The Sea Lady

by Margaret Drabble

  She introduced him to her world and poured forth her secrets. She sucked him into her whirlpool. He learned her frame of reference, and she made some attempt to acquaint herself with his: she quickly grasped enough of it to be able to introduce him effectively, and to make the most of his deep-sea enterprises. 'Here's Captain Clark, Cambridge's answer to Captain Cousteau.' 'Here's the Darwin of the Damascene Islands.' 'Here's the zebra shark man.' 'Here's the new Thor Heyerdahl.' He became the recognized escort of Ailsa Kelman, as well as her night-time lover. She took him about on his London visits, and showed him off, and showed herself off. She took him to pubs and to clubs, to restaurants and to parties, she introduced him to painters and actors, to broadcasters and poets, to set-designers and artistic entrepreneurs, to comedians and singers. He was a novelty: he was the bridge between the two cultures.

  He soon learned that in her circles the name of Martin Pope was a talisman, a key that opened many doors, though the villainously and trimly bearded Martin Pope himself did not in person reappear. He was safely installed in Stratford-upon-Avon, married to his film star, and directing a bloody production of Titus Andronicus in which the star was to appear as Lavinia.

  The film star's attempts at verse-speaking would not be well received.

  Humphrey was content to be in thrall. He did not neglect his studies, for he remained, by nature, irredeemably conscientious, but at every opportunity he was on the London train, first from Lowestoft and then from Cambridge. Through the spring, and into the beginning of the long vacation of the summer, he paid court.

  He sat through her act many times, and learned to measure the audience's responses to minute variations in the routine. He watched her as she danced and denounced: Ailsa, the stormy petrel with red feathers. He watched the smoke from the footlights, and became familiar with the hot and risky smell of the red and purple gel, with the theatrical and pungent odours of glue and white spirit and lanolin and cosmetics. He got to know the cast, who accepted him as a hanger-on, and seemed quite pleased to welcome a man from such a different world of expertise, a man who had no desire to tread the boards in competition. His exploits in the Damascene Islands improved slightly with the telling. Zebra sharks were smart.

  The zebra sharks, he explained to them, are spotted, not striped. They are striped when they are young, but as adults they become leopard sharks. They change their stripes and their name and their spots. But they remain graceful. The grace of the sharks had been remarkable. He had tried to map their movements, but the pattern had continued to elude him. They were full of pretty tricks and habits.

  These were the free-and-easy sixties days of open doors and informality, of experimentation and fun, of flower power and of making friends and love with strangers. Humphrey would sit obediently in the hospitality suite at the BBC Television Centre at Wood Lane, drinking free-flowing alcohol and watching Ailsa on a monitor as she discussed Expressionist theatre and abortion law reform with a fresh-faced young interviewer: God knows what the links were between these subjects, but she made them. She liked an audience, on screen, in the studio, backstage, the larger the better. He watched her talking about under-appreciated women painters, about Artemesia Gentileschi and Gwen John and Laura Knight and Eloise van Dieman, about van Dieman's ground-breaking sets for The Blue Bird of Happiness. She talked well. She played to the camera, she talked beyond the camera. She was brave, she would take on any subject, she spoke fiercely. Sometimes she was inconsistent, but nobody but Humphrey seemed to notice her contradictions. He would sit proudly watching her, thinking of the moment when he would have this lavishly broadcast and much duplicated and refracted woman to himself, in the flesh, alone.

  He enjoyed his enslavement.

  Once he even sat in a hairdressing salon in Mayfair, waiting for her, and watching as her hair was teased and moulded into the high back-combed beehive of the day. This hour of his life remained forever vivid in his memory. The subjugation of his attendance gave him a thrill of sexual satisfaction.

  Everything about her gave him sexual satisfaction.

