The Sea Lady

by Margaret Drabble

  Ailsa also was still brooding on style. She was not yet ready to relinquish the subject.

  'Your mother wasn't much of a stylist,' she informed Sandy aggressively. 'Plain stuff, plain stuff.'

  'That was all that was asked of her,' said Sandy. 'And maybe I should have asked less of myself.'

  'My style has been the ruin of me,' said Ailsa. 'I used to try to think things through, but now I think I can solve everything with a cheap joke. I think I can jump across any gap with a sound bite or a stunt. That's what the culture had done to me. No, I take that back, that's what I've done to myself.

  'Or maybe that's what I've done to the culture. I used to be a serious person, once. I had a serious agenda, before I learned to play the media. Before the media learned to play me. Humphrey, you must try to remember me at my best. In the old days, I had ideas. And we had some good times. Do you remember the Bride of Abydos? Do you remember Plato and Darwin and the Blue Lagoon?'

  'Forgive and be friends. Forget and forgive,' said Humphrey. 'We are old now. What's done is done. We tried. We all tried, all three of us. We did our best.'

  Humphrey saw, as he spoke, a subliminal flash of salmon after mating and spawning: gaunt, crimson, gape-jawed, dying, cartilaginous, scaly, exhausted, upriver, in the stony shallows. The eggs are in the burrows of the pebbles. The adult fish are dying.

  The fish return to their spawning ground. They die at the source.

  Sandy's face was white and drawn with age and fatigue and thought and effort, but at Humphrey's words he summoned up a spark, and a sudden smile of great encompassing and unexpected sweetness. Humphrey had shown himself to be pure of heart, and therefore Sandy smiled.

  'Tomorrow,' said Sandy, 'I can show you the unborn souls as they come leaping and splashing on the incoming tide. I can show you the free souls jumping and splashing. If you come with me, we shall all be born again on the rising tide. It is a miracle. It happens daily. You will have the time, I promise you. I am in charge of the arrangements, and I know the timetable, and I know the tides, and I will be your guide.'

  Recessional

  In his unfamiliar hotel bed, Humphrey dreamed his familiar dream. He was standing on the beach of a bay, beneath a summer sky, stripped, gazing at the water. He could feel the hard ridges of the rippled sand beneath the arches of his bare feet. The bright illimitable sea lay before him. He walked towards the water, longing and yearning to immerse himself in it, but knowing in his dream that it would recede and drain away as he approached.

  But for the first time in his dream life, the water did not retreat from him. He stepped into the waves, disbelieving, and then waded to thigh depth, and then began to swim. But as he began to swim, the frame changed, the time shifted, the air darkened, the water darkened to a steely grey, and a dim fog thickened and smoked upwards from the surface of the water. He was swimming now, freely, in deep water, but there was no longer any shore in sight. He swam round in circles, looking for a sign, but there was no sign, no shore. There was nothing but this circular horizon of greyness and fog, below and above, extending for ever in every direction. He knew that he would swim until he drowned, and that this was the end, and that there was no meaning in it. There was nothing but the unlimited greyness of ocean, and he did not know where land lay. He had lost all sight and hope of land. He would swim in diminishing circles until death. This dream would be his death, and in his sleep he would die.

  Along the corridor, Ailsa, in her unfamiliar bed, dreamed an unbidden and unfamiliar dream, a new dream. She dreamed that she was climbing up the exposed outer wall of the bell tower, towards the belfry, on a crumbling and ever-extending and ever-steepening and ever-narrowing stone staircase. Ahead of her and above her climbed another figure, a shrouded female form. She could not identify the figure. Maybe it was her daughter Marina, maybe it was the poor princess, maybe it was the poor princess's aged and ugly big sister, maybe it was Eloise van Dieman. This figure laboured upwards, and Ailsa followed, until the figure came to a projecting overhang, and gripped it from beneath and tried to pull herself over it and up again towards the summit. Ailsa below, hanging on to the crumbling stonework, cried out to her, 'No!' and as she cried out the woman lost her grip, and let go, and began to fall, and Ailsa saw her falling, and saw the fragile skirts of her gown held in a spiralling wind. The figure was suspended for a bloodless crystal instant, and then began to fall like shattering glass, transparent in the air as she plummeted downwards, and a fraction of a second before she was about to spill in fragments upon the earth beneath Ailsa knew that she herself must let go and fall and die, because she could not bear to see and witness the impact and the blood of human death. But she could not force herself to let go, her fingers clung to the stone and to survival, her body wished to clamber on, and by an immense effort of the sleeping will she woke sharply in horror, as dawn came sweeping towards her in a low light over the North Sea. Waking saved her from the impact, and condemned her to live on, a little while.

