On the Broken Shore

by James MacManus

  She had shut Julian up by telling him to listen to the lyrics of Arcade Fire’s album Funeral, which he regarded as the coolest album by the coolest group. ‘All about love and loss and redemption,’ she said, ‘which was why Christ was crucified.’ Julian replied, ‘Yeah, whatever,’ which was his standard response to any question or comment; but when he sat down to listen to the lyrics properly he was impressed. And then of course he died, and until now she had never been able to listen to the album again.

  There was a good turnout from the Institute. Tallulah Bonner was in the second row, flanked by the vice president in charge of academic programmes, the Dean, and senior members of the marine biology department. Buck, bulging out of the only suit he possessed, was accompanied by Renee, a tiny, birdlike woman who clung to his arm throughout.

  To Margot’s surprise a small group of older fishermen from Chatham were gathered at the back. Sandy Rowan represented the Herald, but Kemp’s father, now in his late eighties, was not well enough to make the trip from Australia. Jennifer Hathaway was there, wearing a dark suit and a black beret. Mrs Gulliver sat at the back in a black skirt and T-shirt and a black leather jacket.

  Sam chose the music: the old slave spiritual ‘Shenandoah’, which the choir would sing in church and which would leave her in tears at the end. Then she chose the hymn ‘To Be a Pilgrim’. Tallulah Bonner read lines from Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’, chosen by Margot, and Sandy read from an anonymous Indian prayer chosen by Sam.

  ‘When I am dead cry for me a little.

  Think of me sometimes,

  But not too much.

  Think of me now and again, as I was in life,

  At some moment it’s pleasant to recall,

  But not for long.

  Leave me in peace and I shall leave you in peace,

  And while you live let your thoughts be with the living.’

  The closing hymn was ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind’.

  Woven into the service were two tributes. The first was from Leo’s postgraduate class, jointly written by all the students and read by Gunbrit: ‘Leo Kemp was different from any teacher we have ever met. He liked to surprise us, to make us think a little differently. He wanted us to question everything, to take nothing for granted. I suppose he was a bit of a rebel, and I guess we liked him for that. So look, this is a really dark day for Mrs Kemp and her daughter, and we don’t want to go on too long, but we do want to give you this, Mrs Kemp.’

  The whole class rose to their feet, leaving the rest of the congregation uncertain as to what to do. Gunbrit walked over to Margot with a framed watercolour painting of a godwit.

  ‘This was Mr Kemp’s favourite bird, a godwit. We can tell you why later, if you like.’

  Margot thanked her, wondering what on earth a godwit had meant to her husband. He had never mentioned the bird. Just another one of his secrets, she supposed. Secrets always come out at funerals, isn’t that what they say? The mistresses, the missing money, unknown children claiming a relationship with the deceased. Trust Leo to have made a secret of a bloody bird called a godwit.

  Gunbrit kissed Margot, and spontaneously the students began clapping, and then everyone in the church got to their feet and applauded.

  As they all said afterwards, it was an emotional moment.

  Margot’s address was not a comfortable one for anyone present, especially as Tallulah Bonner was so prominently seated with her senior colleagues around her. Everyone agreed that Margot should not have said what she did, and that it would be best for her to leave as soon as she could, and to take Sam back to Scotland. That was what she wanted, wasn’t it?

  Margot read from a prepared text, rarely looking up at her audience. She had written it the night before, and had refused to let Sam see it.

  Leo’s was a good life, she said, devoted to a cause he believed in: the search to unlock the secrets of our oceans and the mammals that live in them. He always said that if you believed in something deeply and sincerely, you should fight for it. He believed the fishing industry and its lobbyists were working to repeal the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 to allow the slaughter of seals and other sea mammals to start anew. And he believed that the Coldharbor Institute should stand up to the big money behind the industry and expose that campaign for what it was, an attempt to turn the clock back to a barbaric age.

