NINE

The Antoine left the next day at 8 a.m. under a silver-grey sky and with the barometer showing fair weather.

Buck and Margot did not speak once on the three-hour journey. Margot hunched up behind her dark glasses staring at the infinite waves ahead while Buck busied himself as usual with the radio and his charts; displacement activity, Margot said to herself. He doesn’t need a chart for this trip. He just doesn’t want to talk to me.

The tug slipped and rolled through a slight swell at just under its maximum speed of fifteen knots. To save fuel Buck should have been going more slowly, but he was fed up and wanted to get the whole thing over. He never should have got involved, never should have said yes. It wasn’t even as if he was being paid for it. OK, she offered, but she knew he wouldn’t take it.

He consoled himself with a stronger wozza than usual. The rum blunted his irritation. A lonely, lost woman looking for a dead man who wasn’t going to be there. It was a shame, and he should be glad to be able to help someone in such distress.

He was about to point out the various sea birds that had attached themselves to the bubbling wake, but one look at the hunched figure in the cabin told him it would be a waste of time.

Just get me to this island, Margot was thinking. Let me have one good look around, and that’s it, I’m out of here, out of the Cape, gone.

They reached the island at 11 a.m., and went through the same procedure as before. He’d be back on the next tide, at three. This time she was better prepared, with a strong waterproof coat, a torch and a whistle in her backpack. She let Buck pour a little rum into the Thermos. ‘Good for the soul,’ he said.

‘And the fog? What do you think?’

They were almost the first words she had spoken to him that day.

‘Don’t know. Doubt it, though.’ He sniffed loudly. ‘Doesn’t smell like fog to me, not cold enough.’

Margot had worked out her plan for the day. She would walk for two hours. That would take her past the seal beach she had seen and on to other larger beaches further along the island. She must have seen several thousand seals the day before yesterday, but that was only a fraction of the 250,000 supposedly on the island.

For an island that rises only thirty feet above sea level at it highest point and is only half a mile wide, Atlantic does not give itself easily to a visitor. Hidden hollows screened by gorse concealed small pools, the freshwater ponds the horses drank from, Margot guessed. Deep crevasses opened into gullies choked with wildflowers and brambles. The land rose and fell like a rumpled rug, much more so than was apparent from the sea. The changing contours and a succession of small ridges meant she rarely had a clear view to the end of the island. Distances were hard to calculate. As she walked she kept an eye out for the horses, still hoping to see those creatures of the fog under more normal circumstances.

She passed the beach where she had seen so many thousands of seals two days before. The sand was empty. There was not a seal in sight.

She stopped for lunch, sitting on her waterproof, eating tuna and sweetcorn sandwiches, swigging coffee straight from the Thermos and remembering how her father had insisted on taking a small primus stove on their family picnics to the beach at St Andrews. He could never be persuaded to take a Thermos, claiming that the tea tasted better when brewed on the spot. But actually the family knew he just loved messing around with the little stove and watching the kettle slowly come to the boil.

After walking for half an hour, Margot saw, half a mile away on the Atlantic side of the island, a deep bay between two headlands with a broad crescent-shaped beach covered in what looked like black sand. As she approached she saw that the dark sand was in fact seals, a huge rookery covering the entire beach, tens and tens of thousands of them, many more than she had seen on her previous visit. Harbour and grey, as before. She walked quietly and slowly, working her way to a vantage point on one of the small headlands. She knew a seal rookery this size would have lookouts, but she could see none. Across the far side of the bay she could see some of the horses grazing, heads down, small, wiry animals, peaceful enough now.

The ground was damp but she decided to crawl the last 100 yards to a point on the slope below the headland leading to the beach. As she struggled through the heather and grass, she cursed herself for an act of stupid, emotional madness, a purely selfish desire to assuage grief, a melodramatic gesture to deep freeze the tangled emotions of misery and loss that she could not shed.

