St Andrews was a small place, one road in from Cupar to the north, one road out over the cliffs and along the coast to Crail and Anstruther to the south. If you wanted any fun it was a ninety-minute drive to Edinburgh. For a young teacher the university town had little to offer apart from hanging out with the students and the younger lecturers.
Once she had seen Leo, she found out where his crowd drank. It was on her twentieth birthday, a few days after the beach party, that she saw him for the second time, in the Cross Keys, where the marine biology crew gathered on Friday and Saturday nights. The Keys had a bar, a darts board, two tables, eight chairs and a linoleum floor mottled by cigarette burns. The young teaching staff used it because it had the cheapest pint of ‘heavy’ in town – on their skinflint wages, that mattered – and because the students avoided it after four of them had been thrown out for vomiting in the lavatories.
And that’s where he’d seen her, across a smoke-fugged pub. She’d worn a tight sweater with Marks and Spencer’s best push-up bra, and had positioned herself in his line of sight, to make sure he saw her.
He’d seen her all right, and she laughed out loud at the memory. He managed to stare at her and at the same time drink his bitter without spilling it, a well-known Australian technique, he told her later. He’d always said she had great boobs. She breathed in and pushed her chest out. Not as good as they used to be, after two children, but still not bad.
They began going out. He was fresh out of Melbourne University and had just started his first job at the Sea Mammal Research Unit at St Andrews, partly teaching, partly research. He didn’t have much of an Australian accent, it seemed to have got lost on the flight over, but he was passionate about his homeland, and spent hours telling her of his childhood in Mornington, his trips on the scallop boats and free diving in the warm coastal waters.
Then of course on their second date he took her out at night miles into the North Sea to look at the stars far from the mainland light pollution. It was madness, of course, but the night out became the talk of the university and Leo was summoned by the Dean to explain himself.
In those days Leo never stopped talking. They would sit in the smoky bar of the Cross Keys eating soggy sausage rolls with the rain rattling on the windows while he told her of the endless sunshine, the weekend barbecues, the late-night skinny-dipping parties in somebody’s pool. Margot was enthralled. She had only ever been on holiday outside Scotland once, to an aunt’s house in Cornwall, and a dismally sodden experience that was.
What made it even better was the envy of her girlfriends. The mere fact that Leo was Australian gave him a glamorous appeal in a granite-grey Scottish university town where the chief excitement on offer was a ferry trip across the Tay to Dundee. Standing just over six feet, with fair hair and lightly tanned skin, he was deemed a rare and exciting catch; and Margot had caught him. She found herself in love with a country she had never been to and a young man she hardly knew. There had been boyfriends before, mostly third- and fourth-year students and that man from the oil company in Aberdeen, but nothing like her handsome Australian.
Then suddenly Leo became well known. His papers and lectures on pinniped communication went around the world. When he had first told her what he was working on she was too embarrassed to ask what a pinniped was, and had to look it up in the dictionary. ‘A: adj.: having feet resembling fins, fin-footed; species belonging to a suborder which have fin-like limbs or flippers. B: n.: a pinniped mammal; a seal or walrus.’
Margot was desperate to shed her humdrum life and share the exciting world in which Leo lived. Whenever possible she travelled with him to conferences, first in Britain and then, when they could persuade the organisers to provide an extra ticket for a research assistant, abroad.
They spent the beginning of their married life in Norway, because Leo had been offered a one-year secondment with better pay and a decent flat at the Norwegian Institute of Marine Research in Tromsø. Describing itself as the northernmost city in the world, Tromsø lies 217 miles inside the Arctic Circle. Leo assured Margot that the climate was not that bad: only minus four in winter and an all-day average of twelve in summer. That wasn’t the point, however. Summer was bearable, although like a lot of nonnatives she found it hard to sleep when daylight stretched around the clock, with a few hours of twilight masquerading as the night. But in the winter, from what she understood, Tromsø made Scotland seem like paradise.
