On the Broken Shore

by James MacManus

Or maybe, he thought, this is the dream sequence before death. Maybe this is what happens: the body shuts down, the brain goes into cold storage, leaving a flicker of life, leading to phantasm and madness; like those tanker crews torpedoed in the Atlantic during the war and left lying for days on liferafts, badly burnt and delirious with pain and dehydration. Most of them were mad when they were picked up, and spent the rest of the war, indeed the rest of their lives, in mental homes.

  When Buck was safely a mile out to sea, he turned the tug. He had put out a mayday call moments after Kemp had gone overboard. He knew – and he knew that Kemp knew – that he had no option but to seek the safety of the open sea. That was thirty minutes ago, and the response of the rescue services had been slowed by weather. Now he saw the 44-foot lifeboats butting through the waves about a mile to starboard. These were the workhorses of the coastguard fleet and as always they worked to a grid pattern, boxing off the ocean into squares and assigning boats to each square. A helicopter from Hyannis airport would soon join the search. A radio message had alerted the Institute. Kemp had been in the water almost half an hour, and the water temperature at this time of year meant that he could still be alive.

  Buck radioed the coastguard his position and informed them that he would take the tug as close inshore as possible and work up the coast from a point just north of the sandbanks. He manoeuvred the Antoine to within fifty yards of the shore, as close as her nine-foot draft allowed on a falling tide.

  The students all seemed to be in shock, but he had little time to worry about them. Two or three of the girls were crying. He gave them his binoculars and told them to scan the shoreline, because that was most likely where Kemp would be. He would probably have swum ashore by now, but the currents around the sandbanks meant that he could have been taken a mile or so up the coast.

  This was reassuring news for the students, but Buck didn’t actually believe it. If Kemp had survived being swept overboard, if he had not been knocked unconscious and drowned straightaway, he would surely have made for the sandbanks. And there was no sign of him either there or on the shore beyond them.

  A coastguard boat found Kemp’s sea boots and jacket. But it was Gunbrit Nielsen who spotted his trousers floating in the water. Buck fished them out with a billhook. The students stared dumbly as he went through the pockets and then squeezed out the water, balled up the trousers and threw them in the back of the boat. ‘Keep looking,’ he growled, and climbed the stairs to the top deck. Gunbrit began to cry, brushing the tears away with the back of her hand. The rest of them pretended to look at the shore, but their eyes kept sliding back to the sodden pair of trousers – a graphic reminder that something terrible had happened to their teacher.

  Tallulah Bonner was in her office when the head of the coastguard station at Coldharbor phoned with the news that Leo Kemp had been lost at sea. There was a small but rapidly diminishing chance that he would be found alive if he hadn’t managed to swim ashore. The coastguard had deployed both their older boats and their latest rigid-hull fast-moving 42-foot craft and a helicopter. The search was now concentrating on the shoreline. The best hope was that he had been washed up on the island. Three fishing vessels from Chatham harbour had been called to make the short trip to Monomoy to join the Antoine in searching the foreshore. Everything possible was being done.

  ‘And his family?’ asked Bonner.

  There was a pause at the other end of the line.

  ‘We thought it appropriate for you to call…’

  ‘OK, I’ll call his wife. Keep me in touch,’ she said.

  Damn. This was going to be horrible. How on earth was she going to break the news to Mrs Kemp? From time to time she had to tell senior colleagues that they were no longer wanted at the Institute. She always praised their work, thanked them for their contribution and then worked around to the ‘new challenges’ ahead, i.e. the challenge of getting another job. That was bad enough; this was awful. She rehearsed her opening remarks. ‘Your husband is missing, but we’re sure we’ll find him. I can’t tell you how sorry we are, Mrs Kemp, but I want you and your family to know you are in our prayers. Can we offer you any help?’ That was the best she could do, and at least it had the advantage of being honest.

  She had met Margot Kemp at the usual functions, and had spent some time with her at the last annual staff picnic. A nice, bright woman, good-looking in a way that men probably thought sexy. But she had been very guarded and quiet since the death of her son. How on earth was she going to take this?

