Appetite and nausea are finely balanced in the struggle for Dame Mary's body, and at the moment appetite dominates, through force of habit and a long history of triumph. Appetite is on the side of life, and will overcome.
At this point, Humphrey emerges from his brooding to remark that he thinks he too has met Ailsa's daughter, Marina.
He describes his brief encounter with Marina Pope in Burlington House.
'Did she know who you were?' asks Ailsa.
Humphrey shakes his head.
'How could she?' he says. 'I worked out who she was, because she was wearing a label, but how could she know who I was?'
'That's a fair point,' says Ailsa.
'And who are you?' asks Dame Mary, turning to Humphrey with an air of accusation, demanding clarification. 'You've all got me in a right muddle now. Who are you?'
'I'm Sandy Clegg's old playmate and classmate,' says Humphrey, 'and I'm Ailsa Kelman's first husband, and Tommy Kelman was my brother-in-law.'
Dame Mary looks bewildered, and scratches at her scalp through her short apricot curls.
'Is that a conundrum? Is it a mind game? It's too late at night for games. Is it one of those "This man's father is my father's son" riddles? I don't get it. I don't like being teased.'
'Everyone,' says Sandy Macfarlane, who has had time to recover his composure and to replan his strategy, 'is related to everybody else, and at very few removes. It's something to do with six degrees of separation. I used to be fascinated by networks and synchronicity. Have you ever played that game where you find out how many people round the table or in the class share the same birthday? It's always more than you think. It's uncanny, but it nearly always works.'
'Your brother-in-law?' echoes Dame Mary to Humphrey, ignoring this frivolous intellectual interjection and seizing the issue before it is lost in casuistry. 'Did you say Tommy Kelman was your brother-in-law? Does that mean that Ailsa was your wife?'
'Yes,' says Humphrey. 'That's what I just said. Ailsa and I were married, long long ago, in another lifetime, as Sandy has clearly discovered. But unlike Mr Pope, who was also at one point Tommy's brother-in-law, I don't boast about my marriage. I don't keep photos on my mantelpiece. I keep it quiet. I haven't got many mementoes. I've a few, but I keep them hidden away. It wasn't a very public marriage. Was it, Ailsa? Tommy was there, at the wedding, but it wasn't very public. No cameras, no journalists. No paparazzi. It was all very informal, very low-key. Wasn't it, Ailsa?'
Dame Mary looks from one to the other, in mock or real bewilderment, and then at Sandy Clegg, who is nodding in affirmation.
'I don't think they called them paparazzi, in those days,' says Ailsa.
'So you and Humphrey were married?' demands Dame Mary, who wants to make sure she has got it right.
Ailsa nods. Humphrey nods.
He does not disown her, or not in public.
'We haven't met for more than thirty years,' says Ailsa plaintively, and with an unwonted meekness. 'And I'm not sure it was such a good idea to meet now. I wasn't certain, but my lady from Rio told me I should give it a go. She said it might be time to try. I don't know, maybe it's all a big mistake. I don't know why I accepted. It's all got a bit out of hand. I'd braced myself for Humphrey, and Ornemouth, and Finsterness, and memory lane, but I hadn't reckoned with Sandy and his schoolboy tricks.'
'I didn't know you were going to be here,' says Humphrey to Ailsa, as though there were nobody else in the room. 'Nobody warned me. I never read the small print. I didn't know you were going to be here until I reached Darlington. When I got on the train this morning at King's Cross, I was an innocent. I'd no idea. I swear to God, I'd no idea. It's been a long day. God knows why I accepted this tomfool stupid invitation. I knew it would be a disaster. First you, then Sandy. It's been too much.'
'Poor Hump,' says Ailsa. 'What a shock. I think you rose to the occasion very well. So why did you accept? I know why I did, but why did you?'
'It's the place,' says Sandy. 'I told you. It draws you'.
'Yes,' says Humphrey, 'it draws you.'
'Is this rigmarole all true?' insists Dame Mary.
'Yes,' say Ailsa and Humphrey, with one voice.
'The place casts its spell,' says Sandy, with authority.
'You have to return to the place, to find the explanation. The place is written on the tablets of the heart.'
And at this prompting, Ailsa intones, as she had done as a child, the incantatory rhymes to which she had once danced upon the beach.
