‘I see,’ she said.
‘Do you? People said we quarrelled about nothing, because they don’t think art matters. It wasn’t nothing to us, it was everything. Different things matter to different people, don’t you think? Or why would you walk out in the middle of watching that video? Look, we’re all going down for a drink. I’ve left the tape in the machine. I’ll come back for it later.’
You had to concede to Leo, she realized, an instinct for what to do.
Going down the hill together, Alice put her arm through Leo’s. Toby and Mathy were walking together, deep in talk. As they went down Lifeboat Hill they picked up Bish and Bar, who were chatting by the propped boards offering fishing trips round the bay. At the foot of Custom House Passage Mathy split off, and rejoined them at the door of the Sloop with Ann. They piled into the pub, and settled round a table in the furthest room, where the sketches of local characters petered out, and were adulterated with one or two consciously arty nudes.
Toby noticed, with mild incredulity, that Leo and Alice were holding hands under the table, and illogically emboldened, reached likewise under the table for Ann’s.
‘Town has gone down dreadful, if you ask me,’ said an elderly man perched on a bar stool within earshot.
‘What d’ye mean, gone down, Uncle?’ said Ann.
‘Last fifteen year, St Ives has gone down to nothing. Uster be a queue to get into chapel at half-past five on Sundays,’ he answered her. ‘Now you can go down at ten to six and get a seat.’
‘Well, it used to be you wouldn’t find a Methodist in the Sloop, come to that,’ said Mathy cheerfully. ‘Can I buy you a drink?’
‘Thank’ee no,’ said Uncle. ‘I got this one, and I know my limitations.’
‘That film we were watching …’ said Toby.
‘If you want to know more about it,’ Mathy said, ‘those old boys in the public bar remember about it, I expect.’
‘I wouldn’t know what to ask,’ said Toby. ‘But that man who thought they shouldn’t have gone – he was right in a way, wasn’t he?’
‘No, he wadn’t!’ said Mathy, with sudden passion. ‘You couldn’t have that, boy. You couldn’t have people getting in and out of a boat, and arguing with the coxswain. If you’re down to go, you go. Couldn’t ever get her launched else.’
‘They had to be very brave.’
‘No,’ said Mathy again. ‘It idn’t brave. It got to be considered a normal thing to do. Can’t have people thinking, well I don’t be no hero …’ As to be, well, automatic.’
Uncle at the bar chipped in. ‘I’ve heard Dan Paynter tell how he come home on leave in the war – just a three-day leave, mind, and as he come down Skidden Hill, right off the train, the rockets went up, and so he goes straight out in the boat, leaving his kit bag in the shed without his family so much as knowing he was back.’
It came suddenly to Toby that if every life involved moral dice-playing, then he knew which risks he himself wanted to take.
‘Mathy,’ he said, ‘if I lived here, could I be in the lifeboat?’
Up the hill, back at the house, Marian picked up one of the photographs on her bedside table, frame and all, and got into the car to drive herself to Gwithian. It seemed a long way. The road was up in Carbis Bay, and two buses coming opposite ways were in difficulty getting past each other. It had become a crisp and very clear day, the kind of day that transforms suburbs into bright utopias, their gardens into toy parks. As the road turned and descended through Lelant, the sweeping and curving profile of the hill with its stand of dark Scotch pines seen over the old houses by the road, offered her sea-struck eyes a reminder of inland beauty. And then – it seemed characteristic of the place – she drove past the junk hoardings of the pleasure park, and the dressed up person, presumably a desperate person, disguised as a wizard, and waving a wand of welcome. So into Hayle and Copperhouses, and out to Gwithian, and onto the Towans.
Marian rang the door bell of Captain Tremorvah’s cabin, and waited. The tide was out, and the beach wide. A bitterly cold wind swept the shore. She looked at the girdle of wall round the abandoned garden on Godrevy, and picked out the outhouses, the flights of steps, the ruined post of the breeches buoy. It brought over her that curious ache that abandoned habitations of all kinds arouse – that foolish desire to repossess, to re-roof, to weed and restore, and resume the once viable pattern of days. You would need a boat, you would need a telephone … The glazed door behind her opened, and Captain Tremorvah was standing there.