  ‘Leo Kemp was an awkward, challenging individual,’ Margot continued. ‘But that’s what made him a great teacher. And that’s why he was not afraid to say that his own field, oceanography and the marine biology that underpins it, is growing fat and lazy on the hundreds of millions of dollars of funds it raises with such skill.

  ‘My husband used to say that if you dropped a baited hook three kilometres down into the ocean – and that is less than the average depth of all our seas – there was an even chance you’d pull up a species of fish unknown to science. I can hear him say this now: “How can it be that we know less about the bottom of the sea than we do about the dark side of the moon?” That’s why he thought modern science was failing to ask the right questions.’

  And then she came out with it: on the day before his death Leo Kemp had been dismissed from a job he loved, not for talking to the media, but for challenging the status quo, questioning the cosy corporate world into which oceanographic science in general, and by implication of course the Coldharbor Institute and its Board of Governors in particular, had sunk.

  Dean Bonner sat tight-lipped and grim-faced as Margot went on to say how Leo had used Hoover the talking seal to poke fun at the pomposity of the science establishment.

  ‘Now, let me tell you, I understand that was not an ideal position for a member of the Institute’s teaching staff to take. But Coldharbor is a great, big, grown-up organisation, is it not? It can surely accommodate a few voices of dissent. Anyway, who knows? Maybe Leo was right. All he wanted was for the science establishment to admit that it doesn’t know it all yet.’

  There was no formal gathering afterwards, although the Institute had offered to lay on a small reception. Margot and Sam stood on the church steps shaking hands with the mourners, or celebrators. Most had a word or two with them, but when Tallulah Bonner came out she offered Margot the briefest of handshakes, kissed Sam gently, and left.

  She was furious, and rightfully so, she told herself. To have the Institute publicly pilloried at a service to remember the life of one of its senior staff was intolerable. Margot Kemp had told her she was leaving the Cape: the sooner the better.

  For old times’ sake Margot asked Buck, Sandy and Jenny Hathaway for a drink at the Dark Side. Buck’s wife came too and sat by his side saying nothing. Once everyone had settled into their seats and ordered, she asked if she had gone too far in her address. Buck and Sandy muttered feeble reassurances, but Jenny said, ‘Of course it was the wrong time and place to say that, and of course it upset Tallulah Bonner. But there was never going to be a right time to get that off your chest, so what the hell?’

  Everyone agreed. Margot looked pleased, and amid general relief the conversation turned to that staple of post-funeral parties, the merits of the various tributes and readings. Buck sank into silence, staring into his drink. His body hunched forward and he began to rock slowly back and forth on the chair, his knuckles whitening as he gripped his glass. Renee began stroking the back of his head murmuring something in his ear. The conversation died around him. Margot suddenly thought that this big man, a lifelong fisherman well used to the casual violence of the sea, was about to cry. Instead Buck straightened up, raised his glass and said in a hoarse voice, ‘Here’s to the best friend I ever had.’

  When Margot had to leave, prompted by a call from Sam, she expected Jenny to come with her. But her friend seemed strangely reluctant. Sandy was at the bar ordering another bottle of wine, she explained, and he had promised to tell her the secrets of his blend of Syrah and Viognier grapes. She smiled and said. ‘I’m enjoying myself. You go home to Sam.’

  That night Margot a
nd Sam started packing. Margot watched her daughter carefully, but she seemed to have weathered the emotional storm, or its first wave, anyway. The fact that Sam had done so much to organise the service had really helped.

  Sam’s friend Mona phoned and asked Sam how she was, and whether she would like to chill for an hour over at her house if her mother didn’t mind.

  ‘Are you sure, darling?’ asked Margot. ‘I mean, we only had the service this morning.’

  ‘Mum that was a service to celebrate Dad’s life. I loved it. I loved what everyone said, and the music and the readings. I’m fine about Dad. Maybe I won’t be tomorrow or the day after, but right now I’m OK, so don’t worry about me. But I do worry about you.’ Sam gave her a big hug and a kiss. ‘Why don’t you ask Jenny Hathaway over?’ she said, looking positively cheerful as she skipped to the door. ‘I’ll only be gone for an hour. Take care.’

