The Sea Lady

by Margaret Drabble

  It has all gone wrong. It is too hard for him. There is no sense in it. All those years of moral effort, the struggle, the resistance, the persistence, the seeking, the stubborn search for and hope of meaning, the hope of virtue, the claims of the super-ego, all to end here, shamed and choking, tricked and shamed by Finsterness and his boyhood friend.

  Hic labor, hoc opus est.

  It is hard, it is hard. Goodness and generosity are required of him.

  But he is not up to it. He cannot clamber back up to the light of day.

  He surrenders to grief. The foreshadowed prospect and then the living and forgiving sight of Ailsa on this night had at first seemed to offer a truce, then even a reprieve and a possibility of the remission of sins: or if not so much, then at least a call to a renewed and not impossible effort. But the sight of Sandy Clegg has filled him with unutterable despair.

  Is he having a stroke? Or is it merely a spasm of violent indigestion?

  To admit to a hollow failure on all levels – moral, emotional, professional – that is the hardest thing. That is the bar to which Public Orator Sandy Clegg has so cruelly, and in public, summoned him.

  Humphrey shuts his eyes, and submits, but when he opens them again after an eternity of horror they are all still smiling around him, unconcerned, as though they were characters in some other more pleasing drama, a drama scripted in a lighter vein. The conversation continues, now on a high note of banter, as Ailsa Kelman accuses Sandy of having changed his name in order to mislead them all.

  'You trickster, you Machiavelli!' she attacks.

  Oh God, how he loved and how he loves his Ailsa! Where does she find her courage? And how could he ever have been brave enough, so long ago, to board her?

  'When were you going to let us know? Or were you going to sit there laughing at us?' demands Ailsa.

  'I would probably have declared my hand later in the evening,' says Sandy demurely, 'if it had seemed appropriate. But I wasn't sure if you would remember me.'

  Ailsa finds this remark preposterous and disingenuous. She has spent many hours poring through his mother's wartime diaries at the University of Sussex in the Mass Observation Archives at Falmer, trying to reconstitute every moment of their mutual past: she has solicited and published (though with less publicity than her work usually attracts) her comments on them and other related diaries of the period. Surely he must know this? But perhaps he does not. She is aware that a whole minefield of disclosures and denials and disclaimers may lie before the three of them, and she stalls for a second, and eats a cherry. After all, she thinks in half an instant, it is true that I might not have made a connection, it is true that I might not have known, had I been as stupid and forgetful and witless as some people are, had the names of Clark and Clegg meant less to me.

  This small pause gives Humphrey time to recover an appearance of equanimity, and he turns to the headmistress and says, 'Dr Macfarlane – my old friend Sandy – and I were at school together for a while at Finsterness. But it is a long time ago.'

  His voice sounds unnaturally low and hollow and pompous, like a bell. Its pained timbre is, perhaps, further distorted by Dame Mary's pastilles.

  Sandy, who is watching Humphrey intently, expands on this statement.

  'It is a lifetime ago. It is fifty years ago, since we last saw each other.'

  'Let us not count the days and the years,' disclaims Ailsa, with an attempt at a conventional but inapposite feminine disclaimer.

  'But surely you may rejoice in them, and be proud of them,' says Sandy, with a mocking gravity. 'After all, we are here to celebrate those years, and the achievements of those years.'

  How much does he know, this enigmatic name-changed aged Orator? Does he know of the hidden marriage? She can tell from his smug and contained demeanour that he does. Are there other secrets he knows, as yet unknown to her and to Humphrey, the gullible and innocent victims of this elaborate party trick? Secrets otherwise known only to God?

  Inspired, she pounces on Sandy Clegg.

  'You remember my brother Tommy? My brother Tommy Kelman?'

  'Of course,' says Sandy, suavely. 'How could I forget? I learned half of what I know from Tommy.'

  'Ah!' says Ailsa.

  'Yes,' says Sandy, thoughtfully, 'I've seen Tommy from time to time, over the years. We've kept in touch, after a fashion.'

