The Sea Lady

by Margaret Drabble

  'But I imagined you were there every summer?' she wailed interrogatively, with a mock indignation which concealed, he was sure, a different emotion, though what emotion it was he could not divine. 'I thought it was sort of your home? I thought it was where you lived? It was where your family lived, wasn't it?'

  He shook his head, and gallantly extended his gunmetal lighter towards her appealing cigarette. Her wrist, unlike her ankles, was very thin. Her nails were bitten and painted, but her wrist was surprisingly small-boned and delicate. It was encircled by a little bracelet of woven red and white thread, which looked not unlike a hospital tag. The pale skin of her arm was lightly freckled, as it had been when she was a child.

  'My grandmother died,' he said in explanation.

  'But you had an auntie?' she persisted. 'I remember an auntie, who took an interest in your fish?'

  'Auntie Vera,' he said. 'I'm surprised you remember.'

  'Oh,' she said, back in a teasing mode, a flirtatious mode. 'I remember everything about that summer. Everything.'

  Sonia was not so happy with this exclusive interchange, and was showing signs of restlessness. She shifted on her bar stool, and yawned.

  'My Auntie Vera moved to Beaconsfield,' said Humphrey, in a tone that closed the topic of Finsterness for the evening.

  Ailsa let it go.

  When they stepped out into the summer darkness, Humphrey pointed out the boat at anchor, the Sally Jane, the boat which would take him and his Marine Society-sponsored colleagues out in the morning on the fish watch. He nearly said, 'Would you like to come too?' but he thought that Sonia would not like it if he said this, even in play. And also he feared that Ailsa might have said yes. Ailsa had been a bold child. She had walked along the wall of that northern harbour at high tide, and climbed down the metal rungs over the slippery weed and barnacles to the landing stage, a steep descent that Humphrey found frightening. She had danced barefoot on the ribbed beach, her hair in rats' tails, taunting Sandy and Humphrey and Tommy, and singing a naughty song. Once for a dare she had eaten a raw shrimp.

  She might want to learn to dive with him. He did not want the responsibility, the embarrassment.

  The three of them walked up the beer-smelling uneven cobbled back street together. Humphrey offered each woman an arm, and they hooked together, a threesome, their arms through his elbows, warm against his body in the summer night.

  Come unto these yellow sands, and then take hands...

  So the imprisoned Ariel had sung, in her bizarre and unflattering white feathered space-suit.

  Ailsa Kelman, rescued from the past. He had forgotten to ask her about her brother Tommy. Neither of them had mentioned Sandy Clegg.

  Sonia and Humphrey walked Ailsa back to her gypsy encampment in the grassy upper car park, on the green turf of the promontory near the bandstand. It looked ramshackle but not unromantic, with twinkling lights shining from the caravan windows. Tomorrow Ilfracombe, said Ailsa. Don't drown, Humphrey, said Ailsa, as she reached up to kiss his cheek. Goodbye, Sonia, said Ailsa. Good luck with the hunting and gathering. They said goodbye beneath the stars, and said they would keep in touch. Then Humphrey and Sonia walked back down the hill to the boarding house, where they occupied adjacent rooms.

  In those days, in the early years of the sixties, it was not so easy for an unmarried couple to share a hotel room without hostile comment or unpleasant innuendo. This was a relief to Humphrey, and he suspected it was a relief to Sonia, although he could not be certain of this. She seemed to welcome his advances, but she also seemed content when he returned, after non-penetrative mutual orgasm, to sleep in his own room.

  The orgasms were non-penetrative because the contraceptive pill was not yet widely available to unmarried women, who lived in well-founded horror of unwanted pregnancy, and Sonia and Humphrey had agreed, without ever discussing the matter, that condoms and Dutch caps were repulsive as well as unreliable.

  Sonia had once had penetrative sex in a tent with a condom-wearing botanist, an act which had given her an appalling allergic vaginal reaction. It had been her first sexual experience, and it had been horrifying. She had been so sore and so inflamed and so ashamed for so long that she had gone off the whole business. She had not dared to visit a doctor, and had daubed herself, guiltily, with Savlon and Nivea cream, which had made matters worse. She had thought, for a while, that the botanist had given her a sexually transmitted disease, but eventually the raging inner rash and gross swellings of the labia had subsided, and had not recurred. Her accommodation with handsome Humphrey suited her well, and she could not afford to worry too much about whether or not it suited him. She did not tell Humphrey the details of this deterrent experience, but she told him enough about it to let him guess at the causes of her sensitivity. That's how things were, in those days.

