Dark Echo

by F. G. Cottam

  It was a truth as plain as it was devastating.

  Years later, I heard that my father had subsequently given Winston Cory a job. More accurately, he had given him the sinecure that enabled Cory to train properly when he stepped up to international competition as reigning English champion. He held this fictitious position for a couple of years, apparently. He put the fact on record, thanking my father publicly, in a profile published in The Times when he came back from the Olympic Games with the silver medal he won there. But this isn’t a story about pugilism. It isn’t a story about Winston Cory, who broke my nose in the years before he turned professional and made his name and his not inconsiderable fortune out of it. It’s a story about a boat, the man who came to acquire it and his son. It’s about other things, too, other considerations and repercussions. But even at the time of writing this, I’m rather less sure about precisely what they might turn out to be. So let’s just call it the story of a boat and the man for whom that boat became an obsession.

  I think my father’s retirement came as a surprise to everyone except himself. When I really consider it, I think it may have come as a surprise even to Dad. From the outside, the announcement was abrupt and shocking. To me, profit and publicity and the power and attendant adulation of his business success had been his rich, boiling lifeblood. So his retirement seemed less the abdication which it was described as, and more a sort of suicide. And his explanations for it had the forlorn style and scant logic of an attendant suicide note.

  The only way I can rationalise it is to compare it to when a great champion quits at the top of his game. So Bjorn Borg walks to the courtside, and tosses his racquet on to his bag and peels off his headband, and even as the sweat of spent effort dries on his twenty-six-year-old body, he knows the flames fuelling the fire of his competitive soul have somehow been doused and he’s had enough, for ever, of the effort required to triumph. I remember that. I’m thirty-two years old. I was six then, and like many boys of my own age, idololised the great Swede. He lost to the French left-hander Henri Leconte in a nothing tournament and the will to win just perished in him as he walked off the court.

  Except that it happened to my dad when he reached the age of fifty-five and he announced to a stunned business press that he was relinquishing all commercial commitments in order to retire and sail a vintage boat. He would sail it to America, he said. He would sail his old schooner eventually around the world. But the Atlantic would provide sufficient challenge, he said, for the maiden voyage.

  You have to picture the room. The announcement was made in the gilt and leather banqueting chamber at Stannard Enterprises. My father was flanked by the men hand-picked to sustain and expand the empire. But he was already history, bought out by the same conglomerate of venture capitalists whose advances he had scorned for years. The room seethed with pinstripe and polish and bold silk neckties and testosterone and it buzzed in the pockets of the seated reporters with the incoming email on their BlackBerries. The atmosphere was odd, my father’s secretary later told me. And not only because she was the one female present. My father had been generous down the years with business tips for these men, many of those tips lucratively acted upon. They were, Sheila said, like well-dressed beggars summoned one last time to the table of a king traditionally munificent with the scraps from his feast.

  Eventually, the fact that he really intended to do as he said sank in. They realised that he wasn’t joking. One waggish reporter, perhaps familiar with Magnus Stannard’s inexperience as a sailor, suggested Southampton to Cowes might be a more appropriate challenge. Laughter ensued. But the laughter was feeble. And it stopped altogether when my father raked the room with the stony sweep of his gaze.

  ‘So far, I’ve lived every one of my dreams,’ he said into the silence. ‘Which is why you’re all scribbling notations and I’m sitting here.’

  They were stilled.

  He smiled. It was his humble, self-deprecating smile. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘if I’m realistic, there’s a case for starting on the Norfolk Broads.’

  They laughed. They roared with laughter. He had forgiven them.

  His eyes brightened and softened under their brows. ‘Boys,’ he said. ‘Boys. Where the hell has the fun ever been, merely in being realistic?’

  Sheila told me the hardened business hacks rose as one to give him a standing ovation. It was spontaneous, she said, and fierce and prolonged. And there were tears in the room.

  I did not need to ask if my father was among those who shed them.

