The Serpentine Cave

by Jill Paton Walsh

‘Dad will think himself well out of this,’ said Alice. ‘I’ll be as quick as poss.’

  ‘Fine. Do you need money?’

  ‘Toby, even viola players can afford food.’

  As the door closed behind her, he went for the phone.

  Marian woke as a small child. For a long moment she lay warmly awake, slightly puzzled as to her exact whereabouts, as she had so often been before. But it was indubitably childhood. The battered and faded familiarity of the chest-of-drawers, the bedside alarm clock, leaning backwards on angled legs, and topped with a miniature structure like a bicycle bell – the worn coverlet stretching over her – all these things which had been hers before she left home carried her backwards and displaced her sense of self. Even more vivid was the rapturously sweet sense of other people in the house – footfalls, quiet voices, a door closing, a few notes played on the piano – that wonderful sensation of a house which contained others, in which other lives also were sheltered and flowing, in which one’s own silence was not silence, one’s own stillness was not stillness – how she had missed it all this time living alone! There was the violently reminiscent faint penetrating odour of turps … only when Marian moved did she feel, astonished, the adult weight and length of her grown limbs, and come to herself again.

  Of course, she was herself the grown-up; the children were downstairs, and the children themselves were grown up. She got up and went down to the kitchen. There she found Alice stirring a pot on the stove, and Toby rinsing brushes and laying them out on kitchen paper to dry.

  The room was transformed; the dishwasher was rumbling away on an umpteenth load, and the dresser was bright with clean dishes. The floor had been washed, the counters wiped, a vase with dead flowers now displayed some prospective daffodils with tightly rolled yellow-tipped buds. She perceived with astonishment their competence, their willingness, Toby especially, doing the brushes.

  ‘I was going to do that, Toby,’ she said.

  ‘Done,’ he said, grinning. ‘Gran always said I was good at it.’

  ‘Did she? I thought I was the only one she let do it.’

  ‘More fool you two,’ said Alice tartly. ‘I made sure I did it very badly, myself. I hope you like garlic, Mum.’

  ‘Have you done supper, darling?’

  ‘I thought we had better eat before visiting this evening – don’t you?’

  Marian realized she was ravenously hungry, and eagerly agreed. And yet her appetite was a chimera which faded after a mouthful, leaving her feeling vacant and sick.

  ‘There, Ma,’ said Toby, ‘it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Alice cooked it …’ said Marian sadly, looking at the buttery, garlicky spaghetti on her plate.

  ‘It’s only spaghetti, Mum,’ said Alice, untroubled. ‘Shall I make you soup instead?’

  Her children’s kindness was too much for her. She sat tongue-tied, overcome.

  ‘Oh, there, Ma, don’t take on,’ said Toby, and then, absurdly, ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘It’s too late!’ she said; the words had risen to her lips before reaching her conscious mind.

  ‘Too late for what?’ asked Alice.

  ‘Too late to ask her things – all the things I was going to ask her, and she was always busy, so busy, and I didn’t ask and now she can’t tell me … Oh, I left it too late!’

  Her son and her daughter both put down their forks and looked at her tenderly.

  ‘What did you want to ask, Ma?’ said Toby softly. His eyes met Alice’s, wide and full of unspoken warning. They were both expecting an answer; they both knew what they thought she would have wanted to know; she must have wanted to know about her father, their missing grandfather, never named, never spoken of, whose absence had left their mother lacking some sort of sixth sense, whose absence had led in the fullness of time – or so they saw it – to the defection of their own father.

  But what Marian said, at last, was nothing about her father. It was: ‘Oh, where were the beaches? Where was the Serpentine Cave?’

  Someone had been there wearing a dress printed with bright blotchy flowers. Pansies, printed pansies. The dress had smelled of laundry – that washing line, open-air smell. Marian’s face had been leaning against the dress, as she was carried down. It must – surely? – have been Stella’s arms she was carried in; but if she rigorously divided memory from supposition, she would have to admit to remembering only the dress, not the wearer. They had to climb down a steep cliff-face. The cliff-top grass was shining and slippery. Marian was passed to another person, who held her firmly, and carried her down to the roaring shore.

