Leo pressed a switch. He loved and hated the Institute in almost equal measure, but on the love side came a real respect for the technology bought by all those endowments. Things really worked. Back at St Andrews University in Scotland where he had begun his career some eighteen years earlier, you were lucky to find a slide rule that worked.
The screen glowed into life, showing a snowy landscape. The camera tracked to the foreshore of a broad, tree-lined estuary, with a soundtrack of running water and wind in the leaves. It then zoomed in on a group of wading birds the size of small seagulls. The birds had brownflecked plumage, long legs and curved beaks. They walked slowly along the water’s edge, pausing to stab their beaks into the soft mud and then throwing their heads back to swallow whatever morsel they had found below the surface. Suddenly alarmed, the flock wheeled as one into the air, their outsize wings lifting them rapidly away from whatever danger they had perceived.
A voice-over said: ‘The bar-tailed godwit has been tracked by the Pacific Shorebird Migration Project via satellite tagging, and has been proved to be the world’s avian migratory champion, flying further non-stop than any other migrating bird. The godwit flies 10,200 miles south from its breeding ground in Alaska without stopping in flight. It can make the flight in seven days with the benefit of a tailwind, and can return north in nine days. Incredibly, godwit chicks can make the southbound flight when only two months old. These are amazing journeys, which the latest technology has allowed us to track and feed into our ongoing research into migration patterns.’
Kemp flipped a switch, and the lights came back on.
‘OK, what’s missing there?’
A hand went up. It would be him. That studious boy from Michigan, Jacob Sylvester, a state scholar. Leo had met his new students at an induction class. He always tried to spot the ones that were going to make something of the subject but it was difficult. Sometimes the shy, silent types produced original thinking in their coursework while the pushy talkers simply regurgitated everything they had read.
Sylvester was a talker; he asked all the right questions and took notes in laborious longhand. He had a Ph.D. and academic career stamped all over him. Rachel Ginsberg wasn’t really shy but she pretended to be and looked at the floor while asking complex questions about the marking of grades. She would flash him quick looks from under long eyelashes to see if he was listening and smile slightly when he nodded her to go on. He sensed she was very ambitious and he knew her foxy-faced good looks would take her up the corporate ladder in some big company.
Then there was Gunbrit Nielsen, very serious, very pretty, with slate-grey eyes and a long plaited pigtail. She was far too beautiful to be sitting in anyone’s class studying marine biology. She should be on a movie set on the west coast. But here she was in his class working for a Ph.D. that would take her back home to a teaching job in Sweden, marriage to a man with a thick red beard and four children.
He would get to know them well over the course of the year and would watch to see how, just as in the wild, a natural leader emerged from the group. Already they seemed to take their lead from Sylvester, letting him ask the questions.
‘Sea mammals, sir. This isn’t our subject,’ said Sylvester.
Leo snapped out of his reverie.
‘Well, clearly a godwit is not a seal, Mr Sylvester. Let me repeat the question: what is missing from that commentary? Something important, really important, that has been left unsaid?’
Silence, heads lowered, sidelong glances: What’s he talking about? When’s the break?
‘OK, here goes. What that commentary did not tell you is that those birds, the godwits, make their migrations without food or water, flying huge distance for seven days southbound and nine days northbound. It didn’t tell you that because we don’t know how they do it. No one knows.
‘Scientists’, he continued, ‘cannot explain the godwit’s ability to lift and transport its body weight of eight to ten ounces for that distance without in-flight refuelling. And science does not like the irrational. The flight of the godwit is incomprehensible to science, because science tells us, and the naturalists tell us, and the nutritionists tell us, that a small bird like that cannot fly such a distance without sustenance.
‘We know that swifts and swallows make similar journeys, but they eat their natural food – flying insects – on the wing. Godwits do not. Their food – worms and molluscs – lies beneath the sand on the shoreline. And there are no shorelines at ten thousand feet. They should not be able to survive their annual migration. But they do.
