The Serpentine Cave

by Jill Paton Walsh

  ‘Did you keep in touch with my mother? Did you write?’

  ‘She wrote. I kept the letter.’

  ‘But she thought you were dead.’

  ‘She was better off without me. I was no good to a decent woman.’

  ‘You had a child, too. There’s no such thing as a decent child. What about me?’

  ‘I couldn’t be trusted with you,’ he said. ‘There at Kynance …’

  ‘You reached me in time,’ she said.

  ‘Only just. Another split second or two … I used to dream about that. In a ship under fire at sea, I would dream about that. I was on a destroyer that got torpedoed in the North Atlantic. An Icelander pulled me out of the drink – a trawler. There was only a few of us rescued. So I thought Stella would read in the papers the loss of the ship. And if I didn’t write again she would be free of me. I wasn’t any good to her.’

  ‘That letter—’

  He got up, and went to the roll-top desk in the corner, and raised the lid. He opened one of the multiple little drawers, and brought her a small, stained, folded paper. Something fell out of it as she opened it. A photograph. It fell face down, and she saw the censor’s stamp on the back. It was of herself, standing holding a wooden spoon beside a sandcastle. And the letter was in Stella’s writing.

  Dearest Tommy Mackerel,

  This is a quick note to tell you that I am leaving St Ives. Our girl is very pretty and happy, and has made friends of some of the Vanson children. She looks very like one of them – Becky, I think, roughly her age. The thing is people have noticed, people are beginning to talk. With you away I can’t talk it over with anyone, but I know you would hate it all to come out in your absence, so I shall have to find somewhere else to live. I’ll send you the new address as soon as we are settled. Don’t be brave – take care of yourself – love always – Stella

  ‘And afterwards? After you were rescued? You were brave though she asked you not to be, I see.’ Marian pointed at the row of medals.

  ‘I wasn’t much worth preserving,’ he said. ‘But the Lord didn’t see fit to take me to him. I served in the navy and the merchant navy, and got to be a captain.’

  ‘And then you came home here?’

  ‘Within sight of home, yes. Fetched up where I should have fetched up in the first place. But it pleases the Lord to keep me waiting.’

  The pattern in Marian’s mind was moving like cloud-shadow – as the past came clear the present was cast into gloom. She folded the letter carefully, and put it back on the desk. She took her shoes from the grate, pulled the paper out of them, and put them on.

  ‘Father,’ she said, almost stumbling on the unfamiliar word, ‘would you like me to come again?’

  ‘You remind me of your mother,’ he said. ‘I don’t need that.’

  White with sudden anger she said, ‘In all those years did it never occur to you that I might need you?’

  But the moment these words were spoken, they were empty. Poor man, she thought, I come as a shock to him. Give him time, he hasn’t much left. Even the longest tide turns eventually; her need for him which had been ebbing all her life had reached its turn while she was standing there, and the coming flood would be his need of her.

  ‘Would you like to keep the photograph?’ she asked, holding it out to him.

  ‘What are their names?’ he asked her, taking it.

  ‘Alice, and Toby,’ she told him. ‘And they loved Stella dearly.’

  The house seemed yawningly empty when she returned. She would have started to tell them at once, pouring out the news of their grandfather, had they been there. But she had learned to be alone. She made herself a cup of tea, surveyed the supper supplies and decided to go out, watched the rapid sunset extinguish itself over the bay. Then she rewound the tape in the video recorder, and sat down to watch the last few minutes, the bit she had fled from before.

  And now the quiet voice was asking John Stevens, ‘Did anyone ever say anything to you about it?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘So the fact that you took your jacket off has never been mentioned to you by any of the other fishermen in St Ives?’

  ‘No. Nobody’s never said a word or raised it to me. And do you know, me and Freeman, we won’t even look at – speak to each other. We haven’t spoken to each other since. Because of memories.’

  And yet somehow, with some triumph of tact and skill, the producer had contrived it. For now the screen shows her Doble’s Wall, along the Harbour Wharf, and Mount Zion behind it. And the two old men were meeting – John Stevens going up the steeply sloping street, William Freeman coming down it.

