The Serpentine Cave

by Jill Paton Walsh

  Marian grimaced. ‘That will have been Stella,’ she said.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Stella Harnaker. My mother. She was an artist. She must have used this room as a studio.’

  ‘We didn’t buy from a Harnaker. It was from a Mrs Godfrey.’

  ‘Stella would have been long ago. Before 1945.’

  ‘Well, none of the owners since has faced up to having it stripped. It’s all set rock hard, I understand. And we couldn’t face it either, we just covered it over and used the attic for a playroom. That’s why the matting is shabby, I’m afraid.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Marian. ‘Not the matting, not anything. I would like to rent from you for as long as possible.’

  ‘We have somebody coming at nine,’ the owner said, unhappily, looking at her watch. ‘From the agents. And you are somebody else altogether.’

  ‘I will give you references,’ said Marian. ‘And three months’ rent down. I’ll go back to my room and get my cheque book right away – I came without anything – I was just walking before breakfast—’

  ‘You haven’t had breakfast?’ said the owner. ‘I’ll make you some coffee and toast. Come and sit in the kitchen and talk to me. After all, the real people are late, and a bird in the hand—’

  ‘I’ll be the bird in the hand,’ said Marian.

  Later, with everything talked over and agreed, she left, and went almost skipping, so light she felt, down the path bending and re-bending to the back of the beach. An extraordinary lightness of heart propelled her – she felt like a kite that flies only when its string is firmly anchored. At the little café – now taking down its shutters and making ready to offer not only vanilla ice-cream but moules marinière and grilled megrim sole – she stooped to shed her sandals, and ran sinking into the soft sand, going back along the beach. And here was Toby coming towards her – coming to look for her, of course, though he pretended not to be, and as soon as she was recognized he adopted a swaggering unconcerned manner, as though he just happened to be walking, accidentally to meet her.

  ‘I’ve rented a house,’ she said. ‘I’m staying for a while. You too – for as long as you can – if you like, of course.’

  She saw in his eyes a strange expression, one that she suddenly recognized, knew must often have been in her own eyes, looking at Stella – that cautious, oh-God-what-next look of child confronting crazy parent. Laughing she said, ‘It’s all right, it’s all right, it’s the right one! I must get my cheque book,’ she added, and waving at him she ran along the edge of the waves, which now the tide had turned were larger, and pawed at her, jumping at her skirt, and wetting her to above the knees as she ran. ‘Three days!’ she called back to him, over her shoulder. ‘We can have it in three days!’

  On that first day Toby set out to explore, to discover where his mother had landed him. He liked exploring. Especially in this kind of weather – cool, bright and breezy, with a salt tang on the air. He was wandering round a tight little town, almost watertight. Built long ago round two ways of making a living, and both of them bloody dangerous – fish and tin. Toby knew about the tin, and knew it was gone now, from reading commodity reports. Nothing left of it to see, above ground. Fishing had come first and lasted longest, though that too had almost gone now. There were a dozen or so little working boats in the harbour, tilting at their moorings on the sand. Having only a half-tide harbour can’t have helped. But the town was made for fishermen; it was built along a sandbar between the outer beach and the harbour, running out along to a green headland, with a little mariner’s chapel on top, overlooking the warren of streets and clustered houses. It was picturesque – a whole town built on a warren of pilchard cellars round a harbour. Everyone cheek by jowl, packed into little streets you could shake hands across.

  There were an amazing number of these narrow little lanes with pretty cottages, making nooks and corners with each other, climbing steeps and twisting round bends, peering at each other through dormer windows, shuffling shoulder to shoulder, jostling each other for ‘Sea Glimpses’. The most cursory glance in the estate agents’ windows – Toby liked to keep an eye on property prices – revealed how desirable ‘Sea Glimpses’ were; those, and parking places. The folk who built the town had not been interested in either. Well, Toby thought, of course they weren’t interested in parking, though they might have been interested in bringing a cart to the door, and some of these narrow ginnels, these stepped alleyways, and enclosed courtyards, would not have allowed even that. And how odd it seemed that they positively turned their backs to the sea, and unfortunate really, now that they earned a living from doing bed and breakfast for tourists. But even in an irregular little square, or a crooked street in which the sound of the sea rocked to and fro and caressed his hearing, no prospect of the sea itself was possible. As though once they were home and dry, he reflected, they didn’t want to know, they didn’t want to see. And perhaps they didn’t, perhaps that was right.