  The Public Orator did not dream and he did not sleep. He worked in the night.

  Sandy Clegg slept, for a few brief hours in his narrow bed, but while he slept his shadow self was keeping watch by his bedside. The cowled form of the Public Orator was processing the day's events, and anticipating the rising tide of the day.

  The first day had been satisfactory. The anachronistically heterosexual couple had played their parts better than had been anticipated. They had not backed away and rejected each other. They had shown a sense of occasion. Dame Mary, their siren muse, had sung them into sentiment, and Ailsa Kelman had wept. (He had seen her tears.) They had accepted the scenario and their allotted roles within it, but they had played it in their different, distinctive styles and come up freely with their own lines. They had touched each other, of their own free will. (He had seen them kiss, he had seen them clasp hands.) And they had accepted Sandy Clegg, and had acknowledged him. They had not forgotten him. They had listened intently to his story.

  Sandy Clegg, the writer without words, turned restlessly in his sleep, his hair white on the white pillow, his cheeks sunken, his frail teeth clenched in the rigour of sleep.

  The Public Orator watched and waited. Sandy Clegg was not in good health. He was not as robust as his old friend Humphrey.

  Ailsa and Humphrey Clark had come up to scratch. So far, they had acquitted themselves with some honour.

  The Public Orator had been watching over this couple from a distance as they performed the scripts of their severed lives.

  He had followed the trajectory of Humphrey Clark's conventional masculine career, with its appointments and its disappointments, with its leaps and its falls, with its snakes and its ladders. He had watched as Humphrey failed to cope with the challenges, first of dissection, then of microbiology: as he failed to accept the intellectual and financial supremacy of the research institutions of the United States of America. He had watched Humphrey recoil from the larger scene, and resign himself to the smaller tank, the second rank. (Humphrey had enjoyed the seas off San Diego, but, some years later, he had been deeply depressed and unhappy in the Institute in Massachusetts.) He had witnessed Humphrey's struggles with envy, bitterness, ignominy, paranoia. He had seen Humphrey rub his nose against the smeared glass, and gallantly attempt to preserve his good nature. He had watched the fiasco of Greenwich, the expulsion from Greenwich.

  The Public Orator had been a spectator at the colourfully staged tableaux of the career of Ailsa Kelman. He had watched over her vanity, her fallibility, her inconsistency, her relentless restlessness, her vainglorious triumphs, her sensational blunders, her cleverness, her stupidity, her courage, her thoughtlessness, her late-onset humility, her attempts at a truce with herself. He had eavesdropped on her night thoughts, and detected from afar the concealed hurt in the face of her daughter Marina.

  What will they do now, these two ageing ill-matched lovers?

  They have not been good spouses or good parents. Ailsa has on principle denied the mater
nal instinct, and Humphrey has weakly allowed his only child to drift away across the ocean. They should have had a child together, but they failed to stick at it. They were genetically well matched, and sexually attracted, but they had ignored the Darwinian imperative.

  They had not lived out their marriage, and they had not lived out their parting. Ailsa had behaved both too badly and too well, following the whim of an emergent ideology, and Humphrey had failed to be man enough to resent her vanishing as he should have done. There had been no true ending. They had not succeeded in playing to the full the role of embittered divorcees. They had frozen rather than killed off their connection. They had arrested it. It was in storage. It had been silted up.

  This is what makes it fun for the Devil to try to play games with them.

  The Public Orator has toyed with the ideas of endings.