‘Mr Sylvester.’ Leo pointed to him, arm outstretched, finger extended.
‘Yes, sir?’
Leo had the class now; he loved it when he made a breakthrough and grabbed the attention of those mediachoked minds, brains buzzing with electronic music, video games, sex, sport and fast food. Cut through the media dazzle with some original godwit-thinking and you find that there is life in the interior of their minds; thin soil maybe, but enough to plant the seed of thought.
‘Your point is that a godwit is not a seal?’
‘Right on.’
‘Absolutely correct, but my original principle applies. It’s what we don’t know that should interest and excite us, not what we do know. Seals have always had their own language, but we do not know what they are saying.’
The Swedish girl had put up her hand.
‘Yes, Miss Nielsen?’
‘Why are we only interested in the language of these seals? Surely there is much more to learn about the seas in which they live?’
She spoke in slightly guttural English that Kemp, whose own accent was a mixture of his native Australian layered with lowland Scottish, found hard to follow.
‘Well, we have only begun to understand how these mammals communicate. But you are right. Our oceans are all around us – we swim in them, travel on them, feed from them and prepare to make war beneath their waves. Yet we have little understanding of them, or of the creatures that live in them.’
He had said too much. This was very much the way he always kicked off the first lecture, but perhaps he had overreached himself this time.
Time for a surprise, he thought.
‘All right. What I am saying is this. Once we understand that the oceans remain the greatest mystery on earth, once we hold that thought in our heads and hearts – yes, in our hearts – then we can move forward. Acknowledge your ignorance. Take nothing for granted. Any questions?’
‘But who says we know it all anyway?’
That boy again. Jacob Sylvester.
‘Never underestimate the arrogance of the science establishment, Mr Sylvester. Big money goes into science in order to produce answers. Scientists have to play the game and pretend that there are answers. My point to you today is that sometimes there are no answers, at least not ones that conventional science can uncover.’
Then he surprised them: there would be an unscheduled field trip the next day, on the tug Antoine. Since only twelve students had turned up he would take them all. Tomorrow was a Friday, and a sea trip would be a great way to start the weekend. They were to meet at the Institute’s own landing dock at 10 a.m., he told them. ‘Bring wet-weather clothing. Packed lunches and lifejackets provided. See you tomorrow.’ He picked up his notes.
‘Where are we are going?’ It was Gunbrit Nielsen again.
He told her that, weather permitting, they would run up to Monomoy Island – a favoured hauling-up place for grey and harbour seals. They would take hydrophones and recorders and spend the day on the water. Field trips were not picnics, he said, they were hard work.
‘And if anyone who didn’t make it here today wants to come, please tell them they’ll have to wait for another time
– the boat has a full complement.’
There was a buzz as the class left. Field trips were popular. As Leo liked to say, what better place for marine biology students than out on the ocean?
He picked up the rest of his papers and walked ba
ck to the car. The 15-year-old Saab 900 had doubled its resale price thanks to the film Sideways a few years previously, in which the same model had a key supporting role. It was probably his most successful investment. His cell chirped: two text messages.
The first was from Sandy Rowan, local journalist and Leo’s occasional drinking companion. Sandy’s passions in life were second-hand books, his cat (called Shakespeare), Cleo the waitress at his favourite bar in town and the Orleans wine company, a local vineyard in which he had made a modest investment some years ago and whose Viognier-Syrah blend he had pioneered, proclaiming the result to be better than anything out of California.
Hoover story really got them going. Watch your back – and your front.
The second message was from Margot. An official letter from the Institute had been delivered at home by courier. It was from the chief executive’s office.
Margot Kemp held the mug of coffee tight in her hands – no shakes today – and looked out over the roofs of Falmouth down to the harbour. She was hungry and needed breakfast. She checked her watch. It was 11 a.m. Call it brunch then. Betsy’s Diner with its large neon sign saying ‘Eat Heavy’ would do; eggs, bacon, waffles, more coffee, anything but a drink.
