The Sea Lady

by Margaret Drabble

  They went on a family outing to the pantomime, dressed up in their best, and Lizzie cried when the stout, gruff-voiced Pantomime Dame shouted personal remarks at a child in the second-to-front row of the audience. The child was wearing a red velvet frock, and she was fidgeting and jumping about a lot. The Dame asked the red velvet child if she wanted to go to the Ladies, which was embarrassing, and not at all funny. Lizzie was afraid the Dame might pick on her next. Lizzie was wearing a blue woollen dress with a white lace collar that had been handed down from somebody called Cousin Joan whom they had never seen. In those days, most people wore second-hand clothes.

  The Clarks were timid children. They did not like to be conspicuous. It was inconceivable to them that a person could wish to be noticed, could wish to attract attention or to stand upon a public stage.

  While they were looking anxiously through the front-room window for the taxi to take Auntie Vera and Grandma to the station for their homeward journey north, Humphrey heard Grandma say to his mother, 'Well, think about the summer, won't you? See what he says.'

  Humphrey heard this, and remembered it, but he said nothing.

  When Grandma's birthday approached, in June, his mother told him to write Grandma a birthday letter. He sat there dutifully at the kitchen table, but he could not think of anything to say. He asked his mother what to put in his letter.

  'Just wish her a happy birthday, and tell her about something that happened at school. She'd like that.'

  That is what his mother said.

  Why would she like it?

  Because she would, affirmed his mother.

  Dear Grandma, Happy Birthday, he wrote dutifully.

  Tell her about how your class went to the swimming pool at Moorhead, prompted his mother. Your grandpa was a great swimmer, she said.

  We went swimming at Moorhead Baths, he wrote dutifully.

  Humphrey was a good swimmer. Some of the boys in his class couldn't swim at all. The pool smelled of chlorine, and the green-and-white tiles were slippery, and the lockers stank of wet wool and other people's socks, but he had enjoyed the outing. He had jumped off the top springboard, and tried a somersault. Nobody else had dared, and Mr Lester had said well done. Humphrey had told his friend Alan Burns about Lifesaving, and about how to bring drowned men back from the dead even when all hope had gone. Alan Burns had been interested, and had allowed Humphrey to practise Lifesaving on him. Humphrey had told Alan about Grace Darling and the rescue of the survivors from the wreck of the Forfarshire. He had written a composition about 'Grace Darling, Daughter of the Lighthouse Keeper', and Miss Matthews had given it a gold star and asked him to read it aloud in class. It had not been very good, but she had liked it.

  In those days, Grace Darling had not been appropriated. Boys were allowed to be interested in Grace Darling, and nobody warned them off. Miss Matthews had not tried to grab Grace Darling back from him.

  He did not think Grandma would be interested in any of that, at her age, so he did not write any of it down. He could not think of anything else to write to her. Words deserted him. He gazed with deep dissatisfaction at his childish handwriting and its boring message. He hoped for better from himself.

  'Is that enough?' he asked his mother.

  'Tell her you look forward to seeing her in the summer,' she said.

  Humphrey tried not to betray pleasure or surprise.

  Did his mother mean it?

  Humphrey stared at his sheet of notepaper. Then he wrote, in one reckless burst of fluency,

  I look forward to seeing you in the summer. Please tell Auntie Vera to tell Sandy I am coming.

  With love

  from

  Humphrey

  Would they all be going? He could not imagine that his father would go with them to Finsterness. His father was always at work, at the office in Corporation Street. Did his father ever have a holiday? Sometimes he went away to London, but that was not going on holiday. His father went to meetings in London, work meetings about town planning and reinforced concrete and reconstruction and zones. And if his father did want to go to Grandma's, there would be nowhere for him to sleep, would there?

  Humphrey did not often venture into the new double bedroom where his parents slept. It had a new double bed, and a new dressing table with an oval mirror, and a new wardrobe. It was called a Utility Suite.

  Mrs Clegg noted in her little book that divans were for sale at Bewick's with metal base, mattress and headboard for £8 7s. 6d.

  The only piece of old furniture in his parents' bedroom was something they called an ottoman, which was crammed full of hoarded papers and letters and old school exercise books. He knew, without being told, that he must never look at anything in the ottoman.

  The room was not forbidden, but it was unfamiliar, unhomely, unwelcoming. He knew they did not want him in there.

  Humphrey tried to piece the summer's plans together from hints and suggestions. He was afraid to ask a direct question, though he did not know why he was afraid. An uneasiness possessed him. He wanted so much to go to Finsterness that he was sure that something would prevent him. He anticipated disappointment. He muttered charms and incantations, to ward off unknown disasters. Superstitiously, he touched every lime tree in the avenue on the way home from the bus stop. He never missed one. He knew that if he missed one, he would never see the northern sea again. He would be condemned for ever to the inland Midlands. When other boys discussed their summer holidays, he tried to keep quiet, though sometimes he said defensively, for conformity's sake, for pride's sake, that he too would be going to the seaside. The word 'seaside' was a decoy, for it suggested buckets and spades and French cricket and sandcastles with paper flags on sticks. Finsterness was not like that. It was not a bucket-and-spade place.

