Suddenly Sam was jumping up and down with excitement.
‘Hey, Mum! Look at this! Quick!’
Margot grabbed her telescope from her, almost pushing her aside.
‘Mum!’
Margot apologised. She didn’t know what she had been expecting, but Sam had only been looking at a riderless horse on the beach.
‘Must have thrown him off,’ said Sam. ‘Mum, will you buy me a horse in Scotland?’
‘No.’ Margot swung the telescope back to the sand spit. A speedboat carved through the water just beyond it.
The seals had gone.
On the way back down the steps, Margot let Sam go ahead, and paused on the landing about halfway down. The image of Leo’s body rolling in the waves would not leave her. She looked out over the beaches to the sea beyond. He was out there somewhere, and sooner or later they would find him, a body on the beach brought in by the tide like a piece of driftwood. An early-morning jogger running along the tide line would see the corpse and swerve away, fumbling in his Lycra shorts for a mobile phone.
Downstairs in the café, Margot took a deep breath and told Sam she had changed her mind. She had been very stupid. They could not possibly go back to Scotland yet. ‘The thing is, darling, people are right. Your dad’s out there somewhere, or his body is, and we have to wait until they find him. We have to bury him properly here on the Cape.’
Sam jumped from her seat, her face lit up with pleasure. She clapped the palms of her hands.
‘That’s wicked, Mum, really cool, thank you!’ she said, and hugged her mother. Margot brushed away a tear and ordered a glass of wine.
This is the time, thought Sam. The time for my surprise. She had waited, uncertain of the timing and fearful of her mother’s reaction. Now she knew the time was right.
‘I’ve got a surprise for you,’ she said on the way home.
‘Do tell,’ said Margot.
‘Not now. When we’re home. It’s a big surprise.’
‘A nice surprise?’
‘Of course,’ said Sam, leaning over and giving her mother a noisy kiss on the cheek.
‘Good, I like nice surprises.’
At home Sam made Margot take Leo’s usual seat in the sitting room, and told her to close her eyes. She left the room and shuffled in backwards, holding, as Margot could see through half-closed eyelids, a square object covered by a sheet.
‘You’re cheating,’ said Sam. Margot screwed up her eyes. Sam turned and whipped off the sheet.
‘OK, open wide.’
And there Leo was, beautifully caught in an oil painting. But…Margot gasped: that half-smile on his face, that cold, hard stare, those seals in the background and that angry sea, was that her husband?
‘How extraordinary,’ said Margot. ‘Who did this?
‘Mrs Gulliver. You know, the art teacher he used to go to. She did the godwit painting for the students.’
‘Yes, of course. But who chose the setting? I mean, with those seals in the background?’
Sam looked at her mother. She had said ‘those seals’ as if they were vermin. Maybe they were to her, she thought. No wonder she and Dad used to argue all the time.
‘I didn’t ask her for that, but I think it’s great, don’t you? I mean, she knew Dad worked at the Institute and did all that stuff on seals, so that’s the way she did it. She said she thought it was a great way to remember him.’
‘Well, she was right,’ said Margot, getting up to examine the painting with care. It was technically excellent. For once that stern face of his was creased in a half-smile. When did I last see him smile, she thought? When did I last see my husband happy? He looked happy here, and of course that was where he was happy. Standing on the rocks in front of his bloody seals.
She ran her fingers over the layered oil paint, feeling the texture of his skin, the rough early-morning feel of an unshaven face.
‘Clever Mrs Gulliver,’ she said. ‘She’s really got him. When did you ask her to do this?’
Sam explained that she had gone to ask for the portrait when she knew her father wasn’t coming back. Something special to remember him by.
‘And how much did it cost?’ asked Margot, coming back to earth.
Sam looked embarrassed.
‘She wouldn’t take anything for it. She said it was a gift in remembrance of a good man.’
‘In remembrance of a good man? Well, how sweet of her. Lovely. We’ll put it up over the mantelpiece.’
‘You don’t like it, do you, Mum? I can tell.’