At that time of year daylight amounted to an hour or so of bluish watery twilight. The long hours of darkness during the polar night, Margot read, were alleviated by the Aurora Borealis, which appeared to be the work of some mad artist painting broad brushstrokes of pink and green across the canvas of the night sky. Otherwise visitors and locals seemed to divide their time between the twin national passions of talking about, or playing, football, and drinking. With 65 licensed clubs, pubs and bars for a population of 65,000 people – the highest ratio in any Western city – Tromsø appeared to take civic pride in enabling its inhabitants to drink their way through the winter.
It was a strange place for a newly married couple, but at first they loved it. For a marine biologist whose reputation and career were being built around the study of seals’ behaviour, the posting to the Tromsø marine institute seemed like an extraordinary stroke of good fortune. There were huge seal populations scattered over the Arctic wastes that stretched all the way from northern Norway across the seasonally frozen waters of the Barents Sea to the ice-capped archipelagos of Spitzbergen and Franz Joseph Land. The seal territories were only a few hours’ flying time from Tromsø, and dog-sledging expeditions took Leo and his colleagues deep into the Arctic Circle for two weeks at a time, camping out at night and tracking seal populations and recording their communications by day.
But it was the long plane trips aboard the flying laboratories crewed by Russians and carrying Norwegian and visiting scientists that alerted Leo to the fact that the research programme in Norway was not entirely what it seemed. The Russians supplied the twin-engined Antonov 26 transport planes and crew, and flew regular aerial surveys along the edge of the ice fields of the northern and central Barents Sea studying seal populations, especially those of the harp seal. In the official language of the Norwegian Ministry of Fisheries, the aim of these flights was ‘to gather data to help understand the interaction between marine predators and commercial fish species, including capelin’.
Leo soon realised this was official speak for gathering evidence to convict seals of eating commercial fish species, including capelin – which of course they did – in order to justify their slaughter – which of course the Norwegian government zealously carried out.
After six months of his contract Leo took Margot out to Tromsø’s finest restaurant, where they ordered reindeer steaks and he told her they were going home. He had been deceived, he told her. The entire programme as far as he could see was predicated on an unofficial policy that seals and other sea mammals were vermin and should be killed. There was no genuine interest in researching the mysteries of their lives. As for the flights, they were not about the welfare of the seal population. The Russians on board were definitely not interested in seals. With their dark glasses and small cigars they looked more like secretservice operatives, which was what Leo supposed they were. As for the Norwegians, they just wanted to prove that their harp seal population was large enough to justify their slaughter.
In the restaurant that night Leo read out a long letter he had written to Professor Stubbs in St Andrews. He was drunk, and spoke loudly, ignoring Margot’s efforts to shush him.
‘I find myself in Kafka country. The man I work for in the sea-mammal unit believes in the mass murder of sea mammals, especially seals, but also whales. All the Norwegians want to do is prove the seals are marine pests. Norwegians eat fish, trade in fish and use fish products in a thousand different ways. They take the simple view that if the seals were wiped out there would be more fish for everyone. Here are animals that eat the sou
rce of their wealth, health and happiness, so the logical conclusion is kill them.’
And as he had discovered, Norwegians ate seals as well. He had had a seal dinner with some colleagues from the North Polar Institute at a weekend camp. The meat had been sliced into steaks and grilled over a wood fire. The dark black flesh tasted very gamey. Minke whale was on the menu too. It tasted like beef dipped in fish oil.
Looking back, Margot realised that sometime during those months in Tromsø their relationship changed; the balance of need, love and lust had shifted. Leo found in himself a wellspring of anger that quickly turned to hatred. He had found a cause, an enemy to confront, a battle to win. More than a battle, this was a war. Norway, Japan, Iceland, the whale-hunting, seal-slaughtering nations justified their actions in the name of business, pure and simple. They were the enemy. They had to be confronted, to be fought through the media at one end of the spectrum and through direct action at the other. That was the world that began to consume him. He loved her, cherished her, and wanted above all for her to be the mother of his children. But he didn’t need her as he had done at St Andrews. What he needed was a cause, a mission in life, a reason for getting out of bed in the morning, and in Norway he found it.
