The seals began to flop urgently towards the water, a mass of moving animals, folds of fat rippling along their shiny bodies as they levered themselves forward with their front flippers, using their strong claws to get traction on the sand.
Margot started to run towards the throng, her eyes fixed on Leo. She threw off her backpack and ran skipping and jumping over the grass, heather and gorse, shouting his name, waving her arms.
He had got to his haunches and was looking at her, transfixed, as the beach and the rocks around him emptied of seals. She opened her arms as she ran, shouting, screaming his name.
Suddenly he moved in a low stooping run towards the water. Around him the seals were splashing into the sea and sliding in from the rocky outcrops at either end of the beach, their bodies, so sluggish on land, moving with balletic grace once they were in the water. Now Leo was in the sea with them. A flurry of spray, a splash of brown legs and he was gone, swimming strongly away from the shore, moving with ease through the waves.
Margot reached the water’s edge and shouted after him: ‘Sam loves you, she needs you. Come back!’
Leo turned in the water, his dark, shaggy head almost merging with the seals around and beyond him. The whole rookery was now in the water and heading out to sea. Leo broke away from the main body and swam parallel with the shore, twenty yards out. Margot ran to the first of the rocks, scrambled up it, and jumped and slithered from one to another to keep up with him.
She missed her footing and slipped, sliding down a sharply inclining slab of rock feet first into the sea, hands scrabbling at the seaweed in an attempt to stop going all the way in. Her shins were skinned and she was winded. She whimpered with pain as she dragged herself out of the water, heaving herself half upright and turning to look seaward. She was crying, tears running down her face. And then she began screaming, long, wordless screams of helpless rage.
After all this, he was leaving her again.
She never knew why, what instinct or memory had arisen within him, but Leo turned and began to swim towards her.
She shouted again: ‘Sam needs you! Come back!’
Now the images were becoming clearer in his head. Sam, mouth full of pizza, face full of smiles, always teasing him for being so serious. ‘If I was a seal, Dad, do you think you’d talk to me more?’ Sam on the beach doing cartwheels into the sea, collapsing in the waves with a shriek; Sam with her hours of homework, head down over the kitchen table, asking endless questions: ‘Dad, what exactly is a logarithm?’
Leo emerged from the water and stood upright, a lean, brown, naked figure with scars and scratches on his legs and upper body. He took long strides up the sloping rock towards her. When he reached her side he bent down and helped her up.
He stank. His whole body exuded the smell of raw, rotten fish. She recoiled involuntarily, putting a hand to her mouth and nose, and then flung herself at him, holding him as tight as she could. His arms remained fixed at his side, pinioned by her embrace. He wriggled free, and gently held her away from him.
‘Come home,’ she said looking into his unknowing, dark brown eyes sunk deep into their sockets.
Leo said nothing, but let her take him by the hand.
The Antoine docked at Coldharbor at six o’clock that evening. Nothing in his near seventy years at sea had prepared Buck for the moment when Margot led Leo up the gangplank. In shock he had become an automaton, backing the boat away from the small pier and turning her to head back to the Cape. The moment the Antoine was on course he had tried to talk to Leo. His friend’s hollow eyes, the thousand-yard stare and the mute incomprehension of the world around him made communication impossible. It was as if Leo had stepped out of his nightmares and into his life, thought Buck.
Margot had begged Buck not to radio the news to the coastguard, and he had agreed. God knows what the coastguard would have said. He found it hard enough to come to terms with Leo’s return after being missing at sea for six weeks and kept turning to look at the figure hunched in a blanket at the back of the cabin. It was Leo all right. At least, Buck thought, he wouldn’t be carrying the guilt of his friend’s death to his grave.
There was no one around to watch the Antoine nose into its mooring place at the Coldharbor pier and tie up that evening. Buck let down the boarding plank and watched as Leo emerged from the upper deck and climbed down the steps. He was shoeless and wearing Buck’s sea jacket and a faded pair of beach shorts. An old baseball cap was jammed down over his matted hair. Buck put out a hand, and Leo took it to steady himself as he stepped ashore. The two men looked at each other wordlessly. Buck turned to Margot to say something, but she tapped a finger against her lips and shook her head. He pulled her aside anyway.
‘You should take him to hospital. And you need to tell the coastguard.’
‘He’s coming home, and I’m telling no one till I get him there. Do me one last big favour, Buck. This is the last time I’ll ask anything of you. Don’t say a word just yet. I want to get him back home, and then we’ll see.’
Buck grunted.
Leo walked to the Saab with an awkward, drunken gait. Buck waved as Margot drove off, and then crossed the road to the Dark Side. There was no more appropriate place to have a drink, a lot of drink, that night.
The story of Leo Kemp’s survival after being missing for almost six weeks made headlines around the world. Sandy had broken the story on the Herald’s website, and had persuaded the editor to follow up with a special edition of the paper, which sold out across the Cape the following morning.
He had gone reluctantly to the Kemps’ house the previous night, fearing that Margot had been drinking again. Her cryptic message had said: ‘He’s back, and I want you to handle the story.’