  Could he ratchet the plot onwards one more notch, by one more turn of the screw? He could ring Tommy Kelman, or P. B. Wilton, or the misogynist daily newspaper which loathes Ailsa Kelman most intensely and which defames her regularly to within an inch of the law. (When she writes for it, it pays her very well.) He could summon the paparazzi, to inspire Ailsa Kelman to a final spectacle. There is still some mileage left in Ailsa Kelman. Professor Clark is no longer very newsworthy, he is too respectable and too passé, but there are some out there who remember the diving exploits of his youth, when he had swum with sharks. The two of them together would make some kind of a story.

  The Devil buys up the stories.

  Secret marriage revealed.

  Childhood sweethearts reunited.

  Celebrity scandal: was the famous foetus Professor Clark's baby?

  Words, words. The Public Orator plays with words.

  They could remarry, and settle down together as Darby and Joan in the apartment in Regent's Park, or in a little cottage near the river in Chiswick, pooling their resources. They would have a lot to talk about.

  Jack shall have Jill

  Nought shall go ill

  The man shall have his mare again

  And all shall be well.

  Sandy Clegg stirs in his sleep. His glasses lie neatly folded on his bedside table, on top of his bedside book. He has been re-reading an old copy of Ballantyne's The Lifeboat, which he had bought this spring in the marine section of the antiquarian bookshop in Ornemouth. He and Humphrey Clark had read it fifty years ago, and this may well be the very copy that they had read, the copy that had once belonged to famous swimmer Grandpa Neil of the Merchant Navy. Sandy returns more and more to the books he had read as a boy, as ageing men do. He is looking for something that he cannot find. He had been anxious to re-read the Royal Humane Society's rules for the recovery 'of those who are apparently drowned'. He and Humpy had been enthralled by this dull book. He had hoped to rediscover the secret of its enchantment, but it has fled. It is a very dull book.

  The three honorary graduands do not meet for breakfast in the hotel dining room. They are too exhausted. They breakfast alone in their rooms, and meet in the foyer. Dame Mary is thickly layered with theatrical cosmetics, and Ailsa has also done her best to conceal the ravages, but Humphrey is ashen-faced and red-eyed and sagging with lack of sleep. They are all too old for late nights. They look at one another for some moments, unspeaking, appalled, before they pull themselves together and force a social smile of greeting.

  A car will pick them up to take them to the robing room in the Town Hall beside the campanile of the medieval bell tower. There they will be dressed in borrowed robes, the scarlet, the green and the black, and foolish dunce-scholar hats will be perched upon their heads.

  Humphrey has Mrs Hornby's notes in his breast pocket.

  Ailsa is wearing a decorous mid-calf black dress and a silvery necklace of cheap, dull and sullen tin.

  Dame Mary is wearing dark glasses with bright purple-pink fuchsia plastic frames. They look jolly with her bristling orange hair.

  They are ushered into a black limousine.

  Humphrey stands in the cold stone antechamber, lifting his arms obediently like a child so that they can fit him into his gown. He feels Mrs Hornby's fingers pressing on his windpipe, he feels the sore throat of the infirmary bed, he sees the old men in their threadbare pyjamas, he sees his Auntie Vera walking towards him with her anxious smile and her shopping bag. His dream of death is heavy on him.

  When he first woke, he thought he had died in the night. He had looked round his hotel room, and had been disappointed with death. A bedside table, a digital clock, a pink folder, a life of Darwin, a coffee tray, a television set, a wardrobe, an empty suit upon a hanger, and some trousers in the trouser press. Death was not up to much. Sandy Clegg was right: Humphrey had clung, like a child, like a coward, to a belief in purpose and meaning. He had clung to a teleological fantasy of a glorious destination, towards which, though with many a wrong turning, he had been slowly treading all his life. But it was not to be so.

