‘And there’s a special problem over the lifeboat, there. There’s got to be one. And it’s got to put out into the high seas, but low tide goes right out of the harbour. So half the time the boat can’t launch into water, but it’s got to be dragged across the sands on a trolley, and there’s a limit to how big a boat you can manage on a trolley. They have a submersible tractor now, but it used to take eighty men on two ropes, going into the water to their chins, before she could be floated off.’
‘So how big was it? What was it like?’ asked Toby. He had done some sailing, in San Franciso Bay. Not that he was an expert—’
‘I don’t know how big. I was only a nipper, creeping out of bed wrapped in a raincoat to watch. There was a wind out of hell blowing, and I got soaked to the skin. My mother gave me a leathering when she caught me, for risking my health … The significant thing about that boat was she was a self-righting boat. So she only drew two foot something below the water-line. She was a replacement boat, just like the one they had lost the year before, and there’s no way that wasn’t in everyone’s mind.’
‘What had happened to the other boat?’
‘She capsized. No loss of life, that time, just gold medals all round. But everyone knew how easily that other boat had gone over—’
‘You didn’t say why people do it,’ Marian prompted him. Of course, she had been reconsidering the great Leonardo during this exposition. His funeral black made him look more like a dignitary than a plumber. Her line of sight brought into view the receipt he had given her, propped against a plate on the dresser.
‘Why do they do it?’ he said. ‘It’s fear of drowning, I think. Horror at the thought. Next time it might be one of them. Ironic, really, when you think that a good way of keeping safe from drowning would be to keep on dry land in hurricanes. Religion might have something to do with it too; they’re all Methodists, if they aren’t Salvationists. They think they are in the hands of God.’
‘So that day in thirty-nine – what happened?’
‘Night. It was night. And a fearful storm. The rockets went up at two in the morning. The tide was out. Everyone was out on the wharf – the men to give a hand to launch her, and the women all standing at the top of the slip, wailing and calling out to their men – “think what you’ve got at home,” and “you aren’t going,” and – well, you can imagine. And it came clear she was short-handed. There was a bit of argy-bargy then. One man got into the boat and then changed his mind about it, and gave his lifejacket back. The coxswain said, “I want somebody to go.” And a man called William Freeman said, “All right, I’ll go. I’ll do.”
‘The coxswain said, “All right, you’ll do.” I heard him say it, I was hanging on a lamppost right there where they were passing. So Freeman put the jacket on and went in the boat. That’s what happened, basically. The coxswain was short-handed, and he took volunteers. Well, they got her afloat. And that boat no sooner got out of the bay than she went over. She capsized three times, and each time she righted again there were fewer men in her, till there was only Freeman left. He was still in the boat when she hit the rocks on the further side of the bay, and he somehow got through the surf and up the cliff, and to a farmhouse. The telephone lines were down in the storm, and the farmer had to ride to Hayle to get the news through. It was seven in the morning before they knew it at St Ives. It left twenty-one widows and orphans. Someone gone out of every web of family in the town.’
‘God help us, what a terrible story,’ said Marian.
‘Yes, it was,’ Leo said. ‘Inquests and funerals, and waiting for the sea to deliver the dead … for a few days there was talk of it having been all for nothing; of the boat having been launched on a false alarm. But by and by there was wreckage washed up in the coves along the shore to Pendeen. And bodies. More lives lost. Believe me, that wasn’t a good time to be someone who had missed the boat.
‘It didn’t die down, you see. There was hell to pay. All those funerals, one after another, thousands of people packing the chapels, coming from all over Cornwall and beyond. Everyone counting on their fingers, and saying well I saw that one down there at the launch, and I didn’t see that one. Where was he, where were you, where was I? Hell to pay. Now the second cox, he didn’t hear the rocket. He was moved into a council house somewhere back along, away from the sea. He’d lost his father, and he’d lost his younger brother, and he was distracted. Others living up where he lived hadn’t heard it either, what with the wind. The man that got into the boat and got out of it again, and gave his jacket away to Willy Freeman, he paid for that for the rest of his life, all but. People never got square with him about that. And there had been terrible confusion in the dark, and you couldn’t hardly hear yourself speak. And people shaking in their boots if they were honest, going, or not going with her. But let’s just say that your man there – Thomas Tremorvah, that’s who it is – was one who might have been down there, and offering to go, and he wasn’t. He hadn’t heard the rocket no more than Thomas Cocking junior, he said. But he would have heard it if he’d been where he should have been. Edgar Basset lived right near him, and Basset heard it and went down to the boat to be drowned with the others. But somehow Tommy Tremorvah missed it.’
