The Serpentine Cave Read online

  When Marian's mother dies, she is left confronting the chaotic detritus of a life obsessively devoted to art. She has left it too late to ask the crucial questions about scenes confusedly remembered from her childhood, and above all about the identity of her own father. Out of the hundreds of paintings in her mother's studio, one, a portrait of a young man, is inscribed ‘For Marian’. Is this her father? And who was he?

  Marian's search takes her to St Ives. In the closeknit Cornish town where communities of fisherfolk and artists have coexisted for many years, she learns of a tragedy which is intrinsically tied up with her father's life. Over fifty years before, the St Ives lifeboat went down with all hands bar one. Marian must delve deep into the past to discover the identity of a man she never knew, and in so doing confront the demons which have tortured her own adult life.

  Jill Paton Walsh was educated at St Michael’s Convent, North Finchley, and at St Anne’s College, Oxford. Her adult novels are Lapsing (1986), A School For Lovers (1989), Knowledge of Angels (1994), which was shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize, and Goldengrove Unleaving (1997). She has also won many awards for her children’s literature, including the Whitbread Prize, the Universe Prize and the Smarties Award.

  She has three children and lives in Cambridge.

  THE

  SERPENTINE CAVE

  Jill Paton Walsh

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Version 1.0

  Epub ISBN 9781446423011

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  THE SERPENTINE CAVE

  A BLACK SWAN BOOK : 0 552 99720 X

  Originally published in Great Britain by Doubleday,

  a division of Transworld Publishers Ltd

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Doubleday edition published 1997

  Black Swan edition published 1998

  Copyright © Jill Paton Walsh 1997

  Extracts on p116 and p221 from From a Fugue by Bach by Siegfried Sassoon, Poems Newly Selected

  (Faber and Faber, 1940)

  The right of Jill Paton Walsh to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All the characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental

  Condition of Sale

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Black Swan Books are published by Transworld Publishers Ltd,

  61–63 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA,

  in Australia by Transworld Publishers (Australia) Pty Ltd,

  15–25 Helles Avenue, Moorebank, NSW 2170

  and in New Zealand by Transworld Publishers (NZ) Ltd,

  3 William Pickering Drive, Albany, Auckland.

  Contents

  Dedication

  The Serpentine Cave

  Acknowledgements

  To Margaret Freeman with admiration

  There were three women in the room. One lying on the bed under a white sheet, eyes closed. One wearing a white coat, studying a bleeping monitor, among an assembly of strange devices on an aluminium trolley. The third staring fixedly out of the window.

  A bare window; if there were curtains nobody had troubled to draw them across the naked night. A characterless window; no dividers, just glass, and so high up nobody could have looked in on the neon-lit drama within the room. Marian had been looking out for some time, ever since a faintly sulphurous ribbon across the glazed screen of darkness had caught her drifting, disorientated attention. This was dawn. Very slowly the streak of dirty pallor across the view brightened, and took on a yellow hue. It was finely laced with the black branches of still leafless trees. A simplifying mist had left them outlined. Behind the visible trees were more, softly obliterated, and a slight swelling of the rolling arable land that in Cambridgeshire passed for a hill. The hospital lawns below the window were white with spring frost, and gently steaming with drifting strands of mist.

  The bleeping monitor counted down the onset of a threatening day. Marian wished it could stop. It did not. She turned to the doctor, and began to speak, but the doctor at once laid a finger on her lips, and shook her head. She beckoned, and they withdrew together into the corridor.

  ‘What has happened?’ asked Marian, though on one level she wanted to tell, rather than ask. She had opened the front door, calling, unsurprised to find no answer and nothing ready. To find the sink full of unwashed dishes, and the usual reek of turpentine competing with the slightly meaty smell of the dishwasher, partly loaded. She had called again, and climbed the steps into the barn that her mother used as a studio, and there had found the slumped body, alive and making awful noises – a monologue of groans and garbled ramblings.

  ‘Your mother has had a stroke,’ said the doctor. ‘A serious one, this time.’

  ‘This time? I didn’t know—’

  ‘Then we can assume that earlier ones, if any, were slight. Perhaps your mother concealed it from you. People sometimes do.’

  ‘Yes – well – but now?’

  ‘I can’t tell you very much. She may recover; people do quite often recover almost fully from a stroke. They may regain movement in the paralysed side; with therapy they can often recover some speech. But to be frank with you, at your mother’s age … there will be some recovery, if she lives long enough. How much, we must wait and see. I am so sorry.’

  ‘If she lives long enough?’

  ‘At her age, you see, Mrs Easton, and after such a severe stroke, she may well have another, within a few days or weeks.’

  ‘I see. Can we do anything?’

  ‘We can make her comfortable. We can keep her here for a while, and then if no further incident occurs, and her condition stabilizes, we would eventually discharge her and you can look for therapists. Perhaps a nursing home … One thing I should warn you about, if I may – your mother has not lost her power to hear and understand you, just because she has lost the power of speech.’