  Humphrey, post-orgasm, lay on his narrow lumpy bed and stared at the stained ceiling and thought about Ailsa and Martin Pope. So the caravan of players would move on along the coast to Ilfracombe the next day, and perform The Little Mermaid there under cover in the little theatre. He knew Ilfracombe. Philip Gosse, the devout father of marine biology and the inventor of the aquarium, had explored the seas near Ilfracombe, and to this day it maintained a modest little town aquarium with an interesting selection of specimens from the local waters. And there was a Victorian natural rock bathing pool at Ilfracombe, a tidal pool not unlike the saltwater pool at Ornemouth which had been inexplicably out of bounds because of the war. He had accepted this prohibition meekly as a boy, but now he wondered: why on earth had they been forbidden the pool? Was it just general anti-child meanness, or was there some more plausible reason? Ailsa had once tried to climb over the fence, but they'd caught her at it and stopped her.

  He wondered if he would ever see Ailsa Kelman again. It had been interesting to bump into her again, so unexpectedly, but he would not pursue her along the coast. He was glad that he had not been expected to see a performance of The Little Mermaid. He did not want to see Ailsa Kelman making a fool of herself on stage. She did not seem content with her lot, but it was not clear whether her anger arose from her unsatisfactorily subordinate relationship with her Svengali, or whether it sprang from a deeper career indecision. She evidently considered herself wasted on selling programmes, and that was surely right. He had been unable to follow her description of her interest in Expressionism, and indeed he hardly knew what Expressionism was, but she had made it plain – she had been anxious to make it plain – that her university had awarded her an excellent degree and a choice of research options. She had displayed all the symptoms of driving ambition. These were no surprise to him. But what would be the object of this ambition?

  His own ambitions, in contrast, were at this period in his life well defined, and well funded. He knew where his ship was sailing. Next year, he hoped, the Damascene Islands in the Indian Ocean. He was a lucky man, and full of confidence.

  'For my false lover broke my heart

  And ah, he left the thorn wi' me.'

  So sang Ailsa, heartlessly, as a pageant of false and discarded lovers paraded through her memory, rising like spectres from the high green fields of the sheep-dotted borders, from the windswept hedgerows, from the deep fast brown treacherous waters of the tree-shaded ravine of the salmon-sporting river Orne. How beautiful is the summer landscape, thought Ailsa, how heartlessly, how patiently it has waited for us, through all these years, with its unimaginable message!

  The debacle with Humphrey Clark had been her fault, for the next time she and Humphrey met was not by chance, but at her initiative. 'I was the criminal,' insisted Ailsa, decades later, to her analyst, who remained silent. 'All right,' said Ailsa, 'I suppose you think I want to think I had control over it, even if that makes me out to be a criminal. But I did have control over it. If I hadn't sent him that card, that invitation, he might never have seen me again. He might have married that nice lichen woman. Or he might have married Beattie Lovelace.' (The unlikely thought of his marrying a wom
an called Beattie Lovelace made Ailsa laugh, even though she was a self-confessed unhappy, guilty, tormented criminal.) 'He might have settled down in San Diego or in Woody Bay or Woody Hole or whatever that marine biology place in Massachusetts was called. He might have won the Nobel Prize.'

  The analyst remained silent. She had her own version of this story, and was waiting to see if Ailsa Kelman would stumble upon it as she wandered helplessly round the minefield of accusation and counter-accusation.

  The Public Orator is trying to work out yet another story, and is both frustrated and encouraged by the lack of an ending, and by what appears (can it be?) to be the free will of the protagonists.

  'Yes,' repeated Ailsa with an air of guilty but proud conviction, 'if I hadn't got in the way, he would certainly have won the Nobel Prize.'

