Margaret drabble’s new novel, The Sea Lady, is about two childhood friends, Ailsa and Humphrey, both now successful and well-known academics separately travelling towards the seaside northern shore where they first met as children during the summer holidays. The epigraph from Robert Graves (Dialogue on the Headland) — which appears again within the novel — sets the tone for this elegiac story about time and tide, about personal relationships, professional trajectories, and the sharply poignant memories of childhood: “You’ll not forget these rocks and what I told you? You'll not forget me — ever, ever, ever?” The chapter titles — “Old Man Traveling”, “The Hall of the Muses”, “Perfect Happiness”, “Recessional”, “The Final Curtain and the Last Tableau” — take us through the slow progression of the narrative. Ailsa Kelman is now a celebrity feminist scholar who thrives on public occasions. Humphrey Clark, a marine scientist, is at first hesitant about accepting an honorary degree offered to him by a northern university, but then tempted by the thought of visiting the landscapes of his childhood. “His eyes filled with water more easily these days… He wanted, once more, to see the bridges and the arches and the viaduct and the sea. He wanted to see the northern light of Ornemouth and of Finsterness.” At the heart of the novel is its longest and most compelling section, “The Bedroom Weeks”, the story of an austere wartime childhood — Humphrey’s lonely throat surgery in the hospital surrounded by the phlegmy coughing of old men; his discovery of mysterious marine creatures in a paperback picture book; the unexplained loss of his pet cat; and the long, endless summer days, with explorations on the beach, fishing expeditions and the small fish tank in which the boys set up a brilliantly-coloured underwater world — until one day they discover that their newest fish, an angry sea scorpion, has jumped out of its enclosure and chosen death instead of confinement. Sitting in the train on the way to the northern coast where he spent that long summer, the grown-up Humphrey Clark thinks of those days, the friendships and the betrayals, and tries to remember what it was like to be a boy. He finds that he cannot quite remember. Despite the intrusive and rather silly device of the “Public Orator” to fill in the gaps in the narrative (“It is a story of convergence,” the Orator tells us, quite unnecessarily, more than two hundred pages into the book), the novel works mainly because of these beautifully drawn childhood scenes. Later years, including Humphrey and Ailsa’s relationship as young adults, are also recounted with vividness and sly humour. “Ailsa’s social life was more interesting than Humphrey’s, and took precedence: that went without saying. The arts were more fun than the sciences. He met her crowd, but she did not meet his. She went to Cambridge once, on her insistence, and he showed her round the laboratory and the aquarium… Her responses, he noted, were primarily aesthetic, which was only to be expected from a woman.” The Sea Lady is a mature and thoughtful novel about public life and private loneliness, lost memories and rediscovered hopes.