She turned the letter over in her hand: ‘From the office of the President, Coldharbor Institute for Marine Studies’ was engraved on the envelope.
She knew what it would say. Leo had blown it. All that stuff about Hoover the talking seal, the coded attack on the science establishment and the abuse of the big money that flowed into Coldharbor. Add in her husband’s obsession with the lobby behind the fishing industry and his unfashionable view that seals had nothing to do with depleted fishing stocks and you had layer upon layer of controversy: press reports, angry letters to the papers, the snide, back-stabbing comments of his colleagues.
He had been warned, of course. The Institute had told him a year ago to stay out of the media, stop giving interviews, stick to his work. It was in his contract, for God’s sake. She could recite the wording because she had read it out to him – well, shouted it at him – during one of their many rows.
‘In no circumstances must you bring the Institute or its officers into disrepute, nor damage in any way its reputation for academic excellence…approval for all media interviews must be sought from the director of communications…’
And now it had come to this. She fanned herself with the letter. A warm spring was turning into a hot summer, and it was not even Memorial Day yet.
Well, good. They could get out of this place, she thought.
‘Mrs Kemp?’
She turned. Tilda had finished in the kitchen.
‘Can I do the bedroom now?’
‘No, let’s leave it for this morning.’
‘You want another coffee?’
‘No thanks, Tilda.’
She went into the kitchen to check. It was spotless, as ever.
Tilda even rearranged the fridge letters which said sweet, silly things like I love you Mum and No 1 Dad, and made sure they also said We need milk.
She opened the fridge door. Tilda’s attention to detail extended to making sure that every level of the fridge had its own produce: dairy, fruit and meat, with eggs, wine and milk neatly slotted into the side section. Maybe she would have that drink. She took out a bottle of Pinot Grigio. There was enough for a decent glass left in the bottom. She poured it into a tumbler and slung the bottle into the recycling bin.
They had been married sixteen years, nine of them spent here in Coldharbor, where she had watched her husband vanish into a world of his own, a world in which the language of seals seemed to mean more to him than anything she had to offer.
That was what men did, of course, she thought: they displaced you, diminished you and then deserted you. What had happened to her interior-design business? It didn’t take a lot of money with it when it went bust, but it took away her pride, her sense of self-confidence. Leo had tried to help, but typically did so in the most hurtful way. ‘You’re a wonderful teacher. That’s where your talents lie, and that’s what you should stick to,’ he would say. ‘Do what you do best.’
She had told him over and over that teaching qualifications gained in the UK did not allow her to teach in America, and that she would have to retrain. But he didn’t listen. He just told her to face the facts: she was not good enough to be an interior designer, exterior designer, any kind of designer, at least not here on the Cape; she didn’t have the talent. It might have worked in Scotland, where they think haggis is haute cuisine, but it wouldn’t here. Cape Cod was stiff with designers, artists, interior decorators and every kind of smart-ass, trendy, boutique-owning fashionista.
The business collapse didn’t finish them, nor her drinking, nor his endless belittling of Scotland (why did he hate the place so much?).
What lay between them would always lie between them. It looked down from the mantelpiece, from the painting in the sitting room and from her bedside: Julian with the uncertain look of a 9-year-old in his first school uniform; Julian on the beach, tousled hair and head poking out from a sand burial; Julian aged 10, the last picture, on his bike outside the bookshop on Main Street. He had gone on the research trip in the Zodiac rubber dinghy the next morning with his father.
Margot took the wine into the bedroom and placed it on the bedside table beside the framed portrait of her son. She kissed the tips of her fingers and laid them gently on his forehead. She turned the frame to the wall, drank some wine and lay back on the bed. There were only ever two painkillers that worked for her and drink was one of them. The postman had been, the housekeeper had gone, and Leo was God knew where. She pulled up her skirt and let her hand drift between her legs, fluttering her fingers like butterfly wings.
