On the Broken Shore. James MacManus
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