Margot hugged her daughter, holding her in a long embrace. Playing for time, thought Sam.
‘I love it, darling. I think it was a wonderful thing to do, a marvellous idea, and it’s been done so well. It’s just a bit of a surprise, that’s all.’
They both knew she was lying.
In truth Margot thought the portrait was mawkish, sentimental chocolate-box art; but far worse, it was an unwelcome reminder of a husband she had lost long ago, and who would now stare down at her wherever she went, in whatever house she lived in. This was not a painting she was going to be able to shuffle off to the attic. For Sam’s sake she was going to have to put up with the bloody thing.
Almost four weeks after Leo Kemp disappeared, the Cape Herald had published an investigation into his death and an appreciation of his life and work written by Sandy Rowan. The analysis of the events surrounding the accident involving the Antoine concluded that extraordinary weather conditions had led to a drowning for which no one was to blame. Buck’s seamanship was commended and he was specifically exempted from responsibility.
Even so, Buck had refused to cooperate with the investigation and had slammed the phone down when Sandy had called him. He spent his days aimlessly at sea on his 44–foot boat and his nights in the bars around Chatham. And every night he would awake from the same nightmare, bathed in whisky sweat and shouting out orders to a crew.
The second and longer article contained a large cut-out picture of Leo standing on the transom of the Antoine, with the text artfully cut around it under the headline ‘A Man for all Mysteries’. The article laid great emphasis on Leo’s fascination with the mysteries of the ocean’s deeps. Passages from his recent speeches were quoted, including one in which he said that while twelve men had walked on the moon, no one had set foot on the ocean floor at its greatest depths and only two people had ever seen it with their own eyes through the pressurised windows of a deep-sea submersible. ‘Huge creatures live at that depth,’ Leo was quoted as saying. ‘What they are, and how they live, we do not know. Why don’t we know? Because we are not looking.’
Sandy wrote that the late scientist would have been amazed that, more than a month after his death, the ocean had still not surrendered his body. The head of the coastguard in Coldharbor was quoted as saying that never in his experience – and he had been in the job for forty years – had a body that had gone missing within sight of shore failed to beach up in a few days.
Sandy had ended the article with the thought that, morbid though it might seem to some readers, Leo would have enjoyed the mystery surrounding his missing corpse.
The editor cut the paragraph on the grounds of taste.
Tallulah Bonner read the article over breakfast coffee on the deck of her Penzance Point house.
‘He doesn’t go away, does he?’ she said to her husband, who was steering his hand towards a glass of fresh orange juice while reading his own newspaper. She put the glass into his hand and watched him raise it to his lips without taking his eyes off the paper – the Wall Street Journal, of course.
‘Who?’ he said, not bothering to look up.
Tallulah had once attended a management-training course in California, on the first day of which the twenty attendees had been asked to write down the three biggest mistakes they had made in their lives. The anonymous lists were printed out and circulated for general discussion. Twelve people had said that marrying the wrong person was one of the mistakes. They were a
ll women. Tallulah was one of them.
Leo Kemp’s replacement in the marine biology department took his first class soon after Kemp’s funeral. Adam Swift came from an old Cape family, and could claim direct descent from Elijah Swift, who in 1820 had been one of the first men on the Cape to realise the wealth to be made from the whaling industry. Generations of Swifts ever since had been brought up to uphold the maritime traditions that had enriched the family.
With that reverence for the Cape’s history came respect for the institutions that had developed from the seafaring lives of the local people. Chief among these was the Coldharbor Institute for Marine Studies. Adam Swift was therefore naturally anxious to shield the Institute from the perceived criticisms of the late Leo Kemp.
Leo’s sacking had become public knowledge soon after the funeral, much to the embarrassment of the Institute. There had been a difficult board meeting, at which the chief executive was questioned closely about the handling of Leo’s case. When she protested that it was they, the Board, who had sanctioned his dismissal, an elderly Board member said quietly: ‘We did indeed, but perhaps we did not have the full facts.’