Grief, she thought. Grief for Leo? She lost Leo long ago. So what was she doing, crawling through the undergrowth on an island in the middle of the Atlantic just to peer at a million seals?

She stopped, fished the binoculars out of her backpack and leant forward on her elbows to scan the rookery.

As she moved the binoculars from one face to the next, she found the seals all looked exactly the same. She could tell the difference between young and old. She knew a harbour seal from a grey, and she could describe a harp seal in detail, but after twenty minutes working through half a mile of seals she found herself looking at one identikit whiskered face after another. Apart from the sheer numbers, this was very much a repeat of the previous fruitless exercise. And the fast-growing seal cubs really did look identical. How, Margot wondered, does a mother seal on the Arctic ice sheet recognise its pup among 5,000 others when returning with food from a hunt?

She could see the lookouts now. There were several on either headland and a few positioned among the gorse at the edge of the beach. They were older males, their coats scarred from long-ago battles, watching for predators. The wind was freshening and the sea growing choppier, turning wave tops into white horses that rolled in towards the beach. She spent another half an hour moving her binoculars from face to face, then rolled on to her back, cushioned her head on her waterproof and snoozed in the sun.

When she woke her face was hot, and probably burnt by the sun. She checked her watch: 2.30, time to go. She got to her feet and took one last look at the rookery.

And then she saw him.

With her own eyes she saw him.

He was partially concealed from view by the seals around him. Disbelief turned to shock. Lightheaded and giddy, she knelt down in the grass and fumbled for her binoculars.

He was burnt dark brown by the sun, his hair was matted and he had a thick beard. He was lying on his side, resting on one elbow, doing nothing, like the thousands of seals on the beach. He seemed naked, although it was hard to tell in the throng of seals; his eyes were half closed against the sun, and like the creatures around him he appeared asleep. She held the binoculars on him, twisting the lenses to focus more clearly. He was thin, almost emaciated, and there seemed to be cuts, some fresh, some healed, on his deeply sunburnt torso.

Still kneeling, she put the glasses aside and looked at him with her naked eyes. It was definitely him. She looked out to sea to make sure she wasn’t dreaming, and then back again. Yes and yes. He was there. This was not an apparition, not a spectre conjured up by a demented widow’s imagination, but the living and very obviously breathing person of her husband, the late Leo Kemp, now not so late, now alive among many thousands of seals.

She felt a surge of elation as she crawled forward, confirmation that buried deep in her subconscious had been the hope, or maybe the fear, that Leo had survived after all.

Margot was twenty yards from the outer line of seals and about seventy-five yards from Leo when she could bear it no longer. She stood up abruptly and shouted his name again and again. There was a ripple throughout the rookery as thousands of seals shifted to identify the source of the noise and assess the danger. Leo’s head turned. For a second their gazes locked, his deep-set eyes holding hers, and then he looked away, seemingly uninterested. Then he turned again to look at her, his mind flipping through the photo album in his head. He knew who she was. Margot, the mother of Julian and Sam. She had stepped out of that compartment in his mind where he had carefully placed her and the children. She was no longer that photograph in the book.

The seals began to flop urgently towards the water, a mass of moving animals, folds of fat rippling along their shiny bodies as they levered themselves forward with their front flippers, using their strong claws to get traction on the sand.

Margot started to run towards the throng, her eyes fixed on Leo. She threw off her backpack and ran skipping and jumping over the grass, heather and gorse, shouting his name, waving her arms.

He had got to his haunches and was looking at her, transfixed, as the beach and the rocks around him emptied of seals. She opened her arms as she ran, shouting, screaming his name.

Suddenly he moved in a low stooping run towards the water. Around him the seals were splashing into the sea and sliding in from the rocky outcrops at either end of the beach, their bodies, so sluggish on land, moving with balletic grace once they were in the water. Now Leo was in the sea with them. A flurry of spray, a splash of brown legs and he was gone, swimming strongly away from the shore, moving with ease through the waves.

Margot reached the water’s edge and shouted after him: ‘Sam loves you, she needs you. Come back!’