As he entered the house, Sandy smelt Leo before he saw him. The sight of his friend in a dressing gown, looking like the old man of the sea, was shocking. Leo half raised his hand, and Sandy noticed the long, curling fingernails. But it was the cloying, oily smell of old fish that confirmed where he had been for the past few weeks. Margot had warned him that Leo had yet to say anything, not one word. He refused to talk, shaking his head when Margot pleaded with him for an explanation of where he had been and what he had been doing.
They looked at each other, and Sandy sat down. What do you say to a friend who has come back from the dead, and who sits there looking at you mute and apparently unconcerned about what has happened to him?
‘You need a shave,’ Sandy said. Leo smiled and nodded.
With a presence of mind for which he would later be profoundly grateful, Sandy borrowed Margot’s small digital camera and took a quick couple of snaps of Leo before he was led away uncomplainingly to have a shower and what proved a long and difficult shave. He even allowed Margot to cut his hair.
Sandy went into the kitchen, poured himself a glass of white wine and sat down to work on the intro to his piece. He was never going to get a better story than this. Nobody was ever going to get a better story than this.
Six weeks after he was swept overboard in a sudden storm and presumed drowned, the well-known marine scientist Leo Kemp has been found alive and well on a remote island in the Atlantic.
When Leo emerged he did so as the old Leo, beardless, his hair cut, nails trimmed and a shy look of surprise on his face. The dank fish smell lingered on over the soap and aftershave, but the old man of the sea had gone.
He sat with Sandy, drinking coffee and listening politely to the repeated questions. But he didn’t speak a word, merely shook his head and smiled. Sandy read him the opening paragraph of his story and looked at him for some reaction. There was none.
‘Show us at least that you can make a noise,’ he said. ‘Make a sound.’
But Leo just shook his head, hunched his shoulders and sank back into himself.
The flashlight photograph of Kemp’s dark, bearded face, his deep-set eyes gazing out from beneath a mass of tangled hair, was the image that went round the world. Sandy’s story had gone with it, tagged �
��world exclusive’. The photograph was to make him rich, a quick shot with a cheap borrowed camera of a man whose survival was widely proclaimed as miraculous. But there were no interviews, not so much as a quote, from the man at the centre of what quickly became a medical mystery story.
To Margot’s relief Sam had been out with friends when she had brought Leo home that night. She could think of no better way of preparing her daughter for the biggest and best surprise of her life than by leaving a voice message on her cell phone telling her exactly that. So when Sam came bounding through the door she knew her father had come home, and accepted that fact with unquestioning joy.
‘I knew you’d come back! I knew you’d come back!’ was all she could say. In the teenage world where dreams merge with video games and TV sitcoms everything becomes possible, Margot reflected. She on the other hand had needed several glasses of wine when she had got Leo home even to begin to understand what had happened.
Over the next two days Sam attached herself to her father like a koala bear to a branch, hugging him constantly, sitting on his lap whenever she could, standing beside his chair as he read the papers and drank endless cups of coffee.
The doctors gave Leo extensive check-ups and reported that his physical health was fine, except for a dramatic weight loss of several stone. Blood tests were clear, and the function of the vital organs – heart, lungs, liver and kidneys – was excellent for a man in his early forties. But they told Margot that he was suffering from severe PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, and should on no account be questioned about his ordeal. She was warned that he would exhibit the classic symptoms of someone recovering from the trauma of a near-death experience: sudden and repeated night waking, panic attacks and flashbacks.
‘And the treatment?’ she asked.
No drugs could be prescribed. PTSD was usually treated by intensive one-to-one psychotherapy followed by group therapy sessions.
So that they could avoid the scrum of journalists camped outside the house the Institute arranged for the Kemps to move into accommodation within the Coldharbor campus, which could be closed off to outsiders. A visitors’ apartment was made available with two bedrooms, a large open-plan kitchen-lounge area and a deck overlooking the sound.
Sam and her father spent their days on the deck playing Scrabble, reading and watching the boat traffic on the sound between Coldharbor and Martha’s Vineyard. She hoped to awaken his memories by getting him to look at the fishing and tourist boats ploughing up and down. Leo happily spent hours looking at the boats on the water through binoculars. He smiled and hugged his daughter a lot, but still said nothing.
‘Ordeal?’ snorted Margot as she sat down with Jennifer at a hastily arranged WALL lunch. ‘I don’t think it was an ordeal. I think the whole thing was a mind trip, something he did subconsciously to deal with his dismissal. Don’t tell me he got washed off that boat by accident. I’m sure Buck doesn’t think so either.’
She and Jennifer were meeting as usual at the Quarterdeck, a rare occasion, as Jennifer said, on which the WALL club had actually managed a lunch.
‘Trouble is,’ Margot continued, ‘I say that and immediately feel guilty. So it’s double jeopardy. I have a husband who won’t talk to me about his near-death experience, but who guilt-trips me when I wonder what was really going on in his head before he went off that boat. I can’t win; I get it coming and going. I think I’m the one who’s going through an ordeal.’
