The Sea Lady

by Margaret Drabble

  The knowledge of the depths will be with her when she wakes, but then it will be lost with the light of the morning. And then she will rise, and leave behind the whispering shell of the pool of the night, and resume her sex and species, and become once more her busy selfish self. She will prepare for the journey.

  The silver dress, the hired robe, the scarlet hood, the green silk, the bell tower, the summer season.

  Old Man Travelling

  He too after a manner was now travelling backwards. He was sitting in his window seat, in G16, in the mobile phone-free compartment, and although he was looking forwards, facing the direction of travel, he was travelling backwards in time as he journeyed north to his childhood. He was, inevitably, thinking of the past, and wondering whether he had been wise to embark on this journey, to accept this invitation. It had seemed innocent, at the time. It could not have been intended to cause distress. He could not have suspected a hidden hook.

  He was old enough to remember that this was the route of the train that was proudly called the Flying Scotsman, and that this line, when he was a boy, had been known by its initials as the 'LNER'. His mother and his aunt had often muttered those monosyllables. The 'London North Eastern Region': that was what those large separate mantric letters had signified, although he had known the letters by heart long before he had known their meaning.

  The trains of his boyhood had been driven by steam. They had grunted and snorted and hissed and hooted like living beasts. They had frightened him, although he had tried not to show his fear. He had stepped backwards on the platform, involuntarily, as they approached. They had made him flinch. Now all that boiling power had been tamed and calmed by diesel or electricity, and the names of the companies that ran the trains had changed so often in recent years that he no longer knew who was in practice and in law responsible for his safe transit. Nationalization had been followed by privatization, and privatization by various hybrid forms of ownership, and now it seemed that some form of nationalization was proposed once more. He did not envy those who ran or tried to run the railways. He did not envy the Minister of Transport. Running the laboratory and organizing the marine research unit and setting up its public interface had been enough and at times too much for him. The money men had got him down. They had worsted him.

  The train, gathering speed as it travelled northwards from King's Cross, trembled and shuddered slightly on its track. There had been accidents of late.

  He had studied the new Emergency Procedure pamphlet, with its icons representing an External Door, a Disabled Call for Aid, a Window Hammer, an Emergency Ladder, a Fire Blanket and a Light Stick. He had been too lazy and too fatalistic to attempt to locate any of these objects. The icons and the names would suffice.

  He sat back, and tried to calm the agitation that was troubling him.

  The approach to King's Cross had been unsettling. The neighbourhood was a building site of concrete slabs and abandoned traffic cones and soaring cranes and drunkenly leaning traffic lights stuck casually into sand-bagged oilcans. The taxi driver had dropped him off on the gridlocked north side of the Euston Road, just outside the calm forecourt of the British Library, and he had made his way with his wheeled suitcase past St Pancras along a much distressed pavement, and eventually down through what was clearly a temporary underpass to the mainline station. Above ground, the road heaved and buckled and bent on makeshift struts and ramps, and below ground, dead-end tunnels and contradictory signs and ramshackle Dickensian wooden steps and blocked entrances offered a vision of indecipherable confusion. Loudly inaudible announcements had tried to direct and to redirect the struggling mass of baffled short-distance commuters and burdened long-distance travellers. He was instructed not to leave his luggage unattended, and informed that there was a signal failure at Baker Street, and delays on the Piccadilly Line because of a person on the track at Arnos Grove.

  The train was a refuge. He preferred the train to the aeroplane. Trains were soothing and rhythmic, they lulled and they rocked on a journey of regression.

  His seat had been waiting for him. Mrs Hornby had fixed it all for him, with her usual competence. She had prepared an information pack for him, with details about his accommodation, his hosts, the timing of events. She had established, well in advance, his dietary requirements. (These days, he preferred when possible to avoid both fish and meat.) She had provided him with a map of the town, now a city, and marked the location of his hotel on the once familiar seafront. She had measured his head, with some mirth, and ordered his ceremonial robes.

