On the Broken Shore
James Macmanus

In memory of my parents, Niall and Fiona.

Epigraph

Don’t give your heart

On the broken shore

Where seals and sea dreams

Sing love’s song

For wind and wave

Will take your heart

And drown your dreams

On the broken shore

Anon. translated from the Gaelic by Leo Kemp

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

PROLOGUE

MAY

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

JUNE

FIVE

SIX

JULY

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

EPILOGUE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

AUTHOR NOTE

Also by James MacManus

Copyright

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

The teak tree had been 25 metres in height and weighed four tonnes when it fell to a chainsaw somewhere in the deep south of Brazil. It had been stripped of its branches, hauled from the rainforest and trucked to the port of São Paulo in a shipment of 400 similar sized hardwood trunks.

He knew this because in the madness of his grief he had spent hours researching the three month journey of that single tree from the rainforest to the coastal waters of Cape Cod.

He worked out how old the tree had been, how many years of rain and sunlight had nurtured it, and how and when it had been logged.

Most hardwood from the rainforest was trucked overland to Central and North America. He knew that just as he knew this consignment from the south of the country was sent to São Paulo to take the cheaper sea route to North America. At the port it had been loaded into a container which had been hoisted on to the deck of a cargo vessel.

Ninety miles out in the Atlantic off the New England coast en route to Boston the ballast had shifted in a storm. One, just one, container had broken its deck moorings and gone overboard. The end-gate locking mechanism had snapped and ten prime teak trunks spilt into the sea. Four days later one, just one, had found its way into the path of his Zodiac boat. He was left only with the mystery of the cruel fate that had chosen it to be the instrument of his son’s death.

Cruellest of all it was his fault. Well, that’s what she thought anyway.

He’d taken Julian on his first seal-watching trip to Monomoy Island, a couple of miles off the Cape Cod coast, although the distance from shore kept shifting, and the latest storms had almost turned the eight miles of sand and scrub into a peninsula.

It was September three years ago, a calm day after the holiday crowds had gone. The Cape was winding down. Julian had been on at him to go for months. His mother said the Atlantic was the Atlantic whether you were twenty yards from shore or twenty miles. And it was no place for a boy. But Julian was his father’s son, and alongside all the passions of a 10-year-old – the Boston Red Sox, the endless planning that he and his friends put into catapult attacks on the seagull population of Falmouth Heights Beach, – was a desire to see what Dad really did on his research trips.

‘Lowering microphones into the water, Dad? Why? What for?’

‘Good question,’ said his mother.

It was a calm day, but the swell had strengthened as they passed Gansett Point and headed north-west up the coast past the villages and beaches that carry Native American and pilgrim history in their names: Washburn, Maushop, Popponesset, Mashpee, Cotuit, Wianno.

About a mile off Point Gammon, with Hyannis point in clear view, their boat had struck a semi-submerged object almost invisible in the water. The Zodiac had been moving fast, maybe 15 knots, and had slid over it, but the propeller shaft of the outboard motor had caught the trunk and flipped them over. They had both gone into the water.

Julian’s lifejacket had been on, and he should have been fine, but his head had struck something hard, maybe the outboard motor, maybe the teak trunk, as he hit the water. He never recovered consciousness. He died in the Boston general hospital three days later. Double cranial fracture and brain haemorrhage, said the doctors. He hadn’t stood a chance.

Julian’s school, like probably every other one in the United States, had campaigned on all the great environmental issues of the day: Save the Rainforest, Stop the Whale Culling, Recycle your Household Waste. Posters had been made, letters written to Congressmen and company executives, and plays performed on the school stage. It was what schools do so well. And Julian had helped create the rainforest poster, a 36-square-foot laminated work that had been given pride of place in the entry hall. Monkeys and parrots had been drawn into a rich green canopy, below which the trunk of every tree in the forest was carefully named. Teak, Rosewood and Tropical Oak were the mighty giants of the forest. And below that was a chart counting down the years, with 2049 as year zero. No more trees in the rainforest, unless the world stops the logging. Then the world will pay a terrible price.

And I’ve already paid the price, he thought. Here was death delivered to my son from the endangered rainforest in a sequence of events and with astronomical odds that no computer could ever calculate.

MAY

ONE

This was the best time, the time before the tourists arrived in their hundreds of thousands, the time when the winter gales had stopped battering this bent arm of land thrust into the Atlantic, a time when Cape Cod allowed you to look back on the harpooners, sailors and fishermen who shaped its past while urging you to put your dollars down and book a whitewashed shingle house for the summer.

May was always a good month on the Cape: buds breaking on the beech, birch, hemlock and maple trees, the old elms throwing a green tracery of young leaves against a spring sky, beach rose plants showing the first pink blooms; young birds on the wing along every stretch of shore – dunlin, sandpiper, yellow legs, oystercatchers, egrets; seal pups wearing big eyes and grey whiskers flopping on the sandbanks; and prices half what you were going to pay after Memorial Weekend at the end of the month.

Leo Kemp dropped in on the Foodworks café in Falmouth for a breakfast of free-range scrambled eggs and a mug of fair-trade Colombian coffee: Foodworks was run by a bottletanned Californian princess who wore bright green eye shadow and a T-shirt that said Overnight Sensation on the back and You Are What You Eat on the front. Leo paid $12.35 including tip for breakfast. It would be a third more in ten days’ time, he thought.

He had left Margot asleep in bed, lying on her back with Sam’s head nestling in the crook of her outstretched arm. Sam who at 16, half-woman, half-child, still burrowed into their bed at unreasonable hours of the morning. Two careless, sleeping faces framed by a tangle of fair hair.

