Читать книгу On the Broken Shore - James MacManus, James MacManus - Страница 9

The Dark Side was a steakhouse on the main street of Coldharbor with a long teak bar that stretched the length of the building to a small conservatory overlooking the inner harbour, called Eel Pond, at the back. The place was unlit except for candles which cast their flickering light over every table. Summer or winter, day or night, the Dark Side was always the same.

Kemp sometimes used the place for meetings with colleagues and overseas visitors when he felt such occasions would go better with a drink: they always did. But he and Sandy mostly used it as an unofficial headquarters for emergency lunches or drinks when one of them had something interesting to report, gossip to discuss, grumbles to share. Today was definitely an emergency meeting. Kemp bought a copy of the Herald and pushed open the swing doors of the Dark Side, standing on the threshold for a moment to allow his eyes to accustom themselves to the gloom.

The Cape Herald was a local daily paper packed with the news the locals really wanted: court reports, road works, sewage spills, the latest inane decision of the Barnstaple county municipal authorities. After twenty years on the paper Sandy Rowan was senior enough to leave the small stuff to the trainees who (amazingly) still came in every year from college media courses wanting to learn how to be journalists. Sandy never understood it. Every kid you saw these days was glued to a laptop, mobile or iPod, yet here they were, queuing up, year in year out to work in an industry that created its main product by squirting ink on to pulp made from dead trees.

Sandy specialised in the big stories: the Kennedys in their Hyannis compound (the paper made sure it was very respectful to them); tracking the tourist dollars to check that at least some of local tax-take went back into the sewage-treatment plants, the roads and the schools; and of course Cape Cod’s most famous institution: the Coldharbor Institute for Marine Studies.

What had made Sandy something of a Cape celebrity was his weekly column, a collection of controversial news, views and reviews about life on the Cape. The column appeared on Tuesdays, with a photograph that made him look a lot younger than his forty-six years, under the rubric ‘Rowan’s Ride’.

Sandy did not set out to be controversial, and intensely disliked over-opinionated columnists who peddled fake moral outrage from the dubious vantage point of their own shallow lives. But he took pride in exposing cosy consensual opinions held to be self-evident because they had been repeated for so long. This did not always make him popular.

When a touring theatrical company put on one of the more celebrated plays of the twentieth-century American canon, Sandy had caused outrage with his review, which began:

Eugene O’Neill tried to drink himself to death on the Cape, at his house in Provincetown to be precise. Pity he didn’t succeed. Have you ever sat through five hours of Long Day’s Journey into Night? Try it. It will make the rest of your life feel like you made it to heaven early.

The editor stood by his star columnist, up to a point. But Sandy was never asked to review a play again.

He was already at their table when Kemp arrived.

‘The usual, please, Cleo,’ said Kemp, smiling at the tall, pale waitress, who had already mixed his favourite drink.

He sat down, checked his BlackBerry, and then pocketed it as Cleo emerged from the gloom with a long glass of chilled green tea, cut with lime juice and ginger ale and served with crushed ice, a slice of lemon and a sprig of mint. Leo called it ‘green dawn’, a name he had dreamt up along with the recipe. One day he would get round to taking out a patent and would market it as one of the world’s best-tasting health drinks – one day. In the evening he added a double shot of vodka, to put a little kick into the health habit.

‘Trouble?’ said Leo.

‘That Hoover piece we did.’

‘You mean the interview you begged me to do after that lecture I gave?’

‘I didn’t beg you.’

‘Of course not: you just rang me every day for a week pleading.’

‘It was a good story. It was picked up a lot.’

‘I know. I did all the interviews, remember?’

‘Yeah. Well, I hear that some people are not best pleased.’

‘Some people never are.’

‘Your people, Leo.’

‘Like who?’

Sandy took a gulp of his white wine. ‘This is just what I hear. There are people in Boston and here on the Cape who think you brought the Institute into disrepute.’

‘Oh, come on,’ said Leo. ‘That seal died years ago. He picked up a few English phrases and I used that as a metaphor for how useless we are at understanding these animals. I mean, if one seal can learn English, how do we know there isn’t a whole ensemble of them out there playing Hamlet three hundred feet below the waves every night?’

‘Very funny,’ said Sandy. ‘But they didn’t get the joke. If you’d left it like that, then OK. But it’s all the other stuff you threw in: calling the science establishment arrogant, all-knowing, all-powerful – that sort of thing. And then there was all that conspiracy stuff about seal culls and fish stocks.’

