Professor Clark sighed.
The papers for the ceremony lay in their dark pink folder upon his table, on top of the new life of Darwin which he was attempting to read. Somewhere in the same folder lay the prospectus for a new volume of brief lives of Great Scientists of the Sea (not a selling title, they'd have to think of something better than that) for which he had been asked to write an introduction. He doubted if he would do so, for the proposal was beneath his dignity, but he had agreed to look. The volume was intended as a popular read, with a TV tie-in for one of the rapidly proliferating new digital educational channels. There were the usual characters, with one or two wild cards. There was a plan to include a chapter on Elaine Morgan's Aquatic Ape hypothesis, that farfetched and implausible evolutionary fantasy which nevertheless lent itself to fine footage of water births and water babies. Elaine Morgan had developed her thesis from Sir Alister Hardy's crazy guesses that hominids had once been water-dwelling animals, and she had elaborated it over the years with an admirable and on the whole increasingly polite and persuasive persistence.
Humphrey Clark had always valued politeness. He had been dragged into controversy reluctantly. He yearned for the polite and imaginary innocence of the early world.
Elaine Morgan's hypothesis was almost certainly (though not demonstrably) wrong, and it was dangerous to flirt with her views, attractive though they were. Her theory of the Descent of Woman had attracted the wrong kind of attention, and her feminist disciples were more fanatical than she was. They were not as fanatical as the creationists, for feminism is a more tenable position than creationism. Feminism, as he knew too well, was a dangerous bedfellow.
But Elaine Morgan was right in her view that we are drawn towards the waters and the sea, and her hypothesis seemed to be gathering respectability.
He wondered if Paul Burden's prize-winning book about hermaphrodites and the sex changes of fish had a metaphysical thesis. Hermaphroditism seemed an unlikely topic to inspire a mystic, but he had some vague notional memory that Burden, as Plato had done before him, had ventured into speculative waters in his discussion on intersexuality and the historic origins of sex.
Plato hops into Professor Clark's thought unbidden, from long ago. Plato and Ovid and sex.
The brutality and the reductionism of the microbiological victory had not destroyed all speculation. Ethology and ethologists had been savaged, but they had not perished.
Humphrey Clark did not like to think about the bitterness of the conflict, the betrayals, the mistakes he had made, the enmities he had incurred, the jealousy he had suffered, the deaths for which he had considered himself responsible. He had known the day's agony, the night's remorse.
The old town of Ornemouth and its people had been steeped in archaic biblical notions of innocence and guilt and honesty, and these had filtered into his growing self, into his bones and his brain. They were a part of him that he could not shed. He did not like the selfish gene, the spiteful gene, the inevitability of what he, in his old-fashioned way, could still call wickedness. He yearned still for the possibility of the generous gene, the sacrificial gene.
The train dawdled and delayed. Now was the time to profit from this delay by studying the papers prepared for him by Mrs Hornby. He knew he should try to memorize the names of his fellow-honorary graduands and of the dignitaries of Ornemouth: the Vice Chancellor, the Public Orator, and the billionaire Canadian-born owner of the now-thriving salmon farms and the experimental cod nurseries. It would be polite to try to weave some of them into his words of thanks at the ceremony tomorrow. But some premonitory inhibition restrained him. He was superstitiously afraid to open the folder. A technique of avoidance had become part of his nature. He knew by now that there were names in that folder that he did not wish to see.
The Public Orator knows that the name of Ailsa Kelman waits for Humphrey Clark. He planted it there.
Ailsa Kelman's name lies there, dormant, waiting. Humphrey will find it soon.
Ailsa is waiting to confront him and entrap him, as she had waited as an angry barefoot child on the seawall.
Their first adult encounter had also taken place by the sea, but on a different coastline, five hundred miles from Finsterness. On the borders of Somerset and Devon they met, overlooking the Bristol Channel.
They met, but they did not immediately, at first or at second sight, recognize and identify each other.
