The Sea Lady

by Margaret Drabble

  Whatever could have happened to Sandy Clegg? He had vanished. Unlike Humphrey Clark and her brother Tommy Kelman, he had disappeared into thin air and into a nowhere life. She had looked for his name, from time to time, but she had not found it. There were plenty of Cleggs to be found, in the old telephone directory, in public life, in Who's Who, on the internet, but Alistair Clegg was not one of them.

  Mrs Clegg, however, had reappeared. Mrs Clegg had come back to Ailsa from the dead. Ailsa had solved the mystery of Mrs Clegg's notes and diaries. It was all too peculiar, and yet all too simple. Who would have thought it? The solution was as odd as the mystery.

  Ailsa had found the real story of Mr Fell in Mrs Clegg's notebooks, deposited in the Mass Observation Archives in the University of Sussex. She had not been looking for it, but she had found it. She had been unable to decide whether it was banal or bizarre. It could, of course, like most 'true stories', be both. But the astonishing thing was that it had been recorded at all. Few of the Mass Observation archivists had been as thorough as Mrs Clegg. She had noted more than most, and more persistently. Many of the new scheme's conscripts had begun diligently, in 1937, filling in page after page of trivia for their sociologist taskmasters, but most had fallen by the wayside. Their observations had grown more and more sparse, and had then faded into silence: the struggles of daily life had overwhelmed some, and a sense of pointlessness and tedium had crushed others. The scheme itself had thinned out and foundered and been largely forgotten by the general public, though every now and then a sociologist or a historian or a journalist would rediscover it and make use of it. As Ailsa herself had done.

  Most of the volunteers had soon given up their mission of observing and counting and auditing, but Mrs Clegg, occupying a useful space between housewifely struggle and housewifely tedium, had kept up her records well into the 1950s, though some of her later entries were undated, indicating that she too was at last losing interest. Ailsa had speculated that maybe Mrs Clegg was a frustrated writer, who in more auspicious circumstances might have written novels or historical romances: the unusual bulk of her contribution to the archive suggested that it had meant more to her than it had meant to most of the diarists, but her narrative style gave little ground for such an interpretation. Mrs Clegg had been told to observe, and she had observed. She had been told to note facts, and she had noted facts. She had also been encouraged to record overheard conversation, but she had not much cared for this part of the assignment, and had no gift for dialogue. She never got much further than 'Overheard in grocer. "She says she saw a banana in Berwick." "I haven't seen a banana since 1942, except those dried ones John sent from Italy in a food parcel." "What were they like?" "They were very black. But what do you expect, coming from Italy?"'

  Ailsa sympathized. She wasn't very good at dialogue herself. She'd once tried to write a play, in the old days when she would try her hand at anything, but it hadn't been very good and had never got beyond a small fringe reading on a Sunday night in a church hall. She had more developed literary and verbal skills than Mrs Clegg, and a much better education, but she wasn't much good at stage dialogue. She could write monologues, but that was another matter.

  On the other hand, Mrs Clegg had some good raw material.

  Mr Fell, Ailsa learned, had killed his wife in a motorbike and sidecar accident in 1937, and he had thereafter been suffering from everlasting remorse. Mrs Clegg had not used that phrase, 'everlasting remorse', but so Ailsa had read the story of his vow of silence and his drawn curtains. She remembered that Humphrey Clark, whose family lived next door, had been affected by the sight of those drawn curtains and by the bowed somnambulistic walk of Mr Fell. Humphrey, in adult life, had sometimes spoken to her of him. Would she now find a chance to tell him the story, and if so, would it bring relief or further oppression? Humphrey had been a sensitive child, too much given to suffering for others.

  The name of Humphrey Clark had appeared many times in Mrs Clegg's diaries, though his history had ended abruptly, a few years before the dwindling ending of those diaries. Ailsa had studied every entry, looking not only for academic fodder for the thesis with which she was then engaged, but also for clues to a personal past, so strangely and coincidentally presented. Humphrey had made his last appearance at the end of the last summer he had spent at Finsterness, the first and only summer that the Kelmans had spent at Finsterness. (She had pointlessly and portentously lied to P. B. Wilton by implying that she and her brother had spent every summer there. They had spent but the one summer in Finsterness, that one intense, decisive summer. After that, increasing prosperity and a desire for milder weather had driven the Kelmans and their children further south, to fashionable and sun-baked Scarborough. Scarborough had been pleasanter, but much less numinous.)

