The Serpentine Cave

by Jill Paton Walsh

  At first Marian didn’t quite get it – the crudely painted boards and scraps of card which Wallis had covered with sea scenes seemed out of key with the sophisticated works, with the Nicholson abstracts, the lovely engraved Perspex shape by Naum Gabo, the Wyndham Lewis in the attic. Then in the extension to the house there was a whole wall of Wallises – a dozen or more. And there the dream ships voyaged on remembered storms, with stiff sails and chugging funnels, quite out of perspective and setting their courses in the mind’s eye. There the harbours stretched out their quays to embrace the little boats, and pepper-pot lighthouses stood to shine them in. The strange shapes of the boards and fish-crates he painted on cast sudden light in Marian’s mind on the curtains and window-frames that constricted the field of view in some of Stella’s pictures. But the shape of memory was stranger still.

  It dawned on her very clearly that it was to be near these, to be able to visit these, that Stella had settled near Cambridge. It had nothing to do with the flat, open land, or the old masters in the Fitzwilliam Museum.

  At last she thought she had finished looking, but as she left she bought a little box of postcards, and as she opened the sample box to see what she got for the money there fell out of it facsimiles of Wallis’s letters to Jim Ede, he who had made Kettle’s Yard, and bought Wallis’s pictures.

  ‘What I do mosely,’ she read in the clumsy laborious hand, ‘is what use to be out of my own memery what we may never see again as things are altered altogether Ther is nothin whatever do not look like what it was …’

  Violet Garthen had said he painted like a child, Marian remembered. But the truth was he painted like an old man. With love, and with the ache of loss. She went back to his pictures again, and lingered till they closed the house at four. She had no doubt at all that if she had owned every single technically perfect work of Violet’s she would have exchanged them all for a tiny piece of torn cardboard with a battered ship on it, riding a swelling wave. But she didn’t have to – Stella had left her three of them. She was rich.

  And now, back in the barn, she looked at Stella’s pictures with a new eye. For all these furious landscapes and raging flowers, whether they were any good or not, were certainly full of Stella. They had in their way what Wallis had – expressive power. They were in the end, worthless or not, Stella’s justification. Marian’s own justification she told herself, as she had always done, was her children, and she felt the familiar little glow of superiority – surely it was better to have devoted oneself to flesh and blood, living and loving creatures, than to all this?

  She prowled round the pictures all evening. She chose an open window, with a prospect of rooftops, chimney and sea for Violet, and paintings of themselves as children for Toby and Alice. And in the morning rang a removal and storage firm, and arranged to have them despatched to Cornwall, and the others all collected and stored until further notice. And then she rang the estate agent and told him he could clear the house and put it on the market at the weekend.

  She needed to leave now. The disabled context, the sense of terminal disruption which inhabited the house made it desperately depressing. She called a taxi. And going into the barn she took Thomas Tremorvah from the easel. This picture was going with her – going, she realized, home. How to take a canvas in a taxi? She took the empty picture with the blue grounds, and tied them together face to face. And then at the last minute, suddenly appalled at the obliteration of all she would leave behind her, she seized Stella’s ancient wooden paintbox, with its splattered surface and split lid, and lugged that away with her too.

  It was early the following evening when the sequence of taxis and trains delivered Marian home again. With unwieldy things to carry, she struggled up the hill to the house in a light rain. She heard the sighing of a gentle surf on the beach below her as she climbed. Twice she stopped to look for the tiny transitory spark of the lighthouse in the dusk. She was tired when she got in. The pictures she put down in the hall, her case and Stella’s paintbox she took upstairs to her room. She remembered the box in so many different places – poor battered old thing – she slipped the catches and opened it, and the ghostly smell of old turps took her by the throat. Somehow she had expected chaos and screwed up paint tubes in the box, but though nearly all the tubes were rolled up, partly used, they were in order, in rows beneath the palettes, both rubbed clean. When you pushed the box it slid backwards on its hinges, revealing a lower compartment, several inches deep, for bottles and brushes.