  Although, how could they not? he wondered, seeing down a steeply descending street a stretch of harbour water, not blue at all, but blazing golden-green, and sparkling with sprinkled stars of incandescent and extinguished highlights. He went down towards it at once.

  And then there were boats. Very little boats in most of the harbour, but maybe a dozen fishing boats, using the quay. And one superb yacht, anchored a little way out. Toby looked at it lustfully, assessing its clean lines, guessing at the cost. He loved boats. His father in America had taught him sailing. He had a sailing boat in San Francisco Bay. Nothing in Toby’s life so far had given him more joy than the lean of a boat in the wind, the start-up of the babbling water under the prow. Now he stood on the end of the quay looking at the yacht, musing for quite a time.

  While he was standing there a little fishing boat came bustling in, with a trail of shrieking gulls behind it, like dragged, tattered bunting. He smiled as it reminded him of a plough pursued across the fields – ‘I will sail the briny ocean, I will plough the salt sea …’ he hummed to himself.

  Someone yelled, ‘Hey, Mathy!’ and a serpentine rope came sailing up from the boat deck twenty feet below him. He caught it easily, one-handed, and swiftly twisting loop on loop dropped a clove hitch over the nearest bollard, and drew it tight. ‘Come for a drink?’ said the voice below. ‘’Ang on and come for a drink?’

  But the favour didn’t seem worth the payment, and, embarrassed, suddenly shy, Toby walked away. Away from the harbour, into the warren of streets, and out again, finding himself looking up across the grassy hill to the chapel. Once up there he could see yet another prospect of the town.

  Toby sat down on a wooden bench in the lee of the chapel wall, out of the wind, to look at the spectacular vistas of golden beaches, both sides of the headland, and the Victorian town, a result of the railway, clearly, clambering back up the inland slopes. An old man was already sitting there, his hands crossed on his walking-stick, a fat little dog lying on the ground at his feet.

  ‘Handsome day,’ he said to Toby.

  ‘Glorious,’ said Toby. ‘Wonderful light. Is it always like this?’

  ‘Bless you, boy, not always. Different every day. That’s why the artists come.’

  ‘I don’t always expect to see what the artists say they see,’ said Toby. ‘But I can see this …’

  ‘It’s quite real,’ the man said. ‘We be upwind of everything in England that makes dust. Including all the ploughing. It’s dangerous light – you wouldn’t believe how quick the tourists skinburn. You won’t catch local people ’alf naked on the beaches.’

  ‘Are you local?’ asked Toby.

  ‘No. I’m not local, I’m a native,’ the man said. When Toby blinked he explained, ‘Locals live here. Natives were born here.’

  ‘I suppose if you’re a native, tourists are hard to bear,’ said Toby.

  ‘They’re a living,’ the man said. ‘And it’s not as bad as it used to be. The rabble go to the Costa Brava now. We do prefer the artis
ts; they’re more faithful, year-round.’

  ‘Who am I speaking to?’ asked Toby. The dog was pulling on the leash now, and his companion got up to go.

  ‘I’m Mr Stevens,’ the man said. ‘But so’s half the rest of the town. If you wanted to find me you’d have to ask for Nubby. Nubby Stevens.’

  ‘Nubby?’ said Toby.

  ‘There’s not enough names to go round,’ Mr Stevens said. ‘Not enough surnames and not enough Bible names to tell us apart. There might be twenty Matthew Stevens in the town. But everyone knows who Bish and Bar and Dinks and Nubby are.’

  He took his dog off on the rest of its walk, and Toby sat on for a while.

