The Serpentine Cave

by Jill Paton Walsh

  So why had she done it? Out of love, of course. It was what she had urgently wanted to do. She had adored and admired her grandmother. But the problem in life, she saw now, was not so much doing what you wanted, as doing what you wanted most.

  The road to Gwithian winds right round the bay. Marian drove it alone; she didn’t know why she hadn’t told Toby and Mathy, hadn’t told Alice, hadn’t told Leo when he came to supper, what had emerged. She didn’t know what she was opening – happiness or calamity. How could she know when she didn’t know why Stella had kept this secret?

  Through dismal suburban-seeming Carbis Bay, and pretty Lelant, then across the causeway road at the back of the Saltings – the tide was out as she went, and the birds were flocking and feeding. Then Hayle, with its derelict engineering works, where once the best steam engines in the world had been made, Leo had told her, and now timber yards squatted in the ruination. But there were some working boats in the pool. And then Copperhouses, straggling out along the waterside, along the Gwithian road. The whole landscape here was strange with blown sand. Mountains of sand were wind-piled on this side of the bay, grassed over, making knobbly lumpy hillocks, high as hills, high enough to conceal the sea entirely from the little road, stretching deep enough inland to have side-roads labelled for campsites, to have a huge derelict works of some description in the midst of them. On the right of the road, the inland side, the peaceful farmland rolled gently away eastwards, quite unconcerned, as though the sea were nowhere near, and nothing was engulfed and buried by the dunes.

  Gwithian was a pretty place; a small village with a church, a chapel, some thatched cottages, and a wildly discordant Edwardian brick pub. No shop; or not one Marian could find. She parked the car beside the pub, and went in to ask.

  ‘Mr Tremorvah?’ said the barman. ‘Sorry, don’t know ’im.’

  But the barmaid, appearing with a tray of clean glasses, said, ‘We got a Captain Tremorvah. That who you mean?’

  ‘Who’s he, then, jinks?’ the barman asked.

  ‘Doddery old geezer. Used to drink here when he first came, but the Methodees has got him now,’ the girl said. ‘Not in the village. He’s over on the Towans. Go back to Hayle a bit and turn right.’

  The road wound improbably among the tussocks, sand showing through bent-grass meadows on either side. It seemed as though it could only possibly be a track to the beach. But it led first to a spectacular prospect of the sea, rolling under a rain-laden, sullen sky, and then to a startling view of Godrevy Island, Godrevy lighthouse, standing up stark and near, stripped of the charms of distance. The white tower was octagonal, the round garden at its foot was dark green with clumps of gorse, it stood grimly admonitory on a rough pyramid of black jagged rock fretted over by breaking water. The road petered out in a colony of ramshackle buildings – shacks and bungalows and wooden houses standing in squares of picket-fenced sandy garden, several deep along unmade roads. Every one was different – there were one or two quite well-made houses, clapboarded, painted. Most were small and evoked that pungent pathos of half-time places, boarded-up places, places down on their luck, places that prosper at some other time of year. There was a shop – a beach-booth sort of shop, and a phone box. Marian asked for directions, and got sent further on.

  It was almost the last house. A little white bungalow with a corrugated iron roof, a glazed porch facing the sea, a new stainless steel stove-pipe chimney, a flagpole in the garden, sharing the space with two palm trees and a clump of pampas grass. It was perched rather high on a tussock, and in front of it the whole bay spread out in view. Marian rang the bell – a hanging ship’s bell with a knotted rope to clang it with. She waited, and rang again, and waited again. A smart wind blew off the immense beach behind her. The waves rolled onto it, breaking twenty deep, making, there were so many, not the soft rhythmical sounds of the beaches back there, but an uninterrupted steady blurred loud roaring. She rang again, and had turned to go when the inner door was opened, and an old man came towards her across the porch.

  He had an upright bearing, but he moved unsteadily. His hair was white, but still stood up in a thick shock from his forehead. He stared at Marian through the glass, and then slowly, with visible reluctance, opened the door. ‘Yes?’ he said.