  He wondered if he would ever see the Pool of Brochan.

  Alan's family was going to the Isle of Man.

  The Isle of Man was posh, Blackpool was vulgar.

  These distinctions meant nothing to Humphrey Clark.

  As the end of the summer term approached, Humphrey's forebodings intensified. He could tell that something bad was happening. Sometimes he overheard phrases like 'it might not be sensible to take the risk' or 'just in case anything happens'. There was even talk about hospitals. His mother said once, out of the blue over breakfast, in a falsely cheerful tone, 'Well, the infirmary at Ornemouth isn't all that bad, is it, Humpy? They did a good job on your tonsils, didn't they?'

  Were they planning to send him back to the infirmary, to the ward full of beastly old men?

  His mother seemed even more anxious and preoccupied than usual, and took to lying down on her bed in the afternoons.

  One Saturday morning, they told him that their plans had altered. Mummy wasn't very well, so they wouldn't be going to Grandma's for the summer after all.

  At the time, he said nothing. He put his spoon back in his cereal bowl, and said nothing. He said nothing at dinner. He said nothing at tea. He said nothing all day, and he went to bed in silence. When he said his routine prayers at night, he prayed that they might change their minds.

  This approach produced results. The next morning, his father asked him if he was feeling all right. Humphrey answered, 'Yes,' but did not amplify.

  'You've gone very quiet,' said his mother.

  They knew quite well what was the matter with him. There was no need for anybody to speak about it.

  After three or four days, when his father came back from work, he came straight into the kitchen, where Lizzie and Humphrey were having supper, and sat down on one of the bentwood kitchen chairs by the Rayburn. He very rarely did this. Humphrey and Lizzie carried on eating their cauliflower cheese. Humphrey had saved the brown crispy bits until last. His father waited until Humphrey had finished, and then he said, 'I've been thinking about the summer, Humpy, and we think you would like to go to your grandma's, wouldn't you?'

  Humphrey nodded.

  'Would you mind going on your own?' asked his father.
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br />   It was the first time he had ever been asked an adult question, expecting an adult answer. Was it a trick question?

  He took the risk. Again, he nodded.

  'We think you're a bit young to go on the train by yourself,' said his father, 'but when the term's over, Auntie Vera can come to fetch you.' He paused, took his glasses off, and polished them on his blue spotted handkerchief. 'The sea air will be good for you,' he said almost apologetically, as though ashamed of this concession to his son's hidden desires.

  'What about me?' asked Lizzie.

  But it seemed that Lizzie was too little to go without her mother. She'd be too much for Grandma and Auntie Vera. She had to stay with Mummy. Lizzie didn't know whether to be cross or pleased. But Humphrey knew what he felt. He felt relief at this reprieve, an overwhelming relief. He didn't care whether Lizzie went or not. Lizzie was irrelevant. He was happy to go on his own. This meant that he could return to the places. He and Sandy could return to the places. His powers would be restored to him. He would shed the carapace of the uniformed subjugated Covington schoolboy from Greenside Close and Goldthorpe Road Junior School, and become once more a free spirit.

  The sea air would be good for him.

  That's what they all said, as they anxiously justified their kindly decision.

  The sea air would be good for him.

  The whinstone and sandstone would be good for him.

  The arches of the three bridges would be good for him.

  The sea air would be good for him.

  Professor Clark mouthed an order for a gin and tonic and a Brie and rocket and marmalade baguette, and the young woman brought them to him.

  Abeyance, latency, regression, recession. He had not known these words when he was a boy, and they were not wholly present in his conscious mind now, but somewhere the notions of them swam, in the creeks and inlets, amidst the green and crimson infusoria of wordless memory. The cold sharp fluid flowed down his stiff sore throat, as he journeyed onwards and backwards towards the places that were his childhood.

  Sandy Clegg had been the one for words. And where was Sandy now?

  The barman in the Flying Scotsman's galley had been generous with the gin, as well as with the ice and lemon. The drink had a kick.

  Beastly, rotten, mean, barmy, batty, awful. Spiffing, scrummy. Gosh, corks, blimey, golly.

  These had been some of the words of his uncontaminated boyhood; these had been the counters and the coinage. And these words swam up busily now into his active recollection, as he tackled the small-format section of one of the broadsheet newspapers. The pages seemed happily empty of those names that lurked like cowards in the caverns of his mind, ready to dart and strike, but nevertheless here was much that tended and intended, on a more general front, to provoke and to distress. Here, for example, was an article about a new exhibition of contemporary art that had aroused some controversy. The exhibition included artefacts that were decorated with words that in his childhood had been unknown to him. Rude words, forbidden words. When had he first come across these words that now appeared so freely for women, servants and children to read? (He was old enough to remember the Lady Chatterley trial, although servants had not been a feature of his home life.) Had he first encountered them at school in suburban Covington? At Goldthorpe Road Junior School, or at King Edward's Grammar School? Surely he had not known them in the innocent outpost of Finsterness, or in the quiet solemn strait-laced handsome town of Ornemouth?