'I stood upon the Ornemouth Fort
And guess ye what I saw
Brochan Bay and Broomside
Fairhouses and Cocklaw,
The Fairy Folk of Finsterness
And the Witches of Edincraw.'
A graveyard shiver passes through Humphrey Clark as he listens.
'Tell more, tell more,' says Dame Mary.
The clock strikes the half hour.
'But make it quick,' says Dame Mary, 'because I've not got long to live.'
There was no twenty-four-hour Room Service in the old Queen's Hotel at Ornemouth. You could ring till dawn, and nobody would answer. But canny Sandy Macfarlane knew where to find the key to the pantry, and he returned, after a brief sortie, with a reassuring blue-and-white willow pattern plateful of ham sandwiches and a jar of English mustard and a slab of Cheddar cheese and some cream crackers. That would see them through, he said. Though through to what, precisely, was still unclear.
Dame Mary had greeted the tray with gratitude and pleasure.
'I'm such a greedy pig,' she had said, as she munched with relief.
Two hours later, all the sandwiches were gone and the level in the bottle of Macallan's was very low.
'Macallan's was always Steven Runciman's favourite malt,' Sandy had confided, impressively, summoning up a world of closeted aristocratic old border queens and towers, as he once more refilled their glasses. 'Sir Steven swore by it. Sir Steven had this beautiful little castle, just over the border.'
('Name-dropper,' Ailsa had murmured, under her breath.)
The whisky level was low, and some of the gaps in the story had been filled. Names had been retrieved from the lower depths: Ailsa found she had guessed right about Sandy's famous French-Algerian lover, and Sandy had provided both the name and fate of the girl called Heather Robinson, whose family had preceded the Kelmans as lodgers at Mrs Binns's.
On the sandwich level, Humphrey was feeling fine. His throat was much better, his voice was stronger. On the levels of shame, remorse and paranoia he was faring less well.
He had coped adequately with the story of Heather Robinson, the lonely stubborn little hopscotch artist whom he and Sandy had spurned, the child whose loneliness had set the seal on their boyhood friendship. Her life had not been marked by worldly success, but the blame for this could hardly have been laid at the door of schoolboy Humphrey Clark. Not even he could hold himself responsible for so tangential and brief a connection.
Heather Robinson had not been eligible for an honorary degree in Ornemouth, said Sandy. Had she been, he would have made sure she would be invited. He has influence, as they have guessed, on the Honours Committee. But she would not have been eligible, and anyway, she was dead. She had lived and died in obscurity, unmarried. No pomp and circumstance for her. No honour, love, obedience, troops of friends. She had lived most of her uneventful adult life with her widowed mother in Sunderland, and had died less than two years after her mother, at the age of forty-eight, of a respiratory disorder.
Humphrey found himself swallowing painfully with useless sorrow, useless and misplaced remorse.
Sandy told them that he knew these facts because he had found Heather's address in Mrs Binns's Visitors' Book, and in his role as archivist and auditor of the summers he had been to London to look up Heather Robinson's death certificate.
('Necrophiliac,' muttered Ailsa, to herself: then recalled, instantly, guiltily, her own satisfaction at having discovered in distant southern Susse
x the nature of the affliction of widowed Mr Fell.)
'Your names were in the Visitors' Book too,' said Sandy to Ailsa. 'Yours and Tommy's. You all signed, all four of you. And in the Comments column, your mother wrote, "A very nice holiday and lots of sunshine. A real break." But you and Tommy just signed your names.'
Humphrey could cope with that information, just as he could cope with the news that Tommy Kelman and Sandy Clegg had tried a bit of hanky-panky in the bracken on the day they'd disappeared together. He'd half-guessed at something like that. Boys will be boys, he'd worked that out, over the years. Nobody cared about that kind of thing these days, and it hadn't been very unusual, even then.
'You were always so high-minded, such a good boy, Humpy,' said Sandy, in explanation, in demi-apology.
But Humphrey had not guessed at the story of Jock in the garage.
'He had skin like hide,' said Sandy. 'His skin was dark and hard as hide. We did it in the back of the garage. I suppose I liked it, or I wouldn't have kept on going back for more, would I?'
