‘I didn’t beg you.’
‘Of course not: you just rang me every day for a week pleading.’
‘It was a good story. It was picked up a lot.’
‘I know. I did all the interviews, remember?’
‘Yeah. Well, I hear that some people are not best pleased.’
‘Some people never are.’
‘Your people, Leo.’
‘Like who?’
Sandy took a gulp of his white wine. ‘This is just what I hear. There are people in Boston and here on the Cape who think you brought the Institute into disrepute.’
‘Oh, come on,’ said Leo. ‘That seal died years ago. He picked up a few English phrases and I used that as a metaphor for how useless we are at understanding these animals. I mean, if one seal can learn English, how do we know there isn’t a whole ensemble of them out there playing Hamlet three hundred feet below the waves every night?’
‘Very funny,’ said Sandy. ‘But they didn’t get the joke. If you’d left it like that, then OK. But it’s all the other stuff you threw in: calling the science establishment arrogant, all-knowing, all-powerful – that sort of thing. And then there was all that conspiracy stuff about seal culls and fish stocks.’
‘So what?’
‘So what? They don’t like it, that’s so what. The way they see it, a seal that can talk a few words of English is just a joke. What isn’t a joke is you telling the world that hundreds of millions of dollars of investment in marine research isn’t being spent properly, that it isn’t being used to find out the big things we don’t know. I mean, that doesn’t sit well with the management. It’s not good for business.’
‘You sound like the chief executive.’
Sandy drank deeply, and then put his almost empty glass on the table.
‘Maybe she’s got a point. I’m just trying to tell you what they’re saying out there. Don’t shoot the messenger. You want another drink?’
‘No thanks. How do you know about this?’
Sandy turned in his chair to signal for another drink. He’s playing for time, thought Kemp.
‘We got a call asking for the notes of the interview.’
‘From?
‘Bonner’s office.’
‘When?’
‘Last week.’
‘And you didn’t tell me?’
‘I was told not to. Sorry.’
‘I thought journos were supposed to protect their sources.’
‘Everyone knew it was you – your name was on the piece.’
‘That’s not what I meant. You could have warned me. Thanks a lot.’
Leo stood up, drained his glass and looked down at the unhappy face of his friend. He put a hand on Sandy’s shoulder and squeezed it slightly.
‘Don’t worry. I’ll deal with it. I’ve got a field trip tomorrow. Let’s have a real drink tomorrow night.’
Sandy nodded. ‘How’s the book going by the way?’
Leo shook his head. The Full and Final Circle of Evolution: Man’s Return to the Sea was long overdue at the publishers, but they weren’t exactly biting his hand off for it.
‘Don’t ask,’ he said and walked out, blinking in the bright sunlight.
So that was the letter Margot had mentioned. He should have known Hoover would get him into trouble. The famous talking seal had been dead for twenty-three years, and his story had been all but forgotten until Kemp had reignited interest in the phenomenon and the controversy around it.
He used Hoover in his off-campus sessions with the students. He would take them to the aquarium café in Coldharbor, buy them all coffee and promise to answer any question they chose. One question always came up. How do you know seals are so intelligent; how can you be sure they really communicate with each other; animal noises are just animal noises, aren’t they?
So he would tell them the story of Hoover, a seal that not only spoke English but did so in a Maine accent: ‘Good morning,’ ‘How are ya?’ ‘Whaddya doing?’ ‘Gedd over here,’ and so forth were standard greetings to visitors to the Boston aquarium where Hoover lived most of his adult life.
An orphaned pup, Hoover had been picked up shortly after birth by a Maine fisherman. He had been taken home, put in the bathtub and bought up as the family pet. He was given the name Hoover because of the huge quantity of fish he ate. Even for a fisherman, the expense of feeding a seal soon became too much, and Hoover was given to the New England Aquarium in Boston. And that was where he started talking to anyone who cared to listen.
The jaw structure and vocal cords of a seal are very much like those of a human, Leo explained to his students. The scientific explanation for what Hoover could do was clear. He had simply heard the fisherman and his family talking, and had learnt to mimic their speech. It was still a pretty remarkable achievement for a seal. Hoover remained the only non-human mammal ever to vocalise in this way. The media loved him, and he became the subject of many newspaper and magazine articles, and appeared on TV and radio shows. But marine scientists did not appreciate Hoover. To them he was just a freak, a distraction. When Hoover died in 1985, he was paid the tribute of an obituary in the Boston Globe.
And then, years later, when Hoover had been almost forgotten, along came Leo Kemp, with his argument that to dismiss a talking seal as a freak of nature demonstrated exactly the kind of arrogance that Galileo had encountered when he argued that the sun did not revolve around the earth. That may have been stretching it a bit, but the marine science establishment got the point, and they hated him for making it. Leo didn’t mind. The important thing was that some of his students got the point too. An animal that can learn to mimic English is a highly intelligent creature.
That wasn’t good enough for Jacob Sylvester and Rachel Ginsberg, who seemed to have become his girlfriend. They were regulars at the Q. and A. sessions, along with a quiet red-haired Brit, Duncan Dudman, who spoke with a deep West Country accent, which the American students could not get enough of. It came from Somerset, where the cider apples grow, he explained.
‘A seal that can talk is just serendipity,’ said Sylvester, straight from the shoulder as usual. ‘Parrots can talk. Doesn’t prove they’re intelligent. I can’t see you proved your point, sir.’
Leo rolled out the heavy artillery.
‘Consider these facts,’ he said, looking at Sylvester, ‘and then tell me how you rate the intelligence of a seal. There are two types of killer whale – those that feed only on salmon, and those that seek out seals, dolphins and other whales. The behaviour of these two separate populations of killer whales is so different that they are essentially different species. But they all look exactly alike to the untrained eye – black, with a white belly patch extending up the flanks, a white patch behind the eyes and another behind the dorsal fin. Only small variations in the skin patterns and the shape of the dorsal fin distinguish the two varieties of orca.
‘So here is the question: If the difference between the two species of orca is that minute, how is it that seals can differentiate between a deadly foe and its harmless cousin? How do the seals know that there are killer whales within threateningly close range of their pod? A seal’s whiskers are like underwater radar, and can pick up minute vibrations or changes of water pressure, converting those signals into data about the presence of food or foe, or a sudden change in the weather.
‘Could it be that the seals’ acute hearing or its radar whiskers can pick up the whales’ own echo-locating communications and decode them?
‘Either