Tallulah Bonner was forced to bite her tongue. There were no ‘full facts’ to disclose, as every Board member knew. Kemp had indirectly criticised the strategy of the Institute, and had held it up to ridicule by reviving the whole ludicrous story of Hoover the talking seal. On top of that, he had attacked government policy towards the Stellwagen Bank marine reserve. And if you really wanted to make a case that Leo Kemp was a rogue academic, look at the way he attacked the Canadian government’s entire fisheries policy. Tallulah Bonner had made the Board aware of all these factors. Now that Leo was dead they were getting snippy with her.
Adam Swift began his first lecture on what he hoped was a conciliatory note. He paid tribute to Leo Kemp as a colleague of great ability whose memory would live on in his published work and in the future careers of the students he had taught. He then proceeded, as far as the students were concerned, to attempt to demolish the intellectual basis on which Kemp had approached the entire subject of marine biology. Communication between sea mammals, he argued, was of secondary interest compared to the crucial question facing marine scientists: the effect on the oceans of climate change. The density, salinity, temperature and current flow of the waters of the seven seas were the real issues; the mammals who inhabited that universe could not be the prime focus of research, nor could they be the main intellectual consideration of the students.
Above all, he said, the notion that space exploration should take second place to the study of the oceans was at the least arguable. ‘He never said that,’ said a woman from the back but her soft voice did not carry and few people heard.
When Adam Swift advanced these views he did so from genuine belief, not in order to be provocative. Intellectual life was the endless pursuit of truth, and that required complete honesty. In Swift’s opinion Leo Kemp was a hopeless romantic who had misled his classes through his emotional commitment to a cause.
Leo’s problem, as Swift saw it, was that he had arrived at Coldharbor as a teacher and had turned into a preacher. In Swift’s view, preachers had their place, and while Leo’s cause may well have been just, indeed honourable, it had nothing to do with the teaching of marine biology.
Adam Swift was not stupid. He did not expect students who had so clearly loved their previous teacher to be swayed immediately by his new, more intellectually rigorous approach to their chosen subject. They would come round in time, he believed, because he was right, and those well-developed postgraduate minds would see the strength of his arguments. He had heard it said that Leo Kemp had the courage of his convictions, the strength of purpose to speak out for what he believed in. Well, so did he.
Swift acknowledged to the students that his views were different from those of his predecessor, and encouraged the class to discuss the differences. The debate changed direction when Jacob Sylvester stood up awkwardly and pushed his spectacles up his nose.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘for Mr Kemp, seals were the centre of a belief system. They were the intellectual beginning of a journey that led him to question the way modern marine science works.’
‘I understand that,’ said Swift, a little too obviously impatient with the patronising tone of his student.
‘No you don’t!’ shouted Jacob. The whole class went quiet, even the usual gossiping crowd at the back. The activity that goes on in the background of any academic class, the chatter, the fidgeting, note-passing and nose-picking came to a halt.
‘The point’, said Jacob, ‘is that here we are studying, researching, working up computer models, while just fifty miles away one of this country’s great marine reserves, Stellwagen, is being comprehensively destroyed. Mr Kemp thought we should do something about it.’
‘Universities are not centres for direct action,’ said Swift smoothly. ‘They—’
‘Universities should use the power of reason to allow reasonable force to be seen as a moral option,’ said Sylvester, his voicing rising with anger.
‘You mean we should advocate violence?’
‘No, I mean that Leo Kemp was trying to make us understand a reality out there, and trying to persuade us to go out and campaign. Not force. I never said that.’
‘That’s exactly what you just said, Mr…’
‘Sylvester. And that’s not what I said, not what I meant anyway. You’re twisting my words.’
The class had grown restless, and was on the verge of open anger. Swift realised that his idea for a debate had been a failure. He ended the session early.
Gunbrit Nielsen and several classmates met regularly in the Coffee Obsession – ‘a coffee house with character’, it called itself – in Coldharbor. After Adam Swift’s disastrous lecture they assembled there to decide on a strategy to rid themselves of their new teacher.
