‘The funny thing is,’ she told him, ‘this is in good time.’
‘I don’t follow you,’ he said.
So she told him about it.
‘Well then, it must be for him,’ he said, when she had done. They were still standing side by side, and looking at the bronze wave.
‘I’m sorry it cost so much,’ he said. ‘It was getting it cast.’
‘That doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘But Leo – weren’t you supposed to be off to the Scillies? I didn’t expect you to be here.’
‘Didn’t feel like going alone,’ he said. ‘Want to come? Carry my gear for me? Better be next week now.’
Marian was silent, the instant negative that had sprung to her lips bitten back.
‘I’d be glad if you would,’ he said. ‘Come, I mean. You don’t have to carry things for me. She leaves a hell of a gap.’
‘Alice?’
‘No. Stella.’
‘Let me think – I’ll think about it,’ she said.
‘Oh, did I say there’s to be an inscription on that?’ he said, pointing vaguely at his wave. ‘Round the plinth. I’ll get it cut by a friend who’s good at lettering. I take it there isn’t any hurry?’
‘No. What is it going to say?’
‘Whosoever will save his life shall lose it,’ said Leo.
‘Of course,’ said Marian. ‘I should have known that.’
She began the walk home. On the harbour beach a woman was painting, working at an easel, her box of oils balanced on a folding stool beside her. Marian stopped to watch for a moment. The artist was painting the row of three arches that pierced the quay, and the upturned boats overwintering in a row above them. And of course her gestures were familiar to Marian – the brush upheld, and the thumb marking off a dimension in the view – the dibbling in the paint on the palette, the long considered and then seemingly impulsive sweep of the brush on the canvas—
So that there came to her mind in the same moment the thought that it is those who miss the boat who carry the scars for years, who can never forget, whereas the only man who saved both his life and his honour that night had said simply, ‘Why should it be? We aren’t here long enough for that,’ and in the same moment the recollection of Stella on the wave-crest of the swelling Downs, offering Marian brushes, offering her an easel, smiling.
The empty house was full of light, of perspectives. She walked round it, musing. In Alice’s room she straightened the bed, and picked up a book from the floor. A slender volume of poems by Sassoon: The Heart’s Journey. The flyleaf bore Stella’s name, and the date 1930. Below, at some time, Stella had written, ‘for Leo’. A postcard marked a page with a poem about a Bach fugue. Marian read it through.
I gaze at my life in a mirror, desirous of good …
There was a mirror in her own room. A heavy, full-length mirror on a stand. She pulled it into the bay window, which, like the one in the living room below, gave a triptych prospect of the bay. The mirror filled with light and distances, the open bay, and the far off lighthouse, that lovely monument to altruism, riding its remote rock like a Wallis ship, for the fall of the light gave it the semblance of a jaunty tilt. Marian fetched Stella’s paintbox, and the vacant primed canvas, and Alice’s music stand to prop it on. She was afraid. She was alone in the cave of flesh, memory’s twisting echo-chamber. Across one way out lay human nakedness, across the other rising oblivion. And it was neither her father’s absence, nor her mother’s abstraction that had hollowed out that cavernous void – it was she herself who had gone missing. She herself who had been lost.
She began to mime Stella – squeezing an array of colours onto the palette, half-filling her tooth-mug with turps. Unnoticed on her shoes and on the floor, the drips of paint began the incursion of chaos. Slowly she turned to face herself. She was standing between the mirror and the light, cast into shadow so that she could discern herself only dimly. But what she wanted to see was truth naked, like the rocks in the tide. It was not something that could be suddenly accomplished. The steepness of the task – it could take the rest of her life – appalled her. She would have to go about it, and about … She drew in the dark outline of her own shape. She herself was still obscure to her, but her background was clear – the golden shores, the blue waters of the bright bay, with white water breaking all over it, and a boat – was it the lifeboat?, making out to sea. She dipped her brush into the extruded worm of white, and put on the canvas in front of her a short vertical stroke. For she was desirous of good; she desired it now more than she feared chaos or failure. And if she could bring her picture to any sort of completion, this first mark would represent a vision of the distant lighthouse.
This is an invented story, containing an account of a true one. The 1939 lifeboat disaster at St Ives, Cornwall, really happened. William and Margaret Freeman and John Stevens are or were real people. The great kindness to me of Mrs Margaret Freeman, who told me her story, and of Barry Cockcroft who lent me a copy of his film Take a Lifejacket has made it possible to enter the real people into the story almost entirely in their own words. Anyone who would like to read a non-fiction account of the 1939 lifeboat disaster will find the story well told in Barry Cockcroft’s recent The Call of the Running Tide (Hodder & Stoughton).
Apart from the passing mentions of established artists and lifeboat men, all the other people in this story, including Thomas Tremorvah and Stella Harnaker, are imaginary. They have been conjured out of thin air and bear no resemblance to any real person living or dead.
I would like to thank John Rowe Townsend, Peter Davison and Bill Scott-Kerr, who know best what help they gave; Mr Graham Care for introducing me to Margaret Freeman; Mr Philip Moran for information on the current organization of the St Ives lifeboat; David Bass, Gillian, Brendan and Aidan McClure for playing me Alice’s music; and finally the people of St Ives, among whom, although I am a stranger and they are much beset by strangers, I have found only friendship and kindness all my life.
The Serpentine Cave Page 20