The Serpentine Cave

by Jill Paton Walsh

  ‘What do you mean, Mrs – Miss? Garthen.’

  ‘Miss. Call me Violet. You keep things tidy. You should have seen it when I lived here.’

  ‘You lived here?’

  ‘You don’t remember? Well, perhaps you wouldn’t. I shared with Stella for a summer, until we quarrelled. It was bloody chaotic. And you were not tidy in those days.’

  ‘I really don’t remember, I’m afraid. Are you an artist?’

  ‘Yes, I am. I make – made – prints. Stella didn’t think much of them.’

  ‘So she gave you a hard time?’ Marian suppressed the ghost of a smile.

  ‘I escaped. I admired her very much at the time.’

  ‘But you tried to share a house with her? Was that wise?’

  ‘There was a war on. Nobody had any money. Sharing was better than starving.’

  ‘Of course. I think you might be the only person left who remembers me as a child. How curious.’

  ‘I don’t know much about children. You were something of a nuisance, but perhaps not more than most.’

  ‘I was a nuisance? Playing with your gravers and spilling the etching acid?’

  ‘That sort of thing. Inclined to wander off.’

  And Marian winced, hearing in that accusation the diverted attention of the grown-ups, all of them, both of them, preoccupied with other things, so that she was perpetually seen as an interruption. Had she really been a trouble to this stranger?

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Let me take you to dinner some time next week, and you can tell me all about it.’ For she had bought three plump mackerel for supper and could see no way to make three fishes do for four. ‘And shall I run you home?’ She hoped that dislike did not ring audibly in her voice. It was so clear to her and so groundless.

  ‘I both look and feel like a crab on these sticks,’ said Violet. ‘But I am supposed to walk. So, no, thank you. But what I came for was to ask you what you propose to do with Stella’s pictures. Are they for sale?’

  ‘Some of them will be. I take it you would like one?’

  ‘Very much, if I can afford it.’

  ‘Oh, it won’t have to depend on that. If you can remember a particular one and describe it to me, I’ll try to find it for you.’

  ‘You are very kind, Stella’s daughter,’ said Violet dryly, heaving herself to her feet, and leaning on her sticks again. ‘And where do you get that from?’

  Seeing her to the gate, for the garden was steeply terraced and surely not safe for her, Marian thought to say, ‘Did you – do you – know a man called Leo Vincey?’

  ‘I know him,’ said Violet. ‘He’s a fake.’

  ‘He’s a fake? What do you mean?’

  ‘That awful war,’ said Violet, suddenly vehement, ‘all the flotsam and jetsam of Europe landed up here. Frightened to stay in London. Too wimpy to fight. Putting their wretched botches and daubs up to the exhibition hanging committees, curling their lips at real artists with a lifetime’s devotion behind their skills. Founding break-away societies, quarrelling, making trouble. The place never recovered, to my mind. We all suffered from it.’

  ‘But what has this to do with Leo?’ asked Marian.

  ‘Well, among the other things the modernists visited on us was a vogue for local talent,’ Violet said. ‘They went and “discovered” a poor old sod of a rag-and-bone man, and puffed him as some kind of untaught genius. Working on broken fish-crates and cardboard boxes, about like a three-year-old. Ludicrous. Next thing you know the town is full of artists; fishermen, grocers, window-cleaners, everyone can do it. You can sell a vile ignorant daub for more than a serious etching. That Leo … He’s plain Leonard, really, of course. Just a skiff boy.’

  ‘What did Stella think about all this?’ asked Marian. She really would take Violet out to dinner and pump her exhaustively, but still couldn’t resist asking, this minute, at the open door.

  ‘She even went down and bought some of Wallis’s stuff,’ said Violet. ‘She let it get to her, God forgive her.’

  ‘Is that what you quarrelled about?’ Marian asked.

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Violet, giving Marian a curious sideways stare. The deep wrinkles of age had bitten in a fixed expression on her face that was stronger than any passing expressive one, and made her hard to read, like a page already scrawled over. ‘Do you really not remember? We quarrelled about you. I’m off, but I’ll hold you to that offer.’

