It may have been July, but the pups were still distinguishable as that season’s offspring. Like the adults they snoozed in the sun, occasionally moving position but always careful to keep a certain space, only a foot or two, between them.
Margot walked slowly towards the colony, closing the distance to about fifty yards. They paid not the slightest attention to her. She had never involved herself in Leo’s work, but she had attended enough of his lectures in the early days to know that these were all grey and harbour seals. On their seal-watching trips to the Farne Islands Leo had taught her to look at the nose. The grey seal’s nostrils run in two almost parallel lines, while the harbour seal’s are set in a long V that almost touch at the point.
Margot sat down on a springy bed of heather and wild grass and began to scan the rookery with her binoculars. She started at the front, sweeping slowly through the attractive, well-whiskered faces. Sleek creatures, she thought, well fed on the fat of the oceans, so easy to hunt and kill, so vital to the survival of early man and so much a victim of his later greed. Christ, I’m beginning to think like Leo, she thought, and looked around, half expecting him to be there and to say it out loud.
It took her half an hour to work her way through the rookery, tracking seals as they slipped into the water, watching others haul up, clumsily shuffling on to the beach on their clawed front flippers. She could hear no sounds above the soft breeze in the grass and heather, but Leo would have told her that the seals had seen her, and were talking to each other. Seals know all about man, and stored deep in their collective memory is an abiding fear of him.
Two blasts of the Antoine’s siren had her scrambling to her feet. It was 1.30, much too early for the pick-up. She walked rapidly to the top of the ridge as the siren sounded again. Cresting the ridge, she looked out to sea on the far side of the island and saw the fog rolling in. She could just make out the blurred outline of the Antoine, about 400 yards from shore. She knew the fog moved fast, but it was still weird and frightening to see the blanket of grey, swirling mist steadily shrouding the island, darkening and dampening the contours of the land and the air around her. It was like something soldiers must have seen in the First World War, clouds of spreading gas slowly rolling towards them
Except this was just fog, she told herself. It was wet and cold and a nuisance, but no more. She turned back to retrace her footsteps to the huts. In a few minutes the path petered out, and she stood uncertainly seeking the way ahead. The fog had thickened. She put her hand out in front of her. In the half-light, wisps of grey and yellow curled around her fingers.
The huts had been built on a gentle slope leading to that beautiful beach on the far side of the island. She listened for the waves, hoping that at least she could find the shoreline and work her way round, but the fog muffled all sound. She could see nothing around her, and heard nothing but the soft squelch underfoot as she walked uncertainly down the slope.
It should have taken her ten minutes to reach the shoreline, but half an hour later Margot was still stumbling through wet, clingy grass and gorse. She had lost all sense of direction. Feeling increasingly panicky, she decided to stop and do nothing until the fog lifted. She peered at her watch using her sleeve to wipe beads of moisture from its face: 2.30 p.m. It had been an hour since she last saw the tug.
When they came, the horses did so without sound, galloping out of the fog as if on muffled hoofs, their blurred outlines assuming recognisable shape as they emerged from the smoky gloom three or four abreast. Margot froze, clutching her Thermos flask to her chest. The horses streamed towards her, suddenly in clear view, plumes of breath flaring from their nostrils, manes flailing from side to side.
Something must have frightened them, she thought – something, or someone? The thud of hooves on the coarse grass was now audible, the delayed soundtrack of a nightmare. She stood still and closed her eyes, remembering that the horses had been wild for over 200 years, and would be more afraid of her than she should be of them.
She realised later that she had been standing on a narrow pathway through deep grass, the path the horses would naturally have taken on their headlong flight from whatever had frightened them. That was why they had literally brushed past her, rocking her body from side to side with the flick of a mane or a tail. The sweaty reek of horse told her just how close those hoofs had come to trampling her.
The herd vanished into the fog as quickly as they had come, the last of their streaming tails silently disappearing into the gloom. Cold and frightened, Margot steadied herself with a long gulp of coffee from the Thermos and wished she had not declined Buck’s offer to liven it up with a shot of rum.
