The Serpentine Cave

by Jill Paton Walsh

  She had come to think very badly of Donald, though not to stop loving him. His posturing, his outraged vanity, could be encompassed in affectionate amusement. But only an unfailing wellspring of unqualified admiration – only deference would do for him; and he had found it elsewhere. She had stopped laughing then. His desertion was not funny, and the loneliness it left her with was hateful, and unfair. Above all unfair. He had left her for being unable to offer something he was not entitled to expect – something rationed in this hard world, and of which he had had more than his share. You would need to be stupid, or of very limited social horizons, to take Donald at his own estimation. He had left Marian for not being stupid.

  Or so she had thought at the time. But perhaps it had more to do with sex. Marian’s colleague Susan had told her decisively that when marriages hit trouble it was always sex at the root of it. Simplistic though that sounded, it might, Marian supposed, be right. She didn’t know. Her experience of her own sexuality was uncannily like a struggle with an intricate machine, say a computer or a video recorder, delivered without a manual. It had proved possible to make it perform its basic functions – she had, after all, conceived and delivered two children – but it had never been possible to make it perform the fancier functions it was supposed to be capable of, it had never been possible to connect it to happiness. Was that why Donald had left? Had he basically got fed up with fruitless struggles with the tuning? He lived now in considerable prosperity in California, with a much younger woman. Yet whenever Marian thought of him, needed him, she called him ‘poor Donald’ to herself.

  But Marian did not need Donald now. Just Stella. Yet, she knew very well, had Stella been alive she would have been painting, leaving Marian to her own devices. So Marian would have been doing exactly what she was doing now, sitting alone under a garden tree, her thoughts drifting. Surely then it should be possible to hold still, and feel no difference – to feel the world the same. Subtract the moments of attention her mother would have given her – those few – and very little was in any way changed.

  But everything was changed. Marian felt like a tree when a great branch was down – unbalanced, straining to cracking point in the lightest breeze. Her whole knowledge of herself had been knowing herself unlike her mother; they had lived like adjacent counties on the map – each inch of territory divided by a boundary so that nothing was in both places, everything was coloured differently, and nothing that Stella was, was Marian. And now the line was gone and the colours were running together, and there was no knowing where she was. Or who. Except that she was no-one’s daughter. The whole branching and flourishing daughterliness of her life was torn away and lay broken and dying in the crushed grasses at her feet. It was the loss of a great part of herself that she was grieving for.

  And here came her own daughter, walking into her mothering shade. Alice, leaf-dappled green and gold all over her pale dress, her turbulently unkempt red hair, coming calling her in.

  ‘Mum? Spare a moment?’

  ‘Coming,’ said Marian. She felt the wrench – the weight of being mother, and not daughter, like a crack in the heartwood of the world.

  Alice came to her, lifted Marian’s arm across her bony shoulder, and twined her waist as they walked together back toward the house – meaning, no doubt, only a gentle show of love, but as one helps a casualty to walk.

  In the barn the pictures were waiting, sorted. Leo had finished, taken his rucksack, and left.

  ‘Look, Mum,’ Alice said. She was pointing to a smallish painting, done on board. The scene was of a golden beach, curving like a lateral new moon round a brilliantly azure and improbable sea. A low grassy promontory stretched across the horizon, pointing towards a lighthouse on a rock. A green drum-shaped buoy topped with a slanting yellow pole floated a little way out. The picture had the meticulous, innocent verisimilitude of a diagram, and clear bleached colour – pale sand, peacock sea.

  ‘These ought to be your long lost beaches, Ma,’ said Alice. She was holding another picture, showing this time a vast expanse of sand, crossed with a silver-blue streak of water, as of a river reaching the sea across a beach. Behind it the white smoking towers of a power-station rose on a green shore. Unusually for Stella, the picture had a title: Low Tide, St Ives.

