On the Broken Shore. James MacManus

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