‘If I know anything about your husband he’s out there somewhere, and very much alive.’
Margot turned away, embarrassed, and muttered a thank you. Tallulah gave Sam a kiss on the cheek and took her hand. The student group trailed past them, shepherded by two Institute staff members towards a bus waiting at the pier head.
Buck was the last person off the tug. He came down the pier with the slightly rolling gait of a man who has been at sea all his life. He briefly shook Tallulah’s outstretched hand, and walked past her to Margot.
‘Mr Buckland. We need to know what happened,’ said Tallulah Bonner.
Buck turned briefly. ‘I’ll tell you what happened. We lost a good man today, and it was my fault. Now, if you will excuse me.’
Bonner said quietly, ‘You’re drunk, Mr Buckland. Go home.’
Buck ignored her and gently put his arms around Margot, enveloping her in the warm smell of rum. She eased out of his embrace.
‘Tell me what happened, Buck.’
‘Sure. Come with me.’
The three of them sat self-consciously in the candlelit Dark Side waiting for their drinks. A Coke for Sam, white wine for Margot and rum and Diet Coke for Buck. He told the story briefly, because, as he said, it all happened very quickly. One minute Leo was safe in the cabin, the next he had run to the transom for the tape recorder, the wave had hit, and over he’d gone.
As wife and daughter sat with their arms around each other, the pent-up tension burst into a flood of questions. Why had he gone back for the recorder? Why couldn’t the tug turn around faster, and where had this wave come from? He could still be alive, couldn’t he? He was a good swimmer, the water wasn’t too cold, and they hadn’t been far offshore.
Buck answered as best he could. He didn’t stop Leo going back down to the deck because he hadn’t seen him until it was too late. He couldn’t turn the boat in that sea, there might have been a second wave, and he didn’t want to risk getting the tug stern on to a small-bore wave. He might have lost more people. As for the wave, if you look back at the records from the old whaling days you will find occasional reports of killer waves that moved with huge speed out of the ocean, triggered by something hundreds of miles away, on or below the seabed. They could be very local and small, as this one was, or monsters that reared up out of the ocean for no known reason.
‘Bigger boats than mine have vanished in the Atlantic just like that,’ said Buck, snapping his fingers to make the point. Mistaking the gesture, Cleo started making him another rum and Diet Coke behind the bar.
‘Take me out tomorrow,’ said Margot. ‘I want to see where it happened – just me and Sam.’
Buck nodded, and grunted an ‘OK’.
‘Do you mind if I come too?’
Startled, they turned and looked up to see Sandy standing beside them, his figure half hidden in the dim light.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to break in. And I’m very sorry, Mrs Kemp, about what happened, but I would really like to…’
‘No way,’ snapped Buck, getting to his feet. ‘No journalists. Just us.’
Sandy began to say something, then thought better of it, turned on his heel and walked towards the door.
Sam began crying, and buried her face in her mother’s lap. Margot put her arms around her and rocked her gently to and fro, listening to the sobs from the tear-stained face of her child, no longer a teenager but her baby again.
In the trauma of the last few hours she had forgotten how brave and grown up Sam had been. Now it had all become too much. This was the second great shock in her young life, thought Margot, and I haven’t really helped. When Julian had died Sam had been just 13 and she and Leo had spent hours explaining to her how Julian had gone to heaven and was happy with his toys and his friends. Sam had spent days in her room writing him letters, telling her brother what had happened since he left. Leo and Margot took the letters to the church where Sam was a chorister. The three of them lit a candle, said a prayer and left the envelopes on the altar. Then the vicar insisted on coming round and sat, smelling slightly of sherry, talking about the inevitability of the afterlife, and Sam had kept asking him when Julian was going to reply to her letters. There was no answer to that and Sam had quickly seen through the vicar’s waffled reply.
And now it was happening all over again. Except, as she kept telling Sam, her daddy was not dead, just missing.
Margot and Sam arrived home to find a note in the hall from the next-door neighbours saying how sorry they were and asking if they could be of any help.
