The Serpentine Cave

by Jill Paton Walsh

  ‘How does it strike you, Toby?’ Marian asked him that evening. ‘St Ives, I mean. I can hardly tell. I can’t see it as if for the first time; it keeps doing vivid flashbacks at me.’

  ‘It’s lovely,’ he said. ‘A lovely empty shell. Well, not completely empty—’

  ‘Whatever do you mean?’

  ‘It was shaped for a way of life. For fishing, for people who lived cheek by jowl and worked together closely. Like a shell that’s shaped round a living creature, and left empty when it dies.’

  ‘And the tourists bustle round in it, like hermit crabs in a shell?’ she said, amused.

  ‘Yes. First artists, then tourists.’

  ‘I expect part of what one likes is the sense of that tight-knit life,’ Marian said. ‘The shape of it. People don’t live like that any more, knowing all the neighbours. We’re all more or less alone. It must have been very close and kindly.’

  ‘And bitchy too, I expect,’ said Toby.

  The house had a big bay window to the living room. Its tall mullions divided the view into three; from the left-hand pane a dazzling prospect of beach below, then the sweep of the town round the harbour, the arm of the quay extending forward, embracing the boats. From the right-hand pane one looked across the bay to the lighthouse on its dark pyramid of rock, and given clear light further headlands fading with distance, one beyond another. Through the middle pane a mysterious prospect of pure sea, a simple line dividing air and water, each changing in an endless panorama of ephemeral effect. It was mesmerizing. Once they were in the house they spent hours simply gazing out. ‘Look at it now,’ they said to each other – and in a minute’s space, ‘Look at it now!’

  ‘Why do I like lighthouses so much?’ Marian wondered aloud.

  ‘Phallic symbols?’ said Toby, suppressing a grin.

  ‘Oh, rubbish, son,’ said Marian.

  Toby came to stand behind her in the window, looking out. The view had changed again; an inky and blurred cloud on the skyline was casting rainbows. ‘Monuments to altruism, more like.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Marian. She could not bear to turn round to ask the question.

  ‘It’s in everyone’s interest to have them, but in no-one’s to provide them,’ said Toby. ‘We like them because they show us that people sometimes act unselfishly. Sometimes.’

  He sounded a little wistful. But Marian, who would have liked to question him, thought better of it.

  They had been settled in the house for a week when Alice reappeared. Toby let her in, and she marched into the centre of the living room, put down her bag and her viola case, and said:

  ‘I’ve come.’

  ‘Darling, how lovely—’ Marian looked up from writing letters.

  ‘I take it there’s room for me?’

  ‘Of course there is. There’s even a nice new quilt on the bed. Bring your things and I’ll show you.’

  ‘No rehearsals, sib?’ said Toby from the foot of the stairs, as they ascended.

  ‘No!’ said Alice, in almost a shout. ‘I wouldn’t be here, otherwise, stupid!’

  ‘Sorry I spoke,’ said Toby.

  Later Alice sat morosely, silently, staring at the view. ‘Do you remember this, Mum?’ she asked.

  ‘Half and half. It’s a funny sensation.’

  ‘Oh – I met Leo on the train.’

  ‘Leo? Coming here?’

  ‘Yes; he lives here. He said he had a place in London, but he lives here. He said as soon as the train got round the headland he could feel it drawing him back.’

  ‘Well what was he doing in Cambridge, then?’ asked Toby.

  ‘Visiting Gran, I suppose. Coming to her funeral. Helping with pictures.’

  Wanting money, added Marian to herself. She braced herself for Leo to reappear.

