The Sea Lady

by Margaret Drabble

  He lay up there, alone, with his tender throat, and wondered about Sandy Clegg. He was told that Sandy had measles, like his sister, but was this true? He knew his sister wasn't dead, because he could hear her whining and crying downstairs. He could hear their mother rocking her in the rocking chair, and singing 'Ten Green Bottles' and 'One Man Went to Mow', although she was really too old for that kind of comfort now. Rock, rock, backwards and forwards, an insistent rhythmic grinding that soothed and excited at the same time. One man went to mow, went to Mower Meadow. Two men, one man and his dog, went to Mower Meadow. He understood that his sister Lizzie couldn't come up to see him. He didn't really want to see her much. But he couldn't understand why Blackie wasn't allowed up, because cats don't get measles or tonsillitis. They get cat flu, but that was different. Nor could he understand how Blackie had managed to allow herself to be confined to the downstairs. She wasn't always an obedient cat, and she liked to be in his bedroom. She liked his bedroom best.

  He shared a guilty secret with Blackie. She liked to get into his bed and suck at his pyjamas. She would nestle in his bed, hidden under the covers, and suck, rhythmically, at the crook of his elbow. He liked it when she did this, although he knew it was probably wrong. He couldn't see why, but he suspected that it was wrong. She would suck and purr, and purr and suck. It was very comforting to him. But she didn't come up any more. She had forgotten him.

  In bed, he read his way through book after book. He quickly exhausted the two new books that had been given to him as treats – a Just William story and a book on aircraft spotting. He studied his aunt's gift of Monsters of the Deep closely, admiring the fish with telescopic eyes and the gulper and the black vampire squid. He wondered at the hideous female angler fish, who dangled a luminous lure before her wherever she went, and devoured her husband and reduced him to a sac of sperm. Then he moved on to the old books that were part of the house's furniture. Robert Louis Stevenson, R. M. Ballantyne, Walter de la Mare, Charles Kingsley, Jules Verne. Some of these books had belonged to his grandparents. They had embossed bindings and coloured illustrations. He was a precocious reader and he made his way through volumes which were in part incomprehensible to him. He liked The Water Babies, even in its lengthy unexpurgated Darwinian version, and he read Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea with rapture. He enjoyed Ballantyne's The Lifeboat, convinced at first that it was set on his own northern coastline, and that it would at some point in the narrative turn out to be connected with the local heroine Grace Darling, daughter of the lighthouse keeper. But it wasn't. This was disappointing, but he enjoyed the melodrama nevertheless, and read again and again the lengthy footnote on the Royal Humane Society's rules for the recovery 'of those who are apparently drowned'.

  That phrase, 'apparently drowned', was magical to him, and he longed to be able to revive a dead man. Again and again, he read the instructions about how to clear the dead man's throat, and how to excite his breathing. 'If there be no success, lose not a moment, but instantly, TO IMITATE BREATHING, replace the patient on the face, raising and supporting the chest well on a folded coat or other article of dress. Turn the body very gently on the side and a little beyond, and then briskly on the face, back again; repeating these measures cautiously, efficiently, and perseveringly about fifteen times in the minute...' Page after page of advice followed, ending, 'The above treatment should be persevered in for some hours, as it is an erroneous opinion that persons are irrecoverable because life does not soon make its appearance, persons having been restored after persevering for many hours.'

  So the apparently drowned might be recovered, and he himself might learn how to recover them. He vowed to practise this useful art, as soon as he was allowed to swim again. He was a good swimmer. His grandmother, teasingly, sometimes called him 'Captain Webb', after the first man to swim the English Channel. This was silly, but although it was silly, it pleased him.

  Ballantyne's The Dog Crusoe also entranced him. This was a tale of a young man and his dog, and of their adventures on the prairie, with Indians and scalping knives and grizzly bears and wild mustangs and stampedes. The prairie was oceanic and endless, like the sea that swelled towards the northern horizon. The hero rejoiced in the swell, the undulation, the wide circle of space. Here, too, men were recovered from apparent death, and were dug out alive from the shallow grave where the red varmints had buried them. The remote and distant violence delighted and soothed him. The redskins roasted dogs alive and ate the raw liver of the buffalo. They were cruel and treacherous and they would cut off your scalp. They were evil and glorious.

