The Sea Cave

by Alan Scholefield

  ‘The sun is over the yardarm, as they say,’ he had said, and taken a long swallow.

  He had talked about London. Kate had been there only to catch the boat-train for Southampton so she had listened in silence and soon she had realised that this was all he required, to relieve his loneliness.

  His house had a cold, unloved look, though she assumed he had a house-keeper, someone like Lena, to clean and cook. The furnishings were brown and the curtains let in very little light. It was a gloomy place, she thought, that needed a woman’s hand.

  He had talked about rugby and indicated the pictures around the walls and the silver trophies and tasselled caps in a glass-fronted cabinet. She felt that he must have brought them into the room since his wife’s death, for they were not the kind of ornaments and pictures one usually saw in a family house. It was as though he had turned the living-room into a memorial to his past.

  He had brought over the sherry decanter to refill her glass, but she had shaken her head.

  ‘The doctor knows best,’ he had said, dimples showing as he smiled.

  He had filled her glass and given himself a second brandy, larger than the first. He had asked her about Edinburgh and she had answered briefly. Then he had asked about her family, but before she could talk about it he had begun to tell her about his own children. They were in Cape Town, two sons who were both doing well.

  Soon she had begun to feel a need to get out of the claustrophobic room. Outside, the sun was shining and the sea was shimmering, but inside the house it was stuffy and hot.

  ‘Have you met anyone your own age here?’ he said.

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘You should meet Miriam Sachs.’

  ‘She was on the train when I came to Helmsdale.’

  ‘She’s a very, how can I put it? – out-going girl. I’ve known her for years. I taught her to swim. Her father is away a lot, you know. She gets lonely when she’s here alone.’

  Kate had put her sherry glass down on a table next to her chair and, for the first time, noticed a magazine, lying open. There were illustrations, but she could not make out what they were.

  ‘You should get to know Miriam. Have some fun.’ He paused. ‘I’ve watched her grow from a little girl into a woman.’

  Kate’s eyes had strayed to the magazine again. There was something familiar about one of the diagrams. She realised she was looking at an illustration of a vagina.

  Du Toit saw her reaction and picked up the magazine. He held it out to her. ‘If you’re interested, borrow it.’

  Words she had never seen written before sprang from the page: penis, testicles, vagina, clitoris. It was a medical journal, but the words were a shock.

  She rose. ‘I must go. Mrs. Preller will be waiting.’

  ‘You haven’t finished your. . .’

  She slipped past him and went out through the surgery door and into the sunshine.

  Since then she had turned down several invitations from him for drinks or supper and had seen to it that any packages were picked up by Smuts.

  Now he was dressed formally in a black coat, sponge-bag trousers and a wing collar. He towered over the diminutive Mrs. Preller.

  ‘What news of Sachs?’ she said.

  ‘He’s not too good. When the police told him, he collapsed. Heart. It hasn’t been strong for some time. I got him to hospital.’

  ‘You see?’ Mrs. Preller turned to Kate. ‘It is as I said.’

  ‘He can’t come today, of course. Maybe it’s for the best. I heard the ice-factory wants to get rid of her as quickly as possible.’

  ‘Who can blame them?’ Mrs. Preller said. ‘You don’t want to make ice near a dead body.’

  They moved out of the hot sun, but it was not much cooler inside the courtroom. Dr. du Toit led them to a row of reserved seats. The only windows were high on one wall and were covered in blinds to keep out the sun, so that the light was dim. An electric fan stood on the clerk’s table, but it only seemed to move hot air from one part of the court-room to another. Kate glanced about her. The room was all mahogany and green leather. The Bench was in front of her, rising like the prow of a ship, and behind it was the Coat of Arms. Her mind went back to another Bench, a different Coat of Arms, another courtroom. Then it had been a trial, not an inquest, and it was her brother Douglas who had stood in the dock.