‘So what?’

‘So what? They don’t like it, that’s so what. The way they see it, a seal that can talk a few words of English is just a joke. What isn’t a joke is you telling the world that hundreds of millions of dollars of investment in marine research isn’t being spent properly, that it isn’t being used to find out the big things we don’t know. I mean, that doesn’t sit well with the management. It’s not good for business.’

‘You sound like the chief executive.’

Sandy drank deeply, and then put his almost empty glass on the table.

‘Maybe she’s got a point. I’m just trying to tell you what they’re saying out there. Don’t shoot the messenger. You want another drink?’

‘No thanks. How do you know about this?’

Sandy turned in his chair to signal for another drink. He’s playing for time, thought Kemp.

‘We got a call asking for the notes of the interview.’

‘From?

‘Bonner’s office.’

‘When?’

‘Last week.’

‘And you didn’t tell me?’

‘I was told not to. Sorry.’

‘I thought journos were supposed to protect their sources.’

‘Everyone knew it was you – your name was on the piece.’

‘That’s not what I meant. You could have warned me. Thanks a lot.’

Leo stood up, drained his glass and looked down at the unhappy face of his friend. He put a hand on Sandy’s shoulder and squeezed it slightly.

‘Don’t worry. I’ll deal with it. I’ve got a field trip tomorrow. Let’s have a real drink tomorrow night.’

Sandy nodded. ‘How’s the book going by the way?’

Leo shook his head. The Full and Final Circle of Evolution: Man’s Return to the Sea was long overdue at the publishers, but they weren’t exactly biting his hand off for it.

‘Don’t ask,’ he said and walked out, blinking in the bright sunlight.

So that was the letter Margot had mentioned. He should have known Hoover would get him into trouble. The famous talking seal had been dead for twenty-three years, and his story had been all but forgotten until Kemp had reignited interest in the phenomenon and the controversy around it.

He used Hoover in his off-campus sessions with the students. He would take them to the aquarium café in Coldharbor, buy them all coffee and promise to answer any question they chose. One question always came up. How do you know seals are so intelligent; how can you be sure they really communicate with each other; animal noises are just animal noises, aren’t they?

So he would tell them the story of Hoover, a seal that not only spoke English but did so in a Maine accent: ‘Good morning,’ ‘How are ya?’ ‘Whaddya doing?’ ‘Gedd over here,’ and so forth were standard greetings to visitors to the Boston aquarium where Hoover lived most of his adult life.

An orphaned pup, Hoover had been picked up shortly after birth by a Maine fisherman. He had been taken home, put in the bathtub and bought up as the family pet. He was given the name Hoover because of the huge quantity of fish he ate. Even for a fisherman, the expense of feeding a seal soon became too much, and Hoover was given to the New England Aquarium in Boston. And that was where he started talking to anyone who cared to listen.

The jaw structure and vocal cords of a seal are very much like those of a human, Leo explained to his students. The scientific explanation for what Hoover could do was clear. He had simply heard the fisherman and his family talking, and had learnt to mimic their speech. It was still a pretty remarkable achievement for a seal. Hoover remained the only non-human mammal ever to vocalise in this way. The media loved him, and he became the subject of many newspaper and magazine articles, and appeared on TV and radio shows. But marine scientists did not appreciate Hoover. To them he was just a freak, a distraction. When Hoover died in 1985, he was paid the tribute of an obituary in the Boston Globe.

And then, years later, when Hoover had been almost forgotten, along came Leo Kemp, with his argument that to dismiss a talking seal as a freak of nature demonstrated exactly the kind of arrogance that Galileo had encountered when he argued that the sun did not revolve around the earth. That may have been stretching it a bit, but the marine science establishment got the point, and they hated him for making it. Leo didn’t mind. The important thing was that some of his students got the point too. An animal that can learn to mimic English is a highly intelligent creature.

That wasn’t good enough for Jacob Sylvester and Rachel Ginsberg, who seemed to have become his girlfriend. They were regulars at the Q. and A. sessions, along with a quiet red-haired Brit, Duncan Dudman, who spoke with a deep West Country accent, which the American students could not get enough of. It came from Somerset, where the cider apples grow, he explained.