  She reintroduced him to her brother Tommy, who appeared one night at the Tinder Box with the queen's little sister in tow, and took them both on after the show to a noisy party given (as it later emerged) by a film producer in a big wild Victorian family house on a village green in Wandsworth. The party was crammed with stoned film stars and small children shrieking in nightclothes. The queen's little sister left after half an hour, but during that half-hour Humphrey had plenty of time to notice the extraordinary obsequiousness with which Tommy tended his royal catch: he listened intently to every word she said, laughed dutifully, contorted his features into expressions of loyal attention and approval, and looked around ostentatiously to widen the circle of admiration that naturally surrounded her. He brayed and whinnied and nodded like a donkey, and lurched forward with his cigarette lighter and his shoulders like a flunkey. The queen's little sister did not seem to register surprise at this bizarre behaviour. She must, thought Humphrey, be used to it.

  When the princess departed with her chauffeur, Tommy briefly turned his attention on Humphrey.

  'So you've popped up again,' said Tommy, slapping him on the back, with the loud relief of one who has just survived a testing social ordeal. 'Little Humpy Clark, like a bad penny. I always knew you would.'

  'I'm amazed that either of you remembered me,' said Humphrey warily.

  'Oh yes, we remembered you all right,' said Tommy. 'How could we forget?'

  And Tommy laughed, with a mirthless laugh full of unpleasant innuendo.

  Humphrey was embarrassed by this, and made an excuse to back away. What had Tommy been trying to insinuate? He did not want to know. Would he dare to ask Ailsa when they got back to the Room? He thought not. He was afraid he might not like the answer.

  The public life of the coupled Humphrey Clark and Ailsa Kelman took place in a heady variety of unfamiliar locations, amidst a swimming haze of alcohol and nicotine and glitter and display. The queen's little sister was in her element in these colourful shallows, and so was a whole host of nibbling little client fishes. Cameras snapped, gossip columnists made notes. Cameras snapped, occasionally, at modest but photogenic Humphrey Clark, mistaking him for a famous person.

  (Do cleaner fish prefer to eat ectoparasites or client flesh? This was the question posed by a paper that came before Professor Humphrey Clark for peer review with a view to its publication in the periodical Marine Undertakings, 2003. He had once written a paper on the cleaning symbioses of fish, and he knew a lot about this kind of behaviour. The sinister and suggestive phrase 'client flesh' took him by surprise. His surprise had reminded him that he was losing his touch.)

  Ailsa's social life was more interesting than Humphrey's, and took precedence: that went without saying. The arts were more fun than the sciences. He met her crowd, but she did not meet his. She went to Cambridge once, on her insistence, and he showed her round the laboratory and the aquarium, and she admired the wavy smooth blue-grey-green thin plush tentacles of Anemonia viridis, the snakelocks anemone. She found this creature exotic, and was astonished to learn that the specimens she admired came not from the Damescene Islands but from Worthing pier. Her responses, he noted, were primarily aesthetic, which was only to be expected from a woman.

  He did not show her the experiments and the dissections. He did not attempt to introduce her to the head of his department, a brilliant and eccentric misogynist whose ground-breaking work on male submarine aggression was even in those early days considered provocative by his women students.

  This was their public life.

  The private life of Humphrey Clark and Ailsa Kelman took place in the Room.

  His first experience of the Room was a shock to the fastidious Humphrey, but, in overcoming his initial recoil from it, he overcame many other inhibitions.

  She had led him there, by the hand, by the nose, after the second long evening they had spent together, and it was there that their pre-puberta
l seaside romance was consummated.

  The Room was a bedsit in Bloomsbury. It was not, she had explained, her primary place of residence: she also shared a large and airy apartment with an old college friend across the river in salubrious Dulwich, to which he was not to be invited. The Room was her private place.

  She told him this as she walked him towards it from the Tinder Box, through Soho, northwards, through the porn-bright streets and past the open doorways of brothels and sex shops, with their crude and colourful solicitations, with their winking breasts and sizzling bubbling neon cocktail glasses. Past the nipples and sperm and spume she took him, through sombre back streets, through cobbled yards and alleys, beneath old lanterns and arches, along the protected footpaths and rights of way of old London. He was lost. He did not know where they were going, or what to expect.

