The Serpentine Cave

by Jill Paton Walsh

  ‘William said, “I’m now washed in on the lifeboat.”

  ‘The farmer could see his lifejacket. They were as good as gold. They brought him in and stripped him and gave him dry clothing, the farmer’s wife dressing – “I can see her now in her corsets!” William used to say – and they came out of their warm bed and put William in it. He could see through the window the lights bobbing and bobbing along the shore, and he knew they were looking for him.

  ‘The first person to reach the farmhouse was William’s cousin. William was not coherent; they thought he was, but he wasn’t. He was telling them to go get Matthew and Jack from the rocks.

  ‘The farmer’s wife kept him the day, and he was brought home to me in the evening.’

  ‘What did you say to him?’ Marian asked.

  ‘What could I say? I didn’t hardly know him.’

  ‘Your husband was a brave man, Mrs Freeman.’

  ‘He wouldn’t have liked you to say that. He wouldn’t have it called brave.’

  ‘I was told he saw a band of light, guiding him up the cliffs.’

  ‘You’ve been listening to a bit of romancing, there.’

  ‘And afterwards – was there ill feeling?’

  ‘There were twenty-one widows and orphans left in the town,’ Mrs Freeman told her. ‘Mrs Cocking lost her husband, her son and her son-in-law in the one night. I wouldn’t want to tell you about it. That man who gave his jacket to William saying that he heard like a whisper telling him he shouldn’t go. People saying they were only after medals, they all had medals, they was after more … I wouldn’t like to tell you about all that.’

  ‘Was William angry about it? Did he resent the men who missed the boat?’

  ‘My husband was one as didn’t show his feelings,’ she said.

  ‘What happened about your little girl? The one who was sick?’ Marian asked.

  ‘She died. Not then. She got better then. But she died at thirty-three, of breast cancer. Just like her father, never mentioned it. Left it too late. She left four children for me to bring up.’

  They began to look together at photographs of those children, and their children, and the certificate of honour – the bronze medal citation given to William Freeman by the Lifeboat Institution, and hanging in the hall. Marian took her leave. And Mrs Freeman resumed stitching the woolly fleece of one of the flock at the feet of the Good Shepherd.

  Marian walked up to the top of the Island, in a bright patch of day, and looked across to the green headland, and the cheerful distant lighthouse, forefending shipwreck. If you had sharp eyes and you knew they were there you could just make out the specks of white and ochre that were the huts and chalets on Gwithian Towans. And Thomas Tremorvah had been right; none of this was yet forgotten. It was as raw as yesterday.

  And it was a hero tale. Everyone had helped her hear this – but what she needed was the other story, the shadow story, the one about someone who didn’t go, who missed the boat. It was natural enough, they didn’t want to talk about that. She would have to ask Leo to help her.

  Marian knocked on Leo’s door, and stood waiting. He opened up to her in stockinged feet, holding his shoes in his hand.

  ‘Alice is here,’ he said, as though she might have known that, and come looking.

  ‘It was you I wanted,’ she said.

  ‘Come in,’ he said. He looked more than usually dishevelled. He led her down the stairs, and into his workshop. There was no sign of Alice.

  Marian noticed at once the grades of order, shading into confusion in the large room. At the far end of the room a dirty canvas sheet covered something standing in the ruins of a dismantled packing case.

  ‘Your mother’s here,’ said Leo to the apparently empty room.

  Alice came quietly up behind Marian, and stood beside her, barefoot, and put an arm round her mother’s waist.

  ‘Hullo, love,’ said Marian. ‘I didn’t expect to find you here.’

  ‘So what did you want then, Marian?’ said Leo. They were all talking without looking at each other.

  ‘Some help, Leo. That man who got out of the boat, on the night of the disaster – the man who wouldn’t go—’

  ‘He didn’t have a regular jacket,’ said Leo. ‘He wasn’t regular crew. He didn’t have to go. He volunteered in the first place, and then he changed his mind. You could say he was right, really, but he wasn’t easily forgiven. He’s dead now.’

  ‘Who would remember him? Who could and would tell me about him, do you know?’