‘Can I come in?’ said Marian.
He stepped back. She entered the porch, and this time he retreated into the room behind, and she followed. His living room surprised her, though she saw at once that it should not have done. It was very tidy and clean. A bright little enamel stove fed from a polished copper coal-scuttle kept it warm. The windows were double-glazed. There were two dark red leather wing armchairs, and a settee with an oriental rug cast over it. The walls were covered with admiralty charts, and photographs of ships in bird’s-eye maple frames. A barometer and a ship’s clock shared a corner of wall beside a door to the kitchen. Marian’s eye was caught at once by a row of medals with their ribbons, pinned to a velvet pad, framed and hung up above the elaborately decorated harmonium, complete with music stool and built in candelabra, which dominated the far wall. A plate-rack ran round the room at picture-rail level, carrying a procession of rather good Chinese porcelain blue and white plates.
Marian was making a rapid reassessment. She had associated living in a wooden cabin on the Towans, if it was not as a holiday home, with poverty. The evident prosperity of the room turned the choice of house – well you could hardly call such a hut a house – into an eccentricity. He was silent, just looking at her.
‘I brought this to show you,’ she said, pulling the photograph out of her bag, and handing it to him. ‘Look, these are my children, Alice and Toby. Toby is the spitting image of your grand-nephew Matthew Vanson. They might almost be twins, don’t you think?’
He looked at the photograph. ‘I couldn’t tell you,’ he said, handing it back. ‘I’ve never seen my grandnephew. Never clapped eyes on him.’
She was baffled. ‘He lives in Downalong,’ she said. ‘I don’t know which street.’
‘I haven’t set foot in St Ives since the day I left,’ he said.
‘When was that?’ she asked. ‘When did you leave?’
‘Nineteen forty-one. Joined the navy.’
‘I was two, then. You must remember me. Don’t you want to see your grandchildren?’
He did not answer, but she saw his eyes go to the photograph she was still holding. She didn’t know what to say to him, standing there old and frail, and denying it, denying her. She was ashamed of herself for insisting, for bullying a frail old man, with his watery dark eyes, the irises clouded with encroaching white. She thought she ought to leave it, she had come too late, he was too old for such upheavals now.
But, ‘Captain Tremorvah,’ she heard herself saying, ‘that night in 1939, where were you when they launched the boat?’
‘Can you walk?’ he said. ‘Come out and I’ll show you something.’
He put on a navy greatcoat, taking it from a hook behind the door. It seemed somewhat too big for him, and he hunched himself into it, as though expecting, when he opened the back door, a mighty wind. And there was indeed a smart breeze blowing off the bay. He crossed the road at once, and led her on a track towards the beach. And facing this way the opposite side of the bay was spread out in view, all the way to Clodgy Point, and you could see the whole town of St Ives, clinging to its sloping hills. You could see the harbour, and the golden crescent moons of the beaches – where was the Island? Marian wondered, and then a patch of cloud-shadow moved a little and the emerald green cushion of the Island slopes came clear to her. But Captain Tremorvah plunged on, and she had to follow.
The path led to the brink of quite a high sandy cliff, instead of a slope to the sands. Half broken concrete ste
ps had been laid in it, and then subverted by the undercut of wind and tide, but they scrambled down. Then they were walking briskly on the enormous shore. The tide had drawn far back, and was piling what seemed like a tumbling vertical wall of wave on breaking wave onto the sand without advancing. So flat was the great beach that it had not drained dry with the ebb, but was glossed with a huge expanse of standing water, reflecting the sky. It had a lilac-grey silken light on it, in which the white tower of the lighthouse was reflected like a dangling satin ribbon, shimmering gently in the wind. Mirrored opalescent clouds paddled in the inch-deep lake, and the two of them strode through it, walking on water like latter-day miracle workers.