Humphrey was repelled by this disclosure, and looked at Sandy in prim disbelief, thus reinforcing Sandy's censorious view of his high and narrow mind.
Sandy had liked Jock. Jock had done Sandy no harm.
The aquarium had been of solid, thick, moulded glass. It had been beyond price. They had bought it from Jock for a shilling.
Dame Mary, who had been snoring intermittently, surfaced at this point to contribute a dubious sexual reminiscence, involving a groping priest and the fat leather apron of a church door. This story (which disquietingly introduced the words 'hymen' and 'membrane') was met with initial mirth, then a lull of silence.
'I'm sorry,' she said, into the silence. 'I think I've lowered the tone. It's time I went to bed.'
But she did not move. She shut her eyes, but she did not move.
Humphrey also shut his eyes, and leaned back in his chair. Although exhausted, he was deep in what was still some kind of thought. Both the tone and the content of all these huddling hustling revelations were perplexing to him. He was finding it hard to absorb, in the space of two hours, the compressed narrative of lives that had taken fifty years to develop to this point: lives compact with successes, failures, adventures, loves, deaths, finalities: lives of which, until so recently, until this evening, he had known next to nothing. His sense of the shifting intensities and variable measurements of time was making him feel giddy, as though he were looking through too many lenses, and none of them in focus. How could it be that two or three unimportant years of his childhood had altered the flow of the course of his future? Who was answerable for this error, this arrest, this misdirection, this strange shift of the landscape, this brick dropped casually to dam and divert the stream?
The riddle of Diophantus came back to him, with its retrospective calculations, its portions and proportions, its message of failure and of limitation and of immortal reputation.
Call no man happy until he is dead. That is what the ancients had said.
Heather Robinson, poor late-born child. What was she to him, that he should remember her so well?
It had seemed, at one point, early in the evening, hours ago, at the reception, that the whole melodramatic Ailsa business (their childhood meeting, their accidental encounter, their love, their days of perfect happiness, their foolish and impetuous sixties marriage, their ridiculous quarrels, their rushed divorce, their long-drawn-out silence) could be turned off with an adult smile and an unspoken mutual agreement between the two of them, with a social contract of polite acceptance and disclaimer: and, looking back, he did not think that he and Ailsa had failed each other or their witnesses on this superficial level. They had greeted each other bravely, they had saluted and acknowledged each other with courtesy, and they had kept up a good front for the duke and the duchess and the magnate and the professor and the head of the department and the headmistress and the bishop and the bookseller. They had bitten on the bullet, and the social structure of the new University of Ornemouth had supported them. But now they were being driven into deeper waters by the late night and this small séance. It was a dangerous game that Sandy was playing. Should Humphrey cling to the plank and try to keep afloat, or should he let himself drift free and drown?
Ailsa and Sandy were now engrossed in the pursuit of trivial recollections. They were talking about the ice-cream man and the Robot King and St Cuthbert's Rock and Mrs Binns and her jigsaws and her jar of pearly beads and the games of Monopoly and Tommy's attempts at cheating. Ailsa's tone was nostalgic, affectionate, forgiving. She was behaving well, this grown and ageing woman whose reappearance he had dreaded for so many decades, the sight of whose name in print had made him flinch with guilty failure and remorse. She was neither the temptress nor the vulgarian nor the avenging fury that he had imagined her to have become. She did not seem to be in any way angry with him. She had not been nursing her anger for decades, as he had fancied. So she was not a Bad Girl, after all. Tommy had been bad, but Ailsa had nobly over the years resisted the bad Kelman gene. She had endured and weathered and come through the other side to somewhere better, somewhere more peaceful. She had grown up, in the thirty years and more of their separation. He should not have been surprised by this, but he was.
'I was such a bad sport,' he heard Ailsa say to Sandy, in mocking wonder, of her angry childhood self. 'Do you remember how I used to scream and yell when I thought I was losing? I was a horror.'
Yes, she had grown up.
And then he heard himself say, unprompted, without caution or forethought: 'And you, Sandy, do you still write?'
He knew enough of writers to know that this was not a question to ask lightly. Ailsa in her silver gear went very still. Her sequins froze.
'No,' said Sandy. As I told you, the Muse abandoned me.'