The old Saab 900 pretty much drove itself the four miles to the Coldharbor Institute for Marine Studies while Leo let his mind drift to his nine o’clock lecture with the new class. They were second-year marine biology postgraduate students. For those who persevered – and the dropout rate was high – their Ph.D. would lead to more postgrad studies, a year or two of fieldwork, a series of papers in academic journals, maybe a book, and then on to the lower rungs of academia, where they would begin their scramble up the ladder towards tenure.

If you sat them down and asked them why they wanted to study oceanography, the answers would be variants on a single theme: climate change. Fair enough, thought Kemp: the oceans and the weather are inextricably linked; but the answer missed the real point.

And if you asked them what they really, really wanted to do with their careers, the honest ones would admit that they would prefer to stay and work here at the Institute.

And why not?

Coldharbor, as Leo had tried to convince himself far too many times, was a great and beautiful place in which to learn and teach; a place in which to enjoy a comfortable lifestyle, raise a family and grow old gracefully.

And it was true. The Institute dominated what had once been a little fishing village and was now the main terminal for the ferries that ploughed to and from Martha’s Vineyard, fourteen times a day in winter, eighteen times in the summer. Apart from a handful of restaurants, bars and tourist souvenir shops clustered around the terminal, and several hundred holiday homes for the yachting crowd, the Institute pretty much was Coldharbor.

When the pilgrims first came to the Cape in the 1620s they found to their amazement that the local Wampanoag Indians were already expert whalers. Canoes made from birch branches and animal hide carried those fearless fishermen on hunting expeditions into the Atlantic armed only with stone-headed arrows and crude spears attached to short lines with wooden floats.

The Coldharbor Institute saw its researchers and scientists as the intellectual equivalent of those daring early fishermen: seekers after the secrets of the seven great oceans of the world, rather than the oil and blubber of the mighty cetaceans that swam in them.

Here the world’s leading marine biologists and scientists from every discipline of oceanography gathered to study the salinity and density of the oceans, the currents that swirled within their uncharted depths, the topography of the seabed, the effects of wind on the sea and wave on the shoreline.

Coldharbor also concerned itself with the behaviour of sea mammals: whales, dolphins and seals, the warm-blooded, oxygen-breathing creatures that inhabit our oceans. But the stars of the Institute’s repertoire were the deep-sea submersibles, known more prosaically as autonomous underwater vehicles, which could descend to depths of 17,000 feet and which, with the ocean-going vessels that supported and launched them, all operated from this small harbour on the Cape.

Leo Kemp was a part of this family of scientists with a solid body of published research to prove it. A family – that was how the Institute thought of itself: a community of researchers, educators and explorers, bound together by loyalty and a common cause – unravelling the secrets of the oceans and of the fish and the mammals that live in them.

It had been a long, blustery winter, followed by an unusually warm spring. Crossing the quad, Leo felt the warmth of early summer on his back. He looked at the line of modern buildings, all steel, chrome and glass, functional but not inelegant, that stretched along the ridge overlooking Vineyard Sound. Research centres, laboratories, aquaria, offices, libraries, lecture rooms; all the academic infrastructure to drive the institute forward on its mission.

And there was plenty of money to make it happen. The Institute’s president and chief executive, Tallulah Bonner, 55 years old and with a treacly Southern drawl that stretched all the way back to her home town of Atlanta, made sure of that. ‘Bonner’s bounty’, they called it.

Chief Executive Bonner understood big money. She knew that for every big private donation there was always a payback.

Every year at the annual financial review with the Board of Governors she made the same speech. Coldharbor was a private institute that received funds from government departments, especially the US Navy, she reminded them. But it relied mostly on private endowments from the wealthy.

‘Big donors are not putting a down payment on eternity when they give to us. Sure, they get their name up somewhere carved in wood or stone. And they’re not looking for gratitude, because the rich can buy that any day of the week. No, what they’re looking for is fulfilment. They want the assurance they’re making a contribution to the development of scientific knowledge on which the future of the human race depends. And, gentlemen, I make damn sure they understand that their generosity is critical to our mission.’

And she did. She knew exactly how to make the superwealthy feel good about giving.

‘The rich are like you and me when it comes to dying. They want to look back and feel they’ve done something with their life.’

At elegant fundraisers in New York and Boston, Tallulah Bonner knew better than to waffle on about the strategic importance of oceanography. Donors would always give for a good cause, and she gave them that cause through the simple but persuasive argument that the dawn of the space age should never detract from the study of marine science.

Let NASA spend trillions proving that there was no life on Mars, but spare a few hundred million for the study of what really mattered, the oceans that covered four-fifths of the earth’s surface.

Luckily the Pentagon had supported this thesis, or at least accepted that oceanography had an important if secondary role in mapping out future war scenarios. Submarines had proved themselves in the cold war era, and their territory – the canyons and valleys that shape the landscape of the ocean floor – was exactly where Coldharbor devoted the bulk of its research.

So while Houston and the space cowboys took the lion’s share of the money – and the glory – Coldharbor quietly took in enough funds to get on with what really mattered.

Trouble was, thought Leo, what really mattered on a warm morning, when the beaches were empty and the sea clean and fresh, was getting even a handful of students to listen to him.

He took the stairs to the second-floor lecture hall two at a time. His father, a retired doctor from Melbourne, had always told him that lifts were a greater health hazard than nicotine: ‘The elevator has contributed more to the high rate of heart attacks in America than cigarettes, alcohol and fatty foods put together.’ This oft-stated paternal thesis translated into equally frequent advice that not only should his son never take a lift, but that he should always eat porridge for breakfast.

