The Serpentine Cave

by Jill Paton Walsh

  ‘I can afford it,’ he said serenely.

  ‘Shall we tell her where we’re going?’ Alice wondered aloud.

  ‘Let’s surprise her,’ said Toby.

  ‘We’ll take a picnic lunch, shall we?’ Alice asked.

  ‘If you like. I’ll do dinner, you do lunch, OK?’

  ‘Thursday?’

  ‘Tomorrow would suit me better,’ he said. ‘I’m tied up Thursday.’

  ‘How can you be tied up?’ she asked him. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Fishing,’ he said.

  They had tried working it out over drinks in the Sloop – Toby felt it incumbent upon him to buy the round of drinks. He noticed with annoyance that he was trembling slightly in the aftermath of the confrontation, and hoped it wouldn’t make him spill the beer.

  ‘So how come you’m walking around impersonating Mathy?’ asked the tall lad.

  ‘I’m not impersonating anybody!’ said Toby, indignant. ‘I am just going about my own business. I was just born looking like this.’

  ‘Well, quite right, that’s the thing, idn it?’ someone said.

  ‘He must be your cousin, Matt,’ suggested the girl. Ann, Toby thought. He was trying to learn names, fast.

  ‘Don’t know how, though,’ said Matthew Huer. ‘Wouldn’ I know a thing like that?’

  ‘Your ma would know,’ said one of the young men – were they calling him Bass? One of the famous nicknames? ‘Ask her, why don’t you?’

  ‘Well, she idn’t here right now,’ said Matt. ‘Don’t you know about it?’ He addressed Toby, and added, ‘My ’ansome,’ to general laughter.

  ‘I have a sort of missing grandfather,’ said Toby. ‘He must have been someone in your family, I suppose.’

  ‘’Ang on, Matt,’ said a third boy. ‘Afore we go asking the parents. We could be stirring things up.’

  ‘I want to know, though,’ said Matty. ‘Gives me a shiver just to look at him.’

  ‘I want to know too,’ said Toby.

  ‘Ess, that’s natural,’ said Bass.

  ‘My grandmother was a painter,’ offered Toby. ‘She lived here for a while. And my mother was illegitimate, we suppose. She doesn’t know who her father was. Our only clue is a painting. We were told it was of someone called Tremorvah. Thomas Tremorvah.’

  ‘That’s our mam’s maiden name,’ said Ann – Mathy’s sister, Toby realized. ‘But I never heard of any Thomas. Did you, Matt?’

  He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘But there must be a link between us somewhere,’ said Toby. He found himself floundering, desperately hoping that this man was his cousin, that the pretty, narrow-faced, sharp-eyed Ann was kindred, as long as she wasn’t too close.

  ‘Can’t be sure, in St Ives,’ another man said. ‘There be a lot of connections here. Lot of likenesses running around; lot of intermarriage. Mathy’s grandad might be your grandad, and might be someone who looked like someone, see?’

  ‘Can we ask your grandad?’ said Toby.

  ‘Dead,’ replied Matt.

  ‘Well, how much do they two look alike?’ asked Bass. ‘Let’s have ’em side by side a minute.’

  Toby and Matthew sat together on a high-backed pew. The others stood around staring. Finally Bass said, ‘It’s when they move around they do be closest. It’s how they Walk.’

  ‘He looks much more like you than Jack does,’ said Ann, decisively. ‘That’s our other cousin,’ she said to Toby. He blessed her silently for the word ‘other’.

  ‘Do you want another beer, anyone?’ he said, unwisely no doubt trying to placate the tribunal.

  ‘Keep your money in your pocket. I’ll get ’em,’ said Matthew at once, standing up.

  ‘Hey, Mathy!’ said the man called Graham at Matthew’s back, ‘I’ve got a notion! Wadn’t you wanting someone to go out with you Thursday? Fishing,’ he said to Toby. ‘Bass has to go to Trurer Thursday, and Matt is short-handed. If you be his cousin you oughter be able to do that for him, didn’t you?’

  ‘OK,’ said Toby. ‘Of course I will.’ He could feel the tremor of amusement the moment he said it.