  The notorious name of Tommy Kelman fragments and disperses the conversation, as others round the table rashly rush in to lay claim to his dubious acquaintance. Tommy, says the duchess, is an old chum of the duke's, and has often been to stay at the castle: Tommy's wife is one of her best friends, they were at school together, they had played tennis together, they had flunked their A-Levels together...

  Ailsa and Humphrey fall silent, separately, as they dwell on the implications of Sandy's associations. Who is Sandy, and what has he become? Their shared but dissimulated confusion gives them a comradely and palpable sense of collusion, and Humphrey begins to feel a little better, and almost to sense a kind of grim amusement rising in him as he hears Sandy explaining to the duchess that the university had thought of honouring Tommy and Ailsa Kelman in the same ceremony, as a rarely distinguished brother-and-sister duo, but had thought better of it: Tommy would have to wait for another year, and let his little sister take precedence for once.

  Ailsa's expression, as she listens to this bit of plot, is a study. She grabs another cherry, eats it, spits out the stone into the cup of her palm, then spears a bit of rotten cheese on the point of her knife, then puts it down again. Then she lays her left hand on top of Humphrey's, and squeezes it. He looks down at her defenceless little wrist, and her ringed and wrinkled fingers, and is filled with tenderness and regret. He can feel the slump of her energy, and the effort of will with which she tries to regain it. The touch of her is at once strange and familiar. Nobody touches him now, and yet she has dared to reach out for him. She has laid claim to him, for all the world to see.

  These bracelets cannot be the bracelets that he bought her in Athens, for how could such cheap and trumpery little trinkets have survived the battering of the years, even had she cared to cherish them? She had worn his bangles in the Hall of the Muses, to praise Byron and to denounce and reclaim Delacroix, but that had been decades ago.

  She has simply bought more of the same, as people do. Faithfully, she affects the same style, of silver, of sequins, of scales, and of guanine and essence of Orient.

  They sit there, side by side, in a kind of stupor, as the feast unravels and reshapes itself, as guests begin to depart to and return from the cloakrooms. There is no new seating plan for the end of the evening: Ailsa, when she returns from refurbishing herself, finds Humphrey still in his place in a trance, behind his honest name card which tells him who he is. Whatever ill may ail him, she deduces, it is not a weak bladder. Side by side, with a good view of the platform, they sink into the stunned passivity of spectators, to watch the fat lady sing. Tommy Kelman, in either of their places, would have been bustling forward, asserting himself, getting in on the act, making sure that everybody knew who he was (and who was he?), but they sit in shock, waiting for the music, as they try to process the evening's events and the significance, if any, of the sudden reappearance in their lives of Sandy Macfarlane Clegg.

  Dame Mary is stout of body and spirit. She gives a jolly little preamble, about her Scottish ancestry and her family connections and her delight at being back in the very special little town of Ornemouth, of which she has such happy memories. And then she sings. Her singing voice is unearthly and seems to issue from a different personality and from a different order of being. Her speaking voice is friendly, embodied, double-chinned and full of chuckles: her singing voice is inhuman in its beauty.

  She gives them an air from the Orkneys and a modernist snatch from an eminent Scottish composer. She sings an unfamiliar setting of Wordsworth's 'Highland Lass', single in the field. Then, with apologies, she gives them 'the unavoidable, the inevitable, the incomparabl
e' Robert Burns.

  She sings.

  O, my love's like a red, red rose

  That's newly sprung in June:

  O my love's like the melodie,

  That's sweetly play'd in tune.

  As fair art thou, my bonnie lass,

  So deep in love am I,

  And I will love thee still, my Dear,

  Till a' the seas gang dry.

  Till a' the seas gang dry, my Dear,

  And the rocks melt wi' the sun:

  I will love thee still, my Dear,

  While the sands o' life shall run.

  And fare thee well, my only love,

  And fare thee well a while!

  And I will come again, my love,

  Tho' it were ten thousand mile!

  It is a wicked trick. There is hardly a dry eye in the house. Ailsa's eyes are red and bloodshot like the eyes of an old dead fish on the slab.