His father was a living proof of the validity of his own advice, having reached the age of 92 without ever having taken a lift, or so he claimed. The fact that he continued to smoke and drink well in excess of the most liberal health guidelines merely confirmed the aged parent’s view about Mr Otis and the invention that had transformed urban skylines around the world.

There were thirty postgraduate students in the class but, as Leo had guessed, just twelve faces looked up from their iPods, BlackBerries, magazines and even a few copies of the Boston Globe as he walked in.

The tiered ranks of empty seating that rose before the podium seemed a perfect comment on the lecture subject: language and communication among mature pinnipeds.

Leo placed a sheaf of papers on the lecture stand. There was a reluctant rustle as the students stashed their papers, detached themselves from their earplugs and swung their attention to him.

He began with the traditional welcome, wishing them well in their studies. He then left the podium and walked up the staircase that divided the seating, speaking without notes. It was an old trick, but it always worked.

‘At the beginning of this course, I just want to say two things. First, we humans are defined not by what we know, but by what we do not know. The science that has brought you here, like all scientific disciplines, has no final frontiers, and it never will have.’

He explained that this world of theirs was a water planet. Their forebears had crawled from the oceans millions of years ago and begun to climb the evolutionary ladder. Many millions of years later, when man first emerged from the African rain forest on to the savannah and was forced to stand upright – some five million years ago – the marine mammals, the seals, dolphins and whales he had left behind in the sea, were fully formed and living in a complex ecosystem that had sustained them and us ever since.

‘Yet throughout human history we have slaughtered those mammals, and today we have gone a step further. We have begun to destroy the environment on which this planet depends – its oceans. We are urbanising and industrialising the great seas of the world.

‘So as you progress through your studies, I want you to remember that our future on this planet depends not on the exploration of space – important though that is – but on understanding the oceans that surround us and first gave us life, and still do today.’

Leo paused at the top of the staircase. Twelve heads had now turned, necks craned to keep him in sight. Was that a flicker of interest down there? Had his words triggered the smallest thought processes in those heads? Probably not.

He walked back to the podium.

‘What I want to talk about today is the language of sea mammals, and especially seals. Until recently we did not know that they communicated at all. Now we do know that whales, dolphins and seals all have their language, but we don’t know how they use that language. These are highly intelligent creatures – we know that – but how are we to decode the intelligence in those remarkable brains?’

A few pens were moving across the big spiral-bound notepads. It was always the girls first. Then the boys would follow suit. Pretty girls, too. Mostly American, but some from Finland, Norway and Japan, where they took marine science seriously. So seriously in Norway that they slaughtered seals as vermin and even ate them.

Leo decided to wake the class up.

‘We’re going to take a break,’ he said, and pressed a switch.

They all stirred, even the boys.

The room darkened. The students sat up, suddenly interested; a screen came down at the touch of a button.

‘You are here to study marine biology. Why? Because the oceans around us hold the key to our survival on earth?

‘Maybe.

‘Because the seas cover four-fifths of the earth’s surface, and we know so little about how they work?

‘Definitely.

‘And perhaps because we need to get hold of this fact: twenty-first-century science, science that can take a man to the moon and land a machine on Mars, cannot answer some fundamental questions posed by our oceans. Why not? Take a look at this.’

Leo pressed a switch. He loved and hated the Institute in almost equal measure, but on the love side came a real respect for the technology bought by all those endowments. Things really worked. Back at St Andrews University in Scotland where he had begun his career some eighteen years earlier, you were lucky to find a slide rule that worked.

The screen glowed into life, showing a snowy landscape. The camera tracked to the foreshore of a broad, tree-lined estuary, with a soundtrack of running water and wind in the leaves. It then zoomed in on a group of wading birds the size of small seagulls. The birds had brownflecked plumage, long legs and curved beaks. They walked slowly along the water’s edge, pausing to stab their beaks into the soft mud and then throwing their heads back to swallow whatever morsel they had found below the surface. Suddenly alarmed, the flock wheeled as one into the air, their outsize wings lifting them rapidly away from whatever danger they had perceived.

A voice-over said: ‘The bar-tailed godwit has been tracked by the Pacific Shorebird Migration Project via satellite tagging, and has been proved to be the world’s avian migratory champion, flying further non-stop than any other migrating bird. The godwit flies 10,200 miles south from its breeding ground in Alaska without stopping in flight. It can make the flight in seven days with the benefit of a tailwind, and can return north in nine days. Incredibly, godwit chicks can make the southbound flight when only two months old. These are amazing journeys, which the latest technology has allowed us to track and feed into our ongoing research into migration patterns.’

Kemp flipped a switch, and the lights came back on.

‘OK, what’s missing there?’

A hand went up. It would be him. That studious boy from Michigan, Jacob Sylvester, a state scholar. Leo had met his new students at an induction class. He always tried to spot the ones that were going to make something of the subject but it was difficult. Sometimes the shy, silent types produced original thinking in their coursework while the pushy talkers simply regurgitated everything they had read.

Sylvester was a talker; he asked all the right questions and took notes in laborious longhand. He had a Ph.D. and academic career stamped all over him. Rachel Ginsberg wasn’t really shy but she pretended to be and looked at the floor while asking complex questions about the marking of grades. She would flash him quick looks from under long eyelashes to see if he was listening and smile slightly when he nodded her to go on. He sensed she was very ambitious and he knew her foxy-faced good looks would take her up the corporate ladder in some big company.

Then there was Gunbrit Nielsen, very serious, very pretty, with slate-grey eyes and a long plaited pigtail. She was far too beautiful to be sitting in anyone’s class studying marine biology. She should be on a movie set on the west coast. But here she was in his class working for a Ph.D. that would take her back home to a teaching job in Sweden, marriage to a man with a thick red beard and four children.

