The Sea Lady

by Margaret Drabble

  Feminism and Orientalism had been conjoined before their eyes.

  Alisa had known a half of it, and she had sensed the rest. She was a conduit, a conductor, a receiver. She picked it up before it was officially transmitted, and she would wait her time to process the message and to name it and to pass it on.

  She was more than a conduit. She was a pioneer. She was the message itself.

  She had fallen silent by his side, as they gazed at the eerily silent and stoic scene of butchery. It was the beauty that appalled. To the right of the painting, the curving torso of a young Greek woman was voluptuously displayed as she was twisted backwards against the prancing horse of her Turkish conqueror. Her figure was conventionally beautiful, beautiful in the manner of conventional sado-masochistic fantasies: her upstretched arms and manacles of bondage, her swooning head, her bared breasts, her rapture, her imminent rape and her enslavement to her turbaned ravisher were designed to arouse the viewer, and not with pity. But the naked Parisian model was but one motif, rearing herself up to one side of the large and crowded canvas. Who had posed for the dark-haired, heavy-lidded dead woman in the foreground with the fair-haired child clinging to her lower body? Who had posed for the strangely indolent reclining dying man with the staring knowing eyes? Who had posed for the handsome chiselled old woman to the right of the centre of the pyramid of death, with her bared and wrinkled chest and her transfixing prophetic Sibylline gaze? It was wrong to admire, and yet the work was wonderful. Its wonder was shaming.

  Staring at it, Humphrey was ashamed, and when he turned to look at Ailsa, he saw moving through her expressive face an eddy of impressionistic emotions, like the clouds scudding over a stormy sky: anger, desire, envy, indignation, apprehension, intent. A deep ripple moved through the dark current of sea and sky and swelled up and sank again. A mouth in the water opened, and closed. She tried to speak, and failed. He remembered her suddenly, three years before, on the Devon coast, in her little programme seller's black dress: her insubordination, her violent energy, her assertion. But it was not herself that she asserted. Something welled up, and she received it. The dead women, the enslaved virgin, the delicate, vulnerable little spine of the orphaned or slaughtered boy, the abused models, the enraptured and dedicated painter of romantic death and romantic love: she took them in, and they became not her, but the process of which she was part, the tide on which she was carried. He would never be able to withstand its force and its drag.

  They were subdued and silent over their glass of ouzo on the quay. They spoke little over their dinner of charred and martyred skewers of fish and lamb. A mood of despondency possessed them: this was the end of the road, the end of his working vacation, the end of the affair. They knew that this would be their last night together. He poured her a last beaker of retsina, and watched as she sombrely drank it down. She stared into the dregs, and looked back at him, and smiled mournfully, her face suffused with sorrow and regret.

  'Creosote,' she said.

  Each knew more than a little, now, of the family history of the other. They had their own shorthand. It would be a pity to waste it. It would be a pity to waste so much of their conjoined past. They had known each other for a long time now. For most of their lives, they had known of and known each other.

  Her father had died of creosote, and his of nuclear fallout. These untimely deaths hung around in the lower air, in the shifting haze of the biting insects of the evening. A swathe of little insects lifted and sank and hummed around them, light on the small breeze. The cheerful fairy lights of the boats bobbed mindlessly over the harbour, yellow and red and green and blue.

  That night, they made love as though it were a parting, although they spoke no words of parting. Their lovemaking was not satisfactory. The god had left them. And in the wake of the god's departure, the mosquitoes came in for the kill. They hovered and whined and bit. Ailsa tied herself up in the shroud of thin hot sheet and groaned, while Humphrey attacked the mosquitoes with the sole of his sandal when they settled to digest their human prey upon the plaster walls. Splats of fresh commingled blood joined the darker stains of the dried blood of earlier guests. She laughed at his antics and his poor aim, and they regained a little good humour as they settled themselves, itching, scratching, inflamed, for an attempt at sleep.

  They slept badly, but dreamed much. They dreamed of swimming in a shrinking sea.