  What was a scalp? He was not sure. Was it the top of your head? Was it skin, or was it part of the skull too? He did not like to ask anyone, because he was ashamed of his interest in scalps. They would have needed a very sharp knife to cut off the skin and the hair. Did it kill you, being scalped, or were you only 'apparently dead'? Could you survive without your scalp? Could you walk around with your skull sliced and your brains open to the prairie sky?

  When he had read The Dog Crusoe for the third time, he turned to the random volumes of The Children's Encyclopedia that his aunt brought back from the little school library, closed now for the summer, and he made his way through those too. They were full of nuggets. At one moment he saw himself as an astronomer, at another moment he explored the oceans, and then he became a specialist in the songbirds of Britain, or in the hummingbirds and hornbills of America and Africa. He pondered 'the immensity of the universe' in Volume 5, and read about the 'little thyroid gland that makes us wise or stupid'. (Were the tonsils glands? He thought they might be, but he couldn't find any articles about tonsils. Perhaps he could be a surgeon when he grew up?) In Volume 8 he discovered an extraordinarily puzzling and challenging article called 'Mysteries of the Border Line', in the Group 4 series on Animal Life. It was about Portia's caskets, and cellular growth, and how simple organisms develop, and how the present of the child is in its past. The article featured sea squirts, which he knew. He learned that they were degenerate creatures, because the sea squirt begins its life with a spinal cord, but loses it as it grows older, to become 'the most helpless and immobile creature in the seven seas'. It regresses, and evolves backwards. He learned that sea squirts are really called ascidians, and that in Greek this word means 'little skin bags'.

  The old men on the ward were helpless.

  Was the sea squirt simply lazy, asked the enquiring article. Had it abandoned its ambitions with its backbone, and sunk to the seabed in despondency? It could have been an evolutionary miracle, and speeded progress by millennia, if it had made more of an effort. But it had lost heart and given up. It had been a dead end. The struggle had been too much for it.

  This was one solution proposed by the author, but the article conceded that there might be others.

  Sea squirts had no will power and no ambition, that much was clear.

  Perhaps he would become a scientist, and solve these mysteries.

  He also read in The Children's Encyclopedia that some members of the animal kingdom change sex during the course of their life cycle. These changes seemed particularly frequent with marine species. There was much yet to be discovered about these mysterious evolutionary processes, said the Encyclopedia.

  'Little is known' was a phrase that often caught his attention.

  The richness of the unknown world was almost unbearable to him. Mighty, altruistic visions of sacrifice and glory and discovery swelled in him as he lay alone, up in his attic room. The books were full of such promise, such large questions, such wild hope. He knew that he would try to solve the mysteries. It was his destiny.

  His throat was feeling a little better by now, and one day he plucked up courage to ask after Sandy. He was told he had to be patient, Sandy was still in quarantine. He longed to go with Sandy to find sea squirts, and to examine their backbones, or lack of backbones.

  Emboldened, he asked after Blackie. They evaded the question. Was Blackie in quarantine too? Well,
sort of, they said. They were truthful people, from church-going stock, brought up to let their yea be yea and their nay be nay, and they were not practised in deliberate deception.

  To throw him off the scent, they brought upstairs to him a new-old puzzle book, a school prize that had once belonged to his late grandpa. This was called Mathematical Riddles of the Ages, and they said he might like the early puzzles, which wouldn't be too hard for him.

  His grandpa had been big and burly. He was famed for having swum, once, to the island, which was dangerous, because of the currents. Humphrey could not remember him very well, but he admired the memory of this exploit.

  He could get up the next day, or the day after, they said. Dr Dunbar had said he could get up soon.

  Dr Dunbar was a tweedy man, moustached and fierce and yellow as nicotine. He stank of tobacco. Even the fraying flex of his stethoscope stank of tobacco.

  So, on Humphrey's last evening in bed, while he ate his special orange jelly with real tinned mandarin segments in it and real sweet evaporated milk poured over it, he studied the mathematical riddles of the ages. How did the Egyptians build their pyramids? How did the ancient Babylonians learn to predict the eclipses of the sun? What did Archimedes discover in his bath? Who designed Stonehenge? Can we measure how fast light travels?

