'I love you for ever.' They had said it. She had written the words on a white wall in an experimental art gallery in Long Acre, for which the proprietor was soliciting comments and quotations and cartoons. 'You'll not forget me, ever, ever, ever?' she had added, in her flowing hand, with thick blue poster paint.
The proprietor of the gallery had watched, and laughed, a cynical admiring laugh. Humphrey had watched, but he had not laughed.
It was a quote from Robert Graves, but she didn't tell either of them that.
Humphrey was obsessed by her firm and fleshly body, by her solid opaline throat and breasts and thighs, by her mackerel movements. He could not get enough of her, nor she of him. Their flesh was perpetually inflamed, weeping with the wounds of love. His body hair was golden and thick, and she ploughed her fingers through it and sucked at it and spat its little golden curls out from her mouth. It was a mutual exploration, a voyage of shocking delight. These were the liberated sixties, when fantasies were not only permitted but obligatory, and these two shivering puny children of the north-eastern shore made their adult best of what was offered to them by the spirit of the age.
There were private desires she had not mentioned or introduced, liberated though she was. And maybe he too had had his.
She would never know now what he had wanted, what she had failed to think to deliver. She had failed him. And now it was too late, too late, too late.
She thought of this now, in the tearoom in Ornemouth.
Sometimes, even today, in her sixties, she dreamed that she was still paying rent for the Room, that she had forgotten to cancel her standing order, that she could go back to the little street in Bloomsbury any day she chose and that it would be there, empty, untouched, waiting for her to let herself in with her Yale key. Perhaps the dust would have grown a little thicker on the mantelshelf, but it would be otherwise unchanged. This was a very vivid dream, and one that she never told her analyst, because it was too transparent and too embarrassing and needed no interpretation. And she had, in fact, kept the Room on, unused, long after she needed it, years longer, long after she married the many-mansioned Martin Pope. She had given it up only when her landlady died, when she received a note from the niece who had inherited it. By then, the dust had indeed been thick. She had not returned the key, because the niece said the locks would be changed, and not to bother.
The key was still in her desk in London.
Humphrey had said he had forgotten the last day of summer, and the rusty ring in the rock in the cave in Finsterness. Perhaps she had dreamed of that too: a fantasy dream of bondage, of mounting death, of the rising tide, of her face pressed against the streaked wet grey and iron minerals of the cliff, of the slow drip of the waterfall, of her back exposed to the eyes of the boys. Andromeda, Angelica. Perhaps, after all, he had not even been there? Perhaps it had been that other boy, the boy called Sandy, who had touched her there, from behind, so slyly, so shyly?
Tommy had made the boy lift her skirt from behind and touch her, through her wet white salt-sprayed cotton knickers. Then they had told her they would leave her there to drown, if she did not let them pull her knickers down.
Did Tommy remember any of this bad play?
Tommy was a bad boy.
Humphrey had repressed the game in the cave, but he had not forgotten the codfish in the Pool of Brochan. He had reminded her of them, in one of their quieter and more sober moments, as they sat in the back row of the Academy Cinema in Oxford Street waiting to see a Fellini movie. He told her that he had been dismayed when he had learned, years later, that the Pool of Brochan was a Victorian larder of living fish. 'I didn't realize they ate them,' Humphrey had said. 'That old crone didn't say they ate them, did she? I mean, she had names for some of them. I thought they were – I thought they were...'
'Pets?' she had suggested, as he groped for a word.
'No, no, not pets,' he had insisted. 'Something more important. Something more sacred than pets.'
'The sacred codfish,' she had echoed. But he had not found it funny.
'Yes,' he had said. 'The sacred cod.'
She had not told him then, she had never told him, that the photograph of Ailsa Kelman and Humphrey Clark, standing together by the iron railing with Mother Longbone, above the suck and pull of the tide, had become a Kelman family joke. In so far as the Kelman family recognized the concept of a joke, this photograph had been a joke: not a kindly joke, not a funny joke, but a joke. It had been labelled carefully, in blue Quink fountain-pen ink, with their names, Ailsa Kelman and Humphrey Clark at the cod pool, with the date. And so it was that the name of Humphrey had survived, fortuitously, in the communal Kelman memory. Photographs were quite rare in those distant days, and this one had become a legend and a mockery.
