The Sea Lady

by Margaret Drabble

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  The Presentation

  Old Man Travelling

  The Bedroom Weeks

  Perfect Happiness

  The Hall of the Muses

  The Symposium

  Recessional

  The Final Curtain and the Last Tableau

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright © Margaret Drabble, 2006

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be submitted online at www.harcourt.com/contact or mailed to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc., 6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

  www.HarcourtBooks.com

  First published in Great Britain by the Penguin Group

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Drabble, Margaret, 1939–

  The sea lady/Margaret Drabble.—1st U.S. ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Reunions—Fiction. 2. Autobiographical memory—Fiction. 3. Marine biologists—Fiction. 4. Women scholars—Fiction. 5. Feminists—Fiction. 6. England—Social life and customs—1945—Fiction. 7. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

  PR6054.R25S43 2007

  823'.914—dc22 2006023778

  ISBN 978-0-15-101263-3

  Text set in Monotype Dante

  Printed in the United States of America

  First U.S. edition

  A C E G I K J H F D B

  You'll not forget these rocks and what I told you?

  You'll not forget me–ever, ever, ever?

  'Dialogue on the Headland'

  Robert Graves

  The Presentation

  The winning book was about fish, and to present it, she appeared to have dressed herself as a mermaid, in silver sequinned scales. Her bodice was close-fitting, and the metallic skirt clung to her solid hips before it flared out below the knees, concealing what might once have been her tail. Her bared brown shoulders and womanly bosom rose powerfully, as she drew in her breath and gazed across the heads of the seated diners at the distant autocue. She gleamed and rippled with smooth muscle, like a fish. She was boldly dressed, for a woman in her sixties, but she came of a bold generation, and she seemed confident that the shadowy shoals of her cohort were gathered around her in massed support as she flaunted herself upon the podium. She felt the dominion. It pumped through her, filling her with the adrenalin of exposure. She was ready for her leap.

  The silver dress must have been a happy accident, for until a few hours earlier in the day nobody knew which book had carried off the trophy. The five judges had met for their final deliberations over a sandwich lunch in a dark anachronistic wood-panelled room off an ill-lit nineteenth-century corridor. The result of their conclave was about to be announced. Most of the guests, including the authors, were as yet ignorant of the judges' choice.

  Ailsa Kelman's wardrobe could hardly have been extensive enough to accommodate all six of the works upon the short-list, a list which included topics such as genetically modified crops, foetal sentience and eubacteria: subjects which did not easily suggest an elegant theme for a couturier. Would it be suspected that she, as chair of the judges for the shortlist, had favoured a winner to match her sequinned gown, and had pressed for its triumph? Surely not. For although she was derided in sections of the press as an ardent self-publicist, she was also known to be incorruptible. The sea-green, silvery, incorruptible Ailsa. And her fellow-judges were not of a calibre to submit to bullying or to manipulation.

  The venue of the dinner might also shortly be observed to be something of a happy accident. The diners were seated at elegantly laid little round tables beneath a large grey-blue fibreglass model of a manta ray, which hung suspended above them like a primeval spaceship or an ultra-modern mass-people-carrier. They could look nervously up at its grey-white underbelly, at its wide wings, at its long whip-like tail, as though they were dining on the ocean floor. Like the costume of Ailsa Kelman, this matching of winner and venue could not have been planned. The museum was a suitable venue for a prize for a general science book with a vaguely defined ecological or environmental message, but the diners could as easily have been seated in some other hall of the huge yellow-and-blue-brick Victorian necropolis, surrounded by ferns or beetles or minerals or the poignant bones of dinosaurs. The dominant theme of fish had prevailed by chance.