He led her straight towards the lighthouse. On their right the little plain behind a sand bar where the Red River spilled out to the sea gave way to the whale-backed height of the headland, bright green grass-cover mantling black cliffs of rock, spines and plateaux of rock jutting across the sands to the water’s edge. Above them some people walked, some cars were parked, and as they came to the foot of the cliffs the river was running across their way. It spread out, and divided and converged, playing a game of delta from a geography book, all in miniature across the sands, but it was fast running and quite deep.
Captain Tremorvah simply chose a fairly shallow point and strode across – he was wearing boots – but Marian had to take off her shoes, pull off her tights, hitch her skirt, and wade across, near to knee deep in freezing water. And then the sand gave way to the rocks, and she had to stop and put her shoes back on her wet and sandy feet. She sat down to the job, and when she had laced her shoes again, her companion had disappeared. She clambered after him, and saw him still steadily advancing, clambering over the rough, seaweedy, rock-pool-cradling uncovered bedrock of the land.
He stopped quite suddenly, and she came up to him. They were very near the lighthouse, almost at the edge of the wide bay, where the strait between shore and lighthouse was at its narrowest, looking due westwards to the piles of rock on Clodgy Point, standing in outline against the afternoon light. They were on a platform of rock, deeply creviced and cracked, but fairly level. Below them another such crazed level extended a little way.
‘D’you see that?’ he said.
She looked down at the rocks, following where he pointed. ‘What?’ she said.
‘That iron there. D’you see?’
Wedged hard in the rocks was a rusty iron spar, worn and eroded, and pitted, as bright orange as the patches of lichen that clung to the rock higher up.
‘What is it?’ she asked. She wouldn’t have given it a second glance, had she walked there alone.
‘That’s her keel,’ he said. ‘That’s where I should have fetched up. With the rest. I should have fetched up there.’
‘If you had been in the boat, you mean?’
‘Had I done what I should have done, had my wickedness not prevented me. See, the sea took that boat clean across the bay, turning her over and over, and it cast her down so hard just here that her keel is fixed in those rocks as long as that iron lasts. I’m fetched up here too, now, as long as I shall last. And no argument.’
‘Have you never wished to go home?’ she asked him.
‘It’s an unforgiving place,’ he said. ‘Or, it was to me. I speak only as I find. And I’ve got as close as I can come. We must walk back now, before the sea takes back the sand, and makes us go the long way round.’
‘But you can see it all, from here!’ she exclaimed, watching the sunlight sweep across the distance, brightening everything below the softly outlined hills, and racing across the bay towards them, chasing the inky blue of the sea in cloud-shadow, and making it lucent azure.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Trencrom Hill, Trink Hill, Knill’s Steeple, Rosewall Hill, Clodgy Point, Man’s Head, the Island, Porthminster Point, Carrack Gladden, Lelant Church … I can see them. And all the town. I can see the roof of my mother’s house from here, and the roof of the house where I was when I should have been down to the boat.’
‘You were with my mother.’
‘I must go in,’ he said. ‘There’s a chill on the wind.’
They walked back in silence, along the roaring waves, in silence forded the icy stream, Marian once again needing to wade barefoot, recovered the distance, clambered the sandy cleft in the cliffs, and stood once more at his door. He held it open for her, and she stepped into the porch.
‘I mustn’t tread sand in,’ she said. She had become very cold, to the point of trembling, and her toes were numb in her sand-laden shoes.
‘Sit in that chair,’ he said. He hung up his coat, and went indoors. And in a short while came out to her with a basin of water. He put the bowl at her feet, and said, ‘Take off your shoes.’
It was barely warm water, but it stung her. The sand drifted off her feet to the bottom of the bowl. He brought an enamel jug to her, and added hotter water. And then more. Her feet stopped tingling, and felt part of her again. She moved her toes. The comfortable warmth spread through her. He stooped in front of her, holding a towel in his hands, steadying himself on the arm of her chair, and began to dry her feet. She was embarrassed, she nearly stopped him doing it, but some instinct stilled her.
‘You can come in now,’ he said.
