On the Broken Shore

by James MacManus

  Margot and Sam spent much of their time walking the beaches with Beano, the West Highland terrier Margot’s parents had given her two Christmases ago, to remind her of home, they said. Beano had been bought sight unseen from a Boston breeder over the internet, and shipped to the Cape on Christmas Eve in a large wire and wicker basket. Margot was amazed. It was the most original present her parents had ever given her, and also the most expensive.

  Most beaches were filling up, although the main vacation period had not started yet, but like all Cape Codders, Margot knew where to find solitude on an out-of-the-way beach. On their walks she and Sam talked endlessly of Leo, and as they discussed the funeral arrangements they slowly allowed themselves to admit the fact that he was dead.

  One morning Margot suddenly said, ‘If anyone says to me again that Leo has gone to join Julian, I am going to slap them good and hard.’

  ‘Who said that, Mum?’

  ‘That idiot priest who came yesterday. He wanted to talk about the funeral. I gave him a glass of wine and he came out with that bullshit.’

  ‘Mum, do you think you’re drinking too much?’

  ‘I’m not drinking enough, darling.’

  Sometimes they would sit on Dad’s deck, as they called it, looking out over the sound and talking until the lights around the harbour dimmed at midnight. Sam believed in an afterlife, and one night she said, ‘I don’t care what you think, Mum, but what I think is that they’re all together, Dad and Julian and the seals.’

  Margot sighed. ‘If you say so, darling.’

  It was late. Margot was feeling sleepy and slightly drunk. Sam snuggled into her lap and whispered, ‘Can I ask you something, Mum?

  ‘Darling, it’s late. Let’s sleep.’

  ‘Did you love Dad?’

  Margot opened her eyes, suddenly awake. ‘Of course I did, darling.’

  ‘Mum, I’m sixteen. I want to know, did you two just stay together for me? I mean, did you both have affairs and stuff?’

  It’s like this with kids. They always ask awkward questions at the most bloody awful times, thought Margot.

  ‘Your father wasn’t interested in that sort of thing, or if he was he never showed it. His world was the Institute – you know that, darling.’

  There was a silence, and then Sam said, ‘And you?’

  ‘Bedtime,’ said Margot, lifting herself from the chair and putting Sam on to her feet.

  She watched her daughter as she fell asleep, the eyelids lowering, the breathing deepening. She went upstairs and sat on the deck listening to the faint childish snores coming from the bedroom below. No drink tonight, she told herself. She lit a cigarette and blew a perfect smoke ring up to the star-filled sky.

  Her cell rang. She checked her watch. It was 11 p.m. His voice sounded strained and nervous.

  ‘I’ve got to see you,’ he said. ‘It’s important.’

  ‘Why? What’s happened?’

  ‘I can’t talk now.’

  ‘Tell me what it’s about. Is it your wife?’

  ‘No. I just need to see you.’

  ‘OK. Tomorrow night.’

  Tom never called her. It was always the other way round. She decided to have a drink after all.

  Margot met Tom at the usual time in the car park of the Squire. He seemed as nervous as he had sounded the previous night, which was not like him. He muttered a barely audible greeting as she got in his car. They drove down to the dunes in silence. She was right: something had gone wrong at home. He wouldn’t look at her, but stared straight ahead, driving much faster than was necessary. He parked badly, braking suddenly and throwing her forward against her seatbelt. He rested his head on the steering wheel, knuckles whitening as he gripped the rim.

  She stroked his back gently. ‘What is it?’

  Tom didn’t look up. ‘There’s talk, bad talk.’

  ‘What – about us?’

  ‘No, about him.’

  ‘Him? Who?’

  ‘Your husband.’

  ‘He’s dead, Tom.’

  ‘No one ever found the body.’

  ‘What are you trying to say?’

  ‘There’s talk, that’s all.’

  She leant over and gently but firmly turned his face towards her.

  ‘What talk? Who’s saying what?’

  He twisted his head away from her and gazed out of the window.