Leo turned in the water, his dark, shaggy head almost merging with the seals around and beyond him. The whole rookery was now in the water and heading out to sea. Leo broke away from the main body and swam parallel with the shore, twenty yards out. Margot ran to the first of the rocks, scrambled up it, and jumped and slithered from one to another to keep up with him.

She missed her footing and slipped, sliding down a sharply inclining slab of rock feet first into the sea, hands scrabbling at the seaweed in an attempt to stop going all the way in. Her shins were skinned and she was winded. She whimpered with pain as she dragged herself out of the water, heaving herself half upright and turning to look seaward. She was crying, tears running down her face. And then she began screaming, long, wordless screams of helpless rage.

After all this, he was leaving her again.

She never knew why, what instinct or memory had arisen within him, but Leo turned and began to swim towards her.

She shouted again: ‘Sam needs you! Come back!’

Now the images were becoming clearer in his head. Sam, mouth full of pizza, face full of smiles, always teasing him for being so serious. ‘If I was a seal, Dad, do you think you’d talk to me more?’ Sam on the beach doing cartwheels into the sea, collapsing in the waves with a shriek; Sam with her hours of homework, head down over the kitchen table, asking endless questions: ‘Dad, what exactly is a logarithm?’

Leo emerged from the water and stood upright, a lean, brown, naked figure with scars and scratches on his legs and upper body. He took long strides up the sloping rock towards her. When he reached her side he bent down and helped her up.

He stank. His whole body exuded the smell of raw, rotten fish. She recoiled involuntarily, putting a hand to her mouth and nose, and then flung herself at him, holding him as tight as she could. His arms remained fixed at his side, pinioned by her embrace. He wriggled free, and gently held her away from him.

‘Come home,’ she said looking into his unknowing, dark brown eyes sunk deep into their sockets.

Leo said nothing, but let her take him by the hand.

The Antoine docked at Coldharbor at six o’clock that evening. Nothing in his near seventy years at sea had prepared Buck for the moment when Margot led Leo up the gangplank. In shock he had become an automaton, backing the boat away from the small pier and turning her to head back to the Cape. The moment the Antoine was on course he had tried to talk to Leo. His friend’s hollow eyes, the thousand-yard stare and the mute incomprehension of the world around him made communication impossible. It was as if Leo had stepped out of his nightmares and into his life, thought Buck.

Margot had begged Buck not to radio the news to the coastguard, and he had agreed. God knows what the coastguard would have said. He found it hard enough to come to terms with Leo’s return after being missing at sea for six weeks and kept turning to look at the figure hunched in a blanket at the back of the cabin. It was Leo all right. At least, Buck thought, he wouldn’t be carrying the guilt of his friend’s death to his grave.

There was no one around to watch the Antoine nose into its mooring place at the Coldharbor pier and tie up that evening. Buck let down the boarding plank and watched as Leo emerged from the upper deck and climbed down the steps. He was shoeless and wearing Buck’s sea jacket and a faded pair of beach shorts. An old baseball cap was jammed down over his matted hair. Buck put out a hand, and Leo took it to steady himself as he stepped ashore. The two men looked at each other wordlessly. Buck turned to Margot to say something, but she tapped a finger against her lips and shook her head. He pulled her aside anyway.

‘You should take him to hospital. And you need to tell the coastguard.’

‘He’s coming home, and I’m telling no one till I get him there. Do me one last big favour, Buck. This is the last time I’ll ask anything of you. Don’t say a word just yet. I want to get him back home, and then we’ll see.’

Buck grunted.

Leo walked to the Saab with an awkward, drunken gait. Buck waved as Margot drove off, and then crossed the road to the Dark Side. There was no more appropriate place to have a drink, a lot of drink, that night.

The story of Leo Kemp’s survival after being missing for almost six weeks made headlines around the world. Sandy had broken the story on the Herald’s website, and had persuaded the editor to follow up with a special edition of the paper, which sold out across the Cape the following morning.

