It will be a day of instant new traditions. The famous old boat of the year of the great flood, the Damsel, has been restored, and she will be wheeled through the streets as part of the procession.
The great flood was well before Humphrey's time. He had never seen the Damsel, and is surprised to discover, from these notes, that this story of this vessel's intrepid rescues had long been considered one of the most celebrated episodes in the town's history. He had never heard of the Damsel, as a boy, although he had known all about Grace Darling. Perhaps the Damsel is a fake heritage item, invented for the occasion.
The Chancellor, he learns, is Lord Lanark of Lanark, the Public Orator is Dr Alistair Macfarlane, and the Vice Chancellor is Professor Helen Sinclair. These are all good northern names. Maybe they are all local names, from the Borders. But he cannot discover much from the names alone. By this evening, these names will have become flesh, but for now they are words on paper. Lanark, Macfarlane, Sinclair, he repeats to himself, not very confidently. L. M. S.
LMS, LNER, LMS.
He depends much on mnemonics these days, but they do not always do the trick.
Dolerite and whinstone, granite and sandstone.
These words of the earth are not a mnemonic, they are more of a lullaby. He has been reciting them for months now to lull himself to sleep in the small hours.
When he was a child, he hadn't realized that dolerite and whinstone were different names for the same stone. He'd thought they were two different substances. But they are the same, under different names. Like zebras and leopard sharks. Stegostoma fasciatum. Some of the happiest weeks of his life had been spent with the sharks in the clear and warm and weightless waters of the Indian Ocean.
Lanark, Macfarlane, Sinclair. He should have checked all these names out earlier, discovered their hobbies, their marital status, their publications, the numbers of their children and grandchildren.
There will be more colour added to the names of the fellow-guests.
He turns the page, and inspects the tiny photograph of a well-known soprano, showing a bare-throated round-faced young-middle-aged woman with a great deal of bouffant curly hair. She is captioned as Dame Mary McTaggart, a name which seems almost ridiculously familiar to him, although he cannot think that he has ever met or seen its owner. He must have heard her on the radio, seen her name many times subliminally in the press. He applies himself to the print, and is told that although Scottish by descent, she was born in Canada. She has sung around the world (famous venues, directors and co-stars are mentioned) but has also in recent years been highly praised for her roles nearer home with the Winter Palace Company. She is as distinguished for her interpretations of traditional Scottish folk song as she is for her work with some of the more innovative groups in Britain. Her pure and soaring siren voice bears us with its disembodied magic to dangerously enchanted realms.
So here is another northerner, receiving honour both for herself and for her ancestry. Her Scottishness must be part of the deal. Again, he recognizes the literary allusion, for one of the very few records possessed by his aunt and grandmother in Finsterness had been a scratchy but enthralling rendering of some famous singer pouring forth various popular Victorian parlour arias, of which Mendelssohn's most famous piece had been one:
On wings of song I'll bear thee
Enchanted realms to see
Come O my love prepare thee
In dreamland to wander with me.
By the banks of the Ganges we'll wander...
These words come back to him from the past, from the Sunday evenings of childhood, along with a sense of the melancholy, boundless intensity of yearning, the oceanic desires and aspirations, the certainty of an ever-extending future. To his embarrassment he feels his eyes fill with tears. He tells himself, sharply, that he has become a sentimental old fool. A foolish old curmudgeon, and an old fool to boot.
He looks back at his own citation, searching once more for ambiguities and insults, and then, again, he re-reads the praise of Ailsa. He thinks of the shifting sands, the quick and shifting sands of reputation. He thinks of the sands of life and of time, and of the old wooden egg timer that hung on the kitchen wall at Burnside Avenue.
The Bebb-Whistler Prize, the Vickery Fellowship, the Chancellor Medal, the Fellowship of the Royal Society, the Gomme-Hardy Chair...
The programme says that the soprano will sing for them this evening, after the dinner: there will be no after-dinner speeches, but, in their place, a 'short recital' by Dame Mary. It does not say whether her choice of song will be traditional or innovative.