  ‘Yes,’ said Marian, softly, ‘I think they are.’ Shining memory stirred, unfocussed as she looked. With the third picture – a view of a beach from above, fringed with raggedy wild flowers, and in prospect the harbour, the chapel on the hill behind it, the crook-armed quay protecting tilted boats, high and dry, she suddenly felt the frame expand, dissolve. She knew that if she turned a little to the right she would see the lighthouse, far away. She knew that just ahead of her to the left a path would plunge down that zigzagged, and took her to dry, silken, engulfing sands at the back of the beach. She knew that behind her was home – the windows and doors standing wide, and the blind billowing stiffly in the breeze, like a salt-encrusted sail. She could hear the tapping of the little acorn-shaped bead on the dangling drawcord on the blind, as it flew in and out across the sill. The knowledge filled her with joy – she could go on and on – she knew how as you ran out into the expanse of sand it hardened under foot, and cooled until you were running on the smooth firm platform left by the falling tide, and then in the glassy waves, the scalloped lace-edged dancing petticoats of the sea. And if you turned round from there, and looked up you would see … memory faltered and fled.

  ‘What do you think, Ma?’ said Toby. He had come in behind her, from the house.

  ‘I think I must go there. At once. Today – well, it’s a bit far, isn’t it? Tomorrow.’

  ‘No problem,’ said Toby. ‘I’ll take you.’

  Alice said, ‘I think I’d better get back. They’ll be working on the next concert by now – in fact I think – Mum, I’m sorry, but I don’t think I can go. Do you mind?’

  ‘I’d always rather have you with me,’ said Marian. ‘But of course you must get back. You have your own life to live. And you’ve given me all this time already.’

  Later Marian found Leo’s incriminating receipt had gone from behind the teapot on the dresser. A fifty-pound note was in its place.

  She and Toby arrived in darkness. It took longer than they would have thought possible – longer to drive Alice to her London train, close down the unfamiliar house, check the doors and windows and lights, empty the fridge, leave the key with a neighbour, stop the milk, pack their things and load Toby’s car. Longer to drive right down England to the end, and into Cornwall. There was plenty to engage the eye in the cloudy-bright, early summer day. The trees in almost Day-Glo green leaf, acres of wheat, acres of barley swathing the gentle lowlands, and giving way to pasture on the uplands, the regions of chalk and bell-barrows, at the heart of which Stonehenge rose suddenly into view, rising from behind a slight crest beside the road.

  Beyond Bodmin they were driving across bleak, rather flat land – what in the north was called a ‘moss’ – barren, marshy, and luridly lit by a sunlight that had slipped under the cloud cover, and was burning like bright embers in the ash. Then the darkness rolled up from the Atlantic, and they saw only road markings, signs, cat’s-eyes.

  Somewhere along the way, Marian asked, ‘Toby, surely that leave you said you were due for must be running out by now, and you show no sign of being bothered at coming this great long way.’

  ‘Don’t you want me, Ma?’ he said.

  ‘You know I do. But …’

  Toby explained about insider dealing, which Marian took a while to grasp. About how only a few people had the knowledge which had done the damage, and he was one of them. He admitted being under suspicion, but avoided owning up to any justification for it. He was ashamed to, with a sharpness that took him aback. He mentioned instead that various people senior to him—

  ‘But son, if you say you know who it was, hadn’t you better say?’ Marian asked him. ‘What about your own prospects? Won’t you be under a cloud?’

 
; ‘I’ll have to live it down, then,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about it, Ma.’

  ‘I can’t help it,’ said Marian. ‘It’s what mothers do. I’ll do it quietly. I’m worried about Alice too. Something’s wrong. Do you know about it, Toby?’

  ‘Don’t ask me, Ma,’ he said. ‘I take after you. I don’t get it.’

  ‘It’s artistic temperament, you mean. It’s music?’

  ‘That too. She’s had a bust-up with Max.’

  ‘Well, that might not be such bad news in the long run … What was it about, do you know?’

  ‘About missing rehearsals to come up to see Gran. He threatened to boot her out of the quartet. She’s been worried sick about it.’

  ‘Well, she’s gone back now.’ Marian was baffled. She was afraid for both her children, afraid for the sudden lacunae in what had seemed lives set fair, and full of prospect. Well, professional prospect, anyway; to be honest, since Toby had no steady girlfriend, and Alice was playing live-in-chattel to a man old enough to be her father, Marian felt no satisfaction with that aspect of their prospects.

