The Sea Lady

by Margaret Drabble

  (We have had the first case of infantile paralysis in the neighbourhood, Mrs Clegg would shortly record, carefully, with her lead pencil. We have been told that children should avoid public swimming pools and cinemas.)

  'Impetigo,' repeated Ailsa with satisfaction. And she laughed, as though looking like a freak with purple legs was nothing to her. She brazened it out. She didn't mind having a freak name. She didn't mind being called after a rocky crag off the West Coast of Scotland. Humphrey hated being called Humphrey. He was glad he wasn't called Clegg, which was a silly ugly name with a low meaning. Nobody could want to be called Clegg, anyone would want to get rid of a name like Clegg, but Clegg was a surname, and you're stuck for life with a surname, unless you're a girl. Whereas his parents had chosen to call him Humphrey. He would have preferred an ordinary name, like John, or David, or Thomas, or Alan. These were ordinary, meaningless names, but Humphrey was a fancy stuck-up name, a name that invited ridicule.

  'Mummy wanted me to bring Monty,' she said, 'but he's too slow.'

  'Yes,' said Humphrey.

  Half a day he spent alone with Ailsa Kelman, left behind, remaindered. They talked, in a desultory manner, about nothing much. They caught some blennies, and let them go again. They ate their sandwiches, in silence, and fed some crumbs to the anemones. Ailsa squatted by the rock pool as they watched the anemones waving their fleshly fronds.

  'I think they're plumose anemones,' Humphrey said. He knew it was wrong to say it, but he couldn't help saying it. The pedagogue that crouched in him spoke out. Ailsa said nothing. She stared at the nearest dark jellied blob intently, squatting, knees bent. She gazed into its pulsing red Medusa valve, its pulsing female valve. She said nothing. Her legs were bare and brown, and he could see the white nubbed triangle of her knickers as she squatted there with her arms around her knees.

  'They're quite common,' he said, discouraged.

  Ailsa Kelman crouched, saying nothing, waiting in the nub of herself.

  The anemone waved, and Ailsa advanced her finger with its bitten nail, with its nail bitten to the quick. The exploring fronds withdrew, and it closed itself up.

  Her wrists were thin and bony.

  She looked across at him, and smiled, with menace rather than mirth.

  Why couldn't he talk about anemones, if Tommy could talk about Hiroshima and the atom bomb?

  He tried not to stare at her blunt exposed female nub. Could it put out tentacles? The changing shape of his own genitals was a worry to him. A pleasure, of a sort, but a guilty pleasure, and a worry.

  'You had your tonsils out last summer,' said Ailsa suddenly, in a much friendlier and more collaborative tone.

  'Yes,' he agreed, surprised that this personal event should have been of any interest to her, or that anybody should have bothered to tell her about it.

  'So did I,' she said. 'It hurt a lot. Did yours hurt a lot?'

  He nodded.

  'Horrible,' he agreed.

  'I've got mine, pickled in a jar,' said Ailsa. 'I keep them in my bedroom. Next to my luminous lamb.'

  'What do they look like?'

  'Nasty,' she said, with relish. 'Really nasty.'

  'They said I could keep mine,' said Humphrey, 'but they forgot. They threw them away.'

  She laughed, but without ill will. Their tonsils had bonded them.

  'I could show you mine, if I had them here,' she said. 'But I left them at home. I wanted to bring them, but they said I couldn't. They let me bring my lamb, but they wouldn't let me bring the tonsils.'

  'I'd like to see them,' said Humphrey.

  'I'd like to show them to you,' said Ailsa.

  This was a very kind thing that she said. He remembered it.

  Then they had compared throats. He had peered down her throat, and she had peered down his. They had looked for scar tissue, and they thought they found it.

  'I can't yodel nearly as well without my tonsils,' said Ailsa. 'I used to be able to make the most frightening noise, but I can't do it any more. I was famous for it, but I can't do it now.'

  'Maybe it will come back,' said Humphrey.

  'No, I don't think so,' said Ailsa gravely. 'No, I think I've lost the knack.'

