The Sea Lady

by Margaret Drabble

  The performance, when it launched itself, was satiric, and to his relief it was scripted, not improvised. The targets were soft and random – the public-school system, advertising, the British Board of Film Censors, and a cluster of Scottish themes: Scottish food, the Edinburgh Tattoo, Scottish clans, the royals at Balmoral. The tone varied from the broadly comic to the uncomfortably abusive. It was all very clever, but where was Ailsa? The actors, to this point, had all been male, which had not surprised Humphrey, as the stand-up female comedian was a phenomenon of the future, but he knew that she must be about to put in an appearance soon, or she would not justify her equal billing, or the overture she had made to him in distant Lowestoft.

  Her appearance, when she finally arrived at the end of the first half, was shocking. She had made them wait, but she was worth the waiting. She had gone through yet another metamorphosis, from sulky servant to disgraceful diva and provocative diseuse. It was clear that at least in this confined space she was a recognized attraction, for she was greeted by wolf whistles and friendly cries from her admirers. She deserved these, in Humphrey's view, for the bravura of her gear alone, which was glitteringly manifest before the nature of her act declared itself: she was wearing two stuck-on silver metallic breast-plates that concealed her nipples but little else of her powerful bosom, and a clinging skirt of a thin purple-red fabric beneath which one could clearly discern, through a flimsy cache-sex, her more or less knickerless condition and the sprouting of what looked like a bush of maroon pubic hair, of wine-red valiant hair.

  The hidden Medusa, the sea anemone in the cleft.

  This was the time of the miniskirt, but her long infernal clinging garment was as revealing as and more suggestive than a miniskirt. She gave her all.

  What was she going to do, in this outlandish rig-out? Good God, she was going to dance – to dance, as she had danced as a thin white freckled child upon the sands. And she was going to sing. He was mesmerized by her courage and her effrontery. So he sat up a little more erectly on his cheap hard bentwood chair to face the music, which began to play loudly and rhythmically from two large speakers precariously rigged up over the stage. (The whole place was a health hazard: he could see wisps of bluish smoke snaking up from the spotlights.) She danced, a strange, weaving, sexual dance, not quite a belly dance, but rudely, crudely and suggestively Oriental. He watched, in a mildly erotic daze, as his eyes fixed themselves to the vibration and undulation of those vulgarly out-thrust silver nipples, that swelling mound of hair. Humphrey knew that his sexual organs would wither before such intense and public inspection: privately, they responded to encouragement, but he had never been tempted to expose them to group admiration. Ailsa's, in contrast, seemed to delight in this massed attention, this concentrated gaze. Fascinated, horrified, delighted, he gazed.

  And then, as the music faded, she began to chant. She chanted a monologue about menstrual blood and the phases of the moon. He could not hear all the words, but he got the gist of it. Ovulation, insemination, conception, gestation, the birth canals, the waters of birth, the breaking of the waters of the womb. Her voice was insidiously penetrating, with a strange lilting accented lisp to it that had been absent from her normal speaking voice. What she did was not singing: it was more of an incantatory recitation, almost a calypso. Was it meant to be comic? Some of the audience laughed, but he could not see why.

  Humphrey was appalled, but at the same time he was proud to know her. She had certainly changed from the angry girl who had lost her temper so uncontrollably as she complained that most of the top edge of Mrs Binns's jigsaw of Constable's The Hay Wain was missing.

  The transformed Ailsa bowed and took her exit to excited applause. She was a sensation.

  During the interval, Humphrey drank a large and solitary Scotch.

  Either the second half was less alarming, or his ear had become attuned. This was not so bad after all. He began to look forward to his 'dinner after the show'. He had a moment of misgiving when he wondered if she might have expected him to book a table, but he put it to the back of his mind: this was her patch, it had been her suggestion, and anyway they were surrounded by restaurants at all prices and from all known cuisines. They could not go hungry here.

