The Sea Lady

by Margaret Drabble

  The nights were sometimes bad, but the days were good.

  The two boys explored to the edge of their known world, and beyond it. They extended their territory inland to the west through the town and up the estuary and the brackish river, and northwards along the beach and the coast path. They were provided with sandwiches and apples for their outings. Sandwiches of white bread, filled with beef dripping, with salty white crumbly fat and dark reddish-brown gravy jelly. Jam sandwiches, of homemade raspberry and gooseberry jam, jam made from the berries from the weatherbeaten bushes in the back garden.

  Their long absences were condoned. Nobody followed them, nobody spied on them, and after a while nobody bothered to nag them not to go near the edge and not to swim out of their depth. They swam, and scrambled together along the cliffs, and waded in the river, and fished, and dug holes in the mud, and stared at the degenerate sea squirts, and collected buckets full of mermaid's purses, and captured razorfish and cockles. At the northern limits of their terrain, they found the secret drip of a waterfall in a cave, and behind it, a heavy rusting iron ring set into the living face of the rock. Who had been there before them? Smugglers, castaways, fishermen? It was a secret place that marked the limits of their daring.

  They broke their way through the barbed wire into the abandoned wooden shack of the tearoom by the lighthouse, and they set up a lookout post amongst the dusty crockery and the triangular ashtrays and the spider-webbed shiny red-lipped advertisements for Craven A cigarettes. They surveyed the horizon through a pair of binoculars with a cracked lens that had belonged to Humpy's dead seafaring grandpa. They watched the intermittently marooned sheep graze on Barbed Wire Island, half a mile off shore. The new games were more thrilling than their pre-measles child's play at pirates and submarines. They had entered a new stage of their lives.

  Did they quarrel? Later, when he was expelled from paradise, Humphrey could not remember that they had ever quarrelled. They were united. Occasionally they joined gangs from Finsterness or from the town, or merged with formations of school friends. But mostly they kept themselves to themselves, a closed twosome. Sometimes they were obliged to mind Humpy's little sister Lizzie or Sandy's little brother Andrew, or to go on errands, but they endured with good nature these small infringements of their freedom. Humpy Clark and Sandy Clegg, the terrible twins, inseparable, blood brothers. Humpy's mother said, once or twice, 'You ought to go and play with the Carpenter boys sometimes, they're always asking for you.' But he didn't hear her. He didn't listen. He didn't believe her.

  They were called the terrible twins, but it was only a joke. They were the same age and much the same size, and they were both skinny, but otherwise they didn't look alike. Humpy had thick fairish-brown hair, and brown eyes, and his skin turned very brown in the sun. Sandy had silky fine red hair, and blue eyes with fair lashes, and freckles, and his skin was milky-pale and blue-veined under its thin wash of seaside tan. His body looked white in the trembling water.

  Sandy had two little brothers, but the smaller was only a baby and didn't count. Andrew didn't count much either, though he would sometimes whine that he wanted to play with them. Humpy and Sandy were the oldest, and they had the power.

  The days were long, and in the evenings the summer light lingered.

  The terraced house next door to the Cleggs belonged to stout Mrs Binns in her flowered pinny, whose fisherman husband had been drowned long before the war. Nobody remembered him. She used to take in summer lodgers, and this year, for the first time since the war, a holiday family arrived for the whole of the month of August. Mrs Binns did their breakfast and their fish tea. The quiet holidaymakers were from Sunderland. The Robinsons had come for the sea air. Mr and Mrs Robinson, and their daughter Heather. Mr and Mrs Robinson looked too old to have a daughter as young as Heather. Like the son of Diophantus, she was a late-born only child. Sandy said he could hear her at night, crying in her bedroom, through the party wall. In the mornings she would kneel on the settee in the front room, leaning over the hand-embroidered antimacassar on its back, and gaze out of the little square-paned window after the boys as they set off on their expeditions. They never thought to ask her to join them. They had no pity on her. Perhaps they enjoyed her envy. Her loneliness fortified their friendship. She had thin fair flossy thistledown hair cut straight round the edges, with a side parting. The floppy longer side of her hair was held back by a large brown hair slide which sometimes had a crumpled bow of limp blue-and-white checked ribbon attached to it. Her mouth was too wide and her nostrils were too wide and her shoulders were too high. She looked peaky and poorly, and her breathing was shallow in her chest.