  They had become momentarily friendly, Ailsa and Humphrey, on this long afternoon, forging a conspiratorial alliance with which to confront Sandy and Tommy on their return. They had got on so well that Humphrey had asked Ailsa to come back to his grandmother's house with him when it started to rain, and she had agreed. He had wanted to show her his aquarium book, and she now seemed willing to let him play the tutor. She examined the books in the glass-fronted bookcase in the front room, and told him that back home in Bonsett she had her own new school-prize copy of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea with pictures of the giant squid and the submarine forest and of gallant Captain Nemo and the Nautilus. Then she'd curled up in the rocking chair and gazed at the Reverend Twigg's illustrations and listened patiently to Humphrey's little speech about the habits of hermit crabs and jellyfish and pipefish.

  He did not tell her about last year's aquarium in Sandy's backyard and the fish that had leaped to its death. The fish death had become unmentionable.

  She'd left him at teatime, to go back to Mrs Binns and the family meal. He had felt proud of himself, and strangely grown-up for having had the nerve to ask her into his grandmother's house. He had salvaged his day and had shown some independence of spirit.

  Next day, he heard the story of Sandy and Tommy's day out. They hadn't gone to the cave and the waterfall, they'd gone the other way, south beyond Ornemouth, to the cement landings where tanks had done exercises in the early days of the war. They'd met up with another gang, and time had flown, and then it began to rain, and they'd taken shelter in a lookout post, and in short they came back very late for their tea. Mr and Mrs Kelman and Mrs Binns were extremely angry with Sandy and Tommy. Sandy and Tommy got it in the neck. The grown-ups said they were angry because they were worried, but Sandy and Tommy knew better. That was just an excuse. They were angry because they were angry, because they enjoyed being angry.

  Mr Kelman made Tommy stay alone in his bedroom for the whole evening.

  Ailsa had been openly delighted by the anger visited upon her brother. She came across as very smug, for twenty-four hours.

  Humphrey had kept well out of it.

  Mrs Clegg had noted with a bleak impotence, Sandy very late back, those children do run a bit wild.

  Professor Clark, brushing the crumbs of baguette from his lapel, remembered Ailsa Kelman's tonsils and her white knickers very clearly. He had good reason to remember them. Ailsa, Ailsa, brave and brazen. Ailsa Kelman, her own worst enemy. She had made her mark on him, and on the times she lived in. She had written her name in the sand at the water's edge, with a big flat blue stone, and then she had written it in lights and in printer's ink and on the airwaves and on the screen. She had stored it in libraries, and she had colonized the internet. Her name had spread like an infestation of algae.

  Ailsa and Tommy Kelman. They had walked into his life as strangers, and taken possession of it.

  He had been successfully avoiding Ailsa Kelman for more than half his life.

  He wondered if they would ever meet again.

  Sandy and Tommy did not say much to Humphrey about where they had been, or why. They did not admit to guilt or shame but they had been alarmed by the degree of adult wrath that their absence had provoked. They resumed their safe old formation, as part of a defensive foursome, the young against the old. But Humphrey did not feel safe any more. Something had shifted. Something had gone wrong.

  The August weather had broken, and rain spattered and pocked the sands, so they spent a lot of time indoors playing Monopoly. Tommy liked to be banker and Ailsa always said he was cheating. She would glower at his heaps of counterfeit paper money with suspicious resentment. Humphrey didn't notice that anything was wrong, and thought she was just being spiteful, though he wouldn't have put it past Tommy to try to cheat.
>
  Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief.

  His special relationship with Ailsa did not last long. She reneged on their brief alliance, and went her own dissident female way.

  There was just one more short spell of fine weather before the end of the holidays. They went to see the cave and the waterfall and the ring in the rock. All four of them went, all four of them did it, all four of them saw it, all four of them would remember it. It would have been a failure if they hadn't dared to go. This time they were careful to be back on time for their tea.

  Two days later, the Kelmans drove away in their temperamental black Ford car with their suitcase roped on top. The next day Humphrey and Auntie Vera went by train to Covington, and the summer was over, and the autumn began.