  They soon came to the junction of various broader commercial thoroughfares, which he vaguely identified as Holborn, and then plunged off again along a shabby narrow one-way street of tall and austere early-nineteenth-century terraced houses, which gave straight on to the pavement. She stopped and fumbled in her bag and opened a door with a Yale key, and let him into a dark and pokey hallway. This was a multiple-occupation dwelling, for he could see a row of named pigeonholes for letters, like the pigeonholes in the Porter's Lodge of his college. She pressed a meanly timed light switch, which briefly irradiated a steep uncarpeted wooden staircase, and shabby walls decorated with a variety of wires, antique disconnected gas pipes, and amateur telephone leads stuck about with tape. This was, he guessed, London bedsit territory. Were they near the university? Was this where the glamorous and sophisticated Ailsa had her dwelling?

  He followed her up the bleak stairs and into her domain on the first-floor back. It had a high ceiling, too high for the single room's width: it had been partitioned off from a larger drawing room. But it was large enough to contain a low collapsible bed on metal struts, a small sofa, an old armchair, a small rolltop desk, a home-made bookcase made of bricks and planks. In a corner, behind a screen covered in shiny Victorian scraps, was a washbowl. Posters adorned the walls, and on a once-handsome Georgian mantelpiece stood an untidy array of cards, invitations, news cuttings, photographs, puppets, shells, jars, bottles, glass balls.

  She switched on a small light with a red shade. The room glowed with a louche theatrical intimacy.

  The lavatory, she told him, was in the courtyard below, but she was off to visit it first.

  This practical information, so instantly offered, was a relief to him. He was modest about enquiring about such matters.

  He took advantage of her brief absence to examine her habitat more closely.

  The surface of the mantel was thick with dust. A pickling jar on the mantel contained what might have been her tonsils. She had once offered to let him see them, and, true to her childhood pledge, here they were. Next to them stood another childhood relic: her tallow one-time-radioactive luminous lamb. He noted also a large red glass ashtray, filled with little long-tailed tadpoles of glass of different colours: he recognized them as Prince Rupert's tears, those strange and magic droplets of glass that can withstand a heavy hammer blow, but by the cunning may be made to shatter into a thousand grains.

  Most of the posters, pinned and pasted inexpertly and haphazardly to the flaking and irregular walls, portrayed theatrical-looking ladies in historical costume, perhaps café performers, probably of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. He thought he recognized some of the artists but he did not know enough about art to identify any of them. Like Ailsa, these divas displayed a penchant for silver and gilt glitter and for metallic surfaces – a penchant which, as he was soon to discover, was an enduring component of Ailsa's presentational psyche, perhaps even of her innermost being. The only poster-painting which bore a title and the name of its artist was in a slightly different genre, though it too showed an exhibitionistic woman, or at least her head and naked torso, swooning as though at the power of her own image in a mirror, in pale and naked and faintly despairing self-admiration. It was called Conception, and it was by Edvard Munch, hitherto known to Humphrey only as the creator of the notorious Scream. In the bottom left-hand corner of the image's framing surround crouched a threatening and malevolent homunculus-embryo, and the pattern of the frame itself was composed of a stream of swimming sperm.

  Ailsa had already informed him that she was taking the pill, so he didn't have to worry about that aspect of the night's events. The technology of contraception had improved rapidly since his inconclusive summer vacation affair with the apprehensive lichenologist.

  A little tree grew in the centre of the courtyard. Outdoors, beneath the London stars, there was an unexpected outdoor country smell of leaf and earth.

  That night the bed creaked and threatened to collapse. It was not built for such activity, but they managed to ignore its protests. Ailsa shuddered and slithered, she groaned and leaped beneath him. She gaped for him. She went at it and at him, with an intensity to which he was unaccustomed. Her thighs ran slippery with sweat, and he drank the brine from her body. A thin salt flow burst from her, smelling and tasting of weed and salt and sea, of soft oyster and hard bone.

