The Sea Lady

by Margaret Drabble

  So schoolboy Humphrey Clark never went back to Finsterness. Time stood still, in Finsterness, but he moved on, through puberty, into adolescence. His oceanic encyclopedic childish dreams dispersed and dissolved. He busied himself, like the normal boy he was trying to become, with schoolwork, and examinations, and university entrance. His only attempt to establish a specimen fish tank in his bedroom in Covington did not last long. Aquarium fish need a lot of attention, and die of disappointing fungal diseases, so he abandoned the project. Nor did he train to become a surgeon or a specialist in songbirds. He did not pursue a desire to become a coastguard or a lifeboat man or a lifesaver, although he swam for his school and was later to swim for his college.

  He nudged himself in vain against the glass wall of mathematics, and eventually he had to give up. He found he could get so far, but always, at a certain distance, there was this glass against his nose. He mastered the riddle of Diophantus well before he went to Grammar School, and he learned geometry, and algebra, and logarithms, and achieved good grades at Ordinary Level, and then again two years later at Advanced Level. He was always top, or near the top, of the class, and his maths teacher assured him he could do it. He could read mathematics at university if he wanted, said Mr Hodges. But Humphrey Clark knew better. He knew he was not good enough. He knew that he would never hear the music of the prime numbers, he would never penetrate the thrilling mysteries of the higher orders of mathematics and physics. Numbers continued to fascinate him, but he knew that they were not for him. He read about Fermat's last theorem, then unsolved, and the Riemann hypothesis, as yet unsolved, and the Fermi paradox, still awaiting a solution from the seemingly eternal silences of space. Who was out there in all the other galaxies, Fermi had asked, but as yet there had been no reply. The planets remained silent.

  Humphrey could understand the nature of the mathematical and cosmological questions, but he knew he would never find the answers, and would probably be unable to comprehend them even when others discovered them. They were too big for him. Mathematics and theoretical physics were both too big and too small for him.

  He did better with zoology and biology.

  Therefore he elected to study natural sciences at university, and when, in the later years of his public success, after the hiatus and hesitations of his failure, people were to ask him why, he would come up with the conventional answers - his difficulties with pure mathematics, his curiosity about the outdoor natural world, the charisma of his biology teacher at King Edward's.

  Every budding natural scientist has a charismatic biology teacher, he was in the habit of saying. It's part of the plot of the life of every zoologist, every ethologist, every marine biologist. Mr Summerscale was brilliant, I owe him a lot. He was a great romantic, Mr Summerscale.

  Ken Summerscale had died at the age of forty-eight climbing a small mountain in the Pyrenees. He had not lived to enjoy his prize pupil's success.

  Mr Summerscale made me into a romantic, Humphrey Clark used to say. He taught me to respect animals and the natural world. He taught me that we murder to dissect. He taught me that if you have to dissect, you must do it with respect. We were obliged to dissect, it was part of the syllabus, but he taught us that we must waste not a particle, not a cell. Nothing should die in vain, Mr Summerscale used to say. Not even a regulation school-issue rat or a dogfish. We should observe, that's what he told us. We should observe the living, we should observe the ways of life. You can't learn everything in the laboratory, that's what he used to say. The whole is more than the sum of its parts, he told us. The whole behaves differently from the parts, and has different properties. That's what he taught us, and he was right. It's out of fashion to say that these days, when we spend our time scrutinizing the interactions of eukaryotic microbes, but it's true, nevertheless. It's still true.

  And Humphrey, then, would mention the heroes of his apprenticeship: Sir Alister Hardy, Sir Frederick Russell, Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen.

  He sometimes mentioned his grandmother, and his Aunt Vera, and his formative childhood years by the northern sea. He often spoke fondly of the sea squirt and St Cuthbert's beads.

  He never mentioned Ailsa and Tommy Kelman. He never mentioned Sandy Clegg. They had been banished from the record.

