The Sea Lady

by Margaret Drabble

  It hadn't worked out quite like that. Nor had he deserved that it should.

  Ailsa Kelman had not invented feminism or Women's Studies or Orientalism single-handed, but she had been there as they gestated, she had been there as they were being born, she had played her part in their history.

  And so, through her, had he.

  He had seen her thinking. He had seen her struggle, and then he had seen her thoughts dart free from her, like silver minnows. Her thoughts were free and fast and fluid, and found their own way into the current of the mainstream.

  Her lecture on Byron and Delacroix had been a first draft for what was soon to follow. She had moved on, to the theme of Gender, Art and Anger, and then she had tired of that, and had taken up sociology and the iconography of domesticity and Mass Observation. She had written a book about Mass Observation techniques and the inter-war and post-war life of the housewife. He had never read it, but he had read about it. She had edited a book (with funding from the Wellcome Trust) on the history of hypochondria and patent remedies and the once-fashionable and predominantly female afflictions of neuritis and neuralgia and 'nerves', now subsumed, according to her, under the equally imprecise label of 'depression'. (Her essay entitled 'And then her health broke down' was greeted as a landmark, though its claims have since been hotly disputed.) She had made programmes about house and home in the 1930s. For a brief period she had perversely and provocatively sung the success of suburbia, and she had narrated the history of the vacuum cleaner. She had a knack of dramatizing the familiar, of making it appear weird and strange. Humphrey, covertly watching her demonstrating on screen both the practical capacities and metaphorical significance of the Hoover and the Electrolux, had remembered the undusted unswept filthy glamorous squalor of the Room.

  At times, in his forties, in his fifties, he dreamed vividly of the Room. Most of these dreams were unpleasant dreams of exposure and shame, in which a wall of the Room would dissolve or fall, and he and she would be discovered in bed, entangled, in flagrante, lying naked to the gaze of his parents, or of cameras, or of colleagues, or of students, or of strangers. Occasionally, a benign dream came to him, in which she lay by his side with her head on his broad shoulder, breathing peacefully, breathing in unison, sharing the rhythm of his rest.

  Which were the true dreams, and which the false?

  All were false, for she was gone, and the past was dead, and they had denied one another.

  Bored with the Hoover and the lower middle classes, she had then ascended the social scale to examine the lives of late-nineteenth-century nouveau riche wives who were afraid of and dominated by their own superior professional domestic staff. She had found some good diaries to illustrate her thesis, but he had found these excursions less interesting, and had not bothered to try to follow them.

  During their brief marriage, he had not been allowed to meet her mother, that genteel one-time lady's maid. But he remembered Mrs Kelman from his childhood, sleeping in her deckchair, sitting in the Crescent Picture House, walking poor old quivering Monty along the prom.

  And now, in his sixties, he was on his way northwards, towards the reunion he had been avoiding for so many decades.

  His most frequently recurring dream now is that he is standing on a sandy shore, or on the bank of a river, and is about to immerse himself joyfully, and to swim deeper into the clear water: but in his dream he never reaches the water, for at his approach it recedes, or dries up, or vanishes, and leaves him dry and beached and stranded.

  This dream does not require much interpretation.

  He looks at the pink folder, and the name that lies there, and swallows hard, and forces himself, with much foreboding, to read the brief biography that accompanies her name and her shrunken passport-sized publicity photograph.

  Ailsa Kelman, scholar and feminist, is celebrated for her pioneering studies of gender and for her gift for lucid and dramatic exposition. Born in Bonsett, County Durham, she is renowned around the world for her courageous explorations of women's achievements, ambitions and limitations. Her classic works include her ground-breaking study of the artist Eloise van Dieman and her analysis of the Bohemian space occupied by the artist's model (both male and female) in fact and in fiction, but she is known to a much wider public for her television presentations of the paradoxes and mixed messages of everyday domestic life and sexual deviance. The University of Ornemouth is proud to recognize her unique achievements as a cultural historian in an area that she has made her own, but into which she has welcomed many of her admirers.

  Professor Humphrey Clark reads this short summary of the past forty years of Ailsa's eventful life with admiration and a mute surprise. It is remarkable both for its discretion and its literacy. He could not have put it better himself. He could not have put it as well. He could never have encompassed Ailsa's career with this precise and generous clarity. Whoever wrote this knew who its subject was and what she had done. Whether the author knows the subject personally is not manifest, but the encomium has authority. It avoids the word 'celebrity', which in the context of Ailsa's biography has become almost unavoidable, and it refrains from mentioning any detail of her private life. There is nothing here carried mindlessly and lazily over from old press files, and there is no mention of the scandalous and tired story of the foetus-on-a-chain. There is no allusion either to Martin Pope or to Tommy Kelman. There are no misspelled words, no grammatical errors, no solecisms. The restraint is unusual, the tone encouraging. 'Lucid and dramatic exposition' is a felicitous and, one might say, a forgiving phrase.

  Professor Clark looks out of the window, and then he looks down at his large-faced waterproof watch. Ornemouth is less than two hours away, if there are no more delays or unscheduled stops.