He would get to know them well over the course of the year and would watch to see how, just as in the wild, a natural leader emerged from the group. Already they seemed to take their lead from Sylvester, letting him ask the questions.

‘Sea mammals, sir. This isn’t our subject,’ said Sylvester.

Leo snapped out of his reverie.

‘Well, clearly a godwit is not a seal, Mr Sylvester. Let me repeat the question: what is missing from that commentary? Something important, really important, that has been left unsaid?’

Silence, heads lowered, sidelong glances: What’s he talking about? When’s the break?

‘OK, here goes. What that commentary did not tell you is that those birds, the godwits, make their migrations without food or water, flying huge distance for seven days southbound and nine days northbound. It didn’t tell you that because we don’t know how they do it. No one knows.

‘Scientists’, he continued, ‘cannot explain the godwit’s ability to lift and transport its body weight of eight to ten ounces for that distance without in-flight refuelling. And science does not like the irrational. The flight of the godwit is incomprehensible to science, because science tells us, and the naturalists tell us, and the nutritionists tell us, that a small bird like that cannot fly such a distance without sustenance.

‘We know that swifts and swallows make similar journeys, but they eat their natural food – flying insects – on the wing. Godwits do not. Their food – worms and molluscs – lies beneath the sand on the shoreline. And there are no shorelines at ten thousand feet. They should not be able to survive their annual migration. But they do.

‘Mr Sylvester.’ Leo pointed to him, arm outstretched, finger extended.

‘Yes, sir?’

Leo had the class now; he loved it when he made a breakthrough and grabbed the attention of those mediachoked minds, brains buzzing with electronic music, video games, sex, sport and fast food. Cut through the media dazzle with some original godwit-thinking and you find that there is life in the interior of their minds; thin soil maybe, but enough to plant the seed of thought.

‘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.

‘What are you going to do with it?’ his father’s friends had asked. He had his answer when the Institute chartered the tug to take research students up the coast, and occasionally far out into the Atlantic. That was in the early fifties, when the first postgrad students were arriving at Coldharbor. The Antoine had paid for herself many times over since then. Now she was on permanent charter to the Institute, and Buck had a regular income, unlike some fishermen, who were reduced to scrabbling for clams at low tide in the off season.

He still fished from March to October, and had his own line of lobster pots out in the season; lobsters were good business, but the money was not regular because the bureaucrats in the Fisheries Department kept changing the weight and size of permitted take. Worse still, they were now charging up to $100,000 a year for a general fishing licence.

Buck had been lucky. He had spent his best years in a business he loved. Now the fish stocks were declining – and Buck well knew whose fault that was – and the industry was dying. Young men still came into the business, but he wondered what for.

His passion for fishing had begun at the age of 8, when his grandfather let him use a small rowing boat on a lake near his home in Massachusetts. It was when Buck was allowed out night fishing on his own that his young world changed.

The Cape Herald had interviewed him some years before as the oldest working fisherman on the Cape. Sandy Rowan was a rare journalist, in that he reported exactly what people said in interviews. ‘That way you get the truth, and get a feel for the person behind the words even if you do lose the grammar,’ he said. So Buck’s words were laid out on a centre spread between two huge quotation marks, alongside pictures showing him from boy to man with rods and reels, and finally as an old-timer pointing to the nets on his 43-foot fibreglass day boat.

‘Out there on the lake at night the bug bit; I was just a kid but I got this amazing sense of freedom and I suppose responsibility. I mean, I was alone, in charge of the boat, the rods, everything. I could have fallen in or anything, but Grandpa let me go off. I spent as much time with him as I could, and fished whenever I could. When I got older and went out on dates, after I dropped the girl off – yeah, this was a long time ago, and we did that in those days – I’d get the boat out and go fishing on the lake. It didn’t pay, so I became an electrical engineer and began going to the Cape at weekends. Salt-water fishing was different. You had to know everything about that damned bitch the sea – currents, tides, weather, and the habits of the fish. I learnt it all. Out there on the ocean you’re always thinking – you have to. It was like going to a school you loved.’

The article was headlined ‘The Happy Hunter’. Both Leo and Sandy reckoned Buck was the happiest man they were ever likely to know.

Buck had no illusions about the future of the fishing industry. It was almost finished and he wasn’t going to spend his last years competing with the other boats for the last fish in the sea. His final destination was a small cashew-nut farm in Hawaii that he had bought back in the fifties, when land was cheap. He had managed to hold on to the farm when he and his wife divorced, and had married second time around to a Filipina called Renee.

Leo had met Buck on his first research trip after arriving at Coldharbor, and long before it became fashionable the two would take Buck’s boat and some beer and spend all day on the Stellwagen Bank watching whales. That was when Leo began to understand what was happening to one of America’s greatest marine sanctuaries.

Leo drove home the four miles to Falmouth, taking care to keep the needle on thirty. In the off season the Cape police had nothing to do but hand out speeding tickets. That was mostly all they did in the high season, come to that. He killed time over a coffee at Betsy’s Diner thinking about the letter; a summons to a meeting, most likely. Tallulah Bonner was a pain, but he had to admit that she did a great job on the money side. The taxefficient endowments rolled in. Trouble was, he had more than once expressed his doubts to her about how it was being spent.

‘Tell me exactly what you mean,’ she had demanded. ‘Give me an example of what we should be doing that we are not.’ When she was angry the treacle in her voice hardened and the Southern drawl tightened.

So Leo tried to tell her. It was difficult, he said, because he was talking about a culture here: a Big Science culture. Hubris, arrogance, the overwhelming view that we know most of what there is to know about planet earth and that we just need to fill in a few gaps.