  It was there, in the Sheriff’s Court in Edinburgh, that she had felt her deepest despair. All her life until then she had fought to get away from her family. As a child her need had been subconscious, as an adult consciously planned. When she heard her brother found guilty she had tasted real bitterness; she had known she could never escape them, for without her, they were lost.

  They had always lived in the same tenement near the Canongate, with the smell of urine and vomit on the common stair. Even as a child, she’d had to help her father up those stairs when he’d had too much to drink on a Friday night. Often he would have spent all his money in the Rose Street pubs and they’d only had the few shillings her mother made with the ironing to buy their mutton pies and pease pudding. As far back as that she had decided that some day, somehow, she was going to escape from the wynds of Edinburgh.

  She’d had one stroke of luck – and that was all she had needed. The headmistress of her first school had felt sorry for the child with the pinched face and thin, bony body, and had given her more attention than most. Kate had responded. She had done good work. She had been praised. The praise had brought a stronger response. It became, instead of the vicious circle of failure into which some children fall, a circle that bred success. The more she achieved the more she was praised and the more she wanted to achieve.

  But still she’d had to live in the stifling atmosphere of the tenement where Duggie was growing into the image of his father. As a counter-balance, she had given more and more time to her school work. She had taken extra classes so she would not have to go home, even learning to play the piano.

  And then one day she had been told about scholarships, and had seen a way to break out of her rut. Each year, one or two girls of her class were awarded scholarships to the Academy, a boarding establishment out past Morningside near the Braid Hills. If she had to board, she could not live at home. She worked as she had never worked before and six months later was living in a kind of paradise. She had slept in a dormitory in a bed with clean, crisp sheets and eaten three good meals a day. She did not go home even on those weekends set aside for visiting.

  She had spent four years at the Academy, the happiest years of her life. She hardly knew that a war was on or that her brother was fighting. She had not wanted to know. She had not wanted anything to intrude.

  But it could not last for ever. The four years had come to an end and she had returned home. She had taken a job in a shop in George Street and begun bringing money home. It had been the signal for her father to become even more erratic. He was a carpenter and was paid by the hour; now he worked fewer hours and spent more time in the pubs. Kate had realised that she was in another circle, only this time the vicious one. She had begun putting a little of her money away, secretly, and used it to pay for shorthand and typing lessons at Nelson’s College in Charlotte Square. Soon she had moved from a shop to an office, where the pay was better.

  All that now seemed to be part of her distant youth. Her adult life, if she could date it, must have started the day she had gone to meet the hospital train at the Waverley Station and seen Duggie brought along on his stretcher. She had almost forgotten what he looked like and had thought how handsome he was. She had felt the tears rise and he had said, ‘Now don’t, Kate, it’s only a wee bit of a scratch.’

  But it wasn’t a scratch and it had been weeks before he could walk on his wounded leg. His discharge came and, with it, a small disability grant. He had found it difficult to settle down and had started drinking heavily. She remembered how he would limp out of the tenement, sometimes with his father, sometimes alone, and they wouldn’t see him for the rest of the day.


  One day after he had come to her with his handsome face alight with the charm he could switch on and off – as his father could – and borrowed a pound for the evening’s entertainment, she had spoken about him to her mother. She could not recall precisely what she had said, but she remembered the reaction clearly. She had always known that Duggie was her mother’s favourite child, but she had never seen it so marked as at that moment. Her mother had been ironing and she had put down the flat-iron and looked at Kate, her gaunt face hostile.

  ‘He’s restless,’ she had said. ‘Who wouldn’t be after what he’s been through, so you just haud your tongue about him.’

  As far as Jean Buchanan was concerned, it was enough to have him back. She had fretted every day he had been away. Now he was home. Her wee Duggie. And if he was restless and drinking, well, who wouldn’t with a leg as sair as his? But the restlessness had led to other things. Money borrowed, first from Kate, then from friends. When her father was in work there was money to be had there and sometimes he and Duggie would meet on a Friday night to spend it. Or there were other men home from the trenches. Old pals. They were restless, too. And work was hard to get, especially for a man with a bad leg. One thing had led to another, and then there had been the cheque book incident. Duggie had found it in a pub, lying under one of the tables. Or at least, that’s what he had told the police. He’d cashed a cheque in another pub. And another. Altogether, he had cashed a hundred and eighty pounds.