  He was a lucky man, to be so carefully minded. He had led, of recent years, a protected life. He had retreated into his shell. So why had he taken what might be considered a risk?

  He had been free to decline this invitation, or so it had seemed. It had arrived last October. It was now July. His first impulse had been to refuse. These days, he declined many of the requests that came his way. Some asked too much of him, some too little, and he was suspicious of them all. But this letter, open on his desk, with Mrs Hornby's neutral query pencilled in the top right-hand corner, had made him hesitate. Indecisively, he had let it lie, which was against his custom. It had lingered on, presenting its flattering phrases and its courteous appeal. He could think of no elegant way of refusing the honour that was offered to him, and the more time passed, the harder it became to find an appropriate excuse. After a suitable period of delay, Mrs Hornby appeared discreetly at his elbow to prompt him. Should she draft a reply, she asked him, in that carefully neutral tone that made no assumptions about the nature of that reply. No, he had said, he should write this one himself.

  When she had left the room, he forced himself to pick up the innocently threatening document. The paper was of a thick rich cream weave, with a wavy line like a watermark in it, and the handsome crest and dour motto were heavily embossed in a deep oxblood-red. The text was laser-printed, but the large signature was handwritten with a flourish in bright blue ink, an ink which declared its authenticity. The date proposed for the ceremony was then several months away.

  Beneath the bell tower, robed in scarlet and bottle-green and black. In July, on the north-east coast, overlooking the North Sea.

  Hic labor, hoc opus est.

  As he looked at the date, and at the crest with its leaping salmon, an alarming wave of longing had risen in him. Suddenly, he longed to go back. The curves of the three bridges and the sublimely repeating arches of the viaduct appeared before him with hallucinatory clarity. He was not aware that he had consciously thought of them for years. Too much troubled water had flowed beneath those bridges, too many decades of his life. But back they came now, the majestic arches, the long summer nights, the thin high blue of the sky, the town of slate and sandstone, the great estuary. He sat there, at his desk in London, on a dark, enclosed late-October day, and saw the heavenly light flooding the enormous plain of salt water. He ached with desire. His throat felt swollen with desire and grief. As he watched the composite image of his memory, a perfect rainbow began to rise irresistibly above it, and superimpose itself upon the childhood scene. The rainbow echoed the curve of the Old Bridge over the river.

  A spectacular, a holy landscape.

  A mirage, a delusion.

  As though one could get back, behind the back of time, behind the heavy leather curtain, behind the thick membrane, to the place before time was, to the innocent soul.

  Sitting on the train, months later, in July, travelling northwards, he tried to swallow. His mouth was dry, and the glands in his neck felt tender. Perhaps he was harbouring a cold. Or was this nostalgia? If so, he admonished himself, it was unwarranted, for his connections with this place towards which he journeyed were tangential, insubstantial. As a small child he had lived there, intensely, in a few years of war and end-of-wartime exile, but it was neither his birthplace nor his natural home, and he had not kept up with what might have been his contacts. Those whom he had known there, most of them, had also moved away. Some who had not moved
had died. He had never been back. He had perhaps almost gone so far as to avoid going back. So why, now, did the memory of it sweep through him like a sickness? Was this yet another manifestation of the sentimentality of encroaching age?

  His eyes filled with water more easily these days.

  Not many animals weep.

  He wanted, once more, to see the bridges and the arches and the viaduct and the sea. He wanted to see the northern light of Ornemouth and of Finsterness.

  Dolerite and whinstone, dolerite and whinstone. Granite and sandstone, granite and sandstone.

  The Great Whin Sill.

  A black ledge of rock, a bedrock of memory.

  He had waited one more day before he sent his acceptance. During that day, the strange yearning kept flowing and swelling towards him, from a distant source. That night, he dreamed of the bell tower. He dreamed that he was climbing up, towards the belfry, on a crumbling and ever-extending and ever-steepening and ever-narrowing spiral stone staircase. He woke before he reached the summit.