‘A seal that can talk is just serendipity,’ said Sylvester, straight from the shoulder as usual. ‘Parrots can talk. Doesn’t prove they’re intelligent. I can’t see you proved your point, sir.’

Leo rolled out the heavy artillery.

‘Consider these facts,’ he said, looking at Sylvester, ‘and then tell me how you rate the intelligence of a seal. There are two types of killer whale – those that feed only on salmon, and those that seek out seals, dolphins and other whales. The behaviour of these two separate populations of killer whales is so different that they are essentially different species. But they all look exactly alike to the untrained eye – black, with a white belly patch extending up the flanks, a white patch behind the eyes and another behind the dorsal fin. Only small variations in the skin patterns and the shape of the dorsal fin distinguish the two varieties of orca.

‘So here is the question: If the difference between the two species of orca is that minute, how is it that seals can differentiate between a deadly foe and its harmless cousin? How do the seals know that there are killer whales within threateningly close range of their pod? A seal’s whiskers are like underwater radar, and can pick up minute vibrations or changes of water pressure, converting those signals into data about the presence of food or foe, or a sudden change in the weather.

‘Could it be that the seals’ acute hearing or its radar whiskers can pick up the whales’ own echo-locating communications and decode them?

‘Either way,’ said Leo, ‘the seals always seek shelter in the tumbling surf close to shore when killer whales are nearby. That way they block the whales’ locating signals.’

‘That’s definitely not serendipity,’ said Duncan.

Leo looked at Jacob Sylvester. God, the arrogance of the boy. He could never admit there might be another viewpoint than his own.

‘OK, I take your point,’ he said finally.

Joe Buckland, known to everyone for as long as he could remember as Buck, was a mile off South Chatham on his gillnet boat with nets out for flounder, bass, maybe squid, when the call came to get the tug ready for a field trip the next morning. Buck turned his boat towards shore, grumbling to himself. He liked the money – the Institute paid $400 for a four-hour trip, exclusive of fuel – but why the short notice? He had other things to do.

When his father had bought the Antoine from the docks at Boston after the Second World War, everyone had laughed. It wasn’t a proper tug, because the builders had gone broke in the Depression and had left the superstructure half finished, with a two-storey plywood box cabin and a bow that reared up like a wounded stag. The Antoine was now 80 years old, an ocean workhorse that for years had shipped out of Boston to salvage and assist wrecked or disabled ships in rough seas off the east coast. Locals joked that she should have been in a museum, but Buck said she was as much an American classic as the 1948 Chevrolet, and just as able to do the job.

His father had died in 1952 when Buck was 18. The Antoine was all he left his son. Once it became clear that the tug was going to make him some money Buck had torn down the old plywood cabin and built a proper superstructure, fitting for a standard seagoing tug of its day: a two-level deckhouse with the second level split between the open Texas deck and the pilothouse, the highest point on the tug. Here, polished to perfection, was the equipment he had bought second-hand from the breakers’ yards: a large manual wooden wheel, the smaller brass power wheel, the polished oak binnacle for the compass. Only the ship-to-shore radio was new.

‘What are you going to do with it?’ his father’s friends had asked. He had his answer when the Institute chartered the tug to take research students up the coast, and occasionally far out into the Atlantic. That was in the early fifties, when the first postgrad students were arriving at Coldharbor. The Antoine had paid for herself many times over since then. Now she was on permanent charter to the Institute, and Buck had a regular income, unlike some fishermen, who were reduced to scrabbling for clams at low tide in the off season.

He still fished from March to October, and had his own line of lobster pots out in the season; lobsters were good business, but the money was not regular because the bureaucrats in the Fisheries Department kept changing the weight and size of permitted take. Worse still, they were now charging up to $100,000 a year for a general fishing licence.

Buck had been lucky. He had spent his best years in a business he loved. Now the fish stocks were declining – and Buck well knew whose fault that was – and the industry was dying. Young men still came into the business, but he wondered what for.

His passion for fishing had begun at the age of 8, when his grandfather let him use a small rowing boat on a lake near his home in Massachusetts. It was when Buck was allowed out night fishing on his own that his young world changed.

The Cape Herald had interviewed him some years before as the oldest working fisherman on the Cape. Sandy Rowan was a rare journalist, in that he reported exactly what people said in interviews. ‘That way you get the truth, and get a feel for the person behind the words even if you do lose the grammar,’ he said. So Buck’s words were laid out on a centre spread between two huge quotation marks, alongside pictures showing him from boy to man with rods and reels, and finally as an old-timer pointing to the nets on his 43-foot fibreglass day boat.