  But on the beach she had been alone. There were huge cliffs, and enormous pillars of rock, standing up out of the sea. It was a rowdy sea, with great glassy walls of waves rolling towards her, and falling into flat, speeding, lacy shallows at the last minute. She had been afraid of the sea; it was too big for her, here. She had backed away up the beach, towards the mouth of a cave. The cave glistened and shone. Down at her eye-level it had polished walls, smooth and coloured. Dark green and dark red, and speckled grey-white, marbled together like the lump of used Plasticine rolled into a ball when she finished modelling, but shiny where the Plasticine was dull. She had touched the gleaming rock, and walked further into the cave.

  It was like a cave in dreams; or, perhaps, it was the cave that afterwards she dreamed of. The roof was rough and dark, and the floor was of smoothest golden sand, cool, firm and gritty under her bare feet. The polished planes of the walls were like coloured tombstones. And across the door of the cave there beat with slow violence a slowly rising tide. Right at the back of the cave facing her was a surface of particular beauty, deep red, with snaking lines of white and green. It was not darker back there, so she walked further in. And soon she saw that the cave was L-shaped; the light at the back was falling from another entrance, which gave out onto a prospect of more bright sunlit sand. So she went out by this other way.

  Beyond the cave she was walking on a golden causeway towards another mass of offshore rock, taller than houses, and topped with grassy green. And in this mysterious place the sea was on both sides, on her right and on her left hand; roaring towards her in huge toppling glassy towers. She had thought the sea was always on one side, and the land the other. There were gulls calling overhead, and some of them began to call her name, screaming from some distance off. She went back into the cave, from which her own footprints led out to where she stood. But when she had walked back through it she found her way blocked, and she doubled back again through the cave.

  The spine of sand beyond it was narrow now; it was awash with joining waters, running up the slopes and clapping themselves together in the middle. She ran for a little dry patch, and at once found no way back. She stood islanded, and said to the ocean, ‘Don’t!’

  Someone came. A man came wading knee deep, shouting, and lifted and carried her. The only way possible, which was out to the cliff island ahead of them. He scrambled up higher and higher, pushing and dragging her with him, until they were on a flat grassy ledge, quite a wide one, with pinks and lady’s slipper growing in the grass. He crouched down with her in the wind shelter of a rock.

  There must have been a sunset, but she did not remember it. All these memories had been sorted out long ago into some sort of sequence – a sequence full of darkness and puzzlement, but more orderly than the broken, intensely vivid visual ‘stills’ from which it had been assembled. It had been dark and cold. She remembered a great moon sailing up out of the sea, and icing the scene with faint but lucid light.

  When she said, ‘I’m hungry,’ the man said, ‘I’m sorry.’ When she asked for her mother he pointed at a tiny point of bright flickering orange light, a fire burning on the facing shore, and said that was where Stella was. When she said she was cold, he took her on his knee, opened his jacket, and buttoned her into it, and she could feel his heartbeat. Now and then he unbuttoned his jacket, made her stand up, made her walk about, run, even. She didn’t want to. There we
re bright stars. Below them the moonlit water was softly clamouring.

  How long was it? – she could not tell – before the waves rolled back, and reluctantly exposed a ribbon of wet, dimly visible sand? It changed its mind between one wavebreak and the next, uncovering and recovering the precarious link to the land. The man helped her down, and held her hand as they ran across between wave and wave, getting wet; but she remembered it not seeming cold – she was bone frozen already.

  There were people round the fire on the cliff. They had blankets, and hot soup. They wore coats and scarves. They would not let Marian and the man come near the fire. And Stella was angry with her.

  When she recovered enough to explain herself, Toby and Alice received what fragments of this memory she told over for them with considerable interest.

  ‘They kept you away from the fire because it’s dangerous to warm up too quickly,’ said Alice. ‘I learned that in First Aid.’

