Ailsa groans.
'Don't talk crap,' she says scornfully, in the tones of the old Ailsa.
Dame Mary, ahead of them, is limping. Sandy and Ailsa moderate their pace.
'You kept in touch with Tommy,' says Ailsa. 'Why did you keep in touch with him? He's the celebrity, not me.'
As they parade slowly up the cobbled street, Sandy Clegg outlines the nature of his shady and somewhat compromising acquaintance with her brother Tommy. Ailsa's eyes pop out of her head.
'No!' she protests. 'Not really! He's supposed to be a married man.'
'Worry not,' says Sandy, in his old-fashioned parlance. 'All shall be redeemed. All shall be reborn. At the stroke of the evening bell, an hour before high tide, we shall all receive new souls.'
'I've brought my bathing suit,' says Ailsa gaily. 'I've got it in my handbag.'
And so the long hot day unfolded, the long and ghostly academic day of mumbled honours and rolled scrolls and illuminated letters and Gothic script and gowned students and Latin tags and fulsome speeches and newly minted rituals and ancient music. The students taking their first degrees looked very, very young. Ailsa, sitting primly exposed on the platform with her spine straight and her knees clamped politely and tightly together (posture, Ailsa, posture) watched their fresh and spotted and smooth and shining faces, their Nordic and European and Asian and African and Japanese features, and longed to be young again. Multi-ethnic were the students of Britain, even in faraway out-on-a-limb Ornemouth, and varied and modern and strangely combined and aggregated were the many modules of their degrees. Some of them, improbably, seemed to have been learning Swahili: others had been studying the science of sport. From Caledonia and the Caucasus they came, from Seoul and Yokohama, from Sri Lanka and Senegal and Suffolk, from Portpatrick and Pakistan and Peterborough. This was the new wave of gender and racial equality and equal opportunity which she had seen emerging, the coming of which she had applauded and analysed, and which would now leave her far behind as it rolled on towards an unimaginable future in which she would play no part. Up to the platform they marched, the young ones, one after another, in a roll-call of honour, to the tattered and occasionally swelling applause of parents, to the catcalls of peers and classmates, in black gowns that only partially concealed an eclectic array of dress: there were skirts of every possible length and colour, and trousers of many variegated fabrics, and a few tartan kilts, some affected by students not evidently of Scottish origin. Nobody was seen to be wearing jeans, so jeans must have been banned, but the footwear, unlike the clothes, observed a remarkable degree of uniformity, in that nearly all these new graduates and some of the postgraduates were wearing versions of the globally dominant and ubiquitous training shoe. To their owners these shoes were sharply differentiated by price and label and signification, but to the platform party they all looked much the same. Uniform, reflected the sociologist in Ailsa, reflects a deep need, and expresses itself in odd ways.
Ailsa suddenly remembered one of her fellow-judges at the Plunkett Prize, distinguished and conspicuous amongst the evening's glamorous revellers in her grey business suit and her shockingly clean white and pale blue Nike trainers. She remembered, in the same memory flash, that odd caption about the dense aggregations of solitary sea squirts, and told herself that she must ask Humphrey what this paradox meant. How can you be solitary and thickly clustered at the same time? And damn it, she must remember to text her daughter Marina about meeting for supper at the weekend. She'd forgotten yet again. She thought of writing a message to herself in ballpoint on the back of her hand, but reluctantly decided it wouldn't look good.
She hadn't been able to get to Marina's graduation ceremony. She'd been filming viewer-response to The Massacre of Chios in the Louvre, and couldn't get back in time. Marina had assured her it didn't matter, but maybe it had mattered.
On and on they came, the novitiates, each following each, to accept their scrolls, some stumbling, some smirking, some shy, some eager, some scornful, some with limp handshakes and some with firm, some making eye contact and some with a gaze aimed firmly at the floor. From the round world's imagined corners they came, and Sandy Clegg announced the name of each and every one of them, with an unhesitating and well-rehearsed command of the pronunciation of many languages. Each one of them was recorded in the annals, each name was inscribed in the book.
