On the Broken Shore. James MacManus

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