The Sea Lady

by Margaret Drabble

  Durty? Yes, durty. Humphrey glanced at his grandson to see if he had noticed the spelling error, but the child was staring intently at a starfish. Was the starfish real or was it a fake? It moved, but that did not mean it was real. The child did not seem very interested in the mermaid. He was too young to be interested by ladies in bikinis, even if their brown breasts rose and fell with the simulated and seductive breath of life.

  Humphrey wondered if he should put some anonymous suggestions in the suggestion box. Perhaps the Grotto ought to set up a piously informative and politically correct panel about Bikini Island, nuclear fallout, and the long-lasting effects of low-level radiation? Maybe there already was one somewhere on the premises? All that stuff was common knowledge now, although recognition had been so slow to come, and so stubbornly resisted. Everybody knew now that nuclear fallout was bad for you, and that you should never have put your feet into those glowing green X-ray machines to check your shoe size when you were a child. It had been fun, one of the more fun things of being a child forcibly taken shopping, but like most fun things, it was bad for you.

  Professor Clark's mind flitted like a bat's wing to Barbed Wire Island, and Anthrax Island, and Tommy Kelman's tasty nuggets of bad news from John Hersey's Hiroshima. His mind flitted to the remote island in the Pacific where his research plane, fifteen years ago, had been forced to put down briefly because of engine trouble: the island belonged to the American military, and was used for the Army's chemical weapon storage and destruction programme, administered by the euphemistically entitled US Defense Threat Reduction Agency. The whole area was highly toxic, and a cloud of reddish smoke hung over the island's cluster of sinister installations. Faceless men wearing helmets and silver protective suits had emerged from these installations to fix the plane, and then had silently disappeared again, as in an episode from an H. G. Wells novella. Rumoured to be one of the most toxic places on earth, the island also claimed to be a Wildlife Refuge. This dual role, of chemical weapons base and wildlife refuge, had puzzled him then, and it puzzled him still, but then he had still retained a hope of understanding the mysteries of global power, and of decoding superpower doublespeak. Now he knew that he would never understand.

  The Damascene Islands, so 'unspoilt' on his first Marine Society visit, were now a much-visited tourist resort. It had been years before he had fully taken in the knowledge that his expedition had been sponsored by an American property company, which had subsequently developed the islands and made them accessible to cheaply run airlines and rich travellers. He had not thought that he had been part of such a programme.

  Toxicity or tourism: that was the choice. Tourism was the better choice of the two. Most conservation programmes are sponsored by oil companies and mineral rights conglomerates. That's the way it is. Shell and BP and the miners of zinc befriend corals and barnacles and sea lilies. They welcome little fishes in, with gently smiling jaws.

  This American child's English great-grandfather had died of radiation sickness, years before his grandparents had met and so unwisely married. The child would have no knowledge of this. The child would know nothing of his Great-grandpa Philip Clark, who had served in the Far East in World War Two, and died a wasted skeleton in Covington Hospital.

  Every twenty minutes Miranda the Mermaid went for a swim. Humphrey and the child watched as she slithered mechanically off her stretch of sand and set off round her island. The poor distressed and living turtle got out of her way and skulked till she had passed. It was used to this routine performance. Its sad face was carved with decades of boredom and despair.

  'Can you swim?' asked Humphrey nervously of his grandson, as they left the lagoon and made their way towards the Coral Reef Tank. (Was the child bored out of his mind? At least he was quiet and polite, this little half-Japanese grandson, as English children used to be. That was good. But Humphrey hoped that he was not too bored.)

  'Oh yes,' said the carefully self-contained child, with composure. 'Yes, I like to swim. But I can't dive yet.'

  Then the child hesitated, and took a very small leap. He looked obliquely up at his grandfather from beneath his long black eyelashes, and said, 'My mom says you are a great diver.'

  The grandfather was childishly pleased by this compliment. He had hardly dared to expect that his name was ever mentioned, let alone favourably, in that other larger world across the pond.