  It contained besides these, a chunky brown paper parcel, somewhat stained. Marian lifted this out and turned it over. It said, ‘Leo’s money,’ written in bold letters. She tore open one corner, and saw banknotes.

  She was full of relief and joy. She seized it, and went tearing out again, almost laughing. She went directly to Leo’s house, and rattled the door-knocker. When she got no answer she knocked again. A young woman looked out of an upstairs window next door.

  ‘He’s at the art class, I expect,’ she said. ‘He usually goes.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘Back Street. Halfway along.’ She closed her window.

  Marian set out for Back Street. There was a luminous darkness, in which the sea contrived not to lose blueness, but to deepen it almost to vanishing point. The lighthouse shone like an intermittent evening star, bright windows round the harbour made gleaming watery banners hang in the sea. As she walked along the wharf she saw in the light of the street lamps to the sandy bottom of the harbour, the washerwoman wrinkled skin of the sand, the submerged ropes, even a tiny shoal of minuscule fishes visible in the scope of the sodium lamps.

  She didn’t know what she was looking for exactly, in the intermittent light of the lamps, and the darkness under the stars. She stood hesitating in the street. As she stood there someone came past her, a white-haired woman in a red coat, who said, ‘The art class? Upstairs.’ Marian followed her up a flight of narrow wooden steps on the front of the house, and entered just behind her.

  There were a lot of people in the room. Men and women. A rough circle of easels and chairs. It was a large room, open to the roof-beams, and very untidy. There was a sink in one corner, and work pinned up round the walls. Some rather good portraits were propped higgledy-piggledy in one corner. A low, very uncomfortable-looking couch was in the middle of the circle, covered with a scruffy blanket.

  She saw Leo, partly hidden behind a huge easel right on the far side of the room, and went towards him.

  He said, ‘Here,’ and thrust into her hands a dirty board, a sheet of paper, and a thick black crayon. ‘There,’ he said, indicating the only empty chair in the room.

  ‘Leo, I just brought this …’ she started.

  Behind her two or three people were chatting to a young woman who stood barefoot beside the couch. Someone said, ‘OK, Jo,’ and she immediately took off what she was wearing – a short, coloured dressing-gown – and stood beside the teacher stark naked. He gestured, describing a pose. She sat down with one leg drawn up, and an arm resting on the knee. She was almost facing Marian. A skinny woman, with small breasts, and a large dark pubic bush. Long-limbed, face turned into the shadow cast by the lamp hanging on the beam above her. It was not that Marian had never seen a naked woman before; it was that she had never had – how could one have, except alone with a lover? – permission to stare. And that permission, of course, was conditional on an intention to draw. To have walked in off the street to stare, to see a naked stranger like a sideshow would have been intolerably squalid. And the woman was posed exactly between Marian and the door. To leave publicly would have been intolerably insulting.

  ‘Fifteen minutes,’ said the teacher. Marian sat down, took up a pencil and drew. And could not tell whether it was looking or drawing that was hard, but knew at once that this was harder than anything she had ever done.

  At the end of the class Leo had looked at her desperate drawing, and nodded. ‘That distance is too long compared with that one,’ he said, ‘so she look
s too thin. I like that line—’

  Marian said, ‘I didn’t mean to do this.’

  ‘Why not?’ he said. ‘Half the people here are amateurs, and half are pros. It’s not a discipline you grow out of. Come to the pub, and I’ll introduce you to some people. Though I don’t think there’s anyone here tonight who would remember Stella.’

  He had gathered his things, and put his coat on. She followed him into the street.

  ‘I only meant to give you this,’ she said, putting the packet into his hand.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘What it says, I think. I haven’t counted it.’

  ‘It’ll be right,’ he said, looking at the scrawled label. ‘That’s a relief.’

  ‘To both of us. I’ve been worried about all this.’

  ‘You didn’t have trouble getting the lawyer to release it?’

  ‘The lawyer doesn’t know about it. I found it, and brought it straight to you. And I won’t come to the pub tonight, Leo. I’ve been travelling all day, and I’m tired.’

  ‘Next week, then,’ he said. ‘Goodnight, Stella’s daughter.’

