In 1981, I discovered David Hellerstein's Harvard magazine essay about a chance encounter with the object of my adoration. A fellow admirer, Hellerstein spies Drabble through a basement window in London. He jots down the address, writes her, and then, checking a book - jacket photo, realizes he contacted the wrong woman. But as fast as you can pronounce humiliation, a note appears from the actual author, whose misidentified neighbor rerouted his letter. She invites him for tea; she invites him for drinks. She signs her note "Maggie." Oh, David Hellerstein, why couldn't you be moi?
Twenty-six years later, I unearthed that essay. It still holds up. And so does Drabble. When other sirens beckoned, I skipped some of her '90s novels. Maybe she had become too political. Perhaps I wasn't worthy. Mea culpa. But I'm back.
In "The Sea Lady," Ailsa Kelman, feminist, scholar, TV celebrity, "media star, media whore," first appears at a museum dinner presenting the Plunkett Prize for a book called "Hermaphrodite: Sea Change and Sex Change ." Wearing a dress that makes her appear, "by happy accident," "as a mermaid, in silver sequinned scales . . . she gleamed and rippled with smooth muscle, like a fish." She circles the room looking, in vain, for the person she both hopes and fears to spot. Does she dare to wear this dress the following week to receive an honorary degree?
There, at a university near the North Sea where she spent a summer, she will find the man she's searching for: her fellow honoree, Professor Humphrey Clark, childhood playmate, marine biologist, and former husband. Now in their 60s, Ailsa and Humphrey "are on a journey backwards in time, towards some form of welcome or unwelcome reunion."
While the reader waits for the will-they-or-won't-they showdown, Drabble returns to that fateful summer at the shore. For boyhood friends Humphrey and Sandy Clegg, "it was a summer without a horizon." They spen t halcyon days swimming, wading, fishing. They "stared at the degenerate sea squirts, and collected buckets full of mermaid's purses, and captured razorfish and cockles." Until brother and sister Tommy and Ailsa Kelman, whose family is staying at the boarding house next door, turn up and ruin Humphrey's life.