The fog had lifted slightly when she finally stumbled into the old huts some hours later. The light was fading outside and inside the hut was cold, dark and smelt faintly of urine. She shivered, feeling both foolish and frightened at finding herself alone at night with only basic shelter on a wild island in the middle of the Atlantic. Fear gave way to anger at her own stupidity as she ate the last of her chocolate. She had missed the appointed time for meeting Buck, and he would not be back until morning. What a bloody fool she had been. Exhausted, she went to sleep on a bed of old newspapers, dreaming of feral horses rearing up from the sea, galloping over the waves towards her, wild-eyed and silver-hoofed.
Margot awoke the next morning to bright, warm sunshine that cast a dazzling light over the beach. The fog could have been part of a dream. She was chilled and hungry, and looking at her watch she saw that there was an hour to go before pick-up. She walked to the ridge top, and there, a mile out in the bay was the tug. She waved, but there was no sign of Buck.
She walked back along the ridge looking for the horses. It would be good to see them in daylight, peacefully grazing with their heads down, their tails swishing at flies, and to take that image back with her, rather than that of the wild-eyed demons of her dreams. But there was no sign of the horses, nor of the seals on the long beach. Only birds seemed to inhabit the island, black-headed gulls borne aloft on the Atlantic wind and cormorants skidding over the waves.
It was just after 6 a.m. when she wearily climbed aboard the tug. She had been on the island for just nineteen hours but it felt like a year. Buck didn’t say much, beyond asking if she was all right. She mumbled an affirmative, left it at that and curled up to try to sleep on the ripped plastic covering of the banquette at the back of the cabin. Buck didn’t look at her, but addressed the wide ocean as if he was talking to himself. He had been worried by the fog, he said, but he knew there would be shelter on the island.
She closed her eyes and tried not to feel queasy as the Antoine slid into the three-hour journey back to the Cape. Once he had set her course Buck made coffee for them both, laced as usual with rum. Warmed by the drink, and suddenly feeling alive, she told him about the seals and the horses.
He nodded, and told her the horses were said to be very skittish in fog. Birdwatchers had reported that even a small thing could set them off – the flutter of a bird’s wings, or the aggressive advance of a seal with pups on the beach. But it must have been scary, he ventured.
‘Very,’ she said.
The rum made her dozy and, despite the heaving, pitching ride back to Coldharbor, Margot fell asleep, slumped sideways across the seat.
As they docked, Buck apologised for her wasted journey. She had been seasick most of the way out, and on the island the fog had rolled in, those horses had appeared and she had been trapped for the night. All in all a disastrous trip.
‘Don’t be sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s not your fault. But will you do something for me? A favour?’
‘Sure,’ he said, not thinking.
Margot had been thinking about how to say this, and decided the best thing was just to come straight out with it.
‘I’d like to go back tomorrow.’
‘You’re crazy. What’s the point?’ Buck said.
‘There’s no point, and I’m crazy if you like. But I want to go back. I want yo
u to take me. Will you?’
Buck shrugged and shook his head.
‘I’ll pay you.’
‘It’s not the money. You know that.’
‘Well?’
‘Take a look in the mirror. You’re all in. You haven’t eaten for a whole day. Why not think it over?’
‘Tomorrow, Buck. Will you take me?’
He looked at her. She was a mess. Her hair was plastered to her skull; there were hollows below her exhausted green eyes. Her face had a ghostly pallor.
Buck suddenly became irritated. He had made two long trips out to the island and back in memory of a man whom he admired – not a great friend, he didn’t have any really – but someone he cared for. Now the man’s widow was turning grief into a gothic fantasy, trying to pretend she could exorcise her ghosts on a godforsaken island fifteen miles out in the Atlantic.
‘Give me one good reason.’ He had raised his voice, and she jumped slightly, startled by his vehemence.
‘Because!’ she shouted back
‘Because what?’
‘Just because!’ She thrust out her face, looking him straight in the eye.
‘Who’s looking after your daughter?’
