The Sea Lady

by Margaret Drabble

  The text of Blue Lagoon has, like Darwin, provided them with themes for enlightening discourse. The fairy-tale story tells of shipwrecked cousins, Dick and Emmeline, who grow innocently and ignorantly from pre-pubertal childhood into sexual maturity on their idyllic desert island. There, to their astonishment, they produce a baby which survives their attempts to feed it on bananas and green coconut juice. Inexplicably, they call the child Hannah, although it is a boy, and the child turns out to be 'a most virile and engaging baby'. The author claims that Dick and Emmeline chose this name because it was the only name they could remember, but Ailsa divines in it a deeper if unconscious purpose. All three members of this primal family meet an ambiguous fate as they drift, unconscious, out to sea in their little dinghy, having consumed (whether fatally or not is not made clear) the crimson berries of the never-wake tree. Ailsa has compared this fantasy, to her own satisfaction if not to Humphrey's, with the plot of George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, where the estranged brother and sister are reunited in death as the flood of unconsummated incestuous passion bears them away on a tide of all-conquering, all-punishing super-ego.

  She is very pleased with this theory, but as Humphrey has not read The Mill on the Floss he is unable to appreciate its ingenuity. He does know that George Eliot is not a man but a woman, but he has never read any of her novels. He comes back with a commentary on de Vere Stacpoole's censorious views on the nature and behaviour of coral. Coral is not, Stacpoole tells the reader, what the reader might expect. The creature which constructs the coral reefs is not an industrious insect, as you might suppose, busily building its gorgeous underwater palaces year after year, with the patience of Job and the genius of Brunel, but a sluggish and gelatinous worm, leading an idle and useless life, and producing its beautiful structures by chance, not by design. Humphrey finds this attitude as curious and as unexpected, in a work of that date and that genre, as Ailsa had found the moving and mythic irresolution of the final voyage of the childhood lovers, and it inspires him to bring up memories of the moral tone of The Children's Encyclopedia, and the evolution of the primitive notochord, and the laziness of sea squirts, and the sexual behaviour of angler fish, and other zoological oddities.

  The female angler fish, says Humphrey, consumes the body of the male, and reduces it, within her body, to a sperm bag.

  Whereas, according to Darwin's Glossary, the male of the cochineal is a small winged insect, and the female is a motionless berry-like mass.

  They both laugh, easily, at these monstrous quirks of nature, confident that the human form is divine, and assured of their place in the divine plan.

  He tells her about the hermaphrodite wrasse, and the sexual instability of the crayfish.

  So when, asks Ailsa, did sex begin?

  In the Precambrian age, says Humphrey with ignorant and sunny confidence. A couple of billion years ago, he hazards. That's when it all began. When cells first developed a nucleus.

  Why did they develop a nucleus? asks Ailsa.

  God knows, says Humphrey.

  And what, asks Ailsa at random, as she flicks through the pages of Darwin, is morphology?

  Morphology is dead rabbits in formalin, says Humphrey, and he tells her about the charismatic Mr Summerscale and biology lessons at King Edward's and why he has stopped eating meat. He explains to her why it is so important to learn to tag fish underwater.

  If you tag them in air, they tend to die, says Humphrey.

  He quotes Mr Summerscale's Wordsworthian motto, We murder to dissect. He describes his dislike of gratuitous animal experimentation. Rats made to swim in circles until they drowned, rabbits tormented with cosmetic eye drops, pigeons left with half a brain. He speaks of his hero Niko Tinbergen and the classic stickleback.

  She responds with memories of her glamorous misfit drama teacher at school, Mrs Lesley, Bonnie Lesley of Bonnie Bonsett, who had been in thrall to the love songs of Burns and of Byron, and who had made Ailsa learn them by heart. She tells him about her course in theatre design at the Institut des Arts Dramatiques, and the Gallic instructor who had seduced her so easily and so cheaply and so merrily.