  There was an oddity, of course, in settling in to live together, even only for a while, mother and grown children making up a family again. They had partly forgotten each other, or perhaps they had cheated memory by changing. Did Toby always sing so loudly, and take baths at such curious times? Didn’t he once like peanut butter, which he now refuses? Did he and Alice always talk so incessantly, arguing and quarrelling about every possible thing? Perhaps they did. Alice had always washed her hair every day, and left clothes lying around on all the chairs. Alice had always practised for several hours a day – had it always sounded so urgent, so raw? Perhaps it had. While it lasted it filled the house with a feeling of struggle and loss. Perhaps, Marian thought, it was just that Alice had once played more cheerful music, or much easier music. Toby seemed unable to live without watching video movies, and had rented a set with a video recorder. Night after night as Marian was going to bed they settled into the armchairs to watch something borrowed from the video shop, that would run till well after midnight. Toby poured them a malt whisky apiece. They bought the drink themselves these days; they offered to pay for their phone calls.

  And something really had changed greatly, from Marian’s point of view; she had become what she never was in their childhood and adolescence, an object of their attention. Marian herself, her moods, needs, quirks, faults, virtues, had become a presence in the group. She had lost the quality of parent that made her once a kind of permanently non-playing captain of the team. Or perhaps it was the role of referee that she had lost; certainly they no longer appealed to her for justice, or even for sympathy, but fought each other without recourse. Of course it was because of her that they were down here, playing house. But it was more than that. If they call her ‘the AP’ – ‘Aged Parent’, Alice explained – if they humoured her, it was as they might humour each other. ‘Did Stella and I ever reach this stage?’ Marian wondered. ‘No, we did not,’ she answered herself. ‘I was never as old a daughter as Alice has become.’

  Also, since she remembered them as a good deal of unremitting hard work, Marian was surprised at the effect of three pairs of hands on the chores of living. There was willing help, instantly, almost unthinkingly given. They washed their own clothes, they did the shopping, they even washed up after supper, and took turns at cooking. It was easier than living alone! And there was time, therefore, to stare at the sea, the sky, the lighthouse, and murmur, ‘Look at it now …’

  ‘I’d like to go there,’ Marian said, softly.

  ‘Where?’ asked Alice.

  ‘To the lighthouse. To land there.’

  ‘Oh, I asked about that, the other day,’ said Toby, looking up from his book. ‘No such trip. They gave me two reasons. No demand, and dangerous water. Look,’ – he came to stand beside her at the window – ‘see all that broken water running out along the horizon? That’s a half-tide reef; that’s what the lighthouse warns of. So it probably is dangerous.’

  ‘I expect altruism usually is,’ said Marian. And now, to the delectable remoteness of the white tower on the black surf-girdled rock, was added the strong pull of inaccessibility, impossibility. Yet from everywhere you went in the town the lighthouse could be seen.

  The day came when Marian came back from shopping in the town to find a familiar duffel bag on the doorstep. Leo was sitting in the porch.

  ‘You found it, then?’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Stella’s. First place I looked for you.’

  ‘It’s mine now,’ said Marian. ‘For a while,’ she added, deferring to truth. ‘I gather you live here, Leo? I somehow supposed you lived in Cambridge.’

  ‘I work all over the place,’ he said. ‘But I live in St Ives.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, putting down her shopping, and opening the inner door to the house, ‘cup of tea? Stay to supper? The young will be home by and by.’

  ‘Remember all this then, do you?’ he said, following her in. ‘Lumme – it’s gone a bit different though. Never used to be clean or tidy, in the good old days!’

  ‘Try looking under the carpet in the attic room,’ said Marian.

  ‘Jesus, is that Jackson Pollock floor still there?’ he said. ‘We should try cut
ting it into squares and selling it to the Tate!’

  They were smiling at each other, like old friends. Like people with shared memories, waiting for the kettle to boil.

  ‘Leo …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You put on quite a performance when we first met. You were so truly awful – do you always try to make people dislike you?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘In case they do.’

  ‘I don’t think I quite get that.’

  ‘Well, if people dislike me,’ he said, ‘at least I know why. You’ve changed your mind about me; but if you hadn’t—’

  ‘You would have been able to blame me.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Leo – that money …’

  ‘I will need it sometime. But I’ve raised it for now.’

  She couldn’t help, evidently, her surprise showing on her face.

  ‘You thought I hadn’t two beans? Well, at a pinch I have one bean. I’ve pawned my house. Remortgaged it.’

