Free Silver Bay by Jojo Moyes Page A

for those whalechasers if it had harpooned itself and swum to the processing plant.
    They’re protected now, of course, what remains of them. But I remember, as a girl, seeing one towed into the bay by two small boats. It seemed wrong to me, even then, as I watched the huge, swollen belly hauled inelegantly on to the shore, the blank eye gazing balefully up to the heavens as if despairing at man’s inhumanity. I would catch just about anything – even as a little girl, my father would boast, I could hook, land and gut with an efficiency that might have been construed as heartless – but the sight of that southern right made me cry.
    Here on the east coast, there hadn’t been the whaling madness that we’d heard of out west. Here, fewer whales were taken before the end of the war – except in our little corner. Perhaps because the whales came so close that you could see them from dry land, this bay became a base for whalechasers. (Our whale-watching crews have inherited their nickname.) When I was a girl, they had killed them from small boats. It seemed like a fair fight, and it kept the catch down. But then they got greedy.
    Between 1950 and 1962 some 12,500 humpbacks were killed and processed at stations like Norfolk Island and Moreton Island. Whale oil and meat made people rich, and the whalechasers used more and more sophisticated weaponry to increase their catch. The ships became bigger and faster, and the haul a plentiful, grim harvest. By the time humpback whaling was banned in Australian waters, they were using sonars, guns and cannon-launched harpoons – the equipment of war, my father said, in disgust.
    And, of course, they killed too many. They swept those oceans until there was near none left of the humpbacks and put themselves out of business in the process. One by one the whaling operations closed, the processing plants shut down or converted to seafood processing. The area sank back slowly into shabby solitude, and most of us were relieved. My father, who had loved the romanticism of early whaling, back when it was about man versus whale rather than whale versus penthrite-charge grenade, bought Silver Bay’s own whale-processing plant, and turned it into the museum. Nowadays the scientists reckon there might be fewer than two thousand humpbacks come past us on their annual migration, and some say the numbers will never recover.
    I tell this story to the crews, occasionally, when they talk about getting a bigger fleet, or trying to up their passenger numbers, of whale-watching as the tourist attraction of the future, the way to rejuvenate Silver Bay.
    There’s a lesson in there for us all. But I’m darned if anyone’s listening.
    ‘Good afternoon.’
    ‘Afternoon?’ Michael Dormer hovered in the doorway, wearing the dazed expression of someone whose body clock was insisting he was in the wrong hemisphere.
    ‘I knocked earlier and left a cup of coffee outside your room, but when I found it stone cold an hour later I figured I’d let you sleep.’ He looked like he wasn’t taking in what I was saying. I gave him a minute, and motioned to him to sit at the kitchen table. I don’t normally let people sit in the kitchen, but I’d just finished preparing the dining room for that evening. I placed a plate and a knife in front of him. ‘They say it usually takes a week to sleep through properly. Did you wake up much?’
    He rubbed at his hair. He was unshaven, and wearing a shirt and casual trousers – still smarter than we were used to in Silver Bay, but a good step forward from the formal get-up he’d arrived in.
    ‘Only once.’ He smiled, a little ruefully. ‘But that was for about three hours.’
    I laughed, and poured him a coffee. He had a good face, Mr Michael Dormer, the kind that suggested a little self-knowledge, an attribute I find in short supply in many of my guests. ‘Like some breakfast? I’m happy to fix you something.’
    ‘At a quarter to one?’ He glanced at the