  Then there was the press to think about. There would have to be some sort of statement. The papers would make a fuss. Kemp had media friends, newspaper friends. That man Sandy Rowan. They would make a meal of it. But did they know about the decision to remove him from the staff? She hoped not.

  She got up and walked to the wall of her office, which was lined with framed citations of the Institute’s great achievements. Pride of place went to a UNESCO award for building the deep-sea submersibles that were the first to examine the hydrothermal vent fields in the mid-Atlantic ridge. She remembered Kemp’s excitement when they showed staff a film of the black mineral-rich fluid spewing from the ocean floor.

  ‘Damn. What a waste,’ she said out loud, surprising herself.

  She didn’t dislike Kemp. It was just that he wouldn’t play by the rules. A paid-up member of the awkward club, as one of the Board directors had told her. Great institutions can tolerate anything but damage to their reputation, because it is on the integrity of their reputation that fund-raising programmes are based and talented staff attracted. And she had built that reputation. In so doing she had raised the whole profile of oceanography at a time when the White House was betting the ranch on manned flights to Mars.

  She had made sure that the Coldharbor story was out there, a story of teamwork, intellectual endeavour and innovative research. How many times had she hammered home those themes to her management team? How many times had she told them to impress on all their colleagues that the golden rule of any media campaign is that everyone has to sing from the same hymn sheet?

  Nothing, she knew, nothing devalues a brand more than confusion over a great corporation’s vision and values. Vision and values, that’s what people like Kemp never understood. That’s why he had to go. And now it appeared that he had gone.

  For good.

  She calmed down, and wished she hadn’t stopped smoking. Nine months, three weeks and four days. She really could use a cigarette now.

  This was going to be a horrible call to make. She would telephone the Board after she had spoken to Mrs Kemp.

  Why, oh why, had she given up smoking?

  She phoned the janitor at the front lodge. Yes, he did have a pack – would Marlboro be all right? He would bring them up.

  Margot was on the road north out of Falmouth, and had just passed Betsy’s Diner, with its ‘Eat Heavy’ sign set to flashing red, when her cell phone chirped. Jamming it to her ear, she checked her rear-view mirror. When they weren’t issuing tickets for parking or speeding, the Cape police loved nothing better than to catch a driver using a cell phone behind the wheel; that and busting the young for smoking dope.

  ‘Mrs Kemp, it’s Tallulah Bonner from the Institute. Can you talk?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Margot, with that sick feeling you get in your stomach when the wrong person phones at the wrong time and asks if you have time to talk.

  Bonner was commendably clear in describing what she had been told had happened, and very encouraging about what she thought would happen. But it didn’t make sense. Margot found herself shouting down the phone.

  ‘Overboard? But what happened? This was a field trip, for God’s sake! They were only going to Monomoy Island, a couple of miles offshore. What do you mean, “small tsunami?” We don’t have tsunamis here. This is Cape Cod, not Sumatra or wherever they have tsunamis.’

  Bonner inhaled deeply and blew out a cloud of smoke, thanking God for the janitor and making a note to look upon his salary kind
ly at the next pay review.

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know what caused it, but I’m told it was the combination of wind and wave, maybe something way out under the sea. But the important thing, Mrs Kemp, is that there’s every chance he’ll be found alive. He’s a strong swimmer. He should have made it to the shore.’

  Margot turned the car round and headed home. No point worrying Sam just now. Of course Leo was all right. But she would call Jenny Hathaway, their family doctor and her best friend on the Cape, and a fellow founder member of the WALL club, membership of which Margot regarded as an essential antidote to the long Cape winters. There were only two members, because Margot had never found anyone else suitable to join. WALL stood for Wine And Laughter Lunches, which was a misnomer, because they usually met in the evenings, since, as Jenny pointed out, doctors could not really drink at lunchtime. Not that Jenny drank much anyway. She supplied the laughter, and Margot did the drinking.

