The Serpentine Cave

by Jill Paton Walsh

  ‘That was Measure for Measure at the Arts Club,’ said Violet, who had come to stand behind Marian’s chair, looking over her shoulder. ‘And that’ – Marian had turned the page – ‘was a civil defence exercise – home volunteers, it was called – we were supposed to be trained fire-fighters.’

  A blurred and tiny photograph showed a group of men and women wearing tin hats and holding an enormous hose. They seemed to be practising in Tregenna Place.

  Marian turned the thick black page. A park somewhere, with palm trees, and the top of the St Ives church tower in view. Tiny Marian was in that picture, too. She was running away from the camera, hands held up, towards Stella who was leaning down, arms outstretched, towards her. Stella was smiling, and the expression on her face was of unequivocal, radiant love.

  ‘Have any of these that you want,’ said Violet. ‘I never look at them now.’

  ‘I’d like this one very much,’ Marian said. ‘I don’t remember—’

  ‘You were too young to remember,’ said Violet. There was a strange timbre in her voice, and Marian did not complete her sentence. She turned another page.

  Now she was looking at Violet with a young soldier. He had an arm round Violet’s shoulder, and they faced the camera and smiled guilelessly. Violet was wearing a bright print dress, covered with pansies. Marian knew they were pansies, knew the purple and yellow and blue colours of the print; it leapt out at her from the faded sepia photograph and took her breath away.

  ‘That’s my Bob,’ said Violet. ‘We were engaged to be married. But he was killed on manoeuvres. They didn’t even get him to the battlefront – they just killed him on an exercise at Slapton Sands. Have you ever heard of Slapton Sands? No, well … I never got over it, in a way, though I was happy enough married to Malcolm while it lasted. You wouldn’t remember Bob, of course.’

  ‘I remember the dress,’ said Marian.

  ‘Hadn’t we better be going?’ said Violet. ‘You can borrow the album if you like. Look at it at home.’

  Marian possessed herself while they walked slowly, at Violet’s pace, down the hill, in a deepening dusk. A pink sunset reflected off a bank of clouds in the east, towards Carn Brea, shone in delicate pearly iridescence on a calm sea. But soon they were lower down in the town, where they could not see over the rooftops. The Pig’n’Fish had only a glancing narrow view of sea past the car-park of the waterfront pub, and the two women faced each other without the distractions of the scene outside.

  ‘I’m told my mother’s best time was when she was here,’ said Marian when they had ordered their food and wine. ‘Why did she leave, Violet?’

  ‘I don’t know, I don’t know. We weren’t close any more, by that time. It had something to do with the way you were turning out, I think, but I didn’t understand it.’

  ‘This photograph,’ Marian opened the album on the table. ‘I remember that dress. It was your dress …’ Her intonation was balanced between statement and query.

  ‘Yes. I loved those great blowsy thirties prints. Of course, everything suits you when you’re young.’

  ‘You never lent it to Stella?’

  ‘God, no. She wouldn’t have been seen dead in it!’

  ‘So it wasn’t Stella. It was you.’

  ‘What was me?’

  ‘You that took me to Kynance.’

  ‘So you do remember. I was afraid you might.’

  ‘Not properly,’ said Marian. ‘Tell me about it.’

  She saw to her surprise that Violet was struggling with some strong emotion. But she couldn’t have expected the remark, from a grown woman, with which Violet replied, almost wailing, ‘It wasn’t my fault. You were palmed off on me. I did my best …’

  ‘Tell me properly,’ said Marian quietly, ‘as though I couldn’t remember anything.’

  ‘I promised I would look after you while Stella went up to London. She had an offer from a big gallery there to give her an exhibition. It was very difficult in the war; but she had this chance, and she wanted to take some pictures and go. So I said I’d look after you. Then the night before she was due back, he rang up, wanting to see you—’

  ‘Who rang up?’

