The Sea Lady

by Margaret Drabble

  Oh, but it was, said Ailsa. It was me. I made them.

  You didn't do it single-handed.

  You want to make me feel powerless, said Ailsa.

  It is sometimes better to feel powerless than to feel omnipotent.

  Ailsa had not liked that comment.

  'It is sometimes better to feel powerless than to feel omnipotent.'

  No, it is never better. It is always better to keep the initiative. It is always better to drive than to be driven.

  The hire car had been a good notion. She'd nearly chickened out of it, but it had worked out well.

  And the problem is, thought Ailsa, as she stared unseeing at the strangely assembled clutter of objects in a Help the Aged charity shop window in Ornemouth High Street, the problem is that I was powerful. I believed that I was then, and I believe that I am now. I cannot rid myself of the illusion. So how can I ever be cured? I am locked into the madness. I am mad. I still believe that I have the power.

  Staying her eye on the glass, her elderly self looked back at her. She was in her sixties now, and she was older than the ancient sunken-cheeked Mother Longbone had been all those summers ago. She was ashen-grey, and at times she looked her age. The power was ebbing and seeping and leaking away, and at times she was afraid.

  She sighed, and blinked, and stared herself out, and straightened her spine, and pulled in her chin, and summoned up her forces. She straightened herself, in the way that Martin Pope had taught her when she was still very young. When she was playing the Shakespearean virgin in the brothel in Pericles, so badly, all those years ago, he had put one pale long-nailed manicured hand on the back of the base of her skull, and the other in the small of her back. He had pushed her skull upwards and forwards, and her shoulders down and back, as though he were pressing her from a primitive humble hominid posture into that of a more evolved life form. Posture, Ailsa, posture, he had said. His touch was powerful. It was not sexually arousing, or physically comforting, but it was powerful. From him an electric current flowed, an inhuman gift. It flowed from his hand, through her head and her shoulders and down her spine to her feet.

  She had seen others dance to his tune, and straighten themselves at the end of his strings. Dame Mary McTaggart herself had felt the force. Dame Mary had once sung to the tunes of Martin Pope.

  It is better to feel powerless.

  She would go back to the hotel now, and look through her folder, and check the details of what was to be expected of her this night, and then again in the morning, and on the day's parade. It was not as though she could avoid the hotel for ever. She could not avoid for ever the night's events.

  She had packed her silver dress. Suitable or unsuitable, she had packed her silver dress, and her soft little metal purse, and her golden slippers.

  And she had packed her bathing suit. She rarely travelled overnight without her bathing suit, because she was supple and she liked to swim. She enjoyed swimming more and more as she grew older. The weightlessness and the defiance of gravity seemed to roll back time. Paul Burden's book had claimed that the North Sea was getting warmer, but she wasn't sure if she believed him. None but the mad swim in the North Sea. The hotel might have a pool, for the town was now a city, recognized by the ageing queen herself, and the shabby old Queen's Hotel overlooking the bay might by now, in the third millennium, have acquired a pool and a gym. She had swum in stranger places than Ornemouth in the last three decades.

  The train began to move, slowly, with more apologies for signal failure and delay. The next stop was York. Although the delay had seemed lengthy, the train was running less than an hour late. He would still be in time, if there were no further hitch, to take a little walk before dinner. He had at one point, earlier in the journey, thought that he might cross the bridge, to Finsterness and to Turkey Bank, to the quaint homes of the Cleggs and of Mrs Binns. But that had been an unrealistic plan, a young man's plan. He knew by now, well in advance of the possibility, that he would not have the energy. He would be better off taking a siesta, and having a rest before the evening's festivities. Maybe tomorrow he would make his way to Finsterness, after the procession and after the recessional and after the luncheon.