In the old days of childhood, Ornemouth had been homogenous and monochrome, its populace as undisturbed as the gene pool of the fish in the Pool of Brochan, but the presence of the university had changed all that. Currents were flowing in freshly from new directions, and the species were mixing and mingling.
At the end of the procession, Sandy in his role as Orator would pronounce the eulogia of the honorary graduands, and after that, Humphrey Clark would deliver his short speech of thanks and his words of exhortation.
Sandy betrayed no bodily sign that he had been up late, drunk deep, summoned up the ghosts of his past, and relived his entire life in a short span. His pallor was an everyday, habitual pallor, and he hid behind its mask. He was a good performer.
So was Dame Mary, who hid behind her shades and her expensive face powder and gave nothing away. Her ankle hurt, but so what? She knew how to be stoical in front of an audience. She was an old trouper, with decades of practice, accustomed to larger stages than this.
Humphrey was less successful in concealing stress. His head was sore, his throat was sore, and Dame Mary's gallantries had not dispelled his sense of premonition. But he knew he couldn't die here, in public, on a platform. He wanted to go home to die, in private, and the sooner the better. He was ready to throw in the sponge. He'd get through this ordeal, as best he could, and then he'd make his escape. Mrs Hornby could deal with the paperwork: she'd know where to find it. She knew his phobias and the contents of his pigeonholes. She knew where he'd filed his will.
He tried to sit upright and to attention, but he was conscious that he wasn't looking his best. He wished he'd written his little speech out on his laptop, and printed it out with large letters and spacing, instead of relying on the inspiration of the moment. He did not feel inspired, he felt overwhelmed. He was going to stutter and stumble. He would have liked to have been able to say something encouraging to these youngsters, and to tell them to avoid all the mistakes he'd made, but he was past it. The words would not come. And the prospect of sitting through Sandy's no doubt ironic and covertly malicious peroration of praise was humiliating.
He was feeling surreptitiously for Mrs Hornby's jottings when he became aware that Ailsa, sitting next to him on the front row of the platform, was trying to catch his attention. She had been fishing around noisily in her handbag for a pen and a scrap of paper, and now she successfully managed to pass him a note, as though they were in the back row of the classroom, not perched up here for all of Ornemouth to behold. His instinct was to stuff it into his pocket, but the expression on her face was both appealing and supportive, so he glanced down to see what she had written. Her message was banal, but it did the trick.
'Cheer up, chin up, perk up, Hump,' she had scribbled. 'We'll all do better next time round. Ever, ever, ever, Ailsa.'
Despite himself, it made him smile.
The Public Orator's appreciations of the two honorary ladies were elegant, witty and discreet. He gave away no secrets and he told no lies. Some of what he said was in Latin, so perhaps some hidden meanings lurked under the cover of an ancient tongue, but if they did, nobody spotted them. The congregation sat in docile silence, as he gave a résumé of the dazzling and triumphal careers, first of Ailsa Kelman, then of Dame Mary. Each had to stand to attention to receive the accolade, and neither flinched, though Dame Mary was seen to shift her considerable weight from foot to foot and to make the odd comical sympathy-seeking grimace.
Humphrey's citation came last, and as he stood to face it he was observed to look a little weary, quizzical, self-deprecating, perhaps even dejected.
The Public Orator stuck, for t
he most part, to the public domain. But in his last paragraph he paid tribute to Professor Clark's aunt, Miss Neil, the much-loved one-time teacher at the village school of Finsterness.
'The word Finsterness,' said the Public Orator, in summation, 'suggests, as some of you will know, Darkness. In the German language, Die Finsternis means darkness, obscurity or gloom. And Humphrey Clark was here as a child during the darkness and gloom of the Second World War. But to the children of Finsterness, it was a place of light and learning. The children played upon the shore, in sight of the immortal sea. And to Humphrey Clark's scholarship, inspired by these early years, we owe a sense of wonder, indeed of immortality. He taught us that, though inland far we be, we may yet see the children sport upon the shore. We yet may hope to hear the mighty waters rolling evermore. We welcome him home.'
Professor Clark was visibly moved by these words, as he lurched towards the lectern to give his response.
Many of the Orator's words were borrowed from Wordsworth, and Professor Clark knew them well.
