On the Broken Shore

‘Your point is that a godwit is not a seal?’

‘Right on.’

‘Absolutely correct, but my original principle applies. It’s what we don’t know that should interest and excite us, not what we do know. Seals have always had their own language, but we do not know what they are saying.’

The Swedish girl had put up her hand.

‘Yes, Miss Nielsen?’

‘Why are we only interested in the language of these seals? Surely there is much more to learn about the seas in which they live?’

She spoke in slightly guttural English that Kemp, whose own accent was a mixture of his native Australian layered with lowland Scottish, found hard to follow.

‘Well, we have only begun to understand how these mammals communicate. But you are right. Our oceans are all around us – we swim in them, travel on them, feed from them and prepare to make war beneath their waves. Yet we have little understanding of them, or of the creatures that live in them.’

He had said too much. This was very much the way he always kicked off the first lecture, but perhaps he had overreached himself this time.

Time for a surprise, he thought.

‘All right. What I am saying is this. Once we understand that the oceans remain the greatest mystery on earth, once we hold that thought in our heads and hearts – yes, in our hearts – then we can move forward. Acknowledge your ignorance. Take nothing for granted. Any questions?’

‘But who says we know it all anyway?’

That boy again. Jacob Sylvester.

‘Never underestimate the arrogance of the science establishment, Mr Sylvester. Big money goes into science in order to produce answers. Scientists have to play the game and pretend that there are answers. My point to you today is that sometimes there are no answers, at least not ones that conventional science can uncover.’

Then he surprised them: there would be an unscheduled field trip the next day, on the tug Antoine. Since only twelve students had turned up he would take them all. Tomorrow was a Friday, and a sea trip would be a great way to start the weekend. They were to meet at the Institute’s own landing dock at 10 a.m., he told them. ‘Bring wet-weather clothing. Packed lunches and lifejackets provided. See you tomorrow.’ He picked up his notes.

‘Where are we are going?’ It was Gunbrit Nielsen again.

He told her that, weather permitting, they would run up to Monomoy Island – a favoured hauling-up place for grey and harbour seals. They would take hydrophones and recorders and spend the day on the water. Field trips were not picnics, he said, they were hard work.

‘And if anyone who didn’t make it here today wants to come, please tell them they’ll have to wait for another time

– the boat has a full complement.’

There was a buzz as the class left. Field trips were popular. As Leo liked to say, what better place for marine biology students than out on the ocean?

He picked up the rest of his papers and walked back to the car. The 15-year-old Saab 900 had doubled its resale price thanks to the film Sideways a few years previously, in which the same model had a key supporting role. It was probably his most successful investment. His cell chirped: two text messages.

The first was from Sandy Rowan, local journalist and Leo’s occasional drinking companion. Sandy’s passions in life were second-hand books, his cat (called Shakespeare), Cleo the waitress at his favourite bar in town and the Orleans wine company, a local vineyard in which he had made a modest investment some years ago and whose Viognier-Syrah blend he had pioneered, proclaiming the result to be better than anything out of California.

Hoover story really got them going. Watch your back – and your front.

The second message was from Margot. An official letter from the Institute had been delivered at home by courier. It was from the chief executive’s office.

Margot Kemp held the mug of coffee tight in her hands – no shakes today – and looked out over the roofs of Falmouth down to the harbour. She was hungry and needed breakfast. She checked her watch. It was 11 a.m. Call it brunch then. Betsy’s Diner with its large neon sign saying ‘Eat Heavy’ would do; eggs, bacon, waffles, more coffee, anything but a drink.

She turned the letter over in her hand: ‘From the office of the President, Coldharbor Institute for Marine Studies’ was engraved on the envelope.

She knew what it would say. Leo had blown it. All that stuff about Hoover the talking seal, the coded attack on the science establishment and the abuse of the big money that flowed into Coldharbor. Add in her husband’s obsession with the lobby behind the fishing industry and his unfashionable view that seals had nothing to do with depleted fishing stocks and you had layer upon layer of controversy: press reports, angry letters to the papers, the snide, back-stabbing comments of his colleagues.

He had been warned, of course. The Institute had told him a year ago to stay out of the media, stop giving interviews, stick to his work. It was in his contract, for God’s sake. She could recite the wording because she had read it out to him – well, shouted it at him – during one of their many rows.