  Humphrey sighs, a heavy sigh of mortality, and then he squares his shoulders, like a man, and sits upright. He feels a new resolve rising in him. He will have it out with Sandy Clegg. He will not take this assault upon his emotions without protest. The shock could have killed him, at his age. He hasn't been feeling well all day. He will expect an account of this prank.

  The Symposium

  When the guests have departed, to their castles and their cottages and their university lodgings, the three honorary graduands and the Public Orator meet in the cosy Edwardian Heather Lounge for a nightcap. Sandy has it all arranged, and they follow him, docile, like dogs, and settle down at his bidding. The armchairs are deep and comfortable, and a full bottle of Macallan's ten-year-old single malt whisky and a bucket of ice and a glass jug of tap water and a green plastic bottle of sparkling Highland Spring stand waiting for them on a homely round wooden table, scarred with many a stain and a circle. Sandy does the honours, and pours for each one of them a generous tumbler. None of them thinks to demur or decline. They accept their whisky and their fate. They raise their glasses to one another, silently, and take their first sip.

  They look historic, anachronistic, in their evening dress. They seem to inhabit a nineteenth-century oil painting of uncertain genre: not quite a salon or a conversazione piece, but something along those lines.

  Ailsa is the first to speak.

  'You are an evil man, Alistair,' she declares, with a mournful extravagance.

  Then she relapses into silence.

  'That's a little hard,' says Sandy reflectively, after a while.

  'I suppose you think this is funny,' continues Ailsa, in a lighter tone.

  'No,' says Sandy.

  Dame Mary pulls towards herself a little tapestry stool, and puts her feet up on it, and cocks her head on one side, waiting. She has ascertained that these three are old friends, of a sort, and she wants to hear more. She is not sure where she comes into the story, if at all, but she senses entertaining gossip, and is happy, for the moment, to sit back and listen. She knows she has met Sandy Macfarlane before, somewhere surprising, somewhere incongruous, in slightly risqué company, probably at a party in Earls Court, and wonders whether this has any relevance to her honorary degree or to this small gathering. All things considered, she is in good spirits. She has done her bit. The relief of having successfully sung for her supper is still warm in her belly, like a mulled posset, though behind the glow in her gut she is beginning to feel just a tiny bit hungry. It's hard to enjoy your food, when you have to perform later, and the meal, though fancy, had not been very filling. She had only picked at it.

  'So why did you change your name?' persists Ailsa to Sandy. 'Why the disguise?'

  'Why not?' says Sandy. 'Women change their names. Why shouldn't I?'

  'I didn't,' says Ailsa.

  'Nor did I,' echoes Dame Mary.

  'Times have changed,' says Sandy.

  Humphrey and Ailsa stare at Sandy uneasily, a little apprehensively. Sandy looks from the one to the other, as though he has no answer to offer, as though the mystery will remain a riddle without an answer.

  And then he relents.

  'I changed my name for two reasons. Do you want to know them?'

  Humphrey and Ailsa exchange glances, and then they nod, with an encouraging eagerness. Yes, they want to hear his account of himself. They are willing to be a receptive audience.

  'I changed my name,' says Sandy, because Sandy Clegg is an unfortunate name. It's not a pretty name. It's a heavy name, an ugly name. An inferior-form-of-life sort of name. Do you know what a cleg is?'

  Humphrey nods, but Dame Mary and Ailsa shake their heads. Sandy bows towards Humphrey, who is obliged, as so often, to take the role of schoolmaster.

  A cleg is a horsefly,' he whispers hoarsely. 'Cleg-flies are bloodsuckers. Well, the females are. The female is more dangerous than the male.'

  'I think that's more than we need to know,' says Dame Mary, with a mock and girlish giggle.

  'Well, I never liked the name of Clegg,' continues Sandy. 'In fact, I hated it. And Macfarlane is my middle name, and always has been. I've a right to it. It's a more attractive name. It's more distinguished. Don't you think?'

  They do not judge this apologia worthy of an answer, so he continues.

  'So I changed my name. I began to use Alistair Macfarlane as my nom de plume. And then I began to use it professionally, and now it is my name.'

  This is a clever move. Nobody dares to ask him what he has published, under this nom de plume. They ought to know, but they do not know, and they are not sure how to ask. Maybe he will tell them?

