The Sea Lady

by Margaret Drabble

  The bed had an iron bar, like a baby's cot. He had to lean over the bar to vomit. He was ashamed.

  He had thought the nurses would be angry with him, when they came to wipe it up.

  He found that he was wearing threadbare over-laundered flannel hospital pyjamas, with pearly buttons worn to thin discs. The cord of the trousers was frayed at the ends. And the ward was full of old men. He had thought at first that he was delirious, when he saw the old men. Had he been sent into a war zone? Were these the wounded, evacuated from the front line? But no, they were too old, and anyway the war was over now. They were very ancient and very ugly. He saw pallid withered faces, bald heads covered in dark splattered stain marks, heads with grey hairy tufts sticking out at angles, stubbled chins with whiskers and warts and blebs and growths, and clouded watery eyes. Gnarled hands and thin wrists protruded from shrunken sleeves. One old man sat on the edge of his bed with his stick legs dangling. He was wearing a nightshirt, and the boy could see high up along his indecent withered thighs, and into the cave of shadows between them. He could hear painful coughing, from all around him, from deep throats of rasping phlegm. His own throat was a torment to him. The sound of the coughing of the old men was a torment to him.

  They had brought him into the infirmary, and taken away his clothes, and put him into a girlish green pinafore, and made him lie down on a trolley bed. Then they wheeled him into another room, where he lay on his back beneath a battery of bright lights. They had covered his face with a large suffocating white pad, and told him to breathe deeply. The smell of the ether had been thick and semi-sweet and nauseating, but he had tried to do what he was told. He had tried to be good. Coloured swathes and spirals and hideous galaxies of purple and bruised yellow-green and brown had swirled into his face and up his nostrils and into his head. He could see these spirals even with his eyes shut. They were inside his eyelids, beating in his eyes. He had been told not to struggle, so he tried very hard to lie still. And when he woke, he was in this long ward, in this humiliating iron infant's crib, in these unfamiliar pyjamas that other sick boys had worn before him.

  When he vomited, the sick came down his nose as well as up his throat. He had not known that there was a pathway down the nose that was connected with the throat. It was disgusting.

  When the nurse came to wipe up the sick, she was not cross with him. She had smiled at him, and then turned away her head as she applied her mop, and she had said to herself, not to him, 'It's a shame. That's what it is, it's a shame.'

  One of the old men had cried out to the nurse, in a thin angry wail. 'Nurse, nurse,' he had moaned. And she had said, again to herself, as she wrung out the mop in the bucket, 'Oh, shut up, Grandpa.' She had said it without malice, patiently. As though the old man were the child. Was it her real grandpa? The boy thought not.

  His grandpa was dead. He had been in the Merchant Navy. He had been a famous swimmer. Humphrey could not really remember him.

  When the nurse left, she patted his hand, and said, 'Cheer up, son.' She patted him with the hand that had held the mop that had wiped up the curdled mess. He tried not to shrink away from her, because he knew she meant to be kind.

  When she left, he inspected more closely the borrowed garments that he was wearing. What had they done with his short grey trousers and his blue shirt and his socks and his shoes and his jacket? They would be very angry if he had lost them. And his mother would not like the buttons on this pale striped pyjama jacket. They did not match, and the top one was missing. She was pernickety about things matching. The war had made orderliness difficult for her, but she sometimes said she enjoyed 'pitting her wits' against the disorder. She knew how to 'make do and mend'. But she would not have approved of the odd buttons. Two were of a faintly iridescent shell-like substance, but one of them had two holes, and the other had four holes. They were not even a pair. And the third and lowest button, above his navel, was a small grey-cream fabric-covered disc, of an unpleasantly rough texture. It had no holes, and the stitching pierced crudely right through its centre. He felt at it with his fingers. Perhaps it had a little metal rim, under the fabric? He picked at it and picked at it. His fingers did not like it, but they could not leave it alone.

  And he could not resist the temptation to try to swallow. Back it came, again and again, the pain, the insult.