  Leo would probably have turned up by the time she got home, wouldn’t he? But suppose he hadn’t? Suppose he had drowned? She held the thought in her mind, turned it over, polished it like the apples that Grandma had shone for her with an old kitchen cloth when she was a child. They always tasted better that way, Grandma said. Suddenly the thought of Leo’s death gave her the same pleasure as had that first bite into a polished apple; but the pleasure came gift-wrapped with guilt. By all means lead me into temptation, but deliver me please from the troubled conscience that comes with it. She could go back to Scotland. With the insurance money, she and Sam could be free of this place. A warm, welcoming thought, freighted with guilt.

  She bundled the thought away. She must tell Sam, but not now. Wait until she had news. Of course he’s not dead.

  At home she ignored the welcoming barks of Beano, Sam’s dog, and went straight to the kitchen, feeling as if she had stepped into a new and unreal world. She poured a drink, just the one, a decent-sized glass of Chardonnay. She had to pick Sam up from school, and it might be a long night. Her husband was not dead, she told herself.

  FOUR

  Leo reckoned he had been swimming up the coast with his pod of seals for about half an hour. They could swim at great speed – up to 15 m.p.h. – but this group was slipping easily but much more slowly through the water. Once he ducked his head beneath the surface and forced himself to open his eyes. There was the silver flash of a fish quite clear in the swirling, dim grey-green water. A herring, perhaps, or a striped bass. In the past week the wind had backed from north-east to a south-westerly, bringing warm air from the tropics. As the water warmed, so the fish began their annual migration to northern waters. The herring, squid and bass came first, and the larger predator fish followed, trailing behind them the sharks. Whales were also part of this migration, moving north to feed on sand eels and squid. In October the winds would change and the whole migration reverses itself.

  Kemp ducked his head below the waves once again, and sighted a shoal of fish a few yards away. Seals have bifocal vision, which allows them to see and hunt beneath the surface of the water as well as on land. Human beings do not. Further evidence that this is my death dream, he thought. This must be what happens when you drown. Death just becomes a dream, ghostly imaginings on the way from one world to the next.

  He had always taken life as it came; now he would take death as it came.

  The pod of seals turned shoreward as it reached the point, and headed for a small group of seaweed-covered rocks. Leo turned with them, swimming strongly until his feet found the rising seabed. The seals hauled themselves up on to the rocks, paying no attention to Leo as he crawled ashore.

  He lay back on a bed of seaweed and looked up at the blue-grey gloaming. He felt his pulse. I am not dead. I have survived. So this is the ultimate research trip. Why shouldn’t I swim with seals? See the fish they see? Watch them as they swim, feed and rest?

  Because the human body cannot do that, came the small voice of logic and reason. You’re not a seal, so how can you hang out with them?

  The seals shifted uneasily as the noise of boat engines became audible. Leo lifted himself on to one elbow. A hundred yards away he saw the Antoine, his students leaning over the port side and scanning the shoreline with binoculars. He could hear the chatter of the radio over the water. Up in the cabin, Buck would be looking at the chart and judging the depth. He could imagine the old sailor drinking a very stiff wozza indeed right now. He lay back down, shielded from their view by a jagged line of rocks.

  Leo looked around him at the seals scattered over the rocks. Whatever has happened to me, he thought, I am feeling no pain. He tried to explain himself but he could not. He understood how he had survived. That was easy. He’d been lucky. Even without a lifejacket he’d made it through that sea to the sandbanks in minutes. But he could not explain what followed, why he was lying here among the rocks surrounded by seals. Why didn’t he stand up and shout to those on the Antoine? He just couldn’t. That’s all he knew. The power of logic and reason had left him.

  Sandy Rowan was in his small glass office (‘I like to see how hard my staff are working,’ said the Herald’s editor), leaning back on his swivel chair with his feet on his desk. He was reading that morning’s edition when the news editor poked his head around the door: local radio hams had picked up coastguard short-wave traffic about a small-bore wave, five feet high in places, that had washed ashore from Hyannis up to the north end of Nauset Beach.