  St Cuthbert's beads, as he had learned at school from Mr Summerscale, were the fossils of the stems of crinoids, otherwise known as sea lilies. They were abundant on the shores of Finsterness. Crinoids were so successful in the Palaeozoic seas that their fossils had accumulated to form great layers of limestone. Humphrey had taken some specimens of fossilized Northumbrian sea lilies to school, in his mother's abandoned shell-encrusted shoebox, and Mr Summerscale had identified them for him.

  The pleasure of identification had been intense and full of hope.

  By the time he went to university, Humphrey Clark had become another person, of another species. Nobody would have predicted the nature of the transformation. The diffident studious delicate little boy had become healthy, physically confident, almost assured. At eighteen, he had been just too young for National Service, which was then in the process of being phased out, and some adults had told him this was a pity, as National Service makes a man of you. But Humphrey had found the Sixth Form at King Edward's full of its own rites of passage. He grew over four inches in eighteen months, or so the school doctor's rickety wooden gibbet-like measuring apparatus told him. He flourished. The virtues of the wholesome state-controlled wartime diet manifested themselves in his physique. He grew taller and broader than his father, who was in these years growing ever thinner and smaller. He made new friends, he sang loudly in the school choir with his well-broken baritone voice, he stopped saying his prayers, he drank beer and cheap wine, he smoked surreptitiously, and although he remained a little shy he joked fairly easily with the Sixth Form girls who came over the road from the Girls' Grammar for their biology lessons with Mr Summerscale. The brother of two pretty sisters, he was accustomed to girls.

  He had survived the shames of puberty and adolescence, and, unlike the cuckoo wrasse and the marine shrimp, he had felt little temptation to change sex. He had become a good-looking young man, and his sisters Lizzie and Di valued him as an escort, and as a procurer of acceptable boyfriends.

  Nor had he lazily, under the influence of beer and companionship, abandoned his notochord and his ambitions. He had not slumped into colonized stasis or invertebrate inertia. He was a hard worker, a diligent student. He passed without too much difficulty his Latin O-Level, then a requirement for entrance to some of the older universities and a stumbling block to many aspiring scientists. He won the Bebb-Whistler Prize for his collection of the larval cases of caddis flies. (Who was Bebb-Whistler? Humphrey had never thought to ask. Some long-dead and long-forgotten amateur, he would have guessed, if asked, but as nobody asked him he did not even bother to guess. If the benevolent Bebb-Whistler had hoped for immortality or even for thanks from his beneficiaries, he had been disappointed. Unlike Alfred Russel Wallace, he wasn't even remembered for being forgotten. He had just disappeared from the record. Humphrey wonders now, sometimes, if he should undertake some pious compensatory research into the obscure life of the obscure Bebb-Whistler. But of course he hasn't got round to it yet.)

  Humphrey was appointed Head Boy, and he was popular in this apprentice managerial role. His school reports commented with what he took to be approval that he was 'always ready to accept responsibility'.

  His parents were proud of him. 'Our son's at Cambridge, he got a minor scholarship,' they would say, even when they were not asked. And they were not often asked. They did not enjoy an extended social life in Covington. They were quiet people.

  His mother liked to say, 'He takes after my father. My father was a grand swimmer.'

  Where was that little misery, that little naked piping boy, that child who had snivelled over a dead fish and a false friend? Was he cast off for ever, or was he dormant, awaiting a miserable watery rebirth?

  Humphrey Clar
k, tall, easy-going, presentable and well-liked, got a good but not an outlandishly good degree, and was encouraged to embark on postgraduate research on the optics of fish.

  He had by this time returned with a dedicated passion to his earlier loves. In his Cambridge years he had joined a diving club, and had taken up diving and fish-watching in the long vacations. He swam with fish, and he studied fish behaviour, and once more he began to dream of fish. (Once he dreamed that the sky was full of shining fish, swimming through the bare boughs of silver-barked forest trees.) Ethology was the discipline to which he aspired, and it was in those days a respected discipline that attracted research funding, grants, honour, places on expeditions, public admiration. Fieldwork was in fashion, and its practitioners were revered. He and his fellow-students and his teachers and their colleagues were largely unaware that their ways of learning and observing and thinking were about to be phased out and displaced by molecular biology and laboratory-based neurology and physiology, and by the computerized mathematical crunching of the fossil record.

