The Serpentine Cave

by Jill Paton Walsh

  ‘Where will we get one?’ asked Alice. A severely practical discussion was in flow around the kitchen table.

  ‘We hire it from the Red Cross, I think,’ said Marian.

  ‘And we put it – where?’ asked Toby.

  They turned over the possibilities together. Not the kitchen. The bedrooms were small, and the cramped little stair with a wind in it was likely to make bed-hauling impossible. The living room was needed for the minimal comfort of whoever was living in and nursing, and in any case was rather gloomy, facing the screen of trees, and getting no sun.

  ‘The barn,’ said Alice. ‘It has to be the barn.’

  ‘Brace yourself, mother,’ said Toby. ‘It has to be the barn, and we have to turn it out. We have to, sometime.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Marian. ‘We do.’

  Toby opened the barn door briskly, and the three of them stood together on the threshold. A threefold unspoken reluctance overcame them. Marian remembered herself small – with a grazed knee, or with impossible homework, standing at some quite different door. Toby remembered pushing Alice ahead of him, starving hungry, wanting to ask when dinner … Alice remembered her grandmother, so kind, so permissive in every other room in the world, so ferocious and self-defended in this one – there rang in the silence for all of them the familiar autocratic voice saying, ‘Get out!’

  Here above all was where Stella had lived; here her absence loomed immanently, and it seemed ignoble and dangerous to take advantage of it. Toby was boldest, and unfroze first. They moved into the room. And the swiftest look around convinced them. The barn had two large wagon-doors, filled in as windows, facing each other amidships. One was heavily screened in coarse calico – that one faced south, and could be uncurtained to admit some cheerful light. The workbench on the wall against the house had an old butler’s sink plumbed in – for washing those brushes? – it would be useful. You could easily move the easels, and shift away the ramshackle shelving, with paints, tins and bottles, encrusted pallets, stacks of frame mouldings. There was a little cast iron stove that looked capable of enough warmth if kept fuelled. There was room for a bed, and a chair, and the clobber of a sick room, or at least there would be if the paintings were removed.

  The paintings were stacked on edge, leaning face down against each other, dozens and dozens deep. Long lines of the tilted boards backed away from the walls across the floor space.

  ‘We could move them up there – perhaps?’ said Alice uncertainly. She pointed to the hay floor, a platform halfway up the walls, which covered some third of the barn. It was inaccessible, except by a steep fixed ladder. Toby scrambled up. ‘There’s room up here,’ he reported. ‘Quite a lot would go here, if we pack them tightly.’

  Alice said, ‘We ought to sort them. We ought to see if there’s any kind of rhyme or reason in how they are stacked, and we ought to keep them together as they are if there is. Any system, that is.’

  ‘No-one’s ever going to care, sib,’ said Toby from on high. ‘They’ll all finish up being lugged into the orchard and burnt.’

  ‘They’re worthless, you mean? Gran’s entire life’s work, and all you can think is burn it?’ Standing below him in the middle of the floor, Alice was suddenly screaming at Toby.

  ‘Well, if they were worth anything, she would have been able to sell them …’

  ‘Everything comes down to money for you, doesn’t it? The great god money, the measure of all things! Just as well you’re so sodding good at earning it, because there’s fuck all else you’d be good for!’

  He had opened his mouth to scream back at her, the old familiar adolescent in-fighting pulling him like a needle in a record track, when his adult self supervened. Why was Alice picking on him like that? Answer: she was unhappy. There she was, standing below him full of rage and misery, and it had nothing to do with him. It probably didn’t have much to do with Stella, either, it was probably about Max.

  ‘Not here, Alice, not now,’ he said. ‘Bitch at me some other time. Let’s get going. Change places with me, Alice – those things will be heavy. I’ll heave them up to you, and you can stack them, and Mother can watch and wait.’ One by one Toby turned canvases over and passed them up to Alice. Landscapes, and flower paintings, worked in thick paint, in bright solid colours. They might have been recognizable, Marian supposed – this procession of scenes must contain the palimpsest record of her headlong, disrupted childhood, she should have been able to name the places, if she could see as Stella saw. Instead she could name the feeling in which they were eloquent, urgent – that sense of displacement—

  ‘What are they, anyway?’ Toby asked, pausing for breath.