  Of an evening, after tea, Heather Robinson played ball, alone, endlessly, persistently, by herself, on the end wall of the cottages. One, two, buckle my shoe. Under leg and over leg and turn, under leg and over leg and turn. Twizzle and catch, twizzle and catch. Clap your handles, twizzle and catch and turn. Monotonously, on and on she went. Making the games more and more difficult for herself, so that she always lost.

  She made it so that she could never win. She could never reach her goal. She played hopscotch by herself, against herself, with a little chipped triangle of slate, throwing it from scratched square to scratched square on the dead-end pavement at the end of the terrace outside Number 8, and hopping and jumping. One, two, three, four/five, six, seven/eight and turn. Eight/seven, six, five/four, three, two, one. All by herself, alone. Sometimes she chanted to herself, quietly, under her breath.

  Sandy Clegg and Humpy Clark saw Heather Robinson and they heard Heather Robinson and they were, after a fashion, introduced to Heather Robinson, but they did not speak to her.

  She was excommunicate. They gave her no hope. She expected no quarter.

  Humpy was enraptured by the company of Sandy. Why did nobody warn him against rapture? Did they warn him, and did he not hear them?

  The sea was full of fish, and the rock pools were teeming. British trawlers and British fishermen had been requisitioned for the war effort, and the dwindling cod stocks had replenished themselves with wanton millions of eggs. During the war the brave fishermen of Finsterness had been busy on anti-submarine patrol and mine-sweeping. They had protected convoys and carried secret supplies through the dangerous waters to the Resistance in Norway, or so the locals liked to boast. The fields of the sea had lain fallow for five years, but now they were ready to be harvested again. The fish were so thick you could walk on them. The fishermen at the little harbour claimed that when they went out, they had only to drop a line over the edge of the boat and they could catch enough codling in an hour to feed a multitude. Like Jesus and the miracle of the loaves and fishes. The codling and the haddock were waiting to be pulled up out of the bay. The Scottish haddock had the thumbprint of St Peter on its flank, for this was the very fish that had fed the five thousand.

  Sandy and Humpy were taken out with the fishermen several times, and it was exciting: feeling the tug on the tarred line, and hauling, and seeing the struggling creatures surface nose-up through the clear brine, with their lips pierced by the hooks. Up from their living element they came, swirling blue-green-white and belly-silver through the water, up to the killing air. Mercilessly the boys watched as the men wrenched the mussel-baited hooks from the throats of the fish, mercilessly they watched as the fish gasped and flopped and jerked and died on the curved wooden planks at the wet bottom of the coble. The boys would take one or two gutted fish home in a canvas bucket for tea. Codling and haddock were the favourites. They didn't bother with mackerel. Mackerel were a waste of petrol, said the fishermen. They despised mackerel. Mackerel were dirty fish and fed on sewage and dead men's flesh.

  The petrol from the boat's motor spread streaked and oily flowers of iridescent blue and mauve and green upon the waters of the bay.

  Nobody ate mussels in those days. Mussels were cheap bait for fat white fish. The British were conservative about fish. In the south of England they preferred cod, and in the north they liked c
od and haddock. And that was that, for generations yet to come.

  Nobody liked the cod liver oil the government made you swallow, but you had to swallow it, just the same. It was the law. The oil came from the cod of Iceland. Iceland did well on the war.