  At last the signs on the endless road offered St Ives, and they turned off.

  ‘I expect there’s a station car-park,’ said Toby. ‘We’ll try and find that while we get our bearings.’ There was. The moment they got out of the car they could hear the sea, chuntering away to itself below the wall. Marian crossed the wet tarmac – it had rained in St Ives – and leaned over. She could just discern, faintly pallid in the velvet night air, the white bolsters of foam crossing the beach below her. The air smelled rinsed and salty. ‘Oh!’ she said.

  They walked out of the station, found at once a flight of steps descending, and went down them, instinctively heading for the water’s edge. But they were not at the water’s edge, but in a narrow little street with steep front gardens to the houses one side, and shoulder to shoulder cottages on the other. It was lit with staccato pools of lamplight, it glistened with rain, and the sound of the sea came over the rooftops in broken gusts. There were wind-harassed plants in window-boxes, and bed and breakfast signs. In a few yards they had found their billet for the night, and Toby went back to fetch their cases.

  They were hungry, but there were places to eat – a modest-looking bistro just on the corner. ‘Toby,’ said Marian, as they strolled back after the meal, ‘thank you for coming. I don’t think I’d like to be doing this alone.’

  But at first she was alone that first morning, because he slept late and she woke early. She woke to the sound of the sea. The well-known, long forgotten sound of clamorous shouted whispers, sighing and shushing with a rhythm of thrusting and withdrawing like sexual play. From where Marian lay it was loud and quite precise, each soft climax an audible ejaculation half a mile wide. The curtains in her room were not drawn quite together, and a dancing undulant riband crossed the ceiling above her bed in a widening net of reflected light.

  She drew back the curtain, and found that the window was right over the sea’s edge; she found herself looking past the harbour quay, and out over bright blue water to the lighthouse, both suddenly seen and suddenly remembered, mistily white in a hazy morning distance. There were the headlands, the near one green, the further one lilac. And the sea that began beneath her a modest green like the glass of a white wine bottle, deepening to turquoise in the middle distance, had gathered at the horizon a concentration of bright blue fierce enough fully to deserve the name ‘ultramarine’. Marian stood tranced, wondering if she was remembering the paintings seen only yesterday – the paintings of the beaches – or something real teasing her from just beyond the limit of recollection, from some time before the dawn of a continuous Marian. She looked at her watch. There was more than an hour to go before breakfast. She got dressed rapidly and went out.

  There was a pearly sky, and the golden beach – Porthminster, she gathered from a sign forbidding dogs in summer – had only one other walker. Marian wandered, deeply bemused, along the beach. The morning light cast the heights behind the beach into shadow, but there were houses there, and a bridge of some kind. On her right the shining bay, still more or less the view from the window just now. She walked on the glossy slopes of sand just relinquished by the falling tide, and her footprints filled with water as she went, and elided behind her. She waved at the other walker as they passed each other.

  ‘Did you see the seals?’ he asked.

  ‘Seals? No! Where?’

  He pointed. There were two black faces bobbing just beyond the breaking surf, that seemed to be staring at Marian. They were growling and barking at each other in a kind of grumbling conversation that made Marian and the stranger laugh.

  ‘There are dolphins, sometimes,’ he said, moving on. But there couldn’t be, could there? Certainly there were none this morning. She watched the seals till they swam round the rocks of the point at the end of the beach, and disappeared. The sands ended in a tumbled rocky cliff, blue-black with mussel shells, and fringed with slippery gold-brown kelp. Marian turned to walk back.

  Facing this way the town was in view, appearing to be floating high above the water. There was the crooked sheltering arm of the quay, with its two lighthouses; the clustered cottages, all roofscape and windows; the white hotel perched on the rocks, past which she had come down to the beach. A little square white beach café stood at the foot of the cliff on her left.

  ‘I have come too far,’ she thought. And then: ‘How do I know? Too far for what?’