  God might forgive Stella, but Violet won’t, thought Marian to her departing back. What a termagant! No worse than Stella herself, I suppose. And I wonder if her work is any good – I must try to see some. As if I could tell – how does one tell? And they quarrelled about me?

  Toby had become sensitive to the sound of footfalls behind him – to any sense of pursuit. Someone running behind him along Fore Street and shouting ‘Oi!’ led him, therefore, without looking round, to turn abruptly to the left, up a side street. He turned and stood waiting, expecting to see the runner, whoever it was, hurtle past across the bottom of the alley. But instead the pursuers – there were two of them – swung round the corner after him, and came abruptly face to face with him. They were both youths, younger than Toby, certainly, but one of them was six foot tall and heavy. He had a shaven head, blue with faint stubble, tattoos on both forearms, and an earring. They were standing staring at him, lolling against each other. There was a sort of speculative determination on their faces which convinced him they were hunting him. The shorter one had a shuttle loaded with blue cord in his right hand. Toby walked straight towards them, and past them, back into the narrow little main street, and the crowds of shoppers, without looking back.

  He dodged into Rose Lane, and Norway Lane, through St Peter’s Street and Fish Street into Island Square. There he stopped, listened, and looked round. The same two rounded the corner just behind him. They came with unmistakable deliberation, a challenging swagger. There couldn’t be any doubt about it, really; they must be following him.

  In which case they could damn well have a run for their money. Abruptly Toby took to his heels, speeding away down Back Road East as fast as he could leg it. When he had shaken them off he slowed down, smiling grimly to himself. Then suddenly he was face to face with the pursuers again, only now there were four of them – one a girl. They were waiting for him at the top of the hill. He turned round and found his way back blocked – three youths with linked arms were standing across the road behind him. But in this town there was always an alley, or a flight of narrow steps. He bolted down the nearest one. It was a courtyard, dark and cramped and full of dustbins, and he thought he was cornered for a moment, but there was in fact a little passageway leading through to another street. He shot out of this like a cork from a bottle, turned and swerved towards the harbour, where there would be people flocking. He preferred a crowd of people. A game like this – surely it was a game? – could turn nasty. What did they want? Why hadn’t he asked them, instead of playing catch? But once you ran there was a hunt, and you were the quarry. Toby was nearly afraid, and still running.

  Of course he couldn’t escape them in this warren of streets, which they knew backwards, and he not at all. He bolted down Bethesda Hill, and they came racing out of a parallel street – six of them now. They linked arms, and came towards him. He spun on his heel, and dived back into Bethesda Hill, leaping up its steep steps. Then he made the inevitable mistake. He chose Carnglaze, and they were close behind him. Turning right at the end of Carnglaze he found them doggedly advancing along the back of the harbour, and his only way to go turned out to be out along Smeaton’s Quay – a stony cul-de-sac standing out into water and sand. He might even have jumped and swum for it if the tide hadn’t been rather low. So he turned at bay, breathing heavily.

  There were more of them than before – a pack of nine or so. They were all looking hard at him, with confrontational curiosity.

  ‘What do you want?’ he said. He was angry. If they wanted his money they’d have to fight him for it. In the back of
his mind he tried to measure the drop to the sand behind him, the probable damage from being thrown over. ‘What the hell are you chasing me for?’

  ‘Chasing?’ one of them said. ‘Wudn’ be chasing if you wadn’ running. Why run? Just because we want you t’come for a drink.’

  ‘I’m not going anywhere with you!’ said Toby.

  ‘And if we say you are?’ the tall one said. Whereupon the girl pushed her way to the front, said, ‘Hang on; don’t hassle him,’ and looking at Toby said, ‘Come on, my cock. What harm can you come to having a drink in the Sloop?’ She even offered a half-hearted placatory smile.

  Toby shrugged, and his captors surrounded him and marched him off the quay and along the wharf. He supposed it was true they could hardly be intending to set upon him in broad daylight, or mug him in the Sloop, but he could feel their tension, them nerving themselves for something. When they reached the dark little door of the inn one of them lifted the latch of the door to the bar, and someone pushed him between the shoulder blades, and propelled him through.