Jennifer suggested they share a bottle of wine, as it was her day off, but Margot insisted that they start with a kir, a glass of decent white with a splash of cassis which adds an alcoholic kick and turns the drink light pink. When drunk on an empty stomach a kir is a mood-altering experience that greatly enhances the meal that follows. At least that was Margot’s theory.
Jennifer relaxed as she listened to her friend pour out her troubles. Margot was beginning to think that the man she had rescued was an impostor. She felt the real Leo was still out there with the seals. Her husband had become a stranger, someone who was perfectly pleasant but who remained mute, refusing all entreaties to discuss the one topic she and Sam and the rest of the world wanted to talk about. He spent his days reading, watching TV and drinking coffee. He seemed to regard the extensive press coverage about his reappearance as something that was happening to someone else.
Jennifer repeated what she had heard from the doctors at the Institute and the specialist who had come down from Boston. Post-traumatic stress can take many forms, and Leo was actually suffering from a relatively benign version. He was in denial about what had happened to him, and could not come to terms with it. That was quite normal.
‘I don’t do normal any more,’ said Margot. ‘Life isn’t normal. Even Leo’s symptoms aren’t normal. He’s supposed to suffer from screaming panic attacks at night, but he sleeps like a baby. There haven’t been any signs of the flashbacks the doctors talked about. He just sits on the deck all day with Sam and says nothing.’
‘Exactly,’ said Jenny. ‘He’s internalising his emotions, refusing to communicate and rejecting the reality of what he’s been through. A classic case of post-traumatic stress disorder.’
‘You know what my problem is?’ Margot said. ‘I think I was happier when I thought he was dead. I’m not sure I can cope with him coming back like this. Isn’t that awful?’
She began to cry, brushing the tears away with the back of her hand and then dabbing at her eyes with a napkin as the waitress brought their coffee.
Jennifer took Margot’s hand in hers. ‘As both your doctor and your friend, I’m telling you it’s perfectly normal to feel like that. Leo is suffering a form of nervous breakdown, and you need to come to terms with that, just as you need to recognise that you’ve been deeply traumatised as well. Remember, you both have Sam, so hold her in your head and your heart, and work this out for her.’
Margot laughed. ‘You should take a drink more often, doctor,’ she said, fishing out a handkerchief and blowing her nose loudly.
In a slow news period the speculation about what had actually happened to the missing scientist filled feature pages and news websites, and inspired bloggers around the world.
The media collectively threw cold water on the assumption that Leo Kemp, the marine biologist who had passionately defended seals’ cause against the fishing lobby, had gone overboard accidentally. All the evidence suggested that he had staged his disappearance as cover for a mission of which his Institute had disapproved. He had spent weeks on the ultimate research trip, living rough among the seal colonies of Cape Cod and Nantucket. The mission had lasted longer than planned; Leo had had a nervous breakdown in the wild, and had been rescued against all the odds by a faithful wife long after the rest of the world had assumed him dead. And now he was on the road to recovery.
This made good copy, but except for the nervous breakdown it was all nonsense, as Sandy Rowan tried to explain. But due to Kemp’s refusal to talk, there were very few verifiable facts. So the questions and the theories multiplied. No one could explain how Kemp had made the fifteen-mile journey across the sea to Atlantic Island. And how had he survived in the open for so long? Had he really been able to sustain himself on a diet foraged from the seashore? On the latter point the journalists and experts were on safe ground. Nutritionists agreed that it was perfectly possible to live on a diet of seaweed, shellfish and birds’ eggs for months, provided there was access to fresh water.
When this question was discussed at the Herald’s daily conference, the editor suddenly remembered the trainee reporter who had been sent to try to survive on the beaches south of Provincetown. It had been his idea, and a very good one it was too. Readers loved reality journalism like that. So where was Lewis Chadwick? The editor threw the question out, and looked around to find his executives apparently engrossed in the agenda sheet.
There was a general silence. Sandy Rowan coughed and looked a little embarrassed. Apparently, he said, Lewis Chadwick had been seen in a McDonald’s in P
rovincetown having a Big Mac and fries the day after he had been dropped off on the shoreline. When finally tracked down to his parents’ home he explained that he had been told to use his initiative and he had done just that. Furthermore, he did not think that freezing to death on a Cape beach and trying to eat rock mussels for breakfast was any way to become a journalist. So he had resigned as a trainee. He had also said that his mother had written a sharp letter to the owner of the Herald complaining about the treatment of her son.
‘Brilliant. Anything else?’ asked the editor irritably.
‘Yes. He’s going to enrol in drama school and become an actor, apparently.’
The case of Lewis Chadwick did not prevent the Herald from concluding that the experts were right. Providing Leo had found access to water and had taken cover in the long grass of the dunes during the chill nights, there was no reason why he could not have survived for the six weeks he had been missing.
Denied access to any member of the Kemp family, and with the Coldharbor Institute refusing to comment, the international media turned gratefully to Sandy Rowan for interviews and background. He worked out that he had given over a hundred radio, television and press interviews in the week after Kemp had returned. He had tried to see his old friend again, but Margot and the Institute were adamant. Leo was seeing no one until he had recovered sufficiently to begin talking about his experiences to his doctors or within the family circle.
On the Broken Shore Page 20