‘Out there on the lake at night the bug bit; I was just a kid but I got this amazing sense of freedom and I suppose responsibility. I mean, I was alone, in charge of the boat, the rods, everything. I could have fallen in or anything, but Grandpa let me go off. I spent as much time with him as I could, and fished whenever I could. When I got older and went out on dates, after I dropped the girl off – yeah, this was a long time ago, and we did that in those days – I’d get the boat out and go fishing on the lake. It didn’t pay, so I became an electrical engineer and began going to the Cape at weekends. Salt-water fishing was different. You had to know everything about that damned bitch the sea – currents, tides, weather, and the habits of the fish. I learnt it all. Out there on the ocean you’re always thinking – you have to. It was like going to a school you loved.’

The article was headlined ‘The Happy Hunter’. Both Leo and Sandy reckoned Buck was the happiest man they were ever likely to know.

Buck had no illusions about the future of the fishing industry. It was almost finished and he wasn’t going to spend his last years competing with the other boats for the last fish in the sea. His final destination was a small cashew-nut farm in Hawaii that he had bought back in the fifties, when land was cheap. He had managed to hold on to the farm when he and his wife divorced, and had married second time around to a Filipina called Renee.

Leo had met Buck on his first research trip after arriving at Coldharbor, and long before it became fashionable the two would take Buck’s boat and some beer and spend all day on the Stellwagen Bank watching whales. That was when Leo began to understand what was happening to one of America’s greatest marine sanctuaries.

Leo drove home the four miles to Falmouth, taking care to keep the needle on thirty. In the off season the Cape police had nothing to do but hand out speeding tickets. That was mostly all they did in the high season, come to that. He killed time over a coffee at Betsy’s Diner thinking about the letter; a summons to a meeting, most likely. Tallulah Bonner was a pain, but he had to admit that she did a great job on the money side. The taxefficient endowments rolled in. Trouble was, he had more than once expressed his doubts to her about how it was being spent.

‘Tell me exactly what you mean,’ she had demanded. ‘Give me an example of what we should be doing that we are not.’ When she was angry the treacle in her voice hardened and the Southern drawl tightened.

So Leo tried to tell her. It was difficult, he said, because he was talking about a culture here: a Big Science culture. Hubris, arrogance, the overwhelming view that we know most of what there is to know about planet earth and that we just need to fill in a few gaps.

‘Examples,’ she had snapped at him. ‘Give me examples.’

So he told her how some years back an eminent physicist had dropped a deep-water recording probe into the Southern Ocean, and at 12,000 feet below the surface, well beyond the diving depth of a whale, it detected something enormous, really enormous, passing beneath it.

‘So? What was it?’

‘We don’t know, Tallulah.’

He told her that there were hydrophones throughout the seven seas, mostly operated by the big-power navies, that could pick up the whisper of a distant submarine and from the sound of its propeller identify its class, direction and speed. Sometimes the operators listening in heard a roaring noise from the ocean depths, a roar that was clearly biological in origin. The wavelength of the sound told them it was not that of the blue whale, the largest creature on the planet. It was something much bigger. Something unknown to science.

‘And what conclusion are you asking me to draw from that?’ The treacle was back in her voice now.

‘I’m honestly not trying to be awkward. I’m just saying that we should be a little more honest about what we don’t know, and less arrogant about what we do know.’

Maybe he had told her that once too often. Still, beneath those starched linen suits, the endless talk of budgets and quarter-one forecasts there was a real human being, a management caterpillar who briefly took wing as a butterfly on the annual staff picnic outing to Nantucket. Kids buried her in the sand; she drank a little too much beer, let the salt water ruin her hair and wore a diaphanous Indian garment that billowed up showing long, shapely legs.

Kemp parked his car in the driveway, noticed the needle in the fuel gauge was once more on empty, and yet again made a mental note to sell the gas guzzler. Sixteen miles to the gallon. With the way gas prices were going, that was crazy.