  Coastguards were calling it a little tsunami, and said it had boiled up out of a sudden storm in the Atlantic. A few boats had been bumped in the harbour, beach properties flooded, but there had been no material damage.

  Sandy looked out of the window. Cocooned in his office he had not noticed that it was almost dark outside, and a hard rain was falling.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said.

  The news editor had not finished. There were unconfirmed reports of a man missing from a boat off the coast. Coastguard lifeboats and a chopper had been deployed. Damn, thought Sandy, a good story and just too late for tomorrow’s edition.

  ‘OK, get someone out there,’ he said, and went back to that day’s paper.

  It was a good edition. The golden rule of local papers is to keep the news local. The Aberdeen paper that reported the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 by headlining the loss of a local man knew what it was doing.

  The front-page lead was a story about local conservationists in yet another campaign against planning applications for new housing. It was a perennial Cape story, but it made good copy. It went to the heart of the old debate about development, heritage and the environment on the Cape. Most importantly, readers really reacted to these stories, firing off volleys of letters and emails in response.

  The Herald’s new owner had invested heavily in websites for all seven of his titles, but so far it was the classified ads that drew traffic to them, not the news. So the business of squirting ink on to dead trees had a few years left to go, thought Sandy, swinging his legs off the desk as his office door swung open again.

  The news editor reappeared, with the self-important look of a man bearing bad news.

  ‘It’s Kemp, Sandy, your friend from the Institute. He’s the one who went overboard. He was on a seal trip on the Antoine with his students.’

  Sandy looked at him, his mind racing as he tried to make sense of what he had just heard. How on earth had his friend fallen overboard? It just wasn’t possible. He did these trips all the time. OK, anything was possible at sea but Kemp was a strong swimmer. He would have had a lifejacket on. Did Margot know? Where and when did this happen? Do we have a picture of him? Yes, we do: taken when he did that guest column.

  ‘We have a snap of him on the Antoine,’ he said to the news editor. ‘It’s on file. Get it up on the web with whatever you’ve got now. Make the headline “Senior Institute Staffer Missing at Sea”.’

  Kemp tried Buck’s cell as he raced down the stairs to the car park. No reply. He knew they would have been somewhere around Monomoy Isl
and. They always went there, plenty of seals and only a ninety-minute run from Coldharbor. He needed a boat. This time of the season he would have a problem getting someone in Hyannis Port to take him out. He checked his watch. It was 7.30 p.m. When the hell did this happen?

  Margery Vickers at the Hyannis family charter boat company had known Sandy’s mother well, and had been one of the few to visit her in her last months at the Orleans hospice. She had not seen much of Sandy since his mother died, but she always looked out for him. So when he appeared in her office, clearly in a state, she listened carefully.

  She would do her best, she said, but look at the weather. The sky was lightening but there was still a strong afterswell in the harbour. A boat would get out all right, but at this time of the evening it was going to be hard to find someone to take him. Where did he want to go, and did he mind if she asked why?

  Mrs Vickers had heard about the search for the missing man, and when Sandy explained the connection she expressed her sympathy but pointed out that there was nothing he could do.

  Sandy knew she was right. He got back in his car and took Route 28 down to Falmouth and Coldharbor. When Buck got back, Sandy knew where he would find him.

  By the time the Antoine arrived back at the Coldharbor pier it was a warm, clear evening that gave little evidence of the brief but violent storm a few hours earlier. Only a strong wind from the east chasing high nimbus inland and a bigger swell than normal suggested that there had been unusual conditions further up the coast that day.

  On the slatted wooden pier Margot, Sam and Tallulah Bonner stood watching the tug tie up. Sam clung to her mother, her pale, tear-stained face making her look much younger than her years. A curious crowd who had heard the news were standing at a respectful distance across the road.

  On the tug’s transom deck the twelve students began to file over the gangplank to the pier with teary, washedout faces. Tallulah turned, and to Margot’s surprise briefly embraced her.