  ‘Warn me?’

  ‘That she can understand you. People sometimes say the most tactless things, even cruel things, because they haven’t fully realized that the patient may be upset, perhaps more easily than before, when they can’t respond.’

  Marian nodded, and returned to the room.

  It had been transformed in her absence, in two ways. The horizontal sun had torn through its wrappings of mist, and was lighting the room with a luridly golden light. It had eclipsed the neon strip lights on the ceiling, overwhelming their chilly accuracy with a rival vision, in which Marian’s mother lay under a sheet of pale primrose, her face jaundiced, the monitor screen had faded to an indecipherable dimness, and every metal surface in the room – the bedstead, the trolley, the machinery – was dramatically gilded. The window now offered a prospect of egg-shell blue sky, scattered all over with pink-gold puffy small clouds like a baroque ceiling.

  But the other transformation was more striking. The patient’s eyes were open, in an unfocussed vertical stare.


  ‘Talk to her,’ the doctor said.

  Marian was seized with a hideous embarrassment, almost revulsion, flinching at the thought of talking at her mother, the-no-reply-possible situation transforming conversation into an exhibitionist monologue, or a horrible manipulation, like that of the ‘carer’ saying, ‘Come along, Granny, time for your bath, don’t be naughty, now!’ Or worse. Marian had heard worse. To say anything at all to someone who cannot offer any reply seemed like a form of contempt.

  But the doctor was standing there, waiting.

  ‘Mother?’ said Marian. ‘I’ll clean your brushes when I get back …’

  And in the silence that followed she had time to feel foolish. She had been subliminally expecting a reply. And – how horribly revealing! She had made a placatory offering. Her mother found her useless in most ways, but had said once or twice that she was good at cleaning brushes. Was this what it would be? When the other cannot reply one simply haemorrhages self-revelation into the silence? She tried again. ‘It’s thick frost. Bad for the plants, I’m afraid.’ For the early spring had tempted the plants to put out tender tipping buds. Now the blooms would unfold with frost burn … Nothing to be done about that, of course. ‘But it does look pretty, don’t you think?’

  The woman in the bed uttered a polysyllabic grunt, and very slightly turned her head towards the window.

  ‘Good!’ said the doctor. ‘She has a little movement in the neck, already. Good. And she answered you – you realize – she did answer, it’s just that we can’t decipher what the answer meant.’

  ‘So what else is new?’ said Marian, bitterly.

  ‘Pardon?’ said the doctor. ‘Look, I’m leaving her with you now. Just keep talking to her.’

  But the urge to silence was overmastering. Marian’s moment of revulsion had given way to a rueful amusement. Nothing was much changed, then; she would be burdened with the need to talk, to keep up relations, to bid in one way after another for her mother’s attention; her mother would reply if at all in grunts or monosyllables, her attention always directed elsewhere. At least, now, she could not simply walk away! Marian remembered numerous times in the past … half-way through the big party she had organized for her mother’s eightieth birthday, mother had disappeared, and been found eventually, sitting in the hotel car-park, balancing herself on a bollard in a biting wind, sketching the half-frozen lake in the grounds. And long before that, in the middle of Marian’s wedding reception, the bride’s mother could not be found when the speeches were being made – she had retreated to her studio and resumed painting. And even longer ago, she had left the guests at Marian’s seventh birthday party unsupervised while she worked, and had taken quite calmly the awful results of the jelly-throwing riot which had ensued. But tiny Marian had felt abandoned to the barbarians …

  ‘Well, Mother, I can say what I want to you, now,’ she said softly. She had to say something, since she was enjoined to speak.

  And that remark, floating unanswered in the silence, punctuated by the bleeping monitor, brought to Marian’s mind the other sense in which she could say anything she liked to her mother, and always had been able to. Indeed Marian’s entire class at school had obtained their unusually accurate and extensive knowledge of sex, male dispositions and physiology, consequences and contraception by getting Marian to ask the taboo questions of her mother, and relay the frank replies. It had not occurred to Marian till many years later that these questions might have misrepresented her to her mother, had she assumed a personal need-to-know basis for them. They had been both knowing questions, and, in Marian’s mouth innocent, technical, as unloaded of emotion as questions about the internal combustion engine would have been.

  The room was suffocatingly hot for someone wearing winter clothes. No doubt for the patient under the starched sheet it was just right … and Marian had not slept that night, and was soon drowsing in the stiff little pseudo-leather chair in the corner of the room.

  Later Marian’s grown children arrived. Toby and Alice had driven themselves up from London, starting early. Marian had not expected them – she would not have expected them to be able to extricate themselves from complex lives for any emergency of her own. Alice came straight to Marian, leaned over the chair, twined her slender arms round Marian’s shoulders, laid a cool cheek against her mother’s and said softly, ‘Hi, there, Mum. Love you.’