  ‘Ma,’ said Toby, ‘there’s somebody I want you to meet.’ Marian looked up from gardening. She had muddy gloves on her hands, and a pile of weeds lay on the ground in front of her. She had been working within the sound of the sea, and of the little rattling train going in and out of the station below. Digging herself in again, relishing her return. Lavender and fuchsia burgeoned along the terraced bed she was weeding, and Toby, standing on the level above her with his companion, was outlined against a dazzle of the descending afternoon light. So that it was only gradually, as she climbed the steps towards them, that she saw what it was about Matthew that was on Toby’s mind.

  ‘My Gran would like to see you, Mrs Easton,’ the strange young man said. She was staring at him shamelessly. But you couldn’t exactly stare at what was remarkable about him; the likeness to Toby was mercurial, glancing, something to do with movement, gesture, unconscious stance. Of course they were roughly of a height; their hair and eye colour, and the shape of nose and brow were like; but the startling thing depended on movement, and faded into a mere general similarity in stillness.

  ‘I think I’d like to talk to her,’ said Marian.

  ‘This is Mathy, I should have said,’ said Toby. ‘Matthew Vanson. We’ll take you to see his Gran any time you like.’

  ‘As soon as I’ve washed my hands,’ said Marian.

  She washed them slowly, working at her fingernails with the nail-brush, shaken, gaining time. It hadn’t occurred to her, though why ever not she couldn’t now imagine, that her father might have connections other than herself. That he might have been a family man, with children and grandchildren who might resemble hers. She had imagined something perfectly simple, a young man going to his death no sooner than he had begotten her. A less dramatic truth was threatening. Had his disappearance simply been because he was married to someone else? All she wanted, she thought, was to know his name for sure; no, more, she wanted to know was he the man in the portrait?

  She changed her shirt, and with clean hands went downstairs to where her son and his double waited for her.

  Mathy’s second Gran was in an old people’s home. It was a large and rambling house in the upper part of the town. The inmates were sitting in a conservatory, lined up in easy chairs. It all glowed with light and warmth, and had a view of the neatened garden. A low buzz of conversation competed with the sound of the unwatched television set in the lounge behind it. But somehow the sense of displacement and diminishment was palpable.

  The woman they had come to see was at the far end of the glassy room, half tucked away behind a huge pot plant. She looked very old, much older than Stella had looked, and her hands told her story at once. Arthritis had deformed them into the likeness of some exotic root vegetable. They lay in her lap, revealing helplessness. But they were not idle; a little square of knitting was in progress on a pair of red plastic needles gripped at a strange angle. She laid the work in her lap, looked up with a brightly alert expression, and said to Mathy, ‘Well, let me ’ave a look, then.’

  Mathy nudged Toby, who stood forward a fraction of a step, and said, ‘Are you some kind of missing aunt of mine?’

  ‘Don’t know, my ’ansome,’ she said. ‘That’s what we’ve got to work out. Some kind of great-auntie is what I might be. Then again you might be some sort of accidental looker. You two young cocks run along for a minute, while I talk to this lady here – Mrs Easton, id’n it?’

  ‘Marian,’ said Marian, sitting down in an empty cane chair facing her. ‘And you are Mrs Tremorvah?’

  ‘No, no. I’m a Poldavy, now. Mrs Betty Poldavy. But that’s my marriaged name. I was a Tremorvah. So if you be any kindred of mine, we be talking about something one of my brothers got up to, and never told about.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Marian. ‘I don’t want to go round raking up old dirt.’

  ‘’Tis natural. You would want to know, though.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And I have been racking my brains since Mathy told me. I have – I did have – four brothers. There was Steven, then Jamie. Both dead and gone now. But they was both married men in the war.’

  ‘It’s been known,’ said Marian, quietly.

  ‘Ess. Ess, it has. More than once. But I’d be surprised; very surprised. They was both very steady men. Family men. Chapel twice every Sunday. Then there was Peter; he was a bit giddy, and he hadn’t got settled when we lost him. His boat was run down in a fog off Gurnard’s Head, and sank like a stone. Steven was with him. The boat that hit them got Steven out of the water, but Peter was gone.’