  God, she’s looking after me, thought Margot, and suddenly she felt very alone. I’ll soon lose her. In a year or two she’ll go to university, maybe St Andrews, and I’ll be all alone. They will all have gone.

  Gloria Gulliver left the service realising how much she missed the man in whose memory it had been held. It had not occurred to her that what had felt like a brief and casual affair was anything other than that, a little warmth blown in on a chance summer wind. She had not taken it seriously. But listening to his students and to Margot’s excoriating address, she realised how much Leo’s passions and beliefs had touched those around him.

  She returned to her studio and threw away the halffinished watercolour portrait. She decided to start again, in oil this time. Gloria loved watercolours because the technique was fast, immediate and unalterable. You just mixed water with a palette of colours and laid the images on paper with swift brush strokes. There was no going back with watercolours. The paint dried almost immediately, and the finished work was there before you. That’s why Gloria was a watercolourist. Once you began a painting you had to finish it quickly. There were no second chances with watercolour. She liked that. It suited her.

  She had completed the watercolour of the godwit the students had commissioned in just over three hours. She knew the bird all too well. Leo had talked endlessly about the godwit, describing in detail its plumage, the long curved bill and above all its extraordinary strength, the power that lay in its wings. Gunbrit explained that the painting was a gift to Margot Kemp as a tribute from Leo’s students. Gloria had refused payment.

  But the portrait of Leo was different. The beauty of oil was that you could build the painting over days, changing colours to alter skin tones, light and shade, altering the whole feel of the composition, which allowed you to explore the inner character of the subject. There was a deeper truth to be found and conveyed in oil. She mixed her paint with linseed oil, making the consistency more liquid than usual; the longer the oil took to dry, the more time there was to modify, adapt and strengthen the portrait.

  She decided to turn the portrait into a statement about this strange man and the work that so obsessed him. It wasn’t that she disagreed with his views on the fishing industry and the science of oceanography. But she wanted to take him out of that world, make him laugh; make him realise that life did not have to be an endless battle with those of opposing convictions.

  ‘Someone should inject you with a joy drug,’ she had once told him. ‘Look at yourself! Sandwiched for a heartbeat of time between two eternities of darkness, and all you can do is put your fists up every day and fight. How about a little fun in this short life of yours? I’m going to show you how. I’m going to make you see there’s more to it than endless angst about those seals of yours.’

  He didn’t object. In fact he laughed out loud when she made a quick sketch of two seals in copulatory position and gave him a mock lecture on their mating habits with microscopic anatomical detail – a perfect parody of the self-congratulatory pomposity that characterised so much academic teaching: probably including his own, he thought.

  She decided early on in the portrait that Leo would be smiling that slow ironic half-smile that very occasionally creased his face when she said or did something outrageous. The first time that had happened was when she had placed a finger on his lips during a passionate discourse on Canadian seal-culling policy and told him to get into the bath.

  ‘What, now? Why?’

  ‘Go on, just do it.’

  So he had undressed and got into the bath while she lit candles and placed them all around its edge. She put Ravel’s ‘Bolero’ on the tape deck and turned it up loud.

  ‘Remember Dudley Moore in the film 10?’

  ‘Remind me.’

  ‘Some gorgeous Hollywood actress is trying to seduce him, but Dudley Moore doesn’t want to know. She puts on this piece by Ravel – all men marching off to war with drumbeats and crashing chords, very sexy – and Dudley says, “What is this?” And she just comes out with it: “Music to make love to.”’

  He smiled and said, ‘That wasn’t quite what she said, was it?’

  ‘No, but I don’t like four letter words.’

  That had made him smile.

  She finished the painting in three days, using a scalpel to work in new oils and scrape off the old. She put a closed sign on the studio door, turned the answer phone on and worked until her eyes blurred with fatigue. But she got what she was looking for: Leo on a rocky foreshore, binoculars strung around his neck, hands shoved deep in the pockets of an old anorak with a pod of seals scattered among the seaweed-covered rocks in the background. He was staring straight out of the frame, the blue-grey eyes looking out at eternity, the mouth creased in a slight smile as if a sudden pleasurable thought had interrupted the melancholic reverie that lay behind those eyes.