He had gone reluctantly to the Kemps’ house the previous night, fearing that Margot had been drinking again. Her cryptic message had said: ‘He’s back, and I want you to handle the story.’

As he entered the house, Sandy smelt Leo before he saw him. The sight of his friend in a dressing gown, looking like the old man of the sea, was shocking. Leo half raised his hand, and Sandy noticed the long, curling fingernails. But it was the cloying, oily smell of old fish that confirmed where he had been for the past few weeks. Margot had warned him that Leo had yet to say anything, not one word. He refused to talk, shaking his head when Margot pleaded with him for an explanation of where he had been and what he had been doing.

They looked at each other, and Sandy sat down. What do you say to a friend who has come back from the dead, and who sits there looking at you mute and apparently unconcerned about what has happened to him?

‘You need a shave,’ Sandy said. Leo smiled and nodded.

With a presence of mind for which he would later be profoundly grateful, Sandy borrowed Margot’s small digital camera and took a quick couple of snaps of Leo before he was led away uncomplainingly to have a shower and what proved a long and difficult shave. He even allowed Margot to cut his hair.

Sandy went into the kitchen, poured himself a glass of white wine and sat down to work on the intro to his piece. He was never going to get a better story than this. Nobody was ever going to get a better story than this.

Six weeks after he was swept overboard in a sudden storm and presumed drowned, the well-known marine scientist Leo Kemp has been found alive and well on a remote island in the Atlantic.

When Leo emerged he did so as the old Leo, beardless, his hair cut, nails trimmed and a shy look of surprise on his face. The dank fish smell lingered on over the soap and aftershave, but the old man of the sea had gone.

He sat with Sandy, drinking coffee and listening politely to the repeated questions. But he didn’t speak a word, merely shook his head and smiled. Sandy read him the opening paragraph of his story and looked at him for some reaction. There was none.

‘Show us at least that you can make a noise,’ he said. ‘Make a sound.’

But Leo just shook his head, hunched his shoulders and sank back into himself.

The flashlight photograph of Kemp’s dark, bearded face, his deep-set eyes gazing out from beneath a mass of tangled hair, was the image that went round the world. Sandy’s story had gone with it, tagged ‘world exclusive’. The photograph was to make him rich, a quick shot with a cheap borrowed camera of a man whose survival was widely proclaimed as miraculous. But there were no interviews, not so much as a quote, from the man at the centre of what quickly became a medical mystery story.

To Margot’s relief Sam had been out with friends when she had brought Leo home that night. She could think of no better way of preparing her daughter for the biggest and best surprise of her life than by leaving a voice message on her cell phone telling her exactly that. So when Sam came bounding through the door she knew her father had come home, and accepted that fact with unquestioning joy.

‘I knew you’d come back! I knew you’d come back!’ was all she could say. In the teenage world where dreams merge with video games and TV sitcoms everything becomes possible, Margot reflected. She on the other hand had needed several glasses of wine when she had got Leo home even to begin to understand what had happened.

Over the next two days Sam attached herself to her father like a koala bear to a branch, hugging him constantly, sitting on his lap whenever she could, standing beside his chair as he read the papers and drank endless cups of coffee.

The doctors gave Leo extensive check-ups and reported that his physical health was fine, except for a dramatic weight loss of several stone. Blood tests were clear, and the function of the vital organs – heart, lungs, liver and kidneys – was excellent for a man in his early forties. But they told Margot that he was suffering from severe PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, and should on no account be questioned about his ordeal. She was warned that he would exhibit the classic symptoms of someone recovering from the trauma of a near-death experience: sudden and repeated night waking, panic attacks and flashbacks.

‘And the treatment?’ she asked.

No drugs could be prescribed. PTSD was usually treated by intensive one-to-one psychotherapy followed by group therapy sessions.