  Supine on the deck they lie, talking, falling silent, now and then reaching out a hand for each other, smiling at each other, lighting a cigarette, sharing their schooldays, pooling their speculations, effortlessly crossing the barriers that divide them. Their thoughts permeate, interpenetrate, drift and spiral, with the random freedom of the certainty of love. The sun beats down upon them, on their closed eyelids. The future glitters before them, and they know that all they have to do is to wait for it to happen to them. They are secure in the present, and their future is also secured. They have their plans, their prospects. They believe, as lovers do, that they are complementary, that they are halves of the same whole, that everything that is in them will fit into the pattern, that one day everything in them will be known to the other, and that by this knowledge they will be redeemed and completed and saved from eternal solitude. All will be for the best.

  She tells him about Plato's speculations about hermaphrodites and the origins of sexuality, as expressed by Aristophanes in The Symposium. This evolutionary myth, of the symmetrically divided self which seeks union with its lost half, is unfamiliar to him, but it is instantly attractive to him.

  So we have been seeking one another since the first separation, he says.

  I don't know how his theory fits in with geological time, he says, and with what went on or didn't go on in the Precambrian, but it seems a good enough explanation to me.

  They wonder what Darwin thought about Plato's morphology, but they have no reference book aboard that can tell them. They agree that Darwin must have read Plato. In those days, they concur, before the two cultures divided, gentlemen had to read everything. Women weren't allowed to read much, but gentlemen were forced to read the classics. They had to read Latin and Greek.

  Women, says Ailsa, were not allowed to take part in a symposium. They had to sit in a back room with the servants and the flute players.

  She has forgotten that Plato puts the principal speech of The Symposium into the mouth of a woman, Diotima, and as Humphrey has never read The Symposium, he cannot provoke her by reminding her of this. And when, years later, she recalls this conversation on board the Bride of Abydos, she will nevertheless conclude that she was correct in the sense of her forgetting. For Diotima was a hollow personification, an abstraction, not a woman.

  Ailsa tries to tell him some more of the story of The Mill on the Floss, and of its heroine's thirst for a classical education, but she stops when he says he will read it himself one day if she doesn't spoil the plot.

  They discover they had both done Latin O-Level, for the same exam board. Humphrey says he had found it difficult, but Ailsa claims to have sailed through.

  They talk, they make love, they swim, they uncover, discover, and educate each other. She too has a strong pedagogic streak, and she teaches him lines of poetry and speaks to him of Sappho and Eloise van Dieman, of Burns and Byron and of Caroline Lamb. 'Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll,' she commands the passive Aegean, and it continues, indifferently, to do as she commands.

  Humphrey has by now been made familiar with the career of Ailsa's heroine, Eloise van Dieman (d. Bruges 1929), and with Ailsa's determination to pursue her abandoned doctoral thesis: he has heard all about her earlier difficulties with funding, her struggles with archaic institutions and supervisors whom she knew to be her intellectual inferiors, her certainty that she was on to a winner and that one day the world would know it. Ailsa swears that she, like Eloise in her day, is ahead of her time, but the world will catch up with her, as it will with Eloise. As yet ill-recognized female cultural figures will have their turn, she informs him. She will abandon, she earnestly insists, the not-so-easy pickings of cabaret and the siren calls of vanity and television, and devote herself seriously to what is not yet securely established either in name or in practice as feminist scholarship and Women's Studies. />
  He in turn teaches her about theories of species and speciation and speaks to her of the causes of phosphorescence and of the peculiarities of plankton and of the parathyroid hormone in the gills of fish. She listens, as Desdemona listened to Othello: he listens, as Adam listened to Eve. It does not occur to her to rebel, it does not occur to him to suspect or to doubt. It is peaceful, it is heavenly. They complement each other. Science and Art lie side by side: together, they cover (or at least illustrate) the spectrum of knowledge. (She cannot understand what the spectrum is, however often he explains it to her, however often he shows her the prism and the rainbow and the colours of the sea spray, but, here, suspended for a while, this does not seem to be important.) They are happy with their lot, with their identities, with their perfect bodies, with their present incarnation. They do not, under this hot annealing sun, dispute territory, or display the cruel spines and colours of aggression. Like Dick and Emmeline by the blue lagoon, they are self-sufficient, even though they are in the company of a crew of at times rowdy and hard-drinking marine biologists. They see themselves easily, lazily, fantastically, as archetypes, as heroes, as glamorous characters in a nouvelle vague Italian movie.