  ‘Is it?’ said Marian. ‘Yes, you’re right; I think I knew that – but I never connected it, somehow.’ She was bemused; she could actually feel the faint ghost of resentment, which clung about the memory like the fusty air in an old chest, dispersing at Alice’s breezy interpretation.

  ‘Was the man our grandfather, do you think?’ asked Toby. Somehow he avoided saying ‘your father’ which seemed too nakedly tactless.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Marian. ‘Don’t you think I would know, if he had been?’

  ‘Perhaps if it was wartime he had been away for ages and he was home on leave,’ suggested Alice.

  But Marian thought that somehow even if he had been strange to her, surely Stella would have told her that this was her father – surely such a thing as that could not have been unspoken. Though of course, with Stella one could not know. She might or might not have dealt with her child as another woman would.

  It had always been a problem. What seemed natural to Stella, needing no explanation or excuse, seemed, often, weird and arbitrary to those around her, including her daughter. Nothing much, on the other hand, seemed weird to Stella, except her daughter. And on that reciprocal strangeness Marian had time to reflect in the days that followed, as she came faithfully to sit by her mother’s bedside, and think of things that might be said into silence:

  ‘Toby cleaned your brushes … Your neighbours have been asking after you … the vicar called; I told him you were here, I hope you didn’t mind? Did he come? …’ And when nothing brought a grunt, a flicker of reaction, a turn of the head, greatly daring she asked, ‘Mother, where was the Serpentine Cave?’

  And then there was time to wonder, sitting in the room heavy with silence, on the little hard armchair facing the bed, on where it could have been, out of dozens of places possible, and why Marian did not now know where it was.

  Stella had moved. She would move in somewhere – a little house in Concarneau, a flat in Rome, a concrete villa in the Algarve, a house in Argenteuil, a farmhouse near Avignon, an apartment in Siena – Marian lost count. Stella would enrol Marian in the local school, and leave her struggling with strange teachers, wary children, a gobbledygook language. She, Stella, would plunge furiously into the local scenery and paint it. Some time later, often when Marian had found a friend of some sort, knew the way to the local shops, had mastered the unfamiliar coins, Stella would suddenly have exhausted the landscape, and would move on. Stella did sometimes sell pictures; she toted them around cafés, she painted portraits which the sitters dutifully bought, she sent some home to England with departing friends who came visiting. But she also abandoned pictures, leaving numbers of them stacked face to the wall in the rooms that they left.

  Marian could be reduced to tears, helpless rage in which she screamed and kicked, simply by the sight of a suitcase. And yet there was a consolation. Each new place was so clean and orderly when they moved in. Stella rented places that smelled of furniture wax, or of the coastal air. The walls were often white, the bedlinen worn fine with age and use. Even Stella could not create chaos – unwashed dishes lying on the trestle among the paints, the smell of turpentine, the clothes cast everywhere and hanging out of half open drawers like the aftermath of a burglary, the twisted and deformed tubes of paint, with caps forgotten, or dried-on solid, the stale loaves mustily green in the bins – absolutely instantly. Even Stella took a week or so to reduce her surroundings to the familiar condition of home. That week partly reconciled her daughter to the arduous business of learning local words, coinage, faces all over again.

  For Marian had yearned for order. For things kept clean and put away after use. For spaces which specialized, so that cooking was confined to the kitchen, sleeping to the bedrooms; so that the toothbrushes could reliably be found in the bathroom, and coats and shopping baskets in the hall, hanging up. So that there should be a room, called the sitting room, la salle de séjour, the drawing room, il salotto, the lounge even, dedicated to the comfortable doing of nothing whatever, so that it could be calm, with clean cushions, folded newspapers, books in a bookcase – a room in which it appeared possible that people sometimes just sat. Above all, Marian longed for painting to be kept in a studio. For there not to be wet surfaces everywhere, for there to be a possibility at least of having no paint at all on her clothes, especially the ones she wore to school.

  None of these things mattered to Stella. She thought about her paintings, and the light.