  How long would he have to lie there, helpless, with the old ones? Nobody had told him. He did not dare to ask. And anyway, he could not speak.

  The shell button with four holes was the nicest.

  The seashore was a treasure trove of shells. Pale pink and oval ones, like a baby's fingernails. Slate-grey, mussel-blue-black, greenish-bronze, russet-pink and pearly-silver. Little delicate cusps and slivers and moon-like crescents, worn by the tides, and stonier snail-like shells, with spiral helical ridges. They lay washed up on a bed of sand, on a fine grit of shell and sand, of shells and rocks and stones ground to grains of yellow and red and white. His mother liked to collect the best of the shells, and she stuck them pointlessly and thriftily with glue on to little cardboard boxes. Her masterpiece, her treasure, was an encrusted shoebox. She kept it on her bedroom window sill.

  St Cuthbert's beads she gathered from the beach, and hoarded in her box. They were little crinoids of the lord: the fossils of sea lilies, from which the saint of Lindisfarne had made his rosary. She did not know what they were, but she knew the legend, and she collected them because they were ancient and curious.

  Whinstone and dolerite, dolerite and sandstone.

  The Great Whin Sill.

  The Great Black Ledge.

  The Great Chalk Shelf.

  The topography of the region was written in the child's heart and laid down and embedded in the chalky history of his bones.

  During the war, parts of the beach had been out of bounds, cut off behind barbed wire and cement blocks, but now they were allowed to walk on the shore and play on the sands, on their own. He had played there with his friend Sandy Clegg, weeks ago, long ago, in the spring, before the tonsils and the measles. They had played at submarines and battleships, at explorers and shipwrecks, at pirates and at walking the plank.

  Would anyone have told Sandy where he was? He did not trust them to explain things properly. The little north-of-the-river village school of Finsterness was closed now, because of the epidemic. The summer term had ended early. His aunt had made the decision. He had heard them discussing it. 'I think we'd better close down,' she had said. 'There are so many off sick, it's not worth trying to keep going.' His mother had seemed to agree. She did not always agree with his aunt, but in school matters, she tended to defer to her older sister. So if Sandy did not go to school, who would tell him where Humpy had gone? He sensed that his mother did not quite like Sandy's mother. She had some objection to Sandy's home and family, but he had no clue as to its nature. It was an adult mystery. She permitted Sandy to come to play, but she never addressed him as Sandy, although she was happy to call her son by his baby name of 'Humpy', which was a much sillier name than Sandy. Sandy Clegg was always 'Alistair' to her.

  His mother did not like many people in the village or the town. She was in exile there, on sufferance. She wished she were back home, in the industrial Midlands, amidst the bomb wreckage, not stranded on this far shore with her sister and her mother. But Humphrey did not really remember his first home, the house that his mother called home. He knew that this was not his home, and that he would have to leave it soon. But he could remember little else, however hard he tried. Sometimes his mother said to him, 'You do remember your daddy, don't you?' and he would pretend that he did. Had Daddy been that man who had arrived late at night, 'on leave', in a heavy coat, exhausted from a long train journey in the blackout, smelling of coal dust and sweat? He had not stayed long. Perhaps that had been Daddy. But even if he was Daddy, Humphrey did not really remember him. He could tell that his mother was unhappy and anxious and angry when she spoke of his father. He could not tell why she was unhappy, and he did
not know whether she was angry with him, or with his unknown father, or with Auntie Vera, or with Grandma, or with the war that was now over.

  Daddy was abroad, in a region called the Far East. He would be home soon. He was doing important work, with the Navy, but he would be home soon.

  The war had driven Humphrey and his sister and their mother north, to this town at the mouth of the wide river. It was home to his grandmother and his aunt, but he and his mother and the baby were lodgers. They had pooled their points and coupons, and taken refuge from the bombs, and the temporary shelter had become his home, and his friends here were his friends for life.