  ‘When was that?’ asked Marian.

  ‘I can’t hardly recollect. You’re asking me to go back sixty years. Somewhere round about nineteen thirty-five.’

  ‘It isn’t him then. I’m too young.’

  ‘Then there’s only Thomas it can be. If it’s any of them. Not just coincidental. Or some other branch of the family that carries on the likeness. Not that I know of anyone.’

  ‘And if it was Thomas you would be my aunt,’ said Marian.

  ‘Ess, I would. But I never heard a breath of scandal about Thomas. Perhaps it would have been kept from me then; but I never heard of it later. Not as much as a shake of the head. Not about that kind of thing.’

  About something else, Marian heard in her inflexion, maybe. But then perhaps these deeply devout people couldn’t be told things? Perhaps there were a lot of secrets?

  ‘My mother was a painter, Betty,’ she said. ‘Could a painter have been a friend of one of your brothers?’

  ‘We didn’t have much to do with the artists,’ she said. ‘It was perfectly friendly. They went their ways, we went ours. They were a good thing for the town, when the fishing went down. They would pay for old sheds and sail-lofts, and they needed rooms. They were a Godless lot, mind. Not a chapel-goer among them, and precious few church-goers.’

  ‘Would St Ives people have been willing to sit as models for the artists?’ Marian asked.

  ‘Oh, ess. There were portraits made, by artists and photographers. Lots of portraits. I remember earning a shilling from Mrs Walsh to sit still while she drawed me as a girl. A whole shilling. You should look in the Sloop Inn. I’m told that’s full of drawings of local people. You should look there.’

  Marian felt stymied. Could she, should she say, ‘My mother painted your brother Thomas stark naked – how did that come about?’ The taboo about not bad-mouthing the dead is powerful.

  But Mrs Poldavy hadn’t fallen silent, just thoughtful. ‘I recall Tommy being very hot to join the navy,’ she said. ‘Father didn’t want to have him go, but he wouldn’t stop.’

  ‘Didn’t he have to go?’

  ‘Not have to, no. Fishing was what they called a reserve occupation. He volunteered. He couldn’t wait to get out of the town, I heard Jamie say. It left them short-handed in the boat they worked. But there it was. He wo
uld go off, and he never came back.’

  ‘And it wasn’t a scandal that drove him out?’

  ‘Not the kind you’re thinking about, no.’

  ‘So why did he leave, do you think?’

  ‘I couldn’t tell you. You’d have to ask him.’

  ‘Ask him?’ cried Marian, nearly jumping out of her chair. ‘But I thought he was dead!’

  ‘He idn’t dead,’ said Mrs Poldavy. ‘He’s over to Gwithian.’

  Alice sat in the bay window of the flat, with the sweep of the bay shining at her round a hundred and eighty degrees. It was a brisk sort of day, with little flickering white horses breaking all over the sea. A big cloud, pearly primrose above and dirty black below, stood over the Island behind the town, seeming to be anchored there by a band of rainbow. The lighthouse had retreated into sheets of rain, and only one person was walking on the sands below. Alice had brought herself a cup of coffee, and The Times to read on the window-seat. She flicked through the paper, desultory, only half able to take her eyes from the view. But the concert advertisement leapt off the page at her – her quartet, playing Mozart and Shostakovitch at the Wigmore Hall. They must be rehearsing without her – worse – the advertisement gave the names of the quartet players, and the violist was someone else. Without telling or warning her, Max had replaced her.

  She had not even the consolation of anger, not for more than a few minutes. For of course she had left a rehearsal to go to her grandmother’s bedside. You make choices, and you live with them. How if she had stayed put, and sent a message? She imagined it – Toby leaning over Stella’s immobile form, and saying, ‘Gran, Alice can’t come, she has a rehearsal.’ She saw at once that her mother would have been outraged, deeply hurt, and that Stella, assuming the message had got through to her, would have perfectly understood. Stella would have expected it of her to the point where, in coming to her grandmother’s death scene, she had ignored her grandmother’s example.