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 his school friends and instead spending every Saturday free-diving 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.