On the Broken Shore. James MacManus

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 are you always with Julian, Dad? You spoil him, you know you do.’

      ‘No,’ he would say. ‘I love you just as much as Julian, but he’s a boy so maybe I do more stuff with him. It’s a different relationship. But I love you just as much—’

      ‘There you are, you’ve said it. See? I was right.’

      ‘Darling, your mum spent more time with you than she did with Julian. Maybe that’s the way parental love works. But we still love you both the same.’

      ‘Don’t care.’ And she would leave the room, banging the door.

      Then he would bring her back and make her laugh by telling the story of her reaction to Julian’s birth. After a week of observing the new addition to the family, Sam, then aged 4, had asked, ‘When is he going home?’

      ‘He is home, darling,’ said Margot. ‘He’s your brother and I’m his mummy.’ Sam had fled the room in tears.

      After her brother’s death Sam tried to become the family peacemaker, patrolling the frontiers of their marriage, anxiously assessing threats from outside and signs of discord within.

      ‘Dad, why don’t you spend more time with Mum? You’re always working, always at the Institute, always away for weekends.’

      And she would tell Margot to be kinder, nicer, more gentle; bury the anger that burns in your soul, Mum, she wanted to say, but she could never find the right words.

      Yet, against the odds, she held them together.

      Leo heard the front door close and a car engine start. Margot was not one for scenes any more. No slamming doors, no wheel-spin on the drive, no transparent excuses about going to the gym. Their marriage had sunk into that quiet and desperate place where there was no need to alarm the neighbours or traumatise their child. The china-smashing rows broadcast to the whole street had stopped. She did what she wanted to, and went where she wanted to go. And so did he.

      He knew she went drinking with the fishermen. She’d begun to go down to the harbour bars in Falmouth and Chatham after Julian died. She said she liked the company, and that for all their bravado and tribal loyalties the men were so vulnerable, always at the mercy of the weather, regulations, the volatile market price for their products and the fickle nature of their chosen workplace, the North Atlantic. They were just like little boys really.

      She listened sympathetically to their doom-laden stories about a dying industry being slowly throttled by state and federal regulators. She knew all about the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972, brought in to stop the killing of seals but which was now killing their industry – or so the fishermen said. It was the same at home in the UK, she told them. There were more lawnmower repairmen in Britain than fishermen, a statistic she had once heard somewhere.

      Leo looked across Vineyard Sound. A light south-westerly ruffled the waves; the sky was clear, with high cirrus cloud forming mares’ tales four or five miles up. The weather should be good for the field trip tomorrow – his last, unless the appeal was successful.

       THREE

      The twelve students were waiting for Leo on the Institute’s pier. Jacob Sylvester and Rachel Ginsberg helped him carry on board the large tape deck containing the recording equipment. They lowered the machine, which was waterproofed with a crude plastic cover, on to the deck using Leo’s lifejacket to provide some padding.

      He ran through a checklist of names, carefully ticked them off on his clipboard and handed out packed lunches and a bottle of water each. There was nobody missing, and Leo was gratified that for once they seemed pleased to see him. He corrected himself. That was too harsh. On the whole his students were usually pleased to see him. He had had coffee with Gunbrit once in the commissary, and had asked her what the students thought of him. She smiled at the question, looked into her coffee mug and said shyly, ‘They think you are a little unusual.’ He took that as a compliment.

      Most of the students were carrying smart digital cameras with pop-out lenses that took brilliant pictures even at a distance. There were seasick pills for those who wanted them. Only two did.

      On board he assembled the group on the rear of the transom deck and handed out lifejackets and oilskins. This was to be a six-hour trip, he told them, during which they would be listening to, and recording, underwater communications among seal rookeries up the coast, but mainly at Monomoy Island. Lifejackets were to be worn at all times, there was to be no smoking, no use of mobile phones, and in an emergency they were to do exactly what the captain told them. They all knew Buck, who waved from the upper deck.

      Leo had already asked the group to read the Herald profile of Buck, and he wanted them to spend some time with him. ‘If you want to understand the ecology of the sea,’ he had told them, ‘you need to know what’s happening to fish stocks, and for that Buck is your man. Talk to him. Take him out for a coffee, a drink maybe.’

      The weather was fine, as the sky had promised the previous evening. Leo checked his watch and steadied himself as the tug rocked in the swell of a departing Martha’s Vineyard ferry. The big 1,000-ton ferries were still running off-season schedules, and thankfully the whale-watching, dolphin-spotting tourist boats had yet to begin operating. In The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald described Long Island Sound as the busiest body of water in the western hemisphere. He had obviously not seen the stretch of sea between the Cape and Martha’s Vineyard in the summer. But today they would mostly have the sea to themselves.

      The tug nosed out of the harbour, passing Penzance Point to the west with its $10-million homes. That was where Tallulah Bonner lived, and Leo swung his binoculars along the shoreline, searching for her house. But they all looked the same, big two-storey houses with swimming pools, green carpet lawns and white flagpoles, all built after the First World War when the big money came down from Boston to find weekend retreats to rival the Hamptons.

      Several of the students gathered at the stern watching as the boat rode a gentle swell, trailing a white wake of foam and a flock of seagulls that fell upon the small fish churned to the surface. The Antoine headed out to sea for half a mile, and then turned north-east, leaving Martha’s Vineyard to the south-west to run up the coast.

      Leo looked at the horizon. A ridge of grey nimbus was building where the sky met the ocean. He climbed the steps to the top deck where Buck was fiddling with the radio. Buck had been the first person Leo had met outside his colleagues