Ailsa had once, stupidly, told Tommy that Humphrey had showed her his tonsils, or rather his absence of tonsils. Humphrey, she boasted, had let her look down his gullet by St Cuthbert's Rock, and she had looked down his. Never one to miss a trick, even when he was not sure what the trick was, Tommy had pounced on this disclosure, and for years after he would taunt her: 'Anyone shown you their tonsils lately?' Or he would refer knowingly, meaningfully, meaninglessly, to 'Humpy Clark, that boy who showed you his tonsils'.
It was a dirty joke. It hurt her pride. It infuriated her, but she knew better than to let Tommy see her rage.
Humphrey Clark's name became, for a while, a synonym for teasing and humiliation, for bullying and ridicule.
She had hated her brother Tommy.
She had wanted to conceal the details of her affair with Humphrey from Tommy, but at the same time she had wanted to boast about it. She had wanted to vindicate the past, to prove that she had shed its miseries, and yet she wanted to forget it altogether. Excision, exorcism. It was a dilemma. You couldn't choose both, could you?
Humphrey and Tommy had become friends, of a sort, in later adult life, in the worldly middle years of their success. They became fair-weather friends, bumping into each other at pompous public events, and greeting each other warily at fund-raising functions. Tommy was ubiquitous. He put himself about. You could never be sure that he would not be there. And you always had to pretend to be pleased to see him. It was not safe to be displeased by Tommy.
Humphrey, clearly, could not have wanted to see him. After the severance, he must have dreaded his frequent reappearances. But Tommy was everywhere, at everyone's elbow, whether you wanted him or not. Tommy was always in the know.
Ailsa over the years had watched her brother's technique with appalled curiosity. It was like a parody of her own ascent: or was hers a parody of his? Tommy worked his contacts. He knew how to work a crowded room. He had a nose and a mouth. He hung on, he attached himself, he sucked at the glass, he made himself useful, he made use of others. Occasionally he ran the risk of being named as a toady, but for the most part he got away with it. And the longer you got away with that kind of thing, the fewer people distrusted you, the less they wished to name you. You became part of them, and they did not like to name themselves. The conspiracy spread its nets. They forgot that Tommy Kelman was making use of them, and they thought that they were making use of Tommy Kelman. It was a useful symbiosis. After twenty years, nobody could tell which was the client flesh and which the parasite.
Tommy, in the 1960s, assembled a shoal of fair-weather acquaintances whose names were often in the press. He knew pop stars and film stars and hairdressers and princesses. (Hairdressers held a curiously high status at this volatile and transformative period: Ailsa in her forties and the century's eighties would make a television programme trying to explain this phenomenon in sociological terms, but although the pictures would be good, she would remain dissatisfied with her commentary and analysis. She would continue to set herself high standards, and to worry away at problems she had set herself and failed to solve.) Tommy knew editors and drama critics and comedians and designers and television interviewers and crime writers who lived in the West Indies. He claimed t
o know the Beatles. He knew a few politicians. He deployed his cutlery deftly and held his glass correctly. He could eat and drink without spilling anything, and make small talk at the same time. He was an increasingly useful bachelor.
She had suspected, in those early days, that Tommy used her as a front for his sparse and uninteresting sex life. He was not, physically, sexually, an attractive man. She had transformed herself into an attractive woman, but he had remained somehow unfinished, pasty-complexioned, under-chinned, large-eared. He was socially bold, but physically timid. He needed an escort, so he took her to places. Sometimes she went along with this.