  ‘It isn’t him you’re looking for,’ said Leo.

  ‘I know,’ said Marian. ‘But he’s part of the picture. I’m trying to get the picture.’

  ‘Leave it with me,’ said Leo. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  Squashed round a black table in the Sloop, Toby and Mathy, and Mathy’s sister Ann, were drinking together.

  ‘There’s a sort of compensation built in,’ Mathy told Toby. ‘Scarcer the fish get, the better the price you get. The old men say it’s all finished, and it has gone down almost to nothing compared to what they remember, when there was seven hundred fishermen in St Ives. And it will be worse when the Spanish get here, next year.’

  ‘But you’re managing?’

  ‘I wish. It’s not a bad life; you ’aven’t got an employer on your back. No bosses, only the tides. There idn’t anything I’d rather do.’

  ‘So what’s the problem with going on with it?’ Toby asked.

  ‘The boat’s the problem. That Mary Ann we was out on just now be all wormeaten. There’s more caulk than tar in her bottom. Had her days. My uncle worked her, and my great-uncle worked her, and I’ve got the use of her because she idn’t worth selling on. But you could do all right with the right boat.’

  ‘What sort of boat would that be?’

  ‘A new one would be the thing. Eighteen footer, right for the harbour here. And set up for pleasure trips, and line fishing. The tourists like fishing. You could take fishing trips in summer, and fish on your own account in winter. And not hardly go out in rough weather.’

  ‘What would a boat like that cost?’ asked Toby. He kept catching Ann’s eye. She was very quiet, but she was watching him.

  ‘Thousands that I ’aven’t got,’ said Mathy. ‘For a good boat and a licence. You need a licence to land fish. And the banks won’t lend for boats any more. There isn’t the sort of money in it that they like to see. So that’s that. One more season out of the old boat and I’ll be grounded.’

  ‘Mathy will be all right,’ said Ann, suddenly. ‘His girlfriend has a nice little business doing gateaux and all that for the hotels. It isn’t so hard for women,’ she added. ‘We’ve been doing bed and breakfast and working in hotels since anyone can remember. Hasn’t changed so much for us.’

  ‘Well, I’m off,’ said Matthew, putting his empty beer glass down on the table. ‘Got to get Rachel fetched up to the Tregenna for the disco tonight.’

  ‘Are you going to the disco, Ann?’ said Toby, seeing his chance.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not so far.’

  ‘Well, are you allowed to go dancing with someone born eastwards of Hayle Bar?’

  Ann laughed. ‘I was hoping you might ask that,’ she said.

  Marian was lying on her bed. The moon was framing itself neatly in the upper left hand pane of her window, and she had not closed it out with her curtains, so only the moon could see her, lying on her front, head propped up, looking at her life-drawings. She had moved the bedside lamp so that it illuminated them brightly. They were not as bad as she had feared they would be; her first attempt was the worst, but not perhaps because it was the most totally unpractised, but because after the first shock, she had thought the young woman beautiful, as indeed, she realized now, the most unremarkable human body in fact is; the result had been a fuzzy drawing.

  Her shot at the second pose had been better. It had been a ten-minute pose, and haste had made her simplify. The teacher had called for shorter and shorter poses, d
own to one minute, and Marian had been driven into ferocious concentration, and airier and airier results. Then there had been another, longer pose. Refocussed, Marian had stared with an ice-cold vision. An almost cruel accuracy of view. The girl on the couch was cradling her head in her arms, and her knees were drawn up to her belly. And you needed to see, not what you knew about arms and hands and feet, about human bulk, about the comfort or discomfort of the posture the girl was in; you needed simply to see what curve exactly the pressure on the muscles made the arm adopt, exactly where the thumb on the interlaced fingers emerged into view beside the nose, exactly how the upturned foot was seen beside the calf of the other leg. The sole of the foot was filthy from the dusty floorboards, and the dirt defined the instep and the complex valley between the ball of the foot and the toes …