  ‘My God, Leo – what if her estate isn’t enough – what if—’

  He shrugged. ‘More fool me in that case.’

  Alice had driven Toby from the house. The endless grinding music from her room, the edgy, restless company she made, oppressed him. It was a squally day, in which the rain lashed the window-panes, and the lighthouse retreated into invisibility in the occluded air. Marian was tidying and cleaning the house – both of them prowling around him. He suddenly found the company of women overpowering, and at a break in the rain he bolted from the house, and plunged down the hill into the town. There he took shelter from another squall in a sports shop, and spent some time trying walking boots. Then he bought boots, a good waterproof windcheater, and a map of the coast path, and set off.

  Beyond the town the land turned rugged. Great outcrops of rocks broke the skylines, and green fields sloped to the brink of precipitous cliffs. The path snaked along the top of the cliffs, margined in wild flowers, and giving astonishing, thunderous prospects of roaring coves. Great vistas of grey-blue sea spread away to his right, to a smudged horizon, a blotted out margin between grey water and grey sky. The wind tugged and buffeted him, and his spirits lifted as he walked. Gradually the clouds were being torn apart by the wind, and giving rags of blue sky, and sudden fragments of sunshine edged with rainbow.

  Toby walked almost at a run, going as fast as the roughness of the path permitted, pushing himself. He drew great lungfuls of the dust-free air. Miles out from the town he stood in the lee of a great cairn of huge fractured boulders that seemed to totter on the brink, but had probably been standing for a thousand years unchanged. It was surprisingly warm in its shelter. He felt exultant, clean. Everything round him was worn down to basics. He remembered London with panic and distaste, thrust the thought away, and walked on.

  He turned back at last, thinking that he ought not to risk blisters from new boots, though they felt OK. He still had his shoes of course, one in each pocket. The squalls had gone rushing up channel, leaving a shining calm in their wake. As he came back within view of the town the graveyard caught his eye, the landed flock of gull-coloured stones and crosses, settled on the green slope above the outer beach, and he mounted the steps to go that way, and lingered in the rosy light of early evening. It gave him a pleasing sort of melancholy to read the headstones. ‘An unknown seaman, washed up, drowned.’ Names recurred, the names of the bedrock people – Paynter and Stevens and Barber and Care and Cocking. Toby wandered, hands in pockets, along the rows. In the middle of the graveyard a little pair of chapels, joined like Siamese twins, presided. If he looked east the back of the Island, grass and rocks and its own little chapel, rose at an angle, closing the beach, but giving, over its shoulder, a different prospect to the lighthouse. Below the wall the ocean shuttled up and down the beach, sighing softly.

  A good place to come to rest, Toby thought, though perhaps all these seafarers, those drowned and those surviving for their natural term, no more wanted eternity in sight and sound of the tides than they had wanted ‘Sea Views’ from their cottages? Moments later he found ‘Matthew Barber, Lost in the lifeboat disaster, 1939.’

  That must be the story that Leo told us, he thought, and, quieted for the moment, headed up to the road.

  At the crest of the hill the town crowded up to the top graveyard wall, and then plunged down towards the church. ‘Barnoon’ Toby read on a road sign. He started down it, lost in thought. Below him the top of the church tower rose up towards his level. Gulls screamed overhead, music thrummed from an open window, and somebody was yelling for someone called Mathy. The sounds made discords around him. ‘Mathy, Mathy!’ Clattering footsteps behind him. ‘Be ’ee deaf, Mathy, for Lord sakes …’

  Toby was trotting down the steps beside the steeply sloping road, when a hand fell on his shoulder. ‘Mathy…’

  He looked round, confronting a young man of his own age and height, who at once withdrew the commanding hand, and said, ‘Oh, aa, sorry. Took you for someone else.’

  The degree of surprise on the stranger’s face amounted to consternation. He disappeared rapidly, dashing off down the rest of the slope and turning left down a side-alley. Leaving Toby mystified enough to tell Alice about it, later.

