The Sea Lady

by Margaret Drabble

They applied themselves earnestly, as children used to do. No bickering, no bad language, just the earnest quiet application of pencil and crayon.

  Were they setting off on their summer holidays?

  Mrs Binns at Turkey Bank had had a jam jar full of glass beads, for threading and unthreading. Humphrey had wanted to have a go with them, but beads were for girls. She also had some Prince Rupert's tears, in a separate pot in a cabinet. Nobody was allowed to play with those, they were too special, they might shatter if you held them in the wrong way.

  They looked lighter, less solemn, these children, than the children of his childhood. They looked much happier than – and now the name came back to him, surfacing unexpectedly – they looked happier than that girl called Heather Robinson. Their colours were brighter, more playful, more eclectic, and their mother was bright and girlish. This family had never known rationing, austerity, prohibition. They had lived all their lives in a world of baguettes and burgers, of chocolates and Coca Cola. Not in a world of dripping and jam sandwiches and Cherryade and compulsory cod liver oil.

  Shipham's paste. There had once been a treat called Shipham's paste. These children would not know about Shipham's paste.

  But some things do not change. The children still liked to join the dots, and to see the picture come.

  The Public Orator waits to see the picture come. He sees the faces rising in the broken mirror of the water. Like dead fish, like drowned men, they rise from the depths, and quiver, and reassemble.

  Ailsa Kelman, as a child, had played the old childhood games. She had joined the dots, and found the hidden shapes and faces. She had played Fives and Conkers and Battleships and Hangman. A combative child, she had liked competitive cut-throat games, and she liked to win. She had tried to beat her brother Tommy for years, and occasionally she had succeeded. But she had also played girlish games, silly soppy shameful giggling girlish games. She had peeled the hard green cooking apple, and thrown the peel over her shoulder to see if it formed the initial letter of a sweetheart's name. She had played counting games with the stones of sour and shrivelled stewed plums: Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief. She had gazed into the wishing well, and asked the Witches of Bonsett or the Fairy Folk of Finsterness to show her the features of her betrothed-to-be.

  She had pretended to see the faces of men, the faces of sweethearts, before she invented feminism. But what she had seen had been unknown shapes rising towards her from the depths.

  On the surface her own clear features gazed back at her seductively, dangerously, obstructively, from the glassy mirror of the water, but the future had lurked in the depths of the well, beneath the reflection.

  Humphrey Clark was experiencing the physical sensations of memory retrieval. The prickling of the gin, the throbbing of the throat and the comforting cradle pulse of the train were bringing back to him the image of his forty-year-old Auntie Vera. There she sat, in the empty seat opposite him, in her neat ivory rayon blouse with its little round collar and its self-coloured embroidered chain stitching on the pocket over her flat left breast. Her tailored jacket was a heathery blend of colours, a mix of lavender and mauve and green. She wore a modest little gold chain round her neck and a golden pheasant brooch upon her lapel. The sprightly pheasant had an eye of ruby-red. He had loved that brooch when he was a boy.

  On the train to Ornemouth, all those years ago, Auntie Vera had given him some puzzle books, with crosswords, and join-the-dots, and anagrams, and spot-the-hidden-faces. She apologized because they were a bit childish for him.

  Spot the hidden faces.

  She said she had a nice book waiting for him in Burnside Avenue in Finsterness. 'You'll really like it, I know,' she said. 'It's your summer holiday present.'

  He asked her what it was, but she wouldn't tell him. It was a surprise.

  Then she retreated into her reading of her Boots library book, with the little metal membership tag that marked her place. It was a historical novel called The Proud Servant by Margaret Irwin. It was about somebody called Montrose. Humphrey didn't know who Montrose was, and Auntie Vera didn't seem to want to tell him. He knew the story was set in Scotland, because he had seen the map, hand-drawn like an old manuscript, just inside the front cover of the book, on the end pages.

  At Doncaster, they had to change trains. This was the bit that he could never have managed by himself, she said, though maybe, next time, if he paid attention, he would be able to come on his own.