  Gloria was a fierce self-critic. But she knew she had caught something of Leo and the world that obsessed him: refracted light from a sunlit sea playing on the rough texture of his face; that half-smile below those haunted eyes; the slick, blubbery bodies of the seals; and beyond them a sea churned to waves by a wind that whipped spume from the crests. The painting was an allegory, of course, but she wanted it to look more like one of those works of photorealism beloved by nature artists. She wanted it to smell and taste of the sea that Leo had loved so much.

  She wanted to show him with feet planted firmly on land, a survivor of the sea and a violent and destructive marriage. Gloria knew this portrait was for Margot, Sam and the wider family, but it was also for her. She had a stake in Leo as well as they did. He had been hers as much as anyone’s. Yes, she told herself, perhaps she really had loved him.

  SIX

  Leo Kemp spent the day of his funeral twenty miles north of Monomoy Island, on a deserted stretch of coast near the village of Wellfleet. He was with the same pod of seals he had been with for the past three weeks. He had long since given up questioning his existence; whether he was dead, alive or dreaming, he didn’t care. If this was life after death, if he had returned to the world of water mammals from which man had struggled so many millions of years ago, then so be it. He felt at peace. His skin almost blackened by sun and wind, his hair a tangled mat, a beard covering much of his face; he had come to resemble the seals around him.

  The sea held no terrors for him. He told himself he was a warm-blooded, air-breathing mammal just like the seals, and with a similar lung capacity. He scraped a diet of mussels, crab, clams and seaweed from the rocks, the latter becoming his dietary staple, the bread and butter of his new existence. There was a great variety of seaweed in the intertidal area, but he ate for choice the long, flat, leaf-like strands of kelp and the dark bubble-wrap seaweed. Leo knew that marine algae was rich in vitamins and minerals and easily absorbed by the human digestive system. The ancients called algae sea vegetables, and Leo reckoned he could probably live well on it alone, provided he had plenty of clean water to drink.

  Water was more of a problem, because rainfall at night was rare in the summer months. There was plenty of water to be found, but he had to
cross the belt of dunes at night to reach one of the almost a thousand freshwater ponds scattered along the Cape. Kettle ponds, the Codders called them, and there were at least twenty of them within reach of the shore around Wellfleet. At night Leo would drink and swim in them, washing off the salt that had encrusted his body during the day. He only went to the ponds at night, and was never seen. Dogs occasionally chased him, but they always backed away growling when they came close enough to smell the rank odour of decaying fish that he exuded.

  He adapted to his new diet and lifestyle without regret or any physical reaction. After only a few days he felt healthier and fitter than he ever had done. He could swim further and faster and was soon able to make free dives of thirty to forty feet to search out scallop beds, as he had done as a young boy in Australia.

  That’s where it had started: long childhood days spent fooling around on the beach with his friends like any other Australian kid. But in truth he had always been more interested in the dolphins to be seen gambolling in the waters of the ‘rip’ at the south end of Melbourne’s Port Phillip Bay, where two headlands of beach create a narrow neck of water leading to Bass Strait. He had got a book on dolphins out of the public library, and had been struck by the title of the first chapter: ‘Half Fish, Half Mammal, and Wholly Human’. From then on he had haunted the harbour at Mornington. Some of his strongest childhood memories were of the fishing boats with their silvery, slithery catches of fish in big wire baskets, including the occasional shark.

  His father could only afford a dinghy on his teacher’s salary at Mornington High School, but the Saturdaymorning expedition with a borrowed trailer to the ramp at Fisherman’s Beach where the dinghy was launched was a much-loved childhood ritual. Better still, his uncle ran a scallop boat from Mornington pier, and it was the day-long trips to the scallop beds up the coast that first made him realise what a strange and different world lay beneath the sea.