It was the crisis over the fish that made them speak.
On one of their last days, they caught a new fish, a dazzling new greenish-bronze and rose and tawny fish, of a species they had not seen before. It was large, by rock-pool standards, a good three inches long, and bristling with spines and bravery. They netted it, and carried it home in the sun-faded pale blue-green canvas bucket, and released it into the aquarium where it dashed around angrily. Neither of them liked the way it hurtled about. They watched it uneasily. It's too big, Humphrey said, and Sandy agreed, it was too big. Sandy said it was a sea scorpion, but Humphrey said it wasn't. It didn't look very like the picture of the sea scorpion in Auntie Vera's book. But then, none of the creatures looked exactly like the pictures in Auntie Vera's book, except for the limpets and the mussels, and even they were more complicated and more various than they seemed at first sight.
The handsome fish dashed angrily.
Sandy liked the name, 'sea scorpion'. He liked the words.
We'll let it go in the morning, he said.
But when Humphrey went round to Turkey Bank in the morning, the new fish had vanished. There was the tank, and all its smaller, duller inhabitants, but the fine stranger had disappeared. Sandy was in despair. 'Someone stole our new fish,' he kept repeating. They would have blamed poor innocent Heather next door at Mrs Binns's, but the Robinsons had unobtrusively packed up and left on Saturday. Humphrey thought of suggesting that Mrs Clegg had done it, but he didn't dare. Who could it have been? They crouched down, interrogating the tank for its secrets. Where was their fish? Had some envious thief taken it in the night?
It was Humphrey who found it dead, tail up, wedged between two bricks by the wall, a good yard away from the aquarium.
At first they went on trying to think of someone else to blame, but they knew it was useless. They had only themselves to blame. The fish had committed suicide. It had jumped out of its confines, like a salmon up the falls, and opted for death. The salmon leap up the falls in hope of life, but their fish had abandoned hope. The sea was beyond its reach and beyond its hoping. They had murdered it.
The boys felt rotten. They did not like to touch the stiffened corpse. They wished they had left the fish in its pool, where it had been at home and happy. They did not need to say this to each other, because they were in accord, they were thinking with one mind. Nevertheless, Humphrey spoke.
'You look after those,' he said, gesturing at the remaining fish and weeds and little water scuttlers.
He said it without reproach, and Sandy took it without offence.
'I'll look after them,' pledged Sandy solemnly.
They did not look at each other, but the agreement was sealed. Humphrey would leave, and Sandy would stay. That was how it would be. That was how it had to be. They had no choice in the matter.
They never mentioned their imminent parting again and did not say goodbye. They went on playing together, in the last days, as though the summer would have no end. Humphrey observed the packing and the parcelling, and was even drawn in to do a little sorting and discarding himself. 'You can't take that with you,' his mother would say of important and valued objects. Her adult views seemed arbitrary to him, for they were not based wholly on size. Some of the objects he hid, others he relinquished. Trunks were made up and sent in advance by rail, hand luggage was kept separate. Humphrey made a final mark on his bedroom ceiling. He would be back soon, of course he would be back. And on the last morning, he got into the taxi, and off they went to the railway station, without a backward glance. Not looking back was bravado. Not saying goodbye was bravado. It was better not to say goodbye. It would be bad luck to admit that this was the end.
The last day of the holidays. The last day of summer. The end of an initiation.
Dumb with his aching throat, Professor Humphrey Clark listened to the rhythm of the train, which had acquired a soothing and even monotony as it had picked up speed beyond Peterborough. You could still see the cathedral of Peterborough from the railway, if you remembered to look: it was not yet totally obscured by the shopping mall and the carpet warehouse and Pets at Home and the multi-storey car park.
Whinstone and dolerite, dolerite and whinstone. G16, G16. One man went to mow, went to mow a meadow.
Why had that jingling lullaby come into his head? When he was little he had thought that the men in the song went to a place called Mower Meadow. In his boy's imagination, it had been a golden field, full of ripe ears of wheat and scarlet corn poppies and white-petalled yellow-centred marguerites. Flowers waist-high grew wild in Mower Meadow.
His mother in the rocking chair, with his sister on her knee.
He was too big to sit on his mother's knee.