So that they could avoid the scrum of journalists camped outside the house the Institute arranged for the Kemps to move into accommodation within the Coldharbor campus, which could be closed off to outsiders. A visitors’ apartment was made available with two bedrooms, a large open-plan kitchen-lounge area and a deck overlooking the sound.

Sam and her father spent their days on the deck playing Scrabble, reading and watching the boat traffic on the sound between Coldharbor and Martha’s Vineyard. She hoped to awaken his memories by getting him to look at the fishing and tourist boats ploughing up and down. Leo happily spent hours looking at the boats on the water through binoculars. He smiled and hugged his daughter a lot, but still said nothing.

‘Ordeal?’ snorted Margot as she sat down with Jennifer at a hastily arranged WALL lunch. ‘I don’t think it was an ordeal. I think the whole thing was a mind trip, something he did subconsciously to deal with his dismissal. Don’t tell me he got washed off that boat by accident. I’m sure Buck doesn’t think so either.’

She and Jennifer were meeting as usual at the Quarterdeck, a rare occasion, as Jennifer said, on which the WALL club had actually managed a lunch.

‘Trouble is,’ Margot continued, ‘I say that and immediately feel guilty. So it’s double jeopardy. I have a husband who won’t talk to me about his near-death experience, but who guilt-trips me when I wonder what was really going on in his head before he went off that boat. I can’t win; I get it coming and going. I think I’m the one who’s going through an ordeal.’

Jennifer suggested they share a bottle of wine, as it was her day off, but Margot insisted that they start with a kir, a glass of decent white with a splash of cassis which adds an alcoholic kick and turns the drink light pink. When drunk on an empty stomach a kir is a mood-altering experience that greatly enhances the meal that follows. At least that was Margot’s theory.

Jennifer relaxed as she listened to her friend pour out her troubles. Margot was beginning to think that the man she had rescued was an impostor. She felt the real Leo was still out there with the seals. Her husband had become a stranger, someone who was perfectly pleasant but who remained mute, refusing all entreaties to discuss the one topic she and Sam and the rest of the world wanted to talk about. He spent his days reading, watching TV and drinking coffee. He seemed to regard the extensive press coverage about his reappearance as something that was happening to someone else.

Jennifer repeated what she had heard from the doctors at the Institute and the specialist who had come down from Boston. Post-traumatic stress can take many forms, and Leo was actually suffering from a relatively benign version. He was in denial about what had happened to him, and could not come to terms with it. That was quite normal.

‘I don’t do normal any more,’ said Margot. ‘Life isn’t normal. Even Leo’s symptoms aren’t normal. He’s supposed to suffer from screaming panic attacks at night, but he sleeps like a baby. There haven’t been any signs of the flashbacks the doctors talked about. He just sits on the deck all day with Sam and says nothing.’

‘Exactly,’ said Jenny. ‘He’s internalising his emotions, refusing to communicate and rejecting the reality of what he’s been through. A classic case of post-traumatic stress disorder.’

‘You know what my problem is?’ Margot said. ‘I think I was happier when I thought he was dead. I’m not sure I can cope with him coming back like this. Isn’t that awful?’

She began to cry, brushing the tears away with the back of her hand and then dabbing at her eyes with a napkin as the waitress brought their coffee.

Jennifer took Margot’s hand in hers. ‘As both your doctor and your friend, I’m telling you it’s perfectly normal to feel like that. Leo is suffering a form of nervous breakdown, and you need to come to terms with that, just as you need to recognise that you’ve been deeply traumatised as well. Remember, you both have Sam, so hold her in your head and your heart, and work this out for her.’

Margot laughed. ‘You should take a drink more often, doctor,’ she said, fishing out a handkerchief and blowing her nose loudly.

In a slow news period the speculation about what had actually happened to the missing scientist filled feature pages and news websites, and inspired bloggers around the world.