  After the bright day outside the bar was dark. Toby blinked. He appeared to be there already, sitting at one of the long tables with a glass of beer in front of him. It was like looking in a mirror in a nightmare – one of those horrible transformation nightmares, in which you dream yourself displaced, in the wrong life – facing him was his twin, nearly. Looking very like him, though more tanned. His hair was cut very short – the skin of his skull glinted through it. Like his friends he was wearing tattoos and earrings. This fellow looked long and levelly at Toby. Then, ‘I’m Matthew Huer,’ he said. ‘And who do you be?’

  Marian was happily prowling, a brief shopping list in her handbag, riding the lift to her spirits that ambient beauty gave to plain days. The light danced on the water in the harbour, and the colours of everything seemed peculiarly unmixed – the green of the grassy sloping Island intensely green, the sea an amazing blue, the sand pure chrome, as though the town and its setting had been painted out of a little box of primary colours. She crossed the road to lean over the wall and look down at the beach, the rioting waters of the sea. And felt it somehow, in her arm and fingers – thought of scribbling the surf in white chalk on the sort of blue sugar paper she had been given to scrawl on at nursery school, felt the ghostly movement that would drive the spiralling thick lines – the steady lateral pull to draw the line of silver on the horizon – was there silver chalk? What colour would she need to make the faded lilac sheen of the draining waters on the wet slopes of the sand, converging, repeatedly confluent like the branches of trees in reverse? Surely she would need oils? Or were there pastels bright enough, in the box Stella had given to Leo, all those years ago?

  Nothing could possibly be bright enough, she thought, walking on. She passed an art shop and paused to gaze through the window. A collection of posters pinned up at the edge of the window advertised various events. Someone would demonstrate print-making at The St Ives School of Artists, where, also, you could take a life class for four pounds, open to all, beginners welcome. There was an exhibition of work at sale prices by Violet Garthen, in the artist’s own home, at the address below.

  Violet Garthen lived in a part of the town Marian had never visited before, well inland, with no outlook to the sea. She showed Marian into her front room. It was the bay-windowed best room of a tight little Victorian terrace house, furnished stylishly in an outdated style – a cane-and-cushions settee, a glass-topped table with art books, an overflowing bookshelf built into an alcove, an upright piano on one wall.

  ‘Could I see some of your work?’ Marian asked.

  ‘Up there,’ said Violet. ‘Excuse me if I stay put. I don’t like watching people look.’

  Marian walked upstairs. The front upstairs room, the largest in the house, was hung round with Violet’s work. A chart chest stood against the end wall. Marian looked at the work on the walls, and opened the chart chest to see more. Violet made engravings and lithographs. The engravings were amazing – technically very fine, meticulously detailed and accurate. They showed street scenes with people in curiously old-fashioned clothes. Or flowers. A good one showed a hare in the grass – every blade cut separately. The lithographs were washy in soft colours; sea scenes; several views of moored boats. One could imagine such things looking pleasant and restful on domestic walls. They recorded what one saw; what one already knew that one saw. They demonstrated mastery, but only of technique. Marian thought, It is not for me who have mastered nothing, and have no technique, to criticize this.

  ‘You’re very good,’ she said to Violet, truthful up to a point only, returning downstairs.

  ‘I sell,’ said Violet. ‘But the last thing you need is more pictures.’

  Marian laughed. ‘I haven’t forgotten that you want one,’ she said. ‘And you will come out to dinner with me – shall we say next Tuesday? I’ll come and fetch you.’

  Alice had begun practising in an empty house. The viola part didn’t stand up alone. She could always hear the other parts running in her head, weaving the pattern, and she could only dimly understand how the viola heard alone might strike a listener. It was a relief not to be listened to, however. She worked for an hour on her part in a Mozart quartet, and then moved on to playing a Bach piece for solo cello. That gave all the tune to her. Lovely, dark music.