Out of the cradle, endlessly rocking.
Hippocampus, Diophantus.
Hippocampus hippocampus is a sea horse. It is also the name of the seat of memory in the brain.
The latest news from the sea horse breeding programme at the Green Grotto had not been promising. Sea horses are fashionable, but they need more than money to survive. They are occasionally fished up from the wild, off the cold coast of Britain, where their cousins the pipefish breed, but they are rare now, and around the world they are endangered. They are too quaintly attractive, too unthreatening for their own good. Their magical properties have put them at risk.
The cold coast of north-eastern Britain is not as cold as it was. Global warming has warmed it up, and species are migrating northwards.
Humphrey Clark looked at the menu. Crayfish sandwiches with mayo were on offer. Should he order a Brie and rocket baguette? None of those three words had existed when he was a boy, or not in their present configuration. Should he risk some wine? The menu offered him House Red Vin Pay [sic] D'Oc for £10.95. It said it was specially blended of ripe, rich fruit with firm body and a smooth finish. The Chilean red boasted great depth of colour and vibrancy. Or he could have a Chablis Premier Cru with depth of fruit, freshness and concentration.
He was on his way to what was supposed to be a celebration.
He looked out of the window for guidance, and met again his own image on the lightly rain-spotted glass. Was he now as ugly to small children as those old men in the ward had once been to him?
The hermaphrodite crayfish. He remembered the whole sentence from The Children's Encyclopedia: 'Hermaphrodites are more common in the invertebrate world.' A microbiologist called Paul Burden from San Diego had recently published a popular science book called Hermaphrodite. It seemed to have been well received. Not his kind of thing, probably, but he ought to overcome his resistance and have a look at it one day. It had been shortlisted for the Society's Plunkett Prize. He had been invited to the prize dinner, but Mrs Hornby had told him he wouldn't have been able to accept even if he had wanted to go, because he had a dinner engagement at the Athenaeum, and so she had declined on his behalf. The Plunkett Prize ceremony had been a black-tie do, last night, or perhaps a couple of nights ago. He hadn't even seen the invitation: Mrs Hornby had taken possession of it, declined it, and disposed of it. He wondered if Burden's book had won. He had not seen anything in the press, but then he hadn't looked, had he? He'd won the prize himself, long ago, in the days when he had been more in fashion.
The railway tea had been free, but the baguette would cost him £3.95.
He tried to remember what it was like, being a boy. He could not remember what a cup of tea and a slice of bread and butter might have cost when he was a boy.
The Public Orator has been able to fill in some of the gaps in Humphrey Clark's memories of Finsterness and Ornemouth. The Public Orator knows things that Humphrey Clark has forgotten, and, unusually, has had access to a form of audit. He knows the price of a bottle of milk and a loaf of bread in post-war Ornemouth. Twopence halfpenny, in old money, in 1947, for a large white loaf: that had been the going rate. It is hard to credit this now. These handwritten notes are useful as a guide to inflation, and they also record the dates of events. But there are gaps of
time and shifts of attitude that they do not cover. The records are incomplete. They tell one side of the story only. The records do not follow Humphrey Clark back to the Midlands and to Covington. Schoolboy Humphrey escapes surveillance there.
It is part of the Orator's job to retrieve the telling anecdote, the personal foible.
The Public Orator diverts his attention from Humphrey Clark in Coach G, and glances anxiously towards the material figure of Ailsa Kelman. The Public Orator must keep track of Ailsa Kelman too. She, like Humphrey Clark, is on her way towards the past. The timing of her meeting with the past is a worry to the Public Orator.
Ailsa Kelman is not on the East Coast train to Newcastle and Ornemouth and Edinburgh, although she might have been. She had at one point thought of booking herself a seat on it. But she changed her mind. She is on an aeroplane.
Ailsa does not have a Mrs Hornby in her life, to squeeze her into whalebone corsets and to dress her hair and to hook up the back of her dress and to answer her letters and to make her bookings and to prepare her folders and her schedules and her timetables. She has an agent, but she does not have a personal assistant. She likes her privacy and her freedom too much. At times, when her engagements become complicated and her double bookings confusing, she will go into an overdrive feminist mode and blame the male culture of servant dependency that makes women like herself such martyrs to the very concept of independence. She has at times spoken forcefully and angrily and even persuasively about this, for Ailsa can find an ideological excuse for anything.