Margot made them both hot chocolate and they sat down to watch the evening news. There was a nice photo of Leo released by the Institute, and an interview with Sandy Rowan at the pier in Coldharbor, with the Antoine in the background.
Sandy was upbeat, saying how well Leo knew these waters, and how likely it was that he had swum ashore at some remote beach and decided to bed down for the night in the dunes. ‘The guy is fit, he’s a strong swimmer and he’s a fighter, so he’s out there for sure.’
He really cares for my husband, thought Margot. More than I do, perhaps. She regretted not stepping in when Buck had snapped out his refusal to take Sandy with them the next day. Sam started to cry again, and Margot took her in her arms, stroking her hair and telling her that Daddy would be home tomorrow.
The doorbell rang, and a small group of neighbours came in hesitantly. The women hugged Margot, and the men shook her hand, and everyone said how sorry they were and was there anything they could do to help. They brought small gifts of food: a flask of soup, a freshly baked loaf of bread, some home-made chocolate cake.
Leo would have been amazed at this kindness, thought Margot. He hardly knew these people. She thanked them profusely and saw them to the door, assuring them that everything would be all right, although she and they knew that it probably wouldn’t.
Sam was half asleep on the sofa with Beano snoozing at her feet. Margot got her upright and sleepwalked her up to bed. She tucked her up and sat watching as she fell into a troubled sleep. For that night Margot allowed Beano, against all the house rules, to sleep in Sam’s bedroom. She would get a friend of Sam’s around tomorrow to stay over for a night.
Leo spent his first night in the wild asleep amid seaweed and rocks. He scraped a hollow out of the sand above the tideline and lay in the damp bed with his head resting on a tangle of dry seaweed. It was a warm night and he felt neither cold nor discomfort. Around him, but some yards distant, the seals also slept. In the starlight he could make out the silhouettes of their slug-like, tubular forms against the rocks.
He awoke the next morning to be reminded that he was very much alive and not imprisoned in a dream after death. He was very hungry. He hadn’t eaten for twenty-four hours. The rocks below the tideline were covered in mussels and limpets. The mussels came away easily from the rocks and he picked handfuls and then smashed them open with a small stone, gulping the white flesh and salty liquor from the boat-shaped shells.
The limpets were more difficult, tightening their grip on the base rock with the strong muscular foot housed within a conical shell almost before he had touched them. A quick blow with the stone dislodged all but the largest. Their flesh was meaty and chewier with a stronger flavour than the mussels and, he persuaded himself, no more difficult to digest than sushi.
Around him the pod of a dozen seals was awakening; they were raising their heads and using their front flippers to shift from side to side as if to rouse themselves with early-morning exercise. Leo had never seen or heard of such behaviour and looked on wondrously as the group rocked gently from side to side and then stopped to swing their heads seaward. One seal, the oldest and a survivor of a shark attack, judging by long scars that ran from tail to head, positioned himself on the landward side of the pod and scanned the dune belt and low cliffs beyond.
The seals paid no attention to Leo and as the light brightened with the rising sun they began to shuffle through the rocks towards a sea that
had calmed into a gentle swell after the storm the day before. A young male led the pod, followed by the females, and within minutes the whole group had slipped into the water where they waited patiently for the old watchdog to join them. Leo stood up and walked slowly to the shoreline. He entered the water close to the pod, feeling totally at ease as he swam away from the shore. Again the seals appeared to pay him no attention. The pod headed out to sea some 100 yards before turning and swimming slowly up the coast.
Leo found no difficulty in keeping up and was elated at the way he was able to stay with the pod and that they seemed to accept this strange addition to their number.
After twenty minutes the seals turned shoreward towards a long stretch of open beach overlooked by a deserted lighthouse. They hauled up some thirty yards from the water’s edge and settled down to face the sea and the sun. Leo walked beyond them into the dunes and sat down. He knew they would stay here for the morning, sunning themselves, snoozing, occasionally sliding into the water when a fish broke surface to indicate the presence of a shoal.