  She had booked a table. She emerged from the darkness, after her last duet and the final curtain, to tell him so. She kissed him, ostentatiously and possessively, on the mouth, and embraced him, and rubbed herself against his trousers. She had become very physical. She ordered him to buy her a drink while she got changed: she was very thirsty, she would have half a pint of stout, please, and then they would move on to the Dolphin in Frith Street.

  He was relieved to hear that she was to change, but unsure whether a dinner à deux was, after all, what she had planned. There was something inclusive in her gesture and manner, and she made a point of introducing him, before her disappearance backstage, to various hangers-on and fellow-artistes: maybe they were all expected to move on, in a shoal, to a communal celebration? Was that what people did, in the West End? Obligingly, he bought a glass of stout for her and another whisky for himself and a glass of red wine for a friendly stranger, and chatted to the stranger until she came back to reclaim him. There was a lot of laughter on her return, and many show-business jokes which he did not follow, but he noted that she referred to him generously in a protective and proprietorial manner as her 'long-lost friend' and her 'childhood sweetheart'. Neither description seemed to be in any degree accurate, but they made him feel welcome, which was perhaps more important.

  A slight moustache of froth settled on Ailsa's upper lip, and, sensing it, she tried to lick it off with her reaching tongue, and then attacked it more efficiently with the back of her hand. He saw her pink tongue.

  The childhood sweethearts, now in the prime of their twenties, eventually set off together towards the promised Dolphin, as part of a general exodus. She slipped her arm through his, as she had done two years before on the Devon coast, but this time there was no Sonia to attach herself to his other elbow, and she pressed against him with a more intimate insinuation. The busy street was flowing with people, and he wondered, again, if he were on his way to a long table and a gaudy night. But when they arrived at the restaurant, they were ushered to a table for two in a lovers' alcove, for a tête-à-tête.

  Ailsa was well known in the restaurant. She was a regular. The plump and dimpled middle-aged manageress greeted her warmly, and smiled her smooth approval at Ailsa's fresh, well-made, well-weathered catch. The manageress lit their candle with a taper from her own hand, and shook the soft pale green-and-white napkins from their folds, and placed them in a motherly manner upon their knees. The napkins and the tablecloth were embroidered with a dolphin emblem, executed in reassuringly old-fashioned and slightly irregular white chain stitch.

  She brought them a bottle of white wine, recommended the moules marinières, and discreetly withdrew.

  By this time, in the 1960s, the people of England were eating mussels and garlic, and drinking rather a lot of wine. They had eschewed mussels during the war, when they were on short rations and mussels were plentiful, and they had queued long hours for cod and herring. Few of them had ever seen a bulb of garlic. But now the people of England were bolder, and were willing to try strange foods. Herrings were out, mussels were in.

  The brazen public Ailsa had fallen abruptly silent. She took a tentative sip of her wine and looked down, modestly. He feared that she would ask what he had thought of the show, and tried to think of some topic that would pre-empt that query, but he too was overcome with sudden shyness. The strangeness of the moment lingered and deepened. Neither of them spoke, but when Ailsa looked up, their eyes met. They stared at each other, eye to eye, with an interlocking and questioning gaze, and then, unthinking, unpremeditating, instinctive, he stretched out his hand across the table towards her. She took his hand in hers.

  So, it was done. Their hands remained joined, in a pledge that they did not begin to comprehend.

 
; The prim children were swept over the sluice.

  The silence lasted, as time unrolled behind them. They were young yet, they had travelled less than a third of their way through their expected span, but already the time behind them was enormous, archaic, Precambrian. Vast tracts and deserts of it already lay behind them, charged with the irredeemable, the unchangeable, marked by prints that would never be erased. Now they must move forward, through the featureless wastes ahead, without a map, without a compass, over the dunes and up the foothills and towards the journey's unseen end. Could they make it? They sat as though in a trance, their hands gripped together in fear and in hope over the pale green cloth. They were willing to try, but they were ignorant and helpless and they did not know what lay before them. And it was too late to retreat.