  Again, he and Sandy did not say goodbye to each other. Perhaps they both thought there might be another summer, in which they could make good the things that had gone bad. They did not know what the uncontrollable future might inflict upon them.

  Mrs Clegg wrote in her notebook: Humphrey Clark went back to Covington today with Miss Neil.

  Soon after his return his mother gave birth to a baby, a new girl baby which she called Diana. Humphrey did not much like this name, but he did not say so. He felt that he was too old to have a baby sister. Lizzie played menacing games with the baby, fondling it and taunting it, but Humphrey tried to keep out of its way.

  Not long after Christmas his grandmother died, without warning, and the house in Finsterness was sold, with almost all its contents, and Auntie Vera moved south to live with a woman they called Auntie Madge, although she wasn't really an auntie. Auntie Madge was headmistress of a school in a village near Beaconsfield. Auntie Vera had found a post at a neighbouring school in Beaconsfield. All of this happened very suddenly. Auntie Madge and Auntie Vera lived happily together in Buckinghamshire, sharing a 1930s semi. Auntie Vera now claimed that she had always dreaded the cold winters, the wind, the damp, the dark nights of the north. She did not miss the North Sea at all, she asserted. Humphrey could not believe that she could mean what she said. How could anybody prefer the inland life? But she stuck to her story.

  So Humphrey never went back to Finsterness. They had cut off his retreat, his lifeline. He knew he would never see Sandy and Tommy again. Ailsa Kelman, fair-weather friend and for one day an intimate, Ailsa with her copper hair and her brazen cheek and her tantrums, would vanish like a summer midge. Or so he thought, through the long years of his adolescence and apprenticeship. He had thought all that was over, like a pointless interlude. Slammed shut, like a closed and childish book that has been outgrown. So he put away childish things, and he tried hard to grow up.

  He thought Ailsa had disappeared, and when she reappeared, he didn't recognize her. When she reappeared and reintroduced herself into his life, he didn't know whether she was another interlude, or part of the main plot.

  And he was still, of this, uncertain.

  For over a decade, he made himself forget about Sandy and Tommy and Ailsa, about the good summer followed by the bad summer. He did not like its paradigm. He had made himself forget both friendship and betrayal. He had deliberately repressed his knowledge of both. He shut the lid. He screwed it down. He rolled the stone.

  Latency, denial, refusal, repression, struggle, combat, maturity, acceptance. The life cycle of the marine biologist.

  The Orator, following the story, following the outline of the story, trying to find the thread through the story, perceives that at this point there could yet have been many outcomes. Up to this point in the journey, no irrevocable decisions have been made, no fatal mistakes embedded. Humphrey Clark is still an innocent. His heart is still pure.

  From this point on, chance and choice each play a part. If the story were unravelled to this point, to this knot, and then rewoven, it could be rewoven in many patterns. But we have to follow the facts. We cannot unweave, and remake. For chance and choice happen. They coincide, they coalesce, they mix, and then their joint outcome grows as hard and as fixed as cement. Like a fossil in stone, it hardens, in its own indissoluble, immutable shape.

  How can old Professor Clark, sitting there in his railway carriage, nearly half-way up the spine of England, sitting there with his old face, and his old skin, and his old heart, and his old brain, and his wrinkled knuckles, and his spotted hands, and his thickening arteries, and his sore throat, and his expensively crowned teeth – how can he think for one moment that he has a hope, a chance, a possibility of redemption? It is done and he is damned. He must know this. It is over, the game is over, and he must face the knowledge of the way he played it. He is a child, to think that anything can be redeemed or recovered.

  There is no point in this return, and no hope in it. The sea will reject him and the town will reject him, for the hiding places of his power are closed to him. He must learn to face the silence of the ending. The bell tower condemns him. The bell tower mocks him. The invitation mocks him. The honour mocks him.

  It is hard, it is hard.

  Is this the story that the Orator must tell?

  If this is the story, then it must be told, for there is some honour left in the honest telling.

  Is there a hope of another ending?

  The Orator turns a page, and adjusts his glasses. It is a long struggle, and full of pain and disappointed hopes. The Orator is detached, but he can recognize and witness pain, although he suspects that he himself may no longer be able to feel it.