  'I was a great diver,' he admitted, feeling more cheerful as they made their way along a subterranean corridor towards the great high wall of fish and coral that was the Grotto's most expensive treasure. 'But I don't go down much these days. You should learn to dive, when you're a bit bigger. It's easy. And it's great fun. Look, imagine, you can swim amongst fish like these.'

  The show tank, he had to admit, was impressive. It was well designed and well stocked and well lit. Its improbable and beautiful and graceful inhabitants grouped and circled and lurked and darted as though they were unobserved, and its hundreds of thousands of litres of water were clear and bright and gave an illusion of limitless space. The illusion was a clever simulation of freedom. The exhibit had attracted a crowd of admirers, who were watching the display with something approaching the awe that it deserved. Tangs and triggers, damsels and butterflies, hawks and humbugs, eels and angels, clowns and cowfish, the spotted and the striped, mingled and wove and flaunted themselves. The child stared intently. As they stared together, side by side, a large thick-lipped square-tailed humphead wrasse appeared in the middle distance and swam towards them, conspicuous in a dazzling livery of electric green shading into purples and blues.

  'What's that one called?' enquired a stout middle-aged woman of the uniformed attendant, pointing at the noble wrasse.

  'He's called Elvis,' said the attendant with a snigger, to a dutiful but half-hearted simulation of general mirth. 'And look, there's his friend, Mick Jagger, coming round the corner.'

  The woman disapproved, as did Humphrey.

  'I meant, what sort of fish is it?' she said crossly.

  The attendant took offence. 'There's a chart over there, with their names, and an interactive console,' he said ungraciously.

  A slight discomfort spread through the mildly offended gathering, as the indifferent fish continued their watery weaving dance. Bad customer relations, noted Humphrey with malicious satisfaction, as he consulted the identification chart.

  The information about the wrasse was not, he had to admit, too bad. It did not of course mention the disastrously premature death of those first acquisitions, those Gatwick murders for which Humphrey still held himself responsible, nor did it indulge in jokes about fat lips and pop stars. It emphasized the endangered status of the species, and described the wrasse's diet of molluscs and worms and crustaceans, and its ability to digest poisonous marine animals such as the sea hare, the crown-of-thorns starfish and the box jellyfish. It managed to describe the unstable sexuality of the hermaphrodite wrasse without vulgar innuendo or facile explanation, and it admitted that 'nothing was known' about the mortality of the species.

  'We do not know how long these fish may live in their natural habitat.'

  Humphrey noted that it was now politically necessary to claim that protected species had not been captured and introduced from the wild, but had been bred in captivity or offloaded from other aquaria. Some of the more dubious fish in the Green Grotto were from Ellesmere Port, some from Plymouth.

  He remembered the magnificent and well-curated display in Monterey. We can't afford to build like that in England. He had tried, he had made plans and suggestions, but he had been outmanoeuvred.

  When he was the age of this child, he had been entranced by phrases like 'little is known'. They had recurred frequently in his old-fashioned childhood reading about marine species, and had given him a little sensuous mystic thrill. He had thought he would be able to answer all the questions.

  'I have not the remotest idea what can be the use of these remarkable appendages...' 'Inside the canopy of mouth and nose, I fin
d some peculiar little white bodies. I have no notion of the meaning of all this...' 'The hog fish, known in Flamborough as the Devourer, has not yet been traced to its breeding ground...'

  These phrases, in old Victorian books of natural history, had delighted him.

  Would the child be interested in these mysteries, as Humphrey had been at his age? He could not begin to guess, and did not wish to inflict his tedious schoolmasterly tendency upon his grandson. The child was watching, intently, the sporting of the little shoals, and the mesmeric weaving of the stocking body of the black-and-white eel, peering from its hiding place on the floor of the tank.

