The Serpentine Cave by Jill Paton Walsh

Author:Jill Paton Walsh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Transworld

Alice had begun practising in an empty house. The viola part didn’t stand up alone. She could always hear the other parts running in her head, weaving the pattern, and she could only dimly understand how the viola heard alone might strike a listener. It was a relief not to be listened to, however. She worked for an hour on her part in a Mozart quartet, and then moved on to playing a Bach piece for solo cello. That gave all the tune to her. Lovely, dark music.

She finished a slow movement, and realized suddenly that she was not, after all, alone. Leo had come in. He had come to the living-room door and stopped to listen. She would have been cross at his eavesdropping had he not said softly,

Musing my way through a sombre and favourite fugue

By Bach who disburdens my soul, but perplexes my fingers …

‘Gosh, Leo, what’s that?’ she said, startled.

‘Sassoon.’

‘Who?’

‘Ah. Music’s not the only art,’ he said. ‘There are cross-connections. He’s a poet.’

‘Can you remember more of it?’

‘No; but I’ll lend you the book if you like.’

‘Yes I would.’

‘Come and get it some time.’

‘Did you want Mum?’

‘Some other time will do,’ he said, waving at her as he left.

Alone again, Alice decided to be useful – to cook a chowder for supper. She needed fresh scallops, and cod, and a crab to stand in for lobster. Also a potato-peeler – being left-handed she couldn’t use her mother’s. She liked shopping like this, going from shop to shop with a basket on her arm like a Victorian photograph. And she needed some soothing activity.

Later she was on her way home, up the long hill from the town. Halfway up was a little bric-a-brac shop with pretty things in the window. She hesitated, and then went in. Almost the largest item in the shop was a dark-red marble lamp, shaped like a lighthouse on a chunk of rock, polished, and sombrely gleaming. At first Alice thought she liked it, but she turned her back on it, studied, or pretended to study, a rack of Coalport plates, and tried to imagine the lamp carried home and lighting a corner of a natural room. It wouldn’t, of course, shed much light, since the little torch bulb in its imitation lamp-chamber was too faint. It was a light to look at, not one to see by. Was it beautiful then? Enough to earn a place in a room? For it certainly wouldn’t be useful. Alice had recently heard, from Max, William Morris’s dictum, ‘Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful,’ and was trying to live by it. In the case of the potato peeler she had just acquired at Woolworths this was both clear and easy; in the case of a stone lighthouse?

She turned round, and looked at it again, perceiving it now as rather kitsch.

‘Serpentine,’ murmured the hovering lady in the back of the shop.

‘I beg your pardon?’ said Alice.

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