  But, nevertheless, she began to retrace her steps, walking up the beach as well as along, to go behind the café. And as if she had known it there was a path there, ascending the flowery verdancy of the cliff. It took its time over the steep, bending and bending back, crossing the railway line, offering wild garlic and bluebells shrinking into the grass, and the delicate stars of stitchwort to passing walkers, and reaching eventually the viewpoint – precisely the viewpoint – from which Stella’s ‘Low Tide’ picture had been made. There was a little blue painted garden bench set there and Marian sat down on it. Remembering, dreaming, and experiencing had become fused. She did not know which she was doing. From here she could see the sea above and behind the houses round the harbour, and was looking down at and beyond it all. The vistas had the wildness of landscape and the open, dangerous seas as well as the nested safety and friendliness of human habitation. There was freshness in the air as though all the ancient rocks and immemorial sands, and hundred and two-hundred-year-old roofs and mellow walls, had been newly made, mint struck clean that very morning. With a tackety-tack noise, freighted with nostalgia, a train ran into the station, passing just below where she sat. And if she turned her head a little, there across the bay was the lighthouse, emerging from the mists of the morning sharp and clear, as though it had come nearer, bringing its backdrop of receding headlands with it.

  It felt like remembering music. As though someone hummed a bar or two of some great music – a Haydn quartet or something – and one’s mind began silently singing the rest, phrase after lovely phrase flowing in one’s inner ear perfectly replayed. And, of course, home was behind her. Marian found she knew that. She got up, and looked around, turning her back to the sea. Behind her was a gate in a garden wall – or a gap with gateposts, rather, for the gate itself had gone. A blue gate, she remembered, and in the same moment saw the remaining flakes of blue paint on the iron bolts that had formed the hinge, still jutting from the granite posts. She walked in, and ascended a terraced garden, all steps, to a driveway sweeping round a dignified granite house. Bay windows, a stained glass window lighting the stairs, a grand front door between two stone lions, mounting guard.

  Marian rang the doorbell. A woman came quickly to the door, and saying, ‘You’re early,’ let her in.

  But the moment she was inside, the dream and the recollection faded together. Marian was standing in the hall of a strange house, looking at a stranger.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry; I used to live here. It would be very kind if you co
uld just let me see my old bedroom—’

  ‘But you can see everything,’ the woman said, and then ‘Didn’t Hickson send you? Aren’t you from the agency?’

  ‘No … I … Are you selling this house?’ Marian asked, struggling to keep a hold on reality in the clouds of dreaming.

  ‘Perhaps,’ the woman said. ‘We might have to consider that. For the moment we are letting it.’

  ‘I’ll take it,’ said Marian. ‘Right through. What will the rent be for a long let?’

  ‘But you haven’t seen it yet,’ the woman said. ‘Don’t you want to see it?’

  She must, as a child, have spent hours on beach and in garden, and more hours gazing out of windows. Every outlook was familiar, every room unknown. It was a large house, having generously proportioned rooms, with high ceilings and mullioned bay windows. It had four bedrooms – three on the first floor, and one huge attic that stretched from end to end of the roof space, lined with some sort of fragrant wood panelling. A scuffed and scruffy coconut matting covered the floor of this room.

  ‘The floor-covering’s not up to scratch here, I’m afraid,’ the owner said – she had been making deprecating remarks all round the house, which was furnished modestly enough with family things showing family wear and tear. Now Marian tore her eyes away from the tops of wind-tilted trees showing through the dormer window, and considered the matting.

  ‘It’s a big room,’ the owner told her. ‘New carpeting would cost a lot.’

  ‘But bare boards would look good up here,’ said Marian.

  ‘They would cost as much as carpet, I’m afraid,’ the owner said, stooping to lift a corner of the matting, and turning several yards of it back. The floor was covered with paint. Not as in a painted floor – but thickly encrusted with daubs and spills and hardened-off worms of colour from tubes, and footprints in spills trodden all over the place and then covered and recovered with more globs and drips, and blots, in violent multicolour – a kind of chaotic graffiti of repeated accident and neglect.