by F. G. Cottam
What did for me in the end was that I just couldn’t endure the cold solitude of celibacy. I craved physical intimacy. Rebecca cavorted in my dreams wearing nothing but a splash of her Guerlain perfume. The last three months were terrible. I was only nineteen and already facing the second great failure to afflict my life. And this one was wholly my fault. There was no mitigation to be had. I prayed, but doing so only seemed to demonstrate the futility of prayer. I prayed, the demeanour of a martyr concealing the instinct of a rabbit in heat. In such circumstances, I could hardly turn to the traditional source in a seminary of comfort and reassurance. Confession would have been of no help at all to someone so desperate to commit sin. There was no choice but to give up, and pack up and leave.
It’s fair to say that my father took this badly. Prior to the call of my false vocation, I’d been doing pretty well on a history and politics degree course at the London School of Economics. But the course was oversubscribed and they couldn’t see any way two years on to take me back. Despite my qualifications and past academic record, if a place did become available, there were more deserving cases than mine, apparently, on an existing waiting list. I ended up on a straight history course at the University of Kent at Canterbury. My father was gracious enough to pay my tuition fees and to help make up my grant shortfall which, in fairness to him, constituted practically the entire grant. But he did not really speak to me for about three years, and he chose not to attend my degree congregation. I couldn’t much blame him. I’d cost him his chance of an easy passage into Heaven. Even to a man as wealthy as my dad, that was quite a loss to endure.
Rebecca, of course, had long moved on by the time of what everyone still talking to me termed my release. She was dating a property developer from Fulham. I saw them together in a bar in Pimlico about eight months after leaving the seminary. I’d had a bit to drink. I might have picked a fight with him, had he been bigger and taller than he was and therefore an opponent I could goad into a scrap without being labelled afterwards a bully. But hitting him, even drunk, I knew was only marginally less infantile than letting down the tyres of his Porsche. I was hugely to blame for what had happened with Rebecca. She was only slightly to blame. The property developer was not to blame at all. But passing what I assumed was his Porsche, on the way home from that bar, I have to say I was sorely tempted.
Between discarding Rebecca and meeting Suzanne, I did have relationships with women. But they were casual and sometimes callous and always fleeting. Romance and spontaneity are, I think, the biggest casualties of the age of the text and the email. Everything now seems so contingent and circumscribed. There’s no place for sincerity when you can so easily avoid the honest call of a human voice. Thank God for the Shadwell Pussies, I used to think. They delivered Suzanne, saved me from solitude and brought me love. That’s what I used to think, before I sat her down after her return from Dublin and told her everything that had occurred since my father’s purchase of the wreck of the Dark Echo.
Her flight from Dublin had been delayed and she got back tired and a bit fraught anyway. She was not making the progress with the Michael Collins research that she had been expected to. Someone superior to her in the programme-making hierarchy had fallen into the trap of reaching conclusions about some aspects of Collins’ life and character before the research had vindicated them. It was the classic pitfall in their particular line of work. Everybody did it, but that didn’t make it any more acceptable a tendency. It was unreasonable and unfair. It had put extra pressure on Suzanne. She got back to London frustrated and angry.
She stood over by our open sitting-room window and smoked a cigarette while she considered what I had told her. She had been a heavy smoker from a family of smokers when I’d met her. She’d cut down considerably since then. But she still smoked Marlboro Reds. And the smoke drifted from her nostrils in two satisfied plumes when she smoked. She stood there in the chill of the window with her cigarette poised elegantly in her hand beside her pale jaw, thinking. Her black hair was cut into a glossy and precise bob. Her eyes, a brown so burnished they were almost black, glittered in the light from the street below. She was dressed in a black pencil skirt and a white shirt and her hair at its edge was geometrically neat above the white, open collar of the shirt. Not for the first time, I thought she looked like a woman from another time, from an era when the circumstances in which the two of us lived would have been nothing other than scandalous. She wouldn’t have cared. That was something else again about her.