  But the boys' private fishing expeditions, with net and bucket, were more exciting than the adult boat trips in the bay. More innocent, less lethal, but more thrilling. The teeming pleasures of the foreshore were more satisfying than the capturing of the homely, edible, slab-familiar codling. The creatures of the foreshore were as exotic as the fabled monsters of the deep. The boys hunted the saltwater fish in the rock pools and the sandy low-tide shallows. They discovered small flat greeny-yellow dabs disguised in the sand on the shoreline, and transparent shrimps with delicate joints and whiskers, with egg-eyes and egg-roe. They found crabs of many species, and the many-coloured fish of the rock pools. There were fish with spines, and fish with sucker mouths, and fish with spots and stripes: an endless variety of creatures. Their uselessness was their glory. The boys knew the humble gobies and the blennies, and the vertical bony-bodied quaint pipefish that swam so proud, so thin and so erect.

  And they pursued the freshwater fish in the deep quarry pond in Maybrick Field, enticing them with maggots and sliced worms. They caught minnows and stickleback. They became experts at the fish watch. They knew they would both be champion salmon fishermen when they grew up.

  Neither they nor the stickleback knew that the stickleback was the classical animal of ethology. They did not know that Niko Tinbergen, the sage of stickleback scholarship, had written the words 'Study Nature Not Books' over his study door. But they followed his advice, unknowingly.

  Maggots were easy to come by. If you left a piece of old bacon in the garden shed, it would soon begin to heave and seethe. Nobody had a refrigerator in those days. Maggots and blow flies were familiar to housewives and to schoolboys.

  They tried to take the tide-pool fish home and to keep them as pets. But at first they couldn't manage to keep them alive for long enough to make the experiment satisfactory. They tried jam jars, and Kilner pickling jars, and tin buckets, but the fish continued, disappointingly, to perish, and to float reproachfully to the surface, their underwater colours fading rapidly. Even the hermit crabs died, extruding themselves from their protective shells and growing queerly larger in death. (How could so large a creature have curled itself up into so small a space?) The boys felt sad when they saw the dead fish and the dead crabs, but they persevered, scientifically, mercilessly, and one day they spotted their aquarium, covered in dust and cobwebs, standing on a shelf above a workbench, in the ramshackle Crossways Garage on the corner by the crossroads.

  Jock, the garage mechanic, was nice to the boys, though their mothers seemed not to care for him. Jock was dark and leathery and melancholy, with a gaunt, handsome face and brooding eyes set in deep sockets. His hair was black like a foreigner's, like a gypsy's. Jock gave them hard round white peppermints from his sweet ration. The mints were called Mint Imperials. Sometimes he gave them a drink of highly coloured and poisonously delicious Cherryade, a drink that stained their tongues and lips a sharp synthetic wicked pink.

  Jock smelled of oil and grease. He was a loner. He was of a different stock.

  Jock sold them the tank for a shilling.

  The tank had something to do with motorcars or perhaps motorbikes, but they didn't know what, and didn't care. They weren't interested in cars and motorbikes. They weren't very interested in pushbikes. Humphrey's Auntie Vera had a push-bike, with a big basket, on which she used to ride to school, but the children didn't have bikes. That summer they went barefoot.

  It was a square tank of solid thick greenish glass, and, unlike a real aquarium, it was as tall as it was wide. It looked spacious and romantic. Surely fish would like to live in it? Surely they would live happily within its swirling wavy watermarked walls? The thickness and patterning of its green glass were strange and mysterious.

  The boys carried the tank home to Turkey Bank. They scrubbed it clean and polished it, and rinsed off the soap several times, and set it up on a platform of bricks in the small paved backyard between the outside WC and the coal shed. They brought sand and small pebbles and uninhabited shells from the beach to make a bottom layer, a seabed, and in it they planted little fronds and trees of green and crimson and brown seaweed. They weighted the seaweed with twists of lead and little metal washers. One or two larger stones served as rocks: these stones were already supplied with a living shrubbery of algae and with encrustations of pimpled barnacles and domed limpets. The boys made an arch, of two leaning stones, to make a landscape for their fish. They knew they needed weeds, for oxygenation and aeration. It was lack of oxygen that had killed their first little prisoners. Impatiently, they waited two whole days for their tank of seawater to establish its balance before they went fishing again.

