The Serpentine Cave

by Jill Paton Walsh

  He began a methodical tally, totting up the amounts owing on each account he discovered. He couldn’t imagine how she had got away with it. On the face of it she was mortgaged to the eyebrows, and that lamb chop should have been the last step into bankruptcy. Toby was appalled. Like many people who have always had enough money – the careful son of a prosperous and generous father – he was afraid of money, or rather of the lack of it. He understood gradations of wealth easily – could have measured the distance between himself and the senior partner in the stockbroking firm for which he worked in terms of exactly how much after-tax income, exactly how many promotions, it was composed of. Gradations of poverty were unfamiliar territory. He had no idea how little was enough; no idea what it cost to buy a loaf and a tin of beans. He had been doing well; by forty he would be provided for for life.

  Or would have been, rather. He had not told his mother or his sister why he could so easily take time out. That he was under a shadow. Someone had been naughty; there was a nasty suspicion of insider dealing, and several people, Toby among them, had been suspended on full pay while a discreet internal enquiry was conducted. Toby’s own involvement had been marginal. He had overheard something in the office, and enlisted his current girl-friend. She was no longer current, as a result. Toby had lent her enough to buy a few hundred shares, but she had told her father, who had staked enough to make a difference, to attract attention. None of this would matter had other people in his firm not done the same – other more senior people. Cumulatively they had made a big blip on the charts, and now there was a hue and cry going on. Toby’s footprints would be hard to trace. But being nearly sure they couldn’t pin anything on him was not the point. He had so blithely got into trouble – sailed over the line into dishonesty without a second’s thought. Now he was ashamed of himself. At least he would never do anything like that ever again! But he wasn’t in a good position to blow the whistle on others, others senior to himself. He thought he would wait and see what they found out. It was up to them to find out. And meanwhile he could follow the prices, read the Financial Times, take a little time to reflect. Be a help to his mother, and sort out the terrible trunk. Twenty minutes of it was enough to convince him his own financial wizardry must come packaged with his father’s genes, and have nothing to do with any matrilineal descent from Stella.

  While he worked methodically through the piles of paperwork, it occurred to him to wonder about that other line of descent. Stella must have had a little help producing his mother; had his grandfather perhaps been good at money, had a head for figures? He and Stella must have had remarkably little in common, if so. How could she have lived like that? Wasn’t she afraid of being found out? But it was he himself who was afraid of being found out.

  Alice came to call him for lunch. ‘How’s it going?’ she asked him.

  ‘It’s horrendous,’ he told her. ‘She simply didn’t pay her debts, as far as I can see.’

  ‘Unless she paid in cash,’ suggested Alice. ‘She often had stacks of cash stuffed away somewhere. I saw her pay a gas bill once, over the counter in the Gas Board showroom, in handfuls of crumpled notes.’

  ‘Humm,’ said Toby. ‘Well, that would explain why she is now laid out under a cover of respectability in the local hospital instead of in a debtor’s prison.’ He was baffled. The cash economy, beyond the realms of small change, lay outside his province.

  ‘She always might have sold a picture,’ suggested Alice, leaning back in a battered cane armchair, and stretching her legs. ‘I’m going back to London tonight, if you can spare me. Just till tomorrow. OK? I take it I can leave you parent-sitting for the moment – no duty calls you back to the job as yet?’

  ‘Not yet,’ he said. It would be much harder, he realized, to tell his sister what had been happening to him than to tell his mother. Alice was only too ready to think the worst of him.

  ‘Social life?’ he asked. He was afraid she would mention Max, that she would be going to see the famous Max. Max was the leader of the quartet Alice played in. He was much older than Alice. He was cold and sarcastic to non-musical people like Toby, who had only met him once and instantly hated him. Alice lived with Max, on and off. And she probably was going to see him, but what she said was, ‘This is all taking much longer than I thought it would. I need my viola.’

  ‘Right. We’ll cope no doubt. Go and get the thing, and then we’ll have to listen to it. And last time I stayed with you you did the same three notes all day. Oh, Lord!’

  ‘The barn,’ she said. ‘I shall serenade the paintings in the barn.’

  ‘Those paintings,’ he said, ‘will have to be …’

  ‘… sorted. Yes. If she dies.’

  ‘When. You mean when.’

  ‘Yes. Meanwhile I suppose we should look for the will thing in there too.’

  ‘See what Mum says.’ For they both knew that they were all postponing the barn. That going in there and rifling through things there was a major step, compared to which ransacking every other room in Stella’s house was a bagatelle. Stella didn’t live in any other room in her house in any way that mattered to her; the studio was the only door that had ever been closed against her grandchildren.

  ‘Toby?’ said Alice, standing in the bedroom door, poised to leave. ‘Nobody has come looking for you – nobody has rung.’

  ‘Who were you expecting?’ He spoke sharply.

  ‘A girlfriend? Someone from work?’

  ‘There’s no girlfriend at the moment. And I have some leave owing. I told you.’

  ‘So you did,’ she said, disappearing down the stairs.