  ‘There you are then, skipper,’ said Bass, as Matthew came back with a tray of full glasses. He was grinning broadly.

  It was a long way down the cliff to Kynance. From the car-park the track descended a steep little valley, with a tiny stream in the cleft. But Marian remembered something quite different – a cliff-face so steep it was perilous – she had been passed down it like a rucksack. She remembered the adult fear of falling, surrounding her like a feeling in the air. She herself had not been frightened. And the path they were now on, with Toby bounding ahead of her, was perfectly safe. True, they found it zigzagged steeply at the bottom, and finished in a scramble over boulders.

  It seemed at first like simply a cove, a pretty cove. But as they walked further it unfolded – there was indeed a double strand, a spur of sand with the sea on both sides of it, with a looming grass-topped cliff-bound island at the further end. Standing in both sand and sea were towers of rock, a group of dark giants, so that they were reminded, all three of them, of the sense of being a tiny child, surrounded by the looming heights of adults. The sun was shining. ‘Under the glassy clear, translucent waves,’ said Alice’s memory to her. She said it aloud, the words snatched away from her and tossed into incoherent snatches by the brisk wind.

  ‘What, sib?’ said Toby, turning towards her, blinking and shading his eyes, for she stood against the light, aureoled in it, as it sprang dazzling off the tossing water behind her. But she said only, ‘Look,’ and held out to him nested in her two hands an egg-shaped dark red stone, polished in the tumble of a little stream. Alice was standing in the bed of the stream, which was over her shoes, and soaking her socks. She was standing on green and red marbled pebbles, polished by the clear water. ‘This is serpentine,’ she said. ‘It’s lovely; look.’

  ‘It’s everywhere, all this – ’ Toby waved at the standing monoliths around them. ‘The roughness hides it – look at the foot of the stones, where the sea rubs the sand against them.’

  Toby pulled off his shoes, and left them topping a boulder. They held hands, and waded into the dashing waves, pointing out to each other the smoothed sides of the rock, its rich colours which were hidden by the roughness and cracks above.

  ‘It’s a marvellous place,’ said Toby. ‘It must be the place she remembers – where is she?’

  ‘Somewhere,’ said Alice. ‘Can’t see her at the moment.’

  Marian had wandered away, looking for her cave. She couldn’t find it at first. She wandered out along the sand bar and stood for a few minutes staring amazed at the cleft in the rocks, in which the waves thumped, and then exploded sighing in a burst of upthrust spray. When she looked round the cave was behind her. The gleaming walls she remembered looking up at were now just a border, snaking along the sandy floor. Compared to the brilliant beach-light around her the cave was dark, though it gaped to the light. She stood looking into it till her eyes widened, till she could see the rocks. It was curious and potent; a pungent organic smell reeked from it – of weed and shell and watery decay; of fish and salt and sea-wrack. And it had an organic look to it too. Like a great gaping fistula in something living, it seemed to be lined with flesh, dark flesh like meat cut yesterday, a sanguinary sombre red, with white flecks and strands of tendon and gristle running in it, and a dull green bloom of fester spreading over it in patches. Marian shuddered, and stepped inside.

  Facing her was another roughly polished wall of the same mortuary colours. Her child’s eye, she thought, had rejected the words someone had spoken: ‘Precious stones. Well, semi-precious.’ Young Marian had seen the rocks as flesh. Now old Marian wondered where she had found such a morbid eye. And memory answered her. For in her precise generation children had seen things, it couldn’t be helped, there had been death all around.

  Where had it been? She and Stella had been staying somewhere … as usual, Marian didn’t k
now where. The bomb had fallen on the house opposite. She was lying in bed, and she heard the little scratching sound made by fine debris skittering against the window, like mice behind the skirting. That always came first. Then the blast – a huge sound that rattled everything in the room, and hurt her ears, though she had slipped down the sheets, and her head was under the blankets, before it came. Last, a long aftermath of thumps and rumbles and crashes, as larger debris, thrown into the air varying distances, fell back. It was warm in the bed, and at first she did not move. Then she wriggled up again enough to emerge from the tunnel of bedding and put her head back on the pillow.