The Kemps had bought their house in Falmouth Heights when they arrived nine years before, a modest storey-and-a-half clapboard-clad four-bedroom home with a steep roof to break the buffeting winter winds and shed rain and snow. It was warm when the autumn gales blew, and cool in the summer when the wooden shingle roof let the house breathe. It was exactly what an $80,000-a-year (plus a decent housing allowance of $20,000) academic at the Institute could afford. As the housing bubble pushed up prices in the nineties, Margot had tried to persuade him to sell up and move inland, maybe even off the Cape, to a bigger, cheaper place. His refusal led to one row after another.

Margot loathed the discipline of the household budget, the weekly payments into the joint account and Leo’s oh-so-casual questions about this payment and that cheque. Her plan had always been to make the money to help pay for a bigger place, but one project after another had failed. Still, the house was big enough now that Julian was gone. Dead. Her son was dead. She still didn’t believe it. She understood now the painful truth behind that old cliché that the bereaved always came out with, the one about expecting to see the lost loved one walk through the door just the same as before. That’s what she felt so often. The wind banged a door shut or the dog made a noise in the next room and her heart would jump and she would turn to see him, to hear him and to hold him in her arms. But he was never there.

One look at his wife and Leo could tell whether she’d been drinking, whether she was angry, whether there was going to be a scene.

‘Hi.’ He leant forward to give her a kiss and she averted her face to receive it on the cheek, as she always did these days. ‘Where’s Sam?’

‘She’s gone straight from school to a friend’s. She’s got a sleepover tonight. Here’s your letter.’

They sat down in the sitting room, facing each other in the same chairs they always used. It was a nice room, with some really good paintings by a Scottish artist, Ethel Walker, who was inspired by the play of sun and moonlight on ruffled loch waters; and there was a clutter of marine art – the sort of stuff the local artists did with driftwood, the residue of one of her failed businesses.

Sixteen years of marriage. It had been good enough, but not for long enough. They married in 1992 in the Anglican Church in Queens Gardens, St Andrews. They were both too young and they knew it, but at that age who cares? She was 20 and heavily pregnant, he 23 and a rising young academic star in an area of science that was just beginning to become fashionable. She daringly wore a tight ivory-coloured dress at the service that emphasised rather than concealed her swelling. Her parents wore their Sunday best suits, Dad with an amazing pink carnation.

Leo’s father had flown over from Melbourne and surprised everyone by wearing a morning suit and making a speech which brilliantly evoked his son’s early expeditions on the scallop boats working out of Mornington harbour north of Melbourne, shunning team sports with his school friends and instead spending every Saturday free-diving for molluscs in the warm coastal waters. Then he surprised everyone again by asking them to kneel and say a prayer in memory of his late wife, Dulcie, Leo’s mother. The congregation obediently got to their knees, wondering at the strange direction the wedding service seemed to have taken.

Dulcie Kemp had died some years before, although Leo refused to talk about it. When he finally did, after their wedding, Margot understood the reason for his reluctance. His mother had suffered from high blood pressure all her life, and a series of strokes had transformed an intelligent and loving woman into a human husk, recognising nothing and no one. She had spent years in that condition until released by a final stroke.

They didn’t marry because of Margot’s pregnancy. They married because they were the glamorous couple, the greeneyed gorgeous primary-school teacher and her smitten Australian academic, who gave interviews to The Scientist and The Scotsman and the Glasgow Herald. They called him ‘the man from SMRU’, playing on the popular TV series from the sixties that was being repeated at the time, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Leo had even managed to invest some glamour into the ugly and unpronounceable acronym that stood for the Sea Mammal Research Unit.

They were in love with being loved; the celebrity couple who bridged the social divide between town and gown in St Andrews and went to parties hosted by the social elite of both communities.

If the truth be told, their summer wedding with a doubledecker bus to take the guests to a marquee on the West Sands was just a way to keep the party going. The wedding celebrations seemed to go on for days.

But there was so much more to their relationship than that – at least for Margot. Leo became her life, lifting her from domestic drudgery at home and the boredom of teaching at school and taking her, quite literally, over the horizon to the far side of the sea. That’s where he told her they were going on their second night out as they walked down to the harbour on a calm midsummer’s night in June.

He took her miles out into the North Sea in a borrowed 14-foot boat with an outboard motor. He cut the engine halfway to Norway – at least that’s where he said they were – and they lay under an old blanket on the damp planking watching the moon and the stars. Then he stood up, stripped off and dived overboard. Margot screamed, first at the sight of her date stark naked and then again because he had swum away in the moonlight laughing. Then he vanished completely and silence fell on the sea. Margot began to panic when the boat rocked violently and he came sprawling aboard. He was shaking with cold but started the engine, lashed the tiller on course for the coast and hugged her tightly – for warmth he said – all the way back.