  Ailsa Kelman sent a printed card to Humphrey Clark, advertising herself in her new manifestation. Nearly two years had passed since their chance encounter near the border between North Somerset and North Devon, and she was not sure if her card would reach him at the Marine Institute in Lowestoft, to which the laboratory in Cambridge said he had been temporarily posted. Lowestoft did not sound like a good address to Ailsa, despite the subversive success of pirate station Radio Caroline, but she was willing to believe that this secondment was a staging post to higher things in the marine life, and that Humphrey's career was prospering. Hers certainly was. That was why she was trying to get in touch with him. She wanted him to know that she was no longer a programme seller. Maybe he knew already, but maybe, in Lowestoft, he didn't watch much television or read the right newspapers. His frame of cultural reference had seemed fairly broad, for a natural scientist, but she had enough realism left to recognize that her fame, although from her own perspective resounding and indeed irreversibly accelerating, might not yet have reached him. Not everybody watched Late Night Line Up, not everybody saw the Evening Standard, not everybody knew the chic alternative nightspots of Soho.

  'I mean, I know I was self-centred, I know I expected to be able to force things to revolve round me, I know I have this problem with perception, but I do have some sense of proportion,' Ailsa said from time to time to her analyst, as she looked back over these giddy years of relentless and successful self-absorption and self-promotion.

  On the blank back of the printed card, she had given her address and telephone number (the exchange was, quaintly, called Museum) and had written in black ink, 'Do come one night, if you can. I could get you a ticket and we could have dinner after the show. Tommy says he would love to see you too. Did you get to the Damascene Islands? You never sent me a postcard, or if you did, I didn't get it. You said you would. I went to see that darling little museum in Ilfracombe that you recommended. Do you remember the Pool of Brochan? How are you enjoying Lowestoft? I have never been to Lowestoft. Yours ever, Ailsa.'

  Humphrey studied this message carefully and subjected it to close textual analysis. It was an invitation, and a come-on of a sort, no doubt about that. The printed side of the card advertised an event that it described, in large gold letters against a maroon ground, as a Candid Cabaret, which took place nightly in a cellar off Shaftesbury Avenue called the Tinder Box. A design of little golden flames licked around its borders. The card gave a box-office number, times, and the names of the cast, including that of Ailsa Kelman and one or two Scottish-sounding personages. (He looked for the name of Martin Pope, but it was not there.) Whatever was she up to now? He was sure it must be embarrassing. She had pledged herself to foreswear theatrical enterprises and devote herself to straight scholarship, but here she was kicking her high heels in some kind of a nightclub. He did not know what to make of this, but noted that the card was professionally printed, smartly designed, and felt expensive to the touch. And he knew enough of the geography of London to know that the location was central. The Candid Cabaret must be a fringe event, but it was not out in the sticks. It was in the square mile where things happened. Perhaps (he did not welcome this suspicion) it was indeed a Happening? But no, the card was too orthodox for a Happening. Perhaps the Candid Cabaret was what an earlier generation had described as a revue?

  When he turned his attention to her personal message, he encountered further perplexity. He had never seen her adult hand before, and he took in her clear, decisive, well-formed female script. So far, so good. But her proposition was obscure. Was she suggesting that he, she and Tommy should meet and dine together? Why had she mentioned her brother at all, if this was not her intention? The phrase 'dinner after the show' struck him as very adult, almost comically so, but he could see that to her it might be nothing out of the way. Maybe she had dinner with a different admirer every night, 'after the show'. But why did she want him to see the show at all? And why had she mentioned the aquarium in Ilfracombe and the Pool of Brochan? He had no recollection of having told her to go to look at the aquarium, nor did he remember mentioning the Damascene Islands, or offering to send her a postcard from them. The epithets 'darling little' as applied to the aquarium (she had got that wrong, it was an aquarium, not a museum) seemed inappropriate, and rang deliberately false. Actressy, affected, unconvincing. They had not used words like 'darling' up in Ornemouth or in Bonsett.

  She was dangling her hook: but why? What was in it for her?

  He remembered her strong ankles and her plaintive little wrist.

  Should he write back to her saying that he would love to see her and Tommy again, and asking if he could bring his fiancée Beattie too? Should he ignore the message, and pretend he had never received it? Should he send a card saying not now, he was very busy, and had to spend all his spare time visiting his ill father, who was in and out of hospital in the Midlands, but that he hoped they might meet again another time one day before too long?