On wings of song I'll bear thee...
The high notes whine and keen in his head from the grooves of the brittle old black recording, and as he listens to them, a short but large woman passes conspicuously towards him through the compartment, clutching in her hand a square brown paper buffet bag which smells strongly of bacon burger. As she draws nearly level with him, the train gives a sudden lurch, and she grabs the back of the empty seat opposite, then straightens herself, murmuring a diffuse and unnecessary apology. Their eyes meet, at an uncomfortably close proximity, and he knows that she identifies him. He knows that canny look of recognition. He can see that she considers speaking to him, and then thinks better of the impulse, for, having regained her balance, she goes on her way, with comic dignity, proceeding past him towards the adjoining compartment. The doors open themselves for her, and she disappears through them to her retreat with her shameful booty.
It is Dame Mary. He has summoned up this apparition by his reading of the programme notes.
He hopes that Ailsa is not on the same train. He knows that Ailsa is not on the same train. He would have felt her pulsing and rustling and pumping through his valves, and forcing her way through his veins and his arteries.
Dame Mary does not look very much like her miniature publicity photograph, although she is surrounded by an unmistakably operatic aura. Her hair, in the thumbnail image copious and dark and conventionally well-coiffed, is now cropped defiantly short and trim and tight about her skull, and it is dyed an unnatural apricot-orange. It sprouts like stubble. He has had time to take in that she has a considerable double chin (he strokes the folds of his own throat) and that she is dressed colourfully, in a shapeless mid-calf gown of brilliant blue, of the vaguely ethnic style often favoured by fat but fearless ladies. Her bosom is looped with a triple string of bright green beads. She is a spectacle, and her face has a jolly determination, a set chuckle.
After her stumble she had recovered herself, and walked off stoutly. If she had not been about to munch her way through a gross bacon burger, she would have stopped to introduce herself.
But soon, on the platform of the bright, quaint geranium-and-lobelia-tubbed Victorian station at Ornemouth, beneath the pretty fretted white-painted wooden canopy, they will meet. A car will be waiting for them, to take them to the Queen's Hotel.
He gazes out of the window, and waits for the great arches to appear.
Ailsa Kelman has already settled into the hotel. She has parked her little red hire car, and checked in, and she is sitting perched in the armchair in the window bay of her first-floor bedroom, leaning forward and looking out towards the sea and the promenade. The hotel is on the lowest terrace of the sloping hillside rising inland to the south of the town, and it commands a good view. Below lies the levelled terrace of the putting green, bordered by orderly municipal flowerbeds of red, white and blue: to the left, the harbour and the cobbles and the steep narrow wynds of the Old Town, and beyond that, round the promontory and to the north, invisible Finsterness. It is late afternoon, and she is possessed by a near-overwhelming sense of fatigue. Her buoyancy has deserted her, and she feels her age, and worse. She cannot face Humphrey Clark, and she is frightened of imminent death. If she sits back, or lies down on her bed, she will die. Energy is draining out of her like water out of a basin. She has kept going all day, but now she is tempted to give up, and to give in.
In the ho
tel car park, she had found a space with a sign saying 'Reserved for Lady Drivers Only'. She had occupied it gratefully, too tired to worry about whether its message was very modern or very old-fashioned. It was a space, and it was easy of access, and she had taken it.
She tells herself that it is not surprising that she is tired, for during the day she has travelled many hundreds of miles, and journeyed backwards through many decades. She has had a busy week, and she has been up since dawn, and she will be late to bed this night. The day has been exhausting, and its memories full of accusation. But she is incapable of admitting the concept of exhaustion. Exhaustion is for lesser spirits, for the old, for the weak, for the failing. And she will never join their ranks. She is immortal, for she was born into the confident baby-boom generation of the high-earning, high-spending, fearless, untiring immortals. So she sits there, to attention, leaning forward towards the distant mirror of the sea. The air is still, the silvery-blue water smooth like glass. She cannot see, from here, the little curls of the small waves as they break.