‘Examples,’ she had snapped at him. ‘Give me examples.’

So he told her how some years back an eminent physicist had dropped a deep-water recording probe into the Southern Ocean, and at 12,000 feet below the surface, well beyond the diving depth of a whale, it detected something enormous, really enormous, passing beneath it.

‘So? What was it?’

‘We don’t know, Tallulah.’

He told her that there were hydrophones throughout the seven seas, mostly operated by the big-power navies, that could pick up the whisper of a distant submarine and from the sound of its propeller identify its class, direction and speed. Sometimes the operators listening in heard a roaring noise from the ocean depths, a roar that was clearly biological in origin. The wavelength of the sound told them it was not that of the blue whale, the largest creature on the planet. It was something much bigger. Something unknown to science.

‘And what conclusion are you asking me to draw from that?’ The treacle was back in her voice now.

‘I’m honestly not trying to be awkward. I’m just saying that we should be a little more honest about what we don’t know, and less arrogant about what we do know.’

Maybe he had told her that once too often. Still, beneath those starched linen suits, the endless talk of budgets and quarter-one forecasts there was a real human being, a management caterpillar who briefly took wing as a butterfly on the annual staff picnic outing to Nantucket. Kids buried her in the sand; she drank a little too much beer, let the salt water ruin her hair and wore a diaphanous Indian garment that billowed up showing long, shapely legs.

Kemp parked his car in the driveway, noticed the needle in the fuel gauge was once more on empty, and yet again made a mental note to sell the gas guzzler. Sixteen miles to the gallon. With the way gas prices were going, that was crazy.

The Kemps had bought their house in Falmouth Heights when they arrived nine years before, a modest storey-and-a-half clapboard-clad four-bedroom home with a steep roof to break the buffeting winter winds and shed rain and snow. It was warm when the autumn gales blew, and cool in the summer when the wooden shingle roof let the house breathe. It was exactly what an $80,000-a-year (plus a decent housing allowance of $20,000) academic at the Institute could afford. As the housing bubble pushed up prices in the nineties, Margot had tried to persuade him to sell up and move inland, maybe even off the Cape, to a bigger, cheaper place. His refusal led to one row after another.

Margot loathed the discipline of the household budget, the weekly payments into the joint account and Leo’s oh-so-casual questions about this payment and that cheque. Her plan had always been to make the money to help pay for a bigger place, but one project after another had failed. Still, the house was big enough now that Julian was gone. Dead. Her son was dead. She still didn’t believe it. She understood now the painful truth behind that old cliché that the bereaved always came out with, the one about expecting to see the lost loved one walk through the door just the same as before. That’s what she felt so often. The wind banged a door shut or the dog made a noise in the next room and her heart would jump and she would turn to see him, to hear him and to hold him in her arms. But he was never there.

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 first 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.

Now 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.

He knew she went drinking with the fishermen. She’d begun to go down to the harbour bars in Falmouth and Chatham after Julian died. She said she liked the company, and that for all their bravado and tribal loyalties the men were so vulnerable, always at the mercy of the weather, regulations, the volatile market price for their products and the fickle nature of their chosen workplace, the North Atlantic. They were just like little boys really.

She listened sympathetically to their doom-laden stories about a dying industry being slowly throttled by state and federal regulators. She knew all about the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972, brought in to stop the killing of seals but which was now killing their industry – or so the fishermen said. It was the same at home in the UK, she told them. There were more lawnmower repairmen in Britain than fishermen, a statistic she had once heard somewhere.

Leo looked across Vineyard Sound. A light south-westerly ruffled the waves; the sky was clear, with high cirrus cloud forming mares’ tales four or five miles up. The weather should be good for the field trip tomorrow – his last, unless the appeal was successful.

THREE

The twelve students were waiting for Leo on the Institute’s pier. Jacob Sylvester and Rachel Ginsberg helped him carry on board the large tape deck containing the recording equipment. They lowered the machine, which was waterproofed with a crude plastic cover, on to the deck using Leo’s lifejacket to provide some padding.

He ran through a checklist of names, carefully ticked them off on his clipboard and handed out packed lunches and a bottle of water each. There was nobody missing, and Leo was gratified that for once they seemed pleased to see him. He corrected himself. That was too harsh. On the whole his students were usually pleased to see him. He had had coffee with Gunbrit once in the commissary, and had asked her what the students thought of him. She smiled at the question, looked into her coffee mug and said shyly, ‘They think you are a little unusual.’ He took that as a compliment.

Most of the students were carrying smart digital cameras with pop-out lenses that took brilliant pictures even at a distance. There were seasick pills for those who wanted them. Only two did.

On board he assembled the group on the rear of the transom deck and handed out lifejackets and oilskins. This was to be a six-hour trip, he told them, during which they would be listening to, and recording, underwater communications among seal rookeries up the coast, but mainly at Monomoy Island. Lifejackets were to be worn at all times, there was to be no smoking, no use of mobile phones, and in an emergency they were to do exactly what the captain told them. They all knew Buck, who waved from the upper deck.

Leo had already asked the group to read the Herald profile of Buck, and he wanted them to spend some time with him. ‘If you want to understand the ecology of the sea,’ he had told them, ‘you need to know what’s happening to fish stocks, and for that Buck is your man. Talk to him. Take him out for a coffee, a drink maybe.’

