The Sea Lady

by Margaret Drabble

  She wanted to swim in the Victorian saltwater bathing pool, but its little cove was still fenced off and the pathway and steps that led down to it were out of bounds. She tried to climb over the wire, but old Mr Bristow caught her at it and shouted at her.

  She listened to the story of how Jackie Hexham had been drowned in the sluice, and she laughed, and she said she didn't care.

  Mrs Clegg: July 12, 1946. Jackie Hexham washed over sluice.

  July 18. Jackie Hexham's funeral. Mrs Hexham did not attend.

  The terrible twins were twins no longer. Humphrey was marshalled into a corner of a foursome. It was better than being left out. It was better than the lonely fate of Heather Robinson. Humphrey could not put Heather Robinson out of his mind. But it was too late to feel sorry for her now.

  Tommy, Ailsa, Sandy Clegg. Sitting in a row, making mock.

  Tommy undermined and poured scorn on everything. On The Children's Encyclopedia, on Humphrey's favourite comic Rainbow and on the worthy Children's Newspaper, on lonely Mr Fell, on the Reverend Twigg's precious Fresh and Salt-Water Aquarium, on the sad fat man with a broad flat nose and a stammer who sold the delicious vegetable-fat ice-cream cones and wafers on the seafront. Humphrey did not dare to mention the fish tank that he had entrusted to Sandy's care, and which now stood empty in the backyard, because he did not want Tommy to make fun of it. Sandy offered no explanation for the abandoning of the aquarium project, and Humphrey did not dare to ask. The fish were dead and gone, and that was that. The glass container was on its side and empty, inhabited only by a dull land snail, and a spider, and the webbed skeletons of dead leaves from the winter that was past. It was reproachful. It was finished. It was failure.

  He did not tell anyone that his mother was expecting a baby, although by now Grandma and Auntie Vera had explained this to him. He was embarrassed by the knowledge. He did not want the others to make mock of his mother, who was surely too old to have another baby. Having babies was silly and smutty. He did not want them to know.

  Tommy disdained and contaminated everything. But he was fascinating. And he knew a lot of things.

  They spent all their days together, Sandy, Humphrey and the Kelman children. They swam, they explored, and they went fishing in the rock pools, though they never brought the fish home, as Sandy and Humphrey had done. They lowered them back into the pools at the end of the day.

  Tommy was a goad. He egged them on. It was Tommy who led them back into the beach-hut café on the cliff, which was even more derelict than it had been the year before. Sandy seemed reluctant to revisit it, but Tommy insisted. Nobody had been near it for ages, or so they thought. It had been abandoned. But there, in one corner of it, was a dark brown dried mound of human excrement. It wasn't dog dirt, it was human excrement. Tommy sniggered and pointed, and Sandy laughed. They both held their noses, although the dirt was too old to stink, and they laughed and pointed. But Humphrey, fastidiously, recoiled. He backed out of the shack. He blamed Tommy for the desecration, which was unfair of him, because it clearly wasn't Tommy who had done it. It was man's business, not boy's business. Man turd, not dog turd or boy turd.

  He had not known the words 'turd' or 'shit' until Tommy Kelman taught them to him. 'Number Two' was the euphemism favoured by the Clark family, and even that was mentioned as rarely as possible.

  The Kelman parents did nothing much on their summer holidays. They had a dull time of it. They had a car, unlike the Cleggs and the Clarks. It was a small black Ford, but the Kelmans didn't use it much, because of the petrol. Most of the time it stood by the kerb, at the end of Turkey Bank. The Kelmans liked routine. Every day they walked from Finsterness over the bridge to the town beach, where they sat in striped deckchairs, behind a wind shelter, wrapped up in woollies, reading the newspaper and paperback detective stories and historical novels and science fiction novels by C. S. Lewis. (Mrs Kelman particularly enjoyed Out of the Silent Planet, and tried to get Tommy to read it, but he wouldn't.) They occasionally took photographs of one another with a box camera when the sun shone. They went for town walks along the promenade, bowed against the wind, with Monty, their arthritic West Highland terrier. The white hairs on Monty's short legs were stained yellow with age as though with nicotine, and he shivered a lot, even when it wasn't cold. Sometimes they went along the short stretch of battlements, or along the little jetty, but usually they walked along the chilly promenade, beneath the putting green and the bay windows of the Queen's Hotel. The Kelmans had mid-morning coffee in the Jenny Wren on the front, then a picnic lunch, and sometimes they had tea with scones in the Copper Kettle, in the steep cobbled High Street. They usually had fish for their high-tea-supper, cooked by Mrs Binns, with scalloped potatoes. Mrs Binns laid sprigs of parsley on the potatoes, as a refinement. She had a large pot of parsley growing on her backdoor step. The parsley was an exotic touch, rarely seen in Finsterness.

