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‘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.