  He fingered the cloth button, and waited for rescue from his iron bedstead. And hours later, his auntie came, carrying a bulging shopping bag. He could see her from far off, as she walked down the long ward with its high windows. She was smiling, but a little nervously. She was a schoolmistress, but not a very authoritarian schoolmistress, and she was out of her element here. In the school, in the village, everybody addressed her deferentially as 'Miss Neil', but here, over the river, she was not so important. Like him, she was frightened of the doctors and the nurses, although she did her best to conceal it. Miss Neil walked proudly and stiffly, on her best behaviour, in her best dark green suit, and on top of the coils of her reddish plaited hair sat her green felt hat with the lucky pheasant's feather stuck in its gamboge twill hatband. Her scrubbed face shone and her cheeks were hawthorn red and weathered by the north wind from the North Sea. She was smiling, but she was in a slight huff, which she explained as she sat down by his bedside.

  'They ought not to,' she said. 'They've put you in with the geriatrics.'

  He looked his bewilderment. It was not a word he knew, though he learned it at that instant, and did not forget it.

  'The old men,' she explained in an undertone. 'They've put you in the geriatric ward. I know they're full, but they ought to have found you a children's bed.'

  She did not kiss him, or touch him. She was not a demonstrative woman. But she smiled at him.

  'Well, Humphrey,' she said in a deliberately and unconvincingly cheerful voice, 'and how are we now? How are we feeling?'

  He could not speak. It was just as well, as he wanted to say that it hurt, and she would not want to hear that.

  'Well,' she said, 'you're coming home tomorrow. They haven't got room for you here, so you're coming home tomorrow. But I've brought you a present or two. Just to keep you going, overnight.'

  Even in his reduced state, he was pleased. Presents had been rare in those days of austerity. She took the objects from her bag, and laid them on the threadbare cream blanket with its pale blue frayed satin binding. A book, and a bobbin for making French knitting. Four nails, stuck in a painted wooden cotton bobbin, and a big blunt needle with a large long eye, and some coloured wools. She said she would start him off with it, and she did. The thin tube of knitting began to extrude and excrete itself through the hole in the bobbin, as her fingers worked busily. You have a go now, she said, and he had a go. You looped the wool over the nails, and you kept pulling at the tube as it grew. Very good, said Auntie Vera, very good. You're doing very nicely.

  He liked the praise, though the product was disturbing.

  The book was a paperback picture book called Monsters of the Deep. It was a different shape from most books he knew. It was oblong, but it was wider than it was tall. It had illustrations of fish and squid and whales and sharks and other sea creatures, and in the middle of the book there was a double spread that opened up into the longest sea serpent ever known. There was a picture of a phosphorescent fish that glowed, five miles beneath the surface of the ocean. And another one with great jaws and a light set in its head on the end of a long dangling stalk, like a fisherman. And one strange underwater creature that no man had ever seen. How could they draw it, when no man had ever seen it?

  You can read that later, she said.

  His aunt disapproved of the old men. When one of them got out of his bed and started to stagger across the floor, she looked appalled. Humphrey knew that she could see too much of the old man's legs, and his legs were a monstrous sight. The woman and the boy tried to look away, as the old man lurched from bed end to bed end, muttering to himself under his breath. His feet were bare and blue and buckled, and the joints of his big toes protruded at a grotesque angle. His toenails were ridged and yellow and thick as horn and they curled over like the toenails of an animal. His toenails had become claws. He was menacing but frail, as he stumbled along. He was menacing because he was frail. Where were his slippers? Why didn't somebody make him put his slippers on?

  His aunt didn't stay long. She had to be getting back, she said, to hold the fort back home. He hadn't asked after his little sister, he hadn't thought to, and she hadn't been mentioned. Maybe she was dead? Probably not, or Auntie Vera would have said so. She wasn't even ill enough to be in the infirmary. He was the really ill one in the family. He wanted to ask after the cat Blackie, but Auntie Vera said he must try not to talk.

  His auntie said she'd be back in the morning, to collect him in the ambulance. It would be fun, wouldn't it, riding in the ambulance, over the bridge from the old town and over the river to Finsterness, their northern fishing-village-outpost by the sea? She didn't think they would use the siren, because he wasn't an emergency. But they had promised the ambulance. He wasn't well enough to go on the bus. And he'd have to stay in bed when he got home, and be good. How long? She didn't know how long. Till he was better. Grandma would make him a nice junket. It would slip down very easily, she promised. He wasn't to chew anything for a while. He must rest his throat till it was better.