The weather was fine, as the sky had promised the previous evening. Leo checked his watch and steadied himself as the tug rocked in the swell of a departing Martha’s Vineyard ferry. The big 1,000-ton ferries were still running off-season schedules, and thankfully the whale-watching, dolphin-spotting tourist boats had yet to begin operating. In The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald described Long Island Sound as the busiest body of water in the western hemisphere. He had obviously not seen the stretch of sea between the Cape and Martha’s Vineyard in the summer. But today they would mostly have the sea to themselves.

The tug nosed out of the harbour, passing Penzance Point to the west with its $10-million homes. That was where Tallulah Bonner lived, and Leo swung his binoculars along the shoreline, searching for her house. But they all looked the same, big two-storey houses with swimming pools, green carpet lawns and white flagpoles, all built after the First World War when the big money came down from Boston to find weekend retreats to rival the Hamptons.

Several of the students gathered at the stern watching as the boat rode a gentle swell, trailing a white wake of foam and a flock of seagulls that fell upon the small fish churned to the surface. The Antoine headed out to sea for half a mile, and then turned north-east, leaving Martha’s Vineyard to the south-west to run up the coast.

Leo looked at the horizon. A ridge of grey nimbus was building where the sky met the ocean. He climbed the steps to the top deck where Buck was fiddling with the radio. Buck had been the first person Leo had met outside his colleagues at the campus when he arrived all those years ago, and they had worked together on these research trips ever since.

It was Buck who had opened his eyes to the power of the fishing lobby when they took his boat out to the Stellwagen sanctuary, 842 square miles of federally protected ocean between Cape Ann and Cape Cod, ten miles north of Provincetown at the mouth of Massachusetts Bay. They had made the first of several trips to Stellwagen a month after Leo had arrived on the Cape. The point about Stellwagen was that it wasn’t a sanctuary and it wasn’t protected, as Buck showed him. On calm days Buck would turn the engines off over the bank, a kidney-shaped shelf that rose to within 100 feet of the surface, and let the boat drift. Around them were the whale-watching boats, and as the day drew on the fishing boats working out of Gloucester, Portland and Portsmouth up the coast.

They would open their beers, unwrap cold steak sandwiches, and Buck would tell his story. The shallow waters of the bank were the heart of the sanctuary, but beyond lay deeper water, dropping at some places to a depth of 600 feet. The steep sides of the bank created rising currents which brought nutrients into the shallows. In turn the fish followed, and they brought the whales.

The fish brought the fishermen, and the whales brought the tourist boats. And both were killing Stellwagen. But the main culprits were the fishermen.

‘That’s me,’ said Buck. ‘Well, people like me. We’ve fished this place to hell and back. Know what? They should have no-take zones in every marine sanctuary, especially here. No fishing. Full stop. But the politicians daren’t do it. Gutless cowards.’

As Leo discovered, it was all true. The fishing industry along the coasts of Maine and Massachusetts could easily withstand the creation of a fully protected reserve over Stellwagen, but all that happened was a seemingly endless series of studies commissioned by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration – and the continuation of bottom-trawling over the bank.

So 80 species of fish and 22 species of marine mammals were being studied to death by Federal bureaucrats, fished to extinction by the local boats, and all the while gawped at by the 300,000 tourists who cruised these waters in the summer months.

That was the way Leo put it in his lectures, and in a guest column for the Herald.

Leo watched Buck at the wheel, his deeply lined face jutting out from an old captain’s cap, his rough hands almost stroking the polished wooden casing of the compass. He wanted to tell Buck that he had been fired. This would be the last trip they would make together on the Antoine, and Buck needed to know. Now seemed as good a moment as any. He watched the older man’s face as he registered the news. Like most Cape Codders, Buck was intensely proud of the Institute, the work it did and the jobs it created. He had lived in its shadow most of his life.

Buck peered ahead, rubbing a cloth on the windscreen.

‘How come?’

Leo explained about his interview with the Herald and how the Boston Globe had picked it up and how in the age of the 24-hour news cycle his words were soon out on the wires on radio and television.

‘What did you say in the interview?’ Buck kept his eyes on the sea and a hand on the wheel.

Leo told him he had used the example of Hoover the talking seal, long dead but still the subject of some controversy, as a metaphor to expose the arrogant mindset of the marine science establishment in general. And he had thrown in the fishing lobby and Stellwagen and all that stuff.

When he had finished, Buck slapped him on the back.

‘Congratulations! No more students, no more getting up for nine o’clock lectures. Now you can get a real life. You never could stand all that hassle up there, could you?’

‘I like teaching, Buck.’

‘You can teach anywhere,’ said Buck, spinning the wheel and bringing the bow of the boat around so that it pointed shoreward. ‘We’ll be there in twenty minutes.’

Monomoy Island appeared out of the haze, a low-lying smudge on the horizon that gained shape and colour as the boat drew closer to it. As Leo scanned the white, yellow and pink of the island’s sand and rock, covered in the grey-green of coarse sea grass and gorse, he made a mental note to sign up for a week’s watercolour course with Gloria Gulliver.

She was a Cape divorcee in her mid-fifties who wore startling low-cut one-piece swimsuits in the summer, revealing a heart-shaped strawberry birthmark on her right breast. Leo focused on the image of her breasts, holding them in his head as he had in his hands. Her breasts in his hands, his mouth on her lips, the unforgettable Mrs Gloria Gulliver.

He looked back at the strangely unfamiliar shoreline. Wind, tide and the autumnal Atlantic gales had reshaped the island since he had last seen it. It happened to the whole Cape coastline almost every year, rendering charts outdated almost as soon as they were published. Navigation depended on local knowledge and every spring, fishermen working out of Chatham, Coldharbor and Hyannis had to plot the new shoals, skerries and channels carved out by tide, current, and wind.