  Marian said, ‘I think you may be my father.’

  Time had leached all the colour out of him. He stood at his door wearing a sandy-coloured sweater, a faded and pallid man, his dark eyes the only vivid thing about him. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You have been misinformed.’

  Marian stood there, disconcerted. Didn’t her blue eyes come from her father? Stella’s eyes were dark, like this old man’s.

  ‘I am Stella Harnaker’s daughter,’ she said, and she saw him react. Some minute, quickly repressed gleam in his eyes. He knew that name.

  ‘I have no children,’ he said.

  ‘But you remember my mother?’

  ‘I know her name. You should ask her—’

  ‘She’s dead now.’

  He had begun to back away, holding the door as if to close it on Marian. He stopped. A silence lengthened between them.

  ‘Please,’ she said, ‘please …’

  He stood back for her to enter the porch, and they stood between the plastic chairs facing out across the shore. He closed the door, and the clamorous surf was muted. A fly buzzed, helpless against the glass. It fell to the sill, and at once rose and tried again.

  ‘What do you want?’ he said.

  She was shaken with anger. She was outraged by his impassiveness, by this cruel lying. Then she suddenly realized that he was trembling slightly, holding tightly onto the back of the flimsy chair, saying, ‘What do you want?’ His eyes were watery, clouded. She could not tell if it was grief, or shock, or just old age that confronted her.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know you,’ he said. ‘You have been misinformed.’

  ‘You do know,’ she said. ‘You must remember! Don’t you remember wading in to save me, holding me all night buttoned in your coat at Kynance? Tell me about it …’

  ‘I have never been to Kynance in my life,’ he said. ‘I have never been there.’

  She caught again his glance askance from hers. He was lying. Why should he lie?

  ‘Go away,’ he said. ‘Leave me alone.’

  ‘I will go,’ she said. ‘But – I haven’t got the wrong person entirely, have I? You are Thomas Tremorvah – you are the man who missed the boat?’

  ‘You know about that then,’ he said.

  ‘A little. It’s all forgotten, now.’

  ‘Oh, no. No, it isn’t.’ There was barely a trace of Cornish in his voice. He sounded like what he was – a retired naval officer. He could have come from anywhere.

  ‘It’s so long ago,’ said Marian. She stepped out of the door, into the bluff pressure of the wind, cold now, and bringing a spittle of rain on its breath. The darkness of the sky had settled down on the water, and blanked out the opposite shore entirely.

  ‘You go and ask them over there if they have forgotten,’ the old man said, ‘You go and ask.’

  And he closed the door.

  She started by asking about the lifeboat disaster in the fish shop in Downalong. Over bright mackerel and pearly scallops they told her there were people who could still remember it. They’d be getting on a bit, now. It had all been in the hands of God, the fishmonger added.

  ‘Why did God save one man and let the others perish?’ Marian wondered aloud.

  With fervent emphasis, the men behind the counter told her. Margaret Freeman was a good woman, a woman who had raised three generations of her family. God had saved William Freeman because his wife needed him. It was clear to them, and they seemed to have not a shadow of uncertainty in their faith. As for anyone having heard voices, they added, angels telling him what to do, they didn’t know about that …

  ‘There’s a lot that’s never been told yet,’ said a customer, overhearing. ‘William Freeman seen a
band of bright light showing him the way to climb the cliff to safety. A shining light to guide him.’

  ‘Where would I find someone who could tell me about it?’ Marian asked.

  ‘Try asking in the lodges on the quay,’ the fishmonger said. ‘Someone ’ull remember.’

  The lodges were three shacks on the harbour waterside. Marian had wandered past them, and seen the notice, declaring that strangers might sit in the open shelter between them only by invitation. She hesitated. ‘Am I – is a woman – allowed to call in there?’

  ‘You’ll find lots of old fogeys in there,’ they told her, ‘but you can go in. They’ve got history; photographs and things.’