Along that modest little promenade she had walked with her mother and her father and her brother Tommy and that long-dead dog, in an agony of premature resentment, impatience and self-pity. Tommy, Humphrey, and that other boy called Sandy Clegg. In one of their more ludicrous quarrels in that dreadful semester in California, she had accused her poor husband Humphrey of having been enamoured of the boy called Sandy, and then of having had a yen for his handsome Greek diving colleague Iannis. She had accused poor Humphrey of being 'queer', for that was the word they used in those days. This had been a ridiculous, a random accusation. He was a 'straight' chap, whatever one might mean by that term, and moreover a decent chap, and she had used him horribly. She had got in his way. And on the rebound from the disaster of their affair and brief marriage he had stupidly married that plain woman who had won the Nobel or married the Nobel or whatever it was that she had done. Humphrey had married another clever woman, who had ditched him. And it had all been Ailsa Kelman's fault. Without her, Humphrey Clark could have been a happy man, happily married to some suitable woman, and in command of honour, love, obedience, troops of friends. She had set him off course.
It was she herself, as she had later discovered, who could lay a more legitimate claim to bisexual leanings. But maybe those leanings had been merely a fashionable phase of feminism, a rite of passage through which all women of the 1960s and 1970s were obliged to make their way? She liked women, she had made friends with women, but she had much preferred sexual intercourse with men.
After Humphrey, she had slept with many men, as was the vogue, and she had stopped counting. But she had married only once more, and that once had been a grave error, committed through vanity, greed and ambition. She had married Martin Pope because he was rich, and powerful, and cunning, and well placed: because he had not been born in Bonsett or Covington but in the London Clinic: because he had been to Eton and King's. She had married him because he had asked her to marry him, and because she had wanted to usurp the bed place of a film star. She had married him because he had surprised and flattered her by asking her to do so.
She had married him, in a fit of weakness, for security.
She had lived to regret this mistake.
Now she lived and slept alone, and here she sat, alone in a hotel room, tense with expectation.
She believed that Humphrey lived and slept alone, in an old-world bachelor apartment overlooking Regent's Park.
Sometimes she had thought of giving him a ring, out of the blue, but had restrained herself. She'd done him enough damage already.
She had never met Dorothy Portal, but she had seen her picture in the papers. Dorothy Portal might be a clever woman, and she might have won half a Nobel Prize for parathyroid hormones, but she does not photograph well.
What was I so cross about, Ailsa asks herself, when I was a child? She remembered her mother's unpleasing refrain, 'If you don't stop yelling, I'll give you something to yell about.' But her mother hadn't dared, or not very often. Her mother had been frightened of her. Once, or perhaps more than once, Ailsa had been handed over to her timid father, who had beaten her ritually on the bottom with the back of a black varnished Pearson Mason hairbrush as she lay face down screaming with fury on her little bed. She'd tried hard to recover any erotic elements of this incident during her talking cure, elements that could have influenced her later sexual predilections, but was not convinced that she had succeeded. Her father was not suitable material for that kind of fantasy. All right, she knew that wasn't the point of a fantasy, but truly, her father, if you had seen him...
And the hard bristles of the hairbrush had been disgustingly matted with her mother's wiry grey hairs. The bristles sprouted fiercely out of a repulsively convex pink fleshly oval dome.
No, what she remembered was not sex but rage. She remembered indignation, self-importance, a refusal to submit to subjugation, either by person or tribe or race or gender, or by the filthy little town into which she had happened to have been born.
She could see, from the hotel's slight elevation, the people strolling along the promenade below, taking their sober evening walk as they had done for a century and more. Once, on that summer holiday, the Kelmans had repaired to this hotel, the best hotel in town, for their tea. It was a treat, to celebrate her parents' wedding anniversary. She had eaten a slice of chocolate cake with a cake fork. The cake had been filled with a deliciously sweet pale pinkish-brown artificial cream. There had been shocking-pink iced cochineal fancies, on a cake stand, and she had eaten one of those as well.