  Crinoids were graceful creatures, as were their surviving descendants. Fish were graceful. Underwater life was full of movement and of grace. This is one of the reasons why it attracted him.

  The computer and the DNA revolution were both in their infancy when Humphrey Clark embarked on postgraduate research. The vast fortunes and commercial wars of the patented genome lay in the future. It was still possible, at that time, to be a serious scientist and to adopt a quasi-mystical approach to the natural world. It was still possible to regard the sea as a sea of faith. Not perhaps as a sea of old-fashioned religious faith, but as a sea of faith in the glory and diversity of creation. The old traditions of respect and wonder flourished, in direct descent from those venerable Victorian collectors of snails and butterflies, those Bebb-Whistlers who had marked out the terrain and filled their cabinets and built the great museums. Those collectors of beetles and bones and the larval cases of caddis flies were his ancestors.

  And some of the heavyweights of marine biology professed themselves to be devout. They believed in the Divine Flame. Marine biologist Sir Alister Hardy had delivered the Gifford Lectures on the theme of the Divine Flame, in Aberdeen in 1964. Hardy had been deeply interested in religious experience. Even the agnostics and atheists in the profession were not such confident proselytizers for their secular molecular creed as their descendants were shortly to become. Darwin and Huxley were in the right, of course, and the entrenched bishops of the nineteenth century had been in the wrong. The Edwardian imperialist religious and political agenda of the scientific articles in Arthur Mee's Children's Encyclopedia had long been abandoned. But nevertheless, nevertheless ... doubt was honoured, dissent was permitted, faith was respected, and the observation of the behaviour of whole and living organisms was considered central to zoological research.

  It was a tolerant time, in the days when Humphrey was an apprentice. A form of anthropomorphism was acceptable, for the human model, despite the Second World War and its revelations, despite Bergen-Belsen and Bikini, was still seen in a benign light. The great Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz had spoken of geese 'falling in love', and he had not been much mocked for this. He had spoken of cichlid 'marriage' and of rat 'families' and of the 'friendships' of fish. These metaphors had not yet been contemptuously deconstructed, nor had the word 'Austrian' yet become an automatic invitation to unthinking and ignorant racist assumption and innuendo.

  Humphrey Clark was to watch the evolution of his faith with dismay.

  The whole field of biological and zoological knowledge was about to be transformed, creating new paradigms, providing new battlefields for new theories, but postgraduate Humphrey Clark had not yet been aware of this. And if he had been aware, he would not have changed course. He was full of confidence in fish and in the saving freedom of fish. Later, he was to waver in allegiance: but not then.

  The bitterness of the wars was to take him by surprise. He had been so sure that he was on the side of the angels. But his angels went out of fashion. His angels were too large to dance invisibly upon the end of a pin, or to be captured through the lens of the electronic microscope. They were graceful, but they were gross.

  The greylag goose and the stickleback were superseded by the fruit fly and the nematode worm and the laboratory mouse, and they in turn by the eukaryotic microbe and the selfish gene and the spiteful gene. Humphrey had been caught in the conflict. He survived, but at a cost.

  We reduce and reduce and reduce, but the habits of anthropomorphism and metaphor are hard to kill.

  Professor Clark, sitting on a train travelling northwards, turned these matters over in his mind. The folder lay closed upon his table, and he was lost for words, lost for words for his thoughts. He was on his way back to the wellspring: would he recover them there?

  Maybe everybody's career, with hindsight, displays evidence of lacunae, jagged edges, fault-lines, false tributaries. So he reassures himself.

  He often thinks of his palaeontologist acquaintance Stuart Troughton, who had so mistakenly convinced himself that his work on fossil distribution had uncovered significant new evidence about the early evolution of sexual reproduction. He had got his numbers and his dates badly wrong, as Darwin had done a century earlier when he had tried to estimate the age of the Earth. Troughton, like Darwin, was only a few million years out, but his theory had foundered. Troughton had been obliged to live, bitterly, with this error. Unlike Darwin, he never recovered his ground.