  ‘How are you?’ John Stevens asks.

  ‘All right.’

  ‘You aren’t too good …’

  ‘No. No breath …’

  ‘This is nearly thirty-seven or eight years since we’ve spoken to each other. Not for any reason …’

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘Whenever I see you I get full of emotion.’

  And William Freeman asks, ‘Why, John? Why should it be? We aren’t here long enough for that.’

  ‘I get emotional …’

  ‘Ess …’

  ‘The thoughts do travel back, understand? See?’

  And as the film ended the two of them were leaning on Doble’s Wall, looking at the harbour, and talking about the price of fish. It had been staged; of course it was staged, and yet …

  The children had returned, were standing in the room with her, and Marian found herself crying, the long dammed-up tears flowing freely down her cheeks.

  Toby said, ‘You know, Mum, what people cannot bear to remember, surely they should just forget.’

  She thought about that the next day, walking out along the cliff path. A young man’s perception; with a gust of affection for him, she saw that it sprang from an undamaged mind, from an assumption that forgetfulness was possible, could even be a deliberate act. Perhaps he needed to think that now. Later he would know, like anyone else, that as life lengthens you cannot forget without unravelling yourself. The details flow away, and rearrange themselves like sands on the wind, and leave the bones of recollection like black rocks standing naked on a beach. She needed to think something through, to catch the train of thought that connected forgetting with forgiving, but first she had to think about Toby.

  ‘I could stay here for ever,’ she had said to him, standing in the bay window, and looking at the sweep of the sea below them.

  ‘What’s stopping you?’ he had asked.

  ‘Well, for one thing, being too far from my children,’ she had said, meaning to stop the idea short.

  ‘You wouldn’t be too far from me, Ma,’ he said. ‘I’ve packed it in, in London.’

  ‘Was that wise? Explain to me.’

  ‘Well, it would have been hard to go on as a trader once there was a shadow on one’s name. And they cast a shadow on everyone they suspended. They haven’t any evidence against me. They know perfectly well if they threw the book at me I could name others – some of them rather high in the firm. So I’ve been negotiating with them on the phone. I exploited the situation, and collected a nice little kitty. Redundancy money, if you like. I’ll be quite comfortable for a while.’

  She thought about it. ‘I think you must be telling me that you did it, really.’

  ‘I’m afraid so, Ma. And it leaves a nasty taste. That’s why I’m throwing it in.’

  ‘But what will you do?’

  ‘Sell the London flat, buy a cottage in Downalong, and help Mathy finance a boat,’ he said briskly. ‘Keep out of harm’s way. I can’t get into trouble doing that. I’m going up to London on the sleeper tonight to fix things.’

  She had thought about it. ‘But in the long run?’ she had asked him. ‘You always planned to be rich. You were so fond of the good things in life—’

  ‘I’ve rather changed my mind’, he said, ‘about what those good things are.’

  ‘I’d be a long way from Alice, though,’ she had sai
d, jumping back several moves in the conversation.

  ‘Ma, I wouldn’t rely on Alice,’ he had said. ‘She might be anywhere.’

  Alone in the house that night, Marian set herself to the task of thinking. She could tell herself her story now. ‘My father was a fisherman, my mother was an artist,’ seemed a St Ives sort of thing to have happened. And in that place and time it needed to be kept secret. Perhaps Stella’s friends would have been tolerant, perhaps they wouldn’t. Perhaps it would have seemed shocking to get into a liaison with one’s model – well, no, hardly that – but then perhaps if the model was the man – would it perhaps have been shocking to cross the gulf of class, and risk ill feeling with the deeply religious local people? Anyway, for whatever reason, Stella had kept it secret. Even her friends of that time, even Violet who had lived with her, had not known until much later who Marian’s father was.