  Ailsa spoke first. She cleared her throat, and released his hand, and leaned back, and sat upright, and spoke. She spoke obliquely, but she knew that he would understand her. Their understanding had sunk beneath the level of words. Decisions were being made for them that had nothing to do with words. Choices, mistakes, wrong turnings, in an empty and unformed terrain. An untrodden track was winding its way onward through brightness and through obscurity, the weather was clearing and darkening and pulsing, and on they went and on they would be compelled to go.

  Ailsa spoke first, and tried an ameliorating social smile, to calm the silent tumult.

  'I told you I was giving up the theatre, last time we met,' she said. And now I'm saying it to you again. This really is my last season.'

  'So, what next?' he asked.

  'No,' she said, as though he had contradicted her assertion. 'That's it. It's bad for me, this show-biz lark. It's exhibitionism. It's bad for my character. Let's not talk about it. What next for you? Are you still spending most of your time underwater?'

  So he talked to her, as they ate their mussels, about the underwater life, about the blue lagoon, about the familiar graceful zebra shark in the cave, about the habits of fishes, about the Indian Ocean, about career choices, about marine laboratories, about fish stocks, about the eyes of the ray and the mating habits of the dragonfish. He told her that he was good at swimming, but bad at slicing. He was no technician. He envied those who had dexterity and patience. He was bad, physically bad, clumsily bad, at slicing and photographing eyes, though he knew about optics, and could read and interpret the results of tedious experiments. He was good outdoors and underwater, but he needed support in the laboratory.

  He delivered his credo, his faith in naturalistic observation and field study and the primary significance of movement. He aired his doubts about experimental techniques in the laboratory and the study of captive or dead animals. He tried to tell her why he thought that the whole was different from the parts, why instinct did not reside in a cell. She listened patiently, intelligently. He could tell that she had never heard of any of his mentors. She had hardly heard of the discovery of DNA. But she listened. She lived on the far side of the gap between the two cultures, but she listened.

  He, for his part, had not heard of most of her points of reference. He remembered the name of Martin Pope, the tyrant of The Tempest, but he had not heard that Pope had become a resident director at Stratford-upon-Avon, or that he had married a film star. (He had, however, heard of the film star.) He had never seen the late-night television programme on which Ailsa claimed to have appeared so often. He had never been to the Arts Laboratory, and had never seen a copy of the notorious literary magazine which was even then going through the courts on a charge of obscenity.

  'Don't you ever watch TV?' she asked with a good-natured impatience, as he admitted to yet another large area of ignorance. 'Television is the future, you can't just ignore it. You must surely have seen it sometimes. What about Jacques Cousteau?'

  'I think he's a dangerous example,' said Humphrey. 'I don't want to end up like Jacques Cousteau. It's an underwater circus. It's all done for the camera.'

  He sounded priggish, even to himself.

  'You're very high-minded,' she said.

  'Nothing wrong with that,' said Humphrey.

  'Good boy Humphrey,' she said, teasing, lifting a slate-blue shell and swallowing down the sea liquor. 'You always were a good boy. You were a very nice, well-behaved, good boy. I bet you were Head Boy at school.'

  In answer, he poured the last drop of wine from the bottle into her glass, and silently conceded her point.

  'I knew it,' she said. 'You were always very good. Except that time you and Tommy and Sandy tied me up in the cave. That wasn't very good.'

  'I don't remember that,' said Humphrey, but he was blushing, beneath his permanent seafaring tan.

  'That was very naughty,' said Ailsa.

  Perhaps he didn't remember? How could he forget? Maybe he hadn't been there after all? Maybe it had been Tommy and that other boy called Sandy? If he didn't remember, why did he blush?

  'You were good,' said Ailsa, exhaling a heavy sigh as she laid down her heavy, slightly pitted pre-war silver spoon. 'And I was always very bad. I was always a bad girl. I was a wicked girl.'

  He didn't know whether to contradict her, or whether she was proud of her bad-girl status. He looked at her again, trying to recapture her gaze, which had been distracted by the complicated diversionary performance of eating mussels. She met his eyes steadily. Yes, there she was.