She can explain that she has missed out on being able to receive help of any kind, through being from the wrong class, in the wrong era, and of the wrong sex. But in her heart she knows that it is largely a highly personal selfishness rather than a generic female weakness that prevents her from employing a personal assistant. She has tried once or twice over the years, and it has never worked. Ailsa is too proud and too capricious and too inconsistent and too sudden in her whims to be able to employ anybody. She is a nightmare. Yes, Ailsa will nod enthusiastically, when challenged: a nightmare!
So here she is, pressing her nose against a small thick unreflective slab of aeroplane window, wondering if she will be able to see Durham Cathedral from the air. Or any other landmark that she recognizes from the old days. She is flying to Newcastle, and there she will pick up a hire car to drive herself north to Ornemouth.
She wants to be free to explore, to examine those old seaside memories of long ago, when they had been children playing on the shore.
Ailsa likes to be airborne. She likes aeroplanes. They are modern and charged with adrenalin, stress and promises. They lack the old-fashioned lull and lullaby of the train. They carry no childhood baggage. Ailsa cannot get on an aeroplane without feeling a spurious sense of importance, however short or dull the flight. Hers is the first generation fully to enjoy this freedom, this unnatural stimulus, this defiantly extravagant consumption of diminishing resources.
Like a child, Ailsa Kelman still expects something new to happen every time she approaches the departure gate. She knows that the story is not over.
That could have been a fatal seaside summer, says Ailsa to herself. She is lucky to have escaped its protracted consequences. She is lucky to be alive and well, and remarkably fit for her age. And game, she hopes, to confront it all once more.
Somewhere down there is the town of her birth, and the ruined industrial coastline that nobody has ever visited for its sea air. You could walk for seven leagues under the sea in the old mine workings, but you couldn't play on the sullied shore.
You could scrabble for nuggets of coal and slack on the beaches, but you couldn't play.
She had told P. B. she was going to Ornemouth, but he hadn't been very interested. The day would soon come when no secret would shock, no revelation would intrigue. She would soon be yesterday's news. Even if she rode naked on a white horse down Whitehall, nobody would notice.
Well, she would make them notice.
The attendant on board this cheap flight is respectful and addresses her as 'Ms Kelman' with appropriate deference and a conspiratorial smile of apparent recognition. But Ailsa isn't a fool, and she knows they're trained to address everybody by name, to be obsequious to everybody. Everybody is somebody. It's hard to keep your head above water, these days. It's hard to stand out from the crowd. It's a tricky business, status.
A living dog is better than a dead lion. So said the Preacher, in Ecclesiastes. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity. So said the Preacher.
Ailsa Kelman remembers the price of a loaf and a herring. She knows the records well, for she has studied them closely, but they constitute only a small fraction of her extravagant action-packed history. The Public Orator fears that she may deny them, she may refuse them, and leap over them into some other and less relevant reality. She may decide to inhabit some other story, to privilege another section of her life. The Public Orator hopes for coherence and conjunction. He does not wish to be obliged to force the plot. He wishes it to unfold itself as a plant unfurls its fronds towards the light, according to its nature. But for this unfolding, he needs the help of Ailsa Kelman.
Humphrey Clark studies the menu. He does not remember post-war prices very well, but he remembers leaving Finsterness and arriving in Covington, where he was never to feel at home. As a boy he did not like the new house. He did not like the new city. He did not like his new school. He did not like the bland taste of the water that came from the taps. He did not like the sooty smell of the air. He did not like his father, who reappeared in his life as an unwelcome stranger, contaminated by war.
His father was a tall, lean, shy, bespectacled, serious man, who seemed nervous in the company of his two children. He tried to make overtures to Lizzie, but she fought to get off his knee and ran away at his approach. Humphrey tried to hold his ground, politely, but it was hard.