  ‘A man who said he was your father. I didn’t know who he was from Adam, Stella hadn’t let on about it. It was still a terrible disgrace in those days. Of course there were lots of young men killed in the war, it wasn’t unusual to have a young widow with a child. But Stella wouldn’t fib about it; she just brazened it out and gave you her own name. He asked for Stella, of course, but also for you. His ship was in the Carrack Roads – that’s off Falmouth. He had a ticket of leave, but only for twelve hours. Someone from the ship was going to the radio station on the Lizard, he could get that far. So I borrowed a car and took you to meet him. We went down to the cove at Kynance … Then you wandered off, and the tide came in …’

  ‘I remember that bit,’ said Marian.

  ‘Tommy got to you in time, but he couldn’t get back. I panicked. I phoned the Falmouth harbour-master to get through to the ship, to tell them what had happened, and I phoned Stella. I rang and rang her until she got in, and her train was very late, and she got the police to drive her over. She was very angry. We waited for you all night. We lit a fire on the cliff-top, and some of the ship’s officers came over, and they used a lamp to Morse code to him. We could see him in the moonlight, but he hadn’t got a torch to answer the messages. I was petrified. I didn’t know what had happened to you. I didn’t know what you had seen. I didn’t know if you would tell her …’

  Marian said, ‘I didn’t know who he was.’

  ‘I never saw him again, I need hardly say. The moment he got back on dry land they drove him off to Falmouth, and he was gone. Stella didn’t say a word to him. Only looked at him, and touched his hand. And she couldn’t forgive me. She hated the sight of me after that. I had to move out.’

  ‘But can you wonder? You had done such a terrible thing …’

  ‘You did see, then?’

  ‘Oh yes, I saw.’

  ‘Did you tell your mother?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Thank God for that. I could never tell if Stella knew. She seemed not to – she never reproached me with that. Only with neglecting you. But I’ve always been troubled about it.’

  ‘You deserve to have been,’ said Marian.

  ‘Ah – you are more like your mother than at first appears. Of course, she was right in a way. She kept saying I should have watched what you were doing. She couldn’t forgive me.’

  ‘All this time, I’ve thought it was Stella I was with. And I thought it was a stranger who rescued me.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I really am. But don’t waste any grief on your father; he was trash, really. Pathetic. Just your mother’s bit of rough.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ cried Marian, standing up, crying out. ‘How can you say that? He was trash, although if Stella had him, you wanted him? You mean he would fuck any slut who made passes at him?’

  ‘Sit down,’ said Violet with sudden force. ‘Keep your voice down. You should forgive us for that. I did make passes at him. But it was the war. I had just lost my lover. He was famished. We were young. And we were afraid of dying.’

  Into a long silence Marian said, ‘Yes, I forgive you. But I can’t eat another mouthful. I will pay the bill, and get them to call a taxi to take you home. But you must tell me what you meant when you said my father was trash.’

  ‘His own people despised him. He had let another man go out in his place and be drowned.’

  Later, Marian sat in the window, looking at the lights of the town jewelling the darkness, and musing. It was an immense relief to her that it had not been Stella’s fault. However unkind Stella had been to Violet, by Violet’s account of things, it had not been Stella who had exposed Marian to the naked sight of copulation, or to the rising tide. Marian wondered with anguish whether the suppressed, the obliterated, belief that it had been Stella at the mouth of the cave had coloured her feelings
for Stella subliminally all her life – is this why she had been so quickly resentful, so demanding? If so it was now too late to confess, to explain, to make amends.

  But Marian also felt joy. For Violet’s photograph had shown her what she had not managed otherwise to know – shown her an expression on her young mother’s face that she never remembered, later, having seen. Somehow she had managed not to know how greatly Stella had loved her.

  And with all this it was only much later, when she was on her way to bed, that it came to her that she knew now exactly why Thomas Tremorvah might have lied to her, might say he had never been to Kynance.

  The house stood open to the soft air of a late autumn day. For the time of year it was astonishingly warm; the front door stood wide, admitting a sloping parallelogram of light and heat, bisecting the hall, and dividing the shabby carpet into plots of light and dark. From the sitting room window a few people could be seen swimming from the beach; a few children running in the waves’ edge, one or two bright encampments of grown-ups. The sea wore azure, edged with turquoise, and fringed with pearly white. The escallonia hedge that screened the house front from the road seeped its hot spicy odour into the garden. A faint haze stood on the view, making it seem to have been drawn in chalk, rather than in oils.