Smoke wreathed around her lovely head. You could easily imagine Michael Collins making a play for her at some dinner held to fête him during the London peace negotiations that indirectly caused his death. You could imagine Harry Spalding doing the same at some plush and exclusive tennis or yachting club. He would click across the parquet in his leather heels approaching her. His tread would be light but determined. She would catch the eye of any man. There was a challenge in her, though, that the predators among them might find irresistible.
Eventually, she ground out her cigarette stub in a foil ashtray on the sill and flicked it out of the window. ‘I’d heard something about the curse of the Dark Echo. More precisely, it might be termed the curse on the Dark Echo. I did a bit of preliminary digging after our conversation on the evening of the day of auction.’
‘Why did you do that?’
She turned to me. ‘I did it because of your father’s proposition. Because although you sounded proud and flattered, you also sounded afraid.’
‘Something spooked me,’ I said. ‘Looking at Spalding’s face in the group picture of the Jericho Crew, I felt something so strong it was almost a premonition. Walking home afterwards in the fog across Lambeth Bridge, I felt as though I was being followed.’
She nodded. And she wrapped her arms around herself and shivered. The London night was very quiet outside our open window in the flat. But you could feel the drift of river damp on the air. It was now early March and the air still raw. ‘You’re a very intuitive man, Martin.’
‘No, I’m not.’
‘Because you didn’t see the punch coming that broke your nose? Or because you wasted a year and a half of your life on a failed vocation?’
‘Either example would stand as evidence.’
‘How do you think the fire was started that destroyed the vessel’s log? Bearing in mind that it burned with such stubborn ferocity, I mean.’
‘I don’t know, Suzanne. In my mind’s eye I see the spectre of Harry Spalding with a Very pistol in his hand. He grins his death’s head grin in the darkness in the vault as he pulls the trigger and fires a distress flare into the pile of volumes.’
‘But we’ll never know. Everything burned, so we’ll never know,’ she said. And this surprised me.
‘I thought you’d laugh out loud, telling you that,’ I said.
She rubbed at her shivering arms again with her hands. She closed the window. She always waited a while, like this. She hated the thought of my smelling the burned tobacco on her breath. I didn’t mind it, really. I had grown up with the ubiquitous stink of my father’s cigars all my young life.
‘Something happened to me on my earlier visit to Dublin, Martin. It happened on the Wednesday. It happened on the same day as the auction.’
The Michael Collins series producer was a BBC high-flyer called Gerald Smythe. He was an obnoxious and unreasonable bully and he was driving Suzanne very hard, I knew. ‘Smythe treat you to one of his bollockings?’
I knew she dreaded the edicts sent her via his BlackBerry. But she shook her head. ‘Nothing like that.’
‘Then tell me.’
She had been on one of those interminably long Georgian streets on the North side of the Liffey. She had been looking under her umbrella, in the rain, for a particular address. The streets were so long and so straight in that part of the city that you could see their gentle incline as they rose towards the distant smudge of the Dublin Mountains. She could hear rain hiss and gurgle in the gutter on it
s descent to the drains. The streets to her in this part of the city were indistinguishable from one another. In a sense they were featureless. All the houses looked the same; rain-stained and austere with iron boot cleaners outside imposing doors standing at the top of worn sets of stone steps. They were handsome in their way, the houses. But they were a bleak sight in the flat rainy light, dwellings redolent of a harder, plainer age.
After years of near dereliction, this part of Dublin had finally caught the fraying tail of the Celtic Tiger and was coming up in the world. The owner of the house was a psychiatrist. He had bought it only recently. But he was not there, was away at a symposium, and Suzanne had been entrusted with the key. And the neglect was good news for her. This area had provided Collins with a warren of safe refuges. In the period ninety years ago, after his release from the internment camp at Frongoch in Wales, he had hidden here. And it had been the same. Those same steps would have heard the patter of his rapid boots. His soft rap would have sounded on that very bronze doorknocker.