  On the next train, she told him about the holiday family that was staying with Mrs Binns in Turkey Bank, next door to the Cleggs. They were called Kelman, and they were from Bonsett, in County Durham. There was a Mr and a Mrs Kelman, and two children, and a West Highland terrier. Mr Kelman was a chemist and he worked for a big company. Something to do with creosote and coal tar, said Auntie Vera vaguely. She thought the boy's name was Tommy. The dog was in disgrace because it had misbehaved in the porch, but Auntie Vera's view was, better the porch than the parlour. 'The children will be nice company for you and Sandy,' said Auntie Vera, before returning to the adventures of Montrose. 'Sandy's got quite friendly with them both.'

  The thought of the two strange Kelman children filled Humphrey with a guilty apprehension. He and Sandy had been mean to Heather Robinson, poor lonely late-born child. They had ignored her. But Sandy had made friends already with these two strangers. Humphrey did not want interlopers.

  Nothing much had changed in Burnside Avenue in Finsterness. His attic bedroom had the same old blackout curtains. The water cistern made the same companionable noises. He had grown an inch and a half. There was a new young neutered ginger tomcat called Orlando, after the cat in the picture books by Kathleen Hale that Lizzie liked so much. Mr Fell's house was still silent, its upper windows shrouded with grief. Grandma gave him a boiled egg for tea, with Marmite toast fingers. She timed the egg for him very carefully, just as he liked it, five minutes exactly, with the wooden egg timer. The egg timer hung from a brass hook on the wall by the gas cooker, and the orange sand trickled slowly from one end to the other, through the narrow glass waist, just as it always had done. It was a five-minute timer: if you wanted your egg hard-boiled, you had to turn the timer over and begin again. The numbers were written on the yellow wood in ancient silvery paint.

  The sands of time, the sands of life.

  The surprise book from Auntie Vera was called The Fresh and Salt-Water Aquarium, by the Rev. P. W. Twigg. So it wasn't that much of a surprise. It was a second-hand Victorian book, but Auntie Vera said it was a classic work and would teach him a lot. She had bought it in the town's antiquarian bookshop. It announced, in Gothic script, that it had Eleven Coloured Illustrations. It had a bookplate stuck inside its cover, which showed a woodcut of a boy on a dolphin. It was Ex Libris Charles Ruthven, 1868. Being second-hand made it more valuable, not less, Auntie Vera explained a little anxiously.

  'It's quite a valuable book,' she said, as she watched him inspect the illustrations of shells and crabs and anemones and fish and insects. 'You must try to take care of it. You can show it to Sandy tomorrow. But I'd keep it indoors, if I were you. Better not let it get wet.'

  And she smiled, to show that was a joke.

  It was too late to see Sandy tonight, even though the sky was still light.

  As he set off to Turkey Bank the next morning, he was still sure that Sandy would be expecting him, would be looking forward to seeing him. But, as he walked along the familiar streets, his confidence waned. He knew every stone, every tree, every garden wall and hedge, every manhole, every pavement slab upon the way, and one by one they marked the ebbing of his faith. It was a bright cool morning, with great white cumulus clouds sailing overhead like towers and castles in a blue sky. The sea shone in the level bay. By the time he turned the last corner, and saw the picturesque row of cottages of Turkey Bank ahead of him, he had lost hope. Why on earth should Sandy want to see him again? Nearly a whole year had passed. A tenth of their whole life had gone by since last summer. It had been
foolish, childish, to expect Sandy to want him to come back. He should have stayed in exile, in suspension, and avoided this encounter, this rejection.

  Mrs Binns's house had been repainted, in a kind of yellowy ochre wash. He couldn't remember what colour it had been before, but he saw that this was new. The Clegg house was off-white, as it had always been.

  He would be so angry with Sandy if all the fish had died. But he would never be able to say so. He was not good at anger.

  His heart was pounding with anxiety, and he wondered whether to turn round and retreat. Maybe Sandy would already have gone out for the day. Maybe Humphrey wished that Sandy had gone out, so that he could delay the moment of shock and disappointment.

  Sandy's mother spotted him as he made his way along the side passage to the back door. She was standing at the sink, rinsing out a well-worn thin aluminium pan, and she knocked on the open kitchen window at him, and spoke to him through it. 'Hello, Humphrey,' she said. 'So you're back, are you?' She seemed quite pleased to see him, though not very surprised. She had always seemed well disposed to him, in her accepting and unemphatic way.