Ailsa and Tommy Kelman had taken to the new medium of television like fish to water. Both of them had been quick to grasp its potential, although he had been quicker than she. Long, long ago, when they were uncorrupted schoolchildren, they had watched the queen's coronation together, in a crowded, smoke-filled front room in a neighbour's house in Bonsett. The pretty young queen, in grainy flickering black-and-white, had been projected forcefully into the heart of her nation. Ailsa had been hypnotized by the black swollen mulberry lips, the wide white brow, the deeply shadowed eye sockets, the death-in-life of the pale skull of the pretty young queen, flickering beneath her stately sparkling crown. The jewels of the crown sprouted out of its dark and fleshly velvet mound. Ailsa Kelman, pre-pubertal ugly duckling, drunk on a thimbleful of dark-brown sweet sherry, crouching on a pouffe, had dreamed of exposure. Should she model herself on the pretty young queen, fully robed as she paraded slowly before the eyes of the nation, or on Jean Simmons in a scanty dress in a blue lagoon?
Ailsa had taken a small sweet sip that had tasted deadly. It tasted of addiction. Tommy had drunk more deeply from the same phial. The sister had dreamed, girlishly, of clothes and nudity and enslaved attention: the brother had dreamed of profit and exploitation.
And now Tommy had ceased to be a sucker, a parasite, a hanger-on, and he had become a power in the land. He had ceased to be a cautiously neutral voyeur. He had married, twice, though he had produced no children. His current wife, a fair-skinned woman of very small but strong opinions, was the granddaughter of an archbishop, the daughter of a marquis, and the ex-wife of a merchant banker. Tommy had risen from the downstairs world of his mother, whom he had treated, in her lonely later years, with cowardly neglect.
This neglect had allowed Ailsa, improbably, to cast herself as a dutiful daughter. She had salvaged some sense of old-fashioned virtue by being kind and attentive during her widowed mother's last years in Bonsett.
Sometimes Ailsa thought that she was not wicked, at heart, at all.
Ailsa's ambitions had not been social. Nor had they been financial. They had been grander and purer and more original. They had been ideological.
Tommy's flourishing progress had soon taken on a tinge of the lush and the lurid. In the early years, he had applied himself and worked hard. He had gained a respectable university degree, a second-class Cambridge degree in History, but he had never had a settled intent of pursuing a respectable profession. He had wanted a career, but not a profession. At university, he had discreetly sniffed around for those with money and contacts, for prototypes foreshadowing the shape of things to come. While still at school he had rejected the law, medicine, academe, the Civil Service, the Foreign Office – these were dusty paths that led but to the grave. He had never been attracted to any form of hard science: the life and death of creosote were not for him. Tommy had known that there would be softer money, big money, pots and pots of money, which would be there for the taking. All he had to do was to learn where to dig for it. He was willing to dig hard, if he could find the right place.
Tommy Kelman's detractors, and there would be many, were to accuse him of imitation, of plagiarism, even of theft. They suggested and indeed believed that he always took the easy, secondary option, and followed trails hacked out by others. This was not wholly true. Tommy Kelman worked. He served his apprenticeship. As a new graduate, he worked for a whole dull ill-paid year in cinema management in outlying London regions, in Acton and Ealing and Southgate, employed by the movie mogul father of a college friend. This grim but useful year taught him that the cinema was dead. So he moved from the rows of empty seats and the pensioners' matinees and the deserted gloomy between-war Bingo-designated edifices of the suburban past to television, which was alive. The monstrous baby of television was growing at an extraordinary, an exponential speed, and Tommy Kelman grew along with it.
Tommy Kelman put himself in the right places at the right times. He developed an instinct for the expanding business of the small screen. In those early days, he would have a go at anything. Presenter, writer, producer, director – he tried it all. He watched and he watched, and he was always there at the moment when one programme dwindled and died, and another was trying to grow out of its decaying compost. He knew how to develop the ideas of others, the ideas that he saw struggling to take root. He watched the slower progress of more gifted friends who had set their ambitions or maybe even their hearts on a single pure trajectory – as film director, as actor, as playwright, as journalist, as orator or Member of Parliament – and he sensed that the odds were that he could get ahead better and faster and maybe even further by diversifying. He would become a jack-of-all-trades. He did not want to be a professor or a prime minister. He wanted to do it all another way. He was not yet sure what way that would be, but he knew he would find it.
In the sixties, all things seemed possible.