  Then he walked round the headland, upon whose rocks the sea was energetically leaping, until the outer beach came into view, spectacular with booming surf a mile long and a mile deep. Even in the chill of the smart offshore wind the beach had children playing. And the surf was peppered with surfers, floating like huge black sea birds, or rising suddenly atop a crest to ride to a fall in the wave-breaks. Toby watched, resolving to try that. His gaze took in the shore, the rocky point beyond the beach, the sloping churchyard, crowded with men at anchor – the embattled run of old buildings – workshops? Sail lofts? And the snazzy modern flats which lined the back of the beach. As he watched, the yacht from the bay came suddenly into view, scudding across the skyline, in full sail, leaning to the wind, and making speed. Where could she be going? Toby wondered. What was out there? Cork? Fastnet? Newfoundland? The Scillies? Or round Land’s End? With all his heart he longed to be aboard her, cutting free, outbound, setting a course.

  Marian was walking too. She was lost, and also disorientated. The town she walked in flickered in and out of memory, alternating places she could recall with uncanny accuracy, down to the shape of the shadow cast across the street, the skew of the lines of cobbles, with places she had never been in before in her life, the commonplace generic seaside town, unknown to her. And then round another corner she would be standing in the light of childhood, looking at the lighthouse framed in a gap between houses, back in a world where everything was perfectly placed. The street names – or passage names, rather – amused and confused her. Nothing could be much less square than Island Square – was Teetotal Street then a hive of drunkenness? And what about Virgin Street? No doubt the virtues of the original inhabitants were better than their geometry. She tried to make mental notes of the whereabouts of useful shops – a hardware store, a greengrocer, a real fishmonger, an old fashioned draper, a newsagent, among the plethora of shops packed with tourist tat.

  Among those, she liked the one selling shells. But for the most part they were horrific. Sixties style kitsch beads and droopy shirts printed with suns and moons; tortured glass and brass, model creatures and luridly furry stuffed toys; mountains and mountains of fudge in yucky flavours … She smiled to herself, and promised herself a competition with Toby, to find the nastiest thing on sale in the town. And paintings. What was different from other seaside resorts was the number of ‘galleries’ selling paintings. Obviously the visitor to St Ives was expected to think that a painting would be a good souvenir. For the most part the paintings she passed by were dire – unbelievably bad. Unpaintings. They wouldn’t clean your eyeballs, and sharpen up your view of the world, they would clutter them, with a double whammy of awfulness. First with a sort of stupid prettification, an intent to show even this spectacular place in the light of any old beauty spot, and then with technical incompetence, so that the intended selective realism was botched and only half achieved. There were far too many sails and sunsets for probability. There was also an inescapable impression of haste, as though the artist had not had time to look carefully before slapping on the paint. However terrible some of the ‘souvenirs’, it would surely be one of these daubed canvases or boards that would win the prize nomination for the nastiest thing on sale in St Ives. Compared to the best of these, anything by Stella was a masterpiece! Marian shuddered. These things overwhelmed her with an unpleasant feeling of pity and contempt. Pity and contempt for the artists who had perpetrated them.

  At twelve Toby bought a beer in the Sloop at the harbour-side, and carried it outside to drink it in the sun, view-gazing. A lot of other people had the same idea, and he was standing in a basking and chattering crowd. Was there another pub by the lifeboat shed? he wondered, for there too was a cluster of people, leaning on the railings. As he watched the glass doors of the boat-shed opened, up-and-over style – it was a snazzy crisp new building – and the boat nosed out, and lurched forward to stand poised at the top of the ramp. Then, with an almost sinister deliberate purpose, like something advancing on an assailant, it came on down the ramp. Near the bottom someone in yellow oilskins ducked under the looming prow to unhitch it from the trolley. Toby stared at it, seeing in everything about it, seeing in its fitness for its purposes, the illimitable, motiveless destructive strength of the sea. In its deep blue sculpted hull with the white Plimsoll line below and the scarlet stripe at the gunwale, drawing its shape to his attention; in the orange super-structure, ready to be battened down, he saw the strength and swell of storm waves; in the battery of radar equipment she carried he saw the immensity of the ocean, in which every ship was lonely, potentially lost, without these slender links, ‘all at sea’.