  And father had been deeply shamed by it. He had been kept from doing his duty by it. Perhaps he had got religion only much later in life, but even at the time he had suffered sharp remorse. And it was to protect him that Stella had left the town, taken her daughter away, escaped from rumour and guesswork. And Marian saw, suddenly clairvoyant, that it had not been the fear that her father would be unmasked as an adulterer that had displaced them, but the far worse fear that it might be guessed where he had been that night. That others would accuse him of what now he accused himself of – being to blame for what happened when the boat was being launched short-handed.

  It had been a very damaging thing for Stella to do, going elsewhere. She had lost touch with the golden vein of inspiration that had given her her best work. She had not been able to paint like that anywhere else. All the best things she had done depended on the light here, on the land here, on the moving water, on the circle of other artists, on the ramshackle warren of studios, on love and anger and rivalry and the bright tide of ideas. Stella had needed the talk, the work to look at, the winds of influence that outsiders brought with them to blow around the town. Exile had hurt her badly. So why, when she thought that Thomas Tremorvah was dead, had Stella not come back again here?

  But by then, of course, the people were dispersed, the scene was different. The Society of Artists was split from top to bottom, the modernists had resigned and made their own society, and that too was rent by dissension. You make choices and live with them. Your chances don’t come twice. And Marian’s chance to talk to Stella, to understand her, had gone for good.

  She heard the front door softly opened, and softly closed and bolted. Alice, coming in very late. Perhaps it was unconsciously waiting for Alice that kept Marian awake, thinking. You never get over being parent-figure when they are under the same roof. Ridiculous, Marian told herself, I wouldn’t worry if she were anywhere else. The bedroom door opened, and Alice looked round it. Alice flushed, and dishevelled, and glowing.

  ‘I saw your light still on,’ she said, coming to sit on the end of the bed.

  ‘Hullo, darling,’ said Marian. ‘Do you want to come and meet your grandfather tomorrow?’

  ‘Whenever,’ said Alice, ‘but not tomorrow. Mum, I’m going to the Scillies for a few days. Leo’s taking me; he’s going to show me a few things.’

  Marian said, ‘Alice, what can you be playing at? Shouldn’t you keep company with someone nearer your own age?’

  ‘Keep company? Mother, this isn’t about sex.’

  ‘But I thought …’ Marian foundered, visibly astonished.

  ‘Well, it is,’ said Alice, ‘but only for comfort. Only out of kindness. It doesn’t matter. It’s your generation that is so hung up about sex …’

  ‘But, my God, child, Leo is my generation; even older!’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ said Alice. ‘I assumed it was me you were worrying about.’

  ‘Make no mistake, I do worry about you. Deeply. I hate to see you so unhappy.’

  ‘You would rather see me happily married with two point eight children and a nice little job as a music teacher? You would, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Would that be so bad a thing?’

  ‘It seems impossible, that’s all,’ said Alice, suddenly quiet. ‘I have plenty of offers, Mum. But I can’t love anyone who puts love first.’

  ‘But Alice that’s what love is like. Any kind of love. I have put you and Toby first from the moment you were born.’

  ‘And didn’t you ever think it might be the wrong place to put children? That it might ask too much of us? That it was hard enough finding our own reason for living, without being yours as well? Look, I’ll be off very early; we have to catch the boat. So here’s the key to Leo’s. He says go and look at the work. OK?’

  Alice leaned over Marian and kissed her. ‘There, Mum, don’t look sad. I hate you to look sad.’

  And yet sadness possessed her. She woke the next morning to an empty house, almost audibly empty, and out of a clear dream. Marian did not usually remember dreams, and hated to be told other people’s, but this one lingered in hallucinatory clarity. She had been going to see Stella in the Barrington house. She had let herself in, and marched straight to the barn at the back. ‘Mother,’ she had said, ‘you never told me that you loved my father. You never said there was anything for which you risked your art.’

  Stella made no reply to this, but began to fade away among the stacked canvases, the shadows in the dark barn.

  And dream, Marian began wailing, ‘Why didn’t you tell me? I got you wrong! Why didn’t you tell me?’