  The programme was going out live, and noses had been discreetly powdered, hair adjusted, and shreds of green salad picked from teeth. Now the assembly fell silent for Ailsa's declaration. Although the winner did not yet know the result, the cameramen and women did, and some of the more media-wise of the guests were able to read the imminent outcome from their disposition. Great sea snakes of thick cable twisted across the floor and under the tables, and thinner ropes of wire clambered up like strangling weeds on to the platform and connected themselves to microphones and control buttons. The technology was at once primitive and modern, cumbersome and smart. The platform on which Ailsa stood was temporary and precarious, and the fake grass matting that covered it concealed a hazardous crack.

  Posture, Ailsa, posture, said Ailsa Kelman to herself, as she straightened her shoulders, drew in another deep breath, and, upon cue, began to speak. Her strong, hoarse and husky voice, magnified to a trembling and intimate timbre of vibration by the microphone, loudly addressed the gathering. The audience relaxed, in comfortable (if in some quarters condescending) familiarity: they knew where they were going when they were led onwards by this siren-speaker. They felt safe with her expertise. She took them alphabetically through the shortlist, travelling rapidly through the cosmos and the biosphere, sampling dangerous fruits, appraising the developing human embryo, interrogating the harmless yellow-beige dormouse, swimming with dwindling schools of cod and of herring, burrowing into the permafrost, and plunging down to the black smokers of the ocean floor. She summoned up bacteria and eubacteria and ancient filaments from the Archaean age, and presented her audience with the accelerating intersexuality of fish.

  Behind her, around her, above her, in the wantonly and wastefully vast spaces of the Marine Hall, swam old-fashioned tubby three-dimensional life-size models of sharks and dolphins, like giant bath toys, and the more futurist magnified presences of plankton and barnacles and sea squirts and sea slugs. Ailsa Kelman shimmered and glittered as she approached her watery climax. And suddenly, all the foreplay of the foreshore was over: Ailsa Kelman declared that the intersexuality of fish had won! The hermaphrodite had triumphed! Hermaphrodite: Sea Change and Sex Change was the winning title. The winning author was Professor Paul Burden, from the EuroBay Oceanographic Institute in Brittany and the University of California at San Diego.

  Applause, applause, as a tall bearded marine biologist picked his way over the seabed of Marconi cables towards the platform to receive his cheque and present his weathered outdoor face to the bright unnatural lights. A television person conducted the applause, encouraging a crescendo, insisting on a diminuendo, attempting, not wholly successfully, to impose a silence. Some members of the captive audience were by now quite drunk, and, deprived of the false concentration of suspense, were growing restless.

  The hermaphrodite had won!

  'This is a brilliantly written survey of gender and sex in marine species ... prefaced by a poetic evocation of a distant and placid asexual past ... covering bold hypotheses about the evolutionary origins of sexual reproductio
n, followed by startling revelations about current female hormone levels, current male infertility, and rising sexual instability caused by POPs and other forms of chemical hazards...

  Few were listening to the formal citation. However, because of the cameras and the controlling conductor, nobody could yet move. They had to sit and pretend to follow Ailsa Kelman's eulogy.

  The jaws of sharks, fixed in the gape of their everlasting grins, displayed their triple rows of teeth above the diners.

  Now the prize-winner was saying his few words. Oddly, he pronounced the main word of his title with an extra syllable, an unusual fifth syllable. 'Herm-Aphrodite,' he said, conjuring forth an intersexed Venus-Apollo from the waves, a goddess or a god of change. He spoke of intersexed males and females, of transitionals. 'When I was young, he was saying, hermaphrodites were more common in the invertebrate world. My first published paper was on the life cycle of the marine shrimp...'

  Ailsa Kelman stood on the platform, back straight, breathing evenly and listening hard. She smiled rigidly outwards and onwards as the marine biologist spoke. Professor Burden was speaking very well. He was a proper scientist, a hard scientist, but he was also a literary man, and keen to prove it. Now he had moved on to Ovid and his Metamorphoses and why they had become so fashionable at the beginning of the third millennium. He mentioned the nymph Salmacis and Hermaphrodite, joined together in one body in the fountain of life. The question of the mutability of gender which had so intrigued the ancients, he was saying, had now become a serious item on the very different agenda of evolutionary biology...