  The old LNER train used to take seven hours, from Coventry to Ornemouth.

  The waterproof watch was given to him by his parents for his twenty-first birthday. It has kept good time, even underwater, amongst the fishes. It had been the last word in its day, and it is still a faithful timepiece.

  No, there is no mention of her second husband Martin Pope. Pope too is still a 'celebrity', although his name is less fashionable, less current, more arcane than Ailsa's. Martin Pope had more or less abandoned the theatre for opera, and Humphrey does not follow opera. He goes to concerts occasionally, alone, but not to the opera or to the ballet, except when he is invited for public occasions, to make up a party. The programme for special occasions consists usually of mainstream work. Martin Pope's productions have become mannered, minimalist, some say mad.

  Humphrey had recently met a young woman whom he took to be the daughter of Martin Pope and Ailsa Kelman, although he had not during their brief encounter worked out her identity and parentage. It had come to him later, as he was walking home from Burlington House through illustrious night-time Mayfair towards Portland Place and Regent's Park. The child had had a look of her mother, and had been indicatively named. Marina Pope was employed by a learned society, and had been delegated to look after him at a gathering in honour of a Fellow of his old college. He had half-recognized her name because she had pinned it helpfully to her bosom, though he had not at first taken in its message.

  They had chatted, agreeably: she was well briefed, and had asked him about the Green Grotto, as people did, but her manner had been so unassuming and so lacking in innuendo that he had been able to respond pleasantly, without displaying the prickling spines of resentment. She had told him that her seven-year-old son Sam liked fish, and that she had taken him to the South Bank Aquarium, where he had stroked the flounders in the Touch Tank. She had never been to the Green Grotto: should she take Samuel there too? And did the fish enjoy being petted, or was it cruel to touch them? Sam longed to go for a Sleepover in the Green Grotto, and to sleep on an inflatable mattress amongst the illuminated fish tanks. Should she encourage him? Would it be a fun thing to do?

  Of course, of course, said Humphrey.

  The Sleepover was one of the better initiati
ves of the Grotto.

  'I'd have loved to have been able to do that, when I was a boy,' said Professor Clark. 'I thought of taking my grandson, when he was over from Boston, but I'm too old for that kind of caper now.'

  Marina Pope was pretty, tentative, gentle of speech, and somewhat sad and diminished of demeanour. She looked tired. Working late hours, if you have small children, is tiring. Even he knew that.

  At least she had not ended up as a foetus in a necklace, or as an advertisement for abortion law reform.

  Was it his fault, wondered Humphrey, walking home, that the child had looked so pale? Was it his fault that Ailsa had gone back to Martin Pope, like a dog to its vomit, and married him? Damage has no limitations.

  'Always ready to accept responsibility...' his school reports had said.

  Of course it was not his fault.

  He knew that whatever had happened to Ailsa's daughter was nothing to do with him, but he could not prevent his mind from moving along the old tracks.

  When he had reached home that night, sitting in his large and solitary apartment, listening to the howls of the wolves of the Zoo, he had been unable to resist consulting the dangerous red-bound gold-lettered reference book, and had, by cross-checking, established that both Ailsa Kelman and Martin Pope laid claim to one daughter as issue of their cross-referred but long defunct marriage.

  So that had indeed been Marina Pope, who was, after a manner of speaking, his stepdaughter. His secret stepdaughter.

  He wondered if Marina knew who was the father of the half-brother or half-sister who had dangled on a chain around her mother's neck.

  Ailsa was a brute.

  So, he and Ailsa Kelman had but one child each, one daughter each. There was a symmetry in that. He had lost his daughter to America, but maybe Ailsa had maintained better contact with hers.

  Maybe he would ask her. Maybe when he saw her he would be able to risk saying to her something trivial, something friendly, like, 'Ailsa, how good to see you again, after all these years, I met your lovely daughter recently at Burlington House, did she tell you?'

  Is that how it could be resolved? In simple-hearted social friendliness? Human beings are very good at triviality. They can adapt to almost any level of social intercourse. They can live better, perhaps, in the shallows than in the depths. It had been his mistake to try to descend too far.

  The press release describing Ailsa is so unexpectedly acceptable that, fortified, he turns the pages of the leaflet to find the entry on his own life and work, hoping that maybe it will restore his confidence in himself and tell him who he is and why he is here. His paranoia over the last few years has become intense, at times disabling, although, like many paranoids, he has made a good job of concealing it.

  Paranoia has made him a lonely man. A lonely public man. There are many of these, but he has the rare distinction of knowing what he is.

  He dreads the cursory dismissal, the patronizing compliment. But why should he find them here, when it is honour to him that is intended?

  Hic labor, hoc opus est.

  What he finds is acceptable to him. His curriculum vitae has more of the ring of an obituary than Ailsa's, but that is not surprising, for she is now more in the public eye than he. He reads that he was born in Covington, but had spent 'formative boyhood years in Ornemouth, which contributed to his love of marine life'. His innovative work on the underwater tagging of wrasse, his study of habitat preference and population growth, his successful directorship of the laboratory, his early election to the Royal Society and his skills as an administrator are all accorded a brief space. There is no mention of Portal or of Moule or, more surprisingly, of the Green Grotto. Nor is there an account of his dead-end study of the structure of the parathyroid hormone, a study so devastatingly and successfully completed by Portal and Herzog. That section of his life is as though it had never been: it has been excised as neatly as though the protective Mrs Hornby herself had dictated the terms.