  Leo came in without knocking. He had a video tape in his hand. ‘I’ve borrowed this for you,’ he said to Marian. ‘Can I stay and watch it too? – I’ve never seen it.’

  ‘What is it, Leo?’

  ‘Barry Cockcroft’s film – or a tape of it, rather. He lent it to me.’

  ‘Film of what? And who is Barry Cockcroft?’

  ‘He’s a writer and film director. Lives in St Ives, now. He made a film way back, somewhere in the seventies, I think, about the lifeboats in St Ives. The thing is, when he made the film William Freeman was still alive, and so was the man you were asking about – the one who wouldn’t go. The problem is, I’ve only got this for twenty-four hours. It’s his only copy, and he has to show it to someone tomorrow night.’

  ‘Well, what’s wrong with now, Leo? Put it on now.’

  A few seconds of black and white flicker – ‘random noise’ Donald had called it, the background rustle of the molecular dance of the universe – then a title Take a Lifejacket – the room was too bright, the picture dimmed by contrast, so Marian got up and drew the curtains across the shimmering day. As she went back to her chair Alice slipped into the room, and sat on the floor.

  ‘What are we watching?’ she asked.

  ‘Shut up and see,’ said Leo cheerfully. ‘You too, Toby?’ For Toby was leaning against the door to the hall.

  ‘I’m going out,’ said Toby. ‘I’m waiting for Matthew,’ but for the moment he stood where he was.

  The film began telling the now familiar terrible story of the 1939 calamity. But it ranged about. It told a hair-raising story of a rescue from Hell’s Mouth. Some potholers had got into trouble in the shaft, and had to be rescued from the sea-cave below. A lifeboat man had paddled into the cave in his lifejacket – he said cheerfully he couldn’t swim – and tied the stranded climbers one by one, in lifejackets, to a line. ‘They came out like tin cans, floating …’

  ‘That’s Dan Paynter!’ said Matthew. He had appeared beside Toby in the door. He sat down beside Alice, all intention of going out suspended.

  The same thing had threatened to happen again, the video told them. ‘What did you think when you seemed to be going out for a repeat?’ asked Barry Cockcroft’s voice.

  ‘Shook. Fright. Everybody gets frighted when them rockets go – well I do, I’m only speaking for myself. I uster shake.’

  And now the camera shows William Freeman, telling his story of the 1939 disaster. ‘Just as I got there a man gave his jacket up, and the coxswain said, “I want somebody to go.”

  ‘I said, “Well all right. I’ll go. I’ll do.” “All right,” he said. “You’ll do.” So I went right then and accepted the jacket on.’

  ‘Did you know that man?’ the voice asked.

  ‘Ess, I knew him, but he was an older man than me. I suppose he thought it might have been too much for him, you know. I knew him well, ess, he was a fisherman.’

  ‘In this community,’ said Barry Cockcroft’s quiet voice, ‘that must have been a hard decision to take. Who was that man?’

  ‘I don’t think you ought to say the man’s name, do you?’ said William Freeman.

  ‘I shouldn’t,’ said Margaret Freeman, a much younger Margaret Freeman, sitting on the arm of her husband’s chair. ‘He’s a cousin of mine too, and he might not like it.’

  Toby said to Matthew, ‘Do you know about this, Mathy?’

  ‘Not all. Not like this,’ said Mathy. ‘The old people talk about it, but they don’t say it all.’

  Now the film was showing them an old man, mending nets. Sitting at a window, high up, with a bobbin in his hands, knotting and mending nets. John Stevens. He is telling his story. He went down to help with the launch.

  ‘It was blowing a ninety mile an hour gale. Well, I said, this is going to be a job. She’s only going to be half manned today. Second cox, he never heard the rockets at all. Anyway, I dressed to go in her. I wasn’t one of the regular crew – she had a regular crew at that time. Anyway, I went down, and when I found out where she was going I thought t’myself she’ll never get there, fourteen mile to west of the Head. The sand from Porthmeor was blowing over all the houses onto the lifeboat slip. So I thought, I’ll give them a hand to launch.