  It was on the bus from the ferry, a long day's journey later, that he declared himself. It was a jolting, uncomfortable metallic local bus, lacking upholstery and air-conditioning, and Ailsa insisted on changing her seat to avoid the sight and the proximity of wads of old chewing gum stuck in the ashtray on the back of the seat in front of her. She moved to the seat behind and sat alone by the window, gazing fiercely and angrily out at the passing landscape of the mainland. The bus had a noisy mechanical problem, the clanking of a detaching exhaust, and eventually it broke down, as Humphrey had said it would. So they sat there, stationary, by the roadside, with a view of a sloping rubbish tip of pale scarred cabbage stalks and fruit rinds and old cans and thin scavenging cats and bald yellow dogs.

  It was there, as they waited in the heat, that he suggested that they should get married. The idea came to him like a sudden inspiration, like a challenge. How else could they be redeemed from decay and defeat, how else could they trap the intensity of timelessness that they had known, how else could they make a bid to remain beautiful, pure, free, weightless, aspiring, and all of those things that they had for the past ten days felt themselves to be? Why should they descend, feebly, unprotesting, into the rubbish heap of decay?

  He turned round to look back at her, with his shocking proposal, his arm along the back of the seat. She leaned forward towards him, surprised. Had she heard him correctly?

  'Why not?' he said, as he gallantly repeated his suggestion.

  The metal rim and the ripped plastic of the back of the seat divided them and their bodies, but their heads were close as they leaned intently towards each other. Their eyes met and interlocked and searched and challenged. A flare of wild hope seemed to ignite between them. Why should they not be together for ever, and be obliged to keep faith with the best that they had been? Why should they not be the exception to the rule?

  It would be an act of faith.

  'Why not?' he said again.

  Her eyes held his, and then she rashly, inexplicably, abruptly agreed. She accepted him. He had hardly dared to fear or to hope that she would, but she did. The flame between them burned, very brightly, for a few seconds. And yet, within a few more seconds, as they continued to stare at each other, it began to fail, for they knew that it was impossible and wrong. The words that pledged them had barely left their lips before they knew that it was wrong, and that it would end badly. All this knowledge crowded into them and surged through them as they sat there, apart yet together, by the rubbish tip. Time slowed down, time stood still, to allow them to receive this inassimilable knowledge. It was too late to seal their faith, and yet, stubbornly, foolishly, they pressed on. For it was also too late to undo the words that had been spoken. They would have to live slowly through the process of fading and dying, through the ebbing and the emptying. The pool would drain dry, the flame would flicker and die, the embers would blacken into darkness. That would be how it would be, but there would be no turning back now from the choice they had made, from the leap into the unknown known.

  But they would be obliged to suspend knowledge of this moment of mutual despair, in order to live through the process that held them in thrall.

  The proposal of marriage (for such it was), once made and once accepted, gathered a momentum of its own. Afterwards, they could never remember in detail how it had all come about, though they remembered well the hard seats of that dreadful bus and the horseshoe scars on the thick stumps of cabbage. They forgot the quality of the moment of hope and fear and knowledge, as one forgets the moment of impact of the near-fatal crash. They submitted themselves to their rash decisi
on, and invested it, for a while, with a kind of last-ditch romantic heroism. They forged ahead stubbornly, against all their doubts and better wisdom, against every practical difficulty that presented itself. They tied, for better and for worse, the Gordian knot. It was an old-fashioned mistake, but they committed it, and they committed themselves to it.

  In Athens, to celebrate their engagement, he bought her three cheap silver bangles from a little shop by the side of the Agora, a shop overflowing with beads and bracelets and necklaces and rings. They were her choice. She said she wanted the silver slave bangles, she said she loved them. He offered her gold or turquoise, but she chose the silver. She tried them on, and they glittered on her slim brown arm, above her deceitfully fragile little wrist.

  He wanted to buy her a ring, but she refused a ring.

  'I like these best,' she repeated, stubbornly. 'I like these best.'

  The bracelets were made of a thin soft pliable silver wire, woven into a repeating Grecian pattern of coils and swirls.

  'I'll buy you a proper ring when we get home,' he said.

  She shook her head, declining the offer, but still she smiled.

  She turned and twisted her bangles, and made them glint as they caught the slanting Athenian sun. They imprisoned her wrist, her arm.

