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 fir
st 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.
N
ow 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.
On the Broken Shore Page 4