  Mr and Mrs Kelman ate a lot of meals but they were not fat. They were thin. Humphrey did not find this mysterious at the time, because in those days everyone ate a lot of meals.

  In the evenings, Mrs and Mrs Kelman sometimes went back over the bridge to Ornemouth to the Crescent Picture House. The Picture House was an incongruous 1930s modern structure, faced with tile-like white squares and rectangles, surmounted by a midnight-blue tiled panel inset with a thin crescent moon of silver. The silver crescent moon was surrounded by seven golden stars. The cinema was glamorous, but it did not sit easily amidst the old sandstone buildings. Humphrey had never been inside it, for his grandmother, aunt and mother never went to the pictures. Nor did the Cleggs. But the Kelmans took their children with them, when it was a suitable film, and Humphrey and Sandy were allowed to go too. The Kelmans liked to sit at the back in the more expensive seats, but children could get in for a shilling. The programme changed twice a week. They saw black-and-white American comedies which Humphrey did not understand, although he tried to laugh in the right places, and American Technicolor romances set in the Rocky Mountains or the South Seas, and films about a dog called Lassie. They saw Blue Lagoon, which was the film Humphrey remembered best. They saw Arthur Askey and Dorothy Lamour.

  On the Pathé News they saw jungle warfare in Malaya and the Soviet troops in Berlin. They did not understand most of what they were seeing. One evening there was a short item about the effects of the H-bomb explosion on the Bikini atoll two years earlier. Humphrey knew the words Bikini and Hiroshima. He had heard the words 'fallout' and 'mushroom cloud'. He had heard his parents use these words, in hushed tones.

  The next day, Tommy told them about the bombing of Hiroshima. How the eyes of the people had melted and run down their cheeks, how their skin had slipped off in huge glove-like pieces, how the patterns on their clothes was all that was left of some of them. How the people had died but the plants had grown bright green and luscious and enormous. How did Tommy know all this? He had read it in a book. His parents had hidden the book, because it was horrible, but he had found it out.

  Humphrey Clark did not welcome the intrusion of Tommy and Ailsa Kelman, but he lived in fear of being left behind. He dreaded that one day he would arrive at Turkey Bank to find the others already gone, with no word left for him. Gone, with the bloater-paste sandwiches and the cold cooked sausages in their thin film of fat, with the hard-boiled eggs and their twists of salt in greaseproof paper. It hadn't happened yet, but he was afraid that it might. He anticipated rejection.

  Sometimes, in the long light northern evenings, after high tea, they didn't come round to call for him. The Fresh and Salt-Water Aquarium was a partial substitute for their company. He read about the quarrelsome sticklebacks who could not resist a skirmish, and about newts and water beetles. He read about Sagataria troglodytes, the cave-dwelling anemone, which was 'chiefly remarkable for its free and roving habits'. (That sentence entranced him.) He read about the sex change of the dazzling purple cuckoo wrasse. He read about Rotifera and Infusoria and Ulva, about Laminaria hyperborea and Laminaria saccharina. He f
elt tragic and neglected, and he overflowed with self-pity. 'Why don't you go out and look for them?' his kind Auntie Vera would ask. But he was too proud to go looking. And then there they would be again, the next morning, wanting to enrol him, wanting to borrow Humpy's grandpa's cracked binoculars, wanting to make an expedition.

  He didn't like the uncertainty, but he had to put up with it.