'But that was your poetic Muse,' pursued Humphrey cruelly, 'the Muse of your poetry. What about your prose? I gather you are now best known for your prose?'
'That gift too,' said Sandy, 'departed'.
He sighed, a cold little sigh.
'It's amazing to me now,' said Sandy, 'that I ever managed to believe I could write. It was all a confidence trick. I tricked myself into believing I could do it. But it was all derivation, it was all imitation. Unlike you, Ailsa, I had no originality. I was trapped in the styles of others.'
Ailsa wanted to know what models he had followed, whom he had imitated, what styles he had affected. Sandy, meekly, came up with a list. His poetry had been after the manner of Auden, his pornography after the manner of de Sade and Genet and Apollinaire, and his Arts Council nouveau roman was a Robbe-Grillet crossed with a Butor set in Stoke-on-Trent.
And the memoir, pressed Ailsa. Had he found his true 'voice' in the memoir, she wanted to know.
'They're very keen on "voice" these days,' said Sandy evasively. 'They talk about it a lot in Creative Writing courses. Or so I'm told. I've never been to one, of course. Nor have I ever taught one. I know my limitations.'
Well, repeated Ailsa, had he found his voice?
'I found somebody's voice,' admitted Sandy. 'But I don't know if it was mine. And whoever it belonged to, I lost it.'
During the lengthening pause that followed this admission, Dame Mary stirred, surfaced, rummaged around her, collected her little pearl-embroidered evening bag from the depths of the coarse crumb-filled pocket of the arm of the chair, searched in her bag for her weighty room key, jangled it indicatively at them, heaved herself up from the sagging depths, tugged and straightened the stoutly creased and crumpled bodice and skirt of her blue satin gown, and made gestures of farewell. The men politely tried to rouse themselves to see her out, but she flagged them back down into their seats, and they unresistingly relapsed.
'I'm off for my beauty sleep,' she said, her hand on the brass doorknob of the Heather Lounge. 'It's above my head, all this book talk, all this talk about voices. I've got to look after mine, I've got to give it a rest. And you should go to bed too, Humphrey, or yo
u'll be speechless in the morning. Goodnight, my sweets. I'll see you all tomorrow, for the grand recessional.'
She made a large gesture that suggested the swelling music, she hummed a phrase, she kissed her fingers at them, and she departed.
'So The Queen of Clubs was the last book you published?' resumed Ailsa, as soon as the door closed. She had not quite finished with the revenge of interrogation. 'Fifteen years ago, was it? Or maybe even more?'
'I've published papers,' said Sandy, 'academic papers. You may have seen my name in the TLS?' (They shook their heads.) 'But I've published nothing very substantial. Well, I was quite proud of my contribution on Beaumont and Fletcher and cross-dressing. It was called Salmacis and Hermaphrodite. Beaumont's version of Salmacis is quite interesting.'
(They looked blank.)
'Salmacis was the nymph of the fountain,' said Sandy. 'The water lady. Any man who bathed in her fountain turned into a woman.'
'Just like Paul Burden's book,' said Ailsa.
'That's right,' said Sandy. 'That's probably why I remembered it. It's a few years ago, now, that piece in the TLS.'
'Sometimes,' he said, his face pinched and pale, 'I sit there, in the window of my room over the bay, and I try to write. Words, you know, words. I think that if I sit there and put the words down on the paper, it may happen. Who knows what meaning may spurt and spring, even so late, so late in the day? But I don't even think of myself as a writer now.' He pauses, then finishes.
'Irony is the enemy of small talent,' he says. 'It kills.'
Humphrey was silent with shame, for he had not meant to initiate this miserable confession. He was thinking of his own failures, his own dead ends. The abandoned parathyroid hormone, the dead wrasse. He was thinking of the Green Grotto, that simulacrum and sepulchre of science, into which so much good work had been poured and parodied, where so many creatures had met a confined and miserable death, where the turtle swam round and round in its prison lagoon and the bejewelled mermaid brushed her fibreglass hair. He was thinking of the sham of the Ethics Committee on which he had served, from which he had too late resigned. He wondered if Sandy remembered the death leap of their fish, and if he had dared to use this shameful private knowledge in his wretched nouveau roman.
The Sea Lady Page 30