The first step was a letter to the Herald, which the editor obligingly placed in a prominent front-page position. ‘Late Lecturer’s Work Attacked’, ran the headline, and the accompanying story noted that Leo Kemp had been a bitter critic of the annual Canadian seal cull, and had warned that the commercial fishing lobby was working to overturn the 1972 Marine Mammals Protection Act.
Sandy Rowan had just taken a long call from Mrs Fiona Chadwick, and had endured a twenty-minute lecture on the iniquity of the paper’s treatment of her trainee reporter son Lewis, when a knock on the glass door of his office and a gesture of alarm from a subeditor holding a phone away from his ear told him there was more trouble on the line.
Tallulah Bonner came swiftly to the point. She did not normally talk to junior editorial staff, but since the editor was out, Mr Bowen or Rowan or whatever his name was would have to do. The Coldharbor Institute had never been subjected to such one-sided, innuendo-driven drivel in her whole experience as chief executive. The worst aspect of the case was that no attempt had been made to obtain the Institute’s side of the story. The Institute’s lawyers would be in touch, seeking redress, and not just an apology but serious damages for reputational harm.
She was about to put the phone down when Sandy said, ‘No need, Mrs Bonner. We’ll give you equal space to reply.’
‘You should have thought of that before,’ snapped Tallulah.
Sandy never understood why supposedly intelligent people like Mrs Bonner could behave so idiotically.
‘We did, Mrs Bonner. We offered Adam Swift the right of reply, and faxed the entire article to him before publication. He never came back to us.’
There was a silence at the end of the line.
‘Nice talking to you,’ said Sandy.
Lewis Chadwick had been congratulated by his colleagues on his good luck when the news editor chose him to undertake a survival mission on a desolate beach south of Provincetown. ‘Reality journalism’, the news editor called it. Sandy Rowan was put in charge of the project. The idea was to follow up the disappearance and likely death of Leo Kemp by showing whether or not it was
possible to survive for a few days on the foreshore and among the dunes without help or resources. At first Lewis thought he was indeed the lucky one, guaranteed a big feature spread with a photo byline and perhaps a page-one cross reference. ‘Reporter Survives Week in the Wilderness’ was the headline he had in mind. But he did not feel quite so fortunate as he watched Sandy get back into the pick-up truck that had dropped him off on the remote beach.
For a start, he was four miles across country from the nearest road. Secondly, Sandy had made him dress in shorts and a T-shirt and had given him only a 125-millilitre bottle of water for use in emergency. His equipment was a Swiss army knife. When he complained, Sandy told him he was lucky not to have been made to begin the exercise by swimming ashore and starting off soaking wet. They had at least spared him that.
The story was that he was the only survivor of a ship that had gone down, and he had to fend for himself until he was rescued. But he was not told when the rescue would take place. The only instruction was to use his initiative.
‘This is all a bit over the top, isn’t it?’ said Lewis as Sandy prepared to leave him.
‘You’ve got it,’ said Sandy. ‘It’s completely over the top. But if you stick it you will get a great piece out of it.’
EIGHT
Leo Kemp had never understood the fashion for expensive watches that can tell you the time on the other side of the world or work at 300 feet underwater. His own cheap plastic digital watch had long since expired, but in his new, timeless world, where he rose with the sun and slept under the stars, and where life was determined by wind, waves and the food he could find, this hardly mattered. He swam close to the pod, moving only a few hundred yards a day, from one beach to another. The seals were more wary after the shooting, and spent most nights sleeping at sea. Leo slept in the dunes, moving back into the water at daybreak.
The hot summer and the movement of the tides over the warmed shallows and sand shoals made the sea a welcome relief after his chilly nights on shore. He spent his days swimming and resting up after food hunts along the shoreline before dawn. He combed the dunes at first light looking for the one picnic leftover he still craved, a banana. Naturally and unquestioningly he hid from human sight, ducking beneath the waves and swimming away when fishing boats came in sight, and moving swiftly offshore when bathers or walkers appeared.
On the Broken Shore Page 16