The media collectively threw cold water on the assumption that Leo Kemp, the marine biologist who had passionately defended seals’ cause against the fishing lobby, had gone overboard accidentally. All the evidence suggested that he had staged his disappearance as cover for a mission of which his Institute had disapproved. He had spent weeks on the ultimate research trip, living rough among the seal colonies of Cape Cod and Nantucket. The mission had lasted longer than planned; Leo had had a nervous breakdown in the wild, and had been rescued against all the odds by a faithful wife long after the rest of the world had assumed him dead. And now he was on the road to recovery.

This made good copy, but except for the nervous breakdown it was all nonsense, as Sandy Rowan tried to explain. But due to Kemp’s refusal to talk, there were very few verifiable facts. So the questions and the theories multiplied. No one could explain how Kemp had made the fifteen-mile journey across the sea to Atlantic Island. And how had he survived in the open for so long? Had he really been able to sustain himself on a diet foraged from the seashore? On the latter point the journalists and experts were on safe ground. Nutritionists agreed that it was perfectly possible to live on a diet of seaweed, shellfish and birds’ eggs for months, provided there was access to fresh water.

When this question was discussed at the Herald’s daily conference, the editor suddenly remembered the trainee reporter who had been sent to try to survive on the beaches south of Provincetown. It had been his idea, and a very good one it was too. Readers loved reality journalism like that. So where was Lewis Chadwick? The editor threw the question out, and looked around to find his executives apparently engrossed in the agenda sheet.

There was a general silence. Sandy Rowan coughed and looked a little embarrassed. Apparently, he said, Lewis Chadwick had been seen in a McDonald’s in Provincetown having a Big Mac and fries the day after he had been dropped off on the shoreline. When finally tracked down to his parents’ home he explained that he had been told to use his initiative and he had done just that. Furthermore, he did not think that freezing to death on a Cape beach and trying to eat rock mussels for breakfast was any way to become a journalist. So he had resigned as a trainee. He had also said that his mother had written a sharp letter to the owner of the Herald complaining about the treatment of her son.

‘Brilliant. Anything else?’ asked the editor irritably.

‘Yes. He’s going to enrol in drama school and become an actor, apparently.’

The case of Lewis Chadwick did not prevent the Herald from concluding that the experts were right. Providing Leo had found access to water and had taken cover in the long grass of the dunes during the chill nights, there was no reason why he could not have survived for the six weeks he had been missing.

Denied access to any member of the Kemp family, and with the Coldharbor Institute refusing to comment, the international media turned gratefully to Sandy Rowan for interviews and background. He worked out that he had given over a hundred radio, television and press interviews in the week after Kemp had returned. He had tried to see his old friend again, but Margot and the Institute were adamant. Leo was seeing no one until he had recovered sufficiently to begin talking about his experiences to his doctors or within the family circle.

The story was given a further twist when the correspondent of a British television news channel revisited all the statements about Leo’s ability to survive for six weeks on the Cape foreshore, and produced a new set of medical experts who disputed the earlier conclusions. No one, they said, could survive without assistance or supplies for such a length of time, even in the summer. The television report included an interview with Lewis Chadwick, in which the former trainee reporter claimed to have been on the edge of collapse after only a day scouring remote beaches for food and water. Chadwick said that survival would be impossible in such circumstances, and added that he would be suing his former employers for placing him in such jeopardy. His performance convinced Sandy that he had been right to choose an acting career.

The British reporter concluded with considerable fanfare that the entire disappearance had been staged by Mr Kemp in order to draw attention to his crusade about the culling of seals and the overfishing on the Stellwagen Bank. He had been secretly supplied with provisions by ‘friends’ – for legal reasons the programme was careful to exempt Margot from collusion in the conspiracy – and had been conveniently found alive and well when his publicity aims had been achieved.

Sandy put out a statement from the Kemp family denouncing the story as media fabrication and threatening legal action. In any case, the caravan of journalists camped out around the Cape had moved on. Leo Kemp’s inability to give any indication of what had happened to him – or his wilful refusal to do so, no one could work out which – and the family’s firm ‘No comment’ to all questions left them with little else to do but repeat themselves. Gradually, other stories drew them away.