She was selling programmes for a show. She was a humble programme seller. She was standing there, at the makeshift entrance to the open-air theatre, with a sheaf of amateur Xeroxed leaflets in her hand. She was inspecting tickets and selling programmes, and he was waiting to buy one from her. He gave her a shilling, and she gave him a programme with a cast list for the play. It was a simple interchange.
Neither of them recognized, at that important moment, that this announced the next act of the drama of their lives.
Humphrey Clark handed the programme to his girlfriend, Sonia Easton, for it was his girlfriend Sonia who had wished to see this performance. He had tagged along with her amiably, as was his way. He had no objection to seeing a touring production of The Tempest, for he enjoyed the theatre, and there was not much to do of an evening in this old-style seaside town in the West Country. The small travelling repertory company, according to Sonia, had a good reputation. It was avant-garde, said Sonia, who knew about such things. Its pioneering work, said Sonia, was a showcase for some of the recently graduated names of the university circuit. They lived in caravans, and shared their wages, said Sonia. They were a sort of commune, said Sonia. She knew somebody who had worked for them during their last season who was now resident dramatist at the Royal Court. This is what Sonia, not without some complacency, had told him.
Humphrey was happy to obey Sonia, and to listen to Shakespeare, in this open-air auditorium, on a summer evening. If his mind wandered, he could think of the fish amongst whom he had swum during the day, or look out to sea, beyond the bandstand and the mild grassy knoll, towards the horizon. He could see the winking of a lighthouse across the water on the far Welsh shore. Sonia had been patient about the diving, and it was no hardship to accommodate her wish to see a play.
But usherette Ailsa, although unrecognized, had not gone unnoticed. Humphrey had registered her, for she had projected herself, even during this brief and basic commercial exchange, as a woman suffering from extreme dissatisfaction. Anger and discontent were banked up and glowing in her and their heat flowed out from her. He noticed this, and therefore he noticed her. The disdainful and flamboyantly downtrodden manner in which she held out her wares, the scorn with which she received his silver coin, the contempt with which she pointed towards the row in which he and Sonia were to sit – all these displayed a disproportionate emotion which surely exceeded any just cause that could relate either to her role as programme seller or to his as customer. True, he might have said to himself, as he settled on to his uncomfortable wooden chair, the job of the usherette is not of the highest dignity, but neither is it demeaning. The young woman was clearly not a professional usherette, for this was not a fully fledged professional troupe of players, and such services would have been beyond its means: she must be a summer volunteer, working for the love of the group, or an actress filling in for part of the season. Had the love turned to hatred? Did she feel herself to be underparted?
It says much for the powers of projection of the young and as yet unidentified Ailsa that these possibilities reached Humphrey Clark as he waited for the drama to begin, and gave him food for thought. He glanced round, covertly, past the high white well-bred profile of Sonia, to the smouldering young woman who, with indiscriminately bad grace, was continuing to tear tickets savagely in half and to sell her tedious wares.
Did she look familiar? It cannot be certain that he suspected that he recognized her at this point. Her hair was still the same thick copper-brown, but the wide-angled shape of her face had altered, very much for the better, and her body was now fully adult. She h
ad a body which protested spontaneously and almost audibly against its subjugation, a body not so much of beauty as of bravado. She was dressed in a parody of servility, in an ill-made little black dress that would have suited a waitress, had not its neck been scooped so low. Even if part of Humphrey's brain had not been searching for a spark of a memory link, he would have noticed those breasts. Sonia Easton's attractive bosom, in or out of its standard Marks and Spencer 34B brassiere, was familiar to him, but this unfamiliar bosom was a statement, a challenge. The legs of this woman – he lowered his gaze, visibly peering, by now, through the rows of chairs and the seated and incoming audience – were muscular and powerful. They were clad in fishnet stockings, and they looked as though they could kick. The ankles were fine yet sturdy, and the heels of the black patent open-toed shoes were painfully high. No professional waitress, no usherette would have sported those punitive shoes.
Yes, thought Humphrey, as he sat back and heard the opening words of the play make their way through the light breeze, yes, there is a woman who thinks she deserves better, a woman who is angry with her lot.