‘So why did Gran give the picture of Thomas Tremorvah to Mum?’ said Alice. They were still sitting in the kitchen, all four of them, making a scratch supper of the remains of the funeral tea.
‘Did she? In so many words?’
‘It says “For Marian” on the back,’ Toby told him.
‘Well, then, it’s hers,’ said Leo.
‘But they’re all hers, anyway,’ said Toby. They had found a dead will, if not a living one.
‘And what can I do with them?’ asked Marian. ‘Of course I shall keep some but—’
‘There are impractically many,’ Leo completed the sentence for her. ‘Well, look, I’ve got a day to spare. I’m on my way up north, and not expected till Friday. I’ll put them in two stacks for you. Saleable and unsaleable. You need to get in cahoots with a gallery and put the saleable ones on the market a few at a time. I can probably find you someone …’
Alice had got up, and fetched the teapot from the dresser, moving towards the kettle on the side. As she did so something was dislodged and fluttered to the floor. She put the teapot down and picked it up. She frowned. Then she slammed the paper down on the table, and said, ‘What the hell is this? Is this something to do with you?’
It was the receipt signed ‘Leo D. Vincey.’
Toby picked it up and stared at it. Marian winced.
‘Is that something to do with you?’ Alice demanded. ‘What’s going on? That can’t be your name!’
‘It is almost,’ said Leo, grinning at her. ‘Leonard Vincey. And my middle name is Derek.’
‘But what are you doing?’ said Alice at him, through clenched teeth. ‘What’s going on? Are you positively trying to get under my mother’s skin? Why? Is it some sort of joke you’re playing at? Does it hugely amuse you to get people to misjudge you? You’re a sort of self-appointed touchstone for other people’s snobberies – is that it? How dare you?’
By now she was shouting at him, and Toby moved round the table, put his arms round her, holding her from behind, and said, ‘Alice, don’t!’
‘I won’t have people sending up my mother,’ said Alice, in a suddenly small quavering tone.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Marian said to Leo, anachronistically taking responsibility for what her daughter said. ‘Of course we’re all tired and overwrought …’
‘I didn’t do it on the day of the funeral,’ said Leo, looking at Alice. ‘It’s an old note. More than a week old.’ She wriggled out of Toby’s grasp, and sat down facing him.
‘So who are you, really?’ she said, grimly.
He cocked his head, looking at her intently, interrogatively. ‘What do you want to know?’ he asked.
‘One minute you’re talking like a tribal fisherman, and the next you’re talking like an art de
aler.’
‘I was a fisherman; likely to be. Then Falmouth Art College, and the world my oyster. That sort of thing.’
‘Tell us how you did it,’ said Alice.
Leo’s face showed a brief passage of emotion, quickly covered up. ‘Stella,’ he said, ‘your bloody grandmother, gave me a box of pastels.’
‘That did it?’ said Toby. ‘She never gave either of us such a thing.’
‘It was a great big box,’ said Leo. ‘A wooden box in two tiers. Straight from Switzerland. Unopened. I can still remember slitting the paper bands that sealed it. I held my breath, and I ran my fingernail along the tiny groove where the paper crossed the edges of the lid and the box. And inside it had eighty-eight colours, all untouched. Every one three inches long, arranged in a marching rainbow. Glorious. There were little brass butterfly hinges on the back of the box, and a red elastic ribbon to hold your sketchbook inside the lid. I would have killed for that box, but I didn’t have to. Stella gave it to me.’