Sandy Clegg would have given his right arm to be able to write words like those. He would have sawn it off himself with a hacksaw. But to write them, you have to feel them. To write them, you have to be pure of heart. To write them, you have to believe them.
Professor Clark was looking dishevelled: his gown was hanging unevenly, his cap was lopsided. He held a scruffy little wad of handwritten notes which he deposited upon the lectern. He cleared his throat, coughed, and began to speak. As he ran through the preliminary courtesies (Your Grace, Your Eminence, lords, ladies, gentlemen, fellow-graduates and honorary graduates) one of his scraps of paper detached itself and drifted on to the floor, to land at the feet of the Vice Chancellor. Humphrey gestured helplessly after it and let it lie.
He paused, at the end of his list of titles and arcane honorifics, and coughed again, and began again. He had decided to go for it. Ailsa, watching him, gave a silent cheer.
'Ladies and gentlemen,' he repeated, 'this is a very moving experience for me. I stand here before you in the presence of my oldest friend and my first love.'
He coughed again, lost his nerve, riffled through his scrappy bits of paper, and started off at a tangent.
The audience, or those members of it who were bothering to listen at all, was confused. Some were paying little heed, absorbed in private contemplation of private matters: they had not even attempted to identify the uninteresting grey-haired old scarecrows on the podium. Some were wondering who this blundering old fool was, and why he had been asked to speak, instead of that television celebrity, Ailsa Kelman, who would have made a much better job of it. ('He shouldn't have been allowed,' hissed one indignant local mother to her sister, in the second-to-back row. 'Maundering on about cats and goldfish and the girl next door, what's he on about?') Others looked nervously at their watches, and thought of their lunch. One or two listened with a keener attention, wondering how he would follow up his opening salvo.
Nobody, not even the speaker, could follow the tangled thread. Humphrey Clark was aware that he was in the grip of that recurrent nightmare of public figures: the nightmare of talking nonsense on a public stage.
Ailsa was wondering at what point she should deploy her long presentational experience to intervene and wind him up when he seemed, suddenly, to pull himself together.
And so,' he said, with a more-than-welcome note of finality, 'in conclusion, I would like to wish to all of you young people a free, happy, and adventurous future, in your chosen professions. And on behalf of Dame Mary McTaggart, my wife Ailsa Kelman, and myself, I would like to thank this innovative new university for the honour it has bestowed upon us. This is a numinous place, and it has been good for the spirit to return to the source.'
And he sat down, wiping his brow, pocketing his notes and adjusting his gown, to polite applause.
Most of the congregation was so relieved that the ceremony had come to an end that they did not even notice that he had claimed Ailsa Kelman as his wife. A few who did notice assumed it was bizarre wishful thinking or a slip of the tongue. Had not the unmarried Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice on a recent occasion even more strangely referred to President George W. Bush of the United States as her husband? People who talk too much in public get muddled: sometimes there's a Freudian explanation, sometimes there isn't.
Sandy Macfarlane Clegg, Mary McTaggart and Ailsa Kelman sat on their chairs like statues, smiling fixed smiles, until the music for the grand recessional began to swell forth from the orchestra in the musicians' gallery.
Then they rose to their feet, and they receded.
The Public Orator was satisfied with his grand finale.
Sandy Clegg has promised them rebirth and redemption with the incoming tide. They accompany their confessor, obediently, in the full encircling light of the early summer evening. Dame Mary has wished to be excused, pleading exhaustion and her twisted ankle, and Sandy has allowed her to retire. Her supporting role is over, and she is on her way home, on the five-forty train to King's Cross and St Vincent's Wharf and the remains of her own life.
Sandy drives Humphrey and Ailsa down to the little beach of the Victorian tidal bathing pool, to the beach that had been inexplicably forbidden during their childhood. He parks his nondescript car in a scruffy little unofficial car park on an uneven patch of dry earth surrounded by a joyously, irrepressibly springing scrub of yellow and purple wild flowers and bushes. He leads them through a little wooden wicket gate, towards the path and the steps that descend, through a tunnelled archway, to the hidden cove.