There was no sign of life on a beach that stretched away for miles on either side. Leo worked out that the seals had hauled up on the far end of the island, one that rarely attracted visitors, especially this early in the day. He was pleased with this thought. He did not want to be seen. He was content where and as he was. He had pushed all thoughts of Margot and Sam to the back of his mind. He was an actor on his own stage, with his own role to play. Somewhere backstage there was an old life, old loves, old friends. But they had no meaning for him now.
The shellfish had left him thirsty and hoping to find a dew pond he walked through the dune grass to the old lighthouse. On one side a roofless wooden shed tilted crazily on its base, ready to be reclaimed by the surrounding sand. On the other a water tank had been raised some thirty feet from the ground on iron stilts. Leo climbed the rusting scaffolding and found that at the top a wooden cover had been pulled back and broken, probably by vandals. The water was dark green and looked slimy. He raised some in his hands and smelt it. There was a faint odour of urine and it tasted sharp and metallic, but he told himself it was just brackish rainwater. He scooped out handfuls again and again, drinking deeply.
From his vantage point he could look along miles of empty beach. The seal pod, his pod, had been joined by several others. There were now scores of seals scattered along the sand, resting on front flippers that were tucked out of sight beneath their bodies, gazing seawards. The first of the fishing boats, some carrying camera-laden tourists, were moving up the coast. As he drank from the tank Leo wondered how seals quenched their thirst. It was not a question that had ever occurred to him in his years of studying marine mammals. He could speak for forty-five minutes without notes on the seals’ diet and the different fish they sought with the changing seasons but never had he asked himself – or been asked by his students – what they drank. Maybe they simply absorbed the liquid content of the fish they ate. He didn’t know and he smiled to think that in years of academic work such a simple question had never arisen. He found nothing strange about looking back on his academic past because whatever life he was leading now, whether as man or seal, whether dead or alive, felt quite natural. It was as if he had shed one skin and slipped into another, as seals did in Celtic mythology.
The Antoine left after breakfast the next day. Buck, Margot and Sam stayed in the cabin, scanning the shoreline with binoculars as they made their way up the coast towards Monomoy. Buck had sunk into a silent gloom, and said nothing as he sipped his coffee. Margot and Sam had heard about his favourite drink.
‘Is that a wozza?’ asked Sam.
‘No,’ Buck said curtly, cutting off further conversation.
There were few seals to be seen on Monomoy, but two coastguard boats had returned to their search at first light, and a helicopter was making low runs up the shoreline. Margot knew they were looking for a body now.
Beyond Monomoy they kept in close to the shore on the high tide. The beaches were almost empty after yesterday’s sudden storm, with just the odd camper and shore fisherman to be seen. There was no way that Leo could have come ashore here and not been found – dead or alive – thought Margot. They passed the long and lonely stretch of Nauset, then the small town-managed beaches, with their eggshell-coloured sand backed by dunes – Orleans, Coast Guard Beach, Marconi.
This is crazy, thought Margot. ‘Let’s go back,’ she said. ‘We’re not going to find him here, not this way.’
Buck said nothing, and began to turn the wheel. But Sam sprang to her feet and shouted, ‘No!’ The words came tumbling out as she stood there, white-faced, hands on her hips, suddenly angry and older than her years. How could they turn back now? What right had anyone to decide that her father was not lying half drowned, waiting to be rescued from a shallow shoal, some spit of sand, some lonely beach?
She turned her back on them both and returned to scanning the coast through her binoculars, listening to the occasional crackle of radio traffic and hoping for a sudden burst of sound that would tell them her father had been found alive and well.
They chugged up the coast until the tide turned and pushed them away from the shore. No one said anything when Buck spun the wheel and turned for home. On the way back to Coldharbor he brewed up coffee in the tiny galley and handed round the steaming mugs with a generous slug of rum in each. Sam tried hers and wrinkled her face in disgust.
That night Margot left Sam ensconced in front of the TV with her best friend from school, two takeaway pizzas and large bottles of Coke. She needed time to think, she said. She took the car and drove towards Chatham harbour.