  She finished a slow movement, and realized suddenly that she was not, after all, alone. Leo had come in. He had come to the living-room door and stopped to listen. She would have been cross at his eavesdropping had he not said softly,

  Musing my way through a sombre and favourite fugue

  By Bach who disburdens my soul, but perplexes my fingers …

  ‘Gosh, Leo, what’s that?’ she said, startled.

  ‘Sassoon.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Ah. Music’s not the only art,’ he said. ‘There are cross-connections. He’s a poet.’

  ‘Can you remember more of it?’

  ‘No; but I’ll lend you the book if you like.’

  ‘Yes I would.’

  ‘Come and get it some time.’

  ‘Did you want Mum?’

  ‘Some other time will do,’ he said, waving at her as he left.

  Alone again, Alice decided to be useful – to cook a chowder for supper. She needed fresh scallops, and cod, and a crab to stand in for lobster. Also a potato-peeler – being left-handed she couldn’t use her mother’s. She liked shopping like this, going from shop to shop with a basket on her arm like a Victorian photograph. And she needed some soothing activity.

  Later she was on her way home, up the long hill from the town. Halfway up was a little bric-a-brac shop with pretty things in the window. She hesitated, and then went in. Almost the largest item in the shop was a dark-red marble lamp, shaped like a lighthouse on a chunk of rock, polished, and sombrely gleaming. At first Alice thought she liked it, but she turned her back on it, studied, or pretended to study, a rack of Coalport plates, and tried to imagine the lamp carried home and lighting a corner of a natural room. It wouldn’t, of course, shed much light, since the little torch bulb in its imitation lamp-chamber was too faint. It was a light to look at, not one to see by. Was it beautiful then? Enough to earn a place in a room? For it certainly wouldn’t be useful. Alice had recently heard, from Max, William Morris’s dictum, ‘Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful,’ and was trying to live by it. In the case of the potato peeler she had just acquired at Woolworths this was both clear and easy; in the case of a stone lighthouse?

  She turned round, and looked at it again, perceiving it now as rather kitsch.

  ‘Serpentine,’ murmured the hovering lady in the back of the shop.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ said Alice. The word caused a tremor of recognition.

  ‘The lamp. It’s made of serpentine,’ the shopkeeper said.

  ‘Oh – I didn’t know serpentine was stuff,’ said Alice.

  ‘It’s a Cornish roc
k,’ the woman told her. ‘Very popular. It ranges in colour from deep reds to deep greens. That piece is quite a rare one – it isn’t often you get a large object made in the deepest red.’

  ‘Local?’ asked Alice. ‘Do you know where?’

  ‘On the Lizard. The other coast. There are craftsmen still working it there, but this piece, of course, is old. Sometime in the twenties, I think. It’s signed on the base.’

  ‘Are there caves?’ asked Alice. She was almost holding her breath.

  ‘That I don’t know,’ said the woman. ‘Perhaps at Kynance? I think there are caves at Kynance.’ But she was losing interest in Alice as Alice was visibly losing interest in the lamp.

  She almost ran up the rest of the way to the house. Toby was lounging in a fraying deck-chair in the back garden, on the only little scrap of level ground between the terraced flower-beds, the rampant fuchsia hedges. An inverted open book lay on his unbuttoned shirt. Alice dumped herself down beside him.

  ‘Look, it isn’t a winding cave, snaking around,’ she said.

  ‘What isn’t, sister dear?’

  ‘A serpentine cave – it means a cave in a kind of rock – there’s a rock called serpentine!’

  ‘O ho,’ he said. ‘Where?’

  ‘There’s serpentine at a place called Kynance. There might be caves there too.’

  ‘Hang on while I get the map,’ he said.

  They spread the map out on the ground. ‘Look, it isn’t far at all,’ he said. ‘And someone at work recommended a good restaurant at Helston, pretty much on the way. Let’s take mother out for the day, and treat her to dinner on the way back.’

  ‘Can we afford that?’ she asked. Musicians, he supposed, must be chronically short of money. Alice had no idea of the scale of extravagances – everything she couldn’t afford was lumped together – fresh Colombian coffee beans, champagne, yachts on the Mediterranean, designer clothes, meals out, economy size boxes of detergent … He grinned at her.