The cove is nearly empty, for it is late in the day, and most of its visitors have gone home for their tea. An elderly woman sits in a deckchair, in a severely upholstered black and white cotton floral sunsuit, with a towel on her head, her large and muscular reddish-brown shoulders naked to the sun, reading a book. A stout young couple in jeans stand arm in arm on the edge of the rocks, on a sloping shelf of seaweed-covered slate, gazing out to sea. A young mother joggles a mewing infant in a pushchair. A clutch of diehard children are gathered together on the southern bank, in their swimsuits, waiting on the brink.
It is a small communion of the few. They are all waiting for the incoming tide.
The pool is formed by an arc of rocks, which reaches across and encloses the little bay, forming an irregular circle. It is a bridge of natural rock, its breaches reinforced here and there by small artificial boulders of cement and aggregate. Notices warn children and the elderly not to venture on to the pool wall.
Another notice informs them that 129, 602 tides have flowed in and out of this bay since the archway approach was built.
It does not seem to be very many.
'What happens now?' asks Ailsa.
'We wait,' says Sandy.
They sit, in a row, on a rock, and wait.
The calm unruffled water level in the sheltered pool is low, and the barrier of the pool wall looks, from this angle, high. Beyond the wall, the more animated surface of the sea extends to the horizon, broken here and there by the jagged peaks of rocks. The light is strong. They can measure the rise of the tide by its level as it creeps up the rocks. It seems to move imperceptibly slowly, and yet it moves. At first Ailsa and Humphrey wonder if Sandy has mistimed his miracle, and brought them here too early, but after initial moments of doubt they grow calm and peaceful and trusting as they wait, for they can see that the sea will come.
It has been a journey of purification.
After a while, the sea beyond the low and stony wall grows brighter, and is seen to flow faster and more strongly. Currents display themselves and sparkle in ripples and eddies and flurries. The three friends are watching now to see where the water will make its first leap across the wall. Sandy has said that the point of entry varies, slightly, with the direction of the wind. This is a calm evening.
The surface beyond the brink gathers and swells and rises, like mounting tears.
And then it breaks. First, a solitary little spurt of s
eawater bravely splashes over, in a tiny low cleft to the left, and this is followed by a trickle, which becomes a stream, and then a little waterfall. To the right, another spot is breached, and the water begins to gush more continuously, here and there, on both sides, making its way over the wall, more and more rapidly, gathering momentum, gathering power, until the whole semicircle is pouring with descending glittering threads and cascades of running rushing water. The music of the waters grows louder as the water level within the bay rises to meet and mingle with the incoming sea, and, as it rises, the little knot of waiting children darts forth, and runs along the flowing almost-underwater barrier. The little ones hurl themselves from it, one after another, into the pool. They swim, they leap out again, they run along the wall again, they plunge in again. One of them produces a small red and yellow inflatable raft, on which, breast down, he breaches the rapids. He floats, climbs out, drags out his raft, pulls it along the wall, descends again, is reborn again. He repeats, and repeats, and repeats, and will go on until the waters meet and are one and are level and there is no more waterfall.
It is a scene of hilarity, of purification, of endless fun.
The children are brave and skinny, they are the new souls, each time they leap they gain a life. They splash and jump and pipe and squeal with joy.
Ailsa cries out in delight.
'It's like the Zambesi! It's like Niagara!' she cries.
The old woman in the deckchair lays down her book, rises up, and advances slowly on the pool. She walks into the water and joins the little souls and swims amongst them with stately strokes, her head held high.
Ailsa, seeing this, cannot restrain herself. She cannot resist.
She tears off her clothes, exposing her puckered ageing thighs and her triangle of grey wire hair and her sagging breasts to the evening light, and squeezes herself clumsily into the bathing suit she has been carrying around with her all day. She sheds her garments and abandons them with Humphrey and Sandy on the rock, and she runs into the water. Only the mad swim in the North Sea, but the sea is in her blood, and her salt blood meets the salt water. She gasps, she splashes, she strikes out, she waves to shore, and she flounders. She disports herself amidst the warmer shallows, which are forever renewed by the cold wash of the incoming main.
The Sea Lady Page 32