  The movement of the carriage and the flow of the landscape rocked him forward, and released him from his inertia. He reached for the pink folder, with its names and its lists. By now, he had reconciled himself to the knowledge that something bad lay in there waiting for him, lurking in its cave, and he had been brave enough or foolish enough to try to imagine what it might be. This had involved running through a whole backlog of professional disasters, failures and resentments, but that did not deter him: he pressed on the bad tooth, he picked at the scab, he probed for the splinter, he swallowed with his tender throat. For there had been something, surely, in Mrs Hornby's demeanour that had alerted him to danger. There was something in his notes that she had been unable to remove or disguise. He had read a warning in her face. A Medusa name lay in there, a name with poisoned tentacles, a name which had already struck him dumb, and would now turn him to stone.

  It could not, he reflected, be the name of his second wife Dorothy, for she was now settled far away in distant Harvard where she shone like the star she had so improbably become. She was not likely to be tempted out of her orbit by an invitation to a small place like Ornemouth. She was in the big time, in the big country: she had won the waiting game, and she had shed him like an old sock. There might, he supposed, be some reference to her, somewhere in the vicinity of one of the citations, or lurking spitefully in the shadows behind the eulogy of the Public Orator, but nobody would be tactless enough to bring her name too directly into play. Their differences, their parting, had been too public, too abrupt, for her to be invoked on so formal an occasion. Humphrey Clark and Dorothy Portal Clark, now Dorothy Portal Herzog, had made it plain to their colleagues and to the press that they never wished to be associated with each other again, either professionally or personally, and on the whole this wish had been respected. He had not seen her in years, and had not wished to do so. He hoped he would never see her again. She was welcome to the brilliant Herzog, and he to her. She would not come anywhere near his patch, of that he was sure. They had skilfully negotiated the problem of their joint parenthood of their only child, to the advantage of both women, with a guilty understanding of the need for distance. It was only accidental conjunctions or allusions that he had to fear from her direction, from her claque and her supporters.

  It could not be said that Dorothy Portal, his one-time student and lab assistant, and later his wife, had blushed unseen and wasted her sweetness on the desert air. No unsung Rosalind Franklin or overlooked Cecilia Payne was she. The ironies of his professional and marital relationship with Dorothy were multiple, and he hoped that only he was aware of all of them. Portal, Dorothy (Mrs Conrad Herzog), R.S., b. 9 May 1950, daughter of Eric and Enid Portal, m. 1st 1975 Humphrey Clark q.v. (marr. diss. 1980), one d., 2nd, 1982, Conrad Herzog q.v. Educ. Lady Bannister's Sch., Loughborough, Downing Coll., Cambridge, Imperial Coll., London ... and so on, through her citations and honours and publications, to her recreations: bird-watching, walking, cooking.

  Cooking.

  She had not been a good cook, he spitefully recalled. What concept of political appeasement or rebellion had led her to claim that she was interested in cooking?

  The spiteful gene.

  He resented the spite that had been grafted on to his good nature.

  He had married on the rebound, for comfort, for kindness, and he had married his nemesis. It was like a Greek tragedy.

  No, it would not be the irritations and inflammations from the sealed but still infected sore of the Dorothy Portal connection that would leak out when he began to read the papers in the folder. The possibility of finding a reference to his ex-colleague and rival Arnold Moule had occurred to him as much more likely. Habitual civility coupled with professional self-interest had obliged him to conceal his loathing and distrust of Arnold Moule. Moule's
name and indeed his person continued to present themselves to Humphrey with uncanny frequency, no matter how hard the discreet and sympathetic Mrs Hornby worked to avoid such collisions. Humphrey Clark loathed Moule, and loathed himself for loathing him, but the world believed that they liked each other, and continued to seat them side by side at dinners, to mention them in the same paragraphs, to couple their names in academic papers, to invite them to introduce each other at conferences. Moule's promotion had dismayed him, but he had hidden his dismay, perhaps too well, and had listened patiently and silently when Moule was praised for Humphrey's successes and when Moule appropriated initiatives for which Humphrey should have been credited. This was the way of the world and the way of academic life, and there was nothing to be done about it. Nevertheless, he deeply hoped that he was not being asked to sit on a platform and share an honour with vainglorious, overlauded, mean-spirited little microbiologist Arnold Moule, the successful scholar of very small things.