  The boat, suddenly precipitate, dashed into the water at the foot of the ramp, and roared round a wide turning circle in the brimming harbour, making out to sea beyond the quay. A wide and foaming wake remembered her course behind her, fading and spreading slowly in the aftermath. Where was she going? he wondered, finishing his beer – who was in trouble? Not some child on an inflatable mattress this time – they had an inshore lifeboat for that sort of thing. With a leap of his heart he thought of the lovely yacht he had seen just a while ago. Could it be her? He minded that thought hideously, and though of course he could see with part of his mind that danger to life on a battered and ugly coaster or tanker was morally speaking just as serious, the beauty of the sailing boat, and the idea of free force, speeding on the wind, that she represented made him care nothing at that moment for morality.

  He returned his glass, and positively ran along the wharf, dodging the strollers, past the amusement arcades with their shoddy and flashy temptations and blaring sounds, and reached the dispersing crowd at the top of the launching ramp.

  ‘What was it?’ he asked, directing his question to two vaguely official-looking men who were standing talking by the doors of the looming empty boat shed. ‘What did they go out to?’

  They seemed surprised, and did not answer him at once.

  ‘Was it that yacht that was anchored here last night?’ he asked.

  ‘Bless you, it idn’t for real,’ one of them said. ‘Only practice. When it be real you’ll hear the rockets go up for the crew to muster.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Toby, feeling slightly foolish. But the man nodded to him, friendly enough, and said, ‘I know you, don’t I?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Toby. ‘It’s my first time here.’

  ‘My mistake then. Thought I’d a seen you somewhere afore.’ He turned back to his companion, and Toby, hands in pockets, wandered off.

  Marian was buying things. She had agreed with Mrs Veal that the house should be rented furnished; but the agreement excluded bedding and towels, china and cutlery, and some of the kitchen equipment – Marian had agreed immediately that Mrs Veal was to take with her anything she needed to help her set up home with her daughter. Marian would simply buy replacements. She had been offered a reduction in the proposed rent to take account of the required expense. And now she stood in White’s in Fore Street, choosing things.

  She had an agreeable sense of wild luxury and self-indulgence, piling on the counter top sheets and bottom sheets and pillow cases in matching sets, piles of pink towels, piles of white towels, piles of blue towels. A green and white gingham tablecloth caught her eye, and she bought that too. And then coarse linen bedspreads, creamy whit
e with a pattern in the weave … she had never done anything like this before. When she and Donald set up house money was in short supply, and she had started with wedding presents, chosen, however lovingly, by other people. And then one replaced things piecemeal, as this and that wore out. Soon nothing matched, nothing was a complete set, and thrift and familiarity worked together to keep things like that.

  Now suddenly, she was buying things all together. From White’s, who would deliver her purchases the next day, she proceeded to Woolworths, where stainless steel kitchen thingummies seemed cheap and serviceable, and she envisioned a whole kitchen equipped in steel and clear glass, not a countrified patterned pot anywhere, and began to put that too into effect. She had set herself a problem carrying things, but luckily she no sooner emerged from Woolworths’ lower floors onto the wharf than she bumped into Toby, and despatched him to get the car. She was childishly happy. How wonderful to choose everything without compromising with Donald’s tastes, or, even worse, his mother’s – all white damask and patterned silver plate. And how relatively affordable it had been to be rich for a morning! She was avoiding thinking forward; she had not considered what she would do with all the lovely new things when the lease ended, when she had to go home. No, when she had to go away from home. Surrounded by carrier bags and parcels she sat on a seat by the harbour, listening to lapping water, and watching the reticulate reflections wavering on the side of a pretty moored boat. People wandered past her, and snatches of their talk mixed with the raucous calls of the ubiquitous gulls. How could any creature look so graceful, and sound so vulgar?

  Toby wasn’t long. They drove the clobber up to the house, and discovered that Mrs Veal was leaving early – they could be in by tomorrow if they liked. Before they went out to dinner that night Toby rang Alice and put the address of the house on her answerphone.