  Toby went to the bedside, and took up his grandmother’s slack hand in his own. A sudden convulsion seized and twisted Stella’s face – her mouth moved lop-sidedly, one side drooping, Marian thought at first, in pain. Then she realized that this rictus was now her mother’s smile – her mother was smiling at Toby, and Toby was weeping, his tears falling on their linked hands.

  Alice moved across to the bed, and took her grandmother’s other hand. Marian watched her children, amazed as always by their beauty and grace. She could see them normally for normal purposes, but secretly also always saw them this way – her children, aureoled by love. And if they made her feel bypassed, short-circuited, if the directness of their love for Stella shamed her, she deserved it. For she had not herself thought to offer tears, or touching, only a few stiff sentences.

  Toby wiped his cheeks dry abruptly with the backs of his hands, and said, ‘Don’t worry, Gran, we’ll look after Mother for you!’

  The very last thing that had occurred to Marian in this situation was that anyone needed to look after her.

  Toby was right, though. When the nurses gently shepherded them out of the room, saying that the patient needed quiet, telling Marian that she needed sleep, suggesting that they came back in the evening, she was lost. She managed to walk as far as the reception area, with its shops and lights, and throngs of people, and the bevies of synthetically smiling clerks and helpers – then she couldn’t quite think what she was doing, or where they were going.

  ‘What time is it?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s not as late as it feels, Mum. Only eleven-thirty. Where are we going?’

  ‘Back to Gran’s – Gran’s spare rooms, unless you’d rather we looked for a hotel?’ Toby said.

  ‘Which would you rather?’ said Alice, gently.

  ‘Gran’s will be best; there are things we must do … people to tell,’ she said.

  ‘Not before you’ve slept.’

  ‘But …’ She began to protest. But she felt so dazed, so weak, that suddenly she gave in. She let them lead her, and they took charge. Toby drove; she sat in the back seat of his car, and fell so deeply asleep that she didn’t wake when they arrived and he switched off the ignition. By the time they woke her they had put sheets on the spare-room bed, and turned back the corner of the blankets, and there was a cup of tea on the bedside table. They had even, she discovered, as having stripped to her underwear she gratefully slid into the bed, put a hot-water bottle between the sheets. As she had so often in the past done for them – the unfamiliar inversion of familiar kindness struck her briefly as astonishing, like watching the shift and tilt of some great balance-beam – and then she slept.

  Downstairs her children sat at the kitchen table, talking together, their voices softened partly so as not to wake Marian, partly from the sense of doom that surrounded them.

  ‘Mum won’t want to go home while Gran’s like that,’ said Alice. ‘It’s such a long way away. She’ll want to hang around and visit.’

  ‘I expect she’ll manage all right if she has to,’ said Toby. ‘But it would be hard on her. I was thinking I might stay over for a day or two.’

  ‘How can you? Won’t your precious firm lose millions the moment you take your eyes off the dealing screens?’

  ‘Listen to you! And no doubt you’re about to drop everything and everybody and tear off to some rehearsal. For some stupid concert with wads of unsold tickets that loses more money every time than I can make in an hour—’

  ‘Toby, we musn’t do this. We mustn’t quarrel now.’

  They looked at each other across the kitchen table.

&nb
sp; ‘Find a time and place for it later, you mean?’

  ‘Probably. But for the moment in spite of your unkind assumptions, I am staying around.’

  ‘Nothing to rehearse for?’

  ‘Don’t probe, Toby. Just accept.’

  ‘OK. The place is a bit insanitary, isn’t it? Should we clear up?’

  ‘Someone will have to, some time.’

  ‘Social services would take one look at this, and decide Gran would have to be put in a home. It’s yucky!’

  ‘It always was. And we never used to mind,’ she said. ‘But just the same … and I bet there’s nothing to eat.’

  Investigation revealed one quite good-looking lamb chop in the refrigerator, several packets of powdered soup, some mildewed bread, and a large jar of porridge oats. They began to laugh.

  ‘Hush!’ said Toby, shutting the kitchen door.

  ‘Oh, Gran!’ said Alice. ‘Gran as ever!’

  ‘I expect one can live for months on porridge,’ said Toby.

  ‘Porridge and a lamb chop – don’t forget the lamb chop!’ Their laughter was fed on recollections of desperate meals eaten in Stella’s house in long ago holidays – wild forays to the fish-and-chip shop, mounds of baked beans topped with one rasher of bacon between the three of them, once – once only – potatoes stolen from the field beside the house; these gruesome menus varied on rare occasions when Stella had sold a painting, by sudden excursions to posh restaurants in Cambridge.

  ‘Well, be fair – she wasn’t expecting company – she didn’t expect to be dying …’ said Toby. Laughter stopped at once.

  ‘I’d better start by going shopping,’ said Alice.

  ‘OK,’ said Toby. ‘I’ll ring Dad – hadn’t I better? I mean he ought to know about it, even if … And then I’ll tackle that.’ He pulled a face at the mound of dishes in the sink.