  There had been a coffee break. She had at once turned to Leo, and told him she had something for him. ‘Not now,’ he said. ‘Come for a drink later.’ He had been looking very intently at the work on his easel, and while she wondered whether to escape – but the truth is she had partly wanted to stay – the session resumed. Marian had been drawing a slender and attenuated person, with a very small head. She struggled to make her drawings proportional. Looking at them now she saw no merit in them, except as rehearsals for another try. She saw that they were attempts at a certain kind of thing – the drawing made of shadowless outline. Absolutely simple. The moulding would be implicit in the line. At the coffee break she had contrived to get glimpses of what the others were working on, and seen how most of them were using sweeps of medium, paint or pastels, to make shadow and highlight do the work she was loading onto pure line. But it had seemed to be not the form to go around openly looking at other people’s work. There was a murmur of conversation; two girls were talking to the model about some surfing incident that afternoon on the beach.

  And Marian had felt completely at home in this coffee break, though lost in the art and craft entirely. Some of the people in the room knew each other, some did not. They were distantly friendly, but detached, their preoccupation was with what was pinned on their easels. They were islanded, each marooned on the difficult shores of art. They probably each knew where they were, but not where the others were, or what signal from this deep solitude would reach a passing ship. It felt, in fact, like the rehearsal intervals in Alice’s concerts. How many hundred such occasions had Marian sat through, when Alice was little, reading a book? The musicians were engulfed in music and the chat was deceitful, it was to pretend minimally that other people existed in a room where the masterpiece being worked on was alone.

  Oddly, the best of Marian’s drawings, she thought now, was one of the most rapidly made – a five-minute pose. And however minimal the merits of this piece of work, it had defined the task for her. The nature of the task was to discern the exact position of the intersection between a physical object and the light, and draw a line round it. She had always supposed, in all those years as Stella’s daughter, that the difficulty – an insuperable difficulty for anyone but the most crazed devotee – was in the drawing, or the painting, come to that; that the difficulty was technical. A mere two hours trying it had taught her that what came first was seeing. The model’s nakedness had dazzled her like the rising sun. She had had to struggle not to avert her eyes, to look steadily at the pensive face, the soft breast, the complex magenta cavity in the pubic hair, to look unflinching, until she saw enough to move the pencil on the paper. What was hard was to see the shape of another person, uncovered whole, as an absolute in the light, like a bare rock in the tides of the shore. She struggled to keep her feet in waves of misplaced emotion, feeling and rejecting embarrassment, admiration, jealousy, repulsion, curiosity – curiosity most of all – before arriving at something cool and hard: simple attention.

  ‘Could one – could anyone –’ Marian wondered, ‘look at themselves like that? Could I look at myself like that? And what would I see if I did?’

  In the depths of the night something woke her. One of the children awake, moving in the darkened house. She got up at once, as she had always done, ready to comfort the bad dream, make the hot chocolate, take the temperature, find the aspirin … or slip quietly away if nothing was wrong. The habit of motherhood could not be thrown off. She stood on the landing, listening. And just as the stillness would have sent her back to bed she heard a soft clunk, clunk below her, somewhere downstairs. She put on slippers and went down. Cool air flowed in the hallway – the front door was ajar. Blown open? Hardly – but it was knocking gently to and fro. It had been latched open, so that it could not close and lock itself against someone … someone had gone out. She looked at her watch. One o’clock.

  She went rapidly upstairs to Alice’s room – she knew it would be Alice. Alice’s bed was empty, rumpled. Her clothes were tumbled on the bedside chair. Her viola case was open on the pillow, likewise empty. Marian ran downstairs again, and grabbed her coat from the row of hooks by the door, putting it on over her nightdress. Alice’s coat was still there.

  Once outside she did not know which way to turn. Along the road seemed unlikely, so she plunged into the double darkness of the trees and bushes which overarched the cliff path. Her own natural direction would have been towards the beach, but as her eyes got used to darkness – it was not true darkness, there was moonlight – she could see the expanse of sand below her, faintly illuminated with nobody on it. So she went the other way. She did not call her daughter; she was afraid instinctively that a revealed pursuit might precipitate – what?