He had been by then a member of the executive of Sinn Fein and a director of the Irish Volunteers. He was a veteran of the Post Office siege during the failed Easter Rising. His will and his charisma had singled him out as a natural leader in his time at Frongoch. There, the British Secret Service had been sufficiently impressed to begin the file they would compile on him. She stopped walking. She had found her address. She rummaged in her pocket for the key. She climbed the wet stone steps. In his time of hiding here, Michael Collins had been twenty-seven years old.
She opened the front door and collapsed her umbrella, aware of the slight staleness coming from within and grateful that the new owner had not yet commissioned the refurbishment work to the house that would gut its interior. She closed the door softly behind her and unbuttoned her coat.
The interior of the house was dim and chilly in the dank late morning. The hallway was long and high-ceilinged. Its walls were covered in plain and dingy plaster and its floor was stone, and inlaid with a chipped and worn stucco design. At the end of the hall there were stairs leading both down and up. Suzanne guessed on up. Collins was too wily and too practised a fugitive to trap himself at night in a cellar. He would want to sleep where the crash of army boots ascending stairs would provide him with fair warning. He would want a point of exit to take him to the escape route across the flat terraced roofs.
She climbed the stairs. She had left her umbrella dripping on the cold stone of the entrance hall. But she had kept her coat on. The house was not heated in its owner’s absence and she could see her breath exhaled in little puffs as she climbed the steep, uncarpeted staircase. She paused only when she reached a door at the very top of the house. She had discovered the address scrawled on a series of expenses chits that were part of a cache of old Irish Volunteers papers kept in the archive at Dublin Castle. They detailed the cost of food and drink ordered over a period of evenings from Dooley’s Hotel around the corner. The name attached to these punctiliously numbered and dated chits was not Collins. It was Browne. But Collins, while strict about expenses, was lavish with aliases. And Suzanne had recognised the careful script learned during his clerical service in London as a youth. It had been him. He had stayed here. He had held meetings here. Plans had been formulated and strategy decided upon that had changed the course of a nation’s history.
She opened the door.
The room was furnished with a truckle bed, a wardrobe and a single straight-backed chair. There was a narrow, rectangular window, its small panes drab with dust. The bed was long stripped, its bare springs slightly rusted but still taut against the pull of the angle-iron frame. The floor was of bare boards. She shivered. There was nothing menacing about this small and modest room. She could hear rain patter above her on a skylight. She pulled the chair over and stood on it, the better to examine this. One of the boyos handy with a chisel and a hammer had put it there, she knew. The work was neat enough. But it was not an original feature of the house. The wooden frame had been canted slightly so that rain would not puddle on the pane. There was a catch at one edge of the skylight and, at the opposite edge, there was a sturdy double hinge. A man would need to be able to lift his own weight with his arms to lever himself through there from the height of a chair. But Collins had been young and very strong. No bother, as he would have said himself. No bother at all.
She stepped off the chair and walked over to the wardrobe, smiling to herself. She thought they should photograph as a still image rather than film the room she was in. It was intact and complete. They had the budget to run to one of those docudrama recreations of actors playing Collins and Cathal Brugha, or someone, seated on the made-up bed, plotting atmospherically by lamp or candlelight. And she was sure the psychiatrist who owned the place would tolerate the disruption involved in that process. But a still image would better reflect the simplicity of the places in which Collins rested from his war against the most powerful empire in the world, the places where he hid in temporary refuge from his enemies.
She was smiling because she was sure there would be a mirror. She stepped over to the wardrobe and opened it. It was a narrow item with a single door. It opened on the faintest scent of Bay Rum and mothballs. She saw the space where his overcoat and dapper suit would have hung. She saw the thin brass rail screwed to the inside of the door over which his unknotted tie would have hung and smoothed itself out during the night. And above that, she saw the little mirror in which he would have fussed and preened, indulging the peacock vanity that was so much a part of this complex man’s make-up.