  Going to bed so late, always outlasting their mother’s stamina, gave Toby and Alice time to talk together, which they needed to do, knowing things about each other which Marian did not. You could hardly find two more different people out of the same nest, she would have said. And she was right in a way. But difference did not impede perception.

  ‘You must look very like this Mathy,’ Alice said, when Toby told his tale. ‘Was it a local voice? Was he a St Ives man?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So Mathy is probably local too. Do you think grandfather was local and you look like him, whoever he was?’

  ‘Well, perhaps,’ said Toby doubtfully.

  Slouched in an easy chair while the video tape of The Age of Innocence tickered back to the beginning, and the rewind light blipped on the machine, he observed, trying not to, but unable to block it out, that Alice, sitting barefoot, her blazing red hair untied and drifting across her shoulders, had an expression of desolation.

  ‘What’s up, sib?’ he asked, lifting a narrow strand of her straying hair, and winding it gently round his finger. ‘Are you worried about the Aged Parent wild-goose chasing after the missing ancestor?’

  ‘That too,’ she said.

  ‘So what first?’

  ‘Well, you for one thing. Might you go to prison?’

  ‘Ah. No. I might lose my job.’

  ‘But you did do it – this funny dealing thing?’

  ‘Sort of. It’s a very grey area, that’s the trouble. And I was one of several.’

  ‘I hate to think of you not being honest, Toby.’

  ‘So do I,’ he said. ‘So do I. But I just lost my foothold, somehow.’

  ‘What will happen to you?’

  ‘Nothing much. They are looking for someone to carry the can for everyone else. So that they can say, “We found the rotten apple, and got rid of it.” And I don’t know who they’ll pick on. It might well be me. Will you cast me out of your life?’

  ‘Can’t, can I?’ she said. ‘You just are my brother, stupid.’

  ‘Thanks,’ he said. But he could not fool himself that the bleakness in her had anything to do with him. ‘What else?’ he asked her, gently unwinding her strand of hair, which he had been wearing like a ring.

  ‘Max,’ she said. ‘I’ve quarrelled with Max.’

  ‘And there really aren’t any rehearsals?’

  ‘He said not. He’ll let me know.’

  ‘Don’t call him, he’ll call you? He’s such a shit, sib,’ said Toby.

  ‘What difference does that make?’ she said.

  ‘Well, some. Doesn’t it?’

  ‘No, not really. Love is a bit like talent, it just strikes where it strikes. It
isn’t connected to anything else, either one way or the other.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ he said.

  ‘I know you don’t,’ she said. ‘I don’t hold it against you. And you will, when it happens to you.’

  Marian could see the visitor coming, though she did not at first, of course, realize that the woman was coming to her. Marian was looking through the garden gate, a trowel in her hand, with which she had been planting nerines, a whimsical act, she knew, for a tenant gardener. She stood in the gate, half the lumpy bulbs planted, half still in the bag, and looked at the path, now tarmacadamed, but then, surely, a rough track. A pearly light from a bright cloudy sky cast a porcelain glaze over the evening scene. Her feet remembered the precipitate descent to the beach, but she stood still, and watched the woman on two sticks struggle up the slope towards her. If she was going to run down onto the sands she should wait till the poor creature was safely past her; probably though, she was simply going to turn away, and plant the other nerines.

  When she finished, and went in, she found the visitor sitting in the porch, outside the open front door. Having passed the back gate she had gone round to the front of the house, and was waiting.

  ‘I heard there were Harnakers here again,’ she said. ‘I saw from the papers that Stella is dead. I’m so sorry … You are Marian, then.’

  ‘Marian Easton. Yes. Stella Harnaker was my mother. You are some friend of hers?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I am Violet. Violet Garthen.’

  At Marian’s blank expression she said, ‘Unknown to you, I see. Unheard of, my usual fate. But I once knew your mother well. You too, in fact.’

  ‘Come in,’ said Marian. ‘I’ll pour you a sherry. Tell me about it.’

  But the visitor seemed to have little urge to narrate. She looked blankly round the living room, and lowered herself gradually into a chair, leaning her sticks against the arm. ‘You don’t take after her then, I see,’ she said.