  In the morning, he had written in his own firm hand to thank the Vice Chancellor for her generous offer, and to say that he would be honoured and delighted to accept. He looked forward greatly, he had said, to revisiting the town, and to meeting the Vice Chancellor.

  He had no idea who the Vice Chancellor was. The name and the credentials meant nothing to him. He meant to look the Vice Chancellor up in Who's Who, but had forgotten to do so. The Vice Chancellor was a woman, and she was Vice Chancellor of a new-fangled, jumped-up institution. It was a recent foundation in an ancient and historic border borough. In his boyhood, this university had not been born. There had been an ancient Grammar School, and a few secondary schools, and a teachers' training college, and a small marine biology institute attached in some administratively problematic manner to the University of St Andrews over the border. And several infants' schools, including the one on the north bank of the river where his aunt had taught, where he had been for a while her pupil. But there had been no university. The university had been part of the great expansion of higher education in the 1960s, following the Robbins Report of 1963. It was much welcomed. The location was hailed as ideal.

  Its Department of Marine Biology would be, it proclaimed, world-class.

  The new university, to judge by its notepaper and its motto, had gone in for an old model. It had gone for the archaic hocus pocus of honorary degrees and anthems and crests and Latin mottoes and arcane appointments and instant traditions, to shore up its rawness, to shelter it from the bleak wind howling over the dark sea.

  He had hesitated, but then he had accepted. The place itself had called to him. It had not let him rest.

  And so the months had passed, and July had come, and here he was, on his way to the north.

  One evening last year Mrs Hornby had had to squeeze him into the collar of his starched hired white-tie outfit: they occasionally referred to this intimate moment of mutual horror and hilarity. Her fingers had pressed against his windpipe. The collar had seemed to be half a size too small, although it was the size that he had worn without too much discomfort two years before. This was the closest they had ever been to each other. These days, he avoided any form of physical proximity. He did not like to be touched.

  He gazed at the smeared window of the compartment, and at the passing landscape. He could choose to stay his eye on the glass pane of the train window, and to see the reflection of his own good-looking, pleasant, good-humoured, generous face. Or he could look through the pane to watch the familiar fields and canals and scruffy skewbald ponies of England as they travelled past him. Is there another world, beyond the mirrored self, and beyond the visible world beyond the self? He had once imagined that there might be. He had believed it might be there perpetually.

  The glass ceiling, the glass wall of the aquarium. He had once studied the optics of fish.

  One could spend one of many lifetimes studying the optics of fish. Happily studying the optics of fish. Or the limbs of lobsters. Or the spawning of lampreys. Or the sex changes of wrasse. Or the cleaning symbioses of sharks.

  Some species are not aware of the glass. Some of them nose against the glass. Some of them attach themselves to the glass, with grey lips and sucking mouths. They suck and suck, for safety, for attachment, maybe for pleasure. It is in their nature to attach themselves to the glass.

  But others dash themselves against the glass. It is in their nature to do that.

  What if there were to be a way out, even now? He is not a brave man, but neither is he a man to surrender without an effort, to go under without a struggle. Perhaps even now he can hack his way out of his imprisoning self with a stick or a hammer or an axe? One last heroic gesture, and, like a character in a thriller, he could be free. One more ingenious thought, one more divining leap, and he could free himself, and climb out of the wreckage. A new beginning, a new endeavour, a new element. Forgiveness, remission, a new dimension. It cannot be that one is stuck for ever in the mire and the silt of all that one has ever been. It cannot be.

  And yet the dull nose rubs, the blunt wall snubs.

  A man must choose. It is necessary to choose. The road narrows, the choices diminish. One presses one's ugly nose against the glass. There is no longer any way through, there is no way out, there is no way back. Time has solidified. What had once seemed fluid has become resistant. It is not yet opaque, but it may soon become so. The cataract may form, the vision may turn to milk. Choices made long ago will blind him. His eyes grow thick as milk and dim as horn.