‘Why?’ asked Marian. ‘Why did she give it to you?’
‘She saw me trying to draw. I had brown paper, rough side up, and a jamjar with chalks she threw away. Little nibs and angles, the worn down ends that got too small to hold. I scrabbled for them in her waste-basket, and got a few colours together. She saw me. I was off school a lot that year, my chest was bad. When I felt poorly my mother sent me to sit in the garden under Stella’s window.’
‘When was this? How old were you, Leo?’
‘Must’ve been twelve or so. I went mad when I saw those colours. She said she’d spoilt me. She said I was better using dusty little butt-ends.’
‘That sounds more like Gran,’ said Toby, wryly.
‘Yes. She was a good teacher if you could withstand the brutal language.’
‘Stella taught you, Leo?’ said Marian, wonderingly. All her life she could never remember Stella having a pupil.
‘My mother got lessons for me,’ he said. ‘Stella rented a room to work in – a sail-loft that belonged to my family. When she couldn’t stump up the rent my mother took lessons for me in lieu.’
‘You’ve no idea how strange that sounds to us, Leo,’ said Alice. ‘All the time we knew Gran she threw a fit if anyone came near her when she was working.’
‘St Ives was full of that kind of barter,’ he said. ‘It was full of artists, and they hadn’t tuppence to their names sometimes. The locals took paintings or lessons in payment of bad debts. There are probably more good paintings in modest houses in St Ives than anywhere else in England. And bad ones, too, of course. Look, I’m knackered, I need to go to bed. Where am I sleeping?’
Both children glanced at Marian. But she had lost her urge to get rid of Leo. ‘The back spare room,’ she said. ‘I’ll share with Alice.’
In the middle of the night Marian eased herself out of bed, moving quietly so as not to disturb Alice in the other bed. Alice was tossing and murmuring, in the grip of some unquiet dream. Marian went barefoot to the kitchen for a glass of water. Leo in a threadbare dressing-gown was rocking himself gently in the wooden rocking-chair, a whisky tumbler half full in his hand.
She sat down opposite him, and he reached out and whiskied her water.
‘There’s something eating that daughter of yours,’ he observed. ‘Something serious.’
‘Yes. I don’t know what. She’ll tell me when she wants me to know. I can’t think why she should take it out on you.’
‘My age? Available father-figure? Real father gone missing?’
‘In America. These ten years past.’
‘Ah.’
‘I suppose you don’t know why Tremorvah missed that boat?’ she asked.
‘I don’t, I’m afraid. I don’t know where he was, and I don’t know why,’ Leo said. ‘But then I don’t know a lot of things. I used to hang around my dad and his friends, give a hand mending nets, and keep my ears open; or I’d help my mother pin sheets out to dry on the Island, and listen to the women, but it didn’t cover everything. For example, I didn’t know Stella had ever painted Tremorvah. I didn’t know she knew him.’
‘Wasn’t it usual to paint local people?’
‘Character portraits, yes. Folksy studies of the wenches gutting fish – that sort of thing. But—’
The striking, defended nudity of the man in the picture hung unmentioned between them, Marian shivered; her bare feet were freezing on the tiled floor.
‘Go back to bed,’ suggested Leo. ‘Why don’t you? I often can’t sleep. This is my thinking time.’
Something interesting was gradually emerging from Leo’s efforts in the barn. Marian wandered in to bring him some coffee. Alice had made the coffee, and filled the row of mugs. She needed coffee all day long, drinking it as a chain-smoker smokes. The sound of her practice session filled the house, grinding a rough zigzag of sound like a growling dog confined upstairs. But the barn was quiet. The easel still carried the canvas with the two zones of grey-blue ground, and the portrait of Thomas Tremorvah propped in front. Leo had simply placed canvases, face out instead of face in, in two groups, one each end of the barn.