  ‘They say there’s a human out there among the seals off Monomoy. A man swimming with them.’

  Margot suddenly felt very cold. She fumbled in her bag for a cigarette, and lit one.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Open the window. I can’t have the smell of smoke in here.’

  She wound the window down and breathed out a plume of smoke.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘There’s nothing more. That’s all.’

  ‘What man?’

  ‘It’s just that when the boats pass Monomoy there’s always seals about, and some of the boys say they’ve seen it.’

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’

  ‘I’m just telling you what they’re…’

  ‘Stop! “They”? Who are “they”?’

  ‘Guys down at the harbour…fishermen.’

  ‘You’ve seen this man?’

  ‘No, and I don’t want to.’

  ‘What does he look like?’

  ‘No one’s certain. It’s just that they swear there was a bearded face, a human face out there with the seals.’

  Margot lit another cigarette, inhaled deeply and tried to be calm. ‘Seals look like humans, don’t they? Isn’t that why we love them so much? Warm-blooded, cute, cuddly creatures with big brown eyes? If spiders had cute furry faces like humans we’d love them too, wouldn’t we?’

  Tom looked miserable, and mumbled that she was right; it was nothing to worry about. He was sorry he’d mentioned it, and would she just forget it?

  Margot said of course she would forget it. There were always going to be rumours when someone went missing at sea and the body didn’t turn up. Leo, her husband, her late husband, was dead, and that was that. She released the catch under her seat to make it recline, and flicked the cigarette out of the window.

  Margot had told Jenny Hathaway all about Tom. She worked on the principle that a secret is not really a secret unless it is shared with a trusted friend. When two people share a secret it somehow becomes a real secret, worth keeping. She told Jennifer everything: her decomposing marriage; every detail of her quickie sex sessions with Tom (In the car park in the dunes, said Jennifer, are you sure that’s wise?); and the pride she took in her daughter. Jennifer pretended to take Margot’s accounts of car-park flings calmly, like a woman of the world who had experienced many such illicit pleasures, but in fact she was riveted and just slightly envious.

  Jennifer had never married, a fact that she accepted without self-pity and even with a certain relief. She told herself she was far too selfish to share her life, her cats and her money with anyone. She wasn’t lonely, or if she was she would never recognise that as a description of herself. She was a spinster, a word she hated, but what else do you call a single woman of 44? There were no children and right now no boyfriend, although ‘right now’ was a term that covered a period of several years.

  She told herself she was lucky and happy. Lucky that she had the things that made her happy: her job, her two Burmese cats, her horse stabled at Falmouth, a circle of friends that provided her with pleasure, the enjoyment of the bridge table, a shared bottle of good wine and travel with a group of skiing enthusiasts, the book club.

  The trouble was she could never convince her circle of friends that a single woman in her forties could be perfectly happy on her own. However much she told them (and she did so partially to convince herself) that she could happily live without someone else in her life, her married friends naturally thought otherwise. Married couples have always wished, and worked, to see their single friends, especially women, paired off. A married woman regards a single member of he
r own sex, especially one of her own age, as a challenge to her skills as a matchmaker. Is it not a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman in possession of her faculties and her figure must be in need of a husband?

  Jenny was aware of the guile, not to say duplicity, with which her friends schemed to introduce her to suitable men. Charming bridge partners would appear who were entirely unfamiliar with the correct response to an opening bid of one no trump. Handsome men would surface at parties and reveal in casual conversation a remarkable knowledge of her love of horses, her annual ski trips to the French Alps and her appreciation of fine wine.

  Jenny reasoned that this was the lot of a single middle-aged woman. (Well, perhaps not middle-aged, she told herself, that surely begins at 50?) And the occasional social humiliation was certainly worth the affection of her friends, who cared so much for her that they spent a great deal of their time trying to find her a husband.

  That was Margot’s great strength as a friend. She was utterly uninterested in Jenny’s social life. She was far too focused on her own problems to worry about her friend’s matrimonial prospects.