  When she had gone, he did a little bit of his French knitting, and read his book. The marine monsters were exciting.

  Once he had seen a strange long waving thing in a rock pool, one of those deep rock pools that you could see only at the very lowest tide. The thing was yards long, and thick as a man's arm. An eel-like thing. A conger eel. He had liked to think it was a conger eel.

  Along the coast, to the north, there was what had once, before the war, been a famous tourist attraction. It was a pool called the Pool of Brochan. Humphrey had never seen it, but he had seen grey-and-white postcards of it, and he yearned for it. It was a deep round natural rock pool, a natural inlet from the sea. In this pool of emerald water lived tame codfish. They came to the hand to be fed, like chickens, the guidebook said. He longed to see the tame and friendly fish, but how would he ever get there? It was nearly ten miles away, unimaginably distant, over the border, in another country. Who would take him?

  A trolley came round with the old men's tea, but he wasn't expected to eat any, which was just as well, as it looked and smelt horrible, of cabbage and gravy. He hated gravy. He liked dry food better. They gave him a glass of water and a pill. He managed to swallow it. It went down, scraping its way over the raw ravine of his gullet.

  The beastly old men ate noisily and clattered and coughed. He wanted to kill them all. It would be easy to kill them. They were hardly alive. They were at death's door. He wanted to kick their skinny legs and batter their splotched blotched thin egg-like skulls. He wanted them dead. They were ugly and useless and offensive. He wanted to go home, to the home that wasn't really his home.

  When he got there, he spent a long time in the little attic bedroom at the top of the house. Days and then weeks, it seemed. He didn't get better as quickly as they said he was going to, but maybe they had been lying all the time.

  Tonsillitis with complications, he heard his mother say to his aunt, in an important tone.

  The curtains were the old blackout curtains. They were very familiar to him. They were nigger-brown, with a repeating woven pattern in a lighter gold-yellow thread, and they had a thick black bunchy ill-stitched lining, that was meant to keep out the Germans. The pattern looked to him like demons with curved horns and curly forelocks, though his grandmother said that it was just a design. He had not told her about the demons, because
that would have made him feel foolish, but he had at one point dared to ask her what the pattern meant. She said that it meant nothing. She said it was 'just a design'. He found it hard to pull the curtains back, because he was not tall enough to get a proper purchase on them, and the curtain hooks snagged and caught on the rail. The view from his window, unlike the views from the front of the house, was constricted, for his little high window looked across the alleyway to the brick wall of the house next door. In the house next door lived Mr Fell, who was a widower, and who spoke to nobody. Mr Fell was a recluse, and rarely ventured out.

  He liked the dignity of the words 'widower' and 'recluse', but in the street, in those earlier days when he had been allowed out to play outdoors, he took pains to avoid any close sighting of Mr Fell.

  His bedroom had a sharply sloping ceiling, for it was under the roof and next to the water cistern. The ceiling was whitewashed, and he had begun to scratch faint marks on it to measure his advancing height. The last year or two of his progress were scratched, at monthly intervals, into the incline. Nobody had noticed the scratches yet. They would be cross with him if they saw them. The whitewash flaked and its harsh alkaline unevenness set his teeth and his nails on edge. But he had to make the scratches, to mark his growth and the passage of time.

  Chalk, lime, bitten fingernails, the school blackboard. The blackboard rubber, dense, packed with dead chalk, dead numbers. The irritability, the sensitivity, the alien particles of matter. He hated the oblong of the blackboard rubber with its rough and matted surface. His aunt wielded it without fear, but he hated it.

  He liked the cistern, though, which jutted out in a wooden box into the corner of his room that was furthest from the door. It made companionable, watery noises, which reassured him that there was ongoing life below, and that he was not alone in the house. The sound of water was pleasing to him.