After that she gave him her love with an exquisite sense of surrender. Of course she liked the glamour of being first the girlfriend, and then the wife, of a rising academic star at a fashionable university. But he meant so much more to her, much more than she to him, she felt. He had given her belief in herself, a feeling of real belonging in his world. And his world was crazy; he was always doing something new, always on the move, always testing new ideas, reading new books that no one had ever heard of. When a girlfriend asked what it was like going out with Leo she had said just one word: ‘Exciting.’

‘I’ll bet,’ said the friend. ‘In bed? Do tell.’

‘Not that,’ said Margot. ‘Well, yes, that as well.’

He was a wonderful lover; gentle and oh, so slow. That was new too, after her few rough-and-tumble experiences at the calloused hands of inept boyfriends.

Now it had all gone. And the loss of Julian had compounded the pain. That is what made her so bitter. The death of her son would have been so much less agonising if Leo had been at her side; the old Leo, the mad, fun-loving Leo, the man who had read somewhere that seven winds met on a hilltop near Forgan in Fife and that if you climbed that hill when the winds were blowing you would be cured of all illnesses; so naturally they spent every weekend for months trekking up wet and windy hills all over the county.

Then there was the trip to the Aran Islands off the Atlantic coast of Ireland to count seals in colonies scattered around the archipelago. There were no research funds for the trip and they had lived in a tent for two weeks. Drinking with some fishermen one night Leo had heard of the blind poet and musician Raftery who had sought sanctuary on the islands some 200 years earlier when fleeing an angry landlord. Raftery was a wandering minstrel who wrote in Gaelic and Leo had dug up a copy of his verses in translation in a bookshop in Westport, Co Mayo.

One poem in particular he recited to her again and again:

I’m Raftery the poet

Full of hope and love,

My eyes without sight,

My mind without torment.

Going west on my journey

By the light of my heart,

Weary and tired

To the end of my road.

Behold me now

With my back to the wall

Playing music

To empty pockets.

He said it was their love song and he glued matchsticks to a thick piece of cardboard to make the words ‘By the light of your heart’ and gave it to her on her twenty-first birthday. She still had it somewhere although the glue had dried and some of the letters were missing.

He was her Paladin then and could do no wrong. Now it was as if a stranger had walked into her life and shared her food and her bed. Leo had been drawn into a world that he refused to share with her. That wonderful, mad, funny man had become cold, aloof, an alien.

And every minute of the day she longed to escape, to go back home where she could start again with Sam, and leave Leo to probe the secrets of the talking seals.

Leo knew she longed to be back there, close to her family in Scotland – the Kingdom of Fife to be precise. That’s what she called it. He knew too that she hated the Cape, with its suffocating traffic and crowds in the summer, and the emptiness of the long Atlantic winters.

He also knew that wasn’t the real problem.

Margot poured them both a glass of wine and watched him open the letter. It was brutally direct. He had been dismissed under the terms of his contract, paragraph four of which stated that any behaviour liable to bring the Institute or its officers into disrepute was cause for dismissal without compensation. Not only had he not been given management clearance to conduct a series of media interviews, but those interviews were damaging to the reputation of the Institute. This was not the first such occasion. He had been warned before, both verbally and in writing. The Dean and Board felt there was no recourse but to sever their relationship with him.

There was an appeal process to which Kemp could apply. In any case, Chief Executive Bonner wished to see him to discuss his options the following Monday.

Should he wish to appeal he would be within his rights to continue teaching class. However, he should communicate directly with the chief executive’s office to let them know his decision. The Board would understand if he wished to stop working while the appeal process was under way. If he did not wish to appeal he should stop teaching immediately, and leave the campus within two weeks.

Kemp looked up from the letter. Margot was watching him with a strange Mona Lisa smile. His wife never smirked, muttered or signalled her displeasure with an eyebrow. She always told you straight out. Now she was smirking. Christ, I’ve finally made her happy, he thought.

‘I told you those interviews would get you into trouble.’

‘This isn’t trouble, Margot. This is the end of my career. Over and out. Finito.’