  There was quiet, after the bomb. But gradually the room became colder, until it was very cold. A disturbing sensation reached her, as of the waft of the open air, the creeping secrets of the night garden. At last she got up, and padded barefoot to the window. Had it been there, but open, she would not have been able to close it without help; but it was not there. Where the window had been there was a neat rectangular hole in the wall, brightly moonlit. Marian fetched a chair from the corner of the room, placed it under the hole, climbed up on it, and looked out. The street looked like one of her drawings. The nursery schoolteacher gave her dark, blue-black sugar paper to crayon on, and everything you drew on it absorbed darkness, and showed faintly in pale outlines. As now the street did, under the unflinching moon.

  The row of houses opposite had a new gap, as though it had lost a milk tooth. The bedroom window was lying on the front lawn, with some of the glass broken in the frame. To Marian’s eye the flight of the window, and its alighting on the lawn, had no more reason than the inexplicable movements of the garden birds.

  Beyond the supine window-frame, in the flower bed and on the pavement of the street beyond, were some giant broken dolls. Staring into the moonlight, in which every outline was furry, drawn in soft chalk, she made out an arm, palm upwards, a burst torso, and a leg. These things glistened in the dark light, with unfamiliar subcutaneous things, veins and bones exposed, under a surface that gleamed wet. On the garden path was lying a great doll in an attitude familiar to Marian. It had its arms raised above its head, and the skirt of its nightdress thrown up over its face, leaving legs and belly bare, and a faintly marked delicate fanny open to view. Marian’s friend Michael loved to expose Marian’s own doll, Amanda Virginia, in this way, and then point and giggle. ‘She’s rude!’ he would say. ‘Buy her some knickers!’ Marian would be shocked, but would usually laugh, as she laughed then.

  She was still laughing when the men in tin hats came running down the street. They looked at the dolls, and one of them pulled down the nightdress, uncovering its face. Then they came running into the house. They released her mother trapped in the back bedroom, the door of which was wedged solid by the fractional movement of the cracked house. One of them came into Marian’s room, peeled the coverlet, and wrapped it round her. He picked her up and carried her downstairs to Stella, who was sitting shaking and weeping in a dusty armchair. He put Marian into her mother’s arms.

  ‘Unscathed,’ he said.

  And Marian had always thought that was true. She had not revisited the memory often, and never with the fierce freshness with which it came to her now, but she thought she had been unscathed. But wasn’t it scathe which had made her see – which made her still see – the innocent rock as flesh?

  She had felt fear, but nevertheless had walked towards the back of the cave, until the bright light from the other end drew her onwards. This is what she did now, advancing towards the gleaming rock. So vivid was the trace of memory that she felt the firm sand under her naked feet, the inaudible but tangible grind of minute golden grains against each other and against her skin. ‘What did I do with my shoes?’ she wondered, having forgotten taking them off, and where she put them – and looking down found she was still wearing them; it was the remembered self that had gone barefoot.

  There was a place in the crook of the cave where you could see out of it both ways. Marian stood there, wondering how she had been trapped. Had the sea closed both mouths? Perhaps at high tide it did – yes, obviously, because she was standing on firmly founded sand, cemented by the secretion of the sea. Puzzled, she walked out of the further entrance – she had to duck her head – onto the sand bar beyond. It was a wide beach now, with waves breaking softly on each side of it. And surely this was the place – there was the chunk of cliff that would be islanded when the tides came in and the waves met. What would they look like, breaking into each other like opposing armies? Had she lingered too long, looking? She must have had a child’s lack of sense, then, for any adult could see that there was no other way onto this stretch of sand, the path through the cave being the only way once the tide advanced. Perhaps as a very little child she had not realized.

  Marian turned back through the cave. She was half in the present, going to find her children, one of whom had a rucksack with picnic food. And as she walked in the gloom of the cave the light at its mouth struck her. She blinked, dazzled. And she saw the sunlit water breaking white, and on the shining sand in the cave’s mouth bodies lying. They had been as naked as the poor broken dolls, but they were not dead. They moved; they struggled and heaved, and gasped. They were lumbering like beached seals against each other, skin to skin. Under the woman’s head her discarded dress was lying across the sand. The bright light danced on the printed pattern of pansies and leaves. She cried like a mewing gull.