  Kate had watched her father in court. He hardly seemed aware of the enormity of what had happened. This was the first time any member of the family had seen the inside of a courtroom. Duggie had been pale and drawn, her mother tearful. Their lawyer had pleaded for Duggie on the basis of his war service, the wound in his leg. It was the type of plea that was often heard in those days and he had been bound over to be of good behaviour for 12 months.

  Kate had seen her future in that courtroom. She had wanted to walk away, but that was the moment when she had realised the impossibility of leaving them, and had begun to plan. If she couldn’t leave them, then they must all leave this city where she would never rise above her circumstances.

  Again luck, if one could describe pain as luck, came to her aid. Duggie’s leg was not healing. An osteopathic surgeon at the Royal Infirmary had advised that he needed sunshine, milk, fresh vegetables and fruit. It was impossible: there was no money for expensive fruit, and where was the sunshine to come from?

  From a sunny country, Kate said. If the sun wouldn’t come to them, they must go to the sun. And in sunny countries there was plenty of fruit and fresh vegetables Her campaign was directed at her mother. The specialist had mentioned the possibility of amputation if Duggie’s leg did not heal. Kate used the threat. Soon, scarcely realising what had happened, Mrs. Buchanan found herself convinced that if they stayed where they were, at the best Duggie would lose his leg, at the worst, die. She had made the final decision to leave Edinburgh.

  They had sold the lease of the tenement and most of their possessions and had taken steerage passages to the Cape of Good Hope. Kate could remember the Dulnain Castle swinging out into Southampton Water, the tugs pulling and pushing, the band playing, the streamers breaking, and her father, stiff and frightened, saying: ‘God knows when we’ll see the Old Country again.’ Even Duggie had looked sombre, as though he had understood at last what he and his father had achieved.

  But in the months that followed, their lives in Cape Town had fallen into much the same pattern as before. All they could afford was a tiny semi-detached villa in the run-down suburb of Observatory. Her father had managed to get the odd week’s work here and there. At first, even Duggie had brought in money selling insurance from door to door. But not for long. The sun was too warm for him.

  ‘You wouldna expect him to walk all over the town with his leg,’ Mrs. Buchanan said.

  Money had become everything and, for once, Kate was finding it difficult to get a job that would pay enough to keep them all. So when she had been offered work at Saxenburg, she had jumped at it; not only for the money but for the distance it would place between her and her family.

  They had all been to see her off at the Main Line Station in Cape Town, her mother in a shining black straw hat with the pins sticking out of it like skewers, her father in his Sunday best, but even then looking what he was: a man not to be trusted. And Duggie, handsome, hair glistening, limping up and down the train looking for her compartment. She remembered the dusty brown coaches, the howling south-easter blowing grit up from the trackside, the acrid fumes from the locomotive, the yells of the Cape coloured porters. And even then, the talk had been of money.

  ‘Have you got everything?’ her mother had said. They had been through this like a litany.

  ‘Yes, mother.’

  ‘I put in a wee bit of chicken and a hard-boiled egg and a tomato.’

  ‘I know, mother.’

  ‘You don’t want to spend anything in the dining-car.’

  ‘I won’t go near the dining-car.’

  ‘Do you remember where to send the money?’

  ‘I have it written down in six places. The Cape Province Savings Bank. St. George’s Street.’

  ‘What number?’

  ‘A hundred and eighty-two.’

  Mrs. Buchanan had nodded. ‘Do you think there’ll be a bank where you’re going?’

  ‘There’s bound to be. There are banks all over the country.’

  ‘It’s just that. . .’

  ‘I’m not going into the jungle. It’s not more than a hundred and something miles. The train only takes four hours.’

  ‘Yes, I know. I know that.’