It says much for Humphrey's perceptions that even then, at that early stage, he recognized that there was something impersonal, something generic, about that anger. The young woman who shortly turned out to be Ailsa Kelman was not simply herself, she was a portent. Her message was directed towards every man within her reach, but Humphrey was perhaps the only one to receive its full blast, and he received it because he remembered her from long ago, and was searching and searching for her name, her place, her meaning.
Humphrey did not go to the theatre very often, but he went often enough to recognize, as the production unfolded, that he was watching something as unusual, in its way, as the programme seller was in hers. This was not a tired and elderly classical turn in shabby, well-worn costumes, dragged around from village hall to school hall to community centre to disused cinema, such as he used to see (and to see happily, to see gratefully) at King Edward's in Covington. It was a dark production with a sharp and sinister focus, which owed something to the films of Ingmar Bergman, then much in vogue. Sonia had been right in her high expectations. Prospero was powerfully portrayed as an arrogant and sadistic Svengali/Mephistopheles figure, more wedded to power and to destruction than to peace, poetry and reconciliation. His relish in the tempest he called forth was alarming, his tormenting of Ariel and Caliban and indeed of his own pale daughter was merciless.
The edges of the production were a bit rough, and some of the exits and entrances somewhat embarrassing, owing to the lack of wings and proper backstage cover, but the overall spirit of the piece was impressive.
Prospero was the star, and, despite the professed communal aspirations of the troupe, he imposed himself forcefully as a star. His clipped diction was eccentric but not unpleasing: it had an old-fashioned, upper-class, public-school ring to it, interestingly at odds with the innovative mood and means of the production. His face was chalk-white (but was that natural?) and he wore a small, trim, very black continental beard. His was a name to remember, and an easy name at that. He was called Martin Pope. (The Miranda and the Ferdinand were, frankly, substandard: you could hardly hear a word Miranda said.) Humphrey, consulting the programme in the interval while Sonia went off to the pebble-dashed building that housed the coin-operated ladies' toilets, discovered that Prospero was the director as well as the principal player. He stored the name of Martin Pope away.
And there, in the programme, he found the name of Ailsa Kelman. The name jumped up at him from the page, just as Sonia returned to his side.
Ailsa's name was listed as a member of the company. There was a brief biography of each member, in alphabetical order. Ailsa Kelman, in the travelling repertory, appeared as Marina in Pericles, Prince of Tyre, and as the Mermaid Princess in an adaptation of Hans Andersen's The Little Mermaid, a work advertised as 'not suitable for young children'.
So the Princess had to sell programmes, from time to time, and she made it clear to all that she did not like it much.
As the second half of the performance began, Humphrey was unable to continue to pay attention to Shakespeare. He was transported back to the summer of the rock pool and the codfish, to the white knickers and the games of Monopoly. So here was Ailsa Kelman, Tommy Kelman's little sister, grown up. Tommy Kelman, who had poisoned the summer with his stories of Hiroshima and his sniggerings about sex and his theft of Sandy Clegg. Would she remember him, as he remembered her? Surely she would not. He was ashamed to remember her and her brother so well. He was ashamed that they had had the power to make him suffer. He had tried to stifle his memory of them, to put it behind him. How best, he wondered, to survive this chance encounter? Should he pretend to himself that it had not happened? Or should he confront her, after the show, with his grown and armoured self? He could introduce her to his girlfriend Sonia, and ask her to join them for a drink. That would be a sophisticated thing to do. He could impress her with the optics and the cleaning symbioses of fish, and with the renown of his underwater expertise. He could exorcize rejection and dependence and loneliness, and show his new colours and prove himself a man.
Sonia Easton seemed pleased to make the acquaintance of the fish-netted Ailsa Kelman. Sonia was a mild-mannered, eccentric, upper-crust Bohemian, a student of algae and lichen, but not, as she emphatically insisted, a diver: she did not, she told Ailsa, with her curious high-pitched nervous neighing laugh, she did not like getting her hair wet, she found diving suits claustrophobic, she was frightened of sharks, and, in short, she preferred to keep her head above water. I leave all that underwater lark to Humphrey, she confided, over her glass of cheap white Spanish wine in the smoky bar of the Sandpiper Inn by the harbour steps.