  'Sandy's expecting you,' she said. 'He said to tell you they've gone down to the harbour. They've got Andrew with them.'

  Open, face-up, on the wooden draining board was Mrs Clegg's exercise book of notes. She had been looking at it while cleaning the pan. He could see watery spots on her pencilled markings.

  'Thanks,' said Humphrey. He tried to peer down the passage, into the backyard, to see if he could see the aquarium. He didn't like to go and look. It would have felt like trespassing. He couldn't see the tank, but that didn't mean it wasn't there. He couldn't quite see round the corner. She had meant to dismiss him to the harbour. He'd better do what he was told.

  At least they had left him a message.

  So on he went, and there they were, sitting on the edge of the harbour wall. It was nearly high tide, and they were dangling their feet over the rising water. Sandy and Andrew Clegg, and the two new Kelman children, sitting in a row, with their backs to the ramp of grounded fishing boats, and with their backs to him as he approached them down the cobbles of the landing.

  Should he shout?

  He would have to get up on the wall and walk along the top of it to reach them. He felt exposed, although he had walked along that seawall a hundred times.

  Sandy turned as he approached. All four of them turned as he approached. Their eight eyes turned on him.

  Sandy said, 'Hello, Hump,' in a deadpan, neutral tone.

  Humphrey sat down at the end of the row, next to the girl. There was nowhere else to sit.

  The girl was looking angry.

  Humphrey Clark did not want to be lumbered with a leftover younger sister.

  The girl looked away as soon as he sat down next to her, and stared at the horizon with an expression of what he took to be scorn upon her face.

  Tommy and Ailsa Kelman, from Bonsett in County Durham. They had had a week's start on him, and they had made good use of it.

  Tommy Kelman and Ailsa Kelman. They had ruined his life.

  Tommy was a year older than Humphrey. Ailsa was younger, but not much younger.

  He would never escape from either of them. He knew they would haunt him for ever, until the day he died. They would intertwine their destinies with his. They would never let him go. Friends and enemies, snakes and ladders.

  They sat there in a row, the five children, while Humphrey came to terms with what had so horribly and irreversibly happened. Tommy Kelman had co-opted Sandy, and his sister Ailsa Kelman had somehow got in there too. That was the kind of people they were, the kind of people they would continue to be. Humphrey liked to think, later, that he had recognized their fatality in that instant, as the lapping water of the harbour slowly rose. He liked to think that he had bravely bitten the bullet, like all those young heroes in R. M. Ballantyne and Captain Marryat. But he knew that he had almost certainly betrayed signs of confusion and distress. He had almost certainly sued for peace and pity. He had probably not been very brave. He had been craven, and weak, and pathetic. 'Pathetic' – 'Don't be so pathetic' – that was a schoolboy word they used and misused a lot, in those days. He had been pathetic. He had suffered, and he had been pathetic, and they had spotted his weakness, and they had gone for the kill.

  Though they did not act in unison. Not even then.

  Tommy and Ailsa Kelman did not look like world-conquerors. Who could have guessed then that they had such talents, such ambitions? Tommy Kelman, gadfly and by-line and sycophant and financier and multi-millionaire. Ailsa Kelman, headline-seeker, exhibitionist and agitateuse. They did not know themselves what they would be. They knew they were going somewhere, but how could even they have known where it was? Their destination did not yet exist. It was waiting for them to help to create it. They were to ride towards it on the heaving swell of the times they lived in. They came from nowhere, out of nowhere, and there they were, perched on the seawall in distant Finsterness, dangling their feet above the rising water, as though they owned the ocean and all that they surveyed. Was this a pretence of confidence? How could the child Humphrey tell?

  They were both pale-skinned, urban pale, unhealthy, off-white. They both had broad faces, with wide brows and wide-set grey-brown eyes. Tommy had reddish slicked-down hair, and his large ears stuck out conspicuously, as boys' ears do. His eyes were small and bright, and with age were to grow smaller and duller. He was nondescript, pasty, sly and knowing. He was unformed, ugly, embryonic. But he was as clever as two monkeys, and as quick as a weasel. He was watchful and patient and tricky. Tommy knew things that Sandy Clegg and Humphrey Clark did not know. Words, gestures, and what he mockingly called 'the facts of life'. Over the long weeks of summer, innuendoes and secrets slowly and deliberately leaked out from him. Poisonous secrets, poisonous innuendoes. He released them, for the sight of the pleasure of the damage they would do. Humphrey admired him, despised him, envied him, feared him. Humphrey was fascinated by him.