  They agreed to marry quietly, and to tell nobody. They knew that if they told, they would be talked out of it. Their lunatic engagement would not bear the light of common day. If they told their friends or their families, the folly of their choice would be taken from them, and they would be robbed of the full-scale disaster that they had promised themselves.

  In those days, marriage had not gone out of fashion. It was still a widely chosen option, even for those who did not 'believe' in it. But its status was uncertain. It was neither a safe refuge nor a liberation nor an act of rebellion. It was a statement, but nobody knew any more what the statement meant. Ailsa Kelman was, in years to come, to speak and write much about the meaning of marriage: its bondage of women, its inequity, its appropriation of property, its legal trickeries, its false promises, its slow and grudging evolution.

  But she kept her own first marriage very quiet.

  Two witnesses attended the marriage in the discreet register office in Rosebery Avenue opposite Sadlers Wells in the borough of Holborn. One of them was Tommy Kelman. How he first got to know about their intentions was a mystery to both bride and groom. Each accused the other of telling, and each denied guilt, but there Tommy was, in on the act, in at the kill, and it was just as well that he was there, because he had thought to bring with him a borrowed wedding ring, without which the pedantic registrar refused to marry them.

  The other witness was a taciturn and monastic entomologist who worked on the unpleasant and cruel life cycle of the Ichneumonidae of the Soviet Union. Harold Blake was a man who asked no questions and told no lies.

  It was a stupid time to marry, just as Humphrey was about to fly off alone as the Vickery Fellow to a marine laboratory in the New World. Why not wait till he got back?

  Because they both knew that if they waited, they would lose each other. Probably they had lost each other already, in the Hotel Actaeon in Chios, or somewhere on the dusty road to Athens, but there was a chance, a very small chance, that if they signed the register, they would keep whatever it was that they so feared to lose.

  And if they didn't keep it, they could always get divorced. Divorce was becoming easier every year. By now, they knew plenty of people who had been divorced. The day of the no-fault divorce had not yet arrived, but it was on its way.

  Getting married, said Ailsa over the wedding breakfast, is like throwing yourself out of a high window or off a high tower, to see if you can fly.

  Tommy laughed. The entomologist appeared not to hear her. Humphrey loved her for her bravado, although she made his heart stand still with fear.

  Foolhardily, for old times' sake, they took their wedding breakfast, with their two witnesses, at the Dolphin Restaurant in Frith Street. They ordered a festive oval silver platter of oysters perched upon a rocky shore of cracked ice and dark green decorative seaweed, and they drank too much Chablis. The smooth and dimpled and matronly manageress watched anxiously from the wings. She had seen everything in her time, but Ailsa was her protégée, and she did not like the way this luncheon was going. The auguries were not good. This couple was not suited for the long haul, and she had always known it. There was a wild look in Ailsa's eye, and her familiar brother Tommy was never good news. The manageress feared a scene, and tried to ration the wine. She did not want them to start their quarrelling here, in her house. She did not want to be a witness. She did not want to have to say, I told you so. She watched as Ailsa pulled off her borrowed wedding ring and handed it ostentatiously back to her brother. Tommy put it in his breast pocket, 'for', as he said 'the next time round'.

  Ailsa and Humphrey Clark had already had their honeymoon, more or less for free, on board the Bride of Abydos. He had chivalrously proposed to her a celebratory wedding night in the Savoy, or in the Ritz, but she had declined the gesture. She had pledged herself to be an inexpensive, self-supporting, hard-working wife, a New Model Wife, and she invited him to spend the night with her, for old times' sake, in the Room. And there, in the Room, they tried to invoke the passion that they knew they had felt for each other, the passion that they willed themselves to perpetuate. They hoped that the Room itself, the scene of so many ecstatic consummations and impregnated with so much past desire, would come to their assistance. But it left them thrashing and gasping like fish on stones in a withdrawing tide.

  Professor Clark, gazing at the notorious name of his first wife, Ailsa Kelman, emblazoned there in his pink folder, rapidly relived his entire life with her, like a drowning man. He saw her on the harbour wall with her thin bare legs dangling, he saw her crouching by St Cuthbert's Rock, he saw her dancing rudely on the sands, he saw her selling programmes in her little black maid's dress, he saw her chanting her gynaecological calypso in the Tinder Box, he saw her lying naked beneath him on the stained mattress, he saw her lying flattened in her sunglasses and bikini on the whitened deck, he saw her buoyant in the waters of the Aegean, he saw her in the museum of Chios as her face furrowed with the hard intensity of giving birth to thought.