  Heather Robinson next door watched them as they set off with their canvas bucket.

  She watched them as they came home with their catch.

  They released their trawl of fish into the tank with a feeling of omnipotent magnanimity, and the dazed fish, after the first shock of arrival, seemed grateful. They began to dart about, exploring the vitreous green space of their new residence. They swam through the arch and nuzzled the barnacles.

  Would there be enough air for them? It was Humphrey who thought of the rubber dropper. He stole it from the bathroom cabinet at Burnside Avenue. It was one of those little glass tubes with a rubber squeezer on the end. Humpy's mother used it for putting olive oil down your ears when you had earache. If you squeezed the air out of it, under water, it acted just like those little automatic electrical aeration pumps they had seen in the solitary showpiece tropical fish tank in the pet shop in town. You had to be patient, you had to sit there and squeeze the little lung, lifting it in and out, and in and out, to refill with air and then with water. This was boring. But it was worth it, if it kept the fish going.

  And the fish did keep going. The tank was a success.

  It was easier to study fish in a tank than in a rock pool.

  Sandy was good at the names of the fish. He remembered names and words better than Humpy. Sandy liked words for their own sake. But Humpy watched to see how the fish behaved. He watched their patterns of fighting and hiding, of grouping and darting and nuzzling. He watched their little gulping mouths and their beating fins. Some of them could swim backwards.

  It was a small and complete world, and they were proud of it. The adults also approved of it as a worthy educational project, but the boys did not let that discourage them. Adults were not always wrong. The boys would spend minutes at a time squatting on their haunches by it and peering into its miniature marine garden. On their explorations on the beach and foreshore, they would collect new treasures for its decor – a red snail, a green snail, an empty shell worn smooth to spirals of mother-of-pearl. A frond of luminous sea lettuce, a pebble with a streak of glittering fool's gold, a periwinkle. Auntie Vera was so impressed by their dedication to the tank that she bought them a little book called Treasures of the Sea-Shore, with pictures of fishes and mermaid's purses and dead men's fingers and sea squirts and scallops and bladder wrack. 'For Humpy and Sandy, 17 August, she wrote on its flyleaf, in her big clear round schoolmistress's script. The book had a stiff dark blue cover with the title picked out in gold, rather like a Bible. It was a slim dark blue Bible of the seashore.

  They were pleased with the book, and with the respect that it showed to their hobby.

  One evening, Humphrey, lingering on the stairs on his way up to bed, overheard them in the kitchen. 'It's a shame,' his aunt was saying. 'But I know it's got to be.'

  He could hear the resigned click of his grandmother's wooden knitting needles.

  'It's been quite long enough,' his mother then said in a weary tone. 'We've been quite long enough.'

  'It's a shame for the boy,' said Auntie Vera. 'He's picked up so well.'

  The e
nd of the summer was approaching, and they would have to leave soon. He knew this, and he did not know it. There had been unexpected delays. He had thought that perhaps they might stay here for ever, in this headland outpost of women and children. But of course that could not be.

  The last days of August and the first days of September were calm and mild and warm. The sea was flat and smooth, and in the evenings the small waves curled and broke without force. The low sun slanted, the fields were yellow, the wind-carved hedges were dotted with scarlet hips and berries, the garden was full of mauve and golden autumn flowers. The yellow sea poppies turned a silky withering orange, and the weatherbeaten leaning trees changed to russet and to red. Bitter purple sloes hid themselves among the thorns.

  The grown-ups did not speak to him much, directly, of the removal. His mother, when she referred to it, spoke of 'going home'. But the place to which they were going was not and would not be his home. It was not even the same house. The old pre-war house had been demolished. They were going to a new house, and a new school, and a new life.

  The boys never discussed Humphrey's imminent departure. They had no way of speaking about it, so they behaved as though it would not happen.

  Nobody spoke. That was the way it was.