‘In no circumstances must you bring the Institute or its officers into disrepute, nor damage in any way its reputation for academic excellence…approval for all media interviews must be sought from the director of communications…’

And now it had come to this. She fanned herself with the letter. A warm spring was turning into a hot summer, and it was not even Memorial Day yet.

Well, good. They could get out of this place, she thought.

‘Mrs Kemp?’

She turned. Tilda had finished in the kitchen.

‘Can I do the bedroom now?’

‘No, let’s leave it for this morning.’

‘You want another coffee?’

‘No thanks, Tilda.’

She went into the kitchen to check. It was spotless, as ever.

Tilda even rearranged the fridge letters which said sweet, silly things like I love you Mum and No 1 Dad, and made sure they also said We need milk.

She opened the fridge door. Tilda’s attention to detail extended to making sure that every level of the fridge had its own produce: dairy, fruit and meat, with eggs, wine and milk neatly slotted into the side section. Maybe she would have that drink. She took out a bottle of Pinot Grigio. There was enough for a decent glass left in the bottom. She poured it into a tumbler and slung the bottle into the recycling bin.

They had been married sixteen years, nine of them spent here in Coldharbor, where she had watched her husband vanish into a world of his own, a world in which the language of seals seemed to mean more to him than anything she had to offer.

That was what men did, of course, she thought: they displaced you, diminished you and then deserted you. What had happened to her interior-design business? It didn’t take a lot of money with it when it went bust, but it took away her pride, her sense of self-confidence. Leo had tried to help, but typically did so in the most hurtful way. ‘You’re a wonderful teacher. That’s where your talents lie, and that’s what you should stick to,’ he would say. ‘Do what you do best.’

She had told him over and over that teaching qualifications gained in the UK did not allow her to teach in America, and that she would have to retrain. But he didn’t listen. He just told her to face the facts: she was not good enough to be an interior designer, exterior designer, any kind of designer, at least not here on the Cape; she didn’t have the talent. It might have worked in Scotland, where they think haggis is haute cuisine, but it wouldn’t here. Cape Cod was stiff with designers, artists, interior decorators and every kind of smart-ass, trendy, boutique-owning fashionista.

The business collapse didn’t finish them, nor her drinking, nor his endless belittling of Scotland (why did he hate the place so much?).

What lay between them would always lie between them. It looked down from the mantelpiece, from the painting in the sitting room and from her bedside: Julian with the uncertain look of a 9-year-old in his first school uniform; Julian on the beach, tousled hair and head poking out from a sand burial; Julian aged 10, the last picture, on his bike outside the bookshop on Main Street. He had gone on the research trip in the Zodiac rubber dinghy the next morning with his father.

Margot took the wine into the bedroom and placed it on the bedside table beside the framed portrait of her son. She kissed the tips of her fingers and laid them gently on his forehead. She turned the frame to the wall, drank some wine and lay back on the bed. There were only ever two painkillers that worked for her and drink was one of them. The postman had been, the housekeeper had gone, and Leo was God knew where. She pulled up her skirt and let her hand drift between her legs, fluttering her fingers like butterfly wings.

She thought of the last time at the Squire bar in Chatham, the fisherman with salt tang on his body, the dragon’s head tattoo entwined around his thighs with long tongues pointing to his crotch, and whisky on his breath. It was quick, sordid, car-park sex. And why not? It was great. It made her feel good just thinking about it; not because it was any kind of revenge against Leo, far from it. But because, as she told herself, it was my choice, my pleasure, my sex, my lust, and I’ll have it how and when I want. I am a mother of two – well, one now – and with a husband lost to the sea just as all those widowed women on the Cape lost their husbands to the sea.

The sea is made of women’s tears, they say on the Cape, and they’re right. I know how those widows feel. I don’t have affairs; too bloody complicated, and anyway, you always wind up with a needy, whining man telling you he loves you more than anything in the world, when all he really wants is guiltless, risk-free, zero-cost sex. I will take my pleasures as and when I want to. She raised herself on to an elbow, drained the glass of wine, took the phone off the hook and reached into the bedside drawer. It was always there, her ever-dependable friend, none too discreetly covered by a clothing catalogue. She wondered if Tilda knew. She didn’t care if Leo knew or not. She lay back on the bed thinking of the fisherman with salt on his skin and whisky on his breath.

TWO

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.