  Bum and tit. Those words he had known as a schoolboy. But these words, here on the page before him? Did his serious black-haired Japanese-American grandson know these words?

  Of course he did. All children knew them now, even in rural England.

  He had been protected, at the school in Finsterness, because Miss Neil was his auntie. A circle of discretion had surrounded him.

  His grandma's black cat in Finsterness had been called Blackie, but the black cat next door but one was called Smuts, and nobody in Finsterness had sniggered at that. 'Humpy,' his mother had called to him, across the arena of the playground in Covington. He had not known till then that it was a lewd and silly name.

  Simple days, simple times.

  Now he knew it all. He had lived through the austere fifties, and the liberating sixties, and the shifty seventies, and the mercenary eighties, and the power-driven, value-free nineties. He had become worldly, and at home in the world. He had grown leathery with age, invulnerable, thick of skin, and idly, imperviously pleasant. He had worked hard at this transformation.

  His throat, however, had remained tender, vulnerable, and easy to infect. And now he was speechless, on his way back to his childhood.

  The tonic cooled and soothed his throat, the gin sparked his neurones and flickered through his synapses. He could feel the gin at work somewhere in the back of his head.

  The hippocampus stores new memories. The old memories live on, already deposited, in some other part of the brain.

  If the hippocampus fails, you can still move backwards in time, to those earlier days (to Blackie, to the ether and the infirmary, to Mrs Binns and her lodgers, to Jock's aquarium and to the Spartan boy), but you cannot increase the memory store with new impressions and carry them on with you into the future. And so time itself changes shape and is distorted. The past swells like a tumour and displaces the present.

  Should he try to find time to revisit his grandmother's old house, or the village school in Finsterness, or the little row of cottages at Turkey Bank? He was booked into the hotel for two nights, for Mrs Hornby had persuaded him that it would be too tiring for him to take the afternoon train back the next day. He had the time, the university term was well over, and his minimal teaching and administrative duties were in abeyance. So he would have a free evening, unless other events had been arranged to fill it in.

  He had enjoyed teaching, once.

  Did those once familiar buildings yet stand? Turkey Bank would still be there, for it was picturesque and old and the whole row must by now be listed as a grouping of architectural importance, but the village school had been an undistinguished structure, built in the 1920s. The Grammar School over the bridge, which Sandy Clegg had in due course attended, was an historic building, with a fine academic record, and it stood where it had always stood.

  Mrs Hornby's helpful notes had informed him of this.

  The plain slices and solid pudding of the past, were they still there? And would the shining sea of hope and of discovery renew its invitation, so late, so late, so late in the day? Or was he condemned to nudge for ever with his ugly nose against the smeared glass?

  Did the tame codfish in the rock pool still come to the hand to be fed?

  What had happened to Sandy Clegg? He did not often think of the inevitable end of his friendship with Sandy Clegg. It was hard to think of Sandy Clegg growing older, in real time. Maybe he still lived in the north-east. Maybe he had moved on, decades ago. Had Sandy followed the story of the successful career of his old boyhood playmate, Humphrey Clark? Or had he forgotten that he had ever existed? Humphrey's memories of Sandy Clegg were sharp, discrete, fixed, but the emotion that surrounded them was fluid and murky. Had Sandy prospered in life, as he himself had done?

  He had forgotten most of the children at his aunt's school. Only a few names lingered. He remembered the lonely little holiday girl, who had played her solitary games so persistently next door, during that long hot summer, but he had forgotten her name. The memory of her stubborn, stoic misery stayed with him, but her name had gone. He would know it if he heard it, but he could not summon it back without a prompt. He hoped that she had escaped from the loneliness of Finsterness, and had enjoyed a rich and happy life, with friends and family, with children and grandchildren. He would never know what had happened to her, and he did not like to consider why he remembered her so well.

  At the end of his compartment he could now see a family party, which had joined the train at Grantham – a young mother with three young children. They we
re not a first-class family, but they had been found seats in first class as the rest of the train was full. He had overheard the little drama of this, conducted with great friendliness and laughter on all sides. And now the young mother was being very attentive to her offspring, in a textbook manner, and keeping them quiet with a selection of magazines and games. She wore her sunglasses on top of her head, perched on a jaunty little knot of baby-pink ribbon surmounting her sun-fair hair, which was tied up in what might once have been called a ponytail. Her trousers were a deep bright shocking pink, and round her throat she wore a necklace of sparkling iridescent green-blue-silver beads. (Were artificial pearls still coloured by a coating of fish-scale brew of guanine crystals? The brew that, magically, was known as 'essence of Orient'? He had been in love all his life with the glitter of fish.) The children wore blue baseball caps and highly coloured shirts emblazoned with various slogans and studded with medallions and glittering insets of reflective glass. The smallest child had a toy helicopter. The two older children had a magazine each, and a pen each. He heard the mother say to them, 'You see, you just have to join the dots, and you'll see the picture come.'