‘Never you mind – Sam’s fine.’
Margot walked up to him and put one arm on his shoulder making Buck step back in surprise.
‘What…’ he began
‘Look me in the eye, Buck, and tell me you’re going to take me out to the island tomorrow. I don’t care if you think I’m mad. I just have to do it.’
‘That’s not good enough,’ he said. ‘No way am I going back there. It’s pointless. I’m not doing it.’
She dropped her arm and stepped back.
‘I know it’s a day out of your life, but for me it’s the rest of my life,’ she said. ‘It’s really important. I can’t explain it. But if you want a real, real reason, here it is. I hardly saw the bloody island. I didn’t have a chance to take a proper look at it. I know I can’t walk every foot of the place but I need to do more out there. I am trying to find my husband’s body. I have to go back. I need to. Badly, very badly.’
Buck stamped away from her across the lower deck. He breathed in deeply, looked out across the harbour to the ferry terminal, and then turned round.
‘Damn,’ he said. ‘Damn, damn, damn.’
NINE
The Antoine left the next day at 8 a.m. under a silver-grey sky and with the barometer showing fair weather.
Buck and Margot did not speak once on the three-hour journey. Margot hunched up behind her dark glasses staring at the infinite waves ahead while Buck busied himself as usual with the radio and his charts; displacement activity, Margot said to herself. He doesn’t need a chart for this trip. He just doesn’t want to talk to me.
The tug slipped and rolled through a slight swell at just under its maximum speed of fifteen knots. To save fuel Buck should have been going more slowly, but he was fed up and wanted to get the whole thing over. He never should have got involved, never should have said yes. It wasn’t even as if he was being paid for it. OK, she offered, but she knew he wouldn’t take it.
He consoled himself with a stronger wozza than usual. The rum blunted his irritation. A lonely, lost woman looking for a dead man who wasn’t going to be there. It was a shame, and he should be glad to be able to help someone in such distress.
He was about to point out the various sea birds that had attached themselves to the bubbling wake, but one look at the hunched figure in the cabin told him it would be a waste of time.
Just get me to this island, Margot was thinking. Let me have one good look around, and that’s it, I’m out of here, out of the Cape, gone.
They reached the island at 11 a.m., and went through the same procedure as before. He’d be back on the next tide, at three. This time she was better prepared, with a strong waterproof coat, a torch and a whistle in her backpack. She let Buck pour a little rum into the Thermos. ‘Good for the soul,’ he said.
‘And the fog? What do you think?’
They were almost the first words she had spoken to him that day.
‘Don’t know. Doubt it, though.’ He sniffed loudly. ‘Doesn’t smell like fog to me, not cold enough.’
Margot had worked out her plan for the day. She would walk for two hours. That would take her past the seal beach she had seen and on to other larger beaches further along the island. She must have seen several thousand seals the day before yesterday, but that was only a fraction of the 250,000 supposedly on the island.
For an island that rises only thirty feet above sea level at it highest point and is only half a mile wide, Atlantic does not give itself easily to a visitor. Hidden hollows screened by gorse concealed small pools, the freshwater ponds the horses drank from, Margot guessed. Deep crevasses opened into gullies choked with wildflowers and brambles. The land rose and fell like a rumpled rug, much more so than was apparent from the sea. The changing contours and a succession of small ridges meant she rarely had a clear view to the end of the island. Distances were hard to calculate. As she walked she kept an eye out for the horses, still hoping to see those creatures of the fog under more normal circumstances.
She passed the beach where she had seen so many thousands of seals two days before. The sand was empty. There was not a seal in sight.
She stopped for lunch, sitting on her waterproof, eating tuna and sweetcorn sandwiches, swigging coffee straight from the Thermos and remembering how her father had insisted on taking a small primus stove on their family picnics to the beach at St Andrews. He could never be persuaded to take a Thermos, claiming that the tea tasted better when brewed on the spot. But actually the family knew he just loved messing around with the little stove and watching the kettle slowly come to the boil.