  But it’s all very odd, he reflected. Like those fairy tales Mum used to read us when we were children. About getting stolen away. The tiny part of his life that consisted of being Stella’s grandson had suddenly ambushed him, and entrapped him. He was lost to his usual world, and could not tell when he would enter it again. And here he was floating, a non-participant – that’s why he had invented a role for himself, was busily sorting papers. The real job, as he saw it, was simply being on hand in case his mother needed him. Well, she visibly did need him, them both. But being needed in this passive sense reminded him dimly of playing cricket, of being a catcher in the outfield, waiting for a whizzing ball that never came.

  Why think of cricket after all these years? He realized that beyond the bedroom window, beyond the garden hedge, he had heard something without quite registering it. The clunk of ball on bat. Time had been passing. It was the first Saturday in May, after all. They were playing cricket on the village green.

  He tipped the lid of the trunk shut, and went out to watch the game.

  Marian was alone in the house, writing letters. She was arranging to leave her normal life in abeyance indefinitely. There wasn’t much to it, really – the assistant pharmacist could run the shop, would enjoy it, and appreciate the extra money. A neighbour would keep an eye on the house. Not even a cat to arrange for. She had meant it to be a rooted life, a steady and quiet one, but could it really be that floating free was as easy as this? She looked at her watch, and got up to put her coat on. She fished the car-keys out of the pocket, and went out to the front. A man was advancing down the drive.

  ‘Can I help you?’ she said, scanning him. Stocky, sixty-something, sharp gaze under bushy eyebrows, dirty hands with broken fingernails, shabby clothes, something heavy in every pocket.

  ‘Shouldn’t think so,’ he said, marching past her and making for the back door.

  ‘It’s locked,’ she said to his back. ‘Nobody’s there.’

  He stopped, and said without turning round, ‘She’s in the barn, then.’

  ‘No,’ said Marian, ‘in hospital.’

  ‘Shit!’ he said. ‘Now what?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m on my way to visit.’

  ‘Oh well, then,’ he said, turning to stare at her, ‘I’ll wait. You can ask her. Tell her that Leo came – that I need the money now.’

  ‘My mother owes you money?�
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  ‘Yes, she does,’ he said. ‘That is – she is paying for something in instalments. I’ve got to have the money, or else … Didn’t know she had family,’ he added. ‘Not much in evidence, usually, are you?’

  ‘What is it she is paying for?’ asked Marian, angered and cold.

  ‘Just ask her. She can tell you if she wants you to know.’

  ‘I can ask her, but she can’t tell me. She has had a stroke, and can’t speak.’

  ‘Oh, shit,’ he said again. ‘I’m sorry, I just assumed … I mean, last time it wasn’t serious—’

  ‘What wasn’t serious?’

  ‘Last time she was in hospital. They only kept her for a day. I wouldn’t have mentioned the money, only I thought … I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘Take yourself off,’ suggested Marian.

  He didn’t move. He looked at Marian strangely – his expression at once wooden-faced and desperate. ‘Will she be all right?’ he said. ‘How bad is it? She’ll kill me if I botch her job.’

  ‘She isn’t in any state to do that. She may never be again. You need have no fear for your own safety,’ said Marian, and saw him wince at that.

  He just stood there, in the middle of the drive, rigid. But he knew about some earlier hospitalization that she herself had not been told about. And she could not be sure her mother had not entered some agreement with a shady-looking stranger. She could not be sure of anything about Stella. But her own standards of conduct forbade leaving tradesmen in difficulties, forbade the postponement of debt.

  ‘A hire purchase agreement, you say? Do you have anything in writing?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s word of honour.’

  ‘I can advance fifty pounds,’ she said, sighing, ‘while we get my mother’s affairs sorted out. Against a written receipt.’ She opened her bag, tore a page from her notebook, and wrote ‘Received £50’ and watched him sign it.

  ‘Anally retentive old bag, aren’t you?’ he said, handing it over.

  She counted out fifty pounds, in ten pound notes, noting that it left her short and would impose a trip to the cash dispenser on her way home, and cursing herself for a fool and a coward.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, still looking at her strangely, thrusting the money into a back pocket. She watched him plod away down the drive. Then she got into her car and drove off towards Cambridge. In the hospital car-park she glanced at the receipt, thinking that she could tell Stella. It would make a thing to say into the oppressive silence. It was signed ‘Leo D. Vincey.’

  ‘Shit!’ said Marian in her turn, slamming the car door far too hard.

  ‘Mother, is Leonardo da Vinci a personal friend of yours?’ Marian asked the supine form under the sheet. ‘Is he a disreputable looking heavy in shabby clothes, not above demanding money with menaces, from whom you are buying an unspecified object on instalments?’ She got no audible answer, but an expression – a sort of jerk to the right side of Stella’s slack mouth occurred, which might have been a reaction to Marian’s message, and might have been coincidence.