  Ailsa Kelman and Humphrey Clark were to meet again this very night. She already knew this, and it was in her nature to assume that he must know it too. This was a reasonable assumption on her part, for she had no means of knowing the paranoid extent of his avoidances. She assumed that he must know of their imminent convergence, and had accepted it, for in her vanity she believed that everything she did was known and observed and blazoned all over the land. Therefore it was clear to her that her imminent re-entry into his life must be known to Humphrey Clark who was, as it were, in on and part of the act. It is true that P. B. Wilton, a good gauge of information diffusion, had been both ignorant of and unimpressed by her Ornemouth honour, and indeed had seemed uncertain where Ornemouth was. But maybe Peter had been pretending. He always liked to belittle and dissemble.

  Yes, Humphrey would have been informed. He would have been sent the magazine with her picture in it, and his picture, their two miniatures married upon the page. The University of Ornemouth probably didn't know what it was doing, but Humphrey surely did.

  It was a lark, a spree, a gamble, a game.

  Humphrey Clark knew Ornemouth. It was in his blood.

  Ailsa Kelman drove north towards Ornemouth in the little red two-seater and she sang as she drove.

  'Ye banks and braes o' bonny Boon,' she sang merrily, at the top of her voice. 'How can ye bloom sae fresh and fair?'

  Once she had owned a folly car with the number plate AILSA. That had been in her days of vanity and glory, which she had now put so far behind her. She was a mature and adult female of her species at last, and she was rejoicing in her maturity.

  'Thou'll break my heart, thou warbling bird

  That wantons through the flowery thorn,

  Thou minds me of departed joys

  Departed never to return...'

  sang Ailsa, triumphant, on her way back to the pensioners' fish teas and crab sandwiches and antiquarian bookshops and tapestry kits and tattoo parlours and charity shops of Ornemouth. She is a pensioner herself now, an Old Age Pensioner, a Senior Citizen, and she tells herself bravely that she has never felt stronger in her life.

  Her voice is not as good or as pure as Dame Mary McTaggart's, but she can still fill her lungs and produce a startling volume of sound.

  Ailsa Kelman tells herself that she had accepted this invitation because she now considers herself ready for the challenge. Her Brazilian confessor, her lady from Rio, had encouraged her to accept it.

  Ailsa has made efforts to deal with her past, with her pain. She move
s in circles where such efforts are acceptable, even fashionable. Women are better than men at these explorations and these confrontations, or so Ailsa believes.

  Ailsa, in what she stubbornly thinks of as her prime, still experiences moments of triumph and of joy. She can still sing loudly, and speak clearly, and stand up straight, and put on a good face.

  Posture, Ailsa, posture.

  But the fragility of the triumph is terrible, the psychic cost enormous. She wears little flat shoes now, but like the Little Mermaid she remembers the pain of the knives. It has not been easy, this metamorphosis.

  She is brave, is Ailsa. She needs to believe in her own courage. And so she sings, against the rising tide.

  She is also getting hungry. She hasn't had much to eat today. There will be a big dinner, but she hasn't had much lunch, and she could do with some tea.

  She remembers the fish teas of Mrs Binns, with their brave little flags of parsley. Mrs Binns, widowed by the stormy seas of peacetime, making ends meet.

  She remembers what P. B. had said two nights ago about the fluctuating fatness of Mary McTaggart. Dame Mary, like many opera singers, was famous for being fat. Ailsa no longer worries about her weight. She had worried about it, intermittently, in her forties and fifties, but then one day she had decided she didn't care if she got fat. She was getting old, and she might as well get fat too. Solidity was admirable, weight was desirable. She hadn't coined the memorable phrase 'Fat is a feminist issue' but she had decided to endorse it. And so liberating had that decision been that since then her weight had stabilized. Now she ate what she liked when she liked and it seemed to make no difference. She was a little overweight, but so what?

  No wonder she thinks that by an effort of the will she can arrest time. What will happen to her when time catches up with her?

  She could do with a sandwich. A crab sandwich, and a cup of tea.