  ‘What do you mean, what are they?’ said Alice. ‘They’re all of different things.’

  ‘I mean, are they impressionist, expressionist, colourist, fauve?’

  ‘No good asking me. Mother? You must know something about these.’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ said Marian. ‘Stellist – that’s what they are. I don’t know anything about them; I wouldn’t look, I wouldn’t listen, I wouldn’t know, I was afraid of it – of them – I wanted to be useful.’

  Her tone of voice brought Alice scrambling down the ladder to her side.

  ‘You were, to us. You were all the world to us,’ she said, squeezing her mother’s hand. Marian smiled at her. Though she had heard the necessary past tense.

  ‘But what would be useful now …’ she admitted.

  She had been staring for some time at the canvas standing on the easel in the middle of the room. It was a new one; covered with a smooth grey-blue wash, darker below, lighter above. Its greyness and emptiness appalled her, as though instead of it giving way to Stella’s bright vision, it had captured and invaded Stella, emptied her of sight and sound … Marian was swaying on her feet, she couldn’t control her weariness – if she sat down she would fall asleep. As though thinking were work, as though feeling could drag you down like hard labour …

  ‘Hey, Ma!’ Toby was saying. ‘Ma, look at this! Gran kept something of yours. You must have done this.’

  He was holding out to her a little picture, done on cardboard. It showed three big boats and a little one sailing past a lighthouse on a chalky-grey sea. Fishes swam along the lower margin. A line of houses endways up bordered the scene on the left.

  ‘No,’ said Marian, ‘not mine.’

  ‘You wouldn’t remember,’ her son told her. ‘It isn’t Gran’s, anyway; all hers are initialled. Hang on; look at this.’

  He held up for her, back facing, a canvas on which was scrawled in chalk, ‘For Marian.’ Nothing else. Then he turned it over, and set it up against the canvas already there on the easel.

  It showed a man sitting naked in a wooden chair, indoors, in front of an open window. He was looking into the room, and the cast of the light composed him of shadow, brightly aureoled. His hands lay slackly in his lap, preserving modesty, though they were the centre of the picture and drew the eye. Large hands, roughened, with broken grimy nails, held stiffly as though unused to lying at rest. His clothes lay tumbled at his feet, on bare floorboards on which, right at the edge, the familiar ‘S.H.’ had been painted in grey. He looked both muscular and thin, wiry, one might have said. And under the shade of his thick dishevelled hair his eyes stared out at them, unreadable, watchful, dark. Through the window behind him a patch of blue, a section of wall, a sketched-in schematic boat, and bright sky.

  ‘Who is it?’ said Alice, softly.

  ‘I don’t know, I don’t know,’ Marian said.

  Faintly, in the house, the phone began to ring.

  It was Alice who took the call, and brought the message back into the barn. Stella’s dying was done.

  There was a lot to do, then. A funeral to arrange. Telling Stella’s friends seemed an impossible task – they couldn’t find her address book, and Marian didn’t necessarily know who they were. Toby put an announcement in The Times and the Telegraph. Marian found a funeral director in the Yellow Pages. He was a q
uiet, soft-spoken, courteous man to whom it seemed possible to leave decisions. Neighbours came calling. ‘I didn’t know her well, but …’ Nobody had known Stella well, but they were very sorry. It was, evidently, a decent place. They were sorry they hadn’t known her better; ‘She was always so busy – you have to hand it to her,’ said the woman immediately the other side of the thick holly hedge. ‘I admired her for that.’

  Marian and her children were cast adrift. The routine they had set up, each of them visiting every day, shopping and cooking for each other, was suspended. And then there were surprises. Toby went across to the village shop and bought copies of The Times and the Telegraph to check the notices he had put in, and later, Alice, flicking idly through The Times, found an obituary notice of Stella. It had not crossed anyone’s mind to look for such a thing.

  ‘Mum! Toby!’ she called. ‘Come and look at this!’ They spread out the paper on the table, and pored over it together.