  And as she woke an unspoken voice said to her clearly in the silence, ‘Why didn’t you ask?’

  Slowly, like a person maimed, she got herself dressed, and went into the breakfast room.

  The table was laid, and there were two notes leaning against the milk jug. One from Toby saying, ‘Back tomorrow. Love, T.’ One from Alice saying, ‘Sorry about last night. I take it all back. Love, Alice.’

  But also, bursting suddenly into the kitchen through the back door, came Alice – a radiant Alice with her duffel bag in one hand and a ripped-open envelope in the other.

  ‘I thought you’d gone,’ said Marian.

  ‘Oh, God, Mum, I nearly missed it!’ said Alice. ‘I just passed the postman on my way down the hill, and I just happened to ask him if he had a letter for me—’

  ‘But what is it?’ asked Marian.

  ‘From Max. A rehearsal tonight. I’ve come back for my viola, and I can just about get the morning train. Max wants me back! Make me a quick coffee, Mum, will you?’

  ‘Alice, what about Leo?’

  ‘I’ll phone him. Don’t worry, Mum, he’s going to the Scillies anyway. He’ll get over it.’

  Marian made the coffee. She heard Alice on the phone in the hall – a brutally quick and unemotional conversation – and then she reappeared, holding her instrument case.

  ‘Alice, wait,’ cried Marian, as Alice opened the door to go. ‘Are you sure you ought to go running back to Max at the crook of his little finger?’

  ‘It isn’t Max, Mum, it’s music,’ she said. ‘And don’t forget to look at Leo’s work,’ she called, slamming the door behind her.

  So later, when she had made her bed, and cleared her breakfast dishes, Marian went out. She took the route down Tregenna Hill, with unfolding prospects of the bay and harbour. The town was basking in unseasonable light, tricking itself out in gold and azure. It did not cheer her. She looked at it with bitter regret, engulfed as it was by vulgarity, by the blaring music from the amusement arcade, and the stupid posters, by the junk art and junk food on offer everywhere. The peeling paint, the stonecrop-blocked gutters with the green slick on the walls below them, the signs all there if you were in the mood for them, of decay, of enterprises fallen on hard times, appeared in uncanny clarity to her as she passed. The fishermen’s lodges on the wharf were all locked up and empty, and nobody leaned on the railings beside them to exchange the time of day.

  Marian walked with leaden feet into Downalong. Here more than anywhere you could feel the force o
f a way of life that had ebbed away like a neap tide. This place was shaped for people who all knew each other, whose doors stood open to their neighbours, who for good or ill lived full in each other’s view. The generations of their families had piled up here like the sands on the shore. They had worked together, and shared the sea’s bounty and the sea’s dangers. The lifeboat had been their form of manliness, their form of solidarity, their fashion of loving their fellow men. And the lovely old times were gone like the masted ships in the harbour, and the shoals in the sea. There is nothing whatever do not look like what it was … Look at it now, she thought, the people dispersed, their livelihood withered away, the survivors prised out of their houses to make way for the mobs of visitors—

  The nearer she got to Leo’s door the more slowly she walked. She was afraid; she dreaded it, she was half drowned already. She realized, standing there with the key in her hand, that Leo must be the real thing, or she would not be afraid of his work. But having come so far, with such inner difficulty, she opened the door, and went in.

  There was a bronze wave on a stone plinth. It was polished, but only where the gouts of bronze represented the breaking foam. The dark wave swelled, and turned over into gold, as though breaking on a beach in a bright evening. Held in the overarching topple of the form was the vestigial, barely surfacing form of a man.

  ‘Do you like it?’ came Leo’s voice behind her.

  ‘Like isn’t the word. There isn’t a right word.’

  ‘It had to meet the rules for the Barnoon Cemetery, up behind Porthmeor Beach,’ he said. ‘So I suppose Stella wanted it for herself.’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. I think it must have been for Thomas Tremorvah – my father—’

  ‘Well I think you can put up a memorial to someone years after they’re dead, if you want to,’ he said.