He had hoped for tenure, for a life in the comfort zone. Or had he really? How many times had he told himself that tenure was just another stage on the academic conveyor belt, that it would turn him into just another template lecturer, machine-moulded to produce the same thoughts, the same arguments, the same mindless posturing at the same conferences around the world as every other conveyor-belt professor.

Why should universities seek to shape young minds with a predetermined set of intellectual verities? Why not produce unicorns, mermaids, fairies, centaurs? Myth-making, rule-breaking creatures that challenged the way we think, the way we are taught to think? Intellectual anarchy, that’s what we need. Maybe he had made that view known a little too often.

‘You’ve blown it, haven’t you?’ said Margot. ‘No tenure – no life on academic easy street. Well, I’ll tell you something. I’m pleased. Know something else? You’re halfway pleased too. Now let’s get out of here. Leave this dammed place.’

He looked at her, wondering, as always, how people once so close could have grown so far apart. People who had once laughed at each other’s inane jokes. People who could sit in the ornate splendour of the Number One restaurant in Edinburgh’s Balmoral Hotel and lean across a starched white linen tablecloth to mix a mouthful of Château Margaux 1961 (hers) with his Chablis 1985 in a passionate kiss that knocked the water jug off the table and sent a cocktail of wine sluicing from their mouths down her white linen suit top, his dinner jacket and on to the tablecloth.

Margot claimed she was so named because she was conceived after her parents had drunk a bottle of Château Margaux they had won in a raffle at a Christmas dinner in the Station Hotel in Perth. Her parents had led the blameless but threadbare lives of teachers in the Scottish state-school system, and her mother had been shocked to be told the bottle they had won was worth £20. That was in 1972, a year when £20 went a very long way for a Scottish primary-school teacher.

Twenty years later Margot and Leo, celebrating their decision to marry, had paid £95 for a bottle of Margaux in the Balmoral, and had shocked the wine waiter as much by their choice of fish cakes with the wine as by splashing the stuff over themselves and the table.

Before daybreak the next morning they had climbed Arthur’s Seat, the hill on the outskirts of Edinburgh rich in ancient tales of witchcraft. It was the site of an Iron Age fort which was supposedly where Celtic tribal chiefs had raised the flag of rebellion against the great King Arthur. Dawn was breaking as they staggered breathlessly to the summit. They made love on the cold, damp grass behind a screen of gorse as the sun struggled out of the North Sea. Suddenly Margot stiffened, her nails digging into his back and her whole body going rigid as her gaze fixed on something over his shoulder.

A small boy with a runny nose and Coke-bottle glasses was peering down at them.

‘Why don’ ye git a room like other folk?’ he demanded and ran off.

Kemp looked at the letter, and back to his wife. He suddenly felt an irrational urge to reach out to her, to hold her, to hug her, to tell her that he was sorry, that he was a stupid arrogant idiot, that everything was going to be all right, that he would get his job back. But he didn’t. He couldn’t. Too much troubled water under too many broken bridges, he told himself, too much scar tissue layered over old wounds. They had both gone too far down different roads to turn back. This is what they call ‘the doorway moment’ in films, he thought. The main character stands framed briefly in the doorway, walks through it, and everything changes.

‘There are too many ghosts here,’ she said suddenly.

‘Ghosts? Is that who they are?’ He smiled at her.

She ignored that challenge, turned and poured a glass of wine. ‘Want one?’

‘Sure.’

They paused, both of them avoiding the row that lay between them like a puddle of petrol waiting for a match.

‘I’ve got a field trip tomorrow.’

‘A field trip? You’ve just been fired.’

‘I’m still going. I’ve booked Buck. If it’s the last time, at least it will be with him.’

‘You’d better believe it’s the last time, Leo. I’m over Coldharbor. You’ve been fired. It’s finished.’

‘I’m going to appeal. I’m seeing Bonner on Monday. And the field trip is on.’

Ego trip more likely, she thought. Another chance to impose upon those kids his theories about animal communication: seal talk, whale songs, dolphin poetry. Who cared if seals talked or whales wrote novels?

‘It might be interesting, don’t you think?’ he said gently.

‘It bloody well might not, Leo. It’s bullshit. It’s everything you criticise in the eggheads up at the Institute: self-indulgent, up-your-arse research into stuff that interests nobody, matters to nobody and will be forgotten by everybody. Those are your words, not mine.’