  Stella Harnaker, painter, died in Cambridge on May 30th, aged 84. She was born in Lewes, Sussex, on December 16, 1911.

  Stella Harnaker trained at the Putney School of Art from 1928–31. She worked briefly in Florence, before settling for some years in St Ives, Cornwall, where she was a prominent figure in the St Ives Society of Artists. She painted landscapes and still life, in a broadly post-impressionist style. She was clearly influenced during the war years by the work of the modernists who had settled in St Ives. But she was among those who left the Penwith Society, founded by Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, shortly after it was formed, and strongly supported the traditionalist faction in the increasingly divided St Ives artists’ community. After the war, Harnaker reverted to her pre-war style, and worked for some years abroad, before returning to live in Brighton, and then near Cambridge. In spite of the obscurity of her later years, Harnaker’s St Ives period works are of interest, dramatizing as they do the conflict between the modernist and the traditionalist vision, and she has always had a following among her fellow painters. She is survived by a daughter.

  ‘Golly,’ said Toby. ‘Did you know all this, Ma?’

  And Marian said, bleakly, ‘No, I didn’t know all this. I did know about the obscurity. I suppose I survived her.’

  Alice said, ‘So that’s where your beaches are, Mum.’

  Toby put an arm round Marian’s shoulder, and squeezed her. ‘We’ll go there,’ he said. ‘I’ll take you there, and you can see your beaches again. Places change, but I don’t suppose beaches do, much. We’ll go. OK?’

  ‘We’ve got a funeral first,’ said Marian.

  It was on a bleak, rain-swept afternoon, at the crematorium on the main road. It had seemed somehow unseemly to impose church on her in death, which they never would have dared to do in life. And yet even in a crematorium chapel one has to do something; the undertaker had arranged a chaplain. And there were people there. There had been one or two phone calls to the house, enquiring for time and place, but there were more than one or two strangers among the mourners. And, Marian noticed at once, the mourners included Leonardo da Vinci, tidied up, and complete with black armband and black tie. Brief though it was, the service caused Marian pain, for it included an injunction to look at the flowers, and see that they were all right, and a breathtakingly perverse and ignorant declaration that, ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall have everything I want.’

  ‘It’s bad enough’, Marian reflected bitterly, ‘to be left alone in the world, to be an orphan, without being made to feel that one is a solitary survivor of civilization itself, of one’s language, of one’s religion. That one is living now among barbarians.’

  The chaplain said, standing on a sort of stand that was ashamed to be openly a pulpit, that he understood very well that Stella had not believed in God, and that many of the people gathered here today in her memory likewise did not believe in God. ‘Never mind,’ he said, ‘God believes in you.’ It had always seemed to him, he added, that God must be particularly fond of creative people, being himself a creator. Stella would be safe in his hands; perhaps now and then – he liked to think so – God let a dead painter do the sunset for the day. Sometimes he was sure it was from the hand of Turner; sometimes it might be a Japanese printmaker’s work, sometimes it was Constable. He would look out for Stella as he drove himself home on winter evenings.

  Marian thanked the chaplain sweetly, and invited everyone who wished to come back to the house. ‘But, dear Jesus!’ she muttered to Alice, who was looking inappropriately beautiful, black suited her so much, ‘What would your grandmother have said to that!’

  Alice laughed. ‘I hope there’s enough to eat, mum,’ she said anxiously. ‘I wasn’t expecting many people.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter so much at teatime,’ Marian said.

  ‘Well, if they knew Gran they won’t be expecting much,’ said Toby.

  Perhaps they weren’t; they didn’t stay long. Most of them were neighbours; one was an old friend of Stella’s from art school days, who came in a taxi all the way from London, a frail old lady with a stick, and whose taxi was lurking outside, making her tea lethally expensive. ‘You’re going to miss her very much,’ she said to Alice. ‘There never was anybody like her. Nobody at all.’

  ‘Were you a friend of Gran’s? Did you like her?’ Alice asked boldly, horrifying Marian who was standing beside them, offering a plate of biscuits.