Back in 1942 a whole island had vanished. It was called Billingsgate, after the old fish market in London, and had a school, a lighthouse and a small fishing community. The sea took them all, as it will the whole Cape in time. Occasionally winter storms would excavate an old wreck from the depths, bringing it perilously close to the surface.

Buck had lost his last fishing boat that way. The nets snagged on the funnel of a tramp steamer that had gone down in a sudden autumn storm in 1917. In the heavy sea the stern of Buck’s boat had been pulled under. It went down in seconds as the sea flooded the rear deck. Buck and his three crew had got off in their liferaft, and had been picked up two hours later. He bought another boat, of course. He always had a fishing boat but it was the tug that brought in the steady money.

Kemp had already decided that he would ask Buck to help him with his appeal. He was the only fisherman he knew who would stand up and tell the truth about the fishing lobby. Fish stocks were in freefall because of overfishing. Seals were being culled in their hundreds of thousands because they were blamed for the declining stocks. The fishing industry and the powerful politicians behind them were slaughtering seals for no purpose.

If there was going to be an argument, Buck was a good guy to have on your side. He had done it before at a conference in San Diego that Leo had persuaded him to attend as a guest speaker: the raw voice of the sea telling a gathering of marine biologists what was really happening to fish stocks and why.

That was how Joe Buckland, nervously clasping and unclasping his hands, desperate for the large rum that Leo had refused him and wishing himself rather in the eye of a hurricane at sea than in that place, came to stand in front of 300 delegates at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California. Leo had told him that Scripps was the oldest, biggest and most important centre for marine research science in the world. Looking at the large, oak-panelled auditorium with its motto inscribed in Latin on the proscenium arch, he believed it.

Buck had wowed them from the start.

‘I have been asked to talk to you about why fish stocks are falling, why the cod has gone, why other fish are going too. Halibut, marlin, you name ’em, they’re going. The problem is simple. You’re looking at it right here in front of you. I’m a fisherman. But I’m only half of the problem. You ladies and gentlemen are the other half. You eat too much fish,’ he said.

‘I’ve been told to get to the point early, and here it is. Hands up who knows what a steaker is.’

Not a hand in the hall went up

‘Steakers are what fishing people call the best cuts of fish, the ones with real big steaks on them. And you know what? Fishermen throw back dead into the sea any fish that doesn’t look like a steaker. Every fishing boat does it. They’ll deny it, but they do. Fishermen throw more fish back into the sea dead than they land for market. Not just us here in the US. They do it everywhere. That’s why the stocks have collapsed.’

Buck was applauded as he left the stage, and afterwards some very charming women smiled sweetly at him and pressed drinks into his hand. He told Leo he reckoned he made a wrong career choice all those years ago. He should have become an academic. The money was easy. They paid you to stand up and talk sense, and they even gave you a drink afterwards.

Kemp turned towards the stern and looked down at his students, all of them working towards a degree that would lead to the further study of the minutiae of the ocean rather than of the warm-blooded mammals that lived in it. Endless papers circulated within the academic community – and then what? Maybe Margot was right. It was all nothing but chatter on the academic networks. But maybe all the research, the lengthy dissertations and those closed conferences so beloved by academics might lead to a new way of thinking about the seas from which we all crawled so many millions of years ago.

Some hope, thought Kemp. And he wasn’t putting much faith in his own book setting the scientific world to rights either.

Buck turned the boat, slowed the engine and moved towards a series of sandbanks that had risen above the waterline on the back of a falling tide. Already grey seals and harbour seals were hauled up on them, dozing under a darkening sky. One or two of the females were still pregnant, but most had already pupped, and the young were nervously flopping towards the water, having caught sight of the intruder.

In the channels between the sandbanks grey-whiskered heads turned as the Antoine approached, then vanished beneath the waves, reappearing a few feet away, ducking, diving and resurfacing. It was too early in the year for the young seals to have got used to boats, and many had not seen or heard one before. The older ones paid less attention.

In their identical black oilskins and yellow lifejackets the students looked like outsize penguins as they trained their binoculars on the seals. Kemp knelt down and pushed the tape deck firmly under the slight overhang of the enclosed deck rail that ran around the transom. He plugged in the leads to four headsets and attached four other leads to a set of hydrophones: large cigar-shaped microphones encased in thick transparent plastic casing.

The technology was a big improvement on what he had been used to in those early days at St Andrews, but it was still petty crude compared to the latest equipment being used by the military. In the 1960s the US Navy laid a grid of underwater listening posts around the world to track Soviet submarines. The fixed hydrophones were linked to onshore listening stations by cable, and the Navy called the whole thing the Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS). When the cold war ended the system was made available to marine scientists studying whale communication. But the more rarefied area of seal communication did not get a look-in, and Leo had to make do with an off-the-shelf version. It was expensive enough, as the treasurer at Coldharbor had pointed out when he signed it off.

‘A ten-thousand-dollar recording outfit just to listen to seals – right?’

‘Right,’ replied Kemp, and that was that.

Kemp paused as a larger swell than usual lifted the boat, causing his students to stumble and clutch each other. Gunbrit Nielsen seemed to have more than her fair share of helping hands.

A casual glance towards shore brought one of those surprises that could lift these trips from the routine to the extraordinary. There, on the furthest sandbank, was a small pod of hooded seals. Normally found only in Arctic waters, they were rarely seen at this time of year on the Cape. The inflatable hoods on top of the heads of the adult males made them look comical, like circus creatures.