  The child was still engrossed in the display when Humphrey saw, approaching the six-inch-thick crystal wall, a small delegation of visiting foreign dignitaries, led by a man whom he recognized from the old days as one of his more obsequious, ambitious and duplicitous young employees. Would they see him, here in the aqueous half-light? If they were to see him, would they recognize him? No, they would not. They passed him by, talking importantly in pompous public self-congratulatory tones. They paid no attention to the small child with his nose glued to the glass, nor to the modest old man with his dutifully purchased Senior Citizen's ticket, lurking guiltily in the shadows like a paedophile by the chart of the simplified story of the life cycle of the handsome endangered purple fish.

  Professor Clark, if he had had the choice, would have preferred to remove the details of his involvement with the Green Grotto from Who's Who and his curriculum vitae. But he had not had that choice. They were part of his history. He had made a bad career move, late in the day, and he would have to stick with the consequences. Nevertheless, he hoped that he would not have to listen, or not for too long, to the praises of the Green Grotto during the ceremony at Ornemouth in the morning. Perhaps he would marginally prefer Arnold Moule to the Green Grotto. At least Moule was a serious scientist.

  Indeed, that was just about all that Moule was.

  This train of thought, these meanly articulated sentiments, were not very pleasing to a man who prided himself on high thoughts and fair play and generosity and good humour.

  Paltry, ignominious, piffling, trumpery, dishonourable.

  These were the hard words that Darwin had used of himself. But Humphrey knew that he had not earned this comparison.

  Too much super-ego, that had been one of Ailsa's taunts, during the bitter time of the dissolution.

  He had not thought of his retort for twenty years: 'That's good, coming from you,' he should have said.

  The Green Grotto could not be removed from the official story of his life, but the name of Ailsa Kelman had not been allowed to enter it. She belonged to a buried Precambrian layer before these records began. She could not be excised, because she had not been admitted.

  As the train pulled northwards out of York station, Humphrey saw the Minster, which had been struck during his agnostic lifetime by the lightning of God. The numinous sight of the cathedral fortified him to gather his waning courage, and he opened the pink folder. And there, of course, as he had divined and denied, lay the name of Ailsa Kelman: the name of Ailsa Kelman, with whom he had once known Perfect Happiness. Ailsa Kelman, who, although human, had been as beautiful to him as a zebra shark. He was on his way towards her, and it was too late to turn back. He was not a coward, and he would not turn back now. He could not jump ship and deny her now.

  The Public Orator pauses here, relieved that at last both of the principals have recognized the necessary shape of the plot. It is a story of convergence, but it is not yet clear whether the story will end in recognition, reconciliation, refusal or rejection. The Orator does not know the end of the story, but has come to see that, defiantly ageing though those two be, enfeebled by age though they be, alternately rash and cowardly though they be, over-reaching, over-extending, over-ambitious, over-weening and intermittently defeated though they be, they may yet, even at this late stage in the game, find in themselves enough strength to push on towards their own resolution. Technically, the Orator is a recorder, a reporter, and not a fashioner. The Orator cannot even be described as a witness, for the events to which he will bear witness have not yet occurred. The Orator is certainly not a precipitator, for that is not a legitimate role for one in his position. So the Orator cannot forge the ending. It must arise, it must ensue, it must not be forced. The Orator will be present, and will comment, and will possibly even dare to prompt, but the powers of the Orator are limited. They have been limited to the forethought, to the planning, to the invitation, to the setting of the stage, to the choice of the venue, to the public confrontation. After that, the actors have this terrible freedom. They can write their own script. The Orator's formal script is already written, but they can write their own informal interchanges, as they meet in a crowded room, and as they climb the painful cobbled steps. This is risky, this is terrible.

  Perfect Happiness

  Nessun maggior dolore che ricordarsi del tempo felice nella miseria

  Dante, Inferno, Canto V

  Can anyone say with certainty that he was happy at a particular moment of time? Remembering the moment makes him happy because he realizes how happy he could have been, but at the actual moment when the alleged happiness was occurring did he feel happiness? He was like a man owning a piece of ground in which, unknown to himself, a treasure lay buried. You would not call such a man rich, neither would I call a man happy who is so without realizing it...