  Mushroom clouds, babies, excrement. The cold war and the iron curtain and the nuclear threat. Those were the days.

  There were moments, still, in that summer, when Humphrey thought he was about to recapture the sense of the living ocean of the earlier year, the sense of immersion, of space, of infinitude. He seemed to be on the brink of rediscovery. But then the growing sense of the ocean would ebb and leave him stranded. Disappointed, dissatisfied, and stranded. Dwindling and drying, on a stony shelf, above the water level. The water would not flow in for him. It had lost the power. He had lost its power.

  But there were moments when it seemed about to return.

  One day, Mr and Mrs Kelman suggested an outing. They had seen a coach trip advertised, a day trip to the little town of Durres. You could visit the weaver's croft and the specialist wool shop, and you could go to the Pool of Brochan. See the purple heather and the rock pool, said the painted notice on the Post Office window. Book here. Adults 4s. 6d., children half price. Did Humphrey and Sandy want to come too?

  Humphrey was astonished. The Kelmans had seemed too set in their daily routine to propose such an unusual and extravagant diversion. He was humbly astonished that they had thought to include him. Of course he wanted to go. It was one of the things he most wanted to do in the world. He wanted to do it so much that he had never dared to mention it. He knew that a visit to the Pool of Brochan would change his life.

  Auntie Vera and Grandma happily gave him the money for his ticket, and some extra pocket money to spend on the trip. They were pleased that he was included.

  For once, he did not even fear that it might be disappointing. And it had not been disappointing. It had opened up to him like the navel of the earth.

  Even the coach ride had been interesting. They travelled north and over the border into the foreign country of Scotland, accompanied by a modest friendly commentary from the fatherly grey-haired middle-aged driver, who was called Arthur. Humphrey and Sandy and Tommy and Ailsa did not listen to this commentary, though the unattended sound of it was reassuring, like the sound of adults talking downstairs at night. The outing was a treat for everybody, even for Arthur. After the years of warfare and self-denial, a little fun was to be permitted, and the children sensed this mood of mild relief and liberation. They sat in a row on the back seat, the four of them, and giggled and chatted and pointed. They were friends, fast friends, for the day. Auntie Vera had bought them a packet of Edinburgh Rock, because they were going to Scotland, and they chewed and sucked on its powdery pastel-shaded sticks. The pale brown ginger flavour was the best.

  The town had been dull, and the wool shop of knitted goods and weaving had been duller, although the grown-ups liked it. Mrs Kelman cautiously bought a lacy hand-knitted mauve scarf. Arthur said it was a pity they couldn't go to see the place where they smoked the kippers: it had closed down during the war, but there was talk that it might open again soon. This was a disappointment to Humphrey, who would have liked to have seen a herring turn into a kipper.

  But the Pool of Brochan was not a disappointment. It was at once banal and divine. Banal, in that a well-trodden Visitors' Path descended to it from the little coach park, a path so gentle in its gradient that even old folk with sticks could easily make it; divine in its archaic form and its prophetic suggestions.

  For Humphrey, the earth opened. Here man and creature met and knew one another, here land and sea met and interpenetrated. Here the species were friendly one to another, as they had been before the birth of guilt and sin and cruelty.

  Or so it had seemed to the boy. Or so the man remembered that it had seemed to the boy.

  Could that have been what it meant?

  Professor Clark, passing by train through red-brick Retford, remembered the old crone who had fed and minded the fish, and retrieved her name.

  She called herself Mother Longbone, and she was very old, like the fish. The name Longbone had not then struck the child as an oddity, for it was the family name of the largest grocer in Ornemouth, and was therefore familiar to him. It was an old name of the region. Mother Longbone was sixty, and she had been minding these fish for fifty years, or so she told them. For five-sixths of her life she had been mother to those fish. She played to her coach audience of day-trippers and to her tame fish. She affected a picturesque Scottishness, and she wore a plaid shawl pinned with a brooch shaped like a silver thistle. Her hair was iron-grey, her brown cheeks were hollow, her false teeth were small and even like pearls. The codfish were her chickens. Mother Longbone's chickens. She summoned them with a strange high-pitched crooning wordless song. And they came, and circled and swirled below her, and poked their dumb beseeching grey-lipped mouths up into the air. The green salt water seethed with their plump silver bodies. One of them was blind. She called him Blind Tom.