  They are to file in slow procession up the rising cobbled street, two by two in a crocodile, like schoolchildren on their way to church, or monks from a seminary on a pilgrimage to a shrine. Humphrey is near the front of the line, behind the Visitor and the Vice Chancellor, with Dame Mary at his side: Ailsa and Sandy are to follow. They make their way from the cool shade into the bright sunlight, shuffling and joking and blinking, twitching and hitching at their unfamiliar garments, patting at their precarious and ridiculous headgear. An attempt has been made to remove Dame Mary's sunglasses, which clash violently with the scarlet of her hood, but she has successfully resisted it. She has laughed, protested, used colourful language, and won her point. Humphrey admires her guts.

  Dame Mary's chumminess and cheeriness would get you down in the long run, but this isn't the long run. It's shorter than you think.

  They set off. Cameras flash. The local press is with them.

  As they approach the windows of the Periwinkle Tea Rooms, Dame Mary mutters sotto voce to her escort, Are you feeling all right? Bit of an ordeal, last night, don't you think? How's the voice?'

  'Better,' grunts Humphrey. 'But the rest of me is worse.'

  'I feel like death,' returns Dame Mary gamely. '"Like death warmed up". That's what we used to say at school, when we felt ghastly. This whole charade is a bit like school, isn't it? Our headmistress in Calgary used to wear a gown. She thought she was the bee's knees.'

  'I had a dream about death last night,' says Humphrey. 'It was a premonition so strong that when I woke up I thought I'd died for real. I thought I'd died and gone to a very boring place.'

  'Well, this bit isn't much fun, but it's better than death, and I'm told there's a very nice lunch waiting.'

  'Will you sing at my funeral?' asks Humphrey.

  'No, my sweet,' says Dame Mary. 'I shall predecease you. But I'm going to sing at my own. I've got it all arranged and pre-recorded.'

  Humphrey laughs, obligingly.

  'I'm not joking,' says Dame Mary. 'I sang on my own Desert Island Discs and I intend to sing at my own death. And on, and on, for ever. They'll never be able to shut me up. I'm on the hard disc of time. They've sent my voice to Titan. Do I mean Titan? One of those moons.'

  'What will you be singing at your funeral?'

  'Oh, various heart-rending laments. I haven't quite made the final selection. "Never weatherbeaten sail more willing bent to shore". It's a madrigal. Do you know it? "Never tired pilgrim's soul affected slumber more..." It's very affecting.'

  It is so affecting, even when delivered in this spirit, that Humphrey's foolish old dog's eyes fill with tears.

  'Come on, old boy,' says Dame Mary. 'Nearly there. These cobbles are hell. I should have worn flatties, like Ailsa.'

  As she speaks, she slips, and stumbles. Humphrey grabs at her, and she hangs on to his arm.

  'Shit,' she says. 'I've turned my fucking ankle.'

  She hops, and lurches, and giggles, and regains her balance. He has to support her up the rest of the hill. She clings to him. He finds this comf
orting.

  'So your friend Sandy,' she says, when she has recovered herself, 'is going to deliver the orations. I thought he said quite enough last night. He can't have much more up his sleeve, can he?'

  She glances behind her, as she speaks, but Sandy, in his deeply sleeved and pocketed purple and lilac doctoral gown, is deep in conversation with Ailsa Kelman.

  'I met your friend Sandy,' says Dame Mary, 'at this gay soirée in Earls Court. Do you want to hear about it?'

  Humphrey shakes his head, but she tells him just the same.

  Ahead of them, the Vice Chancellor and the Visitor are talking about university top-up fees and foreign student intake.

  Behind them, Sandy and Ailsa are talking in erudite but impassioned tones about Beaumont and Fletcher and gender and sexuality during the Renaissance. They are talking nineteen to the dozen. Ailsa can hardly believe that she has wasted so much time not knowing Sandy Macfarlane Clegg, and reproaches him for his many years of delay in reintroducing himself to her. To think of the programmes they might have made together, the sparkling flow of books on which they might have collaborated! Mass Observation, gender studies, Eloise van Dieman and the Theatre of Cruelty, feminism and the Liberation Movement in Algeria, Last Year in Marienbad and the seaside resorts of the north-east coast ... the leaps, the conjunctions, the discoveries!

  'I didn't think you'd want to hear from me,' says Sandy coyly. 'You're a star, you're a celebrity. I didn't think you would want to hear from a nonentity like me.'