  ‘No,’ said the old lady, surprisingly. ‘No, I didn’t. But I thought she was wonderful.’ Then into the silence she added, ‘Candid – like you, young woman.’ And then ‘I wonder who wrote that obit. It wasn’t very generous, was it? Perhaps Violet Garthen …’

  ‘We don’t know, I’m afraid,’ said Alice.

  It’s an uneasy sort of gathering at best, a funeral tea. Nobody knows whether they are supposed to be enjoying themselves. Anecdotes about Stella probably better left untold hovered in the air. People began to depart.

  Marian looked round at an empty living room. She sat down in the nearest armchair.

  ‘That’s that, then,’ she said to Alice. ‘Leave the clearing, love, we can do it later. Did that Leonardo person go without making a nuisance of himself?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ said Toby. ‘He’s just gone out to his car to fetch his things.’

  ‘What things?’ asked Marian in alarm.

  Toby gestured towards the kitchen door behind him, and Leonardo came in, bearing a bulging duffel bag in one hand, and a bottle of whisky in the other. ‘Let’s stop pissing about with tea, and have a proper drink,’ he said. ‘I’m sure you need it as much as I do.’

  All three Eastons were staring, not so much at him, as at his bag, dumped on the kitchen table.

  ‘I’ve come to stay for a few days,’ he said. ‘I reckoned you were going to need some help.’

  ‘We can manage—’ Marian began. She was too tired to sound angry. What was the matter with her? Why was she always tired?

  ‘Sorting paintings,’ he said. ‘You’re going to need help with that.’

  ‘Yes, we are,’ said Alice. ‘We do. Come and look.’ She led him through to the barn. He was still carrying his bottle. Toby and Marian followed. What faced them at once was the large easel, bearing the grey, empty canvas, and the small picture leaning in front of it.

  ‘Who’s that?’ Alice asked. ‘Do you know who that is?’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ he said. ‘It’s rather good, isn’t it? Wouldn’t mind having done that. I’ve lost his name for the moment – I’ll get it in a minute, but I can tell you who he is. He missed the boat.’

  ‘What boat?’ Alice asked.

  ‘A lifeboat,’ said Leo, ‘what do you know about lifeboats?’

  ‘Nothing much,’ said Toby.

  ‘Pour me a drink and I’ll tell you about it.’

  They settled Leo down at the kitchen table with a glass of his own whisky.

  ‘Have you ever lived in a place with a lifeboat station?’ he asked them.

  ‘There might have been one at Brighton,’ s
aid Marian. ‘I lived there for a bit. I can’t remember.’

  ‘If you haven’t you might not get it,’ said Leo. ‘There’s even people thinking it’s some sort of government service, like it is in other countries. It’s all done by the coastguard in America, I’ve been told. Paid for out of taxes.’

  ‘Well, someone must pay for it, here,’ said Toby. ‘Isn’t it a charity?’

  ‘The boats and the gear are paid for out of charity, but the men are all volunteers. They’ve all got other jobs; but when the rocket goes up they down tools, leave meals half-eaten, and customers standing, and they get the hell down to the wharf. Unpaid. Well, the coxswain gets a pittance over the winter months, but nobody does it for money. They were all fishermen then, of course. Fishing was the town’s living.’

  ‘When was then?’ asked Alice.

  ‘Before the war. Well, the lifeboat continues to the present day, of course, but I’m telling you about thirty-nine.’

  ‘Was my mother there, then?’ asked Marian.

  ‘Yes. The fishing was declining already, and the artists could get cheap lodging, and have old sail-lofts and boat-sheds for studios. The town had artists like rabbits in a warren. I was there myself, come to that, though I was only a nipper.’

  ‘But there weren’t any artists in the lifeboat?’

  ‘God, no. I don’t know how to explain … Two things. First, it’s fiercely contested. It’s a signal honour to be regular crew. The young men can’t hold their heads up till they’ve held a jacket for a spell. It makes a man of you; and there’s only eight in a crew – not enough to go round for the natives, back then, and none to spare for others. Second thing, it’s bloody dangerous. Well, they have better boats now, I grant you; but even so. The open Atlantic beats right up to the doors of the town, and that’s a wicked coast right up to the Bristol Channel.’

  Toby reached out and picked up the whisky bottle, and refilled Leo’s glass.