  Once, after a particularly painful quarrel – for these differences between mother and daughter did not go unenunciated – Stella tried to explain herself, excuse herself to her daughter. Marian could not now remember what the triggering quarrel was about; not surprisingly her childhood was a blur to her now. She could barely remember which place was which … Mother, where was the Serpentine Cave? Perhaps they had quarrelled about a move. No – it must have been the occasion when she had been brought home in disgrace, having run amuck in a French classroom, bloodied the nose of a fellow pupil, refused to sit down …

  The teacher had asked her what her father did for a living.

  ‘I have no father.’

  ‘Your mother, then?’

  Groping for the word, Marian said, ‘Elle est une artiste.’

  The other children tittered. But it was because the teacher had laughed too that Marian went berserk, and lashed out at the boy sitting beside her.

  ‘But what should I have said?’ Marian had asked her mother, as later they mulled over the calamity together, sitting facing each other across a table covered in congealed paint and abandoned coffee cups.

  Stella had fetched her Harrap’s French Dictionary, and consulted it. ‘Une femme peintre,’ she said. ‘It seems I am une femme peintre. But it’s somewhat obscure. I might be une artiste peintre. But perhaps that sounds too like the artiste as in trapeze artiste, singer, stripper, performing seal, performing whore, or whatever it is you accidentally called me …’

  And Marian had wailed at Stella, ‘Why can’t you be like other people’s mothers?’

  Stella had not answered at first. She had wiped her hands on her overall, leaving a smear of flake-white on the blue canvas, moved across the room to the little bench that served as a kitchen, lifted the kettle off the gas ring, tipped the dregs of something out of a chipped mug, made herself a Camp Coffee, brought it to the table, and sat down facing her sullen and accusing child.

  ‘You see, Mara,’ she said, using Marian’s self-given, lisping baby name, ‘there isn’t any point in living just to live. In making oneself rich and comfortable and then just being rich and comfortable. What would it be for? Things have to be for something.’

  At the time Marian couldn’t see anything she herself was for. Her answers, when they came, would be Toby and Alice, and Stella would have applied the same brutal query to them.

  ‘You find something to live for,’ said Stella, ‘and it takes priority. It must. Painting, for me. Only that.’

  ‘What about me?’ Marian had asked.

  ‘You’ll find something,’ her mother had said
. ‘There are lots of things.’ But Marian had been asking a more dangerous question.

  ‘And are they all arty, these things?’ she had retorted, bitterly. ‘I think to make your life worthwhile something useful would be better!’

  ‘Then you will do something useful. But useful things, you know, are only for use.’

  ‘What’s for supper?’ young Marian had asked, baffled, and playing her ace card. Even her mother had to eat.

  At bedtime that day Stella had arrived to kiss Marian goodnight – she did not usually bother – and said, ‘I suppose you don’t fancy that school any more. I think I might go and paint Italy for a while.’

  ‘Mother,’ Marian had said, ‘isn’t there anything to paint in England?’

  Later shame was replaced by pride. An art teacher in the secondary school, in a mundane inland suburb of Brighton where they had fetched up, gave Marian a life of Van Gogh. The story transformed Stella’s total inability to sell paintings in England from a badge of failure into a possible waymark on the path to glory. Marian’s classmates at this stage of life mostly despised their mothers, whose neat homes, dated taste in clothes, and preference for dreadful dance music put them beyond every possible pale. The chaos and freedom of Marian’s life impressed them. And she was in the grip of a fierce and partisan admiration for her mother. Stella was a heroine, a self-sacrificing, aspiring martyr to her art. The desperate hand-to-mouth economy of mother and daughter, the near hardship they endured as the unsold paintings accumulated on top of wardrobes and under beds, the all too obvious disinterested lack of material greed which characterized Stella’s life-choices further impressed her daughter. Marian’s admiration was compounded by the knowledge that she herself would never be so noble; there was no cause or skill of anything like comparable difficulty and elevation that she, Marian, wished to serve or acquire. She was going to be ordinary.