  (Maybe she had?)

  The mini-essay ends,

  Professor Clark will be remembered not only for his scientific achievements but also for his ability to convey the complexity of the myriad interdependent but individual lives that make up the marine environment. In an age of increasing specialization, his most widely read work, The Immortal Shore, is a reminder that, though we may see eternity in a grain of sand, we may not discover it so easily in a laboratory.

  He reads these last sentences over and over again, looking for the hidden barb. Does it imply that he has wrenched success out of failure? Is he being dismissed as a second-rate scientist, as a popularizer, as a soft-bellied and sentimental ecologist, as a waffler of codswallop? He recognizes the quotation from Blake, for it is a quotation much used by scientists and science journalists, but it seems to be used here with an unusual if enigmatic care.

  He wonders who is responsible for the wording of these brief eulogia, and whether the Public Orator will be up to the mark. He thinks that maybe he should have spent more time preparing a proper speech for his address the next day. He has his notes, but maybe they will not be adequate. The Ornemouth standard, he now belatedly discovers, is unexpectedly high. It was wrong of him to have thought he could mumble and ad lib his way through, on the lazy and patronizing grounds that Ornemouth is a small, new, provincial university in a small border town. To Oxford or Cambridge or St Andrews, to Chicago or San Diego, he would have paid more respect.

  It is true that he had spent 'formative boyhood years in Ornemouth', although this aspect of his intellectual history is not always invoked. He has not kept it secret, and indeed he had assumed that there was a link between the invitation, the honour and his sojourn in Finsterness. But it is surprising to find it thus singled out for mention, when so much else of his career has been mercifully omitted.

  The programme for the degree ceremony displays coloured photographs of the university campus and of some of its halls and buildings. The campus covers a green-field site, a mile or two inland from the little port and the Old Town, but it is centred on Hawick Old Hall, an old mansion that has been rescued by academe from neglect and death duties. During the war, it had been commissioned as a girls' boarding school, and after standing empty for some years had passed into a transitional phase as a Field Study Centre.

  Humphrey cannot remember anything of the Old Hall's history. He is not sure that he has ever seen it. It had not been part of his boyhood map. Had it been too far away, or out of bounds, or merely uninteresting to small boys? He remembers vividly the beach-hut café, and the mound of dried excrement, and Sandy and Tommy's escapade to the cement runways. He can remember the Crescent Picture House. He can remember St Cuthbert's Rock and Barbed Wire Island. But Hawick Old Hall is a blank.

  How small their world had been, and yet how illimitably vast.

  He looks again, hardened now to memories, at Ailsa's paragraph. The only topographical reference there is to her place of birth, which also has a contextual significance, for it marks her out as a child of the north. Universities tend towards the distribution of regional favours. Bonsett is less than a hundred miles from Ornemouth, and thus is well within its sparsely populated catchment area. Ornemouth can lay legitimate claim to the Kelmans. He wonders if Ailsa Kelman has received honorary degrees from the more ancient universities of her past and her heritage, from Durham, or from Edinburgh, or from Newcastle. He had not thought to look for these distinctions, when he had guiltily and furtively opened the perilous paranoid red book in search of the pedigree of Marina Pope.

  He thinks of his mother's collection of St Cuthbert's beads, so carefully gathered on the shore at Finsterness. They had survived for many millions of years, and they had survived the return to Covington: where were they now? He thinks of St Cuthbert, and of the Venerable Bede, and of the plump and friendly mild-faced seals that swam companionably in the shallows round Holy Island, like illustrations of Elaine Morgan's aquatic hypothesis.

  His mother would have been proud of his world
ly success, but she had not been very pleased when she had discovered that he had once been married to the notorious Ailsa Kelman. He had told her, during her last illness, at her bedside, thinking it right to confess before she died, but she had pretended not to hear, and she had never again alluded to his youthful indiscretion. He did not know whether or not she had passed the information on to her daughters. If she had, they too had kept their mouths shut. Denial is an easy English route.

  His mother had thought that his wife Dorothy Portal was a nice girl. He had not disabused her. She had lived to see her granddaughter, but she had not lived to witness the divorce.

  He sighs, and resigns himself to the task of looking through the rest of his pink folder of paperwork. Now is the time to memorize the names of the Vice Chancellor and the Public Orator, of the other fellow-graduands, of the senior professors. He is acquainted with the head of the Department of Marine Biology, a St Andrews man called Jimmy Ruthven, but other members of the department are unfamiliar to him. And he must get to grips with the timetable. There is a reception, this evening, at the Queen's Hotel, to be followed by a dinner, and in the morning there will be an assembly at the bell tower, a procession through the town, a motorcade to the university, the degree ceremony, the speeches, the recessional, the luncheon at Hawick Hall. He need not fear to look, for he has surely seen the worst that the folder can hold.