  They are peacefully at anchor off the island of Chios, the island of massacres.

  They do not mention the massacres.

  Male and female created He them, at some point in the Precambrian or shortly thereafter, and He allows these two this moment of equilibrium, of sexual symmetry. How are they to know that it cannot last? They do know, because they are not stupid, but they do not know that they know.

  Time is suspended.

  He dives into the water, and she jumps after him, and they swim together, away from the boat. Treading water, they embrace. Bubbles of air are trapped in the golden hair of his chest and thighs, but she is smooth and slippery like a fish. Their solid bodies meet, weightlessly, supported by the thick salt water. He feels her saline breasts against him, she feels his hot thighs through cool water. Their hard bodies press against one another. They defy gravity. There is no effort in it. They are free. They kiss.

  This is the perfect happiness. It is for ever, it is archetypal, it is sempiternal. Time has ceased.

  Eternity did not last long. Time reasserted itself unpleasantly and uncomfortably, stage by stage, on the long hot dusty journey back, towards the town, towards the ferry, towards Athens airport and the aeroplane, towards England, towards inevitable and foreseen divergence. Humphrey and Ailsa parted from their chorus of complaisant companions, and they journeyed onwards, together and alone, and, as they journeyed, doubts about the future surfaced, one after another. Apart, together, they had doubts, doubts that gathered strength, doubts compounded by the minor and mundane irritations and uncertainties of travel, by unconfirmed tickets and ill-considered connections, by the absence of Tampax and of soap and of paper tissues.

  He looked to the future, guiltily, and wondered whether he had been right to accept the imminent posting to distant California. Should one not be willing to sacrifice one's career for love, for such a love? Should he not have stayed in England, to be with his love?

  She looked to the future, anxiously, and wondered whether she had been right to reject the lucrative though unsecured offer from the BBC, whether she would have the guts and perseverance to return to academe and to finish the book that she had promised herself and her prospective publishers that she would write. Had she overestimated her sticking power, she wondered? Had she overestimated her intellectual weight? Had she guessed wrong about the future, her future? Did she need an agent? Tommy said she needed an agent. Tommy had offered to find her an agent. Tommy was a crook, but Tommy was canny.

  Their prospects were incompatible. There they were, high on well-consummated sexual passion, jogging along side by side in a dusty jeep driven by a crazy Chiot, protesting their undying love and enduring union, and yet they were about to part. Of course they knew they would never stay faithful to each other. It wasn't on the cards. This was the end of the romance.

  They spent, as they had planned, a day and a night in the town on the island. They thought they had been looking forward to some privacy and a proper bed, but as they checked into the bald-faced shabby Hotel Actaeon in the late morning their spirits sank yet further. The bedroom was small and dark, and though the bed was wide it was hard and low with concealed and vicious metal corners. It was far worse than the bed in the Room in Holborn, whose tricks they knew, and which they had subdued and tamed to their familiar demands. Within five minutes, as she unpacked her small bag, Ailsa had barked her shin. She yelped and bled. He too shortly bled, from her over-enthusiastic attempts to probe the weathered heel of his foot with a flame-blackened sterilized needle. She was trying to extract the embedded spine of a sea urchin, but her search verged on sadism, and he told her, quite sharply, to stop. They sat together on the hard low mattress, and laughed at their injuries, but there was a forced note to their laughter, for the ambience of the room was lowering. The long thin bolster-pillow was scratchy, the mosquitoes were active, the washbasin had only a trickle of water and no plug, the handle of the plywood wardrobe was broken, the lavatory down the corridor lacked paper and was blocked. The Hotel Actaeon was a disappointment. They had been expecting a more attractive, a more romantic departure from Cythera and Perfect Happiness.