  It was a show, it was a display, but it was powerful. It was joyful but it was disturbing. It was worth more than four shillings and sixpence for the ride.

  The old woman, the rocky shore, the curving pool, the imprisoned fish.

  The wind caught the strands of the old woman's grey hair, and blew them backwards from her haggard face.

  The sea sucked in and out. The tide entered and withdrew. The pool had been hollowed by the endless sucking and pulling and ebbing and flowing. The adult fish remained within the hollow inlet for ever.

  Humphrey, entranced, leaned on the low rusted railing and watched the fish. Ailsa Kelman was at his elbow. Her stiff copper-wire hair was wet with beads of spray. Her bony freckled elbow touched his by mistake as she leaned further over, and he withdrew his quickly from the accidental contact.

  Sandy and Tommy had clambered round to the very far end of the path and were trying to scramble up the rocks. The old woman shouted at them to get down.

  Mrs Kelman took a photograph of Humphrey and Ailsa leaning on the rail. She took a photograph of Mrs Longbone.

  The old woman told them that the pool had been scoured into its near-perfect circle by the movement of the elements, by the incessant circular grinding of the imprisoned rocks. And the fish bred there naturally. Now they were trapped there, by a metal grid placed at the mouth of the cove, but long ago they had sought its sanctuary of their own accord. And now they no longer knew the enormous ocean with its vast horizon, although it visited them twice a day with the swell and the ebb of the tide. They were in the ocean, but they were not of it.

  Humphrey was filled with pity and wonder and terror. Was the meaning of this that he too was trapped? Or was his life measureless like the fullness of the ocean?

  Mrs Longbone handed out to the children little dry harsh-smelling pellets of fish food from a tin box, and told them to cast them upon the waters. Ailsa and Humphrey and an unknown and never-to-be-known girl from another family party obeyed her instructions. The fish rose and snapped and threshed and devoured the pellets.

  Sandy and Tommy disdained this childish and effeminate activity. They stayed apart, at the other side of the pool, sniggering at some boys' secret of their own.

  On the way back to Ornemouth, in the coach, Mr and Mrs Kelman fell asleep. Mrs Kelman snored, with her mouth open. Sandy and Tommy whispered to each other. Ailsa stared grimly and coldly out of the window at the picture-postcard purple and gold of the heather and the gorse. Humphrey sat silently, struggling with the mystery of the thing, as he sucked on a Mint Imperial. He was afraid of something, but he did not know what it was. It was a monster, a monster of the deep, but he did not know what it looked like. It was too far down for him to see. It was terrible, more terrible than a codfish. It had an open mouth, a dark and open mouth, a mouth that sucked
like a maelstrom. He was afraid of it, but he needed it, and he was almost glad that it was there.

  Ailsa displayed her driving licence and signed for her hire car. Her licence was not as clean as she might have wished. She had two endorsements for speeding. But she had some points to spare, and some time left, and she meant to make the most of them.

  The A1 going north was what she wanted, but she was too impatient to listen to the Rent-A-Car woman's well-intentioned advice about how to find her way to it from the airport. She would just get behind the wheel of the little red two-seater and get out on the road and look for the turnings. The compass in her blood would guide her to the Great North Road and to the old spine of England.

  She put her foot down, circled a few roundabouts, and hit the highway.

  Her daughter Marina had never been to the old northern heartland. Well, as far as Ailsa knew, Marina had never been up here. But Marina had a life of her own now.

  Marina had never known her maternal grandparents. They had died long before her birth.

  Sandy Clegg and Humphrey Clark. She was on her way to see Humphrey Clark. And perhaps she would bump into Sandy Clegg strolling on the pier or on the quay or on the red ramparts. She would not know him if she saw him, after half a century. He would be old by now, as she was.

  She was going back to try to find out what had happened. This is what she had said to P. B., and it had been true. It had been more seriously true than the lightness of her tone had suggested.