  The auction where he paid too much for his folly of a wreck was held at the boatyard of Bullen and Clore, just outside Portsmouth, on a cold and misty morning in January. My father requested I attend but, of course, we didn’t travel down to Portsmouth together. I drove where he flew. He didn’t even ask me to meet him at the heliport, preferring to take a taxi to the sale. When he arrived, without retinue and punctually, I was already there, cold and damp and bored from my tedious vigil on the dock.

  Bullen and Clore; to me the name had been suggestive, when I’d first heard it, of a firm of Victorian undertakers. But when I got there, I saw that interring was actually the reverse of what they did. They specialised in salvage. Their business was summoning to an undead state the corpses of the shipping world. They raised and reclaimed sunken craft, or they rescued abandoned boats, or they provided refuge and repair for the terminally damaged and the derelict. In their domain of piers and pilings by the sea, you could hear the sound of great and mysterious chains, moaning at the pull of stupendous tides. Amid the iron hulks and sodden timbers, you could half imagine Isambard Brunel in his stovepipe hat, slipping on leather-shod boots in the ooze in the hours before his catastrophic stroke. The mist that day bled out all light and colour, rendering the scene at Bullen and Clore in the grainy sepia of a bleaker age.

  The boat concerned in the sale was in dry dock. And it was a hull, more than it was a boat. I knew from my father’s description that she was a two-masted, gaff-rigged schooner. Or she had been, in her prime. Time and neglect had torn the low roof from the area where the living quarters should have risen from the deck. Of the foremast, there was nothing remaining. And a storm had snapped the main mast. Its root rose thickly from the deck, cleaved in splinters about eighteen inches above a two-foot brace of corseting iron, the whole broken column about eight feet proud in total from the point where it emerged. That this damage had been done by elemental violence and not the deliberation of a boat-breaker’s chainsaw was somehow a comfort.

  My father slapped me on the shoulder. ‘Gets to you quickly, doesn’t she?’ he said. Mist was pearling like dew on the wide shoulders of his coat and his breath already stank richly from the day’s inaugural cigar. As usual, though, he was right.

  It was the lines of her that did it. Even out of the water, she had this sweep of imperious elegance. The timbers of her hull were stained but sound-looking, apparently intact. Her deck, with its brass rail, was a low-sung hymn to grace. She was so beautifully proportioned that, even as a wreck, she seemed somehow poised and dignified. Maybe it was also that she was redolent of the wealth and glamour of the man who had commissioned and raced her. I knew from reading the literature in the sale catalogue that Dark Echo had been Harry Spalding’s boat. But really, it was her lines. Even with her brass tarnished and her portholes canted or sunk altogether, you could imagine her under full sail on a glittering sea with the whitewashed walls of Cap d’Antibes or somewhere a brilliant promise under the sun on the horizon. It was quite something to picture that, standing on wet cobblestones in the prevailing gloom of Bullen and Clore’s monochrome wharf on a winter day. But even beached and wrecked, even then, suspended above the ooze from ropes and chains, Dark Echo seemed to possess the power to summon dreams.

  The auction took place in a dismal teak and mahogany room with high windows bleared by fog and rain. The room smelled of damp and turpentine. It felt chillier in there than it had outside. There were only two concessions in the room to m
odernity. On one wall hung an old and faded Pirelli calendar. According to the calendar, we were enjoying April of 1968. Boy, weren’t we just! And there was a telephone on a desk by the auctioneer’s podium. It was the old-fashioned kind, though, black and enormous and perhaps fashioned from Bakelite. Even in 1968, this instrument would have been borderline antique. The telephone was manned by a clerk in a cheap suit and plastered-down hair. The auctioneer was old and austere-looking. There were half a dozen people seated in the room, none but my father among them looking anything like someone with the means to be a potential buyer. And there was a boy with a notebook who did not remove his raincoat, whom I took to be from the local newspaper. The Dark Echo had little in her history to connect her to Pompey. The keel had been laid in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1916. But late and diminished in her long and sometimes illustrious life, here she had turned up. Bullen and Clore were a local firm. The boy might get a single column on a newspage about it. It might make a decent colour story or a snippet on a diary page. There was no photographer accompanying this cub reporter. Cheaper and more dramatic to use an archive shot of the vessel in splendour under full sail, I supposed.