  He put the card on the mantelpiece of his chaste and spartan room in the Institute, along with a sparse and comfortless array of invitations to lectures and seminars and sherry parties. It glowed at him with a steady subversive allure.

  It was that phrase 'dinner after the show' that did for him. It was irresistible. Nobody had ever invited him, in so many words, to 'dinner after the show' – nobody, let alone a West End actress.

  It was true that his father was ill, terminally ill, and it was true that he himself was, after a manner, engaged. He was not engaged to Sonia Easton, who had left him to his indecision and gone off to look at lichens in Northern Australia: she had been obliged to choose between them and him, and she had chosen them. They had parted without recrimination, but a quasi-fiancée called Beattie had swiftly moved into the place Sonia had vacated, and she and Humphrey seemed to be drifting, at least in public perception, towards a public betrothal. Beattie Lovelace was a very clever woman, and in many ways a suitable fiancée, and Humphrey was frightened of her. But did he want to marry her? Probably not. Did she intend to marry him? Possibly. That was how things stood, when Humphrey Clark received Ailsa Kelman's proposal.

  It was to be a very long time before anybody dared to ask Humphrey Clark why he was attracted by clever women, and why he let them bully him. When asked, he did not have a ready answer.

  Ailsa sent him a single ticket and his notional club membership for a Saturday evening. She made no further mention of her brother Tommy. Humphrey intended to take the last late train or the early milk train back to his old digs in Cambridge. It would be a long night, and he would never get back to Lowestoft.

  During the fortnight that elapsed before their meeting, he wondered if he ought to try to find out more about the Candid Cabaret and the Tinder Box. The names of one or two of the cast were familiar to him from his undergraduate days, for they had been associated with the Cambridge Footlights: Humphrey had been briefly involved with helping with the lighting of one of their shows. Other names meant nothing to him. Were they perhaps some of her Edinburgh connections? The Tinder Box was not listed in the major broadsheets, and he did not know where else to look for it. It would be by way of a blind date.

  This
was the age of satire and of stage nudity and of improvisation; this was the last ditch before the final overthrow of censorship and the Lord Chamberlain. Humphrey Clark, marine ethologist and happiest underwater, suspected that he was about to enter an alarming and possibly dangerous new environment. As he walked from Leicester Square tube station, through Soho, past the beckoning neon-lit brothels of Greek Street, on his way to meet his fate (on his way to take the bait), he reassured himself that he was a grown man, who had survived three months on an island in the Indian Ocean, and swum with sharks and devilfish, and bore a handsome three-inch jagged scar on his knee to prove it. (He had swum into a rock while mesmerized by the seductive weaving movements of his zebra shark, but nobody needed to know this.) He had endured freezing conditions on a trawler in the North Sea, and explored the plankton and the sewage of the Dogger Bank. He had braved the wildness of the elements, and fish tagged by his own hands were even now coursing the globe. He had slept, on several not wholly enjoyable but necessary and memorable occasions, with a Damascene Islander. He could surely cope with Ailsa Kelman in a nightclub.

  The Tinder Box was in a basement in theatreland. Dickensian steps led down from the side street, beneath an old-fashioned gaslight. It was a popular spot: a queue was waiting to descend into the dark and smoky crowded white-tiled cellarage. Everybody was smoking, including the healthy hero Humphrey, who bought himself a pint from the bar at the back of the cavernous room and settled himself down, a little self-consciously, as far from the rickety little stage as possible. The air was so thick that it was hard to say if there was an underlay of cannabis beneath the smell of continental Gauloises, of beer, of spilt wine. The very floorboards were impregnated with decades of drinking, and worse than drinking. The audience, he noted, was predominantly young, as one would expect, though there were one or two suave and suspect-looking silver-haired older men: spies, talent-spotters, perverts, pimps, stage-door johnnies, theatre critics? Humphrey was out of his depth and had no idea what was happening, or why he was here. In Cambridge, this kind of show had been a joke, a prank, a bit of harmless undergraduate fun. This all seemed more serious, more professional, and at once more overt and more oblique. Humphrey was sure that Ailsa was about to make an exhibition of herself, and wondered what he would find to say to her about it afterwards. He was already nervously planning his escape.