When they got back from Tromsø in February of 1993 Leo resumed his old job at the Sea Mammal Unit, but they both quickly wearied of St Andrews. Sam had been born in Norway, and they settled with their new baby into a one-bedroom first-floor flat over a café in North Street. It was just across from the university library, and beyond that, past the 400-year-old oak tree, lay the new buildings that housed Leo’s department. That was very convenient for him, but without a job to do, and no longer being able to travel with him because of the baby, Margot became bored and restless. She felt like a prisoner in the tiny flat at the top of a steep narrow staircase leading from the street.
When Leo bounded up that staircase one evening and told her about the Coldharbor job, they discussed it for exactly thirty seconds – the time it took to open a bottle of sparkling Spanish wine.
The Cape was a revelation after St Andrews. They arrived in the spring of 1994 and, as Margot wrote home to her mother, it was like opening a long-locked door in a dark and dreary house and discovering a brightly lit room filled with colour, light, sound and new faces.
Leo fell in love with the Coldharbor Institute, its resources, and the rich opportunities for field research. He even claimed to like the Portuguese food in the canteen, a popular local cuisine brought over from Lisbon by fishermen who crossed the Atlantic in search of cod two centuries before. As for Margot, she just loved the American way of doing everything, especially driving slowly in a large car sipping a takeaway latte and eating a sugary doughnut while listening to endless weather reports on the local radio station WXTK.
‘And the weather in the summer months is hot, hot, hot,’ she wrote home to her mother. ‘I spend the summer days on the beach with the kids while Leo does his stuff at the Institute. If heaven has another name, it’s Cape Cod.’
Also, both of them loved the passionate commitment of the Cape Codders to the environment and history of this strange corner of the United States. Everyone cared, everyone was an activist, everyone saw it as duty to do something to preserve and where possible improve life on the Cape.
There were endless associations and committees to preserve the wildlife, the wetlands, the woodlands, the dunes, the windmills and the historic homes of the old whaling barons. If a seal was found injured on a beach it would be headline news. The emergency services would rush to the scene and cordon the area off. Veterinary surgeons would be brought in and the press briefed. In Norway they would shoot the creature and throw the carcase into the sea.
But just as Tromsø had deceived them, so, in time, did the Cape. Leo’s work engulfed them. Every other weekend he was away at a conference, a seminar, a workshop, attending grandly named events that seemed to Margot little more than an excuse for most of the participants to indulge in a weekend of ego-stroking. They allowed Leo and his colleagues to pursue their favourite hobby: impressing each other with their bountiful store of knowledge. It wasn’t much better when he was home: every conversation seemed to be about the Stellwagen Bank, seal culls, Canadian policy on declining fish stocks, the latest Norwegian or Japanese position on whaling, sustainable this and irreplaceable that.
Margot became lonely. It was as simple as that. Her fault? Probably. She had Jenny and the WALL lunches. Of course she had Sam, and Julian who had been born a year after they arrived; but as any parent knows, children put their chubby little fingers on time’s fast-forward button and press hard. The years somehow slip past and suddenly that blue-eyed baby, almost edible in its deliciousness, has grown up. And you have grown old, and you ask yourself, ‘Is this all there is?’
Margot couldn’t teach, so she tried her design business, but that failed, and then Julian died. No, he didn’t die, he was killed in an accident, a stupid, silly, seal-watching accident. It was no one’s fault, except it wouldn’t have happened if his father hadn’t taken him out that day. But that wasn’t fair. Well, fuck fairness, she thought. It was Leo’s fault. He killed our son; as good as, anyway.
They had the funeral in the same church in which Leo was to have his, and because the graveyard was full of mossy old headstones they had cremated Julian and scattered his ashes. Not at sea; she wouldn’t allow that, although Leo wanted to.
No, they scattered Julian in the woods behind their house where he used to play with the neighbours’ children when he was very little. She, Sam and Leo had tipped the grey ash, the culmination of ten years of life, in drifting clouds below the trees, and watched it settle on the mossy undergrowth and the petals of the small crocuses.