  Delacroix, Journals, 28 April 1854

  Humphrey Clark and Ailsa Kelman have known Perfect Happiness. They have known it and named it. It has a place, and the place has a name. It is a memorable name. Their lives will flow outwards and onwards, bearing them helplessly away from this place and from each other, but here they are together, in this place and in this moment, and they lie calm and still, with the peace that comes from satisfied desire.

  They lie flat on their backs beneath the blue sky on the warm wooden deck of a large boat that rocks gently on the infantile blue waters. They listen to the slap and cluck of the small ripples of the sea. The movement soothes and assuages, like a cradle, or like the movement of the waters of the womb. They are not entirely naked, for the boat has unseen and senior occupants to whom they owe respect, but their handsome young bodies are well exposed to the rays of the afternoon sun. They are both tanned, and he is golden. They are in their sexual prime, and they know that they are beautiful. They are beautiful to each other and to any observing human eye. The gods smile on them. They are a fine couple. Natural selection and Eros have done their best for them, and here they lie, paying tribute to the processes that have brought them together to this Aegean paradise.

  It is primarily his place, and she is here as his guest. He has priority here, and the balance is here in his favour. This makes them equal, as they lie becalmed.

  He has tried to teach her to dive with him over the last two days, and she has made sporting attempts to learn, but she is still nervous about the unplumbed depths of emerald and indigo. This hesitation adds to his power, but she is so contented here with him that she concedes his advantage without grudge. She finds the contraptions of the diving apparatus cumbersome and knows she does not look her best as she struggles with them. Nor does she look attractive when she has at last managed to squeeze and buckle herself into them. She prefers to swim prettily and lightly clad in the surface of the waters, wearing not goggles or a mask but fashionable starlet sunglasses. She plunges and turns and floats in the safe swell of the small translucent waves, amongst the pale green and turquoise bubbles, where she can admire her own body, and his. He tempts her with stories of the fish and the coral of the world below, but she vows that she is happy in the shallows. She will leave the depths to the men. Tomorrow, perhaps, if there is a tomorrow in this timeless world, she will subject herself to another lesson.

  They have agreed that swimming here is very different from swimming in the North Sea, that grey surge which they had braved together in their immature livery
of white and childish puckered gooseflesh.

  She is smoking a cigarette, wilfully defiling the pure air with a thin plume of blue smoke. The smell of nicotine mingles amorously with the smell of salt and garlic and Ambre Solaire. An occasional sun-warmed breath of citrus and of pine, of oregano and of thyme, wafts towards them from the shore of the island.

  Two books lie by her side on the whitened plank of the deck. One of them is an Everyman copy of Darwin's On the Origin of Species, for she has been taking lazy lessons from her incurably pedagogic lover on the subject of evolutionary biology. The other is a luridly jacketed and battered paperback copy of Henry de Vere Stacpoole's Blue Lagoon, showing a bronzed blond naked couple frolicking on a rock on a coral island. Its jacket says it costs 2s. 6d., but they had picked it up for a few drachmas at a shabby quayside bookstore at Piraeus on the mainland.

  They have been discussing the Jean Simmons movie of Blue Lagoon, and whether they could have seen it together all those years ago in the quaint little white Crescent Picture House in Ornemouth, with its crescent moon and its seven stars. Both have seen it, but they cannot remember where and when, and are not sure if the dates would fit an Ornemouth viewing en famille with Tommy and Mr and Mrs Kelman and that other boy called – was it? – Sandy Clegg. Ailsa thinks she may be confusing some of its images with frames from the colourful South Pacific, which she knows she has also seen, but which she thinks was of a later date. They cannot check, for there are no reference books (or not of that nature) on board the Bride of Abydos, but they do not argue about it. They are happy with the uncertain fusion of their past forgettings and rememberings.