  Mrs Clegg had written in her diary in her spare and uninflected but exceptionally copious and diligent prose:

  Herrings twopence each yesterday, they have gone up.

  School shoes for Sandy, fifteen shillings and eightpence.

  Wellingtons, four coupons.

  Fireworks Gala Display and Cossack Riders, 2s. 6d.

  Finished Margaret Irwin's book about Rupert of the Rhine.

  Humphrey Clark went back to Covington today with Miss Neil.

  End of episode. End of Humphrey Clark, as far as Mrs Clegg and Sandy Clegg were concerned. He'd gone back to Covington with Auntie Vera. There were no more references to Humphrey Clark. He had disappeared from the record.

  Ailsa Kelman, in her incarnation as a scholarly sociologist, sat in the University of Sussex staring at the white ghostly handwriting of Mrs Clegg on the dark Microfilm, carefully preserved in the Mass Observation Archives. She shivered when she saw those words.

  Humphrey Clark went back to Covington today with Miss Neil.

  In her lined exercise book, Mrs Clegg had also jotted down with her newly sharpened pencil the brand names of medications, though whether this was because she was a cynic or a hypochondriac Ailsa was unable, at a remove of nearly forty years, to discover.

  Shadphos tonic tablets or Phylossan for your nerves, Elliman's embrocation for your lumbago, Yeast-Vite Pick-me-Up for your headaches, Musterole Ointment for your chilly coughs, Penetrol for your influenza, Carters Little Liver Pills for your Liver Bile, Benger's Food for your digestion, Sabit for your Dandruff, Silf for Slimness, Rennies for Acidity, Vironita for more or less everything.

  Karswood Pig Powders for your Pigs.

  Ailsa had been to Colindale Newspaper Library and looked up the advertisements for some of these products. She had used them as illustrations for her mass-readership article on Mass Observation, published in a colour supplement. She had provided a hard feminist gloss on female illnesses and hypochondria.

  And now here Ailsa Kelman was, driving back to the source of memories, and leaving well behind her the Durham coalfields and the wretched, filthy little town of Bonsett. She'd seen them from the air, and that was quite enough. Unlike the famous Fairy Folk of Finsterness, they did not draw her back. After her mother's death, she had stayed well clear of Bonsett.

  Some, in attempting to explain the extraordinary upward trajectory of Tommy and Ailsa Kelman, had ascribed it to the influence of Bonsett. Bonnie Bonsett, as some of its residents still call it, with savage but protective irony. What fish would not attempt to leap from such a tank? Ailsa herself had sometimes suggested that Bonsett had much to answer for. J. B. Priestley, in his English Journey of the 1930s, had described it as the pit of hell, as a town of slagheaps, ashes, pitheads, filthy air, lung diseases, stunted adult gnomes, dirty rat-faced children taunting him from the rubble. 'Feral children', we would now call them, thought Ailsa, but that politically risky phrase had not yet been coined. Priestley, in principle and by temperament tolerant of the industrial north, had disliked the north-east, and Bonsett had been its symbol, the archetypal disaster town, a smoking, poisonous urban dump set amidst a harsh and scruffy rural wasteland.

  Ailsa's analyst and confessor
had not bought the environmental diagnosis. Ailsa's analyst had thought it a red herring. She had preferred to talk about Ailsa's father, who did indeed offer some grist to the twice-weekly mill, but who was not, in Ailsa's view, sufficient cause. He was odd, his habits had been odd, and his death had been melodramatic, but Ailsa claimed that she had not thought much about these oddities in her formative years. His oddities had lacked glamour. They had been embarrassing and parochial and penurious rather than interesting. She had taken him and his anal collections of jam jars full of copper coins for granted. Everyone collected coppers, Ailsa had patiently explained to her quizzical listener, and on holiday he had been quite generous: almost, by his own standards and the standards of the day, a spendthrift.