  ‘And there are roads and telegraphs and telephones. You can even telephone me there.’

  ‘You wouldn’t expect me to spend money on a thing like that! No, it’s just that . . .’

  ‘And if there’s not, there’ll be a post office and I can send the money that way.’

  Mrs. Buchanan had looked vaguely around the station. She had not settled down in Cape Town. She was only really at peace when she was inside the house with Duggie. Just getting to Cape Town had been like getting to the end of the earth. The huge hinterland of Africa might have been the Gobi Desert or Antarctica or Outer Mongolia as far as she was concerned.

  ‘She must be a grand lady,’ she had said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘That Mrs. Preller.’

  ‘Remember, mother, I haven’t got the position yet. This is a trial.’

  ‘Och, if the lawyer says you’re good enough, I’m sure you can take his word. Just do what she tells you . . .’

  ‘Mother, I’m twenty-five years old!’

  ‘And if she asks you to do things you think . . . a little beneath you –’

  ‘They’ll have servants.’

  ‘I’m only saying if.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I don’t know. You mind your place, that’s all. You’re very self-willed at times.’

  Kate was about to say, ‘I need to be,’ when her father had said: ‘I’m sure she knows what to do.’ He had patted her gloved hand. ‘You’ll be just fine. I’ve seen how you’ve studied and worked. It’s a marvel what you’ve achieved. All you have to do is your best. You canna do more than that.’

  ‘Now, dad, don’t you start.’

  The guard had waved a green flag, there was a hiss of steam, and the train had begun to move out of the station.

  ‘Good-bye,’ she had called.

  Her mother was dabbing at dry eyes, her father had taken off his hat, Duggie was waving his cane. She had hardly noticed them. She was looking over their heads, as she had been for the past ten minutes, hoping to see Tom. She had told herself, as the train moved out of the station past the seventeenth-century Dutch castle on the one hand and the steely waters of Table Bay on the other, that it was a good thing he hadn’t come. She had told herself that distance would cut her off from Tom and what remained of their feelings would die a natural
death.

  But now, sitting in the courtroom at Helmsdale, she knew this to be one of the great ironies of her life, and in spite of the heat she felt herself go cold with the thought of what she had to do, what might happen in the future.

  The courtroom began to fill. She saw Mr. Sachs’ lawyer, Arnold Leibowitz, take his place at the advocates’ table. Van Blerk, the police sergeant who had interviewed her, came in and nodded respectfully towards Mrs. Preller. That had been a feature of the morning: the respectful greetings for the old lady. It was one of the first things Kate had noticed when they were together in Helmsdale. It was natural, she supposed, Mrs. Preller owned a great deal of Helmsdale. Smuts had come in and was sitting on Mrs. Preller’s far side, beyond Dr. du Toit. She turned and looked towards the rear of the court, where the coloureds stood. She could make out Lena and Betty, and in the far corner, almost hidden in the shadowy room, she saw Jonas.

  At that moment the coroner came in and the inquest started. She inspected him closely, for she was to be questioned by him. He had come from the town of Caledon some fifty miles away. He was an elderly man with moist eyes and walked with a shuffle. He took his seat on the Bench, nodded to Leibowitz, unscrewed a fountain pen and shifted his legal pad into the correct position.

  Sergeant Van Blerk was first on the witness stand and he began to giving evidence of identification.

  ‘You say the father is not in court?’ the coroner said.

  ‘That is correct, sir.’

  ‘But you contacted him?’

  ‘Yes, sir, the deceased was taken straight to the ice-factory. The day was very warm. I then went to call Mr. Sachs.’

  Van Blerk was a large man, running to fat. His head was bald and dotted with perspiration. He held a notebook in one hand and a handkerchief in the other, with which he wiped his forehead from time to time.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I accompanied him to the ice-factory where he identified the body as his daughter . . .’ He consulted his note-book. ‘Miriam Rose Sachs. And then he collapsed, sir.’

  I see. And he is still sick?’