  'That's only one reason,' says Dame Mary, overriding this small obstacle. 'Come on, out with the other.'

  'The other reason is that at first I did not want my family to know my identity. I was a criminal, in the eyes of the law, and I do not think my parents would have liked that.'

  The high-minded Humphrey is bemused by this remark, and Ailsa's thoughts flit disbelievingly to her wicked brother's insider dealings with television network shares, but Dame Mary is quicker off the mark, and guesses the explanation in one. She was right, she must have met him at one of those parties in Earls Court.

  'You mean you were gay,' she says. 'Well, anyone can see that. Your parents must have known.'

  Sandy looks slightly deflated by the pre-emptive speed of this remark, but he concedes at once.

  'I suppose they did,' he says, 'but we didn't want to have to talk about it. And they wouldn't have liked the poems. Or, later, and even less, the memoir. And they wouldn't have liked my partner. And he wouldn't have liked them.'

  'Now you've given more than two reasons,' says Dame Mary. 'So you might as well tell us everything.'

  As she says this, the grandfather clock in the corner of the Heather Lounge strikes the quarter with an indeterminate high single silvery note.

  'Well, nearly everything,' amends Dame Mary. 'Give us an outline. Give us a plot summary. We don't want to be up all night.'

  So Sandy Clegg tells his tale.

  Sandy's Story (abridged version)

  Once upon a time, says Sandy, there was a little boy called Sandy, who lived in a picturesque little fisherman's cottage, in a village at the end of the world. He was a happy little boy, and he played happily on the sands, in his kingdom by the sea. When he was a child, he played like a child, and he went to the village school with all the other village children. And then he grew up and put away childish things and went to the big old school of stone across the bridge. There Sandy fell in love with words and with language and became very unhappy, and the classics master fell in love with Sandy and became very unhappy. And then Sandy went off to Oxford to read Greats.

  And at Oxford Sandy Clegg began to write poetry, and he co-edited a university magazine with a poet who has subsequently become (for a poet) well known, and the little magazine published Sandy Clegg's poems under the name of Alistair Clegg.

  ('Copies of that magazine are collectors' items now,' says Sandy dryly, in parenthesis, 'but not because of my poems.')
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br />   And after Oxford the young man drifted miserably, sick at heart and down at heel, guilty and miserable, trying to scratch a living as a journalist and a poet and an extra-mural lecturer, and then he went to Paris, as such young men do, and got in with the wrong set, and started to write homoerotic pornography for the Olympia Press.

  This unexplained jump in the narrative momentarily jolts his listeners out of their inert Listen-with-Mother mode: Humphrey reaches for the whisky and refills his glass in a devil-may-care, in-for-a-penny-in-for-a-pound manner; Dame Mary's mind leaps involuntarily to the exotically metal perforated leather-dressers of the Earls Court party and the diversionary relief of a ham sandwich, and Ailsa emits a small squawk of surprised admiration.

  A period of happiness and fulfilment ensued (Sandy does not give much detail) and Sandy Macfarlane (also known as Max Angelo) exchanged neurotic celibacy for a multiplicity of partners (the use of the phrase 'wrong set' had, as his listeners now realize, been ironic) and, eventually, he had found true love with a handsome continental intellectual.

  Are we still in Paris?' prompts Ailsa, who is wondering if her sojourn in that city had overlapped with his, and if so, whether they had ever unknowingly bumped into each other, in a café on a boulevard, in a gallery, in a bookstore, or crossing a bridge over the Seine.

  'Yes,' confirms Sandy, 'it began in Paris, though we were soon to move to the West Coast and all it had to offer.'

  'Beach Boys?' suggests Dame Mary eagerly, who seems by now to be well in tune with this part of the tale, and Sandy nods in agreement.

  'Great days, great days,' says Dame Mary to herself.

  But it had not been great for long. In California, Sandy continues, the lover falls ill, and the story takes a dark turning. This is not an AIDS story, for at that period AIDS had not yet begun to terrorize the gay world, and indeed had not even been identified. This is a good old-fashioned drugs story, with a bad ending, says Sandy.