  Humphrey was slavish with the desire to please this interloper, who knew so much.

  Was it all scripted, as they sat there in that row? Surely Tommy Kelman cannot have intended to turn into Tommy Kelman?

  Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief. Journalist, presenter, anchorman, courtier, thief. Insider dealer, entrepreneur, speculator, rich man, risk man, gambler, con man, thief.

  Tommy's sister Ailsa Kelman was nervous, tenacious and fierce. Her hair was wavy and wiry, and it was darker and thicker than her brother's. It was strongly coloured, a dark metallic copper like beech leaves. It stood out from her head, although her mother tried to make her tether it above her ears with kirby grips. Her strange-shaped face was broader across the cheekbones than her brother's, and her chin was more pointed. Her face was pointed like a python's. She licked her pale lips like a snake. Her arms were freckled. Her hazel eyes were large, and with age and attention were to grow larger. She was not a pretty child.

  Tommy was a toad, Ailsa was a cobra.

  Mrs Binns had a cupboard full of cards and defective jigsaws and battered board games, for visitors on rainy days. Snakes and ladders, Monopoly, Halma, Chinese chequers. She had a jam jar full of glass beads, red and green and turquoise and pearly, for little girls to thread and unthread in different patterns. You weren't allowed to take them away, when you'd made them into a necklace or a bracelet. You had to put them back in the jar for the next little girl.

  Heather Robinson had spent a lot of time with those beads. Ailsa briskly unthreaded her last year's efforts, and began to remake the beads into new patterns, but she hadn't the patience to finish anything properly.

  The jigsaws were frustrating. You got so far, but there were always pieces missing.

  Ailsa Kelman, Tommy Kelman and Sandy Clegg. Three redheaded Nordic children, sporting a recessive gene, a minor mutation.

  Ailsa was not content to be a left-over younger sister, which was the status that destiny
had allotted to her. She resented her role. She did not like being a girl among boys, a gooseberry, an extra. She could not accept it. She insisted on tagging along. She whined and nagged and loitered and refused to leave. The local girls of Finsterness were traditionally more docile, more willing to segregate, more willing to go off on their own to play their girlish games. Ailsa stuck to her brother, stuck along with Sandy and Humphrey, even when they made it clear that they didn't want her. At first Humphrey wondered how she got away with it - did she have some secret hold over Tommy? When they tried to leave her behind, or told her to go off and play by herself, her face would turn grim with misery, but she didn't cry, or not that he could see, and she didn't give in. After a few days, when she'd got the hang of the mild-mannered Humphrey and the reflective Sandy, she began to show another side of herself. When pushed, she could lose her temper in a spectacular manner. Over a lost ball, a lost game of cards, an insufficient portion of a Mars Bar, or a taunt and tease too far.

  Ailsa hated discrimination, because she was always on the wrong side of it.

  Ailsa hated to lose at Snakes and Ladders. She did not cheat, because it was hard to cheat at that simple and overt game, but once, when luck was against her, she knocked the whole board over, accidentally on purpose, and once she threw the dice so violently that it got lost for some time behind the settee.

  'Ailsa's having one of her tantrums,' Tommy would snigger, but even he was afraid of her tantrums. She could kick and bite like a pony. She was as brave as a scorpion. And in some ways she was bolder than her brother. She was a fearsomely brave swimmer. She wasn't a good swimmer – Humphrey was much the best swimmer of the quartet – but she was a headstrong swimmer. She would head out through the rearing breaking waves, fearless and determined, first into the icy water, as the boys shivered and hesitated in the shallows, with cold knees and shrivelling willies and cold bottoms. She wore a dark blue seersucker bathing costume and a turquoise bathing hat with a raised pattern of big white daisies on it. Sometimes her costume slipped and exposed her nipples. She swam until her skin puckered and pimpled and turned a dull mortuary grey. She was full of pluck. She was skinny and weedy and girlish and she wasn't very strong, but she was brave. She stood her ground when they played dangerously, jumping on and off the seawall, dodging the waves as they came swirling up the sluice and the concrete slipway.