  Ailsa found it hard to concentrate on the content of his speech, elevated and displayed to the public view as she was, as she so often was. But she tried. She was dutiful, in her fashion. She was a professional.

  Public occasions enthralled Ailsa Kelman. She loved their special effects, their choreography, their managed glamour, their moments of panic, their humiliations, their heterogeneity, their ephemeral and cynical extravagance. She rose to these occasions and blossomed in the surf of them. She was in her element here.

  The marine biologist mentioned the escalating incidence of uterine cannibalism in certain species. Fish siblings, it seems, increasingly tend to devour one another in the womb. The womb is a surprisingly dangerous environment, he was telling the obligatorily attentive diners.

  Ailsa swept the cavern of the darkened room with the searchlight of her gaze, looking for predators and prey, for the faces she wished and feared to see. Her wicked brother Tommy was not here tonight, although he would probably have been invited. He was invited to everything. He would be at the Guildhall, or at the palace, or at the embassy, tickling or devouring other fish. She could do with a drink now, having prudently abstained during dinner. Soon she would be handed briefly back to her place at table, where she could receive the thanks of the president and the sponsors, and retrieve her evening bag and her refilled glass, and set off to cruise the room.

  Her evening bag was a sensuous little folly made of a kind of fine dull pewter-coloured chain mail. Its texture of soft silky metallic links was a joy to her fingers. It was a fetish bag. She had bought it in Scarborough, and she had owned it for thirty-odd years. She had never possessed a dress that became it as well as the dress she wore this night. Her little bag was a comfort to her, in her peacefully celibate late incarnation.

  Would she dare to wear her mermaid dress at the dinner near the northern borders after the degree ceremony at the end of the week? Or was it too metropolitan?

  This was the summer season of prizes and of honours.

  The television programme director was making frantic circular wind-down gestures at the marine biologist. The biologist was paying no attention to them, carried away as he was by his brief victory and by his important message about the shifting sands of sex. The director started to signal for assistance to Ailsa Kelman: they had to be off air in a minute and they urgently needed an exit line. Ailsa, seasoned though she was to such small presentational crises, was not quite sure how best to intervene. She had admired the book, and did not want to offend its large lean penguin-suited author. She did not wish to show him disrespect. But a camera lens was zooming in upon her glowing face, and she found herself brutally interrupting him by saying, 'And so, goodbye to you all from the Marine Hall and the Plunkett Prize ceremony, and our congratulations, once more, to the winner, Professor Paul Burden. Remember that fish are not always what they seem!'

  A more meaningless sentence have I never uttered, said Ailsa Kelman to herself as the director cued applause, as the cameras panned out to the pillars, as the silenced marine biologist bowed a little ironically beneath the looming belly of the manta ray, as jewelled and wrinkled and spotted and eager young white hands reached for wine bottles, as talk and laughter began to spread and splutter and wash from table to table. It was over, it was done, and now she could get down, carefully avoiding the dangerous creek in the rostrum, to join the fray. It could have been worse, it could have been far worse. The sponsors could not complain. She had worked hard, and earned her fee.

  Circling the room, glass in hand and little metal lucky bag dangling from her shoulder, she spoke to friends and foes in short bursts, moving on in mid-sentence, her eyes restlessly darting around the further reaches of the murky cavern. The face that she most keenly sought and avoided and hoped and feared to see was not here. He had not come, although this might be thought to be his natural habitat. It had not occurred to her, when she first took on this job so many months ago, that it might precipitate a meeting with him, after so much time, after so many years passed. But then she had begun to think he might be here after all, and that a confrontation might be even more imminent than she had more recently anticipated. Had he stayed away this night because of her? Did he think of her as often, as punishingly, as painfully, as she thought of him? Was he too perplexed by what had passed? Or had the heavy years silted over the memories of damage and distress and buried them beyond pain and beyond recall?