  Barking up the wrong tree

  Backing the wrong horse

  Taking the wrong turning

  Going up a blind alley

  Digging your own grave

  Meeting a dead end

  Humphrey often thinks of his friend Harry Field, who had euphorically mistaken a cellular organelle for a molecule, and had published prematurely, to the ridicule and satisfaction of his rivals. And of Barry Armstrong, who had waited too long, and yet not quite long enough. Barry Armstrong had devoted twenty unproductive years to the study of the digestive tracts of colonial ascidians, and then had stopped, impatiently, just one step short of the significant discovery that had won his successor the prize. And, at the other end of the scale, he often thinks of his one-time diving companion Jack Stringer, who had drowned off the coast of Australia while investigating the suicidal impulses of beaching whales.

  With all these he has sympathy.

  His own career had been more successful. His mistakes had been concealed. He had been lucky.

  The train stopped for a long time just outside Doncaster and engine trouble was reported over the loudspeaker.

  Nothing was over. Nothing is ever over.

  As the train began to stall, he began – oh, slowly, not in a wave of sudden recognition – he began slowly to realize that he had been 'out of his mind' to accept the invitation to receive an honorary degree in the new university at Ornemouth. What folly, what vanity, what complacency had seduced him into this journey? The sinews and valves of his memory would be prised open, slowly, painfully, with each mile he travelled, like the stiff hinges of a shellfish.

  The scalped memory would lie open to the sky.

  Folly and vanity. He struggled with these notions. He had nourished such high hopes. Surely there had been at least a promise of restoration in his hopes?

  There was a period in his life when he had been tempted to abandon any pretence of hard science, to abandon the jungle warfare of academic competition, to retire from the race, and to become a historian of science rather than a practising scientist. He had seriously thought of becoming a historian of marine biology. It was a good subject, and the funding had been adequate. He had been offered a fellowship and a publishing contract for this harmless project, and he had started work on it, but then had been lured back from this peaceful backwater into the 'real world' by flattery, big money, commerce, and glory, treacherously disguised as education and the public good. He had been seduced by the grandiose Greenwich project, b
y the Green Grotto. It had almost undone him.

  He still continued to teach a course on the history of marine biology. It was an indulgence, a vanity, a frivolous option. His students loved it.

  He looked out at the inland railway sidings, where purple and yellow weeds flourished abundantly between the tracks. Would the lost land of his innocence materialize, as he travelled towards it? The ache in his speechless throat was like an ache in an amputated limb, in a missing organ. He thought of the incoming tide, and of the ebb and flow of schools and disciplines and reputations. He was old now, and he had seen them come and go. He had heard the complaints at High Table. The resisted rise of sociobiology, the waning of belles-lettres and of literary criticism, the rise of deconstruction, the rise of literary theory, the decline of the Germanic languages, the spread of the Hispanic languages, the death of easel art, the fad for installations, the rise of women's studies, the rise of media studies, and of business studies, and of sports science, and of political correctness, and of academic servitude. He had been witness to the snapping and the sniping, the gossip and the grievances. He had seen it all, he had followed it all.

  He had noted the exclusion, and then the sanctification, of Rosalind Franklin, for long the unsung heroine of crystallography and DNA, and now the icon of women's success in hard science. He had noted the recovery of the forgotten work of Cecilia Payne, famous for hydrogen and helium, and of Henrietta Leavitt of Harvard, who had discovered those dying giant yellow stars. He had watched the gender game.

  The excavations, the rehabilitations, the posthumous awards. The rearguard attacks of the creationists, the intemperate responses of the geneticists, the bitter debates on heritability and race, on biological determinism, on animal experimentation, on the patenting of genes. The struggles for funding, the shifting of paradigms, the intemperate raging in the pages of academic journals.

  Buckets of water had been thrown at professors on platforms, and death threats issued against heads of departments.