The authentically sixteenth-century bar was bedecked with unconvincing and largely twentieth-century marine paraphernalia. Coarse fishing nets hung from the ceiling, ornamented with highly coloured plastic crabs and lobsters of scarlet and salmon-pink and orange and navy-blue. Glass globes pretending to be buoys and thick bottles of dark green and poisonous purple dangled from outsize hooks, and anchors and oars were stuck haphazardly about the distempered walls and over the boarded fireplace. Incongruous horse brasses were nailed to low nicotine-blackened beams. A large brown smooth varnished spotted fish in a glass case sneered down at them from above the lintel. The barman wore a Guernsey sweater, and sported a nautical beard, a sprouting untidy red beard very unlike that of Martin Pope, who was sitting at the far end of the bar, still unnaturally white of face and black of hair, surrounded by admirers.
Ailsa, for her part, protested that she was not and would never be a professional actress. This was a one-off for her, she said, perched on her bar stool, her skirt riding high over her knees, sucking hard on a stylish menthol cigarette. This one summer on the road, and then she was off and out. They had begged her to stay, but it had been a disaster, she said loudly, and in earshot of her fellow thespians: the takings for The Little Mermaid had been dismal, the so-called communal company spirit was a fake and a fraud, actors were monsters of egotism, she was sick of sleeping in a bunk, and Martin was a tyrant.
He's good, though, said Sonia, who had enjoyed the production.
Oh yes, he's good, said Ailsa dismissively, as though that had nothing to do with anything.
The two women ignored Humphrey. He bought them another round, and listened politely as they nattered on, competitively, making their pitches not at him, but at each other. It was an interesting display of redirected behaviour, and he was not quite sure what it meant, but he was happy to remain an observer. Sonia described her doctoral thesis, and drew a little picture on the back of the programme, of her favourite lichen. Ailsa confided that she too had been writing a dissertation, when the roles of Marina and the Princess had beckoned her: she would return to it, she asserted, as soon as the season was over, and as soon as she could reorganize her funding. And what had been her subject, enquired Sonia, with a very slight tone of patronage. Expression
ist drama in France and Belgium, retorted Ailsa with panache. With special reference to the work of Eloise van Dieman.
Humphrey wanted Sonia to say, 'Who?', but she lacked the guts, and so did he, so the esoteric name of Eloise van Dieman had to join that of Martin Pope in the memory bank, for future reference and examination.
A third round followed, this time boldly purchased by Ailsa, who made short work of capturing the barman's attention. This round revealed that Ailsa had studied modern languages at Edinburgh, and had then spent a year or so of further postgraduate study in Paris, attached to the Institut des Arts Dramatiques, where she had unfortunately made the acquaintance of Martin Pope. (She said this very loudly indeed, but by now Mr Pope appeared to have left.) So now, said Ailsa, she was rethinking her strategies. Very wise, said Sonia, in a voice of submission and agreement that implied nothing about the stability or fragility of the nature of her relationship with Humphrey Clark. Or if it did, Humphrey failed to detect what it was, and he had been listening attentively. He himself often wondered what their relationship was, and what Sonia expected of him, or he of her. Some of his university friends were married already, to wives who had opted for domesticity: one or two of them even had children. He did not know what Sonia expected, if she expected anything. He knew he seemed to have become responsible for her, but he did not know why.
The specialist topics of algae and Expressionism being temporarily exhausted, the two women fell silent for a moment, and then, suddenly, Ailsa Kelman looked up from her heaped ashtray and looked accusingly at Humphrey Clark and said, 'So how are things in Finsterness? I suppose it's changed a lot?'
She professed herself astonished when he said he had never been back. She stared at him for an unguarded instant of surprise, before she continued her approach.
The Sea Lady Page 15