  He saw her swallowing a living oyster on her wedding day. He saw her as she walked away from him at the airport terminal at Heathrow, without a backward glance. He saw her as she walked towards him at the airport terminal at Los Angeles, a month later, her face set with the determination of rejection. She was walking towards the first brief disastrous reunion of their brief married life.

  He saw their afterlife. He saw the divorce papers, he saw the bills for the divorce, he saw the lawyer's cheques he signed. (She had demanded no maintenance: on that front at least, she had been true to her word. She had proved a cheap ex-wife.) He saw the headlines of her ascendant career, he saw the press photographs of her wedding to Martin Pope, he saw an announcement of the birth of her daughter Marina, he saw the second-hand news coverage of her rapidly following divorce from Martin Pope. Her second marriage was nearly as brief as her first, and the divorce had not required fabricated grounds. He saw her on television, he heard her on the radio, he read articles about her and articles by her in The Times and the Guardian and the Daily Mail and New Society and the New York Review of Books. He even, God help them both, saw her name in Nature and in the New Scientist. She had put herself on the agenda of the age. He looked at her books, surreptitiously, secretly, in libraries and bookshops. He bought a copy of her glossy first publication, on the rediscovery of the art of Eloise van Dieman, and gazed at its lavish illustrations in envious wonder, remembering that Ailsa Kelman had once been his bride.

  He had hidden the book in a drawer, as the Kelman parents had vainly hidden John Hersey's account of the bombing of Hiroshima, but he had it still. After that, he bought no more of her publications, although he kept track of them.

  In this her after
life, it was as though their aberrant early marriage had never been. Never did she mention him, in any interview, in any discourse. She had blotted him out. No first husband ever appeared in any news item associated with her name. The first Mrs Humphrey Clark had never existed. And she stuck with her maiden name, even after her monstrous marriage to Mr Pope.

  Marriage had not suited her.

  He had married the second Mrs Humphrey Clark for a quiet, safe and unostentatious life, a life without risk. That had been a worse mistake. At least he and Ailsa had been young and foolish, not nearing middle age and foolish. The second Mrs Clark, now Professor Dorothy Portal Herzog, had been more demanding about the terms of the divorce. And worse than that, she had stolen his only daughter, and taken her across the Atlantic. He does not like to think about this loss, and the supine way in which he had submitted to it.

  Old Professor Clark in his first-class railway carriage wonders if he is man enough to face the shame of the turbulence and failure of his first love. Ailsa Kelman has made such an exhibition of herself over the years. She has shown the worst of bad taste. She has been vulgar, strident, disgraceful. She has histrionically and hysterically bared herself in public, and boasted both of her abortions and of her androgynous amours. She has worn an aborted foetus on a chain around her neck, and submitted to a cervical examination on television. The viewing public has looked right up her vagina. She has risked imprisonment, not, like her brother Tommy, for conventional financial offences like minor fraud or insider dealing, but for what have now become known as Women's Reproductive Rights. She has appeared in court for assault, and been sued for libel. She has appeared in court as a witness in defence of oral sex, risqué art galleries, sodomy and sin.

  But never, in all this wash of vulgarity and publicity and suicidal altruism, has she mentioned the name of Humphrey Clark. She has both disowned and protected him. She has left him to his dull scientific respectability, to his dishonourable ambition and his honourable research. She has never suggested, in any text or subtext of any statement she has ever issued that he has ever seen (and there was a time when he looked closely), that her hysteria has been in any way prompted by the failure of her marriage to a semi-eminent marine biologist called Humphrey Clark. She had hurled enough abuse at him during their brief marriage, but since their divorce she has never in print or on screen or as far as he knows in private accused him of being a vile man, a man of the old patriarchy, a male chauvinist, a prick or a prig. She has accused most of the other men with whom she has ever been associated of these and other offences, but she has left his name out of it. Their secret has remained a secret.