  She had not talked to Alice about Leo, she was too appalled for that. Max was bad enough – but someone as old as Leo? A flip psychological reasoning occurred to her – Alice had grown up without men. Long lost grandfather, absconding father, other grandparents far off in California – no, such reasons cheapened Alice – Marian hurried on.

  She slipped and stumbled on the rough footing – the soles of her slippers did not buffer the edges of the broken stones underfoot – brambles snagged her nightdress hem unseen. Then the path opened out. A bridge over the railway line led out onto a rocky promontory. There were no tall bushes there – only heather and bracken in the clefts between massive boulders, and a muted vision of the bay in moonlight opened before her. Overhead the stars were thick – visible in their millions, blurred into streamers of cloudy brightness like sequinned scarves of light. Faintly, from somewhere beyond her, Marian heard music.

  Alice was standing on the edge of the drop to the sea, her nightdress billowing in the cool air, playing. Marian found her quickly, drawn by the heartbreaking sound. For the viola part was terrible, if heard alone. Mutilated, meaningless, like something fierce and caged. The violins and the cello gave the music warmth, melody, meaning. Just now and then the melody was passed to the viola, and Alice played the singing line, disembodied, eerily soaring – for the drive and depth had passed over to the other, unheard instruments – like flowing water out of rough rock. And then the grinding urgency resumed.

  Marian listened, desolate, to Alice’s naked unself-sufficiency revealed, while below her the great slow metronome of the bay – the rhythmic breaking waves, the winking lighthouse – marked time in the darkness.

  Marian shivered – Alice must be bone-frozen in the cool air – and she hesitated. Somewhere in her mind she feared that disturbing Alice might make her fall – it would be to her death if she did.

  And then someone came running noisily, Toby, leaping on the rocks, passing Marian and shouting, ‘Alice you silly cow! What the hell are you doing? Come here! Come in!’

  Marian shut her eyes, but Alice did not fall. Toby reached her, stooped, swept one arm round her shoulders and the other behind her knees, and caught her up in his arms. He carried her back from the brink, and set her down beside his mother.

  ‘What is going on?’ he said. ‘It’s the middle of the bloody night!’

  ‘I didn’t want to wake you,’ Alice said.

  ‘So why not wait till morning? Come
on in, before one of us gets pneumonia.’

  The moon was setting behind them, and a cold wind blew at their backs.

  They put Alice to bed with a hot-water bottle, and a mug of hot milk and whisky. She was silent and passive, as obedient as a little child.

  ‘Is she going mad, Mother, do you think?’ asked Toby quietly, when Alice’s door was safely closed. ‘Look, get some sleep if you can. She should be all right till morning – I’ve confiscated her bow.’

  And then the quiet remainder of the night was followed by a quiet day. Alice sat silent, barely acknowledging the concern of her mother and brother, the offers of a walk, a coffee, the loan of a detective novel. They retreated, drawing an invisible line round her, leaving her in peace. She did not ask for the return of her bow, and the house was silent. She slept some of the afternoon – well she must need to – and when she got up she said, ‘I’m going to see Leo,’ and went out.

  ‘So this is to do with Leo,’ said Toby, grimly. ‘Shall I go and knock his teeth in?’

  ‘Counterproductive, I should think,’ said Marian. ‘Oh, God, I can’t talk now, Toby. I’m taking the Garthen woman out to dinner.’

  ‘Where are we going?’ said Violet, putting her coat on.

  ‘The Pig’n’Fish’ said Marian. ‘I booked a table for eight o’clock. There’s lots of time.’

  ‘I put that out for you to look at,’ said Violet, indicating a black photograph album on the coffee table.

  Marian sat down to look at it, feeling uncomfortable, with Violet standing, coat on, in the door, ready to go.

  But as soon as she opened the album she was gripped. Young Stella stood in a garden somewhere, holding baby Marian. She had been a handsome woman, then, black-haired, straight and tall, wearing an elegant, simple dark dress. Violet stood beside and a little behind her, recognizably Violet, pretty and a little unkempt. Then a group of people in fancy dress, on a rigged up stage—