After walking for half an hour, Margot saw, half a mile away on the Atlantic side of the island, a deep bay between two headlands with a broad crescent-shaped beach covered in what looked like black sand. As she approached she saw that the dark sand was in fact seals, a huge rookery covering the entire beach, tens and tens of thousands of them, many more than she had seen on her previous visit. Harbour and grey, as before. She walked quietly and slowly, working her way to a vantage point on one of the small headlands. She knew a seal rookery this size would have lookouts, but she could see none. Across the far side of the bay she could see some of the horses grazing, heads down, small, wiry animals, peaceful enough now.
The ground was damp but she decided to crawl the last 100 yards to a point on the slope below the headland leading to the beach. As she struggled through the heather and grass, she cursed herself for an act of stupid, emotional madness, a purely selfish desire to assuage grief, a melodramatic gesture to deep freeze the tangled emotions of misery and loss that she could not shed.
Grief, she thought. Grief for Leo? She lost Leo long ago. So what was she doing, crawling through the undergrowth on an island in the middle of the Atlantic just to peer at a million seals?
She stopped, fished the binoculars out of her backpack and leant forward on her elbows to scan the rookery.
As she moved the binoculars from one face to the next, she found the seals all looked exactly the same. She could tell the difference between young and old. She knew a harbour seal from a grey, and she could describe a harp seal in detail, but after twenty minutes working through half a mile of seals she found herself looking at one identikit whiskered face after another. Apart from the sheer numbers, this was very much a repeat of the previous fruitless exercise. And the fast-growing seal cubs really did look identical. How, Margot wondered, does a mother seal on the Arctic ice sheet recognise its pup among 5,000 others when returning with food from a hunt?
She could see the lookouts now. There were several on either headland and a few positioned among the gorse at the edge of the beach. They were older males, their coats scarred from long-ago battles, watching for predators. The wind was freshening and the sea growing choppier, turning wave tops into white horses
that rolled in towards the beach. She spent another half an hour moving her binoculars from face to face, then rolled on to her back, cushioned her head on her waterproof and snoozed in the sun.
When she woke her face was hot, and probably burnt by the sun. She checked her watch: 2.30, time to go. She got to her feet and took one last look at the rookery.
And then she saw him.
With her own eyes she saw him.
He was partially concealed from view by the seals around him. Disbelief turned to shock. Lightheaded and giddy, she knelt down in the grass and fumbled for her binoculars.
He was burnt dark brown by the sun, his hair was matted and he had a thick beard. He was lying on his side, resting on one elbow, doing nothing, like the thousands of seals on the beach. He seemed naked, although it was hard to tell in the throng of seals; his eyes were half closed against the sun, and like the creatures around him he appeared asleep. She held the binoculars on him, twisting the lenses to focus more clearly. He was thin, almost emaciated, and there seemed to be cuts, some fresh, some healed, on his deeply sunburnt torso.
Still kneeling, she put the glasses aside and looked at him with her naked eyes. It was definitely him. She looked out to sea to make sure she wasn’t dreaming, and then back again. Yes and yes. He was there. This was not an apparition, not a spectre conjured up by a demented widow’s imagination, but the living and very obviously breathing person of her husband, the late Leo Kemp, now not so late, now alive among many thousands of seals.
She felt a surge of elation as she crawled forward, confirmation that buried deep in her subconscious had been the hope, or maybe the fear, that Leo had survived after all.
Margot was twenty yards from the outer line of seals and about seventy-five yards from Leo when she could bear it no longer. She stood up abruptly and shouted his name again and again. There was a ripple throughout the rookery as thousands of seals shifted to identify the source of the noise and assess the danger. Leo’s head turned. For a second their gazes locked, his deep-set eyes holding hers, and then he looked away, seemingly uninterested. Then he turned again to look at her, his mind flipping through the photo album in his head. He knew who she was. Margot, the mother of Julian and Sam. She had stepped out of that compartment in his mind where he had carefully placed her and the children. She was no longer that photograph in the book.
On the Broken Shore Page 19