  The whole point of Margot was that she was not a kindred spirit but someone who made Jenny laugh and occasionally cry, someone she had grown to care greatly for. Margot reminded her of Mehitabel the cat in Don Marquis’s books. ‘Toujours gai’ was Mehitabel’s motto, a philosophy which sustained her through a series of disasters all carefully chronicled by a cockroach called Archy.

  Mehitabel believed that life was to be lived, and there was no need to be crushed by the mistakes of the past, or even the memory of who we once had been in the past. Since she believed she had been Cleopatra in a previous life, she managed her transition to a mangy alley cat in this life remarkably well.

  Jennifer had given Margot the Archie and Mehitabel books to read, but her friend saw neither the point of them, nor the similarity between Mehitabel and herself.

  ‘Look at me,’ Margot would say, raising her glass of Chardonnay. ‘I had a brilliant education and a loving family, and I did exactly what they wanted and wound up as a primary-school teacher. Absolute disaster. I should have been a wild child rock singer.’

  ‘It would certainly have suited your sex life better.’

  ‘Thank you very much, Jennifer. A little jalouse, are we?’

  Margot and Jennifer met for their wine and laughter lunches in the Quarterdeck Bar and Grill on Falmouth’s Main Street. They liked it both because the restaurant cleverly recreated the interior of an old sailing ship, and because they usually managed to get a table at the back, which allowed them to observe the comings and goings of the customers while remaining largely unseen

  Given the discreet setting and the confidential nature of their lunches, it was natural that Jennifer was the first person to learn that Margot intended to return to Scotland.

  ‘The big question I can’t answer,’ said Margot, ‘is whether it would be fair on Sam. She’s sixteen, happy at school, has lots of friends here. I mean, she’s American, dammit.’

  ‘That’s simple,’ said Jennifer. ‘No, it’s not fair on her, and you should wait a year or two before even considering a move. She hates Scotland, you’ve told me that.’

  ‘But if we stay here, she’ll grow up with the ghosts of her brother and her father,’ argued Margot. ‘Surely that wouldn’t be right? She’ll be reminded of them everywhere in this small, crowded place. She needs a new start.’

  ‘No,’ said Jennifer. ‘You mean you need a new start. Have you thought you might be acting a little selfishly here?’

  ‘Of course I’m being bloody selfish! I have a dead son, a missing, presumed dead husband, and no job. I can’t work here. My qualifications aren’t recognised, you know that. I can pick up a good job in Scotland. I can go straight back into teaching. I can get my life back on track. My family is there! That’s got to be more important for Sam than anything else.’

  Jennifer bowed to the force of the argument. ‘All right, yes. On balance I suppose you’re right to go.’

  Margot chose her moment carefully. She met Sam in the tea rooms on Falmouth Main Street, and ordered coffee for herself and melted fudge ice cream and hot chocolate for Sam.

  Then she explained slowly and carefully that she had some news which would be good for them both in the long run, and would allow them to start afresh and put this terrible time behind them. Sam seemed lost in her ice cream, and nodded distantly. They would be returning to Scotland after the funeral, said Margot.

  ‘To visit?’ asked Sam

  ‘No, to live.’

  Sam’s chair went over backwards with a crash as she got up, causing a woman behind her to spill her tea

  ‘Mum!! That’s not good news! I don’t want to go back to Scotland. I have my friends here. I’m American. I live here, this is my home.’

  ‘Listen, darling—’

  ‘I don’t want to listen. I’m not leaving! You can’t make me. I hate Scotland.’

  Conversation at the tables around them was coming to a halt.

  ‘Sit down,’ hissed Margot. ‘You don’t know Scotland, darling. Be reasonable.’

  Sam sat down, noticing with gratification that she had every ear in the café.

  ‘No, you be reasonable, Mum. I’ve been there. I don’t like it.’

  ‘You only went once, to visit Grandma and Grandpa.’