She thought of the last time at the Squire bar in Chatham, the fisherman with salt tang on his body, the dragon’s head tattoo entwined around his thighs with long tongues pointing to his crotch, and whisky on his breath. It was quick, sordid, car-park sex. And why not? It was great. It made her feel good just thinking about it; not because it was any kind of revenge against Leo, far from it. But because, as she told herself, it was my choice, my pleasure, my sex, my lust, and I’ll have it how and when I want. I am a mother of two – well, one now – and with a husband lost to the sea just as all those widowed women on the Cape lost their husbands to the sea.
The sea is made of women’s tears, they say on the Cape, and they’re right. I know how those widows feel. I don’t have affairs; too bloody complicated, and anyway, you always wind up with a needy, whining man telling you he loves you more than anything in the world, when all he really wants is guiltless, risk-free, zero-cost sex. I will take my pleasures as and when I want to. She raised herself on to an elbow, drained the glass of wine, took the phone off the hook and reached into the bedside drawer. It was always there, her ever-dependable friend, none too discreetly covered by a clothing catalogue. She wondered if Tilda knew. She didn’t care if Leo knew or not. She lay back on the bed thinking of the fisherman with salt on his skin and whisky on his breath.
TWO
The Dark Side was a steakhouse on the main street of Coldharbor with a long teak bar that stretched the length of the building to a small conservatory overlooking the inner harbour, called Eel Pond, at the back. The place was unlit except for candles which cast their flickering light over every table. Summer or winter, day or night, the Dark Side was always the same.
Kemp sometimes used the place for meetings with colleagues and overseas visitors when he felt such occasions would go better with a drink: they always did. But he and Sandy mostly used it as an unofficial headquarters for emergency lunches or drinks when one of them had something interesting to report, gossip to discuss, grumbles to share. Today was definitely an emergency meeting. Kemp bought a copy of the Herald and pushed open the swing doors of the Dark Side, standing on the threshold for a moment to allow his eyes to accustom themselves to the gloom.
The Cape Herald was a lo
cal daily paper packed with the news the locals really wanted: court reports, road works, sewage spills, the latest inane decision of the Barnstaple county municipal authorities. After twenty years on the paper Sandy Rowan was senior enough to leave the small stuff to the trainees who (amazingly) still came in every year from college media courses wanting to learn how to be journalists. Sandy never understood it. Every kid you saw these days was glued to a laptop, mobile or iPod, yet here they were, queuing up, year in year out to work in an industry that created its main product by squirting ink on to pulp made from dead trees.
Sandy specialised in the big stories: the Kennedys in their Hyannis compound (the paper made sure it was very respectful to them); tracking the tourist dollars to check that at least some of local tax-take went back into the sewage-treatment plants, the roads and the schools; and of course Cape Cod’s most famous institution: the Coldharbor Institute for Marine Studies.
What had made Sandy something of a Cape celebrity was his weekly column, a collection of controversial news, views and reviews about life on the Cape. The column appeared on Tuesdays, with a photograph that made him look a lot younger than his forty-six years, under the rubric ‘Rowan’s Ride’.
Sandy did not set out to be controversial, and intensely disliked over-opinionated columnists who peddled fake moral outrage from the dubious vantage point of their own shallow lives. But he took pride in exposing cosy consensual opinions held to be self-evident because they had been repeated for so long. This did not always make him popular.
When a touring theatrical company put on one of the more celebrated plays of the twentieth-century American canon, Sandy had caused outrage with his review, which began:
Eugene O’Neill tried to drink himself to death on the Cape, at his house in Provincetown to be precise. Pity he didn’t succeed. Have you ever sat through five hours of Long Day’s Journey into Night? Try it. It will make the rest of your life feel like you made it to heaven early.
On the Broken Shore Page 2