She hadn’t had a drink that day apart from the wozza. God knows she had needed one during her long and difficult conversation that evening with her parents back in Perth. They had wanted to come over, but she had politely and then probably a little too firmly refused. Too much emotional hassle, and anyway they could not really afford the airfares. ‘And hey, Mum, he’s going to be home tomorrow anyway, right?’
She called Tom on his cell the moment she cleared Falmouth Main Street. For some reason phoning him as she drove past Betsy’s and the picture windows of the bookshop where an arty crowd had gathered for a wine and poetry evening didn’t feel right.
‘I can’t do it tonight,’ he said.
‘I must see you.’
‘Not possible,’ he mumbled.
‘TOM, PLEASE! BE THERE! I NEED YOU TONIGHT!’ she shouted, and dropped the cell into the well of the car.
And he would be there, she thought. He would leave that wife of his, make an excuse about fixing something on the boat, and he would be there.
The car park behind the Squire is big enough to allow the summer sailors to park their trailers and boats while they have a drink after a day on the water. Margot parked in her usual spot as far away from the rear entrance as possible, lit a cigarette and listened to an FM news station. The second item was about the continuing search for a marine scientist from Coldharbor who had been missing at sea for over twenty-four hours.
A dented, rusting camper van pulled up alongside and Margot got in. They drove down to an old car park in the dunes that the coastguard had placed out of bounds in order to protect nesting plovers in the area. A padlocked gate barred access, but like most local fisherman Tom was allowed a key.
He parked up with the sea just visible through the dunes.
She told herself she was using this as an anaesthetic, that she was in shock, that she was trying to blot out the reality that her husband was a bloated corpse washing around the coast somewhere.
But it was a lie. Her enduring memory of her school days in St Andrews was of her headmistress, Mrs Pomeroy, giving the sixth-form leavers farewell tea and cakes along with her advice for life: the needle on the compass that would point them in the right direction, as she put it.
‘Always tell yourself the truth, girls,’ she said, ‘because if you can’t be honest with yourself, you won’t be with anyon
e else.’
And the truth was that Margot was here for a pleasure fix, a high-voltage sex jolt, nothing more, nothing less. Her son had died three years ago, and now her husband had gone. She needed something to remind herself that she was still alive, still had something to live for. Tom was ideal. A decent, dumb, good-looking fisherman who worked the day boats out of Chatham and was on call whenever she needed him. Stop being a bitch, she thought, he’s a nice guy. Married, so no hassle, no worries about clingy involvement.
She had told him this would work if they both recognised it for what it was, just a sanity break. He kept saying he wanted to see her for a meal, for a drink somewhere discreet, but she always said no. Stick to what works, and here in the car park, backed up among the dunes, is what works. You come when I call, and I’ll come when you call. ‘I don’t even want to know your last name,’ she said. ‘You’re Tom to me, just Tom.’
But he told her anyway, because he was proud of who he was: Ballantyne, Tom Ballantyne, 28 year-old father of two. Handsome in a baby-faced sort of way, her very own human rabbit.
She was damned if she was going to sit at home in her widow’s weeds.
But she would be damned anyway, she thought. Someone would see them and the poisonous gossip would start flowing at the coffee mornings and the drinks parties. If Leo was dead she and Sam would go back to Scotland and start again making a new life with new friends where it all began.
Her first memories were of family picnics on the West Sands at St Andrews. Years later it was on that same beach that she had first seen Leo when she was a primary teacher. She had tagged on to a drinking party of students and their lecturers, and everyone had finished up in the dunes at three-o’freezing-clock in the morning. People were draining quarter-bottles of whisky, falling asleep, or quietly being sick. One adventurous couple was making an effort to have sex, a coupling doomed by the cold and the spiky dune grass. Then, as the sun came up, this tall Australian with a mop of fair hair falling over his forehead walked down to the water’s edge to gaze at a pod of seals.
On the Broken Shore Page 8