He did not settle easily after the uprooting. He pined for his bedroom by the water cistern. He could not adjust. At school in Goldthorpe Road, he was behind with his lessons, although, in the little school at Finsterness, he had been ahead. He could not understand why this was so. His teacher said he was making what she called 'slow but steady progress', but he knew better. He knew he was not making progress. He was growing more stupid. His learning capacity was on hold, in abeyance. He did not yet know the words 'abeyance' and 'regression', but he felt the meaning of them in his spirit.
At school, he was teased. When his mother called 'Humpy' to him across the asphalt playground, the other boys sniggered, as though his nickname had a bad meaning. He did not like his school uniform of maroon and grey. It made him look silly.
He worried silently, inwardly, about the aquarium in Sandy's backyard in Turkey Bank in Finsterness. Were the fish and the hermit crabs and the anemones surviving? What would happen to them in the winter?
Sometimes he thought of the death leap of the sea scorpion. He and Sandy had murdered the sea scorpion. It had been a wicked act. His mother and his aunt and his grandmother had murdered docile Blackie, who had sucked at his pyjamas for comfort like a baby, and he and Sandy between them had murdered the fighting fish.
He never thought of writing to Sandy. He had no stamps, and no paper to write on. He had to be brave, until the next summer, when he might be allowed to go back.
Was the word 'stoic' familiar to him at that age?
Professor Humphrey Clark, travelling north through the Midlands, and looking out at a flowing landscape of cooling towers and poplar trees, could not remember what words he had then known, and how he had articulated his feelings to himself. But he could remember the feelings. And he knew that he had known the story about the little Spartan boy gnawed to death by the fox he hid under his cloak. He had read it in The Children's Encyclopedia. He had never quite understood what the little boy intended to do with the fox, or why he was hiding it in the first place, but he remembered the message of the story very well: Don't show that it hurts.
He had been sto
ic. He had stuck at his lessons, he had settled down, he was tolerated. He did well in his maths and got good marks. Gold stars, occasionally, were stuck upon his homework. He still thought he would work harder and harder and solve all the riddles. He had not forgotten about Diophantus. Diophantus was his secret well of promised knowledge. He would say the name to himself, for comfort. He wasn't sure if he was pronouncing it right, in his head, but he thought that he was.
Nobody else knew about Diophantus.
He still couldn't work out the age of Diophantus correctly. Did he die aged eighty-three, or aged eighty-four? There was something wrong with his adding up, but he couldn't quite work out what it was. Algebra was the answer, but they didn't do proper algebra yet.
Covington had its consolations. Humphrey liked the nature table, where the fruits of the suburbs were laid out on a bed of brilliantly green moss. Acorns and conkers and prickly sweet chestnuts and beechnuts, red and yellow palmate and pinnate autumn leaves, black and blue and copper and scarlet berries, hips and haws, winged seeds, and elf-cup mushrooms growing on wrinkled silver bark.
The days in Covington filled in, and he started to live a trivial, superficial, bare-kneed, short-trousered boyish life. He began to present a fair outward imitation of a schoolboy. Nobody seeing him, could have told that he was a fraud. Christmas came, and with it came Auntie Vera and Grandma. Auntie Vera and Grandma brought suitcases, and presents wrapped up in wrinkled red and green coloured crêpe paper, and news of Finsterness. Humphrey found the meeting of the two worlds disconcerting. His Midlands world was shallow and fragile, badly damaged and newly painted, full of danger and false steps. It was built precariously, on rubble. The summer past and the winter present did not fit together. They were of two different orders of reality. His memory world was deep, but Auntie Vera and Grandma could not fully restore it to him. It had been sealed off.
Auntie Vera spoke of Sandy Clegg. She reported that he was getting on well in class, but gave no details. Soon Sandy would be going to the big school, the Grammar School, in the old stone building across the bridge. If he passed the Common Entrance, which of course he would. Auntie Vera did not mention the backyard aquarium, although she had once taken such an interest in it, and Humphrey thought it would be bad luck to ask her about it now. He was deeply puzzled by the knowledge that even then, even at that instant, as he sat there watching Grandma dozing and toasting her legs into mottled blotches by the gas fire in 38 Greenside Close, Covington, even at that instant Sandy Clegg continued to exist, and continued to pursue a life in time. He would have preferred to have believed that the other life had stood still, suspended in his absence, arrested from the moment of his departure.
The Sea Lady Page 8