  ‘I find it hard to tell, with you,’ Marian went on. ‘I wouldn’t have thought he could be anything but a sponger. He couldn’t be a blackmailer – what could he allege about you that you wouldn’t be indifferent to being known? And while we’re talking like this, Mother, I’d like to know something – anything – about my father. I’ve been wondering about him. We lost him in the war, you said – you didn’t say how. You didn’t give me his surname – I am an obvious bastard? I said once, perhaps I got my liking for tidiness, and ability at arithmetic from him, and you said no, he wasn’t an educated man, and he wasn’t tidy. Was he an artist? I asked you once, and you said no, he knew nothing about art at all, but he had a good eye. A good eye for tits and a bum, as well, come to that, you said. You said once we couldn’t go back somewhere, because of him – was it Concarneau? Was it Italy? Was it Spain? Was it where the beaches were, was it him who held me in his buttoned coat all night long while we waited for a tide to fall back? Where was that? That cave? You must realize that it isn’t much to know about a father. It isn’t enough, it leaves me not knowing enough. There he is, running in my bloodstream and in my children’s bloodstream, and we don’t know a thing. Those forms – you know those forms, Mother, that they make you fill out when you’re ill in some way, or on research projects – What did your parents die of? Has anyone in your family had cancer? We have to tick ‘unknown’ every time. Why didn’t you tell me, why didn’t I ask you before? I should have battered it out of you while you could still speak. And now what?’

  She shrugged helplessly, and reached out for her mother’s hand. And thought that her mother had squeezed hers, for she felt the unfurled fingers tighten in a passing spasm that might not have been an accident.

  ‘This is taking too long, Mother.’ She said it sorrowfully, and saw what she would have sworn was understanding and agreement pass across the less frozen side of her mother’s face. ‘We have to deal with things. I have to read your papers, pay your bills, try to get a deed of attorney. We might have to sell your house; I’ll try not to, but we might. We shall have to clear things out of it. Oh, Mother, it feels terrible – a terrible thing to do. You would so have hated it, wouldn’t you? I’m so at sea in your life, I’m going to make horrible mistakes. Give me permission – blink at me if I may do whatever I think needs doing – can you?’ Stella slowly closed her eyes, and slowly opened them.

  To the sister, who stopped her on the way out, and offered a cup of tea when she saw Marian’s face frozen with strain, Marian said, no, she hadn’t found a nursing home. ‘She can be in her own home. I shall look after her.’

  The sister ushered her into the ward office, and offered a chair. ‘Would your mother have wanted that, Mrs Easton? Only many of our patients are desperately anxious not to burden their families, not to disrupt younger lives. Perhaps for you to give up your home and move in and nurse her isn’t what she would want …’

  ‘It’s what I want,’ said Marian. ‘She can’t always have her own way.’

  A cup of red-brown tea in a thick white cup and saucer had appeared before her. She sipped it, unwillingly.

  ‘Is it money?’ the sister asked. Her tone was of gentle professional concern. In a minute she would offer an interview with a social worker, and a means test. ‘Is there a problem paying for residential care?’

  ‘No it’s not money!’ Marian snapped at her. ‘It’s love.’

  And the word once spoken, like a bird let out of a box, flew away abruptly leaving silence and stillness behind.

  ‘We’ll keep her a few days more, while you think about it,’ said the sister.

  There aren’t many hills in Cambridgeshire – none that would count as hillocks in Yorkshire. But one of the few gentle rises was on the road between the hospital and Stella’s house. Marian drove herself home and stopped the car on the crest. The towers of a cement works edged into view on the right of the road; on the left a stretch of England lay in sight, an unremarkable prospect, without any particular beauties – just gently undulant green fields, patched with scraps of woodland, and here and there a church tower. The season was poised now between spring and summer. A dusting of bright yellow lay across acres of rape, just now gone over, and nearer was a field of flax that looked like water under a grey sky, with the wind trailing swathes of green through it, rocking its fragile flowers. It isn’t that flat land is less beautiful, Marian thought, surprised, it’s just that it’s harder to get a view of it.

  It occurred to her as she started the car that there was some kind of parallel. These hard days were like the gentle upswing of the minimal hill she was on – giving a view, letting her see what her life and her mother’s life had been like, which while being lived went unconsidered.

  But it had been true, the word she never spoke to Stella. If she hadn’t loved her mother – if she had been able to manage the casual indifference, the dismissive mentions, the patronizing got-to-humour-the-
poor-old-boot attitudes of other people in adult life to their parents – she would have been free. She wouldn’t have needed to strive so bitterly to be different. To be the shadow to every light in her mother’s life, the light to every shadow. To be practical, to be tidy, to be dutiful, to be attentive and kind, to choose a place and live in it, to stay put lifelong, to have no interest in art, no opinions on anything intellectual – it was loving her mother that had laid these heavy shackles on her, as though she could by being at the opposite pole in some way pay her mother’s unpaid debts, make up her mother’s shortfall, pay her mother’s unpaid tribute to convention, to normal conduct, to uncontroversial judgement about how to live.

  This insight came to her with a guilty start, like a recollection of a duty neglected. Something she didn’t want to know, but ought already to have known – hadn’t Stella once told her that an unconsidered life was not worth living?

  What needed considering now, of course, was nursing Stella. A hospital bed would be needed; it was back-breaking work to turn, wash, feed a patient on a normal one.