  Fossilized, petrified, mummified, oxidized, mineralized, entombed.

  Had he forgotten that he ever knew her? No, that could not be.

  She had made sure of that.

  She had not seen him in the flesh for decades. She had seen his photograph, as he must have seen hers, but they had not met. He had moved in different circles, and he had taken care to avoid her, as she had taken care to avoid him. They were both public figures, but their glittering spheres had been separate, discrete and crystalline.

  But at times, over recent months, she had felt that they must be coming together, like the iceberg and the Titanic. She had suffered, for a good year now, a superstitious sense of convergence. This week, next week, sometime ... Perhaps she had taken on this science book business in order to meet him again, and now was disappointed that he was not here. (This had been put to her as a possibility by the only other person who knew the whole hidden story: her confessor, her confidante, her lady from Rio.) It was time. It was time to face him again. But he was not here. He should have been here. He was a Fellow of the Society, and he had worked for many years with fish, but he was not here. She would have to wait for a reunion.

  But she would not have to wait for long. Although this night had failed as a rehearsal, the catastrophic event was at last imminent. He too, wherever he was this night, must by now surely know that they were about to meet again. He had sent Paul Burden to her as his herald, as his harbinger, to warn her. Do all marine biologists know one another? How large was the pool in which they swam, the big fishes of the underwater trade?

  Although he was well tanned, Paul Burden was not much of a diver. He was more of a laboratory man. Diving was out of fashion. Making that kind of a splash was out of fashion. It was all DNA and genes and chromosomes and microbiology and eubacteria these days. Or so all those books had taught her.

  The lofty space had seemed at first even murkier when the harsh glare of the television lights was dimmed, but now her eyes and her expectations ha
d adjusted, and she surged on cheerfully, consigning her sense of his absence to the lower depths of consciousness. She enjoyed these public post-prandial promenades, she enjoyed the attention, she enjoyed the slinky rub of her skirt on her firm thighs. Her feet were divinely comfortable in their little flat gold net slippers. In earlier days, at such events, she had vainly walked on high heels, on high knife heels, like Hans Andersen's poor Little Mermaid, but now she knew better.

  She had all at her command. She liked the random, promiscuous mingling, the screeches of false laughter, the dull murmur of platitude, the conviviality of strangers, the sparkle of bracelet and necklace, the clean flicker and colour and sheen of the female fabric, the dull heated faint nicotine odour of the male. She spoke briefly to congratulate Paul Burden, she spoke to the woman from Bristol who had written about extremophiles and black smokers, and she paused to compare notes with fellow-judge and distinguished gravel-voiced physiologist Professor Hilary Gravely, who was still uncompromisingly clothed in the workmanlike grey suit she had worn for the sandwich lunch, and whose feet were comfortably and conspicuously encased in brand-new white and pale blue Nike trainers. (She suffered, as she had told Ailsa over one of the judges' meetings, from bunions.) Ailsa was cornered by a radio interviewer, she produced a sound bite for a journalist, she presented her cheek to a one-time publisher. She kept moving.

  Most greeted her with a flattering friendliness, pleased to share her ephemeral circle of light, although one elderly gentleman went out of his way to accost her to tell her that the first three chapters of the prize-winning book were what he said 'could only be described as metaphysical tosh'. It was not clear whether he was an old buffer or a Nobel Prize-winner or both, but she listened, then smiled, then moved on. He no doubt thought she was a celebrity simpleton: why bother to protest and try to prove otherwise? She seemed to have learned, at last, to be less confrontational. It had been a hard lesson, but she hoped she had learned it. She was appeased by a more flattering brief encounter with an old flame, with whom she had once, decades ago, shared for a couple of nights an improbable bed in Adelaide: they greeted each other with cries of public delight, and he complimented her upon her speech.