  I was right about the people there. There wasn’t a single bid from the floor other than the bids made by my father. And my father did have to bid quite tenaciously, against someone on the telephone who seemed really to want the boat very badly indeed. My father went way above the reserve. But he was nothing if not stubborn, and his pockets were nothing if not deep, and he wanted the boat badly himself and he was not a man accustomed to coming second at anything. So he paid vastly over the odds and, when the gavel came down, turned and gave me a smile much more complex than the familiar smirk of triumph I’d expected to see. There was something odd in the smile I could not readily identify. Now, looking back with the clarity of hindsight, what I think flawed my father’s smile that morning was an instinct almost wholly alien to him. I think, now, what cramped that victorious smile was an unfamiliar hint of trepidation.

  This was immediately followed by another surprise. ‘I’d be grateful if you would drive me to the heliport, Martin,’ my father said. I nodded, rose and buttoned my coat, fingered the keys to my car and walked over and waited by the open office door while he granted a few quotes – gracious and witty, I was sure – to the lad from the local rag.

  Out over on the dry-dock wall a man was supervising a team with a crane and hawsers, hitching a huge protective tarpaulin over the teak and oak cadaver for which my father had just paid a king’s ransom. There, the fog was thickening. There were fifty feet of abyss between the wet cobbles on which the men stood and the bed of the dock, and they moved with deliberation. The man in charge wore a seafarer’s cap and a reefer jacket over filthy overalls. The mist rolling off the sea was making a belligerent ghost of him as he barked instructions and pulled on the stub of cigar in his mouth, turning the burning end of it into a faint, fiery smudge of orange. He was unaware of me watching him, I think. When the task was done and his team of men turned away and retreated, enveloped by the grey air, he paused and looked at the still, enormous shape of the craft in its shroud. And he tossed the butt of his smoke over the wall of the dock into the mud far below and he crossed himself, once and deliberately, like a genuflecting Catholic at Mass. It seemed an incongruous thing to do, after the cursing and shouting that had chorused the task just completed. I thought perhaps it was just some obscure nautical tradition of which, like all nautical traditions, I was ignorant. Then he, too, was gone, swallowed by the fog. Bullen, if it wasn’t Clore, I thought. Undertakerly reverence from one of the salvage bosses about to benefit from my father’s ill-spent wealth. Then my father was at my side, taking my arm, a third surprise, for our walk to where I’d parked the car. Our route took us right past the Dark Echo in its vast canvas shroud. But he didn’t even look at her. He looked straight ahead, the trepidation increasing to make a pale leer of what he probably thought was still his practised grin of triumph. My father was afraid, my instinct told me. He had taken my arm the way a frightened toddler might for comfort grasp his own father’s hand.

  By the time I had driven the distance to the heliport the fog had thickened to an extent that made taking off impossible. Even Magnus Stannard could do nothing about the official grounding of all flights.

  ‘I’ll drive you, Dad,’ I said. I did not want the first day of his retirement proper sullied by any suggestion of defeat. I was a good driver. Even he would accede to that fact.

  He looked at the Saab. And he sighed. ‘I wish I’d bought you a better car,’ he said. ‘Remind me to sort you out a Jag or something.’

  ‘I like my car. The Saab’s fine,’ I said.

  ‘Fine if you’re a Swede,’ he said, getting back in. ‘Fine if you follow the gospel of self-deprecation. Which the Swedes, as Scandinavians, have no recourse but to do.’

  ‘As I remember,’ I said, ‘you chose the Saab for me.’

  He laughed at that. He laughed, easily. We were getting on. I could still fuck it up by ramming someone’s bumper in ten yards of soupy visibility on the motorway. But we were getting on, me and my dad. I felt a flush of pleasure. Gripping the wheel, God help me, I felt pride.

  We dined together that evening. Suzanne was on a research trip to Dublin so I had nothing planned and no excuses to make to anyone. My father phoned his secretary on the journey back to London to make the necessary excuses to his most recent wife. Maybe a text message was too intimate a form of communication for my father. Maybe it was too modern. Obviously phoning her himself was totally out of the question. The early signs were not looking encouraging and, without taking my attention off the opaque view through the windscreen, I made a bet with myself that she would last no longer than her two immediate predecessors.