  Marian knocked before going in. It was a large square wooden cabin. In the middle of the floor a little stove and chimney pipe gave out heat. The old men were sitting on benches, lined up around the walls. Most of them sat with their backs to the window towards the harbour. There was a handsome old clock, and a barometer. A rather good painting of the harbour beach hung at the back, and otherwise the walls were entirely covered with old photographs.

  ‘May I come in?’ Marian said. ‘I was told you could tell me about the lifeboat; the one that was lost before the war.’

  One of the old men got to his feet. He led her across the room, and pointed to a photograph. It showed her a lifeboat of a shape familiar from the collecting boxes, open amidships, with a small canopy back and front. It was on a trolley, and a crew were lined up in lifejackets, standing in front of it. But it did not seem to interest the old man much. He began to point out to her one by one the old pictures of the town – here the back of the beach when the seine boats were pulled up under the railway arches; here the station buildings before they were demolished for a car-park; here the rocky point tipped by a mining tower, where now a hotel stands … mixed in with the old topography were numerous shipwrecks, going back years and years, to the days of sail. He named the vessels, and their dates, as though he were reading tombstones. Around her the other men resumed a desultory conversation. But they were all watching her.

  Marian’s eye was caught by a boat burning – on fire on the rocks, swathed in flames with the surf breaking just beyond. ‘What’s that?’ she asked her guide.

  ‘That’s the boat you were asking after,’ he said.

  ‘On fire?’ Nobody had mentioned fire to her yet.

  ‘We burn a boat if there’s been loss of life in her,’ he told her. ‘Tradition.’

  ‘Do you remember it?’ she asked him.

  ‘Ess. Yes.’

  ‘Were you there?’

  ‘No. I was tucked up in bed with my brother.’

  ‘But you remember it?’

  ‘Afterwards. I remember the morning afterwards. We all do.’

  ‘Could anybody tell me about that? About what it was like?’

  She waited while they thought about it.

  ‘She ought to talk to Margaret Freeman,’ someone said.

  ‘Freeman?’ said Marian. ‘William Freeman’s daughter?’

  ‘His widow,’ they told her.

  They seemed somehow to have decided something, wordlessly. Marian’s guide said, ‘There’s cousins of hers here. By marriage, that is. We’ll ask her. We’ll see if she’ll talk to you. You come by tomorrow, and we’ll let you know. All right?’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Marian.

  Her guide took the two steps to show her to the door. His untaught, princely courtesy abashed her. He was on his own ground absolutely, and she had been an honoured guest. She could find no words to let him know she had understood that.

  Mrs Freeman had agreed to be called on. Marian found her sitting in the front room of a house just one row behind the great beach, within sound of the sea. She was tucked in an armchair beside the fire, working a needlepoint picture of the Good Shepherd. Her feet were in slippers, and she looked frail, but she had that bright alertness that shines in some people in old age. A quiet lady, Marian thought; a shrewd lady. The room was full of photographs and flowers – her four generations in every age of childhood and adult life smiled out of photo frames. Someone in naval uniform, someone in graduate’s robes, holding a scroll …

  ‘What do you want to know?’ Mrs Freeman asked her.

  I want to understand, thought Marian, but what can I ask? ‘Was your husband in the regular crew of the lifeboat?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ Mrs Freeman told her. ‘He was in the rowing lifeboat that preceded the motor lifeboats, but he had never set foot in that boat before.’

  ‘But it was short-crewed? The cox needed volunteers?’

  The two who didn’t hear the maroons had been rehoused in the council houses further up the town, Mrs Freeman told her. ‘They didn’t hear the rockets. And I believe them; my brother who also lived up there didn’t hear them.’

  ‘Tell me how it happened that your William went with the boat …’

  Mrs Freeman began to talk, softly and fluently.