Tommy had worried Ailsa in her youth. She had recognized him as a portent, but she was not sure what he portended. How long would this bubble last? Some of his cronies were clearly doomed to oblivion. Those Beatles, whose intimate friendship he claimed, whose irritating names he so tirelessly dropped – their vogue would never last. They would surely sink forgotten beneath the froth.
But she hadn't been able wholly to resist Tommy's version of events, his plot for the future. He was her brother, and he exerted a peculiar power over her. He tempted her from her highbrow academic ambitions with his visions of cheap and worldly success. Tommy persuaded her that he held the key to a glamorous television career, and that prospect had frightened Ailsa. Ailsa was so deeply mesmerized by the new medium of television that she found herself dreaming about it. It was intoxicating. She loved it and she hated it. She had thought she could ride the wave.
Tommy had made millions out of commercial television. He owned companies worldwide. He had made a fortune, and become a philanthropist. His financial reputation was dubious, but he had bought impunity and respect.
Tommy had skated very near the edge with that insider trading business, reflected Ailsa in Ornemouth, as she handed her dull yellowish and copper coins over to the still-puzzled waitress. The profile of the queen's not-so-young but nobly idealized head adorned the coins.
Tommy, although a personal friend of the queen's little sister, had nearly spent time inside at Her Majesty's Pleasure because of shares in a new satellite television station serving the Middle and Far East. It had been an unpleasant few months. At least half of Ailsa had wanted him to end up in jail, despite the spill-over and contamination of family shame, but he'd wriggled out of it all. He was as clever as a weasel.
Tommy Kelman had come a long way since the days of the codfish.
The sign for Longbone and Son across the road was reassuring, and the shop front was not much altered. The Longbone family business had not changed its name, and that was a comfort. Not everything had changed. And the Pool of Brochan was still there, just up the coast, as one would expect. She had looked it up last week on its website. Old Mother Longbone was long dead, but the rock was sempiternal, and the restless sea still entered and withdrew at the moon's command. (That tautologous word, sempiternal, had enchanted her as a child, and it resurfaced now in her memory with a glimmer of its ancient incantatory magic.) It cost you £3.50 now to visit and feed the fish. The website claimed that generation after generation of holidaymakers returned to the
pool to feed the fish, drawn back compulsively to revisit Mother Longbone and Blind Tom. (The website did not use the word 'compulsively': this adverb was suggested by the lady from Rio, who had enjoyed the story of the Pool of Brochan.) The pool claimed all who saw it. Grandparents, parents, grandchildren had returned again and again to the source.
Ailsa wondered if Blind Tom had outlived Mother Longbone. Blind Tom had surely been inedible.
She and Humphrey Clark had been happy together. Together, they had known extreme happiness, and they had destroyed their happiness. It was a common story, a dull story, a sixties platitude, an eternal platitude with a sixties gloss. Love, passionate love, obsessive and consuming love had turned to resentment, jealousy, anger, desertion, and the sudden parting of the ways.
Ailsa picked up her bag and wandered, somnambulant, entranced, into the cobbled street, thinking of that lost happiness, of doomed attempts to rediscover the quality of that happiness, of satisfied ambitions and ideological justification and diversionary goals. Of lingering slower later years of regret, remorse and self-reproach.
Her analyst had said, intending comfort, You were both young, these things happen, you were too young to handle it, Eros is a dangerous god.
Yes, said Ailsa, head bent, her nose running, her eyes weeping, histrionically clutching her paper tissue, but it was my fault, I betrayed him. I couldn't resist the temptation. I betrayed him, I abandoned him.
It wasn't as simple as that, said her analyst.
We should never have done it, repeated Ailsa.
It takes two to do a thing like that, said her analyst patiently.
But I knew, I knew, I was always more knowing than he was. He was an innocent. I knew it was foolish. I knew it would be a disaster. So why did I do it? Why did I let him do it?
Look, said her analyst, these things happen. The tide of events was pulling very strongly at that time. You can look back now, more than a quarter of a century later, and you can surely see the currents. It wasn't you that made them.
The Sea Lady Page 19