The Sea Lady

by Margaret Drabble

  'Was that wonderful phrase about the placid asexual past from you or from Burden's book?' he wanted to know, as he stared intrusively, with the claims of an old intimacy, right into her eyes.

  The whites of his slightly protuberant brown eyes were jaundiced, and his polished forehead looked steep and bleak and confrontational beneath his streaked receding hair.

  'I think it was me,' said Ailsa. 'But it could have been him.'

  'Does he tell you, in his book, when sexual reproduction began?'

  'Nineteen sixty-three?' guessed Ailsa.

  'No, no, that was sexual intercourse. Sexual reproduction began in the Precambrian. Or the Silurian or the Devonian. Or some place and time like that. Didn't he tell you?'

  'If he did, I've forgotten. There was a lot to digest.'

  'And now it's back to parthenogenesis and asexual reproduction. The sexual imperative is over. Pity, in a way.'

  'It lasted our time,' said Ailsa.

  'It certainly did,' said the old flame, with a smirk of conspiratorial gallantry.

  'Brave days,' said Ailsa, distracted by thoughts of her only daughter Marina, both of whose children were the offspring of sperm donors.

  'But now we have Viagra,' he said, 'to keep placidity and asexuality at bay.'

  'We're probably better off with the placid asexual future,' said Ailsa.

  He agreed, too promptly.

  'Yes,' he said, 'sex causes nothing but distress. We're better off without it.'

  'You conceded that very quickly,' said Ailsa.

  'What else should I do?' he challenged.

  'I was in love with a marine biologist once,' said Ailsa impulsively.

  She continued, rashly, 'I was madly in love.'

  'Was that before or after our little fling in Adelaide?' asked her ageing and extinguished suitor.

  'Oh, long, long before. In the Precambrian, or the Silurian.'

  'Was he as handsome as Paul Burden?'

  'Of course.'

  'You're looking very well yourself,' he said.

  She stared at him appraisingly, in a detailed manner that implicated his vain attempt to disguise his thinning hair.

  'Women last longer than they used to,' she said. 'They're full of preservatives.'

  'So are we all,' he said: but he had lost her, and she was once more on her way.

  After a rolling tour of the tables she came to rest for a moment of refuge by a grouping of sea squirts set into a solid glassy display panel. The sea squirts (creatures labelled as Stolonica socialis and Polycarpa pomaria, of the Ascidian class) were tastefully placed against a frozen flowering bouquet of seaweed fronds of coral-pink and lettuce-green. A caption read, confusingly, that 'these solitary sea squirts often occur in dense aggregations'. Ailsa took this apparent paradox in, instantly, but knew she did not have time to worry about it now. She filed it, and moved on.

  The coral reefs were absorbing carbon dioxide at an alarming rate, the book on neurology and environmental pollution had argued. Or was it Paul Burden who had said that? She had read so many books on so many unfamiliar subjects in the past months that they had all merged and converged in her memory. Her brain was too full.

  But she did not fail to recognize troublemaker P. B. Wilton, the poison pen of the quality press, with his tight smooth pale-fleshed face and his high-set narrow eyes and his pale thin sandy eyebrows, who now advanced upon her refuge. She had known Phoebe, as he was known to his many enemies, for years. Had he had a face lift? If he were a woman, one would guess so. Or was it the tautness of malice, the perpetual strain of maintained mischief that so distorted his childlike ageing features? His skin seemed darker than usual, it had a hard pinkish finish, as though he had been on holiday in the sun, but the veneer was only skin deep. Beneath the burnish, he was a pale man still, an indoor man of obsequious spite. He had blood on his conscience, if not on his hands. He was a wanton killer. Broken marriages, ruined reputations, even a putative suicide or two had been laid to his charge.

  Poor Effie Fitzroy, she'd jumped off the roof of a multi-storey car park.

  P. B. had taken a stab or two at Ailsa, but unlike some of his victims, she had warded off his attacks.

  You wouldn't catch Ailsa jumping off a roof. She'd been near the edge, but she hadn't jumped.

  P. B. greeted her as an old friend, as an accomplice.

  Ailsa, treasure,' he said floridly, advancing to brush his face against her cheek.