  ‘I miss your mother,’ my father said a minute later. His voice was weary with the burden of grief it always carried when the subject of Mum came up. ‘God, Martin, I miss her so.’

  ‘So do I,’ I said, which was the truth. I drove on in silence. But though it was not easy, it was not in any way an awkward silence. It was simply that there was nothing further to be said on the matter. A dozen years on from her death, the loss of my mother felt no less shocking or abject. I could not resent him for words spoken straight from his heart. Nor could I offer a shred of consolation.

  His mood improved over dinner. He seemed to recover something of himself after the first few sips of champagne.

  ‘What do you know of Harry Spalding?’

  ‘One of Hemingway’s Lost Generation.’

  My father frowned. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I don’t know. He was a Dick Diver type, I suppose.’

  ‘Dick Diver was a character from Scott Fitzgerald.’

  ‘I know. But you know what I mean, Dad. He was one of those rich American expats who decorated the Riviera in the 1920s.’ I wasn’t entirely ignorant on this subject. It was a favourite literary sub-genre of Suzanne’s. As if to prove the point, I said, ‘There were any number of Harry Spaldings. Rich, feckless, sporting and with light artistic pretentions. Gerald Murphy would have provided the template. They summered in the South of France and wintered at Zermatt. Spalding played polo and won trophies at regattas aboard his celebrated boat.’

  ‘You seem very well informed.’

  ‘It was in the sale catalogue at the auction today.’

  ‘Bullen and Clore are not historians, Martin. They are scavengers, the rag and bone men of the sea. Let me tell you about the real Harry Spalding.’

  My father wasn’t some tiresome autodidact. He was a scholarship boy who had shone very brightly, taught by the Jesuits at Ampleforth. But he had missed out on university and the consequent intellectual insecurity sometimes made him seem pompous when discussing academic subjects or in the cultural arena. He was inclined to be dogmatic, pious and pedantic. That said, Suzanne reckoned he possessed a first-rate mind and she had better credentials than anyone else I knew to be able to pass accurate judgem
ent. But I had to wait for my lecture on the real Harry Spalding, because a waiter had stolen across the restaurant floor and stood at my father’s elbow ready to take our order.

  We were dining at the Kundan in Horseferry Road. It is an Anglo-Indian, about as discreet and expensive as a restaurant can get. Its core customers are high-ranking civil servants, senior parliamentary backbenchers and legal staff on hefty Whitehall retainers. My father had been coming here for years. In all that time, I doubt the menu had changed at all. I was reminded again that, for a man who set such store by certainty, the sea voyage he planned seemed wildly cavalier, really out of character. I remembered his expression, then, earlier on in the day, as we’d passed the shrouded boat.

  It transpired that Harry Spalding was a hero of the Great War. He had started out as a lieutenant, leading a platoon of the infantry ‘doughboys’ from the States through the latter stages of the fighting in France and Flanders. Woodrow Wilson was the peace-loving American president who finally committed his country to the conflict. And he really was ardent about peace, dreaming up the League of Nations after the armistice to try to ensure that nothing like the war he embroiled his nation in would ever be repeated.

  But the American troops in the field were far more influenced by the philosophy and fighting ethos of Wilson’s less pacific predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt had actually led a cavalry charge in the war against Cuba early in the century. He was belligerent, tough and unhesitating in his belief that, where American interests were concerned, might was always right. Teddy Roosevelt it was who established the huge forts where America’s fighting forces learned their tactics and became battle-hardened. It was he who saw to it that the soldiers were properly paid and equipped with the best boots and the warmest blankets and the latest weapons technology.

  When the call came in 1917, the Americans had to face veteran German divisions who had held their trench lines through four years of assault and counter-assault. But they were fit and confident and well drilled. They fought with courage and distinction. Even in an army that generally excelled, however, Lieutenant Spalding’s exploits became the stuff of legend.