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