  These thoughts were paltry, ignominious, piffling, trumpery, dishonourable, and he strove against them. But they lurked, fathoms deep. He told himself, from time to time, that it was the disappointment of a lost collaboration that he mourned. They had once been friendly, he and Arnold, although they had not been friends, and Humphrey Clark had valued the decency of their good manners to each other. But, in truth, he knew that he now hated Arnold Moule, and that he hated him largely because he had got ahead. He had not got ahead as spectacularly as the patient Dr Portal, once his wife, but Moule, like Portal, had, through patience and determination, achieved priority, and Humphrey found it hard to forgive him for this. Portal and Moule had stuck it out, and Humphrey had caved in. He had failed, in the long haul. It was a comparative failure, but a failure. He had been tempted away from the long slow tedious dedicated watch, he had stepped aside for good reasons and for bad, he had accepted incompatible appointments and responsibilities and promotions, and Portal and Moule had moved ahead. He had been promoted, but they had moved ahead.

  The riddle of the shifting meanings and allocations of time, the riddle of Diophantus.

  At least, he told himself, he had not become a semi-popular television scientist with diminishing credibility and a diminishing market value. He had swum dangerously near that reef, but he had not been wrecked upon it.

  It occurred to him, subliminally, hardly consciously, that perhaps it was the name of the ubiquitously destructive Tommy Kelman that lay in the pink folder. But no, surely not, it could not be. It was Arnold Moule whom he had most to fear.

  He did not want to be forced to be pleasant to Moule, even for twenty-four hours, and anyone connected with the later fiasco of the Green Grotto of Greenwich would also be unwelcome. The Grotto, for which he had worked so hard, had failed on so many levels that it was hard to know which failure had been the most wounding. It had proved to be neither fish, flesh nor fowl. In Humphrey's view it had failed financially, intellectually and aesthetically. It had failed as a research institution, it had failed as an educational resource, it had failed as an ecological project dedicated to the renewal of marine life. It had wasted its lottery grant, its cement had been cancerous, and its tanks had leaked. Nevertheless, it was now accounted a great success. After much tampering and tinkering, the accountants were happy. The bottom line was secure, and the tanks had stopped leaking. It was an icon, not a disaster.

  Everything about it disgusted its first advisory director, who had given it his influential blessing: its stupid name, its ill-written and ugly advertisements, its misleading gobbets of information, its vulgar branded merchandise, its horrible shop full of soft toys and inflatable frogs and sea shells and jellyfish and tea towels and rubber sharks, its plopping blobbing screeching interactive website.

  The Green Grotto had been turned into everything that Humphrey despised in modern education and popular culture, and therefore it thrived. He had tried so hard and for so long to preserve its integrity, but he had been defeated and outwitted. The spirit of the age had been against him. Shortly after its official opening Humphrey had been, in effect, constructively dismissed, and the venture had begun to prosper as the accountants and the salesmen and the PR women moved in. It was not widely known that he had left under a cloud of his own making, and therefore his name was linked with its prosperity, and he frequently had to face congratulations for a project which he would have preferred to disown. He had schooled himself to accept these congratulations meekly and without protest, but it was hard for him to do so. One day, he feared, he would hear himself speaking out.

  He dreaded that one day he might speak out about the disgraceful death of the three humphead wrasse. They had been ill caught, ill packed, ill transported. These beautiful, imperial and valuable fish had died needlessly in the hold of an aeroplane standing at Gatwick airport. They had died in their shark coffins, an unfortunate and in this instance too-apt nickname for these containers. They had been murdered, and he had been guilty of their death, for he should never have permitted their capture, and, having condoned it, he should have supervised their transit with more care.

  He had set up an Ethics Committee at the Grotto, but it had been too late for the wrasse.

  The humphead wrasse, also known as the Napoleon wrasse (Cheilinus undulatus), of the Labridae, were denizens of the coastal waters and coral reefs of the Indo-Pacific oceans, and were all too often to be found on the dinner plates of the Japanese. This species of fish was now on the CITES protected list, but that would not profit those three poor specimens who had ended up, partly through his negligence, in formalin.