  Indeed, she had argued, how could her development have been profoundly affected by her father's admittedly dreadful death, as this death did not occur until she was at university, when her psyche, as well as her body, was fully formed? Nor had the manner of his death been foreseeable. The fact that it had hit the local headlines was sheer chance, sheer mischance. It was what philosophers call 'moral bad luck'. He'd been in the wrong place at the wrong time. A minor negligence had unforeseeably sparked a major conflagration. That's all that had happened. Ailsa Kelman would still have been Ailsa Kelman had he died in his bed of pneumonia and old age.

  Her analyst did not set much store by chance.

  Her analyst, reflected Ailsa as she overtook a Eurotruck on the dual carriageway, was a sophisticated urban Brazilian from Rio, who had little experience of the English landscape. Her analyst accepted the concept of environment, but only in so far as it concerned parents and siblings. The environment of the leathery womb she was prepared to consider, but rocks and stones and trees were nothing to her, and neither were slagheaps and creosote and coal tar. Ailsa suspected that her analyst had never read Wordsworth or J. B. Priestley.

  Ailsa's father was not a father to boast about, or to waste much time upon. Ailsa had tried to explain this to her analyst, but her analyst had correctly pointed out that Ailsa's memories of her father's social dullness and domestic penny-pinching were hardly relevant. They were superficial. The true plot had been developing beneath the level of Ailsa's perception.

  Ailsa had correctly returned that the environment and nature of her father's death had been both intimately and dramatically connected. Creosote had been the key to her father's life, to her father's living, and to her father's death. Creosote had killed him. He had died in a factory fire. It had not been a noble death. But creosote would have killed him in the long run anyway. He had been ill and wasting when he died.

  Creosote had recently become a forbidden substance in Britain and the European Union. In 2003 it was put on the blacklist. Paradoxically, you could continue to own it, but you couldn't use it. But back then, back in the 1940s and 1950s, there had been good money in creosote. It had been classified as a preserver, not a destroyer.

  Humphrey Clark, years later, had said to Ailsa that he loved the tarry masculine seafaring smell of creosote. The deathly smell of formaldehyde he hated, but creosote had been as a life-giving perfume and an aphrodisiac to him.

  Ailsa and Tommy Kelman's father had been an industrial chemist. Their mother had once been in service at the big bleak mock-Palladian house up the ravaged valley. Ailsa and Tommy had received mixed messages from this mixed parentage.

  Their mother had known how to lay a table. Ailsa and Tommy knew how to manage their cutlery and how to hold a glass. In adult life Tommy had become increasingly enamoured of dukes and duchesses, of princes and princesses, of merchant bankers and the super-rich, so this expertise had stood him in good stead. Ailsa had found it less valuable, but she too had deployed it to her advantage.

  Ailsa, trying to tune in the hire car radio for some Radio 3 musak, remembered the tame codfish in the Pool of Brochan. They had come trustingly to the hand to feed. And she remembered Humphrey Clark. Oh yes, she remembered Humphrey Clark. She had tried to scissor him out of her life, as he had tried to scissor her out of his, but she had failed. And now she was boldly on her way to look him in the eye. If he hadn't chickened out of the enterprise. But he wouldn't dare do that, would he?

  He wasn't a coward. He'd never been a coward. He'd taken his defeats like a man.

  Humpy knew they would do it, and they did. A few days after the outing to the Pool of Brochan, Tommy and Sandy did it.

  They went off without him, the two of them, as he had known that one day they would. When he got to Turkey Bank, he found they had gone. Sandy and Tommy had gone and left him. They'd set off early, and gone. No, they didn't say where they were going. They'd just said they'd be back for their tea.

  Mrs Clegg did not seem to recognize the scale of the disaster. It was just another day to her, not the end of an era. Humphrey was relieved that she did not see how much he minded. He preferred to conceal his hurt.

  She volunteered, however, that Ailsa Kelman was feeling poorly, and had stayed at home. Maybe she was going to go down to the town beach with her parents later, she wasn't sure. He could go next door and ask.

  She didn't realize that it was impossible for him to go next door and ask.

  Humphrey had his pride. He had nothing but his pride. Rejected, jilted, spurned and friendless. Expelled.