  The fish nudge and nose against the invisible wall. They circle and they cruise. The water of time lacks oxygen. It grows murky, it dims and thickens, it fills with particles of dead and decomposing matter, it suffocates.

  Two newspapers lay unread on the table before him: one he had purchased at the station, the other was the complimentary copy provided by the rail company. They would be full of things he did not need to know and things he did not want to know. There would be names that he preferred to avoid, photographs of faces that he preferred to avoid. Sometimes, when Mrs Hornby arrived early, she discreetly removed items from the newspapers before offering them to him. She was acquainted with his professional paranoia, his personal phobias. But these two broadsheets were undoctored, and might well harbour offensive material.

  He had not yet examined the names of all those whom he was due to meet. He knew he would only forget them. He was bad at names, and his short-term memory was already overstocked. Why try to squeeze in the Chancellor, the Vice Chancellor, the High Steward, the Speaker, the Visitor, the Public Orator, the Dean, the heads of the various departments? Why study the roll-call of local landowners, of local industrialists and manufacturers, of sponsors and benefactors? The new university had gone to town with its lengthy list of ancient and modern appointments, with its newly forged traditions. These were the names that stitched the expanding community together. These names remained in the folder. He would look at them later, as he approached his journey's end.

  So the Vice Chancellor was a woman. That at least was modern. He did not know her field.

  He knew the name of the local duke. He had met him, once or twice, at functions in London. He remembered little of the anachronistic duke. He was called Gerry, and he was prematurely bald. He was quite a new duke, a young duke. He had never met the father. His family had not been on familiar terms with the aristocracy or the gentry.

  Mrs Hornby would have supplied the university with an up-to-date version of his curriculum vitae, his paper life. She would have disguised the lacunae and smoothed out the graph of his past. And she would have supplied him with shorthand reminders of issues he ought to mention, anecdotes that he might like to tell, people he ought to remember to thank. Unlike some of his contemporaries, he had not descended to the level of the after-dinner-joke book, and usually he managed to sound spontaneous, but Mrs Hornby's notes were a safety net, in case his mind went blank.

  He had prepared an outline of hi
s short speech, to be delivered towards the end of the graduation ceremony. He did not much care for making speeches, and increasingly disliked the sound of his own public voice. He could hear himself repeating himself, but what was one to do, at his age? He would do his best. Others did not seem to notice his repetitions, or, come to that, their own.

  He had a reputation for wit and fluency. He had the gift of the gab. He did not know how he had acquired it. Most of the time, these days, he felt like a fraud, waiting to be exposed. This was not wholly paranoia, for he had been attacked. His reputation had been threatened, his achievements mocked, his discipline and faith downgraded. But he could put on a good face, for the public. He did not sound or look bitter. Did he?

  His throat was slightly sore. He swallowed, to test it, and his brain received a message of ominous but possibly imaginary discomfort. Was he developing a summer cold? Would he find himself speechless at the ceremony, and if so, what would that portend? People have been known to lose their voices, in an instant, in moments of stress or denial. Or was this an early indication of something more deadly, like the onset of cancer of the oesophagus? He had smoked heavily as a young man, in his buccaneering days, as young men did in the fifties and sixties. For how many years had he steadily filled his lungs with nicotine and tar – seven years, eight years, nine years? Should he recalculate once more? He had tried to work it out so often. He had even tried to work it out while attending the memorial service of the man who had finally established, beyond all reasonable doubt, the link between smoking and lung cancer. He had stood there, in the solemnly suited congregation, mouthing the words of 'Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise' while trying yet again to remember how old he had been when he had first started to buy packets of twenty, regularly, to smoke on his own.

  He recalled his trips to the corner newsagent's in Cambridge, and the heavy consumption on the coral island in the Indian Ocean. Not many people had thought it very dangerous to smoke, in those days. They had thought it dangerous, but not very dangerous. People didn't know about nicotine, or low-level radiation, or asbestos, or DDT, or aluminium, or lead poisoning, or the perils of bedside toys painted with luminous paint. Or they said they didn't.