  Maybe, said Ailsa, looking at the blood and the mosquitoes, we should have had a tetanus injection.

  He forbore to admit that his injections were all up to date. He knew he should have warned her, but he had forgotten.

  They both wanted to explore the town, and discussed their itinerary over a miserable lunch of leathery rings of squid and roughly hewed tomato and onion salad. She had wanted to go to the town's museum, because that was the kind of thing she always wanted to do. He resisted, she insisted. They quarrelled pettily, like a married couple, or like lovers who are tired of each other and are looking for release. They knew this quarrel was a warning, but they ignored the warning. What else could they do?

  The future, over the long wait for the meal, had begun to oppress them. They talked about it, but it had lost its confident shine. They talked about their research grants. His, thanks to some long-deceased and long-forgotten zoologist called Vickery, was munificent. Hers was meagre. Was this discrimination, and if so, of what nature? The plan had been – what had it been? To write love letters, to ring long distance, to keep in touch, over their year of separation. It would be a trial, but their love would surely survive a trial, would perhaps thrive on an endurance test. It would prove them, and they would triumph over it. Anyway, there would be visits and vacations.

  What does one do about love, at that age? How does one trap it and tag it and clip its wings?

  She had won the argument about the museum. He had wanted to loaf and to idle by the quay and to drink his last glass of the island's speciality ouzo as he watched the fishing boats and the ferries, but she marched him in the heat of the late afternoon to look at incomprehensible prehistoric shards and vessels, at vases and broken pottery, at copper fish hooks and bones and shells, at amber and faience and marble dagger pommels and obsidian blades and old maps and Venetian coins. She forced him to admire the exploits of the British women archaeologists who had led the excavations on Chios between the World Wars. He could see that her insistence on female accomplishment, which had amused him on board the Bride of Abydos, might irritate him if she insisted on overplaying it on dry land. He did not want to know any more about those old spinsters, Miss Edith Eccles and Miss Winifred Lamb and the Honourable Mercy Money-Coutts. He was bored by findings from the tombs in the Valley of the Sacred Milk, and he did not see why Ailsa found the milk so significant. He had a headache, and the labelling in the museum was unhelpful, although she would not admit it.

  She was on terra firma now, and she was letting him know about it, though she herself was not quite sure of what it was that she was letting him know. Her programme was forming itself there, dimly, assembling
its shapes, as she paced by his side across the marble floors. It was not yet articulate. It was in its prehistory, but it was evolving, even there, as they stared together at the ruins of the ancient cultures of the island of Chios. Over the past two or three years she had lunged at this programme, wildly, with little jabs and large assertions that sometimes joined and sometimes missed and sometimes hit an unexpected and unintended mark. She had previewed it and foreshadowed it, and now it was beginning to take shape.

  It had no place in it for this man.

  In the largest room in the museum hung a copy of the most famous painting inspired by the history of the island. It was called The Massacre at Chios, and it was by Eugène Delacroix, who had never visited Chios (or Scio, as it was alternatively labelled in French). Painted in 1824, it recorded the massacre of the Greeks by the Turks in 1822. The artist had worked on it for many months.

  Together, they paused and stood in front of this vast and terrible and overwhelming canvas. Even in reproduction, it overwhelmed. They stood, and they stared.

  Ailsa, in her role as semi-trained art historian, had already spoken to Humphrey of this masterpiece of Eros and of Death, and had sought it out here to show it to him. She had come to the museum to inspect it. And now, confronting it, confronted by it, he remembered that he had seen it before, somewhere - who knows, perhaps in the section on 'Famous Paintings of the World', in The Children's Encyclopedia in distant Finsterness? (There were many improbable works reproduced in that fatal compendium.) There it was, The Massacre, in all its macabre glory, in all the extravagance of its beauty and cruelty.

  He could see, years later, as he looked back over this passage, over this moment, that the painting already stood as an emblem, as a paradigm, of two of the great intellectual and aesthetic causes of the last four decades of the twentieth century, but he had not known it for what it was, and even Ailsa, quick though she was, had not known quite what she was seeing.