  'Peter,' said Ailsa, inclining, but avoiding his touch.

  'A triumph,' said P. B.

  'So,' said P. B., 'this was a bold move on your part.'

  'What was?' asked Ailsa, with instant suspicion.

  'Reading all those books. Did you understand any of them?'

  'Of course.'

  'I haven't read any of them, of course. I know my limitations.'

  'I didn't understand them all, but I understood enough.'

  'Enough to make a judgement?'

  'Yes, enough to make a judgement.'

  They stared at each other, old adversaries, old rivals, both of them long-term inhabitants and survivors of the killing pool of the media. They knew each other's weaknesses, each other's strengths. P. B. knew that Ailsa Kelman could not resist any publicity, any exposure, however hostile. You trailed the bait, and she came snapping. She courted attacks, taunts, embarrassments, for the sake of the product, which in his view was the product of herself. She needed notice. She needed attention. She would never be satisfied. Indifference was death to her. Celebrity was the breath of life to her. She had invented herself, and reinvented herself, and reinvented herself yet again. Showgirl, academic, trophy wife, media star, media whore, and, in sum, a clever, clever girl.

  So he placed her, so he judged her, so he attempted to dismiss her.

  And he, what was he? Ambiguous, slippery, inconstant, treacherous, witty, poisonous, ingratiating, unmotivated. It was not clear to Ailsa that he was homosexual, as he was now generally supposed to be. He had had a wife at some point, it was rumoured, and now he had no known partner. If he was gay, he hadn't come out. If he was straight, he hadn't come out. A bisexual, hermaphrodite, neuter, androgynous, dissimulating covert heterosexual. A man of unmotivated malignity.

  Neither fish, flesh nor fowl.

  So she saw him.

  'So what next? What else?' asked Peter Wilton, in that harmless, sincere, companionable, curious way of his that had elicited so much indiscreet and interesting gossip from her and from others in the past.

  'Any journeys, any adventures, any holidays planned?' he pressed. 'Where are you spending the summer? Your daughter Marina says you're not a very good granny. I saw her the other day, going in to do her shift at Burlington House as I was going into the RA. Did you see the Soutine? Ghastly, ghastly. She says that her girlfriend's mother is much more reliable as a babysitter. She says that even the sperm donor sometimes babysits.'

  His hard unnaturally polished skin gleamed with an almost phosphorescent glow. There was no sign of wrinkles, of the natural forgiving fullness of age. She could see him, in a sudden perception, as an embryo, as a baby, as a neonate. She could see him as though reverted to a small child, with its innocent apprehension, its trusting vulnerability. Did he apply lubricants and ointments each night to preserve and polish this unpleasingly tight texture?

  She did not welcome these mean-spirited reflections, and she tried to shake them off. If women can fill themselves with preservatives, why shouldn't men?

  She did not believe that the sperm donor babysat, but if he did, it was good of him. She had the grace to think this thought, in passing, but she did not deliver it as a hostage to P. B. Wilton. She did not know who the sperm donor was. Her daughter Marina did not tell her mother everything. Marina kept her secrets. Ailsa did not like to think that she told these secrets to P. B. Wilton.

  She stared at her old friend Peter. They had known each other for thirty years. How had they become their savage selves? It was a mystery. They had mutated. T
hey had evolved into hard-jawed monsters of the deep, sexless, battle-scarred, smooth with defensive plating, enclosed in ageless shell.

  'In a couple of days,' she said, throwing him a sprat, 'I'm going up north to get an honorary degree, at the University of Ornemouth. That's the next excitement.'

  'Congratulations,' said P. B., opening his lashless eyes mockingly. He hesitated, and then he continued, with carefully offensive timing, 'Whatever for?'

  One had to laugh, and so she did.

  'Do you mean why am I going, or do you mean why am I getting the honorary degree?'

  'Whichever. Both.'

  'I'm going because we used to spend our summer holidays near there, and the degree is for my contributions to culture.'

  'Culture?'

  He let the word float questioningly in the air between them. A little sadly, it floated: waterlogged, submerging, a small paper boat too fragile to carry any cargo.

  'Culture,' she repeated.