He had put her shoes in front of the stove, with newspaper thrust in them. She sat in one of the red chairs, and he brought hot black tea, and sat in the other. As once, long ago, he had put her down freezing beside the fire … There was a long silence in the room. She would not ask him anything more. She was bringing herself round to not needing to.
‘Round two in the morning,’ he said. ‘The rocket went up round two in the morning. And I wasn’t where I ought to have been. We was like two birds in a nest that nobody knew about, and I was naked as the day I was born. Well, I heard the rocket, and I jumped out of bed at once, and began to put my clothes on, quick as I could. And there was all this uproar in the street. People running on the cobbles. You could hear them above the wind and the storm and everything. I was stood inside the front door, aheaving my jacket on, and there was a fixed bit of window above the door, and I saw the light from the street-lamp just outside cast against the wall, and the footfalls clattering on the cobbles outside, and I realized I couldn’t go out. Not without being seen. I was trapped in there, behind that door. So I waited for things to quiet down, and the coming and going to be over, and I waited till nearly morning. It was morning till men stopped going up and down to the Island to look out and see if they could see any sign of the boat. She was launched and she was lost before I could go out in the air.’
‘But there aren’t any cobbles by Stella’s house, and it isn’t on the way to the Island,’ said Marian, ‘I don’t understand you.’
‘Her first house in St Ives. She had a cottage and a loft in Bethesda Hill. She moved higher up the town a bit later, to keep out of sight a bit. But she was in Downalong, then. I only had to slip round the corner from my mother’s house, and go through the cellar door, and I was there.’
‘And you had been lovers for a while, by then?’
‘Fornicators, yes.’
‘Why didn’t you marry?’
‘Couldn’t. I had a wife at that time. She was in the sanatorium, very poorly, yes. And times were hard. Your mother put an advert in the St Ives Times for a model, for a man to be a drawing model, for half a crown. And I needed the money. I hurt my hand on a fish-hook, and I was off the boats till it mended, so I needed the money. She had me take my clothes off to draw me, and I thought, well, I would. I had a devil in me, a bit of a swagger, you know, and I thought it wouldn’t do no harm. She was a handsome woman, your mother. And I was stood there, cock-naked. So then I was a deep dyed sinner all in a minute and I hardly knew how it happened.’
‘But – it can’t have been just once, surely?’
‘Once we started we couldn’t leave off. She got in my blood and bones so I couldn’t think of anything else. But we kept it dark. We kept it secret. I don’t kn
ow what my brothers would have done to me, what my mother would have said if they’d known, but there it was. They didn’t. And I thought I was getting away with it, I thought even God didn’t see, till that night. Even then I didn’t appreciate what had happened, at first. Because it does occur sometimes, missing the boat. Not everybody gets down there every time the rocket goes up. You’d have a bit of explaining to do, and then they’d rib you a bit, and forget it. So when I got out that morning I thought I’d think of something to say, some sort of a reason where I was, and it would be soon forgotten. The hand of God had struck me in my wickedness, and I didn’t even feel the force of it at first.’
He got up, and felt how her shoes were doing, drying out beside the stove. He replaced them in the warmth, and went on speaking, though perhaps not really to her. ‘Well, it didn’t die down. It went on and on, recriminations. And everyone counting the regular crew on their fingers and saying where were you? And how come you wasn’t there? The second cox, he didn’t hear the rockets, but there were some that didn’t believe him. I could walk round the town and feel like a stinking fish, the way people looked at me. All those widows and orphans. There were those two men walking round the town, one of them broken in health, and the other cold-shouldered, and both on my conscience.’
‘But why—’
‘They were neither of them regular jacket-holders. They were both volunteers. If there hadn’t been places in the boat that wouldn’t have happened not to one or the other of them.’
‘But my mother didn’t give you the cold-shoulder – not for that?’
‘I couldn’t hardly stand the sight of her after that night, I was so ashamed. She moved up the hill a bit, so I could go to her along the back of the beach, and up the path out of sight, but I only went once or twice. I couldn’t stand the thought that people might guess what had kept me from my duty. So anyway, September nineteen forty-one my poor wife died, and I got out of it into the navy.’
The Serpentine Cave Page 18