  And Marian had been frightened and run away. She had run back through the cave, and out onto a ribbon of sand to be engulfed by the rising waters.

  And this was what she had forgotten. Clean forgotten, wiped out of mind. So that only now, at this moment of recollection, could she see the scathe; the fear of drowning in an invisible sea which had made her clench her teeth and her fists, made her cringe and feel slimy as a seal, made Donald, poor Donald, call her frigid. He hadn’t known the half of it; had never known why if he managed to bring the wave to breaking point he had to hold her closely all night long, had to console her for the inflicted joy. He held her without knowing where she was – but she had been on a black rock cut off, cut off from land, and shivering in the arms of a stranger.

  And most painfully, acutely, she asked herself how could Stella have done that? How could she have let that happen? Marian would have suffered any loss, any delay of yearned for encounters, rather than leave one of her children wandering in a place of danger while she put herself beyond recall, beyond the reach of appeal, the duty of care thrown utterly aside. And it cast Stella, she saw at once, in quite a new unfavourable light. However often in her heart she had felt neglected in the cause of art, it was quite different to be – to have been – endangered for the sake of lust; for the sake of a hasty grapple on the sands. She needed to find Stella and yell at her, reproach her, vent her anger, extort some kind of explanation, some kind of apology, any kind of acknowledgement that she, Marian, mattered too – mattered enough to have been looked after, to have been kept from harm, and from untimely knowledge. From the sight of death no loving care could have kept her, in those days, but from that other knowledge of the nature of the flesh she should have been protected.

  And this justified indignation, like so much else, had come too late; death had foreclosed it. Marian took a deep breath, and walked out again onto the sunlit landward beach, where Toby and Alice could be seen a little way off, perched, picnic at the ready, on top of a knoll of rock, waving her towards them. In Alice’s slender extended hands the smooth serpentine pebbles were held out for her admiration, and she managed, shuddering briefly, shaking off the feeling of the cave, to see them as, and call them, pretty stones. Cold stones, harmless, patient, pleasing things. Their roundness was wholeness. Alice had weighed herself down with them, filling her rucksack with their dead weight, choosing them out and caressing them one by one.

  Marian sat in the sun, beside the bright tumult of the waters, and ate her lunch. The three of them, out together on a jaunt, as they had done when
Toby and Alice were children. It was different, though; Marian, who had usually been calm and motherly, concentrating on being motherly, now mused silently on herself at every pause in the talk. Toby, who had been the restless one, running about and climbing trees, now stretched out on a rug at her side, quite peaceful. Alice was sad, playing with her pebbles and spreading cheese on biscuits, and talking, distracting herself, disguising sadness, but not succeeding. Marian wondered whether to ask Alice what was wrong, but would not do so now, on this bright and riotous shore, which the children had found and brought her to, as a gift, in the hope of pleasing her. Very well, then, she would be pleased. By and by she would paddle, playing with the ambushing surge of surf, and eating an apple as she walked. Her children would laugh and join her, and all would be well.

  So it was. They brought home as many chunks of serpentine as they could lug up the steep to the car-park, and made a cairn in the garden.

  ‘There is a problem, Toby,’ Marian said. They were having drinks in the porch, watching the dusk, while Alice, austerely audible from the living room, played her viola. It was a dark and grinding sort of sound she was making – steady and urgent as a heartbeat. Like a heartbeat it sounded at once indispensable and subordinate to some other, greater thing. Listening to it spread a kind of unease through the house, a sense of something taken apart that should have been kept together, of something dissected alive, tremulous, shivering.

  ‘Stella seems to have owed Leo money, and I gather from the lawyer’s letters that there isn’t any. The last letter is on my desk – look at it if you like. You don’t happen to know if we are liable for debts incurred by your grandmother, do you?’

  ‘Her estate would be. You personally, no. I think. I’m not an expert. But it isn’t down to legalities, is it? Rather a question of keeping Gran’s promises? How much is it?’