The Sea Lady

by Margaret Drabble

  As Humphrey watches her antics, it comes to him that forgiveness need not be maintained in time. It may come in an instant, like grace. It need not endure. One may be redeemed in an instant. Repentance needs only an instant, a measurement too small to show on the clock face. They have forgiven one another, for this instant, and that will suffice.

  The Final Curtain and the Last Tableau

  Dame Mary sings at her own memorial service, as she had threatened to do, and the gay world lines up to hear her and to salute her as she bids it an operatic and posthumous farewell. Her ashes will be scattered in the Thames and snapped at by disappointed fishes, but her voice lives on.

  The formalities are properly observed.

  Professor Humphrey Clark, in the third pew back, is wearing a dark suit with a sombre dark green Marine Society tie. Next to him stands Sandy Macfarlane Clegg, whose paler tie is striped with pink and silver.

  Ailsa Kelman, in the middle of the front row, is dressed in steel-grey and charcoal. Next to her stands her brother Tommy Kelman. His expression of affected solemnity is extremely irritating to Ailsa, and as he starts to bray out the words 'Blest are the pure in heart' she digs him in the shoulder with her elbow and tells him to shut up. He never could sing in tune, and she hates this pious hymn. She can't think why Mary had wanted it. It is hardly appropriate.

  Martin Pope is not there.

  Marina Pope is sitting near the back, with her partner, wearing a black cloth coat and a neat black hat. Her partner's navy blue hat is broad-brimmed, and adorned with a saffron feather.

  P. B. Wilton, an old hand at memorials, sits in the back row, making notes.

  It is midwinter. The church is cold. It warms itself, a little, from the bodies and the blood and the breath of the people, and from the sounds that run through the veins of its stones.

  Dame Mary had been planning her obsequies for many months, ever since the fatal diagnosis. She had made one or two late alterations, in the light of her late-flowering friendship with Ailsa and her daughter, both of whom had been attentive during her last months. Ailsa is scheduled to read one of the lessons.

  So Humphrey Clark and Ailsa Kelman are not even sitting in the same row, notes P. B. Wilton. The reconciliation has not been a full-blooded affair. But there is still time for further developments. Not much time, but a little. P. B. is a sentimental romantic at heart, like many sadistic gossips and voyeurs, and he wishes Humphrey and Ailsa to get together again. It would be more fun for him that way.

  The presence of Marina is surely promising.

  P. B. Wilton does not recognize Sandy Clegg, in any of his impersonations.

  The hymn draws to a sonorous conclusion. The congregation, despite its complement of professional singers, has rendered it very badly.

  Ailsa, who has been waiting impatiently and nervously for her moment of glory in the public eye, rises to her feet, and strides towards the pulpit. She mounts the worn stone steps. She straightens her shoulders, and opens her text at the marker, and she begins to read.

  It is a familiar text, a text for all seasons, and it ends with a dying fall. She reads it with unfeigned emotion. Her voice echoes and vibrates through the stones of the ancient nave and rises up to beat and flutter against the stained and jewelled and toughened glass of the high windows.

  The words are seeking the air.

  Vanity, saith the Orator, all is vanity. All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full. Unto the place whence the rivers come, thither they return again, Vanity, saith the Preacher, all is Vanity.

  Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them.

  For then the keepers of the house shall tremble, and all the daughters of music shall be brought low.

  Ailsa replaces the dark blue satin ribbon bookmark in its place in the Book of Ecclesiastes, and closes the thick wad of the gilt-edged Bible. She lays her hand in farewell on its womb-heavy cool leather binding. She has read the lines well, and without stumbling, but there is no applause, for this is not a theatrical performance. She looks out, over the congregation, and her gaze seeks Humphrey Clark. At first she cannot locate him, amidst the silent and attentive ranks, but there he is, looking upwards towards her. He inclines his head, very slightly, towards her, in recognition. He smiles, in support and approbation. She has done well. She begins her spiral descent from the pulpit. She treads carefully, clutching the polished brass handrail. It would not be good to slip now. Her ankles are not as reliable as they were when she was young. She feels the weakness of the many little bones, the intricate frailty of the joints. She finds it easier to walk up stairs than to walk down them. Although she has renewed herself in the waters of youth, the relentless approach of age has not been arrested.

  Humphrey watches her, as she slowly picks her way down, step by step. He is thinking that he will ask her to dine with him one day soon at the Dolphin, for old times' sake. It is too late, now, to become a specialist in the songbirds of Britain. He will never solve Riemann's hypothesis, and he will not hear the music of the prime numbers. He will continue like a guilty thief to avoid any reference to the parathyroid hormones of fish. But there is still time for a comforting dinner at the Dolphin, where he had first stretched out his hand towards her, and seen a glimpse of the long journey ahead of them. The journey draws to its end, but it is not over yet.

  The Public Orator watches. His role is over, his part is played. From his perch in the gallery he watches Sandy Clegg, his shadow self. Sandy's face is drawn and dry with suffering. The dry point of the needle of suffering has etched itself in lines and wrinkles into his fine pale skin. The Public Orator cannot alleviate Sandy's suffering. He is powerless. There are no more words. Sandy has freed Ailsa and Humphrey, but himself he cannot free. Sandy is not a coward, and he does not look for comfort. This is the way of it. Sandy hears the echoes of the words of the Preacher, as they spiral upwards, and waste themselves in the empty air.

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank the Royal Society for inviting me to be one of the judges of the Aventis Science Book Prize for 2003, a task which I enjoyed so much that it prompted me to attempt a novel with a man of science as its protagonist. I would also like to thank Dr Geoffrey Potts, who talked to me about marine biology and diving, and made me wish I were young enough to learn to dive myself. Elaine Morgan's books on the Aquatic Ape hypothesis have been a joy and an inspiration to me. I have taken some poetic licence with the names of fish, though in the underwater realm nothing seems impossible, and some of the strangest things are true. Any mistakes about marine biology and evolution are, of course, mine alone, and all the characters, both scientific and unscientific, are wholly fictitious.