This was where it always went. She couldn’t stand his work; he couldn’t take her drinking; and the only way either of them could deal with Julian’s death was to inflict their pain on each other.

‘Living with the death of a child is not living if you have a shred of responsibility for that death, and I do!’ she had screamed at him during one of their frequent rows. ‘I let you take him in that fucking rubber boat out on the Atlantic, for God’s sake!’

He had tried to put an arm around her, this woman who had crushed his hand and looked at him with eyes pleading for the pain to stop during Sam’s long and bloody delivery, who had clung to him in bed like a baby when Julian had died and the tears and the whisky and the dope had done nothing to dull the pain; this woman who had cooked his favourite linguine di mare for him every Friday, ironed his sea-island cotton shirts with care and made love to him for seventeen years.

She pushed him away.

He poured another drink and took it upstairs to the small deck they had built alongside the children’s bedrooms on the first floor. You could just see the sea and the distant shoreline of Martha’s Vineyard across the sound.

Plenty of marriages survived the death of a child thought Leo Kemp. It happened to other people, didn’t it? So how come theirs hadn’t?

The saddest thing of all was that he and Margot could not comfort each other. They tried, but it just made things worse. At first Margot simply vanished for hours at a time, and then occasionally for whole nights. Only Sam kept them sane, kept them together.

Shy, quiet, funny, wounded Sam. Her mother’s beak of a nose on her father’s oval face revealed a confident and thoughtful character, well able to ride out the storms of the teenage years; but she was much quieter now that her brother was gone. Julian’s death had brought father and daughter closer together. That was what made Leo feel guilty. He had missed so much of her growing up: the first sleepover; the first clumsy attempts at make-up; the first time she had come back from a school dance aged twelve and said that a boy had tried to kiss her.

Now she was almost a young woman, who looked at him with reproachful eyes, remembering all their earlier arguments.

‘Why are you always with Julian, Dad? You spoil him, you know you do.’

‘No,’ he would say. ‘I love you just as much as Julian, but he’s a boy so maybe I do more stuff with him. It’s a different relationship. But I love you just as much—’

‘There you are, you’ve said it. See? I was right.’

‘Darling, your mum spent more time with you than she did with Julian. Maybe that’s the way parental love works. But we still love you both the same.’

‘Don’t care.’ And she would leave the room, banging the door.

Then he would bring her back and make her laugh by telling the story of her reaction to Julian’s birth. After a week of observing the new addition to the family, Sam, then aged 4, had asked, ‘When is he going home?’

‘He is home, darling,’ said Margot. ‘He’s your brother and I’m his mummy.’ Sam had fled the room in tears.

After her brother’s death Sam tried to become the family peacemaker, patrolling the frontiers of their marriage, anxiously assessing threats from outside and signs of discord within.

‘Dad, why don’t you spend more time with Mum? You’re always working, always at the Institute, always away for weekends.’

And she would tell Margot to be kinder, nicer, more gentle; bury the anger that burns in your soul, Mum, she wanted to say, but she could never find the right words.

Yet, against the odds, she held them together.

Leo heard the front door close and a car engine start. Margot was not one for scenes any more. No slamming doors, no wheel-spin on the drive, no transparent excuses about going to the gym. Their marriage had sunk into that quiet and desperate place where there was no need to alarm the neighbours or traumatise their child. The china-smashing rows broadcast to the whole street had stopped. She did what she wanted to, and went where she wanted to go. And so did he.

He knew she went drinking with the fishermen. She’d begun to go down to the harbour bars in Falmouth and Chatham after Julian died. She said she liked the company, and that for all their bravado and tribal loyalties the men were so vulnerable, always at the mercy of the weather, regulations, the volatile market price for their products and the fickle nature of their chosen workplace, the North Atlantic. They were just like little boys really.

She listened sympathetically to their doom-laden stories about a dying industry being slowly throttled by state and federal regulators. She knew all about the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972, brought in to stop the killing of seals but which was now killing their industry – or so the fishermen said. It was the same at home in the UK, she told them. There were more lawnmower repairmen in Britain than fishermen, a statistic she had once heard somewhere.

Leo looked across Vineyard Sound. A light south-westerly ruffled the waves; the sky was clear, with high cirrus cloud forming mares’ tales four or five miles up. The weather should be good for the field trip tomorrow – his last, unless the appeal was successful.