  'There's a word,' he said, with a sigh that might have been of nostalgia. 'Yes,' said Ailsa.

  'There was a word,' he said. His tone was ambiguous, as usual, but it bore a taint or tinge of respect or regret.

  'Yes,' she repeated.

  He rallied.

  'But surely it's a very nouveau little university? And a tin-pot little place? I'm not sure if it deserves you. It's not worthy of you. You are an Edinburgh-educated girl, aren't you? Or was it the University of Sussex that you graced? You've got some kind of a Sussex connection, haven't you? Didn't you spend a year digging around in the archives in Falmer?'

  'Ornemouth is a very beautiful place,' said Ailsa reprovingly, her voice modulating into its let's-be-serious-for-a-moment mode. 'It's a historic city. With a bell tower, and all that kind of thing. Cobbles and ramparts and salt baths and an estuary and an esplanade. There's nothing tin-pot about it.'

  'Is it a city?'

  'The queen turned it into a city two years ago. She elevated it. It wasn't a city then, when I knew it, but it is now.'

  'So you are being honoured as a local girl made good?'

  'I shall be pleased to see it again. I haven't been up there for years. It's a beautiful coastline. It's very unspoilt.'

  A flicker of incipient boredom and dismissal moved over his face like a high thin floating cirrus cloud. His concentration span, like his weekly column, was short. He did not want to be told dull and harmless stories about unspoilt seaside resorts and Ailsa Kelman's girlhood. They were no use to him. He was about to drift away, looking for stronger meat, when he thought of a new tack.

  'Did you holiday there with your brother Tommy? Did you play together like Eustace and Hilda? Was it Shrimp and Anemone territory?'

  'How did you guess?'

  One should not underestimate Peter. He was very clever, and he had read a lot of books, although he spent so much of his time trying to pretend that he had not.

  She held out her glass to a passing waiter for a refill, and continued riskily, teasingly, 'Except that Tommy was older than me, and nastier. He bullied me, I didn't bully him. In The Shrimp and the Anemone, it's the other way round. Big sister bullies little brother. It wasn't like that with us. Tommy was horrid to me, most of the time. He still is. If we had been twins, he would have devoured me in the womb. Like those uterine cannibals that Paul Burden has just described.'

  P. B. considered this.

  She had sailed into dangerous waters.

  Thin ice, near the wind, perilous reefs.

  'How did he bully you?'

  'Once he tied me to the hook behind the waterfall in the cave and said he was going to leave me there till the tide came in and drowned me.'

  'Like Andromeda?'

  'Not really. There wasn't a dragon. It was just the tide. And I was rescued by this other boy. It was part of the game. We were only children. It was more Enid Blyton than Perseus and Andromeda, really. I used to love Enid Blyton.'

  'And how is Tommy? Is he getting an honorary degree too?'

  'I trust not. Not this year, anyway.'

  'I don't suppose there will be many photo opportunities in Ornemouth? Or scandals? Or stories?'

  Ailsa seemed to hesitate, as though on the brink of an indiscretion, but contented herself with, 'Oh, I'm sure shocking things could happen, even in Ornemouth. Mary McTaggart is going to sing for us. Do you know Dame Mary?'

  'Of course,' said P. B., who claimed to know everybody who was anybody.

  'She's lost weight,' he continued, after a pause, in a modulated tone, of not patently insincere regret.

  'I've met her,' said Ailsa with a degree of caution, 'and I've heard her, but I can't say I know her. Do you know her well?'

  'Not very well,' said P. B., this time with a note of such uneasy and uncharacteristic disavowal that Ailsa swerved away.

  Dame Mary was not a liability, was she? Nor had P. B. implied that she was. She sensed that P. B. could have scored there, with some insider knowledge, but had chosen not to do so. P. B. seemed almost protective about Dame Mary: she could not think why. Chivalry was hardly in his line.

  Would Ornemouth prove to be a mistake on every level?

  'You've already been on holiday,' accused Ailsa. 'You look quite brown. Somebody told me you were in France with the Beckmans. Was it nice? Was it very grand? Was it a chateau? Did it have turrets?'

  'So Tommy bullied you by the seaside,' pursued Peter Wilton evasively. 'I can't see you putting up with being bullied. I bet you got your own back. I bet you were a proper little tyke.'