  Deep into the book, towards the end, he came across the wonderful riddle of Diophantus. Once upon a time, the book told him, in Ancient Greece, there was a great mathematician called Diophantus whose works revealed some of the eternal secrets of the world of numbers. And Diophantus loved mathematics so much that he caused a mathematical riddle to be engraved upon his tombstone, as an epitaph, for later generations to wonder at. And the riddle went like this.

  God granted Diophantus to be a boy for the sixth part of his life, and, adding a twelfth part to this, God clothed his cheeks with down. God lit him the light of wedlock after a seventh part of his life, and five years after his marriage He granted him a son. Alas! Poor late-born wretched child; after attaining the measure of half his father's full life, chill Fate took him. After consoling his grief by this science of numbers for four years the bereaved father Diophantus ended his life.

  The question was, 'How old was Diophantus when he died?'

  The boy had no idea, and could not begin to think how to discover an answer, but the question entranced him. When he sneaked a look at the solutions at the back, he was told that Diophantus died at the age of eighty-four, but he could not work backwards from that answer to the method by which the answer was achieved, as he knew he was meant to be able to do. He was too young. His brain strained and yearned to understand, but it failed. It nudged against its limits, and it failed. But there was as yet no shame in the failure. On the contrary, there was a sense of thrill and glory and expectation. One day, he resolved, he would get his mind around these matters, and know how to know why we know that Diophantus lived to be eighty-four. Scooping up the last melting blebs of jelly with the special silver Coronation teaspoon, he was filled with expectation, hope and happiness.

  The book had a line drawing of Diophantus, looking sad and wise and Greek and dignified. Diophantus did not look like the coughing, hawking, spitting old stooges in the infirmary ward, although he had lived to be eighty-four. Poor Diophantus, who lost his only son. Did Diophantus end his own life, because of grief, or did he just die of old age? The message wasn't clear, but it was haunting. And the poor son of Diophantus, the poor 'late-born wretched child'! Humphrey was moved by the chill fate of the father and of the son, who had lived and died so many thousands of years ago.

  Perhaps a life of numbers would be best, in the long run. The boy resolved to be a mathematician when he left school. He would devote himself to the science of numbers. He vowed that he would recite his tables to himself every night, when he couldn't get to sleep, and practise his mental arithmetic every morning, and then, when he was older, he would be able to answer all the riddles. He swore to himself, as he rocked himself to sleep, that he would master the riddles.

  Though maybe it would be better to be an astronomer, or a deep-sea diver, or the captain of a lifeboat?

  He rocked and rocked, and fingered his pyjama button, and wished that Blackie would come.

  When he was allowed up, the next day, and came downstairs for the first time, there was no sign of Blackie. He could not see her anywhere. He found her abandoned basket, its blanket dusted white with DDT, stuck shamefully at the back of the cupboard under the stairs. They told him at first that she had gone to live with Auntie Janie in Newcastle, but he did not believe them. Their hesitations gave them away. He never saw Blackie again. He held it against them for the rest of their lives.

  His sister was still there, but she did not seem at all pleased to see him. She screamed at the very sight of him. Her red, square, yelling face and her wet rubbery pink lips and her runny nose and her lank fair wispy curls made him very unwelcome. In response, he started to cry for Blackie, although he was such a big boy now. He had forgotten what it was like, downstairs. It wasn't as nice as he had remembered. The familiar terrain of the front room and the dining room and the kitchen seemed unfriendly, as though bedimmed and bewitched. His legs felt shaky and they looked thin and white and wasted. He almost wanted to go back to bed, where he had felt, for a while, both hopeful and powerful. When he stopped crying, he said he wanted to see Sandy Clegg. Tomorrow, his mother said. She always said tomorrow. Everything would be tomorrow. Nothing would ever be now. He sat curled up in the deep lumpy armchair in the front room, picking at his toes, and restlessly turning the pages of the Monsters of the Deep. You could feel the coiled metal springs of the armchair through the worn loose cover. The black vampire squid looked like an underwater bat. Would Sandy like it? Would it terrify Sandy? Would it bore Sandy? Would Sandy ever again be allowed to come to play? Had Sandy Clegg forgotten him?