When excited or nervous the seals closed their noses and pumped air into these hoods, which swelled up to the size of footballs. That was what they had done now, and Kemp shouted to his group to take a look and to get some photographs. He handed his binoculars to Jacob Sylvester, who took a quick look before passing them back and joining the others in taking photographs that would be uploaded on to computers and winged around the world to friends and family, showing inhabitants of a cold Arctic world sunning themselves within sight of some of the Cape’s most popular summer beaches.

Kemp raised his glasses and swung them seaward; the cloud base had darkened and thickened. Over Chatham harbour a mile away the skies were still clear, and he pointed out to the students the old Marconi radio masts moved there from Wellfleet up the coast, where in January 1903 President Theodore Roosevelt had sent the first radio message across the Atlantic, to King Edward VII in the village of Poldhu in Cornwall. A king emperor conversing with an American president who liked to talk softly and carry a big stick. Leo always wondered what they had talked about in that first brief transatlantic conversation: probably that great British default topic of conversation, the weather.

The masts had now been adapted with wooden platforms on which ospreys built their stick nests. The birds had almost been wiped out by DDT poisoning in the 1960s, but were now increasing in numbers; an example of old technology infrastructure being used to repair the damage done by what had once been hailed as the new wonder chemical herbicide.

‘See what I mean,’ Leo told his students, although more accurately he told Gunbrit and let the others listen in. ‘Take nothing for granted. DDT wasn’t a modern miracle, it was poison. But everyone fell for it, like asbestos.’

No sooner had he said this than he wished he had kept quiet and let them work it out for themselves. Maybe he was banging on too much; becoming a bore, a one-track mind with a message that had lost all its potency through endless repetition. Maybe he should just shut up.

He shook himself out of these thoughts and turned his mind to the task at hand. ‘All right, everyone, gather round. Bring your mikes and pair off.’

He helped the students lower the hydrophones into the water. They needed to be positioned carefully so that the sensors were facing the source of the sound. There was one headset for every two people.

‘What’s the depth?’ he yelled to Buck.

‘Thirty feet.’

‘OK, lower the hydros to twenty feet and turn the sensors to face the sandbanks. And get your headphones on,’ he shouted to the students.

Seal talk, Kemp called it. Down there in the waters around the sandbanks the seals would be sending their rumbling signals to each other, warning of dangerous intruders. It was a language he knew well, and there were times when he felt he could half guess the meaning of these long underwater conversations. But the real code he had yet to crack.

He had made his name at St Andrews, where an unusually generous subsidy from a government determined to prove it cared about its maritime heritage had led to the establishment of the Sea Mammal Research Unit. Out of curiosity, on a field trip to the north of Scotland he had lowered his hydrophones into 100 feet of water below the mile-long Cromarty Firth Bridge that carries the A9 road north from the Black Isle. The waters there were rich in fish and heavily populated with seals. With Loch Ness only a few miles to the west it was no surprise that the coast was also rich in marine mythology.

The fishermen working out of the deep-water ports of Inverness and Aberdeen had plenty of stories about seals and how they could talk and sing. Even today the older generation who crew the deep-sea trawlers out of Scotland recount the Celtic myths about the selkies, the seals who come ashore, shedding their skin to take human shape as beautiful women. The stories vary little among the fishing communities around the Celtic rim of Britain – the Orkneys, the Hebrides and the Aran Islands off the Irish coast: a seal in human form bewitches and marries a local fisherman only to flee back to the sea, sometimes years later, leaving behind motherless children, broken hearts and empty beds.

Science paid no attention to such fantasies, of course, and at first Kemp thought his own discoveries would be treated in the same light. No one had ever identified and recorded the language of seals until that day in 1992 when his hydrophones had picked up low rumbling noises. At other times he picked up a crescendo of noise, like a bowling ball and the crash of skittles. At first he thought that it was trucks passing over the Cromarty Bridge above him. But the strange rumbling noise continued after the trucks had gone. There, 100 feet down in the darkness of the estuary, harbour seals were making sounds no one had heard before – or if they had heard them, they certainly had not been identified as seal talk.

Kemp had taken his tapes back to the university and played them to his boss at the research unit. Professor Melrose Stubbs had listened, eyes fastened on the revolving spools of tape, smoke from a clenched pipe drifting out of the window.

‘No one’s heard this before?’

‘If they have, they didn’t know what it was.’

‘And you do?’

‘Harbour seals. There was nothing else down there.’

‘And if I said, “So what?”’

Typical Stubbs. He was as impressed as hell, but hated showing it. He delighted in the counter-intuitive challenge, and always insisted on making his students work hard for the answer that he already knew.

So Leo told him what they both knew: that identifying the language of creatures that had been on the planet longer than humans was the start of a scientific journey to unlock the minds of those with whom we share this earth.

They had had a celebratory drink that night, first at the small bar next to the old Cross Keys Hotel, and then back at Stubbs’s flat in Hope Street. It was four o’clock in the morning and light when he and a few collegues straggled down to the West Sands and fell down on the dunes to watch the sun come up over the bay. Freezing cold, of course, but with that much whisky inside them it didn’t matter.

And then, their darkened heads just visible over the waves, a pod of grey seals appeared with the sun, slipping through the water, hunting for sand eels and flat fish that had come in with the tide.

It was a magical moment. And Margot had been somewhere in the crowd that had collected as the party gathered pace throughout the evening; a young primary-school teacher who hung out with the junior academics looking for a little intellectual stimulation and a break from the boredom of cramming maths into the minds of 9-year-olds.

After the publication of his paper ‘Underwater Vocalisation of the North Sea Harbour and Grey Seal’, Kemp’s reputation in the small and cloistered world of sea-mammal research was born. Invitations to speak came from the most prestigious institutions, the ocean sciences department at the University of California Santa Cruz and the Australian Institute of Marine Science among them

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