhere. She could find another job when she wanted to. She had wilfully decided long ago to be ordinary, and she had achieved it, with what advantages it had.

  Toby called her from the house. ‘We’ve made some tea, Mother. Will you come?’

  She felt their excitement as soon as she sat down with them. A just perceptible tension in the room. She knew them so well they would never, lifelong, be able to keep things from her – or
at least they would be able to keep from her the reasons for what they felt, but never the feelings.

  ‘You found something?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Alice. ‘Not what we were looking for. Toby found that.’ She grimaced as Toby flung open the lid of a tin trunk that he had placed on the kitchen table, the other end from the tea things where they sat. It was full of envelopes. He picked up a clutch of them, and held them out to her.

  ‘Just look at them, Ma,’ he said. ‘She hasn’t even opened them, and some of them are postmarked in the seventies!’

  Tax returns, tax demands, electoral roll forms, bank statements, buff-envelope letters of every kind – soon they had the table covered with unopened communications, many of them stamped with URGENT and other assorted dire warnings. They began to laugh, awestruck.

  ‘But look …’ Toby picked up a knife and slit open an envelope at random. It summoned Stella to an interview, which she was to attend without fail, with a local bank manager in Cambridge, on the sixth of September, 1978. He urgently needed to discuss her account with her.

  ‘It won’t be funny sorting it all out,’ he said. ‘What will you do?’

  ‘Most of it will have sorted itself out by now,’ said Marian. ‘I shan’t do anything until the time comes to hand it all over to the solicitors. Close the lid, son. Drink your tea.’

  Visiting Stella had become hard. Holding her unresponsive hand, talking into the silence, sounding foolish, knowing that given the possibility of answering such idle remarks Stella’s retort would have been crushing, they found now, all three of them found, that they were weighed down with guilt at having ransacked Stella’s house, felt as though they had been caught red-handed in some unpardonable act of busybodying. They had not found a living will. They had found other things.

  Toby had found that his grandmother was deeply in debt. He had not been able to resist opening, reading, sorting, the contents of the tin trunk. He had hauled it up to his room under the skylights, put up a card table beside the desk to make more sorting space, and worked doggedly through the bills and letters. Stella had spent money steadily, which apparently she did not have. She had multiple bank accounts, which had all slid into overdraft, and then been left dormant. When she earned any money, as far as he could tell, she simply paid it into a new account rather than clearing any of the debt on an old one. It would take him weeks to sort out. He opened incredibly frightening missives, threatening distraint upon goods, proceedings in court, bankruptcy suits, and was appalled at his grandmother’s sang-froid in ignoring them. ‘Gran, how could you?’ he asked the empty room, and then realized since she hadn’t opened anything, she hadn’t known about it. Had she frustrated them all simply by not reading their letters? Had they all just given up and gone away?