  He hammered at the cuttlefish bone of her. They were both heaving with exertion, until they both crashed, together, from the peak of the wave. He slumped down on to her, heavily. He was a heavy man. She told him that she felt safe at last beneath the heavy weight of him. Under a weight like this, she said, into his damp shoulder, a woman can rest.

  It was very good, for both of them, that first time. After it they both slept, profoundly.

  In the light of morning, the state of the Room appeared even more shocking, but by then he had entered it and made it his own. He was over the threshold, and there was no withdrawing now from these stained sheets, these limp yet lumpy yellowed pillows, this cheaply, deeply, uncomfortably studded mattress with its painful buttons. The sash windows were smeared with city grime, and grey net curtains hung limply from lengths of plastic-coated wire. The old cream gloss paint of the walls ran with sweat from the kettle. The horror and squalor of it entrapped him, enslaved him. Her beautiful body shone, opalescent, like a pearl in its unworthy case.

  They lay there, in each other's arms, in the light of the morning, and slowly, deliberately re-enacted the first coming. Then he got up, at her request, and made her a mug of instant coffee: she kept the milk in a bottle outside on the window sill, and to his taste it was slightly off but she did not seem to notice. The tea towel was stiff as cardboard with usage, and could no longer be used to dry a mug or a spoon.

  The sheets of the bed were stiff with semen.

  And so they remained, through the weeks and the months. He came to love the very smell of the Room. He insisted on fixing the legs of the bed, so that it did not make so much noise or threaten to break beneath them, but he did not suggest a visit to the launderette.

  The objects in the Room became fetishes: the dark green face flannel, the dirty towels, the thin enduring amber sliver of Pears soap, the tonsils in the jar.

  The tea towel had a design of robins and holly. Ailsa, in her later incarnation as a feminist sociologist, was to write a monograph on the iconography of tea towels.

  In The Children's Encyclopedia in Finsterness, there had been an unsuitable illustration of an unsuitable story about a shipwrecked woman who had gashed her bosom with a knife in order to conceal within her breast a ruby. The blood had spurted out from her, clouding the water, tempting the sharks, but she had kept her treasure. As a boy, he had been aroused by this drawing. And now Ailsa was his prey, and he sank into her again and again, in search of the ruby. He plunged into her through water and brine and mucus and sperm and menstrual blood. Fastidious Humphrey, all inhibitions washed away, swimming hard upstream.

  She rented the Room, she told him, for £6 a week. She had seen it advertised in the New Statesman, as 'close to the British Museum, and suitable for a student', and she had snapped it up.
Her landlady was a quiet old lady who lived in Kent.

  Ailsa Kelman, in the tearoom in Ornemouth, inspected the bill for her cup of tea and her buttered teacake. (She had restrained herself, at the last moment, from ordering a crab sandwich.) She counted out the coins. Life was still cheap in the north. London was one of the most expensive cities in the world. A bottle of water in London cost you far more than a pot of tea with a teacake up here.

  The waitress had seen her on television, although her expression indicated that she couldn't place her, and probably thought she was somebody quite different. Ailsa could spot the familiar look of puzzled recognition.

  Should she drive, now, to Finsterness, and gaze across the sands to St Cuthbert's Rock in the summer light of the afternoon? Was there time, or would she be late?

  She thought of the Room and of its shameless secrets and satisfactions. Humphrey had been good at it. He had been good at it and at her. He understood her body, and he could make it dissolve and flow for him like a fountain. She had been surprised by how good he was at it. He was strong and tireless and he was even inventive. He was more gifted and better equipped than Martin Pope, who, like a true man of the theatre, had relied on mesmerism and manipulation for most of his effects. Humphrey seemed to do it all by instinct, though she did accuse him, one night, of having learned a trick or two in the Damascene Islands. He had laughed, flattered, but had protested. No, no, he had sworn to her, I learned nothing there but how to get rid of the crabs. This is all for you, and it is love itself that teaches me.

  They had used the word 'love', lavishly, recklessly, generously, unwisely. They had poured love forth, they had let it spill out all around them, as though it could never be spent, as though it would renew itself for ever. They were willing victims of the romantic fallacy.