  ‘We lived in Victoria Place, then, just behind the harbour. We had a child sick, Susan, she was nine then, seriously ill. We were up nights and nights with her. She was just fallen asleep that night, and we were going to our bed. William went up to the top window to look out at the storm. “William you aren’t going nowhere,” I said. “Come to bed,” I said. He was just getting into bed, he had one leg out of his trousers, when the maroon went up. There was the sound of men running in the street outside the door. William put his trousers back on, and went out. I went to the door, looking out. I followed William down to the wharf. And someone comes up with his lifejacket in his hand, and said, “I can’t go, boy.”’

  ‘Was it someone you knew?’ Marian asked.

  ‘Oh ess, I knew him. He was married to a cousin of mine. So William took the jacket. That’s stale news. And my brother was down there on the slip. I was saying to William, “Think what you’ve got at home.” I suppose I was whimpering, really, and my brother said, “Goest home, Margaret, she’s as safe as houses.” And that was the last word he said to me. He was gone, then.’

  ‘With that I took William’s cap, and gave him the tam-o’-shanter I was wearing. I was stood outside the Sloop, and the women were at Chy an Chy, at the top of the slipway. William’s mother was there, and she cried out, “William, you ain’t going!”

  ‘Matthew Barber said to me, “Take her in, take her in.”

  ‘That was fifty-six years ago; he had a niece born on the same day.

  ‘I went back in to my daughter. Night went on – he oughter bin back. I put his dry clothes to warm by the fire. Men going up and down, running from door to door – nobody came in to tell me anything. I remember I knelt down to a chair in my kitchen, and I said, “Lord, you know where they are …”

  ‘I went out just coming light on the twenty-third – those January nights it’s pitch black outside. So I could see a bit of daylight coming in, I’d move the curtains now and then, have a peep out to see. I thought I’ll go down the wharf again now – children were quiet, and I think Susan had gone asleep and I met a neighbour as I was going along the road, she said, “Oh, it’s awful, Margaret, idn’ it?”

  ‘I said, “The weather is dreadful.”

  ‘She said, “I mean the lifeboat.”

  ‘I said, “What’s the matter with the lifeboat? My man’s on it.” And she looked horrified at me, I never saw her disappear, she just completely vanished from me – she went like the wind.

  ‘Well, what with that, I started to cry then. I went home to my mother. She never knew anything about it, father had been out, he hadn’t come back. I just blurted out to my poor mother that the lifeboat had gone, so mother went screaming out as well by the back door, I can see her now, poor soul – John was in, you see, her eldest boy – and she knew Willy had gone too, because she was down on the wharf as well when the lifeboat went, she was down crying, you see, “Oh you aren’t going, you shan’t go,” and all that sort of thing.

  ‘So as we went out together there’s others runnin
g up. “Your man’s all right, Margaret. He be all right — he be over to Gwithian.”

  ‘I said, “My man’s all right? How do be the others?”’

  There was silence then. Two women in the room, strangers to each other, thinking about the dead.

  ‘What had happened to William?’ Marian asked.

  He had told her afterwards. The first time the boat turned over, the cox, and William Barber and Edgar Basset and John Thomas were thrown out. The engine stalled. There were four left. Dick went forward to start the motor, and Dick was thrown out as she went over again. Then there were three of them in under the canopy. William had said, “Hold on boys – where she’s agoing, I’m agoing with her,” – he wedged his hand someway under the canopy.

  ‘She was already in the shore surf, when Jack and Matthew were thrown out – William couldn’t think how, Jack was wedged behind him in the canopy, he felt him flying over his head. They were so close in, William thought had there been anybody there, they would have been saved. Over and over he asked himself, “How come they two didn’t hang on, just that minute!”

  ‘She landed flat on a rock, and William walked out over. He thought he should have been washed away, still with his boots and lifejacket on. But he climbed out of the reach of the waves. He thought he would die of cold, just sat there. So he took off his sea-boots that were full of water, and climbed the cliff in his stockinged feet. He’d never been to Gwithian before, and didn’t know where he was. He went first to a chalet, where he had no reply, and then walked on and fell over a hedge into the lane leading to a farmhouse.

  ‘He knocked on the door, and the farmer put his head out of the window, and said, “What is it, what do you want?”