For some minutes after the explosion, the leader had rolled around near the surface fighting for breath, his mind in confusion. One moment his ultimate lesson was proceeding perfectly as he held the man still so that his consort could learn the joy of killing humans; then the sea had hurled itself into his face, into his lungs, seemingly into his mind. As soon as he was out of danger himself, he started to look for his beautiful sleek black and white mate, calling to her with the strange, sad, haunting tones of their language, but there had been no reply. His sonar had found no shape he could recognise as hers in the quiet water, and even when his eyes found her, he did not recognise the truncated mess of her body at all.
Now, instinctively, he was swimming south. The rest of his pack were down here somewhere he knew, and although his ears, damaged like his lungs by the blast, had not yet cleared sufficiently for him to hear the directional and locational cries they were still periodically giving, he knew where they had been before the final attack had started, and that was close enough. He needed the reassurance of his fellows.
During the next half-hour his strength began to return and his head began to clear. A new sense of purpose began to direct his movements as he swam. Suddenly, with a great wrench which seemed to swing the whole length of his body all at once to the north, he turned and went back.
ii
Ross was the first to get up. As soon as she felt him begin to move, Kate took her arm from round his shoulders and let him stand on his own. Her heart was thudding uncomfortably, not only at the horror of Job’s death but also in fear at how it might affect her man. She looked past Colin’s legs to Simon. He dropped the rope he was holding and turned.
“Christ, Colin, I . . .” But there was nothing he could say.
Ross gave his strange lop-sided shrug, turned and walked away towards the camp. Fifteen strides of his long legs took him to the net, five more to the fire tray on the far side of the camp. Beyond him stretched a half-circle of ice ten strides in radius. Then the grey ocean began. Thoughtlessly holding his right hand in the warmth over the smouldering fire, Colin studied the hazy grey horizon. He didn’t know what to do or say. He didn’t even have any feelings to analyse, nothing inside him at all to advise him whether to weep or sing. Jesus, he thought, oh Jesus. There was nothing he could do; nothing left to be done; nothing left. He closed his eyes and Job’s face was there.
Pain flared up his arm, and he took his hand out of the fire. The shock of the burn, however, proved therapeutic and he straightened, jerked a little out of the grief. He thrust his burning glove into the pocket of his anorak and turned. Kate was just behind him, picking her way carefully over the restless jaws of the crack under the net. She sniffed, crinkling her nose.
“Something’s burning.”
“My glove. My hand. It’s all right.”
“You might have burned yourself badly. Let’s have a look at it.”
“Oh no. Look what happened the last time you said anything like that. My mother warned me against girls like you.”
She smiled automatically. Then replied, trying to keep it light, “That’s funny, my mother told me about men like you.” Suddenly she remembered her mother – for the first time in many years without a twinge of regret – not as a faded face in the huge bed, but as a humorous tough-minded beauty, taking her young daughter by the hand and saying, “You’ll know him when you see him, Kate, and when you see him . . .”
“She told me to grab hold and never let go.” Perhaps she should have blushed, being so brazen. A week ago she probably would have done so.
“Did she now? What a wise old lady. The doctor never talked of her.”
Thinking about her father didn’t hurt too much either. “She’s been dead for nearly ten years.”
“I’ll have to introduce you to mine, then. It sounds as though they would have got along.”
“I didn’t know you had a mother!” She had never thought of Colin as having any family. Right from the beginning he seemed to exist on his own, like a phenomenon of nature.
“Oh yes. And a father too. It’s not unusual, you know.”
“No. I know. I mean I never thought of you as having a family.”
“Oh yes. No brothers or sisters, but cousins and cousins’ children. I’m an adopted uncle about twenty times over.”
Glad to have got him talking, she sat down beside the fire-tray and scooped up some ice to make coffee. “Coffee, Simon?”
“Yes.” From the edge of the ice.
“Tell me about your parents,” she invited. “From what Job told me, I’d thought of you as just living all the time in Washington all on your own, never having anyone . . .”
“Oh no. Nothing like that. I don’t even live in Washington. I’m a Scot. I was raised in the Highlands, just north of Inverness, where my parents still live. Father was a gillie – a gamekeeper – on an estate up there, but he’s retired now.”
“Do you see them often?”
“Oh, I go back for Christmas, Hogmanay. I’m useful for the First Foot, you see, being tall and dark.”
“God, yes. I can just see you looming out of the night armed with coal, demanding a dram.”
“Aye, well.” Suddenly, for no apparent reason, his English accent wavered and the ghost of a broad Highland Scots moved in his words. A shiver went up Kate’s spine again, as had happened when she first heard his deep bass voice.
“You said you don’t live in Washington.”
“That’s right. I work there. Squat there . . .”
“Where do you live then?”
“In London.”
“You live in London?” Her voice betrayed her surprise. She had expected him to say he lived somewhere in the United States.
“That’s right. I commute from London to Washington on a, well, roughly a monthly basis.”
“Why do you live in London?”
“Because I like it.”
“You like living in London? But you were brought up in the mountains, and you spend a good deal of your working life in wildernesses like this! It doesn’t make sense.”
“Yes it does. You just don’t know enough about me. You see, I love the theatre, cinema, all that; I can’t get enough of it. It started at school, I suppose, in Edinburgh. I mean, I’d grown up in the wilds. I knew a fair amount about red deer, grouse, salmon, trout, and suddenly there I was in Edinburgh and it was all totally different. It . . . I don’t know . . . it caught me, somehow. And then there was Oxford, of course.”
At that moment the water boiled. Simon came over for his coffee, but he didn’t stay long; he just cast a speculative look at the two of them from under lowered eyebrows and then drifted away again, the steaming mug cupped between his mittened hands.
The time slipped by unnoticed as Kate worked quietly and with surprising success at keeping Colin’s mind on the distant past, eliciting a surprising number of stories about his undergraduate days at Oxford.
But then the stories began to take a darker turn as they jumped forward into the more recent past. Again, an unsuspected side to him began to emerge as he told of drowning his sorrows in London, Paris, Rome; carrying his nebulous but terribly weighty sense of guilt everywhere with him. The names of several women appeared and disappeared in his disjointed narrative and she found herself wondering what they were like – Marie-France, Laura, Isabella, the others . . .
“COLIN!”
Quick came tearing past the latrine-cum-supply tent, stumbling over the tent-pegs, sliding on the ice. His face was white.
“Colin. It’s back. It’s out there now!”
Ross looked up. As though a switch had been thrown deep inside him, the growing love he had felt for Kate turned to a cold, terrible hatred. Abruptly he saw Job again, trapped against that immense chest, hemmed in by the white-sided flippers. “Right,” he said. “Let’s get the bastard.”