  Margot realised that she had gained the attention of a café full of afternoon tea drinkers, but lost an argument.

  ‘I hated it.’

  ‘I know you did, and I understand. But this is different. We’re going to live there in a beautiful house, and your friends can come over.’

  ‘Come over? After school they’ll fly over and drop in for a chat? I don’t think so, Mum.’

  Why are children so bloody difficult? thought Margot. So she explained about her need to work now that Leo was gone, her need to have her family around her. She had two brothers and six nephews and nieces back home. She could not stay here on the Cape. She had lost her son here, and her husband. She would be lonely and miserable, haunted at every turn by an awful past. This was the time for a clean break, time to move back home. ‘And I promise,’ she heard herself say, ‘I promise we’ll come back every summer for the whole school holidays, back here to the Cape.’

  ‘Lonely, Mum? You say you’d be lonely here?’

  Margot was startled. She looked at her daughter carefully. Your children always know more about you than you could ever imagine.

  Sam knew that her mother sometimes took condoms with her when she went out at night after a few muttered words on the phone.

  Sex was a foreign country to Sam, but one she had visited so often in the virtual world all her age group inhabited that it held few mysteries for her. Girls in her class at school talked about it all the time, as if they were discussing a fast-food menu. The way they talked, sex seemed to occupy the same level of importance and pleasure as a takeaway pizza. It wasn’t true, of course. Fast food, music downloads, cool clothes and the occasional quick ciggie; they were the real deal. Sam and her friends might talk of sex as if it was a slice of pizza, but it was bravado – and they knew it. And Sam knew too that Mum’s visits to the Squire – oh yes, her school friends had told her she’d been seen there – weren’t about pizza.

  They called a truce, and agreed on a visit to the cinema and supper afterwards. Sam’s choice. The film was Mamma Mia, two hours of shared pleasure and popcorn that repaired the rift between mother and daughter.

  As they were leaving the cinema, Margot saw Tom in the crowd with his young and plumply pregnant wife. Their eyes met with a flicker of recognition, and they quickly looked away. Margot felt a surprising pang of jealousy. Her casual, throwaway lover with his blonde, swollen wife. He hadn’t told Margot she was pregnant. Or that she was so young. She stopped, half turned and bent down to adjust her shoe strap.

  As she straightened up Sam said ‘Who was that?’

  ‘Who was who, darling?�
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  ‘That man who looked at you.’

  ‘What man?’

  ‘Mum, stop it. I saw. You looked at him, too.’

  ‘Oh him. Just some fisherman. A friend of Buck’s.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  Margot spun round and grabbed Sam tightly by the arm. ‘Don’t “Oh yeah” me,’ she hissed. ‘Skip the sarcasm. I have too much else to worry about.’

  ‘Sorry, Mum.’ Sam was visibly shocked by the sudden change in her mother’s mood.

  Margot relented. ‘No, I’m sorry. This is a horrible time for both of us. We must be strong, be together.’

  They entwined their arms and walked out of the cinema together.

  Tom and his wife had vanished.

  Leo Kemp’s funeral took place at 10 a.m. at St Barnabas’ Anglican Church on Falmouth’s Main Street, opposite the green. It was exactly three weeks since he had been swept overboard. The coroner had agreed to issue a death certificate at the request of the family, on the grounds that his disappearance had been witnessed by a number of his students, and that it could reasonably and legally be assumed that he had drowned.

  Without a body there could be no coffin, and Margot and Sam had agreed with the rector’s suggestion that the service be conducted as a celebration of Leo’s life. All the same, everyone had dressed for a funeral, since there was general agreement that it was hardly appropriate to celebrate Leo’s life given that its ending had been so sudden, and was still so recent.

  Neither Leo nor Margot had been churchgoers, but Sam had discovered a talent for singing at school that had led her into the church choir. As a chorister she attended the two main Sunday services, and responded to the inevitable teasing by her classmates and her younger brother by pointing out that the Christian message of love and forgiveness was actually pretty cool.