  ‘But when I passed the light, and my brother-in-law seen me, he said, “John,” he said, “go with us, will you?” I could see there was only four men there. So then the coxswain came around the bow of her, he said, “Govn’er go with us, will ee?” I said, “All right, I’ll go.” I was thinking that he wouldn’t put her outside of the bay. And I went aboard to take this jacket, the lifejacket was on the deck, so I took it, and it was like a lump of lead in my hands, when they’re only featherweight. I was going to start to put it on, or go over the side to put it on, but as I neared the side of the boat there was voices in my two ears, “drop that jacket, drop that jacket,” incessant, incessant, which stopped me. Yes, I’ve heard them before, my angels. But they were distinct voices, because I wanted to put that jacket on. So then I had the courage to say to the coxswain, I said, “Bar, you give this jacket to somebody else.”’

  And now some reconstruction. Teams of men by torchlight, towing the boat across the harbour beach in two long lines, going up to their necks in the water … and Margaret Freeman saying, ‘Couldn’t see the sea – it was all white like soapsuds as far as the eye could see …’

  ‘So I give them a hand to launch the boat,’ John Stevens was saying, ‘and she turned around and went over all that broken water like a flying bird, and that was the end of her.’

  There was a sort of stillness in Marian. The room was quiet, the children, Leo, Matthew, all held to attention. A light breeze fluttered the edge of the curtain at the open window. William Freeman’s voice was telling them what happened in the boat, how it had gone over and over, how he had heard one man shouting to them in the dark, how he had fetched up alone in the empty boat on the far side of the bay, and blundered around for help …

  But Marian was not thinking about the ordeal of those who went with the boat, but about this other man, who did not. As though you had been looking for something for a long time, for years, and when you found it, when it was apparent you were about to find it, you were afraid. You were circling round and round, and the nearer you came to the heart of it, the less you could bear the thought of the stillness within it, what you would know when you stood still.

  The film was telling her that William Freeman had never set foot in a boat again. He had been brought home in a terrible state. ‘Fact, I don’t go near the water any more, now,’ he was saying. ‘Not further than the top of the pier. Strange thing – there was a boat going out one day there, and I was looking out, and she was rolling a bit as
she was going out. And you know I had to turn away, I felt sick!’ He was laughing, bewildered at himself, ‘And I was only on the pier! Ess …’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t ask the right questions!’ Marian thought. For what can it have been like with a family to look after, and a child sick, and the breadwinner unable to work? How had they managed? What was the price paid for that one night?

  Barry Cockcroft was asking if William Freeman ever talked to the other man about it.

  ‘No. Never. I don’t talk about it to anyone.’

  ‘What do you say when you meet him?’

  ‘Meet him? Oh, nothing. Just pass on. Never say anything to him, just pass on.’

  Marian got up. You long for something, and then you turn away from it. She had seen how nearly this touched her; she had begun to guess her own story. And at the last minute you flinch away … She left the room.

  Leo found her a little later, in the garden. She was finding the curious double-edged quality of the beauty of the place. The haze had lifted, and you could see distance and distance beyond Godrevy all the way to Trevose. The horizon was drawn in a clear dark line, floating on a paler stripe of shining water, as though it belonged to the sky as much as to the water. If you had the least joy to bring to it, this spectacle lifted your heart; if you were in any darkness it sharpened the mental pain.

  ‘Leo,’ she said, ‘that London dealer told me about a lot of backbiting and quarrelling among the artists here. He made it sound terrible. I wondered how true it was …’

  ‘Well, yes and no. I mean they did quarrel. In-fighting was meat and drink to some of them, who shall be nameless, although they are famous. But there’s another side to it.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Kindness. Fellow feeling. I’m not the only nipper who got a helping hand, a box of crayons, free lessons. They shared with each other what they had; a hot meal, a warm fireside for someone half dead of hunger and cold. Given a little money, they bought each other’s pictures out of friendship, and gave them back without a murmur if a richer buyer appeared. They worked and talked all day and all night. And if they quarrelled it was because they cared about it all so much.’