  Expulsion. That was the word. He had been expelled.

  Fish spit out the bits of food they don't want, the bits they swallow in by mistake. They expel them. They spit out grains of sand, in little clouds, from their ever-working lips. Little strings and threads of excrement dangle from one end of a fish, and cloudy spews of grit puff out from the other.

  There is a fish which goes by the name of stone biter. It sucks in stones and spews them out again. He had read about it in his book.

  A boy at school had been expelled. The word was heavy with disgrace. The boy had been a thief, or so the rumour went. But Humphrey was not a thief. So what had he done wrong, to be left behind in disgrace? He turned his mind over the day before, over all the days and weeks before. It hadn't been his fault. Nothing had been his fault. It had been Tommy's fault.

  Tommy Kelman was a thief. He had stolen Sandy Clegg. And when he had finished with him, he would spew him out. Humphrey knew this. He didn't know how he knew it, but he knew it.

  Humphrey was devoured by jealousy and envy. He suspected they had set off early to go to find the waterfall and the ring in the rock, because that was the most exciting place that he and Sandy had ever found. They had talked about the possibility of this adventure, and now they had gone off without him.

  He sat on the low wall at the end of the row of cottages, and looked down across the bay. There was rain, far out to the north-east, a low purple-grey misty bank of it. Was it coming his way? He licked his finger and stuck it into the air, but he couldn't feel much of a breeze from any direction. He picked at a scab on his ankle. The intensity of his sorrow was at once painful and numbing. It filled him with a noxious deadening ache. He knew that it was not just for today. It was permanent, this nauseous sorrow. It would never pass. He was marked for life. He was chained for ever to his rock, with a vulture gnawing at his liver.

  He'd read about that in The Children's Encyclopedia, in a section called 'The Myths of Ancient Greece'.

  Humphrey had made the scab on his ankle bleed. He dabbed at the wound with a dirty handkerchief.

  He was about to set off alone, to the pool in the lee of St Cuthbert's Rock, when he heard his name being called. It was Ailsa, at an upstairs window, calling from Mrs Binns's. He could see her, framed in the open lower half of the sash window.

  'Hump!' she called, leaning out towards him. 'Humpy!'

  She sounded pleased, excited.

  He waved at her. She beckoned him over.

  The cottages were small, the ceilings low. She wasn't very high above him. It was a strange angle. He could see the pale underside of her chin and her throat. He stood there, looking up at her.

  'I've been sick,' she announ
ced. 'Mummy says I've been swallowing too much seawater. I had a sore throat, and I felt as though I'd swallowed a hard-boiled egg, whole. And then I was sick. But I'm better now. I got it all up. I'm coming down, as soon as I'm dressed. Will you wait for me?'

  She seemed proud of having been sick. Not embarrassed, or ashamed, as he would have been.

  Yes, he would wait for her.

  She was down in a matter of minutes. She had not brushed her hair properly. He asked her if she would like to go to St Cuthbert's Rock, and she said yes, so they sauntered off together, conspicuously careless. The tide was right for St Cuthbert's Rock.

  'Where did you learn to swim?' he asked, after they had spent some time crouching on the verge and peering busily and silently into the cracks and crevices. They had picked up a net and his old canvas bucket from Burnside Avenue, but they hadn't tried to catch anything yet.

  'At the public baths,' she said. 'With my friend Gloria and her mother. Gloria's mother taught me. But it's more fun in the sea.'

  'You're a good swimmer,' he said. It was only half true, and he didn't know why he said it.

  'You're a very good swimmer,' she said.

  He felt guilty when she said this, although it was true. Maybe he had been fishing for a compliment?

  She stared down at the brilliant sunlit underwater green of the sea lettuce, with its lucent oxygenated glow.

  Could it have been true that the flowers and foliage of Hiroshima flourished and blossomed after the explosion that killed so many? 'Fresh, vivid and lush,' Tommy had said, smacking his thin lips. 'Lush and luscious.' Those were the very words in the book, said Tommy, with an unpleasant pleasure.

  'My mother says the public baths are dirty and they give you diseases,' Ailsa continued. 'And it's true, I got impetigo, all over my legs, and they painted me with gentian violet. I looked a real freak.'