At the far end a patchwork of sombre colour faced Marian – an almost lurid flower garden of blooms, blurry leaves, coloured shadows, highlit petals. A closer look revealed that some of the coloured patches were actually landscape – swelling fields, dark woods, black barns – but oddly, they were not really that different from the flower paintings. There was, Marian thought, a kind of gloomy fury in them, a fury of brush-strokes, a fury of the light. In one or two she recognized the subject – a church and field she had walked past going to school in France, a peasant chair that had stood under a fig tree somewhere in Italy. But though Marian remembered sunlight, the paintings had been done in black weather.
They were all initialled and dated, and Leo was putting them into a rough chronology. Gradually the murky colours became brighter, gaudier, raw. The style moved towards abstraction – or did it just become vaguer? Almost as though the painter had averted her eyes … Marian had a sharp and curious sense that the paintings did not play fair by the subject. As though the pictures formed a sort of complaint against the world, as though the subject had been worked up into a painting, as though seeing were an act of confrontation, an act of anger, of existential rage. It was perfectly clear why these paintings had not sold – who would want such disturbing things on living-room walls?
At the other end of the barn were far fewer pictures, and they were quite different – to Marian’s eye they might have been by a different hand. They were cool paintings, done on a white ground, shapes in grey line, and partly filled in with colour, as though they were half finished. Outlines of boats in a harbour, quays, lighthouses. Outlines of roofscape, higgledy-piggledy, with the sea beyond. Many of them were painted through a window, with casement and white curtains offering a broken and irregular frame to a view of part things – part of two boats, half a sail, half a man leaning his weight on a rope. Low headlands ran out from the right of those paintings which had a horizon visible. A lighthouse on a pyramid of offshore rock recurred, as did a green rocky hill tipped with a little chapel. They were all only partly coloured, but what colours they had were bright, flat and uniform. And they were calm. They radiated calm; as though seen with the transcendent radiance of memory. As though painting were a kind of expressive dreaming.
‘These are the saleable ones,’ said Leo, watching her.
‘But these are what one would keep,’ said Marian.
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘And then there are these.’ He was showing her the child’s pictures on cardboard, that Toby had thought she might have done herself. ‘Stella didn’t do these – she must have bought them. And in view of what she used to say about the artist, that’s a bit rich. But there you are, she’s got three Alfred Wallises. Just one would pay me what Stella owed me. OK?’
‘Leo, how much did she owe you?’ asked Marian.
‘Ten thousand pounds,’ he said. ‘Look, I’m seeing a frien
d this afternoon. I’ll finish this job for you tomorrow. Right?’
Marian was sitting in the garden, thinking. Mostly she was thinking about Donald, but also about Stella. Grieving, she was finding, is intransitive; its objects coalesce, it becomes a feeling about itself. Donald had hated Stella, but grief did not choose between them as life had necessarily done. And Marian had gradually swung round between them, like the slowly rotating beat of the Science Museum’s pendulum, at first taking Donald’s part, wonderful Donald, of whom her dragon mother would take no notice, for whom she would not stop painting, to whom she would barely talk. This hostile behaviour culminated disastrously with Stella’s desertion of the wedding breakfast, to the scandal of Donald’s family, so that Marian was doomed to the silent sympathy of all her future in-laws, as though Donald had married a social misfit of some kind.
Only very slowly had it become apparent to Marian what Stella’s crime had been. Only when other people committed it likewise, as of course they did, by and by. Donald liked to be the centre of attention. He liked to be the cleverest person in the room. Gradually their circle of acquaintance narrowed to exclude people at whose tables, round whose firesides, one found eminent guests, professors, famous musicians, writers. In the light of this later knowledge Donald’s positive detestation of his mother-in-law appeared differently. She was only a very glaring example. There had been a warning not taken, because not taken in. Blaming Stella, when one was blind with love, had been easier. That Donald was eminent in his own field – he was a popular scientist whose books were very well known – had not assuaged his thirst for attention. That he knew nothing whatever about art did not impede his adverse judgement of Stella’s paintings. Marian had thought innocently at first that Donald just did not like them – the ones he had seen, that is – as that early boyfriend of hers had not liked them. Later she had known that he could not like any painting that had not been acclaimed as a masterpiece by an accredited authority.
The Serpentine Cave Page 6