  She noted this interesting and unexpected dialect word, chosen perhaps for what he might wrongly have thought to be its local flavour, but continued, undeterred, 'It wasn't quite like that.'

  'What was it like?'

  Ah,' said Ailsa Kelman. 'If only I could remember. That's really why I'm going back. To see if I can remember. To try to find out what happened, so very long ago.'

  At midnight, or thereabouts, Ailsa Kelman shed both her sex and her species. She drew her dark red bedroom curtains, and hung her silvery dress in the closet, and unhooked her white boned armour from her full soft breasts, and gave a last caress to her loving little pewter purse, and combed her thick short crop of stylishly ashen hair before the oval mirror.

  When she climbed into her bed, she ceased to be a woman. She swam back, through the metamorphoses of time, to the undecided embryo in the amniotic sac. This was a technique she had been taught by the lady from Rio. Under self-hypnosis, the bones dissolve, the flesh melts away, the body dwindles, and the past liquefies. She travelled back, through the ridged red tunnels, to the dark sustaining waters of the womb, where she floated, unmade, unformed, uncommitted, forgiven, and free.

  She hopes she may learn to swim freely once again, in the three dimensions she was born for, not live as if trapped in a flat and frozen plane of glass. It is possible, it can be done. We can go back to the source, if we can find the true source, and immerse and suspend ourselves in it. It is the source, it is the fountain, but how may we find it again, after so many temptations and compromises, after so many wrong turnings and mistakes?

  When she was a child, she had read about the hermit crab. The boy had shown her a book of seaside wonders, one memorable afternoon, and later he had shown her hermit crabs upon the shore. The hermit crab changes its abode, when it grows too large for its borrowed lodging. The lobster sheds its shell. During the period of homelessness, the soft-bodied creatures are tender and vulnerable. They hide away, until their defences grow once more. In Paul Burden's book she had learned, to her astonishment, that some of the creatures of the sea are ageless, in their endless cycle of self-renewal. It is almost impossible, even with the new technologies of modern microbiology, to tell the precise age of some of the creatures of the sea. Time leaves no marks upon them, they evade our human knowledge. They are dateless, and therefore they are free.

  She had also learned that it is fanciful to suppose that the sexuality of the embryo is undecided. The fertilized egg knows its
sexual destiny at inception, and long before its ensoulment. But it may change its destiny later in life, according to Paul Burden's book. A fish may change, so why not men and women? Sex is no longer destiny, as once it was.

  The book on foetal sentience had been disturbing. Ailsa had once been involved in a foetus scandal. She had worn a plasticated foetus on a chain around her neck. It had been in a good cause, but she had long repented of this foolish act of bravado. As a publicity stunt, it had been all too successful. She had never been allowed to forget it. It hadn't been her own foetus, from her own womb, but she had lied about it, and defiantly claimed it as her own.

  A sac of water, a drop of brine, a curved teardrop, a cell with a permeable membrane, a glass embryo. Her mind and her dreams are full of the imagery of all the books she has been reading. The images of the laboratory have penetrated her soul. She looks to them for a new ensoulment.

  She drifts into sleep, and dreams. Dreams come to her generously, offering her their forgiveness, their vast possibilities. Her dream creates the image of a drop of water. Her dream creates the point of a needle, pressing tenderly, insistently, against the delicate sphere of the soft egg of the teardrop. The needle of memory prods and attempts to pierce; it is about to penetrate. Will it suck out the heart of the egg, or is it about to implant other cells and other memories within the egg? The cell is a teardrop, convex, vulnerable, with a thin surface that can barely hold its shape. But it holds.

  Prince Rupert's tears of hard yet brittle glass.

  Prince Rupert's tears, St Cuthbert's beads.

  In her sleep, she feels the hot tears grow and well and swell. The divisions between the cell walls dissolve. The impenetrable will become permeable. The glass will melt without shattering. Something will dissolve, something will merge. She is unborn, and free to begin again.

  She will wake with salt tears in her eyes, thinking of her imminent journey back to the beautiful city by the northern sea. For a moment, as she wakes, this deep knowledge will be with her.