She told Leo and Sam to go, insisting they leave her on her own for a few minutes. She poured some cold wine from her Thermos into the plastic cup lid, raised it high in salute to her lost son, and told him that she loved him, had always loved him and would always love him. Then she drank the wine. It didn’t make her feel any better.
Leo commissioned a bench, and placed it with permission from the Falmouth council on the town green with Julian’s name and the dates of his brief life carved on it and the Latin words ‘Ave Atque Vale’. Hail and farewell. Margot would sit there with Sam some evenings in the summer drinking coffee and waiting for the old Saab to come up the road from Coldharbor.
The first thing visitors to Sandy Rowan’s apartment noticed were the books. They marched across the walls in the sitting room on smart wooden shelving; they were piled up high on the floor and were stacked on the dining table, allowing only a small space for a single diner to sit and wield a knife and fork; they climbed the sides of an old desk as if in rebuke to the laptop, voice recorder and other digital equipment on top. There were books in the bathroom, damp and slightly mildewed, and more in the kitchen, spattered with stains of ketchup and gravy. There were books under plastic sheeting on the balcony and lining the stairs in the common parts of the building on rickety shelving, the latter a subject of occasional arguments with the landlord but of no great concern to the other tenants, who actually liked the aura of erudition they bought to an otherwise nondescript block of apartments.
Book-buying, preferably cheap second-hand books, was an addiction from which Sandy had suffered for many years. He couldn’t help himself. He could no more imagine a day without a glass of wine at the end of it than he could a week in which he did not spend an hour or so casting an eye over the shelves of one of the Cape’s many second-hand bookstores. Occasionally, usually after a little too much wine, he would fall over one of the piles of books, and a few armfuls of volumes would be selected more or less at random, shoved into boxes, loaded into the station wagon and driven away to a dealer. Then the buying would start again.
The only challenge to the hegemony of books in the apartment came from a large, glass-fronted wine cabinet of the kind you find in liquor stores. Illuminated from within and refrigerated so that the tigh
tly packed array of bottles were all suitably beaded with moisture, the cabinet occupied half of one side of a wall, shouldering aside the indignant piles of books that surrounded it.
After his rebuff in the Dark Side, Sandy had returned to his apartment, swept the books from his desk and begun to write. He knew he should have gone round to see Margot and Sam at home, as any good friend would have done, instead of trying to muscle in on the boat trip. But he could not confront the reality that Leo wouldn’t be there. This surprised him. Hardened newsman can’t face the fact that his friend has been lost at sea? Strange.
Stranger still, he left the wine in the cabinet, and for two hours he wrote down everything he could remember of his conversations with Leo; every joke they had shared; the ideas they had explored; and the wittily obscene comments they had exchanged about the women in the bar.
He wrote fast, and checked the word count. Fifteen hundred words. Good words too, clear, unadorned short sentences. No frills. ‘Just give me the facts, ma’am,’ as the detective said in that old TV series. That’s what this job of his taught you, to write English. That alone made his career choice worthwhile. To be able to sit down and pour old memories on to paper while your heart was breaking.
Then he opened a bottle, sat on the narrow balcony and drank.
Sandy got up early the next morning and walked the waterline of the estuaries and bays that indent the coast north of Chatham. Pleasant Bay and Little Pleasant Bay, and then Salt Pond Bay, Nauset harbour, anywhere a man might have swum seeking shelter from a sudden storm at sea.
He slashed at reed beds with a long stick, tramped through back gardens, peered into boathouses, kicked and swore at barking dogs and flashed his press card by way of explanation to irate householders and boatmen.
It didn’t make sense, of course, but there was still a chance, a faint chance, that Leo might be there somewhere, half dead on an inland shoreline. Once through the dunes Sandy saw the Antoine going slowly up the coast, on the same mission impossible as his own, he thought. After three hours’ tramping he gave up. If Leo Kemp was anywhere on the Cape, dead or alive, there had to be a better way of finding him.
On the Broken Shore Page 9