Suzanne closed the wardrobe door with her secret smile widening. And she sensed a warmth envelop her in the room, in the quiet. And she did not feel that she was any longer alone in it. It was very sudden, this change in atmosphere. She turned sharply and looked around. Everything was the same. But the temperature in there had risen, she was sure. The room no longer had the same raw, desolate quality of neglect that had characterised it only a moment earlier. It felt entirely different. It felt occupied. She could feel a presence. She could almost smell the warm, amused humanity of the energetic presence watching her there, in repose. She heard a slight creak from the bed as though the weight of someone sitting there shifted and stretched in relaxation.
‘Then what happened?’ I asked her.
‘Nothing happened,’ she said. ‘The moment passed. The feeling sort of . . . evaporated. But I felt it. I did not imagine it. For a moment, he was there.’
‘What time was this? Roughly?’
‘I’ll tell you exactly. It was twelve fifteen. I looked at my watch. And then I left.’
Twelve fifteen. Just after the auction. She had looked at her watch at the exact moment I had looked at mine at the boatyard of Bullen and Clore on seeing the foreman there cross himself in the presence of my father’s prize.
‘It was why I was still awake and alert when you sent me that text late in the evening,’ she said. ‘Nothing remotely like that has ever happened to me before. I was still pondering on the experience. It was inexplicable. But it was real.’
I did not say anything. I did not doubt her, though.
‘I want to show you something,’ Suzanne said. She went and got her travel bag and put it on the table and unzipped and rummaged in it. She took out a Manila envelope with the flap folded rather than gummed, and opened it. She took out the contents, a Xerox copy of a page of newsprint, folded into four. And she handed it to me. She had attached a Post-it note to the upper left-hand corner of the photocopied document. She was very punctilious about her research, even when it was research she wasn’t supposed to be doing. On the Post-it note, she had written Liverpool Daily Post, August 9, 1927. I removed that and unfolded the photocopied broad-sheet page. It was laid out like a diary rather than a news page. There were three photographs, far too many for a news page of the period, which might carry one picture at most. The relevant article was the most prominent. It had been printed under the heading BOATBUILDER ALL AT SEA.
> Distinguished boatbuilder Mr Patrick Boyte, 54, yesterday attended James Street police station to witness the release from custody of his daughter, Jane Elizabeth Boyte, 29. Miss Boyte had been arrested and questioned on a matter neither the Liverpool Constabulary, nor the Boyte family, proved willing to disclose or further discuss. Mr Boyte was at pains, however, to emphasise that his daughter was released without precondition or charge, and that bail was never set and, further, that no charge or charges are pending.
Our reporter attempted to engage Mr Boyte on the happier matter of the successes enjoyed at Cowes last week by Mr Harry Spalding aboard his racing schooner, Dark Echo. Regular Post readers will recall that the vessel put into the Boyte dock little more than a listing hulk in the aftermath of the great storm of April last. Did Mr Boyte agree that the Cowes victories of last week were testament to the refurbishment work completed in his own yard?
But Mr Boyte would not be drawn. ‘I’ve nothing to say concerning the vessel or her master,’ he said.
Would he not wish, through the columns of the Post, to extend his congratulations to Mr Spalding?
‘I would not,’ he said. And with his newly liberated daughter on his arm, he bid our correspondent a curt goodbye.
I read this account twice. There was a tone about it, an underlying sarcasm, more spiteful than I would have thought appropriate to a diary piece. That said, being arrested, when you were a woman of quality, was not a light-hearted occurrence eighty years ago. And the Boytes were of quality, both. Patrick was prosperous-looking. The light in the picture exposed the vivid detail of a sunny late-summer day. Patrick Boyte, bald and sturdy and tall, glowered in tailored broadcloth with a thick gold watch chain worn across his waistcoat, and a waxed collar and silk necktie. The hand not gripping his daughter’s carried a hat and a cane. Jane was svelte and groomed with bobbed hair and wearing a light summer coat.