  For endless hours he sat in the chair and pined, in an agony of self-pity and an enjoyable loathing of his hostile baby sister. She hated him, he hated her. It was not an important hatred.

  But tomorrow did come, and with it came Sandy, who appeared at teatime, just as he used to do before the illnesses. Sandy confirmed, in few words, that he had had the measles and had felt fairly awful. Rotten. He'd felt rotten. (He was always uncharacteristically tongue-tied when within earshot of Humphrey's family.) When encouraged, he boasted a little about his high temperature. The pale boys compared notes. Fresh air, it was decided, would be good for both of them. Provided they didn't stray too far or get into trouble. Could they go to the beach? Yes, tomorrow, they could go to the beach.

  Sandy's house was much older and much nearer to the sea than Humphrey's grandmother's Edwardian semi-detached in Burnside Avenue. The Cleggs' house was called Number 8, Turkey Bank. Nobody knew why Turkey Bank was called Turkey Bank. Turkey Bank was a terrace of old cottages, at the edge of the northern village-outpost of the town, and Number 8 was the last house in the row. It had a sea view, looking south towards Ornemouth Bay, and in the distance you could see the headland of the cove hiding the cold forbidden fenced-off rough-hewn seawater Victorian bathing pool. The house next door to Sandy's was a boarding house, which used to take in summer visitors, though the war had dried up the supply of guests. The war had filled the sea with fish, and emptied the resort of custom.

  The Cleggs did not take summer visitors.

  They were superior.

  The small, remote and silent Mr Clegg worked in an office in the town, for the council, or the government, or something official like that. He had not been called up because he was official. The boys had no notion of how he spent his time, or how he earned his living. Mrs Clegg was an eccentric. She read library books during the afternoons, omnivorously – detective stories, romances, thrillers, children's adventures, memoirs, politics, history – and in the evenings she made notes in school exercise books. She even wrote, intermittently, during the day. She wrote in pencil, laboriously, methodically, with a slight frown on her face.
Had she been a spy for England, watching the coastline for enemy attack during the war, and noting the movements of shipping and aircraft?

  Like Humphrey's mother and aunt, Mrs Clegg seemed to approve of reading, though she never talked about it.

  The next day of his convalescent downstairs life, Humphrey was told he could go out to play. Having been confined to his room for some immeasurable time, and comforted with books, it now seemed to Humphrey that he was being forced outdoors, whether he felt like it or not. Having been shut up with his books, he was now being told to stop frowsting over them and to get out. The inconsistencies of adults were nothing new to Humpy and Sandy. Philosophically, they took their chance, and, the next day, they scarpered. The books would wait for their return. The tides and the sands beckoned.

  And so began the endless weeks of summer.

  What had Mrs Clegg been noting in her notebooks? Prices, temperatures, news items, plot summaries of her library books, food availability and points and coupons, hobbies, wireless programmes, cinema showings, gossip in the queue at the fish shop. She had been requested to include notes on sex, but, like so many of the project's volunteer diarists, she found this problematic, and for the most part she avoided the subject, though she managed to include a token comment on the noise made by a tomcat on the prowl.

  She liked listening to Town and Country programmes on the Home Service with A. G. Street and Professor Joad. She never went to the cinema in Ornemouth, but she conscientiously noted the titles of some of the programmes.

  It was a summer without a horizon. Day after day of limitless sunshine rose for Humpy and Sandy, day after day of space opened for them. It was the finest summer of the century. Wave followed wave along the curving shore. The leash that had held them to their homes grew longer and longer, and eventually they were allowed to run wild. The adults in Humphrey's house were preoccupied with other matters, discussed in lowered womanly voices at the kitchen table, or after bedtime, in the evenings, over knitting or mending. He thought he heard the words 'troop ship' and 'decontamination' and 'radiation' – or did he later imagine that he had heard them? They were heavy words, words beyond his knowledge. (Did that mean he could not have heard them?) Plans were being made, worries were being voiced and debated, but Humphrey did not listen. When he heard his father's name, he shut his ears. He did not want to hear about the man called Philip who would soon be on his way home. He buried his head under the bedclothes, and wished that Blackie were still alive.