  Better to be eaten than to die in transit.

  No, he hoped he would not have to stand up on a platform and smirk by the side of one of those ignorant and merciless traders in the flesh of fish. He would not even wish to shake a hand of one of them. They had despised him, and he despised them. They had debased their remit.

  He had been dismayed by his most recent visit, incognito, to the Grotto, and now, remembering it, his anger and his humiliation returned to him. He had taken with him his solemn sallow boot-polish-black-haired American grandson, his daughter's son, a child whom he hardly knew, and, for the child's sake, he had had to pretend to enjoy himself.

  Humphrey had done his grandfatherly duty. He had bought two tickets, one Senior Citizen's and one child's, and they had done the tour. First they had been to the as yet inoffensive and unspoilt Rescue Room, where they watched the play of some diminutive freshwater Mexican fishes, pale and agile fishes of subtle mottled gold and silver and blue and pink, fishes of a species now extinct in its native land. The grandson had read the label respectfully, respecting his grandfather and the fish, and together they had watched the small survivors of a lost tribe as they darted and displayed themselves and turned and wheeled about and scattered and re-formed themselves in tiny shoals. These little ones would never know their natural home. They would die if they were to be released into it. So they could not be counted as unhappy: they lived a false life, but there was no other life that they could have led. The delicate colours and habits of these ignorant little creatures were pleasing, soothing.

  But coloured fish were two a penny these days, and the American child from the land of Disney would want to see something more dramatic.

  They wandered on, these tentative blood strangers, through a dark corridor walled with larger tanks of dogfish. The dogfish were subdued to their element. They turned and cruised, and cruised and turned, in sleek dull blue-grey boredom. They had become psychotic. They were too large for their tank. The Ethics Committee was supposed to report on aberrant and distressed behaviour, but the circling and cycling of these fish had been overlooked. It is true that they were common fish, easy to replace. Humphrey had wanted to say to the child, They should not be here, but he had said nothing, like a false apostle or a careless father. He had denied them.

  He would have preferred to pause by a small corridor tank containing a hunched and lonely cuttlefish, and to point out the little tal
low colony of waving semi-translucent sea squirts that kept it company, but he did not think he could communicate his enthusiasm for these strange but simple organisms. He did not take the risk. He followed the easier route.

  The sea squirts looked like little graceful waving condoms. Would the child recognize a condom, if he saw one? Condoms and tampons had been washed up on the beach at Finsterness, and at first he and Sandy had not known what they were. Tommy Kelman had always known.

  Blinking green arrows on the walls and a track of glowing yellow Man Friday naked footprints on the floor led them onwards, through the darkness, towards the Blue Lagoon. Humphrey had fought hard against the Blue Lagoon, and lost. He had never seen it in its kitsch and crude vulgarity. It was the one of the Grotto's most distinctive and widely promoted attractions. It appeared on all the adverts.

  The Blue Lagoon looked like an oval blue plastic hotel swimming pool, and it occupied a large arched hall. It was surrounded by palm trees, some of which were fake and some of which were real. In the middle of the water was a small atoll-shaped island, on which a life-size mermaid lolled, her tail dangling into the water. She was supported on one elbow, and a comb and a glass lay by her on the white sand. Her head moved sinuously, electronically, from side to side, and her eyelashes fluttered. She was wearing a diamanté turquoise bikini, and her full curved lips were very red. The silver scales of her tail glittered, and her golden hair was artificially lifted and fanned by an invisible breeze. In the shallow waters around her inexpensive little fish played, and small fountains spurted, and miniature wavelets lapped. A wretched turtle cruised sadly and aimlessly about, and crabs and clams studded the carefully positioned rocks. Visitors were invited to touch panels and press buttons for information about coral-reef fish, about coral formation, about pollution and environmental hazards. 'Don't let Miranda the Mermaid Die!' exhorted one aspiring notice. 'Do not throw coins in water!' declared another, more reasonably. 'Durty water kills!' said a third.