Then they had gone back to Mrs Binns for plaice and scalloped potatoes, and she had not been able to finish her portion. 'Your eyes were bigger than your tummy,' Mrs Binns had said to her, more as a joke than as a reproof, as she removed the plate with its distressed fillet of uneaten fish. Ailsa had found this phrase extraordinarily offensive and humiliating. She hadn't asked for the plate full of plaice. She didn't want to eat its wet white flesh and its orange spotted skin, cunningly concealed beneath the vinegary yellow batter. And her eyes weren't bigger than her tummy. Her eyes were a normal size. She wasn't a sea monster.
One evening in Burnside Avenue Humphrey Clark had shown her his pictures of the monsters of the deep. He had shown her the vampire squid, and the hideous female angler, which she had much admired. But she had not liked the drawing of the fish with a grotesquely extended external stomach, a stomach into which it had engorged a whole fish larger than its own body. The big-bellied fish had frightened her, and she had never forgotten it. She had not admitted to fear, but she had been afraid.
She hears the plaintive, angry cry of the gulls.
One summer, from Scarborough, in a fit of boredom, she had written a soppy and obsequious little letter to Uncle Mac on Children's Hour on the radio about kittiwakes, and puffins, and about Ailsa Craig, her namesake rock, the breeding ground and home of the gannet, a seafowl also known as the Solon goose. The common plants on Ailsa Craig grow strangely large, she had helpfully informed Uncle Mac, because of all the guano. On Ailsa's rock the red campion, the white dead nettle and the wild hyacinth had flourished, and seals had thrived in the Mermaid's Cave. She had been trying to impress Uncle Mac with her precocious learning, which she had gleaned from a couple of pamphlets. She had never been to her namesake rock. She has still not been to her namesake rock. All her life, she has been trying to impress the world with her learning. She had been in love with learning. She is still in love with learning. Knowledge is sadism, said Sigmund Freud. Once, she had been innocent and had not known what Freud meant, but now she knows.
The people stroll, up and down, dying slowly as they walk.
She longs to lie on her bed, to put her feet up, to rest, but she is afraid that if she lies down and shuts her eyes, she will die. Her lady from Rio has tried to help her to overcome this fear, and she sleeps better at night now in her sixties than she had slept in her haunted, hag-ridden and panic-stricken fifties, but still she
dreads the horror of the sleep in the afternoon, the horror of the waking from the little death.
So she stays awake, on duty.
Her parents had slept, side by side, in their striped deckchairs, of an afternoon, in Ornemouth, in Scarborough, facing the sea. Even in the bitter wind, they had dozed, stoically, fearlessly, indifferently, her mother's head tied up in a scarf, her father's covered with a cloth cap.
In the old days, there had been a machine in the little amusements arcade on the front, which told your fortune. You put a copper penny into the slot in the hand of the Robot King, and pressed the red Impulse Button on his stomach, and then he whirred and his eyes flashed and his head wagged, and when the whirring stopped a card with your fortune printed on it was excreted from beneath his feet into a little bronze metal cup.
Tommy said it was a waste of a penny. He liked the machine with a spring lever and little balls that whizzed round and rolled until they dropped noisily into Win-or-Lose slots. If you were clever you could win your money back, and sometimes more. It was more skill than luck, said Tommy. If you leaned hard on the machine from the left and joggled it a bit, the ball was more likely to go into the Win hole. He'd tried it lots of times, and he knew.
Ailsa's little printed fortunes had always been propitious. The Robot King unfailingly promised her fame and riches. The Robot King had been on her side, and his prophecies had been fulfilled. But by now she had forgotten how to identify herring gulls and gannets and kittiwakes. She had forgotten many of the things she had once known.
These circling birds were common gulls. They were not even black-backed gulls.
The Sea Lady Page 26