  'I didn't like tagging along,' she said in explanation. 'I was always tagging along. It was hard, being a girl, with you boys. It was hard, being Tommy's little sister. I had to fight for survival.'

  'So do we all,' he said.

  'Tommy is bad, too,' said Ailsa. 'But Tommy enjoys being bad. I don't.'

  Her brother Tommy, she explained, was in television. He had his fingers stuck deep in the rich commercial pie, and he also presented – surely Humphrey must have seen it? – a current affairs magazine programme on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. He was doing well. Very well.

  And Humphrey's baby sister, asked bad girl Ailsa politely, in turn: she must be grown up too by now?

  He explained his sister, he explained both his sisters, he told her that his father was slowly but surely dying. He told her that in his view his father was dying of nuclear fallout from his time in the Pacific, but that the Navy would never admit responsibility. His older sister Lizzie was married to a schoolteacher in the Cotswolds, his younger sister Diana was studying chemistry at Birmingham.

  She told him of her father's death in the creosote factory fire.

  They ordered a slice of lemon tart and a crème brûlée.

  'Do you remember Tommy telling us about Hiroshima?' he asked her.

  She shook her head.

  'He'd read John Hersey. God knows how he got his hands on that, at his age. It gave me nightmares for years. Don't you remember?'

  No, she did not remember.

  They commanded, on her recommendation, two glasses of Calvados, a liqueur then unknown to him. This order struck him, as she had intended it should, as very suave.

  He caught the milk train to Cambridge, and woke on Sunday morning with a hangover.

  Ailsa, sitting in an old ladies' tearoom in Ornemouth with a cup of stewed and acrid tea, stiff with tannin, believed that she could recall almost verbatim that long-ago conversation about goodness and badness. Such a puzzling evening, with such a strange outcome. Had she intended to seduce him? Poor Humphrey, poor good Humphrey. Even his name was virtuous. A comfortable, old-fashioned, virtuous name. Whereas Ailsa was sharp and rocky and washed with icy spume. Ailsa was a weatherbeaten sail, putting out to sea. Ailsa Kelman, Ailsa Craig.

  The tea was the colour of red Devonian mud, and as thick as poster paint. She shuddered as she sipped.

  Was this the tearoom that had once been the Copper Kettle, where her parents had sometimes taken tea and scones? It had relabelled itself the Periwinkle, but was not otherwise much altered, and the familiar façade of Longbone and Son, Grocers, still occupied a large stretch of the frontage across the road.

  Sh
e had not seduced him that night, nor he her. Instead, they had 'fallen in love'. This was not what had been intended.

  The courtship had proceeded along conventional lines to its unconventional denouement. She had taken more of the initiative than was usual for women at that period, but that was because her status as grisette and woman about town justified it, indeed in a manner dictated it. Her boldness, in those early days, was only body deep, and in herself, deep in herself, as she later tried to explain to her analyst, she had been frightened. 'I was such a mixture of cowardice and confidence. I would hype myself up and psych myself up and perform, and then I would go home and cry. I had to throw myself at things,' said Ailsa, 'or I couldn't do it at all.'

  Like the salmon going up the falls.

  And so she had thrown herself at Humphrey Clark.

  Ailsa stared at her undrinkable tea, and at the common pattern of the cheap pale green teashop crockery. Eau de Nil, was that the name of that unpleasing colour? Jacques Cousteau had made a film about the sources of the Nile. She had watched it, long ago, with Humphrey.

  Tears rose to her eyes, and the waters threatened to break and spill over.

  Prince Rupert's tears, St Cuthbert's beads.

  So hard, so fragile, so old, so indissolubly frail.

  She had thrown herself at Humphrey, as though hoping that he could save her from herself. And he was bewitched by her. She was powerful, irresistible. And he had no wish to resist. Why should he? She was glamorous, attractive, exciting and she seemed to want him. He gave himself up to her. He had not been formally engaged to zoologist Beattie Lovelace, had he, and these were the Swinging Sixties. Many months, indeed whole years had passed since sexual intercourse began. Everybody was doing it, or so he told himself.